Tim Green: Exact Revenge

When I hear Chuck Lawrence’s voice on the line, my body goes rigid.

“I know you said not to interfere,” he says, “but you better come over here.”

“Why?”

“She’s in pretty bad shape,” he says.

“Lexis?” I say, and now Helena’s body goes rigid too.

“She needs a doctor,” he says, “but she wants you first.”

“I’m coming,” I say, and swing my legs out of bed.

I look down at Helena. She grabs my hand.

“What’s wrong?” she asks. “Where are you going?”

“An old friend,” I say, pulling away from her and putting on my dark blue slacks. I pull on a matching short-sleeved collared shirt, button it up without tucking it in, and slip on my shoes.

“That’s his wife,” she says, tilting her head and raising one eyebrow.

“She is an old friend,” I say, putting on my watch. “Please, Helena. This is almost over.”

“Then what?” she asks.

I shake my head that I don’t know.

“And us?” she says, raising her voice. “Am I part of your plan ?”

I bend down to kiss her.

“Don’t,” I say, running my fingers through her long silky hair. “I’ll be back.”

I don’t make any noise leaving my room, but when I get to the bottom of the stairs, Bert is hustling after me, pulling on his shirt.

“Working?” he asks.

“Maybe.”

“Forget me?”

“Figured you’d make it.”

“You know me,” he says with a thin smile. “Never like to miss any fun.”

In the garage next to my limousine is a boxy black Mercedes G55. I get in and drive toward Lexis’s address on Park Avenue. At 54th Street, I run through a yellow light turning red. The car behind me makes it too. Maybe it’s following me, but I don’t have time to worry about that. I leave the SUV right there on the street. The doorman seems flustered-purple-faced with a crooked hat-but he sends us right up. The heavy wooden door is open. We go in and I call Chuck’s name. My voice rebounds off the glass dome far above. The Caesar without a nose stares from his pedestal. I walk through the rotunda entry, my heels clicking on the marble until they reach the deep rug of the great room. I stop short and Bert bumps into me.

She stares down at me from that painting and then I hear Chuck’s voice coming from the vaulted passageway on the opposite side from where Lexis has her studio.

I jog down the hall, past a doorway that leads into the kitchen, and into a bedroom of long drapes and marble columns. Chuck is sitting on the bed with his arm around Lexis. Her hands cover the top of her head. When she looks up at me, I stop, sickened.

“Jesus,” I say.

“Frank,” Chuck says, getting up and moving away from the bed.

Her hair is crimson and matted. One eye is a bluish slit. That side of her face has grown red and swollen. She’s been crying and holds a knotted towel in her hand.

“Raymond,” she says.

I hear Bert grunt behind me.

“You’re thinking of someone else,” I say, frozen in front of her.

“I know who you are,” she says.

I shake my head and feel my plastic face.

“The Blue Hole,” she says, angling her head. “I think of it every day.”

Behind her is a painting on the wall. Thundering water, foamy green. Three figures in the mist. Faceless parents holding hands with a child. My face is stern. I can feel it heat and my eyes filling.

“You said it couldn’t happen,” I say, sitting beside her on the bed, staring at my hands. “That we couldn’t be apart.”

I can smell the hint of Frank’s Cool Water cologne. The demon that haunts even my memories. She reaches out and takes my hand, stroking my palm with her fingertips.

“In a way, we weren’t,” she says, looking into my eyes and tilting her head. “Part of you has been with me all the time. We made love that day, remember?”

I squint at the painting and see, now, my totem-the stick figure of a running deer-faintly etched in the mist above the father. A smaller totem floats over the child in the middle.

“You’re a liar,” I say, the words coming out before I can think about them. I stand.

She looks down, quiet for a moment. Then, without looking up, she says, “You’ve seen him. His eyes.”

“He’s not mine,” I say. “If he was, you stole him. He belongs to you now, you and your husband.

“Chuck, call an ambulance,” I say, then turn to go.

Lexis doesn’t speak but I hear a wail as I put my hand on the door.

I stop.

“You loved me,” she says.

I turn and glare at her. “I did.”

“This mess,” she says. Shaking her head, she drops off the edge of the bed and onto her knees. “It’s all a mist. All these years. It can change. I’m begging you. He’s your son .”

I drop my head and close my eyes. I take a deep breath, fighting back a tide of emotions.

Suddenly Chuck steps forward.

“Frank said something to Allen about getting his money from Mickey and meeting him at the Rockefeller Outlook,” he says. “It’s a rest area on the Palisades Parkway, just north of the George Washington Bridge.

“Give me your gun,” I say to Chuck.

I feel the heft of his HK self-loading.45 and close my fingers around it. Without looking back, I turn and go.

ON OUR WAY UP the Hudson Parkway, I call Ramo Capozza and tell him I think I’ve got a package for him. I ask him to have a couple guys meet me at the outlook. We cross the GW and head north on the Palisades. A few miles up, Bert points at the blue-and-white sign glowing in our headlights. The Rockefeller Outlook. There are no headlights in my rearview mirror. Ahead a pair of taillights disappear around a bend. I slow and pull off the parkway.

Under a row of streetlights, faded yellow diagonal lines mark two dozen parking spots along the river’s side of the narrow parking area. It’s empty except for a dark green Excursion and a small Mercedes sedan. Nothing moves. Beyond them is a line of trees, ghostlike in the glow of light. I turn off my headlights and coast to a stop behind the Excursion. Small stones and grit crunch under the tires, and I hold my finger to my lips signaling Bert to be quiet.

We slip out of the black G55 and stand together surveying the area. The trees that line the sharp edge of the Palisades are broken by a sidewalk lined with lollipop telescopes where you can see the sights of the Hudson up close for fifty cents. Beyond the walk is a jagged line of black rocks separating the outlook from the plunging drop that leads to the river hundreds of feet below. On the far side of the Hudson, the distant lights from the Bronx twinkle around the mouth of the Harlem River.

But there is no sign of Frank.

I lean close to Bert and in a whisper say, “Stay here. I’ll take a look.”

“I should go too,” Bert says in a low rumble.

“No,” I say. “If they come back, don’t let them get away. Be careful.”

I leave Bert in the shadow of the Excursion. Crouching low, I hurry up onto the sidewalk. Now I can see the city to the south.

I hear nothing except the rustle of leaves in the breeze until the horn of a freighter moving upriver sounds from deep below. There is a sign I see now planted between the big toothy rocks. DO NOT CLIMB ON THE BLUFF. As I move closer to the edge of the darkness, a light flashes at the same time a pop sounds from below. They are swallowed almost instantly by the darkness, and for a moment I wonder if I imagined it. Then I hear a shriek, and voices.

Frank.

Nothing mattered to Frank anymore but his boy and the money. When he saw Mickey’s car resting under the lights, his face stretched taut with a grin. Things were working so well that the pain in his leg and hand and neck seemed distant, unimportant. He pulled up the truck alongside the small Mercedes and looked around only briefly before climbing out.