A Ticket to the Boneyard (20 page)

“It didn’t have to be twelve years. You could have been back on the street in a year or two. You’re the one who decided to make it hard time.”

His grip tightened and my knees buckled. I might have fallen if he hadn’t been holding on. “I shouldn’t have served a day,” he said. “ ‘Aggravated assault upon a police officer.’ I never assaulted you. You assaulted me, and then you framed me. They sent the wrong man to jail.”

“You belonged there.”

“Why? Because I was moving in on one of your women and you couldn’t keep her? You weren’t strong enough to hold her on your own. Therefore you didn’t deserve her, but you couldn’t accept that. Could you?”

I didn’t say anything.

“Ah, but you made a mistake framing me. You thought prison would destroy me. It destroys a lot of men, but you have to understand how it operates. It weakens the weaklings and strengthens the strong.”

“Is that how it works?”

“Almost always. Cops don’t last in prison. They almost never get out alive. They’re weak, they need guns and badges and blue uniforms to survive, and they don’t have any of those props in prison, and they die within the walls. But the strong just get stronger. You know what Nietzsche said? ‘That which does not destroy me makes me stronger.’ Attica, Dannemora, every joint I was in just made me stronger.”

“Then you should be grateful to me for putting you there.”

He let go of my shoulder. I shifted my weight, looking to balance myself so that I could thrust behind me with my foot, raking his shin, stomping on his instep. Before I could begin to move he jabbed a finger into my kidney. He might as well have used a sword. I cried out in agony and fell forward, landing hard on my knees.

“I was always strong,” he said. “I always had great strength in my hands. I never worked at it. It was always there.” He grabbed me by my upper arms, hoisted me to my feet. I couldn’t even think about kicking out at him. My legs lacked the strength to keep me upright, and if he’d let go of me I think I’d have fallen.

“But I worked out in prison,” he went on. “They had weights in the exercise yard and some of us would work out all day long. Especially the niggers. You’d see them with the sweat pouring off them, stinking like hogs, pumping themselves up, turning themselves into muscle-bound freaks. I worked twice as hard as they did but all I added was strength, not bulk. Endless sets, high reps. I never got any bigger but I turned myself into wrought iron. I just got stronger and stronger.”

“You needed a knife in Ohio. And a gun.”

“I didn’t need them. I used them. The husband was soft, like the Pillsbury Doughboy. I could have put my fingers clear through him. I walked him into his living room and killed him with his own gun.” He was silent for a moment, and when he spoke again his voice was softer. “I used the knife on Connie just to make it look good. By then she was already dead in her soul. There wasn’t much left of her to kill.”

“And the children?”

“Just tidying up.” One hand slid over my rib cage, and he didn’t take long to find the spot he wanted. He pressed with a fingertip and the pain was like an electric shock, radiating down my arms and legs, taking the resistance right out of me. He waited a moment, then pressed just a little bit harder in the same spot. I felt myself swaying at the brink of unconsciousness, dizzy with vertigo as I stared down into the blackness.

I didn’t know what the hell to do. My options were limited—I couldn’t try anything physical. He was every bit as strong as he claimed to be, as far as I could tell, and I could barely keep myself upright, let alone mount an attack. Whatever I tried would have to be psychological in nature, and I felt similarly overmatched in that department. I didn’t know what strategy was best, whether to talk or to remain silent, whether opposition or agreement was called for.

I tried silence for the time being, perhaps for lack of anything to say. He didn’t speak either, letting his fingers do the talking, pressing various spots on my rib cage and around my shoulder blades and collarbone. His touch was painful, even as his instinct was unerring in guiding him to the best targets, but he wasn’t putting the pressure on. His fingers toyed with me like a mandarin’s with a worry stone.

He said, “I didn’t need a knife with Antoinette. Or a gun.”

“Why did you kill her?”

“She was one of your women.”

“I barely knew her.”

“I killed her with my hands,” he said, speaking the words as if savoring the memory. “Stupid cow. She never knew who I was or why I was punishing her. ‘I’ll give you money,’ she said. ‘I’ll do anything you want,’ she said. She wasn’t a bad fuck. But you already know that.”

