B009XDDVN8 EBOK (41 page)

Footsteps on the walkway outside, footsteps that approached and didn’t pass by, footsteps that stopped right at my door.

Knock, knock, like the beginning of a joke.

“Who is it?” I called out.

“It’s me, Johnny. It’s Harry. We’ve got us a guest.”

I gripped tight the armrests of the chair, I lowered my jaw. “Let him in,” I said.

The door slowly opened. Sunlight streamed into the room through the opening and then, with the blinding light behind it, a silhouette, huge. Its shoulders reached from doorjamb to doorjamb, its head had to duck down as it stepped inside.

“J-J.J.?” said the figure as it leaned forward to peer into the darkness of the room, with that extra
J
thrown in as a bonus. “Is that you?”

“Hello, Ben,” I said. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

M
Y
G
OD
, J.J.,” said Ben, one of the immortal three, which were, contrary to the name, now down to the immortal two. “I’m s-so glad to see you,” he said, his voice soft and slurred like always, but now tinged with a panic evident in his resurrected stutter. He stepped toward me and stopped. “When your friend Harry showed me those two pieces of the old twenty taped together I almost y-yelped. I’ve been so worried. I didn’t know what happened to you after you called me about Augie.”

I stayed seated, still gripping the armrests of the chair, as Harry, from behind Ben, said, “You need me to stick around, Johnny? I can, if you want.”

“No, thanks, Harry,” I said. “We’ll be fine.”

Ben turned his head to look behind him, puzzled by my purposeful lack of reaction to his presence in that room after all those years.

“I might just head off to the Elbo Room for a jolt, then,” said Harry. “You don’t mind I take the truck, do you?”

“Enjoy yourself. Just close the door behind you and be back in a couple of hours.”

“Will do, chief,” said Harry, just before doing it.

With the door closed and the stream of sunlight shut off, I could actually get a clear view of Ben. I hadn’t seen him in years,
and the years I hadn’t seen him in hadn’t been gentle. He didn’t look so much like Ben as like a bad copy of the Ben I had known. He had gained weight and held his body crookedly, as if the bad knee had ground down to meal. His jowls were pouched, the bags beneath his eyes were well packed, his face was lopsided, with a ragged recent scar on his cheek, and his mouth was a tense pucker.

“J.J.,” said Ben. “Wh-what’s been happening to you? Where have you been?”

“On the run,” I said. “Ever since I discovered Augie’s body.”

“My God.”

“They found my house in Virginia, and they ransacked it. They followed me to Pitchford.”

“You were in P-Pitchford?”

“I barely got out of there alive.”

“Wh-what were you doing in Pitchford?”

“Trying to find who was after us, Ben. Trying to find out how they got onto us. Trying to find who killed Augie.”

“Did you l-learn anything?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Then who is it? Wh-who killed Augie?”

“Derek Grubbins.”

“That animal? Christ, it’s worse than I thought. What are we going to do, J.J.? How are we getting out of this?”

“I don’t know if we do get out of this.”

“I ran when I first got your c-call. But I had no place to go and nothing left to lose. After two divorces my bank account was empty and my m-mortgage was underwater. What were they going to take? So I figured, the hell with it all. If there was a price to pay I was ready to pay it.”

“And they never came after you?”

“Maybe they knew I had nothing left.”

“We need to find Derek.”

“Are you insane? He’s a maniac.”

“I know he is,” I said. “But that’s the only way to play it. Make a deal if we can, take the fight to him if we have to.”

“He’ll k-kill us.”

“Only if we sit back and wait for him. He killed Augie, he’s coming after us, we have to make him stop.”

“Augie,” said Ben, his voice softening. “Was it bad?”

“Worse than you can imagine.”

“It crushed me to hear it,” said Ben, something trembling inside him. “I hadn’t seen him in years and still I m-miss him. More than I thought I would.”

And there, just there, in his eyes, was a sadness that I remembered. It’s often like that when you see an old friend. First you can barely recognize him within the crust of age. But then something familiar shows itself, a famous smile, a tilt of the head, and the age disappears with every blink until all you see is the person beneath, and the old friend is no longer old, and you can honestly say he hasn’t changed a bit over the years. And here, before me, suddenly stood the Ben I had known from my very first afternoon in Pitchford. And he was crushed about Augie, as crushed as I, he couldn’t fake that, my Ben would never be able to fake that.

My eyes teared as I pushed myself out of the chair. “Ben,” I said. And then I stepped forward because, truthfully, only this man in all the world could understand how it felt to see Augie dead in his bed in that barren Vegas house. And I reached out and I hugged him. I hugged Ben, like I had hugged him on that final day in Pitchford before I drove away in the truck. I hugged Ben, the last of my old friends, my arms barely reaching around his bulk. And he hugged me back, hard. And I could feel the heaving of his sobs, true and earnest, unless the sobs I was feeling were the echoes of my own.

“God, J.J.,” he said.

“Ben,” I said. “Ben. They have my daughter.”

“Who? How?”

“I tried to hide my family, but they found her, they found my daughter, and they took her.”

“J.J., my God.”

“My daughter, Ben. And all I want to know is, why?”

He didn’t say anything, as if the question was rhetorical, but I could feel him tense in my arms, not quite sure.

And then, soft as a breath, I whispered in his ear, “How could you do it, Ben?”

Ben’s exhale caught in his throat, his fists behind my back balled, the full weight of his body pressed against the knob of metal at my hip. For a brief moment the air crackled with the prospect of blood, and the bright tang of violence filled my mouth. I bowed my head and leaned into the inevitability.

