Michael Langlois - Bad Radio

Dominic was on the floor, leaning against one of those nice leather couches. He seemed to be having trouble catching his breath. I squatted over him and grabbed his left shoulder in my right hand. I was trying to pin him in place, but I must have grabbed him too hard. Something in his shoulder popped and shifted under my hand. He tried to scream, but all that came out was a hoarse wheezing. I drew back my other hand in a fist. I could see myself reflected in his wide eyes, looming over him like fate.

“Stop!” I felt a small hand covering my fist. “Abraham. Stop.” Anne’s presence pushed its way into my awareness.

I regained enough control to feel how contorted my face was, to feel my lips skinned back from my teeth in a rictus, and I knew that right then I looked like my portrait in Georgia’s house. That I was unknowingly wearing my secret face. The uncomfortable shame helped me back to myself. My anger turned back into something human, something that I could control.

Dominic glanced away from me to look at Anne. “Thank you.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “I did it for him, not you. If I had my gun, you’d have died in your office thirty seconds ago and to hell with what you know.” Her voice was icy. Frightening.

I let go of Dominic and dropped my fist, but I continued to stand over him as he knelt on the floor. “Tell me where you delivered the pieces.”

He put a hand up, fingers outspread. “Give me a moment.”

“We are not negotiating. You don’t get requests. If I have to ask you again, I will remove your left arm at the shoulder.” I don’t think I would have. I hope not, but I always try to be honest with myself. It was hard to forget that this man had tried to murder the only people in the whole world that I had left to care about.

“Wyoming. Belmont. It’s a little town not far from the Colorado border.”

“Where in town?”

“I don’t know. He met me at a gas station on the border last night. Him and about twenty of his … men.” His eyes went opaque for a moment as he remembered. I knew that look; Dominic had encountered the real world last night. “You have to understand, it was too late for me to back out. I wanted to when I got there. It was like I had driven into hell. They’re not men.”

“I know. Worms under their skin, right?”

“Bursting out of their skin! Hanging out of their mouths and eyes and falling onto the ground. Some of them, I don’t know how they’re still alive. But Peter was the worst. No worms. He looked normal on the outside. But whatever is inside of him is worse. When he walked up to me to take delivery, I would have given anything if it would have been one of those monsters instead. Even they seemed to be afraid of him.”

Anne frowned. “And he just let you go?”

“He said that he needed men like me, and that he would be in touch. But I’m not going to be here. I’m leaving and I’m not coming back.”

Dominic stood up gingerly, his left arm dangling grotesquely from his dislocated shoulder. “There really was no need for all of this. When the silent alarm went off, I came here to offer to help you, maybe atone a little for helping Peter. Anything he wants, I don’t want, you know?”

“How did you know it was me? Maybe it was a regular burglar.”

He grinned tightly. “Son, I can promise you no burglar is going to set foot anywhere near here unless it’s to ask me for work. No, I knew it was you because of something Peter said. He said that you couldn’t help but be drawn to him, like you didn’t have a choice. Since I’m the only person you know that has Peter’s location, and you’re the only person I know that’s dumb enough to actually break into my office, it wasn’t exactly rocket science to figure it out.” He shifted his weight and sucked in a breath as his arm moved. “Do you mind?”

I leaned in and grabbed his arm and his good shoulder. He clenched his teeth and looked away. When I shoved his shoulder back into the socket, bits and pieces of a scream escaped his control, but he recovered his composure surprisingly quickly.

“Son of a bitch, that hurts.” He sat down on the couch and wiped away the sweat that had beaded across his forehead and upper lip. “You had me pretty worried when you attacked me. I could see in your face that you have some of the same crazy in you that Peter has. It’s pretty obvious that the two of you are connected by more than just circumstance.”

“That’s not really your business, is it?”

He gestured to his office, and the injured men on the floor. “I do seem to be involved.”

I had to smile a little at that. I learned in the war that the ability of someone to earn your respect had very little to do with whether they were your enemy or not. “Let’s just say that something happened to me the first and only time we ever met, and I’m still figuring out the extent of it.”

I suddenly had a sense of what this conversation must look like to an outsider. Here I was, having a pleasant chat with the guy who had paid men to kill me and my friends, while his henchmen writhed in pain on the floor not ten feet away. I guess I’d been away from life for so long, I’d forgotten how relentlessly strange it was.

Dominic continued, “So Peter was right, then. You have no choice but to find him.”

“There are two options, kill him or keep him away from those altar pieces. I didn’t do so well on B, so I guess I’d better start working on A. If I don’t, it’ll be bad. For everyone.”

“You believe that?”

I shrugged. “Feels right.”

“Alright, I’ll give you directions, but it’s a drive of several hours to get there. You moving out tonight?”

“We need to sleep for a few hours first, but yeah.”

“I’m leaving town myself. Tell you what. You and your lady friend come back to my place, get rested up, and then we’ll both leave and go our separate ways.”

He broke eye contact with me and looked around his wrecked office.

“I’ve never felt like the things I’ve done in my life were wrong, you know? You don’t want your knees broken, you pay what you owe. You want a night with a good looking girl, and you can pay for it, who am I to judge, right? But doing work for that crazy son of a bitch in Belmont? It makes me feel dirty. First time for everything, huh? Come back to my place, let me fix you up, and I’ll feel like I’ve made up for it. What do you say?”

And that’s how we ended up staying at Dominic Tesso’s place like we were old friends.

Dominic called someone over to help his injured men, and then we followed his gleaming black Range Rover with our rental across the city.

His house had all the earmarks of purchased respectability: swanky part of town, wealthy neighbors, enormous manicured lawn with a circular drive and columns bracketing a fifteen-foot-tall set of artfully carved wood and glass doors.

Or, as I noticed when we passed through, steel doors painted to look like wood, inset with bulletproof glass. I guess there’s a fine line between fitting in with the society crowd and sleeping well at night.

The entryway opened into a vast living room, airy and bright, in which the entire back wall could be opened to the patio. With a touch, Dominic caused a sliding cascade of glass partitions to sweep aside, opening the house to the great Colorado outdoors. I tried not to look impressed, but I don’t think I did a very good job of it.

Dominic ushered us outside to sit in the sunning chairs which were artfully arranged on the wide patio and urged us to enjoy the spectacular view of the lake that graced his back acreage, its surface mirror-flat and serene. He went back inside to fetch us something to drink.

Anne grabbed my arm and whispered at me. “So, what, you pull the guy’s arm out of its socket and now he’s your best friend? You know he’s going to come back out here with a gun and just shoot us, right?”