A Time of Torment (21 page)

‘Really? First you might have to get them to scrub the cock from that leprechaun’s fist. He looks like he has a hell of a grip for a little man.’

‘I ought to warn you,’ Parker told Louis. ‘They won’t have seen anything like you before.’

‘You mean black, or gay?’

‘No, just clean.’

The interior of the Porterhouse wasn’t terrible. The windows could have been a little bigger, and the wood a little lighter, but it smelled no worse than most of the bars in town, and considerably better than some. The music was generic adult rock, but not so loud as to rattle a hangover, and a couple of the bottles outside the well indicated a familiarity with decent liquor, even if none appeared ever to have been opened. It was the clientele that brought the tone of the place down. If they weren’t the dregs of humanity, they were at least on nodding terms with them on this particular Saturday afternoon.

The woman seated on the stool nearest the door wore a white sweatshirt bearing the Stars and Stripes, and the slogan ‘These Colors Don’t Run’, which might have been more affecting if the colors hadn’t actually run, staining the sweatshirt a faint pink. Her hands were so weighed down with rings and bangles that it should have been a struggle for her to lift her glass to her mouth, but judging by the bleary eyes she turned on the new arrivals, she looked to Parker to be managing just fine. Her hair was streaked red and blond, as though an ice cream had melted on her head, and she bore a tattoo of a black rose on the left side of her neck. She looked past Parker and Angel to take in Louis, who watched a succession of feelings play out on her face – curiosity, mild lust, confusion, and irritation – until ingrained racism won the day and she turned away with an expression that suggested the Porterhouse’s already poor standard of clientele had just plummeted to new lows.

To the right of the door sat a pair of skinny twentysomething guys wearing oversize jeans, wife-beater shirts, and the kind of tribal arm tattoos that seemed to be obligatory for every knucklehead who didn’t belong to a real tribe. They were drinking PBR and keeping track of their progress by stacking the ring pulls. Unlike the woman, they barely glanced at the new arrivals. Parker reckoned that if the cops took them into the parking lot, then turned them upside down and shook them, pills would drop from their pockets like hailstones from a doper’s dream sky.

Farther back, the bar drifted into semi-darkness, although Parker could just about pick out in the murk a hand-lettered sign reading
SMOKING AREA
taped to a steel door in the far wall. True to form, the bartender had tattoos as well. The first read ‘Know Thyself’ and ran along his left forearm. The second, on the inside of his right arm, announced ‘I Will Fear No Evil’. He was in his forties, and heavy without running too much to fat. His eyes suggested that he had seen just about every kind of misfortune that a place like the Porterhouse could attract, but wouldn’t be surprised if he might be about to see some more.

‘Help you?’ he asked.

‘We’re looking for a man named Harpur Griffin. Someone said that he was here.’

One of the tribesmen at the table by the door lifted his head, but didn’t move. Louis, who wasn’t watching him, continued not watching him, except more closely than before.

‘Someone, huh?’

‘Yeah, someone,’ said Parker. ‘It might have been his mother. She’s worried about him. She thinks he’s not eating his greens.’

The bartender nodded.

‘Sounds like a nice lady. You a cop?’

‘Licensed investigator.’

‘These two?’

‘Concerned private citizens.’

‘Identification?’

Parker handed it over. The bartender spent a long time looking at it, long enough to let one of the two tribesmen, the one who had not reacted to Griffin’s name, pick up a pack of cigarettes from the table and start to drift toward the door at the back. He stopped in surprise when Louis, who had so far largely kept his back to him, shifted marginally in his direction and asked, ‘Where are you going?’

The tribesman held up his cigarettes.

‘Smoke, man.’

‘Sit the fuck down,’ said Louis.

The tribesman sat the fuck down. He exchanged a look with his pal, who shook his head. The bartender, who had taken all this in, returned Parker’s ID.

‘We done delaying?’ asked Parker.

‘Just being careful,’ said the bartender.

‘Great. Is Griffin outside?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Alone?’

‘No, he has two guys with him.’

‘You know them?’

The bartender shook his head. ‘From away.’

‘And these two?’ Parker jerked a thumb at the tribesmen.

