For decades, when you thought about the blue-collar East Side of St. Paul, you thought about the Payne Reliever, an infamous rock ’n’ roll club and strip joint located on Payne Avenue. With its catchy name and wicked reputation, the Payne Reliever pretty much defined the rough-and-tumble neighborhood to the outside world, so much so that once when I told a guy in Florida where I lived, he asked if that was anywhere near the club. And did I go there? And how many shootings and knife fights had I seen? It’s gone now, just like the Faust and Flick adult theaters, replaced, I swear, by an Embers family restaurant. Yet the reputation for mayhem it embodied persists. As a result, people seldom go to the East Side unless they actually live there, and many of those are cagey about it, telling outsiders they reside in Hazel Park, Prosperity Heights, or Lake Phalen. Still, most East Siders are fiercely loyal to their neighborhood. I played hockey with one guy, you could insult him, insult his politics, his religion, even his mother, but say something nasty about the East Side and he’d drop his gloves. Boom.
Mrs. Thomforde was loyal like that. Her husband might have moved her to Merriam Park, yet once a month she’d faithfully return to gossip with her East Side friends. As kids we used to think that she was tremendously courageous—or just plain crazy.
Usually the friends would gather at the Silver Bucket, located not too far from where the Payne Reliever once stood. The Silver Bucket is a family joint that’s been thriving since the turn of the last century, when they actually served beer in small buckets. It had been built long before people decided it was okay to put windows in bars, and as a consequence it always looked like the inside of an old movie theater. There was no smoking—the result of a recent City of St. Paul ordinance—yet the odor of a million cigarettes could be smelled in the carpet, booths, and chairs.
There were at least one hundred people in the Silver Bucket when we arrived, and by the way they cheered you would have thought it was a sports bar and the Vikings had just put six on the board. Instead, a middle-aged woman dressed in a business suit was collecting her prize of a combo pack of chicken breasts and cheesy hash browns. Like a running back following a touchdown, she accepted about a dozen high-fives as she gamboled her way back to her table. Meanwhile, the manager held a plastic-wrapped package high above his head and called for order.
“Next up, a five-pound package of pork-chops-on-a-stick,” he announced. That brought more cheers. “Don’t forget, all proceeds go to the Johnson High School Hockey Association,” he added as two waitresses fanned out through the bar, each carrying a round tray. On the tray were little tents of paper, a number written on each, the tents arranged in a circle along the edge of the tray. People dropped dollar bills into the middle of the tray and snatched paper tents at random, or according to some secret betting system.
“Should we buy a chance?” I asked Karen. “Pork-chops-on-a-stick. I love pork chops.”
“Do you see Mrs. Thomforde?”
“We’ll have a barbecue. The last barbecue of the season.”
“Is that her?”
Karen pointed at a woman with white hair cut short sitting at a large table with seven other women. I had known Mrs. Thomforde for nearly three decades. During those years, along with the usual wear and tear of life, she had lost a husband just as he reached retirement age and had seen her favorite child sent to prison—more than once. Yet somehow her face had managed to retain a youthful contempt for the passing of time, for mortality itself. Looking at her, I decided that the old aphorism was true: That which does not destroy us only makes us stronger.
I came up from behind her and set a hand on her shoulder. She turned toward me. Curiosity, then recognition flashed across her face. She did not even say my name, simply stood and hugged me and said, “Oh, my, I haven’t seen you since your father’s funeral.” She hadn’t actually been a friend of my father’s, but she came from that generation that went to funerals when someone in the neighborhood died.
Mrs. Thomforde touched my face and said, “You turned out so handsome.” She turned to her friends sitting around the table. There was at least a case of longneck beer bottles, most of them empty, scattered in front of them, as well as the remains of several appetizer platters. “Isn’t McKenzie handsome, girls?”
The girls agreed with Mrs. Thomforde. The one called Ruth thought I was handsome enough to take home and lock in the basement.
“You’re just being polite,” I told her.
“Are you kidding?” said a friend. “Compared to the ground chuck she’s been chopping, you’re Grade A sirloin.”
