Final Stroke (34 page)

Before he changed out of his grays and went home for the night, Ty
rone took the elevator up to the third floor to check on the bastard. He picked this time because he knew it was just before dinner and it would be busy up there.

After shooting the breeze a while at the nurses’ station, complaining about the weather and jets from O’Hare taking off overhead, he made like he was doing a last errand before going off shift and headed down the hall to the bastard’s room. If the guy was with his wife he’d try to listen in, see what they were talking about. And if they were talking about that old lady who happened to kill herself near the closet where he did business with Flat Nose, well then, maybe he’d just have to come back tonight. Give him the old bigger-cats-out-there-that’ll-cut-your
balls-off-and-throw-you-down-the-elevator-shaft bullshit. And if that didn’t work, maybe he’d say something about this other guy who’s been watching his wife and knows where she lives.

Part of the reason for checking up on the bastard was because of Flat Nose. Not that Flat Nose said he had anything planned, but it was the way Flat Nose was acting. All that staring-down shit had got
ten on his nerves. He’d even begun to wonder whether DeJesus and Flat Nose had separate agendas. To Tyrone, the stare-down shit from Flat Nose was like the distancing a gang-banger might have done be
fore he pounced in the old days. If he checked on the bastard him
self and satisfied DeJesus, maybe he’d get DeJesus and Flat Nose off his back. Yeah, time to steal the show, stop acting like a shorty who doesn’t know shit.

The bastard was alone in his room, sitting in his wheelchair be
tween the bed and the window. He was staring out the window, but the phone from his bedside table was in his lap and he seemed to be shaking all over like someone had already gotten to him.

Tyrone slipped into the room, figuring he’d pretend to check the
heating register below the window. He walked slowly across the room, and when he saw the guy glance up at him, he gave him a smile to throw him off guard.

The guy turned slowly toward Tyrone, smiling back. This guy al
ways smiled, even when he was shaking. The bastard even smiled when he’d called him a fuckhead earlier in the day. Yeah, calling him fuck
head and making off like it’s the stroke did it. But now, for some rea
son, the smile looked different. Tyrone thought he’d seen a smile like this before, back when he was a shorty and that cat DeAndre used to threaten kids in the block if they refused to join. Smiling, yet not smil
ing. Yeah, smiling, but behind the smile was a guy showing you he was thinking about what he’ll do to you if you don’t play the game.

The smiling guy rolled his chair toward Tyrone. The telephone in the guy’s lap was still connected to the wall by its cord, and as the guy rolled toward Tyrone the phone slipped off and clattered on the floor. But the guy didn’t seem to notice this and Tyrone saw that the guy wasn’t shaking the way he had when he’d first come in.

Then the guy was all over him. He sprung from the chair like a jump-shot artist and caught Tyrone off guard and now they were on the floor. The guy growled and had Tyrone by the throat. And al
though Tyrone was able to throw him off, one side of his neck throbbed where the guy’s good hand had been.

“Crazy bastard!” screamed Tyrone, sitting up.

But no sooner had Tyrone sat up and the bastard was on him again, slithering toward him with one side doing all the work the way he’d seen it in physical rehab. The guy got Tyrone’s shirt front with his good hand and banged Tyrone’s head on the floor.

This was enough, thought Tyrone. He rolled away, stood up, and kicked the bastard in the gut, making him spit and sputter. After kicking him once more for good measure, he bent over and grabbed
him by the shirt collar.

“We’ll meet again, motherfucker! Only next time I’ll bring a friend! Between the two of us we oughta be able to whip your ass be
cause he works for Jesus Christ himself!”

When the bastard opened his eyes and smiled, Tyrone stood up, making ready to kick him again. But just then the nurses’ aide named Betty came in.

“What’s going on here? Did he fall? Can’t you help him?” Betty rolled the guy onto his back, knelt down beside him, placed her hand on his forehead, took his wrist for a pulse.

“Tyrone! Don’t just stand there! Get help! Don’t you know any
thing about procedure? My goodness, you’ll be fine, Mr. Babe. You’ll be fine. Get going, Tyrone!”

