The Wrong Man (9 page)
Authors: Matthew Louis
“He’s not going to answer,” I said. “I already asked him for help and he just wiggled out of it.”
“ ’Course he did. I could have told you he woulda done that. Just call him, will you?
Let Grandpa Art talk to him.”
I picked up my jacket, found the inner pocket and retrieved my cell. I opened it, punched through until I found Tommy’s number and punched CALL. I waited a long time in the silent garage, listening to the mechanical rings, feeling my grandfather’s stare, and just as I was about to give up I heard, “This is Tom.”
“Tommy!” I said.
“I’m not by the phone but if you leave a message at the tone I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.” I almost laughed at his staid and stiff impersonation of a normal citizen.
“It’s his answering machine,” I said to Grandpa Art, knowing he would instantly understand “answering machine,” but would scowl at me if I tried to explain it was the message service on his cell phone.
“Gimme that thing!” the old man snapped. “Tom?” he bellowed, standing up, pressing the device to his ear. “What the fuck are you doing to Sam, shithead? Where are you? You better call me back, you hear me? You’re gonna get Sam out of this, or so help me Jesus I’m gonna see that your ass goes back to prison, and whoever your fat friend is with the guns and knives is gonna hear from the police too!” He winked at me. “You call me back the minute you get this message, you hear? I’m giving you until
.
! And then I’m calling the cops, and you know goddamned well I will!” He gave his number and said, “You better step up to the plate, Tom!”
He tossed me the phone and I caught it and closed it, terminating the call.
Grandpa Art seemed to deflate and he sat down again on the cement bags. The line of light fell across his lower half, washing his withered denim knees in sunshine.
His bottom lip sagged from his teeth. He sighed and looked up at me and the moment took on a portentous air. “I’ll just say this, Sam: If it comes down to you or Tommy getting hurt, let it be him. I love him but he’s no good to anyone. You, you’ve got a kid on the way, for Christ’s sake. So don’t get proud and do anything stupid. Anything
else
stupid, I mean. The regret you feel when you save your own skin, that lasts about five seconds, lemme tell you.” He was looking out the garage opening, at the grill of his pickup. He leaned forward, stood with effort and placed a hand on my shoulder. “I gotta go lay down.”
10
I
retrieved
my
car
from the alleyway, drove back into town, and parked once again in the lot of the shopping center across the street from my apartments. The shopping center was now alive if not quite busy. I locked my car and started home under the sunshine, seeing myself through the eyes of malignant onlookers I was only imagining. I went up the main walkway of the apartment facility and then up the cement stairs of my building, my hand on the gun in my pocket. I pulled the gun out and cocked it as I reached the landing.
The door was ajar and I pushed, took a breath and went in with the gun extended. I flashed it to my right but the living room was empty. There was no sign that anyone but me had been here. The blanket I had slept under the previous two nights was crumpled on the couch from yesterday morning.
I flashed the gun to my left and followed it into the little five-foot hallway that opened to the bedroom and the bathroom. I jabbed the gun into each room, but I already knew I would find nothing. Sweat oozed in my armpits, my heart was pumping away like a steam engine. I let the gun sag. I wondered if they had worn gloves even, had guns with silencers so they could just execute me and disappear and deny everything. I wondered if I had imagined last night, but no—the door was ajar. It had all happened. It was disturbing, almost disappointing, that they hadn’t lashed out in any juvenile way, spray painted the walls, taken a shit on the bed. I had been resigned to the worst. They might have even stolen, or at least smashed, the TV as a message. But it was all untouched. They only wanted me. Nice and neat.
My eyes snapped wide and I hustled down the hall and closed and locked the front door. Jesus, what if someone was watching for me? I went into the kitchen and found my pan-and-coffee-cup door chime and hung it on the knob by its shoe lace, then went back to the bedroom for fresh clothes. I glanced at the clock and felt the icy fingers tracing down my spine. Twelve-fucking-thirty. I was due at work in less than two hours.
I could call in with any excuse, I knew. I could not call in and just be AWOL for all anyone would ultimately care, but . . .
