The screen door was too conveniently agape, the wooden side door too artistically cracked.
He felt like the protagonist in a Twilight Zone rerun, wondering and then losing all certainty and hope of where or when he was, and knowing the outcome would always be dire.
There is a time to risk it all, and a time to run the table.
Tell me where is justice bred, in the heart or in the head?
In an old garage, he thought. Not the ordinary Las Vegas construction. In the hidden vault carved from under a church renovation. Not the usual Las Vegas method. Vaults. Underneath. Benny Binion buying so much property. The building near the Circle Ritz, used by the Zoot Suit Choo-Choo Club. In a basement. Not the ordinary Las Vegas venue. And its founder, Jumpin’ Jack Robinson, hanged there on a zoot suit cat chain. Likely another Binion casualty.
Did someone harbor an obsession with underneath, the desert, the city, with vaults, not basements. Not middle-western basements for canned beets and fruits, but for illegal things, like alcohol, drugs, guns, skimmed money. The underworld, the Chicago Outfit, so powerful.
Underneath the Irish rebellion. The millions. Under a church basement, for Christ’s sake. And the old building Matt had stormed with Electra’s Probe car. Its basement was pockmarked with holes in the concrete, keeping the desert sandstone out. Desert storm.
Matt heard the whine of power tools, shaking the scarred and lusterless wood floor beneath his feet.
He charged the swinging door to the kitchen, onto a floor covered with a splotchy sixties-pattern of blemished linoleum.
Woody had lived here for a long time because its covered garage and the oddity of a basement suited him. And his work.
He’d lived here for decades.
But maybe not much longer.
Matt had always hated basements. His mother’s two-flat in Chicago had one. Dank, dark, damp. Out of a serial killer movie. She soon married Cliff Effinger in hopes of giving Matt a “normal” childhood. From the first, Matt had hated Cliff Effinger, who soon became lazy and sour and abusive for reasons of his own and maybe a little because Matt despised him.
Matt began to see Effinger’s point of view, as unjustified as it was. After Effinger was dead and gone, murdered horribly, and as much as Matt had relished his absence, he saw they had, and he may still have, common enemies.
And only by going down the basement stairs, where in his childhood a hidden monster pursued him up the stairs every time he ventured down there, would he stop the fear.
Bob Dylan sang that dreams were only in your head. Classic understatement of all time. No wonder Matt had wanted to march down the aisle to the guy’s words and melody. He was an anti-social genius who named and banished lies.
Now, if Matt was going to do that, he would have to confront, and conquer, his dreams and nightmares.
The worst part of the basement steps was that they were usually freestanding, each step open to anything. Anything or anyone could be lurking down below to snake a fist or tentacles through a riser space and catch your ankle from behind. Any black-and-white movie monster.
And yet a kid could be sent down there time and time again to fetch a jar of pickled onions.
Do parents ever remember those horrors? See “AB Normal” brains floating in a jar labeled “Cauliflowers”, a.k.a. Frankenstein’s Monster in the making?
No. They had forgotten their own childhood fears.
Matt stepped sideways down the basement stairs, hearing voices from dozens of scary movies in his head. And maybe from down here.
“All right. Rat-a-tat, you rat.”
A machine whined, drilled, shut out sound, made vibration torture.
“You’re crazy, kid.”
Matt, on solid if lumpy ground at last, stepped into the cool fetid air. “He’s not the only crazy one,” he said.
The strobe light flash of black-and-white in his mind illuminated Woody Wetherly gagged with T-shirt material and bound by clothesline to a three-generations-back recliner chair covered in cracked turquoise vinyl upholstery.
A jackhammer bit was poised between his legs like a ballerina’s toe shoe en pointe.
Chunks of concrete lay piled around the bit. Woody’s bunion-distorted toes strained against their worn Reebok uppers.
“Matt, my man,” Chuck hailed him. What had he done? “Aren’t you always where you shouldn’t be? You should be in church, man. Having a life. A Life with Father. Old-time family sitcom. Get it? Don’t say I can’t be funny.”
“I think you’re a scream.” Matt eyed Woody, struggling to free his hands and whimpering through his saliva-wet gag.
“This Devine guy is not what he says he is,” Woody managed to mumble.
Chuck nodded. Slowly. “You shouldn’t have come, Chicago boy. I hate your guts too.”
“But I didn’t know anything,” Matt said. “Woody did.”
Chuck was rocking back and forth slightly, the jackhammer handle swaying with him. His face was bruised and cut, but his arms were raw, red, the tattoos sanded halfway off. Matt winced for his pain, both outer and inner.
“My dad,” Chuck said, shaking his head. “Maybe he was just a dream, but he was mine. I didn’t need being farmed out to my Uncle Joe. Dad knew too much and they hounded him out of Vegas to live all those years in Chicago, to keep an eye on him. He knew he knew too much of what-was-what back here. He knew he’d been sold out.”
“Banished,” Matt suggested.
Chuck eyed him with an appreciative glint. “Yeah. Big word. Banished. Gotten rid of while this piece of crapola was hunting the big payoff. Benny Binion’s Last Las Vegas Big Cash Dump.”
“And you’ve been sold out, in turn,” Matt said. “What did he do to you?”
“He’s got a sixth sense, Woody. Always has. He knew I knew something that might lead to the Binion money and went about getting it out of me and my past, my ink, my skin. Now I’m getting it back out of him.”
Chuck pressed down. The jackhammer whined and then machine-gunned into the concrete floor, spattering Woody’s legs, arms, and face with freckles of blood from impacting concrete spray. He screamed into the gag.
“Chuck.”
“Yeah, perfect little Matt, what?” Chuck wouldn’t take his eyes from Woody’s bizarre figure.
“You had to get real close to that altar to see your father’s mark, to know he’d worked there. Why? You didn’t have to follow me inside.”
Chuck wouldn’t look at him. “I don’t believe in that holy stuff.”
Matt kept quiet.
“I got to wondering, that’s all.”
“Wondering what?”
Chuck’s eyes—Matt noticed that they were a pale hazel in a pale, freckled-by-nature face—finally met his.
“I got to wondering why I wasn’t you. So I went in and saw the altar.”
He tore his gaze away to Woody. “Did he get it? Did Woody’s years of favors and confidential informants pay off? He get his payoff over at the church?”
“No. The cops got it. And the FBI. And they’re coming to get him pretty soon.”
“Oh-ho-ho-ho-ho, old man!” Chuck eyed Matt again after taunting Woody. “Bet that feels good to you.”
“Yes, it does.”
“You’re supposed to be super-holy and forgiving.”
“Well, I’m not. But…you, you could be smart and on the move and read all about it in the newspapers. You could vanish and I could call Metro Police to pick up Woody, in one piece mostly, and, presto, you could be a vanished mystery man.”
“You came here. From there. The money was at the church, under the altar?”
“Yeah. How’d you know?”
“This piece of scum had me follow you. After we, um, met, you could say. I was curious too.”
“I led you to Our Lady of Guadalupe.”
“Led me there, but I stayed to go in.”