was from New Jersey.
Fingers nodded. “Yeah, that’s him. Sticks. Crazy as a fucking loon. So we drive out there, me and him. And Gary Indiana is like, nothing you ever seen before. Everybody is gone, except some jigs that couldn’t make it in Shy-town. All the buildings are empty. Or just plain gone. A wasteland. So we find the jig, drive him around for a while. He’s all acting cool, like his life is worth something. Like he thinks we drove all this way just to, I don’t know, shoot the shit or something. He has this gym bag with him? He has a fucking Tec-9 in there.”
“Piece of shit,” Moss drawled.
“All right, a Tec-9. It’s a piece of shit. But I mean this jig has it in the gym bag, and he has a forty round clip in it, and then he has this custom twelve dozen round drum magazine, you should’ve seen the fucking thing. Like something out of the movies. He says he has the thing modified for full auto, and this big drum to attach to it. Can you imagine this guy running around, spraying bullets everywhere? No wonder all these little kids get shot in these jig neighborhoods. You got these guys running around, think they’re fucking Rambo. Am I right?”
“I never saw a gun like that,” Moss said.
“You wouldn’t see one. Only a crazy person would have one. So anyway, we bring him to this abandoned building, right? We take him upstairs. Now he’s not as cool, he’s starting to get the message. We bust him up a little. Then, you know Sticks, he starts to cut the guy up. It’s all right, but it’s a lot of blood and shit now. The jig is crying and all this, half his face coming off. Sticks cut the jig’s lips off, you know what I mean? The guy’s teeth are like out to here.”
Fingers held his hand out about a foot in front of his face. He laughed, an uncertain sound. “I don’t know about Sticks, man. He should’ve been a butcher or some shit. He gives me the fucking creeps, to be honest.”
“And the guy never pulled the gun?” Moss said.
“Yeah. He never pulled it. He never got anywhere near it. A hundred and forty four rounds. A lot of good it did him, right? So finally, I take over from Sticks and I’m just like let’s do this shit and get out of here. So I take the jig and I tell him, you know, that’s it, man. You’re done. He’s grateful by then. He just wants the whole thing over with. They got these floor to ceiling windows and they’re all busted out. So I send him out the window. We’re about six stories up, right? By now, it’s full on dark. And I send him down into a vacant lot down there. I mean, the whole city’s a vacant lot. The guy didn’t scream or anything. He just sailed down there in total silence.
“So here’s my point. We go downstairs to the street, and it’s like, let’s check it out, let’s make sure this guy is dead. We go around back and here’s the jig. He’s laying there and the whole top of his head is broken off. You know what I mean? I mean, he hit the pavement and the top of his head broke off – right above the eyes. He was like a stewpot with the lid off. His eyes were open and I thought for a second he was looking right at me – I thought he was gonna say something. And his brain had come out and was sitting there on the ground. So I’m just standing there looking at this brain, and the jig with his eyes open is laying there like he’s awake. And the brain – it was like a bowl of Jello. You know, when you turn the Jello upside down and it comes out all in one piece? It was like that. Like a toy. It was fucking perfect.
“So what does Sticks say? He’s like, let’s take the brain.”
“He wants to take the brain,” Moss said. He laughed, a short, deep bark. “That sounds about right for Sticks.”
Fingers nodded. “Yeah, he wants the brain. I’m like, you got to be fucking kidding me. Is this a joke? He wants to take it for a souvenir. Thinks he’ll put it in his refrigerator or maybe pickle it. And he starts getting adamant about it. I’m like, man, I am not driving twelve fucking hours to New York with a brain in the car. You want the brain, call a cab.”
Cruz had had enough of their conversation.
He slipped the music back on his ears and picked the dossier off the floor. He started to read about Smoke Dugan again, but then changed his mind. Instead, he gazed out the window and watched the passing trees.
Pamela jogged the Back Cove trail.
