Past Tense Page 20

  “Asshole.”

  The necktie became a garrote. I fought for breath, my lungs laboring to expel my exhaust, then inhale fresh fuel for my brain. My throat surged to expand its dimensions but was held fast by the insistence of the rope. It was hard to see how I was going to get out of this mess if I couldn’t talk to them.

  “What’s he up to?” the little one asked. It was the first time I’d heard his voice. It was thin and cutting and familiar, like the bay breezes that swirled around us. He didn’t sound nearly as frightened as I felt.

  The rope slacked. “What’s Charley up to, you mean?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Charley.”

  “I guess he’s off his rocker,” I said.

  “Why? What the hell happened to him?” The whir of wonder in his voice was surprising—I’d figured the cops were the ones who had the answer to that one.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m trying to find that out, too.”

  “We won’t hurt him,” the middle one chimed in, with a surprisingly sincere timbre. “We just want to talk to him.”

  The big guy and I both laughed.

  “I’m not sure about you,” I said to the middle one, “but the guy with the rope wants to kill him.” A tug at my throat made the final words a croak.

  “What’s he got on you guys?” I asked when I finally felt some slack. “What makes you so afraid of him?”

  “He’s got shit,” the big man growled. “He’s a punk.”

  I was certain it was the first time that term or anything like it had been applied to Charley Sleet. From the abashed aspect in his eyes, even the big guy knew it was absurd.

  “He never understood,” the middle one piped up earnestly, his voice a distant whistle in the heavy night. “He’s blind or something—he doesn’t see what we see; he doesn’t know what we know.”

  “And what might that be?”

  “That they’re animals. Every one of them. All we deal with is animals, day after day after mother-loving day. All we see is a fucking zoo.”

  “Hey,” the big guy said. “That’s an insult to my dog, calling them animals. They’d have to be trained with a fucking choke chain to get as smart as animals.”

  The little one laughed with quiet strength, the way Goebbels might have laughed on a tour of the crematorium. I was beginning to think that he, not the big one, was in charge of the operation.

  The middle one wasn’t done with the subject. “They value nothing, they respect nothing, and they know nothing. You should see how they live. The filth is unbelievable. It’s disgusting, it’s repulsive, it’s inhuman. Bob’s right. His dog wouldn’t live like that.”

  “Like I said,” the big one concurred. “I mean he might lick his dick once in a while, but he don’t sleep in his own shit, he don’t lie in his own puke, he don’t let rats gnaw on his kids, and he don’t peddle his lady’s ass to stoke a crack habit.”

  And suddenly we had a contrapuntal chorus of police prejudice, big Bob and his buddy tossing stereotypes back and forth like shuttlecocks.

  “Problem is, you can’t frighten them and you can’t reason with them either.”

  “Yeah. The only thing you can do is hammer them.”

  “Even then they’re too stupid to be frightened.”

  “What it comes down to, they’re too stupid to live.”

  “All they can do is fuck and take drugs. A fucking hamster can fuck and take drugs.”

  “And gun each other down in the street. They’re real good at that part. Hell, if we weren’t trying to stop them, they’d all be dead.”

  “Which wouldn’t be so bad, but they expect the decent folks to pay for the damage. Problem is, the liberals been buying into that since Franklin fucking Rosenfield. But no more. Newt and the boys going to make the street scum fish or cut bait for a change.”

  “Shit. Only thing they can cut is each other.”

  The big guy had had enough sociology. “Where the fuck is Sleet?” he demanded of me again.

  The twine clutched tighter at my throat; a line of blood dripped along my trachea toward my chest. I saw stars, my lungs heaved in panic, my head seemed to swell to the point of explosion. “Tell me, asshole,” he ordered, and tugged the twine tighter.

  Consciousness became elusive. My eyesight dimmed, my sense of who and where I was began to fade. I was dizzy and nauseous and insensate, afloat on a deficit of awareness. My knees began to buckle and my stomach began to heave. When I raised my hands to loosen the rope, he knocked them away with ease.

