A Drink Before the War (22 page)

When I got
there, there was a squad car double-parked in front of the house. Directly behind it was Devin's Camaro. He was standing on the porch with Oscar, talking to another cop, a kid. Too many cops were starting to look like kids to me, I thought, as I climbed the steps.

They were standing over a huddled lump of flesh by the railing, the young cop giving it smelling salts. It was Phil, and my first thought was, Jesus Christ, she killed him.

Devin looked at me and raised his eyebrows, a smile the size of Kansas on his face. He said, “We answered the call because we asked that anything at her or your address be rerouted to us.” He looked down at Phil, at the contusions that covered his face like lesions. He looked back at me. “Oh happy day, huh?”

She was wearing a white shirt over a pair of faded cobalt shorts. There was a red bubble on her lower lip and mascara ran down her face. Her hair was in her eyes as she stepped gingerly out onto the porch in bare feet. She saw me then and came toward me in a rush. I held her and her teeth dug into my shoulder. She was crying softly.

I said, “What did you do?” trying to keep the happy surprise out of my voice, but probably not succeeding.

She shook her head and held on tightly.

Devin was leaning against Oscar, the two of them happier than I'd seen them since they both stopped paying alimony on the same day. Devin said, “Wanna know what she did?”

Oscar said, “Make him beg.”

Devin reached into his pocket, giggling. He held a Taser gun up in front of my face. “This is what she did.”

“Twice,” Oscar said.

“Twice!” Devin repeated gleefully. “Damn lucky he didn't have a friggin' coronary.”

“Then,” Oscar said, “she laid a beating on him.”

“Went nuts!” Devin said. “Nuts! Booted him in the head, the ribs, punched the fuck out of him. I mean, look at him!”

I'd never seen Devin so thrilled.

I looked. Phil was coming to now, but once he felt all that pain, I'm quite sure he would've preferred sleep. Both eyes were almost completely swollen. His lips were black. He had dark bruises over seventy-five percent of his face at least. If what Curtis Moore had done to me had made me look like I'd been in a car accident, Phil looked like he'd been in a plane crash.

The first thing he said when he came to was, “You're arresting her, right?”

Devin said, “Of course, sir. Of course.”

Angie stepped out of my arms, looked at him.

Oscar said, “You're pressing charges, sir?”

Phil used the railing to get to his feet. He held onto it like it might just up and run away any second. He started to say something, then leaned over the railing and threw up into the yard.

“Pretty,” Devin said.

Oscar walked over to Phil, put a hand on his back as he retched some more. Oscar talked to him in a low soft voice, as if there was nothing out of the ordinary going on, as if he was used to carrying on conversations with people who vomited all over their lawns. “See, sir, the reason I ask if you're going to press charges is 'cause some people don't like to do that in this sort of situation.”

Phil spit a few times into the yard, wiped his mouth with
his shirt. Always the gentleman. He said, “What do you mean—‘this sort of situation'?”

“Well,” Oscar said, “this sort of situation.”

Devin said, “Sort of situation where a tough guy like yourself gets his ass handed to him by a woman couldn't weigh more than a hundred fifteen pounds soaking wet. Sort of situation that can become real popular conversation in neighborhood bars. You know,” he said, “sort of situation that makes a guy look like a serious pussy.”

I coughed into my hand.

Oscar said, “Won't be so bad, sir. You just go on into court, tell the judge your wife likes to beat you up every now and then, keep you in line. That sort of thing. Ain't like the judge'll check to see if you're wearing a dress or anything.” He patted him on the back again. Not hard enough to send him down the block, but close. He said, “You feeling better now?”

Phil turned his head, looked at Angie. “Cunt,” he said.

No one held her back because no one wanted to. She came across the porch in two strides as Oscar stepped out of the way and Phil barely got an arm up before she clocked him in the temple. Then Oscar stepped forward again, pulled her back. She said, “Phillip, I'll kill you if you
ever
come near me again.”

Phil put a hand to his temple and looked on the verge of tears. He said, “You guys saw that.”

Oscar said, “Saw what?”

Devin said, “I'd take the lady at her word, Phillip. She has a gun and a permit to use it from what I understand. It's a miracle you're still breathing as it is.”

Oscar let Angie go and she walked back to Devin and me. I thought I saw smoke coming out of her ears for a moment. Oscar said, “You going to press charges or not, Phillip?”

Phil took a moment to consider it. Thought about the bars he'd be unable to show his face in. Every one in this neighborhood for sure. Thought of the whistles and ho
mosexual jokes that would follow him to the grave, the bras and panties that would show up in his mailbox on a regular basis. He said, “No, I'm not pressing charges.”

