One of them jogged off to get his coat. "C'mon, Jimmy," the guy holding Hopkins said. "Muckle on, ovah heah." The third guy stepped forward and grabbed Hop's other arm, and the two of them dragged him away.
I went back inside, looked at myself in the mirror in the men's room. I was going to have some bruises on my shoulders and arms where Hop's punches had landed, and there was some blood on my forehead, but it was Hop's, and it washed right off. I was going to leave, but Roscoe's band was taking a break, so I sat back down. Roscoe was making the rounds, shaking hands. He stopped at my table. "T'anks for coming, aye?" he said. "You like da music?"
"Too loud," I told him. "Hurts my ears."
Roscoe laughed. "Yeah," he said. "Franklin, he tell me dat last time. We play loud, by God."
"I was kidding, Roscoe. You guys are all right."
"T'anks," he said, nodding. "I hear you popped old Hoppie pretty damn good."
"Damn. Word gets around fast."
He shrugged. "He had it coming. Maybe you make a few friends tonight, aye?"
He leaned in, lowered his voice. "You be careful now, aye? Old Hop, he's a backshooter from away back. Okay?"
"Thanks, Roscoe." I watched him walk away.
* * *
I was thinking about leaving when two Russians came through the door. I'd never seen either one of them before, but I knew who they were right away because they had my old partner Rosario with them. His face was gray and sweaty, and if you looked close you could see how carefully he was walking. The crowd had gotten a little thinnerthe saner portion had gone home during the break, and I began to wish that I had, too. The Russians were both big, beefy guys, thick necks, wide shoulders. One of them had a vertical scar on one side of his face, ran from one cheekbone up past his eye into his hairline. The other guy looked like he was the one in charge of the brain. He was still in decent shape, but you could see the ghost of Boris Yeltsin in his face, he had already started down that booze highway. The three of them made their way over to an empty table and sat down.
Yeltsin leaned over and said something to Rosey. Rosey nodded, and then he made a show of panning the crowd. His eyes passed mine without stopping. A few seconds later, he looked back at Yeltsin and shook his head. Yeltsin said something, he must have wanted Rosey to be sure, because Rosey did it again, looked at all the faces carefully, shook his head again. The Russian bent closer, looked into Rosey's eyes, saying nothing. Rosey leaned back away from the guy. I could see he was afraid. He shook his head, No, the guy ain't here. Yeltsin sat back, disgusted, looked around for the bar. He said something to Scarface, got up, and walked into the back room.
Rosey wiped his forehead with a shaking hand, dried it on his shirt. Scarface watched him for a minute before he turned away, showing his contempt by twisting in his chair so he wouldn't have to look at him. Very slowly, Rosey leaned his elbows on the table in front of him, steepled his fingers, and glanced up at the ceiling like he was praying. Then he looked over his shoulder for Yeltsin again before glancing across the room at me.
I stared right at him.
He looked around for Yeltsin again, then pantomimed holding on to a steering wheel. I nodded to him. Yeah, I get it. He put his hands palm down on the table just as Scarface turned to check on him.
We're all human. No matter how tough you think you are, you've got fears, you've got emotions, you've got nerve endings. Rosario was a bad motherfucker, but the Russians had reduced him to a sweaty, shaking husk of what he had been. I read somewhere that we're all born with two fears, the fear of loud noises and the fear of falling, all the rest of them we pick up as we go along. I mentally added those two Russians to my list.
Two tables down, the people got up to leave. I waited until they passed by where I was sitting, then I got up and mixed in with them. One of the women in the party looked like she was still in her teens, she had long blond hair and she wore jeans that could not have been any tighter. Who would look at me when they could look at her? I got out the door just ahead of them.
I took a quick tour of the parking lot. There was a late-model sedan with a National Car Rental sticker on it, and I assumed that it had to be what the Russians were driving. There were a bunch of empty spots in the lot from the people who'd already gone home, so I moved the Subaru to a place where I could watch both the car and the doors of the VFW. They stayed about another half hour. I guessed that Yeltsin must have been juicing himself pretty hard during that time, because he looked unsteady when they came out, and Scarface looked pissed. Rosey walked slowly and carefully, as he had before. I didn't want to think about what they had done to him.
It's not all that hard to follow someone in an urban setting. There's usually plenty of other cars around, nobody's gonna notice one more. Here, though, it was just the two of us, my car and theirs. They pulled out of the lot, and I gave them about thirty seconds before I started in their wake. I thought about that, and I lagged back maybe three quarters of a mile. They seemed to be heading more or less due west. I tried running without my headlights for a while, but I don't know how smart that was. When there aren't many houses with lights on and there are no streetlights at all, it gets real hard to see the road. I had to slow down too much to keep from killing myself, so I turned the lights back on.
They turned south when they got to Route 1. I was about a half mile behind them, but I saw their brake lights, and the left-hand turn signal blinking. I had to wait when I got to the stop sign, and a southbound pickup truck got between me and the Russians. I thought that was a good thing at first, but the guy in the pickup drove too slow, and the Russians began gaining on me. I couldn't get past the son of a bitch, either, because he would speed up every time the road straightened out, and the Subaru just didn't have the horses to take him. I guess the driver thought I was questioning his manhood, I don't know. We were headed toward Louis's house, and I was beginning to learn that section of Route 1 pretty well, so I hung back until we got to one long curve, and then I stood on the gas all the way around it, caught up with the bastard, and passed him at the beginning of the next straightaway. I must have pissed him off, he stayed right on my ass until we hit the next curved section of road, but I had other things to worry about. Rosario hadn't given me up. Maybe he really did think I could rescue him, or maybe he was worried what the Russians would do to him once they found me. But they had definitely squeezed him, and I couldn't be sure how much more of that he could take.
