William Lashner - Past Due

I felt bad about the whole thing, about the wound I had opened, so I did as he said and started walking away, and then I thought of something else. I stopped and turned around.

“Mr. Greeley,” I said. The old man stared at me with a fierce hatred. “Was your son allergic to peanuts?”

“No,” he said, a glint of triumph in his eye.

“You sure?”

“Sure I’m sure. Check the records. He wasn’t allergic to nothing.”

“Okay.”

“Nothing but fish.”

It was a warm day, the sun was shining, yet as I walked away from the putting green and then across the eighteenth fairway toward the parking lot, I couldn’t suppress a shiver. It wasn’t proof, there was nothing substantial I could take to Slocum or McDeiss, but, son of a bitch, just then I felt for a moment as if I were in the middle an old George Romero movie, where the dead had come ravenously to life.

It scared the hell out of me, all of it, yes it did, and that was still a few hours before the big silver gun was pointed straight at my chest.

“WE JUST WANTto talk, Sully,” I said in the kitchen of his apartment, the bottom floor of a shabby three-decker in a part of Brockton called the Lithuanian Village, my hands raised, standing between Kimberly Blue and the revolver James Sullivan held in his right hand and aimed at my heart.

I wasn’t standing between Kimberly and the gun out of any chivalric impulse, she was just better at ducking behind me than I was at ducking behind her. For a moment, as we jockeyed for position away from the gun, we were like a pair of vaudevillians trying to get the other to go first through the booby-trapped door. After you, no, after you, no, I insist, no, age before beauty, no, pearls before swine, no. We jockeyed and jostled as Jimmy Sullivan looked on with confusion, until our positions settled with me in front. “We just have a few more questions,” I said after my last attempt to gain some cover was parried by the surprisingly quick Kimberly Blue.

It was what she had found at the library, on the microfilm machine, reviewing past issues of the Brockton Enterprise , that had sent us back to Sullivan. “He was a basketball star at Cardinal Spellman,” she told me. “There’s dozens of articles about him from junior high on. He broke all his school’s scoring records, was the top prospect in the whole area. The headlines were all, SULLY LEADS SPELLMAN OVER FATHER RYAN, or SULLIVAN HITS 37 AS SPELLMAN ROLLS. There were articles talking about his being heavily recruited at U. Mass and some of the big-ten schools. Iowa. Illinois. All the I states. But that was before.”

“Before what?”

“Before the accident,” she said, handing me a photostat.

And that was what we had come to Jimmy Sullivan’s house to ask about, the accident. But he wasn’t happy to talk to us, not happy at all. Maybe what cued me to that was the fierce fear in his herky-jerky eyes when he saw us at the door of his apartment. Or maybe it was the way his mouth twitched when he asked what the hell we wanted, or the jut of his jaw as we told him. Maybe it was all those subtle signs, but what cinched it was the not so subtle sight of the gun.

“I don’t have what you’re looking for,” said Sully.

“Then why are you pulling a gun on two unarmed strangers?” I said. “Why do your eyes wheel with terror whenever the name of an old friend, twenty years gone, gets mentioned.”

“I told you to go on home.”

“We’re not here to hurt you. Whatever you’re afraid of, it is not us.”

“I got enough troubles without the ones you’re bringing.”

“We only want to hear about Tommy.”

“I’m done talking.”

“People are dying in Philadelphia over this story.”

“Shut up.”

“Three deaths already, three people somehow connected to Tommy Greeley. In just the last few weeks.”

“You’re bullshitting.”

“See this scrape on my head. I was there when the last one was killed. His building blew up with him inside. I almost caught it too. And I wasn’t part of what went down twenty years ago.” I stopped, watched as the fear flooded his eyes. “But you were, weren’t you?”

“Shut up.”

“It’s coming to a head, Jimmy. Whatever has been festering beneath the surface for twenty years has erupted. And it’s not going to stop at the Philly city limits.”

“What do you want from me?”

“Just the truth, Jimmy. About you and Tommy.”

“Get the hell out of here,” he said. “Please,” but as he made that final plea he backed away from us and the gun dropped to his side. I heard Kimberly release a breath from behind me.

“Put it away, Sully,” I said. “We’re not the ones you’re afraid of. Put the gun away and we’ll go out and have ourselves a couple of beers and we’ll talk. And you might be surprised, whatever has got you so spooked, I think we can help.”

He ended up taking us to a jauntily named joint called Café Lithuanian Village, a boxy place with opaque glass blocks for windows and a handwritten sign outside that said all you needed to know about the place. DOORS WILL BE LOCKED AT 1:00 AM. YOU MUST BE IN BY THEN. NO EXCEPTIONS. Whatever the law said about closing time, drinking at the Lit was an all-night affair. The place had a pool table, shuffle bowling, a little Budweiser fixture where the Clydesdales went round and round, and its very own weather system. Cloudy today, cloudy tomorrow, one hundred percent chance of clouds for years on end. Everything in the place had marinated in nicotine for decades.

“So what do you think of the Lit?” Sullivan said when we were finally seated, three abreast, at the U-shaped bar.

“It’s brown,” I said.

“It is that.”

A squat man behind the bar, in a black LIT MOB T-shirt, gave Kimberly a long look and a martini, gave Jimmy and me each a bottle of Bud. I put a twenty on the bar. He took my money, dropped a pile of lesser bills in front of me. I took a long pull.

“We used to come to this place as kids,” said Jimmy, looking down at his beer as he spoke, his voice flat. “Fifteen we were getting served. Six-ouncers for twenty cents. The Lit. Just down the bar there’d be a cop in uniform getting his belts in. We’d nod to each other. I won’t bust you if you don’t bust me. Brockton, man. What a place to be from. You’re way too pretty for this place.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“Not you.”

“Me?” said Kimberly. “Don’t you think my eyes are too close together?”

Without raising his head or looking at her he said, “No.”

“And my mouth’s a little too small?”

“Too small for what?”

“I don’t know. Just too small.”

“No, it’s not too small. You’re goddamn perfect.”

“I didn’t think you noticed me at all.”

“I’ve got a pulse, don’t I? If there was any traffic in the place you’d stop it.”

“That’s so sweet,” said Kimberly, beaming. “You are so sweet. Didn’t I tell you he was sweet, Victor?”

“Sweet,” I said.

“What is it you guys really want?”

“We just want to hear about you and Tommy,” I said. “Why don’t we start with the accident that gave you your limp.”

He lifted his head. “What do you know about that?”

“Just what we read in the Brockton Enterprise. Prep star arrested at hospital. The only question I have is whose idea was it in the first place, yours or Tommy’s?”

He sat for a moment, took a drink from his beer. “His,” he said finally. “I can truthfully say every bad idea I ever had in my entire life was his.”

“TOMMY TOLD MEit was easy money. We cased it one night, the next we got high and went out to do it. Drove the van up, snapped the chain, opened the gate, went right in. Stealing those motorcycles was the simplest thing.”