A Dead Issue (14 page)

“I suppose you expect to get paid,” I said flatly.

“Wouldn't be a job without a paycheck.”

“You get paid by the hour?”

“By the job,” he explained. “Figure me like a consultant. When I do something that helps keep your ass out of jail, I get paid.”

I cracked open a beer and took a swallow. “How much?”

“Depends.” He crushed his can into a ball and studied it. “Take today for instance. I took care of Phil and Dex. Made sure they don't do anything to harm my client. That should be worth,” he reached out and picked up the envelope, “a hundred dollars.”

He pinched two of the bills and it slid them out. Holding them up to the light one at a time, he inspected and stuffed them in his shirt pocket with the other two.

“Tomorrow, I may have to shoot Dusty. That ought to be worth sixty-three cents.” He scraped the sixty-three cents off the edge of the table into his hand and poured the coins into his pocket. “Advance payment,” he grinned. “Then maybe next Tuesday I got to shoot that cop—Devereaux or whatever. That'll get me enough to retire on.”

He gave me that deadeye stare that I usually found unsettling. Today, it scared the hell out of me. He held my eyes for an eternity, and then he winked. “Just kidding.” He put the can to his mouth and poured beer down his gullet. I reached over and snatched the fifties from his shirt pocket using my index and middle fingers.

“And what if I don't want you on the payroll?” I asked, tucking the bills into my own shirt pocket.

The deadeye look was back, and with it a hardness about the mouth—muscles flexing in his jaw. “Then you go to jail, motherfucker. Go directly to jail. Do not pass Go. Do not collect two hundred dollars. You ever been in Lewisburg? Graterford? Ever do time?”

He knew that I hadn't, but the tone of his voice reaffirmed that he had.

“No get-out-of-jail-free card for you. Just hard time. The hardest damn time you ever gonna do.”

His shoulders relaxed as he got control of his anger. He pushed himself away from the table, rose to his feet, and stood over me. “Maybe I should explain a few things to you.” Suddenly, he had become overly patient like he was talking to a child.

I stood also—nothing threatening or challenging. I didn't want him talking down to me.

“Explain what?”

“Life—on account of you're the dumbest fuck on this planet,” he continued. “You don't know the value of money, and you don't know the value of freedom. So how are you going to know how much money to spend keeping your ass out of jail?” He looked at me, letting that sink in. “What you need is a lesson on how it is. First of all, you go to jail, they going to eat you alive. You're just too damn white. You'll be somebody's bitch the first day. You'll be waddling around with a size 14 asshole—bend over in a breeze you can join a jug band.”

I tried to show no emotion and listened quietly.

“And then, you're too damn easy.” He shook his head as if dismayed by my lack of understanding. “You'll fall for every con they run at you.” He smiled and snorted. “Look what just happened. I come in here with a bullshit story about Phil and Dex wanting hush money. Total bullshit. And you bought right into it—on my word! Christ. Then you sign your check and take an envelope full of money that's hardly worth shit.”

He smiled again at the look of confusion that crossed my face.

“Those fifties,”
he explained. “Don't you read the paper? Al-Qaeda is flooding the world with phony fifties, trying to ruin our economy. They look good—all those anti-forgery measures, special paper with threads, color images—they've got them all covered, but they had to get in our face. They put Osama bin Laden in the clouds behind the Capitol Building. Hold it up to the light you can see him.”

I pulled one of the fifties out of the envelope and held it up to the light. I saw the clouds and a face that looked like Grant, but nothing that looked like—and that's when he punched me.

I never saw it coming. One moment I was backlighting a fifty-dollar bill and the next moment I was doubled over with the wind knocked out of me, midsection on fire with the pain from a punch to the stomach. Cash must have
bruised his knuckles on my backbone. I held myself—mouth gaping and eyes staring at the floor. I saw a blur that was a knee coming up to my face and I couldn't react. It caught me square on the nose with an impact that I heard rather than felt. The delayed burst of pain exploded across my face as I hit the floor, cupping my hands over
my nose and rolling into a defensive ball. I was unable to breathe. My mouth filled with blood and the overflow trickled down my throat, joining the torrent that flowed from my sinuses. Cash kicked me in the kidneys and a new pain exploded in my back. I sucked in air and a lungful of blood. I choked, drowning in my own blood. I rolled over to my knees, still bent double. With a controlled effort, I took in enough air to cough out some blood. The next breath cleared some more. I heard Cash's voice and tried to focus on it, still fighting through waves of pain.

