Joe is, well, a middle-class racketeer running a middle-rank Mafia franchise operation. He wouldn’t even call himself a good man, but he’s not the worst of men either, now is he? Okay, so he’s a gangster, but he’s never killed anyone in the course of doing business, and he’s never put out a contract.
But then, he’s never had to.
Not yet.
Would he if he had to?
Joe doesn’t know and he doesn’t want to find out.
But he will.
Or has he already?
Perchance in dreams?
Because when the wicked flee where no man pursueth, they’re likely to find themselves somewhere and somewhen where the past can become the future and the future can become the past—a somewhere and somewhen known as the Twilight Zone. . . .
And you say that you’ve never—”
“Look, Doc, I’m a Catholic, maybe not such a good one, but if I had, wouldn’t I be telling this at confession to a priest, not to a shrink?”
“We’re bound by an oath to maintain doctor-patient confidentiality, too.” He gives me this oily grin. “I’m from Vienna, you can trust me,” he says like I’m supposed to laugh.
“Just a little inside joke.”
I made this guy for a sleazy scam artist as soon as I walked into his office. The building’s a dump, there’s no couch like there’s supposed to be, just a leather-upholstered easy chair seen better days, a desk looked like secondhand from my high-school principal’s office with which I had been all too familiar, and this guy in maybe his late fifties behind it in a cheap gray suit with an open-necked white shirt needed a trip to the dry cleaner’s, hippie-style wire-rim glasses, graying ponytail to match behind a high bald forehead reaching about halfway back.
Maggie had found this shrink’s ad in one of her magazines, said something about how he had trained with L. Ron Hubbard or Dr. Phil or another of those heavyweight psychiatry stars could get themselves on Oprah, but offered bargain-basement rates. And the whole thing was Maggie’s idea, not mine anyway, I never believed in this stuff, I went along mostly to get her off my back.
“If Tony Soprano can take his problems to a shrink, then why the hell can’t you?”
“Hello? Jesus Christ, Maggie, there ain’t no Tony Soprano, he’s just a character in a TV series, remember?”
“So? So you’re just a character in your dreams. Unless . . .”
“Unless? Unless what? How many times do I have to tell you I’ve never killed anybody!”
“You sure, Joe?”
“Am I sure? You think it would just slip my mind?”
“Maybe. Like I read in Psychology Today, a guilty conscience could push it out of your waking memory and into your dreams. I mean, in your line of work. . . .”
Well, Maggie has a lot of time on her hands to watch daytime television with the kids gone off to college and all, and she likes the phony judge crap and the talk-show bullshit better than the soaps, and she reads these chick lit romances, and those damn self-help magazines full of starvation diets, fortune-telling astrology, New Wage fruitcakery, an’ all, and while it’s all a load if you ask me, which she doesn’t, at least I gotta admit she might know a little more about this dream interpretation stuff than I do.
I mean about all I know about it is the dream books some of the marks read to pick numbers, and once in a while one of them dreams something that does give them a winning number, or so they claim.
And the dreams . . .
By this time they’re really getting to me.
“Always different, always the same, sort of, Doc, know what I mean?”
“Sort of,” says the shrink. “Why don’t you give me three examples? One’s just a dream, two could be a coincidence, three establishes a pattern, game theory, know what I mean?”
“Sort of,” I grunt, but I kind of do. Like when some bar owner’s late with the protection money, well, sometimes shit happens, a second time the month after just might be coincidence, but the third time, gotta give him a Dutch uncle session or it’s gonna degenerate into a serious enforcement issue.
He gives me a go-ahead nod and a rolling hand signal, and I’m paying by the hour, now ain’t I, so . . .
“I’ve always dreamed I’m a kid again a lot—”
“You’re back in the fifth grade in your eleven-year-old body, but you’re really an adult, the teacher’s giving you a hard time, or you’re out there in the schoolyard with the older kid that’s always bullied you but you know karate—”
“Wow! Amazing! Howdya know that, Doc?”
“Quite common in the literature, a lot of people have dreams like that. Sometimes they’re wish fulfillment dreams, sometimes they’re—”
“Bummers. Yeah, well, they used to be mostly fun stuff, like you say, kickin’ the crap out of fuckin’ Tommy Murphy, gettin’ my grown-up hands into Mary Coangelo’s thirteen-year-old pants, winnin’ the ballgame with a grand slam in the bottom of the ninth, like that. But three, four months ago maybe, they started to go bad . . . come to think of it, I think that’s how this whole damned thing started . . .”
“You began killing people as a kid in your dreams?”
“I told you I’ve never killed anyone, damn it!” I shout like an asshole. Like I’ve been taking to shouting it at Maggie in a way that’s starting to make her think I’m keeping some hit from my youth from her all these years. Like if I was to lose it that way being questioned by the cops all I’d succeed in doing was convincing them I was hiding half a dozen stiffs in the basement.
