L
ike an errant shotgun blast, a swarm of green flies blew from the trash bin when Scratch threw open the lid. The stench of garbage had hints of onion peel and coffee grounds.
He scanned the restaurant parking lot for people, saw nobody, tightened his insides against a gag reflex, and then boosted himself over the lip, into the bin. He landed with a crunch on plastic garbage bags, knee-deep in trash, and sent up another cloud of flies that buzzed in chaos and bounced off his skin.
“Goddamn stupid flies,” he muttered to himself, flailing hopelessly at the insects.
His inner pessimist mocked him.
Yeah, who would have expected flies in a Dumpster? Normally they're full of rose petals.
Anybody who thinks the poor are noble should hang with me for a day
, Scratch thought.
He breathed through his mouth and poked around with his foot. The better the restaurant, the more disgusting the trash bin. Why was that? Were better establishments more likely to pitch rotten meat and brown lettuce in the trash? Did that mean inferior places put bad
meat on the menu? He shuddered. That was far enough with
that
line of logic. This Dumpster, painted a lovely forest green, and belonging to one of the best restaurants in Providence, was perhaps the most putrid Scratch had ever entered. He did not think about germs. He had lived long enough in squalor to tune his immune system into top fighting shape. And the puncture wound through his sore left arm had been slathered with Neosporin ointment and bandaged under his sleeve with athletic tape.
He rested his elbow on the steel side of the Dumpster.
Could this steel stop a bullet?
It would stop an ice pick, for sure. Was he crazy for thinking this?
Doesn't matter
, answered his inner pessimist.
That puncture wound is probably going gangrene.
The money he had carried the night he was attacked had not lasted long at a no-tell motel near the airport. Scratch was afraid to tend bar to earn more, and terrified to go home to collect his boosted loot to sell for cash.
To survive, he had to steal.
Though he preferred to call what he did
swindling
.
In Scratch's gerrymandered morality, anyone dumb enough to fall for a street scam deserved what he got. He had made a little dough with some three-card monty, but that was a minimum-wage hustle, especially while working without a partner whom the dealer can allow to win a few hands, to set up the marks.
He had not given up trying to figure out who had attacked him. His mind's eye saw an image of a possible suspect: the manager of the Greek restaurant where Scratch and his old roommate had pulled the ukulele scam. Scratch smiled at the memory. That had been the
smoothest
job. Scratch and Adam had bought a beat-up ukulele at a junk store for twenty bucks. Scratch carried the instrument into a classy restaurant, devoured a lavish sixty-dollar lunch, and then claimed to have forgotten his wallet. When the owner demanded his
money, Scratch offered to leave the ukulele for collateral while he went home for his credit card.
That's where Adam took over the scam. While Scratch was out of the restaurant, Adam came in, fawned over the ukulele, claimed it was some rare antique, and offered the restaurateur six hundred dollars for it. He promised to get a bank check, and left.
When Scratch returned, the sly restaurateur casually offered to buy the instrument. They negotiated three hundred dollars, plus the lunch. Scratch had insisted on cash.
Now Scratch realized how much he missed having a partner.
Adam Rackers had been the best wingman Scratch could have asked for.
What the hell happened to you, man?
Why Adam had freaked out and killed a judge in cold blood, Scratch could not imagine. He had learned of the crime from a newspaper headline, and read the details through the spaces between his fingers as he hid behind his hands. For days, Scratch lived in fear the police would learn that Adam had been crashing at Scratch's apartment.
But no cop ever knocked.
How Adam ended up at the judge's house was a mystery to Scratch. Adam had been a competent B and E man, nimble in tight spaces, a daring climber, and good with locksâthey had just finished together a successful spree of nighttime burglaries of Providence town houses. But Adam had never mentioned a job in Charlestown. They had never worked that far from the city.
Scratch's foot finally clinked on glass at the bottom of the Dumpster. He tore open a trash bag and discovered a dozen empty champagne bottles and a handful of corks.
Where was a wine steward when you needed one?
The Krug was probably the most expensive of the lot. Too pricey for his needs. Ooh, he saw that some prosperous gentleman had tried the Pol Roger Brut, the lucky bastard. Scratch squinted into the bottle
as he would into a microscope, saw a tablespoon of champagne on the bottom rim, and would have sucked it down, if not for the surroundings. But such uncommonly good champagne had too uncommon a name, and he tossed the bottle aside. He settled on an empty container of Dom Pérignon, with its familiar shieldlike label. When in doubt, stick to the classics. He took the bottle, pocketed one cork, and heaved himself out of the bin.
