Rough Men (22 page)

“Oh, no, Lou. You’re a prince.”

“Shut the fuck up. All I did was get the word that there were some pictures out there and made some calls. Carlos and his nasty little buddies came through. MS-Thirteen gets a bad rap, the way he tells it. Other gangs will unite just to try and get rid of them, but that’s like putting out a fire by filling your dick with gas and commencing to piss on the flames—it doesn’t even sound good in theory. These people are not to be fucked with, not with their money and especially not personally. You’ve done both.”

“I know that. How do we make this right?”

“We don’t, Will. Or at least, we don’t for you. I tend to land on my feet. You look to be on life
numero nueve
, as our friends from El Salvador might say. Come on now, stand up. And leave that fucking backpack where it is. I can tell by the way you’re hanging onto it that you’ve got a piece in there.”

Will stood, casting a brief, mournful look at the backpack. It was his last link to survival; he was losing the strings that connected him with life by the second. Lou slid open a pocket door that Will had often noticed but never seen the other side of, and Lou ushered him in with his left arm, the one without the heater. Will walked through the door and stopped, almost falling backward.

The room had no windows, but did have a second door. That one wore a padlock. There was a sink, a toilet, and a man lying on a Murphy bed on the far side of the room. The man had tattoos all over his face, and he wore a very well-tailored suit, the right side of the coat soiled with a round, red spot the size of a small pizza. It was no longer very wet, so maybe he was no longer
bleeding. But the man’s ochre pallor told the tale—gut shot, and badly.

The wounded man barked something in Spanish, and Lou pulled off his second trick of the day, responding in kind before turning to Will.

“Your friend shot this man,” he said. “I’m guessing it happened when we were driving away. I saw you admiring the scars on the Caddy out front, putting the pieces together. One of those bullets drove through my friend, my partner on this deal. He lost a stable manufacturing business, a lot of friends, and he’s at least a day away from the sort of doctor he needs.”

“That’s a tough spot. Can’t say I’ll lose sleep over it, though. That’s the asshole that got my son killed.”

“No,” said Lou, “your son came in on a job and got nosy, that’s why he’s got a toe tag. You came looking for what happened, but your ego never let you see that everything around you was bigger than your want to see justice. Your son killed people, he robbed people—he got what he gave to another man just minutes before. He made you into a lunatic.”

Will considered that, giving a look to the waiting-to-die MS-13 leader and then back to Lou and his gun.

“How long have you been living here, Lou?”

“A long time, Will. A very long time. That last divorce destroyed me. I tried to hint around about that, but you never seemed too interested. This was a way out of that, a perfect one. Crack the mayor open on the street like a rotten egg and get paid for doing it.”

“Lou, you were fucking her best friend. What was she supposed to do?”

“An affair should have nothing to do with alimony. No judge could ever make me believe otherwise, and you won’t, either. Not that it matters. I’m broke, and what can you do about that?”

“You heard me talking to Alison, about a new contract?”

“Yes. So what? You were just bullshitting me. You’re a two-time lucky hack that managed to get off the sauce long enough to write the denouement of your own life. Nothing more.”

“Yeah, OK. Maybe. So you’re fucked on money. I guess this is just the end of it.”

The man on the foldout bed groaned loudly and began to piss blood onto the floor, the moan turning high-pitched, and as Lou lowered the gun to frown in disgust at the smell of urine and death, Will charged him, all fear gone. The revolver barked once as Will hit him.

Will landed with Lou under him and began smashing his fists against him as fast as he was able. Lou had fired once, and Will hadn’t felt anything, at least not yet. The wounded man on the foldout was screaming in a language that Will wasn’t sure he would’ve understood even with a fluency in Spanish.

Will connected with Lou’s nose, hard enough to feel the cartilage shift under his hand and to force a high-pitched squeal from his attorney. Will could feel Lou trying to turn under him, and he brought his elbow down in a point to attack Lou’s ribs, eliciting more pained noises.

He rose up to punch Lou again. He was starting to like the way using his hands on the lawyer felt; it was an adrenaline dump strong enough to make him forget that he was exhausted. He cocked his fist, and something smashed into the back of his head, toppling him, and the world faded from gray to black, then drifted back to gray.

Will was on his hands and knees. He could see Lou next to him, slowly attempting to stand, the revolver blindly menacing the room as he wobbled. The MS-13 leader was staggering across the room, hanging onto a piece of the chair he’d used to smash Will with before collapsing next to the Murphy, the wound to
his side more than doubled now and leaking blood so congealed that it had the consistency of strawberry jam. Will watched Lou stand, slowly, the pistol rising, and Will drove his body into his legs, the gun going off again.

