Gately lay in the Trauma Ward in terrific infected pain, trying to Abide between cravings for relief by remembering a blinding white afternoon just after Xmas, when Fackelmann and Kite were off disposing of some of a furnished apartment’s furnishings and Gately was killing time in the apartment laminating some false MA drivers licenses rush-ordered by rich Philips Andover Academy[371] kids for what turned out to be the last New Year’s Eve of Unsubsidized Time. He’d been standing at an ironing board in the by now pretty much unfurnished apartment, ironing laminates onto the fake licenses, watching good old Boston U. play Clemson in the Ken-L-Ration-Magnavox-Kemper-Insurance Forsythia Bowl on a cumbersome first-generation Inter-Lace HDV hanging on the bare wall, the high-def viewer always now the last luxury furnishing to be fenced. The winter daylight through the penthouse windows was dazzling and fell across the viewer’s big flat screen and made the players look bleached and ghostly. Through the windows off in the distance was the Atlantic O., gray and dull with salt. The B.U. punter was a hometown Boston kid the announcers kept inserting was a walk-on and an inspirational story that had never played a major sport until college and now was already one of the finest punt-specialists in N.C.A.A. history, and had the potential to be a lock for a pretty much limitless pro ball career if he bore down and kept his eye on the carrot. The B.U. punter was two years younger than Don Gately. Gately’s big digits could barely fit around the iron’s EZ-grip handle, and stooping over the ironing board made the small of his back ache, and he hadn’t eaten anything except deep-fried stuff out of shiny plastic packaging for like a week, and the stink of the plastic laminates under the iron stunk wicked bad, and his big square face sagged lower and lower as he stared at the punter’s ghostly digital image until he found himself starting to cry like a babe. It came out of emotional nowheres all of a sudden, and he found himself blubbering at the loss of organized ball, his one gift and other love, his own stupidity and lack of discipline, that blasted cocksucking Ethan From, his Mom’s Sir Osis and vegetabilization and his failure after four years ever yet to visit, feeling suddenly lower than bottom-feeder-shit, standing over hot laminates and Polaroid squares and little stick-on D.M.V. letters for rich blond male boys, in the blazing winter light, blubbering amid fraudulent stink and tear-steam. It was two days later he got pinched for assaulting one bouncer with the unconscious body of another bouncer, in Danvers MA, and three months after that that he went to Billerica Minimum.
Entrepot-bound, twitchy-eyed and checking both sides behind him as he comes, rounding the curve of Subdormitory B’s hall with his stick and little solid frustum-shaped stool, Michael Pemulis sees at least eight panels of the drop-ceiling have somehow fallen out of their aluminum struts and are on the floor — some broken in that incomplete, hingey way stuff with fabric-content gets broken — including the relevant panel. No old sneaker is in evidence on the floor as he clears the panels to plant the stool, his incredibly potent Bentley-Phelps penlight in his teeth, looking up into the darkness of the struts’ lattice.
Given the Faxter’s historical proclavity for fraudulent scams, it was amazing to Gately that he didn’t ever know how Fackelmann had been fraudulently getting over on Whitey Sorkin in all kinds of little ways almost from the start, and didn’t even find it out until the not at all small scam with Eighties Bill and Sixties Bob, which took place during the three months Gately was out on bail Sorkin had generously put up. By this time Gately had fallen in with two lesbian pharmaceutical-cocaine addicts he’d met at the gym doing upside-down sit-ups from the chin-up bar (the lesbians, not Gately, who was strictly from bench, curl, and squat). These vigorous girls ran a rather intriguing house-cleaning-and-key-copyíng-and-burglary operation in Peabody and Wakefield, and Gately had begun working heavy-merchandise-lifting and 4x4-vehicle-promotion for them, serious full-time burglary, as his taste for even the threat of violence diminished on account of remorse at the bouncer-damage he’d inflicted in that Danvers bar after just seven Hefenreffers and an innocent comment about the B.-S.H.S.’s Min-utemen’s inferiority to the Danvers H.S. Roughriders; and Gately left more and more of Sorkin’s transfer-and-collection work to Fackelmann, who by this time had gotten back into oral narcotics out of Virus-fears and stopped resisting the sugar-cravings he associated with oral narcs and gotten so fat and soft his shirtfront looked like an accordion when he sat down to eat Peanut M&M’s and nod, and now also to a bad-news new guy Sorkin had lately befriended and put to work, a fuchsia-haired Harvard Square punk-type kid with a build like a stump and round black unblinking eyes, an old-fashioned street-junk needle-jockey that went by the moniker Bobby C or just ‘C,’ and liked to hurt people, the only I.V.-heroin addict Gately’d come across that actually preferred violence, with no lips at all and purple hair in three great towering spikes and little bare patches in the hair on his forearms — from constantly testing the edge on his boot-knife — and a leather jacket with way more zippers than anybody could ever need, and a pre-electric earring that hung way down and was a roaring skull in gold-plate flames.