No stains on his clothing, he was pleased to see. He walked hurriedly with the bottle, letting the wind he created brush the garbage smell from his body. His arm throbbed, and he sighed. Being homeless, hiding in motels, swindling all dayâit was too much work. He couldn't do this forever.
Eventually, he would have to find the courage to go back to his apartment.
Maybe then buy a dog. Or a machine gun. Or enroll in ninja school.
In a minimall convenience store, Scratch invested ninety-nine cents on a liter of diet ginger aleâhe detested the diet-soda aftertaste, but this bottle wasn't for drinking, so what did it matter?âand then he ducked around the back of the mall. He slowly filled the empty champagne bottle with ginger ale, then trimmed the swollen cork with his penknife until he could force it back down the bottleneck with a few blows from his palm.
With his prop under his arm, he walked back to the sidewalk and felt the music of the moment.
I'm singing in my brain.
Just singing in my brain â¦
He walked briskly and scanned for a well-dressed person who was not paying close attention.
He passed on an earthy-crunchy woman watching her feet, and
an artsy kid in dark glasses. Then he found the perfect partner to this scam:
Ladies and gentlemen, this afternoon's mark will be played by that doughy gentleman in the pin-striped suit who is hurrying along and barking into a cell phone.
Scratch walked square into the man.
The bottle dropped and blew apart on the sidewalk.
“Oh God, no!” Scratch howled. He stared at the broken glass and liquid fizz. He clutched his own head in horror. “What have you done?”
The man froze in place. His eyes grew with alarm. He said into the phone, “I'll call you back,” and then folded the clamshell device and slipped it into his pocket. A growing puddle approached his feet. He stepped back from it.
“
You
walked into
me
,” the man said, diagramming the collision in the air with his hands.
Scratch squatted beside the broken glass, and lifted the piece with the label attached. “It's our anniversary,” he said, sounding sad and detached. “I don't have a hundred dollars for another bottle.”
“Get her something else,” the man offered, gruff. “Flowers.”
The scene had attracted a handful of people, curious how it might turn out. Profanity? Violence? Fellowship? Anything was possible.
“Our five-year anniversary,” said Scratch.
“
You're
the klutz. Where'd you learn to walk?”
“Five years ago on this date,” Scratch said, softly, strangling his inner pessimist, willing himself to
believe
, and summoning true tears, “the love of my life gave me one of her kidneys.”
The crowd said, “Awwwww.”
“Oh, what a fucking fine day
this
has been,” the man growled. He reached for his wallet. “I'll split it with you.”
T
he dead do not complain. But who says they don't expect good service?
“Thanks, mate,” Billy said.
He ended his long-distance interview with a retired Australian sportswriter, hung up the phone, and smiled over his notes. His customer would have appreciated Billy's work, near the end of his long night shift on the obituary desk. Earlier in the evening, a funeral home had faxed an obituary that contained a mystery. Billy Povich had just solved it for his readers, and for his customerâthe late Robert Hoover.
Mr. Hoover had died at ninety-four, though his mind had drifted through dementia for a decade.
At the nursing home, he had liked to be called “Three-Fists.” Wouldn't answer to anything else, according to the slim set of facts the funeral director had gathered for the obit. Mr. Hoover had no family. No one to give answers. No one to provide a biography.
Obituaries with no sense of story, no reflection of the life they represented, were like tombstones with no name.
Here Lies Whatshisface.
They were disrespectful to the customer.
A global search of newspaper archives, a little informed guesswork by Billy, and a transworld telephone interview had uncovered the mystery. Billy typed:
PROVIDENCEâRobert K. Hoover, 94, of the Blessed Angel Nursing Facility, died yesterday at home. In his youth, Mr. Hoover had been well known in his native Australia as “Bobby Three-Fists,” the teenage bare-knuckle boxing champion of Melbourne, who hit so fast that one of his dazed opponents swore he had an extra fist.
He added quotes and some history from his interview, finished the obituary with funeral information, and filed it electronically for the editors to lay out in the morning.
