Onion Street

CHAPTER ELEVEN

I drove back to the fix-it shop, but made sure to park blocks away and out of sight of anyone who might know me or my brother’s car. As I walked, I tried very hard to focus on the cold, on the passing traffic, or just about anything I could other than what I had in mind to do. Did the idea of going back into that apartment and patting down a corpse scare the shit out of me? Yeah, it did, but the thought that Mindy might never wake up scared me more. It scared me more to think that my best friend might’ve murdered someone. And what scared me most of all was the opposite, that rather than killing the man who had nearly beaten my girlfriend to death, Bobby had a connection to him or had tried to save him.

Again, as I’d done earlier from the safety of Aaron’s car, I watched and waited. This time, from the shadows of a doorway directly across the street. A light went on, not from the third floor bedroom where the body was, but from the storage area on the second floor where the sign on the black door had threatened OR ELSE. Frayed and puckered shades covered the windows. They allowed light to leak out their sides, but did not give up anything more than that. I checked the Bulova watch on my wrist that my Aunt Sylvia and Uncle Lenny had given me for my high school graduation. Suddenly, standing out there alone in the biting cold, high school felt like a chapter from someone else’s book.

It was a little after eight. Only two hours or so had passed from when I’d first pulled up across the street. Two hours, the same amount of time that had elapsed between my conversation with Mindy and when I found her smoking and drinking outside Burgundy House on the evening this nightmare had begun. I’d been confused by her mood swing that night. What, I’d wondered since, could possibly have happened in two hours to make her change so dramatically? I was no longer as confused. If the events of my evening had taught me anything, it was that a lot more than moods could change in two hours — a lot more.

At 8:16, an old, shit-brown Dugan’s Bakery truck, the company logo sloppily painted over, parked in front of the fix-it shop. Two guys about my age, dressed alike in woolen watch caps, army surplus jackets, and gloves, got out of the truck. The back door of the van swung open. When I felt it was safe, I moved four doorways to my right so I could get a better angle on what there was to see. I noticed that the white door to the upstairs apartments had been wedged open and that the two guys, neither of whom were familiar to me, were disappearing up the creaky stairs I’d navigated less than an hour before. For their sakes, I hoped they had nose plugs. The place stank badly enough before I’d deposited the contents of my digestive system on the second floor landing. I couldn’t imagine how bad it reeked in there now. I got a little sickly just thinking about it.

When the two of them came down a few minutes later, they were each carrying small, rope-handled, wooden crates that they loaded in the back of the truck. I couldn’t make out anything about the crates from where I stood, but they must have been heavy because the truck sat down on its rear tires. Either that or the truck’s springs were shot. Frick and Frack made two more round-trips, each time carrying similar crates as on their first foray. On their last trip, Frick had a small duffel bag slung over his right shoulder. Frack was empty-handed. Then when Frick threw the duffel bag onto the floor of the truck box, Frack went nuts.

“What the fuck are you doing, man? You wanna get us killed?”

“Fuck you,” said the guy who’d slammed down his duffel. “You’re not the boss of me.”

Then there was a third voice, a girl’s voice, one that cut through the night air like a straight razor. “Shut up! The Committee is the boss of us all, and they won’t be happy if these are damaged or if we get caught here. Now let’s go. We don’t have much time.”

When the owner of that third voice stepped out into the ambient street light, my heart caught in my throat. I recognized her. How could I not? I’d sat next to her in Romantic Poetry class three times a week during fall term. Her name was Susan Kasten. She’d said about five words to me during that time, four of which were “shut up” twice. But those were five more than she uttered aloud in the rest of the class. She was a petite, mouse-haired, plain-faced girl who struck me as the kind of person who longs for invisibility. And if it wasn’t for her cat-green eyes, she might have been able to disappear into the background. I squeezed my eyelids shut, combing my memory to recall if there was anything about Susan that would connect the girl from class with the one barking orders at Frick and Frack. Nothing came to mind. The sound of the truck door slamming shut broke my trance. I looked up to see the Dugan’s truck pulling away, coughing big clouds of exhaust as it went. I was half hoping that Susan had slammed the white door shut behind her so that there’d be no way for me to get back up to the third floor. She hadn’t. In fact, she’d left it wide open.

There was a fair amount of traffic in both directions on Coney Island Avenue when I stepped out of the shadows to cross the street. At least a minute passed before I could even make it halfway across. When I got stuck there on the double yellow lines, I looked up at the third floor windows. I got weak in the knees and lightheaded thinking about what I was going up there to do. But when I looked up, I saw orange light dancing in the windows of the bedroom where the body lay. Before I could take another step, flames completely engulfed the room. I was frozen in place. Then I remembered what Sue Kasten had said to her flunkies: “We don’t have much time.”

As my eyes shifted down one story, there were two loud explosions. The second and third floor windows blew out, showering the street below and the cars below with jagged glass shards, bits of plaster, and wooden shrapnel. The hallway coughed flames out onto the sidewalk. Some of the debris flew over my head. Some of it bit into the blacktop around my feet. More than just fire had caused that blast. Gas, maybe? Molotov cocktails? I couldn’t say. The explosion unfroze me and I ran. As I did, I kept thinking that I’d asked Lids to get me an address so I might find some answers. What I got instead were more questions wrapped in other questions. I’d worry about that later. First I had to get back to the car.

• • •

Bang!

This explosion was of a completely different, more personal nature. I guess I wasn’t paying careful enough attention to the world outside my head, because under most circumstances I would’ve seen it coming. Not only didn’t I see it coming, I wasn’t even sure what it was: a length of pipe, a baseball bat, a two-by-four? That was kind of beside the point as whatever it was knocked the wind so far out of me I felt like I would have go to the Bronx to retrieve it. As if it wasn’t bad enough that I had already taken a shot across my midsection and was currently writhing on the sidewalk next to my brother’s car, the kick in my ribs was like the cherry on top of the icing on top of my indignity cake. It got even worse still when powerful hands grabbed the shoulders of my coat and flipped me over onto my back. Then those same hands twisted themselves around my collar and yanked me up onto my knees. A big man in a full ski mask stood over me, the knuckles on his fingers pinching off the blood to my brain.

“Listen ta me, ya fuckin’ amateur. Stay outta this shit or I’ll have ta really hurt ya. Ya understand, asshole? Don’t be playin’ on the big boys’ court no more. Ya understand?”

He could have repeated that question fifty times, but I was in no position to answer. I already couldn’t breathe, and he was pressing on my neck so hard I couldn’t speak. I suppose he finally figured out my answer when I kind of moved my head in a feeble nod.

“All right, you hippie piece a shit. Remember what I said. Stay outta this.”

Hippie! Me? I thought the ski mask was supposed to prevent me from seeing his face, not prevent him from seeing mine. My hair wasn’t that long. I was clean-shaven, and there wasn’t a peace sign anywhere to be found on my clothes. Anyway, if you came from my family you knew better than to think love was the answer for all the world’s ills. I might’ve even laughed at him if he wasn’t busy interfering with the bodily processes required to produce laughter. Then I felt his grip relax. Blood rushed back to my brain, and I could feel my lungs were once again in working order. But when he fully released his grip, I went crashing back down onto the cement. As I lay there like a dishrag on the frozen sidewalk, I realized the bruise on my shoulder would have new friends to keep it company.