Fuckin' Lie Down Already (3 page)

“What? Who?”

The young cop tried to keep it together but he started to gag, lips quivering, eyes damn near popping out of his head. He covered his mouth with one palm and turned his face aside, trying to keep the gun steady, but his mother must’ve fed him a greasy breakfast with lots of bacon and juice, and it all came up in roaring waves.

While the kid was barfing, Clay took three steps over, smacked him to get his attention, and took the gun away. Clay wasn’t moving too well, and he was weak as hell, but the last few days had given him a new resolve.

Hey, you did what you had to do.

“What’s your name?”

The cop wiped ropy strands off his chin and said, “Officer Yahmi.”

“What kind of name is that?”

“My father’s from Indochina. You need medical attention. You’re going to keel over any second.”

“I’ll make it long enough.”

“To do what?”

“What’s your first name?”

“Thomas.”

It stopped Clay. “Tommy?” he said. Then the laughter boiled up in him, a squealing acid that felt like it was tearing him in half, but still he couldn’t stop. “Tommy Yahmi?”

It hurt the kid’s feelings, laughing at him like that. He chewed his lower lip, trying to get tough inside, deal with everything the way he knew he should’ve been able to, but he came up short. Could bench press 350 easily but this took his breath away.

Clay kept guffawing for another ten seconds and then the reality of the situation came pouring back in, and his laughter stopped as if someone had cut his throat.

Tommy Yahmi was doing a few things right at least. He hadn’t panicked yet and he was trying to keep Clay talking. “You really with the NYPD?”

“Yeah.”

“What are you doing this for?”

“There’s no way to make this sound hip, really, but you just wouldn’t understand. You would’ve had to be there, and you’d better thank Christ that you weren’t.”

“Thank you, Jesus,” he said, and he meant it too.

“Do that later.” Clay checked the kid’s service .38. “I need your extra ammo.”

“Please, mister…I haven’t done anything to you…
please
…”

“Relax, only scumbags kill a man with his own gun.” Clay grabbed the cop’s extra clip, stunned to see it was a speed-loader. Something else that made the rookies feel slick. “I don’t suppose you have a throwaway or a back-up piece.”

“A what?”

“Forget it. Give me your cuffs.”

“In the cruiser.”

“You dumbass. Always keep them on your belt.”

Clay used his pocket knife to cut the radio cord in the cruiser and snatched up the cuffs. He jammed Tommy Yahmi’s night stick through the steering wheel and braced it against the column, threw the car into drive and let it slowly arc to the right and roll down the embankment.

The police car hit the end of the slope, went over into a ravine and was out of sight among the brush in two seconds. He couldn’t help wondering how many bodies might be hidden there as well. You never knew where Chuckie Fariente’s crew might be burying them.

So far, he and the young cop had been out here for fifteen minutes already and not another vehicle had passed. Clay looked up and down the highway and saw nothing.

“Is that your family?” Tommy Yahmi asked, still hoping to get the conversation moving a little.

“Yeah.”

“What happened to them?”

“It’s a little too long for me to get into right now.”

“What are you doing?”

“Finishing what somebody else started.”

“You need-”

“Get lost Tommy Yahmi,” Clay said, waving him away with the two pistols. The kid just kept staring. “Start walking. Go home and eat your pie and ice cream. Tell Mom I said hello.”

“Let me help you.”

“Got a man I need to see first.”

A wave of dizziness washed over Clay as he climbed back into his ’89 Caprice and got behind the wheel. He’d always hated the cramped space before, but now he welcomed it, feeling closer to Kath and Edward than he had in months. Protected on all sides.

He drove for about three miles before he saw a pile of roadkill on the shoulder. Clay had no idea what the animal had been, but he pulled over, pried its smashed furry body up with the toe of his shoe, grabbed the thing and tossed it onto the floor of the back seat.

There now. He got back in and started hunting for Rocco Tucci again, while his liver slid another inch to the left.

CHAPTER TWO

Sometimes you can surprise the hell out of yourself, stepping into a scene like this and still not losing all your cool.

So he’d walked in the door to see Kath lying there on the couch with a pink scrunchie tied tightly around her arm, the syringe on the floor but the broken needle still jabbed in a vein.

Her chest was covered in vomit, one thickly encrusted breast exposed. Legs wide open, knees bent and propped with her feet wedged into the corner cushions. The torn panties had been thrown across the room and hung off one of her high school cheerleading trophies on the mantel. Clay could tell she was dead by the effortless, smooth look of serenity and release in her slumped body.

A blur of motion broke to his left. He turned, reaching for his gun, and recognized the face-pissant hustler from the neighborhood name of Rocco Tucci. Chuckie Fariente must’ve hired him, paid him off with a few grams of skag. God damn it, nobody took care of their own business anymore.

Rocco was holding one of Clay’s throwaway .32s. He must’ve been in the house for a while, tearing the place apart, to have found it inside the cutaway panel behind the night stand. If he’d kept digging he would’ve discovered two others, all with their serial numbers filed off, untraceable. Rocco gave a quick smirk of triumph, aimed from his hip, and pulled the trigger.

Lunging forward, Clay let out a bark of fury even before the agony exploded in his belly. The force drove him back against the wall and he almost went through the cheap plaster before he dropped to the carpet. The smell of his own cooking flesh filled Clay’s nostrils and nearly made him go into a fit of sneezing. Rocco grinned and Clay could guess why. There was a man-shaped hole in the stucco. Must’ve looked pretty damn funny from where the bastard was standing.

Rocco fired twice more but he was coming down off his high and the fear had started to get hold of him. Both shots went wild, striking the floor on either side of Clay’s head. The screen door banged shut, and Rocco’s terrified footsteps receded down the sidewalk to where he’d parked his car in the shopping center at the end of the block.

