The Little Sleep (27 page)

He backs off, picks up the gun. “All right, Mark, but only because you’re Tim’s kid. I shouldn’t be an enabler, but I’ll go look in your bedroom, and then we’ll be done.”

“Say hi to Jennifer for me.”

The DA backs away from the couch, moves the screen out from the front of my bedroom door. Still watching me, he turns the knob and pushes the door open. Yeah, I know now that Jennifer and the goons were a hallucination, but part of me is still surprised that the door is unlocked. Times ducks inside my bedroom.

My right hand is heavier than a mountain and moves like a continent, but it moves, aiming inside my jacket pocket. I don’t need more smokes, but I do need my cell phone. I’m moving too slow. I have only moments, moments that can’t be defined or measured in seconds, not by me anyway. My fingers are clumsy and thick, but
they find the hunk of plastic, hold on, and pull it out. I can’t hold the phone up in front of my face, so I flip it open and rest my hand, arm, and phone on my stomach. The LCD screen glows brightly in the dark room.

The DA says, “Drop the phone, Mark.” Gun held out like he means it, but he won’t shoot me unless he absolutely has to. I’m banking that it would be too messy to cover up. Here’s hoping there isn’t a run on the bank.

I say, “No need to get your tassels in a twirl, DA, I just wanted to show you I had a little phone chat of my own, earlier.”

Goddamn it, the buttons are so small and my thumb isn’t ready for the minute motor coordination test. I hit the wrong buttons. The DA lunges across the room. My thumb cooperates, I select
INCOMING CALLS
from the main menu, scroll down, and there it is. The magic number. Phew. It’s actually there.

The DA grabs the cell phone, but he’s too late.

I’m breathing heavy. Ash floats onto my chest. Cigarette two is getting low. I say, “Take a gander at the screen. That’s a list of incoming calls, not outgoing. See that menu heading, DA? Tell me, what does it say?”

He complies without looking up. Good DA. “Incoming calls.”

I say, “Oh, I lied about Jennifer being here. Sorry about that. If I had told you to check the incoming calls of my cell phone, you either wouldn’t have or would’ve lied about what you saw. That, and it was nice to have a few seconds of me time.”

The DA doesn’t say anything, just stares at the phone and then up at me.

I say, “I think you recognize Jennifer’s number, unless that’s
some secret line you don’t know about. Nah, you know that number. I can tell. Note the time too. She called me this afternoon. Hours and hours ago. And now I’m wondering: have you talked to her since she called me? I’m guessing not. I’m guessing that if she was home, she avoided you like herpes.”

He says, “Why would she call you?”

I say, “I’m also guessing she didn’t really tell you about our date at Amrheins either. Did she tell you I showed her the pictures? No? Fancy that. Tell me, are you stressed now, Billy?”

He yells, “What did you tell her?”

Cigarette number two is a bullet between my teeth, and I’m chomping the hell out of it. I say, “I told her everything. I told her that once upon a time there were three musketeers, you, my father, and Brendan Sullivan, the lords of Southie—or lords of their project at least—and they decided to try their hand at an amateur porno. Tim was the director, Brendan an actor, and everyone’s local hero, Billy, was costar and producer. They found and bribed some young barely-there junkie, and a star was born. Only she OD’d, or was just so drunk she choked on her own vomit, and died on camera as you guys just sat and watched with your thumbs up your asses.

“Some bad luck there, I guess, but you three of Southie’s finest never reported the death. No. You see, Billy Times used to go around bragging about mob and Whitey Bulger contacts to whoever would listen. Yeah, you had a big mouth and it was always running, but maybe it wasn’t all talk, maybe you weren’t just full of shit. So the junkie died in your bedroom, you called in a favor, and the body magically disappeared. But what you weren’t expecting was that two of your musketeers, your pals, Tim especially, didn’t trust you. Not
one goddamn bit. He didn’t destroy the pictures or the film. He split them up with Brendan, a two-man tontine of your former musketeers. That’s gotta hurt a little, eh, DA?”

While I’m talking, the DA drops my cell phone and it disappears into the rubble. He jams the gun in his waistband, by his left hip, and slumps over to the projector. He plucks the take-up reel and film from the rear arm.