‘Just trying to do a good deed. They didn’t mean no harm.’ The bartender extended his upper body across the bar, in the manner of a man about to share a great secret. ‘Listen, I don’t want any trouble.’

Parker leaned in as well.

‘Seriously, have you seen where you work?’ he said. ‘Somewhere back there, I bet there’s a mop sitting in a bucket of bloody water. If you didn’t want trouble, you should have found employment someplace safer, like Fallujah, or Kabul. Now we’re going outside to talk with Harpur Griffin. We’ll take three sodas, just so you don’t feel like we’re freeloading.’

Parker placed a ten on the bar, and the bartender poured three large plastic glasses of soda over ice. They carried their drinks to the smoking area out back. The door to the Porterhouse opened behind them, but nobody looked back, so absorbed were they by the progress of Parker and his associates.

As soon as they were gone, one of the tribesmen took his cell phone from his pocket and started to dial. A shadow fell over him, which was immediately joined by a second. It was as though a pair of mountains had just dropped from space and landed in the Porterhouse. If the bartender had started to believe that his day couldn’t possibly get any worse, he was about to be profoundly disillusioned.

The tribesman, whose name was Dale Pittsky, discovered the massive twin bulks of the Fulci brothers staring down at him. They’d had difficulty parking, a consequence of owning a truck that was like a building on wheels.

The Fulci brothers rarely blessed the Porterhouse with their business. They preferred to avoid blighted institutions on the grounds that they brought their own trouble with them, and so drinking somewhere like the Porterhouse was like taking sand to a desert. They were on new medication, according to Louis, but it didn’t appear to be working any better than the old one, although Paulie Fulci claimed it made everything taste like Grape-Nuts.

Tony Fulci reached out and took Dale’s phone from his hand. It was an old flip top, and Tony stared at it curiously, the way a paleontologist might have examined a particularly obscure fossil.

‘I didn’t think they still made these,’ said Tony. He handed the phone to Paulie, who amused himself by flipping it open and closed with a thumb that was roughly the size and shape of the top of a hammer. His fun came to an end when the phone snapped, leaving the screen dangling by a wire. Paulie shook it, like a cat trying to understand why a dead mouse wouldn’t play anymore.

‘That was the guy’s fuckin’ phone, man,’ said Tony.

‘Sorry,’ said Paulie. He handed the stricken instrument back to Dale.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Dale.

‘You know,’ Tony told Dale, ‘they got these things called smartphones now. You should ask for an upgrade.’

‘I’ll do that.’

‘Who were you calling?’ said Tony.

‘Nobody,’ said Dale.

‘Aw, you must have been trying to call somebody. Here, why don’t you use mine?’

Tony handed Dale a phone the size of a cinder block, encased in rubber.

‘You don’t mind if we listen in, do you?’ asked Tony. ‘I mean, you might be calling France, or –’ He tried to think of another country right off the top of his head, and failed, so settled for ‘somewhere’.

Dale didn’t take the phone. He was seriously wishing that he’d never left the house that day. Fuck Harpur Griffin. Dale barely knew him anyway, and no longer saw any percentage in making a call for help on Griffin’s behalf.

‘It’s not urgent,’ said Dale.

‘If you’re sure,’ said Tony. The massive phone vanished into one of the pockets of his jacket, causing it to bulge like a tumor. ‘In that case, why don’t you just sit quietly and wait until our friends have concluded their business, and then we’ll be on our way.’

Tony gestured to the bartender.

‘You got any board games?’

‘No.’

Tony shrugged, and turned back to Dale.

‘You know any songs?’

T
he three men were sitting behind the Porterhouse, smoking around a wire spool table with sawed-off beer cans as ashtrays. Parker had a description of Harpur Griffin, supplemented by a couple of mug shots courtesy of Moxie Castin’s contacts. Griffin was the kind of man who had probably skated by on looks and a certain superficial charm in his youth, but his stocks of both were dwindling and he had nothing with which to replace them. His features were fading into vacuity, and his charm had curdled to sleaze. Jail must have been hard for him at the start. What Griffin inflicted on Burnel had probably been visited on him earlier in his incarceration. He was not tall – five-five or five-six – and wore dark blue Levi’s, tan cowboy boots, and a white shirt. His hair was long and blond, and he was laughing about something, displaying yellowed jail teeth. The tabletop was littered with bottles of Bud and a handful of shot glasses, although the glasses – and most of the bottles – seemed to be piling up at Griffin’s side of the table.

