Big Goodbye, The (2 page)

“That ain’t
his
little girl,” July said. “Look at her. She’s a doll for creeps like ’em young.”

Just as he was supposed to, the man stepped toward us, preparing to protect the dignity of his daughter-bride.

I snapped out a hard left jab—well, as hard as I could with my left—and the punch caught him square on his left cheek.

He staggered back a bit, but didn’t go down.

So I hit him again. This time, a left hook that connected with his right cheek and buckled his knees. He went down, the closing elevator doors bumping into his prostrate body as he did.

Before I could grab him, little Lisa was on top of him, making sure he was okay between turning and yelling obscenities at me.

“We’re here to take you home, Lisa,” I said.

And that was my mistake.

They both perked up when they heard me use her name.

“Your mom hired us to find you and bring you home,” I continued, unaware a guy as sick as Stanley would be paranoid enough to suspect something like this.

“I won’t go,” she said.

“Oh yes you will,” I said, reaching down and grabbing her. “And your daddy’s going to jail.”

When I pulled her off him, Stanley came up with a gun.

That’s me, Jimmy Riley, boy genius.

“Stupid son of a bitch,” I said.

“On the contrary,” Stanley said. “I was ready for—”

“He’s talking about himself,” Ray said as he walked up behind Stanley with a gun of his own. “He should’ve known you’d be packin’ a rod. Put down the heater, Stanley,” Ray said. “I’m a very good shot.”

“Okay,” Stanley said, dropping his head and lowering his gun.

Suddenly, he grabbed Lisa, spinning her around for a shield and sticking the gun to the side of her head.

“Put
your
gun down.”

Behind Stanley I withdrew mine as Ray placed his on the ground.

“Just relax,” Ray was saying.

Stanley spun around to face us, placing Lisa between us.

“Get around there with him,” he yelled. “Drop your gun.”

We did and I did, my little revolver clanking against Ray’s as it hit the floor.

“We don’t want to live if we can’t be together,” Stanley said.

“I’m not going back,” Lisa said. “I’d rather die.” She then cut her wide and wild eyes up toward Stanley. “I’m tired of running. Tired of her chasing us. Shoot me, baby. Let’s die together. Today. Right here. Right now. She’ll just keep sending ’em. She don’t understand. Nobody does.”

Stanley nodded.

“Kick the guns away from you,” he said.

We did.

“Kneel down.”

We did.

“Stanley,” July said, “she’s clearly an unstable and melodramatic little girl. What’s your excuse?”

“She can’t understand,” Lisa said to him. “She’s never been in love.”

As they talked, I felt back to the .22 in my ankle holster with my left hand. My movements were awkward and clumsy. I hadn’t gotten used to using my left yet.

Coughing to cover the sound, I pulled it free.

“Honey, this ain’t love,” July said. “It only feels like it. You’re the one who’s never been loved.”

“Why you fuckin’ floozy,” Lisa said, then turning back to Stanley, “Bump her off, too, Daddy. Do it for me. Whatta you say?”

Stanley thought about it for a minute, then nodded.

At that, Lisa lit up. Bending over toward July and sticking her face out like a child much younger than she was, she said, “Guess who’s gonna take a powder with us, huh? Huh?”

When Stanley let go of Lisa and raised his gun toward July, Ray lunged toward him as I brought up the small revolver and fired it.

The bullet hit his right leg just before he squeezed off a round. He flinched and missed July, the bullet lodging in the elevator wall behind us. Before he could fire again, Ray had tackled him to the ground and taken away his weapon.

Lisa dove for our guns, still on the floor about five feet away, but July kicked them out of reach. She then jumped up and began flailing at July, who easily blocked most of the kicks and hits, and, quickly growing weary, slugged her in the stomach. She doubled over, trying to take in air, but nothing happened. When she finally could take a breath, she began to cry.

A couple of hours later, after Lisa had been picked up by a rotund police matron, and Stanley had been taken into custody and to Lisenby Hospital to have the bullet removed, and my old partner had taken our statements and let us go, the three of us were riding back down in the elevator.

“She was right,” July said almost to herself.

When Ray didn’t say anything, I said, “About what?”

