Feelers (26 page)

I will be brutally honest, and please do not think less of me, Father: I still get a great deal of satisfaction thinking about those two opening the bag, and Fanny giving Speedy an earful about
how it was all his fault somehow, and the subsequent gloom in the Malibu. Perhaps they would pull over to a rest area on the Belt Parkway to try to think of their next move; maybe they would pull over next to the Verrazano Bridge. You would not have to hear a word that was said to understand their defeat. Just watch them from afar, Speedy downcast, Fanny pacing and flailing her hands around, the approaching storm clouds roiling the sky over the giant expanse of the bridge over the narrows.

Devastation and defeat. What a glorious sight.

I sigh contentedly every time I imagine it.

Never saw either of them again outside of my mind.

I HOPE YOU ARE SITTING
down, Father. I was not when I heard this next part, but fortunately I was at Oscar’s, so a bar stool and a stiff drink were at hand. Mim was reading aloud from her paper, and Slim and Buddy and Buddy Dyke and Oscar were riveted.

I could give you the straight newspaper account Mim read to us from the
Daily News,
but it does not do the story justice, so I will tell it to you my way, the way I imagine it all happened, knowing the people involved, painting you a picture. It is for dramatic effect, yes? Any idiot can read the
Daily News
account. They did not even mention the storm.

Lightning flashed and crackled across the sky as Danny entered the white hospital corridors by way of the delivery entrance. There were too many cops standing around the emergency room entrance. After killing four people, Danny figured there might just be a description of him if one of the bodies had been discovered, and no criminal enjoys the company of cops under any circumstances.

He passed between two oxygen supply trucks loaded with canisters. Both were idling, and nobody in them. Even in his
tense and eager mood, Danny reflected how it was nefarious that oxygen suppliers would leave their engines running. Perhaps in an effort to reduce the amount of free, unpaid-for oxygen?

Climbing the stairs to the loading bay, he went through the swinging doors, past a room where the oxygen supply men were drinking coffee and chewing the fat, past the doorway to the shipping and receiving room crowded with boxes, and through more swinging doors into the main corridor of the hospital, next to the elevators. He pushed the up button, and it lit up.

Danny waited with hands folded before him, Mr. Manners in his brown plaid shirt, brown jacket, brown Gap ball cap, and brown Donna Karan sunglasses.

Some nurses came and stood next to him. They smiled at him, and he nodded.

See, Father, these are the details the newspaper would not supply. Isn’t this much better? I think so.

So Danny is standing with these nurses, waiting, and an elevator arrives with someone on a gurney and an IV. They exit, Danny and the nurses enter, and a doctor arrives at the last second. So there are four of them.

“I’m sorry,” Danny began, smiling sadly at the nurses and doctor. “The nurse told me which floor to go to, and I’m so worried that I forgot what floor she said. A friend of mine was assaulted. I don’t know how bad he is. Could you tell me which floor I should go to for someone like that?”

Danny exited at the fourth floor and went to the nurse’s station. There was a large black woman in a white uniform cradling a telephone between her jowl and prodigious shoulder.

“Excuse me, sorry to bother you, but my brother is here. Louie Franco.”

She held up a finger.
Wait.

She muttered something about how they needed more oxygen tanks for someone and hung up. Then she flipped through some computer printouts.

“Room 404.” She pointed a thick finger down the hall. “Visiting hours are almost over. You have fifteen minutes.”

Room 404? That was the number of the motel room at the thump and bump where he had beaten Dexter’s face into a bloody pulp with the telephone. Danny smiled at the absurdity of the coincidence. It was coincidence, wasn’t it? “Thank you. I won’t be long.”

He strode down the corridor and pushed through the partially open door. There were two beds, one left, one right, separated by a curtain. On either side was a dark window splashed with rain and vibrating with the storm’s thunder.

In the bed on the right was an older gentleman with ginger hair on his head and a lot more covering his arms and the one leg that was out of the sheets. He was watching television and looked at Danny.

