“But she didn't know you were out here brawling with two mob dumbasses.”
“I think she knew, she just didn't care much. She figured I could handle it.” A worried expression crossed his face. “She doesn't get rattled most of the time. Except by you. You shake her up worse than anyone.”
“Why?” Dane asked.
“She said you give her nightmares.”
“Me?”
“She told me she dreamed of your eyes before she ever met you.”
Tension tightened the muscles in Dane's back. “Jesus.”
“Hey, I'm just explaining what she said.”
Dane thought about it, wondering if Fran might have a touch of the burden herself. What Special Agent Daniel Ezekiel Cogan's blessed granny would've called special consideration under the Lord.
“I'll see you tomorrow,” Dane told him. “Sorry for the trouble.”
“No trouble at all, man, I had fun.”
Dane climbed into the limo and went the slow way to Glory Bishop's place, hoping the extra time would help him to put everything into perspective. He cruised from Flatbush Avenue to Parkside, hitting the next roundabout to Ocean Parkway, into the Prospect Expressway, merging onto the BQE, the flow of the cars around him always more consoling than being surrounded by people.
He slid into the Brooklyn Bridge traffic, another component of the burg, no different than any piece of stone or iron. Slowly he hiked from Greenwich Village to the Upper East Side, working his way through rush hour, enjoying the flux and drift.
Here he was doing nothing but killing time, even though it felt as if he didn't have that much time left.
A miserable whisper from the backseat made him look in the rearview. It was Aaron Fielding again, the grocer and fish seller, sitting back there whimpering. Dane wished he could hear the man's booming laugh just one more time, instead of all this sniveling.
Dane met the man's eyes in the mirror, and saw him raise an ashen, quivering hand, trying to clutch at Dane's shoulder. “Johnny, I need to-”
“What, Mr. Fielding? I'm listening.”
“Johnny!”
“Tell me. I'll help if I can. I promise.”
“I… I swear that I-”
What kind of confession was so important it would keep someone trapped in jail with you, in the cemetery with you, in the backseat?
The despair finally lifted clear of the old man, and Fielding threw his head back and smiled. A heavy, joyful laughter broke from him, resounding and pure, deepening and echoing beyond the confines of the car until the sound of his own deliverance carried him away.
Did you bring all your petty fears and worries with you right into the grave? Did they keep you awake during the long night of your interment? Were you compelled to confess and apologize and justify throughout the hereafter?
A weak man became a martyr in his own mind. Did you do the same thing when you were underground?
The poor bastard, spinning in his coffin because every Friday afternoon Grandma Lucia would send Dane down to Fielding's market for the same order, memorized word for word. “Gimme two portions of shrimp, two of potatoes, three fillets and don't burn them.” A small joke preying on a corpse's conscience, even way down in the box.
Whatever the answer, Dane knew one thing now. The dead didn't have a sense of humor.
He pulled up to Glory Bishop's building and Special Agent Cogan was standing outside eating a
TWENTY-TWO
Once, back when you were still driving a cab, you saw two guys beating a police officer in an alley with his own nightstick.
The cop scrambled on all fours trying to fight back, but they started kicking him until he rolled himself into a ball, his face to the brick.
Dane gunned it to the mouth of the alley, threw the taxi into park, and hopped out with the engine still screaming. He took his civic duty seriously, most of the time. What the fuck. The cop scuttled under the front end of the cab, and the two guys turned to face Dane, the one with the nightstick raised above his head, and the other picking up the vials of crack he'd dropped.
If you stared straight ahead long enough, they'd take it as a sign of fear and attack. The guy with the nightstick charged, bringing the club down, giving a warrior's bellow, and doing this little twirly jump he'd seen some stuntman do in a movie once.
Dane caught him by the throat with one hand and broke his nose with two short chops. The nightstick started to drop and Dane grabbed it in midair. A silly macho gesture because he didn't even need it, but it was kind of a cool move. This dumbass fell to his knees, clutching his face and sobbing. The other was still rooting around in the trash on the ground, picking up his drugs. Dane kicked out and felt the hinge of the mook's jaw shatter. Teeth collapsed against each other and his tongue slithered loose as if the muscles had been cut.
It was enough. The cop had blood on the back of his head and kept muttering, “Motherfuckers. Those rotten motherfuckers.”
Dane leaned down and took his hand. He could not feel it. The cop was his father.
He didn't know what it meant. The man's ghost wandering around, talking to him finally? Or had Vinny's abilities somehow infected him, allowed him to warp things, tread another track, maybe even back in time? Or was he finally dead? Dane waited for Dad to speak. That same cold expectation he'd felt so many times before.
Without touching him, he helped his father into the back of the cab. His dad looked the way he had on the ten o'clock news the day of his murder. Not tough at all. Sort of soft, maybe a tad too nice for the job.
“I'll take you to the hospital,” Dane said, knowing how stupid it sounded. The plates in his skull were vibrating.
“No, I'll be okay,” his father told him, and said nothing more.
Blood dripped through the man's hair and soaked into his uniform shirt collar. His aftershave wafted through the taxi and made Dane grimace, thinking about his teenage years, when he used to splash on his father's remaining skin bracer while he learned to shave.
He drove his father home to Grandma Lucia's house. He led him up the front stairs and rang the bell. He hung back for a moment. His dead mother answered and gave a terrified cry. His father shushed her and said, “I'm all right, it's nothing. Let me get cleaned up and I'll walk to the station.”
Dane thought that perhaps he'd been murdered himself, shot in the head, and was sitting around in limbo. He ran his fingers through his hair feeling for bullet wounds. There weren't any, and he stared at the closed door to his grandmother's house, where he lived, before he turned back to his cab.
He had slept in the backseat for two nights after that, and when he finally went home again, his grandmother slapped the crap out of him for not calling.
Dane was starting to feel like that again. Stuck in purgatory, waiting for the hand of God to reach down and smack him around.
Daniel Ezekiel Cogan walked over to the limo and asked, “You doin' okay there, son?”
“Sure.”
Maybe it proved Cogan was wired into Olympic somehow, or maybe Fran was just telling everybody where Dane would be, at what time, hoping somebody would take him out when he got there.
Or perhaps Cogan really had managed to lie during his night ride and the feds did have Glory Bishop's place tapped. It put some tension between Dane's shoulders, all those possibilities.
“You waiting for me?” Dane asked.
