A Firing Offense

THIRTY-ONE




THE BARTENDER WAS fanning out cocktail napkins with a tumbler when I entered La Fortresse sometime after eleven. I passed him with a nod and walked towards the back room.

McGinnes sat at a deuce, halfway into a cold bottle of beer. He saluted mockingly and shook my hand as I sat down. I put the briefcase on the floor, between our feet.

“What’ya got in there,” he asked, “a bomb or something?”

“Something like a bomb,” I said cryptically.

He waved a hand in front of his face and finished the beer left in his bottle. Our fine-skinned waitress came over to the table. Her white shirt had a start-of-shift crispness. She smiled.

“What can I get you, Nick?”

“A Coke,” I said. “Bottled, please, not from the gun. Thanks.”

“One more for me, darling,” McGinnes said, pointing at his bottle. He frowned at me. “You on the wagon, man?”

“No.”

The waitress brought our order. I poured from the bottle to a glass full of ice and waited for the foam to retreat. By the time I took the first sip McGinnes had killed much of his second beer. Some of his straight black hair fell across his forehead as he set his bottle down.

“You seen Andre?” McGinnes asked.

“Yeah.”

“He’d better drag his black ass back to work. The man is in some shit. And you know what it’s like to work with Void, full time? That shit-for-brains can’t close one deal—hell, he can’t even close his fly.”

“Andre’s not coming back, Johnny,” I said. “He’s dead.”

McGinnes’ mouth opened, then the corners of it turned down. One tear immediately fell from his left eye and rolled down and off his cheek. He swept the bottle off the table with the back of his hand, sending it to the floor. Foam poured from its neck. McGinnes made a fist and dug knuckles into his forehead.

Our waitress came back into the room. She saw the bottle and McGinnes, then looked at me.

“Bring him another,” I said. She nodded and left quickly. She returned just as quickly, set a fresh beer in front of McGinnes, picked the old up off the floor, and left the room. McGinnes stared straight ahead with watery eyes and slowly shook his head.

“You stupid bastards,” he muttered. “You stupid, stupid bastards.”

I waited until he looked at me again. “Andre and me,” I said carefully, “and a couple of guys from his old neighborhood interrupted the tail end of Rosen’s drug deal on Friday night. The idea was to heist the money and the drugs and trade the drugs back to them for the boy. Andre was to keep the money. But Rosen’s people turned out to be gunslingers. When it was over, most of them were dead. Andre died quickly.” I drank some soda. “On Saturday morning I got the boy back. He’s safe, Johnny. He’s with his grandfather.”

“That’s it, huh?” he said emotionally. “The boy’s safe, Andre’s dead, you and me just walk away into the sunset.”

“Nobody will touch us,” I said vaguely. “I fixed it.”

“You fixed it,” McGinnes said, and snorted. I slid the briefcase along the floor with my foot, until it touched his own. He looked down, then back at me.

“There’s a hundred and twenty grand in that case,” I said. “It goes to Andre’s mother. I think that’s what he was planning to do with it, regardless of the outcome. Do me a favor and see that she gets it.”

“How much did you skim?”

“I took ten, to keep me on my feet. Until I figure out what’s next.”

McGinnes chugged the rest of his beer and slammed the bottle on the table, loud enough to cause the waitress to poke her head back into the room. He signaled her for another. She served it without looking at either of us.

“So, Nicky. Was it worth it?” McGinnes squinted at me. His voice shook as he spoke.

“I don’t know.”

“How did it feel to deliver the kid?”

I thought about it and said, “It felt good.”

“You know what I mean,” he said impatiently. “Did you find your parents, too? Did you say good-bye to your grandfather?”

I stood up and reached into my pocket. I found a five and dropped it on the table.

“Make sure Andre’s mother gets the money,” I said.

“To Andre,” McGinnes said, and raised his bottle in a toast. “The only hero in this whole damn thing.”

I grabbed a handful of McGinnes’ shirt and pulled him up out of his seat. When I looked into his frightened eyes, I let him down gently but still held on. His breath was sour and sickly, like an old man’s.

