B009XDDVN8 EBOK (3 page)

When the smell and sight and, yes, the reality of my bloated dead friend became too much to bear, I lurched past his body and into his bathroom to throw up the breakfast I had snatched before takeoff. I turned on the water in the sink, put my hands under the faucet, splashed my face over and again. When I looked up at the mirror, I expected to see a sadness in my wet, red eyes, and I did, but I saw something else, too, something that shamed me in its calculation.

I saw relief.

It was over now, the whole Augie part of my life. No more long-distance entreaties for me to come out and party with him, no more inconvenient visits to Vegas, no more worries when Augie didn’t call, no more fears about the brilliant young boy who had turned out to be the weakest of the three of us, no more guilt about how our great coup had ruined him. I was relieved that my best friend in the whole of the world had finally died. What had happened to him? What had happened to me?

I could get into a metaphysical wrestling match with the untrammeled remnants of my once-young soul some other time, and I would, I was certain, when I got back to my basement, where I did all my best thinking. But now was the time to clean things up and get the hell out of there. I knew Augie’s secrets, and his secret places, and it was time to empty them all.

The kitchen was an unholy mess; Augie’s last days were obviously spent in squalor. Or maybe the final party had gone on a bit too long. But I wasn’t in the kitchen to judge his housekeeping. There was an unglued floor tile in the corner by the stove. It was hard to see because there were no gaps in the grout. I spent a few minutes grappling at the wrong tile before I found the right one. With the help of a kitchen knife, I levered up the tile. Beneath was what appeared to be the usual base of glue on cement, but it was really only glue smeared across a board, and that too could be worked up. Beneath the board was a hole, hacked out of the slab and the dirt beneath it. And in the hole was a familiar leather gym bag. I pulled out the bag, looked at it for a moment, remembering, and then zipped it open.

Cash, loads of it, packed in wads $10,000 strong, old stuff, original lucre, untouched over the years. I had figured Augie had blown through his stake and was now living a desperate financial existence, hand-to-bottle-to-gut, but here was a small fortune. He had been more careful than I thought. I opened my briefcase and threw in the stacks, one after the other. Eight. Half for me, the rest for Ben, after I took all that I had loaned Ben over the years.
I put the leather satchel back in the hole and closed it up as tight as I had found it.

There was another hiding place, in the living room, in the stuffing of an old easy chair. Augie said he always stashed some cash there in case he was being robbed and needed to give something up to the gunmen. I suppose those are the crazy kinds of precautions you take when you live the kind of life Augie lived. I saw no reason to leave anything for scavengers, so I headed through the kitchen to the living room, which was in worse shape than the kitchen. It had been trashed, completely. The final party must have been a doozy.

And then I noticed that the chair was overturned, and the lining of the bottom was slashed, and the hiding place within the chair was exposed and empty. Suddenly the potent combination of sadness and relief that had been flowing through me was replaced by raw fear. And I knew, as I should have known from the start, that it wasn’t his addictions that had taken Augie down, and that the ruined state of his house was not the remnant of a final wild party.

Back in the bedroom, a quick examination of Augie’s body confirmed the diagnosis. Bloated and green, yes, and covered with his tattoos, yes: birds and dice, tribal markings, Chinese letters. And, on his shoulder, just as on my shoulder and on Ben’s, three skulls with a banner beneath holding the words
Still Here
. No longer, old friend. He was dead cold, and his joints were loose, which meant he’d been gone at least two days. But there were other things I had skipped over the first time I saw his corpse, maybe because I wanted to. Bruises. Burn marks. A small, jagged wound on his breast. I wondered for a moment who else could have killed him: a drug dealer, a loan shark, a pimp? Actually I was hoping like hell it was a drug dealer, or a loan shark, or a pimp.

But there was something about Augie’s jaw, its strange elongation. I had thought that was merely from the rigors of rigor
mortis, but now it did look truly strange to me, weird. I leaned over Augie’s body and, grimacing, pulled his lower lip back. There was something in his mouth.

Jesus Christ, there was something in his mouth.

With two fingers I pulled it out, a wad of paper, wet with the stinking slime of his festering fluids. Something cold brushed against my neck as I pulled the wad apart to get a look at it.

A hundred-dollar bill.

I dropped the bill as if it were burning my fingers. I didn’t need to figure out what it was there for, I knew. It’s amazing how fear quickens the thought process, even as it quickens the pulse. It was a message, a message to me, a message from the distant past, as clear as if skywritten in the cloudless Vegas sky. And what it said was that my life, as I now knew it, was over.

The first thing I did was open my briefcase and take out the gun and look about me for a target, any target. I was jumpy enough that I would have killed the television if it had winked at me. Hell of a torpedo I was. Then I took my phone from my pocket and called Ben. He didn’t answer, which was a relief, I didn’t want a long conversation when a voice mail message would do.

“They found Augie and they killed him,” I said. “I’m disappearing. Take care of yourself, pal, and have a good life.”

And that was the end of Ben, too, as far as I was concerned. My two oldest friends, snap, gone just that fast. I had shrugged off much of my past already; it wasn’t much of a stretch to cast away the rest.

“Good-bye, Augie,” I said to the corpse.

And that very instant, as if Augie were returning my sentiment from some dark place in the ether, the cordless phone on his bedside table rang.

I
SHOULD HAVE
left Augie’s house without answering the damn phone. I should have just nodded one last time to my old dead friend, let the handset ring itself off the hook, and gotten the hell out of there. But I suppose I still had hope, hope that my suppositions were all wrong, hope that I wouldn’t have to do what I knew I had to do once I stepped out of the house, hope, foolish blind hope. Because maybe I was jumping to the wrong conclusion. It had happened so long ago. Maybe this actually was the doing of a dealer, or a loan shark, or a pimp. Weren’t those the most likely possibilities? And maybe this ringing phone could set me right, maybe it could be what we all most desperately desire when facing our inexorable fate, a reprieve from the governor.

