Plainclothes Naked (22 page)

Zoned-out, Tony raked idly at the scabs on his face, clamping and unclamping his jaw as though cracking invisible walnuts. Then the TV sparked on and they both flinched. A velvety Australian intoned: “
The ocelot is neither cruel nor kind. It is an animal, doing what animals do. When we return, we’ll visit a pair of cubs abandoned at birth. . . .
”

“Sorry,” said Mac. “Sat on the remote.”

“No wait!” Tony whispered urgently, “he’s talking to us! It’s
code.

We
are
those cubs! Oh man, we gotta move. You got the torture kit?”

McCardle lifted the canvas bag, desperate to avoid looking at his friend. The blood seeping from Zank’s wounds seemed to have worms in it. Tiny white worms, all swaying to the music from the Chevrolet commercial now blaring from the tube. Little worm Rock ettes. McCardle could not stop staring.
“Like a rock,”
sang the TV people.

“Thanks, I
would
like a rock,” Tony answered them, grabbing McCardle’s arm. “What are you staring at?”

“Nothing, man. It’s just ... you’re bleeding. You gotta stop pick ing. You always pick at yourself when you smoke too much.”

“Who am I, your bitch? You fucking worried about my skin? You think my looks are goin’, honey?”

“No, hey,Tony, it’s not like that.”

“Oh no? I think it is. You think I’m gonna put on the red dress for you, right? You think you’re my daddy, huh Mac? You my jocker now, you piece of shit? I oughta chop your joint off and feed it to the dog, you fuckin’ homoloid.”

“Tony,” pleaded McCardle. “We
talked
about this. She had a gun.” “Yeah, and you had a boner.”

“You’re just tweaking is all,” McCardle protested weakly. “That’s what’s goin’ on.”

“Tweaking?
I’m
tweaking?” Tony twitch-hopped to his feet, press ing his palms over his ears. “Oh
FUCK!
Now see what you did? They’re sendin’ out brain rays, man! They catch you, they’re gonna know what you are.” He let go of himself and raised a hand for quiet, then broke out in a rasping whisper. “Hear that? Now they’re gonna send the choppers! I can hear ’em, man! They’re coming for the black Dino. Everybody seen you on
America’s Most Wanted
. Shit!” Zank peered wildly around the apartment. “Grab the kit. Quick! We’ll make a run for the car. Leave the TV on, so they think we’re home. You remember her address, this Tina chick?”

“I know how to get there,” said McCardle, careful to keep his dis tance.

Zank pointed a finger at him. “You better. We make one stop, load up on kibble-and-bits, then we haul ass to the bitch’s house and get the picture.”

“You sure she has it?”

“She either has it, or we staple her tits to her shoulders, and she tells us who does.”

“Jesus,Tony.”

“If Jesus smoked crack, we’d wear little pipes around our neck. Think about that. He wouldn’t have touched a bite of the Last Supper.”

“What?”

“Nothin’. If the tit-staples don’t work, we feed her Ex-Lax, then superglue her bunghole. Saw a guy they did that to in juvey. Fucker swelled up like one of them boas with a gopher in it.”

“A
gopher?
” McCardle ran a tongue over his lips. He
had
to drink something besides beer. His kidneys were killing him. The dwarf leered from behind the couch, and a thought ran through him like a shock. “How come you hate women so much,Tony?”

“Who me? What I hate,” Zank snorted, “is we’re out of rock. I take another hit of cheese, I’m gonna upchuck. Let’s get the fuck over there, and I’ll show you how much I like the ladies.”

Before leaving,Tony had one of his feelings—“they’re waitin’ for us out front, I can
feel
it!”—so they decided to sneak out the back way and down the rusted fire escape. They made it all the way to the sidewalk before they remembered: They didn’t have a car. Somehow, in the midst of all their crack-fun, this fact had escaped them. The Gremlin was toast. The priest’s cherry Mustang, too hot to drive, was already dumped in the Allegheny. And Tony’s regular ride, a Chrysler minivan pinched from a Wal-Mart lot, was still plunked outside Seventh Heaven, where’d they’d left it to transport Carmella in the now dead Gremlin to the Pawnee Lodge.

“I can’t believe you forgot,” Tony seethed, popping his fist in his palm and craning his skull left and right, as if trying to wring it off his neck.

“So did you!” Mac whined. “And stop twistin’ around. It looks like you’re doin’ some kinda Linda Blair shit. It’s creepy.”

