Vengeance (6 page)

Chapter 6

I wasn’t going to my dad’s house to take another stab at catching up with the old man. Aiden’s motorcycle was the only physical piece of evidence left from that night. If the bike was there, I’d be able to see it with my own eyes.

I pulled in last and let myself in. Vickie was bustling about. She had already changed into pants and a shirt. I gathered she was going directly to a shift at the lounge. She and my dad went down the hall into the bedroom. Casey sat on the sofa.

“What do you think about Paige?” he asked, keeping his voice low enough to not reach the bedroom.

“Hard to tell,” I said. “She’s going through a lot.”

He chuckled.

“No,” he said. “I mean, I saw you checking her out at the service. You feel like hitting that?”

“She’s Aiden’s ex-fiancé, man!”

“All right, all right. Just saying. She could use some comfort about now.”

For once, I was glad my dad entered the room. Vickie went straight out the front door without a word and my dad joined Casey on the sofa. I didn’t feel any need to beat around the bush with small talk.

“Paige told me what you said about the motorcycle. How it wasn’t even scratched.”

“Not the paint or the chrome,” he said without missing a beat. He was watching me to see if he was walking into a trap. “Not a scratch anywhere.”

“How is that possible?”

“You’re right. It should be scratched up and scraped and gashed and dented somewhere.”

“So you’re saying Aiden wasn’t in a motorcycle accident at all.”

“I don’t care if you don’t believe me,” he said.

“I’m trying to see how all this fits together. And why it matters. So maybe he wasn’t in an accident. He’s still dead. Something still killed him.”

“That’s right. You’re right. He’s still dead,” he said. “You’re absolutely right.”

“Jesus! I’m trying to talk to you. I don’t know whatever it is you think I should know. If he didn’t crash, what happened? How did Aiden end up dead out there in the middle of the street?”

“If he didn’t crash, someone killed him and made it look like an accident,” my dad said. Casey monitored our exchange like an avid ping-pong fan. “Or maybe they intentionally left the scene looking suspicious enough for people to wonder what happened. Maybe they wanted people to know there was no accident. Maybe it’s a message.”

“A message? To who? From who?”

“To anyone who got sideways with them.”

“Got sideways with who?”

“Jesus, for my son, you sure are ignorant.”

“Yeah, I’m fucking ignorant. So educate me,” I said. “Sideways with who? Why would someone make a message out of Aiden? You’re not making any sense. You call
me
fucking ignorant!”

“Aiden was on heroine.”

Heroine? Aiden had smoked weed since sixth grade. But he never got into anything harder than that. Aiden had tried cocaine at a party once and freaked out. He said he’d never touch anything like that again.

“OK. You need to walk me through this step by step,” I said. “Because I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.”

“A few months back. He was in a bad place.”

“Aiden would never be stupid enough to shoot heroine,” I said.

“I’m telling you, he was having a hard time. I don’t know what all was going on. He never talked about it. But you could sit with him in silence and feel the weight dragging on him. The way he just stared ahead sometimes. He was my son, and I should have pulled it out of him. I should have known it would eat him up. I thought he was being moody, but he was disappearing from the inside out. You don’t see it until you look back. But I see it now.”

As much as I tried to listen for any important details, I couldn’t help but cringe away from my dad as he puffed that cloud of self-pity around himself. Did he feel any true remorse? Or was he casting a smoke-screen so he would be the object of our sympathy? Why weep for poor departed Aiden when my dad was here in the flesh to console? Whether he deserved any sympathy or not, I had none to give to him. Someone else could coddle that old man. I was only interested in the truth about Aiden. He saw the stare I had fixed on him.

“You don’t believe me,” he said. “Yeah, your old man’s a lying fuck. I’m making all this shit up. Fine. Ask Casey or Paige if Aiden was using heroine. They’ll tell you.”

Casey was rigid, trying to stay on the sidelines. I reminded myself of what I had come for.

“Do you have Aiden’s bike here?” I asked.

“The bike’s gone.”

“Gone?”

“Aiden was still paying for it. It wasn’t even in his name. The guy he was buying it from took it.”

“So who’s this guy?” I asked.

“Jeremiah. That’s the only name I know for him. He’s a welder. Lives on Third. Down on the sixteen or seventeen hundred block. I’d know it if I saw it.”

