The Realm of Last Chances (16 page)

The convenience store’s parking lot was empty except for a white SUV. When they got to the door, he told Suzy to sit, then pushed it open and stepped inside.

If he’d been the kind of guy who paid a lot of attention to cars, he might have noticed that the SUV was identical to the BMW owned by his neighbor, whom he’d waved at once or
twice but avoided conversation with since he’d bailed out on his dinner invitation. If he’d noticed that, he probably wouldn’t have gone inside. He had plenty of stuff at home to make a sandwich with, and just getting out of the house had been the point. He would’ve walked back up the hill and fixed himself something to eat. And then what was about to happen wouldn’t have, though he later guessed that maybe something worse could have.

Vico was standing with his back against a floor-to-ceiling refrigeration case filled with soft drinks, Gatorade and bottled water. Hugging a big sack of Cape Cod potato chips, he was sweating badly. That didn’t make much sense because the day was cool and he was wearing only a light sweater. His eyes looked abnormally large, and the left one was twitching.

To Cal’s right, behind the counter, were two other men. One was about twenty-five, with light brown skin that made Cal think he might be Pakistani. He was wearing wire-rimmed glasses and had his hand in the cash drawer.

At first Cal didn’t see the third guy, who was crouching behind the display case containing the sandwiches and prepackaged cartons of potato salad, coleslaw and marinated peppers. Now he stood up, waved either a .38 or a 9 millimeter at Cal and said, “Move your ass over there beside Robert De Niro.” He was in his midfifties, short and gray-haired, and had on a long-sleeved gray work shirt. Even his face looked gray, covered as it was in stubble.

Cal had never been threatened before by a weapon more lethal than a stone or a crowbar. Both could kill you if the person wielding them knew what he was doing, but the odds were much lower. This was something different, in a year filled with new experiences, and he felt himself coalescing around a center whose existence he’d begun to question. “Where?” he said.

“Whatta ya mean ‘where’?”

“I don’t see Robert De Niro.”

“I’m speaking about the wop of the day,” the gunman said, nodding at Vico. Three weeks earlier, he’d been released from the New Hampshire State Prison in Concord after serving five and a half years for armed robbery. He’d done time in Massachusetts and New York State, too. “Get over there next to the guy looks like he aims to fuck that bag of chips.”

“All right,” Cal said. He had fifteen dollars, an ATM card and a Visa in his wallet. There was nothing on his person he couldn’t afford to part with, which was kind of a shame. He’d left home without his cell phone. He didn’t even have on his watch, a stainless-steel Rolex Explorer that Kristin had bought him for his forty-fifth birthday. It cost close to four thousand dollars, and had it been on his wrist the burglar might’ve noticed it and come close enough to take it off him. If he’d just had something a thief badly wanted, he would’ve been in a much better position. It went without saying that if you set off to rob a convenience store, you couldn’t expect to come away with a Rolex. It also went without saying that the guy with the gun would probably rather get the money and run without pulling the trigger, though it was by no means certain he wouldn’t kill somebody if he needed to.

The man stepped out from behind the case, his eyes scanning the parking lot, the gun in his right hand acting as a director’s baton as he waved Cal along toward his neighbor. Suddenly there was a loud crash, followed by thunderous barking. Cal turned to see Suzy hurling herself at the glass door, slobber flying from her tongue.

“Make that fucking dog shut up.”

Cal, Vico would later tell reporters from the
Boston Globe
and the
Cedar Park Independent
, seemed strangely calm when he addressed the burglar, whose name was Andrew Saucer. “He looks at the guy and says, ‘I’m not sure I
can
make her shut up. She didn’t do real well at obedience training.’ And that’s when the fellow goes apeshit.”

Neither paper printed the expression “apeshit” in its account. From Cal’s perspective, it wasn’t accurate anyhow. “Apeshit” meant you completely lost your wits, forgot about consequences and acted without reason, whereas Saucer was behaving pretty rationally, despite holding a gun in his hand and trying to rob a convenience store in the middle of the day while an eighty-pound black Lab flung herself at the door and barked so loudly people could hear her several blocks away. If he’d truly gone apeshit, things might have worked out better for him, or maybe not, you could never really predict. You did what you did, and things happened as they happened.

