Bloody River Blues

TWO

Yellow light fading in and out, going to black, black to yellow, motion, shouting, more blackness, deep deep pain, can't breathe can't swallow… The fragments of yellow light. There they go, slipping away…

Don't leave, don't leave me …

Donnie Buffett focused for a moment on Penny's terrified face. Pale and framed with dark hair. The sight of her terror terrified him. He reached for her hand. He passed out.

When he opened his eyes again his wife was gone and the room was dark He had never been so exhausted.

Or so thirsty.

After a few minutes he began to understand that he had been shot. And the instant he thought that, he forgot everything-Penny, the sickening loose feelings in his back and guts, his thirst-and he concentrated on trying to remember something. One word. A short word. The one word that gave purpose to his entire life.

The Word. What is the Word? He slipped back into, unconsciousness. When he woke again he saw a Filipino nurse.

"Water," he whispered.

"Rinse and spit," she said.

"Thirsty."

"Rinse and spit." She squirted water into his mouth from a plastic bottle. "Don't swallow."

He swallowed. He vomited.

The nurse sighed loudly and cleaned him.

"I can't feel my legs. Did they cut my legs off?"

"No. You're tired."

"Oh."

The Word. What the hell was it? Please, dear Mother of our Lord, let me remember…

He fell asleep trying to remember the Word and when he awoke a short time later he was still trying to remember it. Sitting across from him were two men in rumpled suits. When he looked at them he smiled.

"Hey, he's smiling." The man who said this was blond and square-jawed.

'Yo, Donnie," the other man said, "I won't ask how you're doing, 'cause your answers gonna be: what a dumb-ass question-

I feel like shit." He was dark-complected, with short, slick hair. He looked at Buffett with real affection. He gripped Buffett's hand warmly.

"They got me from behind. There was another one behind me."

Bob Gianno, the dark-complected detective, continued, "The mayor's coming down to see you. He wants to wish you luck."

Luck? Why do I need luck? I've been lucky, I don't need luck. What I need is to get out of this bed.

Buffett's lips were rising and falling.

"What's that?" Richard Hagedorn, the blond detective, leaned forward.

"Why can't I…" He shook his head and said indignantly, "I had my body armor on."

"He got you below it. That's what they said at the press conference."

"Oh." Press conference? There was a press conference about me?

Gianno said, "We met your wife, Donnie. She's really pretty."

Buffett nodded blankly.

The detective continued, "Guess you know why we're here. What can you tell us about the hit?"

The periphery faded fast, dissolving again into a million black dots. Yellow light, white light. His organs seemed to shift. Floating. He felt deep pain that was all the more terrifying because it did not seem to hurt. He tried to remember the word.

The Word. The WORD. The answer lies in the Word.

"I…" His voice ended in a rasp. He inhaled hard.

"Maybe we should-" Hagedorn began but Buffett wiped sweat away from his face with the blanket and said, "All I saw was one perp. Cauc, balding, dark hair. Back was to me, I didn't make the face. Thirty-five maybe." A pause. The air hissed in over the dry tissue of his mouth and burned like alcohol on a cut. "Make him five ten, eleven. Weighed one ninety.

Wearing a dark jacket, shirt, jeans, I think. I don't remember. Had a big gun."

"A.44."

"Forty-four," Buffett said slowly. 'The other one, the one shot me…"

"You make him at all?"

Buffett shook his head no. Then asked, "Who was the hit?"

"Vince Gaudia and some squeeze."

"Man," Buffett whispered reverently. "Gaudia." He closed his eyes and shook his head. "Peterson's gonna be pissing red."

Hagedorn said, "Hell with Peterson. We're gonna get the scumbag that did you, Donnie."

Buffett said, "I didn't see the third one, either."

"Third one?" Hagedorn asked. He and Gianno exchanged glances.

'The guy in the Lincoln."

"What Lincoln?" Gianno was taking notes.

"Dark Lincoln. It was parked across the street. I didn't get tag numbers or make." Buffett coughed. "I want some water."

Hagedorn went into the John and got a glass.

He handed it to Buffett, who hesitated then said, "I might puke."