Gene Fackelmann had, it turns out, for years been getting fraudulently over on Whitey Sorkin’s bookmaking operation in all sorts of little ways that Gately and Kite (according to Kite) hadn’t known about. Usually it was something like Fax taking long-shot action from marginal bettors not well known to Sorkin and not phoning the action in to Sorkin’s secretary, and then, when the long-shot lost, collecting the skeet plus vig[372] from the bettor and rat-holing it all for himself. It had seemed to Gately after he found out about it a suicidal-type risk, since if any of these long-shots ever actually won Fackelmann would be responsible for giving the bettor his winnings from ‘Whitey’ — meaning it would be Sorkin that would hear the complaint if Fackelmann didn’t come up with the $ on his own and get it to the bettor — and the whole crew’s pharmacological expenses meant they always existed on the absolutest margins of liquidity, at least that’s what Gately and Kite (according to Kite) had always thought. It wasn’t until Fackelmann’s map had been presumably eliminated for keeps and Kite had returned from his long highatus and Gately and Kite were getting the late Fackelmann’s stuff together to divvy up valuables and dump the rest and Gately found, taped to the underside of Fackelmann’s porn-cartridge storage case, over $22,000 in mint-crisp O.N.A.N. currency, not until then that Gately realized that Fack-elmann had through iron will kept unspent an emergency reserve skeet-payment stake for just such a worst-case possibility. Gately split this found Fackelmann-$ with Trent Kite, then but went and turned his half of it in to Sorkin, claiming it was all they’d found. It wasn’t that he forked his half over to Sorkin out of any kind of fear — Sorkin would have regretfully had the C kid and his Nuck/fag crew demap him, Gately, too, along with Fack-elmann, if he’d thought Gately had been part of Fax’s scam — but out of guilt over having been clueless about his own fellow Twin Tower screwing Sorkin after Sorkin had been so neurasthenically over-generous to them both, and because Fackelmann’s betrayal had ended up so hurting Sorkin and causing him so much psychosomatic grief that he’d spent a whole week in bed in Saugus in the dark with Lone Ranger-type sleep shades on, drinking VO and Cafergot and clutching his traumatized cranium and face, feeling betrayed and abandoned, he’d said, his whole faith in the human creature shaken, he’d wept to Gately over the cellular phone, after it all came out. Ultimately, Gately gave Sorkin his half of Fackelmann’s secret $ mostly to try and cheer Sorkin up. Let him know somebody cared. He also did it for Fackelmann’s memory, which he was mourning Fax’s gruesome death even at the same time he cursed him for a liar and rat-punk. It was a time of moral confusion for Don G., and his half of the post-mortem $ seemed like the best he could do in terms of like a gesture. He didn’t rat out that Kite had a whole other half, which Kite spent his half of the $ on Grateful Dead bootlegs and a portable semiconductor-refrigeration unit for his D.E.C. 2100’s motherboard that upped his processing capacity to 32 mb2 of RAM, roughly the same as an InterLace Disseminator-substation or an NNE Bell cellular SWITCHnet; though it wasn’t two months before he’d pawned the D.E.C. and put it in his arm, and had become such a steeply-downhill-type Dilaudid-addict that when he signed on as Gately’s new trusted associate for B&Es after Gately got out of Billerica the once-mighty Kite wasn’t even able to dicky an alarm or shunt a meter, and Gately found himself the brains of the team, which it was a mark of his own high-angle decline that this fact didn’t make him more nervous.