Then Billy leaned back in his chair, thumped his feet upon the desk, and waited for that glow of satisfaction for having done his job well. He waited ⦠waited ⦠waited ⦠eh, maybe he was tired. The Doomsday Clock on the wall said six minutes to midnight, but that was what it always said; it hadn't worked in decades. Billy's desk clock said 2:20 a.m. Ten minutes to quitting time. He rubbed his eyes and stared at the giant wall clock, some six feet across. The newsroom annex where Billy worked had originally been a train depot. The soaring space had been divided into two floors, wired for fluorescent lights, and crudely painted a two-toned dirty yellow and avocado. Nobody else was there this late into the night. The space reminded Billy of a worn-out office of some forgotten part of government, maybe a wastewater treatment plant on the far edge of nowhere. The giant clock face, with black iron hands and Roman numerals, reminded Billy of the Doomsday Clock invented by the
Bulletin of Atomic Scientists
to symbolize mankind's flirtation with nuclear disaster. At one time,
Billy thought the clock had come to symbolize his own crisis over his ex-wife's death. Now, it reminded him of his father, and the choice they would make together. Should the old man continue his treatment? Or stop running from Doomsday?
The fax machine beeped and hissed and clacked out another obituary. Billy frowned at his desk clock. What undertaker would be sending obits this late at night? Billy scooped the sheet off the machine ⦠. If it needed a lot of reporting he would have to hold it for tomorrow ⦠.
Reading the first line, Billy felt himself flush.
His heart beat heavy in his ear, struggling to pump, as if his blood had suddenly thickened.
PROVIDENCEâWilliam R. “Billy” Povich, 40, of the Armory Neighborhood, is going to die tonight.
Violently.
For sticking his nose into somebody else's bizzness. It ain't personal. It's just the way things are.
Good-bye, Povich.
At that instant, a fist pounded the door three times.
Billy jumped, stumbled, knocked over his chair. He stuffed the paper in his pocket and dove behind a desk.
Who the fuck is that?
The fist banged three more times on the glass door. Not as a plea: the knock was a demandâopen up, it commanded. Billy lay on his belly, panting, staring at a wasteland of flotsam under his desk: paper clips and pen caps, cracker crumbs and bottle caps. A mousetrap set by the cleaning staff waited under the desk, cocked but unbaited; some quick-witted mouse had already Indiana Jonesed the cheddar off the trigger. Billy could use some of that nimbleness at the moment, he thought.
BANG.
BANG.
BANG.
No longer a commandment; that was a threat. Open this door or I break it down.
Billy lifted his head and peeked at the door. A lone figure bundled in a long dark coat stood at the second-floor landing. He had come up the outside staircase. Had taken the chance that somebody on the street might see him. The newspaper's annex was tucked against a highway overpass. The outside stairs, added after the building had been converted to offices, were shrouded in shadow at this time of night, but they faced the street.
Goddamn it, whose
bizzness
did I stick my nose into?
How was Billy supposed to talk his way out of this if he didn't know whom he had offended? He browsed a list of bookies and sharks in his mind.
Who do I owe? Who did I screw?
Nothing came to mind.
Well, nothing recent.
The figure leaned against the glass and became a dark blur. The visitor changed tactics, and knocked lightly five times with just one knuckle. The hair on the back of Billy's neck rose and fell like sea grass in an underwater current.
Legbreakers looking to collect a debt knocked
hard
.
Killers knock softly.
Billy snatched his phone from his desk, flipped the receiver off, pounded 911, and fumbled with the hand piece on the floor.
“Hello? Hello?” he pleaded.
The dead sound he heard from the phone was like a call to a tomb. He drummed a finger on the hang-up button.
No dial tone.
Uh-oh.
The visitor knocked softly again, but not with a knuckleâ
something harder, something metal. A gun? Why couldn't he just go back to pounding?
Billy quietly replaced the receiver, then slid the phone under the desk so he would not trip if he had to run.
What to do?
His first plan was to answer the door with a flying desk chair. Bull-rush him, fight it out on the stairs. Hope some passing driver noticed the commotion and called the cops. Stay alive until the police arrived.
Maybe win the sweepstakes for the World's Worst Plan.
On hands and knees, Billy crawled to Plan B.
He hurried through a maze of office cubicles toward the back staircase. Carpet burn scorched his knees through his pants. At the back corner of the room, he waited against the fire door, mouth-breathing in silence, sweating tangy fear into his shirt, until he heard the metallic knock again, soft and chilling. Mustering courage, he pushed through the door and sprinted down the stairs. Billy had always been clumsy going
up
stairs; he was a tap dancer going down. At the ground floor, he yanked open the fire door and shot out the stairwell. He ran past empty desks and file cabinets and a conference table littered with sickly office plants, toward the outside door in the back of the building. Even if the visitor had seen Billy make for the stairs, by the time the guy ran down from the landing and around the office, Billy would be lost in the neighborhood. Bullets don't take corners.
Billy's palm hit the panic bar and the door burst open, revealing a steep concrete ramp leading to a parking lot of cracked asphalt.
He never saw the rope.
