Empty Ever After (17 page)

When Sarah closed the door behind her, I nodded across the desk. “You first, doc.”

“So I assume your daughter didn’t discuss it with you.”

“Not in so many words. She asked me to give her and her mom a few days. I guess she didn’t think I’d react well to being ordered not to visit.”

“Was she correct?”

“Probably.”

“Look, Mr. Prager, Katy is my patient and therefore necessarily the focus of my efforts. That doesn’t mean, however, that I am unconcerned about you. So I am going to give you some free advice that I have come by honestly. We can’t escape our pasts. We can neither undo them nor make up for them, but ultimately they must be dealt with. Not everyone pays the same prices for their perceived transgressions. In a very real sense, the prices we each pay are dependent upon how we choose to pay them. Take a long hard look at the price Katy is paying. Know this, that regardless of how you may have contributed to her difficulties, the bill is hers to deal with, Mr. Prager, not yours. And no grand or sweeping gesture on your part can change that.”

“Thanks, doc. I know Katy’s your patient and you can’t really discuss too much with me, but why did she freak out like that before? I would’ve thought she’d be relieved to know she wasn’t seeing things.”

“Part of her was relieved, but part of her was also disappointed. Can you understand that?”

“Yeah, I guess I can.”

“You must also understand that logic and reason will not just make Katy’s issues vanish. You can’t argue her out of her depression. You can’t just say, ‘Snap out of it.’ So no matter what proof or evidence or whatever you and the sheriff come across, you mustn’t ever repeat today’s episode. Please, if you want to see Katy, you must clear it with me beforehand.”

“I give you my word.” I stood. We shook hands on it. “One more thing, Dr. Rauch, if you don’t mind.”

“Yes.”

“Is there anything else my daughter conveniently neglected to mention to me in her attempt to manage the situation?”

“It would be difficult for me to know what she didn’t tell you as I don’t know what she
did
tell you.”

“Well, on the phone earlier, she kept saying Katy was embarrassed. I’m a pretty smart guy and I can understand why a person who survives a suicide attempt might be ashamed, but Sarah didn’t say ashamed. She said embarrassed and my kid chooses her words pretty carefully.”

“I’m not sure. I suppose it could be a reference to what she says drove her to overdose.”

“The videotape?”

“That, and seeing her brother looking through the front window.”

“What?”

“I thought you knew. While she was watching the videotape, she saw who she thought was her brother staring at her through the window. Given Katy’s fragile state of mind and her serendipitous viewing of the security tape, it’s easily understandable how his appearance, imagined or otherwise, might have been the precipitating event …”

But I had stopped listening. “Fuck me! Now I gotcha.”

I ran out of the office without saying goodbye. Sarah was pacing circles in the hail outside the office. She called after me, but I didn’t hear a word.

DRAMATIC AS THE
image might be, it wasn’t like Day-Glo puzzle pieces assembling themselves on a black felt backdrop in the void. Things are apart. Things come together. It’s not there, then it is. You can only see pieces come together in retrospect. As Dr. Rauch spoke, it wasn’t his words I heard. I was transported back to the ER the night of Katy’s attempted suicide.

That was Crank’s exact quote to Sheriff Vandervoort in the ER waiting area. What he said registered with me, but not in any way my brain was prepared to handle at the time. I was too agitated about Katy to grasp the implications of what a bloody-faced biker said about some minor motorcycle accident. When I saw Crank the following day, something about the time and place of the accident made more of an impact. Still, I couldn’t quite pull it all together. But now that I knew the kid in the videotape had been snooping around the Hanover Street house, I had the questions to ask and, more importantly, some of the answers. To access Hanover Street, you needed to turn off Van Camp. To get out of Janus and head toward New York City, you had to go through the intersection of Blyden and Van Camp.

“That biker, the one we saw in the ER.”

“What about him?” Vandervoort asked, his eyes skeptical.

“Did he come in the next day to talk about the accident like you asked?”

“Hell, with all the excitement, I forgot about him.”

“Shit!”

“Why, is he important?”

“Could be. I gotta go find him. In the meantime, do us both a favor.”

“What?”

