B009XDDVN8 EBOK (32 page)

“What the hell?” barked the old man.

The man with the pool cue leaned over and whispered in the old man’s ear. Like a corpse meeting a cattle prod, the old man shot up to sitting. Skinny and clearly wracked with something, he stared our way for a moment as the man with the pool cue kept talking in his ear. Then the old man rolled off the table and hobbled over, his legs bowed like an old cowpuncher in a black-and-white movie.

“Is that you, Tony, you punk?” said the old man.

His face was drawn, his hair was yellow gray, his beard was scraggly, and there was something familiar in the high screech of his voice that made the scar on my neck twitch.

“Hello there, Corky,” said Tony.

“What the hell are you doing here?”

“Looking for you.”

“Don’t get no ideas, now. I’m nothing but a sack of bones held together by tumors, but I could still gut you afore you saw the glint of my blade.”

“Not anymore,” said Tony. “And even then you couldn’t, not without Flynn.”

“That thing what we done, it was business only. Nothing personal about it. I always liked you.”

“No you didn’t.”

“Well, maybe not. But in them days I was so cranked I didn’t like nobody. Who’s the primp?” he said, indicating me.

“Just a friend.”

He stared at me for a bit. “Almost looks familiar.”

“I have something I need to say to you,” said Tony.

“Not sure I want to hear it. Anyway, Billy wants to talk to you.”

“Who’s Billy?”

“The new chief.”

“The one at the table?” said Tony.

“You got it.”

“Looks young.”

“Maybe, but rabid as a junkyard rat,” said Corky.

“So how’s things going with you, Corky?” said Tony. “How’s your life?”

“What the hell?”

“I’m asking. For real.”

The old man stared at Tony like he was a freak, shifted his weight, looked awkwardly behind him. He was one of those guys who had aged far beyond his years. Ancient and wizened, he might have been only in his early sixties, but the years had been hard. Early sixties put him at late thirties when he slipped into my house and stuck his knife into my throat.

“I’m trying to make a connection here,” said Tony.

“What the hell for?”

“What I wanted to say,” said Tony, “what I need you to know, Corky, is that I’m sorry. That what you and Flynn did to me that night, it’s in the past and I’m sorry I drove you to it.”

The old man looked at Tony for a long moment with his wet rheumy eyes and then spat on the floor. “I don’t want your stinking apology.”

“That doesn’t matter,” said Tony. “It’s not like a blender, you can’t give it back. So now you’re off the list.”

“What list?”

“How was that?” said Tony to me.

“Pretty good,” I said.

“What’s this list?” said Corky.

“Am I finished yet?”

“One more,” I said.

“What the hell is this list?”

“All the people I need to apologize to. I won’t be able to apologize now to Flynn, which is a shame. I had a lot of apologizing to do to Flynn. But now I only need to find my brother.”

“You want to say sorry to that son of a bitch?”

“He stepped up to take care of me after my parents died, and I treated him like dirt. That’s all. There was the time I crashed his car, the times I stole cash from his wallet, all the times I stayed out late and ignored his advice, the grief I gave him. He did a lot for me.”

“He beat you like a lazy dog, day after day.”

“That he did, but I usually gave as good as I got. I just want to give him a sorry, check him off the list, too. You know where he is these days?”

“That a joke?”

“No sir.”

“I ain’t seen him since he went off to jail.”

“Has anyone here heard from him?”

“Let me tell you, Tony, if anyone did know where he was, he wouldn’t be there no more.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” said Tony, standing now and tossing some bills on the bar for the soda waters. “But that’s all I came for.” He put his hand on the old man’s shoulder, peered deeply into the old man’s eyes. “Thank you for listening. Take care of yourself now, Corky. And I mean it.”

A moment later Tony was headed out of the bar and I was scrambling to catch up, grateful as hell to get out of there, when a huge man, like a great block of ebony, stepped in front of the door and shook his head. He was almost Tony’s size, but even so his presence wouldn’t have stopped Tony without the tire iron he held like a baseball bat. When we turned around, Corky was right behind us.

