Shadow Season (29 page)

“He didn’t, really,” Finn admits. “I wonder, though. How’d he get my home address so quick?”

“It’s the syndicate. They’ve got thicker files than the FBI.”

Ray pauses and Finn hears a lot of distant noise, laughter, singing on the other end. “What’s going on?”

“The pussy boys of C-Block are putting on a talent show. Some of them are pretty good dancers, and they all do Barbra Streisand to a fuckin’ T.”

“Cher too?”

“And Bette Midler. If I gotta hear that ‘Wind Beneath My Wings’ shit one more time, I may have to shank somebody. It’s not the song so much as how it gets everybody crying. Even the bulls.”

“You gave Freddy my address, didn’t you? You told him it was me who wasted his brother.”

Ray, in his expert arrogance, doesn’t deny it. His voice takes on a nuanced tone, one that wouldn’t register with almost anyone else. Discreetly concealed anger and resentment seep into his words. “I knew he wouldn’t pull the trigger. He didn’t have the heart. You fucked it up. You fucked it all up. You should’ve just iced Carlyle, it would’ve made everything right again.” Ray actually tsks. “What are you going to do now?”

“I’m handling it,” Finn says.

He gently hooks the phone back into its cradle. He climbs from the bed and crawls on the floor, his mind so starved for information that it draws on his memories at odd times and confuses him. For a moment he thinks he’s back at his house, on the kitchen tiles with Dani.

Then he hammers the floor with his fists. The pain defines and gives shape to his hands. The shape of his fractured hands gives his arms substance. The arms help to delineate the torso. The neck grows from it. He feels
the definition of his face and head again. And residing within his skull is his brain, and within that his mind, and within that himself.

He’s still here, despite the everlasting darkness.

The evening nurse discovers him under the bed two hours later. He’s got his fractured fingers up his nose. He’s been trying to snort the blood from his torn knuckles, the smell keeping him in the past where he can relive his life in excruciating detail. It’s his wedding day. It’s his first day on the job. The fury of Howie has found him again.

It takes twenty stitches to close the gashes. When they put his broken hands in casts, he cries.

Over the next two weeks they up his medication and call in four psychiatrists to talk at length with him. At first he’s honest, hoping someone can explain this phenomenon to him.

But the shrinks all act with varying degrees of condescension. They think he’s either crazy or out for attention. Finn starts telling them what they want to hear and learns to hide his cutting. Even with the casts he can just manage to hold on to a safety razor and run it a little too deeply against his chin.

One night, Roz tries to make love to him in the hospital bed and he elbows her onto the floor.

A few nights later she tries again. He doesn’t fuck her but he doesn’t kick her out either.

A couple mornings after, he’s awoken by two quarreling voices. Some bitchy couple arguing whether they should eat in the commissary or hold out for the diner a few blocks down. The woman says her blood pressure is dangerously low.

The man says, Jesus Christ, I’m still waiting for a time when you’re not being held in the fucking thrall of hypoglycemia.

Finn recognizes the voices. Besides, only one person he knows would ever say “thrall.”

There’s a pressure on the edge of the bed, tilting the mattress at a sharp angle. Finn can see the woman sitting there, those sleepy eyes with a swirl of poison in them, the thick ringlets slipping down over both shoulders. She’s digging around the gifts that people have sent him, looking for something to munch on.

He tells her, “There’s some chocolate in the drawer.”

“Why would I want any of your candy bars?” Carlyle’s mistress says.

Finn often can’t tell if his eyes are open or closed. It disturbs his visitors but he hasn’t gotten used to wearing shades all the time yet. He knows that Carlyle is a man used to staring into the eyes of his enemies and reading whatever might be hidden there. Finn enjoys the fact that, in such a small fashion, he’s at an advantage.

“Do you know why I’m letting you live?” Carlyle asks.

“Yes,” Finn says.

“You do?”

“Sure.”

Carlyle pauses. “Tell me.”

“Four reasons.”

“You count four?”

“Yeah.”

“Let me hear them, please.”

