The night with Tara at the lake, and my sister’s findings on the Internet concerning Mr. Perrelli, made for a conflicting mess of hope and dread in my mind. One moment I would be thinking again of holding Tara’s hands in mine, leaning in close, anticipation for the warmth of her lips on mine setting my heart aflutter; and the next those images were invaded and sent scurrying by that of Vincent Perrelli and the squat, brick-house figure of Brock, sandwiching me between them at the Fourth of July show in front of the courthouse.
Such a bundle of nerves had I become, that my mom noticed when I paced too often about the house, or peeked out the windows, and she asked what was wrong. I made some weak excuse about being restless and bored, and at the first opportunity when she left to run some errands, I picked up the phone and called Jim.
I told him what Sarah had found on the Internet about Mr. Perrelli, and Jim came over not twenty minutes later. The four of us—Jim and I, Bobby, and Sarah—tried to come up with some ideas on what to do. Should we tell our parents? Should we call the police?
After the events on Lookout Mountain, both these options held particular appeal. Yet I remembered what the Collector had said about collecting, how sometimes he collected for others, sometimes for himself, and the gratification such work brought him. This led naturally to Mr. Perrelli’s businesslike impersonality, and the image I had of him back at the sandwich shop, like a CEO at the head of a conference table.
Mr. Perrelli, for all his professional demeanor, was no doubt a collector of a sort himself. Tallying his allotted dues on a ledger in his mind, the debtors filed just so in some mental Rolodex.
If we didn’t give him what he wanted, I knew it wasn’t just us kids that would pay. He would collect from our families as well.
I wouldn’t allow that to happen, and, I was glad to see, my friends seemed to be of the same mindset. Gathered about the kitchen table, snacks, drinks, and printed copies of the articles on Mr. Perrelli spread before us like the articles of the world’s lamest staff meeting, the four of us decided against telling our parents or the police. For the time being, at least.
Pushing up from our chairs, the four of us parted, Bobby to the guestroom he was using upstairs, complaining of feeling sick, which I understood only all too well; Sarah to her room, promising me she’d call Tara and fill her in; and Jim and I out to the porch, idly deciding what to do with the rest of the day. Jim suggested we go to his place, kill some time roaming about the car yard or playing video games.
I said fine, and we headed off.
* * *
Jim and I were walking down the highway towards the turnoff that led to his father’s shop, Bandit gliding between us, when I heard the sound of an engine coming up the road from behind. Remembering the night Dillon Glover and his friends had pulled up beside me—Dillon in the shadows with his head and hands seeming to float in the darkness, and the click of his knife flicking open—I turned to watch the vehicle approach.
The long black Cadillac in which Vincent Perrelli and Brock had driven away from the restaurant patio just a couple days before, now cruised towards us. I turned back around and quickened my pace. Jim spun about to see what had captured my attention, saw the Cadillac approaching, and hurried to keep up with me.
“Shit,” he muttered, jogging beside me. “What do we do?”
I shook my head.
There wasn’t much we could do. The Connolly yard was still maybe a quarter mile away. We could make a dash for it, but even in that short distance the car would overtake us. Which it did just then, rolling past us and turning in a right angle across the shoulder of the highway, blocking our path.
I reminded myself that, like the incident at the diner, it was daylight, and nothing would happen to us. We were safe in the day.
The passenger and driver’s doors opened.
Brock came out from behind the wheel. Vincent Perrelli stepped out onto the dirt shoulder from the passenger seat. His eyes hidden behind the sunglasses he wore was somehow worse than the black eyes themselves. Behind those tinted lenses I knew I was being watched, weighed, measured. He wore a gray-and-black pinstriped suit, the coat seeming heavy to me in this heat, yet the older man didn’t produce a single bead of sweat.
He seemed in control of everything, even the biological function of perspiration.
I couldn’t even reliably control when and where I pissed.
“Hello, Joey,” he said. “I came to see about our little dilemma.”
He looked from me to Jim, but neither of us spoke.
Bandit was growling and took a couple steps towards the man before I called his name and he stopped. He stood his ground, though, poised, legs and back tensed like he was ready to spring.
“You don’t still expect me to believe that story about you kids burning the money, do you?” Mr. Perrelli said. “With all the stuff you could buy with that kind of money, you really think I believe even for a second that you burned it?”
“It’s the truth,” Jim said.
