Love and Other Wounds (13 page)

The men laughed. Tommy laughed. He leaned back. An arm wrapped around his throat. He had just enough time to wonder why they just didn't put a bullet through his brain. The arm around his throat squeezed. Nothingness bloomed at the edges of his eyes. He planted his feet against the bar. Pushed. The man choking him came down with him. They hit the floor. It seemed like Tommy should have felt something.

Tommy wrapped his hands around the duffel bag straps. The animal inside him said, Run. He tried to scramble to his feet. The men grabbed him. Hands from behind pulled him up. Balic put his face inches from Tommy's.

“I have a message to send to Lambert,” he said. “Give me that bag and you can give the message with your mouth. Do not give it to me and I will write the message on you.”

“Fuck you,” Tommy said. It felt good to say. He rolled his shoulders. The men holding his arms struggled to keep hold. Balic hit him in the stomach. Tommy puked air. Dropped. He didn't feel anything. His lungs refused to start up again. Balic stomped his head. The world blinked out.

It blinked back in. Three men left in the room. Balic and two of the black suits. The two men in black held his arms to the ground. Balic grabbed a vodka bottle. Broke it on Tommy's forehead. Bloody vodka splashing down into his eyes. Little rivers plugged his nose. Balic stomped him. And again. Something cracked. Tommy didn't feel any of it.

Tommy turned his head and watched the blood pool below his face. Black and spreading. Hands turned his face back to the ceiling. Balic stood over him with a knife. He pushed the knife into Tommy's stomach. His body jittered. It knew it was being gutted. But Tommy didn't feel it. Vodka and blood and black
ness and Tommy all mixed together, like he was the world and he was drowning in himself.

He gasped like breaking the surface of a lake. He roared. Balic stood over him, still working with the knife. The pain of it all rushed into him. He drove his boot into the fork of Balic's crotch. Balic dropped. He left the knife hilt-deep in Tommy.

Slick with blood. Tommy took a punch in the face from one of the men holding his arms. His head hit the floor. His teeth clicked through the tip of his tongue. His hands went to his stomach. Found the knife there. One of the black-suit men tried to wrestle him back down. Tommy stabbed strobe-light fast. Hit something major. Now the blood wasn't just his.

Tommy moved toward Balic. His feet went spastic. He caught himself on a barstool. He looked down. So much blood coming out of him. More black than red. Dark with life like soil.

The still-standing man in black tried scrambling over the bar to get away from Tommy. Tommy grabbed him by the ankle with his left hand. With the knife in the other, he opened the man's leg to the bone. The man screamed. Tommy laughed and yanked the man down to the floor with his friend.

Balic reached for his gun. Tommy got to him first. He laughed and lunged. Butted him with a bloody forehead. Balic went slack. Tommy turned Balic over onto his back. Tommy hung his face over Balic's so his blood dripped like rain.

“I've got your knife, friend,” Tommy told him. “Let me give it back to you.”

Tommy gave it back. And again. It had been a while since Tommy had done any work with a knife, but the way of it came back to him quick enough.

Things Tommy will never remember.

Tommy drives through gray mist, like fog had rolled in
from the Mississippi and buried the city. Blood soaking him everywhere, down to his sodden socks.

He walks through the door of the Black Goat holding a heavy wet load.

Tommy lies on the floor of the Black Goat. Blood trailing from the back door. Meadows turns him over. Meadows sees that the messy thing he held in his arms is his guts, slipping through the gash in his stomach. Meadows carries him to the Black Goat's unused kitchen. Lambert asks him questions about money. About Geat. Tommy laughs pink foam.

There is a man elbow-deep in Tommy. Some doctor Lambert owns. He works Tommy's intestines with both hands. Shoves them back inside Tommy, hard, like a man overloading a washing machine.

Tommy woke up to a pain he'd never known before. Meadows and Lambert stood in the kitchen of Lambert's place. The never-used kitchen of the Black Goat. He wore his stinking jeans and a black T-shirt. He had an IV in his arm. Someone had gotten him a pillow. Probably Meadows.

“Is Geat dead?” Lambert asked.

