Afterburn

dying, the old man irritable and unpredictable, drinking too much, unable to get out of bed for weeks sometimes, pissing in a cup he left by his bedroom door. I get my depression from him, Rick thought. Paul had just sucked it up. You had to hand it to him, starting to run their father's business while still in college, making sure Rick had enough money for baseball cleats, movies, whatever. Made the right career decisions, the right woman decision. I'll never be that good, Rick told himself.

He hunched against the garage for an hour. He didn't want to present himself at the front door, in case the boys saw his arm and cheek and got scared. He wondered if Tony had found Christina yet.

He heard the car pull into the driveway, pause, then proceed as the garage door opened. Coming home early-maybe the other boy has a school football game, he thought. He stepped around the corner of the garage as Paul switched off the car.

'Paul.'

Paul looked up, eyes scared. 'Rick?'

'You got to help me, Paulie.'

Paul stared at him, assessing the situation. 'Rick, hey, I'm-What happened to your face? And your arm looks-?'

Rick pulled his coat back and showed Paul the bandaged stump. 'I'm in a lot of trouble here, Paulie.'

'We'll take a drive,' he said.

On the way out of the neighborhood Paul called Mary from the car phone and said he'd been pulled away on business. Sorry, he said. He hung up. 'She's pretty pissed off.'

'Did one of the boys have a football game?'

'No.' Paul breathed uneasily. 'No.'

'What?'

'We had a doctor's appointment. I was going to take her.'

'She okay?' Rick asked.

Paul nodded. 'Yeah. It's just a little-whatever. Don't worry about it. She's fine.'

A few minutes later they were headed toward the Verrazano Bridge to Brooklyn. Rick started to breathe heavily. 'They cut off my fucking arm, Paulie. They fucked up my foot, too.'

Paul said nothing but kept glancing at Rick. 'Where we going?' he finally asked.

'I don't care.'

'I'll get on the drive,' Paul decided. 'Take in the view.'

The southern Manhattan skyline appeared to their left like a huge pile of shiny toys, little boats scattered across the harbor.

'I think they could have her, Paul. You know, Tony and Peck and this guy Morris.'

'Why?'

'They got it out of me.'

Paul just listened, watched the traffic on the bridge.

'I need you to take me to Christina,' said Rick.

'I don't know where she is.'

'C'mon, Paulie, help me.'

'I can't.'

'Wait a minute.' Rick felt confused and almost sad.

'What?' Paul kept looking ahead.

'You didn't ask.'

'What?'

'How they found me.'

Paul sat rigidly. 'Yeah,' he said with disgust now. 'That's right, Rick.' He took the car onto the elevated expressway through Brooklyn toward Manhattan, past treetops and flat tar roofs. 'I didn't ask.'

'You knew?'

'Yeah,' he said casually. 'Sure.'

'You knew about my arm?'

Paul looked at Rick, his voice cold. 'They were supposed to put it in the cooler.'

Rick lifted the shotgun up, cocked it, pointed the stuffed left glove at the back window, and fired. The gun blew a grapefruit-sized hole in the safety glass, cratered it outward. Through the window, sunlight and blue sky. The glove was shredded.

'Rick, for fuck's sake!'

'They cut off my arm, Paul! You didn't stop them?'

'Because I thought you fucking stole five million dollars from me and Tony!'

'The fuck I did.'

'You stole it, man!' Paul pounded the steering wheel, and the horn sounded. 'Don't tell me you and Christina didn't steal that money! She took the walk and you've been out there waiting for her.'

'I fucking didn't, Paul!'

'Don't lie to me, goddammit!'

'I swear, Paulie, I don't know anything.'

'Come on, Rick, the last job! You don't remember?'

'The air conditioners?'

'Yes.'

'Bunch of fucking air conditioners. What's the big money?'

Paul sighed. 'There were ten boxes of cash on that truck, Rick. We needed to move the cash out of Miami. It was getting hard to launder down there. It was piling up. We were behind fifty or sixty million. The guy doing it down there had some health problems. Skin cancer. Just a little black mole and the next day they say he's dying. So Tony decides to do the cash in New York for a little while. We got it as far as Virginia with two cars and switched it into the truck with the air conditioners.'

'I didn't know!'

'There was no reason for you to know. It was all small bills. I mean fifties and hundreds. Old money. The boxes were marked. You couldn't just tell, you had to know what to look for. The plan was that Frankie was to pick them up.' Paul slowed to let a private carting-service truck pass him. 'Then the deal was fucked up, the cops started appearing out of nowhere, and we still don't know why. After they seized the truck and the air conditioners, we found Frankie an hour later, and he turned over the boxes he'd been able to off-load. He said he'd only found eight of the ten. He swore it. We believed him. We had no reason to doubt him. He was right on time, and the mileage on his van was right. We had a video camera inside the van that he didn't even know about. Also, there was a security camera outside the loading dock, down the street, and we got hold of the tape. We grabbed that before the cops found it. It showed him taking eight boxes out of the truck and then looking for the others. You can actually see him looking.'

'So? I didn't know any of this,' said Rick.

'You were so fucking depressed, you didn't know anything, Rick.' Paul glanced at him. 'It took us three months to get that tape. Frankie lived in his house the whole time, by prearrangement. He said he had nothing to hide. He gave us his car and his passport and his bank numbers. It all checked out. Then we figured that the two boxes of cash somehow got mixed up with the ones seized by the police. It took us a hell of a long time to get someone inside the evidence room to look. They had to go into a police warehouse. I still don't know where it is. They counted the boxes. Two were missing. That meant that Frankie's story didn't hold up. We told him we would kill his kids. He just fucking wept. Swore he was innocent. We decided to believe him. Maybe a cop stole the boxes, right? Maybe in the confusion they got moved. We let him go and he came back to work. So we're wondering, Where the fuck are the two boxes? Four hundred and something boxes, maybe they didn't look inside every one. Nobody heard anything about a bunch of money. So we paid the guy to go back to the warehouse and look again. This took time. We were worried the police would sell the air conditioners at a sheriff's auction. We'd have to buy them all back, maybe. So we paid the guy to actually go rip open all the fucking boxes, every one. We got him a staple gun so he could close them up again. No cash. So we went back over it, slow and careful. Christina was in prison, she wasn't going anywhere. And you were whacked out and half drunk all the time. We followed you, we knew where you were. Tony said, Let's just watch him. We knew you'd put some cash in Aunt Eva's basement, but