“Andre’s no hero,” I said softly. “He was, when he was alive. But he died, and then he was nothing. I dumped him in a f*cking alley, like a sack of shit. So don’t romanticize it, understand?” I released my grip on his shirt.

“Sure, Nick, I understand.” He tilted the bottle back to his lips.

I wiped tears off my face with a shaky hand. “Try not to sit here all day,” I said.

“The stuff tastes awful good today, Nicky.” I walked to the doorway. “So long, man,” he said behind me.

I looked back to the table. “So long, Johnny.”

I left him there, staring into his bottle. I crossed the dark barroom, passed through the door, and stepped out into the light.


THE CORRIDOR I HAD entered marked the beginning of the hospital’s original wing. I followed its worn carpeting as it snaked towards the ward. Small hexagonal windows had black bars radiating spiderlike from their centers, and were spaced at intervals on the yellowing walls to my left.

At the end of the corridor I pushed open one of two swinging metal doors and stepped into the ward’s reception area. I signed my name and recorded the time in a notebook on the desk. Behind the desk sat a young man wearing a flannel shirt and a brush mustache. I asked him for her room number.

“She stays in eight-oh-two,” he said. “But this time of day you might try the rec room.”

“Thanks,” I said, and headed down the hallway.

I had visited friends on several occasions in places such as this. The alky wards were usually populated by middle-aged individuals who drifted slowly and deliberately, like ghosts, in and out of doorways. In this place they separated the boozers from the druggies. The k-heads and cocaine kids moved about these rooms like hopped-up insects.

I passed a large room that had a shield of gray smoke at its entrance. There were Ping-Pong tables and board games, but everyone was seated in vinyl furniture watching a television mounted high on the wall. A couple of them were laughing.

I stopped at eight-oh-two and knocked on a partially closed door. She told me to come in. I pushed the door open.

There were two cots in the room, with a night table and reading lamp in between. On the night table was some propaganda, and under that a notebook. Next to the notebook was a flat aluminum ashtray filled with crushed filters. She sat on the edge of the bed nearest the window, a live cigarette between her fingers.

“Nicky,” she said, without emotion.

“Kim. May I come in?”

She nodded and I entered. She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, with a sweater vest over that. Her hair had been cut short and spiky, which made her big eyes even more pronounced above her hollow cheeks. She had the pallid color of the very ill.

“Cigarette?” she asked, rustling the pack in my direction.

“No thanks. I won’t be staying long.”

She took a drag and blew some my way. “I knew you’d be by, eventually. You’re not particularly bright. But you are persistent.”

I let that go and asked, “How’s it going?”

“I’ve been through all this before,” she said with a small sweeping gesture of her hand. “Several times. They tell you to surrender your will to a higher being. Trouble is, I don’t know if there is one.”

“Let’s assume there is,” I said. “But then you still would have a problem. There’s certain people, even He has no interest in saving.”

She calmly shook a cigarette out of her pack and lit it off the one still burning. She butted the shorter one of the two and exhaled a wide cloud that spread around me.

“How did you get on to me?” she asked.

“Nothing set right with you from the beginning,” I said. “Like what you were doing with those kids in the first place. And the fact that you were barely hurt, much less alive, when we found you. I buried those suspicions, though, as I became more attracted to you. At that point I was letting my dick do all the thinking.” I waited for a reaction to the twisting knife. There wasn’t one. I folded my arms and leaned against the wall. “After you left me, I met a geezer in a bar who reminded me of your old man. I started to think about his unused video equipment, and the new stereo in your apartment. And how Maureen Shultz told me that you had worked in some stores in the South before coming up here. Then there was the time you asked about me and Johnny taking ‘ups.’ Only a retail salesperson would know that expression. I made the connection to Rosen and called Ned’s World in South Carolina. You had been on the payroll at one time.”