As Clay lay there, still trying hard not to sneeze, he heard Mrs. Fusilli’s yapping Chihuahua, Cuddles, barking its little ass off next door. The thing didn’t stop for ten seconds all day long. It was no wonder the neighborhood was filling up with addicts-listening to that mutt would drive you out of your head if you weren’t on your way already.

“Cuddles,” he whispered into the rug, tasting fuzz, “give it a rest.”

Clay heard the sound of gushing and couldn’t believe he was still alive with that much blood running out. The worst he’d ever seen was a guy who’d had his throat slit by his teenage son in an argument over the best wide receiver in the league. You never knew what could do it to you.

Guy was lying in a two-inch deep pool, vocal cords sliced through, but still flailing and trying to talk. Clay was the first on the scene and just kneeled there with his fingers stuck in the man’s carotid and jugular veins, doing his best to plug the holes, arterial pressure blasting blood all over the place. But the guy just wouldn’t die.

Maybe it was like that here.

Clay looked down shocked to see that there was hardly any blood at all. The wound was nearly cauterized by the bullet. His flesh sizzled but the rip was there, opening wider. He’d never been shot before, not even nicked, in his fifteen years on the force, but he’d heard about this kind of thing happening on occasion. You heard it all eventually. After being shot you joined a different kind of club, stuck behind a desk usually, and had nothing to do but tell stories.

Clay’s shirt smoldered and threads of smoke twined into his face. He gasped and managed to shift and turn over to smother the sparks. He thought about just going to sleep right then, but the water was running.

“Oh Christ,” he begged, “no…”

He’d heard the bath.

Overflowing.

You do what you have to do, there’s nothing else. He tried to make it to his feet but wasn’t quite there yet.

So he crawled to his son.

Edward bobbed face-down in the water, with his blonde hair floating above like a golden lily-pad, wreathing his crown. Fingers of his left hand were touching the side of the tub the way a swimmer would reach for the edge of a pool. His other hand lay beneath him, bent awkwardly under his chest. The red and blue toy boats had drifted out of the flooding tub and now lay sideways, trapped under a steady stream of soapy water sluicing onto the floor.

His boy’s naked back had broken the surface and was dry and warm to the touch. Clay placed his palm there and wanted to leave it for a while, but he realized he still had motions he had to go through.

In his career he’d saved perhaps a half dozen people through CPR. He worked on his son for fifteen minutes-mouth to mouth, thumping and massaging his chest, pounding at his boy’s heart. He thought he might be crying but wasn’t sure and didn’t want to check.

Every now and then a whine slid deep within him but it wasn’t like any sound he’d heard before. It could be a different kind of death rattling around, hungry and mewling and wanting out, but Clay kept a tight hold. He wasn’t going to go yet, and he continued working at his boy until he couldn’t take the frozen, insane glare in Edward’s eyes anymore.

Clay kneeled with his forehead to his son’s face, the fiery pain in his belly growing and the flames clawing up through him to settle in his brain. Something in his chest throbbed for a moment and then a sob broke. Clay threw his head back and thought he might howl like a dying dog, but all that came out was a guttural snarl.

Taking the towel from the rack, Clay dried his boy carefully. He was beginning to move a little better now-the vicious twinges of pain made him grunt and gnash his teeth, but at least he could stand. He headed back to the living room, stumbling and shouldering his way along the walls, seeing clues everywhere and knowing exactly what had happened.

It was a wicked way to go through the world. Always capable of putting the pieces together quickly, in the correct order. A hell of a talent when he needed it, and something much uglier the rest of the time.

He could picture how it happened, all right, that’d always been the easy part-walking through the crime scene, adding one fact on top of the other. The angle of blood spatter, heaving arc of the knife.

His father had been the same way-the man would wander in and glance into your face, and he’d know everything you’d been doing, everything you might be trying to hide. On the job thirty years until he’d retired to Fort Lauderdale, started planting flowers and tending fruit trees. He was dead six months later with a head full of tumor.

Clay nearly went down. His own brain was stuffed with rot now. He twisted sideways, came to a rest against the edge of the couch, and felt the blackness welling up behind his eyes. His mostly digested breakfast trickled out of his torn guts and between his fingers.

The urge to sit beside Kathy grew overwhelming. Another moment to play house, just fade off into the night and pretend it was all going to work out on the other side of hell. He tugged her feet free from under the cushion, sat, and laid her legs across his stinking lap.

“Just need a minute to rest,” he said. “But I swear, it isn’t over. Trust me. This isn’t how it’s going to end, baby.”

He hadn’t called her that in a while. Things had begun creeping downhill again the past couple of months, and he still wasn’t certain why. His fault probably-a better than fair chance at that. He had fallen into cliché, which was something he’d been hoping to avoid all his life, but failing at most of the time. At thirty-seven, his middle age crisis had sprung out at him from behind a fucking bush and sent him sprawling. He tumbled into the predictably routine dismay of having more of his life behind him now than out in front. Where was the grace and wisdom you were supposed to find as your gray patches started to fill in? He didn’t know.

Kath had been even more fidgety the past few weeks as well-snappish, moody, quickly depressed and really pining for the good life that had somehow eluded them. He couldn’t get over the feeling that he just hadn’t tried hard enough.

Maybe if he’d pushed just one extra inch along the way they could’ve made it over the line to whatever they’d been missing. The slightest brushing against the larger dream.

She’d gone through the same sort of thing a couple of years earlier, after a cervical cancer scare. He’d seen that kind of thing jolt people into becoming wheat germ and Yoga nuts. For others, it swung them around in the other direction. Kathy wound up screwing around with H for a couple of months, but she fooled with it the same way he’d had a brief period of binge drinking. Trying to find other ways to deal with the burden of high school hopes that kept tugging at your ankles after all these years.