His foot caught the trip wire just above the ankle. He had the sensation of diving into a pool.
It was all a ruse
, he thought.
The obituary, the knock at the door ⦠to get me to run out the back, away from the street.
His fingers grabbed impotently for handholds in the air. He tucked his left shoulder to take the impact, and hit the concrete with an
oomph
. His chin clacked against the ground. Spit and sharp pain
flooded his mouth. He had bitten his tongue. The numbness in his hand told him he had suffered a deep scrape, before it even had time to bleed.
They were on him with the rope in an instant.
Â
Â
“Rides like a floating bed, doesn't it?” the driver asked.
Billy said nothing until the goon sitting to Billy's right elbowed him lightly in the ribs and said, “He's talking to you.”
“Nothing beats Cadillac for the ride,” Billy agreed from the backseat. No lie; it did ride great.
They're taking me for a ride.
“This is the DTS model,” the driver said. He was a little guy, very pale, anemic-looking. “Right off the dealer's lot. Came tricked out like this, all standard. Is the air too much for you guys back there?”
Billy sighed. “I'm comfortable.”
The driver pushed his derby hat higher on his forehead, shot Billy a glance in the mirror, and smirked behind his rainbow sunglasses. Billy hoped the guy could see the road through those shades, though it probably would be better if they crashed; at least Billy had a chance to survive in the car. Bullets don't come standard with air bags.
They traveled south on Route 95, exactly at the speed limit. Traffic was light. A few headlights flew by the other direction; the Cadillac seemed to have the southbound lanes mostly to itself. On the right, they passed the broadcast headquarters of a local rock station. The station's call letters glowed in pink neon in a fifth-floor window. The overnight DJ would be awake, Billy thought. Was there nobody else who could help him?
“Make sure them headlights back there ain't following,” said the goon sitting on Billy's right.
“I know what I'm doing,” the driver snapped. “Keep him under control.”
Though the driver tended to give a lot of orders, the goon on the
right struck Billy as the true brains of the operation. He was a steroid freak of six foot four, with a profile like the departed Old Man of the Mountain in New Hampshire. His long goatee had been dyed pure white. The other goon was almost as big, with striking green doe eyes, and a brooding sense of doom about him. Billy had not yet heard him speak.
He took measure of his situation. After binding his feet with rope, taping his wrists together with duct tapeâand choking what little fight had remained in Billyâthey had bandaged the scrape on his palm with tape and an old T-shirt. That was probably so he wouldn't bleed in the car, Billy figured. He swallowed the blood from the cut on his tongue. No sense spitting on the upholstery and angering these men.
Was it time to talk his way out of this? Or would talking hurry his fate? Did these men have authority to decide how the evening would end? Or were they just following orders? Could they be bribed or threatened?
Bribed or threatened? With goddamn what?
Escape seemed impossible at the moment. Billy's hands were bound in the
front
, which was a tiny advantage if he had to defend himself. But that was a small favor. He could not run with his feet tied, nor could he survive the tumble if he somehow forced past one of the goons, unlatched the door, and inchwormed out of the car.
Nothing to do but sit back and enjoy the smooth ride.
Â
Â
Twenty minutes south of Providence, and just a mile off the highway, the car bounced gently down a graded dirt road, into a vast sand pit dotted with dark blotches of vegetation. The tires crunched softly on gravel. They drove through the open gate in a chain fence and then passed a portable office trailer, a dozen pallets stacked with bricks, and two piles of new white lumber. This was a construction site. Hard to tell what was to be built here. A mall or an office building,
probably. Billy sighed. Were it up to him, they'd be building a police academy and a hospital.
He wondered what time it was. Sometime past 3 a.m., for sure. He wondered what Bo and the old man were doing. He never knew with those two. The old man was an insomniac, and the kid a light sleeper. Billy endured a brief flash of dread ⦠what would happen if the apartment caught fire when Billy was not around? The kid wasn't strong enough to take his grandpa down the stairs, as Billy did nearly every day, wearing his father like a backpack and carrying him in silence so not to add to the old man's shame. William Povich Sr. weighed barely a hundred pounds, but that was still too much for Bo.
Would the kid know enough to leave the old man and save himself?
Billy shuddered. He feared the kid would not leave, and that the boy would die from smoke trying to save an old man who didn't want to be saved.
The Cadillac's headlights landed on a yellow Caterpillar backhoe with a wide front bucket and a narrow back pail lined with steel teeth. The driver jammed the transmission into park and shut off the car, but left the headlights on. He reached into the glove box for a long metal flashlight, then got out of the car and slammed the door.