She nodded. “I was a cashier in one of the stores down there when Jerry Rosen was sales manager. It wasn’t long before he was f*cking me, and supplying me with all the coke I needed. We moved up to D.C., I got heavier into drugs, and he lost interest in me. In the end, he only kept me around to help out with his business.”

“He had you hook into Jimmy Broda,” I said, “when he discovered the missing VCR. You were to keep an eye on him and the drugs, maybe take him out of town, someplace where Rosen’s boys could take care of things without much scrutiny, right?”

“Yes,” she said, and looked away. “I didn’t know anybody would be hurt. It was just another free party for me. And for a change, I didn’t have to sleep with anybody to do it.”

Tired laughter ebbed briefly from the television room down the hall. “Back to Wrightsville Beach,” I said. “Jimmy never went out for beer like you said. He was there when Rosen’s boys came in. You must have signaled them somehow. But why didn’t they kill Broda too?”

She blew some smoke at her feet and spoke softly. “After you fought, Charlie Fiora called me at the motel to tip me off that you were on the way. They had just killed Eddie. There wasn’t time to do anything but take Jimmy and leave me behind, to slow you up.” She looked up at me with pleading eyes and began to cry, but I stopped it.

“You can save the crocodile tears,” I said coldly. “I don’t think I’ll ever forget the way Eddie looked, tied up on that bed. His throat had been cut, left to right. You could tell by the entry wound on the left, and by the direction of the skin as it folded out from the slice. Assuming he was killed from behind, that would have to be done by a right-handed person.” I stepped away from the wall and unfolded my arms. “The other night, I faced the man I thought had killed Eddie Shultz. He proved to me that he didn’t have the stomach for that sort of thing. In fact, before his brains were blown out, he dropped his weapon. And he dropped it from his left hand.” I paused and stared at the cigarette in her right hand, then into her eyes. “You cooled Eddie Shultz.”

The silence between us was heavy and long. Finally she spoke just above a whisper and with her eyes down. “They couldn’t do it,” she said. “They were tough, but even they couldn’t do that, not to a kid. They didn’t know Redman like I knew him. Him and his Nazi friends. They would have queered the whole deal, believe me. He had to die.”

“Everybody has to,” I said. “But nobody has to like that. What were you going to do about me?”

“Nothing,” she said, her voice rising. “Jerry just wanted me to keep you occupied until he could figure out what to do.”

“Relax. I’m not going to turn you in. They’d only treat you and set you free. I’d only be doing you a favor.”

“I know what I did was horribly wrong,” she said. “But this program here…. I’m going to clean up.”

“There isn’t going to be any program. Not much longer. Your benefactor is going to be leaving town any day now. When the well dries up, you’re out. You’re a junkie, Kim. That’s your future.”

“I’ll make it,” she said.

“I don’t think so.”


MY LANDLORD HAD WEDGED my mail in the screen door of my apartment. The cat nudged my calf as I carried in the letters and sorted them out.

There was a phone bill, which I kept, and a credit card offer, which I tossed. The last item in the stack was from the D.C. government. My application for a private investigator’s licence had been accepted. The notice instructed me where and when to pick it up.

I fed the cat, brewed some coffee, and took a mug of it and a pack of smokes out to the living room. I settled on the couch to read the Monday Post.

Andre Malone’s two little paragraphs were buried in the back of Metro, under a group head called “Around the Region.” He was “an unidentified N.W. man.” He died of “gunshot wounds to the chest and lower abdomen.” Police believed the killing, the article said, to be “drug related.”


ONE WEEK LATER, McGinnes phoned.

“Nick?”

“Yeah?”

“Johnny.”

“Hey, Johnny. Where you at, man?”

“The Sleep Senter,” he said.

“That the place that spells Center with an S?”

“The same.”

“Uh-huh,” I said.

“The way they explained it to me, it has a double meaning. The sleep sent-her, get it? Like this place really sends her, it’s some kind of out-of-body experience.”

“Clever.”

