The Power Of The Dog (75 page)

Callan ain’t thinking about any of this.

He’s just thinking about getting that drink, and his feet carry him into one of the old survivors, a dark narrow bar he doesn’t know the name of—the sign faded long ago—wedged between the last of the neighborhood Laundromats and an art gallery.

It’s dark, like all bars should be.

This is a serious drinkers’ bar—no amateurs or dilettantes need apply—and there are a dozen or so drinkers, mostly male, staggered around the bar and in the booths along the opposite wall. People don’t come in here to socialize, or talk sports or politics, or to sample fine whiskeys. They come in here to get drunk and stay drunk for as long as their money and their livers last. A few of them glance up resentfully as Callan opens the door and lets a wedge of sunshine break into the darkness.

The door closes quickly enough, though, and they all go back to staring at their drinks as Callan walks in, takes a stool at the bar and orders.

Well, not all of them.

There’s one guy at the end of the bar who keeps glancing surreptitiously over his whiskey. A little guy, an old guy with a cherub’s face and a full head of perfectly silver hair. He looks a little like a leprechaun perched on a toadstool instead of a bar stool, and his eyes blink in surprise as he recognizes the man who just came into the bar, sat down and ordered two beers and a whiskey chaser.

It’s been twenty years since he’s last seen this man, twenty years ago in the Liffey Pub in Hell’s Kitchen when this man—a boy then, really—pulled a gun from the small of his back and put two bullets into Eddie “The Butcher” Friel.

Mickey even remembers the music that was playing. Remembers that he had loaded the jukebox with replays of “Moon River” because he wanted to hear the song as many times as he could before starting on his next prison stretch. Remembers telling this man—no, it’s clearly him, even down to the small bulge in the back where he still carries a pistol—to go toss the gun in the Hudson River.

Mickey never saw the boy again, not until this moment, but he heard the rest of the story. About how this boy—what is his name?—went on to overthrow Matty Sheehan and become one of the kings of Hell’s Kitchen. How he and his friend made peace with the Cimino Family and became hit men for Big Paulie Calabrese, and how—if the rumors were true—he had gunned down Big Paulie outside Sparks Steak House just before Christmas.

Callan, the old man thinks.

Sean Callan.

Well, I recognize you, Sean Callan, but you don’t seem to know me.

Which is good, which is good.

Mickey Haggerty finishes his drink, climbs off his stool and slips outside to a phone booth. He knows someone who’ll be very interested to learn that Sean Callan is at a bar in the Gaslamp.

Must be the d.t.‘s.

Callan reaches for his gun anyway.

But it’s gotta be the d.t.‘s—here at last—because there ain’t no other explanation for Big Peaches and O-Bop standing over his bed in the Golden West Hotel, pointing their guns at him. He can see the bullets in their chambers, shiny and lethal, pretty and silver, reflected from the light of the street lamp outside, the fake gaslamp that the broken venetian blind can’t block out.

The red neon from the porn shop across the street flashes like an alarm.

Too late.

If this ain’t the d.t.‘s, I’m already dead, Callan thinks. But he starts to pull the gun out from under his pillow anyway. Take them with him.

“Don’t, you dumb fucking mick,” he hears a voice growl.

Callan’s hand freezes. Is this a drunk dream or reality? Are Big Peaches and O-Bop really standing in his room with their guns trained on him? And if they was going to shoot, why don’t they shoot? They say if you die in your dreams you die in your life, but sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between dead and alive. Last thing he remembers is pounding beers and whiskeys at the bar. Now he wakes up (comes to) and he might be dead or he might be alive. Or is he back in the Kitchen, and the last nine years were a dream?

Big Peaches laughs. “What are you, some fucking hippie now? All that hair? The beard?”

“He’s on a binge,” O-Bop says. “An Irish sabbatical.”

“You got that little .22 popgun under that pillow, don’t you?” Peaches says. “I don’t care how fucking drunk you are, you got that gun. Eeeeasy, there—we had come to whack you, you’d be dead before you woke up.”

“Then why the guns?” Callan asks.

“Call it an abundance of caution,” Peaches says. “You are Billy the Kid Callan. Who knows what brought you here? Maybe a contract on me. So bring the gun out slow.”

Callan does.

Thinks for a half-second about popping them both, but what the hell.

Besides, his hand is shaking.

O-Bop gently takes the gun out of Callan’s hand and tucks it into his own belt. Then he sits down beside him and wraps his arms around him. “Jesus, it’s good to see you.”

Peaches sits down on the foot of the bed. “Where the fuck you been? Jeez, we said go south, we didn’t mean like the Antarctic. You fuckin’ guy.”

O-Bop says, “You look like shit.”

“I feel like shit.”

“Well, you look like it,” Peaches says. “And what the fuck are you doing in this fucking toilet? Jesus, Callan.”

“You got a drink?”

“Sure.” O-Bop takes a half-pint of Seagram’s out of his pocket and hands it to Callan.

He gulps down a heavy belt. “Thanks.”

“You fucking Irish,” Peaches says. “You’re all drunks.”

“How’d you find me?” Callan asks.

