The Bad Kitty Lounge (24 page)

The dresser drawers held clothes, nothing else. The table next to the bed had magazines. I went to the closet. More of the big man's clothes hung on the bars.

There were four boxes on a closet shelf. I lifted them. Two had gloves, hats, boots, and winter clothes. The others had high school football trophies, a diploma, and old photographs. I put the boxes back on the shelf, stumbled out of the closet, and sat on Terrence's bed. The seagull head shifted on the mattress. I opened my hand to swipe it away, then lowered my arm and left it there. I looked at Terrence's body and he seemed to recede from me.

I needed a drink. I needed to rest on a stool in a bar that smelled of old whiskey and wood. I needed to go away. The destination didn't matter. It was the trip itself, the leaving behind.

I got up and walked into the living room, wondering if I should fight the urge or drive to one of the places I knew that poured a tall shot and tolerated you when you got beyond reason. But I never got to choose. I stopped hard.

David Stone was standing in the living room. He held a large caliber pistol. It was pointed at my belly.

HE LOOKED AS SURPRISED
to see me as I was to see him. “What the hell are you doing here?” he said. Like I was a seagull in the kitchen.

I stared at him. “I've been asking myself that a lot lately.” I took a step toward the front hall.

He moved between me and the hallway and wiggled the gun barrel at my belly. “What the hell are you doing?”

I looked at him up and down. The band on his ponytail had come off and his hair hung wild. But if Terrence had shot him and the blood on the wooden decking was his, he didn't show it. He had no obvious holes in him.

“No,” I said, “what the hell are
you
doing? My friend's lying dead in his room and I'm going to take a wild guess—if I sniff the barrel of your gun, I'll smell cordite. And there's a dead hooker lying in her bed about a mile from here and I'll bet you killed her, too. A nun and a priest are in the morgue and, who knows, maybe if we poke around your car and your house we'll
find a thing or two that links you to them. What am I doing? Who cares what the hell I'm doing! What are
you
doing?”

His face went ashen and he stepped backward as if my crazy, angry words were blunt weapons and I was swinging them at him. I stepped toward him and reached for my Glock. But he held his gun toward me, his hand shaking, and fired. The shot went past me and tore a hole in the wall. The sound of it almost knocked me over.

I stopped and panted.

He stared at me wide eyed as if
I
had the gun and was shooting it.

“Okay,” I said, calmer. “What now?”

He needed a moment to think about that. “Your gun.” He caressed the trigger of his pistol with his finger.

I nodded but said, “Last time I reached for it, you shot at me.”

He thought some more. “Take off your jacket. Slow.”

I opened my jacket, exposing the gun, and started to slide off the sleeves.

“Stop,” he said.

I did, and he came to me and removed my gun from the holster. My sleeves cuffed my hands behind me. Unless I kicked his knees or bit him, he had me. He backed away with my gun, and I slid my jacket onto my arms again.

He gestured at Terrence's bedroom. “In there.”

“You going to shoot me, too?”

He pointed his gun at my belly. I walked into Terrence's room.

He came in and glanced around like he'd left something behind. He saw the remains of the bird I'd shot, spread across the top of the bed—feathers and blood, an intact wing, and two orange feet. “What the fuck?”

“A seagull.”

He gave me a look.

“You don't want to know.”

He must have figured that he didn't because he went back to looking around the room. He went to the gun cabinet and peered inside. He retraced the search I'd made, though he didn't bother with the closet and he never glanced at Terrence. Whatever he was looking for, he didn't find.

“Need help?”

He gestured toward the door. “Out.”

He marched us around the apartment, looking for something that didn't seem to be there. In the kitchen the seagull stood on the table. Stone pointed his gun at it but it stared at him blankly and he left it alone.

“Okay, let's go,” he said, and he steered me back into the living room toward the broken window.

It was cold out there. I shook my head. “I've had enough. If you want to put the gun away and tell me your sad story about why killing four people wasn't your fault, I'm curious to hear it. If not, you can leave on your own. I'm tired—”

He lowered his gun and shot at the floor and this time the shot was no mistake. A five-inch hole splintered the wood in front of my feet. The blast of the gunshot roared through the apartment.

