Play It Again (20 page)

“Well,” said Bertelli with a shrug, “things being what they are with the lieutenant, there’s not a whole lot I can do officially. In fact, I was kinda hoping you might do something with it, R.J.”

Casey looked at R.J. and raised an eyebrow.

“I got just the thing,” R.J. said.

CHAPTER 24

Outside the precinct R.J. flagged a cab. As it pulled to the curb, a bald man in a three-piece suit shoved at Casey with an expensive briefcase and grabbed for the door handle.

R.J. yanked him back by the collar and the belt and walked him into a lightpost.

“Hey, what the fuck—” the bald guy started to say.
BONG.
R.J. rang his forehead off the post.

“Sorry,” R.J. said. “This cab is taken.”

“You’re in a lot of trouble, asshole. I’m a lawyer.”

“Then it sounds like
you’re
the one in trouble,” R.J. said. The guy thought he was going to say more, but when R.J. took half a step toward him he shut up.

R.J. turned and, stepping to the cab, opened the door for Casey, who glared at him before getting in.

R.J. heard steps behind him and turned. The lawyer, briefcase raised, was rushing at him. But at the last minute he rushed right past, pretending he was just hailing another cab.

Grinning, R.J. got in.

“We could have gotten another cab easily enough, R.J.”

He turned to Casey. She still looked miffed.

He shrugged. “So could he. In fact, he did.”

“I can take care of myself, you know. And I don’t like the idea of having you running around like a cheap thug defending my honor.”

“Listen, I’m a very expensive thug.”

“At least stop looking so pleased with yourself, like you just did something noble.”

R.J. gave her his best sour face and turned to look out the window.

I don’t get it, he thought. If I did nothing I’d be a spineless, gutless weeny. So I run the guy off and I’m a thug. He sighed and wished he could figure this woman out.

“Where are you taking me?” she said after several minutes of silence.

She wasn’t sulking anymore. She looked composed, cool, completely neutral, and that bothered him just as much: that she could shake it off so fast, like whatever he did was not really that important to her.

Get a grip,
he told himself.

“We’re going to see a friend of mine,” he said, holding up the brown envelope Bertelli had given them. It contained twenty photocopies of the sketch.

She arched an eyebrow. “You have friends?”

“Just a couple.”

“And what does this one do? Break legs for a bookie?”

R.J. grinned. “That’s my
other
friend. This guy is in urban intelligence.”

“Say what?”

“Hookshot is a little hard to explain,” he told her.

She shook her head. “I’ll bet.”

“I’m giving him the composite, see what he can do with it.”

“We’re counting on a guy named Hookshot?”

“That’s right.”

She looked away. “Just don’t ask me to team up with anybody named Tinkerbell.”

* * *

Casey was not impressed with Hookshot’s office, either. The midtown news kiosk was shabby and festooned with cheesy tabloids. It looked its age.

“Oh, brother,” Casey muttered as they got out of the cab. “I’ve never seen a newsstand that beat up.”

“Relax, will you?” R.J. told her.

“It looks like a Bowery Boys set.”

They walked around to the front of the kiosk. A middle-aged man in a gray coat hurried past. At the last moment he snaked out a hand and grabbed for a
Times.

From inside the booth there was a streak of silver, so fast it was only a bright blur. The gray-coated man jerked to a halt.

His coat sleeve was pinned to the counter by a steel hook.

On the other end of the hook was Hookshot.

He flashed his teeth at the man. “Fifty cents, please,” Hookshot said.

“Jesus Christ,” said the man and Casey at the same time.

The man fished out the change as R.J. laughed.

“Hook
-shot?” Casey said.

“You got it.”

“Jesus Christ,” she repeated as the gray-coated man scuttled away.

“Nice snag,” R.J. told his friend.

Hookshot gave Casey the once-over. “You too, R.J.”

“This is Casey Wingate, Hookshot.”

“The TV producer?”

R.J. nodded. “That’s right.

Hookshot looked doubtful. “Weeelll, if R.J. says you’re okay…”

“I do say.”

Hookshot held out his hand. “Nice to meet you.”

Casey took his hand and shook it. “It’s mutual, I’m sure.”

“I got something for you,” R.J. told him, flipping the envelope onto the counter.

“This have to do with your mama?”

“That’s right. I need your help.”

Hookshot opened the envelope. “You got it.” He pulled out the picture and studied it for a minute.

“He looks like a shoe salesman,” Hookshot said, studying the picture. “You sure that’s him?”

“That’s him,” R.J. said, wishing he felt that much confidence.

“Uh-huh. You want me to check all the Thom McAns in Manhattan? ’Cause I look at this face, and it ain’t a Florsheim’s face, know what I mean?”

“I know.”

“Maybe I oughta take a shoehorn along.”

“All right, Hookshot. I got twenty copies in there. Pass ’em out to your best boys.”

Hookshot shook his head. “I told you we don’t use that word, R.J. They the minimensch.”

“I don’t care what you call ’em. Just find this guy, all right?”

Hookshot smiled. “If he’s out there, we’ll find him.”

* * *

It is dark now. He’s finished three or four drinks. The greasy sandwich he ate as he sat at the bar lies in his stomach like a lead weight, but that doesn’t matter.

It is time.

He feels the thing inside him uncoil and stretch in preparation for what he will do tonight.

He stands up and stretches too. The clock over the bar says it’s ten
after seven. That gives him twenty minutes to get across town; plenty of time.

