Where It Hurts (10 page)

I unlocked the clip from the Sig and let it fall to ground. I kicked
the clip away, listening to it skim along the pavement beneath the row of parked cars. I popped out the chambered round and watched it tumble away in a wide arc from the pistol. I handed the Sig to Shivers.

“Collect Jamal and Antwone and get out of here.”

He held out his left hand. “My license.”

“Nope. Not part of the deal and it’s non-negotiable. I give you my word I’ll get it back to you.”

Kareem studied my face, screwed up his lips, and shrugged. “That the way it got to be, that the way it got to be.” He put his left hand back down by his side.

“Slava!” I called out, keeping an eye on Shivers.

“What is happened, Gus?”

“When I step out from between the cars, you can let those two assholes go.”

There was a very loud silence. Then, “I am not liking this.”

“It’s okay, Slava. It’s okay.”

Relieved of the weight of the pistol, I found myself rubbing my abdomen where Kareem Shivers had laid into me.

He was smiling again, only this time with his whole face, eyes too. “Hurt bad, don’t it?”

“Hurt doesn’t quite say it. Why’d a man who can hit like you stop fighting?”

“I stopped boxin’. Ain’t never stopped fightin’.”

“I’ll get your license back to you,” I said, backing out of the spot between the van and the Escalade.

“I know you will.” He was still smiling, but not with his eyes.

When I turned and walked to where Slava was, I noticed Antwone and Jamal were seated on the curb that ran around the entire perimeter of the Paragon. Antwone was rubbing the back of his big head with his massive left hand. The hand was shiny and wet with blood. His blood. Jamal was glassy-eyed.

“Up!” Slava shouted at them, nudging them to their feet with the toe of his bulky black doorman shoes. “Up!”

Antwone was up first and turned to stare at Slava with a look of anger and a kind of awe. I suppose he was still wondering how a fat old white man took him. I was wondering pretty much the same thing. With his right hand, Antwone lifted up Jamal, who was wobbly and unsteady on his feet. They walked slowly over to the Escalade. Slava and I stood next to each other and watched.

When the Caddy was gone, Slava pulled my gun out of his waistband and handed it to me. He smiled that smile of his. “What is this trouble about, Gus?”

I thought about it for a second before I answered. “About something I don’t have—not yet, anyway.”

(SATURDAY, EARLY MORNING)

S
lava was eagerly devouring his four eggs, corned beef hash, sausages, bacon, toast, and home-fried potatoes while I sipped at my coffee, waiting for him to slow down or finish. I figured it would have been rude to discuss what had happened at midnight in the parking lot at the Paragon before he’d gotten some food in him. He had, after all, saved me from a beating. Might even have saved my life. At the end of his shift, I came down from my room and took him to the airport diner. He seemed reluctant to accept my invitation, but I made it pretty clear to him that no wasn’t an option. He also knew I would want to hear about how he’d managed to get the drop on three armed men, one the size of Mount Rushmore.

“I have seen the two black men in lobby of hotel,” Slava said without prompting, his mouth full of eggs. “They are looking around all the time to see if they are being watched. This gets my attention, how they are acting and how they have on them weapons.” He patted his side to indicate where a shoulder holster would hang beneath a jacket or coat. “When they get into elevator, I see they go up to the floor where is your room. Ten minutes later, they are coming down looking angry. So I am keeping my eye on them out the door.”

“You saw the big man pushing me along and the other one holding the Beretta to my neck.”

He nodded, shoveling more food into his mouth.

“But that doesn’t explain how you—”

Slava didn’t let me finish my sentence. “They thought they were safe, that no one is seeing them. When men are thinking they are having no threat, they are sloppy. They were not paying to me any attention. Was easy for me to coming behind them. The big man, him I am clubbing first.”

“Clubbing with what?”

Slava swallowed his mouthful of food, washed it down with coffee. He then swung his right arm down by his side, raised it back up, and laid it flat on the table. When he took his hand away, a well-worn leather-covered sap sat on the table where his palm had been. Saps were old school, but effective. I picked it up to feel its heft, slapping it against my palm, then placed it back on the table.

“I can make for you one if you wish,” he said, making it disappear beneath his big mitt of a hand.

“No wonder Antwone’s head was bloodied.”

“He will live. I am not hitting him so hard to kill him. He will have headaches for many days.” Slava took a forkful of food, chewed a little, said, “The other one, the one with Beretta, him I am putting in sleeper hold. You were policeman. You are knowing it, yes?”

I nodded that I did. A sleeper hold was a polite euphemism for choking someone into unconsciousness. They used to teach cops how to do it with their forearms or nightsticks, but it was risky because there wasn’t much room for error between sleep and suffocation.

“But what if things had gone sideways?” I asked.

“What is meaning ‘sideways’?”

“Wrong, what if things had gone wrong?”

He gasped and snorted that laugh of his. He leaned forward, placing his arms beneath the table. I felt a hard tap on my knee.

“Look down and take it, Gus. Put in lap and look.”

