The Staked Goat - Jeremiah Healy (34 page)

"Now?"

"Yes."

"Sure. But why?" she asked.

"There's someone I'd like you to meet."

"I'll get my coat." She stood and turned
away from me. Back over her shoulder, she said, "You're a good
man, John Cuddy."

"No, but I used to be."

She stopped at the doorway but did not turn to face
me. "Sometimes that's enough," she said.

I went to the bathroom while she bundled up. The walk
would probably dispel the dull buzz I was experiencing from the
painkiller, but I had fourteen more of them.

When we hit the sidewalk, Nancy locked her right arm
into the crook of my left. The early evening was clear and bright, a
little damper but a lot warmer than Pittsburgh. The last few working
people were pulling into their virtually reserved parking places in
front of their three-deckers. Here and there, one waved to her. She
waved back with a name and a greeting.

"You grew up in this neighborhood?" I
asked.

She gestured behind her toward the massive Edison
plant, puffing impossibly high and full clouds from numberless stacks
and vent holes. "Two streets over. Dad died when I was three.
Mom died my last year in law school." She shook her head. "We
rented, you see, and she worked so hard to put me through. Oh, I had
scholarships and loans, and part-time jobs, but it was her effort
really, and she never got to see it."

"Oh," I said, "I think she saw it."
I took a deep breath. "I know I have."

Nancy pressed her forehead into my shoulder for a few
steps. Then we walked up the hill. We got to and walked through the
gate. Nancy never broke stride or hesitated in any way.

"They're pretty good about leaving the place
accessible," I said. .

Nancy nodded, patted my forearm.

"Usually either this gate or the K Street one is
open." We climbed the car path for the forty yards or so to the
second walkway that cut right. Except for a car that I heard pulling
onto the wide path behind us, . the place was empty.

We walked the right path, then eased left. We stopped
a few steps later at the familiar marble stone. Nancy slid her arm
out from mine.

"Beth," I said, "this is Nancy."

Nancy didn't say anything. She didn't look at the
stone or at me. She just stared down at the ground, where I used to
look. Where Beth was.

I said nothing. Nancy glanced up at the inscription,
then down again.

"Thirty was too young, Beth," she said.
"Way too—"

The first shot hit her high on the left shoulder,
spinning her around and down. She bounced off the marker of Edward T.
Daugherty, d. 1979. I dropped and felt the stitches tear out of my
right arm. Not much pain, just the parting sensation and a feeling of
warmth flowing outward. My blood.

I skittered crablike in an arc five or six headstones
wide. The second shot took a chunk from an angel's granite wing, and
I quick-crawled three or four more monuments away, leading the
shooter away from Nancy.

He spoke to me. "I wanted her first, shithead. I
wanted her down so I could come after you."

I recognized the voice, and I rubbed some snow on my
face. It stung away whatever painkiller effect the adrenaline was
missing.

"Just like you hunted my brother, shithead."

I moved three headstones more, quartering toward the
gate and further away from Nancy.

"Y0ur brother was the shithead, Marco," I
yelled and dived, a round pinging off my former cover.

"Keep talking, big man," said Marco,
sounding closer. "I torched that nigger and his whore. And I
thought I got you."

I zigzagged twelve paces. "I've got nine lives,
Marco," I said, diving again as he fired twice at my voice.

I heard him clicking new bullets against a cylinder,
so I moved as fast and as far as I could. Still toward the gate. His
next round sprayed stone shards into the left side of my face.

"Closer that time, wasu't I, asshole?" he
called. "I read about you in the paper but I missed you at the
hospital."

I rolled three or four yards, came up in a crouch. I
still hadn't spotted him, but his voice was moving with me.

"Since when do chickenshits like you read,
Marco?"

I slipped on a patch of ice and his shot caught me in
the left calf. I clamped down hard and swallowed a scream. I dragged
myself on elbows as fast as I could. If he saw the blood, he'd have a
perfect trail and pick up his pace.

