Vengeance (7 page)

“So Rook hears it all from his office and comes out to stop things before they get out of hand. These old boys, they fold their hands on their table and stare straight down when Rook comes around that corner. Like kids in a Catholic school. But that other fella, he thinks he has them beat like a dog thinks it scared the mailman away because the mailman moved on to the next house. And when he sees Rook standing there, staring him down, giving him one last chance to play by the house rules, that stupid mother fucker says, ‘What’re you looking at?’ like he’s gonna scare Rook away, too.”

The man at the end of the bar past my dad had started tapping his empty bottle on the bar to get Lenny’s attention. Now Lenny looked at him over his shoulder and waved at him to settle down. “Yeah, yeah!” Then to us again, “Fucking deadbeat. Anyway, Loudmouth says that and the goddam world stops spinning as far as this room’s concerned. Rook steps forward as if he’s walking to his own car door. Loudmouth has a smirk on his face like he’s going to call Rook’s bluff. He doesn’t understand he’s a watermelon playing chicken with a locomotive. Rook grabs him by the back of the neck and walks out the front door dragging that screaming pussy like a five pound bag of trash.

“That door blasts open and he strides right outside with the guy, out of sight. No one in here moves. We just listen to Loudmouth screaming for mercy. To hear a man scream like that, to know his own life is in another man’s hands. It’ll chill your blood. But if Rook took him outside, he didn’t want an audience. Loudmouth’s friends get up to follow, but something about the stillness of the room tells them to stay put. We’re all about to breathe again when this crash like a sledge hammer crushing a metal garbage can makes us all jump. That’s Rook ramming this fucker’s head right into the wall. Hang on.”

Lenny took care of the customer at the end of the bar. He filled his own glass with club soda and came back to lean down on his forearms across from us.

“The door’s still open,” he said, picking up the story. “I’m staring outside, expecting Rook to come in any second. Instead, I see him, but he’s almost out to the road. He’s still got Loudmouth by the back of the neck, but there’s no screaming anymore. He was dragging that boy like a rag doll. Loudmouth’s friends gather at the door. I can barely see through them as Rook stops at the edge of the road, reaches down and lugs that limp body clean over his head. That’s when I hear it, a semi-truck. The headlights are sweeping the pavement, so it’s only a second away. Rook throws Loudmouth right into the path of the semi. The trucker hits his horn and it roars while the whole length of that rig barrels past. Loudmouth’s friends scream and damn near shit themselves. They run out to the road while Rook walks back in. He nods to me to carry on and shuts himself in his office.”

“Holy shit,” I said. I had finished my beer during the first half of the story and now wished I had some left. I knew the story was probably mostly fiction, but I went along with their attempt to put the fear of Rook into me. “Was the guy dead? Did the semi hit him?”

“No,” Lenny said.

“Rook threw him all the way into the ditch,” my dad said. “If you believe what you hear.”

“Or maybe just past the first lane, and he landed and rolled across the second lane. I think the lucky fuck was out cold. Probably wound up with some road rash and bruises.”

“On top of a concussion,” my dad added.

“We never heard from Loudmouth again. His friends must have taken him to a hospital. Maybe they even called the police. But certain cops would try to talk him out of pressing charges for anything that happens here. Others might write down what he said and stuff it in their pocket to throw away when they get home.”

“Shit,” I reiterated.

“Shit,” my dad said sharply. I had inverted his mood with one word. “You’re patronizing again. You don’t even know what we told you. You think I’m trying to scare you?” He got up and dropped a few limp bills on the bar. “Lenny,” he said. “I’ve about pushed my luck too long.”

“Yes, you have,” Lenny said, snatching the bills. “You take it easy, Liam. I’ll see you around one of these days. I’m sorry again about your boy.”

