The Bialy Pimps (48 page)

Ted was already being rolled into the ambulance on a gurney. Somewhere in the back of her mind, Jenny wondered how long it had been. Five minutes, maybe?
 

Pretty damn fast.

Maybe it had been longer. The store was in chaos. She couldn’t trust her internal clock now, of all times.

“Ted’s been hit!” she yelled, finding her voice again. “Ted’s been hit by a COTA bus!”

The Anarchist thought:
Jenny is losing her mind.

Philip was yelling that he wanted the goddamned thing shut off, that he wanted the goddamn doors unlocked, and that he wanted the goddamn system uninstalled and used to beat the salesman in the groin.

Jenny was clawing at the door, desperate. Ted had been loaded into the ambulance and the back doors had been closed. The EMTs were scrambling back into the cab and soon it would pull away, sirens wailing, leaving only the policemen to take photos and statements and the technicians to clean up the blood. She was going to miss it. And for some reason, she felt that she could not afford to.

Jenny heard Philip yell, “Thank you!” aggressively, then noticed that the red light had turned off and that the green one was now lit. She burst through the door and scrambled across the street, but it was too late. A policeman would want to know what she had seen, but it was all over.

Army Ted, or maybe just his corpse, was gone.

The accident scene across High Street had pretty much resolved itself by the time the fire department trucks arrived. A long pump truck pulled up on the curb in front and three firefighters hopped out, dressed in full gear.

“There’s no fire,” Philip told them as soon as he saw them.

“We have to check it out, just the same,” the apparent leader told him. “Do you have a basement?”

Philip opened the half-door and beckoned the trio to follow him to the back staircase. One straggler had to be called twice, as he had noticed that Darcy was still whipping her hog-tied customer and found the spectacle strangely compelling.

Jenny burst into the store, out of breath. “Army Ted is dead!” she shrieked at the Anarchist.

“Ted’s dead?”

“Yes!”

He looked at her face, trying to decide if she was out of her mind. Hadn’t she said earlier that he had been hit by a bus?

“How?” he asked her.

“He was crossing the street and was hit by a COTA bus!”

This was too weird.

“Are you sure?” said the Anarchist.

“Yes! Yes, I’m sure. I saw it all. He was walking over here and this bus came along and
Wham!”
She stopped suddenly, aware of an odd sense of déjà vu.
 

“A COTA bus.”

“A Number Two.”

“And Ted was hit by it.”

“Do I stutter? Yes!”

The Anarchist was still doubtful. “How could he miss a huge bus coming at him?”

“It came down 15th and turned onto High, moving fast. Maybe the driver was drunk.”

“He’d have to be,” said the Anarchist, “since the Two doesn’t go down 15th.”

Jenny hadn’t thought of that. But it had been a Two; she was certain of it. She turned around to confirm it but the bus was gone.
It shouldn’t be gone already,
she thought. Only, it was.

The Anarchist scratched his chin. “You’re sure it was Ted?”

“Well, I couldn’t get out there until he was driven off to the hospital because the doors were locked, but it was definitely him. I was sitting right up front, right at the counter by the window. I saw his face and everything. Looked like he was chewing gum, in fact.”

“And you’re sure he’s dead.”

She frowned. “Well, no.” She wondered why the Anarchist wasn’t more concerned. So she asked him.

“I suppose I don’t really believe it,” he said. “It’s too ironic. Things are pretty crazy, and I wouldn’t be alarmed – or even surprised – if you told me that I had been shot in the face.” He paused, suddenly aware that if she was telling the truth, he
should
be concerned. Ted was a friend. Ted would be missed. He felt guilty for his emotionlessness.

Philip and the firemen were returning from the basement. Jenny and the Anarchist told him what had happened.

“Is
that
what all of that was across the street?” he said. “Hmmm.” So Philip couldn’t register it yet either. It made the Anarchist feel better.

“Don’t you two
care?”
Jenny shrieked at them.

Philip rubbed his forehead. “Are you sure it was Ted?” he asked.

One of the fireman walked in through the front door. He yelled to another, who was on one of the phones behind the counter. “Hey, Jim! Is that the dispatcher?”

