The Wrong Man (12 page)

As I knew we would, we slowed and stopped before we reached the bridge. The Celica turned right without signaling, nosing up onto a farm road, folding tall grass under its lowered undercarriage. I nosed up behind it, the car looking somehow ominous, somehow obscene, removed from the pavement, washed by my white headlights. I watched as Owen opened the driver’s door and stood out of his car. He squinted back at me for a moment. He was keeping his hands in the open. And then I watched the gun emerge after him, followed by Tommy’s arm, and then Tommy himself unfolded, the same height as Owen but twice the gangster’s width. Where was the other gangster? I didn’t have time to contemplate the question because Tommy was glaring at me, jerking his arm toward himself, waving me over.
 
I pushed the gear lever into park, killed the engine and got out, but Tommy was shaking his head. “Lights! Turn ’em off!”

I turned off the lights and moved toward them. As soon as I was near, Owen said, “Schuler! You’re fucking up, Homes!” his voice somewhere between threatening and begging.

I didn’t answer. Tommy had turned out the Celica’s headlights and closed the door so its interior lights were dark. The three of us stood under the moonlight like nocturnal animals.

“I didn’t go anywhere near your chick, man. You’re fucking up!” Owen said, his voice getting slightly shrill.

I looked at Tommy and said, “What if he didn’t?”

Owen’s eyes locked with mine and he looked like just a kid—blinking, swallowing, trying to appeal to me without words.

But Tommy was shaking his head again. He said, “Look inside the car, Sam,” in a flat voice. “Hey!” he added. “Put your sleeve over your fingers. No fingerprints.”

I did as he said, opening the driver’s door of the Celica with my jacket sleeve hooked over my fingers. The dome light shined on the other gangster. It was the gamecock. His cap was pushed up, so it was on top of his head but he wasn’t wearing it. He was twisted and bent forward, his temple against the dash. His eyes were blank and the brain and blood and bone that the bullet had accumulated as it tore through his head was spattered on the interior of the window glass around him.

I inhaled and now caught the faint butcher shop smell and stood straight. I closed the door with my knee. I looked at Tommy and said, “Fuck!” in a weak voice.

“You don’t want to finish this?” Tommy said. “After all this you don’t want to take out the motherfucker that raped your girlfriend?”

“Fuck, Tommy!” My heart seemed to shake my whole body. “Just hang on! Really, what if I fucked up?”

“Listen, Sam!” Owen’s Mexican accent was thicker than ever, his jaw seemed to jut out to a painful level, as if he spent all his life trying to keep his underbite under control and now, panicked, he couldn’t stop it from thrusting out an inch more than usual. His eyebrows were knit hard and his nostrils flaring.
 
His eyes were wet, but I didn’t believe they were actually tearing up. “Schuler!” he said. It came out as if he was ordering me. “I wouldn’t rape your chick, Homes! Think about it. That ain’t my style and you know it! I never heard about any of this shit until your cousin—”

You never realize how loud a gunshot is from watching movies. In the nanosecond during the explosion all other sound in the universe is drowned out and every cell in your body convulses, shudders, shrinks back.

The bullet passed through the side of Owen’s head and flesh and bone sprayed out the other side before the head could even lean in the direction of the shot. Owen’s body went down to the knees, then flopped into the tall grass almost slowly, almost easily, like a kid pretending to die in a game of cops and robbers.

Tommy stood stock still for a long moment, gun still extended.

Then he snapped out of it. He stepped backward, turned and jabbed the gun into the back pocket of his jeans. He pulled his sweatshirt over his head so his T-shirt slid up and his thick pale torso shone in the moonlight. He used the sweatshirt as a rag and wiped where he had touched the side of the seat and the adjustment lever, then climbed in back like an animal squeezing into its burrow. I could hear him huff air onto surfaces, fogging them like a person does glass, and then wiping them down. He emerged again from the driver’s side, using his forearms for support, careful not to put his hands on anything. He stepped over to me and said, “Gimme the keys. Let’s go.”

His face was shiny. His body odor powerful now. I found the keys in my pocket and laid them in Tommy’s palm
.
 

