B009XDDVN8 EBOK (51 page)

“I hear a shout, a call, anything,” he said, “and your daughter gets a hole in her gut. Understand?”

“I understand,” I said. “And don’t worry, you won’t hear a peep out of me.”

He turned briefly, opened the sliding door, and then continued backing out slowly, his gun still jabbed into Shelby, his eyes still on me as he stepped backward into shadow.

It happened so fast it barely registered. A flash of something, quick as a dart.

Holmes’s face snapped back and he reeled around, his arms rising as he did.

And then two more just like the first, two quick jabs that pummeled his nose, leaving him teetering before a swift left hook to the jaw sent him down, down for the count, the gun sliding across the flat pale stones that surrounded the pool.

A bent figure now stood over his prostrate body. Like Ali over Liston. You bet it was. And as my daughter rushed back inside and pressed her wet face into my neck, I suddenly knew just how good a fighter Sugar Ray Robinson had been.

T
HIRTY MINUTES LATER
I stood with Harry on the deck of Derek’s Bayliner as the engines churned the water and the boat slid backward into the waterway.

The boat lights were lit, red and green beaming from the front, a bright white on a post rising from the rear, and Harry was at the wheel, gently fingering the throttle. I turned and surveyed the scene to my right, the grotesque house bright and welcoming even though it was empty, the pool lit from below like a kidney-shaped jewel. It all would stay lit like a party of light until the power company turned off the juice and the bank repossessed the thing.

“You hear that?” said Harry.

“Yeah, I hear it.”

“Let’s hope no one else does.”

“I’ll take care of it,” I said.

Before throwing off the ropes and hopping on the boat, I had done one of the most difficult things I had ever done in my life. In front of Derek’s house I had said good-bye to my daughter. It was just until the morning, but still.

“Dad, no. I want to stay with you. Dad.” There was fear in her voice, a panicky fear, completely understandable after what she had gone through, and it cut me that I was forced to ignore it. But there was nothing to be done.

“I’m going to leave you with Ben,” I said. “He’s one of my oldest friends. He’ll take care of you. You’ll go to his house and you’ll call Mom. She already knows you’re safe, but she needs to talk to you, to hear your voice. We’ll be together again tomorrow.”

“I’ll stay with you. Let me stay with you.”

“You can’t,” I said. “I don’t want you involved when I take care of these guys. After tomorrow we’ll be together long enough for you to be sick to death of me, okay? But I’ve got to make sure these people stay out of our lives for good.”

“What are you going to do with them?”

“I’m going to take care of them.”

“Dad?”

“With the authorities, sweetie. I’m going to take them to the authorities, where they’re going to pay for their crimes.”

“Okay.”

“But you don’t need to be in the middle of it. What they did to my friend in Las Vegas is enough to put them away for a long enough time. We can keep you out of it that way, so that’s the way I’m going to play it. Go with Ben.”

“I want to be with you.”

I want to be with you.
When was the last time she had said such a thing? “Go with Ben, call your mother, be as sweet to her as you’ve been to me. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“I guess.”

“No guessing,” I said. “I love you, Shelby. It will all be okay. Now go on.” And it would be okay, I knew, but still my heart cracked as I watched Shelby slowly leave my side and climb into Harry’s truck.

Tony and Ben were standing to my right, surveying the scene as I sent my daughter away. “I won’t forget what you did for my brother,” said Tony.

“He sold me out, he sold out Augie.”

“He’s a bastard, I agree, he always has been.”

“And yet you apologized to him. Maybe I’ll figure it out sometime.”

“I’ll leave Harry’s truck at the dock in Virginia where you told me and hitch a ride north.”

“I guess that’s it, then. I’ll see you around.”

“You coming up to Pitchford again?”

“Never.”

“Then you won’t be seeing me around.”

There was a moment when I thought I ought to hug Tony Grubbins, a moment when the nascent embrace sort of hung in the air between us, but thankfully the impulse died.

“You were an asshole growing up, J.J.,” said Tony. “I just wanted you to know that.”

“You were a bully.”

“We deserved each other.”

“Keep an eye on Madeline for me,” I said, before I took the hug that had been hanging around Tony and gave it to Ben, hard. And he hugged me back, just as hard.

“We’ll keep in touch this time,” I said while still grabbing tight to my oldest living friend.

“Sure we will,” said Ben. “We’ll check in every week.”

“No, for real now. Not just still here, but how’s it going, how can I help, the whole thing. Like friends should.”

“Okay.”

“I don’t have many people left in my life. I’m not going to lose you again. We’ll meet up in Las Vegas, all right.”

“Sure.”

“Sooner rather than later.”

“Okay, yeah,” he said, catching on. “Vegas.”

I let go and watched Ben and Tony climb into either side of the cab. It was a comforting sight, like a security sandwich from my past wrapping around my daughter. As the truck pulled away, my daughter turned and stared at me. I gave a little wave.

