A Firing Offense (24 page)

The door of that room was ajar. Out of it fell a bar of light and the sound of a radio playing AOR at a very low volume.

I knocked on the door and shouted “Hello.” No response. My knock opened the door halfway. I finished it with a push and stepped onto the green carpet of the living room. McGinnes followed me in.

We walked slowly past the standard bamboo and plastic beach furnishings and the seaside prints that hung on the wall. There appeared to be two bedrooms. I pointed to one, and McGinnes walked in. I walked into the other.

At first I did not recognize the figure lying on the bed. He did not look much like the defiant kid in the photograph his mother had shown me. In the photograph, Eddie Shultz had been alive.

They had gagged him and tied his hands and feet together behind his back, laying him on his side on a dropcloth. Then they had cut his throat down to the windpipe, from left to right. His shirt and jeans were soaked halfway up in blood. Rope burns marked his wrists and his eyes were open. He looked something like a frog.

I fell back against the door, tasted the bile of my dinner, and swallowed my own puke. I felt the blood drain from my face and I thought I heard Maureen Shultz’s voice on my answering machine. I stumbled into the other bedroom.

McGinnes was on the bed, cradling a woman in his arms. Her eyes were barely open and her lips were moving but there was no sound. He pushed some hair out of her face.

“She was unconscious when I walked in,” he said. “I’ve
almost got her around.” He turned his head to look at me and dropped open his mouth. “What the fuck…?”

“Eddie Shultz is dead, man. Murdered in the other room.”

“Hold her,” he said, and I absently put my arms around the woman as he rushed out. I heard him say, “Jesus Christ,” then walk around the apartment until he came back, pasty-faced, into the bedroom.

“Is Jimmy Broda…?”

“Nobody else in the apartment,” he said.

“We’ve got to…. ”

“We don’t have to do shit,” he said, his voice shaking. He reached out and grabbed a handful of the front of my shirt. “Now listen. Did you touch anything besides the front door?”

“I don’t know. I mean I don’t remember. Probably.”

“You walk downstairs, now, and bring the car around to the stairwell we came up. I’m going to wipe this place down and get her walking. I’ll be down in a few minutes. Understand?”

“Yes,” I nodded.

“Do it,” he said, and released my shirt.

I let the woman down gently on the bed, forcing her hand off my back. I walked out of the apartment, around to the north side of the hotel and down the stairwell.

I moved the car past the pool and into the spot nearest the stairwell. I kept the windows rolled up, listened to the tick of my watch, and wiped sweat off my forehead.

McGinnes came down the stairs ten minutes later with the woman. She was walking, supported by his arm. In his other hand was a suitcase. He put her in the back seat, where she immediately lay down. He stowed the suitcase in the trunk and got into the passenger side.

“I think I got everything,” he said to himself, then looked at me. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”

I found the bridge over Bank’s Channel, left Wrightsville Beach, and drove into Wilmington. At a convenience store I parked far away from the entrance.

I bought three large coffees and a pack of Camel filters. I returned to the car, handed McGinnes two of the coffees, and tore a hole in the lid of mine. Then I opened the deck of Camels, shoved one in my mouth, and lit it. I had not smoked in more than three years. The raunch hit my lungs and burned. I kept it there, finally exhaling a stream out the window.

“She know where Broda is?” I said, jerking my head in the direction of the backseat, where she slept.

“No,” McGinnes said. “Drive.”

He directed me to 421 heading northwest. It was past midnight and there were few cars on the highway. I kicked on my hi-beams with a tap on the floorboard.

“We blew it,” I said, after a long period of silence.

“Bullshit,” he said angrily. “Everything that’s happened has had nothing to do with you. And everything that’s going to happen, whether they catch up with the kid or not, you can’t change that either. The boy got his hands on some shake that wasn’t his, and the guys he took it from, man, they are not to be fucked with. You’re way out of your league, Nicky. Forget about it.”

“What about the woman?”

“She’ll be all right. I don’t think she was hurt bad. I’ve got to figure that half of her condition right now is from all the drugs they were doing. Take her back to D.C., drop her off, and wash your hands. Then pray we don’t get implicated in all this.”

We drove for a couple of hours on 421. When we neared the signs for 95, McGinnes had me pull over.

“I’m going to switch with her and try to get some sleep,” he said. “It’ll do her good to open her eyes for a while.”

We urinated on the shoulder of the road. McGinnes rousted the woman and walked with her down the highway for a block, then back to the car. She slid in next to me on the passenger side. McGinnes lay down on the backseat.

At Dunn, past Fayetteville, I turned off onto 95 and headed north. I offered her a cigarette. She took two from the pack and
lit them both with the lighter from the dash, then handed one back to me.

She smoked while staring out the window. Her shoulders began to shake, and I could see that she was sobbing. I turned the radio on to a country station and left the volume very low. When she had stopped crying, she turned her head in my direction.

“Who
are
you guys?” she said. There was that slight Southern accent.

“We’re taking you back to Washington. I’m Nick Stefanos. The guy in the back is John McGinnes. Who are you?”

“My name is Kim Lazarus.” She took another cigarette from the pack and lit it off the first. She still had the long brown hair from her father’s photograph, and large, round, blue eyes.

“You feel well enough to talk?”

“I think so,” she said, but again began to cry. She shook her head. “Fucking Eddie. Why?”

I let it go again for twenty minutes. She drank the cold coffee we had saved for her and smoked another cigarette. I kept my eyes on the road.

“I’m not interested in anything other than Jimmy Broda,” I said finally. “I want you to know that… so you can speak freely. I was hired by his grandfather to find him, and that’s what I was trying to do when I caught up with you. I know he had coke that wasn’t his, and I know you were selling it off as you traveled. But I don’t care about any of that.”