“I never
have
been in love.”

“Neither has she,” I said.

“Have you?” she asked me.

I nodded, images of Lauren flashing in my mind like buoys bobbing in the bay on a stormy night, not daring to speak for fear of what might come out.

“Was it anything like that?”

I remembered how gladly I would have died for Lauren when we were together, how badly I had wanted to die when she left me. I recalled the passion and obsession that had so often bordered on madness, and the way in which nothing else in the world seemed to matter—no, that’s not exactly it, the way there didn’t seem to be anything else in the world when we were together.

I shook my head. “No. Nothing like that.”

And then the elevator doors opened and Lauren was standing there with a dandy I didn’t recognize—the poor grotty sap she had her hooks in now.

The timing couldn’t have been worse. I still had the jeebies from shooting Stanley, still raw from the memories July’s questions had resurrected.

Time seemed to stop as I projected onto him all her lies and betrayal. Instantly, standing there all togged to the bricks and high-hating, he embodied all I hated about her faithlessness and my weakness.

Before I realized what I was doing, I had knocked him down, pinned him to the ground with my body, and was punching him repeatedly in the face with the bottom of my left fist.

Friend and father figure that he was, Ray pulled me off him, and when I tried to get through him to continue my assault, he committed a little assault of his own—on me.

Chapter 2

“I hope he’ll be all right,” Ruth Ann said.

“She’ll do far worse to him,” I said.

We were sitting at the bar in Nick’s.

“Gee, mister, who gave you such a high opinion of women?” she asked, smiling before she took the next sip of her drink.

The playful question was rhetorical, so I didn’t answer. She knew damn well.

Nick’s was a small, dark bar that served hard, cheap liquor and lots of it. It had a Wurlitzer jukebox with fluorescent lighting, a small dance floor, and a couple of pool tables in a room in the back.

Ruth Ann Johnson, a Salvation Army nurse, and I often met here for drinks and conversation late at night when the place was filled with our kind of people. I was nursing a tall-neck bottle of Schlitz, staring into the large mirror on the wall behind the bar. She sat beside me sipping on a martini. In the mirror, I could see a few couples dancing in front of the jukebox, the colorful lights of its pipes and grille panels flashing on their faces. Beyond them in the back room, a handful of men in uniform from Tyndall Field and the naval section base were drinking and shooting pool like they meant it.

“I’m worried about you,” she said.

“Because I hit a guy?”

“Hit? You pummeled him, soldier, and you know it.”

I didn’t say anything. I had asked her not to call me that, but the more I asked, the more she said it. She knew better, but it was an assumption nearly every stranger made. I hadn’t been wounded in combat. I never got to serve. I got tangled up with the serious-intentioned end of a shotgun while I was still with the Panama City Police Department and any hopes I had of serving went the way of my right arm.

Unlike me, Ruth Ann had served in the war, helping wounded soldiers in the South Pacific before getting wounded herself. I think it was our wounds that made us such good drinking buddies, though we never really talked about my missing arm or her missing leg. I found mine a source of embarrassment, but I wasn’t sure why she avoided the subject of her heroism.

“You think he’ll press charges?” she asked.

I shrugged. “Probably not if it means explaining to his wife why he was at a swanky hotel with another doll.”

“How you know he’s married?”

“It’s my business,” I said with a smile.

I glanced at the bullet hole in the mirror behind the bar, the web-like veins spreading out from it, and recalled a recent case of marital unhappiness involving Angel Adams and her hood husband, Mickey.

“I thought trouble was your business?”

I laughed.

Though I’d never seen her get all dolled up, not even once, Ruth Ann was still the kind of girl guys called doll. She had thick blonde hair worn above her shoulders and flipped out on the ends and big blue eyes that looked interested even when they weren’t. She was small and looked like somebody’s cute kid sister.

“Hey doll face.”

I turned to see a sailor leaning against the bar on the other side of Ruth Ann.

“What’ll you have?”

“Some more quiet conversation with my friend here,” she said, jerking her head back toward me, her blonde hair swishing about as she did.

“You with lefty?” he asked, leaning around her to glare at my missing right.

Before she could answer, I spoke up.

