Everybody's Fool

Crazy Like a Fox

THE SERPENT THREAT REMOVED, Gert’s was mobbed and every booth occupied, the bar three deep, two bartenders going flat out. Raymer’s timing was good, though. The couple occupying the darkest booth along the far wall, the one he most coveted, away from all the mayhem, were insulting each other at high volume. “I’m not the one that’s fucking crazy,” the man shouted. “You’re the one that’s fucking crazy.” Someone down the bar shouted, “You’re both fucking crazy,” leaving the angry couple no choice but to form a temporary alliance, bellowing in perfect unison, “Fuck you!” A second later, though, they were squaring off again, and whatever the man said next — Raymer didn’t quite catch it — must’ve tripped the woman’s switch, because she lunged across the booth, knocking over their pitcher of beer, and punched him in the face, the blow landing with enough force that his head rebounded off the back of the booth. “Don’t,” Raymer told her when she drew her fist back, about to let fly again. “I’m serious. Don’t do it.”

“Give me one good fucking reason,” she said, her features contorted into a mask of unreason, so Raymer showed her the badge that he now realized he should’ve given Gus along with his resignation letter. He still had his revolver, too, as well as his radio, though he’d left the latter in the car, not wanting Charice to interrupt his drinking.

“She assaulted me,” the man whined, a thin trickle of blood leaking from one nostril. “You’re my witness.”

“Because he’s a goddamn asshole,” the woman explained, as if establishing a companion’s generally rum character was a time-honored defense in cases of physical assault.

“Pay your tab on the way out,” Raymer told them, then stood aside so they could sheepishly vacate their booth.

“See what you went and done?” the man told his date when he saw Raymer slide in.

Gert came over and wiped off the table with a smelly rag. “Jesus,” he said, noticing his ruptured fruit of a hand.

Outside in the parking lot, Raymer had discovered that the sharp-edged garage-door opener, though useless at Sully’s, was the perfect tool for digging at the inflamed, itchy edges of the wound, which had taken over his entire palm. Thin red cobwebs now crept up his wrist. He slid his hand out of sight under the table. “What was that beer I was drinking when I was in here the other day?”

“You mean yesterday afternoon?”

“That was yesterday?” Raymer said. Because it felt like last week.

“Twelve Horse ale.”

“Right,” he agreed, Jerome’s low opinion of it now coming back to him. “I’ll have one of those. In fact, bring me two. I’m going to murder the first in about two seconds.”

When Gert left, Raymer raised up on one haunch to regard the puddle of beer he was sitting in. At least he hoped it was beer.

“On the house,” Gert said when he returned, sliding two bottles of Twelve Horse and a glass in front of him. “I heard you saved the life of one of my regulars.”

“Thanks,” Raymer said, sliding the glass back to him, then draining half the first beer in one go. It tasted every bit as wonderful this afternoon as it had yesterday. Since turning in his resignation, he’d been wondering what he might do next. Suddenly his path seemed clear. He would become an alcoholic. He would sit in dark, smelly bars like this one in the middle of the afternoon drinking cold, cheap beer. “I should probably tell you,” he said to Gert. “That as of this afternoon I’m officially unemployed. I might not be able to pay my tab.”

Gert made a sweeping gesture that took in his entire establishment. “Welcome to the fucking club.”

In three more swallows he’d finished the first beer and settled into grateful ownership of a large booth all by himself, confident that not a single raucous drunk wanted any part of his company. With his uninjured left hand he rolled the cool empty bottle over his forehead, the exquisite pleasure of this proving that — yes indeedy — he was running a fever. That said, he’d felt worse, even quite recently. He seemed to have moved beyond exhaustion to whatever came next. The primal scream he let loose over at Sully’s must’ve dislodged something. Dougie? That would be nice. Because that guy, he’d concluded, was an asshole. Somehow he managed to bring out both the best and worst in his host, making Raymer at once a better cop and a much-worse human being. Admittedly, he never would’ve tracked William Smith down without Dougie’s help, and good had come of that, but it was also Dougie who’d encouraged him to dig up Judge Flatt for no sound purpose and it was also under his influence that he’d punched out an innocent (albeit obnoxious) motorist. Nor was Dougie as smart as he seemed to think he was. Without a shred of evidence, he had encouraged Raymer to believe that Becka’s boyfriend was Peter Sullivan, which, granted, he’d been all too willing to accept. And maybe worst of all, after Raymer demonstrated some actual maturity by crafting an agreement that benefited both Ghost Becka and himself, the bigmouth had reneged on the deal. So if he’d somehow managed to expel Dougie with that primal scream — he’d been silent ever since, and the buzzing in Raymer’s ears had stopped — so much the better.