Oscar tapped his cheek with his hand. “That's real manly of you, Phillip.”

The young cop came out of the house carrying Angie's suitcase and set it in front of her.

“Thank you,” she said.

We heard a sound like a cat lapping at wet food, and when we looked over, we saw that Phil was weeping into his hands.

Angie gave him a glare of such withering and final scorn that the temperature on the porch must have dropped by ten degrees. She picked up her suitcase and walked to Devin's car.

Oscar slapped Phil's hip and Phil's face came out of his hands. He looked up into Oscar's huge face and Oscar said, “Anything happens to her while me and him”—he pointed at Devin—“are alive, I mean anything, like she gets hit by some lightning or her plane crashes or she breaks a nail,
anything—
and we're going to come play with you, Phillip. Know what I mean?”

Phil nodded and then the convulsions returned and he began sobbing again. He hit his fist against the railing and got them under control and his eyes fell on mine.

I said, “Bubba really misses you, Phil.”

He began to shake.

I turned and as I walked down the steps, Devin said, “Hey, Phil, is payback a bitch, or what?”

Phil turned around and got sick again. We walked down to Devin's car and I sat in the backseat with Angie. Camaros have just enough legroom in their backseats to make a dwarf comfortable, but tonight I wasn't complaining. Devin pulled down the street, looked in his rearview at Angie a few times. “No accounting for taste, is there?”

Oscar looked back at Angie. “Boggles the mind. Absolutely boggles the mind.”

Devin said, “Socia's
definitely lost the war. He's been underground for two days, and half his guys have gone over to the Avengers. No one counted on Roland being such a tactician.” He looked back at us. “Marion won't last the week. Lucky for you, huh?”

“Yeah,” I said, thinking, that still leaves Roland.

“Not for me,” he said. “I lost a hundred bucks in the fucking pool.”

Oscar said, “Should have bet on Roland.”

“Now you tell me.”

They dropped us off at my apartment. Oscar said, “We'll have a unit roll the block every fifteen minutes. You'll be fine.”

We said good night, walked up to the apartment. There were eight messages on my answering machine but I ignored it. I said, “Coffee or beer?”

“Coffee,” Angie said.

I put some in the filter, turned on the Mr. Coffee. I took a beer from the fridge, came back into the living room. She was curled in the corner of the couch, looking smaller than I'd ever seen her. I sat across from her in an armchair and waited. She placed an ashtray on her thigh, lit a cigarette, her hand trembling. She said, “Hell of a Fourth, huh?”

“Hell of a Fourth,” I agreed.

She said, “I came home and I was not in good shape.”

“I know.”

“I mean, I just killed someone for God's sake.” Her
hand trembled so badly the ash dropped off the cigarette onto the couch. She brushed it into the tray. “So, I came in and there he is, bitching at me about the car still being parked down at South Station, about me not coming home last night, asking me—no, telling me—that I was fucking you. And I think to myself, I just got in the door, damn lucky to be alive, blood all over my face, and he can't think of anything more original to say than ‘You're fucking Pat Kenzie'? Christ.” She ran a hand up her forehead, pulled the hair back off her face, held it there. “So, I said, ‘Get a life, Phillip,' or something to that effect and I start walking by him and he goes, ‘Only thing you'll be able to fuck once I get finished with you, babe, is yourself.'” She took a drag on the cigarette. “Nice, huh? So, he grabs my arm and I get my free hand in my purse and I shoot him with the stun gun. He hits the floor, then he half gets up and I kick him. He's off balance, goes tumbling back out the door onto the porch. And I hit him with the stun gun again. And I'm staring down at him, and it all went away. I mean everything—every feeling I ever had for him just sort of flushed out of my system and all I saw was this piece of shit who had
abused
me for twelve years, and I…went a little hoopy.”

I doubted that part about the feelings. They'd come back. They always did, usually when you were least prepared for them. I knew she'd probably never love him again, but the emotion would never leave, the reds, the blues, the blacks of all the different things she had felt during that marriage, they'd reverberate time and again. You could leave a bedroom, but the bed stayed with you. I didn't tell her this, though; she'd learn it soon enough on her own.

I said, “Judging by what I saw, you went a lot hoopy.”

She smiled slightly, let her hair fall back in front of her eyes. “Yeah. I suppose so. Long time coming though.”

“No argument,” I said.

“Pat?” She's the only person who can call me that with
out setting my teeth on edge. On those rare times she does, it sounds OK, it feels kinda warm.

“Yeah?”

