Blackout, page 18
‘I’m here for you,’ Eve said. ‘Remember that.’ She reached out and clutched his wrist. She released him, then watched as he gathered his clothes.
‘You’ve got a broken tooth at the back of your mouth,’ she said. ‘I could feel it. Kind of jagged and rough.’
‘Another souvenir of the crash,’ he said.
‘You want to get it seen to, Greg. Before decay sets in.’
27
The telephone rang at 7 a.m. Lee Boyle reached out to pick it up. He’d lain on the sofa for hours without catching even a glimpse of sleep, because his head was a satellite that wouldn’t quit transmitting images of Almond.
‘Lee? I got your message.’
‘You’re a tough sonofabitch to find,’ Boyle said. He was weary, dry-mouthed. The little ulcer in his gum was stinging suddenly. He had layer on layer of black feelings. Was this how sadness engraved itself? Mournful surges that ring the dead seaman’s knell?
‘I can’t imagine why. You know my haunts, don’t you? Maybe we just kept missing one another.’
‘Maybe.’ His interest in The Kid had been dwindling lately. Almond dead. I can’t grasp that one.
‘You want to come out to my place, Lee?’
‘I’d prefer if you came down here,’ Boyle said.
‘No, I’ll tell you why. I keep all my stuff here, and it’s just more convenient, that’s all.’
‘I have to drag myself out there,’ Boyle said. ‘Is it worth my while?’
‘I think so, Lee.’
‘It better be. Give me an hour.’
Boyle hung up. He showered, gargled, brushed his teeth. His mouthwash agitated the ulcer. The tiny fucker throbbed intermittently, like a miniature lighthouse in his mouth.
He’d breakfast out of Stretch’s baggie. He considered the needle, but that was a whole ritual, and he didn’t feel up to it. He laid out some crystal on a mirror that he placed on the coffee table. This shit, one fine day in the future he’d give it up. But not now. He needed it. Even if he didn’t trust Stretch’s product, even if it amped him out of control, it was the only game in town right now.
He chopped the speed swiftly with a razor blade until it was a fine powder. He stared at the white mound a moment, wondering how many thousands of times he’d done this over the years, then shaped the stuff with the blade into two generous lines. With a cut plastic drinking straw between his fingers, he lowered his head. He saw sparkle, fragments that glinted. He saw his nostrils reflected in the mirror under the lines. Gimme glass, I need glass. These two lines were tracks that would carry him express-style for the next four or five hours.
After he snorted he felt the stuff coagulate in his sinuses. He remembered to take his multi-vitamins. He brushed his hair back, ran a quick mirror check. You don’t look the same, Lee. You look older this morning. Depressed. Something’s gone out of you.
He ransacked a closet in the bedroom, found a blue silk shirt and gray jeans hanging among Almond’s clothing. He gazed at her dresses. He imagined her presence. Her white smile. The little generosities she bestowed. Any moment now she’d come through that goddam door and she’d have some convoluted tale about why she’d disappeared. These are dreams, Lee. She’s lost to you for all goddam time. She’s gone where nobody comes back. So you put the thought away, stuff it someplace.
Don’t think sorrow.
Zip. He was out of here. 7.30 a.m. and already on the streets, driving the stolen Pontiac through hard sunshine and heat you could taste. No air-conditioner in this heap.
Gregory J. Samsa.
A cop, for Christ’s sake.
Now you know what he looks like anyway.
For the sake of argument, say Samsa was the one that picked up Almond. Not the ponderous Silas Goba, that slob drunk, but Samsa the respectable cop. You couldn’t blame the guy for that. Almond made all heads swivel like they were on stalks. That strut she had down to perfection, the pert little breasts, the luscious mouth, the sexual confidence she oozed. He’d seen all that the first time he’d met her in a bar, when she’d been in the city only two days, escaping from some family hell out west, and was wandering like a soul in purgatory.
A week later she was working for him. Mainly hotels, outcall services, where the money was good, 150, 200 a throw. But sometimes the street, although he’d always thought that the saloon of last resort, a place she went when the phone wasn’t ringing off the hook. He didn’t like her out on the sidewalks.
It was from those black sidewalks that her killer had plucked her. Taken her to the Purchase field. Broken her neck.