Ben had always been bigger and faster than I was, always twice my strength, always able to freely pummel me had he so chosen. And even now, in his bloated and deteriorated state, between Ben and me there would be no such thing as a fair fight. And yet I had foreseen the possibility that it would come to this, and not only was I ready for it, but also I welcomed it. I had been battered by strangers in the past week, it would be cleansing to be battered by Ben. And I would get my licks in, too, don’t be deceived. It would be ugly and bloody, and all of it would be well deserved on both our parts, but I wasn’t wholly unprotected. That knob at my hip was Holmes’s gun, safety now off, and if it turned badly enough against me I wouldn’t hesitate to kill the son of a bitch who had set up Augie, who had set me up, too, and who now had put my daughter at risk. Even if he was one of the two best friends I had ever had in this world, I wouldn’t hesitate.

And then, as I hugged him close so he couldn’t get a crisp shot at my jaw, I felt the taut snap in the atmosphere go soft. And Ben’s weight sagged into me. And my knees buckled, and I staggered back, still clutching at his huge body. For a moment I was certain that I would collapse backward, and Ben would fall atop me and crush me with his great bulk, and the whole bout
of necessary violence would end in my being smothered without getting in even one good blow.

I grabbed tight and lunged to the right and spun Ben onto one of the stained and flabby beds. And he let me throw him down without a fight, like a huge sack of wet towels. And when I backed away he just lay there, as if stricken by something, his hands, palms facing out, covering his face.

“Do you deny it?” I said.

Silence.

“They knew I had a boat, Ben. How could they know that? I hadn’t even told Augie about the boat. But I mentioned it once during one of our idle chats, let it slip out when you told me how much you liked going fishing. But I wasn’t worried. In all the world the one person I truly could trust was you, right, Ben?”

Silence.

“Tell me I’m wrong, please. Tell me I’m full of shit.”

Silence.

I took out the gun, chambered a round, put the muzzle in his eye. “Then tell me why the hell I shouldn’t kill you now.”

“You should,” said Ben softly, without shying away from the cold steel.

“That’s not what I asked. I know why the hell I should; tell me why I shouldn’t.”

“I can’t,” said Ben, the stutter suddenly gone now along with the lies. “I deserve a bullet for what I did.”

“They have my daughter, you son of a bitch.”

“Just do it, and you’ll be doing me a favor.”

“We loved each other.”

“Before we took the money.”

“For always.”

“Not after,” said Ben.

I stared at him for a moment, a heaving mass of flab and flesh quivering, not from fear of my anger, but from something else, something deeper and far more devastating.

I took the gun from his eye. It was one thing to pull a gun on Diffendale, one was another to pull it on Ben. Christ, what was I becoming?

I clicked on the safety, ejected the magazine, opened the chamber and let the bullet drop out. In my fevered imagination I had thought I could point the gun and solve everything, point it at Ben, at Derek, at the deranged Clevenger. The gun was my daughter’s ticket to freedom, the gun would solve all my problems. But only now, as Ben lay in a heap on the bed, did I know that to be utter bullshit. The gun would solve nothing. It was their tool, not mine, it would only end up killing everything I loved. I tossed the automatic on the floor and watched as it skittered into the corner. If I could end up pointing it at Ben, there was no telling what tragedy I couldn’t cause with that damn thing.

I sat down in the chair and put my head in my hands to gather myself. I never knew what that expression really meant before, but I did now. I was all over the place, my anger, my fear, my love, my hate, I was spread about that room like a deck of cards after 52 Pickup. Bit by bit I gathered myself until I was close to whole.

“Tell me why,” I said, finally.

“What good will it do?” said Ben.

“Shut up and talk,” I said.

And he did. And to God I almost wish he hadn’t. Because friends are grand things to have and hold in our lives, but it is our enemies that stoke the fires of our grandest achievements. We need our betrayals to be hard core and deep rooted, to be based on long-seated resentments that have infiltrated the bone, we need our betrayals to be personal as blood to drive us to get even in the worst possible ways. But how could anything as banal as needing to pay the mortgage do the trick?

I
N THE BEGINNING,
Ben had been even more cautious than I had been with the Grubbins money. A full scholarship put him through Lehigh without tapping his cash, and as an engineering graduate from a top engineering school he immediately found a job in Florida, as far from Pitchford as he could manage. And to keep prying eyes prying elsewhere, he kept his expenses well below his after-tax income. The Grubbins money was socked away in a safe-deposit box, to be used only in special circumstances. A trip to Vegas with Augie and me, an engagement band for his soon-to-be wife, the occasional outlandish gift for his kids, the occasional whore when his marriage turned stale.

“What really happened with Sylvia?” I asked. “You never went beyond the irreconcilable-differences stuff with us.”

“The differences were pretty irreconcilable,” said Ben.

“Was it the prostitutes?”

“That was only toward the end, when it was already dead. Sylvia said it was the silences that killed it.”

“But that’s just you, Ben. What did she expect?”

“She said she expected more than a brick wall.”

It was the divorce that set the disaster in motion. Suddenly there was alimony and child support, along with his share of the mortgage payments on the house in which his wife and kids were still living, in addition to his own rent. Ben missed a few
payments during the divorce proceedings, which crapped his credit score, but he was able to catch up and then keep things going by using some of the stolen money each month, not a lot, but enough for him to know that the status quo wasn’t sustainable. Yet in the heat of the moment he couldn’t worry about that; he was just trying to make ends meet. And then there was another marriage, and a new house for the new wife, bigger than he really could afford because she had one kid already and there was another on the way. But the real-estate broker was touting the investment value of holding both properties in a rising market, and the mortgage broker performed a small miracle.