The Wrong Man (3 page)

4

W
hen
I
went
into
Vanguard the next day Sully was behind the counter. He had a knot of hangers-on around, a couple of white skaters with the backward caps, tattoos and eyebrow piercings and a tiny Americanized Mexican who must have been nearing forty, clinging to the group until he could score something for free. They had a football game on the TV that was mounted up in the corner, over the magazine rack, and you could bet the business was losing a hundred bucks in beer and cigarettes today.

I walked in and said, “Hey,” and they all looked at me. A couple of the guys muttered greetings and Sully averted his eyes and echoed, “Hey.”

I stuffed my jacket on a shelf under the counter and got an orange juice from one of the coolers. Sully eyed his friends. “Guys,” he said. “Go wait at my car. I’ll catch up.”

They made a few cracks but did as he said, and when they were gone Sully looked hard at me. “You fucked up, dude.” His voice was low and grave. Secretive. His brown eyes hooked mine and held them fast. In the naked daylight his face looked like it had been boiled until the flesh was ready to drop off his skull.

“What?” I felt the ice trickling down my spine, raising gooseflesh on the backs of my arms. I had a good, sickening idea
what.

“Calling the fucking cops.”

“That shit last night? Hey man, I didn’t call the cops. They just
showed up.
Owen needs to know that. Can you tell him? Tell someone who knows him? Do me a favor and do that, can you?” My voice was strained. Terror was knocking hard.

“Yeah,” Sully said. “I’ll call him, dude. But he’s pissed. He was in here saying all kinds of shit. I’m just telling you. Next time I see that guy, if I was you? I would call the cops.”

And that began the longest eight hours I had ever known. Like they say, the hardest part is the not knowing. How about not knowing if you’re gonna get shot or stabbed or blackjacked or what? How about terror shutting down your mind a hundred times in a night as you wait for some skinny murderous prick to come and rush you every time you hear the electronic buzzer in the doorway, every time you see a lowered car pull up thumping rap music? How about thinking every tough, wannabe pimp asshole—the guys who made up half of Vanguard’s clientele—was sent by Owen and his crowd, and he’s going to maybe rush you and drag you over the counter, or maybe just whip out a gun and start blasting away?

That was my eight hours and in case I was going to forget my predicament, at seven-thirty Rich came in, still alive after all. He wasn’t so bad. He just looked like his head been dynamited to small pieces and then stuck back together by a six-year-old using Elmer’s glue. He displayed, with an odd pride, the gap where one of his big front teeth was gone and the other broken in half, under a purple lip that was completely split, four or five times its normal size and sewed back together with thick black thread. One eye was puffed shut, his nose ballooned and squishy-looking, and his cheeks and forehead dark and lumpy.

“What happened to you?” I blurted. “I mean, I know what happened, but do you have to come up with money?”

“Yeah, dude. But you know me. Blood from a fuckin’ turnip. Fuck those guys. I’m making myself scarce. I’m going to fuckin’
Canada
, dude.”

“
Canada
 
. . . ?” I grabbed Marlboros off the counter display and set them in front of him and he picked them up, started tapping the pack against his palm and said, “Thanks, bro.”

“You ought to stick around, man,” I said. “Owen’s due by here any minute to fuckin’ kill me.”

“Dude!” He became hushed and serious, and glanced behind him, looking for Owen. “I heard about that! Fuck, why’d you call the cops on him?”

My heart sank. I explained myself to Rich, emphatically, as if he could help me. I guess the logic was that he could start spreading the rumor the other way, telling the right people—or people who might tell the right people—that I was a hundred percent victim of circumstance.
 

“That’s fucked up,” Rich said, amusement breaking through, glad that his turn was over and that for all his stupidity he wasn’t in as deep as me. Then he looked away and looked back. “What time you get outta here?”

I frowned. No way I was getting pulled into the orbit of Rich’s idiocy—ever again, I had decided—but I said, “Ten, just like always.”

“Oh.” He knit his brows, not asking me to hang out after all. “Hey, you think I can get one more pack for my driver? I’ll pay you for it.”

I looked out and saw a little red Japanese go-cart with gray primer on the fender. I couldn’t make out the driver but he was no friend of mine and I didn’t need to give him smokes. “Pay me when?”

Rich looked at me and I could see him trying to do something cute with that wrecked face. “I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for some Marlboros today.”

I suddenly felt like throwing something at him, yelling, kicking him in the ass and chasing him off. “No way, man. You already owe for a dozen packs. Share the ones you got, asshole.”

I saw something like surprise, maybe even anger, flicker in his good eye and then vanish. “Yeah, you’re right. Sorry. Well, I’ll send you a postcard from
Canada
, bro. Hey, thanks for the smokes. Seriously.”

 
He was retreating as he spoke and then he was gone. I watched the little Japanese car pull away, the weight of my impending doom settling onto my thoughts again. And then I slapped the countertop. I had forgotten to find out what had become of the pound of weed. Jesus, that could get us off the hook! I hustled out to the parking lot to wave them down but they had already driven out of sight.

During the minutes before closing it got worse, not better. It wasn’t the home stretch, it was the danger zone; the handiest time to get me. It was so intense that when I finally found myself driving away with the store locked behind me, I started laughing a strange laugh that I had never experienced before. Nothing at all was funny, but I guess that tension simply must escape. I grinned and I started thinking that maybe, maybe it would all blow over now. Sully must have gotten hold of Owen, and maybe I was granted some kind of reprieve in some goofy-ass court of coked-up gangsters. It was going to be fine.