Tony didn’t bother to respond. Instead, for another minute or two, he and McCardle paced in small circles in front of the Bundthouse Arms, scanning the sky for choppers and trying not to inhale dead meat fumes. (Strangely, Zank could handle them
inside
—he could
live
in them—but once
outside
, in the open air, the stink sometimes got to him.) They both noticed the spanking new Town Car across the street at the same time.

There was no reason for such a swanky vehicle in that neighbor hood. But when they’d strolled around the Lincoln a couple of times—McCardle touched the hood to see if it was still warm, and it

was—no one ran out waving a hand-cannon, so Tony gave the high sign. Meaning it was probably okay to steal.

“Mac,” he whispered, as if agents were posted behind every phone pole, “go back to the pad. Grab my slim jim.”

McCardle balked. “You hungry, after all that rock?”

“Jesus H. Piss! Not
that
kind of slim jim, you pinhead. Don’t you know
anything
about crime? I’m talking about the
slim jim
slim jim, like you buy at Pep Boys, to get into your nice-ass car when you forget your keys. You’re dumber than dog food, you know that?”

“You don’t have to abuse me, man!” Mac sulked a few seconds, then decided he had a better idea. He ambled casually behind the shiny Town Car, pretended to kneel down and tie his shoe, and began feeling around under the back bumper. His mammoth hamstrings strained against his pants as he groped, but a second later he hopped up clutch ing a small black box with a magnet on the bottom and
HIDE
-
A
-
KEY
in white letters across the top.

“Gotcha!” he cried, sliding the top of the box sideways and pluck ing out the spare key. “Don’t know why they call this a Hide-A-Key,” he chuckled. “They oughta call it the Ride-For-Free. ’Cause that’s what I’m gonna do anytime some fool be dumb enough to stick his car keys under his damn bumper. Motherfuckers might as well have a little flag on their antenna sayin’
STEAL MY RIDE
! I swear, the richer the White Folks, the dumber their ass. I guarantee, no brother I know’s gonna leave the key to his Lincoln under the bumper. Huh-uh. Nossir. Never happen.”

Zank eyed the ride suspiciously. “I don’t know, man. I’m thinkin’ car bomb. Get in and start ’er up.”

McCardle unlocked the car door grudgingly. “I get my shit blown up, at least I’m dead,” he said. “Standin’ where you at, you’ll probably just get maimed, have to live out your days one of them stumps they got to wheel around and feed through a mush-tube. I’ll be up in heaven laughin’, watchin’ you tryin’ to change your shit-bag with your teef.”

“Teef,”
said Tony, “there you go again. Now get in and hit the igni tion. But wait till I get across the street.”

Car go boom,
Tony heard himself think, trying to block out the

stress-fueled baby talk in his brain. But McCardle didn’t wait for him to cross the street. He just got in and turned the key. Tony threw him self to the ground as the Lincoln purred to life.

“Asshole,” he hollered, picking himself off the sidewalk. “Shove over and let a man drive.”

Chief Fayton, dissatisfied with the knot in his Wind sor, undid his tie and tried not to think about his wife’s shoulders. Lately, whenever he looked in the mirror he thought about them. He’d married Flo rence, way back when, because he admired her verve, her social connections, and her behind-the scenes celeb stories. (Who knew Dr. Laura had back hair?) Mostly, though, it was because of her money. Personal assistants, it turned out, pulled down a lot more than senior DMV execs. But the years, as they say, had not been kind. Beyond the inevitable gray ness, the chin sag, and the Samsonite eyelids—all, happily, repairable conditions, which Flo, just as hap pily, had gone to Upper Marilyn’s own Dr. Roos and repaired—a yolk of suet seemed to have descended
‌

from heaven and landed on her shoulders. The yolk, he was loathe to admit, lent her upper body the approximate heft and girth of a retired nose tackle.

South of the waist, Florence remained the svelte ex-celebrity helper he’d wed. But those shoulders. . . . He sighed to think of them now while regarding his own chiseled features. (He liked the sound of this,
chiseled features,
and imagined how, once the movie of his life came out, scribes for
Vanity Fair
and
Us
would pepper their profiles with that very phrase when describing his still strong chin and prominent Roman nose.)

By and large, Fayton was happy with his wife. Flo’s charity work kept her occupied. And, as top man at a police department—even a teeny one—he was understandably too busy to spend a lot of time with her. They rarely went out. When they did, it was to attend the odd political dinner, the biannual Police Department dance and fund-raiser, or, the very reason he was fiddling with his tie this very morning, a policeman’s funeral.