I had my car keys out before he finished. I assumed he was inviting himself along as my guide. But when he saw I was serious, he backed down.

“I just opened a beer,” he said.

“Put it in the fridge. I’m flying out tomorrow so I need to see that bike today.”

He took a long drink, left the beer on the coffee table, and grumbled all the way to the car. The address he described was a few minutes away. I knew the area so that eradicated the necessity for communication until he had to show me which house we were looking for.

“That’s him,” my dad said, pointing to a tall man wearing blue jeans and a tan Carhart work jacket walking from his drive toward his porch. He wasn’t hard to spot, being the only person outside in that cold. I swooped up to the curb on the wrong side of the street to a stop in front of his house. I got out while he was still working his house key in the lock.

“Jeremiah!” I called. I could see him checking who was behind him in the reflection of the door glass before turning halfway in my direction, keeping one hand on the door knob. I was still dressed in a suit, which might have made him think it was a lawyer or detective behind him.

“I know you?” he called over his shoulder.

“You knew my brother. Aiden Tanner. He was buying a motorcycle from you.”

“Yeah. OK,” he said. He let his hand fall from the knob and turned to face me square on. He stuffed his fists in his coat pockets. “Good thing he didn’t fuck my bike up. When I heard about the accident I was pissed.”

“You were worried about your bike?” I said.

“Hey, it’s a shame about Aiden, man. Fuck. You know? They just told me my bike had been in an accident. I had to get down there before they impounded it. I didn’t know about Aiden until I saw it in the paper.”

As much as I wanted to go off on him about caring about his bike more than about my brother, I realized that maybe the police wouldn’t tell someone who wasn’t related to Aiden what had happened. So I gave him the benefit of the doubt and put aside my disgust.

“Mind if I take a look at the bike?” I asked. The bike was nowhere to be seen, but most of those old houses had garages off the alley.

“Can’t. Sold it.”

“Sold it? Already?”

“Buddy of mine was on his way out west. Needed a steed. I didn’t want to keep it. Not after I found out Aiden had died on it. It’s cursed now, if you ask me. But my buddy didn’t mind. He took off yesterday.”

This whole time, my dad had stayed standing by the car. Now he stepped beside me.

“How much did you get for the bike?” he said to Jeremiah, whose impatience was manifest as he shifted his weight from leg to leg.

“That’s none of your business, friend.”

“It is too my business. If you got your money from my boy and you got all your money from your friend, you got paid twice, and you owe me what Aiden paid you.”

“I don’t owe you shit, old man.”

“I put my son in the ground today, you fuck. My heart—I can barely believe I’m standing here right now, talking to a fuck like you. It’s not bad enough I put my son in the ground, but you’re robbing him after he’s gone.”

“What the fuck are you talking about? I’m not robbing anyone. Fuck you. Get the fuck off my property.”

“Hang on. Hey!” I called to intercept Jeremiah from going inside. I was standing on the public sidewalk. I wasn’t going to march up his yard and give him an excuse to escalate things into a brawl. “Listen. If you got your money from your friend, then you got your money for your bike. And if Aiden wasn’t late on any payments, then the part of the bike he paid you for was his. You should have given my dad the chance to pay off the bike before you sold it. But you didn’t. So it’s only fair you refund part of the price. Aiden wasn’t behind, right?”

He stood staring at me, squinting as he might if he were tacking a spot weld without a face mask. Looking like a lawyer may have leant credibility to my case. “I’m not trying to cheat anyone,” he said. “But I can’t give you back all he paid me. I’ve got three hundred dollars inside. Take it, and leave me the fuck alone. I’m sorry for what happened to Aiden, but this ain’t my problem.”

I looked over at my dad. He gave a nod of agreement to Jeremiah, who went inside, leaving the door open. Either he didn’t mind his heat escaping outside, or the money wasn’t far from the door. Staring into the murky interior, I half expected him to come back to the threshold with a shotgun. But after several seconds, he came back through the door, closing it most of the way behind himself. He came down and put a wad of doubled-over bills in my dad’s hand without a word.

“It’s not easy burying your son,” my dad said before Jeremiah turned toward his house. “There’s lots of bills,” he added to the hunched shoulders as Jeremiah plodded up the porch steps.