“Tell you what,” I said. “I was right-handed before it got blown off, but I’ll arm wrestle you for her.”

“Sure, soldier, I’ll take your girl,” he said.

I turned around and took a few steps so I could put my left arm on the bar and move away from our drinks some. He strutted around, placed his hat on the stool next to him and his elbow on the bar.

“Don’t go nowhere doll,” he said to Ruth Ann. “This’ll only take a second.”

The moment he finished speaking, as he was still looking at her, I reached up and grabbed the back of his head and slammed his face down into the bar. His nose and forehead smacked the marble bar top but good and it knocked him out cold. He fell to the floor face up and didn’t move.

I moved back down beside Ruth Ann and took a long pull on my bottle of Schlitz, eyeing the other sailors in the mirror. I didn’t think this guy was with them, and I must’ve been right because they continued their game without more than a passing interest in their fallen comrade.

“You not worried about being so . . . What’s the word I’m looking for? . . .
eager
. . . to make with the mauling?”

“I didn’t maul him,” I said.

“I was talking about the guy earlier today,” she said. “Jeez you’re dropping guys all over town.”

I started to say something, but she cut me off. “You should talk to someone.”

“I do.”

“A professional.”

“She is.”

She turned and looked at me, her big blue eyes wide. “Really?”

“That so surprising?”

“Jimmy Riley talking to a shrink?” she said. “Well, heck yeah.”

“The force sent me to her when I got shot. When I left the force I just kept going.”

“Just keep the surprises coming, soldier, I don’t mind,” she said. “But have you considered maybe it ain’t workin’ so good?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I didn’t
kill
either of ’em.”

Chapter 3

“Lauren Lewis is here to see you,” July said.

My quickening pulse began to pound inside my constricting throat.

I had just returned from the small library around the block with a bag of books when July had eased into my office and closed the door behind her. She waited in front of my desk, as she always did, while I finished the sentence I was reading, and when I looked up, I caught her casting an eyeball over the novels and philosophy and psychology texts with only a mild interest.

“Really?”

Suddenly, the hairline at the top of my forehead was moist, my mouth dry.

“She asked for you, but I could take her in to see Ray.”

“Show her in,” I said.

“But—”

“Show her in.”

Dropping the book on the scarred wooden desk with the others, I jumped up and looked out my second-story window, across downtown Panama City. The traffic on Harrison was light, the sidewalks mostly empty. The unseen morning sun behind me cast a warm glow on the sleepy streets, but I found no peace or strength in any of it, so I sat back down.

July didn’t usher Lauren in so much as stand aside and allow her to enter, and I couldn’t help but think that the way she stood, leaning against my door and arching her back to accentuate her nearly flawless figure, was the female equivalent of a man flexing for another man.

When Lauren had walked in, she glanced around, noting—I could tell because I knew how she thought—that in the year that had passed, the old walls had remained bare.

Unlike the first time July had shown Lauren into my office, she didn’t take her coat, offer her coffee, or close the door.

I resisted the urge to stand, and I forced myself to look right into her dark eyes as if for the first time.

Swallowing hard to ensure my voice wouldn’t break, I attempted a casual, “Lauren.”

“Are you following me?” she asked.

For a moment I couldn’t speak, guilt gripping my vocal cords.

“What?” I asked, my voice filled with a surprise as brittle as my attempt at casualness had been.

I tried to laugh it off as inane or absurd, but images of a desperate man hiding in the shadows undermined my attempt. Nearly a year had passed, and I didn’t recognize that man any longer, but I still hated his helplessness, loathed his lack of self-control. His existence had been a brief and solitary one. Lauren never knew of it. As far as I knew, only my counselor did.

“I remember one time you said if you ever wanted to follow me I’d never know it, but . . .”

“I’m not following you,” I said as if I never had, my voice filled with the wounded pride of an innocent man.

She collapsed back in her chair and the familiar scent of Paris perfume drifted across my desk.

Beneath her dark brown hair, combed smooth across the top and hanging in soft curls above her shoulders, her flawless skin seemed nearly too perfect, the almond eyes beneath the razor sharp eyebrows nearly too dark, too deep, too . . . Nearly, but not too.