“Not even in your dreams?”
“Not even in my dreams, Doc,” I tell him, getting ahold of myself. “Well, not exactly, but . . .”
“But?”
“But, well, I’ve already done it when the dream starts. It’s never my fault, you understand, Doc, I had to do it to protect myself, or the son of a bitch was just asking for it, or . . .”
I gotta stop and take a long deep breath, three or four actually, because talking about it is like puttin’ me right back in there body-wise, I’m startin’ to feel that nervous lump in my gut, that hollow behind my eyes, that cold sweat comin’ out on my nuts, that twitchy-itchy feeling that I’ve forgotten something, that they’re closing in on me, that they’re gonna find out . . .
“Go on . . .” the shrink says in this nothing nerdish way.
This guy don’t give away much with his mouth, but there’s something about the way he’s hunching forward a little, something about the way his eyes are getting glossy behind those hippie glasses like he’s stoned on reefer and getting off on this somehow, a pervo thing, or like some down-on-his-luck grifter hoping that this is gonna somehow turn into the main chance.
Or maybe that’s part of the job, like you gotta not exactly be sympatico if you expect to make it as an enforcer, what do I know about this shit, and I’m paying for this, ain’t I, so . . .
“Okay, Doc, so I admit it, I’ve already killed someone when it starts, even in the kid dreams, I’ve disposed of the body in a professional manner, I’ve gotten rid of whatever leads to me, I’ve done such a good job that I’ve forgotten I’ve done it myself, until—”
“You’ve killed someone and you don’t remember?”
He gives me a halfway freaked-out look and you don’t need to be a shrink or a mind-reader to know what he’s thinking, like if this guy can forget he offed someone in a dream, how can he be so sure he’s not forgetting he’s done it for real? Maybe more than once? How do I know I’m not sitting across my desk from a homicidal maniac so far gone he doesn’t even know it?
Is that a question so good he don’t even have to ask it? For sure, this is the first time I’ve found myself asking it. Is that what you pay shrinks for? Is it such a good idea?
I sit there looking at him for a long time saying nothing and neither does he as I run back through my memory looking for any holes. There aren’t any. Or any that I can . . . remember. But would I know if there was . . . ?
“Until what . . . ?” he finally says.
“Until it begins to fall apart, and the dreams sorta run backwards,” I tell him, and it’s like magic or something, I’m right back there in one of these kid dreams, it’s really happening, well, sort of, except that I’m awake, and I know it, and I’m babbling it across the desk as it’s happening, or maybe it’s the babbling of it that’s making it happen, or maybe it’s somehow both . . .
I’m thirteen years old, I’m upstate, in the country, where we used to spend the summers when I was a kid, or anyway me and Mom and my sisters did in the cabin we rented in this bungalow colony, with Pop staying in the city to work on the docks and come up only on the weekends.
I love it up here, there’s a bunch of kids more or less running wild, ball fields, handball courts, woods, a lake, wild blackberry brambles everywhere, orchards not that big a hike away to steal apples from, and best of all two whole months with no school, no homework, only two days a week of Pop givin’ me crap about studying hard so I can go to college so I don’t end up like him or worse even though I’m not even in high school yet.
Not that I intend to do either. In fact I know I’m not going to because I haven’t, I’m me inside the little punk’s head, the grown-up me that’s talking to you now, remembering everything that’s going to happen, what’s gonna be the future for this kid.
Right now, sunset is coming on, and I’m sitting at one of the picnic tables outside the kind of candy store-bar-pinball parlor, where there’s enough light from the windows so we can keep playing poker, me, my main man Richie, Dominick, and Ted, and Richie and me are giving the usual secret hand signals that let us know who’s holding the best hand so we can control the bidding between us and split our winnings. Not like this is cheating, Doc, it’s teamwork, and ain’t that what made America great?
Yeah, okay, so I’m a little wiseguy already, we all are, poker games, craps, running this and that on kids younger than you are, same kind of stuff the bigger boys running on you, beatings sometimes when you don’t cough up your allowance money or your gambling winnings when you got ’em, the law of every jungle, asphalt or otherwise.
Worst of us is Big Al, almost sixteen, and that’s what all the guys call the big fat prick if they know what’s good for them and even if they don’t, because, yeah, he may be overweight, but most of it’s muscles, he’s built like a gorilla with a brain to match, and if you don’t watch your ass when you’re around him, and even if you do, every once in a while he’s gonna kick the crap out of you when it’s your turn, just to remind everyone who’s the top all-beef hotdog around here.
But Big Al, he ain’t too bright, else why would he be hanging around with kids mostly a couple years younger than him, and it’s usually Big Al who Richie and me take the lion’s share of our winnings off in these poker games, not cleaning him out all the time—that he’d not be stupid enough not to notice, and we’re not stupid enough to try.