The other lifted a stubbly face from the phone. “Yeah.”

“Does he say that the fire is supposed to be out front?”

“Yeah. How’d you know?”

The other sighed and rolled his eyes. “Because I found it.”

The firemen walked out front and gathered on the sidewalk. The Bingham’s crew followed them. They all gathered around a shallow planter that had been set into the concrete sidewalk. A small tree was growing from it – part of an urban “beautification” project a few years back. The fire raged at its base.

The third firefighter spoke first. “That can’t be it.”

The man who had been on the phone with the dispatcher spoke next. “It is. They said that it was in a receptacle on the sidewalk.”

Philip reached an arm into the huddle and poured the remainder of his Mountain Dew on the few flaming slips of paper. “Look, I’m a fireman,” he said.

“Goddammit. Who called this in?”

“Campus police.”

“Goddammit. Those assholes.”

“Campus police?”

“Fucking rent-a-cops.”

Tony the UltraClean man pointed to the policemen across the street. “Hey,” he said, “looks like there might have been an accident over there!”

When Tony had gone, the firemen had gone, and the blood across the street had been mostly mopped up, Darcy put down her cat o’ nine tails, hiked up her leather bra, and asked Jenny, “Are you sure it was Ted?”

“Oh, for the love of...”

“Yes,” Philip answered for her. “It had to have been Ted.”

“Why didn’t anyone go out there?”

“Because we were in high-security lock-down thanks to a lit cigarette and a campus cop unwilling to stamp it out. I’m going to kill the people who sold me that alarm.”

Darcy asked, “Could it have been another skinny old guy with a too-tight baseball cap and a blue shoulder bag?”

Beckie had just walked in for her shift. “What’s this about Ted?”

The Anarchist patted her on the shoulder. “Beckie, sit down,” he told her.

“Why?”

“Ted was hit by a bus.”

“What? Did Jenny put you up to this?”

The Anarchist kept patting her. “It is ironic, I’ll admit. But it’s true. Jenny saw it.”

Jenny nodded.

Beckie narrowed her eyes at Jenny. “Bullshit.”

“I swear. Sorry, Beck.”

Beckie couldn’t believe it. “Well,” she said, already tearing up, “are you sure it was Ted?”

“Totally sure.”

“Is he...?”

Everybody looked at Jenny. “Well,” she said, “the ambulance was from University Hospital. I guess we could call.”

Philip went over to the phones while the rest of the crew filled Beckie in on the day’s tumultuous events. He was working for ten minutes or so, and when he returned to the others, his face was serious.

“Ted Handy,” he said. “D.O.A.”

Beckie was shaking her head. “It’s just a trick,” she said. “Like when he used to taunt us with his license and tell us lies. It’s just a dirty trick.”

The Anarchist kept patting her back. “There there.”

Tony, sitting in the UltraClean Hygiene van in the alley, licked his lips. He wondered who had stolen his camera. But even more than that, he wondered why nobody was mad at him, why nobody was threatening him with criminal charges or with a baseball bat. The purpose of the thing in the air freshener would have been obvious to anyone, and Tony was the only person who ever touched the air freshener. He supposed that if cornered, he could try to blame it on a clever customer who’d planted the thing during the past week, but nobody would buy it. They’d know he’d done it. He’d lose his job. He might face a beating. Maybe he’d even be arrested.
 

Just as bad as the threat to himself was the cost of the whole endeavor. The camera had cost him three hundred dollars, and the recorder had been another four. Now both were gone, and he had no idea how he could possibly get them back. The situation was intolerable. He could only ask so many questions. He couldn’t put in a request at Bingham’s lost and found. If he was going to find the thing, he’d have to find it himself. It was tricky to recover something you couldn’t admit to having lost.

Tony swore.
 

How had they known to look inside of the air freshener in the first place? There was no reason to look inside of the thing – let alone to
break it open
when it refused to yield gently – so they must have had a reason to do so. They must have had a tip. But if that were the case, it only created more questions. After they found the camera, why didn’t they report him? Why didn’t they mention it to him when he came in? Even if they couldn’t connect the dots, they should have asked him about it, or responded when he’d said that a part might have gone missing.
 