The door to our apartment was unlocked when I got home. I didn’t panic then, but I stepped in quick and said, “Jill?”

There was no answer.

I closed the door, my heart picking up tempo. Nobody was in the living room but the bathroom door was closed with the stripe of light under it, so I didn’t think much about anything yet. When I walked into our bedroom, I stopped and blinked, completely dumbfounded. The bed was not just unmade, the blanket and top sheet were ripped away, drooling onto the floor, leaving the fitted sheet totally exposed. Three of our four pillows were mashed against the headboard. The fourth was obviously on the floor on my side of the bed where I couldn’t see it. We had matching bedside lamps and the one on Jill’s side was on the floor. Beside it was a pair of her panties.

I stared for a long moment, feeling the way you feel when you’re looking at books in the warm safe environment of the library and you come across those old pictures of war atrocities or hollow-eyed, skeletal prisoners in death camps gazing frankly at the camera. What I was seeing wouldn’t fit into my understanding of reality. It disturbed me on a level I couldn’t have prepared for. I had a weird thought of Jill screwing someone else on our bed, and me coming home while they were halfway into it, but I knew that was impossible.

“Jill?” My voice was louder and shrill, and I was up against the bathroom door now. I rapped three times and said, “Jill!” then rapped again.

The toilet flushed. I heard rustling, feet on the floor, and the latch clicked and the door came open.

She was naked.

“I need
 
. . . to take a shower,” she said. Her face was bloodless and without expression, her eyes huge and empty.

“What? Jill! Look at me.” I took her shoulders. There was a bruise on her neck, the size of a thumbprint. I already knew. “Did someone come in here?”

“They
 
. . . they
knocked,
” she said, and took a huge breath, as if thinking of it exhausted her. “There were two of them. A white guy and a-a-another guy, and they just backed me in there.” She glanced at the bedroom.

I think I said “No!” but maybe I didn’t. There was a humming growing in my ears, speckles in my vision, and I might have rolled my eyes up in my head and passed out if Jill hadn’t started crying.

It was just a sniffle at first, but it brought me back like smelling salts, made me smart with the knowledge of who the goddamned victim was here. She was starting to shake, and I reached out, pulled her against me and began rubbing the silky planes of her back and telling her everything was all right.

But even then a blinding rage, a need to do something, was clouding my thinking. We were going to the police. Modern investigative techniques would turn the motherfuckers up and I would arm myself, go into the courtroom during their trial and execute them. Right through the face. The cops could drag me away after that. I didn’t give a fuck.

“We have to go the police,” I said into her hair, my voice sounding thin, almost metallic. “Go to the doctor, do all that.”

“There’s nothing!” she sobbed into my shoulder. “Sam, they had on ski masks.” And lower, she said, “The even used rubbers. All I could tell, the first guy, he was white, and the other guy was dark. Mexican––probably.”

And it came to me. Hit me so hard I felt the breath go out of me. Owen Ferguson. Oh Christ, he had given up on getting me at the liquor store but that guy wouldn’t just give up altogether, would he? How could I not know that he would teach me, one way or another, what happens when some punk crosses him? My body felt so hot it might begin steaming. My rage was suddenly corrupted by guilt and the combination was so poisonous my knees were buckling.

“Jill, I think—”

“Sam?” Her voice was thick with crying now, tinged with hysterics, and it took her a couple of times to get it out. “I want you to take
 
. . . I want to go
 
. . . to my
mom’s
!” And with the last word she began sobbing too hard to speak.

“Okay,” I said. “Okay, Jill.”

I nearly had to carry her into the bedroom to get her dressed.

We were mostly silent and Jill didn’t seem to want to be touched on the drive. All I could think about was Owen, but I couldn’t bring myself to put any of it into words.
 
I tried to comfort her a couple of times but wound up stammering and rambling, promising again and again that we were going to move out of the apartment, we were going to move far away from Blackmer.

Her mom answered the door, looking like hell. The woman was a waitress with a raspy voice and bleached gray hair. She was long divorced from Jill’s father and remarried to a tough little Filipino biker. They lived at the end of a cul-de-sac in a tiny, grubby house that smelled of their pugs, Vinnie and Minnie, and their cigarette smoke. I hadn’t phoned ahead. I walked Jill to the door and delivered her inside. She kept saying, “I’m fine now. I’m fine,” as we went up the darkened walkway. She seemed a little irritated with me but I didn’t dwell on it and went ahead with my duty. I began trying to explain to her mother, saying, “Two guys
 
. . . they
 
. . . they came into our place
 
. . .” my speech halting idiotically until Jill threw me a look and recited the basic facts in an eerily tranquil voice.
 

I assumed her mother would get her through the police and medical stuff, and was ashamed at how glad I was to be avoiding it. As soon as I could I began inching toward the door, saying, “Listen, I got some stuff to do.”

Jill sat at the dining room table, which was a few feet from the front door. She didn’t look disappointed or hurt by the idea of my leaving. She didn’t even seem to hear me. Her mother glanced at the clock and said, “I hope you don’t have any stupid ideas, Sam!”