LATE TO THE GAME
“I know you?” He did, even though we’d never met. Lot of years between now and the event Danny and I shared. I couldn’t fault him either, not for that, but what I do fault him for is the role he played in what the Abrum brothers set in motion all those years ago. A role which, judging by body language alone, someone felt had moved past its sell-by date a decade or so back.
Not where things involving me were concerned.
Not even close.
Jeramiah long ago making up lists and checking them twice in regard to probation, transfers, expunged, reduced, or commuted sentences.
“You do know me, Danny. Of me, anyway. Might be hard, but between Jeramiah getting you here and then up into these chains, I’m going to assume a smart guy like you can figure it out.”
“Rider.” And it’s not quite a snarl, but there is venom to it all the same. It came mixed with Jack, coffee, and by the look of the fingers on his left hand, somewhere north of two packs a day. Dragon breath, in other words, as foul as he and his horse-shaped face.
“Thirty years can do a lot to a man. As both our appearances now attest. We’re going to discuss a few things, Danny. You know that much at least. It will involve Abrum, your relationship with him and his brother, and a point in time that might not mean anything to you but is everything to me. These things, they happened before you went in. If it’s an easy conversation or a hard one, that’s going to be up to you as well. You know this. I know this. We either cut through the shit right now and you give me what I want, or you don’t. Either way, we both know you aren’t leaving this basement.”
Time can change a man. It also holds the power to enact the opposite in some men, making them no worse or better than they’ve ever been.
“I ain’t tellin’ you shit.” And it was a snarl this time, along with some spit.
I step toward him, blade in hand.
“Let’s see how much we can take off that middle of yours before you do, then.”
In the end, it wasn’t much. Two pounds, maybe a little more. Enough to get me what I wanted, though.
Each name he gave me, thirty years on, late to the game.
But it’s never been a game. Never could be and never would be.
None participate either, not directly, but they do facilitate. And one, Jon Robinson, he’s found behind an abandoned IHOP with his jaw half removed, the better part of his tongue shunted and shoved three feet south of where it originated. Made me think the man liked to talk more than was good for him. Made me also think someone wanted to leave a message that couldn’t be misconstrued.
Removed from the board as well was Abrum’s backup driver at the time, man by the name of Parks. Succumbing to cancer two years after it all goes down, it left Velencio Jones and Marcus Jane. We start with Jane.
“Hillside retirement home. Been there the last six years. Seems Marcus has a wee bit of everything wrong with him too. Shingles, skin cancer, legs that can no longer hold the size he’s let himself become.” I catch the smile in Jeramiah’s voice as he states this. Nose deep into the intel we’d be using in the next few weeks, I flashback to the hatchet I used to remove his father’s head before he, Jeramiah, looks up from the computer. How it stuck in the man’s neck and the number of tries it took to displace it.
“Might make the visit a little easier is all I’m saying.” True. And I’d managed something similar before. Strangely enough, of all the people for it to involve, it was Jeramiah’s grandfather. Had I ever told him I lit that man on fire? No. And I can’t say I ever would.
“Maybe,” I say, and move to top up both our cups. “But either way, we’re going in hot.”
In hindsight, we needn’t have worried.
Beige ceiling. Grey carpet. White corridors marked by nature prints every eight feet or so. Each a requirement to the inside of Hillside retirement home. Outside, the three-story building stood above the ground it was built upon. Not looming, but practical, as many retirement homes the world over are. The grounds around the grounds are an entirely different story, however: except for the entrance, the property itself encircled by a stone wall four feet high. The grade not as gradual as it probably should have been when first constructed, but Jeramiah and I, we’d worked with less. Beyond this wall, at the bottom of the drop, lived rock beds and forest, each in contention as to the last thing Marcus Jane would see. His wheelchair hitting the wall at such a clip that for a brief moment the man would come to know what it felt like to fly.
“I don’t know what this is about. The younger gentleman said something about family?” But he did know. I knew he did. I’m sitting on the bench to his right, Jane in his wheelchair where Jeramiah placed him. Above, skinless and like bones, branches of a white birch bend and reach for us both.
“Think harder,” I suggest.
“You’re the brother?”
“I’m the brother.” He’s wearing a 3x light blue crew neck and dark green track pants. His hair is thin, wispy, and the breeze continues to state as much. Tears come last, down each side of a bulbous, pockmarked nose.
“I didn’t know they were going to use the room that way. I never knew beforehand. I never saw their masks.”
He wanted a response. Most of them do.
I rise and move behind him instead. Release the brakes to his wheelchair and move him through the grass, past the concrete walking path, and over the raised lip clearly meant to prevent what was about to occur from occurring at all.
No tears now. Only screams. And I watch as he tries to remove himself from the chair as it picks up speed. He’s unable to, of course, his size holding him back in ways not many foresee. For one quick moment, the chair appears as though it might tip, but then everything becomes as it should, as time and space runs out and Jane and the wall collide, his arms pinwheeling as he’s thrust forward and up until I see gravity reassert itself and my mind, as it should, turns to the rock beds below.
Jones is a different day of the week altogether. In better shape, with the use of his legs, it takes both Jeramiah and I to subdue him.
“I was doing a fucking job,” he says before we get to it. We’d tracked him to a little clapboard house off Hanover Avenue—low-income inside as well as out. We find him at his kitchen table, cigarette in one hand, coffee mug in the other. I smell bacon as well as tobacco, but under it all, something unwashed hung in the air, like fermented fruit. “You wanna take it up with anyone, take it up with the man who paid me.”
“I already have.”
Maybe it was something in my voice. Maybe it was something in Jeramiah’s stance. His eyes narrow. His body tenses. And then it’s on.
He rifles his mug at Jeramiah’s head and comes at me low, his shoulder up into my gut in an attempt to lift me. No go. Not with the stove to my back as it was. He roars and attempts it again with the same result. This time I take him in a headlock, the man raging against it at once. But just as fast, he goes still as the sawed-off pressed to the side of his head allows him to understand that Jeramiah was now up and beside us both.
“You win. You fellas win. You boys are tougher’n me.” But he wasn’t cowed, even with his hands up and the steel against his skull. Eleven words later, and I understand why.
“Shame the same couldn’t be said about that sister of yours.”
We never get him back to the place on Buchannan. We never get him up in chains. I lose time as well, just a moment or two, coming back into myself as I’m looking down at Jones and what remained of his face. Unrecognizable, he’s more pulp than bone, more muscle than skin, parts of my right leg up to the knee sharing the same color and consistency of what now occupied the floor.
Not how I thought it would end, and if I’m honest, far from the win I look for. But dead was dead. Deserved was deserved.
It would have to do.