I shielded my eyes as we emerged from the cave. I paused outside the door, squinted against the glare coming off the tin siding. It looked like a cannonball had thundered into the wall at waist level. “Damn,” I breathed. I couldn’t imagine how I had missed it before. Dad was waiting by his door, so I reached into my pocket and unlocked the car. I peered beyond him, to the road, and got a sense of the width of it. I tried to visualize the monster that could heft a limp body and throw it across that distance.

“It’s the way it happened,” my dad said. He was sitting in the car with his door still open. “It was without pity or mercy. You understand? Rook has a background, I told you. What he used to do, he did well. He never hesitated and he always did what needed done. He’s not scary because he’s big or tough. He’s scary because he’s cold as the grim reaper. He didn’t calculate whether hitting that guy’s head into the wall would give him brain damage, and I can tell you he didn’t look both ways to be sure a truck wasn’t coming before he tossed him into the street. And he wasn’t out of control, either. He just didn’t care.”

We weren’t far from my motel, so it was a shame to have to drive him up the other side of the river just to head back out this way. I pulled into a break in traffic and accelerated.

“You don’t hang out there anymore, do you?” I asked.

“No,” he said. The resentment in his voice was directed at the situation regarding the bar, not me.

“You got blacklisted?”

“It’s none of your fucking business,” he said. “You needed to see what Rook’s capable of. And knowing the bar won’t hurt, either.”

“You and Rook are friends?” I said, reading into the way he talked about him.

“We’ve got history. But that’s not important. Nothing goes down in this town without his knowledge and consent. If Aiden was killed, Rook should know.”

“He’s going to tell some kid like me that a crime boss ordered a hit on Aiden?”

“Don’t be such a wise-ass all the time. It pisses people off,” he said, then muttered something too low for me to hear. “You think I’m full of hot air. Some broke dick has-been telling stories from his glory days. Fine. But have enough sense to know when you should take a man seriously. I’m not saying some crime boss had Aiden killed. That doesn’t make any sense. They’d never get involved with something so small. Whoever had Aiden killed was street level, and no one on the street has the authority to put out a hit.”

“You’re saying the chain of command wasn’t followed?” I said. “Is that supposed to comfort me?”

“There’s no comfort for any of us,” he said. “But if someone is breaking the rules, we might be able to get some justice.”

Chapter 8

Sitting in the car outside my motel, I tried to piece together a picture of what had happened. But it was like working a jigsaw puzzle with only a handful of the pieces.

Paige and my dad were convinced that Aiden hadn’t really died in a motorcycle accident. Did I want to believe what they were telling me? I can’t say there was much solace in either version of events. Accident or not, Aiden was gone. But if someone had killed my brother, I wanted someone to find his killer. The police had already written it up as an accident. They weren’t going to change their minds. As for me, I needed something more tangible or at least more credible than my dad’s story. I trusted my father to different degrees depending on the context. He was known for his hyperbole. Sometimes everyone knew it was bullshit and laughed along. Other times, his friends would finish their drinks trying to ponder how much of what he had told them might be true to some extent. Even sober, it was challenging to determine whether he could be telling the truth and whether those details necessarily added up to some nefarious conclusion.

I reached into the center console and pulled out the card George Flynn had given me in the cemetery. I wasn’t sure what time he went in for his shift, but I decided to give him a call. Back in my room, I left my name and return number with the officer who answered. I hefted the phone book across my knees and looked up the mortuary. I figured if no damage to the bike could be documented maybe Aiden’s injuries could shed some light on whether or not he’d been in an accident. As the phone rang, I tried to formulate questions that wouldn’t seem gruesome. Maybe that was for my own benefit. The mortician could handle talking about a corpse as an object. But for me to treat Aiden himself as evidence was unsettling.

No one picked up so I had to leave a message on the machine. It was only a temporary setback, but I couldn’t help feeling discouraged. I couldn’t find someone to ask the questions I barely knew how to construct. But as soon as I cradled the phone it rang.

“Hey, Ethan,” he said.

“George.”

“I guess the funeral was today? How you holding up?”

“All right, I suppose.”

