He had a second glass of wine at the end of the meal, something with an edge to cut the sweetness from a crème brûlée, then gathered his case and stick and went outside. Nice night. He decided to walk, a little more than a mile. He ate at the Daily News twice a week, and the walk was just right for his leg.
The light was dying as he strolled along the uneven sidewalks, puzzling out the problem of what to do. He took twenty-five minutes to get home.
The front walkway to the house was still torn up, so he automatically continued around to the back, to the alley entry.
He heard the car doors open. Paid no attention to it until he got his key in the gate lock, realized that he hadn’t heard them close again. Not that it was odd, exactly . . . then he saw the man coming, too fast, way too fast, too close, something raised above his head. And a second man, coming in a rush, a step behind the first. They were big, rangy, fast, one black and one white, he thought, and then they were on him . . .
Somebody shouted and Jake raised his cane and flinched away from a movement and took the first stroke of what might have been an axe handle—or maybe just a stick, but he had axe handle in his mind’s eye—on the side of his cane and his arm, and he shouted, heard himself shout, more like a scream, then the second man swung at him, another ax handle or stick and Jake caught the blow with a push of the flat of his left hand, and then the first man caught him on the back of the neck, then on the head, and dazed, he went down, flailing, rolling, rolling, rolling, trying to make them miss, trying to get back in the fight, off the defensive. The two men were flailing at him, one of them saying, “Git him, git that mother, git him,” a kind of chant, and he tried to stay faceup so he could see the blows coming, fending with his cane and hands, and he heard a man scream, Hey you sonsofbitches and he was hit again and again and then there was a powerful, shattering blast and a flash of light and the man closest to him froze for just an instant and Jake slashed his knee with the steel handle of his cane and felt it crunch home, saw the man stagger, then a woman was screaming and another flash of light and another blast, a gun, he thought, and then he was hit one last time and he was gone . . .
Jake woke up in an ambulance, rolling hard downtown. “What happened?”
He struggled to sit up, but couldn’t. A phlegmatic black man looked down at him and said, “You rest easy. You got mugged.”
“Mugged?”
A few minutes later, he woke up in the ambulance, struggled to sit up, couldn’t, and asked a phlegmatic black man, “What happened?”
“You got mugged.”
“Mugged?”
The doc told him later that he asked the question twenty-five times over the next hour, both in the ambulance and in the OR. Then he woke up in an intensive care unit, still in his street clothes, minus his shoes, and looked at a young Indian doc and asked, “What happened?”
“You got mugged.”
“Mugged? Where? My house?”
Now the doctor smiled: “Ah. You’re awake. Yes. As I understand it, you got mugged at your house. You have a concussion, of course, but not too bad, I don’t believe, and a whole bunch of bruises. Good bump on your head, and a cut. It’s going to hurt in a while. Your skull is in one piece—we took a picture—but we had to cut some hair away from the head wound. After it stops hurting, it’s going to itch like fire. You have five stitches there. A couple of your neighbors are outside, by the way. Would you like to see them? They witnessed the event, I believe.”
“Yeah. Sure. Mugged? I can’t believe I was mugged.”
A woman came in and said, “Mr. Winter?”
“Yes.”
“Mr. Winter, do you have health insurance?”
“Sure.”
She seemed to step back. “Really?”
“Why wouldn’t I have?”
“Well, that’s nice.” She seemed skeptical. “Rami, the doctor, said you had good shoes and I should check. Would you have the card?”
She went away, clutching the card; seemed amazed at the turn of events.
A moment later, Harley Cunningham, his across-the-alley neighbor, pushed through the door, trailed by his wife, Maeve. Cunningham sold home bars and pool tables for a living. He did a double take, said, “Man. They beat the hell out of you, Jake.”
“What happened?”
“My back window was open, I heard you come tapping up the alley, I looked out, and I saw these assholes get out of a truck and I could tell they were coming after you. They had these clubs—they might have been pool cues—but I had my shotgun in the bedroom closet and I yelled and Maeve yelled and they were beating the shit out of you and I ran and got the shotgun and let off a couple of shots up in the air and they run off.”
“Who were they?”
“Fuck if I know,” Cunningham said.
Maeve gave her husband an elbow and said, “Watch the language, he’s all beat up.”
“He’s not gonna hurt any worse because I said ‘fuck,’ ” Cunningham said.
“Didn’t hit you in the face,” Maeve said to Jake. She patted him on the arm. “That’s a blessing.”
“The doc said I was mugged,” Jake said. Now that he was awake, he was beginning to feel the ache in his back, arms, legs, and one hip. “Just a couple of guys . . . ?”
Cunningham shrugged. “They were layin’ for you, man. That truck was parked there, and they jumped out when they saw you comin’. You been playin’ around with somebody’s wife?”
Maeve: “Harley, my God.”
“You see the car?” Jake asked.
“Yeah. It was an SUV. I think, like, a Toyota maybe. Dark in color. I told the cops. They’re gonna come see you. I think one guy was black and one guy was white. Salt ’n’ pepper.”
“Harley, that’s bigoted,” Maeve said.
“That’s what they call them, black and white guys together,” Cunningham said.
“Maybe in nineteen fifty-five,” Maeve said.
Cunningham to Jake: “I liked firing that twelve-gauge, man. It made a wicked flash in the night. Scared the hell out of ’em.”
“You say they were laying for me?”
“Oh, yeah. That truck was there for a while, I noticed it earlier on. Didn’t know anybody was inside. When I heard you in the alley, I was going to yell something down about those jackhammers on your sidewalk, and I saw them coming after you. I’ll tell you something else—that wasn’t no cheap SUV. It was brand-new, from the looks of it. They weren’t looking for a quick fifty bucks.”
“Did you tell the cops that?”
“Sure. But they didn’t pay too much attention to me. They were too busy typing stuff in their computers.”
The Cunninghams left after a while—they’d picked up Jake’s briefcase and cane, and left them with him—and the cops did come. Jake had nothing to tell them, partly because he couldn’t believe that anything he was doing would get him beaten up, and partly because talking to the cops wouldn’t help track down the guys who’d jumped him. They had nothing to go on, except that the men were driving a dark SUV, maybe a Toyota.
“Ten percent of the trucks on the street meet that description,” one of the cops said. “At least you managed to hang on to your wallet and your briefcase.”
“Maybe they picked you out because you’re disabled, homed in on that cane,” the second cop said. “Believe me, some of these assholes like nothing more than seeing a well-dressed disabled person.”
They went away, leaving the strong impression that they would file a report but that nothing would be done.
The headache arrived a few minutes later. The doc came in, said they would keep him overnight, and, “I can give you a little something for that head. When you get home, you can take a Tylenol when you need it, but no aspirin or ibuprofen. You want to stay away from any blood thinners for at least a couple of days . . .”