“We’re not gonna do anything else? Hide them?” I said as he walked past me.

“Nope. Get in. Hurry up,” he said, sitting in the driver’s side of the Ford Focus.

There had been no traffic on the road. I thought of all the detective stories I had read, about the cops finding tire tracks, but we had driven on either tall grass or dry hard dirt.

“Cops couldn’t ever dream who iced those fuckin’ idiots,” Tommy said as if he was reading my mind. “There’s no pattern, no nothing. Don’t think about all that Detective Columbo bullshit, Sam. It’s over. They’re gonna look at this shit and shrug. Figure some drug deal gone fucked up. And I used one of their guns, too. There’s nothing. Listen. Just never think about this shit again. Never talk about it to anyone, you hear me?”

“I hear you.” I was wondering if Tommy had done this sort of thing frequently in the past, but not really wanting to know.

As we drove back to Greens Landing Tommy said, “I need a shower.” And I grunted and said, “I’d say so.” The events beside the river were broken off clean by Tommy’s willing it to be so. He had advised me to forget it, and now was leading the way.

“See that?” he said. “And I got a shower waiting. You make fun of Candy, but look, we got this car to use, I can use her shower . . .”

“Her body,” I offered.

“Even that, asshole. I ain’t too good to take one for the team. What—do you think that’s all I get?”

“Naw,” I said, “There’s that supermodel at the bar today.”

“Fuck you, Sam. I never hit that. Shit, I fuck girls that you’d wet your fuckin’ pants if they said hello to you.”

I couldn’t help but scoff and I said, “Yep, that’s exactly my point.”

He was quiet for a moment, then muttered, “See what kind of pussy you’re getting when you get my age, you fuckin’ punk.”

There was menace in his voice, and I thought of him killing people and said, “I’m just kidding, Tommy. Jesus, I thought you could take a joke.”

He said nothing and I continued:

“Hey, I want to say thanks for helping me out. Seriously.” I cleared my throat and looked at his face, glowing from the miniature footlights on the dashboard. “You saved my life.”
 

And he sighed, one of his rare human moments, and said, “Yeah,” in a defeated way.

13

A
n
hour
later
,
back
in my car, I could only think of Jill. My longing for her, for the life and the new family she represented, was suddenly overpowering. I tried to delve down to the source of the impulse and could only equate it with the men coming back from war, returned from seasons of cold and slaughter and the abiding threat of death and now able to truly appreciate the comforts of hearth and home and the creation and nurturing of life. How lucky I am, how unbelievably fucking lucky, I thought at long last, that this baby was coming and that I had a girl like Jill for my own.

I glanced at my cell and it wasn’t even
midnight
yet. I punched in the number of Jill’s mother’s house. It rang and rang and the muscles of my neck and shoulders hardened. Oh Jesus. I had set the whole of gangland on edge, I had got them angry enough to take steps to kill me
 
. . . would they go after Jill? Couldn’t they research, ask around, find out where her mother lives and go wait for her, drag her into a car or something? “Please, God,” I said aloud. “Let her be fine.”

“Sam?” Jill said, sounding sleepy.

“How’d you know?” I said.

“Caller ID. We gotta get it when
 
. . . whenever we move to a new place. It’s great.” She paused, then, “Sam? I’ve been having nightmares about you getting killed or something. I don’t know why.”

A shiver went up my spine. “No such luck,” I said. “I’m coming over, all right?”

She waited a moment. “Yes. Hurry up.”

We ended the call and I set the cell on the seat beside me. I wanted to tell Jill the whole story but I shook my head. Never. What if she could never see me the same? Wanted nothing to do with me? And that was nothing. What if she repeated the story, in confidence, to a girlfriend, who then repeated it to someone else and so on until the cops came knocking? No, I would have to lock it up inside me and carry it with me for the rest of my life.

It couldn’t be difficult, I thought. Men went off to war for years, did and saw things that should not enter the life and mind of any civilized person. This was nothing. A few days of my life—I realized that since the time Rich had crawled in my car and I had smelled the pot it had been exactly a week. Seven days. A brief disruption of the natural order, an infection flaring up, burning, raging, and then dying with those two brutal gunshots. Now the wounds would scab over, the scar tissue would form and life would continue.