“Books and toys and maybe a new bike,” Mr. Perrelli continued, speaking over Jim as if my friend hadn’t spoken at all. “Maybe some girly magazines to peek through at night when the folks are asleep.” He said this last with a sly and confidential grin that said: Ahhh, I know what you kids do. “The possibilities are endless. That’s a lot of money.” A sober and earnest expression replaced the warm smile, like he was a doctor with bad news.
“But it’s not your money,” he said. “And I would really like it back.”
“You’re gangsters,” I said without thinking.
Mr. Perrelli gave a short bark of a laugh like he’d heard a good joke. But it must not have been all that funny because then he was all business again.
“I told you. I’m a businessman. And I think it’s past time we ironed out the terms of the deal I have for you.”
Brock came around the Cadillac to stand next to Mr. Perrelli. He stood casually with his substantial arms crossed over his chest. Bandit’s growl rumbled again at the thick, squat man’s approach, but he stayed where he was, back arched, ears pinned against his skull.
“Brock is what I like to call my contract negotiator,” Mr. Perrelli said. “I tell him what I want and he sees to it that I get it. He can be very persuasive.”
Brock’s eyes were a steely gray, like chips of flint stone. I don’t know if I’d say they were persuasive eyes, but they were cool and reflected nothing of emotion or anything resembling human sentiment. They seemed like the glass optics of some sort of machine.
“And I think that’s what you children need right now. A little persuasion to bring you around to reason.”
“We don’t have the money,” Jim repeated, and the tremor in his voice made me feel not so bad about the terror jumping around inside of me.
“Brock,” Vincent Perrelli said and gave a slight gesture with one hand, “if you would.”
Brock came forward, and Bandit charged to meet him.
I called out to my dog to stop.
One huge slab of a foot shod in a steel-toed leather boot came up and met Bandit’s head with a thunk like something heavy hitting the floor. Bandit dropped to the ground and stayed there.
I charged the man-mountain and he backhanded me like he was swatting an insect. My head rang and my teeth clacked hard together and the ringing seemed to echo through my skull. I fell to the dirt, tried to stop my fall, skinned my arms and elbows in my awkward landing.
From my low perspective I saw the boot that had kicked my dog step past me and towards Jim. I lifted my head to watch, trying to push up. Dirt stuck to the blood at my lips where Brock’s knuckles had cut me. Grains of it in my mouth ground between my teeth.
Jim turned to run, and, surprisingly, I wasn’t angry. That was the right thing to do; the only thing to do. One of us had to get away. But my friend had waited too long to make a move. The man like a tank was there, intercepting him. One arm went around Jim’s middle, pinning his arms to his sides. Brock’s other arm brought Jim’s left up and out at the elbow. Brock held Jim’s hand out so that we could all see.
I didn’t want to see. But I couldn’t turn away.
The big man extended Jim’s index finger. Yanked it backwards with one quick tug. There was a quick and brittle sound like a dry stick snapping.
Jim’s scream climbed the sky in octaves I would have thought impossible outside an opera house.
Brock let go, and Jim fell to his knees, crying, holding his damaged left hand in his right. Cradling it to his chest like a baby at the teat, he cried, and I realized I was crying as well, and my finger hadn’t even been the one pulled back.
“I want my money,” Mr. Perrelli said. His tone was quiet and soft and in a way serene, yet it carried over Jim’s cries of agony effortlessly. I looked up at him from the dirt, then away and at my dog still lying in a heap. I thought I saw the slight rise and fall of breathing, but wasn’t sure. “I have all the time in the world. But the longer I have to wait, the more I have to use Brock to negotiate.”
I didn’t ask for elaboration.
He gave me a bit anyways.
“Escalation, Joey,” he said. “Escalation is the key word here. I need my money or the negotiating gets tougher. And I expect our business to stay just that: our business. No parents, no police, no anyone but us.”
I looked up at Mr. Perrelli again. Then I glanced side to side, up and down the highway. It was long and deserted both ways, like a road to nowhere. I wondered how far Jim’s cries had carried. Wondered if anyone cared even if they’d heard them.
“Do we understand each other?” Vincent Perrelli asked, removing his sunglasses, fixing his gaze on me. His eyes sparkled like dark jewels.
I nodded.