“It’ll get easier.”

He delivered that line with such assurance that I wondered how many times he had encountered death, whether professionally or closer to home. Neither of us was all that old. We had no business being well-acquainted with grief.

“Thanks. I was wondering if you could help me out,” I said. “I wanted to take a look at the accident report. Can people get copies of those?”

“Yeah. But I have to tell you, I already did. When I got off my last shift I made a copy.”

“Well, can I ask you a few things?”

“Of course.”

“OK. It’s just that people are saying that there were all sorts of reasons it didn’t look like an accident. I know this probably sounds crazy. I’m not sure if these people are in denial, or what. But they put those ideas in my head.”

“So you want to follow up and put your mind to rest?”

“Yeah. They said the motorcycle was leaned against a tree off the side of the road, with Aiden’s helmet on the handlebars. Is there anything about that?”

“Well, now that you mention it, I was wondering about the diagram myself. It shows the bike where you said it was.” He paused and I could hear him tapping on something as he deliberated. “Listen. What are you doing right now?”

“Just trying to make sense of what I’m hearing,” I said.

“If you’re up for it, I’ve got a little time before my shift and I could walk you through the scene of the accident.”

The thought of seeing where Aiden had died gave me a sensation of sinking in cold river water at night. But if I wanted to understand what had happened I was going to have to see for myself.

“Down on First, just across the tracks. Right?”

We agreed to meet in twenty minutes, which was twice the time I needed to drive there. Even after killing several minutes watching the news channel, I arrived before George. I braked gently as I came over the hump where the railroad tracks crossed the road, as if I might disturb some leftover evidence, or, maybe, as if I might crest that rise to find my brother and the whole mess still sprawled across the pavement.

But what I found was a nondescript stretch of asphalt, contoured along the outside of the levee. The road was not a tomb or a shrine. It was a route used by commuters and shoppers and those on their way to the marina. No one passing by would know what had been lost here. It made me reflect on all the roads I had driven and all the intersections I had crossed. How many of them held significance to a surviving family member? How many people had to avoid driving over a certain stretch of road for the uneasy sensation that they were desecrating hallowed ground?

I parked on a side street and walked back to First. George was coming over the tracks as I reached the boulevard. He pulled around and parked his cruiser behind my car and joined me where I waited on the corner. He was wearing his uniform, but had left his cumbersome duty belt in the car. I looked out at the slithering behemoth of the river. It was virtually silent, but its murky mass tugged at me. A saccharine breeze ferried bellows of industrial phantom from the Quaker Oats plant across the rail bridge.

“This is it?” I asked.

“Right over there,” he said, pointing midway between our corner and the slope from the tracks. He was holding a paper and checking it against the surroundings as he walked. I appreciated how intensely he was concentrating and followed his lead. But he was the one who knew what he was looking for. I followed as he crossed to the oncoming traffic lane and walked along the curb until he reached where he had been pointing, where he slowed his gait and started scanning the pavement. “Well, this is weird.”

“What’s that?”

“Judging from the sketch, we’re right where Aiden was found. But I don’t see any markings on the pavement.”

I had been scanning the pavement, too, but now scoured its surface thoroughly. I inched toward the tracks as I did. But even thirty feet away, I still couldn’t see anything other than the typical soiling of tire rubber and oil on the road.

“No skid marks,” George said. “And you would expect a fresh scar or scrape from the bike. But I can’t see anything. There’s no way it would have faded already.”

“What else does the report say?”

“Here,” he said, handing me the copy of the police report. A quick glance revealed how little information it held. I asked if such sparse detail was normal.

“It depends on who fills out the report. But it’s not what I’d consider thorough.”

“So the officer was being lazy? Or maybe he avoided being accurate for a reason.”

“For a reason?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he’s on the take. Maybe someone told him not to do a good job of this. Maybe he was supposed to include just enough evidence to make this look like an accident.”

