The Poisoned Rose (11 page)

The first guy clipped me and sent me into the wall. He threw all his weight against me. I noticed then that he really was no taller than I. But he outweighed me easily, and by a lot. He was wearing a sweat-stained T-shirt and green fatigues and combat boots. His face and neck were covered with pockmarks, his nose scarred and twisted.

I only needed one glimpse at the bigger man’s ugly face to know that he had once been a boxer.

He shoulder-butted me twice, driving into me like a bull, forcing me hard into the wall. My body cracked the plaster, leaving a deep dent. The ugly boxer backed away then, fast, moving as far from me as the hallway allowed, then immediately raised a sawed-off double-barrel shotgun to his shoulder, aimed it toward my head, and pulled the trigger without pause.

I had dropped the instant I saw the butt of the gun touch his shoulder. It was the only reason the buckshot took out the wall behind me and not my head. I was moving toward the man even as the sound of the blast slapped against my ears like two open hands. Bits of flying plaster peppered my back. I reached the ugly boxer fast and straightened up, driving my shoulder into the stock of the shotgun as I rose. The barrel was forced upward. I jammed the man up against the wall and grabbed for the gun with both hands. I was face to face with him now, eye to eye. His breath was foul, stale.

His hands hung tight onto the shotgun, and I could see his knuckles clearly. They were thick, like small rocks, and his skin was leathery. Several of his knuckles were covered with blood. I knew it had to be Augie’s blood.

The other man, the smaller one in the cap and hooded sweatshirt, had come rushing out of Augie’s room right behind the boxer. But the narrowness of the hallway, and the size of his partner, had kept him from being able to rush me. I saw him coming now and stepped to the side of the boxer, moving around so the boxer remained between me and the second guy. Once there I found a better leverage position and forced the gun down fast, leveling it with the smaller one’s head. His charge stopped suddenly and he stood there, frozen, facing down the remaining live barrel. I saw his eyes grow wide. Without hesitating, I threw a head butt with all my weight behind it into the face of the boxer, slamming the top of my head into his nose. It broke clean. The smaller man, out of blind fear more than anything else, dropped just as the boxer’s finger twitched on the trigger and the second barrel blew orange sparks and sweet-smelling smoke and punched a hole the size of a fist into the wall.

The smaller man hit the floor and sprawled out on his stomach, covering his head with his arms. He waited there for only a second, then lifted his head and looked up at me and the boxer.

Without a word the smaller man scrambled up to his feet and ran toward the living room. I heard him burst through the front door.

Blood was running from the nose of the boxer. Still, he held onto the gun, his leathery, blood-stained knuckles whitening from the tension.

For an instant his narrow eyes tried to focus on me through the water that was gathering in them—a side effect of a broken nose. Then he lowered his head the way boxer’s do when they are stunned and want to buy time.

I gave him no rest.

I drove the tip of my knee hard into his right thigh then, tagging him in the sciatic nerve. He flinched and spread his legs slightly in response, opening a clear path to his groin. I took it and thrust my other knee upward, landing it deep between the legs. He doubled over, and I pried the gun from his hands as he went, holding it by the barrel in one hand like a club. I slammed it down over his right kidney. He twisted and tucked his elbows to protect himself from other such blows. I crouched then and drove the butt hard across his left knee. Then I shot upward as he began to slump and brought the butt down across the back of his head with all I had.

He dropped like dead weight to the floor. I tossed the empty shotgun aside and started after his partner. I feared he had spotted Tina waiting in my car. But when I reached the door I saw that he was tearing down Little Neck Road, heading in the direction of Montauk Highway.

I saw that Tina was looking at me, that she was confused and scared. And yet despite that, she was opening the passenger door, ready to come running toward me.

I held up my hand, telling her to stay put, then turned and rushed into the kitchen. The phone had been pulled from the wall, its cord torn out of the socket. I headed down the hallway, grabbed the boxer by the ankles and pulled him into Augie’s bedroom to get him out of the way. Moving into the study, I knelt beside Augie.

