Fire Lake (12 page)

"C'mon, Stoner," Lewis said, jerking me by
the handcuffs. "Let's get this over with."

He led me out of the apartment and down the hall. I
glanced back at Karen. She was standing in the doorway, staring after
me with a stunned look on her face.

"Go home, for chrissake!" I shouted back
over my shoulder. Lewis jerked the cuffs again and we started down
the stairs.
 

17

Before they locked me up in the Central Station
holding tank, I got to make my one call on the pay phone. I called
Laurel Gould, my lawyer, and told her I was in trouble.

"What are the charges?" she asked.

"I'm not sure yet," I said. "But they
may throw the book at me. Possession of cocaine. Possession for sale.
Assaulting a cop."

There was a dead silence on the line. "You
assaulted a police officer?" Laurel said, as if I'd told her I'd
boarded a flying saucer.

"I lost my temper."

"You've lost your mind," she said sharply.
"Assaulting a cop can be a nasty charge, my friend. And
possession for sale is no day in the country. Where are you going to
get the money to raise bail for all this?"

"From pushing drugs," I said acidly. "Just
get me out of here, Laurel. I mean it. This cop I punched . . . he's
very bad news."

"It's that way?" she said with concern.
"Very likely," I told her.

"I'll be down there in ten minutes," she
said. "With a photographer."

"Good," I said, and hung up.

As they were closing the cell doors on me, I called
Lewis over to the bars.

"Do me a favor and tell Lieutenant Al Foster
that I'm down here?" I said hopefully.

Lewis walked away without saying anything.

After he'd gone, I wandered back to the rear of the
tank. There were a couple of cell-blocks inside the tank, rows of
six-foot by three-foot walk-ins, sided with bars on three sides and
stone on the fourth, like animal cages in the zoo. I walked into one
of the open cells and sat down on the steel bench suspended from the
wall. To the right there was a tiny porcelain toilet smelling of
urine and Pine-Sol, with a roll of oatmeal-colored paper tissue
sitting beside it. I reached down and picked up the tissue. Tearing
off a dozen sheets, I wadded them up and formed them into a
mouthpiece. It wasn't much protection--a toilet-paper mouthpiece. But
it was better than nothing at all.

I sat there for a few minutes, staring at the
graffiti on the wall: naked women with huge breasts and ash marks,
where cigarettes had been stubbed out, for vaginas; a dagger with the
slogan "Born to lose" bannered above it; a motorcycle wheel
pouring smoke; a skull. A couple of the other inmates walked past the
cell and tried to bum cigarettes from me. I didn't even have to
ignore them. My mind, my whole being, was centered on one thing. It
wasn't long in coming.

About five minutes after Lewis had booked me, I heard
the jailer call out my name. I fitted the toilet-paper mouthpiece
around my teeth, stepped out of the cell, and walked slowly up to the
holding-tank bars. Just a little piece of me was hoping that it was
Laurel and her photographer. The rest knew better. And the rest was
right.

I could see Jordan plainly as I rounded the
cell-block. He smiled at me as I walked toward him, crooking a finger
and making a come-hither gesture. The jailer opened the barred doors
and I walked out. A desk sergeant came out of the jailer's cage and
cuffed my hands behind me, while Jordan looked on.

"We've got some unfinished business, Harry,"
Jordan said, giving me his graveyard stare.
I
didn't say anything. I didn't want him to see the mouthpiece I'd
fashioned from the tissue.

Jordan grabbed my arm and
pulled me toward an elevator. I looked around to see if his partner
was coming with us. But Lewis wasn't there, and the desk sergeant had
already returned to his cage. It was just Jordan and I. Just the way
he wanted it.

***

He took me down to the subbasement. There were a
couple of unused cells down there--dark, empty holes lit by hanging
lamps and full of old, dusty office furniture. Jordan pushed me into
a cell that was filled with ancient wooden chairs. He pulled one of
the chairs from a pile and plunked it down in the middle of the room.

