“And Cupcake’s usually in one night a week.”
He gave her another.
“This is a lot of money, Charlie.”
“Is that everybody?”
“I think so.”
“Good, ’cause I got less than fifty left.”
“You sure about this, Charlie?”
“I’m sure. I got plenty of money; don’t worry about that.”
“You want a blow job, Charlie?”
He replaced the wallet in his hip pocket. “I’m not doing this because I wanted a blow job.”
“I know that. I meant more like a Christmas present.”
“Thanks anyway. I gotta get going. Have a merry Christmas.”
“Oh, yeah, I’m having one already. Thanks for the bonus, though.”
Outside there was more snow on the Mercedes, but no fluid underneath it. Truly a fine car. If he had the time he’d head back to the Tease-O-Rama and set Dennis straight about the stage rentals, but he wanted to stop for a quick one at the Midtown Tap before he moved on to Vic’s, and after that he was out of town. Maybe he’d phone Dennis from the Tap.
The Midtown Tap was dark and warm, the Christmas lights ringing the room had been turned on, and Andy Williams droned over the PA singing “The Little Drummer Boy.” The bartender acknowledged Charlie with a slight wave of his hand as he served an elderly couple at the far end of the bar. There were maybe twenty people scattered around the room, none of them looking too cheerful.
“I’d like to get my hands on that goddamn drummer boy,” the bartender said when he finally made his way over to Charlie. “I’d wring his fucking neck. Pa rumpa pump pum.”
“Not your favorite Christmas carol?”
“None of them are. It wouldn’t be so bad if Tommy didn’t make us play the same goddamn tape over and over all night. I bet I have to hear the same twenty carols two or three hundred times each between Thanksgiving and Christmas.”
“That’d dampen your Christmas spirit, I guess.”
“But none of ’em’s as bad as ‘The Little Drummer Boy.’ ”
Charlie nodded in agreement, then jumped at an unexpected slap on the back. Tommy stood behind him, in a dark brown jumpsuit and a wide-brimmed fedora, hands on his hips, staring at him as though his presence there was a source of great puzzlement.
“How you doing, Charlie? Is Lester bitching about the music again?”
“Damn right I am. It drives people away.”
“Yeah, yeah, and right up till Thanksgiving you were saying the same thing about Peter Frampton. Drives people away, my ass.”
“It does. They hear it all day long on the radio, in the supermarket, in the shopping mall; they come to a bar they don’t want to hear that shit anymore. Especially the ‘Little Fucking Drummer Boy.’ ”
“Watch your mouth, Les, you’re talking about the fucking Bible now.”
Les sighed. “ ‘The Little Drummer Boy’ is not in the Bible, Tommy.”
“What the fuck do you know about what’s in the Bible, you fucking atheist?”
“I know ‘The Little Drummer Boy’ is a cartoon they show on TV every Christmas and it was never in the Bible.”
“Shut up and get Charlie a drink and leave us alone. We gotta talk.”
Lester shrugged wearily and fixed Charlie a CC, water back, and went down to the far end of the bar to sulk.
“Did you get the envelope?” Charlie said.
“Yeah, luckily. What’s the matter with you, leaving it with Susie?”
“She gave it to you, right?”
“Sure, and then she hassled me for forty-five minutes, wanting to know what it was. Christ, that chick’s annoying. She says you used to fuck her. Is that true?” His nostrils flared slightly at the thought.
“Close to ten years ago. No shit, you should have seen her then.”
“Was she any smarter than she is now?”
“I think she had a few more brain cells on active duty.”
“So what the fuck are you giving it to me this early for? We don’t have a delivery until the thirtieth, right?”
“I wasn’t sure I was going to see you before that.”
“I fucking hate it when people start to improvise, Charlie. Makes me nervous things might change. You and Vic are still with me here, right? Gerard is still in the dark?”
“Of course he is,” Charlie said. For the time being he was, anyway.
“He’d fucking better be. So how’s your Christmas? You see your kids and all that shit?”
“Yeah. Saw them earlier.”
“Good for you, good for you . . .” He scanned the room. “Look at these poor, pathetic assholes, nowhere else to go on Christmas Eve. You guys were open tonight, right?”
“Three hundred and sixty-five days a year, Tommy.”
“Somebody’s gotta stay open. That’s what I figure. Let the staff bitch all they want.”
“Shit, that reminds me, I have to make a call.”
The phones were next to the men’s room and directly underneath a loudspeaker rumbling Jack Jones’s version of “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” Charlie signaled Lester to turn the volume down, but Lester shrugged helplessly. Apparently the issue had come up before. He put a quarter into the slot and dialed.
