Pain Management Read online

  The maggot wasn’t going to bleed to death, even in that abandoned building—I used the little blowtorch to cauterize the nice clean amputations his pretty white knife had made.

  By the time I got back to the vacant lot, Ann was gone.

  “She took off in her own ride. The Subaru,” Gordo told me. “I asked her if she wanted to go to the hospital, but she told me she had it under control. I didn’t know what to—”

  “You handled it perfect, Gordo. Let’s get out of here.”

  “You have to do the motherfucker?”

  I unwrapped the black handkerchief, showed Gordo the two index fingers.

  “Should have taken his fucking cojones. He cut that girl for no—”

  “He didn’t have any to take. Besides, the other one’s still out there.”

  “Yeah? You think that gusano could describe you?”

  “Not a chance,” I said confidently. “His eyes were closed.” But even as I spoke, I knew he’d gotten a real good look at Ann. And if I was right about the black guy being the jockey . . .

  “Where you want to toss the fingers, hombre?” Gordo asked.

  “Anyplace there’s rats,” I told him.

  “Never in all my life been no place where there ain’t,” he said, pointing the Corvette toward the waterfront.

  “You okay?” I said into the cell phone, relieved that she’d answered at all.

  “Fine. It was a clean cut. Shallow. He was just like any other trick, doing whatever he has to do to get off.”

  “Look, knife wounds can be—”

  “It’s fine, okay? I swabbed it out, put on some antibiotic paste, gave myself a tetanus shot, and butterflied it closed. It was strictly subcue, didn’t get near the muscle. I’ll be fine.”

  “You did that all yourself? You didn’t go to the—?”

  “Don’t be dense,” she said curtly. “And don’t talk so much on the phone.”

  “Okay. When do we get to see—?”

  “Meet me at my . . . at the place I use.”

  “When?”

  “Now.”

  “Can you drop me at—?”

  “No, hombre. Here’s what’s up. I call Flacco, he comes to where we park, we leave you the ’Vette. You come back whenever you come back.”

  “Why not just—?”

  “Don’t be putting us in a cross, amigo,” he said, his voice full of that special sadness that works best in Spanish. “Gem asks us—and—you know what?—I don’t think she’s gonna ask us, but, if she does—we tell her the truth, understand? We don’t want to know where you meet anybody. Especially that woman.”

  “It’s just a—”

  “Don’t matter what it is. What you think it is, anyway. We had your back tonight, yes?”

  “Yes. And I’m—”

  “You don’t got to be nothing, man. Like we told you; it’s for Gem, bottom line. Get it?”

  “Yeah. Thanks, Gordo.”

  “De nada.”

  As I guided the Corvette to where Ann said she’d be, I turned to one of the blues programs you can find on KBOO at odd hours. Slim Harpo’s “What’s Going On?” growled its way out of the speakers. The way I was going, I might make that one my Portland theme song.

  The radio kept it going. Butterfield’s “Our Love Is Drifting.” Then Bo Diddley’s “Before You Accuse Me.” As if the DJ knew I was listening.

  But before I could call Hong the other mule, what I had to figure out was . . . if it was really my stall.

  Ann was waiting on me, her left biceps wrapped in a startlingly white bandage.

  “Pretty sexy-looking, huh?” she greeted me.

  Considering the bandage was all she was wearing, I decided not to guess what game she was playing and just nodded.

  “What happened?” she asked, following me to the armchair.

  “I took your signal, shadowed him back to where he was holed up. He went for his knife,” I lied, planting my self-defense seed just in case. “He ended up getting hurt.”

  “Bad?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Dead?”

  “No.”

  “Think he’ll go to the cops?”

  “Not a chance.”

  “And he’s done putting the muscle on the girls?”

  “He’s done with muscle, period.”

  “So we can go to Kruger now.”

  “We’d better give it a few days. No reason Kruger should take anyone’s word for anything. Besides,” I said, watching her closely, “that other one—the black guy—he’s still out there.”

  “But he never cut—”

  “Listen to me, Ann. I was there, okay?”

  “So was I.”

  “Not the same way I was. And you don’t come from the same place I do. The white guy, he liked doing what he did. But, the way I see it, the black guy, the whole shakedown thing was his idea. And he had a bigger plan in mind than these penny-ante payoffs.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “That it may not be over. And if it’s not, we’ve got nothing to trade to Kruger.”

  “Damn! All this for . . .”

  “Maybe not. But for the next few days, I think we have to play it out.”

  “How?”

