The Four-Night Run (25 page)

What about Bozant? Vega doesn’t put it past Bozant, that animal, to blab with pride over beers in some ragged Crapstown joint about who he was going to kill. First, Scrbacek. Then the fat slob Trent Fallow, for sure, the idiot who had given Scrbacek the file in the first place. Then the crooked judge, Dickerson. And then the Cuban lawyer, Vega. Why him? Because he’s Cuban, which makes him expendable. It’s always been that way; when things turn bad, turn on the Cuban. Was it all a lie, what Scrbacek had said? If it was, then Scrbacek had indeed read the file and put it all together and knew everything. But Scrbacek was clearly a man who knew nothing, desperate to figure it out but even more desperate to get out of town. No, the way Vega figured it, Scrbacek had never read the file, or had not put the disparate facts together. And if Scrbacek doesn’t know, then Bozant must have said exactly what Scrbacek said he said. Bozant had a list, was checking it twice, and Vega was on it.

Jesus. This has turned worse than he ever could have imagined. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. The telephone handset is still in his hand, and he bangs it against the wall. Dammit. And then, suddenly, he is seized by terror.

He looks around, first slowly, with a dawning awareness, and then desperately. Someone is there, he is certain, watching him, readying to off him right where he stands. Maybe aiming at him right now from the other side of the window, through the space made by that weirdly bent venetian blind. He doesn’t want to die, and he especially doesn’t want to die in this shabby place, amidst the numbers scrawled beside the pay phone, the stains on the walls rubbed there by pathetic slatterns giving up an end-of-the-night screw, the uneven browned ceiling tiles loosed helter-skelter from their places in the grid. Not here, not here, not now.

Bit by bit he gains a grip on his calm. No one is here. The venetian blind has always been bent that way. He is safe for the moment, reassured finally by the broad hunched figure of Sweeney still behind the bar. He is safe here, but he has to do something, and fast, and he knows exactly what it is he needs to do. He isn’t some tragic refugee right off the raft, wading onto a Florida beach. He is Cirilio Vega, the Cuban fire-eater on the rise, a man not to be trifled with. A man who has already taken the necessary precautions. He’ll have a busy morning, for sure, but he’ll pull himself out of this mess. First, he’ll make the call, take care of Scrbacek once and for all. Then he’ll have another double vodka to fire up his courage. Then he’ll pay a visit of his own, right away—go straight to the man and make sure that bastard understands the price they all will pay if something untoward comes to pass.

He turns to the phone, punches in the numbers, waits for the ringing to stop.

“Let me talk to Dirk.”

39

M
AI
T
AI

Scrbacek peered over the lip of the wall surrounding the flat roof of the building across the street from Sweeney’s. He watched as Cirilio Vega, that bastard, slipped out of the front of the tavern and looked first right, then left, like a little thief, before heading away from his office, away from the courthouse, heading toward, Scrbacek was certain, a confrontation with the man behind everything, the man pulling the strings.

The magician.

Scrbacek had scared him, he could tell, forcing a doubt into those arrogant lying eyes. And now Vega, that bastard, would take that doubt to the person who was giving him his orders. Who was it? Breest? Galloway? Torresdale? The great James E. Diamond himself? Scrbacek slipped across the roof to the corner to get a better view of Vega, that bastard, making his way down the sidewalk.

As Scrbacek watched, a dark presence alighted beside him.

“Did you catch it?” he said without looking around.

“He called Dirk’s,” said the Nightingale. “The view was clear as day through the venetian blind you bent.”

“That bastard. I need to find out where he’s going, but I can’t be seen on the street. Can you tail him?”

“Sure.” She slipped off her rifle and laid it by the side of the roof. “Keep your eye on baby.”

She skipped across the roof, jumped the gap to the roof next door, and kept moving. Scrbacek watched as she moved, lithe and quick, like a cheetah on the prowl. When she finally disappeared, he was left alone, on the roof, with her gun and his emotions.