Also apparently expelled at the same time, unfortunately, was his judgment. Because face it: instead of sitting here guzzling beer, he should be at the hospital getting his hand amputated. Would Charice think poorly of him and find him less attractive as a one-handed man? he wondered. To feel so disconnected from his own well-being was mildly alarming, but this was more than compensated for by the fact that, for the first time in his life, he didn’t give one tiny little shit about anything. Was this what freedom felt like? If so, bring it on. All he was missing, he decided, was someone to tell how perfectly happy he was.

On the wall between the two restrooms was a pay phone, a suspiciously thin Schuyler County phone directory dangling from it by a chain. Half the pages had been torn out, but he was in luck, the number he needed having been left behind. “Jerome,” he said when the man finally answered, his voice sounding groggy. How best to engage somebody probably still suffering the lingering effects of powerful sedatives? “I know who keyed your car,” Raymer told him.

“I do, too,” Jerome replied dully.

Raymer paused only briefly to puzzle over his lack of interest, then continued. “It was this asshole named Roy Purdy.”

“No,” Jerome said. Not contentious, just confident. “It wasn’t him.”

“Actually,” Raymer said, “we’ve got a witness.” Though this wasn’t quite true. All Mr. Hynes had seen was Roy emerging from the alley, but still.

The silence on the other end of the line lasted so long that Raymer wondered if he’d somehow missed the telltale click of his having hung up. Finally, Jerome said, “You. You keyed the ’Stang.”

Raymer let out an exhausted sigh. “Why would I do that, Jerome? I mean, we’re friends, right? Why would I?”

“I have to go now,” Jerome said.

“Don’t hang up,” Raymer said, surprised by the angst in his voice. “Hold on a minute, okay? There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you. Something I have to come clean about.”

“You hate me. You keyed the ’Stang.”

“No, Jesus, will you listen?”

“I know what you’re going to say.”

“No you don’t. I think…I might have feelings for your sister.”

“Now you’re trying to fuck with my head.”

“That’s not true,” Raymer said. “Why would you even think that? I mean, is that so weird? You said yourself that she was devoted to me. I should’ve realized how I felt about her sooner but…I don’t know…it’s just been really hard to let go of Becka. Hard to, well, to forgive her, I guess. Because she could’ve come to me, right? Explained how things were? Why she didn’t love me anymore? Told me who the other guy was? She could’ve done all that, right?”

“I have to go now,” Jerome repeated.

Raymer was visited by a sudden intuition. “Jerome? Are you drunk?”

“Maybe a little.”

“Charice told me about last night…”

“ ’Bout me slipping my moorings?” he said. “It’s true. Came straight unglued, ole buddy. Guess why.”

“Sure, Jerome. Because I keyed your car. Except I didn’t, okay? That’s what I’m trying to explain, if you’d just listen. It was this asshole Roy Purdy. He’s a racist dickhead, okay? He probably saw us go into Gert’s and—”

“I have to go now.”

“Look, how about I come over? I’ll bring a six-pack of one of those microswills you like. We can talk this through.”

“No,” he said. “Definitely not.”

“What if I promise not to use your bathroom,” Raymer said, recalling what Charice had told him about that.

There came a muffled, whimpering sound. Could Jerome actually be crying?

“Or we could go out someplace,” Raymer offered. “We could go to that wine bar in Schuyler. Adfinitum.”

