Caught Stealing

– I’m making them, Timmy, my boy, I’m making them.

– Damn.

Lisa comes over and passes me my bag and I stuff all my new first-aid crap into it.

– Ready for a drink yet?

– Naw, just get me a…

– Yeah?

– Fuck. Get me a seltzer.

She chuckles and gets me my seltzer. Tim tosses back a shot ofTullamore Dew and shakes his head.

– Seltzer! Nowthat!That is what I call a healthy life choice.

Lisa plops the soda down in front of me and I pick it up and raise it in Tim’s direction.

– To healthy life choices.

He lifts another shot and clinks it against my glass.

– To health.

We drink. He slams his empty shot back down on the bar and Lisa tops it right off. With Tim you don’t have to ask, you just keep him full and put another mark on his tab. The seltzer’s not bad, not bad at all, kind of refreshing and I feel good, here in the bar with people I know and like, with friends. And in my head I hear a voice telling me,Weknow all your friends. Which one?

I don’t say good-bye. I just pick up my bag and leave.

It’s rush hour.Impossible to find an empty cab. I start jogging west. I could call, but if someone is there, it might freak them out or something. Fuck, I don’t know. I jog and keep looking at the traffic, searching for an in- service cab. At Third Avenue I strap the athletic bag on tight and start to run. I reach, I stretch for my stride and, this time, I find it. I blow down the street. It’s too far to keep this up all the way. Across Union Square, on University, a guy is just getting out of a cab and the cabbie is flicking on the off-duty light. I cram myself through the door and into the backseat. The cabbie starts yelling something at me in whatever his native tongue is. I push a big wad of cash through the Plexiglas shield and he shuts up.

– West Side Highway and Christopher.

He looks at the money I’ve dropped on the front seat. It’s well over a hundred dollars and he pulls away from the curb. We don’t talk. He looks at me from time to time in the rearview, but we don’t talk at all.

He stops on the highway where it meets Christopher, I climb out and he drives off. The traffic is too dense for me to try to cross, so I have to wait for the lights to change. When they do, I run over to the building, let myself in and run up the stairs. None of the locks to the apartment door are fastened.

Just inside there is a grocery bag full of cat stuff spilled out over the floor. I don’t want to look up from the mess, but I do. She’s all over the table, spread-eagle with her limbs strapped to its legs. Lying in the same space I occupied a few hours ago. They’ve done something horrible to her. The kiln is still on and the whole room smells like burning. I approach her with my head turned away. Then, with my eyes closed, I place my ear against her chest to hear that she is dead. I run to the futon for a blanket and cover her. Then I crawl under the table to hide.

In action movies, there is a moment where the hero is just pushed too far. The bad guys have stolen his money, taken his good name and beat him up and he’s swallowed it all. But then they go that one step too far: they kill his partner, his wife,his kid, whatever. This moment is indicated by the hero tilting his head back and releasing an agonized scream: NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! Then he gets mad.

I don’t feel like that at all. I want to sleep. I want to roll over and die. I want to give up and lose. I don’t care. I just don’t care.

They followed me. They followed me from my apartment to Yvonne’s and then they waited. They watched her come and go and kept waiting until they saw me leave and saw the cowboys throw me in the trunk. Then maybe someone followed us, and Paris lost them or maybe fucking not. But they waited until she left again and they went up to look for the key and when she came back they asked her where it was and she didn’t know what the fuck they were talking about because I didn’t tell her anything that might have saved her life.

I hear a soft, regular thumping on the floor and look up to see Bud coming towards me.A cat walking in a cast. He manages to get into my lap and curls up there and promptly goes to sleep.

This is it, this would be the time to finally call the police and let them sort it out, take my chances with Roman, and have it over with. But I find that it really is too late for that because, just as I’m thinking about it, several officers of the NYPD come running in and stick their guns in my face.

They find I have no record in New York. They find I was once arrested as a juvenile in California for breaking and entering and burglary, that I pled the case, served a year of probation, and did over a hundred hours of community service. They find these things out without my help because I’m not talking.

My eyes have become little glass windows at the ends of two dark, narrow tunnels. I sit at the other end of the tunnels and look at all the things happening out there. People talk to me and it sounds like voices traveling betweenpaper cups tied together by long pieces of string. Deep inside, back behind the tunnels, I am aware that I am in shock. And at a deeper level I realize that I am also thoroughly fucked.

They have me in one of those little rooms with steel screens on the windows, where all the furniture is bolted to the floor and the wall opposite the door has a small one-way mirror. They think I’m atoughguy. They think I’m giving them the freaked-out-psycho-killer-silent-treatment. The fact is,I just can’t talk. Words form in my mind and I send them to my mouth, but they never get there. What I really wish they would do is take the pictures off the table in front of me because, no matter how hard I try not to look, my eyes keep getting dragged back. They beat her. They didn’t cut her or burn her or strangle her or rape her. They beat her until she was dead.

Yvonne shared the top floor of her building with a guy. He lives in a loft at the end of the hall. He came home and saw the door of her place wide open and, like a goodneighbor, he took a quick look to see if everything was OK. When he saw the covered thing on the table and me sitting under it, he crept back to his apartment and called 911. Nice guy. A lot of people wouldn’t have bothered. He told them I was a guy Yvonne saw sometimes and there I was, catatonic, holding a cat, all bruised up with blood still on my clothes from the fight with Red. It sounded perfect to the cops, some kind of freaked-out sex/violence jealousy crime. Case closed. Except I gather now that there’s a problem because people keep coming in here to whisper stuff to the cops who have been questioning me.

The two detectives in the room with me both drink coffee and smoke cigarettes. They areboth balding, paunchy, and ruddy and have matching mustaches. I can tell them apart because one has a terrible cold and keeps blowing his nose and hawking and spitting into the wastebasket. He’s clearly pissed at me because he wants to be home in bed. The other cop is pissed at me because he thinks I’m a “sick, murdering fuck.” They tried a little good cop, bad cop at first. Then they tried bad cop, bad cop. Now they’re really just Sick Cop, Bored Cop. They keep asking questions though and, through it all, I keep trying to say the same thing and stopping myself just before I say it because I just don’t know what will happen when I finally say the wordsRoman did it.

Sick Cop launches a lung oyster into the trash and Bored Cop stubs out his cigarette. Then they look at each other and have one of those cop telepathy moments and Bored Cop lights another smoke, looks at me and tells me what’s fucking up their case.

– So, OK, so we know something. We know that more than one person didthis. We have hairs, right. We have fibers and scuff marks and bruises on the body and we know this was two, maybe three people. We know you didn’t do this alone. So fine, so paint the picture: It wasn’t reallyyou, you were just there. OK? Something got out of hand with you and your girl and some friends. You were just there and you didn’t do anything. That’s fine, that’s OK,we can live with that. So paint that picture and tell us how it happened, how it wasn’t you, and tell us about the guys who did do it. Tell us about your friends.

The strings snap. I race down to the end of the tunnel and the glass over my eyes shatters. I reach out and flip the pictures over. I look directly at the one-way mirror because I know who’s on the other side.

– They’re not my fucking friends.

And Roman walks in.

Sick Cop and Bored Cop look over and nod at him. Sick Cop takes out a tissue from the little plastic pack in his shirt pocket and blows a hole in it.

– Lieutenant.

Roman makes a little grunt noise and waves the two detectives over to where he stands by the door. The