  The next thing I knew he released me—I fell to the ground in a heap, eating a mouthful of dirt. I think I was unconscious for a moment—it seemed to frustrate them or worry them that too much time was passing.

  “Where is he?” the big one demanded again.

  I could only shake my head and spit out dirt.

  “Enough,” the small said suddenly. “Rough him up, break something nonessential, and come on. It’s getting light.” He strode toward the Pathfinder in a huff.

  The big one looked down at where I lay. “Which one?” he asked.

  “One what?”

  “Finger.”

  I held up the one I had to spare—third finger, left hand. He broke it with a single twist. I don’t think I screamed, but I might have.

  CHAPTER

  28

  I GOT BACK TO MY APARTMENT BY 5 A.M., COURTESY OF A courageous BART employee who gave me a lift to the Montgomery Street station and a cabbie who took me on faith after I told him I didn’t have enough money to pay the full fare up to Telegraph Hill.

  It hurt to breathe, it hurt to move, it hurt to think. My finger was swelled triple size and my guts felt as if they had been torn and shredded and wadded into a something resembling a hamburger patty. My thought processes had been knocked out of kilter—I dashed up the stairs to my apartment but by the time I got there I’d forgotten why I’d been in such a rush. Only when the cabbie leaned on his horn did I remember I was supposed to be finding the money to pay him. Going down the stairs hurt even more than coming up.

  After the cab had rolled off down the hill, I moved my car into its assigned space in the garage, then trudged back up to my digs. After six aspirin and two slugs of scotch, I was still as achy as a flu patient, but my senses seemed to be more in control of themselves. I needed some sleep, but it occurred to me that it might not be a good idea, given my probable concussion. So I tried to read the paper, I tried to watch TV, I tried to eat some soup and some cereal, but all I could really do was hurt.

  My mind roamed to and fro, without anchor or vector or achievement. One question that lingered in the vicinity was what I should do about the beating I’d just suffered. Since the guys who had banged me around were cops, the usual avenue of protest was foreclosed. On the few occasions when I’d run afoul of rogue cops in the past, Charley Sleet had intervened on my behalf, at least if I’d asked him to. But Charley was on the run himself and as far as I could tell the rogues were in charge of the store, sort of the way it is in Congress these days. I decided not to do anything vis-à-vis the police department until I’d talked with Wally Briscoe.

  Another question was what the cops who banged me around were up to. Did they want Charley out of the way out of principle, or to avenge some long-simmering slight, or was he a more specific threat to them, an obstacle to some sort of scheme? I had no idea, and no inclination to find out any time soon unless the answer would lead me to Charley. Since my assailants seemed more ignorant on that score than I was, my instinct was to leave it alone.

  Another question was what to do about my physical condition. I probably should have gone to the hospital to make sure I’d suffered no serious injury, but that would take hours and even days if they found something suspect and I didn’t have that kind of time. Maybe Al Goldsberry could check me out; I wondered how early in the day I could ask him to make a house call.

  He gave me the answer himself, less than an hour after I’d posed the rhetorical question. “Is it t
oo early, Marsh?” he asked after I picked up the phone that rang at the decibel level of jet engines. “If you’re not up, I can call back later.”

  I waited for a splash of pain to subside in the reaches of my head near the left temple. “It’s fine. What’s up?”

  “I found it,” he said simply.

  “Found what?”

  “The hospital that treated Charley.”

  “So I was right.”

  “Yep.”

  “Where’d he go?”

  “UC Med Center.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “Sounds serious.”

  “Is serious.”

  “So what’s wrong with him that took the best hospital in the state to diagnose?”

  “I … you sound funny, Marsh.”

  “I’m fine. Just tell me what—” My guts took a sudden lurch to the left, tumbling over and under themselves, then knotting and cramping and making a fist. “Maybe you should come over,” I said after I caught my breath, in as close to my natural voice as I could manage, which wasn’t all that close.

  “Now?”