At a
I locked the apartment behind me, checking the doorknob twice, and went down the steps into the afternoon sun. Longing to hide somewhere, to slink off and disappear, to do anything but what I was doing—stumbling down onto the walkway and making my way to my car as if I was a prison guard conducting my own self down the corridor to the gas chamber.
At five to two I parked in front of Vanguard Liquors and looked at the place with its neon OPEN sign glowing and the seedy cardboard LOTTO advertisements propped in its dust-caked windows. I wished I could reach into my chest and take hold of my heart, squeeze it hard enough to stop its wild twitching. Inside that building was the underbelly of Blackmer. Inside was my fate. I stood out of the car, imagining Sully and his friends staring at me, nudging each other and saying, “Holy shit! Sam’s out of his fucking mind! He’s gonna get killed!” It added a faint whiff of satisfaction to the death-march atmosphere.
I locked my car and moved. Over the blacktop, past the newspaper display rack, through the doorway. It was cool and dim inside and Sully said, “What’s up, Sam,” in a flat, possibly sarcastic voice. He had one friend standing across the counter from him. A Mexican gangster in a huge white T-shirt, with slicked back hair and the usual lip caterpillar.
I said, “What’s up,” and got an orange juice from the cooler. I deliberately said, “What’s up,” to the gangster and he stared a moment, then gave a single nod.
There was a used car salesman yammering from the TV in the corner. The three of us didn’t say anything and I just sipped my orange juice, again and again, a nervous tick, being careful not to slop it over my chin, hoping the two young men couldn’t see how much my hand was shaking.
“Well, I’m outa here,” Sully said, somehow extricating himself from everything with those words.
I kept my jacket on, although I became uncomfortably warm. Fifteen, twenty minutes passed and I stood behind the counter. Two guys came in and bought a couple of twelve packs. A guy in a suit came in and bought cigarettes. I was too distracted to bother turning off the sports program on the TV. There was something comforting about the noise and presence; about the way it had nothing to do with me, as if evidence that I wasn’t Sam Schuler after all. I surveyed each customer as they approached the store, telling myself I had the advantage here—they had to enter through that thirty-inch doorway. They couldn’t sneak up on me. I was positioned like the Spartans at
Thermopylae
. I could whip out my little revolver and start blasting away, on more or less equal terms, with whoever came at me through that door.
My cell phone began its electronic impersonation of a real phone. Ring-ring! Pause. Ring-ring! I retrieved it, saw the distantly familiar number and snapped it open. “Hello.”
“Where are you, Sam?”
“Tommy!”
“Yeah, Grandpa Art just raked my ass over the coals. Thanks a lot for that, ya prick. Where you hiding out?”
“I’m at work.”
“At that fucking liquor store?”
“Yeah.”
“Listen.” His voice sounded strange. Strained. “You’re gonna get killed, Sam. I mean that literally. Some people already asked me about you. I mean some fucked up fucking people. You can’t just––fuck. Lock the door and just hang out there. Lay down behind the fucking counter, why don’t you. I’m coming right now.”
“You’re coming here?” I said, but he had hung up.
I took out my keys and moved toward the door, but Jean was there. She was a brain-damaged sixty-year-old ex-addict who came in every shift. She had bloodless, parchment skin, thinning hair with a cheap auburn dye job, and an IV bag on a roller-stand next to her. She called the IV bag and roller her “date,” which I thought was funny the first dozen times she said it. She had some terminal condition and the only joy in her life was throwing away her social security money playing scratch-off lottery tickets. I think she went hungry so she could buy them. I didn’t even have the chance to tell her I needed to close the store; she and her “date” had already passed the threshold and were shuffling toward the counter.
She stationed herself against the counter and began her ticket-buying spree, two, three, five at a time, selecting the different themes—Gold Rush, Luck O’ The Irish, etc.—which all had the same dismal odds of paying off. Sometimes she won five bucks, sometimes two, and she always put her winnings back into more tickets. She called out the plays to me as she scratched away with her nickel—“Oh, there’s two pots of gold! I just need one more!”—and I suffered this for ten minutes before I saw the car stop right in front of the door and felt my nerves melt.