When they were gone, I headed back through the house toward Harry and the boat. On the way around the pool I passed Holmes, still lying where Harry had put him down. I didn’t know what to do with the son of a bitch, so I decided to leave him where he fell. To bring him to the police would get my daughter involved in something she should never have been involved in. I had done a job on him with the car, Harry had battered him with his fists, he wasn’t worth the further trouble of dealing with. Maybe he would learn something, stop being a dumb lug, though I doubted it.

When I reached the boat, the engines were already thrumming. And beneath the thrumming, like a low undertone of dread, there was a moan coming from the boat’s cabin. I threw off the lines tying the boat to the dock and hopped aboard. Harry gave me a look as I wiped away a tear before he started maneuvering the boat away from the dock. And as we slowly motored away from Derek’s former mansion, I thought of the three people in that truck, the old friend to whom I had remained loyal, the old enemy whom I had befriended, and the daughter whom I loved and had saved. And as I thought of them I could believe that whatever I had done twenty-five years ago, and whatever I had done to protect what I had done, all of it hadn’t ruined me. I could think of those three and believe in my own innate goodness.

Then the moan started up again and Harry said, “Do you hear that?” and after a moment more I left his side, climbed down the steps into the cabin, and kicked Clevenger in the head to shut him the hell up.

Back on deck I gave a nod to Harry as he edged the boat down the canal. We were sailing away from the house, away from my past, toward the Intracoastal Waterway and the inlet that would lead us out to the dark roll of the sea.

Do you have something to say? Think twice.

We’re Americans. We eat too much, we work too hard for too many hours, we buy houses that are too big for our families, televisions that are too big for our houses, we have too many wives, too many cars, we own so much stuff we need to rent sheds to store it all in. We drown ourselves in our surfeit. And to pay for all this wondrous excess we take on too much debt. Hallelujah. Which is Hebrew for
get used to it
.

There was a time in this country when pennies were banked, when socks were darned and shoes repaired, and we stayed together for the sake of the kids. But then there arose a generation that knew not Woody Guthrie and the great splurge was on. Hallelujah. Show me a country that lives within its means and I’ll show you Finland.

My country ’tis a nation of excess and I love it, with all its contradictions, with all my heart. In the spirit of my native land, I grabbed my piece of the pineapple pie when I was seventeen and never looked back. And when it was time to find a profession, I ended up selling that same opportunity to anyone with the vision and fortitude to spit the future in the eye and take hold of what he couldn’t yet afford. For tell me true: Who really wants to live within his means? Where is the imagination in that? America is the land of giants, not half soles.

But that doesn’t mean the piper won’t come knocking, as from hard experience I can attest. We had sat down together and had our accounting and in the end I had paid the piper his price, steeper than ever I had imagined. I had given up everything that ever mattered to me without even knowing it, and in the process I had given up the richest part of myself. Yet in the shadow of that loss I say still, hallelujah. For if you embrace the excess, and I surely did, you need to embrace the piper, too.

But that doesn’t mean the piper always gets his way, at least not in this great country of ours. Titans stiff the piper with a
bailout. Minnows, in a house underwater, swim away. We even have a trapdoor out of the piper’s prison called the US Bankruptcy Code. You would think all of this would keep the piper humble enough to know his place. But sometimes still the piper oversteps his bounds. And when he kills your friend, and sticks electrodes on your breast, and kidnaps your daughter, and threatens to hound you and your family for the rest of your natural-born lives, you have no choice other than to drown the vile son of a bitch in a bathtub as big as the Atlantic. Any other way would be un-American, and don’t ever say I’m not a patriot.

Didn’t I tell you where I lived?

“When you was belowdecks, you see any gin?” said Harry as he piloted us through the ocean waves into the brightening day after passing through the dark of the night.

“Not that I noticed.”

“I’m not complaining now. You do what you got to do in this life and I don’t see what you had any choice. But I sure could use myself something that burns all the way down because I still got the taste in my mouth.”

“Hence the need for gin.”

“Or something stronger if you got it.”

“Kerosene?”

“That would do, as long as you lit it first.”

We left the ocean at the Boynton Inlet, motoring past the clot of fishermen at the end of the long cement pier. With the sun at our backs we headed into the wide Intracoastal Waterway and then north, to a series of long sturdy docks reaching out into the canal. And there, at the end of one of those docks, with his hand shading his eyes as we motored toward him, was Ben. And standing beside him, waiting to climb aboard the Bayliner, as thin and fragile as a river reed, was my daughter.

It took us a week to make it up north.

A few hours after we picked up Shelby, we stopped at a marina and spent a chunk of cash on a batch of supplies. Instead of the kerosene, we grabbed some gin for Harry, along with vodka, rum, a couple of cases of beer. And once the necessities were taken care of we loaded up on the luxuries: gasoline, food, toilet paper, navigational charts.