Peaches says, “Little Mickey Haggerty, speaking of drunks. He sees you at this shit-hole bar you been drinking at, he drops a dime, we find out you’re living in the Golden West Hotel, we can’t fucking believe it. The fuck happened to you?”

“A lot.”

“No shit, huh,” Peaches says.

“What’d you come for?”

“Get you the fuck out of here,” Peaches says. “You’re coming home with me.”

“New York?”

“No, dumb fuck,” Peaches says. “We live here now. Sun Diego, baby. It’s beautiful. A beautiful thing.”

“We got a crew going,” O-Bop explains. “Me, Peaches, Little Peaches, Mickey. Now you.”

Callan shakes his head. “No, I’m done with that shit.”

“Yeah,” Peaches says, “whatever you’re doin’ now is obviously working. Look, we’ll talk about that later. Now we gotta get you sobered up, get some good food into you. A little fruit—you wouldn’t believe the fruit out here. Not just the peaches, either. I’m talking pears, oranges, grapefruit so pink and juicy they’re better than sex, I’m telling you. O-Bop, get your boy some clothes together, let’s get him out of here.”

Callan’s drunk enough to be compliant.

O-Bop scoops some of his shit up and Peaches walks him out.

Tosses a c on the front desk and tells them the bill is settled, whatever the fuck it is. All the way out to the car—and Peaches got himself a new Mercedes—O-Bop and Peaches are telling Callan how great it is out here, what a sweet thing they got going.

How the streets are paved with gold, baby.

Gold.

The grapefruit sits like a fat sun in a bowl.

Fat, swollen, juicy sun.

“Eat it,” Peaches says. “You need your vitamin C.”

Peaches has become a health nut, like everyone else in California. He’s still three bills and change, but now he’s a tan three bills and change with a low cholesterol number and a high-fiber diet.

“I spend a lot of time on the can,” he explains to Callan, “but I feel fucking great.”

Callan doesn’t.

Callan feels exactly like a man who’s been on a years-long bender. He feels like death, if death feels really shitty. And now fat, tan Big Peaches sits there nagging him about eating his fucking grapefruit.

“You got a beer?” Callan asks.

“Yeah, I got a beer,” Peaches says. “You ain’t got a beer. And you ain’t getting no beer, either, you fucking alcoholic. We’re going to get you straightened out.”

“How long have I been here?”

“Four fucking days,” Peaches says. “And every moment a delight with you puking, crying, mumbling, hollering about shit.”

What shit was I hollering about? Callan wonders. It’s kind of worrisome because the dreams were bloody and bad. The goddamn ghosts—and there were a lot of them—just wouldn’t go away.

And that fucking priest.

I forgive you. God forgives you.

No, He don’t, Father.

“Man, I wouldn’t want to see a picture of your fucking liver for anything,” Peaches is saying. “Must look like an old tennis ball. I play tennis now, I tell you that? Play every morning, except the last four mornings I been playing nursemaid instead. Yeah, I play tennis, I Rollerblade.”

Three hundred twenty pounds of Big Peaches on wheels? Callan thinks. Talk about your accidents waiting to happen …

“Yeah,” O-Bop says, “we took the wheels off a Mack truck, put them on the blades for him.”

“Fuck you, Brillo Pad,” Peaches said. “I blade pretty good.”

“People get the fuck out of his way, I’ll tell you that,” O-Bop says.

“You ought to get some exercise other than lifting your fucking elbow,” Peaches says to O-Bop. “Yo, Lost Weekend, eat your goddamn grapefruit.”

“What do you, peel it first?” Callan asks.

“Honest to God, fucking idiots. Gimme the thing.”

Peaches gets a knife, cuts the grapefruit in half, then carefully slices it into sections and puts it back in Callan’s bowl. “Now you eat it with your spoon, fucking barbarian. You know the word ‘barbarian’ came from the Romans? It meant ‘redheaded.’ They was talking about you people. I saw that on the—what do you call it?—the History Channel, last night. I love that shit.”

The doorbell rings and Peaches gets up and goes to answer it.

O-Bop grins at Callan. “Peaches in that bathrobe, he looks like some old mamma mia, don’t he? He’s even getting tits. All he needs is them fuzzy pink slippers with the little pom-poms on ‘em. Honest to God, you should see him on those Rollerblades. People like run out of the way. It’s like some Japanese horror movie. Wopzilla.”

They hear Peaches say, “Come in the kitchen, see what the cat dragged in.”

Couple of seconds later, Callan’s looking up at Little Peaches, who gives him a big hug.

“They told me about this,” Little Peaches says, “but I didn’t believe it until I saw it. Where have you been?”

“Mexico mostly.”

“They don’t got phones in Mexico?” Little Peaches asks. “You can’t call people, let them know you’re alive?”

“Where was I supposed to call you?” Callan asks. “You’re in the Witness Fucking Protection Program. If I could find you, so could other people.”

“All the other people are in Marion,” Peaches said.

No shit, Callan thinks. You put them there. Old-school Big Peaches turned into the most spectacular songbird since Valachi. Put Johnny Boy in prison for life and then some. Not that life is going to be long—word is, Johnny Boy has throat cancer.