Had the killer been Gregory J. Samsa? He fucked Almond and took her down to that unruly place, and then, consumed by an enormous guilt, murdered her.
Just try proving it, Lee.
He rolled down the windows. Muggy air that smelled of gasoline and slow death blew through the car. He wondered if cancer had a scent. If leukemia had its own aroma. He wondered also about rigor mortis and when it set in, and if Almond was stiff and lying in a chilled drawer at the morgue. He had an image of her flesh turning blue, which caused him to sense an impending angry derangement, gray vapors forming around the margins of his vision, and his brain like something in a boxcar hauled by a freight train through bleak railroad yards and alongside drab fields.
This day is unreal. This day is totally fucked before it’s even begun. The jitters are arriving in hyped-up droves, like hordes of ravenous black flies.
He drove past shopping malls and through suburbs, his thoughts turning to the nightingale. The chime of her voice. That innocence. Perilous seas in faery lands forlorn.
She had to be Samsa’s daughter. Who else could she be?
Gregory J’s little girl.
He looked in his rearview mirror. He didn’t believe what he saw.
He pulled the black Pontiac over and, with a feeling of concentrated tension, waited. He heard the flies drone malevolently in his head. He glanced in the wing mirror and watched Tom Raseci step out of the Porsche and walk toward the Pontiac. Raseci, wearing a lurid Hawaiian shirt, stuck his head in the window.
‘Nice wheels, Lee,’ Raseci said. ‘Very nice. Where’d you get them? Gossamer?’
Gossamer Avenue, despite its poetic name, was the pits, a row of sleazy used-car lots that provided their own extortionate credit and specialized in selling junked-out gas-guzzlers to itinerant Mexican workers or deadbeats who couldn’t raise a cent from any bank. The guys that ran the lots on Gossamer were always busy repossessing their junkers and making a quick turnover.
‘I stole the car, Tom,’ Boyle said. ‘Happy now?’
Raseci kicked a tire idly. ‘I hate to see the mighty fallen.’
‘And I hate this shit of being followed around.’
‘All that dope’s made you schizoid, Lee. I happened to see you boogie past, was all. So I swung round for a better look. Lee Boyle in a beat black Pontiac. What is it? Seventy-four? Three?’
‘Who cares?’ Boyle said. He didn’t believe Raseci had been driving along casually at all. At this time of the morning?
Raseci kicked the tire again with the toe of his size thirteens and the hubcap fell off. ‘Not put together real well, is she, Lee?’
Boyle got out of his car. ‘Okay, Tom. You’ve seen the car. You’ve noted my humiliation. Is there anything else?’
‘That Porsche,’ Raseci said. ‘I had it tuned up. Running like a dream. Real sweet. A Swiss fucking clock.’
‘Do we stand around in this God-awful humidity and talk cars, Tom?’ He looked into Raseci’s face. He couldn’t see the eyes because Bigshoes was wearing black shades.
‘Hell, no,’ Raseci said. ‘Let’s talk about the morning news, Lee. Let’s discuss this fresh-breaking story about how a certain young girl was found dead not three miles from where we’re standing.’
Boyle gazed along the street. Boxy houses built too close together, spindly young trees, the roar of a diesel-driven lawnmower. ‘What can I say, Tom?’
Raseci said, ‘Mr Plumm is very distressed by the news. He had the cops talking to him about your whereabouts at a certain time. So did I, Lee. We’re not happy with cops phoning. Especially Mr Plumm. Apart from the inconvenience, he sees an income problem for you now.’
‘Her death’s a tragedy.’
Raseci took off his black glasses and slipped them into his pocket. His pecs shuddered under the fabric of his garish shirt. He touched his bad eye with a fingertip. His battered nose gave him the look of an ex-slugger, somebody who’d been knocked around a few rings in his time. ‘Yeah, it’s a real tragedy all right, Lee.’
Raseci suddenly grabbed him, got a tight lock on his neck, forced his face down against the hot hood of the Pontiac and pushed his knee directly into the crack of Boyle’s ass.
‘Christ, Tom. What the hell are you doing?’
‘Consider this a freebie, a taste of things to come.’