The phone at the Tease-O-Rama rang about twenty times before Dennis finally picked it up. “Tease-O-Rama,” he snapped.
“Dennis, it’s Charlie.”
“I can’t talk right now. My hands are totally fucking full and it’s your fault. I got a clubful of angry customers and nobody to dance for ’em.”
“What do you mean, nobody to dance?”
“Cupcake and Francie walked out.”
“What for?”
“No reason.”
“Bullshit, I heard you made ’em pay back the stage rentals I refunded.”
“You never should have done that, Charlie. Now look what I’m in for.”
“Don’t blame me; you’re the one who tried to make them pay the stage rentals back.”
“I gotta go, Charlie. The house is buying a round, just so you know. These guys are pissed.”
“I’ll see if I can’t find the girls and get ’em back to work.”
“What’s the fucking point; we’re closing in twenty minutes. You guys don’t pay me enough to put up with this kind of bullshit on Christmas Eve.”
Charlie looked up at the big black clock, its fluorescent violet markings competing with the blinking ring of colored lights surrounding it. It was twenty minutes to two. He hung up the phone. It was time to head for Vic’s anyway.
11
V
ic lived in a new two-story house that belonged to Bill Gerard. It was at the end of a woody suburban cul-de-sac on the east side, just a few blocks from where Sarabeth and the kids lived. Most of the other houses in the neighborhood had opulent Christmas decorations, and in the early evening during Christmas season the surrounding streets were typically jammed with cars full of people driving slowly around, taking in the lit-up plastic crèches, six-foot candy canes, and Santa’s workshops. For holiday decor Vic, whose local notoriety had not made him a popular neighborhood figure, had contented himself with a single pine wreath with a red velvet ribbon on the front door. Charlie rapped on the door’s glass and waited, then rapped again louder, then gave up and rang the bell. It was seven minutes after two, and the house was dark inside.
He went around the side of the house past the garage, noting several sets of tire tracks, all of them partly filled in with fresh snow. He stood on the back porch and looked through the glass into the kitchen. There was no sign that the house was occupied. He knocked and waited. Had Vic cleared out on him? Charlie had both plane tickets, but with the amount of cash Vic was holding the price of an overseas plane ticket could certainly be considered an acceptable loss. He reached for the doorknob and found it unlocked.
“Vic?”
There was no answer. The house was furnished in much the same empty fashion as Charlie’s condo. He flipped on the living room light. Nothing seemed out of place. He moved to the bar and poured himself a double shot of Vic’s good Scotch, which was already sitting out open on the bar, next to an ice tray full of lukewarm water. He began wandering around the house turning lights on, room by room. He checked the basement and found nothing out of the ordinary, found much the same in the laundry room and the kitchen and the downstairs bathroom. Upstairs in the master bedroom he was relieved to find Vic’s suitcase, packed but open, lying on Vic’s bed. “Vic?” he called out again.
Downstairs again, he opened the garage door. Vic’s car was gone; probably he had thought of something he needed and didn’t make it back by two. Vic wouldn’t have bothered to leave a note. He went back to the living room to wait and turned on the television. The only thing on at that hour of the morning was an old pirate movie and a pre-sign-off sermonette. He watched the pirates for a few minutes, then stood up and turned it off as he felt himself beginning to drift into sleep. He couldn’t afford to let himself get drowsy again, not with a two-and-a-half-hour drive ahead of him. The thought of the drive made him wonder how much gas was in the Mercedes.
He was down to less than a quarter of a tank. Might as well gas her up while he waited for Vic to come back. He drove through the neighborhood and out onto a main artery heading south to the state highway, where he found a Stop ’n’ Rob with gas pumps out front. After a minute’s investigation he managed to get the lid to the gas tank open, but, after sticking the nozzle in and flipping the switch, nothing happened. He leaned into the car and honked the horn, and the attendant’s voice came through over an intercom.
“Pay before you pump,” he snapped, barely intelligible through the static.
Charlie went inside and gave the man ten dollars. He was about sixty, with nicotine-yellowed white hair, and he didn’t seem happy about working Christmas Eve. Neither of them said anything.
Charlie pumped eight dollars and sixty cent’s worth of gas and went back inside. The attendant gave him his change without comment, and as Charlie turned to go he found himself looking at the candy rack. It was four feet high and six feet wide, stocked with an amazing variety of brightly colored candy boxes, and he remembered Spencer and Melissa.