“Ok, hold on,” George said, thrusting a finger at my chest. “First off, I am not going to accuse anyone of intentionally doing a bad job. It was the middle of the night, and it probably looked like an obvious accident, so maybe the officer included what was necessary to establish that fact. I’m not going to second-guess that. And I am definitely not going to talk about cops on the take, as you put it. I came out here because the report is sloppy and I knew you wanted to fill in the blanks. Honestly, so did I. When you see something like this, you want it to make sense and explain what happened, and this report doesn’t do that. But I don’t know what the rest of this you’re talking about is. Who’s telling you someone would want to make this look like an accident?”

Listening to George react to what I had said reminded me of just how skeptical I needed to be. There were still plenty of unanswered questions. No cars had come by as we stood there. Still, I backed up and stepped onto the grass beyond the curb. I looked over to what I assumed was the tree where the bike had been propped up. It was virtually at the same point in the road where Aiden’s body had been found. If he had been riding the bike along the road, as he must have been, there was no way to explain how the bike would end up no further ahead than his body and off the road at a perpendicular angle. It defied physics as well as common sense.

“My dad came out here that night,” I said. “He says the motorcycle was over by that tree.”

George reached over to the paper in my hand and bent it open so he could compare the sketch to the location. “Yeah, that looks right.”

“He also says the bike didn’t have a scratch on it,” I said. “And there’s nothing on this paper about any damage, either.”

“Listen. I see how your mind is working right now. And I can’t explain everything, either. But it’s a pretty big leap of logic to assume there wasn’t an accident. What if he came over the tracks too fast and there was a truck parked in the middle of the road? He could have hit the rear bumper with nothing but his front tire and that would explain why the bike didn’t show any damage.”

“Except the tire would probably be flat,” I said. “Or the rim would even be bent.”

“I’m just saying anything could have happened out here. Whoever was driving the truck, if there was a truck, could have tried to help Aiden and panicked when he realized he was dead. Maybe he moved the bike so no one else would hit it and took off.”

“And leave Aiden in the middle of the road?” I could hear the anger as I spoke.

“Who knows? Maybe he was coming back for Aiden and there was a car coming, so he took off instead. We don’t even know who called it in. It was an anonymous caller. That could have been the truck driver, feeling guilty.”

There were a lot of “could have beens” in George’s story, but I understood what he was saying. There were plenty of possibilities. Still, every scenario included someone other than Aiden being there when it happened. That bike hadn’t moved itself. At the very least, someone had some explaining to do.

“You’re right,” I said. “I’ve been hearing some crazy theories. I guess people are just trying to make sense of all this. But it’s hard to do that when something seems so out of place.”

“I understand. Believe me. But I don’t think entertaining conspiracy theories is going to leave you feeling any more at peace,” George said. He checked both lengths of the road then turned to cross the street. He kept his eyes over his shoulder at me to not be rude. So I caught up and walked abreast with him. “Knowing your dad and some of the characters he runs with, I can guess the kind of stuff you’re hearing. But don’t take that too seriously. They see something they can’t explain, so they create an explanation that somehow fits with the world the way they think it works. I’ve seen this sort of thing, and the pieces people make up to complete the puzzle always come down to who is putting the puzzle together. Listen. Things like this, there’s always something out of place. There’s always at least one question that doesn’t have an answer. Losing someone is messy. And that mess doesn’t disappear the way chalk washes off the pavement.”

We were approaching the cars. The moment was similar to the first time we met, with me standing outside his car as he got in. I assumed my silence unsettled him because he added, “I didn’t mean to sound pushy. You’ll do what you’ve got to do until you have the closure you need. I get that. I’m just saying, if it’s peace you’re looking for, look for peace. This other stuff, it might lead in the opposite direction.”

“Thanks,” I said, so he knew I didn’t resent his advice.

As he pulled away, I considered the questions I could find answers to. The bike was long gone and I still hadn’t spoken with the mortician. My flight home left the next day, and I wasn’t sure I would be able to track down my answers in time.