“This guy is like two hours from taking a flight to Paraguay or some fucking place when I find him at his girlfriend’s.” He flicked his cigarette into the bushes fronting the three-decker. “I made him lie face down on the floor, Kenzie, and then I jumped up and down on his back until his spine broke in half. Made the same sound a door makes when you kick it in. Exact same sound. There’s that one big loud crack and all those little splintering noises at the same time.”
The sharp breeze rode up the avenue again, and the crisp leaves in the gutters made a crackling sound.
“Anyway,” Kevin said, “the guy’s screaming, his girlfriend’s screaming, and they keep looking at the door to this shitty fucking apartment, not because they think they got a chance of getting to it, but because they know that door means they’re locked in. With me. I have the power. I decide what images they take to hell with them.”
He lit another cigarette and I felt the breeze bore through the center of my chest.
“So,” he said, “I turn this guy over. I make him sit up on his broken spine, and I rape his girlfriend for, I dunno, a few hours. Had to keep throwing whiskey in the guy’s face to keep him from passing out. Then I shot his girlfriend like eight, maybe nine, times. I pour myself a drink and I look in the guy’s eyes for a while.
“It’s all gone. All his hope. All his pride. All his love. I own it. Me. I own it all. And he knows it. And I walk behind him. I put my gun against the back of his head, right at the brain stem. And then, you know what I do?”
I didn’t say anything.
“I wait. I wait like five minutes. And guess what? Guess what the guy did, Kenzie. Guess.”
I folded my hands across my lap.
“He begs, Kenzie. Fucking guy’s paralyzed. He’s just let another guy rape and kill his girl and he couldn’t do shit. He’s got nothing to live for. Nothing. But he begs to stay alive anyway. This fucking crazy world, I swear.”
He flicked his cigarette into the steps below me and the coals shattered and were picked up and swirled by the wind.
“I shot him in the brain just as he started to pray.”
Usually when I’d looked at Kevin in the past, I’d seen nothing, a great hole of it. But now I realized it wasn’t nothing, it was everything. Everything rancid in this world. It was swastikas and killing fields and labor camps and vermin and fire that rained from the sky. Kevin’s nothing was simply an infinite capacity for all of that and more.
“Stay away from the Jason Warren thing,” he said. “That guy who ripped off Jackie? His girlfriend? They were friends of mine. You,” he said, “I don’t ever remember liking.”
He stood there a full minute, his eyes never leaving mine, and I felt filth and depravity violate my blood and stain, stain, stain every inch of my body.
He walked around to the driver’s side of the car, rested his hands on the hood.
“I hear you went out and got yourself a ready-made family, Kenzie. Some doctor cunt and her little girl cunt. This little girl, she’s what, like four years old?”
I thought of Mae sleeping only three stories up.
“How strong you think a four-year-old’s spine is, Kenzie?”
“Kevin,” I said and my voice felt thick and filled with phlegm, “if you—”
He held up a hand and pantomimed a chatterbox, then looked down as he opened his door.
“Hey, fuckhead,” I said, my voice loud and hoarse on the empty avenue, “I’m talking to you.”
He looked at me.
“Kevin,” I said, “you go anywhere near that woman or her child and I’ll put enough bullets in your head to make it look like a fucking bowling ball.”
“Words,” he said, opening his door. “Lotta words, Kenzie. See you around.”
I pulled the gun from against the small of my back and fired a round through his passenger window.
Kevin jumped back as the glass imploded onto his seat, then looked at me.
“A promise, Kevin. Take it to the fucking bank.”
For a moment, I thought he’d do something. Right there. Right then. But he didn’t. He said, “You just bought a plot at Cedar Grove, Kenzie. You know that.”
I nodded.
He looked in at the glass on the seat and fury suddenly exploded across his face and he reached into his waistband and started around the car fast.
I aimed the gun at the center of his forehead.
And he stopped, hand still in his waistband, and then very slowly, he smiled. He walked back to the driver’s door, opened it, then rested his arms on the hood and looked at me. “Here’s what’s going to happen. Enjoy your time with that girlfriend of yours, fuck her twice a night if you can, and make sure you’re extra special nice to the kid. Soon—maybe later today, maybe next week—I’ll come calling. First, I’ll kill you. Then I’ll wait a while. Maybe I’ll get something to eat, go to the track, have a few beers. Whatever. And after that, I’m going to drop by your woman’s place and kill her and her little girl. And then I’m going to go home, Kenzie, and laugh my ass off.”
He got in the car and drove away and I stood on the porch, my blood popping and boiling against the bone.
20
When I got back upstairs, the first thing I did was check in on Mae. She was curled on her side, hugging one of the pillows, her bangs covering her eyes, her cheeks slightly flushed with heat and sleep.
I looked at my watch. Eight-thirty. Whatever sleep her mother lost working so much, this kid made up for.
I shut the door, went into the kitchen, and fielded three phone calls from irate neighbors who wanted to know what the hell I was doing discharging a firearm at eight in the morning. I couldn’t tell if it was the discharging of the firearm or the time of morning I chose to do it that pissed them off most, but I didn’t bother asking. I apologized and two hung up in my ear, while a third suggested I seek professional help.
After I hung up for the third time, I called Bubba.
“What’s up?”
“You free to shadow some people for a couple days?”
“Who?”
“Kevin Hurlihy and Grace.”
“Sure. They don’t seem like they run in the same circles, though.”
“They don’t. He may fuck with her to get to me, so I need to know where both of them are at all times. It’s a two-man job.”
He yawned. “I’ll use Nelson.”
Nelson Ferrare was a guy from the neighborhood who worked with Bubba on his arms deals whenever he needed an extra trigger man or driver. He was a short guy, no more than 5’4”, and I’d never heard him speak above a whisper or utter more than five words in a given day. Nelson was as shit-house crazy as Bubba, with a Napoleon complex to boot, but like Bubba, he could reign in his psychosis as long as he had something to occupy his time.