And I finally let Owen Ferguson step to center stage in my mind. I replayed his last moments, then rewound and replayed them again. He was nearly begging. Well, how would he act, anyway? Of course he would say he didn’t do it, but . . . My stomach sucked up under my ribs and I could have vomited. My palms were sweaty, slippery on the steering wheel. I thought of Owen looking like the kid he had never been. Confused. Genuinely terrified. I thought of his tone and I just couldn’t believe he had raped anyone no matter how hard I argued the case to myself. I had known it there, beside the river, but it was no use with Tommy already having shot the other guy. And Tommy was right, after all. We weren’t doing this anymore because of any rape. We were doing it because Owen was going to have me killed, or was going to kill me himself. It hadn’t been revenge, it had been survival.

Sunday passed in tranquility. Jill and I took in a matinee and looked at a couple of apartments for rent in
Del
Mar, where the square footage was a third less and the monthly rent a third more. I slept at Jill’s mother’s, on a futon with Jill, in the room she had used for two or three of her teenage years.

Monday morning I went back to our apartment to shower and change clothes. I didn’t bother with the door chimes, although I kept the thirty-eight on the bathroom counter while I showered. For the first time, entranced by rain sound and the warm water massaging the back of my neck, I felt the weight and significance of what I—well, what Tommy—had done. I felt the void left by Owen Ferguson’s death. The screaming silence. The engine of retribution, I realized, had been stilled. I thought of Owen’s mother and little sister, and of Ramón, and wondered if they were thinking of me.

At two I stepped into Vanguard again. Another kid who worked there, Keith, said hello to me, grabbed his jacket and a pack of smokes from the rack, and left.

The entire shift ticked by, second by second, without incident. The door buzzer sounded regularly and regular customers made their regular purchases, faces I didn’t know hovered before me as I rang them up, then drifted out, but nothing out of the ordinary took place. I had forgotten my book so, during the long, tedious stretch between about eight-thirty and closing I dragged the utility mats outside and beat them against a support post and piled them next to the door. I found the old broom in the back and swept the dust bunnies and heaps of dirt from all the corners of the store and transferred it to the garbage can by the door. On a high shelf in the back room I found new mop heads in plastic bags and I replaced the ancient, moldy gray head that had been on the mop since I started working here. I fixed up hot mop water, with plenty of Simple Green and a dash of bleach, and went to work. Halfway through the job the water was so filthy that I dumped it and started over. At the end I stood and surveyed my work, breathing the bleach, trying to appreciate the darkened floor mats, and sheen on the speckled tiles. It still looked like shit and I laughed to myself, knowing that nobody who worked here would notice, and it would be a year before anyone thought to mop the floor again. But, what the hell, I had killed an hour.

I went through the closing ritual, darkened and locked the store, went to my car, sat while it warmed up and then drove to
Del
Mar to spend the night with Jill.

It wasn’t until the following night that it happened.

I was beginning to feel rather confident and relaxed by seven-thirty on Tuesday, and that was when I looked up to the sound of the door buzzer and figured I was going to die. The gangster was staring at me as he cruised in, his face smug. He was short, maybe forty, wearing the crisp white T-shirt and black, new workpants. He was a
veterano
, a creature of the prison systems. He had his hair slicked straight back, the teardrop tattooed next to his eye, the cursive on his neck, the murky prison ink like elaborate bruising, giving a green tincture to his brown arms. He stared at me openly as he walked in and said, “What’s up, Sam Schuler?” as he passed. My heart was jumping. I turned my head and watched him strut to the beer cooler. He came back with a twelve pack of
Corona
in bottles, hoisted it and clinked it on the counter between us. He kept staring at me as I rang the beer in and recited the price. He slid a twenty over the counter with tattooed fingers and said, “Relax, bro.”

“Do I know you?”

He leaned in. “I know
you,
Homes.” His skin was grayish-brown, his face had an oriental cast. He was smirking. “You’re a badass. You’re like that dude in
Death Wish
, ain’t you?”

We stared at each other.