“Yeah,” he said. “This place is okay. They got a bunch of schmoes on the floor, but they’re an all right bunch of guys. And dig this—they put a fifty dollar pop on the reconditioned mattresses. Fifty big ones, man, for something that’s recession proof. Everybody’s gotta sleep, right, Jim? Anyway, mattresses, electronics, what the hell’s the difference? I could sell my mother if they’d tack a dollar bill on her.”

“When did you make the move?”

“Today’s my first day. The last day I saw you, I kinda fell into a black hole. When I crawled out the next day, I quit my job at Nathan’s. Good thing I did. I talked to Fisher—they had some serious shake-ups after I left.”

“Such as?”

“Rosen resigned on Wednesday, effective that day.”

“Who’s running the show?”

“They booted Ric Brandon up to general manager. You believe that shit?”

“The cream always rises to the top,” I said.

“Yeah.” He laughed briefly, then coughed into the phone. “Listen, Nick, I gotta go take an up. I don’t want these putzes to think I’m weak. Talk to you later, hear?”

“All right, Johnny. Talk to you later.”


THE NEXT MORNING I was folding my clothes from the laundromat when some shells and stones fell from the pockets of my swimtrunks. An hour later I was driving south on 95, headed for the Outer Banks and Ocracoke Island.

The ferry was nearly empty that early November day, as was the island campground. I pitched my tent on a spot near the showers and, wearing a sweatshirt beneath my jean jacket, unfolded a chair on the beach.

I spent the first day reading the rather seedy biography of a relentlessly hedonistic musician, a story I lost interest in long before the inevitable overdose. Later I wrote a long letter to Karen that took two hours to compose and only a few seconds to shred. In between those activities I walked on the beach and stopped occasionally to talk with fishermen who were wading in the surf. In the evening I cooked hot dogs and ate a can of beans, and then crawled into my sleeping bag as soon as it was dark, as there was little else to do.

By the middle of the second day, I realized once again that being away from home clarifies nothing. Despite romantic notions, that’s been the case in every instance that I’ve left town to “think about things.”

An approaching northeaster shook me out of my stupor late in the afternoon. I broke camp as the slate sky blew in, and was packed and in my car when the rain came down, suddenly and quite violently, from the clouds.

I started my Dodge and drove through the storm to the gray house on pilings with the small gray sign. Running through the rain and up the wooden stairs, I entered Jacko’s Grille.

The door slammed behind me when I entered and most of the heads in the place turned my way. There was a group of older locals in plaid flannel shirts and dirty baseball caps, all sitting at a couple of picnic tables that they had pushed together. Empty cans of beer dotted the tables. Full ones were in the men’s hands. Water dripped down through holes in the roof into more than a few spots in the room, though no one was taking much notice. The sound of the rain competed with the country music coming from the jukebox.

I nodded to the men and pushed wet hair back off my forehead. A couple of them nodded back. One of them smiled and said, in a startling island accent more northern European than American South, “Wet enough for ya?” I said it was and stepped up to the bar, where I ordered a burger and a beer.

I took the beer out to the screened-in deck and drank it while I watched the hard rain dimple the wetlands as it blew across the sound. The beer was cold but warmed me going down, and I ordered another when I picked up my burger.

I ate the burger and drank the beer out on the deck. When I was finished, the first, beautiful verse of “Me and Bobby McGee” came from the juke, and the men inside began to sing. I listened as their drunken voices welled up on the achingly true chorus. When I went to the counter for another beer, one of them waved me over and I joined them.

I bought what was the first of many rounds. The water was coming in now all around the bar, and someone had turned up the jukebox to its maximum volume. One of the men produced a fifth of whiskey and some glasses, and we started in on that.

The corners of the room bled into the walls. There was laughter and it was warm and I was away from my world, and everything was cleaner and more clear.

With time came darkness, and the rain continued to fall outside and into the barroom. My friends told jokes and sang, then joined me in a toast, to a Greek immigrant everyone had called Big Nick. For a moment I wondered what he would think, seeing me now, so twisted and so far from home; that moment burned away with my next taste of whiskey, stronger than reason, stronger than love.