Sweat broke inside my shirt and between my legs. “What kind of noise does it take around here before the neighbors call the cops?”

He raised the gun and pointed it at my chest. “You ready now?”

“Let's go,” I said. I stepped through the window frame into the freezing air.

I went lightly, quietly, afraid I might make him pull the trigger again. But then my cell phone rang inside my jacket. I raised my hands, half expecting the noise would make Stone shoot me in the back.

“You want me to answer?” I said.

He thought some more. “Give it to me.”

I gave him the phone. He looked at the display. “Lucinda?”

“My partner,” I said.

He dropped the phone on the deck and ground it to pieces with his heel. “Not anymore.”

He directed me down the stairs past the cases of bottles and the bicycles and tricycles. The spots of blood continued all the way down. At the bottom of the stairway, Stone's silver Mercedes was parked in the trash-filled alley.

“You drive,” he said.

I slid into the driver's seat and he got in beside me and stuck his gun in my ribs.

The car crunched over beer cans and cardboard boxes in the alley. I swung it onto the street and drove past the McDonald's. My Skylark sat in the parking lot and I wished I was in it. If I left it long enough, maybe the seagulls would finish eating scraps of Filet-O-Fish and French fries and devour it, too, rust and all.

“Where to?” I asked again.

“The Dan Ryan. South.”

“Did Terrence wound you before you shot him?”

He looked at me hard.

“I don't want you bleeding to death,” I said. “Not in your car. Not on this fine leather upholstery—”

“Would you shut the fuck up?”

“Sure,” I said, and I drove onto the Dan Ryan and headed
south out of the city. I merged into thickening traffic, swung two lanes to the left, and accelerated. If the speed worried Stone, he didn't show it. “So how is Greg Samuelson trying to take Stone Tower from you?”

Stone shoved his gun harder into my ribs. I took a hand from the wheel and pulled the barrel away from a rib bone. “Shooting me at eighty miles an hour would be bad for both of us.”

He put pressure on my ribs again but let me breathe.

“Samuelson's definitely trying to play you. When he went to your mother's house after he walked out of the hospital, he wanted to confront you—he wag going after something big, big enough he was willing to risk his life again after you'd shot him. He could've killed you if he'd wanted to. He could've killed everyone at the table. But that would have ended the game right there, and no one would've won. I figure he wanted money—big money. The kind of money only rich guys like you usually see.

“You know what I don't get, though? What's with Samuelson's wife and your brother? Why's she screwing him if Greg is about to take his money? And why's he screwing her if her husband's extorting you? You got any ideas?”

“I've got the idea that I wish you'd shut up.”

“Yeah, you said. But who knows? Maybe it's love. Stranger things have happened—”

I grabbed the barrel of his gun and shoved it toward him and up. With my other hand, I cut the wheel, and swung the car across two lanes, then back. The trick almost worked. His body bounced off the passenger-side door and if he'd squeezed the trigger, he would have made himself a sunroof. But he reached into his waistband and came up with my Glock and pointed it at my head.

I let go of his gun.

He said, “Don't do that again or I'll shoot you, eighty miles an hour or stopped.”

I forced a smile. “Fair enough.”

“And shut the fuck up.”

I nodded. We drove for a while quietly. Overhead signs said the expressway would split into the Dan Ryan to the south and the Skyway toward Indiana and the southeast.

“The Skyway,” Stone said.

I nodded again. “So you made two mistakes.”

He growled, “Shut up.”

“Right. When you shoot a man in the head, shoot him in the brain. A jaw shot will make him ugly, but it won't kill him. You needed Greg Samuelson dead. That's your first mistake. Your second mistake was the priest, not that it could be helped. You needed to search Judy Terrano's room, and there he was, poking around. Did you find what you were looking for? I don't think so. If you'd found it, all of this probably would have stopped and you wouldn't have killed Louise Johnson or Terrence, and I wouldn't be driving your car—which, by the way, handles beautifully—”

“If you grab again, I'll shoot you.”