And there in my lap was a semiautomatic pistol, but one I didn’t recognize. It resembled a Walther, but it was bigger, heavier.

Slava said, “Is Makarov. Russian gun.”

“Russian, huh?” I smiled. “I heard you were from Poland.”

“No, France.” He laughed at his own joke.

“Figures. You know ex-cops, we’re always getting our European countries mixed up.”

Slava stopped smiling and stopped eating. “Gus, I am liking you. I know I am having to explain about last night, but please to leave it there. It would not be good to be curious about Slava,” he referred to himself in the third person. “That is the word, ‘curious’?”

“Curious, yeah.”

“That would be bad, to be curious about Slava.”

“For you or me?”

He turned stony-faced. “For both, I am thinking.”

“I get the message, Slava.”

He went back to finishing his meal.

A few minutes later I said, “But maybe someday you’ll tell me your story.”

His happy eating expression went mournful and grave. “No, Gus. I am never telling you this. I am shamed in my soul. Please you are not asking me this again. Promise to me this.”

I reached across the table with my right hand. “I promise.”

He took my hand and, feeling the incredible strength in his grasp, I understood how he had been able to do what he had done earlier in the parking lot. Yet there was more than power in his grip. I can’t explain it except to say I somehow knew that his right hand had done more than wield a sap or pistol. Until our palms and fingers meshed, I wouldn’t have believed it possible to transmit sadness and regret through touch. I believed it now.

As we left the diner, he clapped me on the shoulder, squeezed the back of my neck, and whispered, “If you are ever needing my help, I give it.”

“Thanks, Slava, but what if—”

“No, Gus. No what if. I am having in me too much shame to worry about what if.”

I offered him a ride back to the Paragon to pick up his car, but he refused. He said he preferred to walk, that he had things to think about. I didn’t doubt it.

(SATURDAY, EARLY AFTERNOON)

A
fter breakfast with Slava, I’d gotten a few hours’ sleep before the ache in my leg and the throbbing in my arm roused me. My new room was much like my old room, as it was like almost every other room at the hotel. The Paragon wasn’t the kind of place with bridal or presidential suites. It wasn’t the kind of place with suites at all. There were some larger rooms on the top floor that the original owners had built to be their club floor. I caught myself shaking my head in the mirror, thinking about a club floor at the Paragon. No one came here to be pampered or to have free wine at five or complimentary continental breakfast in the morning. People came here to leave.

I caught something else in the mirror, too. The room might have looked the same as my old one, but I didn’t. I looked tired, but also alive. There was light in my eyes. I hadn’t been able to say that for a very long time. Maybe that had something to do with meeting Casey. Maybe not. It was very odd, I thought, that I should feel this way in the wake of Tommy D.’s murder and getting a chunk of my calf shot off. I didn’t question it. All I had done for two years was ask questions that had gone as unanswered as an old woman’s prayers. The universe was nothing so much as deaf and unjudging. I’d learned to take some
comfort in that. What else was left to me? Moral judgments were a man-made albatross, so I didn’t beat myself up for feeling even a little bit alive again in the midst of spilled blood.

I put in a call to Al Roussis to see how the investigation into Tommy’s murder was going and to see if the forensics and/or ballistics backed up Kareem Shivers’ claim that his boys had nothing to do with Tommy’s murder. After last night, I also wanted my gun back. Given how easily Jamal and Antwone had handled me, I felt pretty naked with just my old service weapon to carry. And I wouldn’t have Slava around to watch my back, not off premises. I got Al’s voice mail and asked him to call me back.

When I hung up the phone, I found myself staring at the green canvas backpack that Smudge had brought me the night Tommy was killed. If the last few days had convinced me of anything, it was that Tommy Delcamino’s murder was somehow connected to his son’s murder. It all seemed to be set in motion by the visit Tommy had paid me last Tuesday. I figured Al Roussis would make the connection between the father/son murders soon enough. In the meantime, I thought that I’d see what I could find out about the kid’s death. If I stuck my nose into an active investigation, I’d get shut down in seconds flat. I’d stashed the bankroll in my drawer for safekeeping and had already looked at all the photos, but I’d taken only a quick look through the black-and-white composition book. Nothing of what I’d scanned had stuck. I got the notebook out and plopped back down on the bed. Before I could flip the cover open, there was a knock at my door.

I didn’t answer. Instead, I put the notebook down and reached over to the nightstand to retrieve the one gun left to me. The last five days had made me think caution first. I held my breath. There was that knock again. This time the rapping lasted a while longer. Again, I didn’t answer. It persisted, growing louder, and more insistent.

“Who’s there?” I asked.

The only answer was more knocking. I wasn’t going to be able to wait out the person on the other side of the door. It was stupid of me, I
know, because if the person on the other side of the door meant me harm, all they had to do was shoot through the door, but I moved to the door as quietly as I could manage. In one quick motion, I flung the door back and raised my weapon. Then I lowered it.

