Reed Coleman - Empty ever after

“I’m ATF and I didn’t drag you into it. You put yourself in it. Who told you to come looking for me? Who told you to show up the night I blew the lab?”

“ You blew the lab!”

“Sshhhhh! Keep it down, Prager. Technically, I’m not supposed to destroy evidence like that, but the case wasn’t ready yet and we were going to ship out a huge volume of product. I couldn’t let it hit the streets, not even for the case. This shit’s like a plague, a fucking cancer. If you thought crack was bad… You ever see what a tweaker looks like after a few months on this shit?”

“Okay, I get it, but why reinvolve me?” I asked, looking impatiently at my watch, wondering when his C.O. would clear me to leave.

“I didn’t reinvolve you. They’ve been keeping eyes out for you. They knew someone was leaking info to the cops and Feds. I told you that night the lab blew that your timing sucked. These kinda guys don’t believe in coincidence. You show up and their lab goes boom… When you got away, they started looking at me. I couldn’t afford that, so…”

“So you told them there was someone inside and a contact outside. I was the obvious candidate for the outside contact.”

“These guys are cutthroats, not geniuses, and they sample a little too much of the product. Too much and it makes you paranoid as all hell. I just fed their paranoia a bit. Yeah, so someone spotted you on the road leading to the cemetery earlier. Good thing I was around.”

“Tell that to my kidney.”

“Sorry about that.”

“Listen, Markowitz, I’m not joking. I gotta get outta-” My cell phone buzzed. “Excuse me,” I said and stepped a few feet away.

“Remember my voice, Moe?” It was Brightman.

“I remember.”

“You were pretty smug the last time we spoke. You feeling smug now?”

“Not at all.”

“Good, but you’re late,” he said.

“Late for what?”

He ignored that. “You were doing so well and then you seemed to disappear on us. Where have you been?”

“Before or after I found Fallon?”

“That, oh, well… how about after the cemetery?”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

“Try me.”

“No.”

Brightman moved his mouth away from the phone, but not so far that I couldn’t hear him. “Hurt her,” he said. There was a second delay and then a woman screamed. He got back on the phone. “Don’t do that again, Moe. I want to kill her in front of you, but if you put me in a bad frame of mind, I’ll do it and they’ll never find her body.”

“Okay. What do you want?”

“I can’t have what I want, but short of that I want you to go for a ride, alone, and keep your cell phone available. I’ll call you when it suits me.”

“Where should I-”

“Head toward the County of Kings. Yes, that suits me fine. Take the thruway and remember, Moe, old stick, alone.”

“I’ll remember.”

I clicked the phone shut.

“You don’t look so good,” Markowitz said. “Who was that?”

“The man who is going to murder my wife.”

I had just pulled onto the New York State Thruway, heading south toward the city, when Brightman called. He had changed his mind, he said. It seemed I wasn’t destined for Brooklyn after all. He had me circle back north and head into the Catskills. Then as he continued reciting the directions, it hit me. I knew where he wanted me to go. I shaped my lips to form the words Old Rotterdam. I wasn’t even certain I had spoken them aloud until Brightman answered.

“Yes, Moe, Old Rotterdam, very good. Do you remember the grounds of the Fir Grove Hotel?”

“I do.”

“Then I’ll see you in an hour or so. Now, without hanging up, toss your cell phone out your car window. I want to hear it hit the pavement. Toss the phone.”

“No,” I said. “First, I want to talk to Katy. And don’t give me that ‘hurt her stuff’ again. Put her on the phone and then I’ll toss it.”

Again, he moved his mouth away from the phone, but not far away. “Bring her over here.”

I heard some background noise, the shuffling of feet, then, “Moe. Moe, what’s going-” It was Katy.

Brightman got back on the phone, his voice edgier, the threat closer to the surface. “Don’t try anything cute. You’re being watched. Now, toss the fucking phone!”

I tossed it. The phone bounced once before being crushed under the wheels of a semi coming up fast on my left. I used the opportunity to check my mirrors to see if Brightman was bluffing about my being followed. It was impossible to tell in the dark in the midst of hundreds of cars. Even when I turned off and circled around, too many other vehicles exited and entered for me to have spotted a tail. It was moot. Destiny lay ahead, not behind me.

The Fir Grove Hotel was gone. It had been gone that first time I drove up its huge semi-circular driveway in 1981. All the bulldozers and dump trucks that had leveled the compound and carted away the debris were mere formalities in the aftermath of the workers’ quarters fire, the broom and dust pan sweeping away the refuse of shattered crystal. No, not crystal. Glass, cheap glass. The Fir Grove, The Concord, all the Catskill hotels that had pretentions were never really anything more than baloney sandwiches. Once people saw what the rest of the world had to offer, the Catskill Mountains became the lunch meat option, a vacation spot for poor schmucks and sentimental fools. In spite of what the locals thought, the Fir Grove fire was nothing more than an exclamation point on the Catskills’ death certificate. My eyes adjusting to the darkness, I noticed that now even the grand driveway was gone. I couldn’t tell if anything more than memories remained.

I parked down at the bottom of the hill and popped my trunk to get my flashlight. People say the crisp mountain air is good for you, that it smells fresh without the taint of the city. They say a lot of things. All I could smell was smoke from the distant fire that killed Andrea Cotter, the first girl I ever loved. A cop becomes intimately familiar with what fire does to the human body. The image of Andrea’s charred body flashed into my head and I shuddered. Although it felt like a million years since I’d last done crowd control at a fire scene, I could taste the acrid stink of burnt hair on my tongue and in my nostrils.

Bang! I stopped in my tracks, trying to remember the date. August

… Christ, it was the anniversary of the Fir Grove fire. Was it the thirty-fourth anniversary? The thirty-fifth? I couldn’t recall. It had been so many lies, so many secrets, so many lifetimes ago. Brightman had done his research. He was going to kill the last woman I loved where the first had been murdered. It was all so symmetrical in a twisted kind of way.

I had to put Andrea Cotter out of my head. Three and a half decades had passed and she was as dead as she was ever going to be. She had met the end of time, the clock had stopped ticking on her nevers and forevers. Katy’s clock was still running. She was who I had to think about. I couldn’t let Brightman play with my head. He already had too much of an advantage. I slammed my trunk shut.

“Stop!” a voice came out of the darkness.

“Ralphy Barto.”

“You remember?”

“I remember. Hitting you in the eye like that, it was a lucky shot.”

“Not for me.”

“As I recall, you were trying to kill me at the time.”

“There was that,” he said, a smile in his voice. “You carrying?”

“I got my. 38 tucked into the small of my back. You want me to-”

“No, thanks,” he said, stepping out of the darkness. “I’ll handle it.”

He was carrying a submachine gun of some kind, a long, thick sound suppressor on the end of its barrel. In spite of the eye patch and years, Barto actually looked better than he had in 1983 and I told him as much.