Where the dead lay

FORTY-ONE

It was finally payday. ’Bout fucking time. After all the work: the lugging the equipment, the installing the lamps, the tending the plants, the making the connections. Yeah, it was about fucking time. Charlie Schlegel stood in an alley off Lambert Street with Kenny waiting for Peanut and Nixie to show. He had the shit in the back of his Durango and they were leaning against it when Peanut’s Neon came around the corner. He pulled up close, and he and Nixie got out of the car.

“’Supps?” were exchanged, and Peanut handed over a thick envelope of money before Charlie passed an old nylon gym bag containing the weed and oxy. It should’ve been that easy.

“Count it, bro,” Kenny said, evoking noises of displeasure from Peanut and Nixie.

“Man, it’s all there,” Peanut said.

“I know it is, ’cause if it’s not, I’m gonna take a reciprocating saw to that piece of shit ride you’re so proud of,” Charlie said, jutting a thumb over Peanut’s shoulder toward the Neon. Kenny smiled; the other two did not.

“Lemme know when you need more,” Charlie said.

“Uh-huh,” Peanut answered, turning back for his car.

“Yeah,” Kenny said, “don’t smoke it all in one place. We know how you folks get.”

Peanut stopped and turned.

“Yo, what fucking ‘folks’?”

“Dirty African folks,” Kenny said, smiling and squaring with Peanut. Charlie tucked the money into his pocket and smirked.

Peanut shook his head, looked down, then swung a right hand, open palmed, and bitch-slapped Kenny hard across the face. Everything froze for a moment, as if none of them could believe it had happened. Then Kenny, eyes full of rage, lunged forward, dropped his level, and laced an arm under Peanut’s and around his back. Kenny pivoted and flipped him to the concrete. Peanut landed on his shoulder and the side of his face with a slapping sound that forced the air out of him. Kenny dropped a knee on Peanut’s chest and began punching.

Charlie shook off the momentary surprise and stepped forward toward the action and right into the point of Nixie Buncher’s Piranha automatic knife. Charlie staggered back, swatting ineffectively at the blade, which landed two more times. Liver-stuck, Charlie sat down and landed heavily on the sidewalk. Kenny looked up and met eyes with Nixie. The knife, slippery with blood, hit the pavement with a clink. Kenny jumped to his feet and went to his brother, who was slowly reclining back onto the ground. A groan of air escaped him.

“Chick,” Kenny said, coming close and seeing the massive amount of blood spilling out through his brother’s hands. “You motherfucker!” Kenny screamed, yanking the Smith amp; Wesson out of Charlie’s belt. Nixie had already started sprinting and was halfway down the block by the time Kenny was done fighting with the safety. Peanut had struggled to his feet as well and was making a run for it, weaving unsteadily away, when Kenny fired half a dozen times and lit him up. Hit all over the back and legs, Peanut tumbled forward onto the ground, his cheek pressed against a crack in the cement. Kenny stood and put two more rounds into Peanut’s upper back, ending him.

“Cocksucker,” Kenny said, kneeling back down, cradling Charlie’s head. His brother sputtered but couldn’t seem to talk. “Goddammit, Charlie, what good is a piece if you don’t pull it, asshole?” Kenny groaned. Charlie’s breath came heavy in his chest and sounded like a kettle on its way to a boil. Kenny scrambled Charlie’s cell phone out of his pocket and dialed 911.

“Yo, send an ambulance!” Kenny yelled the location off Lambert. “There’s a white guy stabbed down here. Forget the spook who’s been shot, he’s done. Just treat the other guy.” He snapped the phone shut and wiped greasy sweat from Charlie’s face.

“Don’t fucking die, bro,” he said quietly. “C’mon, Charlie boy.” He waited there for another minute, until he heard sirens in the distance. He wiped off the gun with his shirt and then placed it in his brother’s hand. He felt a slow, heavy drumbeat kicking in the base of his skull and heard the echo-effect lyrics in his head:

You’re nobody, till somebody kills you… I don’t wanna die.

He tried to shake the stupid shit off, took the envelope of cash out of Charlie’s pocket, left the bag of weed, climbed into the Durango, and drove away as slowly as he could make himself go.

The heat had finally broken. The day had started much cooler than had any in months, and it had stayed that way. Vicky Schlegel went through the empty house turning off the air conditioners. Why keep the house cool when no one was home? Everything was costing a fortune now: electricity, food, gas, booze. Well, maybe not booze. They had plenty of that. Terry brought home cases’ worth from the bar. And he and the boys had been coming home with a real snootful lately, too. They were under a lot of pressure, she supposed, and needed to blow off steam. They were all handling it well enough it seemed, except for Deanie. He was the one she was worried about. He’d sicked up all over the place that morning and made a big racket over something he’d seen in the paper. The rest of them had tried to calm him down, but nobody would tell her what it was about when she’d come out of the bedroom. She’d make Terry tell her later, but for now she didn’t know. And then they’d all gone out. She went to take a shower, and when she was done the cars weren’t there.