But Al’s not here now for some reason I can almost remember, has something to do with Richie’s black eye, I think, which makes for a crummy game of seven-card stud, not just because me and Richie are missing our main mark, but also because a four-handed game don’t work as well as a five somehow, if you know anything about poker.
And oh shit, here comes Big Al’s mother with the local deputy sheriff, which gives me a kind of hollow feeling in my gut and sucks my balls up tight into my scrotum, but doesn’t surprise me at all, why the hell is that?
“You bums seen my Al?”
Dominic and Ted shrug.
Richie and me exchange looks and try not to look nervous.
Why is that?
Oh yeah, we haven’t seen Big Al for a couple of days now, strange, come to think of it.
So why ain’t it surprising?
“Come on, where is he?” Big Al’s mom screeches. “You think I don’t know he plays cards with you here every afternoon before dinner?”
“Yeah, kind of weird, come to think of it, ain’t seen him at all for a couple of days,” Richie tells her, but it don’t sound very convincing, Richie’s not a very good liar. And besides—
“Yeah yourself, Richie,” she snaps back at him, “then how did you get that fresh shiner?”
Of course the bitch knows her son’s the main bully around here, she’s proud of it, after all there’s nothing else about him she can be proud of, and it’s better than even money that when a kid shows up with a black eye that he got it from Big Al.
“Uh . . . playing softball . . . got hit by a line drive. . . .”
Big Al’s mom don’t know squat about softball, so she doesn’t know Richie is a hotshot shortstop not likely to take a liner in the face. The deputy probably knows from softball but not that Richie’s an ace shortstop, so maybe Richie gets away with a lame one like that if it doesn’t take him what seems like a year to think it up and slowly spit out. Like I said, Richie is a lousy liar.
He’s gonna get us caught.
’Cause Richie’s not the bravest guy around either. Even these country cops can get it out of him, probably won’t even have to bring on the rubber hoses.
Caught doing what . . . ?
I’m almost remembering . . .
“Ah hate t’ haveta say this, Miz Fiorellio,” Deputy Dawg drawls, “but looks like we’d better dredge the bat cave.”
Oh no! It’s probably gonna be full of gut gas now and floating!
They’re gonna find Big Al.
I don’t just remember, Doc, I go back in time, I’m back there yesterday.
I’m walking with Richie along the abandoned narrow-gauge rusted-out railway line that leads back through the woods to the bungalow colony from the bat cave. The bat cave isn’t really a cave, though the bats that pour out of it at sunset are real enough, it’s a sunken mine—coal, iron, copper, nobody knows—that went down too far, hit an underground river, flooded, and had to be abandoned.
Big Al is why Richie’s walking back from the bat cave with a shiner and I’m trying to come up with a story explaining it that will hold water when the grown-ups start looking for the son of a bitch and don’t find him, and someone remembers seeing the three of us going up there and two of us coming back and the local yokel cops dredge the sunken mine shaft where, according to what passes for tough country boys up here claim, they’ve fished up the rotting corpses of those what had it coming to them many times before.
The grown-up me inside the thirteen-year-old kid knew that you’re supposed to tie weights to a corpse when you ditch it in a drink, and preferably with chains instead of ropes that might rot away too fast, or it’s liable to fill up with dead man’s fart gas and float to the surface, as well as the moves that allowed me to do what was necessary when Big Al demanded we both take turns sucking his dick and socked Richie in the eye.
But I didn’t have either ropes or chains with me, so we had to just drop his fat ass down the well and hope for the best.
Oh shit!
I know they’re gonna nail me!
“And?” the shrink demands eagerly, like what I’ve been telling him’s left him with a boner and it’s up to me to come to a punch line that gets him off.
“And nothing, Doc, that’s the end of the dream. They all always end like that.”
“Nothing like that in the literature . . .” he mutters. “Suppressed memories inside dream timelines, time sequences running backwards . . . very strange . . .”
“No shit, Sherlock. Why do you think I’m here in the first place?”
“Uh . . . well, they could be wish-fulfillment dreams.”
“Are you nuts, Doc? Who would wish he was gonna take a fall for a homicide?”
“You’d be surprised . . .” the shrink sort of mutters under his breath with a weird dreamy look on his face. “Guilt can do funny things to the mind.”
“Guilt for what?” I shout at him. “I told you I never offed anybody, what’s the matter, don’t you believe me?” I say it in a movie-gangster voice, half rising from my chair to leer at him cockeyed like Tough Tony wiseguy.
He turns pale. “What kind of work you say you do . . . ?” he stammers.
“I didn’t. You sure you want to know?”
He cringes a little.
Why I want to do this, I’m not sure. Probably just because I’m getting pissed off. Who wouldn’t be?
