Oregon Hill (22 page)

Wanting to be the little drama king, I handed her the tickets, hoping she’d ask me how I got them.

She stared at them for a moment.

“Circus?” she said finally, still holding the last beer, the one the Chuck Wagon let her take home with her. “What the hell do I want to go to the circus for?”

When she woke up the next morning, she remembered the tickets while I was cooking us breakfast. She came up behind me, put her arms around me while I tried to dodge the hot grease spattering up from the skillet, and asked me where I got tickets for the circus.

She cajoled me out of my hurt feelings and I told her what I’d been dying to tell her. We went to the circus together two nights later, and she at least pretended to have a good time.

The point is, I’ve always wanted to do it that way. Savor the big moment, the grand gesture. Look what I did, with no help from anyone. Aren’t I great?

Just after midnight, though, word comes on the police scanner that there’s been a shooting in the East End. From the neighborhood, it’s almost certainly the usual DDGB.

The body’s in an abandoned house on a street where nobody will have seen anything. Mercifully, the weather’s so nippy and death is such a common commodity around here that we don’t have a lot of gawkers. With the body inside, there’s nothing to see anyhow, except a bunch of cops picking their noses.

Gillespie’s there, and he pulls me aside.

“What the fuck are you doing?” he asks me as soon as we’re out of earshot of his brethren.

I ask him for enlightenment.

“These guys want to kick your ass,” Gillespie says. “Hell, I’ve wanted to kick your ass for a long time, but now I got company.”

Cops don’t like it when you question them. It makes them grind their teeth and think about doing bad things. They definitely don’t like it when you question them on the front page of the newspaper. They’d cut me off, but there’s only one daily in town. TV? Right. Those assholes get their news by reading the goddamn paper.

“So you’re sure, you’re all sure, that you’ve got the right man?”

“If Shiflett’s sure, I’m sure,” Gillespie says. “He might act a little weird sometimes, but he’s never wrong. I’m telling you, he always knows what he’s doing. He arrests somebody, he knows they did it. You ever hear of one of his cases gettin’ thrown out?”

I say that I haven’t, but I’m thinking there’s a first time for everything.

This one will land on B2 or B3, near the obit pages where we’ll see some pathetic summation of the seventeen-year-old drug dealer’s life in a day or two. Jackson’s on the night desk, and he tells me to keep it to four inches—something for the suburbanites to tsk-tsk over while they eat their bagels and drink their fresh-squeezed orange juice.

“Why,” I imagine them asking each other, because I’ve heard approximately the same conversation at cocktail parties enough times, “can’t those people get their act together?”

“I don’t know,” I said one time, when I’d had enough bullshit and too much to drink. “I guess it’s because they don’t have youth soccer and swimming. Or fathers. Or schools worth pissing on. Or bedrooms with less than four people in them. Or pets, if you don’t count cockroaches.”

Kate stopped me, as she often did in our time together. She later reminded me that publicly humiliating people seldom caused them to have a change of heart.

Still, it felt good.

I log off and drive home. It’s only ten blocks, but I don’t walk it at night. There are more homeless than streetlights between here and the Prestwould.

Being a renter, I don’t have one of the parking spaces inside the chain-link fence that protects the mortgage-paying residents’ cars.

My space is in the alley between the building and Grace Street, beneath a light the city’s going to replace one of these days. I have to hope when I come home that some student hasn’t blithely ignored the permit-only sign. I hate having them towed, and the truck usually doesn’t come until the next day, anyhow.

This time, there are cars front and back, and I’m pretty proud of the fine job I do of parallel parking the Accord. The spaces aren’t big, and I have about two feet on each end when I’m done.

I’m usually pretty careful. There’s a bank of phones at the convenience store across the street, a leftover from the old days before cell phones. Out of habit, I guess, it’s still a hot spot for dealers. Bad things seem to restrict themselves to defined areas in the city, but sometimes shit spills over, and you have the odd purse-snatching or just general harassment of our older residents by young assholes who cross the DMZ separating Drug World from the rest of us. I asked Gillespie once, when we were on reasonably sociable terms, why the Richmond police couldn’t patrol one little chicken-shit corner.

“If we run ’em off,” he explained, and I swear he was munching on a doughnut when he said it, “they’ll just come back.”

Well, I said, you arrest people for murder, and that doesn’t stop them from continuing to kill each other.

“Yeah,” Gillespie said. “Maybe we oughta stop doing that, too.”