Tommy ground teeth. The pain swelled from rivers to an ocean in him. The pain felt bigger than he was.

“He wasn't with me. He's back home.”

“I know,” Lambert said. “I talked to Geat.”

Meadows started to ask, “Then why—”

“To see if he'd lie to me again,” Lambert said.

Tommy told them what he could. About leaving his gun. About the attack. He thought he'd feel better once he told the truth. That's how it was sometimes in stories. People unburdened themselves of all the lies and they felt clean and whole
again. Tommy didn't feel that way. He felt like a man who had needed to vomit and now had a lap full of puke.

“The doctor left some pills,” Meadows said. He held forward a couple of blue capsules. “For the pain.”

“No thanks,” he told Meadows.

“You've got to take something,” Meadows said.

His death had been so near him in Little Bosnia that he could still smell its stink. It smelled like gasoline, like hydrogen peroxide, something clear and pure and overwhelming. He'd run toward nothingness every night for the last twenty years. But when he'd seen it staring back at him from the inside of his guts . . .

He needed the pain. He needed to know he could take it.

Tommy took the pills. Lambert watched him. Tommy popped the pills under his tongue and held them there. He felt the capsules go sticky under his tongue. He fake-gulped. Lambert turned away. Tommy spit the pills out. He slid them under his pillow.

“Just one thing I want to know,” Lambert said. “If you wanted to die so goddamn bad, why the hell did you fight them?”

The pain had colors. Red at the crevice of the cut where the steel staples pulled his torn flesh together and forced it to knit. The pain that spread around his body was yellow-brown, the color of old banana or Balic's rotting tooth. The colors washed over him. He opened his eyes and the colors went away, but the pain did not.

That night. Three in the morning. A summer storm roared against the building. Tommy's moans came out of his throat
like solid things. He tried to ride it out. He tried to take it all. He broke.

He pushed his hand under the pillow (and that motion set upon him a new wave of pain, oh Christ) for the painkillers he'd stuck there. He lifted his head (stomach muscles contracted, sweet Jesus). Searched under his pillow with a blind hand. The pills were gone. Maybe on the floor somewhere.

The bar in the next room. He could see the bottles through the wall with Superman eyes. Three rows of everything. Single-malt scotch with caramel color and the memory of oak. Smooth Irish whiskey. Corn-sweet bourbon, the city-slicker brother to rocket-fuel moonshine. Vodkas with frosted bottles and fancy names. Sweet toxic-green Midori and ghost-pale ouzo. Vermouth, on the rocks like Hemingway. Gin, juniper scented, medicinal. Cognac, with an amber glow and fumes that burned the eyes. Chase it all down with a beer: pale gold Budweiser, St. Louis original from the keg, Guinness, pop-top Old Style and Pabst, brown Anchor Steam. Pissy Corona cut with lime juice. He'd drunk them all, knew them, knew they could kill this.

A castle against it all, the agony and everything else. A mote of ice, towers of glasses. Drink until the booze filled him and blanked him and gushed out the gash in his stomach. Until he flooded himself.

He pushed himself off the table, the gash kicking up a silent scream when his feet hit the rubber kitchen mat.

Tommy walked with his useless eyes shut, fingers out front of him like a teevee sleepwalker until he made it into the main room.

A streetlight spilled through the windows. The red neon Red Stripe sign above the bar cast the clear bottles pink and the green ones black. Rain thudded on the window. An angry man wanting in.

He lifted the drawbridge of the bar and walked inside. A highball glass. And whiskey. He poured. The smell like gasoline vapor filled his nose. The whiskey would be sweet. Sweet as southern tea. And dark.

In the red neon light it looked like a glass of blood. He lifted it. Thought about Nikki. About running from pain and running back to it.

He threw the glass across the room. Shards flew. He fell on the floor. Something inside him exploded. He took the pain. He lay there and accepted his share of it. He lay there in sweat and tears. The pain didn't leave. Neither did he.

The rain pounded against the window and the blood pounded in his head. Tommy got up off the floor. The pain went through him and he took it. He walked out into the storm. It soaked him. Washed off the blood and the sweat and the stink. He stripped off his shirt. Ran a hand across his stapled stomach. Lived with the pain.