I say, “Fast forward to last week. Brendan saw Jennifer performing on
American Star
, and she looked so much like the junkie, like the dead girl, and your name was being bandied about on fluff news pieces all over the state, Brendan had a belated attack of conscience. He brought me the photos and hired me to find the film. Of course I was, shall we say, indisposed when he was in my office and I thought it was Jennifer who gave me the pics. This is where you come in again. Yeah, this Monday morning quarterback knows taking the pictures to you was a full ten on the Richter scale of mistakes, which resulted in my apartment and office being torn apart and your goons putting the lean on me and making sure Brendan Sullivan was out of the picture, so to speak, or dead if you prefer I speak plainly. But I found the film.

“Oh—and this last bit is pure conjecture, but Jennifer thought it sounded plausible—the narcoleptic me had taken some notes when Brendan was here. The only piece of automatic writing that wasn’t gibberish was
South Shore Plaza
, and that notepad was stolen from my office. Haven’t had a chance to check dates yet, but I’ll bet more than two bits there was some heavy construction going on at that mall back in your day, and Dead Girl has herself a cement plot, maybe parking-garage Level Three?

“That’s what I told Jennifer. All of it. She found it to be riveting stuff. Begged me to show her the film and told me she’d help me if I needed it. So, Billy boy, what do you think? How’d I do? Did I get it right?”

He says, “Not perfect. But you’re more right than wrong.”

He doesn’t accuse me of bluffing, doesn’t deny the goons, either. I nailed it. Perfect dismount. I broke him down. I’m the one with all the hand. In the midst of the mental back pat, cigarette number two falls out of my mouth and onto my chest. My arms are tree trunks, but I slowly manage to brush the glowing stub off onto the couch—but still too close to me. Wasn’t thinking right. Should’ve flicked it across the room with my fingers.

I still smell smoke, and now I see it. It’s coming up from the floor, from between my legs. Unless my floor has taken up smoking, there’s a fire down below. I try to move my legs; still no go. I don’t have much time.

The DA has gone all quiet. He’s the secret that everyone knows. He passes the film from hand to hand. He says, “Jennifer wouldn’t believe you.”

I try to move, but all I manage is some feeble twisting of my torso and some hip movement. It’s not the Twist and I’m no Chubby Checker. The dummy film inside the couch cushion digs into my ass as I move. It’s not helping. I say, “Why wouldn’t she believe me? Especially after I wind up quote
accidentally dead
unquote.”

The DA looks at me, his wheels turning, but they aren’t taking him anywhere. He says, “She’ll believe me over you. Time will pass, and she’ll believe me.” He says it, but I don’t think he buys it, not even at discount. He stands in the dark of my ruined apartment.

Need to keep those wheels a-spinnin’. I say, “Who was Dead Girl? Tell me.”

He says, “I don’t know, Mark. I really don’t.”

The couch on my too-close left is smoking now. Maybe it’s my imagination but the apartment is getting brighter. The heat down by my feet is no longer a phantom heat. It’s real.

I say, “Come on. It’s over, Times. Just cross the Ts for me.”

The DA pulls his gun out. I might’ve pushed him too far into desperation mode. “I can’t tell you what I don’t know. We found her in Dorchester. Tim had seen her wandering the streets for days, bumming smokes and offering five-dollar blowjobs. We didn’t even know her name, and after—after, no one missed her. No one asked about her.”

I say, “That’s not good enough—” and then a searing pain wraps around my left ankle, worse then anything I’ve ever felt, worse than anything I’ve ever imagined. I scream and it’s enough of a jolt to bend me in half, send my arms down to the emergency scene. My left pant leg is engulfed in flame; so is most of the floor beneath my feet. I beat frantically at my pant leg, each swipe of my paw like mashing a nest full of yellow jackets into my ankle. I quickly and without thinking or planning try to stand, and manage a somewhat upright position but fall immediately to the left, crash-landing on shards of broken coffee table. That hurts too. The high-intense pain of my actively burning flesh is gone, replaced by a slow, throbbing, and building ache. I belly-crawl away from the flames, but things are getting hotter and brighter in the apartment.

