Swain. The irony is, he dies in nearly the same manner as the Comets’ Delmonico, except Swain’s car doesn’t get pushed into the side of the train. It gets shoved into its path. The engineer was able to see the whole thing pretty clearly from the cab of the diesel, even though the incident happened at night. The headlight beam picked up the car, a small Japanese sedan, waiting at the flashing lights. With the engine only a few yards from the crossing, this big pickup appears out of nowhere, rams the sedan from behind, right in front of the locomotive.
Swain was declared dead at the scene, but they had to gather his various parts together before they could get someone to come look at the body for the purposes of identification.
April 9, 2002: The Kickstart, after hours. Someone bursts into the upstairs back room, where the night’s receipts are counted, and shoots Eldridge Smith, Payne Fletcher, and Zane Heighton. The shooter disappears, with the money. Gary Merker and Leonard Edgars, who were not in the building at the time, return to find the three men dead. Canborough Police steel themselves for an all-out war against the Comets.
It doesn’t happen.
The Comets deny any responsibility for the Kickstart massacre. As if they’d own up to it if they’d done it.
Police speculate that the Slots don’t respond because there aren’t enough of them left to mount a war. Merker lost his number two man a few months earlier. Now he’s lost three more. He hasn’t got enough soldiers left to go into battle.
But there are other questions, reading between the lines. Why was it that Merker and Edgars weren’t there? Merker, at least, was usually there to check the day’s tally. Was it possible he’d cut some deal with the Comets, that he’d set up his friends for some sort of reward from the other side?
It was all speculation. No one really knew what happened. And no one was ever charged in the deaths of the three men.
Nothing I read in the Canborough Times’ files indicated what was unusual about the manner in which the three men were shot.
People stopped frequenting the Kickstart. Who wanted to grab a beer where you stood a chance of getting your brains blown out? The strippers quit, found work elsewhere. Before long, Merker bailed on the Kickstart, and wasn’t much heard from again. He left Canborough.
The Comets, it seemed, assumed control of the drug and prostitution trade in the city.
All interesting stuff, but some big questions remained unanswered for me.
Where did Trixie fit into all this? Why didn’t her name even come up? What did she know that had her on the run from Gary Merker? What had she seen?
And there was another question I supposed I had to consider.
What had she done?
Gary was impressed with how you never had to say to Candy, “Get over it.”
He liked that she got over things so quickly. What a trooper.
Her boyfriend Eldon, the father of her kid, gets himself smacked by an oncoming train, she pulls it together. He and all the other guys except Leo, they get a little out of hand one night, treat her, he had to admit, a bit disrespectfully, and she’s back to work a couple of days later.
It must have been the get-well-soon card, he thought. Chicks love cards. He was actually going to bring her flowers too, then, on the way over to her apartment, but he forgot and only got the card, and yet, that seemed to do the trick. He tucked that away for future reference. A card, or flowers, but not necessarily both.
A few months had gone by, and Candy-it was the only name he knew her by-was there pretty much every day, lots of nights too, doing her job. What a fucking relief, letting someone else handle the finances. Those rare times when he’d actually go to a bank machine-not very often, considering there was always plenty of cash around the Kickstart-and take out a hundred, he had to count out those five twenties two, maybe three times, to double- check that he was getting what he was supposed to.
But Candy, she paid the bills, took care of all those invoices, was always on top of things. Never even got that moody. He’d never known a broad didn’t get moody.
Miranda figured she deserved a goddamn Oscar. Meryl Streep never had to work this hard at playing a role.
Almost every day after she got home from work, she’d get sick to her stomach. It was eating her up, working day in and day out with these people. With these men who’d raped her. This man who’d killed her Eldon. She’d take a shower, like she was washing the stink of them off her every day.
She was giving herself a year.
Eldon had died the last day of July. She thought, Maybe I can hang in until next August. Or until Gary starts getting suspicious. The dummy accounts, the fake invoices, it was all going very well. By the time she was done, he’d be fucking bankrupt and she’d have enough to start over with Katie someplace else. But if he started getting wise, started asking too many questions, the “Abort! Abort!” warnings would start sounding in her head. She had to be ready, in case she had to bail early.
But so far, so good.
When she started going crazy, when she thought she couldn’t stand being in the same building with them one more moment, she used thoughts of revenge to calm herself. She imagined Gary’s reaction the day she didn’t show up for work, went hunting for her, discovered she and Katie were gone. And then when he figured out what had happened, that she’d ripped him off. Big-time.
Oh, to be the fly on the wall.
He’d be too astonished to remember to stick his finger up his nose.
The other guys, they seemed wary of Gary lately. They could never figure out why he didn’t avenge the death of Eldon Swain. It had to be the Comets, right? They had to have done it. But Gary, he wasn’t ready to go to war. He was cool with it.
Didn’t seem like Gary.
Even Leo, who didn’t think too hard on anything, asked him one time, “Don’t you miss Eldon? I do. He was always nice to me. When he was going out and I asked him to grab me a burger or something, he’d always do it.”
“He thought he knew everything,” Gary said. “He thought he was the boss around here. Well, he wasn’t. I’m the boss around here.”
Leo pondered that. “If you’re the boss, shouldn’t you be getting who done that to Eldon?”
Gary said, “You want some pizza?”
Leo thought that was a great idea.
Miranda had to be strong. She had to hang in. And she had to be careful not to get too greedy. She had to know when to call it quits. Because if she blew this, she’d be ending up plastered to the front of a train herself.
Katie needed her mommy.
20
I asked the woman at the information desk where the police station was, and it turned out to be only three blocks south. I left my car where it was and hoofed it. There was a cool breeze coming in from the north, and my sports coat wasn’t up to the job of keeping me warm. I put my hands in my pockets and hunched my shoulders up, thinking that would help. It did not.
Unlike the library, the police services building lacked any architectural link to the past. It was a wide gray and black building devoid of personality. I went up to the main desk and asked whether Detective Cherry was in, and if so could I speak with him?
I got lucky. The woman on the desk said he was still in the building and would come out to see me in a few minutes. I kicked around the front lobby, half listened as some woman complained at the desk about a barking dog. Two uniformed cops brought in an unruly drunk.