  “You go back on the stroll. Or at least be visible. And I’ll be right with you. Only not.”

  “Not . . . what?”

  “Visible.”

  “Like my bodyguard?”

  “Not like tonight. If I even see him, I’m going to drop him.”

  “But you don’t know what he looks like. And neither do I. Those descriptions, they aren’t worth the . . .”

  “If it’s like I think, it won’t matter,” I told her, keeping my voice level.

  “I don’t—”

  I reached over, grabbed the fleshy pad at the inside of her thigh, squeezed it hard, pulling her closer to me.

  “You’re—”

  “I know I am,” I said. “But you are going to listen. And you are going to fucking ‘care,’ understand?”

  “Yes! Now let me—”

  I released my grip.

  “You want to kiss it and make it better?” she half-snarled, flexing her thigh.

  “You really are a stupid bitch, aren’t you? Fuck you, listen or don’t. The way I see it, the black guy can’t let this one go. He’s got a lot invested. Plus, he has to show his punk he’s stronger, understand?”

  “No.”

  “Stop pouting and pay attention. The black guy wasn’t the lackey; he was the leader. He’s been watching the street for a while. He probably knows you’re no hooker. He probably knows your car. And he’s probably going to try to take you out.”

  “Kill me?”

  “At the very least, hurt you. Real, real bad.”

  She dropped into my lap. A bruise was blossoming on the inside of her thigh. It took me a minute to realize she was crying.

  Gem wasn’t around when I got back to the loft. I realized how I felt about that when I let out the breath I was holding.

  It didn’t take me long to throw everything I needed into my duffel. I found one of her cross-ruled pads; wrote:

  I spent a minute trying to think of how to close it. Came up with nothing. So that’s how I signed it, too.

  The penthouse topped a high-rise in downtown Portland. The woman who let us in looked to be in her early forties—impossible to tell when they’ve got unlimited money and are willing to spend it on their looks. The living room was overpowered by a condo-sized aquarium, densely packed with brilliantly colored fish. I didn’t recognize anything inside it except for what looked like a pair of miniature gray sharks near the bottom.

  “It probably started with gays smuggling AZT,” the woman said. “That wasn’t even for pain, necessarily. But the pain of knowing there’s something out there that could maybe save you—or give you more of your life—and you can’t have it, that’s . . .”

  “You’re sure about the Ultracept?” Ann interrupted.

  The ri
ch lady didn’t seem to mind. “Absolutely sure. Men just love to boast, don’t they?” she said, talking to Ann while giving me a piece-of-meat look. “It’s not information they’d guard zealously, like some hot stock tip. One thing about those dot-com parties, honey, they’re much more egalitarian than the kind you’d find at a country club. They’re all so very into mind, you know? Nerdy little biochemists who wouldn’t get listened to at a backyard cookout behind one of their tract houses, well, they get a lot of attention from people who just come at the prospect of a new IPO.”

  “I’ll need some—”

  “Whatever.” The rich lady waved her away. “Is this the man you’re going to use?” she asked.

  “No,” Ann said smoothly.

  “He doesn’t talk much. Is he yours?”

  I didn’t rise to the bait.

  “He’s not anybody’s,” Ann told her.

  The football game filled the big-screen TV that dominated the glassed-in back porch of the little house set into the side of a hill. I figured it for European pro; it was too early for pre-season NFL.

  “Hi, Pop,” Ann greeted the massive man in the recliner. She bent down to give him a kiss on the cheek. “Who’s winning?”

  “Not the fans, that’s for damn sure,” the old man snorted.

  “Pop used to play,” Ann told me.

  “Is that right?”

  “That’s right,” he answered. “Played for NYU when it was a national power.” Seeing my slightly raised eyebrows, he went on, “That was before your time, of course. But you could look it up. Hell, I played against Vince Lombardi; that was the caliber of the opposition back then.”

  “The game’s changed since—”

  “Changed? It’s not the same game, son. We didn’t play with all those pads. And the helmets we had, they wouldn’t turn a good slap. You played both ways then, offense and defense. None of this ‘special teams’ crap, either.”

  “And no steroids,” Ann put in.

  “That’s right, gal,” he said, smiling approvingly. “Annie knows more about the game than ninety-nine percent of the wannabe faggots who lose the rent money every week.”

  “People bet their emotions,” I told him, on more familiar ground now.

  “They do; that’s a fact,” the old man said. “Especially with pro ball. Doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. What’s the point betting on men who don’t give a damn themselves?”

  “You mean the big salaries?”