Gianno said, "I seen worse than cops barfing."

Buffett didn't puke, though, and he handed the empty glass back to Hagedorn with triumph. "Best thing I ever had in my mouth."

The men laughed; there was no need to say aloud any of the three punch lines that materialized simultaneously in three different minds.

Gianno asked, 'The guy in the Lincoln. Was he getaway?"

"No, he drove off by himself. Maybe it was somebody who had to ID the hit."

"Naw," Gianno said, "everybody knows what Gaudia looks like. He's a cover boy. Well, looked like."

Buffett said, 'Well, maybe it was the guy who hired baldy."

"Some big fish? I wonder. Donnie, you got any idea who was inside?"

"No, but I saw a guy who did."

"There's a witness?"

Buffett told them about the beer incident. 'This guy was talking to the driver, saying something."

"Fantastic." Hagedorn smiled.

Gianno turned to a blank page in his notebook. "What's he look like?"

Buffett was about to give them a description, and that's what did it. The Word came back to him. The magic Word.

Buffett beamed. He whispered, "Pellam."

'Tell him?" Gianno asked and looked at Hagedorn with a frown.

"His name's Pellam." The smile on Buffett's face glistened and grew.

"You got his name?" Gianno nodded enthusiastically. "He live around there?"

"Dunno." Buffett shrugged, which sent a stab of pain through his neck. He remained very still for a moment, frozen as the pain slowly receded.

"We'll find him," Gianno said reverently.

The smile slipped off Buffett s face as he tried to shift his leg and found he was unable to. The sheet, he guessed, was rucked in too tightly. He absently pulled at the bedclothes and smacked his thigh. "Gotta get the circulation going. I've been on my butt too long."

"We're gonna go find this guy, Donnie." Gianno slapped his notebook shut.

"One thing," Buffett said, "you know witnesses. When it's a hit like this? He's gonna get amnesia. Bet you any money."

Gianno snorted. "Oh, he'll talk, Donnie. Don't you worry about that."

Apparently some trouble with the chili.

The beer and whiskey were gone completely, but the whole pot of chili was pretty much untouched.

Danny and Stile remained behind in the camper after the other poker players had left and they helped Pellam clean up. Danny, with his thick nose, twenty-nine-year-olds smooth complexion, and shoulder-length black hair, resembled a Navajo warrior.

"What'd you do to the chili?" Danny said to Pellam, crinkling his nose, then emptied some ashtrays into a trash bag. Although he often said blunt things to people they rarely took offense.

The chili?

Stile slipped Labatt's bottles into another bag and twirled his bushy mustache. Although Pellam was descended-so the family story went-from a real gun-slinger, Pellam thought Stile was a dead ringer for the ancestor in question, Wild Bill Hickok. Stile was lanky and had a droopy Vietnam vet mustache the shade of his dark blond hair. He reflected, "I remember this western I worked on one time… I forget whose. I was falling off a cliff. I think it was an eighty-foot cliff… and the compressor broke, so they couldn't inflate the air bag as much as the unit director wanted to."

"Hm," Pellam muttered, and stepped into the kitchenette to look at the chili. He'd eaten two bowls, piled with onions and slices of American cheese. Seemed okay to him.

"No," Stile reflected. "It was a hundred-and-thirty-foot cliff."

Bored again, Danny said, "Got the point." An Oscar-nominated scriptwriter, Danny sat in deluxe hotel suites in front of an NEC laptop computer and wrote scenes that sent people like Stile off hundred-and-thirty-foot cliffs; he was not impressed.

Stile: "Man, there we were in the middle of this desert, in a very Native American frame of mind, you know what I'm saying?"

What's wrong with the chili?

Pellam tried another spoonful. Yup, burned. It reminded him of Scotch, the smokiness. But there wasn't anything wrong with it. It could have been intended, as if he had tried a new recipe. If it tasted like mesquite, for instance, nobody would have said anything, except maybe "Damn good chili, Pellam."

He piled dishes in the tiny sink, rinsed some of them in the dribble of the water from the faucet.