I look up. Times is still there, looking down, watching me, gun in one hand, film in the other. I say, “Burning me up isn’t gonna
solve anything. You’ll still have questions to answer.” The flames are speaking now, the greedy crackle of its expanding mouth.

He says, “I’m sorry it has to be this way. I’m not a good guy.” He bends down, knocks my hat off, grabs a handful of my hair, and yanks my head up. Can’t say I’m thrilled with this by-the-scruff treatment. He says, “Your father wasn’t a good guy either, Mark. But I liked him anyway.”

The pain in my leg starts to subside and this isn’t a good sign, because it likely means I’m going out again, and this time the sleep won’t be a little one. I yell, and scream, and bang my forehead on the floor, anything to keep myself awake.

The fire races up the blankets over the windows, throwing an orange spotlight on the room and waves of powerful heat. The DA stands up, coughs, and takes a step toward the front door.

I reach out with my right hand and clamp down on his ankle. I’m a leech, a barnacle, and I’m not letting go. I yell, “Go ahead, shoot me!” He won’t. If he’s careful, he won’t even step on my hand to break it, or mark me up with bruises. He can’t chance ruining his quaint narcoleptic-burned-himself-up-smoking setup.

The DA halfheartedly tries to pull his leg out of my hand, and it gives me time and an opening to pull my torso close and wrap myself around his leg. Now I’m an anchor, a tree root, and he isn’t going anywhere.

Apparently my apartment isn’t very flame retardant, because a full-on blaze is roaring now. I curl up into a tighter ball, trying to keep my assorted parts out of the fire. The DA is yelling, getting more violent and desperate.

I turn my head and pin my face to his leg, trying to protect it. I
close my eyes, waiting for a bullet that doesn’t come. Instead, he kicks me in the back of the head and kicks me in the ribs, but I’m not letting go. No way.

The DA drags me and his leg behind him, toward the front door. He gives me a few more kicks, then pulls us out into the hallway. My legs are weak, but they have something in them, they have to.

He sticks the gun barrel in my ear, jams it inside, trying to poke at my brain. The pain is like that pressure-point pain where your whole body involuntary gives up. He yells, “Fucking let go! Right now!”

I twist and load my legs under my weight, like I did in preparation for my ill-fated shed leap. Then I lift his leg off the ground and I’m in a crouch. The gun hand goes away with the sudden shift and he stands and waves his arms like a kid on a balance beam. I throw his leg left, which spins the DA around, away from me and facing the stairs.

I jump up, my burned leg erupting into new pain, but I get into a standing position right behind the DA. I grab handfuls of his turtleneck first, fixing to twist his gun arm and pin it behind his back, disarm him, and be the hero, but my legs go out like they were never there. My momentum takes me forward into the DA’s back and my legs tangle and twine in his, knocking out his knees. He can’t hold us and we pitch down the wooden stairs.

The DA lands almost halfway down the flight, face first, with me on his back, clinging, hands still full of turtleneck, and I’m driving, forcing all my weight down, not that I have a choice. We land hard. There’s a crack and I bounce up and manage to stay on his back,
riding him like a sled, until we hit the first-floor landing. I involuntarily roll off him, crashing back first into the outside door. The glass window rattles hard in the frame but holds together.

The DA comes to a stop at my feet, sprawled and boneless, his head bent back, too far back, a broken doll. The gun is still in one gloved hand. The take-up reel of film sits on the bottom step, between the DA’s feet.

I think about sitting here and just closing my eyes, letting that orange warmth above rock me to sleep. I think about crawling into my office, maybe that bottle of whiskey is still in the bottom drawer of my file cabinet. Those scenarios have a nice captain-going-down-with-the-ship appeal to them, but that’s not me.

I grab the film, open the front door, and crawl out onto the sidewalk, the gritty and cold sidewalk, and the door shuts behind me. Everything goes quiet, but below the quiet, if my ears dig hard enough, is the not-so-subtle rumble of flames doing their thing inside the building.

I crawl the first fifty feet down the street, then struggle onto unsteady feet. I use the facades of apartment buildings and pizza joints and convenience stores to rappel down West Broadway and to my rental car.