Cirilio Vega had sold him out, that bastard, had sold him to those who would build a trench through the heart of Crapstown. First, Vega had fucked Jenny, of that he now was certain, and then he had fucked Scrbacek. Scrbacek would be having a postcoital cigarette if his lungs could bear it. He had seen it all in Vega’s eyes when Scrbacek asked him if he knew what was in the file. Vega knew, that bastard, and the fear in Vega’s eyes was the fear that maybe they wouldn’t get to Scrbacek in time.

He took Jenny’s phone from his raincoat pocket, powered it up, and made a call.

“I’m surprised you’re still alive,” said Surwin.

“I’m surprised myself. You sound beat.”

“Late night.”

“Want to have some fun?”

“Always.”

“Show up at the bus terminal in about half an hour. They’re going to come in full force to find me. There’s a bus leaving for Austin that they think I’ll be on.”

“And how’d they get that idea?”

“A rat in a double-breasted suit whispered the word in Dirty Dirk’s ear.”

“You want to come in? I could have a squad anywhere in the city in fifteen minutes to give you full protection. You ready?”

“Not yet. I’m getting closer.”

“To what, Scrbacek? To you finding an answer or to us finding your corpse?”

Scrbacek didn’t respond. Instead he pressed the “End Call” button and kept it pressed hard, as if he were choking the damn thing until the good-bye screen died. Scrbacek was scared, no doubt about it, but he felt the fear giving way to something else, something dark and sharp and vicious. It took a moment for him to recognize it.

Anger. Ruthless and predatory and breathtakingly familiar.

It had been in him from the start, from the moment someone blew up Ethan Brummel. It had been superseded by fear and then confusion and then the raw purpose of survival, but now it burst from its hiding place and spread its wings like a huge hideous raven. Its great black shadow covered at first only Cirilio Vega, that bastard, but then spread to everyone who was behind what had happened to him, and then spread even farther, to anyone who had stood by untouched as it all rocked out of control, until it encompassed the whole of humanity. The muscles in Scrbacek’s jaw tensed, his fists balled, blood reddened his sight. He called out in frustration, and the sound from his throat was like a great angry caw. He flailed his arms about and slapped his fist into the barrel of the Nightingale’s Kalashnikov.

He picked it up and felt its heft, its brilliant sense of direction. He snapped the gun into firing position just over the edge of the roof. He could stay atop here and pick them off, one after the other, keep firing until he shot a hole in the center of the universe. He could feel the anger drag him up to the bell tower of the University of Texas, or through the halls of Columbine, gripping his shoulders in its claws as it swept him away from his life. His life.

He turned onto his back and tossed the gun away, the stock skittering loudly on the roof.

His life. It was gone, torn apart as surely as his cherished Ford Explorer, and the building he owned, and the law practice that had defined him now for too many years. His life was like Crapstown—abandoned, lost, left to rot and ruin. And who could he go to for help? Donnie and Elisha Baltimore? Blixen and the Nightingale? Nomad Aboud? That a bunch of Crapstown freaks were all that he could rely on anymore seemed unbelievably sad to him. A rush of loneliness rose to choke his throat. He wiped at something wet running down his cheeks and was embarrassed at his weakness. He moved across the roof, picked up the Nightingale’s gun, and squeezed it tight to his chest as he swallowed down the tears.

Scrbacek was a hard guy. Scrbacek could take whatever the hell they dished out. He had built his practice from nothing, had faced down the toughest prosecutors the state could throw at him, had whipped Thomas Sour-Wine in the biggest case of his career. Scrbacek could lick what ailed him, just like he licked his little addiction, all by his lonesome, cold turkey. He had taken off in the middle of winter for some seaside place where he could drink himself silly out of coconut halves, screw divorcées, and let the poison drip out of his system. That was his twelve-step program, three piña coladas, four mai tais, a double hurricane, a pack of Marlboros, a night with Val from Toledo, a night with Glynna from Santa Fe, a night with Charlotte from Savannah, who wasn’t technically divorced but had a husband who didn’t understand her. Scrbacek wasn’t the kind of guy to cry about his loneliness. They could blow up his car, burn down his home, send their hit squads through the city hunting for him, and still here he was, ready and willing and able to bring the fight to them. He was so tough he thought about himself in the third person. Scrbacek was a hard guy.