Instead of being offended, Ruth said, “A body needs a nice fillet every once in a while, if you know what I mean.”
The women all laughed like they knew exactly what she meant and I was reminded of yet another aphorism, this one more recent: Girls just wanna have fun.
Mrs. Thomforde pulled out an empty chair and said, “So what brings a nice boy like you to the East Side?”
“Isn’t this where all the good-looking women hang out?”
The girls liked that answer, and it occurred to me that if I were into sexagenarian romance, I could have made out like a bandit.
I sat in the chair and asked, “So, did anybody win any meat?”
Turned out that Ruth won a five-pound package of New York strips that she expected her husband to ruin. “He’s awful. Burns everything. I say, ‘Let me cook the steaks.’ Oh, no, grilling’s a man’s job. He’ll turn these steaks into charcoal, wait and see.”
The girls all nodded in understanding. They had known each other for decades, knew each other’s families as well as they knew their own. The general consensus was that Ruth’s husband could screw up a ham sandwich.
While they were telling me this, Mrs. Thomforde rested a hand on my forearm. “You brought a friend,” she said.
“Actually, she brought me.”
“Good evening, Mrs. Thomforde,” Karen said.
“What do you want?” Mrs. Thomforde asked. I noticed she didn’t offer Karen a chair.
“I’m looking for your son.”
“Why? Is he lost?”
The girls all thought that was a pretty witty reply until Karen said, “Yes, he’s lost, and if I don’t find him soon, he’s going back to prison.”
“Oh, Jeezus,” said Ruth.
“May we speak privately?” Karen asked.
“What is it?” Mrs. Thomforde gestured at the other women. “You can speak in front of my friends.”
Karen said, “Scottie is late reporting back to the halfway house. Several hours late.”
“You’re going to send him back to prison for that? Scottie is a good boy.”
“Mrs. Thomforde, everyone in a halfway house program is treated as if they’re incarcerated in jail. If they’re not where they’re supposed to be when they’re supposed to be there—”
“You saying that Scottie broke out of jail? That he’s a fugitive?”
“If I don’t find him soon, he’ll be treated that way.”
“Why can’t you people just leave him alone?”
It was the same question Joley had asked, and it made me angry. I tried not to let it show.
“Mrs. Thomforde,” said Karen. “The way the system works—”
“The system, the system. I hate the system. The system put a seventeen-year-old child in prison for a crime he didn’t even commit. He didn’t shoot that cop. That other boy shot him. The cop wasn’t even hurt that bad. Only they punished Scottie for it, and see what’s happened? Do you see? His life was ruined, that’s what happened. The system—”
“Mrs. Thomforde,” said Karen.
“—is terrible. The system doesn’t work. Now you say that Scottie’s run away—”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Wouldn’t you run away, too, from such a system?” Mrs. Thomforde glared at Karen; her mouth was twisted with fury. “He wouldn’t be running away if he was living at my house. None of this would happen if you let him stay with me. I thought you were going to let him stay with me?”
“That’s what I thought, too,” Ruth said. The girls were listening intently.
“I don’t see how that’s going to happen now,” Karen said. Her frustration was palpable; whatever empathy she felt for Mrs. Thomforde had been left at the curb. “After this incident…” Karen shook a finger at the older woman. “When he was furloughed to your home the last time, he didn’t stay there the entire weekend like he was supposed to. Did he?”
“He certainly did. He was in the house the whole time.” I noticed that Mrs. Thomforde was looking upward and to her left when she spoke. “He helped me do some chores around the house, helped me move furniture and clean. He played the drums. He’s such a fine musician.”
“He was seen in a bar, Mrs. Thomforde. That’s a terrible violation of the terms of his parole.”
“I don’t know where you’re getting your information, but you better go back and get some more. Anyone saying Scottie wasn’t at my house is lying. Scottie wasn’t anywhere else but at my house for the entire weekend. We had a family reunion. The entire family came over and we had dinner together. Scottie played the drums for us.”