“Breathe, man,” he said. “I ain’t gonna do nothing to you. Word to the wise, though.” His voice dropped and he leaned a little closer. “I’m the shot-caller and I already said to drop it. Someone fucked with my chick? I’d bury ’em, too,
ese
. I’ll tell you the truth, I respect that. You got heart. And between you and me? A lot of people didn’t like Owen and his crew. Lotta people thought they were punks, aye. So, ‘officially’ ”—he actually made little quote marks with the fingers of his left hand—“there’s no beef no more. But them two guys had some friends, and I can’t guarantee you nothing. All I’m saying is, you made your point, now you want to be watching your fuckin’ back.”

I nodded and said, “Okay,” trying to be the character he had superimposed on me—trying to be as stony-faced as Charles Bronson. I slowly unwrapped my fingers from the thirty-eight and removed my hand from my pocket. I hit the CASH button and made his change and asked him if he needed a bag and he said nope and grabbed the twelve pack. “Take it easy, Sam,” he said on his way out.

“You too,” I said.

I tried to let the tension drain away. I could feel the sweat in my armpits. I wondered what had been said. I wondered if they had any idea that it had been Tommy and not me—that I wasn’t anything even approaching a badass. But I couldn’t guess how my reprieve had come about, what conversations had taken place in little houses and apartments in the seedy parts of town. The nerve centers of the monster, the machinations that determined its actions and decisions were unknowable to me. The monster was rabid, untamable, half insane, and it had simply turned on me one day. I had fought it, clinched with it, felt its muscles rolling and flexing beneath its dry, hot, mangy hide even as its teeth had sunk into my neck. I might have succumbed, but the secret is that the monster is not merely ferocious, it’s starving and frightened and it bares its teeth and lashes out because it hopes to scare you off without a fight. I had been equally frightened, and in my desperation I had bit back. I had made it bleed and yelp, made it feel respect, at least for a moment. So now it was slinking off again, into the piss-stinking alleyways and sidestreets, in search of easier prey. It was done. It was over.

But it wasn’t.

As I was stocking the beer cooler, during the last hour, I heard the door buzzer and went out behind the counter and was confronted by the sight of Rich. His face had calmed from his beating, although it was far from normal. I thought of Owen, of his near-begging, and I stared at Rich Channing.

“What’s up, Sam?” he said, tilting his head, looking at my face. “So they got you too, huh? Shit, that’s nothing. You didn’t even get no stitches, did you? Compared to me you look like you been in a fuckin’ pillow fight . . . Hey, you hear about Owen Ferguson, dude?”

“Yeah, I heard.”

“Is that fucked up or what? Lucky for us, though.”

“Yeah,” I said. The bruises on his face were a washed-out yellow. His black-stitched lip had returned to almost normal size. Except for a few scars and a little dental work he’d be himself again in another week or two and wouldn’t give this incident so much as a backward glance. He looked at me looking at him and said, “What, dude?”

“Nothing,” I said. I looked past him, out the door, and saw the car. The little red Japanese go-cart with the gray-primered fender. “Who’s driving you around, Rich?”

“My friend. Some dude you don’t know.”

“What’s his name?”

“Johnny.”

“Yeah, I know him,” I said. “Mexican dude, right? Dark skinned guy?”

His eyes went hard and he said, “Yeah, he’s pretty dark, I guess.” Then he recovered and said, “Hey, can I get a pack of smokes, dude? I’ll pay—”

“Nope.”

“What?”

“You got no money, Rich, then get the fuck out of here.”

“What, dude?”

“Get the fuck out of here, Rich. Or I’m gonna come around this fucking counter and put your face through the fucking window glass.”

The fear flickered in his eyes, then dimmed. He was walking backward and he said, “All right, dude. All right. Whatever,” and he spun and almost walked into the doorjamb, grabbed onto it and steered himself out the door, making the buzzer sound again.

I walked around the counter and stepped to the doorway, staring as they drove away. My vision strained at the license plate of the little go-cart and I said the numbers and letters to myself and went inside, grabbed a pen, ripped off a piece of paper bag and wrote them down. I put the piece of paper in my wallet.