But they’d said nothing, which really only left one possibility. They’d stolen it.
 

That was the only scenario that made sense. Someone had known the camera was in the air freshener, and now the camera was gone. Nobody was reporting Tony, nobody was calling the police, and everybody was playing dumb. It was technically possible that the camera could just be lost, but it seemed like a long shot. The dispenser had been broken open with malice. There had to be a reason for someone to do that.
 

Seven hundred bucks, that rig had cost him. Incentive enough for any burgeoning voyeur who didn’t mind borrowing other people’s property.
 

Who had it been? he wondered. Could it have been a customer, or did it have to be the employees? And then he decided that yes, it pretty much had to be a member of the Bingham’s crew. The dispenser had been shattered to pieces. Nobody could do something like that without raising a hell of a racket, so it had to be the people who worked there, who had access to the store all day and night, who wouldn’t need to be stealthy about it.
 

Those little bastards.
 

He rubbed his freckled forehead with the back of his hand. He wondered how he was going to get the camera back. And what’s more, now that he was thinking about it, he wondered what Dicky Kulane would say when he learned that his plan to spy a rat had been foiled. Tony had liked Dicky from the beginning because both of them were fringe-dwellers who didn’t have many friends among normal people, but Dicky had always been a bit off, a bit unstable. And this last time Tony had talked to him, Dicky had been even
more
off, even
more
unstable. He had been almost frightening. There was something in his eyes, and in the way he huddled closer than ever when he talked, as if paranoid that the world might overhear. There was something in the subtle way Dicky used his words, and in the tone of his voice. Whatever he was trying to do at Bingham’s wasn’t just business. It was personal, and it mattered a great deal to him.

Tony was sweating in spite of the late autumn chill. The camera had gone missing, costing him seven hundred dollars. The Bingham’s employees knew his perverted secret. Dicky Kulane was expecting him, hoping for something that he could use. And Tony was just a little bit afraid of Dicky Kulane, now that he thought about it.

Tony started the van’s engine. Given the way things had turned out today, there was really only one thing he could do.

Philip, the Anarchist, Beckie, Darcy, and Jenny stood near the phones, halfway into the back room, huddled into an intense group. The store wasn’t empty, but it felt that way.

“Can’t be,” said Beckie, crying, shaking her head. “Ted can’t be dead.”

Philip shrugged. “Maybe there was a mistake.”

The Anarchist was at Beckie’s shoulder, wanting to tell her something that would make it better but reluctant to raise false hopes. He looked at Philip and said, “How?”

Philip shrugged again.

Mike walked in through the back door and surveyed the group. His somehow derisive eyes peered out from under the low brim of his hat.
 

“What’s this noise?” he asked.

Beckie blew her nose. “Ted’s dead!”

Mike paused. “Guess we’ll find out if he’s the tutor now.”

Philip glared at him. “Mike!”

He shrugged. “Shit happens.”

Darcy was thumbing the metal spikes on her leather bra. She drew circles with the toe of her shoe. “Army Ted,” she said airily.

“Your tits look huge,” Mike observed.

“Mike!”

Mike shrugged again, then donned an apron.

Beckie pulled her face from her tissue and looked up at him. “What are you doing?” she asked.

“Life goes on. I’m getting a Dr. Pepper.”

Mike slid behind the register and glanced up at the wall of a person across the counter from him. He was a black man who stood at least six-foot-nine and was easily three hundred and fifty pounds, with the shiny handle of a plastic hair pick jutting out of his afro. Mike looked tiny standing in front of him.
 

“I’ll have a Tom’s Turkey, with...” the customer began.

Mike interrupted him. “Do you know you have a comb in your hair?”

The customer looked down and said nothing.

Mike pointed, his face expressionless. “Right... there. There’s a comb stuck in your hair.”

Jenny was mumbling, looking across the lobby and at the now-defunct accident scene on the street. “This is somehow my fault,” she said.

The Anarchist turned to her. “It’s not your fault. Just because it is exactly, to the letter, spookily right-on what you’ve said you always wanted to see doesn’t mean...” Then he trailed off, thoughtful.