“All right. One, I’m no threat to you. Two, you know
I had no choice where Donnie was concerned. You should ace whoever gave him the green light.”

“No one did.”

“Then whoever was looking out for him didn’t do a good job.”

“Go on.”

“Three, you owe me for what your boy Freddy did.”

“He did nothing to you.”

“Of course he did, he was the catalyst for my wife’s fatality and my own … self-destruction.”

“You speak like an English professor. By definition no one else can be held responsible for another’s self-destruction.”

“I see it differently,” Finn says, and smiles.

“Go on.”

“And four, you can always point me out in the crowd and say, ‘See there, that’s what happens to people who go up against me.’”

“That doesn’t sound like me at all.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

Carlyle’s mistress is hunting around for candy bars again, doing it slowly, trying to be silent.

“Your partner set much of this in motion,” Carlyle says.

“You set it in motion, he just went along. That’s what he does. He always takes the easy money, the easy shot, the easy way out.”

“And you never do.”

“It’s an ineradicable flaw in my character.”

“I could eradicate it.”

“I strongly doubt that.”

Finn waits. He thinks, It wouldn’t be so tough to
dive on him right now, smash the casts into his throat until I crush his larynx. I could pound on him for however long it takes. I can snuff him.

He leans forward. Carlyle springs to his feet and backs away.

Finn grins and asks, “How’s Freddy?”

“On suicide watch.”

“So am I.”

BY THE TIME JESSE GETS BACK
with Murph and Duchess, Rack is gone and Judith is wandering the halls with a dislocated jaw and several of her teeth kicked out.

Harley must’ve gotten her brother out of the building, who knows how. Maybe he was only hurt, maybe dying, maybe dead, but she managed to drag him off. Finn will never underestimate the holler folk again.

Using the plow on the front of his truck, Murphy manages to beat through the snowbanks to get to Three Rivers. It takes him more than an hour to dig his way five miles to town. It takes them twenty minutes to get back in the county’s Sno-Cats, six folks packed into the two confined front cabins. The sheriff, three deputies, Murph, and a small-town doctor like they don’t make anymore, replete with black bag. Say what you want, they know how to rally.

The authorities check out Finn’s story.

There is no one in Three Rivers by the name of Rack Moon. There is no one called Pudge Moon. There was no body found out in the snow where Finn says Pudge’s corpse should be. There’s no Harley Moon who takes care of five younger siblings.

Finn nods and lets it go.

There is no county coroner. The doc will do the job when he gets Vi and Roz back to town. Right now he’s got the bodies wrapped and packed out in the snow.

Duchess wants to confess to her role in the meth dealing even though there’s no evidence against her either. Finn tells her to shut the fuck up. He’s not sure why.

The doc tapes up Finn’s wounded shoulder and gives him some oily liquid that should help his damaged throat. The sheriff asks more questions but Finn’s voice is gone.

A week goes by, full of police reports and some media coverage and funerals. Finn’s got his arm in a sling. His voice is raspy as all hell, the thick fingerprint bruises so bad that the makeup folks ask him to wear an ascot. It makes him laugh, which causes him to choke. They ask him what’s so funny. It’s a good question.

He is lauded as a hero by certain parents. There are no photo ops with the Three Rivers Sheriff’s Department. Vi’s father shows up for the body. Her mother never visits. Finn takes nine g’s out of his savings and has Duchess drive him out to the Moon house. He leaves the money on the front porch to a shack that smells like nobody’s lived there in years.

“This the place?” he asks.

“Yeah,” Duchess tells him, “but there’s no footprints in the snow, except for ours. Nobody’s been here for a week or more.”

“Doesn’t matter.”

He’s paid up and fulfilled his promises. Maybe it’ll be enough.

Judith’s son Billy or Bobby or Billy-Bob is forced out
of his bomb-shelter basement apartment and compelled to take his mother to the dentist. Finn goes along because Judith, for no reason she names, wants him to. The son is in a constant state of frustration, wanting to get back to his
World of Warcraft
with the Senegalians and Polynesians. Finn sits in the dentist’s waiting room listening to them setting up Judith with a temporary bridge. The whining of her kid and the whining of the drill both give him a migraine.