“I never slept with her.”

“I didn’t sleep with her,” he said. “I just screwed her like you’d screw a sheep. Or a chicken. You wring their necks as you come, that’s how you do it with chickens. I didn’t wring her neck. I broke it. Snap, like a twig breaking.”

I didn’t say anything.

“And then out the window. It was just luck she hit the boy on the way down.”

“Luck.”

“I was trying for Andrea.”

“Who?”

“His girlfriend. Of course I didn’t expect to hit anybody, but I was trying for her.”

“Why?”

“I’d rather kill a woman,” he said.

I told him he was crazy. I said he was an animal, that he belonged in a cage. He hurt me again, then crossed a leg in front of mine and gave me a shove. I went sprawling on my hands and knees. I scuttled forward, scraping my hands on gravel and broken glass, stumbling over things I couldn’t make out, then spinning around, setting myself, bracing for his approach. He rushed me and I threw a right at him, putting whatever I had into the punch.

He slipped the blow. The follow-through carried me past him and took me right off my feet. I managed one step, then lost it completely and fell full-length upon the ground.

I lay there, gasping for breath, waiting for whatever was coming next.

He let me wait. Then, softly, he said, “I could kill you right now.”

“Why don’t you.”

“You wish I would, don’t you? Good. In a week you’ll beg me.”

I tried to get up onto my hands and knees. He kicked me in the side, just below the rib cage. I scarcely felt it, the pain refused to register, but I stopped trying to get up.

He knelt at my side and put a hand at the back of my head, cupping the base of the skull. His thumb found the hollow behind the earlobe. He was talking to me but my mind was unable to track his sentences.

His thumb dug into the spot he’d found. The pain reached a new level, but I had gone somehow beyond pain. It was as though I were standing to one side, observing the sensation as a phenomenon, experiencing more awe than agony.

Then he turned up the pain a notch. There was already nothing but blackness in front of my eyes, but now the blackness spread behind my eyes as well. There was just one drop of fiery red against a sea of inky black. Then the red shrank to a pinpoint and went out.

I couldn’t have been out long. I came to abruptly, as if someone had thrown a switch. I used to come to like that after a long night of drinking. There was a period of time when I never fell asleep and never woke up. Instead I would pass out and come to.

Everything hurt. I lay still at first, taking an inventory of the pain, trying to assess the extent of the damage. It took me a while, too, to make sure that I was alone. He could have been hunkered down alongside me, waiting for me to move.

When I did get up I did so slowly and tentatively, partly out of prudence, partly of necessity. My body didn’t seem capable of fast movement or sustained activity. When I got up onto my knees, for example, I had to stay there until I summoned up the strength to stand. Then, on my feet at last, I had to wait until the dizziness passed or I would have fallen back down again.

Eventually I found my way through the obstacle course of litter to the fence and groped along it until I got to where the opening had been cut. I emerged on Attorney Street. I remembered that was where I was, but I’d lost all sense of direction and couldn’t tell which way was uptown. I walked to the corner, which turned out to be Rivington, and then I must have turned east instead of west because I wound up back at Ridge Street. I turned left at Ridge and walked two blocks and finally got to Houston Street, and I didn’t have to stand there too long before a cab came along.

I held up a hand and he drew up and slowed down. I started toward him, and I guess he got a good look at me then and didn’t like what he saw, because he stepped on the gas and peeled off.

I would have cursed him if I’d had the strength.

Instead it was all I could do to remain on my feet. There was a mailbox nearby and I walked over and let it take some of my weight. I looked down at myself and was glad I hadn’t wasted breath cursing the cabbie. I was a mess, with both trouser legs laid open at the knee, my jacket and shirtfront filthy, my hands dark with dried blood and embedded dirt and grit. No cabdriver in his right mind would have wanted me in his hack.

But one did, and I can’t say he came across as particularly demented. I stayed there at Ridge and Houston for ten or fifteen minutes, not because I really expected anyone to stop for me but because I couldn’t figure out where the nearest subway entrance might be, or trust myself to cope with it once I did. Three more cabs passed me up, and then one stopped. He may have thought I was a police officer. I was trying my best to give that impression, holding up my billfold as if to display a shield.