‘Tom, it’s broad fucking daylight, there are people in these houses, you’re probably scaring the shit out of them –’
‘Fuck ’em, it’s you I want to scare,’ Raseci said. ‘Only you. Dum-di-dum. How’s that song go?’
The blow was deft and painful. Raseci drove his big leaden fist into Boyle’s back just below the shoulder blades. Then Raseci raised him up from the hood, swung him round, and delivered a second punch with great impact into the solar plexus, that intricate network of nerves and ganglia. Boyle felt as if he’d been vacuumed by a very crude sucking device that also crushed and hammered as it cleaned. A Hoover with attitude. He slumped, slithered against the side of the car and groaned. The pain was excruciating. What made it worse was the fact that Raseci was singing ‘Only You’ as he worked.
Boyle’s head rolled to the side. Dizzy. Seeing swirls.
Raseci picked him up and dusted blades of grass from his silk shirt in a manner that was almost tender. ‘Nothing personal, you understand,’ he said.
Boyle blinked, groping to make sense of his fractured perceptions.
‘I don’t want to bust your face, Lee. I don’t want to break bones. But I’ll do it with great pleasure in’ – he looked at his watch – ‘let’s say about thirty-eight hours from now. Unless, of course, there’s a hefty infusion of money before then.’
‘Thirty-eight hours,’ Boyle said, dazed.
‘Time just evaporates,’ Raseci said. He stepped back, gazing at Boyle. ‘You feeling okay, Lee?’
‘I’ll survive,’ Boyle whispered. He saw Raseci walk back to the Porsche, get inside and drive away, his big ugly face grinning, and he was filled with assorted notions of getting even.
He edged himself carefully into the Pontiac. He lowered his face against the warm plastic of the wheel and gripped the steering column for support. Even though speed anaesthetized up to a point, this pain was going to take some time to pass away. Time he didn’t have. Time was a hummingbird, darting, elusive. Now you see it, now you don’t. Thirty-eight hours. Was that all he had left? He needed to move. He felt sick. He opened the door and puked what looked like thin minestrone on the sidewalk, and let his head dangle for a while.
He couldn’t linger. He had to get his hands on some hard currency. He was trembling as he wired the car, and there was a painful stiffening in his gut, but this was a trifle compared with the damage Raseci could really do.
Blow town. What Vass recommended. Walk down to the bus station and say, I want fifty bucks’ worth of motion in any direction, Mr Greyhound, sir. No way, he wasn’t going to let Raseci and Plumm hound him, he still had thirty-eight hours, enough time to work something out.
Like what?
Your prospects are zero.
He decided he could live with pain. If you focused it could be controlled. He thought about his gun. If it came right down to it, if he was really backed into a corner and there was absolutely no way out, okay, screw it, he’d shoot Raseci, and then he’d go after Jimmy Plumm. He’d do that. He wouldn’t even think twice.
He drove, listening to imaginary gunshots and struggling to contain his physical distress, to where The Kid lived. He parked outside the apartment complex and didn’t move for a moment. Then he got out of the car and walked toward the entrance. Jesus, there were stairs to climb. He’d forgotten that. Halfway up a flash of pain caused him to pause. His animosity toward the world in general was gigantic. Beyond management.
Die, Raseci. Die, Plumm.
And you, Hugh.
He imagined Hugh lined up with his head in a hood, body staked to a post in a lonely place. A last cigarette before the ultimate beddy-bye, Hugh? Except Hugh didn’t smoke. It was unhealthy. Jesus, how he loathed Hugh. His hatred was like some heavy mahogany yoke around his shoulders.
He continued to climb, and reached the third floor. His heart was slogging. The Kid must have spotted him getting out of the car, because he was already opening the door and beckoning Boyle inside. Boyle nodded, but didn’t feel like smiling. He needed to sit, made it to the sofa, and looked at The Kid, that soft wholesome face, hair light and floppy and no doubt shampooed in gentle herbal matter, the sleeves of his sweater rolled.
‘How are you, Lee?’
‘I’ve had better days,’ Lee Boyle said, trying to recollect when he’d last been in this apartment. Months ago, when he’d run into The Kid in a bar downtown and they’d drunk a few beers together and smoked The Kid’s hash, and then they’d come back here and Boyle had provided a little speed from his stash. The night was spent hatching vague plans and plots, ways of making a quick buck. The stoned babble of mendacious conspiracies. Blackmail, that was the word The Kid had used – I have it scoped, Lee. Trust me. This is a solid proposition.