“Mrs. Thomforde—”
“Are you saying she’s a liar?” one of the East Siders asked. “We don’t lie.”
I liked the collective “We,” but didn’t say so.
“What’s important is where Scottie is now,” Karen said. “Do you know, Mrs. Thomforde?”
“No, I don’t. You’re the one who’s supposed to be watching him.”
Karen was this close to losing it. She clenched her fists and stepped forward. Something was about to come out of her mouth, and my inner voice warned, It ain’t gonna be pretty.
“Miss.” I spoke loudly and gestured. Both women turned toward me, as I had hoped they would. I purposely looked past them. “Miss,” I called again. A waitress pivoted and stepped between Karen and Mrs. Thomforde to reach my chair. “How many tickets do you have left?”
She did a quick count of the remaining tents on her tray and said, “Ten.”
“I’ll buy them all.” I dipped into my pocket for cash. “Ladies, pick a ticket, my treat.” I dropped a ten on the tray and leaned back while each woman made a selection. Ruth said that I certainly knew the way to a girl’s heart. Her friends suggested that Ruth was a cheap date.
“Take a ticket,” I told Mrs. Thomforde. “You, too, Karen. Pork chops, yum.”
Mrs. Thomforde selected hers, and Karen followed, leaving one ticket on the tray for me. I pulled a four. Victoria’s number. Suddenly I wasn’t having any fun. Suddenly I was angry again. I kept it to myself.
The waitress thanked us, scooped up the cash, and made her way to the front of the bar where the manager stood next to a spinning wheel. They both scanned the crowd for the other waitress, catching her eye. The waitress held up four fingers.
“Four tickets left for a chance at winning five pounds of pork-chops-on-a-stick,” the manager announced.
“You and Scottie talk a lot, don’t you, Mrs. Thomforde?” I said.
“Of course we do,” she said. “I’m his mother. He calls me all the time. He’s a good boy.”
“Did he ever mention any friends to you? People he spends time with?”
“You mean from prison?” She was looking at Karen when she said, “He doesn’t spend time with that trash.”
“Did he ever mention anyone called T-Man, for instance? Mr. T?”
Mrs. Thomforde looked up and to her right. “I don’t think so,” she said. “No. No, I’m sure he hasn’t. Why are you doing this, McKenzie?” She flung a look at Karen. “Why are you helping her?”
I patted Mrs. Thomforde’s hand. “I’m not,” I said. “I’m trying to help Scottie. When I found out Karen was looking for him—I was looking for him because I was hoping he might know some people who can help me out with something, but then she told me”—I flicked a thumb in Karen’s direction—“that Scottie was missing…”
“Yes, yes,” Mrs. Thomforde said. “You were always a good friend to Scottie. I remember what you did that one time. I won’t ever forget it.” She sighed dramatically. “Back when you were kids—everything seemed simple back when you were kids. Scottie was so full of fun and love and…” She was looking up to her right again. “If only…”
The manager spoke loudly from the front of the bar. “Here we go, ladies and gentlemen. For five pounds of pork-chops-on-a-stick.” He spun the wheel. It completed several revolutions before slowing and eventually settling on number sixteen. The woman who had won the chicken and hash browns gave out a squeal from a table behind us.
“Did she win again?” asked Ruth.
“It’s so unfair,” said Mrs. Thomforde.
I thanked Mrs. Thomforde for her time and said good-bye to the girls and led Karen out of the bar. I stopped her just outside the door and studied my watch, counting the seconds as they ticked by.
“What are you doing?” Karen asked.
“I think Mrs. Thomforde was lying about knowing where Scottie is,” I said.
“What makes you say that?”
“Did you notice that while she was speaking to you she was looking upward to her left, but when she was speaking to me, she was looking upward to the right?”
“No, I didn’t. What difference does it make?”
“Right brain, left brain. When you glance up to the right, you’re pulling your thoughts from your memory. If you glance up to the left, you’re pulling thoughts from your creative side. Often, that means the person is lying. When Mrs. Thomforde told us she didn’t know where Scottie was, she was looking to her left.”