So with gun still in hand, I took a chance and picked up the phone. “Hello?”

“Well now, so you finally answered,” came a voice I didn’t recognize, a man’s voice, acid sharp but calm, with drawn-out, flat Midwestern vowels. “I’ve been calling and calling, hoping I’d eventually find you in.”

“Who’s this?” I said.

“Never mind that. The question is: Who are you?”

“Augie.”

“Is that right?” A rustle in the background, a draw from a cigarette. “How’s it going there, Augie?”

“A little rough,” I said as I took the phone to the front of the house. With the muzzle of the gun, I nudged open the edge of the curtain and checked as much of the cul-de-sac as I could see. Nothing.

“A little early in the day, hey, Augie?”

“You could say that.”

“I guess so, considering I watched you die two days ago.”

I opened the curtains wider, pressed my head close to the glass, felt a new jolt of fear. There, on the other side of the street, two figures emerging from behind what appeared to be just another deserted house. They had thick heads and big bellies and were dressed in black slacks and print shirts that hung loose over their belts. Their sunglasses had the terrifying emptiness of an insect’s eyes. I spun around and pressed my back against Augie’s front door.

“Why’d you do it?” I said to the bastard on the phone.

“You know why.”

“No, I don’t.”

“That’s the second time you’ve lied to me within the last minute. I’m going to get a complex. We’ve been looking for you.”

“Not me.”

“You are precious, aren’t you?”

“What do you want?”

“The rest of the money.”

“It’s gone.”

“Not all of it, I’d bet.”

“A bad bet in Vegas,” I said. “How unexpected. So what tipped you?”

“It was only a matter of time.”

“But why now?”

“No time like the present.”

I checked the window again, watched as the men got closer. They had no guns in their hands, at least not yet. I had an opportunity to take the initiative, to smash the glass and start firing, to
let both bastards have it. Rat-a-tat-tat, baby, just like the hardest scar-faced torpedo in Nevada.

But I wasn’t a torpedo, I was a middle-aged salesman with a family and a lawn and a gun he was afraid to use. I let the curtain swish closed as I backed away through the living room, down the hall, into the bedroom.

“You know we could make a deal,” said the man on the phone. “We’re not averse to a deal.”

“Like you made a deal with Augie.”

“Augie was stubborn. It was as if he wanted to die.”

“And you obliged him, you sick son of a bitch.” I jammed the gun into my belt and grabbed the briefcase.

“We couldn’t talk to Augie. But you, I can tell, are a reasonable man. With you we could work something out.”

“There is nothing to work out,” I said. “It’s all gone, I told you.”

“You could take out a loan.”

“Who the hell are you?”

“Just think of us as your friendly neighborhood collection agency. Your life is in foreclosure, boy, and we want to help you find a way to save it. If we sit down together and have an accounting, I’m sure we could come up with something. What do you say?”

“I’ll think about it.”

“Don’t think too long, Frenchy. One way or the other we’re going to sit down together.”

The sound of the old and hated nickname resounded like a shot over the phone. I stopped for a moment, felt the fear fill me and bubble over and coat me with its molasses, leaving me stuck as if glued to the floor. Glued to the floor until I heard glass break from the front of the house.

Suddenly I was out the door and skip-hopping around the pool. As footsteps thundered along the side of the house, I tossed the phone into the water and charged heedless for the wall. No
middle-aged heaving struggle to get over it this time. Fueled by adrenaline, I tossed the briefcase to the other side, planted my hands, and leaped, swinging my legs high as a gymnast on the pommel horse. Who the hell needs steroids? Point a pistol at a baseball player’s face and watch the homers fly.

I landed with a thud and stayed low on the other side as I heard something crash through Augie’s back door. Hoping they hadn’t spotted my mad leap, I grabbed the briefcase and scooted like a chimpanzee toward Selma’s house. I opened the rear door slowly, spun myself inside, closed the door softly. I stood just high enough to peek through the blinds at her empty backyard.

And then I heard something behind me. I jumped like an electrode had been placed on my scrotum. I grabbed for the gun but it was gone, it must have slipped out when I leaped the wall. Hell of a torpedo I was. Defenseless now, I turned slowly, expecting the worst, and saw Selma, leaning on her cane, staring at me with something hard and unfriendly in her eyes.

“What in the barnyard’s going on?” she croaked.

“Someone killed Augie,” I said. “And now they’re coming after me.”

“Not in here, they aren’t.”

“They have guns, Selma.”

“Guns?”

Selma’s eyes widened and just that quickly she turned around and scooted away. To lock herself in the bathroom, no doubt. Smart lady. I was taking another look out the window when I heard Selma behind me once more. When I glanced back, I found her standing there with a huge shotgun in her hand.

“This is Vegas, honey,” said Selma. “Everyone has guns. I’ll watch the back door.”

“Augie needs a funeral,” I said as I pulled out the wad of hundreds I had jammed in my pocket, laid it on the top of the washing machine in her mudroom.

“I’ll take care of it.”

“Try to run it through someone so they don’t know you’re paying. He’d like something simple, I think. Pine, maybe.”

“Pine’s nice.”

“And just a name on his headstone. No fancy sculpture of a naked lady, even though I don’t think he’d mind that so much. His family was Catholic, whatever that means. He was a good friend. And he always wanted to be a dentist.”

“A dentist?”

“Yeah.” I shrugged. “It was what his mom wanted for him.”

“Why are you telling me this?” she said.

“I thought someone ought to know.”

“Get the hell out of here already.”

“I won’t be in touch,” I said.

“Is that a promise?”