Greely's Cove (8 page)

“Well,” answered Carl, dropping all pretense of civility, “I won’t presume to offer you any legal advice, because you’ve undoubtedly got a lawyer of your own. But I will tell you this: I’m Jeremy’s natural father, I have a good income, and I live an upstanding life. There isn’t a judge in this country who would deny me custody.”

The waitress set the check down, and Carl glanced up at her face. She was a pleasant-looking woman of middle age with short black hair. Her face was contorting, her eyes filling with tears, her hands shaking.

“Thank you,” the waitress managed to gasp. “P-please join us again.”

Carl handed her a credit card and asked, “Are you all right? Is something wrong?”

The policeman who had entered a few minutes earlier came to the table and took the waitress’s arm. “Come on, Edna, we’ll find someone else to take care of things here for a little while. Until you feel better.”

“Excuse me, Officer,” said Lindsay. “What’s going on here?”

The policeman had a baby face, a pair of mirrored aviator glasses that hung from a buttonhole of his shirt, and a nameplate that identified him as Hauck. “We’ve just had some bad news,” he said. “I hope you’ll excuse Edna. If you’ll wait a minute, I’ll get you another waitress.” He put an arm around Edna’s shoulders and guided her toward the door that led to the kitchen. “I should never have told you about it, not while you were on the job,” Hauck said.

Edna broke down completely then. Heavy sobs racked her body. “I used to babysit for the Zoltens!” she blubbered through a torrent of tears. “Teri was such a wonderful child, so intelligent, so thoughtful!”

Lindsay watched their backs as they moved away, then glanced at Carl, whose face had gone ashen, the color of the smoky mist beyond the window.

Mitch Nistler woke to the crunch of gravel and the slosh of tires through water and knew instantly that a car had pulled into the muddy, unpaved drive at the front of his house. He forced open his aching, crusty eyes and grabbled for his glasses.

Fuck a bald-headed duck, it must be Kronmiller!
he hissed. His stomach churned as he remembered that he had not shown up for work at the mortuary last night, but instead had gotten drunk at Liquid Larry’s.

Well, not exactly drunk. Just
loose.
Loose enough, in fact, to get thrown out of the place by Liquid himself. Loose enough to decide that his boss, old Matthew Kronmiller, could take his assistant embalmer’s job and shove it up his rosy ass, for all Mitch cared.

Now it was morning and the sun had dawned, revealing the world in all its bleak clarity. Mitch’s body had burned off most of the alcohol he had poured into it the night before, which included ten beers at home after getting a taste of Liquid Larry’s size eleven. Now he had a throbbing head, aching joints, and a different attitude about his job.

He
needed
that job, damn it, despite its less attractive aspects. The money, while not great, was decent—especially for an ex-con who had barely made it through high school. It was the closest thing to a future that he owned.

He ransacked his closet in search of a clean shirt and a presentable pair of jeans, neither of which he found. He settled for stuff he’d worn earlier in the week but had not yet washed. They would have to do, despite the wrinkles, and he hurriedly pulled them on over his skinny body.

He heard a car door slam and then another—more than one person, apparently, meaning that Kronmiller had not come to roust his ass to work after all. Kronmiller always came alone when there was rousting to be done. Mitch breathed a little easier, but not
too
easy. If he knew what was good for him, he would haul his butt over to the mortuary right now, and he would start cleaning up that suicide if the old batfucker hadn’t already done so. Mitch hoped that his visitors, whoever they were, would not stay long.

He heard the scuff of shoes on the cement stoop, the ticks and snaps of someone pushing the doorbell button (the doorbell didn’t work), and finally, the thump of heavy knuckles on the splintered, rain-bleached door.
Boom-boom boom-boom.

Mitch stepped into a pair of tattered loafers and dashed out of his cluttered bedroom, stuffing his shirttails into his jeans. He whirled and lunged around the living room, snatching up empty Olympia beer cans and Big Mac wrappers, which he crammed into a black Hefty bag that usually lay next to his Salvation Army armchair.

Boom-boom boom-boom.

He pounded into the kitchen, tore open the back door, and flung the bag onto the rickety rear porch, where it landed atop a pile of half a dozen such bags, all bulging with beer cans and burger wrappers and wadded cigarette packs.

Boom-boom boom-boom
.

“All right, I’m coming, I’m coming!” he yelled, and he heard a barking laugh that was somehow familiar. He attacked the scatter of porn mags that lay on the couch, on the carpet, beside his armchair—memorable publications with names like
Cocktail
and
Honey Pit
and
Beaver
, all with gynecologists’ views of young women in blazing color on the covers. He chucked the pile behind the couch.

