Heroes (24 page)

“That little prick,” Bayle said, looking away from Warren and shaking his head, imploding anger at his looselipped dealer overwhelming his surprise at Warren's mention of Patty.

“Now, now, Peter, blaming Ron isn't going to solve anything. What we like to say in counselling is that people like Ron are only symptoms, not the problem.”

Bayle frowned. “Look, Chuck, I appreciate your coming over here, I really do, but I don't have a drug problem.”

“Denial.”

“What?”

“It's perfectly natural, Peter, it really is. It's what we in group like to call one of the essential steps toward recovery.”

“Chuck, look, I told you: I don't have a drug problem.”

“I know this isn't what you want to hear right now, Peter, but anyone who purchases a thousand dollars worth of cocaine most definitely has a drug problem.”

“For the last time, I don't have —”

“I bet you haven't even left this room since you scored, have you?” Warren leaned back in his chair, crossed his arms tight across his chest. “Where is it, Peter? How much of your hard-earned money have you stuffed up your nose already?”

“I'm not high!”

“Yes you are!”

“Oh, for the love of —”

“My God, Peter, just take a look at yourself: agitated, nerves ground to the bone, and nearly as paranoid as these militia types we've got hurling their bombs around town now. I'm afraid it's as plain as the nose on your face, old man.”

Almost at the point of yanking out the container of cocaine from underneath the pillows to prove he hadn't even touched the drugs, it suddenly struck Bayle that, thanks to Ron's big mouth, now that Warren knew he had the coke, letting him think that he was actually using was the only way he could possibly justify having it. He took a deep breath and ran both hands through his hair, attempting to look his most junkie-repentant-sincere.

“Okay,” Bayle said. “Okay. Let's say I did have a problem and did want to get clean. What would be the first step? I mean, if I did have a problem.” Bayle tapped what he hoped was a passable version of a cokehead's frantic tune on his thigh.

Warren stood up and put his hand on Bayle's shoulder. “The first step is always the most difficult, Peter. And by admitting to yourself that you've got a problem, you've already taken it.” Warren didn't dab his nose as usual but blew it this time good and loud. He stuck the handkerchief in the inside pocket of his black suit jacket like he never intended to use it again.

Plans for Bayle to attend his first group counselling session tomorrow afternoon at seven p.m. sharp and the extraction of a promise to try and only do enough cocaine to get him through the night and the next day were made and given. Warren shook Bayle's hand firmly and reassured him for the third excited time that, with the right kind of professional help, anything was possible. Bayle tried to continue looking strung-out but cautiously optimistic. Warren looked like a man who loved his job and wasn't a problem drinker with a predilection for mainlining morphine.

The Reverend already at the elevator, Bayle suddenly remembered something. “Hey, Chuck?” he said, peering around his opened door. Warren turned to face him.

“Don't worry, Peter. We're going to lick this thing. Together. You'll see.” Warren raised a clenched fist.

Bayle lifted a limp fist of his own. “I don't doubt it,” he said, “I don't doubt it.” The elevator dinged its arrival at Bayle's floor. “I was just wondering though,” Bayle continued. “What did you mean by my unresolved feelings toward my sister?”

“Come again?” The elevator doors opened up.

“You said something earlier about my unresolved feelings toward my sister. Where did that come from?”

“Oh, that. You don't remember?”

Bayle didn't like the sound of where this was going.

Warren looked both ways down the hall, lowered his voice to a pointed whisper.

“The night you spent at my place enjoying Ron's ... little delivery,” he said, looking up and down the hallway again. “Your sister. She was all you could talk about.”

The news struck Bayle the way headlines, no matter how big the letters, never do. “But that's not ....”

Warren gave an enthusiastic thumbs-up and stepped out of sight into the elevator, remarking before the doors closed that he also did bereavement counselling and that that might be something they'd want to explore later on after first getting Bayle's more immediate problem under control.

Still half inside his room, half hanging out, “But that's not true,” Bayle said.