Tonight, I’m thinking about what Clara told me, and about Isabel Ducharme and Martin Fell. And Shiflett. I’m not paying attention.

My first inkling that I’m fucked is the guy who seems to appear out of nowhere in front of me. The fence is on one side, the car’s on the other. The guy’s wearing a ski mask. Shit.

He isn’t that big, but I’m ready to let discretion rule. When I turn, though, the other one is standing at the back of the Honda. He has on a hoodie, and I can’t really make out the face hidden in there. All I can tell is that one is black, the other white. Who says we can’t work together in Richmond?

With nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, I revert to Hill survival skills.

I walk up to the guy in front, who’s shorter than me, and hit him in the stomach as hard as I can.

“Don’t hit him in the fuckin’ head,” Mickey told me when he and Peggy were still married. “You’ll break your fuckin’ hand.” It was the only useful advice the SOB ever gave me. Mickey knew something about hitting.

The guy doubles over, and I do the thing I figured out myself, no help from Mickey. It always worked as long as you didn’t fight the same guy twice. I come up with both hands together, palms up, and catch him under the chin. His head jerks upward. I hope I haven’t broken the asshole’s neck, but you can’t hesitate. When kindness fails, keep going until somebody isn’t moving.

My young assailant goes flying backward, and I see enough daylight to make a run for it. My goal is the convenience store, a couple of hundred feet away. There, at least I’ll have witnesses to my ass-kicking.

Next thing, I’m tasting pavement. I’d counted on the guy behind me hesitating, which he obviously didn’t.

It was probably a nunchuck, the cop told me later. We can’t even make our own deadly weapons anymore, it seems. Whatever happened to good old Louisville Sluggers?

Later, I remember being down, with people kicking me while I tried to crawl under my car and only succeeded in wedging myself there, helpless as a football on a tee.

I try to reach for my wallet, and that just seems to piss them off. I try to talk, but the blood’s flowing pretty good, and I figure I’m in for a trip to the dentist.

I finally croak out the word “money.” One of them stops and laughs.

“Sure,” he says, the first time either one of them has spoken. “We’ll take that, too.”

The beating probably doesn’t last a minute, but it feels like about two days. They drag me out, and one of them reaches for my back pocket.

I must have passed out, and when I come to, my head is resting on my wallet. I’m bleeding on it. They took the cash and left the Visa card and everything else. Who says young people don’t have good manners anymore?

The only other thing I remember, before the lights went out, is the other one, who hadn’t talked yet, saying, “Blog that, motherfucker.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Saturday

W
hen Jeanette and I were married, we had a dog, this mutt named Killer we’d taken over when our neighbors decided they didn’t want a pet after all. That was in my first tenure on the police beat, and I got home even later then, before all the technological advances of the last twenty-five years somehow made newspaper deadlines
earlier.

Despite that, it was somehow my job to walk the dog, who would wake me up, more dependably than an alarm clock, around dawn. The colder it was, the earlier I had to get up. If I didn’t respond to Killer’s telepathic stare as he stood patiently beside the bed, he’d move closer. His breath would knock a buzzard off a fence post. If that didn’t work, he’d give a little throatclearing whine. As a last resort, he’d piss on the floor.

Soon, he had me trained. I would wake up, nine mornings out of ten, to the sight of his dumb, soulful eyes willing me to take him out.

It’s that same sense I have this morning, though it’s well past dawn and the idea of doing something so strenuous as opening my eyes is not appealing.

I open the right one first. Instead of Killer, though, I see Abe Custalow.

“You OK?” he asks.

I open the other eye and ask him if he’s fucking kidding me.

“Well,” he said, “you’re alive. That’s something.”

Whether that’s something good or something bad, it’s hard to say right now.

It was Abe who called the cops. I must have given the guys who found me, probably the same ones who hang out on the other side of Grace Street, his cell number. They woke Abe up and told him where I was, but they probably didn’t want to be there when the police came.

So Abe came downstairs and got me on my feet, or at least leaning and bleeding on my car. I didn’t want to call the cops, but he didn’t ask for my input. They came, two younger ones I’d never seen before. They took all the information, which wasn’t much, and acted concerned, but they’ve got bigger felons to fry, and I don’t expect justice to be served up hot and steaming.

They and Custalow heeded my demand not to be taken to the ER. Don’t go to the hospital, Peggy used to say. It’ll make you sick. Maybe not good advice, but I could tell that nothing serious was broken, just maybe the nose a little, and it’s been broken three times already. Maybe Mr. Nunchuck has straightened it some.