Sickening was more like it.
Didn’t feel good about this. Didn’t feel good about this at all. But sometimes you just had to do what you had to do, at least so long as you were still working for Vince Fleming.
He raised the ax over his head, swung down hard in a perfect arc.
Smoosh.
Moved over about a foot, swung again.
Smoosh.
It wasn’t quiet out here, not even with the car turned off. He was right up against the pen where the pigs were kept, and all the commotion had awakened them. They were grunting and snorting and bumping up against one another against the fence. They knew a treat was coming.
Bert tossed some morsels into the pen.
“Eat that, you fat fucks,” he said.
He had the ax up over his head, was getting ready to put some momentum into it, when his phone rang.
“Shit,” he said. Threw him off. He brought the ax down to his side, leaned the handle up against the front bumper of the Buick. He fetched the phone from his pocket, getting some blood on the screen, but not enough that he couldn’t see where the call was coming from: HOME.
Jabba.
He put the phone to his ear. “Yes, Janine?”
“Where are you?”
“Work.”
“Do you know what time it is?” she asked.
“I’ve got a pretty good idea.”
“You said you were going to be back by ten. You had a short thing with Vince and you’d be back.”
“Something came up,” Bert said.
“You’ve forgotten, haven’t you?” she snapped.
“Forgotten what?”
“The meeting? At ten? At the home?”
How could he forget? She’d been reminding him about it all week. They’d moved Janine’s eighty-year-old mother, Brenda, out of her apartment and into a seniors home in Orange a month before, but it wasn’t working out. Brenda was making everyone’s life hell. Hated the food, dumped it on the dining room floor in protest. Accused staff of stealing from her even though she couldn’t tell them what was missing. Cheated at cards with the other “inmates,” as she called them. Pushed people in wheelchairs out of her way so she could get on the elevator first.
The managers of the home had compiled a list of grievances about her, and now they wanted her out.
Janine said there was no way her mother could return to her apartment, so she’d just have to move in with Bert and her.
Bert had objected. But Janine wasn’t hearing any of it.
“I won’t be able to make the meeting,” Bert said.
“You have to be there. We’re probably going to have to move her out right then and there,” Janine said.
“I told you, something’s come up, and it’s going to take all night to sort it out.”
“I’m not happy, Bert.”
“You’ve never been happy,” he said. “Jesus could return to earth and paint a smiley face on your puss and you’d still be miserable.”
“Don’t you—”
He ended the call, muted the phone. She’d call back. She always did.
Bert returned to the task at hand, imagining that it was Janine he was cutting up into pieces and feeding to the pigs.
He wondered whether the beasts had any kind of standards. If he brought his wife here, tossed her into the pen in bite-sized bits, would they turn their snouts up at her? Give her a pass? Bert guessed she’d be too distasteful even for them.
Twenty-three
Terry
“It’s obvious you know about tonight,” I said to Vince Fleming, “but I don’t understand how.”
“This is going to go better with me asking the questions and you answering them,” he said.
“Bullshit,” I said. “My daughter’s scared out of her wits. She got mixed up with some dumbass kid, got dragged into something she had no business being involved in, and now she’s not even sure what the hell happened. You want answers? I want answers.”
“Don’t be so sure,” he said. “What’d your kid tell you?”
“Grace,” I said.
“Hmm?”
“Her name is Grace.”
A long hesitation. “Okay. What did Grace tell you?”
I brought up my hands, folded my arms in front of me, and leaned back in the chair. “No.”
“Excuse me?”
“No,” I repeated. “You want to know what she told me, then you tell me why you care.”
“You got a lot of balls for an English teacher,” Vince said.
“Clearly you’ve never taught in the high school system.”
“Don’t push me, Terry.”
“Look, I’m not an idiot. I know what you do and what you’re capable of. Your band of merry men could haul me out of here and I’d never be seen again. So, okay, you’re an intimidating son of a bitch, but I’m not the same guy you met seven years ago. You and I have a history, Vince, and I’m saying that warrants some mutual respect. Yeah, you helped Cynthia and me, and you got shot and now you wear that bag. I’m sorry. You want pity? I can’t imagine that. It’s beneath you. We’re all scarred, one way or another.”
I took a breath.
“I think you know what happened in that house tonight. Not all of it, obviously, or I wouldn’t be sitting here. You want me to answer your questions? Then you answer mine. Tell me what the hell is going on.”
Vince glowered at me for several seconds, then pushed back his chair, took four steps over to the kitchen counter, grabbed two shot glasses from the cupboard and a bottle of scotch, put them on the table in front of me, and sat back down. He splashed some brown liquid into each glass and shoved one toward me. He knocked his back before I’d touched mine.
I hate scotch.
But this seemed to be a peace offering, so I put it to my lips and downed half, doing my best not to make the face I made when I was four and my parents made me eat a brussels sprout.
Vince sighed. “Let’s say I have an interest in that house where... Grace was tonight.”
“What kind of interest?” I asked.
“You might already know. That’s why I needed to talk to you.”
I waited.
“And if you don’t already know, it’d be better to keep it that way. Believe me when I tell you, that’s for your sake, and your daughter’s.”
“But it’s not your house,” I said. “You don’t own it.”
“I do not.”
“It’s about the boy,” I said.
Vince nodded.
“Stuart Koch,” I said. “You know this kid?”
“I do.”
“How?” I asked.
Vince weighed whether to answer, then probably figured that if I didn’t already know, it wouldn’t be a difficult thing to find out. “He’s one of my guys’ kids. Eldon. You might remember him. Bald guy, gave you a lift when you came to visit me here before.”
I remembered. I hadn’t known his name, but I remembered the bald guy as one of the ones who’d tossed me into a car to bring me to my first meeting with Vince. So I had taught the son of one of Vince’s thugs.
Small world.
“Eldon’s been raising Stuart on his own for several years now, ever since his wife left him for a Hells Angel and moved to California, and doing a lousy job of it. Lets the kid get away with all kinds of shit and doesn’t know where he is most of the time.”
“Where’s Stuart now?”
“He’s being taken care of.”
“So he’s okay?”
Vince hesitated. “Like I said.”
I didn’t know how to interpret that. I wanted to believe it meant Stuart was alive, and that if he had been shot in that house, he was on the mend. Somewhere.
“Grace would like to talk to him. So she knows he’s okay,” I said.
“Great,” Vince said. “Let’s get her up here. Then I can ask her some questions, face-to-face, at the same time.”