I knew I shouldn’t move him, not in his condition, but he was in bad shape, and maybe the two shotgun blasts had wakened the whole neighborhood and the cops were on their way. But maybe it hadn’t. Either way, I couldn’t just wait and hope for the best.

I skimmed my hands over Augie’s body—his neck and his spine, ribs and collarbone, up and down each arm and leg. I was feeling for breaks but found none. Then I lifted him into a more complete seated position against the wall, doing so as carefully as I could. After that I took his left arm and tucked my head under it, holding his wrist with my left hand and wrapping my other arm around his left thigh. Getting up to my feet, I hoisted him into the fireman’s carry, his stomach across my right shoulder.

I used the wall to support us, and to help keep my balance, and yet it still took all my strength to lift Augie. My legs trembled as I moved step by step down the hallway and through the trashed living room.

Finally, I was out the door and heading toward my car.

At the hospital, Tina struggled with the paperwork while I found a pay phone and dialed Frank’s pager number. After the beep I entered the number of the pay phone and hung up and waited. Less than two minutes later he called me back.

“Did you find him?”

“Yeah. We’re at the hospital.”

“What happened?”

“Two men ambushed him at home.”

“Where are they?”

“One took off on foot, the other is still there.”

“Alive?”

“Yeah. If you go, you might want to bring some help.”

“The cops are there now.”

I realized that someone must have heard the shotgun blasts.

“I just found out that you’ve had yourself a busy night.”

I said nothing.

“I think we need to talk.”

I hung up without saying anything more and went back into the waiting room and sat beside Tina.

She was visibly shaken. It took all I had to hide that I was, too. The clipboard with all the paperwork lay unfinished on her lap, the pen clutched tight in her hand. But she was ignoring it, staring instead at the double swinging doors through which her father had been wheeled on a stretcher.

I watched her for a moment, certain that she was not aware of me or anything else around her. I reached across and took the clipboard and pen. Her hand opened and relaxed once the pen was removed.

She sat silently, without moving, staring off across the room as I filled out the paperwork. When I was finished, I got up and handed the clipboard to the heavyset black woman in white behind the reception desk. Then I sat back down beside Tina. I didn’t say anything, just waited with her, watching her closely while being careful not to stare.

Eventually I looked through the sliding glass doors that led outside. I could see that the sky above the tree line was changing from black of night to dawn’s silver. Despite my surroundings, I could sense the stillness that was out there, that quiet moment that always comes when night bridges slowly into day.

The two shotgun blasts that had struck my ears like cupped hands had set off a ringing that was just now beginning to diminish. I felt myself emerging from a muted world to a more distinct one. I could hear Tina breathing, I could hear conversation around me, sneakers squeaking against tile, dolly wheels rattling as they rolled. I thought about Gale and wondered if she was somewhere in this building right now. I wondered if I would ever see her again.

It wasn’t long before I heard the sound of a siren approaching. It grew louder and more insistent as it came nearer. I watched through the sliding glass doors and waited for what I knew by the sound would be a patrol car. The siren grew more urgent till finally I saw it pass the doors and come to a stop just beyond them. I heard car doors open, then close. I glanced at Tina. She was staring at some point across the room, unaware of everything. I heard voices and looked back toward the double glass doors just as they parted automatically. Two cops entered with a handcuffed man between them. They held him by the elbows and walked past us without glancing at me. I didn’t realize till after they had passed that the man between them was the boxer. I’d been too busy looking for recognition in the cop’s eyes to notice.

The boxer staggered as they led him to the reception desk. There was blood caked on the back of his head. The cops wore latex gloves on their hands. The nurse stood up right away and escorted them through the swinging doors and into the emergency room. I watched the doors swing to a close in their wake.

I could hear my heart pounding. Blood rushed in my ears, sounding to me like the echo of a thunderclap out over the ocean. We were all here, in this building—Augie and Tina, the ugly boxer who had beaten Augie, at least two Southampton cops, maybe even the three boys, one of them with his knee torn to shreds.

And maybe, too, the father of the boy was here, contemplating a future destroyed and entertaining thoughts of revenge.