"Anyway, when I landed I went down so far, my belt loops made an impression in the mud beneath the bag."

"Uh. That happens sometimes," Danny said lethargically.

To air out the camper Pellam opened the front door. Chili smoke was only part of it. The lawyer from St. Louis had been lighting one cigarette after another. Pellam had noticed that midwesterners did not seem to know this habit was bad for you.

Danny and Stile argued about who had the riskier job-Stile falling off high cliffs or Danny having to pitch his stories to producers and development people. Stile said that was an old joke, and tried to convince Danny to go base-jumping with him sometime.

"To Live and Die in L.A.," Stile whispered reverently. "Awesome scene. The jump from the bridge."

Pellam, still at the front door, squinted. He saw a large, boxy shadow in the grass not far from where the camper was parked. What was it? He squinted, which didn't help. He remembered seeing that area in the daylight-it was a field full of crabgrass and weeds. What would be sitting in the middle of a lousy field this time of night? Funny, the shadow looked just like… The shadow began to murmur.

… a car.

It accelerated fast, spraying dirt and stones, nosing quickly out of the grass, grinding the undercarriage as it went over the sharp drop to the highway.

Probably lovers, Pellam thought. Necking. He could not remember the last time he necked. Did people still do it? Probably in the Midwest they did. Pellam lived in Los Angeles and nobody he'd ever dated there necked.

It was only when he turned back to the camper that he realized that the car had not turned on its lights until it was far down River Road; because of this, the license plate was not illuminated until it was too far away to be read. Odd…

"Wish I'd seen it," Danny said emphatically.

"Was just a car," Pellam muttered, glancing toward the disappearing taillights.

The other two stared at him.

"I meant," Danny said, "the base jump off that bridge."

"Oh."

Danny thanked Pellam for the game and the company but not the chili. After he left, Stile stepped into the kitchenette and began doing the dishes.

"You don't have to."

"Not a problem."

He washed everything but the chili pot.

"Man, black-bottom chili. You're on your own there, buddy."

"I got diverted on my way back from the store."

Stile asked, "How long you in this hellhole of a town for?"

"Till shootings done. Tony's reshooting every other scene."

"He does that, yup. Well, if we're here next week, come over to the Quality Inn for a game. I've got a hotplate there and I'll whip up Philly cheese steaks. With onions. By the by, I'm getting the Hertz tomorrow. You can have your bike back then."

Stile had been in town three weeks and had already burned out the transmission of his rental car. Rental companies should ask for occupation and not rent their vehicles to stuntmen.

Pellam walked him to the door. "When you got here, d'you see a car parked over there?"

"Where? There? That's just a mess of weeds, Pellam. Why'd anybody park there?"

Stile stepped outside, inhaled the air. He whistled a Stevie Wonder tune through his gunslinger mustache as he walked in long strides to the battered Yamaha with the rack dangling precariously from the back fender.

"Was it him?"

"I couldn't tell."

"He get a look at the car?"

"If I couldn't tell it was him how could I tell if he got a look at the car? And if you cracked that transmission case, boy, you're paying for it. You hear me?" Ralph Bales was speaking to Stevie Flom. They had abandoned the Pontiac and were in Ralph Bales's Cadillac, Stevie driving.

Flom was twenty-five years old. He was north Italian blond and had gorgeous muscles and baby-smooth skin. His round face had never once been disfigured by a pimple. He had slept with 338 women. He was a cargo handler on the riverfront though he took a lot of sick days and for real money he ran numbers and did odd jobs for men who had the sort of odd jobs few people were willing to do. He was married and had three girlfriends. He made about sixty thousand a year and lost about thirty thousand of it in Reno and at poker games in East St. Louis and Memphis.

"Drive," Ralph Bales instructed, looking back at the camper. "It's like he was looking at us."

"Well, was he?"

"What?"

"Looking at us?"

"Just drive."

The night was cloudless. Off to their left the big plain of the Missouri River was moving slowly southeastward. The same water that had looked so muddy and black yesterday, when he was planning the hit, tonight looked golden-lit by the security floods of a small factory on the south shore.