He was seated so that he was facing away from the back door of the bar, which meant he was either careless, drunk, or simply didn’t believe he had any cause for concern. Then again, it might have been the men with him who had provided Griffin with an enhanced sense of personal security. The one nearest the door wore black jeans and a black shirt buttoned to the neck, along with a gray fleece to keep out the gathering chill that didn’t appear to be bothering Griffin. He had scuffed black work boots on his feet, and hands that had put in some heavy manual labor. His hair was brown running to gray, and his face was heavily lined around the eyes and mouth, and pitted with flecks of black, as though a gun had once gone off too close to him. He had picked at the label on his bottle, and made a pile of the shreds on the table.

The one who sat alongside him was like a fox in human form. His features were distorted so that his nose and mouth were strangely elongated, lending him his vulpine aspect, accentuated by red hair flecked with silver, and sideburns that extended neatly almost to the corners of his mouth. His eyes were a very dark brown, and the nails on his fingers had been trimmed to points. He seemed almost to snarl at the three men approaching him, baring his teeth to reveal the spaces between them, so that they resembled pale fence posts long stripped of their wire.

A Gunpowdered Man and a Fox: they were quite the pair.

As though to a prearranged signal, Parker, Angel, and Louis spread out, never taking their eyes from the two silent men, for they, and not Griffin, were unmistakably the threat. Griffin, realizing suddenly that he had lost the attention of his listeners, turned to face the newcomers, but did not rise. He was that smart, at least.

‘Help you?’ said Griffin.

‘I hope so,’ said Parker. He gave Griffin his attention, knowing that Angel and Louis had the other two marked. ‘I was wondering if you’d heard from Jerome Burnel lately.’

‘I don’t think I know that name,’ said Griffin.

‘You were in Warren with him.’

‘I was in Warren with a lot of guys. Pardon me, but I don’t think you’ve told us your name.’

He put the emphasis on both ‘us’ and ‘your’, which gave Parker all he needed to know about him. Griffin would always rely on a pack for support. Alone, he’d run.

‘My name is Charlie Parker. I’m a private investigator. I could give you a card, but I figure your friend there would probably just add it to his collection of torn paper.’

The Gunpowdered man’s face had not moved a muscle. He hadn’t even blinked much, as far as Parker could tell. Parker thought that he’d encountered human-shaped voids like this one before: they could skin a man alive without breaking a sweat or raising their blood pressure.

‘I don’t believe I have to answer any questions from a private investigator,’ said Griffin.

‘That’s right, you don’t. But here’s how it goes: you don’t talk to me, and I feed you to the police, and then you have to get all lawyered up if you decide not to answer their questions. It’s easier just to deal with me.’

‘And your friends – are they private investigators too?’

‘No, they’re just private.’

Griffin took a sip of beer to give himself time to think.

‘Just private,’ he said. ‘I like that.’

‘Aren’t you going to make the introductions?’ asked Parker. ‘Shame to have us all out here, and nobody knowing anyone’s name but yours and mine.’

‘My friends are private too,’ said Griffin.

‘From away, is what I hear.’

Louis shifted his weight, like a big cat vacillating between a stretch and a pounce.

‘These are Southern boys,’ he said, ‘the low-down kind.’ Louis sniffed the air, then added: ‘I can smell it on them – all grease, and blood, and damned ignorance.’

The Gunpowdered Man tensed, and the Fox raised the index finger of his right hand in warning to his colleague.

‘Aw, you don’t like that, huh?’ Louis continued. ‘Don’t care to be called on your roots. I’ve been dealing with peckerwoods like you all my life, men whose mommas shit them out after their daddies put their pole in the wrong fishing hole. See, I’m a Southern boy too, but not your kind, and it’s nothing to do with the color of my skin. I just got more self-respect than to keep company with a jailhouse rapist.’

This time, the Gunpowdered Man was halfway out of his seat when the Fox gripped his forearm, digging those nails into his partner’s flesh. And all the time the Fox’s eyes flicked from Louis to Angel and back again, as though uncertain from which of them the first attack might come, but unafraid of either.