The Barbed-Wire Kiss (3 page)

He had spent childhood summers in this house, staying with his grandparents, and he remembered a time when there were few vehicles on that road besides pickup trucks and tractors. Colts Neck then was nothing but farms and apple orchards. Now every year there were more cars, more people, fewer farms.

Across the road, he could see yellow surveyor’s tape strung through the woods. Before November, he knew, the bulldozers and backhoes would arrive. They would clear the trees and drive the wildlife out onto the highways to become road kill. Then the houses would spring up, indistinguishable from all the other subdivisions that now lined this stretch of Route 537.

They’d drive him out too, one day. He was the only Rane in the county now, and though he still referred to the place as the farm, the seventy adjacent acres his grandparents had once used for corn lay fallow. His grandmother had sold the acreage a year before her death, willed him the money and the house. The amount was more than he’d expected, nearly $300,000, and he had planned to put the house up for sale as well, but something had stopped him. Then, after Melissa was gone, he’d decided to sell the house in Metuchen instead, move in here. In the meantime, the developer who’d bought the seventy acres had gone bankrupt. The land remained untouched.

It wouldn’t stay that way, he knew. The title would someday be cleared, someone else would buy the land and build on it — it was worth too much. The farmhouse would be an island in a sea of development, an anachronism. Eventually the lawyers would come to him with the right numbers, and then one day the machines would roll up his driveway. Then the farm, and everything it meant, would live only in his memory.

The coffee was bitter, acidic. He drank half, then leaned over the railing and poured out the rest.

He took the mug back inside, rinsed it in the sink, and used the kitchen phone to call Ray Washington’s office. The receptionist put him through.

“This must be a wrong number,” Ray said when he came on the line.

“Why’s that?”

“I have only one friend named Harry, but he would never call me. Can’t figure out how to use those new phones. The kind with the buttons instead of the dial.”

“Sorry, Ray. Long time, I know.”

“How are you doing?”

“I’d say I’ve been busy, but that would be a lie.”

“Edda was just asking about you. She wants to know when you’re going to come work for me.”

“Someday you’ll ask me and the answer will be yes.”

“I hope so. Man offers you a job, you should think about it before you say no. What can I do for you?”

“I’m looking for some information.”

“Let’s hear it.”

“What do you know about a guy named Eddie Fallon?”

“Fellow used to own all those clubs?”

“That’s him.”

“Not much. He lives in Spring Lake now, I think, but he’s kept himself out of the news the last few years. Owns some racehorses too, but he’s not quite the mover and shaker he thinks he is.”

“Any arrests, indictments?”

“I’d have to check. The most serious thing I can remember him being involved in is that business at that club up in Wayne, where that kid got killed. That had to be ten, twelve years ago now, though.”

“I remember that. Anything else?”

“Nothing comes to mind. I know he still owns some places up here. He had one or two down in Florida for a while, I think.”

“You recall his name coming up at all when we were at Major Crimes?”

“Not especially. Everyone knew he was dirty and wondered where he got his money from. But nothing beyond that. Why the sudden interest?”

“It’s for a friend of mine.”

“Anybody I know?”

“Maybe.”

“In other words, mind my own business?”

“I didn’t mean it like that.”

“What’s the trouble?”

“He got involved in a business deal with Fallon. Things went sour and now Fallon’s getting ready to put the screws to him.”

“This a real business deal or an Eddie Fallon business deal?”

“The latter.”

“And why are you involved?”

“I thought I’d look into it, see if I could find a way to help him out. But I wanted to talk to you first. I’ve been out of the loop for a while.”

“Let me reach out to some people, see what I can turn up. What sort of information you looking for?”

“Anything and everything.”

“Might be nothing you haven’t heard.”

“I’ll take the chance. One other thing. He’s got someone who works for him, was a bouncer at one of his clubs, I think. Name’s Wiley. Don’t know if that’s a first name, last name, or what. Not sure how it’s spelled.”

“You’re making me curious. I’ll ask around, but that’s not much to go on.”

“Anything will help. I’m just trying to put together as much information as I can right now. Like they say, knowledge is power.”