He probably kicked something or cussed to himself for a bit once he shut himself inside, but we had what we had come for. My dad had his money and I had my answer. Jeremiah told me clearly enough the bike hadn’t been damaged. I would have liked to have seen it, but that seemed impossible. So we got back into the rental car’s still-warm interior and headed to my dad’s house.

“I don’t know what to do,” I said as we waited at a stop sign.

He stared out his window without offering any response.

“Fine. Maybe you’re not crazy to think Aiden was killed. I sure can’t find a single piece of evidence that he was in a crash. But there’s also no evidence that he was killed. And it’s not like a guilty conscience is going to make someone step up and confess,” I said. I was exasperated by the illusory whorl of conjecture. “I’m supposed to fly out tomorrow. What should I do?”

His advice was usually worthless to me. On the rare occasions he offered some wisdom I could benefit from, I preferred to ignore him and learn on my own. Even when I had to learn the hard way, it meant I alone owned those lessons. So he surely grasped the significance of me asking him for guidance.

“You drink?” he asked. It wasn’t a question so much as a wish he was making out loud. “Well, I could use a drink about now.”

Chapter 7

We drove in silence a couple of blocks between the ranks of parked cars. The rental was immaculately quiet and braked softly as cotton balls.

“How old are you this year?” he asked.

He should have been able to figure that out any number of ways. Two years younger than Aiden. Twenty-five years younger than himself. But I replied matter-of-factly, “Twenty-three. Twenty-four in July.”

“I never bought you your first legal drink,” he said. “Of course, you weren’t around for it.”

Dear old dad. But I wouldn’t let him bait me. The shadows of the bare branches swept over me as I drove on. I let the car’s cocoon of silence do my talking for me.

“Right. So have a drink with your old man.”

I was coming up on the stop sign at 19th Street, so I braked and asked, “Where to?”

“Andy’s.”

There was no cross traffic, but I stayed at a complete stop.

“Where’s that?”

“Andy’s? Shit. I’ve been there a thousand times.”

I suppressed a sarcastic comeback. We didn’t need to explode into a scene like the day before. It wasn’t that I didn’t know the name of the place. I’d heard of it as often as he’d frequented it. But I had never been along. I don’t know that I ever imagined where it was.

“Left or right?” I said, feeling pressured as a flow of traffic was coming down the hill from the light at Mt. Vernon Road. We’d be trapped another minute if I didn’t get out in front of it.

“Left,” he said. His frustration bled through the word.

Such a typical exchange with my dad. Him expecting despite all past experiences to the contrary that I could read his mind, getting frustrated when I didn’t. What was new about our dynamic now was that I had no fear of him barking at me or backhanding me anymore. Not that he had become any more patient or developed any respect for me. I just wasn’t afraid of him anymore. And he could tell. He knew if he hit me he wouldn’t be hitting a child rendered incapable of retaliation by the stigma of respect for his parents. I don’t know if I would have intercepted his feeble swat and suspended his arm in mid-swing or if I would have shrugged off any blow he dealt and stared him down to let him know it had better be the last time he pursued that misguided path. I may even have responded in kind, the force of my blow nowhere near as devastating as the shock he would feel at knowing his reticent offspring could turn the tables.

Luckily, we didn’t need to find out what would happen. He put his elbow up on the padded top of the door panel, a little crowded against the rolled-up window, and leaned his cheek into his palm. His eyes blankly scanned the passing houses on his side.

At the next light, I asked for directions again. “Head out toward the mall,” he said. When he saw me turn on the right blinker, he said, “No, not Lindale. Westdale.”

We were only a few miles from Lindale Mall, so I had assumed that was where he meant. Westdale Mall was twenty minutes away, back near my motel.

The tension didn’t ease any during the drive. So I was glad when he turned on the radio, even if the station he chose wasn’t to my liking. It kept his mind occupied and saved us from feeling the need to fill the time with pain-staking conversation.

As we drew near the mall, all I could see were used car lots, the mini-golf course, and self-storage businesses on either side of the divided road. He could tell I was about to drive right past the bar, so he extended his arm at a diagonal to point out my corner of the windshield. “Right there,” he said.

