They Don't Play Stickball in Milwaukee (9 page)

The cop at the front desk was doing the crossword puzzle. I didn't recognize him from either of my previous two trips to the Riversborough Station and if he recognized me, he wasn't letting on. When he got around to asking me what I wanted, I said I'd like to visit one of the prisoners.

“Sorry,” he said, “fresh out.”

He went on to say that they hadn't had a prisoner for two weeks. He was unimpressed when I explained that I had been a prisoner just the day before.

“Who brought you in?” he asked.

“Campus security.”

“Were you officially charged?”

“No.”

“Then,” the cop said, “you don't count, do you?”

I told him it was up to him as to whether I counted or not, but at the moment, I wasn't interested in me. There was another guy in the holding cage, I explained, and he was tripping out somewhere beyond the moons of Saturn. Grudgingly, the cop punched in a few keys on the computer.

“Prisoner's name?”

I said I didn't know. That went over like termites at a toothpick convention.

“Look, mister, you better stop wasting my time or you sure as hell will be a prisoner in this jail.”

Disregarding his own words, the desk cop continued punching at his keyboard. I guess before he got really mad at me, he wanted to make sure I was wrong. He turned his monitor around so I could see it. He brought up two weeks worth of booking sheets and arrests. Only one screen had a name on it. That name was mine. And in bold letters beneath my name, it read:

“RELEASED TO DEAN DALLENCBACH. NO CHARGES TO BE FILED”

“But I'm telling you,” I pushed my luck, “there was another guy in the cell with me: blond, long hair, earring, twenty, maybe twenty-one.”

“Well, I wasn't here yesterday and this screen's the only thing I got to go by.”

When I asked to see the fat cop who was on duty when I was being held, the guy at the desk answered: “No can do. Sergeant Wick left last night for an ice-fishing tournament up in northern Ontario.”

The other cops I had met when I'd first come into town were similarly indisposed. How convenient, I thought, for everybody but me. All I had wanted to do was to ask my cagemate where he'd gotten hold of his Isotope. Now, it seemed, I was the one who was hallucinating. Unfortunately, it was a wee bit late in the game for me to be having flash backs. I was getting jerked around something fierce. But there was an upside to getting jerked around. It meant there were people in Riversborough with things to hide. Maybe one of those things was my nephew. It was time for me to get MacClough up here.

“Thank you, officer.”

“That's it?” he sounded sad to see me go.

“See that flat spot?” I pointed to my forehead. “I got that from pounding my head into the wall. I've learned when to stop.”

Now that Kira wasn't with me, I was prepared to tear into the desk clerk at the Old Watermill. He wasn't in. Probably gone ice fishing. I picked up my messages. MacClough and Jeff had called. Neither one requested an urgent callback. I swiped a copy of the local paper from the lounge and went up to my room to catch a few hours of real sleep. Passion is great, but it does tend to get in the way of normal sleeping patterns.

I stretched out on the big down comforter and began wading through the local paper. I got as far as the picture on page three. It was an enlargement of the driver's license photo of the skier killed at Cyclone Ridge. His name was Steven Markum, an unemployed chair-lift mechanic from Plattsburgh, New York. But I knew him better as Captain Acid.

A Certain Romance

MacClough agreed to come. He thought I was making progress. If getting someone killed was making progress, then he was right. It didn't feel like progress to me. It was difficult to discern what it felt like with a six-pack and half a bottle of vodka in me. I wasn't any good at regulating hurt with alcohol. I don't think anybody is, really. But there are people, people like MacClough and my Uncle Saul, who derived a certain liquid catharsis from binging. Even in the nausea of the next day, they found a strange satisfaction which escaped me, a certain romance. It wasn't romance I was looking for.

I could not remove my gaze from the newspaper, from Steven Markum's impassive face. I thanked God, for lack of a reasonable alternative that it wasn't one of those photographs with penetrating eyes. They were neither the eyes of the omniscient oculist nor eyes to pin you wriggling to the wall. They were eyes bored of waiting on line at the motor vehicles office. I raised my glass to Steven Markum. We were quite a pair, Markum and me, numb and number. Numbness was underrated.

“To Captain Acid! Beware of incoming red tracers.”

He remained unmoved.

There was knocking at my door. I made myself not hear it and continued on the second half of the bottle. It would not go down so easily as the first. The headache had since started crawling into my sinuses and dinner wasn't liking it. too much in my stomach. The knocking grew louder, insistent.

“Dylan!” Kira's voice was worried. “Dylan, are you all right?”

I did not answer.

“Dylan, please let me in.”

Again, I did not answer.

“Dylan! Please. I hear you. What's wrong?”

“You're wrong!” I lashed out. “Get the fuck outta here!”

“Dylan!”

“Play time is over, Kira. Go and find some other kids and play grown-up with them.” I could be so brave behind a closed door.

“I'm frightened, Dylan.”

“For chrissakes,” I blustered, “stop calling me Dylan. I know my fucking name!”

“Do you want me to get some help?”

“No! I want you to go fuck somebody your own age and leave me the fuck alone. I don't want you here.”

“Dylan—”

“Shut up!” I paused. “You know what I've been won dering, Kira?”

“No, I don't.”

“I've been wondering how you got so good at fucking old men. I—”

“Don't do this, Dylan, please.”

“I'll do what I want. Answer the question.”

“Please, Dylan, don't—”

“Answer the fucking question!”

“What did I do wrong?” she quivered. “Why do you want to hurt me like this?”

“I'm not hurting you. I'm doing you a favor. Now do me one and get the fuck away from me!”

There was silence. No more pleading. No footsteps. No sobbing. Then:

“I hate you. I hate you for this!”