Ralph Bales had thought that locating the witness would be easy. Just find the store where he'd bought the beer and trace him from there.

But he'd forgotten he was in Maddox, Missouri, where there was not much for the locals to do except be out of work and drink all day, or do muscle labor for Maddox Riverfront Services or stoop labor for farmers and drink all night. Ralph Bales, checking the yellow pages, found two dozen package good stores within walking distance of where he'd collided with the witness as he climbed from Lombro's car.

So they'd ditched the Trans Am, sent the Ruger to sleep forty feet below the choppy surface of the Missouri and sped home to change clothes then returned here in Ralph Bales s own car. He had shaved off the mustache, donned fake glasses, a rumpled Irish tweed cap, a pressed blue shirt open at the neck, and a herringbone sport jacket. Pretending to be an insurance company lawyer representing the cop who'd been shot, he walked from store to store until he finally found a clerk who remembered selling a case of beer to a thin man in a bomber jacket at around seven that evening.

"He said he's got a camper parked over at Bide-A-Wee."

"It's that… What is it?" Ralph Bales asked.

"You know, that trailer park? By the concrete plant?

"One thing," the clerk had warned solemnly. "Don't ask him for a part in the film. He don't take to that."

Film?

Ralph Bales and Stevie had then cruised down to the river and parked in the weedy lot outside Bell's Bide-A-Wee. They could look through the camper's small windows, but Ralph Bales had not been able to see clearly if it was the beer man or not. Then the door had opened and Stevie had gotten it into his head that he was calling in a description of the car to the cops and had burned out of there, Ralph Bales shouting, "Be careful with the transmission case," and Stevie Flom not paying any attention.

They now cruised through the night, at fifty-five m.p.h. even, away from Maddox.

Tomorrow morning, let's pay him a visit"

"But maybe he'll give the cops a description of you tonight."

Ralph Bales considered this. He shook his head. "He doesn't even know about the hit. Christ, he had a party going on in there. A guy's a witness to a hit, he isn't going to have a party. I mean, wouldn't you think?"

Stevie said he guessed and put on a Metallica tape.

At seven the next morning they started with the sledgehammers on the Winnebago door.

The interrupted dream was about old-fashioned cars driving slowly in circles around a movie set. Someone kept asking

Pellam if he wanted a ride and he did but whoever asked didn't stop long enough to let him get in the car. Pellam had grown very bored waiting for a car to pick him up.

It wasn't a great dream, but at least he was asleep when he was having it and when the sledgehammers started he became awake. Pellam sat up and swung his feet over the edge of the bunk in the back of the camper. He found his watch. Pellam had often been up at seven but he had rarely wakened at that hour. There was a big difference between the two.

The hammers pounded.

He stood up and pulled on his jeans and a black T-shirt. He looked in the mirror. He'd slept in one position all night-on his stomach like a baby-and his black hair had gone spiky. Pellam smoothed it and rubbed at the welts that the crumpled sheet had left across his face. He went to see who was swinging hammers.

"Hey, dude," Stile said, walking into the kitchen past him. "I was sent to collect you."

Pellam put a kettle on. Stile stood beside the camper's tiny dining table, still covered with cards and Pellams meager winnings. He looked at the chili pot and tapped the black crust with his fingernail. He foraged in the miniature refrigerator. "You got zero food in here."

"Why are you here?" Pellam mumbled.

"Your phone. It's not turned on." Stile found an old bagel and broke it in half. He lifted the other half toward Pellam, who shook his head and dropped two spoonfuls of instant coffee into a Styrofoam cup. "Coffee?" he asked Stile.

"Naw. I got my wheels. You can have the cycle back. It's in the trunk. There's a little teeny dent on the fender. Otherwise it's in perfect condition. Well, it's muddy. Well, the rack, too."

Pellam poured water into the cup and sat heavily on the bench. Stile told him his hair was all spiky.

"What are you doing here?" Pellam asked again as he smoothed his hair.

"Tony needs you. He's like apoplectic-is that the right word?-and you shut your phone off."

"Because I wanted to sleep later than seven o'clock."