Fayton sighed heavily as he slid the knot north on his reconfigured Windsor. Florence could hardly be expected to understand why he wouldn’t want her by his side at Chatlak’s burial. He’d have to think of something.

The chief slipped into his police dress jacket and snapped his freshly polished badge to the lapel. He strained his cranium trying to think of an excuse. They’d already agreed that Florence would meet him at the station, where they’d take his official black Chevrolet Caprice to the funeral, chauffeured by young Officer Krantz. Fayton was a tad miffed he didn’t get to ride in the limousine. But Chatlak, apparently, had a raft of sisters in McKeesport. According to Edward Edward, the Korean bride–ordering fellow from the funeral home, the immediate family had limo dibs.

If he didn’t call soon, Fayton knew, it would be too late. Flo would be on her way. But he couldn’t think of how to stop her. Much as he might want to, he could not just come out and say,
“I love you, honey, I just hate being seen with you in public. . . .”
Nor, come to think of it, could he unleash the deeper truth: that he harbored a secret yen for Mayor Marge. Or worse, that he had an itch to trade up....

The chief was still racking his brains when Krantz, tapping gently

on his office door, stuck his head in to say that he’d just gotten a call from Ruby. “And what did
he
want?” asked the chief, wondering, as always, exactly what was going on with Krantz’s haircut. Somehow, it managed to be too long and too short at the same time.

“He said he can’t make the funeral,” Krantz announced. “Some thing came up on the Pawnee Lodge case. He says he’ll call when he nails it.”

“I’ll bet he will,” Fayton scowled, giving up on his Windsor and staring at himself with the dour, defeated expression he tried to coun teract every day with a hundred chin lifts. He was still staring when the door opened again and Florence pranced in, wrapped in an off-the shoulder black Armani knockoff.

“Darling,” he gushed, avoiding his own eyes in the Honor Wall mirror as she leaned in for a kiss, “you look absolutely ravishing!”

Manny hung up on Mullet-man Krantz and slid the Impala to a tire-over-the-curb stop in front of Tina’s house. He felt slightly guilty about bailing on Chatlak’s funeral, and promised himself he’d pop out to the cemetery and drop off the plastic flowers he’d bought the first chance he got. Tacky as they were in most cir cumstances, when it came to cemeteries, it was hard to beat phony roses. Not only did they last forever, but nobody wanted to steal them. This was the one bit of wisdom his mother had bequeathed him: Plastic flow ers are okay on a grave! Manny clung to this as an absolute truth in a confused and uncertain universe.
‌

That morning, dreading the hours ahead in the com pany of Fayton and Krantz—not to mention his ex-wife and the rest of what passed for Upper Marilyn official

dom—Manny’d indulged in an extra bit of medicine: a pair of plump yellow Percodan to go along with his usual Code Fours. Unfortu nately, he’d neglected to eat anything, and the stew of controlled sub stances seemed to be working their way through his stomach like a rogue backhoe, leaving a ragged, acid-tinged divot in their wake. He’d already drunk enough Pepto-Bismol to paint a barn.

Manny made a thorough survey as he stepped onto the Podolsky property. Nothing looked out of place, except for a tipped-over garden gnome, which the paramedics had upset hauling Marvin’s corpse from the front door to the ambulance. Eyeballing the fallen Hobbit, he decided to take Tina with him to the Dendez house. It might help hav ing a woman there to hold a few hands. If she was up for it, he’d intro duce her as a social worker. Families appreciated police bringing social workers along to give them bad news. It gave them one more person to scream at.

He banged on the door a few times, then gave up and hollered. “Tina? Tina it’s me, Manny!” After a minute, someone tugged a curtain aside in the living room. If that was Tina, fine. If it was Zank or McCardle he’d need more than a plastic bouquet in his fist. Since he wasn’t going to the funeral, he’d decided on impulse to give the faux roses to his new girl. Now he shifted them to his left hand and eased the .38 into daylight with his right.

Manny was still standing there, palm sweating on his gun-butt, when he heard a rustle behind him. He dropped to his knees, tossing the roses and bringing the gun up with both hands as he swung around.

“Freeze!”

“Nice moves,” said Tina, holding a can of Diet Pepsi and sipping it through a bent straw. “I bet you were first in your class at Twister.”