A shadow moved behind him.
He turned and four teenaged boys stood there. They were slim and tall and well-muscled in their tight white T-shirts. True to form, one of the boys had a pack of cigarettes rolled up in his sleeve, showing off one bulging and tattooed bicep. Greaseballs. They loomed over him like dinosaurs above a scrap of hamburger. He became aware of how small he was – and not small like Artie. Small small. Small in his mind. Small in his presence. Small in his very being somehow. He became conscious most of all of his right leg and of how useless it was.
He knew a few of their names. Ace McCoy was right out in front with the cigarettes and the tattoo. O’Malley had seen Ace and his crew around, and what was bad about the situation was they had evidently seen him as well.
“Hey there, Gimp,” Ace said.
“Hi,” O’Malley said.
“Hi, that’s rich,” Ace said. He put a big fake smile on and waved like an idiot. “Hi!”
The other three laughed – a merciless sort of laugh. A tall blonde one said, “You know why we’re here, right?”
O’Malley tried to give them nothing, but already he could feel his body shaking. Already he could feel his heart pumping in his chest. “N-no.”
“Nuh-nuh-no. I knew you were a gimp. I didn’t know you were also a stutter.”
“I’m n-n-not.”
All of them laughed now.
Ace squatted down to Smoke’s level where he sat on the wall. “Our clubhouse got burned up the other day, Mr. Gimp. You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would you? You wouldn’t know any smart guys who like to make firebombs, right?”
Smoke shook his head, moved to say something, if only he could get his lips unstuck one from the other.
“Now wait a minute, before you say anything you need to know something about us. What you need to know is we like stand-up guys who tell the truth. Guys who lie, we don’t like them. Bad things happen to guys who lie.”
O’Malley found his voice. “I don’t know anything about it.” Once it was out there, he found he had surprised himself with the statement. It came out strong and firm, like he meant it. “The bombs, I mean. I don’t know anything about that at all.”
“You don’t, huh?”
“Nope.”
“Then how did you know there was more than one bomb?”
“You just said it yourself. You said it was bombs.”
“Did I say that boys?”
“I didn’t hear you say bombs, Ace. I heard you say bomb.”
“No, you didn’t,” O’Malley said. “You said bombs.”
Ace stood up. “Okay, if that’s what you say, I guess we gotta deal with that. You say I said bombs. You say you don’t know about it.”
“That’s exactly right.”
Ace took a long drag on his cigarette, regarded the short butt remaining, then flicked it into O’Malley’s face.
“Fuckin’ liar.”
Three of them grabbed him. He tried to kick and punch them, but they were too strong. Within a couple of seconds, they had him under control.
Ace gestured at the open air on the other side of the wall, the five-story drop to the pavement below.
“Liars take the dive. Okay boys, let’s see what he says to that.”
O’Malley fought them, but it did no good. They lifted him into the air and turned him upside down. Then they held him out over the edge by the legs. O’Malley’s arms dangled down helplessly. His hair dangled down. His shirt came un-tucked and fell down almost to his nipples. He felt the pressure of the blood rushing to his head. He saw the activity down below, all of it oblivious to his plight up here.
It went on for a long time. They were saying things to him now, and he could hear their voices, but the sounds had melted together into a slow-motion, unintelligible mush. All there was out there was that upside-down view of the street, so far away. He felt their hands slipping on his legs. They grabbed him harder and higher, the split second as they abandoned their old grip for a new one stretching out sickeningly. They laughed because they had almost dropped him. The world spun.
He felt his bladder go.
The piss went with gravity as all things will do. Instead of running down his legs, it soaked through the fabric of his pants, it cascaded between his belt and his waist, and streamed down his torso and chest. Droplets made the journey past his shirt and rolled down his neck to his chin. His tasted urine on his lips. And still more came. He had never pissed so much in his life.
“Look! He’s pissing on his own face!”
He heard that much clearly.
He didn’t care that he was pissing on his own face. He didn’t care if he ended up shitting on his own face, if that was even possible. What he cared about was these kids were going to drop him, either because they would lose their grip on him, or because they were sadistic bastards and they didn’t care if they killed him. They were going to drop him and he was going to take an incredible dive to the pavement, one that would seem long but would be too short. One that would end with him splattered on concrete like an overripe gourd.
“I didn’t do it!” he screamed. “I didn’t do it!”
The car behind him honked its horn, really leaning on it. Smoke looked up and noticed for the first time that the drawbridge was down and he was free to go. He’d been free to go for a while, by the looks of things. Traffic was streaming by him on the left. To the right, that drop to the water still beckoned. The driver behind him honked again.
Glad as ever to be getting down from there, Smoke put the car in gear and cruised toward the end of the bridge.
“Are you going to tell him?” said Pamela Gray.
Pamela was Lola’s roommate of two years – and in many ways Lola’s opposite. She was pretty in an understated way, and dressed conservatively compared to Lola’s sometimes sexy, sometimes outrageous sense of style. She had grown up in a quiet New Hampshire suburb with a typical nuclear family. She was bookish – she devoured romance novels, for instance. At the same time, she had an edgy side to her – Lola had picked up one or two of Pamela’s romance novels. The books she read were the steamy kind – adventure tales of pirates on the high seas, of wild untamed women and dark men with powerful thighs and raging, uncircumsized members. Bodice rippers, she sometimes called them, historical rape novels.
Pamela was shy about men, okay, but there was more to her than met the eye. When you got her going, she had a tongue that was plenty sharp. And she was not afraid to speak her mind.
“Am I going to tell what to whom?” Lola said.
Lola and Pamela were cooking dinner. As they talked, they bustled about the kitchen. Tonight was smoked salmon with cream cheese, lightly sauteed Digby scallops and shrimps, and garden salad made from Lorena’s bounty. Pamela had made a chocolate mousse for dessert. They had already opened up the first bottle of wine. Smoke was coming, and the two women sometimes cooked together for him as though he belonged to both of them. They would share him, his conversation, his sense of humor, the warm smell of his cigar, right up until the time came for Smoke and Lola to go to bed.
“Are you going to tell Smoke about what happened?”
“Why? So I can upset him? So he can decide to be chivalrous and go off looking for them and maybe get himself killed? There’s nothing anybody can do, and besides, no harm done. I fought them off. I won.”
Pamela didn’t smile. “But what about the next one? Will she win? What if it was me? Would I have won?”
Lola was silent.
“I’ll have to think about it.”
“I think you should tell Smoke and then you should go to the police.”
Lola began to think she should have gone to Smoke’s for dinner. If Pamela was going to be so adamant about this, what slip of her tongue might be loosed during conversation after a few glasses of wine?
But then, going to Smoke’s would be too strange. Lola rarely went to Smoke’s apartment at all, and never went there to stay the night. She liked many things about Smoke. She liked that he worked with his hands, and that his hands were the thick, rough and strong hands of a working man. She liked the smell of his evening cigar, especially when they were on the deck together, looking out over the water and the sweet smoke would pass for a second before the breeze lifted it and took it away on the air. She liked his smile, and the fact that he chose to do his work for children. She liked that he was so smart. It seemed he could make anything.