"Sit down," he said casually.

I sat on the chair and watched Jordan as he took off
his coat and rolled up his sleeves. "You shouldn't have
sucker-punched me, Harry," he said, turning to me with a
pleasant smile on his mouth. There was a half-dollar-size bruise on
his chin where I'd clipped him. The rest of his face was as dead as
his eyes.

Jordan stared at me for a long moment, then reached
behind him and pulled a four-ounce leaded sap from his back pocket.
He slapped it against his palm. It made a full, rich sound in his
hand, as if he'd slapped a loaf of fresh dough.

"I'm going to give you a good beating, Harry,"
he said. "Then we're going to talk about the crack. Okay?"

He looked at me as if he expected me to agree with
him.

Jordan started toward me, waving the sap in his fist.
As soon as he got close, I kicked at him. But Jordan was prepared for
me this time. He juked to his right and brought the sap down hard
against my upraised leg. It caught me on the left shin.

The pain was excruciating. I doubled over on the
chair; and he brought the sap down even harder--on my spine. I
snapped upright, throwing myself backward with so much force that I
cracked the back of the chair and went sprawling onto the floor-my
legs still crooked over the broken chair seat.

"Get up!" Jordan roared, yanking me to my
feet by my shirtfront and throwing me against the bars of the cell.

I kicked at him again, with my right leg, missing
badly. He countered by driving the sap deep into my belly. I doubled
over again and sank to my knees with a groan. My face turned red and
sweat poured out of me. I could feel it running down my cheeks, down
my arms, as if I'd been doused with water.

Jordan stood over me for a moment, breathing hard.

"Tell me how you're connected, Harry," he
said. "Save yourself some pain."

I looked up at him from where I was kneeling. The
pain in my gut was intense. But I could feel the indignity just as
intensely. My face started to burn with shame. The toilet tissue had
turned to mush in my mouth. I spit some of it out on the floor,
started choking on some more of it, and then vomited up the rest.

"You better kill me, fucker," I said
between heaves.

For the first time, Jordan smiled at me with genuine
amusement. It lit up his whole face, even his dead eyes. "I
think I can manage that," he said.

He raised the sap over his head and slammed it across
my right arm at the shoulder. I shrieked and Jordan barked with
laughter. My right arm went numb, all the way to the fingertips.

"Did that hurt?" he said, pressing the sap
against the bruise.

I shrieked again and writhed against the bars behind
me.

He slapped me with the sap a few more times--little
stinging snaps on my chest and thighs. He wasn't using all his
strength, like he had on my shin, my back, my shoulder, and my gut.
But the blows still hurt. And after a half dozen or so of them, the
pain began to accumulate.

I started dreading the next slap, flinching before he
hit me, as if I were being whipped. I knew he was setting me up for
another big one. And I told myself to save my strength for what was
ahead. But each time he flicked that piece of lead against me, I lost
a little more willpower and cowered a little more openly against the
bars.

"Enough fooling around," Jordan said, when
he'd gotten me good and scared. "This time, we go for the head."
He dangled the sap in my face. "Give you a walleye and a drool
for the rest of your life." He lifted the sap above his head,
and I felt something inside me just give out.

"Don't!" I screamed.

"What was that?" Jordan said, pressing his
face close to mine.

"Don't!" I said, begging him. "Please,
Christ, don't!"

"That's a little better," he said, backing
away with a satisfied look. He slapped the sap against the bars of
the cell. They rang like a bell and I cringed. "You going to
tell me about your connection now, Harry?"

I nodded weakly.

"I can't hear you," Jordan said.

"Yes!" I shouted. Yes, yes.

"All right," Jordan said with satisfaction.
He smiled at me, almost paternally. "No hard feelings, Harry.
That's the way it's done. You remember, don't you?"