He nodded also, turned, and climbed back into the Cadillac. Brock walked around the car and got in on the driver’s side. They drove away, leaving us in a plume of dust. When the dust cleared there was only pain: the cries of my friend cradling his broken finger; my dog coming to with a whimper; me with my throbbing head in my hands, the world seemingly trembling with each thrum and pulse of my skull. As if it were on the verge of falling apart around us.
We walked the rest of the way to the Connolly yard, Jim crying the whole time. I had my arm around his shoulders and wasn’t the least bit embarrassed to be doing so with another guy. Bandit strode on wobbly legs beside us, like he’d just drunk an entire bowl of Purina Dog Beer.
Trying not to look at the horror of my friend’s backwards pointing finger, I gave weak words of encouragement and consolation, like “It’s not that bad” and “I’ve seen worse”, which were both lies.
What should have been a walk of a few minutes turned out to take us, the sorry battered lot that we were, fifteen minutes or so, pausing now and again as Jim stumbled, cradling his finger, or Bandit stumbled, knotted head giving him faulty dog radar. Only when we were at the turnoff to Jim’s home did another car finally pass, and seeing us stagger about drunkenly with our injuries, the driver slowed, rolled down his window, and asked if there was anything wrong. Why he couldn’t have driven by twenty minutes earlier when two mobsters had been busy beating us, I didn’t know. But it pissed me off and I flipped off the driver, a bald man in his fifties, and his eyes widened in shock. He cussed at me and drove on.
Mr. Connolly saw us coming up the road to the gate of the yard. He was leaning on the bumper of a car he’d been working on, still in a T-shirt and jeans like I’d always seen him, so that I wondered if that was all he owned. If maybe his whole closet was wall-to-wall grimy oil-stained white shirts and dirty, faded jeans. He saw me supporting his son, his son cradling his injured hand, and Mr. Connolly came running down the path, throwing the gate open. Ushering us in quickly, he led us to the garage.
“What happened?” he asked with a tone like a hammer blow.
Jim was still crying, his finger poking up like a crooked periscope, and though his face was stern and smooth, Mr. Connolly’s eyes shone with an urgency. My friend unable to speak, it was left to me to think of a quick lie.
Vincent Perrelli had said no parents or police were to be involved.
He had spoken of escalation, and I knew he meant it.
So I said what first came to mind, and the simplicity and stupidity of it is what I think made Jim’s father believe me.
“He fell,” I said, and then thinking perhaps a little elaboration was needed: “We were running, horsing around, and he fell.”
“I have to get him to the hospital,” Mr. Connolly said.
Grabbing a set of keys from a pegboard on the wall, he herded his son out of the garage and into a jeep. The vehicle started smoothly and rolled out of the still open gate, leaving me alone in the car yard. Standing there with my woozy dog, I realized I’d have to make the short walk home back down the highway—alone.
* * *
I made it home without any black cars full of mobsters pulling over to whack me. As I strode up the driveway I saw the garage door was rolled up. Inside, Dad was home for lunch and throwing some punches with Fat Bobby, who, I realized from a distance, wasn’t as fat as he’d always been. I took this in with something like mild amazement, seeing that the rolls of fat were still there, but maybe not as many. Whereas previously he’d been monstrously fat, now he only seemed fat. Like there was freak show fat lady fat, and then baby fat, and Fat Bobby seemed to be leaning more towards the baby fat kind of fat, which was still fat, but not obscenely so.
It was all very complicated, these gradations of fatness.
I walked past and Dad saw me and waved, and Bobby turned and waved. I gave them one back and continued up the porch and went inside. Mom was there and noticed the redness where Brock had backhanded me across the face. She looked worried and asked what had happened, and I told her Jim and I had been wrestling. Her worry went from the type I’d seen after the episode at the Haunted House, or when Dad had tussled with Mr. Templeton—the urgent, wringing-her-hands worry—to the motherly scorn of someone who had to deal with the trouble of boys on a daily basis. She took in the dirt smears on my clothes and shook her head and told me to go wash up. I gladly went upstairs, away from those probing eyes.
I made a beeline for Sarah’s room.
Taking a cue from her, I went inside without knocking, found her sitting in front of her nightstand mirror, an array of pink and red goop in front of her. Applying some of it to her lips and face, she was making all sorts of weird expressions in the mirror. When the door opened, her hand jerked in surprise and the stick of red lipstick she’d been applying made a smear on her cheek, so that she looked like a brave putting on war paint. Or a clown putting on his funny paint.
