S. Tooley - When the dead speak

“Gang shooting?” Jake pulled a blue tweed sportscoat from his closet and tossed it on the bed.

“Have you talked to Sam this morning?” Frank trailed Jake from the bedroom to the kitchen.

Jake turned from the counter and studied Frank’s face. “Why? What’s going on?”

Frank looked at the phone and answering machine on the counter sitting next to the toaster. He lifted up the cord which had been unplugged from the wall.

Jake did not remember doing it. “I must have knocked it out when I cleaned off the counter last night.” He took the cord from Frank and plugged it back in.

“Guess you’ve really been out of touch. You probably don’t know about Cain Valenzio either.”

Jake blinked, his eyes drawn back to the telephone as if trying to remember if he or Sam had unplugged it.

“Cain was shot and killed.” Frank slapped Jake on the forearm. “Hey, stay with me here, buddy. Did you hear me?”

Jake leaned back against the kitchen sink. He had never asked Sam where she had been last night. They had gone from the living room to the shower, where the lingering smell of smoke in her hair was washed out before he had a chance to ask her about it.

“Preston’s security guards shot and killed Cain last night.”

Picking up the phone, Jake asked, “Have you tried calling Sam?”

Frank placed his hand on top of Jake’s.

“The cops haven’t been able to reach her at home. There’s no answer and Abby hasn’t seen her.”

Jake wasn’t sure what time Sam had left. When his alarm had gone off at six, she wasn’t there. But she should have been home by now.

Frank moved his hand to Jake’s shoulder, saying, “Word from Ballistics is the bullet that killed Stu Richards came from Sam’s gun.”

While Frank drove them both to the Suisse Hotel, Jake again tried to reach Sam’s cellular phone. Then he called Abby who said she hadn’t seen Sam this morning. Abby was tactful enough not to say that she hadn’t seen Sam all night. It was while Jake was talking to Abby that the call came in about Sam’s Jeep.

They could see the flames and smoke from blocks away. Frank couldn’t drive fast enough to suit Jake. The words Sam spoke last night came back to haunt him.

If anything happens to me, she had said.

Wooden horses were set up around the perimeter to keep traffic and bystanders as far away as possible. It was a busy intersection with strip malls lining the street, a Burger King, lumber company, and mom-and-pop stores. As though frightened by the explosion and debris, the sun had slipped behind a large dark cloud.

Jake ran around the barricades toward the Jeep, but the heat from the explosion was too intense. Frank caught up with him and pulled on his arm. “Jake, it’s too late.”

A blue door lay fifty feet from the flaming wreckage. There was so much smoke, it was difficult to tell how much of the Jeep was still intact. Grief-stricken, Jake turned away and leaned against the side of a brick storefront. He felt Frank’s hand on his shoulder. His senses were numb. Reality wasn’t quite setting in. He felt something flutter under his shirt and realized it was Sam’s medicine bundle, the one thing that was to protect her from harm. In his anguish, he slammed his fist into the building.

Refusing Frank’s suggestion that he have his hand X-rayed, Jake slipped around the back of a two-story renovated courthouse where he found a shaky fire escape leading up to the roof. His gnarled right hand hung limp, sending searing stabs of pain up his right arm. He didn’t even wince. The pain was nothing compared to the grief.

He couldn’t handle the press right now much less listen to eyewitnesses recount details about the explosion and the victim caught inside. Reaching the four-foot ledge, Jake stopped and peered down. He saw Russo directing Civil Defense cars around the wooden horses and Frank writing down names of eyewitnesses. Clusters of curious bystanders pressed against the barricades

Slowly Jake turned, sliding his body down the brick wall until he was crouched in a catcher’s position. Holding his left hand out to catch some of the ashes, he remembered Sam’s smooth skin, the feel of her body under his. How synchronized were their movements, as though in a previous life they had been lovers and knew every curve of each other’s body.

The last time Jake cried he was ten years old. His earliest recollection of his father’s fury was at age three when he had dumped a glass of milk on the floor. His father had picked him up by the back of his corduroy bib overalls and held him over the mess making him wipe it up with a paper towel.

His father never showed affection, never played ball, never took him to Cub Scouts like other kids’ dads. All he knew was how to hit. His mother told him it was the liquor that made his father mean, that made him want to strike out. He doesn’t mean it, Dear. He really does love you, she would say.

At age ten, Jake decided he wouldn’t give Evan Mitchell the satisfaction of seeing him cry. Evan Mitchell, who played poker with the boys in the back room of the Frolick Club, who played Santa for the kids at Mercy Hospital. There were two sides to Evan Mitchell. Gradually, the drinking cost him his friends, his job. It reduced his two-hundred-pound bulk to one hundred and sixty. But Ann Mitchell stuck by her man.

She would comfort Jake after his beatings. She would argue with Evan not to hit the boy. Then Evan would hit her. Jake tried to protect her, tried to fight him off. He realized too late how weak his mother really was. Too weak to stand up for herself much less her son. Jake hated her for that weakness.

When he was fifteen, Jake suddenly sprouted up and filled out. It seemed to happen overnight, something Evan hadn’t counted on. When Evan smashed a hammer against Jake’s head and split his forehead open, Jake hauled off and punched him, sending his father flying down the back stairs of their rented town house. Rather than tending to Jake’s bleeding skull, Ann ran down the stairs and cradled her husband’s head in her lap.

Jake didn’t cry at his father’s funeral one year later. Nor did he cry when his mother passed away three years after that. He hadn’t thought about his childhood since his mother’s funeral, as though burying the last of his parents also buried his past.

Each year of his life from age ten on, Jake added another brick to the wall around him until it was so high even he couldn’t see over it. He vowed that nothing would ever get through that emotional barrier. Until Sam. Now he could feel that wall building up again, brick by brick. He had opened up, only to feel pain.

Jake stared at the ashes accumulating in his palm. He closed his fingers around those ashes as if they were the last remnants of Sam he would ever touch. Pressing his fist to his forehead, he wept.

Jake stood on the bottom step of the patio. The sun was shining brightly, too brightly. He expected the skies to be crying, mourning his loss.

He had sent Frank to the Suisse Hotel, saying he would meet up with them at the Jenkins Art Center. Anger and revenge had propelled Jake down those grated stairs, off the rooftop. He had thought briefly of driving over to Preston’s house and placing his Colt 9mm to the back of the politician’s head, execution style. But there was something more pressing he had to do. Someone had to tell Abby and he wanted her to hear it from him.

How damn clever Preston was. Smarter than Jake gave him credit for. In his statement to the press, Preston had shown them the picture of Cain Sam had given him. Told them she had warned him he might be Cain’s next target. Preston’s hands were lily white — in Cain’s death, Hap’s, Samuel Casey’s, and now Sam’s.