Nobody heard him, though. Nobody.

H
E KNEW
it would take nearly an hour to walk to Duceeder's place, but Bayle didn't want to run the risk of anyone like a bus driver being able to place him in the area. He spent most of the trip resisting the desire to look over his shoulder every time a car horn or errant human voice announced itself and logically demonstrating to himself that a crime can only be said to be a crime if there is a crime scene, and that there can only be a crime scene when a person gets caught and charged with committing a crime. And since Bayle had no intention of getting caught it stood to reason that he really wasn't going to be doing anything criminal, just righting a wrong that, if the world ran on reason and not pettiness and mean-spiritedness, never would have required his righting it in the first place. So there.

Looking up to notice he'd just passed Davidson's street, Spruce, Bayle doubled back and detoured down its sidewalk. Nearly seven-thirty now and feeling fairly comfortable under the cover of an almost-darkness, he stood in front of the old man's unoccupied apartment.

Tonight was the first time since Davidson had been hospitalized that Bayle hadn't gone by to visit. Not that he did much when he was there anyway except steal guilty glances at just-showered Gloria fresh from practicing her routine at the rink (all-over workout-taut and whatever springtime scent it was she wore whenever returning from the arena kicking the death out of the hospital smell of rubbing alcohol and slow decay that upon signing in at the front desk always made Bayle temporarily loath to take the elevator up to Davidson's fifth-floor room). But once he got there and saw the grateful little half-smile Gloria always gave him when he came in the room and heard the grunt of recognition half-asleep Davidson always made when hearing Bayle's voice saying hello to Gloria, dread of disease and dying disappeared and nowhere else he'd rather be than in room #563, Hays County General Hospital, passing the hours between six and eight p.m. with his two friends.

And friends, Bayle thought, still standing there in front of Davidson's house, real friends, they'd do anything for each other. Anything. Because that's what friends do.

Bayle took one last look at the house and strided back down the sidewalk. He was only about ten minutes away from Duceeder's place and figured he could be there and done with what he had to do in fifteen, twenty-five minutes tops. Duceeder. That bastard.

M
R.
B
AYLE.
I'm afraid you don't look at all well. I fear this horribly inclement weather is getting the best of you. Stay the course, young man. According to the weather forecast on WUUS a change for the better is on its way. A cool front down from Canada, apparently. And how about that? Relief for all of us, and all the way from where you call home.”

Samson said his smiling-as-usual-as-he-said-it bit before turning his attention over to a question tug-on-his-sleeve posed by one of the two others on either side of him in press box row, the thick sideburns like furry porkchops and identical pot-bellies stuffed into tight-fitting white suits to go along with longhorn bolo-ties and enormous white cowboy hats leaving little doubt that the two men were from Texas, or at least willing to play the part in the made-for-T.V. movie. Duceeder also sat in the press box, but at the other end, his eyes never leaving the ice surface. It appeared as if he hadn't been invited to Samson's hoedown.

Bayle sat himself and his laptop down and looked where he was supposed to look at the rink below without actually seeing the quick two-on-one break right off the face-off converted into a Warrior goal by Robinson assisted on by Trembley at the 15:31 mark. Never heard the public address system announcement of the goal, either.

White as a sheet (or a ghost; or, alternatively, looking like he had just seen a ghost); sick as a dog; weak as a kitten; feeling like death warmed over: cliches, sometimes, exactly what the doctor ordered, the patient too sick with — fill in the blank with whatever ails — to come up with a witty way to say just how one hurts (and how). Dull language for a dull pain. In Bayle's case: fear, and all its still-echoing after-effects.

Bayle put his hands together with the celebrating others in the arena and struggled to quit looking at then quickly looking away from Duceeder smiling to himself at Robinson's goal. Struggled, but apparently not hard enough.

“Yeah?” the G.M. finally said, end of his tether at Bayle's peek-a-boo routine having finally been reached. He took a gnarled pen out of his mouth. “Yeah, what?”

“Good game so far?” Bayle said. Jesus Christ, what did I do? he thought.