“When I was looking down at him, afterward, I kept thinking about the two of us in that alley with the car heading around the block toward us. And I was terrified then, don't get me wrong, but I wasn't half as terrified as I could have been, because I was with you. And we always seem to make it through things if we're together. I don't doubt things as much when I'm with you. You know?”

“I know exactly,” I said.

She smiled. Her bangs covered her eyes and she kept her head down for a moment. She started to say something.

Then the phone rang. I damn near shot it.

I got up, grabbed it. “Hello.”

“Kenzie, it's Socia.”

“Congratulations,” I said.

“Kenzie, you have to meet me.”

“No, I don't.”

“Jesus, Kenzie, I'm a dead man you don't help me.”

“Listen to what you just said, Marion, and think.”

Angie looked up and I nodded. The softness in her face receded like surf from a reef.

“All right, Kenzie, I know what you're thinking, sitting there all safe, saying, ‘Socia done now.' But I ain't done. Not yet. And I have to, I'll come looking for you and make sure I take you with me on the way to the grave. You got what I need to stay alive and you gone give it to me.”

I thought about it. “Try and take me out, Socia.”

“I'm a half mile from your house.”

That stopped me, but I said, “Come on over. We'll have a beer together before I shoot you.”

“Kenzie,” he said, suddenly sounding weary, “I can get to you and I can get to your partner, that one you look at like she hold all the mysteries to life. You ain't got that psycho with the hardware to protect you no more. Don't make me come for you.”

Anyone can get to anyone. If Socia made it his sole objective to make sure my funeral preceded his by a few days or a few hours, he could do it. I said, “What do you want?”

“The fucking pictures, man. Save both our lives. I'll tell Roland if he kill me or you, those pictures definitely see the light. That's exactly what he don't want, people saying Roland take it up the bunghole.”

What a prince. Father of the Year.

I said, “Where and when?”

“Know the expressway on-ramp, beside Columbia Station?”

It was two blocks away. “Yeah.”

“Half an hour. Underneath.”

“And this'll get you both off my back?”

“Fucking right. Keep me and you breathing for some time.”

“Half an hour.”

 

We got the photographs and guns from the confessional. We Xeroxed the photos on the machine Pastor Drummond uses for his Bingo sheets in the basement, put the originals back in their place, and went back to my apartment.

Angie drank a tall cup of black coffee and I checked our weapons supply. We had the .357 with two bullets left, the .38 Colin had given us and the .38 Bubba had acquired for us, the nine millimeter, and the .45 I'd taken off Lollipop, silencer attached. We also had four grenades in the fridge, and the Ithaca twelve-gauge.

I put on my trench coat and Angie put on her leather jacket and we took everything but the grenades. Can't be too safe with people like Socia. I said, “Hell of a Fourth,” and we left the apartment.

Part of I-93 stretches over the neighborhood. Underneath it, the city leaves three deposits—sand, salt, and gravel—for emergencies. These three cones rise up twenty feet, the bases about fifteen feet wide. It was summer, so they
weren't in all that much use. In Boston though, you have to be prepared. Sometimes Mother Nature plays a joke or two on us, drops a snowstorm on us in early October just to show what a card she is.

You can enter the area from the avenue or from the back entrance of the Columbia/JFK subway station or from Mosley Street if you don't mind climbing over some shrubs and walking down an incline.

We climbed some shrubs and walked down the incline, kicking clouds of brown dirt in front of us until we reached bottom. We stepped around a green support beam and came out between the three cones.

Socia was standing in the middle, where the bottoms converged into a ragged triangle. A small kid stood beside him. Unformed cheekbones and baby fat betrayed his age, even if he thought the wraparounds and the hat on his head made him look old enough to buy a pint of scotch. If he was any older than fourteen, he aged well.

Socia's hands hung empty by his sides, but the kid's were dug into the pockets of a team jacket, and he flapped them back and forth against knobby hips. I said, “Take your hands out of your pockets.”

The kid looked at Socia, and I pointed the .45 at him. “Which word didn't you understand?”

Socia nodded. “Take 'em out, Eugene.”

Eugene's hands came out of the jacket slowly, the left empty, the right holding a .38 that looked twice as big as his hand. He tossed it into the salt pile without my asking, then started to place his hands back in his pockets. He changed his mind and held them out in front of him as if he'd never noticed them before. He folded them across his chest eventually and shifted his feet. He didn't seem to know exactly what to do with his head either. In quick, rodent's motions, he looked at me, then at Angie, over at Socia, back at the place where he'd tossed the gun, then up at the dark green underside of the expressway.

All the salt and exhaust fumes and cheap wine aromas
down here, and the stench of the kid's fear hung in the air like a fat cloud.