What was it Augie had said to me when we’d first met?

We take care of the ones we love.

I had been thrown in the middle of something yet again, but not by Frank Gannon this time. It was the cruelty of an entitled son that had done that. And, too, the recklessness of my only real friend. A man who had once said to me, “My right arm is yours.” A man who had given me no reason since to doubt his pledge.

Regardless of what put me here, I had to start piecing things together. I had to catch up or be left behind. I needed to know what Augie was up to.

I turned to Tina and said, “I need your help.”

At first it seemed that she hadn’t heard me. She just stared ahead. But eventually she turned her head a little and looked at me. Her eyes were flat, and by her expression it appeared as though she were looking at someone she had never seen before.

I knew I had to break through that. “I need to know what your father was doing,” I said. “I need you to tell me what you know. And I need you to tell me now, okay?”

She looked away, saying nothing. I leaned closer and spoke in a whisper. “I’m in trouble, Tina. I’m in trouble and I need you to help me.”

She turned and gave me the same odd stare. Then her eyes lowered, her line of vision coming to rest on my chest. She reminded me of a bird that had stunned itself by flying into a window.

“Anything you can tell me, Tina. Anything.”

Her eyes shifted from side to side as if she were trying to decide whether or not to say what was on her mind. I gave her time, watching her closely.

“There’s a boy in my school,” she said finally. Her eyes were still fixed on my chest. “We were in the same homeroom. Two weeks ago he overdosed on heroin and died. He’d bought the bag or whatever from someone on school grounds. My father didn’t take the news very well.”

“What do you mean?”

“He had moved us out here to get away from all that. Drugs, gangs. He used to say this was the last safe place on earth. He talked about coming back here for years. But when the boy at school died, Augie went kind of nuts.”

“You said he would leave the house at sundown and not come back till dawn. This was after he heard about the boy?”

She nodded. “He was very angry about the whole thing. It was like he was taking it personally.”

“You think he was trying to find out who was selling at your school?”

She nodded again, her eyes still on my chest. “People have seen him out there during the day, like he was watching the place or something. He’d be sitting in his car, watching the parking lot. It was embarrassing.”

“He must have felt like an old enemy had caught up with him,” I said.

Tina took a breath, let it out. “Do you think he found out who the dealer was? Is that why they did what they did to him?”

I realized then that she wasn’t aware of the condition their home was in. She had no idea that it had been torn apart. She didn’t know about the professional who had tried to kill me with a sawed-off shotgun. All she knew about was the guy she had seen bolt across the front yard in a hooded sweatshirt and baseball cap and the condition of her father.

“I don’t know,” I answered.

Her eyes lifted then, rising from my chest to my mouth. They held there for a moment. I could tell she wanted to say something.

It took her a while but finally she shrugged and said, “My life would be very different right now if you hadn’t shown up. In a lot of ways, you know. If you hadn’t stopped Tommy and his friends. And if you hadn’t taken me home.” She shrugged again. “I can’t imagine what would have happened if you hadn’t done what you did.”

“Everything’s going to be okay,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say.

She found my eyes then. “Promise.”

“Yeah.”

She looked at my mouth for a moment more, then leaned into me, resting the side of her head on my shoulder. I didn’t dare move. She stayed that way till a doctor came out of the emergency room and approached us.

His hair was dark and tightly curled. He had an early tan on his face and forearms. Tina and I stood to meet him. He was wearing green hospital scrubs and there were pockets of sweat under his arms.

He spoke to Tina and me equally, alternating eye contact between us. His voice was calm and certain, but there was a graveness in his tone.

“He’s unconscious still,” he told us. The three of us were together in a tight huddle. “He took a severe beating to the head. There is some blood clotting that’s pushing against the brain, which we can drain, but we’ll have to wait till he’s stronger. He’s listed as critical, but we’re hoping that will change soon. Our real concern here is in the long term. There may be some brain damage. We won’t know anything till he comes around. He’s a strong man, and he’s healthy. It’s just too early to know anything for certain. All we can do now is wait and see. If you come back this afternoon you should be able to see him.”