“You tell me who you want to see and I’ll go in and get him and see if he’ll come out.”
“Won’t that get you in trouble?”
A bleak smile. “Nah. They don’t pick on gimps till real late at night.”
“Nice folks.”
“They don’t pity me, anyway, McCain. And they don’t make fun of me. You take your nice, normal people — they wouldn’t let me fit in even if I wanted to.”
Even if some of that was paranoia, I knew how he felt. Or should I say I presumed to know how he felt? Being short and coming from the Knolls had made me into an outsider of sorts, too. But I was strictly a tourist. There was a French saying I’d picked up from a Graham Greene novel — “Embrace your fate.” I was pretty sure mine was a whole lot easier to embrace than poor Ray’s. He had to live his out every second of every moment when another human eye was on him.
“So who is it you want to see?”
“De Ruse.”
He laughed. “Man, you picked just about the meanest son of a bitch in the whole wolf pack. De Ruse. You sure you want to talk to him?”
“Yeah.”
“You packin’?”
“I’ve got my old .45 in the glove compartment.”
“Maybe you should transfer it to your coat. One of the guys who’s still servin’ time is his brother.”
“Good thing I’m a mean son of a bitch myself, huh?”
He laughed again. “I don’t know about mean. Crazy might be closer.”
He adjusted his crutch and said, “You sure?”
“I’m sure.”
When the door opened, a hurricane of dank smells violated the soft, sunny afternoon. Smoke, beer, whiskey, marijuana, and a toilet that the UN might cite as a weapon of mass destruction.
De Ruse came right out.
The muscles in his arms rippled like crawling snakes.
His green eyes gleamed with enormous malice.
He was alone.
He didn’t need anybody else.
He was strutting.
With his big loop earring and his bare chest and his red Indian-style bandana around his blond head, he looked like somebody who’d give Spiderman a whole raft of shit, Spidey being the only comic book I still read.
He threw the right hand from at least a foot and a half away. Given his short legs, just throwing it should have knocked him off balance. It didn’t. And traveling such a distance, and it being only one punch, its power should have been cut at least in half. It wasn’t.
There was quick, sharp, overwhelming pain, and then there was nothing.
I woke up sometime later with my wrists bound up in the necktie I’d been wearing and the rest of the tie wrapped around the rear bumper of my ragtop.
De Ruse was dragging me around the dusty lot of the Iron Cross to the great and abiding amusement of maybe twenty Road Devils.
The Road Devilettes, or whatever you called them, laughed especially hard. I knew right then and there that I probably wasn’t ever going to sleep with any of them, much as that was to be desired, with their beehive hairdos and witches’ brew cackles.
The point wasn’t to hurt me, it was to humiliate me. The soil was loose and sandy and he probably wasn’t even going fifteen miles an hour. The big fear was pieces of glass scattered across the lot, but the worst I got was the occasional scrape from small rocks. He was being careful without seeming to understand that simply by knocking me out he was already in trouble and probably on his way back to the state pen.
He went in wide circles. I didn’t try to get loose. That would give them too much pleasure.
He drove close enough to them so that they could spit on me, which they took the opportunity to do. But at least they didn’t hit my face. I imagined that my trousers and jacket were beyond even the healing powers of dry cleaning.
And then he decided to give me a little scare. He floored it. We tore across a long sandy patch that ended up near a creek at maybe forty miles an hour. Now there was pain.
Behind us the Devils were shouting and applauding.
And then it was over.
He shut off the ignition and shouted “Beers’re on me!” and then ran back to the crowd.
This was how the truly cool guy would handle himself. He had not given me any formal verbal recognition. He’d hit me, he’d dragged me around. But he hadn’t acknowledged me as a person in any other way.
And he still hadn’t.
They hailed their hero and then went back into the tavern, thunder of jukebox, unholy stench of toilet.
Leaving me to start the process of getting to my feet and untying myself. It didn’t take long and it wasn’t difficult. Restoring my dignity would be another matter altogether.
I was in the process of taking off my loafers and dumping the sand out when I heard the tavern door open. But I was already prepared for a return match.
Ray crutched his way over to me. “You all right?”
“All right? A tough guy like me?”
We both smiled at that one.
“He can be a real asshole sometimes.”
“I find that hard to believe, Ray. Seemed like a real nice fella to me.”
He moved a few feet closer for a better look at me. “No offense, but you sound kinda crazy.”
And I suppose I was. In a business like mine, whether I’m investigating for myself or the judge, you meet people who do their best to belittle you any way they can. I used to be able to deal with it. But as I got older I got tired of insults, innuendos, jibes. And when I got tired enough, I’d push back. These were almost always verbal battles.
But being punched out and dragged across a parking lot for the entertainment of a bunch of bikers — that was a special kind of debasement.
What I should’ve done was find a phone and call out the gendarmes to arrest him. And that had been my first impulse. But then I remembered that not only had I been humiliated, I hadn’t even done my job, which was to ask him about being spotted at the murder scene the other night.
Ray said, “Some of them’re afraid he’ll get sent back to prison.”
“Aw, that’d be too bad now, wouldn’t it?”
“They said to tell you he was only havin’ some fun was all.”
“A growing boy needs to have some fun, doesn’t he?” And right then I knew that I did sound crazy. That in my voice you could hear rage and tears that I couldn’t control. “I’ll tell you what, Ray. You go back in there and tell him to come out here by himself and we’ll talk.”
“You mean you might not get him sent up again?”
“We’ll see how it goes. Now you go back in there and tell him.”
He was still studying my face. He was still sensing how near being unhinged I was.
“Well, I’ll go tell him.”
“By himself, remember. And nobody else is to come out until I open the door. You got that?”
“I’m sorry this happened, Mr. McCain. I truly am.”
He stared at me a little more and then started working his pained way back to the tavern.
I flipped the trunk open, got what I needed, and when he went inside, positioned myself next to the door.
I knew I wouldn’t have much time. There was a back door, and a few of them would undoubtedly sneak out to back him up.
Like the good thug he was, he let some time go by. Get me nervous, uncertain, so he’d have the advantage when he strode through the door.
But I was neither nervous nor uncertain. I was crazy pissed is what I was.
And so when he was less than four feet from the door closing behind him, I moved.
He’d been looking straight ahead for me. By the time he decided to look to his left, I was bringing the tire iron down on the side of his head.
He did a cartoon take. He staggered backwards but for a second there he looked as if he was going to shrug it off, the way those professional wrestlers do after the opponent hits them with a chair.