after a Saint, all within a stone’s throw of the bad side of Los Angeles.
The address I have is on a residential street lined with squat one-story houses packed as close together as the city planners will allow. None of the houses seem too eager to do battle with an earthquake, should a fresh one arrive.
The address I have for Hap’s father, Tom Feldman, is 416 N. Armstrong Rd., and as I scope out the unassuming house from down the street, I find myself praying there’s an older white man still living in it. Just don’t be a dead end. Not when I feel like I’m so fucking close.
There are times in life when fate smiles on you, when you ask for a piece of luck and that piece arrives in a box with a bow on it. I asked for luck when I killed that prostitute back in Pennsylvania, what the fuck was her name, I can’t even remember it now, just the smell of that grape bubblegum in the passenger seat of my rental car, and I was asking for luck here, luck I had done my homework, I had guessed right, Hap’s old man hadn’t died or moved or been kicked out for not making his mortgage payments. And here’s the thing: luck has a way of shining on preparation, of rewarding those who put themselves in a position to take advantage of it when that gift box with the pretty bow plops into their laps.
Hap’s father parks his car in his driveway, gets out and heads to his mailbox. His face unmistakably belongs to the sire of the man who killed my partner; father and son share the same features, the same small nose, the same eyes. I can feel anger and excitement building up inside me.
I slam my door shut and hurry down the street.
“Sir . . . ?”
He looks up innocently. “Yes?”
“Are you Tom Feldman?”
“Yes . . .”
“Thank God . . . How you doing?”
“Fine . . . ?” It is more of a question than a statement.
“I’m so glad I found you. I’m friends with Evan . . .”
A broad smile crosses his face. “Really? Well, nice to meet you . . .”
“Jack . . .”
“Nice to meet you, Jack. Evan should be here any minute.”
My heart leaps up into my throat. He’s coming
But I need the element of surprise and if Hap or Evan or whatever the fuck his name is drives up now, the tables could turn in a matter of seconds. I manage to say, “Excellent! He’ll be so happy to see me.”
His dad pulls out a cell phone. “He probably stopped off to load up on groceries. Let me call him and tell him you’re here, Jack. Hurry him on his way.”
I keep my voice even, keep the smile on my face. “That’d be great.” I pause, like I’m thinking more about it. “You know what, though? He has no idea I’m coming to see him and I’d love to surprise him.”
His dad laughs. “Sure. He hasn’t kept up with any of his old friends, so this’ll be a nice treat for him.”
I look down the street, my ears straining to pick up the sound of an approaching engine. I need to get out of the front yard, be inside the house when Hap comes through the door with grocery bags in his hands.
“Can I use your bathroom?”
“Of course.”
He leads the way up his front steps. “How do you know Evan?”
“We used to run trucks together in Boston. Ten years ago.”
“You’re kidding me. Well, I’ll be.”
He approaches the front door, and my instincts fail me, I don’t see it coming, I am so sure fate is smiling on me that I don’t notice the warning signs. The father asking to use his cell phone. The quick way he warmed to me.
We reach the front door and the old man opens it in a flourish and screams “Evan! There’s a killer here . . .” and then I bash him in the side of the head before he can say any more but it’s already too late.
I counted on a lot of things but one thing I never imagined is Hap telling his old man exactly what he did for a living. I didn’t count on Hap being home and I didn’t count on his father covering for him, and I didn’t count on that old bastard bellowing out like a wailing siren.
I barely see a flash of feet bounding up a nearby staircase before I have a chance to get my bearings, have my eyes adjust to the light. If he had cared about his father before, enough to throttle a kid who had stolen his old man’s wallet, he certainly doesn’t care any more. The years of being a bag man have forced the survival instinct into him, and he is fleeing. If I kill his father, so be it.
I sprint into the house and dart for the stairwell when a volley of bullets cascade down at me like a dozen wasps defending the nest. As soon as the avalanche recedes and I hear his feet clomping away, I fire through the ceiling and then hurry up the steps two at a time.
I peek around the corner quickly, just enough to catch a glimpse, fully expecting another shot, but instead, I see Hap smash through a second-story window and I am moving to the end of the hallway and looking down and he is already rolling up off the grass like a cat and running away. I don’t hesitate and fling myself out the window, bracing my knees to absorb the fall, and then roll with it and up at the same time.
He should have been waiting for me to jump and then shot me as soon as I hit the ground but he didn’t and I’m up and running after him without missing a step. I’m faster than he is, and he’s going to have to make a move as we sprint across lawn after lawn, but I can tell something is wrong with him, something’s amiss. He hasn’t tried to pop a shot off at me since the spray of bullets down the stairwell, hasn’t tried to distract me or keep me at bay so he can duck between houses, and I realize I’m in luck after all; I caught Hap unprepared. He had to scramble off his father’s couch when the old man signaled him and he only had time to sprint up the stairs and grab his gun but he had been lazy and hadn’t scooped up a second clip and he’s out of bullets now.
He makes his move, and just as a young couple down the street steps out of their front door, Hap lowers his shoulder and barrels into the house. I am twenty steps behind him and the husband just looks at me and yells “Hey!” but he sees my gun out and grabs his wife and backs away and I am past him and through the front door and I am hoping the layout of this house is different from Hap’s father’s house, different than the house he grew up in, but it looks familiar, and I hear a clinking coming from a nearby doorway, a drawer overturning in the kitchen and I scramble to the sound and smash through the swinging door but he is on me before I can get into the room and he buries a knife into my shoulder.
“Hiya, Columbus!” he says with eyes filled to the brim with fire.
I fall and my gun clatters across the tile floor in the kitchen and Hap scrambles for it, but I trip him up with my good arm and he topples and I am smashing him in the ribs with my fist as hard as I can.
Ten minutes is all we have to kill each other. Ten minutes from when that young husband whipped out his cell phone and dialed 9-1-1 as soon as we blitzed by him into his house, so if we’re gonna do this, we need to do it now and get it finished and get the fuck out of here. Hap knows it and I know it and we’re going to fight right here to the death in this middle-class suburban kitchen because there’s no time and no other way to do it and it is and might as well be. He drives his fist into the kitchen knife handle buried in my shoulder, and fuck if I’m not blacking out but this is a goddamn hand-to-hand fight to the death and I cannot afford to go dark. Not now. Not after all I’ve done, not after I traveled from East to West, from spring to winter, from present to past to present and saw so much and gave up so much. Not now when the finish line is so close I can smell it like the salt in the air.
I open my jaws as wide as I can and bite into his side like a rabid dog and his arm that was reaching for my gun on the tile floor is forced back involuntarily by the pain and that’s all I need. I get my knees under me and leap for the gun past his retreating arm and I snatch it up in my good hand, my left hand, and flip over and point it at Hap’s head with my finger on the trigger, and I see it in his eyes. The life goes out of them like the electricity has been cut. He is defeated.
“Fuck.”
“Yeah.”
“Vespucci fingered me?”
“No. He stayed true blue.”
“Then how?”
“You told me a story once. The first time I loaded truck for you.”