He wiped again at his face, suppressing a sob.

Suddenly the sun burst over the edge of the taller roof to the east, shooting flares into his eyes, forcing a squint. It felt good, the sun. He had been running for so long now. How many nights? Three, heading into his fourth. And in all that time, this was the first he had seen of the sun. And before he was on the run he had been on trial, working nights and mornings, glimpsing the sky only as he grabbed a quick lunch from a vendor before rushing back to the courtroom to prepare for the afternoon session. The kiss of the sun on his face felt lovely and loving. Maybe that was what was wrong with him, maybe all he had was a seasonal affective disorder, maybe all he needed was a tan. He stood on his knees, took off his coat, balled it up, put it on the black tar of the roof, laid his head upon it. When had last he slept? At Jenny’s, yesterday. In her bed. With her scent.

The sun lapped at his face, and he fell asleep hard, as if he were dropped from a great height into the flat black earth east of Eden in the Land of Nod.

The story he dreamed had the sort of deep strangeness characteristic of dreams, with switches of setting and plot that had no internal coherence. But there was running in it, and a gun that wouldn’t go off, and a woman with long dark hair, and a boy who watched him and followed him and tugged at his shirt. Tugged at his shirt. And in the dream there was something drifting between the three of them, around Scrbacek and the woman and the boy, a purple haze floating through all the shifts of place and incident.

When he did wake, finally, when the Nightingale pulled at his shirt and woke him and told him the exact room in Casinoland where Cirilio Vega had run off to, Scrbacek would forget all the settings of his dream, all the incidents, he would forget even the woman and the boy, forget everything except that which had swirled around him. It was like smoke, this swirling thing. It rose and fell with the ebbs and flows of the ocean. It snaked its way into his throat and down until it pierced his heart. And it stayed with him after he awoke, and it followed him through the rest of that day and the night to come, a night full of discovery and terror and violence, a night that would change a thousand lives and end more than a few of them.

And this is what he felt from the swirling thing in his dream, each component keen as the blade of a freshly whetted knife: he felt regret, desperation, confusion, need, fear, desire, hope. It was a potent cocktail, though he couldn’t recognize the combination, because he had never felt it before. He didn’t know where it came from, and thought, maybe, the flutter in his stomach was merely adrenaline pumping through his veins. But he was wrong. It was the purple haze he had felt in his dream. Regret, desperation, confusion, need, fear, desire, hope. Take dark rum, curaçao, lime juice, sugar, a splash of grenadine, shake it with ice, serve it with a lime wheel, and what you get is a mai tai. Take regret, desperation, confusion, need, a splash of fear, shake it with desire, serve it with hope, and what you get, pure and simple, is love.

And from where the hell in a place like Crapstown did ever he find that?

FOURTH NIGHT

40

D
OLORES
R
OSAS

Dolores Rosas, the former Dolores Jepsen, the former Dolores Delossantos, though only for six months before that louse slinked out and knocked up her best friend Jeannie, the former Dolores Macklin of West Orange High School in West Orange, New Jersey—
Field Hockey 9; Best Buddies 9, 10; Library Aide 10; Affiliation Club 10, 11; Italian Club, 11; Joseph Delossantos 11, 12
—Dolores Rosas waits beneath a flashing sign with an arrow pointing straight down at her head.

PARK HERE. PARK HERE. PARK HERE.

She holds a brown paper bag to her chest and taps a shoe nervously upon the cement as she waits. The doubts about what she is doing whisper madly in her ear. She tries to banish the voices but fails.

