Day One (36 page)

“Made a funny sound, stopped working.” He gestures and I look, see the phone on the wet fir needles at his side. I grab it, but it drips water. Dead.

“Come on then, let me help you.” I grab his arm, wonder if I can help him to his feet, if the two of us can hobble down the hill together to find help.

“No, no. I’m the ace. I’m the card up the sleeve.” He shifts against the tree and I see he’s got his other hand stuffed in the pocket of his zip-up hoodie. He sees where I’m looking and pulls out a gun, sloppy grin on his face.

“Where did you get that?”

But I know. Not an S&W 500, not a Python. Big enough though, .357, late of Mitch and Luellen’s kitchen, I’ve no doubt. I reach out to take it from him, but he holds on with surprising strength. “No. Got a job. I’m the ace.”

“Eager, I don’t know what you’re talking about—” He swivels his head, peers up the hill through the shadows. Voices trickle down from above, the sound broken by trees and falling rain.

“They’re bad.”

“Who?”

“I gotta stop ‘em.”

“Eager, don’t be ridiculous. We need to get the police.”

He shakes his head, tries to lift the gun again. “No time.”

I don’t want to, but I believe him. I’ve seen too much already; Myra, Big Ed, the stranger with the hole in his head. I can’t make out the words from above, but the anger is unmistakable. I guess
they’re at the top, south end of the summit near the Harvey Scott statue. Not far from where Michael Masliah found Eager and the Tabor Doe three years earlier.

“Who’s up there, Eager?”

He rolls his head, tries to look. He coughs. The gun slips out of his hand. Someone shouts, someone else screams. A man, a woman, I can’t be sure. “Is it Luellen?”

His head yaws. “Yeah. Luellen.”

“And Danny’s grandfather?”

“Grandpa and some dude with a gun. They want Danny.”

“Danny ran away.”

The crazy grin fades and he closes his eyes. His swollen orb won’t quite shut. A red bubble seems to press against his eyelid. “She’s still okay only as long as they don’t got Danny.”

“What do you think you’re going to do, Eager?”

He pushes the gun toward me. “S’prise them. They don’t know about me. I’m the ace.”

I try to make sense of what I’m hearing. The ace in the hole? ... Eager? He comes out of the woods with the gun, unexpected, and changes the balance of power. At least, that’s what he thinks he’s gonna do, though whether or not he can would be an open question even if he wasn’t crumpled half-dead at the foot of a tree.

“Eager, you can’t just walk up to a man and shoot him.”

“Have to. You fucked it up. Now I gotta fix it.”

“Eager, damn it ...”

“You supposed to take care of her, protect her. That’s why I told her to buy the house, cuz you would make sure she was okay.”

“Jesus.” I press my fingers to my eyes.

“You thought I was casing the joint. But I never went in for house prowls.” He laughs again. “You were supposed to protect her. Now I gotta. But I can’t lift the gun.”

“Eager—”

“They’re bad people.”

Up the hill, the shouting continues as the rain falls and my feet sink into the mud. Eager pushes the gun toward me and I pick it up. Heavy. It’s been a while since I held a gun.

“Eager, how long have you known Luellen?”

“A while.”

“How long?”

“Whole time, I guess. Since the day she got to town.”

“And when was that, exactly?”

He rolls his head downhill. His next words are mumbled.

“Speak up, Eager.”

“You know.”

I have no idea what’s going on, but there’s already a man face down in mud, a boy lost in the woods, and too many questions without answers. If Luellen is up there, if the stranger with the brain injury is up there, if there really is a man who’ll kill for a little boy, what are my choices?

Eager stares at me, bulging eye like a boil.

“Remember that day we met, Skin?”

“Eager, come on.”

“Seriously. Remember it?”

I sigh. I have to figure out a way to get help, find Danny. It’s all bigger than I am. “Of course. Crazy day.”

He moves his head side-to-side, a slow-motion negation. “Not that day.”

It takes me a moment to realize what day he means. “Out in front of my house. You were on your board, I was putting out the recycling.”

“I was lookin’ for you. Found you. Now you found me.” He laughs his strangled laugh. “Full circle, my girl would say.”

“We have to get the police, Eager.”

“No.” His voice finds sudden strength “Can’t be any police.” I know why Eager doesn’t want cops, and not just because he’s a thief and a scammer.
He was a cop.
I wonder if it would matter if he knew about Big Ed down the hill. Probably not. Other thoughts are bouncing around in Eager’s mind, clanking pinballs of certainty. There is too much I don’t know, too much Eager couldn’t explain even if he was able to form a coherent thought.

Yet here under the trees in the rain and the dark he’s been trying to make me understand. The house across the street. Mitch and Luellen’s house. I was supposed to protect her, he said. It’s with a dull shock I finally recognize the bridge of trust Eager tried to build between us. Not just a punk messing with the head of the cop too dumb to catch him, but a kid who looked at me and somehow saw a man who would do the thing he was unable to do.

Is it possible to fail at a task you didn’t know was yours to begin with? Looking into Eager’s focusless eyes and blood-drained flesh, I see the answer. I’ve grown blind and bitter, congratulating myself for babysitting a four-year-old, all the while unaware his mother looked to me as her guardian. And where is Danny now? Lost in the woods, hunted by a savage tweaker and faceless figures out of the inscrutable past of a girl who, unbeknownst to me, put her faith in me.