It was when she’d finally shut the last window unit off that she heard it, the low hum of a running vehicle coming from the garage. The odd thing was, they never used the garage, there was too much crap in there to park inside, and any work on the cars took place down at Rubber House where there were countless Latino mechanics to do dirty work like oil changes. The sound of the engine grew louder as she reached the door and opened it. A cloud of exhaust and horror hit her and she staggered and pressed the button raising the door to the outside. Household junk had been pushed to one side to accommodate Dean’s Magnum. Fresh air flooded in as she crossed to the driver’s side of the car, where a figure was pressed against the window. Even distorted like a horror-movie monster because of the plastic bag stretched over his head she could see it was Dean, her boy, his face bright red and lifeless…

“This is it,” Behr said into the phone as he raced toward the Speedway address. “I got you what you wanted.”

“Linkage,” Pomeroy said.

“That’s right, by witness statement. A shake girl.”

“Schlegel?”

“Yeah.”

“Where’s the girl?” Pomeroy asked, and Behr gave him the location.

“They don’t know where she is-,” he added.

“I’m gonna pick her up anyway,” Pomeroy said.

“Good idea.”

“And you?”

“On my way to the home address-”

“Behr-”

“I’ve got something to settle.” Behr turned off Crawfordsville Road and onto the Schlegel’s street and started scanning house numbers.

“Your friend? Let’s not get stupid here-”

“It’s more personal than that now.”

“Behr!”

But Behr hung up on him and tossed the phone onto the passenger seat. He saw the rambling house he was looking for at the end of the block. It was fairly well kept, with a slightly yellowed yard and a chain-link dog run poking out from around the back. The garage door was open and a slender blond-haired woman was pounding on the driver’s side door of a Dodge Magnum and screaming. Behr rolled into the short driveway, jammed his car into park, and paused. The woman didn’t seem to notice him as she began to yank on the door handle, but the door appeared to be locked. Her head whipsawed around the garage, and she moved to a workbench. She ran her hands over a pegboard, selecting and discarding car keys. Now Behr got out of his car and watched as she scrabbled around the loose tools on the bench and came up with a wooden mallet. She went to the Dodge, which Behr could hear was running, and began pounding on the driver’s-side window. He noticed a shop-vac hose taped over the tailpipe and running into the cracked rear passenger-side window. The heavy odor of exhaust was in the air. Behr crossed the driveway toward her as the driver’s-side window shattered, the safety glass pebbling into a thousand pieces. Mad piano, baroque guitars, machine gun drums, and a distinctive voice playing on the car radio spilled out of the gaping hole. Behr recognized the song. It was Meatloaf’s “Bat Out of Hell.” A bereft wail escaped the woman as she reached inside, opened the car door, and a body slumped out.

The kid was dead, that much was clear enough. After a moment, Behr eventually recognized him as the same one he’d followed from Flavia Inez’s old building. It took him a moment because the man had a plastic bag secured over his head that the woman tore away revealing his face, cherry-colored thanks to the carbon monoxide poisoning. The woman had slumped to her knees by the time Behr approached and she looked up at him with dazed and distant eyes. She began backing away across the cement floor of the garage. Behr extended what he hoped was a calming hand.

“Ma’am,” he said. It seemed to ignite her. She leaped to her feet and bolted inside the house. Behr took a look back over his shoulder. No units were responding as of yet, and if sirens were sounding in the distance the operatic rock music blasting out of the car stereo was drowning them out.

Shit, Behr sighed, and headed inside the house after her. He didn’t have much choice, and he went quickly because he didn’t know what he’d find waiting for him in there and didn’t want to give her time. He moved down a hallway, the house silent around him. He came upon her in the kitchen. Her eyes flashed with hatred. Her feet, shod in sneakers, squeaked on the linoleum floor as she came at him, slashing, with a boning knife.

Rush in. Close the distance. Get inside striking range.