"So, no piece, huh, asshole?" said Marco,
sounding a lot closer than I wanted to place him. "That's how I
found you, you know. I told the woman at the hospital office I was
your partner and was bringing you your gun. Hah. The stupid clit told
me you was meeting your wife. I thanked her real nice."

I tried my left leg. Gingerly. It wouldn't push me at
all. I shifted over to my right leg and raised up to a three-point
stance. I could hold it only for two counts. I sagged back down into
the snow.

"You know," said Marco, maybe twenty feet
away, "I checked around on you. After the trial. I found out you
went to Pittsburgh. I also heard in a bar down the street that your
wife was dead and buried here and that you was queer for her."
His voice was circling me. "After what the hospital broad said,
I froze my ass for hours out in the car, by the gate back there. I
knew you'd come."

He stopped talking, he was where he should have seen—

"Blood? Oh, did I get you, asshole? Or still
bleeding from last night? Either way, don't matter. It's like Hansel
and what's her face, followin' the bread crumbs."

A giant 747, on its declining approach to Logan,
passed in majestic thunder three hundred feet above our heads. It
drowned out everything. I edged around the headstone I'd picked,
keeping it between Marco's last position and me.

The plane roar subsided. I didn't hear anything.
Couldn't hear anything but my own heart, pounding in my ears and
pumping life out the holes in my arm and leg.

"Behind you, asshole," he said from four
feet away. I stayed rabbit still.

"From where I stand, I can see a hole in your
left leg, just below the knee."

I exhaled.

"Come on, shithead, turn around. I wanna see
your eyes when I do you."

"Marco—" I said.

"Turn around!"

I turned but my right arm gave way, so I flopped
over, like a fish struggling for air on top of a frozen pond.

He was standing, looking down at me, long-barreled
revolver in his right hand and pointed at me.

"Oh, this is good, asshole, this is very fuckin'
good."

"When I had your brother like this," I
said, weakly as I could, "I stepped on his shoulder, on his
wound,
Marco, till he did what I wanted."

Marco's expression screwed up in rage. He took a step
toward me, then stopped. His face relaxed. Sort
of.

"Nice try, shithead. You had me going there for
a minute. Joey told me about what you did. He told me, all right. But
I'm just gonna chip away at you, a part at a time, till I only got
one bullet left. Then I'm gonna drill you. Dead square in the face,"
Marco jeered, cooking his revolver. "In your face."

The barrel mouth slid toward my good leg. I was out
of ideas. I thought of Nancy and Beth, Martha and Al Junior. Of
unclaimed book envelopes gathering dust in a post office. The waste
of it all.

I heard a shot and a second, and a slug thumped the
ground next to me as a third and a fourth and . . . Marco pitched
toward me, the monument between us throwing a stationary hip-check on
him. There was a clicking noise behind him as he slumped and tumbled
over the stone. His face crunched into a small marker at my feet.
There were two gaping, burbling holes in his back. I released a long
breath and raised unsteadily to face the clicking.

She was propped against a waist-level cross. A
bloodstain the size of a baseball cap was spreading on her shoulder.
Her clothes looked like she'd been the mold for a snow-woman. Her
eyes were open, but her trigger finger kept driving home the shrouded
hammer of the Bodyguard, methodically, reflexively.

I limped over to her. I put my hand on her gum arm.
She stopped pulling the trigger. I gently pried the weapon from her
clamped fingers. A police car, lights flashing, no siren, came
barreling into the cemetery and up the car path. "Oh, my God,"
she said, sinking down on her knees, "oh, my God . . ."

I tried to support her, but instead my leg gave way,
and I sank down with her. I heard the cruiser doors open and slam.
"Over here," I called, dropping the Bodyguard to the
ground. "Get an ambu1ance."

"Oh, John, oh my God, I killed him . . . oh
Jesus Mary, I killed a man."

I drew her face toward me and mourned for the time
when I would have felt as she did.