“You son of a bitch,” Andrew Saucer said. “If you don’t stop her from barking, I’m gonna shoot you
and
your fucking dog.”

“The only way I might be able to stop her,” Cal said, “is if you let me go out and take her home. I think she’s formed a low opinion of you.”

“You arrogant fuck,” Saucer said, his gun hand starting to tremble. “You think I’m playing around?”

On the far side of the parking lot, next to East Border Road, a couple of schoolkids were walking by. Both of them stopped to look at Suzy, who continued to bark and throw herself against the door.

“This is all kind of new to me,” Cal replied. “I really haven’t had time to find out what I think.”

Big drops of spittle had formed in both corners of Saucer’s mouth. The first couple of weeks after his release, he’d stayed in Montvale with his brother and his sister-in-law. Then he’d lifted a pair of twenties from her purse, and even though she didn’t see him do it and couldn’t be sure he had, they told him to clear out. Last night, he’d ridden the Orange Line from Oak Grove to Forest Hills and back three times, and when the trains finally quit running he’d shivered for a few hours on a bench near Pleasant Pond. This morning, after his brother and sister-in-law left for work, he’d gone back and forced a window, eaten
a sandwich and swiped his brother’s gun. They’d hidden it in a tool chest, but he knew how that asshole’s mind worked.

Cal decided later that if he’d been in Saucer’s position, he would’ve shot the dog first. That would’ve made the most sense for at least two reasons. To begin with, Suzy was raising holy hell, already attracting attention, and because of her size it wasn’t inconceivable that she might jar the door open and lunge into the store. She’d never bitten anybody, but Andrew Saucer didn’t know that. Second, Cal was on the far side of the counter and deli case from Saucer, a good seven or eight feet away. If he was a decent shot, Saucer could have killed the dog and then turned to fire at Cal before he was able to take more than one stride.

But for whatever reason, Saucer, who’d aimed plenty of weapons at people but never shot anybody, made the opposite choice. He stepped back behind the deli case and braced the butt of the pistol on top of it, between two big jars of Lakeside Red Hots.

According to the article in the
Globe
, the deli case weighed 543 pounds when it was empty, and all the stuff inside and on top of it probably added another 40 or 50 pounds. Yet when Cal lowered his head and threw himself against it, the case moved enough to disrupt Saucer’s aim, so he fired a round into the ceiling before losing his grip on the gun, and the glass in the case shattered, several shards ending up in Cal’s left arm and shoulder.

What occurred next was never clear to Cal. Unlike Andrew Saucer, he’d gone apeshit.

“My neighbor’s on the floor with blood streaming down his arm,” Vico told two of his friends that night, sitting in overstuffed chairs in his “man cave” in the basement. There was yet another wide-screen TV down there, and the Yankees were playing the Rangers in the American League championship
series, New York up two games to one, but he didn’t feel like watching, and his friends understood. It was the drunkest he’d been in years, which wasn’t saying much, since normally he never got drunk. The ex-cop from Everett kept drawing him glasses of wine from a big box of Franzia Cabernet that stood on the wet bar. Vico hadn’t drunk such bad wine since college. “I mean, for all I know it’s his jugular.”

“If it’d been his jugular,” the ex-cop said, “he never would’ve made it to his feet. See, body posture’s got a lot to do with how fast you lose blood. If you’re in a prone position, your ticket’s punched. I saw a guy bleed to death like that down in the Dirty E.”

“He didn’t stay down long,” Vico said. “It was like he shot off the floor. He just kind of high-jumps the counter—that’s the only way I can put it. Like he’s doing the fucking Fosbury Flop.”

“He went over
backward
?” the ex-coach asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Fosbury jumped backward—that’s why they called it the flop.”

“I don’t know if he went over backward, forward, sideways or upside down. That’s what I’m trying to get across. It all happened so fast it’s like one constant blur. He’s over that counter in a flash, so fast the poor Pakistani can’t move aside in time and gets knocked like a bowling pin. And when he throws the first punch at the skid, the bastard just disintegrates. I mean he crumbles before my very eyes.”

“And the whole time this is happening,” the ex-cop said, “you’re doing what?”

