Charlie Huston - Caught Stealing

– What took you so long, Sailor?

– Just had to stop in somewhere, baby.Just had to stop in.

– Hey, I only needed a pack, Hank.

– No problem, baby.

– Well, thanks. When you get out of the john, I’m gonna buy you a soda or something.

I smile at her and go into the bathroom and lock the door. Out in the bar the jukebox is playing Joe Cocker, his cover of “With a Little Help from My Friends.” I hum along while I check myself over. First, I clean Red’s blood off the back of my head. Then I strip the bandage from my nose and take out the little gauze plugs I’ve been using to prop it up. It looks stable at this point, so I just clean up the flakes of dried blood and leave it alone. My wound is another matter. It’s oozing blood again. I clean it and dry it off as best I can, slap some gauze over it and tape it down. I look at the bottle ofVicodin. I can have two an hour, but they’ll make my head foggy as hell. I take one out of the bottle, bite it in half and dry-swallow it. The adrenaline is wearing off and I’m starting to crash from the fight high, but I still feel pretty damn good. I look myself over in the mirror; no doubt about it, I’m a wreck. But I’ll hold together for now.

Back in the bar, the bell for happy hour has rung and things are starting to cook. Tim is down at the end of thebar, getting a quick one in before he does his evening deliveries. Some of my other regulars are around now, too. I get a lot of back pats and commentary about the nose.

– Ali! Hey, Ali!

– What’s the other guy look like?

– Did you get the license on that truck, Sailor?

I laugh it all off and pull up a stool next to Tim. He gives me the once-over and shakes his head.

– Jesus.

– Yeah.

– Jesus.

– I know.

– Man, you need to make some healthy life choices but soon.

– I’m making them, Timmy, my boy, I’m making them.

– Damn.

Lisa comes over and passes me my bag and I stuff all my new first-aid crap into it.

– Ready for a drink yet?

– Naw, just get me a…

– Yeah?

– Fuck. Get me a seltzer.

She chuckles and gets me my seltzer. Tim tosses back a shot ofTullamore Dew and shakes his head.

– Seltzer! Now that ! That is what I call a healthy life choice.

Lisa plops the soda down in front of me and I pick it up and raise it in Tim’s direction.

– To healthy life choices.

He lifts another shot and clinks it against my glass.

– To health.

We drink. He slams his empty shot back down on the bar and Lisa tops it right off. With Tim you don’t have to ask, you just keep him full and put another mark on his tab. The seltzer’s not bad, not bad at all, kind of refreshing and I feel good, here in the bar with people I know and like, with friends. And in my head I hear a voice telling me, We know all your friends. Which one?

I don’t say good-bye. I just pick up my bag and leave.

It’s rush hour.Impossible to find an empty cab. I start jogging west. I could call, but if someone is there, it might freak them out or something. Fuck, I don’t know. I jog and keep looking at the traffic, searching for an in-service cab. At Third Avenue I strap the athletic bag on tight and start to run. I reach, I stretch for my stride and, this time, I find it. I blow down the street. It’s too far to keep this up all the way. Across Union Square, on University, a guy is just getting out of a cab and the cabbie is flicking on the off-duty light. I cram myself through the door and into the backseat. The cabbie starts yelling something at me in whatever his native tongue is. I push a big wad of cash through the Plexiglas shield and he shuts up.

– West Side Highway and Christopher.

He looks at the money I’ve dropped on the front seat. It’s well over a hundred dollars and he pulls away from the curb. We don’t talk. He looks at me from time to time in the rearview, but we don’t talk at all.

He stops on the highway where it meets Christopher, I climb out and he drives off. The traffic is too dense for me to try to cross, so I have to wait for the lights to change. When they do, I run over to the building, let myself in and run up the stairs. None of the locks to the apartment door are fastened.

Just inside there is a grocery bag full of cat stuff spilled out over the floor. I don’t want to look up from the mess, but I do. She’s all over the table, spread-eagle with her limbs strapped to its legs. Lying in the same space I occupied a few hours ago. They’ve done something horrible to her. The kiln is still on and the whole room smells like burning. I approach her with my head turned away. Then, with my eyes closed, I place my ear against her chest to hear that she is dead. I run to the futon for a blanket and cover her. Then I crawl under the table to hide.

In action movies, there is a moment where the hero is just pushed too far. The bad guys have stolen his money, taken his good name and beat him up and he’s swallowed it all. But then they go that one step too far: they kill his partner, his wife,his kid, whatever. This moment is indicated by the hero tilting his head back and releasing an agonized scream: NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! Then he gets mad.

I don’t feel like that at all. I want to sleep. I want to roll over and die. I want to give up and lose. I don’t care. I just don’t care.

They followed me. They followed me from my apartment to Yvonne’s and then they waited. They watched her come and go and kept waiting until they saw me leave and saw the cowboys throw me in the trunk. Then maybe someone followed us, and Paris lost them or maybe fucking not. But they waited until she left again and they went up to look for the key and when she came back they asked her where it was and she didn’t know what the fuck they were talking about because I didn’t tell her anything that might have saved her life.

I hear a soft, regular thumping on the floor and look up to see Bud coming towards me.A cat walking in a cast. He manages to get into my lap and curls up there and promptly goes to sleep.

This is it, this would be the time to finally call the police and let them sort it out, take my chances with Roman, and have it over with. But I find that it really is too late for that because, just as I’m thinking about it, several officers of the NYPD come running in and stick their guns in my face.

They find I have no record in New York. They find I was once arrested as a juvenile in California for breaking and entering and burglary, that I pled the case, served a year of probation, and did over a hundred hours of community service. They find these things out without my help because I’m not talking.

My eyes have become little glass windows at the ends of two dark, narrow tunnels. I sit at the other end of the tunnels and look at all the things happening out there. People talk to me and it sounds like voices traveling betweenpaper cups tied together by long pieces of string. Deep inside, back behind the tunnels, I am aware that I am in shock. And at a deeper level I realize that I am also thoroughly fucked.

They have me in one of those little rooms with steel screens on the windows, where all the furniture is bolted to the floor and the wall opposite the door has a small one-way mirror. They think I’m atoughguy. They think I’m giving them the freaked-out-psycho-killer-silent-treatment. The fact is,I just can’t talk. Words form in my mind and I send them to my mouth, but they never get there. What I really wish they would do is take the pictures off the table in front of me because, no matter how hard I try not to look, my eyes keep getting dragged back. They beat her. They didn’t cut her or burn her or strangle her or rape her. They beat her until she was dead.