“What can I tell you? We were partying for two weeks straight. We had sold most of it, and we were doing the rest of it like a last blowout.” She dragged on her cigarette.

“Keep going,” I said.

“Jimmy went out for some beer late in the afternoon. Pretty soon after that two guys came into our room. I don’t remember much after that. Either I hit my head backing up or they knocked me out. Anyway, the next thing was, your friend in the backseat was waking me up.”

I thought about that for a while. “You recognize the guys?”

“Black dudes,” she said meaninglessly. I didn’t ask her any more questions, and after a short time she fell back asleep.

I drove on through the night, into Virginia and around Richmond, stopping once more for gas. Kim slept through, though her body jerked occasionally from speed rushes.

McGinnes awoke outside of Springfield and sat up. He stared out the window for the remainder of the trip. We rolled into D.C. just after dawn on Saturday morning. McGinnes grabbed his gear from the trunk and walked back to the driver’s side, leaning his forearm on the door and putting a hand on my shoulder.

“I’ll be talking to you,” is all he said. Then he turned and walked into his apartment building, stoop-shouldered and slow, and suddenly old.

I WOKE KIM LAZARUS
and got her into my place. While she showered, I put fresh sheets on my bed. She came out looking clean but still drawn. She had only enough energy to thank me and get into bed. I closed the bedroom door and walked out into the living room.

The light on my answering machine was blinking. I let it blink. I lay on the couch and pulled the blanket over me. My cat jumped up and kneaded the blanket. I went to sleep.

I did not dream. But I woke two hours later, thinking of a redheaded boy who looked so horrible in death that I was grateful for never having known him alive. And there was still Jimmy Broda. Either he was caught now, or he was running. I knew with certainty that he was frightened and he was very much alone. The thought of it made the comfort of my apartment seem obscene.

Unable to return to sleep, I rose, and with great impotence, paced the rooms of my apartment.

O
N THE TELEVISION
news there was no mention of the out-of-state murder of an area youth.

I erased the tape on my answering machine without listening to the messages. The phone rang twice during the day but I did not pick it up. In the afternoon I gathered all the liquor, beer, and wine from my apartment and made a gift of it to my landlord.

Kim Lazarus woke up at around six in the evening. I cooked her an omelette, fried potatoes, cut a salad, and served it with juice and tea. She ate it and returned to bed, where she slept soundly through the night.

ON SUNDAY MORNING I
prepared a huge breakfast. She came to the table, a bit swollen around the eyes, but with color back in her face. She was wearing Levi’s and a blue sweatshirt.

“Thanks,” she said as I poured her some coffee. One side
of her mouth rose as she smiled, her thick upper lip arching lazily above her slightly crooked teeth.

“You’ve been thanking me an awful lot. It’s no bother having you here. I figure we both need to chill out for a few days.”

“What day
is
it?” she asked.

“Sunday.”

She ate her breakfast and cleaned her plate with pieces of toast. I refilled her plate and she kept going. She was a big-boned woman with little body fat but plenty of curves.

When she was finished, the cat, who had already taken to her, jumped up on Kim’s lap.

“Do you mind?”

“No,” she said, rubbing behind the cat’s ears. “I like it. How’d she lose her eye?”

“Catfight, I guess. That’s how I found her. She was hiding outside behind some latticework, and her eye was just hanging out, hanging by a nerve. I got her to a vet, and he took it out, then sewed the lid shut. After that she stuck around.”

“Kind of like how you adopted me.”

“Until we figure this whole thing out, yeah.”

“Don’t you work?” she asked.

“I lost my job last week.”

“Where?”

“I did ads for a retail outfit.”

“Really. Which one?”

“Nutty Nathan’s,” I mumbled.

“I know that place,” she said. “‘The Miser Who Works for You.’”

“That’s the one.”

“Your friend John work there too?”

“Yeah, how’d you guess?”

“He looks like a salesman. You don’t.”

“Well, I was—for years. Johnny and I worked the floor together for a long time.”

“Hard to stay friends and not fight over ups and things like that.”

“Oh, we fought over ups, believe me.”

“How did that happen?” she asked, reaching across the table and touching the faded purple area around my nose.

“Looking for Jimmy Broda.”

I refilled our coffee cups and put a fresh pack of smokes on the table between us. She shook one out and lit it, then blew smoke at the window. Her mouth turned down at the edges and her eyes watered up.

“Have you heard anything yet?” she asked.

“Not yesterday. Not on the news today or in the Sunday paper. Frankly, I’m beginning to think that the ones who killed Eddie went back and cleaned up.” I thought of the dropcloth they had placed beneath him. “I don’t think anybody’s going to find Eddie, not for a while anyway.”

“And you’re not going to report it?”

“Not yet,” I said. “Can I ask you something?”

“Go ahead.”

“How did you get involved with those guys?”

“Cocaine,” she said. “The same way I get involved with every guy I know.” She butted her cigarette and lit another, then looked back at me. “When I moved up to D.C., I didn’t have a job, but I had money. I was dealing for a guy. Then we had a falling out, and my supply and income got cut off. I started hanging out in the clubs. One night at the Snake Pit I met Eddie and Jimmy.”

“And Jimmy was holding.”

“Bigtime. And he was generous with it. I think it made him feel like a bigshot, but at the same time he was real nervous about it.”

“Did you know it was stolen?”

“I suspected it at first,” she admitted, “and then after a while I was certain. But I’m an addict, Nick. I didn’t care
where
it
came from, only that he had it, and that he didn’t mind handing it out.”