Danny removed his sunglasses and hat out of politeness. “Sorry,” he said to the man, who stared at him as if he had intruded. Or was it something else? “Are you Louie?”

The man stared blankly and jerked his thumb toward the other side of the curtain.

Against the wall was a bed and one of those tables that swings over the bed so that the patient can eat and drink. In the bed was a man with slicked-back long blond hair. His eyes were closed. His face was badly bruised on one side, and his left arm was in a fresh white cast.

There was a chair next to the bed, and Danny sat in it. He leaned in close to the man’s ear.

“Excuse me. Louie?”

Frog awoke with a start. “Hmm?” He turned his head and looked at Danny with confusion. “Yeah? Who are you?”

Danny smiled serenely. He suddenly felt he would get the five million dollars after all.

“We need to go.”

“Go? What d’you mean?” Frog held up his cast, as if to demonstrate that he was injured.

“We need to go. Now. To get my five million.”

Frog looked confused a moment, narrowing his eyes, and then he suddenly understood what was about to transpire.

Danny had an ice pick to Frog’s throat.

“Please, let’s go,” he whispered, securing the Gap hat back on his head.

“But . . . but . . .”

Danny just shook his head sadly.
No buts
. He threw back the covers and put a finger to his lips.
Quiet.

Frog slid to his feet, looking feeble in his flimsy hospital gown. Danny put his arm around Frog as if to help him walk and led him past the partition. Charlie Binder was in the next bed frantically pushing the nurse call button under the sheets.

Danny led Frog out of the room, the point of the ice pick dimpling the captive’s flank. Right where the kidney was. If the shiv plunged four inches it would penetrate the kidney and Frog would be dead within minutes. Well, they were in a hospital, they might be able to save him, but Danny did not know or care. The way he had his arm around the patient, it looked like he was helping him walk. The large nurse was just leaving her nurse’s station as they approached the elevators.

“Where are you taking him?” she demanded.

Danny smiled politely. “He wanted to get some circulation to his legs. Just down and back, is all.”

She did not look happy about it but continued on her way to answer Charlie’s frantic call.

The elevator doors opened as they approached. Two policemen inside. The cops stopped talking and looked at Danny, who decided he had better go ahead and get in with them.

Frog goggled at the police, trying to ask for help with his eyes, but they continued their conversation, not looking at him.

On the ground floor, the police turned one way, Danny and Frog the other. The policemen’s radios squelched with some excited chatter as Danny led Frog through the doors marked
LOADING DOCK
.

They passed by an oxygen deliveryman going the other way, rolling a tank, a delivery for the big nurse on the fourth floor. The man looked back at the duo curiously, but Danny saw no need to explain anything to a deliveryman. They passed the storage area, and there was a redheaded hospital worker with tinted glasses and a clipboard. He looked up and said, “Hey!”

Danny walked a little faster, even though Frog was stiffening his legs.

“Please don’t,” Danny warned, breaking the skin over Frog’s kidney with the point of the ice pick.

In the loading bay were the two oxygen trucks, still idling, rain pounding their roofs. Danny opened the driver’s door to the one at the bottom of the stairs.

“You drive.”

Frog, his long blond hair already sopping wet, held up his cast pitifully. “I can’t, I . . . Danny, listen, the money . . .”

Danny backhanded Frog hard across the mouth. “Please get in and slide over.”

The red-haired hospital worker with the clipboard was standing on the loading platform.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” he yelled over a clap of thunder. Curling his lip with resolve, he added, “I’m calling the cops.” He pulled a radio from his back pocket and began speaking into it rapidly. By the time he got a response, Danny was in the driver’s seat, and Frog was shoved to the opposite side fumbling for the door handle to get out. The door was locked, but in his panic he did not notice.

Danny threw the truck in reverse and cut to one side, clipping a brick wall. It had been a long time since he drove. He slammed the truck into drive, and the oxygen bottles in back rattled as he roared from the hospital loading zone onto the street.

Frog was still fumbling with the door, so Danny took the ice pick and lanced him through the cheek, right into the teeth. Frog howled with pain and left the door alone to massage the searing pain in his injured cheek and gums.