He settles his bar tab and leaves a tip. The bartender tells him thank you without really seeing him, just like everyone else never saw him, but that’s all right. He’ll be seen later tonight, he is sure of that.

* * *

Frank had been coming to the meetings here in St. Mark’s for twenty-two years. He had been leading the meetings off and on for the last eight. Although the position of secretary was supposed to rotate, somehow it kept coming back to Frank, and so he stood in front of them tonight and scanned the faces as he had so many times.

There were two new faces tonight: a woman who had clearly come with Allison C, and a plain-looking man sitting by himself in the back row.

Frank nodded and cleared his throat. “My name is Frank. I’m an alcoholic.”

“Hi, Frank,” the others chorused back to him.

After the standard opening of the greeting and a few quick announcements, Frank went back to his chair and the meeting began.

A large man named Ben stood up. He was almost a caricature of a big drinker, with his red nose and big belly. He was sweating heavily, although the evening was cool. Frank recognized the signs: Ben was wrestling with an almost overwhelming need for a drink. Talking about it would help. So Ben talked.

He talked about having a drink with the boys, how it had helped him know who he was, and how it had slowly turned into lots of drinks with the boys, and finally into drinking with or without boys, girls, or dogs. Until his life was a series of drinks, nothing more.

When he was done, Allison’s friend introduced herself. Her name was Susan and she had a story to tell too. It was a familiar one: She’d started drinking just a little to ease the pressure of job and family expectations. The drinks steadied her, gave her confidence. She believed the family and co-workers really liked her more when she drank. So she drank more.

Soon the downward spiral began: lost jobs, loved ones pulling away, her life crumbling around her, her health deteriorating. And now she had almost nothing left to lose—except her drinking, the one friend who had stayed with her no matter how bad things got.

And now she realized it was not her friend at all and she didn’t know what she was going to do.

There was a short pause when Susan sat down again. Then the other newcomer got to his feet.

For a moment he just stood in the back of the room. Then he moved slowly up the aisle to the front.

He turned and faced the meeting, an ordinary-looking man—and yet, thought Frank, there was something about his eyes. They were gray and gleamed coldly.

“My name is John,” he said softly, “I’m an alcoholic.”

“Hi, John,” the others said.

“I am—an ordinary man,” he said, looking around the room at them. “My face is standard issue—I could be anybody. When you see me on the street, you don’t give me a second glance, not ever. Even my name is ordinary: John. Everything about me is so completely plain that you would never guess there is a war going on inside me twenty-four hours a day.

“I’m a drunk.”

He paused here and swept his chilly eyes across the group. Frank felt a small shiver as the eyes passed over him, but he could not say why.

“As long as I can remember, I have been plain. Average. Ordinary. Banal. Common. Prosaic. Routine, dry, dull, colorless, drab, lackluster, monotonous, tedious, uninteresting, everyday, unexceptional, mundane. Ordinary.”

His voice rose through the last sentence, and when he paused it was so quiet Frank thought he could hear a mouse moving through the church upstairs and he realized he was holding his breath.

“Ordinary,” John resumed quietly. “Except when I drink. When I drink I feel special.” He slammed his hands together and Frank nearly jumped out of his seat.

“Drinking makes me
special.
I know that has happened to you too, or you wouldn’t be here. You like to feel special; we all do. We’re all human. The same things are inside all of us.” There was a strange gleam in his gray eyes as he said that, and once again Frank shivered.

But John had them all in the palm of his hand, and Frank thought he had never seen anything like it, not in all his twenty-two years of coming to AA meetings. Sometimes there were meetings that degenerated into can-you-top-this sessions as each speaker tried to go one better than the speaker before. But this topped them all. This John was a real spellbinder.

His story was not so different. It could have been the story of almost anyone here. But the way he told it…

Frank felt gooseflesh forming up and down his back as John told of drinking a fifth of vodka a day before his fifteenth birthday. Something about the story seemed like a performance, and that was a little unnerving. But it was so compelling, Frank eventually let go and just listened, swept away like everyone else in the room.

* * *

Look at them eat it up. So gullible. So weak.

Rabbits.

They deserve to die, all of them. Huddling miserably together to trade their pitiful stories of puking and humiliation.

And he feels the slow uncoiling inside him, the wonderful thing stirring, waking, becoming fully ready for what lies ahead.

This is, after all, just a warmup, a curtain raiser. The featured entertainment will begin soon after.

Very soon now.

CHAPTER 25

“I still think we ought to send the picture to the local news,” Casey said. “Let them put it on the air.”

R.J., bent over to unlock his door, looked up at her. “You can’t really believe that,” he said as he pushed the door open.

“I know you don’t like TV people, R.J., but you shouldn’t let a prejudice stand in the way of doing something right.”

R.J. snorted as she followed him in. “If I don’t like cats, that’s a prejudice. If I don’t like piranhas, that’s common sense.”

Something hit him hard between the shoulder blades. He turned to see that it was Casey’s shoulder bag. It was heavy. It hurt.

“I am not a piranha,” she said. “Buster, you had better respect what I do or I’ll teach you the hard way.”

“I wasn’t talking about you,” R.J. protested. “I just
meant—”

“What is it you think I do for a living, R.J.?”

“I know what you do. I’m sorry about the piranha remark.”

“Because you have been making cracks about this just about nonstop, and I’ve had it up to here.”

“All right, all right, for Christ’s sake, I said I’m sorry.” R.J. held up both hands.

She snorted at him and spun away toward the bedroom.

R.J. followed.

“Casey. Would you hold it for a second?”

She kept going into the bedroom.