When Judith gets out, she says, “Jesus, I should’ve just gotten dentures.”

Her jaw’s still a little misaligned and she has trouble forming certain words. While her son speeds them back to St. Val’s, knocking ninety the whole way, Judith admits to Finn that she’s getting another divorce and Murphy is moving in.

“Slainte,”
Finn says.

The authorities don’t seem eager to drag Ray’s name back into the press. There’s no proof against him or anybody else at Sing Sing. The cops know Finn is hiding something, and they’re suspicious as hell.

But Finn figures there’s no reason to mention Roz’s part in it all. What the fuck’s the point?

Vi’s parents have the juice to chase this thing into the headlines for months, but they don’t bother.

The fallout will certainly close the academy. Judith tells him she’s already started shutting the place down and sending out résumés. He thinks the school would be better off left abandoned for five or ten years, and then turned back into a hotel. By then Three Rivers will be properly dead and ready for some developer to come in and open up a couple of factories and bring the people
back down out of the hills and make them mingle with a new work force sent up from the city.

Back in Manhattan, Finn lucks out and finds a furnished studio apartment in the Village around the corner from NYU. He lands a job within a couple of days. He suspects he’s the token handicapped teacher on campus and that’s why the wheels are so greased, but he doesn’t give a damn. He doesn’t have to start until the fall semester.

He sits in his shrink’s office.

She asks him, So how have you been?

She’s got the disinterested air of a prom date you run into twenty years later at the supermarket checkout.

When she shifts her earrings jingle and her necklace clicks. Maybe pearls. He has no doubt that they look beautiful, but they rattle falsely. He can hear her pulling up her stockings, snapping them around her thighs. She smooths her hands along the meat of her legs, either admiring or critiquing.

She has a rendezvous after this, must be a second date, someone she’s really trying to impress. Leaving right after their session, she can barely control her excitement. Or maybe she’s just trying to show off for her next patient. She’s got a crush on some sex maniac describing his most detailed acrobatics. Tells her how he likes to punch them in the back of the head while he’s digging in from behind. It disgusts her and makes her moist.

She coughs into her hand, put off by Finn’s silence. Without a chance to gauge him by his eyes, he must appear inscrutable to her. She’s not in control. She’s never
been in control but she only realizes this when Finn’s in the room with her.

The tingling earrings sound almost plaintive. They make him want to reach for them, draw them gently from her ears, and pet them, tell them, It’s all right, it’s going to be all right now.

He wonders if she’d still tell him that this is a natural reaction, treating the sounds of inanimate objects as if they were people. If it would still be normal for him in his situation, under these circumstances, to want to comfort things, especially if they’re hers and he took hold and didn’t let go. If he held her up on her date with the next patient who’s wanting to touch her thing. If he made her late in grabbing his thing.

Finn thinks of crooking his finger, trying to get her to come closer, so he might whisper in her ear that she was right. It certainly was important for him to assert his independence. To feed his need for security, take a hand in his own self-preservation.

Of course, if he’d had nothing more than pepper spray, he’d be dead right now. He’s already bought another blade and keeps it in his pocket.

He begins to speak but he can’t recognize what he’s saying. The voice is small and sounds like it’s coming from a neighbor’s apartment down the hall. He strains to hear the words but fails. The voice is animate, angry.

He’s chewed his cheek open. Right now he’s remembering being down at One Police Plaza, waiting on line for his uniform and his issued piece. Ray’s beside him, oddly quiet. Maybe another fifty guys ahead of them. There’s a fair amount of nervous laughter. They’ve graduated the academy but they’re not officially cops
until they’re sworn in. A couple of the guys are talking about how they’re glad they’ve landed in the shittiest precincts in the city. More action so they’ll make more busts. Better chance for promotion. They’re already talking about gold shields, making detective first grade before they’re thirty.