Annie was standing there, the heat coming off her in waves. Her hair was freshly cut and styled the way I liked it, razor straight and parted down the middle, some of it falling across her left cheek. The air smelled of her perfume, the musky, patchouli-based one. The one that when blended with her own scent made me hard. I knew why she had come. That she was wearing the belted, tan leather coat I’d given her for her birthday three years ago over red patent leather stilettos cleared up any doubts I might have had about her intentions.

She gave me a feral smile and came toward me, closing the door behind her. She pushed herself against me, the smell of the perfume even stronger now and mixing with the scent of the leather. I was dizzy. She took the gun out of my hand, placed it on the rug, and again pressed her body into mine. I pulled her head back by the hair and kissed her hard on the mouth. She let out a sigh, her body clenching. I could feel her muscles contract beneath the butter-soft leather.

For reasons I can’t explain, I asked, “What are you doing here?”

Annie pushed back, using her hands against my chest, untied the belt of the duster, undid the buttons, and slid out of the coat, letting it fall to the floor around her heels. The only thing she’d been wearing beneath the leather was that perfume. She dropped to her knees, sliding my boxers down to the floor with her.

“Do you still want to know what I’m doing here?”

When I didn’t answer, she put me in her mouth.

An hour later, we lay on opposite sides of the bed, the air, the sheets, the room reeking of us. Silent, we were staring through the shade-drawn darkness, looking for answers that had eluded us for the last two years, answers we would never find. Not in bed. Not anywhere. I waited for Annie to speak first because, as was the pattern
since John’s death, she was the one who had initiated the encounter. Sex between us now was about everything else except sex. This time it had been different, though. Since we had separated, the sex between us had been urgent, ferocious, angry—a mixture of punishment and pain, revenge and grief. And it usually began with a fight. A fight over issues real or imagined, over something or nothing. It was a fight that gave us an excuse to scratch an itch.

Today there had been no fight to start with and there were real moments between us, moments of tenderness. The kind of tenderness that hadn’t been part of our intimacy for years, even before John’s death. We kissed. And the kissing wasn’t all the fevered, hair-pulling, tongue-jabbing kissing that usually followed our screaming at one another and preceded our tearing at each other’s clothes. She had let me hold her. Had wanted to be held. Had let me trace my fingers lightly over her hip, along her thigh, and slide them inside her. She had held on tightly to my wrist as I helped her to climax. Annie had done things to me she hadn’t done since we’d dated, and they seemed to excite her as much now as then. But that was all gone. There was only that darkness between us, and silence, and only the air clung to what had passed between us.

“What was that about?” I said, no longer willing to wait for her to cut through the dark.

“That was about goodbye.”

“Goodbye?”

“Goodbye.”

She let that land there for a minute before continuing.

“I wanted to have a last time, something to look back at and say that was that, enough. I wanted it to be special and I wanted to enjoy it. I even wanted you to enjoy it. I wanted you to enjoy it so that you’ll miss it.”

“Mission accomplished, Annie. But what just happened between us . . . that wasn’t us,” I said, sitting up and kicking my legs over the
side of the bed. “That wasn’t us, not since we got married. Maybe not even then. Maybe that was us when we dated. The things we just did, those were amazing things, but it was like living a greatest hits album. I loved you once like I never thought I was capable of loving a woman and I was really happy being married to you, but it was never about the sex.”

“What was the gun for, Gus?” she asked. “And why the change of room?”

I was hoping she would have forgotten about the gun and hadn’t noticed the room switch. “There’s been some trouble lately.”

“Is that what the bandage on your leg is about?”

I nodded, then said, “And the house—”

“The house? Eleven Pinetree?”

“Yeah, it was broken into and ransacked pretty bad.”

I stood, flicking on the bedside lamp. My ex, shielding her eyes with her hand. I have to say, she did look amazing there, her breasts still beautiful and firm, her body taut and slender, her hair now wild yet glimmering. But the look on her face drew a sharp contrast to her body. She wore an angry, fearful expression. Fearful of asking me the question about John’s room. More fearful of the answer.

“Yeah, they wrecked that, too,” I said, bowing my head. “I asked Sue Sherman, the tenant, to clean it up as best she could and—”

Annie was out of bed now, furiously gathering up her coat and shoes.

“The tenant! How could you leave it to a stranger to touch John’s things? Why didn’t you do it yourself, Gus? How could you—”

“I couldn’t, Annie. I just couldn’t.”

She ran at me and slapped me across the face. “You’re a fucking coward, John Murphy. How could you?” Tears streamed down her cheeks. “How could you let a stranger touch his things?”

“I’m sorry.” It was a feeble thing to say, true as it was.

She threw on her coat, belted it up, and ran out of the room in bare feet, her fingers hooked through the straps of her stilettos. I’m not sure that she’d meant what she’d said before about this encounter of ours
really being a gesture of goodbye. It was hard to know with Annie. But I was pretty certain it was goodbye now that I had told her about John’s room. And if this was goodbye, I would miss the feel of her, the taste of her, and most of all the scent of the smoke we made when we burned together.