I lean back on my haunches. I’d like to believe it wasn’t always like this. I’d like to believe Ruby Jane saw something greater in me when she accepted, for the briefest moment, my fumbling advance. Can I become a Skin who doesn’t fear his own imagined irrelevance? Accept the charge given to me by Eager Gillespie, dipshit stray, enigma, man-child with a gun? Can I find my way out of the dark?

The voices above flicker through the trees, bitter motes and fear and rage. I grasp Eager’s icy shoulder, and for a second his focus clears.

“Someone’s coming.” His good eye blinks.

“Who?”

He breathes, a gasp. I don’t think he has many more in him. “It’s time, dude. Don’t worry about me. Help my girl.”

“Eager, please hang in there.”

But he slumps. The last thing he says to me is a faint whisper. “The only problem with being dead is it lasts such a fucking long time.”

The young bastard has become who I wish I could be before my eyes.

November 19 - 4:42 pm

T
his is what I must do: acknowledge who I can never be again, accept what I am. Older than dried shit, sick as last month’s soup. Hanging by a thread in an empty house, working in a coffee shop to make rent after a life behind a badge. In love with a woman young enough to be my daughter, wise enough to by my mother. Every joint hurts. Every nerve is a frayed wire. I’m out of time and fading fast, with nowhere to go but down. Fresh out of illusions.

The bodies are piling up. I can smell Eager’s blood and vomit along with mud and wet fir needles. A little boy is lost in the dark. Luellen is up the hill, her and others. Grandpa, his man, maybe Myra. I look up through the trees into the amber glow of dusk and dream I have one last gasp in me. Maybe, just maybe, I can get to my feet, climb up out of the shreds of my life, and do something worth remembering.

Did you kiss me because of how you feel about me, or because you’ve lost faith in who you are?

I draw a breath, heave myself upright.

Breathe ...

breathe ...

     
breathe
.

“Ruby Jane.” I speak to the weighty, indifferent clouds. Streaks of red vein the sky at the horizon. “I hope I’ve found the way past myself.”

I wade into the storm.

November 19 - 4:37 pm

B
ig Ed remembered three things from his last visit to Mount Tabor: pulling the trigger, falling to the ground with his arm flapping like a roadhouse skank’s tongue, and seeing the girl run off through the trees with the baby. Somewhere in there he lost the gun. Somewhere in there the skate punk picked it up and then— Christ in a Cheeto—shot him like some kinda of vermin.

Grasping his numb throat, he’d staggered off, somehow convinced he could still finish the assignment. Along the hillside through the rain-soaked trees. Then he heard shouting, saw the flashing lights. Fucking cops arrived before anyone could even know what went down. His bearings lost, he climbed as best he could until he came out at the road that circled the summit. The light was viscous and grey, but he could make out the form of the cop and the kid on the ground in front of the patrol car. The boy sat silent and staring at the girl on the ground in front of the statue, face down and unmoving. Big Ed’s gun, who knew where the fuck.

Only two pieces of good news in the whole goddamn mess. He was still alive and the gun couldn’t be traced to him. Maybe it shot
one person, maybe it shot two. Maybe it shot a dozen before Big Ed took it off that toothless lemon dropper. Didn’t matter. No longer his problem. He stumbled back into the trees until he found a path down to the parking area. Soaked to the skin by the time he reached his car, but that was all right. Rain meant no one had seen him shoot the girl, and no one would see him when he got into his car, drove straight to the highway, and set his compass south. He could tell any story he wanted.

Once behind the wheel, he turned the rearview mirror to check out his neck. Blood and jagged flaps of skin, a sucking sound he hadn’t noticed over the
rat-a-tat
of falling rain. He probed the damage with his bloody fingertips. The punk had hurt him bad. But it would be days before he’d learn he would never speak with his own voice again.

Three years ago.

Some things don’t change, some change a lot. Hawthorne Avenue looked much the same as he remembered it. There were small differences, places gone he couldn’t quite remember, places new he didn’t recognize. But the obvious landmarks were still there. The movie theatre with the pub, the tchotchke stores and granolamuncher restaurants. The Ship Shop was a UPS Store now, but the coffee house was still there, joined by a new one just a few blocks up the street. First thing when he got to town he stopped in, ordered himself a latte. Hiram would give him shit if he knew, but the soreness had never left his throat, and warm milk soothed on the way down. Wasn’t like Westbank didn’t have its own espresso shop. He’d enjoyed his latte, then found the Bronsteins, right where Myra said they’d be.

Big Ed no longer worked out like he had back in his playing days. Been a long time since he’d hit the gym five days a week, run every morning, and played pick-up basketball in between—good for agility, basketball, especially for a big man. But if those days
were long past, Big Ed still deserved the name. If Hiram needed you to throw hay, you threw hay. If he needed you to beat down some puffed-up beaner who thought he could organize the day laborers, you beat down a beaner. He hadn’t run in years, but between Hiram’s business and the free weights in his apartment, Ed had maintained most of his bulk and all of his strength. Layers of muscle protected his cervical spine. When the blue-clad man appeared from among the tree and pulled him to the ground, he’d failed to crack Big Ed’s neck by dint of a sheath of overdeveloped contractile tissue. A smaller man, a weaker man, a man more soft fat than dense muscle might be paralyzed now. Or dead.

He wasn’t dead, but he almost wished he was. He awoke face down in a river of mud. For a moment he thought nothing was wrong. He felt no pain, just a chill in his hands and feet and a wet itch up and down his legs. A good itch. He knew where the man’s knee had struck and he knew what such a blow could do. The itch and the chill meant he still had intact nerve fibers between his brain and limbs.