I had to swerve into the turn lane and brake abruptly to avoid having to go up to the next crossing and make a U-turn. But there was a gap in oncoming traffic, so our momentum kept us sailing across the oncoming lanes until we crunched into the gravel lot. I’d raised a cloud of dust that overtook the front of the car as we parked next to a cargo van with heavily oxidized paint.

“Jesus. I’m glad I took my fucking heart pills.”

“Sorry.”

“You should have pulled around back. No one parks out front.”

“I didn’t know.”

I listened to myself apologizing, getting caught off guard by the old man, and winced internally. He opened his door and lifted his legs, one at a time, under the knee and set his feet on solid ground. As he did, I looked over the wall of corrugated tin in front of us. Whenever I had passed by before, I had thought it was a warehouse where one of the adjacent businesses housed junkyard dogs or shelved surplus inventory. The vertically mounted panels of metal sported a galvanized finish that revealed some surface tarnish and rust around the fasteners that held the panels to the structure. There was a single window cut about five feet high near the steel door. The window was maybe two and a half feet wide and about one and a half feet high. The glass was so thickly black it could have been a pane of obsidian stone polished to mimic a window. The only evidence that it was translucent was the faint glow from a neon sign that filled its dimensions and read “Andys” in cursive, and lacked an apostrophe.

I got out and made it to the bar’s door as my dad was swinging his car door shut behind him. I locked the car with the remote and turned to open the door to the bar. The handle was a gate pull, attached to the door’s sheet metal face with heavy scars of welding beads. Surface rust as fine as powder came loose in my hand. The door didn’t budge as I pulled. I gave it a stronger yank, but just strained my shoulder in the effort.

“You sure they’re open?” I said.

“Put your weight into it. Like you’ve got some balls.”

I hated when he said that to me. When other men said it to each other, it was with an air of humorous derision. But my father meant it with malice. He had always been ashamed of me for not being more like him. And he liked to remind me of it.

I braced myself, spread my stance for leverage, and grasped the handle with no slack in my grip. One sustained effort brought the door away from the iron jam with a shriek from the parched hinges. The door moved relatively freely once it was in motion, if still under the burden of its own weight.

My dad passed me and was swallowed whole by the darkness that was so thick it seemed to ooze out into the gravel along with the sounds and smells. I stepped inside and pulled the door shut firmly. But I stayed standing there with my hand on the door because I couldn’t make out more than the faintest shapes. A few neon beer signs along the walls provided the sole illumination. As my eyes adjusted, I saw there was a bar maybe five feet in front of me. I could hear my dad’s voice coming from that direction. He was having a hushed, urgent argument with someone that ended with him saying, “Well, it’s my luck to push, so you just let me push it.”

“Fine. But don’t go poking your stupid face at the camera in the corner,” the other voice said.

I was able to make out my dad’s form on a stool, his cocked head now turned over his shoulder, waiting for me to join him. “Jesus. Get over here already.”

I stepped forward cautiously and felt the stool with my hands before sitting blindly. I scanned the room and could see maybe a dozen people at four or five tables and booths. I couldn’t be sure of who else might be in the dark, but there seemed to be about that many tables and booths sitting empty, too. The space was bigger than it appeared from outside. If anyone noticed me in my suit I’m sure I stood out like a sore thumb. Maybe they’d think I was a parole officer or sleazy attorney having a drink with a client.

“What do you want?” my dad asked. I turned to see the bartender looming, waiting on me. His eyes were hollow black sockets against that obscure backlighting.

“You have any light beer?”

Instead of answering, he stepped to the tap and filled a mug. My dad signaled for his second scotch. The first must have been delivered before I got the door shut, and was already reduced to a stain in the bottom of his glass. I had never appreciated my dad’s drinking ways, but given the occasion, I wasn’t going to begrudge him wanting to be less than sober.

“So this is it,” I said. I was hardly overwhelmed by the reality. Still, it was an experience beyond expectation. All the stories I had heard about his nights here took on substance. “This is where you got stabbed, isn’t it?”

It was one of his stories that I had never known how seriously to take. He and a few buddies had been out drinking and started throwing comments back and forth with another booth. Before long, the guys in the other booth had drawn a gun and some knives – though how he could be so sure of the details in this darkness was still a mystery. No one got shot, but my dad and one of his pals got cut, and they ended up with the gun after a scuffle. The other guys took off, not wanting to be around for the aftermath of stabbing someone.