“Go back to the PrimeOil station and look over
all
their security tapes, inside and out, for the day that Katy tried—for the day Katy saw her brother in town. Look for any SUVs and try and get their tag numbers. Also, go back over the station’s credit card receipts for that day and try to match it to the SUVs.”

“Why?”

“Because I think our ghost drives a SUV.”

 

DUSK HAD JUST passed the
baton noir
to the night when I pulled up outside Henry’s Hog. I’ll tell you what, the joint wasn’t a damned thing like red wine. It didn’t grow on you with repeated exposure and it sure as shit didn’t improve with age. Jesus, maybe I had been in the fucking wine business too long.

Unlike my two previous visits, when horse flies outnumbered patrons, the place was buzzing with more than beating wings. There were a good fifty motorcycles parked out in front of the roadhouse, but the machines were all of a type. Ducatis, Moto Guzzis, BMWs, and Suzuki dirt bikes need not apply. These were Harleys, Indians, and custom choppers. There was the occasional Japanese faux hog mixed in with the odd classic Norton and Triumph as well.

I could almost smell the sweat, black leather, and cigarette smoke as I got out of my car. That “Born to be Wild” wasn’t blaring on the juke was the only missing part of the cliché. I felt for the familiar bulge at the small of my back. My snub-nosed .38 was now as old and as much a classic as a Norton or Triumph: a museum piece, just like me. Currently, Glocks, and Sigs were the rage. It was all about rates of fire and walls of lead, but sometimes it came down to a single bullet. My hopes were to never find out and for my revolver to stay holstered until the next time I cleaned it.

I had worn it nearly every day for the last thirty-three years. First it was my off-duty piece. Then it was my insurance when I worked my cases as a PI. Eventually, although I was loath to admit it to myself, the little .38 had morphed into a shopkeeper’s gun, something to keep me safe when I made bank drops or closed one of our stores late at night.
A shopkeeper!
I mean, who says I wanna be a shopkeeper when I grow up? But that’s what I was, a goddamned shopkeeper.

Some old Lynyrd Skynyrd was blasting when I walked into the noisy bar, my entrance seeming to cramp everybody’s style. Except for the dead
man singing on the juke, most all the patrons stopped what they were doing. If my cop vibe revealed itself a bit on my first two visits here, it was fairly screaming this time. I blended in like Neil Diamond at a hip hop show. I might just as well have yelled
Fore!
and asked to play through. Actually, if not for all the hostile facial expressions, I would have gotten a kick out of it. But I walked through the crowd as my namesake through the Red Sea and straight up to Tina at the corner of the bar. As I passed, the sea filled in behind me and the noise started back up.

“You again,” she said, pressing her hand to the flap on her throat.

“Is there someplace we can talk?”

“Sure. Come … on. Butchie, keep an eye … on things.”

I followed Tina into the back room and down the stairs into her office. It might have been a biker bar on the upper level, but down here it looked like any other basement office. It was a business. There were bills to pay, a payroll to meet, and taxes to evade.

“So,” she said.

“Crank.”

“What about … him?”

“I need to find him.”

I didn’t wait for her to ask why or to do the Bribe-me-first Cha-cha. I took out a roll of money and explained to her why I needed to find him.

“He’s that important … to you … to find, huh?”

I shook my head yes.

“Put your money … away,” she said, closing the door behind her, “and … fuck me.”

I didn’t have to say
what
. My face said it for me.

“You heard … me.” Tina unbuckled her belt, unhitched her leather pants, and made a show of slowly undoing her zipper. She reached up with her free hand. “You don’t even have to … look at … me. I’ll bend over or … you can shut the … lights.”

I didn’t flinch. My father-in-law and I had played a game of chicken that lasted two decades. If I hadn’t flinched for him, I wasn’t going to for Tina Martell. I’d also learned that chicken was a two-team sport and that it worked both ways.

“You know, Tina, I didn’t think you were ugly till right now,” I said, starting for the office door. “I can find out what I need to know without Crank. But remember this, anything happens to my family because it took longer than it had to, I’ll come back and burn this shithole down.”