At some point during the ordeal he’d wet himself. He was on prostate meds, and most of the time he did well to squeeze out a couple ounces, but he hadn’t needed Flomax today. “What do you mean, what am I doing?” he asked, downing the last of his wine.

The ex-cop got up again to refill his glass, and this time he had to tilt the box. “Like maybe you grabbed the gun?”

“I didn’t have to. When the clerk got to his feet, he darted around the counter and picked it up and ran out the back. Then he called your former colleagues.”

“That still doesn’t tell us what you were doing,” the retired coach said. “And that’s what we’re interested in, my friend, because tonight you’re not yourself. You look like Vico Cignetti, but right now you’re acting like somebody else.”

“I was
watching
,” Vico said. And then he told them what he couldn’t get out of his head. “He pulls the poor limp fuck off the floor, props him against the wall and hits him so many times, so freakin’ fast, the guy can’t even fall back down. It’s like the force of the blows is what’s holding him up.

“Then my neighbor grabs him with both hands and begins ramming his head into the wall, throwing him into it again and again like he’s on some kind of assembly line, picking up metal parts and jamming them into a punch press. He’s still doing it when the cops pull up.”

“And then what happens?”

This was the part Vico found most troubling. He’d think about it later that night and off and on again for many weeks afterward. It would repeatedly disrupt his sleep, leaving him wondering if he was safer, or more at risk, than he’d been before Cal Stevens and his wife moved in. He’d never even considered safety before. Around here, stealing a hubcap made news, and slashing a tire could land you on the front page of the
Montvale Sun
. “What happens then is, my neighbor”—he gestured in the direction of the house next door—“my
neighbor
who damn near just killed a man turns to me and asks if I’m all right. His face is a little red, and he’s got blood all over one arm, and his knuckles are bleeding too, and there’s a gash in his forehead and a Band-Aid dangling down over one eye. But just like that, he’s as placid as if he’s eaten a bottle of Valium. So I nod at him,
though I’m anything but all right because I’ve pissed my own pants, and he says, ‘I’m sorry I didn’t make it over to watch the game that night with you and your friends. That was rude of me. Maybe you could ask me again?’ ”

The ex-coach was chewing tobacco. He looked at the ex-cop, then spit a long brown stream into his Styrofoam cup. “Sounds like my kind of guy,” he said. “But he might be more fun to watch boxing with than baseball.”

that night,
when she returned from the shower, she found him in their bed. For the last few weeks he’d been sleeping on the third floor, which he explained by saying that he knew she had to rise early and was worried about waking her if he came to bed late. Around two or three, when he climbed the final flight, she always woke anyway and lay there thinking just how easy he was making it for her to disengage. She’d come here hoping that starting over in a new place would bring back whatever it was she’d felt in the crossroads grocery the first time she heard him play. But it was as if he intended to convince her that what she’d felt was nothing at all and that marrying him was simple expediency, like changing a guitar string after you broke one.

He lay on his back in a pair of black jogging shorts, his right knee raised, his left arm bandaged and folded over his chest, his right arm hanging down off the bed so far his fingertips grazed the floor. The only light came from the Himalayan salt lamp she kept on the dresser, and for a moment she thought he was asleep, but as her eyes adjusted she saw that his were wide open and staring at the ceiling. “I almost killed that guy,” he said.

She pulled her bathrobe off, opened the closet door and hung it on the hook. When she received the call from the hospital, she assumed he’d injured himself with a power tool. No one told her until she walked into the emergency room and found him sitting on a gurney that he’d broken up an armed robbery. And it wasn’t until they were riding home in the taxi that she learned someone had tried to shoot him. “Well,” she said, “he almost killed you before that.”

“On the news, they said he’s spent eighteen of the last
twenty-one years in prison. He’s fifty-two. Just a couple years older than me. That’d be like me being in jail all but three years since I was twenty-nine.”

He was lying on her side of the bed, or the side she’d come to think of as hers since he began sleeping upstairs. As she walked around the foot of the bed, she noticed what the raised knee was apparently intended to conceal: a huge bulge in his shorts, where she hadn’t seen one in ages.

The sight caused her to pause, and her reaction didn’t go unnoticed. “We don’t have to make anything of it,” he said, “if you don’t want to.”