On his way to the nurses’ station, Tyrone nearly tripped over a white dude in a leather jacket and baseball cap who seemed determined to take up the whole damn hallway with his wheelchair. The dude didn’t budge, but stared at Tyrone like someone looking for a fight.

Tyrone said, “Tough guy,” then sidestepped the guy’s chair and ran on.

After reporting that a resident had taken a spill while he’d been checking the heating register, Tyrone left the floor. On his way down to the first floor, he figured the elevator might as well take him on down to hell because something was sure to come of this. But when he took his time changing and said goodnight to everyone and went to the supervisor’s office to say goodnight and she didn’t say a damn thing about the incident, he felt like he’d been given a stay of execu
tion by the governor.

Out back in the employee parking lot, as he slid into the DeVille, he decided he would definitely have to come back tonight and put some fear into the bastard. Stroke or no stroke, Babe had tried to
choke him.

A jet on takeoff boomed overhead as Tyrone started up the DeVille. He thought about his Uncle Ezra and the really old DeVille he had. He goosed the engine on his DeVille a couple times, drawing power from it. As he backed out of his parking spot, he thought of the white dude who’d run into him in the hallway and mentally slugged the dude, making his baseball cap fly and his chair go into reverse. He put the DeVille in drive, spun the wheels on the wet asphalt, and drove fast out of the parking lot toward the road around the front of Hell in the Woods, only slowing down when he saw a cop car coming in the front entrance.

CHAPTER

TWENTY

ONE

Knit caps off, heated inside of the van smelling of rain,
sweat, mud, and leather jackets. Tape smell, too, especially when she tries to move her mouth. Nose running because she has been slapped and because she cannot breathe through her mouth. Wrists aching where they are taped. Arms numbed because they are pulled tightly behind her. Raincoat furrowing into her armpit where the shoulder belt is fastened beneath her left arm instead of over her shoulder.

At first they had taped only her hands, apparently expecting her to tell them what they wanted to know. They put her in the rear seat of the van, one man holding her while the one with the deep voice asked repeatedly, “Where do we go next?” It was dark in the van and she could not see who was talking. Then, when the man holding her left the van and she sat alone in the back seat and they began driving and streetlights flashed by, she saw that the hood from Marjorie Gianetti’s funeral named Dino, the same hood who had shouted to her through the closed window of her car, sat on the floor of the van facing back
ward, facing her.

When they’d been driving for a time, Dino got up from the floor of the van and sat on the rear bench seat beside her. He ripped tape from a roll and taped her mouth quickly and brutally, the way some
one might slap a sticker on the bumper of a car. After taping her mouth he reached across and belted her into the seat, pulling the com
bined shoulder and lap belt beneath her arm, buckling it and cinching it up tight. At one point she tried kicking him, but this only made him angry and he had slapped her hard across the face.

Although the van had only front bucket seats and a rear bench seat, it was quite long. The center part of the van was taken up by the wheelchair lift she’d been held down on after they took her from her car. The handicapped man sat up front in the driver’s seat. She could see a partially folded wheelchair at an angle in the space between the front seats. Except for the sliding door through which the lift extended when in operation, the van had windows all around. However, by con
trasting the street lighting coming in the front windshield with that of the lighting coming in the side and back windows, she judged all but the windshield were darkly tinted. Up front, beneath the dashboard, she saw red and green lights, and realized, when she heard the muted chatter of police calls, the van was equipped with a scanner.

When she heard a male voice say, “Code-seven,” she recalled Steve teaching her the basic codes when she was learning to use his scanner. Code-seven meant out of service for a meal break. She recalled it viv
idly because that day Steve had taken her to a restaurant to have lunch with the pair of cops who’d just gone code-seven. She recalled one of the cops complaining that he hoped he was able to retire before he was ten-fifty-five, which had nothing to do with his age. Ten-fifty-five was one of the “ten” codes. It meant dead body.