‘You look somewhat piqued, Lee.’
More tweaked than piqued, Boyle thought. ‘Late nights.’
‘Do you know your name means a calm sheltered place, Lee? Did you know that? A lee.’
‘I enjoy a little irony this early in the day,’ Boyle said. ‘You got a cold beer handy?’
‘Coming right up.’ The Kid vanished into the kitchen, gliding off in his bare feet, then came back with two bottles of chilled Amstel.
Boyle guzzled half of his quickly. He looked at The Kid and said, ‘Okay. This better be good.’
‘I think we’ve got something, Lee. You want to come this way?’ The young man beckoned to a door. Boyle got up from the sofa, stepped after The Kid into a small room where a blackout curtain was drawn over the window and a light bulb hung with red crêpe paper.
Boyle saw various bottles of chemicals, trays, prints hung on a plastic line with clothes-pegs.
‘Now, let us see, let us see.’ The Kid began to unhook prints from the line. He cleared a space on his work surface, shoving aside the chemicals, then spread out a bunch of prints. Boyle leaned over them, feeling an ache deep in his stomach. He wondered about internal damage. Maybe rupturing inside. A crab clawed at his intestines. He imagined pincers digging.
‘The idea was I’d photograph only those guys that looked respectable, right?’
‘Well-heeled,’ Boyle said. ‘Moneyed.’
‘Nice cars. No scrapyard candidates. No riff-raff.’
‘Exactly,’ Boyle said. He peered closer at the prints, which were generally of a poor fuzzed quality. Mainly they showed shadowy figures of men sitting inside cars, occasionally somebody on a sidewalk.
‘These don’t look too sharp,’ Boyle said.
‘Consider the circumstances. I’m working in the dark. I can’t use a flash, obviously. I have to conceal the camera. You try taking photographs in those conditions, Lee.’
‘I’m not criticizing you,’ Boyle said. ‘I’m not expecting Karsh of Ottawa.’
‘They can be enhanced, of course. That isn’t a problem.’
‘Okay. What am I supposed to be looking at?’ Boyle asked.
The Kid, smirking a little, hovered over the spread of photographs like a magician about to play a card trick. He slid two prints toward Boyle. ‘Check these out.’
Boyle picked up the prints and moved closer to the light and examined the dark images. It took him a moment before he focused, before he understood what he was seeing. Suddenly he was beyond pain. He was flying where the air was thin and he couldn’t catch his breath. It was like hanging by a parachute caught on an updraft and all the green countryside spread out way below you.
Thank you, Jesus. This is what I need. This is the break.
The Kid asked, ‘You’ll see the image in one is sharper than the other. You want me to improve them even more?’
‘No need. They’re perfect. You any idea what you’ve got here?’
The Kid nodded and looked gleeful. ‘Yeah. I know exactly what I’ve got. What happens next?’
‘You sit back. I’ll take it from here.’
‘You walk out with the prints?’
‘You got a problem with that?’
‘I’d like, uh, some kind of guarantee.’
‘Guarantee? What kind of partnership is this?’ Boyle asked. ‘You don’t think I’m running a risk here? I’m putting my neck on the line, and if it goes wrong your name doesn’t even come up. That’s your guarantee. I’m the one burned.’ He brought his face close to The Kid’s, a belligerent little motion. ‘Or maybe you want to do the whole thing yourself, huh? You want to look this guy in the eye? He’d fucking eat you and spit out the bones. You want to mess with that, sport? Huh?’
The young man shook his head timidly. ‘I’d rather not, actually.’
‘You better believe it, actually. So don’t give me shit about guarantees. I’m about to commit a felony here. You want to stray that far on the other side of the law? You’d be in way over your head, man. You leave this to me, and I’ll be in touch the very moment our ship comes in.’ Some people, Boyle thought. They think they have the balls for the real hard stuff. Ooh, taking pictures in the dark, how awfully dangerous.
Boyle stepped back into the living room. He stared at the fish swimming round in the big tank. ‘I’m thinking, if you ever fall on hard times and you’re really hungry, Kid, you could stick one of them in a sandwich.’