The staccato thoughts of what he was supposed to do when facing a knife screamed across Behr’s cortex. But instead, he found himself leaping backward, instinctively trying to clear the weapon in the other direction. It was a mistake. She cut him on the outside of the left forearm, and he felt the cold burn immediately. The floor would soon be slick with blood, difficult to keep his balance on, his hand perhaps not functional if she’d nicked a tendon. The pain woke him up to the fact that this was real, and as she stumbled forward for another strike, Behr set his feet and drilled her in the face with a straight right. The shot caught her flush on the cheekbone and sounded a loud crack. Her feet ripped up and out from under her and she landed flat on her ass and her head went back and hit the kitchen floor. Behr felt something for the blonde, laid out there, what looked to be her son dead in the garage, but he stuffed it down deep and kicked the knife away. He checked his arm. Blood was seeping from a three-inch slash, but the wound wasn’t deep. He grabbed a dishtowel and wrapped the arm before checking the rest of the house. The rooms were all empty. He discovered the woman’s purse on her unmade bed, rifled it, found her cell phone, which he snapped in his hands. He took the battery for good measure and returned to the kitchen, where the woman was stirring slightly and moaning on the floor. He considered waiting for her to come out of it and questioning her but didn’t want to invest the time or get entangled with the responding officers. On his way from the house he ripped out the telephone landline where it fed in by the side of the open garage door that held the car and the dead kid, and then he was back in his car. He placed a call to Pomeroy’s cell phone, but it rang through to voice mail. He left a message of what the police would find at the Schlegel residence, and though he knew he should stop, pull over, turn off his car, and call it a day, he signed off by saying: “I’m heading for the husband’s work addy.”

Where the fuck is everybody? Terry Schlegel wondered, closing his phone. He’d called them all in succession. Charlie, Kenny, Dean, and Vicky. It was like some kind of cell phone outage, Terry thought, as he dialed into the AMSEC safe that was set in the floor of his office at the garage. The only one whose location he had locked down at the moment was Knute, who would be coming by in a few hours once he’d met up with the Chicago guys. Fifty-seven thousand in cash was what he had in the safe. He’d have seven left in his pocket when it was done. It seemed like a good time to carry extra cash, as he’d be needing it to take a powder for a while. He filled a small tool bag with the rubber-banded bills. Beneath the money was the stainless Smith amp; Wesson. 40 caliber Charlie had given him a while back. Some might have thought it a strange gift, but that was the kind of family they were-they did things their own way, they had their own kind of closeness-and if people didn’t understand it, they could go fuck themselves. Terry checked the clip on the Smith, racked the slide, and tucked it in his belt. He was closing the safe when there was a knock at the door.

“Yeah?” Terry called out.

“Boss?” It was Raul, his shop foreman.

“Come on,” Terry yelled, standing up. The door opened. Raul was standing there, and beyond him was a flash of blond hair and skinny legs in tight faded jeans.

“You got a visitor,” Raul said, his tone and his expression blank.

That’s ’cause he’s smart, Terry thought. He knows better than to come smirking around my office. The foreman cleared and revealed Kathy, that little girl from the bar who went to high school with Kenny. She’d boned how many of his sons? He didn’t care, and neither did they. He’d brought her to the garage that night not long ago. He was usually pretty good with the discipline, but the blond hair, the little slip of a body, the jut of her chin that spoke of her tough attitude-it all put him in mind of Vicky when she was young. This Kathy, with the hundreds of little scars along her arms, like she was trying to erase herself but not all at once, was like a time machine. They’d shared a bottle he had in his desk after he’d shown her a GTO that was getting a full makeover. He’d stuck his dick in her mouth that night and she’d bounced her face on it like some kind of lobotomized mental patient. He’d been fairly sick about it for a week, and then he’d forgotten it. He didn’t expect her back, but here she was.

“Thanks, Raul,” Terry said. “I want you guys closing up early today. I’ve got something I’ve gotta do and I may need the space.”

“Sure, boss,” Raul said. The foreman and the rest of the guys all knew that they’d be paid in full despite the short hours. Raul turned to spread the good news to the others and left Terry with the girl.

“Kathy,” Terry smiled, “what can I help you with?”

“Hi, Mr… I mean, Terry,” she said, and smiled.

As he drove, Behr felt like a locomotive hurtling toward a tunnel.

I can’t stop.

It seemed clear enough.

I should stop, just pull over and turn off the car and wait for the police… I probably have enough to jam the Schlegels up all the way…

But something had tripped in him and it pushed him on. He couldn’t let it set. He’d been training his whole life, he realized, for some fight, hoping like hell he’d be strong enough and ready when it came. It wasn’t the one in the bar, or the one in Francovic’s place, or any other scrap he’d been in-that was clear to him now. He thought of Susan, of the baby she carried, and the fact that they-the Schlegels and their scumbag friends-knew who she was, and that she was in this thing, and suddenly he knew what he was fighting for.

He drove into the parking lot of the Rubber House, the body and tire shop that Schlegel owned, and saw that he had gotten there before the police. The place looked closed; only a Dodge Charger was parked around the side. His immediate concern, as he nosed into a spot right near the door, was that he was too late and had missed Schlegel and wouldn’t be able to find him. He crossed to the door of the building, looking and listening but not seeing any sign of activity. The front door was unlocked when he tried it, and he bit back on the saliva in his mouth and went in.