Boom-boom boom-boom.

He fumbled with the safety chain and dead bolt and finally managed to jerk the door open. The face on the other side caused his stomach to flip-flop. It had exaggerated brows that knitted above a fleshy nose, a blockish jaw covered with stubble, and hazy eyes that could not quite hide a wild anger, even when the mouth was smiling, as it was now. The face belonged to Corley Strecker.

Or, more accurately, to Corley the Cannibal Strecker, recent graduate of Washington State Prison in Walla Walla.

“WHOOOOAH, Marvelous Mitch! How in the fuck are ya, boy?” Corley the Cannibal—a mountainous man who chewed bubble gum with loud, pistonlike strokes that caused the muscles in his face to roll and ripple—flung his beefy arms out wide.

Somehow Mitch got his unhinged jaw under control. “Fuck a bald-headed duck!” he breathed, wanting badly to disbelieve his own bulging eyes, wanting even worse to escape the bear hug, and failing on both counts. Cannibal swung him around as though he were a loose-limbed toddler, laughing the barking laugh. Mitch staggered crazily against the doorjamb when Cannibal finally set him down, feeling dizzy and nauseous from the stench of bubble gum mixed with Cannibal’s gamy breath.

“Marvelous Mitch, I want you to meet my lady,” said the big man, reaching for the arm of the woman who waited a few steps behind him. “Marvelous Mitch Nistler, meet Stella DeCurtis. Stella, this is my best bud from the old days in Walla Walla, none other than Sir Marvelous Mitch Nistler.”

The woman stepped forward. She, like Mitch himself, was painfully thin and as tall. She had white New Wave hair that must have been bleached. Despite her apparently high mileage, she looked not yet thirty. From a knot on the top of her head the hair spewed upward and then down in all directions, like a geyser of brittle ice. Her dark eyes glared from sockets heavily shadowed in electric blue, and though the hollows beneath her jutting cheekbones were powdered in rouge, the rest of her taut face was without color. Her skin-tight pants of black leather and coarsely woven poncho of greens and blues looked expensive.

“So you’re the little slave boy I’ve heard so much about,” said Stella DeCurtis, not bothering to offer a pale hand but stepping uninvited through the door. “From what I hear, you’re lucky you had a master like Cannibal over in Walla Walla. Otherwise, you might not have lived through it.” She flopped down into Mitch’s Salvation Army armchair and busied herself in preparing a toot of cocaine.

Cannibal sprawled onto the threadbare sofa and lit a cigarette. “Well, don’t just stand there, Mitchie-Witchie, close the door and be sociable. Least you can do is offer us a drink or something.” He laughed the angry laugh again.

Mitch did as he was told, fetching his last two Olys from his rusty little fridge in the kitchen and turning them over to his “guests.” He felt just like the little slave boy he had once been.

An old feeling wormed up from his guts and threatened to choke him, a feeling he had not endured since Walla Walla, a noxious mixture of self-disgust and mortal fear, of having lost himself in a hell of sound and smell. It all came back: the perpetual din of clanking cell doors, hectoring shouts, out-of-tune guitars and blaring radios; the pukish smells of sweat and urine and antiseptic and mushy prison food heaped on wet metal trays.

“So, did you get off on being Cannibal’s slave?” asked Stella in her dry voice, after taking her hits. “What’s it like being a slave, anyway?”

Mitch balled his fists to keep his hands from shaking and nearly succeeded. “That was a long time ago,” he managed.

“Oh hell, Mitch, it only seems like a long time ago,” said Cannibal, chewing his bubble gum violently. “You’ve only been out—what? Five years?”

“Almost seven.”

Strecker launched a short review of Mitch’s history for Stella’s benefit. “Mitchie Witchie here only had two choices when he got to D Block: be a slave or be a chick. You see, honey, ol’ Mitch was only about twenty-two or twenty-three back then, and he looked just like a kid, all scrawny and smooth. He’d gotten himself caught sellin’ crank and pot to high-school kids—for about the third time, as I recall—and the judge dropped a tenner on him; made him serve a quarter of that. He’d never been to the joint before, and he’d never heard about the wolves. Ain’t that right, Mitch?”

Talk of the
wolves
made Mitch’s skin cold and crawly.