I went with the clown and told her so.
She threw a makeup compact at me and it hit me on the chest.
“Get out of my room,” she said, her face blushed red so now she looked more like an Indian, but a retarded one that couldn’t put on their war paint correctly. Maybe her warrior name was Dumb Deer Clown Face.
I told her this, and she got up and came at me like she intended to hit me, which she did, hard, but instead of retreating I stayed in her room and closed the door. Though it was obvious I wasn’t going anywhere, she hit me a few more times.
“Would you stop hitting me?” I said, bringing up my arms to fend her off.
“Get out of my room then!”
She moved past me to the door, as if ready to open it and throw me out if I didn’t leave of my own accord.
I moved between her and the door.
“Mr. Perrelli got to me and Jim while we were walking down the highway,” I said, blurting everything out in one big stream of words. “He broke Jim’s finger, and told me not to tell Mom or Dad or the police. He said he still wants his money and he’d be back for it. That we better have it ready or—”
I didn’t finish because Mr. Perrelli hadn’t really detailed what would happen if we didn’t have the money. But he had left the distinct impression that it wouldn’t be pleasant. I walked over to my sister’s bed and sat heavily on it. Burying my face in my hands, I started crying.
Sarah, wiping the streak of lipstick off her face, came over and sat beside me. She put a hand on my back and patted me there, and I again remembered that night after the Haunted House. When, later that night, having learned what had happened to me and my friends, Sarah had come to my room and hugged me.
No, she really wasn’t that bad of a sister at all.
“What’ll we do?” I said when my sobs died down enough for me to speak semi-coherently.
Like an epiphany, I realized I was asking the wrong question, and with that realization came the answer. It wasn’t what “we” were going to do. This whole thing had started because of me seeing some light in the woods and wanting to know what it was. It was me that had brought everyone else into the whole mess. First my friends, and now, if I was unable to get Vincent Perrelli what he wanted, and since I didn’t have his money I couldn’t think of any way that I could, his threat of escalation might include my family also.
The responsibility was mine, and mine alone.
Knowing what I had to do, unable to tell my sister, I sat with her for a few minutes longer, then got up and walked out. Knowing what I had to do and knowing it might be the last thing I ever did was emotionally taxing, and I suddenly wanted to be alone with my burden.
Hindsight being what it is, I can see that deciding to meet with Mr. Perrelli alone was the dumbest decision I’d ever made.
If you took all the dumb asses on the planet—the kind of people who struck matches near aerosol sprays; set electronics on the edges of their bathtubs while bathing; stuck their hands in kitchen appliances to try to fix them while the machines were still plugged in—increased their stupidity by making them all mental retards, and gave them all lobotomies to top it off, you still wouldn’t have reached the level of God-awful stupidity that I was possessed of when I made this decision.
Of course I didn’t see it as foolish then. I thought I’d come to some sort of revelation. I would find Mr. Perrelli and confront him with the truth, alone, and by me being alone and having the courage to tell him face to face that the money was gone, he’d have no other option but to believe me.
Now, he might hurt me, hell, he might kill me. But I thought that even if he did hurt me or kill me, he would still see the truth of it, that his money was gone, and having taken his frustrations out on me, he’d leave everyone else alone. Didn’t even gangsters have a code of honor? In the movies they did. And so, in a strange way, my death would be a heroic one.
Well, I never did claim to be the smartest kid around.
It was the day following the brutal assault on Jim that I walked into town by myself. I left Bandit at home, fluffing a pillow on my bed for him so that he could settle down and rest his battered skull.
The walk down the highway and into town was a long and nerve-wracking one. I expected to see the black Cadillac at any moment, swerving in a rubber-squealing arc to cut me off on the shoulder of the road. Brock would step out and grab me and throw me in the backseat and lock the doors. Then would come the finger breaking, this time not Jim’s but mine. When all my little fingers were snapped back like those jointed straws they give kids at restaurants, I’d be driven out into the desert, like mobsters did on TV, and thrown out into a ditch. As I tried to crawl out of the ditch with my crippled hands, a hammer or a shovel or a baseball bat would come slamming down on the back of my head, and that would be it for me.
Broken, lifeless, left in a ditch.
With my luck, my body would probably be found in an embarrassing position. Maybe with my pants down around my ankles. Or I’d loosened my bowels upon dying. Or birds would shit all over me.