"I been up for an hour." Stile did tai chi at dawn. He ate the bagel thoughtfully. "You know, John, I got to admit I was a little curious why you're working for Tony."

Pellam took three sips of scalding coffee. That was something about instant. It tasted terrible but it started hot and stayed hot. He rubbed his thumb and index finger together, designating money, in answer to Stile's question about Tony.

Stiles grunt equaled a shrug, as if he suspected there was more to it. On the other hand, Stile was a senior union stuntman and even at the Screen Actors Guild's contract minimums, would be well paid. But he was also a stand-in for one of the leads, and because of this and because of his experience, his agent had negotiated an overscale contract. He understood all about the motives for being attached to a big-budget project.

"Well, Herr Eisenstein has summoned you and I'm delivering the word." He finished the bagel.

"He tell you what's up?"

"He wants to blow up an oil refinery. For the final scene."

"What?" Pellam rubbed his eyes.

"I swear to God. He's going to build this mock-up of an old DC-7 and tow it behind a chopper, then-" Stile mimicked a plane diving into the stove "-Ka-boom…"

Pellam shook his head. "He's out of… You son of a bitch. You eat a man's last bagel and you rag him all the while you're doing it and here it is not even dawn."

Stile laughed. "Damn easy to pull your chain, Pellam. Up and at 'em. Rise and shine. Our master calls."

Bell's Bide-A-Wee contained two tents, the Winnebago, which was parked in the row closest to the road, and a Ford Taurus, from whose trunk a yellow motorcycle protruded.

The camper was surrounded by unoccupied spaces dotted with short galvanized steel pipes and junction boxes for utility hookups that stretched away toward the river like slots in a miniature drive-in movie theater.

Stevie Flom had turned off River Road and driven a half block through a stretch of boarded-up one-and two-story houses and stores. He had started to park nose-out in an alley between two deserted shops. Ralph Bales had told him not to get fancy-just parallel park on the street and read the paper or something-only leave the engine running.

Ralph Bales walked down to River Road. It was morning, but he saw lights on in the camper. Then he saw a man's silhouette walking around inside. Ralph Bales stepped into a phone booth, whose floor was covered with the tiny blue cubes from its four shattered windows. Three tall weeds grew up through this pile. He picked up the receiver with a Kleenex and pretended to talk while he studied the camper.

He looked beyond the Winnebago to the river. This morning it looked different still-not silver-gray, not the golden shade of last night. Now the surface had a rusty sheen to it, mirroring a redness in the sky that came, Ralph Bales believed, from garbage pumped into the air by refineries outside of Wood River, across the Mississippi. The wind was steady and it bent grass and weeds on the riverbank but hardly lifted any ripples from the ruddy water, which plodded southward.

Ralph Bales remembered a song that he hadn't thought of for years, a sound-track song from twenty-five years ago, the Byrds' closing number in Easy Rider. He heard the music in his head clearly but could not recall the lyrics, just snatches of words about a man wanting to be free, about a river flowing away from someplace, flowing to the sea…

The door to the camper opened.

Yep, it was him. The beer man, the witness. He was followed by a tall, gangly man with a droopy mustache. Together they stepped to the back of the Taurus and wrestled the motorcycle out of the trunk.

The Colt appeared from under Ralph Bales's coat, and he looked around him slowly. A mile away, a semi downshifted with a silent belch of smoke. A flock of gray birds dotted past. In the middle of the muddy river a scarred and patchy tug fought its way upstream.

The two men were talking, standing together over the cycle. The mustached man pointed to what looked like a dent in the mudguard, then he jiggled the chrome rack. The beer man shrugged, then wheeled the motorcycle toward the road.

Ralph Bales was waiting for the friend to get in the Taurus and leave but then decided he should kill both of them. He lifted his Colt and rested the square notch of the sight on the beer man's chest. The silver truck approached. He lowered the gun.

It roared past, engulfing the men in a swirl of papers and dust.

Ralph Bales lifted the gun once more. The road was empty now. No trucks or cars. Nothing between him and his targets thirty feet away from the phone booth and its floor of shattered glass.