“I don't want the gun. I want to know what you were looking for in Judy Terrano's room. And why you killed her to begin with. What did she know that threatened you? Something about the fire at the Bad Kitty Lounge? What did she have?”

“You've got the ideas. You tell me.”

I thought about it. “A photograph? You stripped Louise Johnson's photos off her refrigerator and walls. So why not a photo? I don't know what you were looking for in Terrence's apartment but why not a photo in Judy Terrano's?”

“Sure,” Stone said. “Why not?”

“It would have to be a pretty good photo for you to kill four people—a photo that would get you in a lot of trouble.”

“It would,” Stone agreed.

He watched my face like I was becoming more interesting to him but he hated me all the same. A sign on the shoulder of the highway advertised an Indiana Welcome Center a mile ahead, just outside the city limits.

I said, “Not a photo.”

“No?”

“No photo is worth four lives.”

“How much are four lives worth?”

“Depends on whose. Your life, about ten bucks. Mine, about twice that on a good day. Most people's, a whole lot more. I figure you were looking for a document of some kind.” I thought about the folder of titles and deeds that I'd seen at Stone Tower and that Terrence was reading when I last saw him alive. “Something that tells what really happened at the Bad Kitty Lounge.”

“Would that kind of document be worth four lives?”

“To you, maybe.”

He shook his head like I amazed and saddened him. He pulled his gun from my ribs and regripped it so that he could hold the barrel and smash the butt on my head. “You don't know when to quit,” he said.

I held my arm to protect myself from a blow, hit the brakes, and slid onto the shoulder of the road, jamming the transmission into Park.

He watched me with a weird, patient sadness.

Then he raised the gun.

I dived across the seat for him, reaching for his throat, his face, his eyes. He brought the gun butt down on me. I threw my
left hand up to deflect the gun but it went through it like I was a ghost. Before the pain, I felt the metal sink into my skull. Then I felt the pain. My vision narrowed and went black, and a small bright red thing the size of a maggot floated across the dark field, and I thought in that final crazy moment that it looked like it might work as fishing bait. Then the red maggot disappeared, and all was dark and cold and very deep.

I OPENED MY EYES
. I was riding in a car. I wondered how I'd gotten there, buckled tight into the passenger seat. The cold October sunlight cut through the windshield. Someone or something had cracked my head. Pain shot down my neck into my shoulders, and nausea flooded my belly and chest. I closed my eyes and the world was a blue veined darkness.

I opened my eyes and a street sign said
COLUMBIA AVENUE
. It meant nothing, said nothing about where I was going or why. Overhead, dozens of telephone wires extended up and down the street. More wires crossed the street and segmented the long wires into squares and rectangles as if someone had stretched the first yarns on a loom to make a blanket that would shelter me from the sun. The asphalt on the street was old and cracked, repaired with snakes of black tar. A woman with an Afro stood by a bus-stop bench, wearing tight shorts and a sleeveless halter top that showed her belly and most of her breasts. She shivered and glared as the car rolled past.

“Where—?” I said.

Like magic, a ten-legged water tower rose on the roadside. Block letters on the water tank said
THINK HAMMOND
.

Hammond, Indiana.

People told jokes about Hammond, Indiana.

Before I could remember them, the world gave itself back to the blue veined darkness.

I opened my eyes. The car had stopped. A man was pulling me from the front seat. I helped as much as I could. Why not? He seemed friendly enough. I fumbled with the seatbelt but it was already unbuckled. I fumbled with it anyway. The man slapped my hands away. I slapped his hands. He reached under my arm and lifted me. He yelled at me and slapped my face. I lunged at him and connected with his chin. He stumbled backward.

I got myself out of the car and onto my feet as he came back for me. My legs didn't like standing. Maybe with one-sixth of earth's gravity they would like it. I tumbled onto the man. I had thirty or forty pounds on him but he held me up and we danced some steps on the pavement. I looked at him eye to eye. His hair was long and wild. His eyes were fierce.