She stopped tugging on her zipper. “Once, I coulda had any man … I wanted. I did and … women too … sometimes. Now look at … me. I can’t even suck—”

I kissed her hard on the mouth, running my hand through her shortcut hair. She didn’t exactly resist, but she didn’t quite melt either. She stepped back after a moment.

“You must really … need Crank,” she said, looking anywhere but at me.

“Yeah, I do.”

“A cabin back in the woods … off Dunbar Road and … Limehouse Creek Way in Craterskill.”

“By the lake?”

She nodded. “Be careful … out there.”

Before I left, I stuck my head back into the office. “No one’s ever accused me of doing things I didn’t want to.”

 

STROLLING INTO HENRY’S Hog was one thing. Driving up on a meth lab out in the woods in the middle of the night was something else. The cop vibe at the roadhouse earned me a few nasty stares. Here, nasty stares would be the very least of my worries. Meth was big business and these guys didn’t fuck around. Shooting first and asking questions later was what they did with their friends. In my case, the questions would come after they had chopped me up and fed me to the local porcine population. As I rolled down Dunbar to the gravel road that was Limestone Creek Way, I thought that I might have asked Tina’s advice on how to approach Crank without getting a shotgun stuck up my ass. It was a wee bit late for that now.

I had three options, none of them any good, but some more dangerous than others. I could have left my car where it was and tried to work my way through the woods to the cabin on foot. That was my ‘if ’ option: If I was twenty pounds lighter … If I was twenty years younger … If my knees worked … Even then, I’m not sure I would have tried it. The woods around the cabin were probably full of eyes and ears and booby traps. Call me a worrier, but I didn’t much feel like stepping into a steel trap or wire snare. I could have tried to sneak up on one of the lookouts and have my .38 convince him to take me to Crank. Again, I wasn’t sure I could pull it off nor did I want to create any more ill will than my unexpected visit was apt to generate. I needed Crank’s help, not his animosity. I went with option three. I restarted my car, put on the brights, rolled down my windows, blasted the radio, and headed straight for the cabin. I might be accused of stupidity, but nobody was going to accuse me of trying to sneak up on anyone.

That was all well and good until the front end of my car plowed into a log placed across Limestone. I didn’t hit it hard enough to have the air bag deploy, but the seat belt tightened up and gave me a pretty good jolt.
Before my head had fully cleared, someone reached out of the darkness and stuck a cold hunk of metal into my neck just under my jaw.

“Shut the car off, asshole. Put your hands on the back of your head, and get out easy,” the man said, slowly pulling back the car door and guiding me with the end of his sawed-off. I still couldn’t quite make him out, but the rifle caught enough light for me to see. “Walk. That way. Slow.” He indicated which way with the gun barrel and moved it from my neck to my back.

If I had ever been more frightened, I couldn’t remember when. I’d been involved in a few shootings, but they had just sort of happened. One minute there wasn’t shooting and the next minute there was. The first time happened up in the Cat-skills. I was in the room when a crooked town cop blew the head off his fellow blackmailer. The next time was a setup. I’d been lured to a meeting at a shuttered Miami Beach hotel during the Moira Heaton/Steven Brightman investigation. When I showed, an ex-U.S. marshal named Barto tried to kill me. I fired back. I think I hit him, but didn’t stick around to make sure. Then there was the shooting at Crispo’s bar in Red Hook when Carmella’s partner was killed and she took that bullet in her shoulder. At Frankie Motta’s house in Mill Basin, there were a few minutes of calm before the old mob capo and his former henchmen shot each other.

Being marched to your own execution was more than a little bit different. The string was going out of my legs and I didn’t think I had the strength to walk much further. A thousand things to say went through my head, but my mouth just didn’t seem capable of forming any words. On the other hand, the little voice, the one that never leaves me, had no trouble with words.
“Be a man. Don’t beg. Don’t shit your pants. Be a man.”

I was so angry at myself for worrying not about my family, but about how I would look to strangers when they blew the back of my head off, that I nearly turned around and charged the guy holding the shotgun on me. Given another few seconds, I think that’s just what I would have done. Luckily, I didn’t get a chance to find out.