  “Yeah. If you can.”

  “Okay. No problem. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

  “Good. And, Al?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Bring your black bag.”

  “For what?”

  “Broken finger; possible concussion; possible internal injuries.”

  “Jesus, Marsh. If any of those are real possibilities, you should be in a hospital.”

  “I don’t have the insurance,” I said, and put down the phone before Al could give me a lecture on preventive medicine.

  The phone rang again ten minutes later. I looked at the clock: six-thirty. I hadn’t had so many calls at this time of day since my friend Betty Fontaine had given birth to her baby and couldn’t wait to tell me about it, ad nauseam.

  I picked up. “Marsh? It’s Clay.”

  “Hey. Where are you?”

  “Back in the city.”

  “I don’t suppose Charley’s there with you.”

  “No such luck. Why don’t we meet for breakfast and I’ll tell you about it.”

  “Can’t. Al’s on his way over. Why don’t you pick up some rolls and come, too. We’ll compare notes.”

  “Danish or bear claw?”

  “Bear claw.”

  “Or sticky bun?”

  “Bear claw.”

  “Or croissant?”

  “Bear claw.”

  “What’s Al going to want?”

  “Nothing, probably. You can’t stay that thin and eat pastry.”

  “It’s just rampant metabolism. I’ll get him a bismarck. See you in thirty minutes.”

  I took a hot bath and two more aspirin but it took three times longer than normal to get dressed and I never did manage to fold enough of myself so I could tie my shoes. By the time Al rang the bell, I could stand up straight and breathe fairly normally but I couldn’t bend or twist or make a fist with my left hand. But what the hell? I wasn’t a bartender, for Christ’s sake.

  “Who did it?” Al said the instant he saw me.

  “Fell down the stairs.”

  “Bullshit. This is a beating. I’ve seen plenty, most of them laid out on an autopsy table. I’d say at least two of them had at you.”

  I shrugged. “Guilty as charged.”

  “Who were they?”

  “Masks.”

  “What did they want? Money?”

  When I shook my head, it felt like I’d driven a nail in my temple. “Information.”

  “Did it have anything to do with Charley?”

  I nodded. “Apparently most people believe I’ve hidden him in the attic.”

  He started to ask more questions, but when I winced at a blade of pain slicing through my right side he decided not to. “Let me look at you,” he said instead, and gave me a rapid exam, with stethoscope and flashlight and fingertips.

  My head and gut seemed fine, he told me when he was through, but I should take some tests to be sure. I told him I would when I had some spare time. He smiled and shook his head and said with some kinds of injuries time isn’t available and his professional medical advice was to check myself into a hospital as soon as possible. I told him I’d take it under advisement.

  When I didn’t say anything else, he set my finger and bandaged it with a plastic splint that looked like an ossified condom. When he asked if I wanted a scrip for some painkiller, I told him I thought aspirin could handle it. Then I asked him how much aspirin was too much. When he told me, I hoped he was joking.

  He was finishing the finger when Clay Oerter showed up. I went through the “what happened to you?” routine once more, then we divvied up the rolls and poured the coffee. Finally we got down to business.

  “So no trace of our boy up at Rio Vista?” I began.

  Clay shook his head. “As far as I could tell, the last time he was there was more than a month ago. I talked to everyone I could find and checked out the cabin from outside. Nothing but mud and spiderwebs.” He rubbed his nose and sniffed. “My sinuses are going berserk. It’s Molds ‘R’ Us up there.”

  “Which doesn’t mean he won’t show up at the cabin tomorrow,” Al pointed out.

  “If he does, I’ll be notified,” Clay said smugly. “I’ve got some people on the lookout.”

  “What if they call the cops on him instead?” I asked. “The papers are full of his picture. There’s even some kind of reward. How do you know you can trust them?”

  “I spoke their language,” Clay said, and rubbed his fingers together in the universal sign for the exchange of currency sub rosa.

  I turned to Al. “What did you find at the Med Center?”

  He didn’t meet my eye. “You’re not going to like it.”

