Dues of Mortality (30 page)

“
So,
what are you gonna call the story?” Jack asked.

Gabriel
rolled his eyes. “Well, that depends on the details. I once
wrote this story about a seventy-year-old grandfather who fought off
a mountain lion with a fruit knife in order to save his granddaughter
during a camping trip. I called it ‘Age Before Beauty.’
My editor loved it.” He turned to face Jack and saw the boy
staring at him like an optimistic wife awaiting the results of a
pregnancy test.

“
So
what happened?” Gabriel asked with a grin. “You burst in
on this heinous crime being committed and through your never-ending
sense of responsibility and justice vanquished the evildoer and
rescued the damsel in distress, right?”

Jack
said nothing, his eyes just looking like buoys bobbing on the water.

“
Okay,”
Gabriel sighed. “Let me put it another way. You came into the
alley with a bag of smelly garbage and you saw this woman being
attacked. Then what?”

“
Actually,
I didn’t see her being attacked. I saw her kind of just 'out of
it' while the guy in the jacket had the other guy pinned.”

“
I
see. Then what happened?”

“
That’s
when the other guy slugged the dude on top and ran off.”

Gabriel
paused, looking askance at the poor excuse for procreation. “You
know what would really help is if I could find this other guy who was
involved—the guy in the jacket. If we could get him to back up
your take on things, it might help to bolster the story. The cops are
being tight lipped as usual, especially since they can’t seem
to keep free of scandal. I don’t suppose you have any idea
where I might be able to find him?”

“
Nope.
I never saw him before.”

“
You
sure?”

“
Positive.
He looked like a million other H-heads scrounging the streets for
change.”

“
Can
you tell me what he looked like? Maybe I could track him down.”

“
He
was really dirty-looking, not a big guy, maybe five-foot-ten or
something, dark hair, really messed up, and dark eyes, I think.”

“
Nothing
else out of the ordinary? Nothing, for instance, the cops might have
missed, or you forgot to tell them?”

“
Not
that I can think of.”

Gabriel
wiped his face as if Jack had spat in it. Except for eye color, which
he wasn’t even sure about, the kid hadn’t given him shit.

Jack
looked contrite. “I’m sorry if that doesn’t help
much.”

Gabriel
peered at him through parted fingers. “Don’t worry about
it, kid,” he said perturbed. He nodded in the direction of the
restaurant. “And don’t let me keep you any longer, huh.”

“
What
about the story? Am I still gonna be the hero?”

“
What?”
Gabriel asked puzzled. He had forgotten about his cover that quickly.
“Oh, well...I don’t have a lot to go on.”

Jack
frowned, heartbroken.

Gabriel
noticed and perked up. “But then again, people like me rarely
do.” He thought it best to leave the boy with
some
hope;
it lessened the chances of him talking. “Don’t worry. I’m
going to come up with something that will definitely make you the big
man on campus.”

Jack
blinded Gabriel with a smile.

“
Oh,
and if anybody else comes to talk to you, try not to mention we had
this little conversation. If anybody official finds out we talked or
if one of my journalistic rivals gets wind of this angle, it could
kill the story.” Gabriel smiled, giving himself points for his
generosity. Ultimately, it didn't matter at all if this future
manager of a fast-food drive thru mentioned Gabriel's name to anyone.
If he did, then Gabriel was just doing his job: taking an active role
in helping the police focus on the real culprit and shielding his
client from any potential public embarrassment due to Richard
Kelmer’s deviant acquaintances. Nonetheless, it just made good
sense to always
Spackle
the cracks.

“
Right.
I get it.” Jack said. He then turned and strutted back inside
the restaurant.

Once
Jack was gone, Gabriel
pulled out his key ring and twirled it
on the end of his finger; a nervous habit he'd picked up during his
law school days waiting for exam results.
There
has to be a way to
...The keys bounded from Gabriel's hand.
They hit the ground with a “clink” and skidded under one
of the dumpsters flush against a wall in the alley. Gabriel uttered
an expletive, walked over to the dumpster and crouched down. The
shadow of the filthy iron tub had completely swallowed his keys.
“Terrific,” he grumbled and quickly began scanning for
something to place between the urine stained ground and his $800.00
suit. He found a flattened cardboard box with a Budweiser emblem on
it and dropped it before the dumpster. He then knelt onto the
cardboard and reluctantly stuck his arm under the dumpster, probing
for the keys. When he thought he touched something “organic”
in nature, he jutted his hand to the right, and wouldn’t you
know it, knocked his keys into a half-open sewer drain just short of
the dumpster’s edge. Mumbling more profanities, Gabriel slid
the cover from the drain and eased his hand inside. He was relieved
the drain was short enough where he could touch the bottom just
before it elbowed. His fingers danced from side to side, inching
further along the drain until they hit something hard. It felt like
metal. It was solid, but not fixed to the inside. Instinctively,
Gabriel grabbed the object and lifted it out.

A
gun.

Gabriel's
car keys had gotten hooked by the hammer of a nickle-plated .38
caliber revolver that had somehow ended up in the drain. It took
Gabriel all of a millisecond to recall Hobson’s excuse for his
failure with Glenda Jameson: “the bum had an old gun”.

Translucent
clouds of thick herbal cigarette smoke swirled around like a living
watercolor painting as they encompassed the big circular bar in the
center of the Blacklight Tavern. The law had recently been finagled
to legalize herbal cigs in bars, comparing it to burning incense
indoors.
Good god
,
Xavier thought,
tweaking his nose at the sugary stink.
Maybe
it was never the nicotine
.
Maybe
people just became addicted to having some form of controlled fire
suspended from their mouths
. He patted the envelope in his
pocket. He prayed Benny's money wouldn't run out too soon; he'd hate
to have to beg his old friend for a loan on top of everything else.
He and Glenda were already down forty bucks from the cab ride out of
the suburbs. Using the side streets, they'd ditched the Civic as far
from Benny's house as they could get. Xavier figured they'd have at
least until the end of the day before someone noticed the plates or
called in the abandoned vehicle.