Danny came to a halt at a light. He began feeling the dashboard for the switch to the windshield wipers, and his forearm rubbed the indicator handle, turning them on. He did not know what he did to make that happen, but as long as it happened he could not be bothered to think about what caused it.

In the side mirror, he saw police cars with their blue flashing lights, and they swung into the loading dock area. Before him, car headlights flashed by in both directions on the avenue, the angry black skies beyond rippling and flickering with electricity.

The traffic light was still red. Danny peered through the downpour both ways on the avenue, inching the truck forward. Rain thrummed the truck’s roof.

He checked the side mirror again.

“The money’s not here,” Frog sobbed from behind where he held his bleeding cheek. “We can’t get it now, it already went.”

Danny put his finger to his lips again, holding up the ice pick as a warning that made Frog cower. In the side mirror, the rain-blurred image of flashing police cars returned. They were backing out of the loading bay.

Foot on the gas, Danny ran the light and swung the truck out into traffic on a wide right turn. He sideswiped a minivan, which jumped the divider and crashed onto its side. Sparks flew from the minivan’s wheel rims as it scuttered and rumbled on its side into an oncoming cement truck. The cement truck fishtailed only slightly as it rammed the front of the van, air brakes locked. The van crumpled and bucked as it reversed course and was pushed into the intersection.

Danny sped down the avenue, the lights now against him, but he paused at the next light long enough to sneak through. Blue from police lights flashed on his face. He didn’t even need to look in the side mirror to know the cops were gaining on him.

Frog saw the blue light dancing in the side mirror and had a glimmer of hope. Then Danny surged the truck through another intersection, car brakes screeching around them. But they made it to the other side, the sound of cars punching into each other on both sides.

Frog stared at Danny’s ice blue eyes fixed on the road ahead, which were pulsing with the blue police lights throbbing in the mirrors. Jaw fixed, Danny clasped the ice pick in his right hand against the steering wheel.

He’s going to get us killed.
Frog realized that he must do something or he would not survive the encounter. Danny was insane.

At the next intersection, Danny stopped and looked left.

Frog lurched forward, swinging his cast at Danny.

But not before Danny stepped on the gas.

Lightning bristled across the sky, thunder rumbling like a bowling ball approaching the pins.

Danny’s head slammed the driver’s window. The truck veered left across the intersection. It clipped and spun a Mini Cooper, veered farther left, and just missed a light pole as it jumped the curb. Oxygen bottles jumped from their racks.

The front entrance of a brick building proved no match for the truck, which punched through the glass and metal frame and plowed into the guard station. Barreling right into the metal security counter, the truck’s front end pushed the elderly Sudanese security guard behind it up against an inner brick wall, cutting him in half at the waist like a butcher knife through a sausage.

The brick wall gave and, as it came down, chipped the top off of two oxygen cylinders.

There was a spark.

It took the fire department all night to put out that fire, even in the rain. They had to be careful because oxygen canisters were still exploding hours later. Two firemen were injured by shrapnel.

Yes, East Brooklyn will long remember the night Storage Hut burned to the ground.

I know I will.

WELL, AT LEAST I DID
not get killed in that fiery truck crash on a stormy night in East Brooklyn. I think you have to try to look on the bright side of things. But when eight hundred grand in tax-free money is incinerated at the Storage Hut by an idiot like Frog? Yes, I blame him for this disaster. Why did he have to choose that particular intersection to clobber Danny? Perhaps fate chose it for him. Perhaps the fate was as much mine as his.

As you might imagine, Father Gomez, my dismay at what had occurred resulted in a malaise for a few days. I thought perhaps opening the envelope from Genealogy Consultants LLC would cheer me up. According to them, my last name is French, not Spanish, and my family originally came from Marseille. I did not want to be French. Who does? Perhaps the French, and only the French.

Still, it was interesting that my father had actually spent part of his childhood in La Paz. I will reveal more on this at the end of this confession, because it explains the big package.