“Enough of this,” I said to Richie. “I’ve got something to tell Teddy myself.”
I pushed past him, went through the front door, and found myself face-to-face with Teddy in the living room. He looked even worse than the last time I’d seen him. His pants were off and his knees were trembling. His skin was gray and scaly. He reminded me of some frail old elephant on his way to the burial ground. But I knew he was still dangerous. My hand went down to the gun in my waistband.
“The prodigal son,” he said. “You got some fuckin’ nerve showing your face around here.”
“I was about to say the same about you.”
I could see he was afraid of me.
“What’d you come back here for anyway?”
“I came back here to give you what you gave my father and what you gave Vin.”
Teddy’s eyes roamed over my shoulder to Richie in the doorway behind me, as if asking how I could have known a thing like that. But Richie just looked dumbfounded.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Teddy started to back up into the kitchen. “Where’s my fucking cut, you punk?”
“You want your cut?” I dug the casino chips out of my pocket and started throwing them at him. “There’s your cut, you pig. Go get it.”
The green, red, and white discs bounced off his stomach and clattered across the kitchen floor, rolling under the refrigerator and the stove. They were for Carla and the kids anyway.
Teddy looked at me with so much hate I could almost smell it.
“Minchia,” he said. “If I ever get a chance to meet God, I’m gonna ask him how he could take my only son and let a piece of shit like you live.”
“Well, you might get the chance to talk to him soon.” I took out the gun and pointed it at his heart.
With a heavy cough, he fell against the kitchen counter and began rummaging through the red canisters, like he was looking for a cookie. I looked over my shoulder once and saw Richie was gone from the porch. I wondered how long it would be until Tommy Sick or the cops showed up.
“Come on, let’s do this outside. I don’t want to wake the kids.”
Teddy was still looking through drawers along the counter, like he was expecting to find something useful. “I always told Vin you were no good,” he muttered. “I said you can’t teach someone to love you. It’s either in the blood or it isn’t.”
“You’re a stupid old man,” I said.
He looked at me blankly, still not understanding he was about to die. Then his face seized up like he was suddenly in great pain.
“Go ahead. You don’t have the nerve.” His eyes weren’t as brave as his voice.
For a split second, he might have been right. I didn’t have the nerve to kill him in the house where my children were sleeping. There may have even been some spasm of conscience telling me I couldn’t just shoot an old man in cold blood. But then he suddenly stumbled toward the folded-up trousers on the breakfast table and pulled out a Ruger that had been tucked in there.
I shot him before he could aim it. The sound echoed off the dishes in the cabinet and he fell to one knee. A dark worm of blood started to seep out of his belly. He cupped his hand over the wound and looked up at me in shock, like he couldn’t believe my manners. I shot him again, this time for Mike. The bullet caught him in the windpipe and a purplish red arterial spray gushed out. He fell sideways, gasping for air, trying to dig the bullet out of his throat with his fingers.
Somehow I’d thought killing him wouldn’t be this hard—I was going to take away from him what he took away from me by killing Mike. But it was monstrous, unbearable. The lack of oxygen was turning his face blue. A horrible sucking sound escaped from his chest. I felt myself suffocating, thinking about the paramedics who’d come and stick useless tubes down his throat. Each second watching him was agony. So I shot him once more, hitting him mercifully between the eyes.
He fell backwards and died locking up at our unpainted ceiling.
I just stood there for a few seconds, feeling like I’d landed on some dark uninhabited planet, cut off from everything I’d known and loved before. I backed into the living room. The couch, the television, and the Ninja Turtle toys were all where they were supposed to be. But I wasn’t. I didn’t belong here anymore. I turned and saw Carla standing in the doorway, her face a map of every betrayal I’d put her through. By some miracle, the children didn’t wake up. That was one thing to be thankful for.
I tried to say something to her, but the words wouldn’t come. How do you apologize for ruining someone’s life?
71
FORTY-FIVE MINUTES LATER, I was still in shock as they put me in the back of the squad car.
“You probably did him a favor,” said Detective Farley, sliding in next to me as another beefy detective got in the front.”He was dying of cancer, you know.”
Great, I thought, as the car started and pulled away. I’d thrown away the rest of my life to kill a dead man.
As the old house receded in the distance behind me, I thought about what I’d done to the kids. At least I’d left something for them. Thirty thousand dollars in chips wouldn’t go far, but once I got a lawyer, I’d get after Frank for the rest of the advance and the pay-per-view receipts. There had to be at least another hundred thousand coming.
Besides, I thought, they were better off without me, though it broke my heart to know I’d never see them again. All I ever did was hurt the people I loved. Little Anthony and Rachel would have to grow up without an old man around.
The driver started to make a left onto Atlantic Avenue and ran straight into a line of cars with their taillights glaring like a row of bloodshot eyes. More cars leaving the casinos at three in the morning.
“Fucking traffic light’s broken on Missouri Avenue,” he said. “It’s only letting through six cars at a time.”
“Atlantic City,” Farley sighed. He turned and looked at me. “We gotta take Route 40 out to Mays Landing so we can book you. You got any ideas how we can get there faster?”
I sat up as the handcuffs dug into my wrists. “We could take the Boardwalk.”
They looked at each other and lifted their shoulders. Why not?
They hit the siren, cut through an alley, and went up a ramp onto the Boardwalk.
With the window down a little, I was able to feel the salt breeze on my face one more time. It was a cool fall night. There were still a few stragglers out in front of the pizza joints and fortune-tellers’ storefronts. On the beachside, the last of those red-and-white-striped tents were shivering and the gulls were circling.
“You get yourself a good lawyer, you could be out in five years,” Farley said.
“Less if you can prove self-defense,” the detective behind the wheel added.
I knew they were trying to soften me up to sign a confession. I kept my mouth shut. The way Vin would’ve wanted me to.
“Plus you got extenuating circumstances, don’t forget that.” Farley leaned over, pushing his shoulder against mine as if we were suddenly the best of friends.
“Like what?”
“You know. You could talk about losing your father and all that crap. Psychological distress.”
“Yeah, right.”
I stared straight ahead through the windshield at the lighted casino towers shimmering in the distance. Vin never really got inside them and Mike never lived to see them. And now I realized I didn’t belong in them either.
“Did I tell you before that you look like him?” Farley asked.
“Who?”
“Mike. Mike Dillon. He was classic. Years ago, he tried to get me to invest in some crazy scheme where he was going to buy up land along the Boardwalk and build another of those grand old hotels. He was always a dreamer, Mike. It must have been something, having him as your old man.”