PARK HERE. PARK HERE.

If the tragic patterns of her adult life could be distilled into one moment, it would be this: standing outside a run-down pile of cement, holding a brown paper bag filled with false hope, ignoring the doubts as she waits for a man to ask too much of her while he brings nothing but trouble.

PARK HERE.

By the time Dolores had finished her shift at the casino and reached J.D. Scrbacek’s office apartment three nights before, the fire trucks were already there, the ambulance and police, a small crowd of gawkers that had seen the flames or heard the news on their police scanners. She had rushed under the yellow tape, past a police officer, to a firefighter with the clean shape of a mask on his otherwise filthy face, and asked if anyone had come out of the building.

The firefighter shook his head.

“There was someone inside. J.D. Scrbacek. The lawyer. He was inside, waiting for me.”

“I’m sorry, ma’am. We didn’t find no one. Let’s hope he left before it started. Why don’t you talk to Captain Beckman over there and tell him what you know. He’s the one writing up the report.”

But she didn’t talk to Captain Beckman over there, sensed somehow that it wouldn’t be wise to officially connect her name to Scrbacek’s. Instead, she took a last lingering look at the fire, clutched her arms around her chest, and walked slowly back to the casino, where she caught a bus to the employee parking lot, climbed into her wreck of a car, and drove back to her small apartment to confront another night of nothing. The papers all said J.D. was missing, and she knew what that meant. It meant that her last hope for something different than her past was missing, too, and, like J.D. Scrbacek, presumed dead.

She was aware how sad a case she was, resting any hopes on the likes of J.D. Scrbacek, whose deadened eyes seemed to fire only as they scanned the exaggerated curves of her body. There was something curiously empty about him, as if nothing inside was firm enough to hold an imprint. The moment she left his bed at dawn, dipped down to slip on her heels, quietly climbed down the circular stairway and out of his building, that moment any impression of her similarly slipped out of his life. And, in fairness to J.D., he never pretended it was anything more. He didn’t ask about her day. He didn’t ask about her daughter. He would see her and pounce, and after, amidst the tossed sweat-sodden sheets, when she tried to raise their talk to something more than ordinary chitchat, she found his concentration faltering as he slipped into sleep. He longed only for her body, she knew, not her immortal soul.

But could she ever expect anything different? Who knew better than Dolores that there was nothing the least bit extraordinary about her immortal soul? And to have a body men longed for, wasn’t that, after all, why she had suffered all the operations?

She was married to Sammy at the time. “What about looking like that?” he’d say, holding up the foldout of one of his magazines. “I know a guy who owes me a favor.” Or he’d say, “You know, your thighs, they’re getting a little chunky. I heard it don’t even hardly hurt.” Or he’d say, “And tell the doc with what I’m paying for them injections, he ought not to be scrimping on the collagen.” She hadn’t wanted the operations, had been scared of the knife and of that little vile vacuum, but when Sammy Rosas asked, she had silenced the doubts that were whispering like a chorus of madwomen in her ear and said yes. Anything to keep him happy and home, even as she knew he was cheating all the time, even as she knew he was soon to be out the door.

When she had looked at herself in the mirror after the surgeries, she wasn’t sure who was looking back. Is that you, Dolores Macklin, or is that someone else, some Sammy Rosas sex-fantasy blow-up doll come to life? She should have listened to the mad whispering doubts that were not so mad after all, but what could she have done then? Reduce the tits? Enlarge the nose? Thin the lips? Thicken the thighs? And, of course, it had its uses, this new and improved thing that stared back at her from the mirror. Every night she served her drinks to gray-haired men with too much money. They would notice the improvements, and it might spark something, anything. Everyone could use a little insurance.

And then along came J.D. Scrbacek.