“Maybe I don’t,” he mutters, then tries to get more professional. “Uh, was there a bully called Big Al in the country place where you spent your summers? It’d be natural if you had fantasies of, uh, getting him off your—”
“Are you kidding, Doc? There wasn’t even a country place, my pop couldn’t afford stuff like that! And the only Big Al I’ve ever known is still alive and he’s—”
I stop myself, because I was about to say he’s just muscle, not a real enforcer, he don’t even have the smarts for that, you gotta be able to talk the talk a little, and Big Al’s just a particularly big and particularly ugly plug-ugly your real enforcer might have use for when dealing with particularly hard-core ass-pains. Or to take a murder rap himself if necessary.
“He’s what?”
“Just a business associate,” I tell him.
“Interesting . . .” the shrink mutters like Mr. Spock. “Very interesting.” He picks a pencil off the desk and starts nibbling on the eraser, an ex-smoker, and probably recently. He sort of waves it back and forth in front of his face like a guy conducting a phantom opera got only one note, like what do they call it, a metropole, a . . . metronome.
“Why . . . don’t . . . you . . . tell . . . me . . . another . . .”
“Like . . . what . . . do . . . you . . . mean. . . . ?” I mimic back at him.
“Like . . . one . . . where . . . you’re . . . an . . . adult . . .”
I find myself unable to stop watching his damn nervous tic with the pencil, like my old Uncle Marty always bobbing his head like one of those trick plastic birds do it forever in a glass of water without a motor.
“Like . . . a . . . wet . . . dream . . . ?”
Like Maggie wagging her finger under my nose when she’s really pissed off at me and reading me out.
“No . . . like . . . just . . . business . . .”
Like . . . funny . . . he . . . should . . . say . . . that . . . dumb . . . line from a dumb movie about the business he don’t even know I’m in, maybe he’s starting to guess, anyway he must know his business better than I been thinking he does, because this time it’s not like I’m telling him the dream like it’s a story, it’s like a movie and I’m back there in it. I know I can’t change anything, but I don’t quite remember how it goes even though I know I’ve seen this one before, even though I know I’ve been this one before. . . .
I’m lucky, maybe not Luciano lucky, but say Tony Soprano lucky. I’ve got bigger turf, I’ve got a bigger crew, I’ve got one of those so-called consiglieres. It’s not just the numbers and the local bookie operation and a couple of whorehouses one step up from street walkers and the neighborhood protection collections, I’m into the coke trade, a string of upscale whorehouses, a couple of clubs I own outright, pieces of a dozen or so bars.
If this ain’t exactly the big time, it’s not the small time no more neither. We got a house out on the Island with enough grounds you might call it an estate and a wall around it makes it a compound, Maggie’s got her own BMW, I’ve got a big black Mercedes limo with a driver and a bulletproof window between me and him no less, and he’s wearing a uniform.
Like this is my sweet future, only it ain’t so sweet now, because that’s where I am now, in the backseat sucking nervously on a ten-dollar cigar the size of a donkey dick as my convoy zips back out of the city and away from the screwup on the docks, a pearl-gray SUV riding point in front, a blue one behind the limo, desperately hoping I’m gonna get back to the compound in one piece, where I’ll have some firepower protection.
If this was one of those old gangster movies, no problem, they gotta find the stiffs, get to a phone, call up a crew, and beat me to my rabbit hole and nothing to worry about except the cops who don’t give high priority to this kind of thing, especially since this was ordered from higher up the food chain where they probably got ’em on the pad.
But this is not a movie, this is not the 1930s, everybody and his kid cousin, everybody and his kid cousin’s dog fer chrissakes, got a cell phone, and the survivors must’ve had cell phones.
So I’m smoking like a chimney, I’m pouring myself a second scotch from the limo bar, whacking it down, I’m stroking the piece in the shoulder holster I never worn before tonight every five minutes to assure myself it’s still there, as if it’s gonna do me any good, and freaking out every time something in the next lane paces my limo for a few car lengths.
I never expected this when I got into the life—does anyone? I don’t know, but I didn’t. I never was muscle, I never even thought about doing a hit, never even carried a gun—well, hardly ever. For sure never thought I’d ever get involved in fulfilling a contract.
Yeah, sure. Never thought a phone call like that would be part of the deal. Never believed that these are the dues you’re gonna have to pay sooner or later.
“Think of it as a Roach Motel, Joe, you and that cockroach Nickie the Dickie go in, and he don’t come out,” says that voice like Arnold Schwarzenegger doing Don Rickles. “A personal favor to your favorite uncle. I am your favorite uncle, now ain’t I, Joe?”
“Yeah, sure.”
Yeah, sure, like there are personal favors in this business, like you can tell your favorite uncle, sorry but I’d rather not, nothing personal you understand, Unc.
Making your bones, what they call it in the movies, like it’s some kind of, what, coming of age ceremony, a bar mitzvah, getting your foreskin chopped by the jungle-bunny chief, yeah, sure, what a load. Like Don Whoever’s gonna waste your cherry on a pointless hit just to let you in on the secret handshake.