Down the street the neon lights of the Pickled Punk glowed. Tommy walked toward it. Laughed to think how Nikki would scream when he walked through the door. And then maybe would smile.

There was that question, the one Lambert had asked him. If he wanted death so bad, why'd he fight it so hard? And he had his answer now.

He still had to pay his tab.

Maybe you should kill her first, seeing as how she was the one who promised you true love forever and then went and sat on another man's dick. That is the first thing you think when you come back from a fishing trip early, drop by your girlfriend's place, and walk up to the apartment complex parking lot just in time to see her lead Danny Fucknuts in through her door. Your first thought is to take her and break her, jelly her face up with a rock, a tree root, something ancient and jagged. Smash her, crush her, make her slick and wet with blood.

You get drunk instead. You drink in a bar with a jukebox that some asshole has loaded up with country songs, old ones about lying cheating women. You start to doubt yourself. You wonder if you drove her to this. If you're to blame.

You take another shot and say fuck that shit. You ask for a
bill. You mention being a cop and the bartender rips up the bill. You give him two twenties for the half-full bottle of tequila and he gives it to you.

You wander through the streets near her place, where right then she is leaning back on her bed with Danny Fucknuts grunting over her. You think about barging in, about causing a scene, and something in you tells you not yet. You think about that portrait on the wall of her apartment. She made you pose for it at Sears two years ago, fresh out of the academy, fresh in love. You in your patrol uniform and her with her hair teased up to the sky. Your friends called you pussywhipped but you didn't care because it was true love. That photo of you is right now watching her bang Officer Danny Fucknuts. In your drunk haze you see yourself in that photo coming to life, breaking out of two dimensions, stepping out of the frame and strangling her right then and there.

You wake the next day floating in shit. You don't know who you are except a giant ball of drifting meat, poisoned and alone. Then it all smacks back into you and again you want her dead. But then you drink a little water. The iciness hits your stomach and spreads through your veins and you get cold and you get smart and you know, you fucking know, the first person the detectives would go to is you. They always suspect the boyfriend or the husband first. Who else could hate a woman that much but someone who let her crawl inside? Could be they'd look the other way. Could be they buy that blue brotherhood talk enough to let you slip by on a murder. It's happened before, maybe it would happen for you. But maybe not. And you can't risk it. You aren't some prick who is going to prison the rest of his life just because he fell in love. No sir.

But that doesn't mean that you are going to let this one ride. Somebody has to die. And you aren't a suicide. You are strong.
You might have sliced off your dignity for that high-test bitch, but you still have a stub left. And so here you are standing over Danny, watching him sleep, standing here so you can kill him. But kill him smart. Ice-water cold, my man. You have done it all cold as hell.

You run through the checklist. Your head is shaved bald, not too radical a hairstyle change from your everyday cop flattop. You aren't going to leave any hairs lying around. T-shirt, jeans, underwear, bought from JC Penney's today, paid for with cash money, straight out of plastic that evening, no chance to pick up secondary fiber evidence. No fake alibi. That's just another lie to get caught in. You haven't gone elaborate with the planning. Plans are threads for the homicide boys to grab.

You parked your car on an empty side street and walked here through the night, passing no commercial buildings with their security cameras. You've come at three in the morning, after the last of the last-call drunks are asleep but before even the shittiest-job-holding sad bastards' alarm clocks ring. You walked. You didn't sneak or creep. You walked up to Danny's place and walked in the garage. Danny has that cop certainty that no one will rip him off. Danny's little plywood door in the garage, the only thing he saw fit to put between himself and God's cruel universe, between him and the man whose woman he is porking, that door you opened up with a goddamn credit card.

You know Danny is alone, because you said good night to her a few hours earlier, and you drove past her house on the way here and saw her car. Danny hadn't gone to sleep without a load on in maybe a decade. He won't wake up unless a gun goes off next to his head. Funny, that happens to be the plan. But you don't think Danny will wake up with 145 grains of lead parting his hair and his frontal lobe.