Xavier
cased the bar carefully, growing more and more nervous with every
second. He guessed it would have been too much to ask that Max should
resettle someplace else. The man loved Cleveland and it's not like he
was the type to pull up stakes as part of some grand gesture of
psychological recovery. If anything, Max was so family oriented that
it made perfect sense he would rely on returning to his roots to see
him through the bad times.

Last
year, when word about Max owning his own bar had filtered down to the
VRC, Xavier made a mental note to steer clear of the Blacklight
should he have ever been in the neighborhood. Serving Schnapps and
cranberry juice to a bunch of out-of-work accountants was a far cry
from the future of rising through the ranks of Army special forces
Max had planned. A future that Xavier had helped eradicate.
What
am I doing here?
Xavier asked himself. He pinched the
bridge of his nose and eyeballed a lustrous bottle of Absolute amid a
glittering pyramid of fine liquors in the center of the bar.

He
was astonished.

There
he'd been, standing in the middle of a
bar
—for
how many minutes?—without having the slightest itch for a
drink.
Correction
,
he thought. It seemed more like he could
go
for a drink, but didn't absolutely
need
to have it. He wasn't salivating in anticipation of the gin's smooth
cottony warmth lubricating his gullet.
I'll
be damned
. Xavier extended the back of a hand, splaying
his fingers in front of him. Steady as a rock. On the outside.
Inside, there was...“something else”...something Xavier
had never quite felt before. Confusion? Disorientation? It was like
he all of a sudden didn’t know what to do with himself. For
whatever damage it had done, alcohol had still always been a reliable
escape...an excuse.
Shit,
what now?
he
honestly asked himself.

Xavier
turned and saw Glenda staring at him with marked concern, beneath the
brim of Bennet Hawkins's Cleveland Browns baseball cap. He labored a
grin at her and shrugged. Any
hoity-toity introspective bullshit could wait, he thought.
T
his
little
reunion was going to be far trickier than his one with Benny and the
added distraction could only hinder his ability to protect
Glenda...which was already as far from professional as it got. He
glanced around at a number of television panels hanging from the
walls. Every one was tuned to some kind of sporting event, no local
news channels. He looked back at Glenda and reevaluated her
appearance. He decided he liked her eyes better in their original
color
.
Before they
abandoned it, Glenda had retrieved a pair of prescription glasses
from inside the Civic. She had programmed them to reflect her eye
color as blue instead of their natural brown. She had also set the
glasses frames—otherwise virtually invisible—to project a
swirling array of red and blue around the rim of the lenses. American
Glitter or something like that, the pattern was called. It was garish
and unfeminine, but it did the trick. Even with Glenda's picture
plastered all over the news, a simple pair of glasses could still
distort one's face just enough to mislead the casual observer. Xavier
nodded at her, satisfied.

He
turned again to face the sporty circular bar with everything he had.
He plodded up behind one of its padded wooden stools like he was
wearing lead shoes. He eyed the back of a stocky, short-haired man
standing behind the bar, rearranging some liquor bottles and sharing
a joke with one of the regulars. In a sudden burst of laughter, the
patron batted his beer bottle off the end of the bar. With a swift
snap of the elbow, the bartender whipped out his hand and snared the
bottle’s neck in all five fingertips. As he replaced the
bottle, he turned his head and spotted Xavier staring at him. A pair
of comically protruding ears visibly dropped with the bartender's
smile, like they were tethered to the corners of his mouth.
Eventually, the bartender exited the ring and began walking toward
Xavier in a way that made it seem as though a taught cord were
pulling them together. Glenda, standing conspicuously off to the
side, couldn't help but notice a limp in the bartender's gait, which
favored the left leg.

“
Well,
I'll be a monkey's shit-flinging uncle,” the bartender said.
“Look at who’s still up and around. I could have sworn
somebody told me different.”

“
Hey,
Max,” Xavier responded, barely getting the words out.

“
How
long has it been?”

“
About
three years, I think.”

“
Right,
right. How have you been?”

“
Same
old, same old.”

“
That
bad, huh?” Max scratched the tip of his nose. It was his go-to
gesture whenever things got uncomfortable. He swirled a finger at
Xavier's face, noticing the physical evidence of Xavier’s
recent action-packed days.

“
You
all right?” he asked. “You look like you ran into another
angry boyfriend.”

“
Naw,
nothing that serious,” Xavier said unconvincingly.

Max
glanced over at Glenda. “She with you or is she just being
nosy?” He didn't have to guess at the answer. Xavier didn't
take two steps without having a woman in tow. And if he did, it was
usually because he'd woken up first.

“
She’s
with me.”

Glenda gave the bartender a
perfunctory wave and then looked away. Maybe it was some sort of
osmosis affect, but Max was starting to make
her
nervous too. He squinted at her in that icky, inconsiderate way men
do when they want women to feel insecure—like she had a booger
or something.

“
Well,
have a seat,” Max said, smiling. “What can I get for you?
I make a great Singapore Sling; you'll love it.”

“
Actually,
we didn't come here for a drink, Max,” Xavier said hurriedly.
He didn't even want the
idea
of a drink lingering in the air.
“I have...” He paused. “I...
need
...some
help.”

Max
stood silent for a moment, passing glances between Xavier and his
companion.