But I made it into town okay. Strolling past housing tracts and into the business district, I passed the bookstore and saw my dad’s car there. I walked slowly by the storefront, looked through the glass, tried to spy Dad or Tara and, seeing neither, continued on my way.
People were milling about on the sidewalks, window shopping at the various mom and pop stores that lined the streets, or sitting on the outdoor patios of the diners and restaurants interspersed among them. I watched these people, trying to find a pair of particular faces, and I looked at the cars parked along the streets and in the small parking lots, keeping an eye out for the distinctive black Cadillac.
I knew they were out there somewhere, watching me. How else had they found me the first time at the courthouse and then, at lunch with my friends and, finally, walking down the highway with Jim? Yes, they were out there, watching, and I hoped if I lingered long enough they’d approach me. Then whatever happened after that would happen.
I found myself walking the Town Square park, strolling the low grassy hills where a few days earlier the fireworks had exploded above in kaleidoscopic patterns. The smell of sulfur and smoke still lingered in the air, and I had the sense of walking the outskirts of hell itself.
Crossing the courthouse lawn, I cut a path to the sycamore near the broad concrete porch steps, where Mr. Perrelli and Brock had stepped out of the shadows that first night. I figured this was as good a message as any, if they saw me. I was saying, as clearly as I could think of: Hey, here I am, I want to talk, come over here.
Even at that age, the irony wasn’t lost on me.
Here I was at the steps of a courthouse, waiting for mobsters.
And they came, the silver-haired one and the blockheaded one, both in their black suits on that hot and arid summer day, walking across the park in my direction. Watching them approach, I thought briefly about calling my plan off, about running home and telling my parents everything, all of it, the truth about the money and the body in the trunk of the Buick. About the Collector and what he wanted, and the arrival of Mr. Perrelli and Brock, and how they wanted the same thing. But then I thought again of what Mr. Perrelli had promised—escalation—and what that could mean for the people close to me, those I cared about. My family, my dog, my friends; all of them. So I remained where I was and watched the two men approach. They stopped in front of me and I felt trapped, which I guess I was.
“You look like a kid with a lot on his mind,” Mr. Perrelli said.
His hands were in his pinstriped jacket pockets like he was out for a casual stroll, not a murderer and monster walking the world in the guise of a man.
“I want to talk about the money,” I said, my voice calmer than I felt inside. Inside I felt sick and fragile and tremulous, like I might fall apart at any moment.
“That’s a wise decision,” Mr. Perrelli said. He smiled what he probably thought was a friendly smile. “But not here. Take a ride with us.”
He made a nodding motion with his head, the intention clear: Follow.
I didn’t move.
Now that it was happening, my idea didn’t seem so inspired and heroic anymore. I imagined being in a car alone with these two, maybe in the backseat with Brock or Perrelli, as one drove and the other guarded me. Or maybe in the front seat with both of them, trapped in between them and nowhere to go.
“As long as you tell us what we want to hear,” Mr. Perrelli said, coming forward and putting a hand on my shoulder like a reassuring friend, “you have nothing to worry about.”
With that arm he drew me towards them, and I had no choice but to follow or run. I didn’t run, and we crossed through the precision-mowed, Irish-green grass, under the high and bright sun like a fiery eye. At the curb there it was, the black Cadillac, only it didn’t seem like a Cadillac to me anymore, but a hearse, and there was going to be a funeral procession and I had the leaden feeling that it just might be in my honor.
* * *
We drove for several minutes, ending up in a nondescript rural neighborhood of spaced out manufactured houses dotting the land so that nature and construction appeared at a peaceable truce. The houses, about a half dozen, were hues of warm tans and whites, and the acreage of each plot leant the area an air of both seclusion and neighborliness. Here one could wave to a neighbor in the distance, and yet go about one’s business in relative privacy.
The road curved in a wide cul-de-sac and Brock steered the Cadillac into the driveway of the house at the heel of the U. Beyond, the buzz of traffic along the highway we’d just departed could be heard, a background noise that lulled in this pocket neighborhood slightly removed from the rest of civilization. Mr. Perrelli got out and held the door open for me like a doorman. I got out, wondering how many doormen in the world had killed people and did time in prison. Scary thing to think of next time you’re walking into a fancy hotel or restaurant and that bellhop is holding the door open for you.