She wasn’t sure how long they’d been driving, perhaps a half hour. The amount of light visible through the front windshield beyond the
knit cap on the driver’s head had brightened. At first, when lights spar kled from within beads of raindrops swept by the windshield wipers, she’d thought the sparkles were in her head and she was on the verge of passing out. But now she saw that the flashes of color were gas stations and restaurants and traffic signals. When she turned her head she could see Dino sitting in the rear seat beside her. Because of the darkly tinted side windows, his face was profiled against near-darkness, the face changing color with traffic signals and streetlights and shopping center lighting coming in through the distant windshield.

Knit cap off, eyebrow ridges prominent. Sitting back, legs crossed, arms folded. Saying nothing and not looking at her, as if his job is fin
ished and someone else will take over.

Only the two of them with her in the van. Front passenger seat empty. The other cars that had chased her gone, or perhaps following because she has not seen them up front. Her car taken because she heard the rasp of its exhaust as they fought to free it from the mud after she was put into the van, one man holding her down from the front, popping the top buttons on her blouse, while the other—Dino—kept asking her where they should go next.

Just as she began to wonder how much longer they would continue driving, the van turned, bumping up into a yellow-lit parking lot. The driver parked behind a brightly lit building. She caught a glimpse of windows and people sitting inside as they pulled into the lot, but now all she could see was a windowless wall of the building. When the driver shut off the engine, the windshield wipers stopped mid-stroke, hands about to clasp in prayer.

The driver reached between the front seats, pushing the wheel chair back and somehow unfolding it behind the seats. In one quick motion like a huge ball bounced from the front seat, the driver spun himself around and propelled himself back between the seats into the
wheelchair facing the back of the van. During the transfer the wheel
chair clattered and the man grunted. It was obvious the driver had no legs at all. She recalled the warning someone had given back at the end of the road where they’d captured her.
“I wouldn’t recommend it, Legless. You’ll get those skinny wheels stuck in the mud and end up on your stumps.”

Because of the light through the windshield behind the driver she could not see his face. But now that he was closer, she realized his head was larger than she’d thought, the knit cap resembling a small append
age. His breathing was heavy and labored, yet slow. Then the motor that operated the lift exploded into life, opening the sliding door while at the same time moving the legless man in his wheelchair outward. Once outside, the lift lowered him, then came back inside empty as the door slid closed.

She could smell meat being grilled, and the heavy odor of deep frying. Now that the engine was off and the whirring of the lift motor and its components had stopped, the only sound in the van was the intermittent patter of rain on the roof.

Dino said nothing. Because of the bright yellow light through the windshield from what was apparently a fast-food restaurant, she saw that he sat with his legs crossed and his arms folded, staring straight ahead. His lips moved slightly as if he were cleaning his teeth with his tongue. His face was expressionless. He did not react when she tried to call out and succeeded only in making a kind of high-pitched hum. The pull of the tape tugged at her skin and made her nostrils feel as if they’d been torn.

When the driver returned, the lift conveyed him into the van as if he were a component on an assembly line. He had a bag on his lap. She could smell greasy cooked food and coffee. The driver opened the bag noisily, brought out a covered paper cup he handed to Dino. Then
the driver turned to the front, placed his bag on the passenger seat, and with more heavy breathing and another grunt, propelled himself back into the driver’s seat.

The driver sat in the front and ate, retrieving his meal from the passenger seat. When he turned, she could see him in profile alter
nately munching on a huge burger and lifting a container of fries to his face. The sounds of chewing and swallowing and the rustling of the packaging filled the van. While the driver ate, Dino sat staring straight ahead, not saying a word, not reacting in any way except to clean his teeth with his tongue. Then, after the driver took a swig from a drink in a large paper cup with the straw, she saw Dino hold up the cup he’d been given.

Dino carefully lifted the cup’s plastic cover. She could see steam rising from the cup as Dino held the cup to the light for a moment, as if he were admiring the steam. Then he reached toward her with the cup, held it above her lap, and slowly tipped it.

She spread her legs and tried to push farther back into the seat, but the coffee caught her on the insides of her thighs. She felt the tape tearing at her chin and nostrils as she tried to scream. It was as if her slacks had been set ablaze. She moved her legs rapidly up and down as the coffee-soaked material of her slacks licked at her thighs. Then, when the coffee finally cooled, and she began to feel relief, he held the cup out again and this time emptied it.