“This is what it's gonna be like in jail. How much you willing to pay to avoid this shit, Waldo?” He touched me with the toe of his shoe and I flinched as if it contained a live current. “This worth a few hundred dollars? A few thousand?”

Ribbons of bloody slaver poured out of my mouth. I concentrated on not inhaling more blood, eyes pinched shut, spitting when I could gather strength and letting the pain subside.

“The scary part is I like you. Imagine what this would be like if I hated your sorry ass.”

I opened my eyes to a pool of blood on the floor, and I pushed myself up and away from it so that I was now on my hands and knees. I coughed and sprayed blood. Cash talked and circled me, his words barely registering.

“And the one thing you got to understand . . . the one thing I got to teach you is this. Just when you think it can't get any worse—it does.” With that, he kicked me—his foot driving up between my legs.

CHAPTER 26

Cash left me curled up in my kitchen. The door slammed. I was terrified that he had gone back to his car to get a baseball bat or something to finish the job right. I tried to gather the strength to get up and escape, but didn't have much success. A car door slammed and the GTO roared off. I slumped back to the floor and curled up again. Sometime during the night, I filled a towel with ice cubes and staggered off to bed where I alternated between chilling my nose and my crotch. The ice melted, the towel turned pink with diluted blood, and everything became damp and uncomfortable. It didn't matter. I slept until 10:00 AM.

After a long, hot shower, I stood before the mirror and took an inventory of damages: nose stuffed with blood and tender to the touch. I'd be mouth breathing until I worked up the nerve to use a Kleenex
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a prospect fraught with the promise of pain. Upper teeth were tender but not loose. Stomach and kidneys sore but no broken ribs. I could breathe, but a sneeze was going to hurt. And my nuts held a sustained note of dull pain.

Moving with slow deliberation, I went to the kitchen and sopped up my blood with wads of paper towels. Then I foraged for food—something to quell the acidic burn in my stomach. My refrigerator was nearly empty. I had cleaned out almost everything the day Devereaux stopped in for a visit. I had kept a few eggs, a stick of butter and bread—enough for a breakfast before moving out completely. If it hadn't been for Jonah's funeral and Devereaux's tour of the scene of the crime, I would have been safely at the Cameron Estate, guarded by security devices when Cash came to collect. His ruthless, calculated attack pissed me off almost as much as it scared me. Cash holding the fifties up to the light—setting me up. The bastard knew what he was going to do before he left home. He also knew what he was going to take. I checked the bank envelope on the
kitchen table. It was balled up like the beer cans, and there
was no doubt that it was empty.

I opened the oven and pulled out a cast iron frying pan the size of a tennis racket. It was crusty black and once belonged to my grandmother. I hefted it in my right hand, thinking of Cash. I turned the burner on low and dropped in a large square of butter and watched it slide to the low end. Then I went back to the bedroom to dress.

The bloody clothes I had worn the day before were in a heap by my bed. I found the four $50 bills I had snatched from Cash in the pile. They were folded in half with blood dried to a dull brown along the crease. I smiled weakly at my “good fortune,” tucked the bills into my shirt, and surveyed myself in the mirror once more.

If I stood perfectly still the pain subsided to a dull ache. Sudden movements brought sharp, stabbing pains that spiked and were slow to subside. I made up my mind to move as little as possible. Then heavy footfalls clomped up the stairs to my apartment—Cash returning to see if I needed another lesson and to collect the rest of his fee.

I swung around, stupidly, looking for a hiding place and wishing I had locked the door the night before. There was no time to run into the kitchen. Instead, I closed the bedroom door, praying that someone had installed a deadbolt during the night while I slept.