My advice: tip big.
We walked up to the front door of the house together, me between the two men like the President escorted by Secret Service. I don’t think any president had to worry about finger-breaking Secret Service agents, though. Brock fished out a key and unlocked the door, and we stepped into the house together.
First thing I noticed was the dried rust-brown stains dotting the carpet and wall of the foyer. To the left of me more dots of that brown stain, and a couple smears leading to a door I guessed led to the garage. I wondered who had lived here before Mr. Perrelli and Brock had arrived in town, and where those people were now.
A faint astringent, unpleasant odor came from beyond that door to the garage, and I thought maybe I had an answer to where the owners of the house had gone off to. People stuffed in boxes or in the walls and dry-walled over came to mind, and I told my mind to shut up. I didn’t want to think about it, turned away from the garage door, and followed Mr. Perrelli across the living room.
There was a lamp knocked over, little pieces of the bulb that had shattered shining in the shag of the carpet like diamonds. More smears of that ugly brown color on the dividing wall of the living and dining rooms could have merely been the careless prints of finger-painting children, I told myself. A couple pictures hanging askew gave away the lie. The pictures showed an elderly couple, gray-haired and wrinkled but lively and smiling like their company returned to each other the life that time sought to steal away.
The stains; the pictures; the smell from the garage.
I knew what had happened to the old couple, in broad strokes if not in the details. Escalation had happened. Escalation and business.
In the dining room was a sofa facing an entertainment center taking up one half of the room. The other half hosted a long dining table with frilly place settings and a glass vase with flowers at the center of it. The furniture was seen and registered almost by rote, though, like when you walk into your own home and you see the furnishings there but you don’t really pay them any mind because they’re always there. It’s just something you see, but don’t really see.
Because although I saw the room itself, what I really saw were the people in it, and I probably would have turned and tried to run then if Brock and Perrelli weren’t right next to me like a wall.
On the sofa facing the entertainment center was Dillon Glover and his friends: overweight Stu, and pimple-specked Max. Each had a can of beer in their hands, frosted and beaded with condensation, arms splayed on the armrests or back of the sofa, legs on the table before them. The three older boys looked at me when I walked in and smiled wicked smiles that would make a snake cringe. Dillon’s smile was particularly eerie, that crooked smirk punctuated by a still fading yet noticeable blue bruising around his nose and eyes where my forehead had pounded his face some weeks ago. The bluish tint to his countenance made me think of zombies in movies, and his grin looked hungry.
On the other side of the room, the half dominated by the long dining table, sat Sheriff Glover, Dillon’s father, facing me at the head of the table. It struck me that this was the first time I’d seen them together. Son muscled, father fat, the resemblance was still unmistakable in the vicious glint of their eyes, and the malice that radiated out from behind them like a hidden spectator peeking through curtains. Sheriff Glover was in his tan and brown uniform, which I thought was bold of him when in the presence of killers. Bold or stupid, or maybe he didn’t care.
He too smiled at me, and I didn’t care for that smile anymore than the winks he gave, or the tip of the hat. His every feigned display of propriety was a nuanced mockery and as much as the Collector or Mr. Perrelli and Brock, I knew Sheriff Glover wasn’t really human anymore. Not in the ways that mattered. Whatever had been in him as a kid, whatever intangible is in each of us when we’re born into this world, that made him human had long since rotted away.
The implications of his presence, along with that of his son and his son’s friends, raced through my head. I wasn’t sure about the how or why of it, but this whole thing was far bigger than a car full of money in the woods.
Or a car full of money was a far bigger deal than we kids had ever imagined.
“Have a seat,” Mr. Perrelli said to me, and whether he meant the sofa with Misters Smirk, Pudge, and Pimple Head, or at the dining table with Sheriff Fatty, I didn’t know. It was left up to me, I guess, and that was one of those lesser of two evils choices.
I chose the table, taking the seat at the far end across from the sheriff.
Don’t ask me why I chose one over the other. I held no pretenses about one part of the room being safer than the other. I knew that not only had the shit hit the fan for me, it had short circuited the fan, caused a big fucking fire, and now I was smack in the middle of a shitfire that would probably burn me alive, and I’d die with the smell of shit in my nostrils.
Life is pretty shitty that way sometimes.
“Now,” Mr. Perrelli said when I was seated, he and Brock remaining at the threshold of the room, still standing, like guards on high overlooking a prison yard, “let’s hear about the money.”
