Gravewriter (22 page)

“Bo is having trouble sleeping,” the old man explained.

“Just when it's dark,” Bo said.

“And since I'm up and down all night, we figured we'd start the day early and then take naps,” the old man said. “Winston Churchill slept that way.” He glanced up at Billy and frowned. “You look rotten.”

“Tough commute,” Billy said. “Pop—”

“There's coffee in the carafe,” the old man said, interrupting. “It's decaf.”

Billy bit his lip and turned his attention to Bo. He asked, “Why can't you sleep?”

Bo shoveled Cream of Wheat in his mouth.

“He won't say,” the old man said. “Something spooked him.”

Fatigue had Billy by the back of the neck. He dropped hard in a chair, poured himself a cup of decaf, and ate a slice of bread. He watched his son scoop and eat around the three glops of margarine in his Cream of Wheat, leaving little volcanoes topped with pools of yellow oil. Billy used to eat his Cream of Wheat the same way. Had the old man showed that to the kid? Naw, he decided. When Billy was growing up, the old man had never been home at breakfast.

“I'm full,” Bo suddenly announced.

“I'll finish it,” Billy said.

“Brush those teeth,” the old man urged.

Bo sprinted to the bathroom.

“Why does he
run
everywhere?” Billy asked.

“You should know.”

“I didn't run like that when I was his age.”

“Not what I mean,” the old man said in his scolding, superior tone, which usually preceded a zinger. “The kid has lived here a year, and you don't know why he runs like that. You're his father and you don't goddamn know.”

“I'm not a child psychologist,” Billy said, too tired to mount much defense. He spooned tepid Cream of Wheat into his mouth. “Why do kids run?”

“
Your
kid runs because he's on a
mission
to brush his teeth,” the old man said, still scolding. “He's a task-oriented little feller—the boy likes missions. He wants to be a superhero's helper, or, if he can't get that kind of job, he wants to be a secret agent with a code name and a radio, and an endless supply of missions. Policemen and soldiers do missions, too, so those are options.”

“My kid, a cop?”

“Until you graduate from gamblers anonymous, I'd steer him away from the Police Academy—so he don't lock up your bookies. The kid has even mentioned being a reporter, because they do missions and write about them for the paper. He doesn't know that you don't do those missions anymore.”

Billy stared at him. “He told you all this?”

“I asked him.”

Billy looked down into the bowl.

“At your age, I was a fuckup,” the old man said, no longer scolding. “But you've seen how that went, so you got no excuse. Why do you keep that kid at arm's length?”

Billy took the cordless phone to his room and dialed the number he had memorized before scrubbing it off his head.

The clock read 4:35
A.M.
He hoped Mia was awake, but he doubted
that it mattered much—she didn't seem the type to get upset about sleep.

“Hello?” She sounded awake. An intercom blared in the background on her end.

“Did I wake you?”

She laughed. “You found my cell number, I see.”

“I had to scrub my head with gasoline and Lava soap,” Billy said. “You know, there's this invention known as paper.…”

“You can lose paper.”

“I suppose.”

“Though,” she said, “if you had lost your head in the boathouse, you wouldn't have been the first.”

“Oh Christ!” Billy blurted. “You're evil.”

She laughed. “He's dead, Billy. Dead people don't care what we say about them, and they can't be brought back by reverent, somber bullshit. The best way to live is by flipping your middle finger at death. Try it. It's liberating.”

The intercom blared again on her end.

“Where are you?” Billy asked. “The airport?”

“The emergency room. I drove my brother here. He was lifting weights barefoot at our mom's house and dropped a forty-five-pound plate on his foot.”

“Your brother lifts weights barefoot?”

“In the nude, actually,” she said, deadpan. Billy couldn't tell if she was joking. She added, “You should see the gash. He won't be walking for a while. They're stitching him up as we speak.”

Billy told her, “Somebody followed me from work tonight. I nearly killed myself trying to lose him on the highway.”

“Somebody you owe money?”

“The guys who collect the money are pros,” Billy said. “If they had been following me, I wouldn't have known until my nose got broke.”