“That doesn’t tell me what you’re doing.”
“I’m giving Mrs. Thomforde a ninety-second head start.”
“To do what?”
At ninety seconds, I opened the bar door and both Karen and I stepped inside, standing close to the entrance. From where we stood we were able to see Mrs. Thomforde’s back. She was speaking on a cell phone.
I asked Karen if she was hungry. She said she was, so I drove to a vacant lot lit up by the streetlights on the corner of Arcade and East Seventh Street. There was a food trailer like the kind you see at state and county fairs anchored against a wooden fence. It was rigged with tiny yellow lightbulbs and covered with hand-painted scenes of a pastoral Mexico.
“You’re kidding, right?” said Karen.
“It has authentic Mexican food,” I said. “The best in town. Unless you prefer Taco Bell.”
I had the impression that she did. Just the same, I parked in the lot next to a Lexus SUV, which was parked next to a Ford minivan, and joined the line. Karen followed reluctantly. The owner, a man named José, stood behind a white folding table loaded with pastel-colored coolers containing soft drinks. He scribbled orders on a pad and handed them through a window into the kitchen inside the trailer. There was a large chalkboard to his right. The trailer served a full menu, yet I recommended the tacos. The tortillas were warmed on a griddle and piled high with chopped onions, fresh cilantro, hot sauce, and your choice of fifteen different kinds of meat, including cow brains. I ordered chicken. Karen requested shrimp. I didn’t say anything at the time, but shrimp tacos? Really? That’s so Southern California.
There were a few picnic tables with huge umbrellas scattered around the lot, only they were all full, so we ate with the Audi between us, using the hood for a table.
“This is amazing,” Karen said after her second bite.
“What did I tell you?”
“The sauce, though. It’s so hot.”
“I like it that way.”
We continued eating in silence until Karen asked, “How do they get away with this, selling food in a vacant lot?”
“The owners get away with it because no one has complained yet. I mean, look. Their customers love them.” The lot was filled with every ethnic group you can find on the East Side: Hispanics, Somalis, Hmong, Native Americans, blacks, and whites, some with money, some obviously without—a true melting pot. “ ’Course, it’s only a matter of time.”
“What do you mean?”
“Sooner or later someone will complain, and the city will step in with their ordinances and permit requirements and zoning regulations and shut it all down. The owners and their customers will protest, yet in the end the city council will explain how it’s making St. Paul a better place to live, and that will be that.”
“You’re a cynical man, McKenzie.”
“No, I’m not. I’m just having a very bad day.”
Not as bad as the Dunstons, my inner voice reminded me.
“Do you think Mrs. Thomforde was calling Scottie?” Karen asked.
“Who else would she call? All her friends were sitting at the table.”
Karen took her last bite of taco and washed it down with bottled water. “What do we do now?” she asked.
“If you’re up to it, we could visit Lehane’s and ask around, see if any of the regulars can give us a handle on this T-Man.”
“What do you mean, if I’m up to it?”
“It’s a dangerous place. More Minnesotans have been killed in and around Lehane’s than in Iraq.”
“It’s not that bad.”
“How would you know?”
“I’ve been there.”
“Alone?”
“No, I was—all right, I was with police officers looking to serve an apprehension and detention warrant on an offender.”
“Yeah, well, it’s different when you have guns. We should get guns.”
“No guns.”
“Karen.”
“No.”
“Fine.”
“They’re not going to talk to you anyway, McKenzie. You start asking questions of that crowd and they’re going to kick your ass.”
“That’s debatable.”
“They might talk to me, though.”
“What makes you so popular?”
Karen’s blue shirt was open at the collar. She reached up, undid the next two buttons, and batted her eyelashes at me. “I’m a babe,” she said.
I hadn’t thought so when I first met her, but I was beginning to reconsider.
“Oh, this should be fun,” I said.