I saw them take a right turn and head west. I thought it might have been that same road where I'd first seen Franklin, but I wasn't sure, and again, we were back to two cars, one following the other through the middle of nowhere. After about three miles we ran out of pavement. The Russians had to slow down, and so did I, but I was feeling less and less comfortable with the situation. These guys would have to be complete idiots not to have noticed me. I shut my lights off as I got to the top of a hill. The dirt road dropped away in front of me. I could see the road going down the hill, but I couldn't see any taillights, so I stopped and waited. It occurred to me then that I was being much more cautious than was normal for me, and I wasn't sure if I liked that, but then I realized that I had a hell of a lot more to lose now than I'd ever had before. I didn't know what to make of it: I sat there feeling like a coward for a few minutes, even though there were two of them and one of me, and they were sure to be armed while all I had was a hunting knife and a can of bug spray. I saw their lights come back onthey had pulled over into the trees to see if someone really was on their tail. I sat there and watched their taillights wink out of sight, wondering what to do. There must be a difference between courage and stupidity, that's what I told myself. Rosario was going to have to take it a while longer.
* * *
Nicky was asleep, right in the middle of the bed, his arm stretched out over to my side, reaching out for someone who wasn't there. I was afraid to move himI didn't want to wake him up. I wasn't all that tired anyhow, in spite of the hour. I sat in an overstuffed old chair in the corner of the room and watched him. One thing about him, he went to bed without complaining and he slept like a dead man. Little bastard got up early, though. Just the opposite of his father. "Father," Jesus, there's a word for you.
Coming from where I did, it's tough for me to understand people who are so desperate to have kids when we don't know what the fuck to do with the ones we already got. You see it in the paper all the time, and I don't get it. Surrogate mothers, in-vitro fertilization, egg donors, sperm donors, fertility drugs that make women bear children like litters of baby mice, and all the time I'm growing up, I'm yelling, "Hey! What about me?" I guess it's in the genes, nobody really wants to just raise some kid, what they want is to procreate. Yeah, I'm a real winner, kid, and I'm gonna give you my DNA so you can be a winner, too. Just like me.
And yet, there he was, you know, this beautiful little person, this natural con artist, sleeping right in the middle of the bed in Eleanor Avery's spare bedroom, and what was I supposed to do with him? He didn't need to live out of a knapsack, sleep in motels and spare bedrooms. No matter how well intentioned I might be, no matter what a great kid I thought he was, if I wanted him to turn out better than me, I needed to start doing things different. Fuck me, it's bad enough you got to be responsible for yourself, okay, I'm a crook, I'm this and I'm that, go right down the fucking list, I don't really care, I'll cop to it all, but now I've got this kid, and if I don't find him a place where he can have his own room, and a bicycle, and a school to go to and all that shit, then it will be on me how he turns out. When he hits eighteen, he could be in college or he could be in prison, and I couldn't get away from the premonition that the decisions I was making right then were going to make the difference between the two.
Even Louis had done better than me. His son had grown up in a house, it was his bedroom that Nicky and I were sleeping in. Okay, maybe the guy wasn't Bill Gates, but he was a regular person, a guy with a job, and whatever the possessions were that he had managed to scrape together, they were his, the cops would stand between him and whoever it was that wanted them, he didn't need to worry about some bastard with a warrant, or two Russians from New Jersey, showing up in the middle of the night to take his shit and his family away from him.
I wondered if it was Bookman who had sold me out. I couldn't think of another way the bastards could have gotten so close so quickly. There was no way they could have traced me on their own. I hadn't used a credit card, I had been paying cash for everything. Even though the money had quite recently belonged to them, or to whoever had hired them, they had stolen it from someone else first. Cash doesn't tell stories, anyhow, it's never clean or dirty, only the hands that hold it. I had gone on-line from Avery's telephone, but I couldn't think of a way they could have traced that, either. They would have to know, in advance, what sites I would be looking at, they would have to know my on-line identity, and nobody knew that name but me. I cover my tracks, man. There's nobody any more paranoid than me. The only person I could think of who could put the pieces together was Bookman.
And why would he do it? What kind of game was he playing? Even if the Russians were offering some kind of a reward, I couldn't picture Bookman going for it. Cops go to cops, that's what they're used to. He didn't seem like that kind of guy, anyway. I hated to admit it, but I kind of liked the guy, even if he was a cop.
I put my feet up on the corner of the bed. Nicky stirred when I did that, mumbled something in his sleep. He liked this place, he liked Eleanor and Louis, and he loved that stupid horse. The kid had never had anything of his own, never in his life. I knew that was more my fault than anyone else's, but I couldn't change it. I couldn't go back into the past and give him a different family, and to be honest, I don't know if I would have done it if I could. He was mine, you know? Blame it on the DNA, he was part of me, and I was part of him, for better or worse.
* * *
It came to me then, what I needed to do. And it's funny, you know, you hear this shit all of your life, and I don't know about you but I would never listen. I already knew everything, why the hell would I pay attention to you? But those voices had been right. I needed to stop taking the easy way out, stop sneaking out the back window, stop running away. I always thought I was so fucking smart. I still do. So go on, genius, figure it out. Find a way to take care of the Russians, deal with Bookman somehow, clean up your goddam mess for once. I had never lived in a house before, never in my life. Well, the big house, but that didn't count. I had never lived in a normal place, like Louis's, with a yard full of green grass outside, and a cat, never mind the horse and the chickens and all the rest of it. Even when I had gotten to the point where I was about as successful as burglars get, I still never had anything real, I still lived in apartments, people upstairs, downstairs, and on both sides, and not even that much was mine, the apartments had always belonged to someone else. Maybe things could work out here, maybe we could stay. If I could manage to give Nicky something real, maybe he could grow up to be something real himself.
Five
