William Lashner - Marked Man

“You gave them my name?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Thank you for that, you little snake. What they say about me?”

“They want to talk to you, to ask some questions. A detective named McDeiss. He’ll give you a square deal.”

“He’ll get me killed, is what he’ll do.”

“Who’s after you, Joey?”

“I told Ralph to be careful, that we were stepping back into it all. But he always thought he couldn’t be touched.” He snatched another drink from the flask. “You should have seen him play football for good old Northeast High. He played huge.”

“I’m sorry about your friend.”

“Yeah. We’re all sorry, but that’s not helping Ralph none, is it? Who’d them cops think done it?”

“They don’t know. But it looks like Ralph knew who killed him.”

“Of course he did. The ghosts have come back, boy. Avenging ghosts from Nightmare Alley.”

“And you think a bullet from that little gun will stop a ghost?”

“Don’t know, never shot one before.”

He took a drink from his flask, wiped his mouth with his sleeve. The car swerved before righting itself. The drinking didn’t seem to be helping his fear or his driving.

“You spend all of Ralph’s cash yet?” I said.

“How you know that was me?”

“Nothing else was stolen but the money clip. No ring, no watch. You were the only one who had seen the cash in the money clip.”

“I took the money ’cause I knew I’d be running and I’d need it. Ralph would have understood. But I didn’t shoot him.”

“Of course you didn’t. You were old, easy friends. You finished each other’s sentences. You couldn’t have hurt him.”

“He was more a brother than my own brothers.”

“You came to his house after the murder, saw him dead on the floor, panicked, took the money and ran. A few minutes later, you stopped at a pay phone and called it in to the police. But what I don’t understand, Joey, is why you ran. Why not call from the house, wait for the cops, tell them what you knew, save yourself from being on the run?”

“You just don’t get it. I ain’t running from the cops, fool. That’s what I wanted to tell you. There’s something after me.”

“The ghosts?”

“Laugh all you want, but they’re after me, they are. And it ain’t just me that needs to be running. When I took the money, I took this, too.”

He reached a hand back and handed me a piece of notebook paper, folded in half, badly creased and spotted with blood. Carefully, using only my fingertips, I unfolded it, read what was scrawled in a thick black marker.

“Where did you get this?” I said when I had started breathing again.

“It was right on top of Ralph when I found him.”

“Left by the guy who killed him,” I said.

“You catching on,” said Joey.

I looked again at the sheet and the rough printing on its face, among the creases and spatters of blood:

WHO’S NEXT?

“Can I take this to the police so they can get it processed for prints?” I said.

“Do what you want, boy. I done my duty to Charlie by giving you the warning. Rest is up to you. But the killing won’t stop with Ralph. We’re cursed, all of us.”

“All of who?”

“You know, the five of us. That’s who the message is for. Ralph and me, Charlie, too, and the others.”

“Hugo and Teddy?”

He didn’t answer, he just took another swig.

“What did you guys do that’s got you so spooked? What happened thirty years ago? Do you think the painting is cursed?”

“Not the painting, just us. Teddy was giving us a way to save our lives, that’s what we thought. That’s what he said.”

“In the bar, when he came back into town?”

“That’s right.”

“What happened in the bar that night, Joey?”

“He rubbed our faces in our own damn crap, that’s what happened,” said Joey. “He told us he was ashamed of us. That we had let life happen to us in the worst possible way. Right there, in that back booth, he told us we was a bunch of losers going nowhere but to the corner tap in hopes of drinking enough to forget all we hadn’t done with our lives.”

“That was pretty harsh,” I said.

“But it was the truth. We were failures, all of us. We told him we had our reasons for the way things had turned out, but he didn’t want to hear it. Told us that nothing consumed a man’s soul more than the easy excuse. And then he put the lie to them excuses, Teddy did, starting with Charlie.”

“What about Charlie?”

“He said Charlie let his mother rule his life like a dictator because it was easier than stepping out and making decisions on his own. He told Ralph he threw his money away on women so that he wouldn’t have to see if he could really make it on his own. And that Hugo quit school not to take care of his family but because no matter how hard it was hauling those sacks of cement, it was easier than matching his brain up against the suburban kids who thought a college education was a birthright.”

“What about you, Joey?”

“Said that me going crazy and getting myself hauled up to Haverford State was a ready-made excuse for not even trying. Called me crazy as a coward.”

“What did you guys do?” I said.

“We went after him, we all did. I even tried to slug him, but not because the son of a bitch was insulting my integrity. I wanted to slug him because he was right. We were, the four of us, drowning in our excuses, even as we drowned our sorrows in our beer. When it all calmed down, he said he had learned something out there in California. He had learned that we had to do anything necessary to take hold of our dreams, and sometimes that meant taking hold of our lives and becoming something new.”

“Something new?”

“That’s what he said, and then he started talking crazy talk. About ropes and apes and supermen. He said we were hovering over some great hole – an abyss, he called it – and we could either go back to the failures we was or go forward and become something new. He said the only answer was to cross that abyss with a rope. But not any rope. He said we was the rope. He said we had to climb over the losers we had become in order to get to the other side. I didn’t understand a word of it, but it felt true, you know what I mean? It was like a part of the Bible I never heard before.”

“And what was there on the other side?”

“Our fool’s dreams, made real.”

“Someplace over the rainbow.”

“Sure, but then he described them to us in a way that made us believe it all could happen. Hugo was a business school graduate, running some huge company, flying about in the corporate jets, letting the congressmen and senators wait for him in his outer office while some lackey shined his shoes. And Ralph had his own shop, taking orders from all over the country, never touching the metal himself. And his secretary was way hot, and Ralph was banging her on his desktop every lunch hour. And Charlie was running free like a feral cat, doing whatever the hell he wanted, and his mother was happy about it, because he had finally become a man.”

“What about you, Joey? What were you doing on the other side?”

“I was driving the fastest rod on the East Coast, going town to town, racing and winning on makeshift tracks, with my own garage and a staff of forty mechanics to keep my baby humming. And, you know, the way he was telling it, he made it come alive. I could see it there, my future, shimmering in the distance. It was dazzling. I could see it clear, just there, beyond the horizon. I still can.”

“And all you needed was a way to get there.”

“That’s right. And then Teddy, he gave us the way. He said we needed something that purified and burned at the same time, an opportunity clean enough and hard enough to transform our lives. And he said he might have the right opportunity in mind.” Joey took a long drink from his flask. “And he did, didn’t he?”