Inside, the waiting room was shadowy. Behr felt his pupils draw wide and pull for light as they adjusted to the half darkness. He continued past the counter into the first work area, where the repair bays were dimly lit and quiet. He was aware of the noise of his shoes and the heavy thud of his steps as he made his way across the cement floor. He stopped and tried to calm his breathing and thought he heard voices coming from the back. He moved toward them, hoping not to disturb the speakers and to hear what they were saying. Then the low grinding noise of a bay door rolling up somewhere deep in the building washed the voices away. He continued toward the noise, picking up his pace now, using the sound as cover for his movement. He rounded the corner toward a back loading dock where afternoon light spilled in through the gap and bathed the garage in yellow. There was a moment’s pause as the door finished its journey, and then a male figure emerged from an office and headed for the open door. Following a step behind was a teenage girl. She saw Behr first, and stopped.

“Ter,” she said, and the man stopped, too. Even in silhouette Behr recognized him from the Tip-Over Tap Room. Then the man turned and stepped away from the backlight toward him, and Behr saw those dark malevolent eyes, flat as flint. It was him.

“Schlegel,” Behr called out, part statement, part warning, part war cry.

A stainless and black automatic was clutched in Schlegel’s hand as it rose from his belt. Behr felt the air go out of him as he bent his knees and lunged forward and to the right and reached for the small of his back. He had an angle as his gun jumped into his hand. It wasn’t at all like the time he’d pulled it at Francovic’s gym, deliberate and slow. This was instinct, survival. The taste of metal came to the back of his throat. A familiar cold darkness squeezed his chest that he was unable to breathe through.

Schlegel pulled the trigger and his gun bucked while Behr was still raising his weapon. Behr felt an overwhelming impulse to fire back as fast as he could and for as long as he could until he’d gone empty. Giving in to it would mean his death. He saw Schlegel’s gun jerk again. More rounds were coming his way, and worse, he realized his eyes were locked on his opponent. With an effort as physical and demanding as any he’d ever put forth, Behr held fire as he leveled his weapon and hunched down over the sights and focused only on the front blade. It grew sharp in his vision-Schlegel’s body a mere blur ten yards away-and he fired twice. Behr raised his weapon to put a third round into his target’s head, to finish the Mozambique, but there was nothing in his sight picture-Schlegel was down.

A cold wave of adrenaline hit Behr like a six-foot breaker. He started to shake as noise and color rushed back in around him. He felt his chest heaving and became aware of a high-pitched screech and looked to the girl who was crouched down in a tiny ball not far from Schlegel. She was screaming. Behr took a step forward and extended his left hand toward her.

“Stay… stay right there,” he said, not hearing the words clearly, as his ears were ringing from firing in the enclosed space without ear protection. The girl broke off her scream and looked up at him. Then she rose and bolted for the open loading dock door. “Hey,” Behr said feebly, but he didn’t consider going after her. She stumbled and fell as she jumped the three feet from the dock to the parking lot, but got to her feet and darted away with the speed, if not the grace, of a cat.

Behr moved toward the fallen man, cautious, his gun raised ahead of him and saw that Schlegel was hit twice, about two inches apart, in the chest, just left of center mass. The slow, heavy rounds of the big-bore revolver had done their work. A coarse, bronchial grating noise accompanied Schlegel’s breaths, followed by the telltale bubbling of a sucking chest wound. Blood and urine pooled beneath his body. The silver automatic rested five feet from his hand, and it was clear he’d never touch it again.

Behr dropped to a knee right next to Schlegel. “Aurelio Santos. Was it you?” he asked.

After a moment, Schlegel issued a weak nod. “It was all of us…”

“You, your sons, and that partner?”

Another weak nod came from Schlegel. “And the Chicago guys,” he added.

“Who?” Behr demanded, a cold chill running through him.

“Bobby B… some guy Tino… a quiet one.”

“Pros?”

A third, almost imperceptible nod came from Schlegel. “Had to. Couldn’t handle the guy.”

“You wanted to know where he’d put the girl?” Behr asked, but Schlegel’s eyes got glassy. Behr slapped him a little, trying to bring him around.

“Who pulled the trigger? Was it you?” A feeble hand came up and waved at Behr. He couldn’t tell if it was Schlegel saying no or a pointless attempt to shoo him away. No more details came forth. Behr realized he was as close as he’d ever likely be to knowing exactly how it went down that night-and that he was headed to Chicago.

Then he asked the pointless question, the one cops, detectives, and investigators rarely profited from. The one for which he both already had the answer and also never would. Not a satisfactory one anyway. “Why?”

“We shouldn’t have never even been there,” Schlegel rasped. “The fucking skank. My son…” A wheeze was followed by a gurgle, and then all sound stopped.

Terry Schlegel had ceased being. Behr sat down on the cement floor next to the body to wait.