Lehane’s was three blocks away from the taco trailer, yet it might as well have been on the far side of the moon for all the similarities. For one thing, there were no minorities. Lehane’s was whites only, and you didn’t need a sign in the window to figure it out. The place reeked of bigotry and hate. Men didn’t go there to relax or watch the ball game. They went to Lehane’s to nurse their grudges against mankind and to plot their revenge. They went there to rage against the world and their place in it.
Fights were commonplace. When I worked the Eastern District for the St. Paul cops, the very last call you wanted to take was to quell a disturbance at Lehane’s. Sometimes you found guys going at it with fists, sometimes with knives, sometimes with guns. That’s how Patrick Lehane got his. A slug from a nine-millimeter fired by a customer who refused to take last call for an answer. That was back in the mid-eighties. Since then the bar had changed hands at least a half-dozen times while retaining its name, rowdy reputation, and white-trash clientele.
It was specifically because of Lehane’s that the St. Paul City Council adopted what it labeled “a nuisance ordinance.” The statute allowed them to shutter any business they wanted if they could prove “by a preponderance of evidence that the property owners operated in a manner that maintained and permitted conditions that unreasonably annoyed a substantial number of people and endangered the safety, health, morals, comfort, or repose of considerable numbers of the public.” Yet, while the ordinance had been used to threaten and shut down several other less notorious bars over the years, including a pretty decent African American–owned blues joint, Lehane’s remained in business. Go figure.
I opened the door and was slapped in the face by the smell of cigarettes and beer and the sour odor of industrial disinfectant. I tried not to react to it. The bartender glanced at me when I stepped inside. His eyes worked me over, wondering if I was trouble, how much, and whether or not he could handle it. From the way he smirked and turned his head, I doubt I impressed him much.
There were six other men in Lehane’s. At first glance you would have pegged them as working class, except I doubted any of them actually had a job or filed a tax return. More likely, they all made their living in the so-called underground economy. I would have bet my Audi that each of them had a criminal record.
The men were divided into pairs. One pair sat at the bar near the door, and another sat at the opposite end, as far away from the first pair as possible. The two other men sat at a table in the corner, their heads close together, speaking intently—at least until I somehow interrupted their conversation by moving to the center of the bar. When they spotted me, they both leaned away from each other and frowned. The others looked at me with an expression of casual indifference before returning their attention to the TV above the bar—I could live or die or go to Iowa for all they cared. Maybe it was my clothes. I was overdressed because I was wearing a clean shirt and jeans. Maybe if I went outside and rolled around in the gutter.
Instead of a legitimate sport, they had ultimate fighting on—think professional wrestling with real malice, real violence, and real injuries. The customers didn’t seem to be rooting for anyone in par tic u lar, just watching the mayhem, maybe taking mental notes on how to hurt and disable. “Wooooo,” one of them hummed when a fighter head-butted his opponent, hurled him down on the mat, and proceeded to pound his face with a forefist. “I bet that hurts.”
“He’s a pussy,” his companion said without indicating which fighter he meant.
The bartender seemed annoyed that I distracted him from the program. He needed a shave and a haircut, his eyes were unsteady, and his belly strained the buttons of his shirt. I set a ten on the bar in front of him and said, “Shot of rye and a bottle of beer. And quarters for the pool table.”
“No bottles,” he said. “Only cans.” A good policy, I decided. Having been attacked with both over the years, I could testify that aluminum cans were definitely less lethal than broken glass.
While the bartender’s back was turned, I fished a pack of Marlboros and a brand-new Bic lighter from my pocket. I had bought both at a SuperAmerica store down the street. When Karen asked why, I said, “Props. An actor needs his props.”
I was lighting the cigarette when the bartender set the shot glass and beer in front of me. “Law says you can’t smoke in here,” he said.
“What the fuck do I care?”
The bartender gave me a small squat glass to use as an ashtray. “I don’t want to see no butts on the floor,” he said, even though the black rubber tiles were already littered with cigarette butts as well as crushed pretzels, peanut shells, and kernels of buttered popcorn. There weren’t any baskets on the bar, so I figured the debris must have been what remained of Lehane’s happy hour spread.