  “I don’t suppose I will.”

  It took him a while to begin. When he did, his voice wavered and his eyes watered. I knew it was awful long before he got there.

  “Charley was admitted to the center three months ago,” he said. “Complaining of vision problems, balance problems, orientation problems, insomnia problems. The initial findings were inconclusive; it took them a week to convince him to submit to a CAT scan.”

  “And?”

  Al shook his head and rubbed his eyes. “Tumor the size of a walnut down near the brain stem. Inoperable. Malignant. Metastatic.”

  “Shit,” Clay and I said simultaneously.

  “I suppose there’s no question,” I asked, just to be asking something.

  Al shook his head. “The best men in the city were called in on consult; if there was a way to get rid of it surgically they’d do it, but there isn’t. The guy who looked at the chart said Charley hadn’t seen a doctor for ten years. The tumor had been around for a long time.”

  “There’s other things besides surgery,” I said.

  “They were considering a chemo series, but Charlie wouldn’t hear of it. Left and never came back. That was six weeks ago.”

  I took a deep breath. “How long does he have?”

  “Couple of months. At most.”

  “Sometimes there’s spontaneous remission, isn’t there?”

  “Most times there isn’t.”

  “The good die young,” Clay whispered.

  I completed his thought: “Which means he hasn’t got a chance.”

  Suddenly the weight I’d carried around since I first learned of the shooting in the courtroom magically and perversely lifted. Uncertainty produces dread and apprehension, but now there were no doubts. Now there were no mysteries. Now the world was inalterably reduced, its contours all too clear and fixed and featureless. In two short months, my friend Charley Sleet would be dead and my future would never be the equal to my past.

  “Could the tumor explain the behavior?” I asked after a while, just to tidy things up. “The homicidal mania and all that?”

  Al shrugged. “Sure. Possibly. Everything changes with a tumor—chemistry, physiolo
gy, psychology. Everything.”

  Clay looked at me. “Could it be a defense to a murder charge, Marsh? Temporary insanity or something?”

  “Maybe. If it deprived him of the ability to distinguish right from wrong. A guy like Jake Hattie could probably make a jury believe it did.”

  “Did it?” Clay asked Al.

  “I don’t know,” Al said, then showed why he was a good doctor—disease and death made him both logical and furious. “But if he’s going to be dead in two months, it doesn’t matter much, does it?”

  That reduced us all to silence, funereal and absolute and terrifying. “Did you find anything helpful, Marsh?” Clay asked in due time.

  “Not really, except it seems possible that he’s killed at least two men in addition to the guy in the courtroom.”

  “Who?”

  “Why?”

  I went through the names and the explanations. “Are there any other people you know of that he has a grudge against?” I asked sourly.

  “Why?” Clay asked.

  “That might be a way of finding him.”

  They looked at each other and shrugged. “I can’t think of any,” Al said.

  “We didn’t know him as well as you did,” Clay pointed out.

  I didn’t know whether it was a compliment or a criticism; all I knew was that it was a fact.

  “If we don’t find him, he could die without us ever seeing him again,” Clay murmured with something close to wonder. “Do you have any leads at all?”

  “Only one,” I said. “And she’s twelve years old and I have no idea where the hell she is.”

  CHAPTER

  29

  SINCE IT WAS SUNDAY, I ONLY KNEW TWO PLACES WHERE I might find Tafoya Burris—the children’s project or the church.

  Running a stakeout in the Tenderloin is like spending a day as a meat inspector—there are more cheerful ways to occupy your time. I parked illegally in a loading zone on Ellis near Leavenworth on the theory that the only loading to be done in the building at my flank would feature packets of white powder most commonly delivered by foot, not truck. I settled in with a book—the new Russell Banks—and a thermos of coffee, a bag of Oreos, and a bad attitude. There are lots of things to be afraid of in the Tenderloin, but what I was afraid of this time was that a stakeout wasn’t going to provide enough activity to keep my mind off Charley.