John Connolly - Every Dead Thing

He did well until some old Polish aristocrat took offense at his wife’s remains being held for ransom and hired a private army to go looking for Coffin Ed. They found him, although Coffin Ed just about got away through a bolt-hole in his cellar that led to his neighbor’s yard. He got the last laugh, too. The power company had cut off Ed’s electricity three days before because he hadn’t been paying his bills. The old Pole’s wife stank like a dead possum by the time they found her. Since then, things had gone downhill for Coffin Ed, and he now presented a down-at-the-heel figure in the back of Willie Brew’s garage.

There was an uneasy silence for a moment, which was broken by Willie.

“You remember Vinnie No Nose?” said Willie, handing me a steaming cup of black coffee, which was already turning the tin mug red hot but still couldn’t hide the smell of gasoline from its interior. “Wait’ll you hear Tommy Q’s story. You ain’t missed nothing yet.”

Vinnie No Nose was a B &E guy out of Newark who had taken one fall too many and had decided to reform, or at least to reform as far as any guy can who has made a living for forty years by ripping off other people’s apartments. He got his nickname from a long, unsuccessful involvement with amateur boxing. Vinnie, small and a potential victim for any New Jersey lowlife with a penchant for inflicting violence, saw an ability to use his fists as his potential salvation, like lots of other short guys from rough neighborhoods. Sadly, Vinnie’s defense was about as good as the Son of Sam’s, and his nose was eventually reduced to a mush of cartilage with two semiclosed nostrils like raisins in a pudding.

Tommy Q proceeded to tell a story involving Vinnie, a decorating company, and a dead gay client that could have put him in court if he’d told it in a respectable place of employment. “So the fruit ends up dead, in a bathroom, with this chair up his ass, and Vinnie ends up back in jail for peddling the pics and stealing the dead guy’s video,” he concluded, shaking his head at the strange ways of non-heterosexual males. He was still laughing his ass off at the story when the smile died on his face and the laugh turned into a kind of choking sound in his throat. I looked behind me to see Angel in the shadows, curly black hair spilling out from under his blue watch cap and with a sparse growth of beard that would have made a thirteen-year-old laugh. A dark blue longshoreman’s jacket hung open over a black T-shirt, and his blue jeans ended in dirty, well-worn Timber-lands.

Angel was no more than five-six, and to the casual onlooker, it was difficult to see why he should have struck fear into Tommy Q. There were two reasons. The first was that Angel was a far better boxer than Vinnie No Nose and could have pummeled Tommy Q to horse meat if he wanted to, which might well have been the case since Angel was gay and might have found the source of Tommy’s humor less than amusing.

The second and probably more compelling reason for Tommy Q’s fear was that Angel’s boyfriend was a man known only as Louis. Like Angel, Louis had no visible means of support, although it was widely known that Angel, now semiretired at the age of forty, was one of the best thieves in the business, capable of stealing the fluff from the president’s navel if the money was good enough.

Less widely known was the fact that Louis, tall, black, and sophisticated in his dress sense, was a hit man almost without equal, a killer who had been reformed somewhat by his relationship with Angel and who now chose his rare targets with what might be termed a social conscience.

Rumor had it that the killing of a German computer expert named Gunther Bloch in Chicago the previous year had been the work of Louis. Bloch was a serial rapist and torturer who preyed on young, sometimes very young, women in the sex resorts of Southeast Asia, where much of his business was transacted. Money usually covered all ills, money paid to pimps, to parents, to police, to politicians.

Unfortunately for Bloch, someone in the upper reaches of the government in one of his nations of choice couldn’t be bought, especially after Bloch strangled an eleven-year-old girl and dumped her body in a trash bin. Bloch fled the country, money was redirected to a “special project,” and Louis drowned Gunther Bloch in the bathroom of a thousand-dollar-a-night hotel suite in Chicago.

Or, like I said, so rumor had it. Whatever the truth of the matter, Louis was regarded as very bad news and Tommy Q wanted in future to be able to take a bath, however rarely, without fear of drowning.

“Nice story, Tommy,” said Angel.

“It’s just a story, Angel. I didn’t mean nothing by it. No offense meant.”

“None taken,” said Angel. “At least, not by me.”

Behind him there was a movement in the darkness, and Louis appeared. His bald head gleamed in the dim light, his muscular neck emerging from a black silk shirt within an immaculately cut gray suit. He towered over Angel by more than a foot, and as he did so, he eyed Tommy Q intently for a moment.

“Fruit,” he said. “That’s a… quaint term, Mr. Q. To what does it refer, exactly?”

The blood had drained from Tommy Q’s face and it seemed to take him a very long time to find enough saliva to enable him to gulp. When he did eventually manage, it sounded like he was swallowing a golf ball. He opened his mouth but nothing came out, so he closed it again and looked at the floor in the vain hope that it would open up and swallow him.

“It’s okay, Mr. Q, it was a good story,” said Louis in a voice as silky as his shirt. “Just be careful how you tell it.” Then he smiled a bright smile at Tommy Q, the sort of smile a cat might give a mouse to take to the grave with it. A drop of sweat ran down Tommy Q’s nose, hung from the tip for a moment, and then exploded on the floor. By then, Louis had gone.

“Don’t forget my car, Willie,” I said, then followed Angel from the garage.

WE WALKED a block or two to a late-night bar and diner Angel knew. Louis strolled a few yards ahead of us, the late evening crowds parting before him like the Red Sea before Moses. Once or twice women glanced at him with interest. The men mostly kept their eyes on the ground, or found something suddenly interesting in the boarded-up storefronts or the night sky.

From inside the bar came the sound of a vaguely folky singer performing open-guitar surgery on Neil Young’s “Only Love Can Break Your Heart.” It didn’t sound like the song was going to pull through.

“He plays like he hates Neil Young,” said Angel as we entered.

Ahead of us, Louis shrugged. “Neil Young heard that shit, he’d probably hate himself.”

We took a booth. The owner, a fat, dyspeptic man named Ernest, shambled over to take our order. Usually the waitresses in Ernest’s took the orders, but Angel and Louis commanded a degree of respect, even here.

“Hey, Ernest,” said Angel, “how’s business?”

“If I was an undertaker, people’d stop dying,” replied Ernest. “And before you ask, my old lady’s still ugly.” It was a long-established exchange.

“Shit, you been married forty years,” said Angel. “She ain’t gonna get no better lookin’ now.”

Angel and Louis ordered club sandwiches and Ernest wandered away. “I was a kid and looked like him, I’d cut my dick off and make money singin’ castrato, ’cause it ain’t gonna be no use no other way,” remarked Angel.

“Bein’ ugly ain’t done you no harm,” said Louis.

“I don’t know.” Angel grinned. “I was better looking, I coulda screwed a white guy.”

They stopped bickering and we waited for the singer to put Neil Young out of his misery. It was strange meeting these two, now that I was no longer a cop. When we had encountered one another before-in Willie’s garage, or over coffee, or in Central Park if Angel had some useful information to impart, or if he simply wanted to meet to talk, to ask after Susan and Jennifer-there had been an awkwardness, a tension between us, especially if Louis was nearby. I knew what they had done, what Louis, I believed, still did, silent partnerships in assorted restaurants, dealerships, and Willie Brew’s garage notwithstanding.