mind, and that was getting a piece of payback for all of them.
The Tip-Over Tap Room was not currently open. Besides Terry, Knute was the only one with a set of keys, so it’d be a perfect place to meet with the Chicago guys, whom he’d called and told to hang back for a while until the cops had dispersed. After having a drink and seeing what was in the safe to pay them with, Knute would call the Chicago guys again, have them come in, and give them the assignment of punching this Frank Behr’s ticket. Even if there was nothing in the safe, Knute felt pretty sure he could talk them into doing it on a payment plan. After all, their asses were riding on the outcome, too.
The building was dark and locked, as it should have been. That’s why it was such a goddamned surprise to Knute when he walked into the back office and saw they were already there.
“What the fuck’s up, guys?” Knute said, reaching into his pocket and coming out with a slip of paper that had Behr’s address on it. “You’re early.”
Tino nodded and kicked the office door shut behind Knute, who felt the air change in the room, just like out on the yard at ISP before someone got offed. It just changed. It got cold or dark or somehow unfamiliar and indistinct. Whatever it was, Knute didn’t have much time to weigh it, because the quiet one, Petey wrapped him up in a bear hug and lifted him straight off the floor. The guy was strong as fuck, and all of a sudden Knute felt weak as diner coffee…
When he’d recall it later, Petey wouldn’t remember the man with the pink scar on his face fighting very hard, but then again, when it finally comes, there’s not much use in fighting it. Before long it was over and they’d wrapped him in a blue plastic tarpaulin. They considered whether or not they should drop him in the same place they’d done the dumping the last time, but that spot hadn’t seemed to hold up very well. Bobby B. figured he knew another one that was a lot closer and easier. Knute Bohgen never made it beyond the parking lot-specifically his own trunk. Petey remembered to pick up the slip of paper that Bohgen had dropped. Add-on jobs were not the way you stayed out of jail in their line of work. Eliminating the nexus was. Petey burned the paper before they made their way out, back to Chicago.
FORTY-FOUR
You want another?” Neil Ratay asked, threatening to pour a fourth cup of coffee, black and strong. But Behr had had enough and waved Ratay off. Behr had gone straight home on the heels of the longest day he could remember living and passed out into a dreamless sleep. Seven hours later he shot bolt upright. He’d sweated through his T-shirt and the sheets. He had a feeling that would be happening for the next few weeks, or months, or maybe even longer. When he noticed morning had slipped around the blinds and into the bedroom and there was no point in trying to go back to sleep, he rose and went to get Susan. And while Susan sat there listening, her jaw clenched tight, he’d told it all to Ratay-all except for Pomeroy, and the name of the big investigation firm. It was what he owed the man, plain and simple.
“So I can write it?” Ratay asked, jotting his final notes.
“Give me a day to think it through clearly,” Behr said, “but yeah, you can write it.”
• • •
After that he took Susan home. They didn’t talk along the way. Something he couldn’t name wouldn’t let him speak. All Behr could do was glance over at her every half block or so and replay the events of the past week in his head. None of it made much sense to him, and the part that made the least was why he’d felt the same sensation when he learned Susan was pregnant as he had when he’d faced Terry Schlegel’s gun: cold, chest-squeezing blackness. He could dress it up and tell himself he’d felt disloyal, that he’d been concerned that a new life would wipe away his memories of Tim, and even Linda, and those memories were all he had left of his son-they were all he had at all for a long while-but now he knew the truth. He was afraid, plain and simple. Because what she had given him with those words in his car that night was hope-hope, and a chance at joy, and a future. But it is a fearful thing to love what death can touch. And the prospect of losing it all again was more than he could face.
Too quickly they reached her house, and the thing that wouldn’t let him speak kept on and she climbed out of the car. She looked at him for a long, disbelieving moment, then turned for her place.
FORTY-FIVE
The strapping young man got the first Whopper of the day when the breakfast menu switched over to lunch, backed it up with a chicken sandwich, and despite his pronouncement that he “never eats this shit,” wolfed them with a monster Pepsi. Then he walked down Scatterfield Road and entered the United States Marines recruiting station there.
Sergeant Fred Kilgen’s eyes got big when the kid walked in. It had been a slow day, hell, a slow time altogether with the latest press the war was getting, but now he felt like a buyer at auction sizing up a prime Angus beef calf.
“I want to join,” the kid said. He was salty as hell, that was for sure, from the spiky hair right on down to the wiseass T-shirt that read “Jesus Didn’t Tap.” They were gonna love him in basic.
“Sure,” Sergeant Kilgen said, getting out his sheet to start writing down the particulars and trying to look cool about it. “Where do you live?”
“I stayed at the Motel Six last night. That’s where I’ll be until this is done.” The kid didn’t mention the cell phone and car he’d dumped after his half hour drive to Anderson.
“How fast you want this to happen?”
“I don’t even want to go home.”
“Well, okay,” Kilgen said. This was the kind of signing that would help him “make his mission,” as they said at the productivity briefings. “We’ll contract you here. Then you’ll head down to the MEPS in Indy for processing. It’s a two-day thing-don’t worry, we’ll cover your room and board. You’ll do your medicals, your ASVAB-that’s your vocational exam. There’ll be an Initial Strength Test, which, to tell by looking at you will be a layup, and you’ll be a shipper.”
“Head off to boot camp?”
“That’s right. Next stop Parris Island,” Kilgen said.
The kid just bounced his head along to the information. He didn’t have any of the usual questions: How long? How much money will I make? Do you pay for college? Do I get to fight? Will I have to fight?
“Now, you got your high school diploma or GED?” Sergeant Kilgen continued, bracing for the usual hurdles.
“I can get a copy,” the kid said. The sergeant didn’t know it, but the kid figured he’d work one up on a computer at a Kinko’s or use his brother’s.
“Couple of standard questions. Ever do drugs?”
“No.”
“Ever been sick?”
“No.”
“Are you gonna change any of your answers for the doctor?”
“No.”
“Outstanding. Welcome aboard.” Sergeant Kilgen threw a laugh that sickened him a bit over the last part, and he had a strong stomach. “So you sure you don’t want thirty days? Go say good-bye to the folks?”
“I’ll send ’em a fucking postcard from Afghanistan or wherever the hell else you put me.”
The recruiter nodded. “Good idea. And you’re gonna want to check that language, son.”
“Got it.” The kid nodded.
“Name?” the sergeant asked, his pen poised to write.
“Kenneth Schlegel,” was the answer.