This is supposed to be a meet to make a deal between me and Nickie been ordered from higher up, that’s the story I’ve been told to have my consigliere tell Nickie’s. Nickie’s got a private garbage hauling company called Earth Angels, I’ve got a bunch of my bars, and clubs, and cathouses what need their crap hauled away, and my operation being in Tony the Tuna’s garbage franchise’s territory, I’ve been using Keep on Truckin like I’m supposed to. But now I’ve been told that for reasons that are none of my business I’m supposed to cut a deal to give my business to Nickie.
Now I ain’t chickenshit, or a pussy, or nothing like that, I may not have ever had a hard-on to make my bones and become a made man—more Hollywood bullshit, anyone who’s running a franchise operation of my size is as made as he needs to get, namely passing at least high six figures a year up the food chain—but I’ve never killed anybody, never ordered a hit, never put out a contract.
Not that I wouldn’t if I had to, just business like they say. But I never had to—who needs it? It’s dangerous stuff. If your protection goes wrong, or the cops get pissed off, or there’s some other kind of screwup and you get nailed, it’s at best a long, long stretch, and at worst sweating out the legal eagles’ endgame on death row.
We get to the docks first, that’s the game, tell Nickie eleven thirty, he’ll arrive at eleven on the bean, we get there at ten forty-five and set it up. The two SUVs full of my guys, that’s standard, he’ll have two of his own plus his limo. My driver parks the Mercedes halfway out on the dock we agreed on, that’s all arranged too, and Nickie’s limo will meet me out there. My backup cars park on the shore end of the dock on the left, Nickie’s gonna be on the right, that’s by agreement too.
But what Nickie the Dickie hasn’t exactly agreed to is that two of my guys are out of the SUVs and hiding under the dock where Nickie’s backups are gonna park. With a couple bundles of stick dynamite with three-minute timers each so they can get out of range after they roll them under the vehicles.
Nickie himself is gonna be my job, should be no sweat because he’s about a hundred years old never known to be packing, or at least not for the last fifty years or so, and me being the triggerman is a sucker punch, because everyone knows I’ve never used a gun.
First time for everything.
Sure enough, Nickie’s convoy arrives right at eleven, half an hour early, as anticipated, so my guys are already in position, hanging on to the crossbeams under the dock with their bombs as his backup vehicles park and his long black stretch limo drives out onto it, to where I’m waiting.
Nickie gets out, an old guy wearing a black suit and white shirt, a matching homburg, even got a trimmed mustache dyed black, like he’s auditioning to play himself in some gangster movie, but the black cane with the ivory eagle head is a necessity at his age as he limps halfway to my limo and stops.
I get out of the car and walk towards him. This is supposed to be the signal for the guys under the docks to set their timers and roll the bombs under Nickie’s backups. My signal is supposed to be the explosions.
There is something of a cock-up.
The first two explosions go off too quick, when I’m still maybe ten feet away from Nickie, big balls of flame and black smoke like in the movies, not as loud as on a movie sound track, but enough to have Nickie yelling, “What the fuck!” and drawing his attention away from me.
But it’s not gonna be for very long, I gotta whip out my piece, a .44 Magnum revolver I’m told don’t exactly require first-class marksmanship.
I aim the gun in the general direction of Nickie’s gut and pull the trigger.
Seems like two explosions at once, the third bomb going off up the dock, the bang from my gun with a recoil that just about knocks me on my ass, as my shot tears through Nickie’s throat, just about blows his head off.
I stagger forward, put another slug into his chest just to make sure, as if I had to, and I’m hearing shots from up the dock but no fourth explosion as I run back to the limo. I glance back there as I climb back in and see that one of Nickie’s backup vehicles has been blown to hell and gone according to plan along with his muscle, but the other one is laying on its side with two of Nickie’s guys crouched behind it trading fire with my men.
My driver starts the engine, I drop down on the floor as we tear-ass up the dock and through the line of fire. I stop hearing shots a couple minutes later, as my backup teams break off the gunfight, and their SUVs catch up to my Mercedes to form up the convey. At least that much has gone according to plan.
Who knew it would end up like this? I guess you could say I’m a real gangster like in the movies, but this ain’t the movies. I never bargained for this, this is the real world, and in the real world more guys like me than not never get called on to do a hit until they’re high enough up to do the calling themselves instead of the dirty work.
Matter of luck is all, and tonight mine run out.
Or not.
Because, hey, here comes the off-ramp finally, and my lead SUV is turning right onto it, and the limo is following, and—
—wham, bang, smash, as the trailing SUV slows down and starts making the turn, a garbage truck comes up alongside it on the left and smashes it into the guardrail, and I recognize the snot-green and piss-yellow colors of Earth Angels, Nickie the Dickie’s carting company. It’s his guys, or what’s left of them—
—and a red Cadillac Esplanade van is now on my limo’s back bumper—
—and there’s another Earth Angels garbage truck at the bottom of the off-ramp—
—and an RPG launcher sticking out of its death seat window—
—and its grenade is launched—
—and my lead SUV explodes, showering my Mercedes with metal and flaming gas and blood and guts, and guys are piling out of the Esplanade with Glocks and M-16s and—
“And?”