“That booth in the corner,” he said, tipping his glass in the general direction. I gathered that using a finger to point at someone in here wouldn’t be well-received. “Fuckers got ahold of Big Sean and meant to mess him up real good. I thought they were about to gut the bastard, so I rammed into the middle of them all and started punching with both fists. Never hit anyone with skulls as hard as those mother fuckers. When they cleaned up the place a few days later, they found four teeth on the floor back there.”

“You got stabbed in the middle of all that?”

“Didn’t even feel it. Didn’t even know I’d been stabbed. We were sitting out front for the ambulance to show up. You cause trouble here, you take it outside. You tell the paramedics you were outside the whole time. That way the police don’t need to come inside and ask around. So it wasn’t until I was helping Big Sean up to the ambulance that the paramedic asked about the blood on the back of my shirt. He asked if I was all right, and I said of course I was. And he says, ‘This is your blood back here. It looks like you’ve been stabbed.’ What, with all the adrenaline and the booze? Shit. I only started to feel something when he mentioned it.”

He finished his drink. I took a long drink from mine and took it about halfway down.

“You never believed your old man was such a bad mother fucker, did you?”

“No, I always knew you could fight.”

“Yeah, but you thought I was exaggerating. Making up stories to sound like a bad-ass. Shit! The things I’ve never told you! You’d piss your pants.”

“I bet.”

“No. You don’t fucking bet. Don’t patronize me, you fuck. You can’t even imagine. Don’t you fucking say to me, ‘I bet’.”

He picked up his glass, remembered it was empty, swirled the thin puddle of scotch in the bottom as he considered another, and sat it down loudly on the bar.

“Back in the day, if I was feeling mean, I’d stand right over there and I’d tell every mother fucker in here that I’d take the whole place on. I didn’t care if it was one by one or if the whole joint got up and came at me like a herd. I’d hit whoever was first and he’d be on the ground. And I’d just keep mowin’ ‘em down. Afterwards, I’d buy a round for anyone man enough to take a swing at me. Ah, shit. Those were the days. Can’t pull that shit anymore. Place got a new manager a few years ago. Serious as a heart attack and big as a bulldozer. He runs this place like it’s a neutral country. Lots of deals go down in here, but no fighting. As long as everyone knows not to try anything, the place keeps its reputation. You so much as make a fist, Rook steps out from his office and asks if there’s going to be trouble.”

“Rook?” I asked.

“The manager. He sits in his office down that hall doing his business and watches the bar with night vision cameras. If he opens his door, the light comes down the hall and word goes round the bar in three seconds flat. Even a roomful of criminals straightens up when they’re being inspected by Rook. But now and then a regular has a few too many and forgets the rules or someone wanders in here for the first time and thinks they can do as they please. There’s this time, a few months back. Lenny, you were here for that one, right?”

The bartender was too far away to know what was being said, but his ears perked when his name was called and he came and leaned over the bar toward my dad.

“What’s that, Liam?”

“Lenny, this is my boy.”

Lenny turned to me and nodded. “Good to meetcha.” He turned back to my dad with a puzzled look.

“My younger son. Ethan,” he said, clearing up the confusion. No doubt Lenny knew about Aiden’s death. He nodded a few times to show he understood. “I was telling my boy about when Rook put that dent in the wall.”

Lenny nodded again, grasping why he had been called over.

“You see that dent?” he asked, picking up the story. I hadn’t registered the dent as we entered, but I nodded to keep the story moving. I would be sure to take a closer look when I left. “Well, we got this loudmouth and his friends in here. Other bars, you smile and try to ignore that kind of guy. Here, a few old boys got tired of his voice and told him to shut up. Some places, that leads to some shouting back and forth. Maybe someone gets up and puffs out his chest and the guys at the other table blow it off and the whole thing fizzles out.”

“Fucking college students and municipal softball leagues,” my dad sticks in.

“Right. Punks like that. They act like a bad-ass until they have to lay some money down and they make like the whole thing was a joke. But these old boys weren’t joking. They’ll take a twat like that out back, beat him until they hear something snap, heave him into the bed of someone’s pickup and come back in here and keep drinking.