Duceeder considered Bayle head to toe for a few unimpressed seconds and then stuck the pen back in his mouth, trained his eyes back on the ice.

“Mr. Bayle,” Samson said, “I'd like you to meet Mr. Handy and Mr. Gunn. Gentlemen, Mr. Bayle. This is Mr. Handy and

Mr. Gunn's first hockey game, if you can believe it. Any tips from an experienced observer like yourself you'd care to pass on?”

Six eyes on him unblinking and awaiting, Bayle, wanting the force of the three men off him like sucking leeches on a twentieth-century sick man, feigned enthusiastic the first thing that came to mind: “Keep your eye on the puck!”

Each man hesitated; then, with the resumption of collective blinking, nodding in understanding agreement all three of them, turning their attention away from Bayle and back to the game. Bayle opened up his computer and plugged it in and tapped away at whatever keys his fingers happened to find, filling up his screen with absolute gibberish in order to buy some time to piece together just what the hell had happened.

Like most unqualified disasters, things couldn't have started out better.

More than once having heard Duceeder bitch and moan about the new patio door he'd just had installed, Bayle made it around the back of his house without, he thought, anyone seeing him, and went right for the glass door, giving it a sharp jerk and feeling the thing immediately give, if only an inch or two. Three more hard yanks and the door jumped from its track just like he'd heard Duceeder complain about. He looked around him — nothing: backyard blackness everywhere only — and slid the door easily open.

Which then promptly fell forward and crashed into the kitchen table, one of the wooden table chairs shattering right through the glass door. Instead of running the other way, though, Bayle was propelled by the glass explosion into the carpeted diningroom, the sliding of the patio door the last act he could with any exactness remember.

After this, only fragments of action and emotion to be ceaselessly replayed over and over, just like that infamous piece of film footage Patty during her conspiracy theory period had for so long lingered over of Kennedy taking one for the home team that one last time in Dallas. Frame by frame, slower and slower, maybe
this
time the meaning of the act won't escape with the end of the tape.

Fragments of action and emotion fifteen minutes in the actual doing but only an instant in the remembering:

The sound of the smashing glass still ringing in his ears even after the slivers and shards on the carpet were only a still pool of crazy water refracting jagged the entering beam of moonlight.

The screaming silence as soon as the ringing had faded.

The first uncertain steps toward ....?

Stopping, looking around, assessing the room.

Second, third, fourth uncertain steps toward ....?

I-Spying kitchen cupboards (no), counter drawers (no), teacup-and-saucer-filled corner cupboard (no), liquor cabinet (Alcohol ... Drugs ... Make sense? Yes). Placing the peppermint tin of cocaine out of eyeshot behind the Southern Comfort and bottle of gin.

On his knees in front of the cabinet and hearing the policemen's walkie-talkies as they came around the side of the house, sprinting into the other room with laptop in tow in search of the first cover he could find — the livingroom closet — mothballs gagging his throat and sweat stinging his eyes, yet too scared to wipe it away for fear of rustling the winterwear and overcoats.

The five-minute (five hours?) up and down the house search by the cops — always one downstairs when the other was up, never an opportunity to make a run for it even if he'd had the nerve to take the chance.

One cop calling the other one over to the diningroom.

“Whatta you got?” the deep voice said. Carpet steps toward the other voice.

Silence.

“Uh huh,” the deep voice said, loud enough for Bayle with strain to hear from inside the closet.

“What do you figure?”

“At least a grand, maybe more.”

“Too much for just him and the little lady for around the house, though, wouldn't you say?”

“Oh, for sure, for sure. This guy's selling. No doubt about it.”

Silence.

“Liquor cabinet open just like this when you found it?”

“Yep. Open as the barn door. Thought I'd check it out for prints in case our B-and-E got a little thirsty before he left.”

“Well, at least now we know what our visitor was looking for,” said the deep voice.

“We must have spooked him off before he could find it.”

“Uh huh.”

Silence.