Next to the candy rack was a spinning rack with plastic bags hanging down from it containing cheap, crappy plastic toys from Taiwan. He spun the rack around, examining the cellophane bags to see if anything there might appeal to either of his kids: misshapen plastic dinosaurs and soldiers, a baby doll a quarter the size of a real one, a jump rope with pale blue handles. He pulled the jump rope and the doll down and looked again at the candy rack. What kind of bubblegum cards did Spencer used to collect?
“Do you still have those Wacky Packs?”
The attendant glanced over at him. “Bottom row, far left.”
There they were. He reached behind the open display box and grabbed an unopened one from the shelf behind it, and he put the toys and the box on the counter.
The attendant rang him up, scowling, looking out between rings at the Mercedes by the pumps. “Total’s eighteen fifty-five.”
Charlie gave him a twenty, and when the man handed his change over he thought he heard him mutter “Big spender.”
“Excuse me?”
“Nothing. I hope your kids have a real merry Christmas with their chewing gum and their crappy plastic toys.”
“They’re not for my kids. They’re for my sister’s kids.”
“Sure they are.”
The man looked away, not caring to pursue the matter any further, and Charlie walked out.
As he approached Sarabeth’s house he went over in his head all the legitimate reasons Vic might have had to miss their meeting time. It wasn’t as though Vic didn’t make a habit out of being late. Maybe there was something wrong with Vic’s car. What then? They could take Betsy’s Mercedes and leave it at the airport, but if Pete van Heuten had to drive a hundred and fifty miles south to retrieve it later he’d be sure to bitch about it loud and long to anyone who’d listen, and that would eventually get back to Gerard. The Lincoln might be safer, but it was registered to the company and Gerard would be sure to know about it when the airport parking authority figured out it was abandoned and towed it. Not that he’d necessarily be able to track them down just knowing the first airport they flew out of, maybe months down the line, but why give him anything he didn’t have to? Anyway, the Lincoln smelled like vomit, and it was too cold to drive without the heater on.
He pulled to where he thought the curb might be in front of Sarabeth’s house, a big ranch-style with a circular driveway. A string of tiny white lights ran along the rain gutter, simple and tasteful, just like at her mother’s. He found himself wanting to go inside and wake them all up and try to explain to her and to the kids why they wouldn’t be seeing him again, but the urge was diminished by the knowledge that his departure would have virtually no effect on the everyday course of their lives. With the possible exception of Melissa, his permanent absence would be welcomed by the entire family as the final and inevitable end result of years of partial and temporary absences.
I’m sitting in a car in front of my ex-wife’s house at two-thirty on Christmas morning feeling sorry for myself, he thought. Maybe that’s a sign I’ve had enough to drink. He got out with the engine running, stepped quietly across the driveway, and left the gum, the jump rope, and the doll on the snowy welcome mat. I should’ve bought a Christmas card, he thought. As he turned back to the car he became aware of the need to urinate again, and he went over to a bush on the side of the house and let it rip, watching the steam rise from the melting snow that covered the bush. Having melted a large patch off of it, he zipped up and got back into the car. Slowly he pulled away from the curb and headed back to Vic’s.
Coming up the cul-de-sac he realized he’d left all the lights on in the house. He went in through the front door and began turning them off again in more or less the same order he’d turned them on. Where the fuck was Vic, anyway? Just to make certain he checked the garage again. The car was still gone. He stood there in the cold air for a minute, trying to think what if anything was the logical next step of action. He leaned back with his palm flat on Vic’s worktable and it gave slightly, sliding away from him and sending him down onto one knee. With some difficulty he rose and, looking down, he saw that there was a small puddle of blood, still liquid, on the cold cement floor under one of the worktable’s legs. He took in a sharp, audible breath and he felt the skin on his face tightening. He stepped back, looking up and away from it, trying without success to imagine some innocuous reason for the presence of fresh blood on the floor of Vic’s garage. Detecting the first warning flutters of vertigo, he put his palm down on the worktable to steady himself and once again looked down.
On the bench vise attached to the table directly above the small, dark red pool was more blood, smeared. Stuck to the rough edge of one of its jaws was a ragged flap of skin about half an inch in diameter, the more or less parallel folds of the middle joint of a human finger.
Charlie spun, slammed both palms to the wall, and threw up. He wiped his mouth on his coatsleeve and ran out of the garage, through the kitchen and the living room to the front door, which he left hanging open as he ran across the lawn to the Mercedes. He got in, started it up, and drove to the end of the cul-de-sac, hyperventilating, and came to a stop. He sat there for two minutes, then three, then five, incapable of deciding whether to turn left or right.
It was two-forty-five in the morning, and the bars were all closed. He had nowhere to go.