It was three and a half miles of dirt track around the Cove. On a cool fall day like today, the trail was packed with joggers, walkers – some with baby strollers, and bicyclists. It was high tide and the Cove shimmered blue with the skyline of the city in the distance. Out on the water, two wind surfers raced back and forth.
Pamela was an avid jogger. She jogged here often, stealing glances at the men who passed. The Back Cove trail was a veritable smorgasbord of fit people out getting their exercise. She noticed the women, too. The women in their tight spandex shorts and halter tops. The sexy women with whom she could never compete.
She in her sweat pants and layered t-shirts.
God, what was wrong with her? As long as could remember, she had always been this way. Shy, retiring, tongue-tied with people she did not know. But she was good looking. At least she thought she was and Lola always told her she was. But she was twenty-nine years old, and more than three years had passed since she had been alone. She thought of her last boyfriend – Thomas – bookish, thin, with glasses. He was smart and had an off-beat, self-deprecating sense of humor. He was a student at the University of Maine law school, and when he graduated, he asked her to marry him.
She said no.
Things were good with Thomas, and she thought long and hard about becoming his wife. But in the end, he wasn’t her type. At least, he wasn’t the type she imagined was hers. And she was not the quiet suburban wife of Thomas the corporate lawyer. She recalled the last time they had made love, right before he left town for Providence, Rhode Island. He had cried, and so had she, and they had stopped halfway through. It made her think of the old joke – if I’d known the last time was really going to be the last time…
Why could she never seem to find a man?
She was bookish, certainly, just like Thomas. From the earliest age, she had been more interested in reading books and watching movies than in dealing with people. Life seemed so boring sometimes, and the lives lived in books, well, they seemed so exciting. She had grown up in Newmarket, New Hampshire, a town where the big excitement was the freight trains passing through town – so close to her family’s backyard that Pamela often thought of jumping aboard as the open cars passed – and summers on the nearby Seacoast beaches. In the evenings, she and her brother would often play Scrabble or Monopoly with her mom and dad. It was a normal, stable life. And for Pamela, from the time she was a little girl, the real excitement – and maybe the only deep enjoyment – came from escaping into the stories. The Nancy Drew mysteries. Encyclopedia Brown. A little later, The Lord of the Rings. And of course, the movies: Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and The Never Ending Story.
She envied Lola. She loved her like a sister, but there was also the sting of envy. Could you imagine? Lola had grown up in a Chicago housing project – a slum where drug deals went down on street corners, where gunfire sounded at night, where men murdered each other in the hallways. Just last week, two men tried to rape her, she beat them both at once, and now she acted like it never happened. Pamela could never do that, would never want something similar to happen to her, and yet, there was something about it that enticed her.
She remembered how as a girl, she would imagine herself as a pirate. Not as a woman who hung around with pirates, but as an actual pirate herself, sailing the high seas, attacking and plundering other ships, making people walk the plank.
She would give anything to live a life of swashbuckling adventure. She should have become a cop, or a spy, or an ambulance driver – not a librarian who half the time felt afraid to meet the eyes of library patrons.
Face it, her life was boring. It was an endless string of days, each fading into the next, her youth passing away fruitlessly. The lives of the library patrons were boring, too. She watched them. She saw the emptiness in their eyes, the longing for escape, the unfulfilled wishing for something, anything, to happen. Even the homeless people – she had once held a romantic notion that the life of a homeless person might be exciting. But they came into the library by the dozens during the cold weather. They slumped in chairs and dozed. They leafed through magazines for hours on end. Some of them simply sat and stared into space. The homeless people led boring lives.
Adventure. That’s what she longed for, what she had always longed for. To be in danger. To survive on the edge. And to take a lover, a dark and handsome stranger – yes, just like in the books – a desperate man with rippling muscles, yes and long hair and a fire in his belly. A savage, passionate man. Yes.
She finished her run at the parking lot. She was sweaty, out of breath, and felt exhilarated as always. It was