He lifted me up to my feet and brushed some of the
dust from my jacket. I could barely stand on my ankle; my back hurt
up and down the spine; my right arm was useless; and the pain in my
gut was like a knife wound,

"You think you can make it upstairs, tough guy?"
Jordan said.

I leaned against the bars, unable to speak, barely
able to stand.

"Just remember, Harry," Jordan said, poking
me gently with the sap. "If I don't hear what I want to hear
when we get up to the interrogation room, we're coming right back
down here. We haven't even begun to party yet."
 

18

Jordan left me in the holding tank while he arranged
for an interrogation room and a stenographer. I barely made it into
one of the little cells. I collapsed on the steel cot and lay there
for what seemed like an hour, smelling the stink of my own fear and
humiliation. I'd been unmanned before. In the war and afterward. It
had happened. But even though I'd come close in the past, it had
never actually happened at the hands of a cop, in the basement of a
police station. The pain would go away. I knew that. I could live
with the pain. What I couldn't live with was the way the pain had
made me behave.

I wanted to kill Jordan for what he'd done to me. I
wanted to kill him more than I'd ever wanted anything else in my
life. And then I wanted to kill Lonnie. For the shame he'd brought
down on my head, for the shit I'd had to eat to protect him. I'd had
to grovel in front of an enemy. I'd almost been killed earlier that
day by another enemy. And on both occasions, I was the wrong goddamn
man! The injustice of it plagued me almost as much as the beating I'd
taken.

Jordan hadn't been wrong. I was connected, all
right-to an absurd, dangerous idea, to a fellowship out of the
sixties that had been ambiguous to begin with and was now turning
lethal. What killed me was that I'd brought part of it on myself. I
hadn't just been victimized by Lonnie. I'd been victimized by my own
need for . . . what? For something better than what I had now, I
guessed, for what Karen and I had briefly shared. For that feeling of
connection itself.

I tried not to think about
Karen. I just hoped she'd taken a plane back to St. Louis. There was
nothing I could do for her from jail.

***

I sat in the cell for a long time. It was an even
longer time before it dawned on me that Jordan hadn't come back. I'd
been more than ready to talk in that deserted subbasement. I'd been
almost eager to betray Lonnie when I'd first been brought back up to
the holding tank. But as the minutes went by, my resolve faded in and
out. I started telling myself things--stupid things, like, "I'll
be goddamned if I let that son of a bitch break me down." I'd
say it, then I'd start feeling the pain in my ankle or in my back.
And that would cool me off.

I really didn't know what I was actually going to do
or say, right up until the moment when the jailer called my name
again. Even though my shin was swollen like a balloon, I got to my
feet and hobbled up to the bars. To my surprise, Laurel Gould was
standing there, with Al Foster standing behind her. Jordan was
nowhere to be seen.

Laurel looked as if she'd had a very long day. Always
immaculately dressed in a business suit and white silk blouse, she
was as raw and wrinkled as I'd ever seen her. Her pretty, careworn
face turned purple with rage when she spotted me. I was a gruesome
sight-hobbling on one leg, my back bent, my shoulder hunched, dried
vomit all over my shirtfront. Laurel turned to Foster with a snarl
and said, "You bastards!"

"Easy, Laurel," Al said. "Remember our
agreement."

"That was before I'd seen what you did to him,"
she shouted.

"I didn't do anything to him," Al snapped.
He gave me a concerned look. "Are you all right?"

I laughed. "How do I look to you, Al? All
right?"

Foster's long, solemn face went blank. He'd seen what
Jordan had done, but he hadn't seen it. He couldn't afford to look
too closely.

"I need to talk to you, Harry," he said. He
gave the jailer a quick, angry look and said, "Let him out, for
chrissake!"

The jailer opened the door and I hobbled into the
anteroom.

Al looked down at the floor--to keep from looking at
me. "All charges against you are being dropped," he said.
"In return, you're going to agree not to press charges against
Jordan."