The bartender took the ten and returned a moment later with my change, including seven quarters. I used four of them to buy a round of pool at the table in the back. I racked the balls and carefully selected a cue from the half-dozen sticks collected in a busted wooden frame screwed to the wall. I found only one that was reasonably straight and still had the tip attached. I was chalking the cue when she walked in.
The men had merely glanced at me, found me uninteresting, and looked away. Karen they studied with the intensity of an astronomer encountering a new celestial body. An unescorted woman in Lehane’s? I doubted they could believe their luck. “Hey,” said the guys nearest the door as she passed. One of them patted his pocket, no doubt mentally counting his money, wondering if he had enough to pay her fee.
Karen spoke first to the bartender. The volume on the TV was up, and I couldn’t hear the conversation. They spoke for a long time. Or maybe it was just me counting the seconds. More and more I began to feel that visiting Lehane’s wasn’t the best notion I ever had. If it hadn’t been for Victoria, for my dismal failure at learning anything more about where she was and who took her, I would never have done it. Desperation makes fools of us all.
Karen made the rounds after she finished with the bartender, speaking first with the pair of jokers at the door, then the pair at the opposite end of the bar, and finally the men at the small table in the corner. I watched her the way a parent watches a small child at a crowded park while pretending not to, giving the kid her freedom, yet ready to pounce at the slightest provocation.
None of the men blew her off—I wouldn’t have, either. They all smiled when she approached, all sat up straighter when she asked her questions, and none of them seemed remotely hostile. Yet all of them looked her up and down and licked their lips as if she were an ice cream cone and it was a hot day. The men nearest the door in particular—they stared at her breasts when she spoke to them, not her eyes, and when she left they tilted their heads so they could get a good look at her ass as she walked away. Instead of smiling, they leered. They called to her when she settled in with the bartender a second time.
“Hey. Hey, honey.”
Karen glanced over.
“What you doin’ lookin’ for this Mr. T asshole when you could have a real man?”
Karen averted her eyes.
“Seriously, me and Marky can help you out if you’re lookin’ for a good time.”
“I’ll go first,” Marky said. He nudged his pal in the shoulder. “Joey here, he likes sloppy seconds.”
“Fuck you, man,” said Joey.
The bartender chuckled loud enough to be heard over the TV. He said something and laughed some more. Karen smiled weakly. The boys at the end of the bar kept at it. The one called Marky told a joke about the difference between a good girl and a nice girl that cracked up his pal and the bartender. Karen draped the strap of her purse over her shoulder as if she were about to leave.
“No, no, don’t go,” said Joey. “How ’bout you let me buy you a drink?”
At the same time, Marky slid off his stool and casually moved to the door.
The bartender backed away from Karen, as if giving his customers plenty of room.
“No, thank you,” Karen said. Her voice was steady and clear.
“What? I ain’t good enough for you to drink with?”
“No, thank you,” Karen repeated. She slid her hand inside her bag.
“You fuckin’ look at me when I’m talkin’ to you.”
Karen didn’t look. If she had, she would have seen Marky sliding the bolts at the top and bottom of the door into place.
“Who do you think you’re dealin’ with, bitch, treatin’ me like that? Like I ain’t even worth lookin’ at?” Joey said. He came off his stool and approached Karen from the edge of the bar. “You ain’t friendly at all.”
Marky swung wide so that he could come up on her from behind. The other four men watched from their seats. None of them were looking to get involved in the action, yet I knew that none of them would turn it down when their turn came. As for the bartender, he seemed bored, his arms folded across his chest, his eyes half closed, as if this sort of thing happened all the time.
Marky was about three steps behind Karen, who kept looking straight ahead. Joey was an equal distance to her left. They were closing in.
“You know what you need?” Marky said. “You need a good fuck.”
“Hey, pal,” I said.
Marky turned. I was behind him. He had forgotten about me. Everyone had.
He said, “Wha—”
That’s all he said.