After the second dose of coffee had cooled and she was able to rest, relieved that the coffee was gone, but still in pain and not sure what was next, Dino went forward, gave the empty cup to the driver, then came back and once again sat beside her. The driver noisily crammed all the wrappers and cups into the bag on the passenger seat. Then he methodically propelled himself into the wheelchair, activated the lift and was out the door, this time leaving it open. The bright lights
from the parking lot shown in through the open door as she watched the driver wheel himself in the rain to a garbage receptacle at the front corner of the van. When the driver returned to the van and was being lifted inside, he turned to her and smiled. It was an insane smile full of creases darkened by beard stubble.

The driver was much older than Dino, perhaps in his early fifties. He had a thick nose and wide-set eyes. A series of scars like meander
ing streams ran between one eye and his chin, distorting his mouth and misshaping his head. He reminded Jan of drunks from the distant past when she was a dancer and they would sometimes reach out for her. He stared at her as if he had suddenly discovered a way to get even with every woman who had ever rejected him. He seemed to read her mind while he paused there, licking raindrops from his lips before he wiped his mouth with his sleeve. Then he turned to the front of the van as the side door whirred shut.

Once back in his seat, the driver started the van and let it idle. The driver’s scarred face reminded her of Lydia’s scar, and of Lydia’s pain, and of the fact that she could have been with Lydia tonight if she had left this whole thing alone like Steve had wanted. Her pain and fear was heightened by the driver’s relaxed movements. She could hear the driver belch several times as the windshield wipers swept back and forth. She tried to hear if any other engines started after the driver started the van, but could hear none. Then the driver backed out of the parking spot, drove out of the lighted parking lot, and they were on the move again.

The pain was nothing. Burns would heal, given time. But right now time seemed to have run out. No time left and nothing left ex cept this van, Dino sitting beside her, and the driver belching up front. The most frightening part was that the world she’d known was already beginning to fade. And with it, Steve was fading, trapped in another
world she was no longer part of. Would Steve remember her? Or would a therapist, in order to help Steve survive in yet another changed world, slowly begin to erase all memory of her for his own good?

When she glanced toward Dino through eyes blurred by tears, she saw him watching her. He had turned slightly in his seat to face her. She could see the glint of street lighting in his eyes, and his cheeks had an oily sheen. He leaned toward her and smiled.

“We’ve been to the bank, Mrs. Babe. We’ve gotten what we needed from the safe deposit box at the bank. You should know because you were there. So where do we go next?”

It seemed so long ago. Sitting in the bank watching Tony Gianetti Junior and his attorney come from the safe deposit box vault carrying their briefcases. Following the Prius south and seeing the truck move into the Prius’s lane to engulf it. Watching as the men in leather jack
ets and knit caps went to the wreckage. The men in leather jackets and knit caps had not been there to help. They had been there to retrieve something from the two briefcases.

Dino tilted his head and looked puzzled. “Should I take off the tape so you can speak? Don’t nod unless you’re prepared to tell me, Mrs. Babe. If you nod and I take off the tape and you don’t tell me where we should go next, we’ll have to get more coffee. Only this time we’ll get a large, and we won’t let it cool.”

Everything was going too fast. The bank, the wreck, the men in knit caps, her being chased and caught. What she had to do now— what she must do now—was think of a reason. And so, despite the pain in her thighs, she concentrated. And when she concentrated, Marjorie Gianetti’s litany of U.S. Routes played back in her head—

U.S.
6 and 45, U.S. 30 and 50, U.S. 20 and 41, U.S. 14 and 94
… Although she could not remember all of it, she knew that the place to go next must be to the next intersection. The litany is what got her to
the bank where she had seen Tony Junior and his attorney. The list of routes was written down in her notebook and the notebook must still be on the passenger seat of the Audi beneath the last stack of maga zines she pulled from the back seat in order to throw them out the win dow and leave a trail. If they found the notebook and opened it to the litany, would this be what they wanted?