“You may be done asking your questions, Tony,” said Corky, “but we got some of our own.”

“I don’t have any answers.”

“We’ll see. Give up your wallet.”

“My what?”

“You heard me.”

“No way.”

“Hand it over,” said Corky, pulling a huge bowie knife from behind his back. “Billy wants to talk.”

“Is this a robbery or an invitation?” said Tony.

“In this joint there ain’t much difference. Billy’s waiting for you. Billy Flynn.”

“Flynn?”

“That’s right. The Fat Dog’s kid, and Billy wants to talk about old debts.”

F
UCK YOU,
T
ONY,
all right?” said Flynn. “And fuck your brother, too, only harder and in the ass. I ought to shoot you in the head just for thinking we might know where that piece of shit is hiding. And who is this table-faced white-shirt faggot sitting next to you?”

The last of this spew of obscenity from Billy Flynn was aimed directly at me.

Billy was not the man we had thought he was. In fact, he was not a man at all. Instead, Billie Flynn was the woman at the head table, huge and round, with a face like a fist. The man beside her was her so-called old man, even though he looked a decade younger than she, but from the authoritative honk of her expletive-spewing voice and the cold, maniacal blue of her eyes, it was clear who was in charge.

“Drink your fucking beer,” said Billie to Tony. Billie had sent Corky over to get enough beers for us to have one in each fist and a boatload to spare. The table looked like an Anheuser-Busch parade.

“I’m off the stuff,” said Tony.

“Not tonight you’re not. We don’t buy that twelve-step bullshit, not in here, not at my table. At my table any man who can’t drink doesn’t walk away in one piece. Drink your fucking beer.”

Tony stared for a bit until Corky picked up his knife, poked it into the table, flicked out a chunk of the wood. Tony drank half a bottle in one swallow.

“How’d that taste, Alkie Boy?” said Billie.

“Pretty damn good.”

“You bet it did. I tried the whole Bill’s-club thing once under court order and the only way I could stand the meetings was to get shitfaced before them. What about you, Pencil Pocket?” she said to me. “Drink up.”

I quickly took a sip.

“What, your husband won’t approve? Drink the whole damn thing, you tan-pantsed fuck.”

I took a bigger sip.

“Who the hell are you, again?”

I was starting to give her my Jonathon Willing name when she said, “Shut the fuck up.”

I shut the fuck up.

“So Tony, how are things on…” She opened the wallet Corky had taken off him, looked at the driver’s license. “Buxton Drive in Pitchford, PA.”

“Dreamy,” said Tony.

“I’m glad you’re enjoying your life. My daddy’s not enjoying his anymore. He died in that prison your brother shafted him into. Someone shoved his head into a lathe at the machine shop. Needless to say, the casket was closed, which was a relief, really, because even with his face, my daddy was uglier than me, and that’s saying something.”

“I’m sorry about your father,” said Tony.

“No you’re not and neither am I. The only two things he ever did for me was ejaculate and die. But he was my daddy and someone’s got to pay. Hey you, Mr. Tan Pants, you think this is funny?”

“No,” I said. “It’s just that my father was a bastard, too.”

“Now this is touching. Here we are, drinking beer, swapping stories about our dads. Tell me more, or, on second thought, fuck
your daddy. You think I care? I’d as soon have Corky slice your throat than listen to one more word about your fucking family.”

“I think I knowed him,” said Corky, tilting his head as he continued to stare.

“You couldn’t,” I said.

“I could swear,” said Corky.

“The scar on your throat,” said Billie, waving a fat finger at me, “that thing that looks like a caterpillar trying to hump your Adam’s apple. How’d you get that?”

“Golf.”

“Tough sport,” said Billie’s old man, nodding.

“Did I tell you to talk, Stoner?” said Billie. “I want your opinion, I’ll pull your head out of my cockpit and ask. It looks like your work, don’t it, Corky? I mean the scar, not them two bruised eyes.”

“Sure does.”