I watched the stout, tough gangster—the gamecock from the other night—rise out of the passenger’s side, cross the walkway and trigger the door buzzer as he stepped through the entrance. Out in the sun the driver popped up from the other side and followed. I wrapped my hand around the gun in my pocket and began to duck. Jean said, “There you go! Lookit that! Two free tickets!” and waved the thing in front of me.
Then I saw the huge, brown, rust-rotted cruise ship from 1974 heave up beside the gangster’s car and rock as the brakes were applied. It was a
Plymouth
or a
Pontiac
or something—twice the size, at least, of the Japanese vehicle. Tommy was already out and running around the hood.
“Hey!” the old woman said. “You gonna give me my tickets, honey?”
I was in a half crouch. The gun was caught in the torn lining of the pocket of my derby. The gamecock had a gun at his side, I now saw, and he was looking at the old woman, trying to figure out if he should shoot me in front of her. Beyond him, just outside, was the skinny gangster, and my eyes traced down from his bony shoulder and I saw his gun too. His skeletal, mud-colored Indian face was taut and half-crazed with fear. The electronic beeper sounded as he finally passed into the store and in that instant the beeper sounded again and his eyes rolled up in his head and his legs turned to water. I saw Tommy lifting the length of pipe away as the skinny gangster crumpled to the floor without a sound. I jerked at the thirty-eight now, shredding the lining of my coat, and I managed to fire it through my jacket pocket, into the shelving under the counter.
The shot seemed to shake the whole store, left the air itself quivering. “OH!” Jean said, pulling her IV bag closer to her, eyes wide and mouth sagging open.
The gamecock was now rushing at me, bug-eyed. The explosion of the gun had clearly panicked him and he whipped the big black pistol up, to just kill me, when Tommy hacked the pipe down onto the crown of his skull, causing blood to spring forth instantaneously. Tommy clubbed twice more as the man was on the way down, and I heard him muttering through clenched teeth, something about,
try to kill MY motherfucking cousin!
I was stepping around the counter without knowing what I was doing. Jean was staring at me, still holding up her ticket that was good for two more of the same. Her mouth was an O, her eyes were huge, her face comically grotesque. At her feet now was the unconscious gangster and I watched her eyes find him.
“Come on, Sam!” Tommy barked. “Let’s get the fuck out of here!” There was nothing but business in his voice.
He shoved the pipe in his back pocket, bent and took Gamecock’s gun, then crouched over the skinny gangster and took his gun as well, saying, “Fucking punks!”
“Oh my gaaaawd!” Jean said, but she sounded amused now.
The skinny gangster stirred and tried to sit up, and I watched in respectful awe as Tommy passed both the confiscated guns to his left hand, cocked his right fist back and neatly clipped the young man on the chin, causing him to exhale and sag flat onto the maroon mat.
“Get in your car and follow me!” he said, already beeping the door buzzer, jogging out to his car.
I hadn’t even got the thirty-eight out of my pocket. I looked at Jean over the two flattened gangsters and said, “Those guys were trying to kill me. I have to go!” and she astounded me by saying, “Run! Run!” and she was already dragging her IV bag toward the door after me.
I left the store open with the two gangsters in piles on the utility mats and the old lady getting herself out of there behind me. I ran straight to my car and jabbed the key into the driver’s door. Tommy waited, revving his nineteen-seventies heap, shooting black smoke from under the rear bumper, staring at me and then pulling out as soon as I sat down behind my steering wheel. He chirped the tires around a row of parked cars and I cranked the ignition key and shoved the Fairlane into first and took off after him.
We had to sit at two lights and then we were hurtling down the freeway onramp and sliding over and fitting ourselves into the fast lane traffic. I fished out my cell, found Sully’s cell number after a few moments of punching buttons and darting my eyes between the gadget and the road, and punched CALL.
“Yo,” Sully answered.
“Sully, man, can you go down to Vanguard and cover for me? I had to get the fuck out of there.”
It was silent for a few seconds and I figured he was profoundly stoned. “Yep,” he finally said. “I guess so. What happened?”
I left Tommy out of the retelling. I just told Sully two guys had come in to kill me and I had run for it. I told him that the store was just sitting there open, and if he could get down there before too much was stolen I’d owe him big. He sighed and said, “Fuck it. Sure.”
Plymouth