Tim Green - Exact Revenge

As we approach the airport, I can’t help myself from searching out the quarry my father worked for so many years. It’s there. A gaping wound in the earth. Small yellow machines crawl in and out, like maggots except for their trails of billowing dust that glimmer in the late-day sun.

There is a black rental Cadillac waiting for us on the tarmac. I drive to an office building in downtown Syracuse. Instead of going in the front, we walk around back into the shadows of the building by the Dumpsters. Mr. Cooper, the agent from Vance International, is middle-aged with dark wiry hair, a crisp white shirt, and a dark blue suit. He is standing and waiting outside by the door in the glow of a single halogen light. He flips shut his cell phone and shakes our hands.

“He should be-” the agent starts to say, but before he can finish, the door swings open and a wiry old Mexican appears with a bag of trash.

“This is Mr. Orroyo,” Cooper says.

I extend my hand. The old man looks up at me and blinks before taking it. His hands are small and gnarled.

“Thank you for talking to us,” I say. “Mr. Cooper says you worked for Dean Villay at his lake house.”

Orroyo shifts the bag of trash from one hand to the other and nods.

“He knows he’s not going to get into any trouble, right?” I ask Cooper.

“He’s fine,” Cooper says. “I talked to him.”

“Mr. Orroyo?”

“Sí,” he says looking down at his feet. He lets go in Spanish and Cooper begins to translate.

“He worked for Villay,” Cooper says. “And saw him that night.”

“The night his wife drowned?”

Orroyo looks at me and nods.

“He hit her?”

Orroyo nods and winces and lets it fly.

“He heard her scream,” Cooper says. “He hit her many times. With a baseball bat. Then he put her in the sailboat and dragged it out with the powerboat. When he came back, the sailboat was gone.”

“And he wasn’t alone?”

Orroyo talks and Cooper says, “No. She was with him.”

“His new wife?”

Cooper talks to the old man, listens, and says, “Then she was the girlfriend.”

“And you’ve got the bat?” I say to Cooper.

“It was buried in the garden right where he said,” Cooper says. “The blood type matched. We’ll have to exhume her body to do a DNA.”

I turn to the gardener and say, “I’m not blaming you, Mr. Orroyo, but can you tell me why you didn’t tell this to the police?”

Orroyo looks puzzled and Cooper translates.

He nods at Cooper and looks up at me with his small dark eyes and rattles the bag as he talks.

“He told me already,” Cooper says. “He wasn’t there to talk. He was there to work. Cut grass. Plant flowers. Work, not talk. That’s what he does now. He works. He doesn’t like this talk…”

Orroyo lifts the top off the Dumpster and heaves his bag in, letting the top fall with a crash.

“Does he know we found him because of the ten-thousand-dollar check Villay wrote him after the wife died?”

“Sorry, Mr. Cole,” Cooper says with a shrug. “He’s sticking to that story. Says it was a bonus for good work. He says it’s the American way.”

Cooper slips Orroyo an envelope that I know is full of cash, and without looking at me the old man goes back inside.

“Here’s the lab report on the bat along with the police report and the coroner’s,” Cooper says. “Says she was caught up in the rigging. There was a strong south wind that night and it banged the boat and the body up against the stone break wall there in town for quite a while. Could be why they didn’t suspect anything if he caved her head in.”

I take the envelope from him and pull out the reports, examining them under the bluish light.

“I don’t know what kind of a witness he’d make,” Cooper says, jerking his head at the door. “I think you’ll need him, though, to make the connection to the bat, but it was tough just to get him to do this.”

“Don’t worry,” I say. “He won’t have to testify.”

“Oh,” Cooper says. “The way you had us put this thing together, I thought you were going to try to have it prosecuted.”

“It’ll be prosecuted,” I say, stuffing the papers back into the envelope. “He’ll prosecute himself.”

Cooper gives me a funny look. I thank him and we leave.

I GET ONTO 690 West and we leave the city, skirting Onondaga Lake. When I was young it was the most polluted body of water in the world. If you stood on top of the soda ash cliffs you could smell the raw sewage swirling in the shallows. The worst part was what you couldn’t see. A lakebed festering in a stew of mercury- and PCB-contaminated muck.

I read they’re rehabilitating it. Dredging. Capping. Treating the sewage. Sucking out the poison with wells and pumps like it was a big snakebite.

The sun is well gone and the pink-and-burgundy glow in the west reflecting off the choppy water makes it blood red. I roll down my window and sniff the air. Nothing.

Bert looks from the water to me and says, “They say you can fish in it now.”

“Not me,” I say.

“Me neither,” he says. “Not to eat. Hey, you missed it.”

We drive under the overpass that leads to Skaneateles.

“There’s a place I want to see on the way,” I tell him.

We get onto the Thruway and off at Weedsport, then drive into Auburn. The prison glows in a bath of halogen light, and I crane my neck as we roll past. I cross the bridge and pull into the parking lot across from Curley’s Restaurant. When I get out, Bert follows me. I walk toward the grim fortress, crossing the bridge where Lester was killed. Below, the water babbles through the rocks. I can smell the weeds growing thick on the banks. Above the sheer forty-foot wall, the shape of a guard shifts from one side of the glass tower to the other. He puts one foot up and leans out over the yard with his arms folded on the railing.

It could easily be the same guard who killed my friend. Lester’s words ring out in the warm night.

You could have a nice life for yourself. Isn’t it enough to be free?

I listen to the water and feel the open night all around me. I have a beautiful woman who loves me and I’m rich beyond reason. I run my hands along the top of the broken wall, my fingers finding the cool smooth stones pushing up through the irregular concrete.

Lester’s words repeat themselves in my brain and in a whisper I say, “Yes. It should be.”

“You do some time here or something?” Bert says in his low rumble.

I nod, staring at the wall. Then I look at him and say, “And why would I take the chance of doing more?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You want a drink?”

“Sure.”

We cross the street, hustling out of the way of a sagging pickup with a bad muffler, and duck into Curley’s. The hostess-a heavy young blonde with Viking braids and thick lips-smiles and nods to us as we push past toward the bar. People are three and four deep, but Bert muscles in and reaches over several heads to take a pair of Molson Golden bottles from the bartender.

The beer fizzes in my mouth. My stomach is empty and it goes straight to my brain, easing the tightness in my chest. I repeat Lester’s words to myself and shake my head. When I feel someone’s elbow in my back, I move closer to Bert. Whoever is behind me takes up the space I gave and I get another elbow amid an eruption of laughter.

I spin around with my hand up, ready to repel whoever it is with a shove until I see three uniforms. Guards from the prison blowing off steam. The blue stubble on the cheek of the one who elbowed me makes my stomach sick. He turns to glare and my whole body goes numb. Bluebeard.