“Where the hell am I?”
I wake up someplace else, sitting in a chair sweating in front of some plainclothes cop’s desk, and he’s giving me this fish-eyed stare and—
No, wait a minute, he’s a shrink, not a cop, and there’s no murder rap to pin me on, I never killed anyone, just like I keep telling him, just like I keep telling Maggie, I’ve . . . I’ve just been sitting here dreaming that damn dream again while I was awake and spilling my guts to this guy . . .
“Wha . . . wha . . . what happen?”
Me and the shrink both say the same dumb thing at the same time.
He’s still waving his pencil back and forth, only in his own face double or triple time like some old lady trying to brush off mosquitoes with a fan, and staring at me like he’s trying to avoid crapping in his pants and afraid he’s not gonna make it.
I’m staring at him staring at me and waving the thing like he was and getting pissed off.
“You hypnotized me!” I yell at him.
He cringes back like I just gave him a big breath of wino halitosis. “It’s a standard recall technique . . .” he stammers.
“You’re at least supposed to ask my permission, ain’t you!”
“It worked, now didn’t it?”
“Worked how, you son of a bitch?”
“What we call catharsis. I hypnotize you so you’re telling me everything while you’re reliving the memory in a dream state, and telling it unblocks the guilty memory that’s been giving you these nightmares into your waking consciousness, and that should—”
“What are you talking about? I don’t have no Mercedes limo! I don’t have a string of upscale whorehouses! I don’t have a fancy compound out on the Island! I never even heard of no Nickie the Dickie! And how many times I gotta tell all of you I haven’t killed anyone yet!”
Yet?
“Yet?”
He says it anyway, but he don’t have to, I heard myself say it. But what the hell did I mean?
The shrink gives me the strangest look, like I’m some fascinating bug under a microscope, but a germ that can give him the Turd Flu or AIDS or some other fatal disease. “But . . . but you really are . . . you’re really a gangster, aren’t you?”
Well, what can I say to that? The son of a bitch hypnotized me into more or less admitting it. And just maybe he can help me figure all this out, so . . .
“What if I am?” I grunt belligerently. Makes me want to stroke the piece in my shoulder holster like in the dream, but of course in the real world I’m never packing.
“The wicked flee where no man pursueth . . .”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Let’s say for the sake of argument that you are a gangster . . .”
“Let’s say for the same sake of argument that the business that I’m in ain’t like in the movies, let’s say it’s like I got a McDonald’s franchise. I don’t kill the cows or chop up the meat, I just sell . . . stuff and services . . . to my customers and pay their cut to the franchisers upstairs . . . and mind my own business . . .”
“Okay, so you run whatever . . . whatever . . .”
“Rackets is okay. For the sake of argument.”
“So you run your . . . rackets, just doing your business, and you don’t—”
“Even order anything much worse than a little roughing up when necessary. Not even a knee-capping. Well, hardly ever. Let alone kill anyone!”
“So you’re afraid to kill anyone?”
“You sayin’ I ain’t got the balls to do it if I have to?” I yell at him.
He cringes back from me.
“I mean you don’t want to kill anyone—”
“Of course I don’t! Who wants to get involved in a hit? The homicide squad’s usually not on the take, a murder-one conviction’s not a hot career move, and it’s a capital offense now, ain’t it, not three-to-five with time off for greasing the parole board.”
“So you’re not afraid to do it if you have to, but you don’t want to—”
“Just good business.”
“But you’ll do it if you have to?”
I gotta think about it. But considering what the consequences would be if I turned down the contract, not for very long.
Not for very long? I already been thinking about it.
In these damn dreams.
I’m not having guilty dreams for what I never done yet, they’re like rehearsals for what I’m maybe gonna have to get done right if and when that’s the way the dice come up. I’m always about to get nailed or worse because of some detail or something gets screwed up, now ain’t I?
“So I gotta get it right for once to make them stop!” I find myself proclaiming, like there’s a lightbulb over my head and I just found the Lost Chord.
“The dreams?”
“Yeah, of course, Doc, what else? I told you I never killed anybody yet, I’m not guilty of anything . . . well, anyway not no capital felony. They ain’t your blocked memories or cathartic enema, they’re not about my past, they’re dreams of my future—”
“Your possible futures! Prescient dreams of a kind—there’s plenty of that in the literature, but not like this . . . they’re . . . they’re a set of alternate future scenarios!” He looks like he’s practically creaming in his pants for some reason.
“Yeah, yeah, like my maybe futures, if I can’t avoid it. At least I gotta know I’ll get it right if it’s ever got to happen—”
“And if you get it right in a dream—”
“The dreams go away.”