The gun is the genius stroke right there in your hand. It belongs to Danny. Your backup piece is strapped to your ankle, but you don't see any reason to chance it when here is Danny's own pistol. Not his department-issue, but that World War II .45 he keeps in that box by the teevee. You can drop the gun right here next to him like you're a movie mafioso. Let them run every ballistics test in the world. Won't prove a thing. A perfect murder to leave the boys in homicide scratching their heads till their scalps bleed. And leave the bitch wondering. You smile when you think about how she'll lay awake and wonder . . .

You pull the trigger. The gun explodes in your hand, blowing off your trigger finger and the first joint of your thumb. The stumps sizzle and bleed as you drop the mangled piece of metal.

That bitch, that bitch, look what she made you do.

Past the weird darklights of the flash you see Danny sit up wild-eyed, floating in silence and gun smoke. With barely time to curse Fucknuts for taking shit care of his piece, you jump on top of him. With the first punch your half-gone hand screams out pain, but you hit Danny again. Crunch crunch. You grab the bedside lamp, both hands to keep the grasp, and you bring that lamp down with a thud and a pop as the fuckwad's skull breaks and then everything is quiet but your own stuttering breath.

Back comes the ice water and even in the dark you can see what you've done. Your perfect crime has devolved to shit. Chock-full-of-DNA blood is everywhere. Mixed together, you and Danny, just like you're both mixed up inside her.

The pain of your hand is once removed, like some other guy is telling you about it. That is just adrenaline keeping you in the fight, but you can't let it run the game. There is still time to make this smart. Not perfect, but smart.

First, off comes that pristine JC Penney's T-shirt to wrap your hand up. Your belt cinches tight to slow the bleeding. You have two choices. You can dump the body, but that is a fool's fucking errand. Stick the body into your trunk, leaving DNA everywhere. And then hide the body where? Bodies get found, and that is a truth that you know for sure. So that leaves option two.

Fire. You find a gas can in the garage. You turn on the gas jets in the kitchen to fill the house. The kitchen isn't far from the bedroom and the gas fumes will hit the flames and foomp goes the house, every little scrap of DNA sizzled like bacon.

You hear the car before you see the lights. The blue and red cherries light up the room like a disco, flash flash flash. The gunshot led to someone calling the cops. Didn't they know one was there already? You peek out the window, thinking maybe you shouldn't have turned the gas on so soon. Tendrils of the invisible stink sting your nostrils. Frank Robinson—you know him a little, talked to him over third-shift coffee and cop-bar beers—has parked his squad car in the driveway and is walking up the drive. Frank rides his squad car solo except for Bruno the German shepherd locked safe in the backseat. So you have only one cop to kill. One more, that is.

You pull your backup piece from your ankle holster left-handed and put it to the wall just to the right of the door where a good smart cop like Frank or you would stand when knocking on the door of a dark house. You wait one long second. Then comes the knock and you pull the trigger. And the whole world catches fire.

The clouds of gas filling the house catch spark from the gun, and the air itself blazes alive with fire for less than a second. You come out the other side of the flame cloud smelling the stench of your own burning hair. But it worked. You can hear the steady rage of flames on Danny's bed chewing up all that DNA. Too
bad about Frank. He lies on the other side of the wall dying out loud. You look out the window past Frankie's body to see the car door open and some rookie shitfuck climb out and take cover on the other side of the Charger, barking into the radio. Looks like Frankie has gotten himself a new partner after all.

The house burns faster. You can go out the back and try to make it home and try to explain away the missing fingers and burns, but you know it is way past that. You've been fucked from the start of this, trying to play it cool and rational when it was simple and savage. You should have cracked her skull the way you were built to do. It isn't too late. Maybe too late to do it perfect. Too late to do it smart. But not too late to do it right. You come out the front door with a caveman yell and pop a few shots to keep the rookie down as you run past.

You hear the rookie let slip the dog, but you're full of animal joy and keep right on running. Heading toward her. You run fast and free toward your fate. It is your finest moment.

The dog takes you down in the street. Your front teeth shatter on the asphalt. Bruno tears out a tendon as you struggle to flop onto your back. You fire the gun into the air. You shoot down the moon. There are arms around you. You scream with a broken mouth.

That bith!

That bith!

That bith!