“Or something like that. You be home later?”

“All day.”

“Give me a few hours. I’ll see what I can do.”

Later, he got a plastic bottle of water from the refrigerator and a towel from the bathroom. He went out to the old barn he used as a garage, pulled open the doors, felt the heat surge out around him.

A month after Harry had gotten out of the hospital, when he was still so weak that he couldn’t walk to the end of his driveway and back, Bobby had hung a heavy bag from the rafters of the barn. In those first weeks home, Harry had gone out there every day, thrown punches until he was exhausted. His stomach was healing, but the six weeks in the hospital had left him weak and depressed. Hitting the bag helped.

Bobby eventually brought weights and a weight bench, and he and Harry had spent long hours in the barn, Bobby spotting him while he worked the dumbbells and then the bar. Gradually his strength returned, and the endorphins and oxygenated blood helped chase some of the darkness from his mind. Even now, on the nights when he couldn’t sleep and was too tired to drive, he would go out and hit the bag until his arms felt like lead.

He set the water bottle on the hard-packed dirt floor, pulled off his T-shirt, and got the leather bag gloves from the workbench. He pulled them on and stretched, touched the floor, limbering up, feeling the gentle pull of torn and reconstructed abdominal muscles. He began to work the bag, half speed at first, left jabs followed by right reverse punches.

It was Bobby who had first taught him how to fight. They’d met in the seventh-grade class at Star of the Sea in Long Branch, Bobby a transfer, his own house just two streets from Harry’s. They’d been altar boys together, and once, walking home from the rectory on a Sunday after Mass, they’d been caught by four older kids from the nearby public school. The kids had peppered them with stones and gravel, chased them. But after a block of running, Bobby had turned to face them and Harry was forced to do the same. In the fight that followed, Harry got the worst of it—a black eye and a chipped tooth—but Bobby had fought with a fierceness that Harry had never seen in him before. The four were all at least five years older and thirty pounds heavier, but Bobby had knocked two of them down, sent the others running. He’d helped Harry from the ground, walked him home.

Harry told his mother he’d fallen off a swing, and she’d believed him. That same week, he’d started meeting Bobby after school in a field near his house. Bobby had two pairs of boxing gloves his older brother had given him before going into the Army. They had to double-tie the strings to keep the gloves from flying off, but they worked well enough. Bobby taught him what he’d learned from his brother—how to punch and block, how to cover up—and they’d beat each other silly for weeks, Harry eventually learning to hit hard and fast, to pick his targets.

The bag swung, chains creaking. He built the combinations, turned up the speed, careful to keep his wrists straight, the impact rippling up his arms every time his fists thumped into the canvas. He felt the dull pain begin to grow in his stomach.

They’d gone on to high school together at Red Bank Catholic, outcasts again among the rich teenagers from Little Silver and Fair Haven. One day sophomore year Bobby had come to homeroom with his left eye blackened, his jaw swollen. The sister called the principal, who took him out of class.

By the time Harry got home that afternoon, his parents already knew about it. A neighbor had called them. They weren’t surprised. They’d heard the stories.

“It’s the drinking,” his mother said that night at the dinner table. “That’s what makes him do it. Why else would someone treat a boy like that?”

There had been more days like that over the next few months. Then, midway through their junior year, Bobby’s father was dead, the cirrhosis in his liver kicking into sudden overdrive. They smoked a joint out behind the funeral home, Bobby dry-eyed, straight-shouldered. “Fuck him,” he said.

Four months later, Harry’s own father was gone, his clam boat capsized and broken by an early nor’easter. He and Bobby grew into adulthood without fathers, stronger for it. The summer before their senior year, Bobby got a job at a Sunoco station, pumping gas and doing basic mechanical work. He kept the job when September came, dropped out of school and never went back. On graduation day, Harry spotted him at the rear of the crowded gym, standing near the far doors. That night, Harry blew off the postgraduation party and they drove around in Bobby’s primer-gray Dodge Charger, sharing a six-pack of Tuborg in cans, tossing out the empties, blasting the eight-track. Harry felt like he was waiting for his life to begin. And then it had and nothing was ever the same again.