I’m practically creaming in my pants myself. “I got it, Doc. Hypnotize me again. But this time you give me one of those . . . what do you call it, hypnotic suggestions. To know I’m dreaming and not wake up until I know I’m home free, I can’t get nailed.”
“Do I have your permission to—”
“I just told you—”
“—to try to communicate with you, can I try to make it interactive, can I write it up for publication? If this works, it could make me the next Oliver Sacks.”
“What kinda sex? Whatever! Just do it!”
I’m a cop.
The worst kind of cop, a vice squad creep accustomed to screwin’ freebies from the same junkie skanks I run through the revolving door when their pimps forget to grease my paw with the weekly payoff, the vice equivalent of old-time beat cops grabbing apples off fruit stands.
But I been going a mile too far, lots of miles in fact, taking whatever smack the hookers I been screwing are caught holding, selling it to those I encounter not holding and feeling the pain. Stealing the goods from the hookers the street dealers sold it to, and then using the very same heroin to steal their customers in the bargain.
And lately I been shaking down pimps and street dealers directly, taking both goods and proceeds, whichever I find them holding, and even forcing them to buy back their own inventory from me at inflated wholesale prices.
What are they gonna do, call the cops?
The cops is us.
I’m standing in an alley full of garbage cans and bum piss puddles over the corpse of a skuzzy pimp and sometime small-time smack dealer with a rap sheet long as an elephant’s trunk, got what was coming to him, lying here in his own blood with his pockets turned inside out and his throat cut in an unprofessional manner and the broken bottle lying there right upside his head.
Standing beside me in a trench coat and a fedora with its brim pulled down over his face like Bogart as he eyeballs the scene with me is a homicide lieutenant.
“You know this guy?” he asks me.
Well, what can I say? Everybody on the vice squad knows who everyone else is running so I’m not gonna get away with denying that one.
“Yeah. One of my snitches.”
“Any idea who did it?”
“Are you kidding? A penny-ante pimp well-known for dealing smack to his own five-dollar junkie whores doesn’t exactly lack for people like to see him dead or ready to cut his throat for the next fix if necessary, so we don’t lack for the usual suspects.”
“But things aren’t always what we think they seem, now are they?” says the homicide dick, looking up at me.
Damn strange thing for him to say. Strange-looking homicide lieutenant. Wire-rim hippie glasses, graying ponytail down behind his head. Don’t go at all with the Dick Tracy outfit.
And I know this guy from somewhere else . . . don’t I? And he’s looking at me as if he knows things about me better than I know them myself.
And somehow I know that I’m not going to get away with lying to this guy.
But I know I gotta try anyway.
Because I killed the scumbag.
What was I supposed to do?
My own goddamn snitch turns out to be an Internal Affairs undercover running a number on me! It’s enough to have Mahatma Gandhi reaching for his revolver! Okay, everyone knows there ain’t no honor among thieves, but looks like there ain’t even honor left among crooked cops. I mean, this son of a bitch’s cover’s long since made him one of the bad boys, Internal Affairs or not.
He arranges a meet in this crummy alley we used, or one like it, to make sure we keep things private, tells me he’s got a tip for a juicy bust. He’s there when I arrive, dancing back and forth nervously like he always does, but he’s wearing wire-rim glasses, which he never has before, and the eyes behind them aren’t the usual weaselly jump and glitter, but cold and hard like greased steel ball bearings.
And since I last seen him, which can’t be more than a couple weeks ago, he’s gone bald on top of his head to halfway back, and somehow managed to grow a long gray ponytail.
“So?”
“So I got a hot tip for you,” he says, giving me a look like a hungry cat about to sink his fangs into a canary. “A significant bust.”
“Yeah? Who?”
“You,” he says, whipping a little .38 snubnose out of his flasher raincoat pocket and pointing it one-handed at my gut in an unprofessional manner so’s he can whip out a badge and shove it into my face at the same time.
“What the—”
“You are under arrest. You have the right to remain silent . . .”
The rat’s reading me my Miranda, and I don’t have to look at his badge to know it’s Internal Affairs.
“You think you’re gonna get away with popping me?” I snarl at him. “I got as much on you as you got on me, they put me on the stand and I’ll sing your song, and it’s gonna be ‘Melancholy Baby,’ you rat-fink bastard!”
He gives me this smug little smile, the kind you want to punch out right away, and I know I gotta make some kinda move to take him out before he even says it.
“Go ahead, asshole, rat out my cover. You really think what I’ve been doing on the side hasn’t been authorized by my captain?”
Well, of course I’m not that stupid. I am screwed. I am looking at fifteen years’ minimum on the Rockefeller Law alone, and that’s the least of it. And vice cops in the joint have worse things to worry about than serving out a long stretch, like living long enough to do it.
He shoves the badge back in his coat pocket, fishes out the plastic cuffs, motions with his pistol for me to hold out my hands. I hesitate.