“ ’Finity,” Jerome blubbered.

“Right. Would you like that? I can be there in twenty. Jerome?”

But the line was so utterly lifeless that Raymer wondered if he’d hallucinated the whole conversation. Because, Jesus, he really was burning up. Putting the receiver back in its cradle, he realized that in the last few minutes Gert’s had taken on a phantasmagoric quality, with hulking, grotesque shapes moving through the tavern’s almost liquid twilight, laughter too loud and not quite in sync with the mouths it issued from. Was he drunk? Was that even possible on one beer? Okay, two beers, he realized when he slid back into the wet booth, because the second bottle of Twelve Horse in his hand was somehow empty, too. Had he drunk the whole thing during his short conversation with Jerome? Suddenly he was frightened, though not of anything he could name. Some kind of slippage, things going too fast, then all of a sudden too slow, tectonic plates sliding along a fault line and giving him vertigo. Placing some bills — it was too dark and he was too messed up to worry about denominations — under the empty bottles, he scooted back out of the booth and stood up, so light-headed he had to grab on to the side of the booth to keep from falling.

Dougie, he thought with odd satisfaction, was a weak stick. Couldn’t handle his booze worth a lick.

—

PULLING UP in front of Jerome’s town house twenty minutes later, Raymer feared, now that he was here, that maybe coming was a mistake. Earlier, when he’d mentioned to Charice that he might swing by to cheer Jerome up, she’d told him without hesitation that it was a bad idea. What if she was right? What if he didn’t want to be cheered up? What if Raymer was exactly the wrong man for the job? If Jerome was determined to believe he’d keyed the ’Stang, how could he convince him otherwise?

He’d just about decided to return to Bath — his injured hand pulsing to the rhythm of his respiration, his fever still raging — when the garage door rolled up unexpectedly. A green minivan sat in the bay, and Raymer waited for it to back into the street. When it didn’t, he got out and walked up the driveway wondering who the minivan belonged to, then realizing that of course Jerome, suddenly without wheels, must’ve rented it. But a minivan? Jerome? Wasn’t that the automotive equivalent of Twelve Horse ale?

It was dark inside the garage, and the vehicle’s windows were tinted, so at first Raymer didn’t realize Jerome was slumped forward onto the steering wheel. Dead, was Raymer’s first thought. Jerome is dead. Had it been a heart attack just as he was about to back out? Was that possible? How could he be alive one moment and not the next, though when you thought about it, this was true of every human being who’d ever lived. At some point you are, until you aren’t. “Jerome?” he said, his face close to the driver’s window. “You okay?”

No response. The man’s forehead still slumped on top of the steering wheel. Alive, though, yeah? Raymer couldn’t be sure in such poor light, but his chest did appear to be gently rising and falling. “Jerome?” Raymer said, louder this time, and when he again didn’t stir, he rapped sharply on the glass with his knuckles, and Jerome bolted upright, his eyes wide with panic, his arms straight out before him with his hands perfectly positioned at ten and two on the wheel, his body braced for impact. The shriek he let loose was high and keening and unguarded, the sound of abject terror. It took Raymer a moment to realize what must be happening, that Jerome, jolted awake in the driver’s seat, had concluded the vehicle was in motion, that he’d fallen asleep at the wheel and was at that very instant about to crash into the wall right in front of him. When that didn’t happen, the screaming stopped as abruptly as it had begun, but only for a moment, because then he saw Raymer peering in at him and let loose again, this second screech even more bloodcurdling than the first.

Raymer waited patiently until he stopped screaming, then opened the door. A bottle of single-malt scotch, a scant two fingers left in the bottom, fell out and shattered on the concrete floor, though his friend didn’t seem to notice.

“What the hell?” Raymer said.

Jerome leaned away from him as far as he could — not very, being belted in — as if from someone with exceptionally bad breath. “What?” he muttered.

“Everything’s all right. You’re in your own garage. You’re safe. Okay?”