The pool cue was in my hands. I had rotated it so I was gripping the thin end. When Marky turned I swung it like a baseball bat. It made a loud whoosh as it cut through the still barroom air and then a cracking sound as it exploded against his face, catching him across the upper lip. I felt the contact rippling through my hands and arms and deep into my shoulders as I followed through. Marky’s head snapped back and his legs came out from under him and he splashed against the dirty rubber floor, bounced once, and settled among the cigarette butts, pretzels, and popcorn.
I glanced at Joey. He didn’t seem to understand what was happening until I moved toward him, gripping the stick like a batter walking to the plate. He drifted backward until his spine was hard against the bar. His arms were spread wide in a pose of surrender, and his eyes were locked on mine as if I were a bad traffic accident and he couldn’t make himself look away. I halted, rested the pool cue on my shoulder, and smiled. Joey just stared, his mouth open, like a man whose brain synapses were too far apart. I walked slowly past him to the door. I opened the bolt at the bottom, then the top, and moved back into the bar. None of the men spoke a word to me, so I didn’t speak to them. I carefully stepped over Marky’s body. He was moaning softly now; blood dribbled from his nose and from both corners of his mouth. I still had three balls on the pool table, and I sank them one at a time without a miss. Afterward, I returned the pool stick to the rack.
“I’m ready to leave. How ’bout you?” I said.
Karen nodded and slipped off her stool. “Gentlemen,” she said and walked briskly to the door. I followed. Nobody would meet my eyes; no one spoke until I moved past Joey. He said, “Asshole,” so I stomped on his kneecap with the outer edge of my shoe. I don’t know if I smashed it, but Joey went down screaming just the same. I caught his hair as he fell and held him up while I punched his face until my knuckles became sore.
I was breathing hard when I left the bar; sweat had pooled under my arms and at the small of my back.
“Are you happy now?” Karen asked. I had unlocked the Audi with my key-chain remote, and we were talking to each other over the roof of the car. “You’ve been wanting to hit somebody all night. Now you’ve had your chance. Does it make you feel better?”
“Am I missing something?” I said. “Did you not know what was going on back there? Did you not see Marky locking the door?”
“I saw.”
“What the hell do you think that was about?”
“I know what it was about.”
“They were going to rape you, Karen. They were going to hold you down on the bar and spread your legs and rape you. Every man in that place—”
“I know.”
“They were going to rape you and abuse you and degrade you simply because you were there and they’re all pissed off at the world and why should you be happy if they’re not—and do you know what would have happened afterward? Nothing. I doubt that they would have celebrated. I doubt that they would have even given each other a high-five.”
“McKenzie, that wasn’t going to happen.”
“That’s because I was there. I can’t believe you’re giving me attitude over this. I was helping you.”
“I didn’t need help. I had it under control.”
“What were you going to do, Karen, when they put their hands on you? Kill ’em with kindness?”
Karen’s hand was in her bag. When it came out, she was holding a .380 Colt Mustang pocket gun. She slapped the semiautomatic on the roof of my Audi, and my first thought was Hey, lady, that’s a fifty-thousand-dollar car. My second thought I spoke aloud. “You had a gun?” That’s why she had draped her purse over her shoulder and why her hand was inside it. “What are you doing with a gun? You said no guns.”
“I said no guns for you. Lucky I did, from what I saw in there. You would have shot those men.”
“Hell, yes,” I said.
“So instead you beat on them. That should make you happy.”
“Karen—”
“Tell me, McKenzie. Do you think either of them will be any less of a jerk tomorrow because you beat on them?”
“Karen, I was concerned for your safety.”
“No. You were upset that you haven’t been able to do anything for Victoria Dunston, and you took it out on them.”
“Get in the car.”
Once we were both inside the Audi and she had put her gun away, I said, “Karen, I have a lot to apologize for.” She turned in her seat and looked at me as if she suddenly thought I was interesting. “For the way I’ve treated you, the way I spoke to your friends.”
“I’ve already forgiven you for that,” Karen said.