“Do it!” And he signals with his gun again.
I give him a sad ya-got-me shrug, move in closer, slowly stretching out my arms to let him cuff me—
—as I kick him with all my might square in the balls.
He folds, hunching over, and reaching down two-handed without thinking like any guy would to cradle his yowling nuts—
Dropping the gun in the process.
I scoop it up, grab him by the ponytail, and yank him as upright as a slimeball like him can get, shove the pistol right in his face.
“Now what, wiseguy?” I snarl.
“Now what yourself, asshole?” he comes back at me. “You gonna shoot an Internal Affairs cover? Murder one, Joe. Murder one plus for killing a cop.”
He’s right, of course. I gotta think fast.
Well, maybe not that fast, I’ve got the gun on him, and he ain’t going nowhere in the next thirty seconds, now is he?
Cold and clear. Got time to get it right this time.
I gotta off this rodent. I can’t let him out of this alley.
But I gotta cover myself. I gotta be able to have it pinned on someone else.
Hey, no problem! I realize.
I can just pin it on more suspects than homicide can know what to do with and they’ll give up trying to sort ’em all out, not worth the effort, Captain; lots of scurve coulda offed this creep, junkies without the money for a fix, one of his hookers high as a kite. Right, it’s a wonder he lasted this long, we really give a crap . . . ?
But it’s gotta look like it happened on the spur of a red-hot moment.
I glance around sidewise. Nothing but garbage cans. Still holding the pistol on him, I slide over to the nearest one, flip off the cover, rummage around blind—
“Hey, what are you—”
My hand closes around the neck of some kind of bottle, I pull it out, smash the bottom of it against the wall as I roundhouse the rat with my gun hand across the temple. Using the pistol like brass knucks, he goes down like the sack of shit he is.
I don’t bother checking to see if he’s out cold or not, who cares, I saw open his throat with the broken end of the bottle until the blood’s spurting out his jugular, not as easy to do as the movies make you think. Then I wipe the bottle off with a dirty pizza joint napkin from the garbage so the crud’ll mask any of my prints I mighta missed, and drop it by his head to make the murder weapon nice and obvious for Homicide, and empty his pockets of cash and smack to supply the motive.
Slick as that, I got it right, and I’m home-free.
“The guilty flee where dead men pursueth.”
I’m staring back at the homicide detective lieutenant.
Suddenly I’m freaking, suddenly I’m shaking. The same trench coat and fedora. The same glasses. The same damn ponytail. Why didn’t I see it before?
I see it now.
The homicide detective and the dead snitch have the same face.
Worse, maybe it’s just the same mask. Because I somehow know there’s someone else behind it.
“What’s that supposed to mean? I’m not guilty of anything!”
It’s like I’m talking to that someone else somewhere else where he’s not a homicide cop and I’m not exactly lying.
“But you haven’t gotten it all right yet, now have you? And you won’t be home-free until you do.”
This dead man’s spook, this homicide creep, this nightmare witch doctor, knows.
And he’s right.
Whichever he is, he’s got the goods on me to nail me to the gurney with the needle. Like we’re playing out the script of some TV show, like in a dream, where you know what’s gonna happen but you know you can’t do anything about it, that it’s gonna rerun forever until you finally get it right.
That he knows.
But he doesn’t know that I know what I gotta do now.
Or for some reason he doesn’t care. Like it is just a TV show he’s watching. Like it’s all a dream.
Maybe it is. But it doesn’t matter, does it? Because one more little detail to take care of and I can’t get nailed, and I’m home-free. I know it. And he seems to know it.
And it’s not like he hasn’t been asking for it, now is it?
I reach under my jacket for the shoulder holster I know is there, pull out my .44 Magnum, and blow him away—
—and I wake up standing over the cheap desk with the shrink facedown on it with half his head blown off and the famous smoking gun somehow still in my hand. Hands are pounding on the door; sirens are howling outside for my ass like a wolf pack.
What the hell happened?
To make a long story short of insanity pleas, guilty verdict, appeals, more insanity pleas, that are still going on, I still don’t know, even after telling the whole truth to the jury and appeals court judges more times than I can remember . . . I mean, that should be enough to prove I was crazy sooner or later, shouldn’t it? It sure convinces me.
Welcome to the Twilight Zone, Joe.
But, hey, spend this much time in a solitary cell on death row, and you look to find a bright side.
You could say I finally got it right after all.
At least in the last dream.
Yeah, that’s right, after I did, those nightmares never came back.
When I made my bones good and proper, I blew them all away.
Picture of a man who’s found his answer.
Picture of a man who’s rid himself of his nightmares.
Picture of a man likely to spend the rest of his life paying the price.
Picture of a man who’s escaped from his bad dreams only to awake into a worse nightmare in what we call reality.
Picture of a man who has learned that one way or the other, he’ll never escape from his jail cell solitarily confined in the Twilight Zone.