David Levien - Where the dead lay

Behr looked at him through narrow eyes. “So you got any idea who might be responsible?” Behr asked.

Francovic, in his own world now, thinking about a rematch that would never happen, shook his head.

“No. I don’t know nothing about that.”

“Call me if anything occurs,” Behr said, putting a business card on the desk. Then he stood, holstered his gun, and draped his shirt over it. He walked through the gym toward the exit and no one said a word to him.

Vicky Schlegel stood in front of a window-unit air conditioner that was losing in its valiant effort to staunch the heat. She was taking a cigarette/iced coffee break from rearranging the knickknacks and photos on the living room shelves. It wasn’t easy to concentrate on her task, though, considering the problems and the noise. The noise was the music, mean and ominous, coming from Charlie’s room. A singer wailed about having a “ball and a biscuit,” and then blaring guitar erupted and shot through her head.

The problems were Deanie’s. She held a picture of him, standing on a softball diamond, sweet and unfettered only a few years back. Now her boy was hurting and Vicky knew why: it was that mocha-skinned bitch he couldn’t get over. Vicky had met her a few times-she’d only been to the house on a couple occasions, since she had a place of her own-and Vicky had seen her in action turning not just Deanie, but Charlie and even Terry, all drooling and stupid. Only her Kenny-bear seemed immune to the girl’s skanky Latin charms. It was bad enough when they were together, but now she’d gone and met someone else and left Deanie a mess. Vicky didn’t know anything concrete, but she was sure of it. A girl disappears like that, and that’s what it means. Her mother’s intuition told her that much. And it made Vicky want to pluck the broad’s smoky brown eyes out.

Then there was the fact that Terry was working the boys too hard. She looked at another framed picture of them, the three boys and Terry, about seven years back out at the fairground. Kenny was just a kid and hadn’t had his growth spurt yet. Charlie and Dean were teenagers, gangly, awkward, and unformed. It was hard to imagine them all then the way they would become: tough and funny and thick with muscle. They were doing well. It was an unbelievable plan Terry had. Sure, they’d had to do some rough stuff, that’s how it was in business. And who, really, had more grit than her men? No-fucking-body, that’s who. But they’d been at it all times of the day and night these last few months, and she could see the effects. Terry’s complexion had gone a little gray from fatigue, especially under the eyes. And all of them had grown a bit grim as of late. Except for Kenny. He’d kept his color and his bounce. But the snuffling and crying coming from Dean’s room, the mass of empty bottles she saw in there when he finally let her in to change the sheets once a week, and the snorting she heard coming through the door every hour or so had her practically grateful for the distraction of Charlie’s music. Practically, but not completely. And what the hell was he always doing on the phone in there? With all the racket, no less? Thousands of minutes per month. She’d seen the usage on his cell bill. A relentless, skin-peeling guitar solo leaked through the walls. She banged on the door to his room.

“Charlie! My ears are bleeding!” she yelled. The result? The “music” got louder.

Something needed to be done for Deanie, and she wondered what she could do. She grabbed her cell and went outside into the heat and quiet and dialed her brother.

“Larry Bustamante, please,” she said to whoever answered, and then she waited a minute.

“Bustamante,” came through the phone.

“Hi, Larry, it’s Vick. Can you find someone for me?”

Dean was feeling skinny, scared, and off his game. He was brain fucked completely. He’d been sitting in his room with the lights off all day and the only thing he’d left for was to piss and to get more to drink. He couldn’t shake the other night. It kept playing back in his head like a grind-house movie. He’d felt a wave of adrenaline and dread hit him that was unlike anything he’d ever experienced that night when he was in the bathroom waiting for the shake house to empty. He knew there was going to be trouble when he stepped out. Of course he knew there was going to be trouble in general-that’s what they were there for-but somehow he knew he was going to see a gun. He’d just felt it. It was like he had developed fear-based ESP. And instead of that knowledge fueling him, causing him to be so pissed off that he crossed the living room right at the little spic and put him down before there was any question, it made his limbs hang like wet towels, like fucking boiled noodles. He had gripped the edge of the sink and held on as his breath came in furious stabs and he felt like he was going to yak. He thought of what his father had said a few years back, when he had quit wrestling-that he was truly happy he had such a sweet daughter in Dean. The memory of that insult was the only thing that got him out the bathroom door.

Even then, once he was in the living room, he hadn’t moved quickly, because his feet were stuck in fear cement, and he had almost fucked up the whole thing beyond repair. It was only last-minute self-preservation and the spic’s unpracticed gun handling that saved his ass. And even then, when he’d gotten the guy down, instead of taking the risk of controlling the guy’s gun wrist with one of his hands, which would have allowed him to punch and elbow with his other, Dean had grabbed on with two and settled for rolling around, hanging on for dear life until the others showed up and bailed his ass out.

I’m in the wrong line of work, Dean thought. If “work” is what you could call it. And nothing’s been right since she left.

Charlie’s tunes were giving him a headache. He needed to get some air. Suddenly he knew where to go. He put on his shoes and grabbed his keys. He paused at the door for a moment, listening for his mom over the music, hoping to miss her and her laser eyes on his way out.

Charlie saw Dean, slump shouldered and shuffling, slide into his Magnum and drive off. God knows to where, the poor bastard, Charlie thought. At least he’s going someplace for a change. Charlie poked his head out his bedroom door and saw his mother outside through the sliders; she was on the phone, facing away, smoking a cigarette, and he decided to make the most of the opportunity. He moved down the hallway and turned up the stairs to the walk-in attic. All the family’s storage stuff was in the basement and one of the garage bays, so it was a part of the house that no one used-no one except him. There was a doorknob lock, and the key for it lived in the utility drawer in the kitchen, but that key no longer worked should anyone try to use it, because Charlie had changed a pin on the lock and had his own new key. He used it and entered.

Fuck, he thought to himself as the smell hit him; good thing he was close to the end of the cycle. The hot, poorly ventilated space was redolent of the thickly budded marijuana that he had grown under six banks of high-intensity-discharge mercury halide lamps, better known as grow lights. It was a good thing the DEA’s use of infrared spotting planes had been ruled illegal search, because if one had passed over the house its scanning screen would have registered like a volcano was erupting in the attic. The lamps threw off three thousand lumens per square foot, and a lot of heat came with that, more than the exhaust fan could properly handle. And if they found the weed, they’d then find the blow and the oxy and he’d be carted away in bracelets and the house probably seized.

It hadn’t been easy getting the apparatus upstairs-someone was always home-and wiring the ballasts from diagrams he’d found online, and cultivating the plants when he wasn’t even a weed head, but he’d eventually managed.