The pain in his stomach was blooming now, sharpening. He pushed away the bag and stepped back, kicked, caught it on its return swing, the ball of his right foot sinking deep. He stepped forward, followed the kick with a combination at face height, pushed away the bag with a shoulder, and fired shots to the body. The sweat was rolling off him now, spattering the dirt.

He threw combinations until he couldn’t raise his arms, then slowed, stopped, leaving the bag spinning. He pulled off the clammy gloves, got the bottle and twisted off the cap, took a mouthful of water, swirled it around and spit it out. He wiped the sweat from his eyes with the towel, leaned against the fender of the Mustang until his breath was back to normal. Then he gathered up the T-shirt and bottle and walked slowly back to the house.

He was sprawled on the couch, half asleep in the heat, when Ray called back. He sat at the kitchen table and talked for ten minutes, taking notes on a yellow legal pad. When the conversation was over, he thanked him, promised to keep in touch, and hung up. He looked over the notes, turning the situation around in his mind, fitting it all together. Wondering how things had come to this.

Driving to Bobby’s house, he found himself taking the long way there. Heading east on Route 36 to the ocean, he turned right onto Broadway and detoured into Long Branch.

It had been years since he’d driven these streets—he never had any reason to come back. He passed the gray stone mass of Star of the Sea Grammar School, closed for a decade now, the windows boarded over. He made a left and turned down the street where he’d grown up. The old house was gone, bulldozed years ago to make room for a methadone clinic. Graffiti marked the white cinder-block walls.

He drove on, past abandoned businesses and the occasional Spanish storefront church. In the 1940s and 50s, when Long Branch was still one of the predominant resort towns on the Shore, these streets had been the heart of its downtown. But the years had been hard, and riots in the late 60s had accelerated a process already begun. When he was growing up, Long Branch was a blue-collar, hardscrabble town, black and white, Italian and Spanish, all living in the same cluster of lower-middle-class neighborhoods. Even after white flight had begun in earnest in the early 70s, his family had stayed on. They had nowhere else to go.

He drove by Bobby’s old house, saw a half dozen people gathered on the porch, beers in hand, salsa music blaring through open windows. They watched him as he drove by.

He turned back onto Broadway, headed east again. When he hit the wide stretch of Ocean Avenue, high-rises sprang up along the beach side, all but fencing off the ocean from view. When he was a kid, the beachfront had been arcades and boardwalks, an amusement pier with a Ferris wheel. All of it was gone now, replaced by ocean-view condos, each claiming its own stretch of private beach. There was no middle ground anymore. Long Branch went from poverty and despair to wealth and insulation in less than a half mile. The people who lived in these high-rises would never know the real town, would never even consider going west into its neighborhoods. He couldn’t blame them. There was nothing there for them.

He turned north, the seawall on his right, and crossed into Monmouth Beach, a one-mile-square town bordered by the ocean on one side and the Shrewsbury River on the other. He passed the Marine Police station and turned left off Ocean Avenue into the center of town, a small compact business district surrounded by middle-class homes.

Only white faces on the streets here. The town had been founded by fishermen, and the sea had been its only industry until development and rising real estate prices had driven the fishermen out. It was an old story, relived at a hundred seaside towns along this stretch of the coast.

Bobby’s house was one of a cluster of old homes on a spit of land extending out into the river. The reeds a hundred yards beyond the house were already flooded. During the strongest nor’easters, when the river and the ocean rose to meet each other, this part of town was always the first evacuated.

Bobby’s old Chevy pickup was parked on the cul-de-sac that marked the end of their street. He pulled in behind it, saw the shiny new for sale sign with the realtor’s logo on it stuck into the lawn. He got out of the car, mosquitoes whining around him. The sun was dying in the west.

He went up the concrete walk and onto the sagging porch, rapped his knuckles on the door, and waited. He slapped at a mosquito on his neck, rolled it into a wet ball, and flicked it away. After a moment there was a flash of movement behind a curtained window to his left. He knocked again.