Angie looked at me and I nodded. She disappeared around the cone on our left while I watched Socia and Eugene. We knew no one was hanging around on the expressway above, because we'd checked as we came down Mosley. No one was on the roof of the subway station; we'd scoped it out coming down the hill.

Socia said, “Just me and Eugene. No one else.”

I didn't see much reason to doubt him. Three days had aged Socia faster than four years in the White House had aged Carter. His hair was mangy. His clothes hung on him like they'd hang on a wire hanger, and there were beige food stains on the fine linen. His eyes were pink, a crack head's eyes, all burning adrenaline and shadow seeking. His thin wrists trembled and his skin had the pallor of a mortician's handiwork. He was on borrowed time, and even he knew he was way past due.

Looking at him, for a twentieth of a second or so, I felt something akin to pity. Then I remembered the photos in my jacket, the skinny boy he'd killed, a hardened robot rising up from the ashes who looked like the boy, talked like the boy, but had left his soul back in a motel room with stained sheets. I heard the tape of him popping Anton's eye from the socket. I saw his wife going down in a hail of bullets on a soft summer morning, eyes glazed with eternal resignation. I thought of his army of Eugenes, who closed their glass eyes and hurtled forward to die for him, inhaled his “product,” and exhaled their souls. I looked at Marion Socia and it wasn't a “black thing” or a “white thing,” it was a human thing. Just knowing he existed made me hate the nature of the world.

He nodded toward Eugene. “Like my bodyguard, Kenzie? Am I scraping the bottom of the barrel, or what?”

I looked at the boy, could only imagine what those words did to the eyes behind those glasses.

I said, “Socia, you're a fucking pig.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” He reached into his pocket and I placed the .45 against his throat.

He looked down at the silencer nestled against his Adam's apple. “Think I'm foolish?” He pulled a small pipe from his pocket. “Just grabbing some lightning.” I took a step back as he extracted a thick rock from his other pocket and placed it in the pipe. He lit it and sucked back hard, closing his eyes. In a frog's voice he said, “You bring what I need?” He opened the lids again and the whites of his eyes fluttered like a bad TV.

Angie came up beside me, and we stared at him.

He chucked the smoke from his lungs in a blast and smiled. He handed the pipe to Eugene. “Aaah. What you two looking at? Little repressed white children appalled by the big black demon?” He chuckled.

“Don't flatter yourself, Socia,” Angie said. “You're no demon. You're a garden snake. Hell, you aren't even black.”

“Then what am I, missy thing?”

“An aberration,” she said and flicked her cigarette off his chest.

He shrugged, brushed at the ash on his jacket.

Eugene was sucking the small pipe as if it were a reed poking above a waterline. He handed it back to Socia and tilted his head back.

Socia reached out and slapped my shoulder. “Hey, boy, give me what I come for. Save us both from that crazy dog.”

“‘That crazy dog'? Socia, you created him. You stripped him bare and left him with nothing but hate by the time he was ten.”

Eugene shifted on his feet, looked at Socia.

Socia snorted, toked from the pipe. The smoke flowed slowly out of the corners of his mouth. “What do you know about anything, white boy? Huh? Seven years back, that bitch took my boy away from me, tried to teach him all about Jesus and how to behave for the white man, like he
had a chance in the first place. Little nigger boy from the ghetto. She try and slap a restraining order on me. On me. Keep me away from my own child so she could fill his head with a lot a shit about the American Dream. Shit. American Dream to a nigger is like a centerfold hanging in a prison cell. Black man in this world ain't nothing unless he can sing or dance, throw a football, make you whiteys happy.” He took another hit off the pipe. “Only time you like looking at a nigger is when you in the audience. And Jenna, bitch tries to pass all that Tom bullshit onto my boy, tell him God will provide. Fuck that. Man does what he does in this world and that's it. Ain't no accountant up above taking notes, no matter what the preachers say.” He tapped the pipe hard against his leg, dumping the ash and resin, his face flushed. “Come on now, Kenzie, give me that shit and Roland leave you alone. Me too.”

I doubted that. Socia would leave me alone until he was secure again, if that ever happened. Then he'd start worrying about all the people who had something on him, who'd seen him beg. And he'd wipe us all out to preserve his illusion of himself.

I looked at him, still scrambling to decide if I had any options other than the one he offered. He stared back. Eugene took a step away from him, a small one, and his right hand scratched his back.

“Come on. Give it here.”

I didn't have much choice. Roland would definitely get to me if I didn't. I reached into my pocket with my free hand and extracted the manila envelope.