“What are you doing with a weak stream of piss like this one, Tony?”

Tony looked at me, shook his head. “He’s my sponsor.”

She barked out a laugh. “I got my sponsor off my back by getting him hooked on coke, which I was selling at the time, so that worked out well. Drink up, boys.”

We drank up. When our beers were finished she pushed two more at us.

“Drink until you puke and then drink some more. That’s what I got out of the two
A
’s. It wasn’t just my daddy your brother put in jail, he put Corky in, too.”

“Six years,” said Corky.

“And half the other guys here. Ever since I was ten and my daddy was in that jail, he would tell me about the Rams on my visits, about the rides, the fights, the glorious outlaw life. It’s all a girl could ever want. I got myself tattooed like a Chinese sailor in anticipation. But when I showed up here there was nothing left but the chicken bones. Your brother, Tony, he tore the whole
thing apart. And I’ve built it back piece by piece for one purpose. These are our life goals now, in reverse order: to drink, to fuck, to ride, to fight, to fuck, to cut Derek Grubbins’s fucking head off his fucking body and nail it to the wall.” She looked up at an open spot between two ragged vests. “Right there, actually, so I can stand on the table and hump his face.”

“Let me get this straight,” said Tony. “What you’re telling me is that you don’t know where my brother is either.”

“Tony, you never was too bright,” said Corky.

“If we knew where your brother was,” said Billie, “he’d be dead already and we’d have drunk a keg of beer to celebrate and pissed it out on his corpse.”

“Do you have any ideas, any possibilities?” I said.

“You’re talking? Why are you talking? Tell him to shut the fuck up, Tony, or I’ll have Corky cut his throat all the way through this time.”

“Shut the fuck up,” said Tony.

I shut the fuck up.

“He’s somewhere, your brother, in some fancy house probably,” said Billie, “living under an assumed name, playing tennis and screwing the neighbors’ wives. He thinks he’s safe in witness protection? They better protect his asshole with a cork, because when we find him we’re going to let Sparky over there stuff it with dynamite.” She nodded toward a skinny kid with greasy blond hair at another table, flicking his lighter on and off, on and off. “Sparky likes fire. It’s good to have a hobby, don’t you think? Mine is murdering your brother.”

“I get it,” said Tony. “You want to kill my brother. You really want to kill my brother. You want to kill my brother and then bring him back to life with electric paddles so you can kill him again.”

“Payback’s a bitch and I intend to strap on and pound away until her nose pops off.”

“You know what you got, Billie? You got issues.”

“You’re damn right I got issues. I weigh three hundred pounds, I’m a mean drunk, I bash heads to calm my nerves, and I want to fuck my dead daddy. Even my issues got issues. Anything wrong with that?”

“But think about it,” said Tony. “Whatever my brother did to your father, he did when you were ten. And you’ve been carrying it like a boulder all this time. Isn’t it getting heavy? Don’t you think it’s time to let it go?”

“Then what would I do for fun?”

“Just let it go. Just drop it, like a stone into a pond. Plop. You don’t know how light you’ll feel.”

“I don’t want to feel light. I like my hate. It keeps me hungry and horny. Oh, baby boy, I’m going to find and kill your brother, yes I am, but only after he coughs it up.”

“Coughs what up?”

“You always was stupid, Tony,” said Corky. “But not that stupid.”

“My daddy told me that back in the day they were pulling in so much cash they didn’t know what to do with it all. They couldn’t bank it, invest it, or spend it; the only thing to be done with it was hide it away or steal it. My daddy said he would have done the stealing himself if Derek didn’t beat him to it. Then maybe I would have been born a rich little girl, and then maybe I wouldn’t have this big fucking stone of hate on my shoulder.”

“So it’s not just revenge you’re after,” said Tony. “It’s also your childhood.”

“Am I on a couch? It’s about the money, Sigmund Fuck. And that means you’ve got a chance here, Tony. You’re on step nine, right? And you want to make amends to your brother? What about making amends by saving his fucking life, how does that sound?”