Jerome sat up straighter, though he seemed reluctant to take his eyes off Raymer, like he suspected he was lying to him. Finally, though, he began to take in his surroundings. Yes, it did look like his garage. His vehicle didn’t appear to be moving. He relaxed his grip on the steering wheel, then let his hands fall. “Whoa,” he said, blinking. “I must’ve—”

Passed out, Raymer thought, though there was no reason to complete the sentence. “You scared me,” he said. “I was afraid you were…”

He let his own thought trail off, because for some reason the garage door was descending. Turning, Raymer expected to see someone standing in the doorway that led into the kitchen and pressing the button, but nobody was there. Again his knees jellied — the same vertigo that had hit him at Gert’s. Looking back at Jerome, he saw his eyes were streaming, his shoulders shaking.

“How could you?” was what he wanted Raymer to explain.

“I didn’t,” Raymer said, getting annoyed. How many times did he have to tell him it was Roy Purdy? And come on. Wasn’t the ’Stang really just another fucking car? It was people’s lives, not automobiles, that got fucked up beyond repair. He was about to tell Jerome to get a goddamn grip, but now that his eyes had fully adjusted to the cavelike dark, something caught his attention. The rental’s rear seats were down, and the entire vehicle was crammed with cardboard boxes and suitcases and stereo equipment and mounds of clothes. “You going somewhere, Jerome?”

He stifled a sob and nodded resentfully.

“Where?”

“Away.”

Again the garage door lurched into motion, this time lumbering upward.

“To where?”

“Away from you,” Jerome said. His gaze was fixed on that bloody hand, as if the wound there was so disgusting, like a ruptured goiter, that he couldn’t bear to be anywhere near it. Raymer, embarrassed, hid it behind his back.

“Because really,” Jerome was saying, still going on about the fucking ’Stang, “it’s hard to believe anybody could be so cruel…”

From outside came the sound of a car racing up the quiet, residential street at unsafe speed. Raymer turned away from Jerome just in time to see Charice’s car rock to a halt at the curb. She’d tried to raise him on the radio several times while he drove to Jerome’s, pleading with him to tell her where he was, but he’d ignored her. Now here she was, leaping out of the car and sprinting toward them as if the building was on fire. Never mind. He didn’t care why she was here. He was just insanely happy to see her. In fact, his heart did a somersault, which could only mean one thing — that even without meaning to he’d moved on from Becka, the only other woman who’d ever made his heart behave like that. Was it even remotely possible that the sight of him might someday inspire in Charice, or any woman, such profound joy?

But suddenly she froze in the middle of the driveway, looking first at her brother, then Raymer, then Jerome again. “Don’t,” she pleaded. “Dear God, please don’t.”

Don’t what? Raymer thought, but when he looked down he saw what must have upset her so. At some point, without realizing it, he’d apparently taken the remote out of his pocket so he could use its sharp edge to dig at the infected wound. The device was wet and sticky with fresh blood, and the pain was simply breathtaking. Apparently Jerome also wanted him to quit, because he’d taken his gun out and was pointing it at him. “No more,” he said, his eyes wide with terrible determination. “I can’t bear it.”

“Don’t, Jerome,” Charice was saying. She’d come closer but was still outside the garage.

Jerome had begun to tremble, the gun in his hand shaking visibly. Raymer understood the situation was serious — pointing a loaded firearm at another human being always was — but he still had to suppress a powerful urge to giggle, recalling Jerome’s favorite pose, copied from the Goldfinger movie poster, where 007, his long-barreled pistol pointed skyward, left hand cradling his right elbow, was the epitome of suave confidence in the face of danger.

“I told you!” Jerome was saying to his sister. “Didn’t I tell you he knew? He’s known all along!”

Known what? Raymer thought, but the garage door was descending again, in response, yes, to the bloody remote in his hand, just as it had been doing since he arrived. Stunned that this could be so, he watched the door motor closed and then turned guiltily back to Jerome, as if he were the one with some serious explaining to do. After a moment the light went out, leaving Raymer and Becka’s lover alone in the unfathomable dark.

“We were so in love,” Jerome said. “You have no idea.”

Congratulations, said Dougie. Well played.