There was one coffin that stood out from the others. This one was nailed shut. I counted the coffins I had looked in, and there were twenty-eight of them. I asked the man with me about the twenty-ninth coffin. Instead of answering me he just smiled, his skin stretching tight against his face and looking as thin as if it were paper.
“Am I supposed to be in that last coffin?” I asked him.
He shook his head sadly at me, as if I were supposed to know the answer. Still, though, his smile stretched tighter.
“Jenny?”
His smile stretched still tighter. The skin covering his cheeks began to rip exposing parts of his jaw through the opening. And still, he kept smiling.
I woke up then.
Christ, what a dream. If that’s what they were like, I was grateful that was the first one I could remember in over fifty years. For a good ten minutes I sat silently before I trusted myself to move. Only after the pounding in my chest subsided did I pull myself off the bed and shuffle off to the bathroom to splash cold water over my face and dry the sweat off. I made sure not to catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror. I didn’t want to risk seeing those same hollowed cheeks and dead sunken eyes that that man in my dream had.
It wasn’t even three-thirty in the morning yet. I’d only been sleeping an hour. I was tired and needed more than that hour, but I didn’t go back to bed. I didn’t want to lie there thinking about what that dream meant, and I certainly didn’t want to find myself slipping back into it. Instead I sat in my recliner and picked up a book that I’d been reading earlier in the day. At some point I dozed off. When I opened my eyes again sunlight was flooding the room. According to my alarm clock it was six o’clock. I had this vague image of lights being turned on and horns being blasted – almost as if I were back in prison, and for a few seconds I could smell that prison stench coming off me in waves. It was stronger than I had smelt it in days. I stumbled to the bathroom to try to scrub it off. I ended up standing in the shower for a half hour, and afterwards I slapped on enough cologne to hide any smell of prison that might’ve lingered.
That morning the diner was busy when I got there and I had to take a table near the front window. Lucinda was too busy running from table to table to do much more than give me a wink. Like every other morning, no one bothered looking at me. As far as the other customers were concerned I was just some invisible old man not worth paying any attention. That was what I liked most about the place, that, and Lucinda.
I was halfway through my French toast and bacon when a man sat down at my table facing me. It took me by surprise, and at first I thought it was the same wannabe writer from the day before. He looked similar; forties, heavy-set, balding. But he wasn’t the same man. This one was glaring at me with a white-hot intensity. A thick ugly vein bulged from his forehead. Nothing but hatred in his face.
“You rotten piece of shit,” he swore, his voice loud enough so that everyone in the room could hear him. The din from the room faded fast after that. I could sense all eyes turned our way. I didn’t want to look, but a glimpse showed Lucinda staring intently at us.
“Why don’t we talk in private?” I offered.
“I don’t think so,” he said, his voice maybe even an octave louder and echoing through the now quiet diner. He smiled as he noticed how uncomfortable I was, then turned sideways to address the rest of the room.
“You’ve got a celebrity with you,” he said. “Lenny March, mass murderer extraordinaire. The piece of shit they’ve been talking about in the news who killed twenty-eight people for the mob. The same one who murdered my dad.”
When he first started his speech I felt a hotness flushing my face. That was gone now, replaced by something cold. Everything had gotten very still. The rest of the room seemed to dissolve as I stared back at this man, my voice odd and unnatural to me when I asked him who his pop was.
His lips curled as if he wanted to spit at me. What he spat out was the name, “Frank Mackey”.
I nodded, remembering Mackey. “Your old man was quite a piece of work,” I told him. “He used to do truck hijackings, but that wasn’t why Lombard ordered the hit. Mackey grabbed a sixteen-year-old girl off the street, and held her for three days in the basement of an abandoned warehouse where he repeatedly fucked every body orifice this poor girl had. Her family wanted justice, but they also didn’t want this girl humiliated any further by the police or the courts, so they appealed to Lombard.”
What I said stunned him. “You’re lying.”
“Sorry, I’m not. Your old man was one of the few hits that I would’ve gladly done for free. Lombard wanted it to be more than just a hit. He wanted me to make sure there would have to be a closed casket, and more, he wanted your old man to suffer. And I did a hell of a job with it. Kept him alive for hours while I whittled away pieces of him. Now get the fuck away from my table. I’m eating.”
His skin color had dropped to a milk-white. Any fury that had been raging in his eyes fizzled. He was unsure of himself, wondering how much of what I told him was true, although at some level probably realizing all of it was. I picked up my fork and continued eating my French toast. He sat across from me for another minute and made a few idle threats about how this wasn’t over, but the steam had been taken out of him. There was too much doubt, or maybe not enough.
The room remained deathly quiet after he left. I could sense people staring at me, but I just kept methodically cutting my food and chewing it slowly. Minutes later when I looked up Lucinda was standing by my table, her face hard and inscrutable, her eyes small black ice chunks.
Her voice brittle, she said, “I liked you better when you were just an old coot.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Do me a favor and find some other place to eat breakfast. I’d just as soon never see you again.”
“Lucinda, that was all a long time ago, I was a different person back then…”
My voice faded on me. The look on her face showed what I said didn’t matter. “Okay, sure, if that’s what you want.” My voice again sounded distant and foreign to me. “As soon as I’m done here you won’t see me again.”
I turned away from her, fixed my attention back on my food and continued eating my breakfast. I would’ve liked a refill on my coffee, but I wasn’t going to ask Lucinda for one, and instead planned on getting a cup at a convenience store. As I ate I looked up and met all of their stares until they looked away. I didn’t care any more whether people recognized me. In a way this was good, it hardened me to the prospect. It also woke me up about the way I was spending money. I was living as if I only had another month or two left, but I’d already been out over a week without any sign of Lombard’s boys, and the only relative of any of my victims who bothered looking me up turned out to be a gutless wonder who just wanted to spout off in front of an audience. It was possible that I was going to fade into the background, and that I’d be around a lot longer than I’d thought. I needed to quit eating out as much as I did, maybe buy a few pots and pans and start cooking more for myself.
The place was still as quiet as a tomb when I finished eating. I hesitated for a moment before dropping a twenty dollar bill to cover the food and tip, then left without looking back.
That afternoon I tried calling both Michael and Allison, and left them messages. I didn’t expect them to return my calls, but maybe I’d wear them down over time. After that I went to the library, and a reference librarian helped me try to track down Paul’s address and phone number on a computer. We came up empty. It was at best a wild goose chase. For all I knew he could’ve changed his last name, or be living overseas somewhere. He could even be dead for all I knew.
That same night while I was working I heard voices drifting in from the lobby. I was vacuuming a third-floor office when that happened. When I later asked the kid working security about it, he tried to look through me as if I didn’t exist, then finally admitted that he had been talking to his girlfriend on the phone.