I took a deep breath, knowing what I was about to say wasn’t what he wanted to hear. The Glovers and Glover Junior’s friends weren’t going to be very happy, either. They obviously had some sort of arrangement with Perrelli. I was about to stir up a hornet’s nest, and this hornet’s nest included a big bull of a hornet named Brock who broke fingers for fun, and I thought I was pretty much fucked.
“We burned the money,” I said.
Looking up at Mr. Perrelli, I hoped against all odds that he’d see the truth in my face, that maybe Jesus would appear to him with this revelation, and he’d be moved by the Spirit to let me go. The look on his face told me he was definitely seeing something, but it wasn’t the Lord Almighty.
“I see,” Vincent Perrelli said, and his hands in his coat pockets withdrew and went behind his back, like a man idly thinking and measuring things in his head. “That is unfortunate.”
I dared look away from Mr. Perrelli to Dillon Glover and his pals, then swung my gaze from them to the sheriff. No one was smiling anymore. I don’t know if that was a good thing or not. I didn’t miss their crocodile smiles much, but the flat looks on their faces weren’t exactly winning any beauty pageants either.
“You promised me payment,” Sheriff Glover said from the other end of the table. “You said I’d get a cut. I’ve been keeping an eye out for that car of yours a long time, Vinnie. I was to let you know if it was ever found, keep people away from it, and you’d send someone to collect. That was the deal.”
“Yeah,” said Glover Junior. “You said we’d get a cut if we took you to the kid.”
The sheriff shot his son a hard look that wordlessly told the older boy to shut up, and shut up he did. I didn’t feel vindicated by the confirmation of my long held suspicion of the less than loving nature of the Glover father-son relationship. This wasn’t the time for me to gloat in anything.
This was a time for me to watch, carefully, and wait.
“It’s not my fault your collector fucked things up,” Sheriff Glover added. “Payment’s still due, Vinnie.”
Dillon, Stu, and Max vigorously nodded their agreement.
Mr. Perrelli didn’t so much as look at any of them. I was the center of his universe and, right then, I wished for one of those Star Trek wormholes that could take me to an alternate universe.
“Now, what I think we need here,” Mr. Perrelli began, “is another example of just how serious I take my business affairs, Joey.” He pursed his lips as he looked at me, like he was considering something. Then he gave a quick little nod like he’d come to a determination. “Yes, I think I need to show you just how much ten million dollars is worth.”
His hands came out from behind his back.
In his right hand he held a black pistol with a long and slim cylinder of metal attached at the muzzle. He held the gun out at me, and I stared down the muzzle of a gun for the second time in my life. That dark eye at the center was like a glimpse into eternity. He would pull the trigger, and with the silencer there’d hardly be a sound. He’d blow off a hand or a foot, or maybe he’d just kill me and go after my friends. Seek the answers from them that I didn’t have, that none of us had.
Either way, great pain or the final darkness, it was going to suck big time.
Then the pistol swung away from me in an arc sweeping from the dining room to the living room. Towards the sofa and the three guys sitting there, holding their cool beers like the masters of everything.
Stu dropped his beer just as the pistol let out a hiss and pop and a brief jet of fire coughed out of it. His chubby head spit out a cloud of red behind it. He fell and rolled off the sofa to the ground. The can of beer followed beside him, liquor and blood pooling on the carpet.
The pistol spit fire twice more.
A bullet went through the beer can Max had in his hands, spraying the foamy amber liquid all over his pockmarked face. Then the second bullet went through his face, spraying everything behind it in red.
Dillon Glover watched his friends fall and, even as the surprise of it broke the comfortably drunk serenity on his face, he rolled off the sofa and the third bullet meant for him struck and chipped the fireplace behind him.
“Whatthefuck?” Sheriff Glover muttered, streaming the words together so that it came out like the muddled syllables of a primitive language. His eyes were wide and he watched the scene before him with disbelief.
He fumbled at his belt holster even as Mr. Perrelli swung the silencer equipped pistol his way. The sheriff looked like a kid caught jacking off, trying to reach down and pull his zipper up even as his mom or dad came into the room.