At first, it suited her fine that he was only after her new body, because, to be frank, after Sammy Rosas, with his bad knees and forty-five-inch waist and soft dick, it was nice to be with someone younger, harder, who didn’t make her do all the work. But then she began thinking of J.D. at off moments, looking for him her entire shift on the floor, feeling disappointed the nights he didn’t show, which was most nights. The gray-haired men still made their passes while their wives were off at the slots, but she wasn’t interested anymore. She had a man on her mind.

When she was with J.D. Scrbacek, somehow she felt full of possibilities. It wasn’t money she was after—the gray-haired men had enough if that was all she wanted. And it wasn’t to snare herself a lawyer husband and to thereby rise, somehow, into a higher level of status—because, honey, after all she’d been through, she could care less about either status or a husband. No, it was something far richer than riches: the hope that a relationship with a man could be other than domination and casual cruelty, punctuated by bad sex. And somehow, in J.D. Scrbacek, she had seen that possibility.

He was gentle, except in bed, which suited her fine. And he didn’t carry the same controlling arrogance of her other men, even Bert Jepsen, Charlene’s father, who had seemed so nice and steady after the disaster of Joey Delossantos, but who had turned out to be the most viciously controlling of them all. Somewhere beneath the hardness he feigned, Dolores could see in J.D. Scrbacek the necessary kindness of a nurturer. He’d be a good daddy, J.D. would, someday, and maybe that was what she was looking for—someone to support her emotionally even as he threw her ankles over his shoulders and kept her bouncing deep into the night. Someone who would allow the Dolores Macklin of West Orange High to step out of the false shell that had been constructed around her and maybe make something new of her life. That was the possibility she felt when she was with J.D. Scrbacek, a last chance, burned all to hell in the fire.

Until he called, just this afternoon. J.D. Scrbacek had called and asked her to meet him here with the stuff in the bag. The whispering doubts told her it could only mean disaster, and yet how could she refuse? She had a man on her mind, and, as history had proven, when the former Dolores Macklin had a man on her mind, she was lost.

PARK HERE.

She is waiting, beneath the flashing sign, wondering if he will really show, and then there he is, turning the corner and walking down the sidewalk toward her, a ragged figure, body hunched, face tilted down, hands jammed in jean pockets, torn and ratty raincoat trailing behind.

She drops the bag, runs up to him, says in a rush of words, “J.D., J.D., my God, it’s so good to see you, J.D.,” tries to throw her arms around his neck, but he dodges away and moves on past.

“Follow me” is all he says, without lifting his face, before he turns beneath the neon arrow and disappears into the garage.

She is stunned for a moment, dumbfounded, and then she does what J.D. had scrupulously not done, she twists her head from side to side to be sure no one is watching. When she turns her attention back to the garage’s entrance, it is empty, as if J.D. had been merely a mirage. But he hadn’t been a mirage. She walks back to the bag, stoops to pick it up, enters the cement structure beneath the neon arrow. Beyond the ticket machines she sees the door of the stairwell slowly shut.

He is waiting for her inside the doorway, smiling. “Hello, Dolores.”

“J.D.?” It is clearly J.D. Scrbacek staring at her from the stairs, one foot higher than the other, but there is something different, too. He is unshaven, his hair is greasy and mussed, his cheeks are red from sun and dark in patches from bruising, there is a dirty bandage over his nose. She has never seen him so unkempt, but that is not what is different. It is something in his eyes. They hold a purposefulness she has never noticed in him before. He doesn’t let his gaze perform his typical rove over her body, despite the time she spent before the meeting opening the top of her jacket to reveal her revealing work halter. Instead he looks into her eyes, as if, for the first time, he is actually looking at her, not at what the surgeons have done to her.

“Did you bring what I needed?”

“Yes. I did, yes. The razor I already had, and I went to the mall at the LondonTown Pier for the other stuff, but I had a devil of a time finding someone who would let me—”

“Good,” he says, cutting her off and beginning to climb the stairs. “There’s a bathroom up here on the fourth floor. We can get ready there.”