The pounding on the stairs stopped. There was a moment's pause and I felt a jarring thud as if someone had dropped a bank vault at my door. Then there was nothing. I stood, petrified, straining to hear the faintest sound, and fully aware of my aches and pains as if they were separate entities protesting in fear at the prospect of being renewed. Someone had made a delivery—something heavy that made climbing the stairs difficult, something th
at landed at my door. The messenger, once disburdened of his load, slipped off in silence.

I calmed myself down and cracked open the bedroom door enough to peer down the long hallway, through my kitchen, to the front door. I waited for another moment to be sure, and then ventured out, never taking my eye from the bright rectangle of morning light streaming through the
door's window. Moving slowly, I reached the door. No one was there and I looked down to see what massive object
awaited me.

It was a rat—a dead rat, seven inches long, and flattened to a quarter of an inch. Sprays of blood fanned out in all directions from it as if it had fallen from seven miles up. Its jaw was scissored open, and a single eye stared up at me. And then two enormous boots came into my field of vision and straddled the rat. My eyes rose from the boots and as they traveled upward, I knew I was going to be looking into at least one eye of a monster named Stomp.

“I hate rats,” he said in a flat tone that rumbled out of him, and he deliberately planted his right foot on the carcass and mashed it as if it were a cigarette butt. He opened the door and I sidestepped for him to enter. In two strides he was in my kitchen, leaving one bloody footprint behind him. Then he stood silently, filling up the room with his menacing presence and the smell of sweat and stale cigarette smoke. I had to walk around him to face him, his lizard eye tracking me until I stood before him. Then it drifted off.

“Stomp. Right?”

The giant stared at me with his focused eye for a moment. “Cut the shit. I want the money—now!”

“What money?” I asked.

“The money you took from Stemmy after you shot him.”

“Honest to God, Stomp, I
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”

He pushed me back into the stove, jarring the frying pan and making the butter sizzle as it sloshed on hot metal. With another stride and another bloody footprint he was on me, grabbing me by the shirt. The crackle of new bills startled him, made him freeze for a second. Stomp released his grip with a little shove. He reached into my pocket and extracted the fifties. I watched his face darken.

“Stemmy . . .”

“Stomp, you have to listen . . .”

“You fuckin' little rat bastard.”

He was raging with anger now, and I knew that I was soon going to have a lot in common with the rat at my doorstep.

“We didn't shoot Stemmy,” I cried. “We tried to warn him!”

“You knew he was going to get shot?”

“No. We knew the money was phony.” Doubt and confusion clouded his face. “Don't you read the fucking papers? The Arabs are trying to ruin our economy. They're flooding the world with phony fifty dollar bills.” He glanced at the bloody money. “They look real good. Made with the right paper, best printing. You almost have to be an expert to tell, but the bastards had to get in our face—they put a picture of Osama bin Laden in the clouds. You can see him if the light is right.”

Stomp looked down at the bills in his hand. There was a long moment as he considered the matter and then he unfolded one and turned it over to look at the U. S. Capitol Building on the back. He frowned at it and then turned to hold it up against the light from the door. I whacked him from behind with the frying pan.

It was a two-fisted forehand with an impact that sounded like a flagpole being belted with a two-by-four. Hot butter sprayed in a wide arc around the room. I dropped the searing pan and it bonked into the corner. Stomp lurched forward in an awkward, high-stepping gait like a drunk with his tie caught in a taxi pulling away from the curb. The door didn't stop him. He crashed through it, the hinge stripping partially away from the door jamb. He staggered out onto the porch with his arm looped through the broken screen. It caught his momentum and spun him around. More screws popped from the hinge and he broke free and pirouetted, hopping on one foot, backward to the rail to the right of the stairs. The railing flexed as he leaned into it, flipping him over. His feet disappeared over the edge in what could have been a perfectly executed backward swan dive. I expected to hear a splash. Instead, a thick whoomp came up from the sidewalk like someone had dropped a side of beef from a balcony.