Will assumed that the second shot from the revolver must have hit the banger, because he still felt no gunshot wound, but the gangster was screaming. Not the whimpering that he was doing when his bladder loosed itself, but really howling now. Will wanted to tell him to stop, to please just shut up, to ask Lou to stop, that they could work something out. He knew that was impossible, though, so instead of holding up a white handkerchief, Will held Lou’s right wrist with his left, the revolver moving back and forth, up and down, over his face and then away from it. Will slipped his right fist past Lou’s left to try and punch him again, but the lawyer saw it coming, and when Will shifted his weight to add leverage to the shot, Lou bucked his hips. Will fell off of him, and Lou stood. Blood was dripping from his mouth, and he started to raise the revolver. If there was a soul behind Lou’s eyes, Will couldn’t see it.

“You fuck! You broke my nose!” Lou shouted, barely loud enough to be heard over the screaming from the dying man. Lou walked over to the banger, seeming to consider the screaming man, and shot him in the head. The gunshot was deafening, but then the room was silent. Then he turned back to Will. “I wish I could let you walk away, Will, but you know I can’t.”

Will watched from ten feet away as the revolver was pointed at his legs, chest, and finally, his face. There was an explosion, and the world went to black and stayed there this time.

W
ill found himself sitting on a beach.
He had no idea where, and then he saw the bridge, the Mac. He stood, feeling sand between the toes of his bare feet, and began scanning his environment.

Save for a man a few hundred feet away down the beach, closer to the bridge, he was alone. Will was drawn to the man like a junkie to a bag of white powder and began walking toward him, and at the exact same time, the man began to walk in his direction. As the man got closer, Will came to the realization that he knew him. As they came even closer, he knew that he knew him well, and at less than a hundred feet away, he knew that the man was Alex. Walking faster, then galloping into a run, Will ran to his son.

Alex had stopped walking when Will finally got to him, had turned to stare at the water. He glanced at Will, then back to the water. If Alex recognized him, he didn’t say.

“Alex,” said Will, “how are you?”

“I’m fine.”

“Are you waiting for something?”

Alex pointed at a flag stuck into the sand up the beach. It was a red pennant stuck onto a wooden dowel rod. “Waiting for a ride.”

“To where?”

“The other side,” said Alex, smiling. “I’ve got just enough money.” Will’s son held his hand out, palm open, and Will could see three silver dollars, utterly unlike any silver dollars he’d ever
seen. Richard Nixon had replaced Kennedy, and the minting of the money had been done poorly. They looked cheaply made. “Where are you headed, mister?” Alex asked him.

“I don’t know. I just woke up here. Do you recognize me?”

“No.”

“We know each other, though. How else would I have known your name?”

Alex shrugged and put the change back in his pocket. “I don’t know. I just figured you knew mine, but I didn’t know yours. It happens.”

“I suppose.”

“Do you have money for the ferryman?”

“No,” said Will, checking the pockets on his shorts. “I don’t have anything.”

“He’s not going to let you on the boat. Look, you can see him coming now.”

Alex was right. Will could see a boat coming. For some reason, the sight of it made him feel sick. Watching the boat come closer, Will could see that it was all black, a bigger boat, but not a yacht like some folks kept in the lakes. He could see a dog on the prow of the boat, an ugly black thing, and he could hear its barking carried by the wind. Twin smells—sulfur and shit—were coming from the lake, and Will could see steam rising from the water. Looking at the bridge, Will would have sworn that it was broken, shattered into the water. He blinked, and it was normal, yet warped somehow. The Mac, but not.

Alex peeled off his shirt and said, “Time for me to go, mister.”

Will watched him walk into the water, never flinching at the heat, just wading into it until it was deep enough for him to swim, and then Alex was slowly swimming to the boat, which was now less than fifty feet from shore.

The dog was much more clearly visible now. It was barking and roaring aboard the slowly rocking boat, and then Will could
see Alex aboard the black vessel. There was a man there, and Will wanted to shout to Alex, to tell him to get back in the water, to swim back, that there would be another boat, a better one. Instead, Will watched Alex fish in his pocket and drop the coins into the man’s gloved hand. The man closed his fist.

W
hen Will woke, he saw Alison’s face.
There was a machine making a screaming, beeping noise, and he felt sure that he was in Lou’s office, the last seconds of his life playing out as he died. It wasn’t quite his life flashing before his eyes, but it could have been a lot worse. He found himself trying to speak, trying to move his arms and legs, but everything was frozen, as though he were glued to the floor with some insanely strong industrial adhesive.

Suddenly, Alison was gone, her face replaced by the face of someone he didn’t know. The beeping grew louder, and an incredible force smashed into his chest.

She was there the second time he woke, holding his hand. She was talking to someone, facing away from him. He tried to squeeze back, but he couldn’t, he had no strength. There were still machines beeping, but none of them were shrieking. He smiled, or at least he felt like he did, and gave her hand another squeeze. Her head snapped toward him, her face more beautiful in that moment than it had ever been, her eyes like fireworks. She said something, her voice coming from underwater, and then she was gone, yelling something.