“I know. I just wanted you to know that I was sorry. I have no reason to get down on you and your pals. You’re true believers. You’re honestly concerned about helping people.”
“We sure don’t do it for the money,” she said.
“Only I am not going to apologize for what I did in Lehane’s. I didn’t know you had a gun, and even if I had, I still would have stepped in.”
“I wish you hadn’t.”
“Tell me, Karen. If those men had laid hands on you, would you have used the gun?”
“I would have pulled it.”
“Yes, but if they weren’t afraid, if they didn’t back off, would you have squeezed the trigger?”
She didn’t answer. I don’t think she had an answer. She turned in her seat and gazed out of the passenger window looking for it. After a few moments, she said, “You think I’m naive, don’t you?”
“A little bit.”
“I’m not. Truly, I’m not. I know these people. I know what they’re capable of. I had one offender, he wanted to show his girl a good time, so he ordered a pizza and then shot the delivery boy in the back of the head for the money he had in his pockets. Another offender, a woman, she was angry that her boyfriend discarded her for someone else, so she burned down the boyfriend’s apartment building, killed seven people. The boyfriend wasn’t even home.”
Another offender kidnapped a twelve-year-old girl and terrorized and traumatized her and the people who loved her for a little bit of money, and maybe some payback for an imagined offense that occurred over two decades ago, my inner voice added. What madness is that?
“None of it makes sense to me,” Karen said. “I understand why they do the things they do. I understand their motives. Yet the motives so often pale in comparison with the enormity of their crimes.” She shook her head sadly. “I don’t forgive them, McKenzie. Who am I to forgive them for the terrible things they do? Except this is the difference between you and me—I want to help them. I want to change them. I want to make sure they don’t do terrible things again. I mean, what’s the alternative if we don’t help these people, if we don’t try to change them? What else would you do with these people?”
“I don’t know.”
“Neither do I.”
“Karen, what’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this, anyway?”
“You mean sitting in an expensive car outside a sleazy bar after being nearly assaulted by a half-dozen degenerates?”
“Exactly.”
“After I earned my criminal justice degree, I worked at Lino Lakes as a jailer. I had taken a lot of psychology courses, and my plan was to work as a juvenile probation officer. I wanted to get a sense of what prison for kids was all about first, so I went to work for the juvenile detention center in Lino Lakes.” Karen stared out the window of the Audi some more. “Prison is a terrible, terrible place,” she said. “A bad place.”
It’s supposed to be, my inner voice said.
“It chews people up in a way that’s… that’s hard to explain unless you’ve seen it firsthand. I saw kids, I don’t care what they did to get there, they were kids, but after a few months—what is it the philosophers say? ‘If you live where they live and are taught what they are taught, you’ll believe what they believe.’ For these kids, prison became their teacher. Most of what they knew about life they learned behind bars. I suspect that’s what happened to your friend Scottie. Anyway, I decided I would work to keep people out of prison. I know it’s not a popular goal. Yet”—she turned and looked hard at me—“when my head hits the pillow and I look back on the day, no matter how crummy the day is, I can always say ‘The world’s a little bit better place because of what I did.’ ”
“Where have I heard that before?” I asked.
I started the car, and we drove off. After a few blocks I said, “Did you learn anything? Back at Lehane’s, did anyone say anything interesting?”
“The bartender didn’t recognize any names, but he said he remembered serving two men who fit the descriptions of Scottie and the T-Man. He said they reminded him of one of those ads for a health club, the kind with a before and after photo, Scottie looking wimpy and the other looking muscular.”
“Did he remember anything else?”
“No.”
We managed to negotiate Spaghetti Junction, the confluence of Interstates 94 and 35E and Highway 52, without getting wrecked and were heading west when Karen’s cell phone rang. I could hear only her end of the conversation.
“Yes… When…? What did he say…? You’re kidding… No, tell him nothing. I’m on my way.”
Karen folded her cell and slipped it back into her bag.
“What?” I said.
“Take me back to the halfway house.”
“Why?”
“Scottie Thomforde just rolled in.”