That made two of us. If she hesitated for a moment or ran down the hall, I couldn't say. I was far too busy gagging on my own self-pity to notice.

Guilt

I watched MacClough stroll out of the gate, carry-on bag in hand. And once again I was dismayed by his looks. It wasn't that I'd forgotten how fatigued and bloated he appeared at my Dad's funeral, but getting to the root of his sudden weight gain wasn't exactly at the top of my punch list. Extra bulk or not, he was still a pro and followed my instructions to the letter. He did not look for me in the crowd, though he knew I was there watching. He confirmed his car rental and headed for the phone bank just to the right of the Riversborough Chamber of Commerce sign. I watched him slowly punch in a number as he read it off a slip of paper. About seventy-five feet away, on the other side of the terminal, another phone rang. I picked up.

“You watched too many Hitchcock movies when you were a kid,” he said. “Are you sure this cloak-and-dagger crap is necessary in such a cockamamy little town? Jesus, Klein, the Sheepshead Bay Diner is bigger than this airport.”

“And it has better cheesecake, but you could barely land a helicopter in the parking lot. Trust me, John, these precau tions are necessary. Like I told you on the phone last night, I've had these two clowns on my ass for days. I'm sure I lost them on the way here, but I can't be certain they're not bearding for someone I haven't spotted. Did you make a reservation at the Old Watermill Inn?”

“I did.”

“Great. It's good to have you around,” my voice smiled. “I've been tripping over my dick in the dark around here.”

“I bet that's not the only thing you've been doing with it.”

I ignored that. “My room in an hour.”

“Klein!”

“Yeah.”

“I'll stay on the line after you hang up. If anybody follows you besides the two guys you know about, I'll spot ‘em.”

“Thanks.”

I took a detour back to the hotel that led me past Cyclone Ridge. The chairlifts were pretty much idle and I could only spot a few lonely souls working their way down the ski trails. That was no surprise. Death on the slopes isn't much of a selling point. With time, though, people would forget. The papers would move onto another story. People would return. Accidents will happen. But so will murder. And murder is what happened here. I could feel it in the marrow of my bones. I also felt responsible. For although I might never be able to prove it, I knew as surely as the sun burned in the sky, that if Steven Markum had never met me, he would be alive today. I wasn't nearly as confident that I knew how to live with that kind of guilt. It was a long ride back down the mountain.

I didn't even look to see who was behind the desk when I got back to the Old Watermill. I went straight up to my room. As I stepped in, a strong hand grabbed my collar and pulled me to the ground. I had a mouthful of carpet and one armed pinned painfully against my back. Something round and very cold was jabbed into the soft spot behind my ear. Then, in one eternal instant, I heard the door lock snap shut and the metallic click of a gun hammer striking.

I was lifted up, not by God's right hand, but by MacClough's.

“Asshole!” He shook me. “You're not paying attention.”

“I am now.”

We hugged. He pushed me back to arm's length and stared through me. I could tell he didn't like the view.

“What's the matter with you?”

“Oh nothing, John.” I pulled out of his grasp. “My Dad just died. My nephew's missing. I crapped out in Hollywood. I've managed to get pepper-sprayed, arrested, and get somebody killed. And last night, because I was too busy beating the shit out of myself to notice what I might be doing to anyone else, I ruined the most exciting relationship I've probably ever had. So no, John, nothing's wrong.”

He lifted his pants leg and holstered his .38. “Stop feeling sorry for yourself or just go home. You're not gonna do anybody any good if you're gonna live inside your head. I can't watch your back and mine at the same time.”

“Why not, you got eye troubles?” I wondered.

“My eyes are fine. It's just that there seems to be a lot of people interested in your flat Jewish ass. I don't know if I can keep track. Maybe we should just give out numbers like the deli counter at Waldbaums.”

“I was followed?”

“You were,” he confirmed. “The first guy looked like a surfer in a ski suit. You know the type, sunbleached blond, funky sunglasses, muscles from here to there. Didn't you spot him?”

“Half the population of Riversborough looks like that. The other half looks like the smartest kid in your third grade class, only bigger and with bad skin.”

“The other guy was a Fed. I worked on task forces with a hundred guys just like him. From the way he dressed, he might as well have had FBI, ATF, or DEA printed on the back of his suit. The problem with those guys is, even though they're trained not to advertise who they are, they can't stand for the whole world not to know. One time I was on a surveillance and it was really late and we'd been in the car for hours. We'd told every joke, every bar story, every sex story we could think of. Finally, I turned to one of these FBI guys and ask him why he became a Fed. You know what he said to me?” MacClough started laughing.

“No.”

“He says becoming a Special Agent is as close to being a superhero as he could get. What a fuckin' idiot, huh?”

“Good thing he liked Superman cartoons better than the Roadrunner.”

We both laughed at that. Then it got very quiet.

“I love you, man.” He hugged me again, but very tight, almost desperately. “I just want you to know that.”

“I know that, John. I know.”

“Good.” He let me go. “Let's take a look inside the mini-bar. We got a lot to talk about before our trip tomorrow.”

“Where're we going?”

“To jail.”

“Been there. Done that.”

“Not this jail,” he said. “And don't worry, we're not staying. We're just visiting.”

“One of your relatives?” I teased.

“No, shithead, Valencia Jones.”

“How did—”

“Don't ask,” MacClough ordered. “Don't ask.”

And I didn't. John was halfway to the minibar when someone knocked on the door. It was Kira. My heart was in my throat. MacClough whispered for me to get rid of her. I got rid of him instead, sort of. He fit nicely into the closet.