Gun at his belt, or gun in his pants, it didn’t matter what Sheriff Glover had been reaching for, because the pistol sent out its lick of flame once more, the hiss and pop of it like a campfire crackling at the last twigs, and a bloom of red spread across his shirt like a blossom. The sheriff toppled sideways, sliding off the chair and hitting the floor with a thump.
Silence followed. Wisps of smoke curled from the pistol like spirits rising.
Sitting at the table, I watched all of this frozen in my seat, afraid beyond words, but at least I hadn’t pissed my pants like with the Collector, and so I figured I was making progress.
Vincent Perrelli’s eyes fell on me for a moment, and the pistol began an arc back in my direction. His eyes sparkled with a sinister satisfaction.
“This is escalation,” he said.
Movement from near the sofa. Dillon Glover rising, turning, running.
Mr. Perrelli swung the gun back that way. Brock also reached behind his back and his slab-like hand returned with his own silencer-tipped pistol.
Dillon dove past the dividing wall into the living room. Bullet holes appeared like magic in the plaster where he’d just been, trailing him.
Both men turned in pursuit.
Across the table from me, behind the now empty chair where the sheriff had been, a sliding glass door led to the backyard. I leapt up from my seat, dashed to the door, gripped it and slid it open.
Motion and a rustle of movement from behind me.
Darting into the backyard, I commanded my legs to move fast, faster. The sliding glass door shattered behind me, raining down on the paved patio in a million tinkling sounds like fairy music.
A set of heavy footfalls coming my way stomped a fast beat. I darted to the left, away from the remains of the glass door, towards the far side of the house and the alley there.
The pursuing footfalls slapped heavily onto the concrete patio behind me.
More hisses and pops from the whispering gun.
A pull of air and heat near my right ear made me yelp as I turned the corner into the alley between the house and the brick wall bordering the property. A jump of a spark flicked off the wall inches away. Far down the alley were a fence and gate and I ran for them.
Somewhere out of sight behind me, around the corner but close and getting closer, the heavier footfalls stomped after me.
My hands reached for the clasp holding the gate shut. I pulled at the contraption and the metal slipped through my fingers, wouldn’t unlatch.
The plodding feet turned the corner, entering the mouth of the alley behind me.
I could almost feel the gun rising, taking aim.
The clasp lifted and the gate swung open. Ducking, I ran through.
More snags of air passed close by my head. I stumbled, bringing my hands to my head, feeling there like a boy on a first date checking his hair.
I ran, saw the black Cadillac, saw Mr. Perrelli some yards down the road, and Dillon even further, turning the far corner and disappearing out of sight. Standing at the center of the cul-de-sac, I shifted from foot to foot, took a step this way, then the other.
Brock’s heavy footfalls were coming again, heavy and fast and determined.
Pivoting, I turned and darted around the end of the wall, leaving the property of the poor dead old couple lying lifeless somewhere in the garage behind me. A cement and dirt easement ran between the wall and the adjacent property, and I dashed down the narrow path. At the far end, a length of chain-link fence separated the neighborhood from the highway beyond. I ran for it, anxiously aware that the brick wall provided cover only until Brock turned the corner. Then, my back would provide an all too easy target in the narrow path of the easement.
I heard them calling out to each other, Perrelli saying that the Glover kid was gone. Here was the Hayworth kid, Brock shouted back, followed by two pairs of footfalls coming my way.
To my left, the old dead couple’s nearest neighbor had an immense lawn, and several fruited trees. Recently watered, run-off from the sprinklers of the lawn had spilled across the concrete easement. Running at full speed, I hadn’t the presence of mind to watch my footfalls, and I caromed from one side to the other as my rubber soles sought purchase on the wet concrete.
I fell hard, rolled, scrambled to my feet.
Grasped the wire of the chain-link, hoisted myself up and over. Dropped, landed awkwardly, almost fell again, then ran straight into the highway.
Traffic intermittent yet regular, I chose my path purposefully. With more than enough time to plot their courses around me or to slow down, drivers nonetheless greeted me with rude honks of their horns and ruder gestures out their windows.
I didn’t stop until I was on the other side. Even then it was only a moment, a second or two, turning and looking back across the highway, over the hoods and roofs of the cars, past the honking, gesticulating motorists.
Peering through the links of the fence I’d leapt, staring across the highway at me, stood Mr. Perrelli and Brock. The older man waved. The big man only stared.
Perrelli mouthed one word at me, and even from the distance between us, I could read his lips and hear the word.
“Escalation.”