“Hmmm. Maybe something to do with court?”

“I dunno. There's no court tomorrow—the judge has a conflict, so I was hoping to spend a day not thinking about the trial.” He was exhausted, babbling.

“Did you call the police?”

“To tell them what? A car I can't identify followed me around downtown, and then I ran over a road sign to get away from it? I saw the headlights, that's all. Are they supposed to look for a car with headlights?”

“You don't trust the cops,” she said, cutting to the truth.

Billy had already moved on. He said, “I've been wondering if my old man'd be capable of raising my kid, if anything were to happen to me.”

After a moment of silence, Mia asked, “What's going to happen to you, Billy?”

He switched the phone to his other ear, leaned back on the bed, and rubbed his sore eyes. “I've been worrying about it,” he said. “The old man uses a wheelchair most of the time. His fuckin' legs are sturdy like two pieces of wet rope. It's a mystery how he even gets on the toilet—and not a mystery I care to solve. I always thought the kid liked the old man.…” The thought drifted from him.

“It takes more than affection to a raise a kid,” she offered.

“I feel stupid—I've wondered if my father could raise my son, but I realized tonight that the old man has been doing the job for thirteen months.”

“Since your ex-wife died.”

“Yeah.”

She sighed. The intercom blared. She asked again, “What's going to happen to you, Billy?”

Tell her.

To hell with the secrecy of the confessional, he thought. Confessing
to Father Capricchio hadn't exorcised his feelings about Maddox; confessing his dark urges aloud had only brought them into the real world, where they had grown stronger. Mia was not sworn to secrecy. Telling her would guarantee he would be caught, should anything happen to Maddox.

Burn the boat. Smash the bridge. Obliterate all hope of escape.

If Maddox died, then so would Billy, if much more painfully, in jail. It seemed like his best chance to save himself.

Tell her.

He took a deep breath. “Mia—”

“Hey!” She called out. “Hey, Bigfoot! Over here.” She laughed.

“Wha—”

“It's my brother, Craig,” she told Billy. “He's stitched up like Frankenstein, and walking like him, too.” She let Billy eavesdrop on a conversation on her end.

“How's it feel?”

“Shitty.”

“Did they numb it?”

“Told him not to.”

“Ooo, tough man. How long are you on those crutches?”

“Ten days.”

Mia gave a sad moan. “Awwww.”

“When you're off the phone,” a man's voice said, “I gotta call coach. He's gonna chew my ass off for getting hurt like this. I gotta sit down.”

“I'll come get you.” To Billy, she said, “He's fuckin' bummed!”

“Ten days ain't so long.”

“At least he's not bleeding over the floor anymore,” she said. “Our poor mother is probably still scrubbing her shag.” She giggled.

Bleeding over the floor
…

Billy bolted up with a revelation. “Oh Jesus,” he said.

“You were telling me about your son,” Mia reminded him. “Billy? Billy? Shit… did we drop the call?”

He said, “I think I know who butchered your friend J.R. at the boathouse.”

A
t eight o'clock on the morning he had planned to pick up his money and disappear, Franklin D. Flagg scraped together forty-nine dollars—a fortune assembled from bottle deposits, a day of hard panhandling, two pints of B-negative sold to the blood bank, and a fiver lifted from a snoozing wino. He walked to the brass and brick Biltmore Hotel downtown and asked the doorman in the hard round cap to whistle him a cab.

Taxicabs were key to Flagg's plan to get the money and get out of town.

He sent the driver south on Route 95, to Cranston, around Roger Williams Park, and then onto Broad Street, heading north toward South Providence. Flagg's head twisted back and forth. He scanned for tails. Didn't seem to be any. They passed a great stone church in a village square, within screaming distance of a family-planning clinic, where America's official national argument played out daily between clients and demonstrators.