When he stopped for me I got the rear door open before he could change his mind. “I’m sober and I’m not bleeding,” I assured him. “I won’t mess up your cab.”

“Fuck the cab,” he said. “I don’t own this heap of shit, and so what if I did? Wha’d they do, jump you and roll you? This is no place for you at this hour, man.”

“Why didn’t you tell me that a couple of hours ago?”

“Hey, you’re not too bad off if you got your sense of humor. I better get you to a hospital. Bellevue’s closest, but maybe you’d rather go someplace else?”

“The Northwestern Hotel,” I said. “That’s on Fifty-seventh and—”

“I know where it’s at, I got a regular pickup five days a week across the street at the Parc Vendome. But are you sure you wouldn’t be better off going to a hospital?”

“No,” I said. “I just want to go home.”

Jacob was at the desk when I stopped to check for messages. If he noticed anything unusual about my appearance, nothing in his manner showed it. Either he was more diplomatic than I’d ever realized or he’d reached that point in the terpinhydrate bottle where relatively few things got his attention.

No calls, thank God. I went to my room, closed the door, and put the chain on. I’d done that once before, a few years back, only to discover that a man who wanted to kill me was waiting for me in the bathroom. I’d only managed to lock myself in with him.

This time, though, all that was waiting for me in the bathroom was the tub, and I couldn’t wait to get into it. But first I braced myself and looked in the mirror.

It wasn’t as bad as I’d feared. I was carrying some bruises and superficial scrapes and scratches, and some of the grit I’d rolled in, but I hadn’t lost any teeth or broken anything or sustained any bad cuts.

I looked like hell all the same.

I got out of my clothes. My suit was beyond salvage; I emptied the pockets and stripped the belt from the slacks and stuffed them and the jacket into the wastebasket. My shirt was ripped and my tie was a mess. I tossed them both.

I drew a hot tub and soaked in it for a long time, let the water drain out and filled it up again. I sat there and soaked while I picked bits of glass and gravel out of the palms of my hands.

I don’t know what time it was when I finally got to bed. I never did look at the clock.

I had swallowed some aspirin before I went to bed, and I took some more as soon as I got up, and another hot bath to draw some of the ache out of muscle and bones. I needed a shave but knew better than to scrape a blade over my face. I found the electric shaver my kids gave me a few Christmases back and did what I could with it.

There was blood in my urine. It’s always a shock to see that, but I’d taken kidney punches before and knew what they did to you. It was unlikely he’d done me any lasting damage. My kidney ached where he’d poked me, and it would probably pain me for a while, but I figured I’d get over it.

I went out and had coffee and a roll and read
Newsday
. Breslin’s column was all about the criminal justice system, and he wasn’t giving it any raves. Another columnist got slightly hysterical on the subject of a death penalty for major narcotics dealers, as if that would make them all weigh the consequences of their actions and turn their talents to investment banking instead.

If the previous day was up to the year’s average to date, there had been seven homicides within the five boroughs in the course of its twenty-four hours.
Newsday
had four of them covered. None were in my neighborhood, and none of the victims had names I found familiar. I couldn’t say for sure, but from what I read it didn’t look as though any of my friends had been murdered yesterday.

I went over to Midtown North but Durkin wasn’t around. I caught the noon meeting at the West Side Y on Sixty-third. The speaker was an actor who’d sobered up on the Coast, and his energy gave a California rah-rah quality to the hour. I walked back to the station house, stopping on the way to get a slice of pizza and a Coke and eat on the street. When I got to Midtown North Durkin was back, holding the phone to his ear and juggling a cigarette and a cup of coffee. He motioned me to a chair and I sat down and waited while he did a lot of listening and not much talking.

He hung up, leaned forward to scribble something on a pad, then straightened up and looked at me. “You look like you walked into a fan,” he said. “What happened?”

“I got in with bad company,” I said. “Joe, I want that bastard picked up. I want to swear out a complaint.”