“J.D.? What’s happening here? Tell me what’s going on. I need to know what you are getting me—”

He turns around and puts his fingers to his lips, and she quiets. “Fourth floor,” he says softly.

When she reaches the bathroom door, he pulls her inside, closes the door behind her. The room is cramped and desolate, thick with stink, the toilet stuffed with gobs of toilet paper, a bare roll of brown paper standing on the edge of the filthy sink. She cringes from the smell and holds her arms tight to her body, making herself as small as possible in that fetid space. He takes the bag from her and rummages inside.

“Let’s see what goodies you brought.” He pulls out the pair of reading glasses she picked up for him at the bookstore in the mall. The rims of the glasses are dark, the lenses thick. A large tag still hangs down from the bridge.

He puts the glasses on and blinks wildly. “I can’t see a thing.”

“You said as powerful as they make.”

“So I did. How do I look?”

“Like a nearsighted computer geek who still lives with his mother.”

“Perfect.”

“What’s going on, J.D.?”

“I’m getting ready for Halloween.”

“Take off the damn glasses and talk to me.”

He slips the glasses off his nose, carefully folds them, and returns them to the bag. “I’m in serious trouble, Dolores, and the man responsible is in room 2402 of Diamond’s Mount Olympus. I have to get inside that room, find out who is behind what’s happened to me, and figure out a way to turn the tide. The problem is, I’m being hunted like a cougar, so I can’t just stroll in on my own. I need your help.”

“How serious are they about finding you?”

“Serious as a bullet in the head.”

“And so naturally, you thought of me.”

“I finally realized that in the whole of Casinoland, you’re the only one I can trust.”

She tilts her head at that and can’t suppress the smile. It’s the nicest thing he’s ever said to her. For a moment a rush of emotion silences the whispering, and she takes a hesitant step forward, another, and then wraps her arms around his neck.

“Oh, J.D. I was so worried. When I saw the fire. And then you came up missing. And there was talk of you being a murderer, which I knew was a lie. And I thought I’d never see you again. J.D.” The tears come. She wipes her nose on his filthy jacket, hugs him tighter. “If anything happened to you, J.D., I don’t know what I’d do. I missed you so much, I was so worried, I . . . I . . .”

She stops speaking when she realizes that he is not hugging back. By now, the old J.D., the two of them alone in a sordid little room like this, would already have his teeth in her neck as he dry humped her against the door. But this J.D. is doing nothing. She lets go of him, takes a step back, and wipes her face, smearing mascara on the back of her hand.

He is staring at her, right into her eyes, like before. “Stop it,” she says. “Stop looking at me.”

“You normally like it when I look at you.”

“Not like that, like you’re looking into me or something.”

“It’s just you’re a very sweet woman, Dolores, and I feel bad about how it has been between us.”

She wipes beneath her eye with a thumb. “And how has it been between us?”

“I don’t know. You know.”

“Tell me, J.D. Tell me what you feel bad about. No, forget it. Please don’t. Just tell me how it’s going to be after all this crap is over. Tell me that.”

“Not like it was.”

“Does that mean better, J.D.? Are you going to take me out to dinner some night, maybe a show? Are you going to take Charlene and me to an amusement park come Sunday? Are you going to maybe stay awake until I show up one night? Tell me how it’s going to be.”

“While on the run, I . . . I . . .”

“Go ahead, spit it out.”

“I saw an old girlfriend.”

“Oh . . . my . . . God.”

“What?”

“He’s going to give me the old-girlfriend speech. Please, dear God, anything but that.”

“And I think I have a son.”

“A son. And he thinks he has a goddamn son.” She stops her performance, wipes her nose with her palm, looks up to J.D. “A son?”

“I think.”

“You’re not certain?”

“I don’t know. All I know is that I saw her and the boy, and I started feeling things I haven’t felt in a while, or ever.”

“And so you and this old girlfriend, you just hit it right off again? The two of you are smack back into the swing of things?”