As the cab pushed deeper into Providence, the neighborhood changed to a mix of street-level storefronts and two-family homes
with double-deck porches. It seemed that anyone in the neighborhood with expertise in
anything—
karate, fixing radios, dying hair, dancing the tango, or making pan gravy—had opened a shop on the street, amid Spanish and Asian markets, beeper stores, fast-food chains, dance clubs, and check-cashing outlets. The buildings were white and blue and red and Day-Glo green. Somebody with talent had painted a mural on the side of the U.S. Post Office of a dark-skinned Eve, serpents gathering at her feet, against a deep blue sky and a full moon.

The sky was clear blue, the air dry. The cab drove past churches and cemeteries, schools and a synagogue. Businesses that didn't open until nine or ten o'clock were still shuttered with roll-down grates. People walked the sidewalks. The cab stopped every few hundred yards for red lights, or to let packs of high school girls cross the street.

Flagg ordered the driver to let him off at a soul-food restaurant. There was a pay phone outside. The meter read seventeen dollars. Flagg stuffed three fives and two ones through a hole in the plastic shield that separated the crazy riders from the fearful driver and then got out. Flagg must have seemed like a crazy rider, paying double for a roundabout trip to a restaurant just a few miles from where they had started.

Flagg watched the cab disappear, then shoved a quarter into the pay phone and called a cellular telephone.

The phone rang just once.

“So you're ready,” Flagg said. “You have the money?… Good. In a paper sack? … Very good. Do you have a cab waiting like I told you? … Excellent.” Flagg felt flush with authority. He was giving orders, which someone else was following.
This is like being an executive in the bank building downtown,
Flagg thought. He liked the feeling. No wonder those bank people worked long days.

“Have the cab drive you around awhile,” Flagg said. “Don't leave the city limits. I'll call you back within thirty minutes and tell you how and where we'll meet.”

Flagg hung up before there could be any argument.

He went into the restaurant, ordered smothered pork chops with two fried eggs, grits, and coffee perked on the stove top, with heavy cream and three sugars. He savored the meal for the full thirty minutes and then paid his tab and made another call.

“I'm ready to meet,” Flagg said. Breakfast rode low in his gut. “Head down Broad Street.” He gave the address of the restaurant. “I'll be out front. Have the cab pull over. Leave the dough on the seat. Pay your fare, get out, and go inside the restaurant. Try the pork chops—the meat falls right off the bone. I'll get in the cab, and when it drives off, you'll never see or hear from me again. No tricks. No eye contact. Don't say anything to me. Don't do anything to attract attention.”

He hung up.

The cab's backseat was red vinyl, worn and slippery.

Flagg slammed the door and grabbed the paper sack.

“Drive,” he ordered.

“Where to?” asked the driver.

“Just go. I'll tell you in a minute.”

The driver shrugged, slipped the transmission into drive, and pulled into traffic, heading north, toward downtown Providence.

Flagg peeked in the bag, saw the money bundled with rubber bands, and felt a delicious cold tickle, as if a naked woman was dragging her fingers across his belly. Flagg could afford as many naked women as he could handle; he figured on handling lots of them. He giggled out loud; he couldn't help himself.

The cab passed a hospital and then a high school as it approached the southern end of the downtown district.

“I can drive all day, mister,” the cabbie said through the perforated plastic barrier, “so long as you know the meter is on.”

Flagg needed a long-distance bus or train, but not from the downtown station, where so many other bums knew him. “Other than Providence,” Flagg asked, “where's the nearest bus or train?”

The driver was silent a moment, and then offered, “I could take you to Kingston station, but that would be a half-hour ride, and sixty bucks.”

Flagg chuckled. “I think I can spare that much.”

“Mm-hm. You're the boss.”

Flagg liked that.… He had the money.… He
was
the boss.

The driver zigzagged through traffic, blared his horn at a pedestrian waddling in his path, and then merged the cab onto the highway. Flagg clutched the paper sack in his fists and sat back. Where would he go? Out of state, of course … far away, for sure … but where? Before he got the money, Flagg had been afraid he'd jinx his plan if he thought too far ahead. He remembered an old cell mate who had grown up in northern New Hampshire. Flagg couldn't remember the guy's name, but he remembered his stories.