“The minute he shows up, the wolves start fightin’ over him, right?” continued Cannibal. “Christ, they damn near tore each other to pieces. Young, smooth meat like old Mitch isn’t exactly common in the joint, you see, and every fuckin’ wolf in the place meant to make ol’ Mitch his chick. Well, ol’ Mitch got lucky, ’cause D Block was mine. I was the goddamn block boss, the secretary-general of the place, and I was in the market for a slave. I needed somebody to bring me my food, stand lookout when I was in the shower, make up my bunk, little shit like that. To make a long story short, I stepped in and coldcocked the big mean wolf who meant to make Mitch his chick. In other words, I saved ol’ Marvelous Mitch from a fate worse than death. Ain’t that so, little man?” Cannibal grinned obscenely without missing a beat in the torture of his bubble gum, revealing the teeth that had earned him his moniker. During his first prison term for burglary (before he moved up to armed robbery and assault with a deadly weapon), he had gotten into a fight with the block boss and bitten two fingers off the older man’s hand. The block boss had mistakenly concluded that Corley Strecker’s bark was worse than his bite. From then on Strecker used his chompers when he fought, as well as his fists and feet, sometimes tearing whole mouthfuls of flesh from an opponent’s arm or leg. Hence the nickname.

Mitch nodded miserably. Cannibal had indeed rescued him from a fate worse than death, and Mitch had paid for his salvation with two years and six months as the indentured servant of a brutal and stentorian master, jumping like a frog on a hot skillet whenever Cannibal bellowed a command. He ran errands for the “secretary-general,” delivered his messages and threats, collected his receivables of candy bars, cigarettes, dope, and money. He brought his food, made his bunk, scoured his sink and toilet, folded his clothes. He relayed rumors and gave him the gossip of the yard. Degrading as the servitude was, it was far better than the alternative. As Cannibal’s slave, Mitch enjoyed his protection, and no one dared lay a hand on him—not even the meanest of wolves.

“So, when did you get out of Walla Walla, Cannibal?” asked Mitch, trying to keep a nervous quiver out of his voice.

“Nine months and twenty-three days ago—ten hard ones out of forty on that armed-robbery beef.” He took a pull from his beer and a drag from his cigarette, always chewing, chewing. “Could’ve been worse, though: The state could’ve tagged me with some extra time for some of the shit I pulled inside. Know what I’m talkin’ about?” He grinned hugely.

Mitch knew what he was talking about. Cannibal had busted heads and limbs, ordered beatings. He had stolen, extorted, and smuggled. Even killed.

“I must say, I’m glad to be out, too,” added Cannibal, shaking his head. “The fuckin’ joint has changed, Mitchie. The niggers got their Muslim Nation, the whites got their Aryan Brotherhood, the spicks got somethin’ else—I never could say the name. It’s gettin’ so a secretary-general can’t count on anybody anymore. Everybody’s got some other loyalty. One guy can’t hardly run the block by himself, like I did. If I hadn’t’ve gotten out when I did, I probably would’ve gotten chopped, I swear to God.”

“So, what are you doing these days?” asked Mitch, eyeing Cannibal’s well-tailored leather jacket and expensive boots with suspicious eyes.

“Well, I’m glad you asked me that, little man. See this?” He pulled a small plastic vial from the pocket of the jacket and held it high for Mitch to see. Inside it were four yellowish white cakes of powder, secured by an orange stopper. “You’re looking at forty dollars retail. You’re also looking at the best goddamn high on the block. Tell you what: Take a hit on me.” Mitch knew what it was without being told. Crack, smokable cocaine, a distillate so powerful you could become an addict after just one hit. He didn’t need this. What he needed was a beer, or maybe four, or better yet, a triple threat, but not
this
shit.

“You go ahead. I gotta go to work in a few minutes.”

“Oh, I never do crack myself,” said Cannibal. “I can afford the good stuff these days—nose candy. The high ain’t as intense, but it sure as hell lasts a lot longer. Ain’t that right, Stella?”

Stella DeCurtis nodded without betraying the slightest enthusiasm.

Mitch cleared his throat, issuing a frightened sound that he regretted. “It looks like the crack business is agreeing with you,” he said to Cannibal. “What I can’t figure out, though, is what you need with me.”

“Hell, Marvelous Mitch, it’s not like I
need
you,” said Cannibal, laughing, chewing. “I just wanted to drop in and say hi, now that we’re neighbors and everything. We’ve got a lot of catching up to do, you and me. We’ve been in the stinker together, right? That makes us asshole buds for life, right? Now, what kind of an asshole bud would I be if I didn’t give you a chance to share a little piece of my good fortune?” Mitch Nistler felt the blood draining from his face.