  “I mean the guaranteed salaries. When I played pro, it was a pretty harsh deal. Fifty bucks if you won. And five if you lost.”

  “Was that a lot of—?”

  “In 1936? That was still the shadow of the Depression. Fifty bucks, that was more than most men could hope to make in a month, and you could earn it in a couple of hard hours.”

  “Who’d you play for?”

  “Ah, teams you wouldn’t recognize. Not the big leagues. My dad did that,” he said proudly. “He played for the Canton Bulldogs, before the NFL. With me, it was all semi-pro. I was just a kid then. I did time with the City Island Skippers. . . . You know where City Island is?”

  “Sure. In The Bronx.”

  “Ah! You from the City?”

  “Born and raised.”

  “Good! Best place in the world . . . if you’re young and strong.”

  “Doesn’t hurt to be rich and white, either.”

  “That doesn’t hurt anywhere, son. I played with the Paterson Panthers, too. Same time as I was playing college ball. Way it worked, you played college on Saturdays, pro on Sundays.”

  “Did the coaches know about it?”

  His laugh was deep and harsh. “Know about it? Who the hell do you think took us to the games on Sunday? And got paid to do it?”

  “I thought they were insane-strict with amateurs back then.”

  “Yeah, if your name was Jim Thorpe, the racist hypocrites. The same ones who wouldn’t let Marty Glickman run in the Olympics, mark my words. Nah, they all knew. And they all looked the other way.”

  “Did you play pro ball after college?”

  “Never finished college,” he said, pride and sadness mixed in his voice. “Once that piece of shit Hitler made his move, well, I was bound and determined to make mine.”

  “Pop was a war hero,” Ann said, standing next to him, hand on his soldier, as if daring me to dispute it.

  “Shut up, gal,” he said, grinning. “I wasn’t a hero, son. Got a few medals, but they gave those out like cigarettes to bar girls, if you were in on any of the big ones. I started at Normandy and made it all the way up with my unit—what was left of it by then. But I’ll tell you this: wasn’t for guys like me, guys your age, you’d be in a slave-labor camp or gassed by now. You’re a Gypsy, right?”

  “Right,” I said. No point in telling this fiercely proud old man that I didn’t have a clue as to what I was. And even less pride in it.

  He had small eyes, light blue, set deep into a broad face. I watched his eyes watching me. “You were a soldier yourself, weren’t you?” he asked.

  “Not me.”

  “You’ve got the look. Maybe you were one of those mercenaries . . . ?”

  “I was in Africa. During a war. But I wasn’t serving—”

  “I don’t hold with that,” he said, plenty of power still in his barrel chest. “When I went in, I could speak a little high-school French. So they put me in charge of a Senegalese gun crew. Bravest fighting men I ever saw in my life. Didn’t have much use for the damn mortars, I’ll tell you that. Couldn’t wait to get nose-to-nose with the krauts. One volley, and they pulled those big damn knives and charged. I don’t hold with a white man killing people who aren’t bothering him. Far as I’m concerned, Custer got what he fucking deserved.”

  “Pop . . .” Ann said, putting a hand on his arm.

  “Ah, she’s always worried about my blood pressure, aren’t you, gal?”

  “I just don’t want you to get all excited over nothing. B.B. wasn’t a mercenary, that’s all he was trying to tell you.”

  “B.B.?” he asked me.

  “That’s what it says on the birth certificate,” I told him, truthfully.

  The old man sat in silence for a minute. Then he turned to Ann and looked a silent question at her, his glance including me in a way I didn’t understand.

  “We’re going to do it, Pop,” she told him, her eyes shining.

  The old man took a deep breath. “I watched her go,” he said, his once-concrete body shuddering at the memory. “That fucking Fentanyl patch, that was supposed to take all her pain. Well, it didn’t. And my wife, she was the strongest woman—the strongest person—I ever knew. She wasn’t afraid of a thing on this earth. All she ever cared about, right down to the end, was what was going to happen to me after she was gone. She was . . . she was screaming, and they wouldn’t give her any more medication, the slimy little . . . I got my hands on one of them once. Shook him like a goddamned rag doll until his eyeballs clicked. So they gave me a shot. Told me I was lucky they didn’t put me in jail. Watching Sherry like she was, I thought my heart was going to snap right in my chest. And then Annie came. With the right stuff. And when my Sherry went out, she went with a smile on her face. You understand what I’m telling you, son?”

  “Yes.”

  “I hope you do. I hope you’re not fooled by this damn cane I have to use to get around with now. Whatever my little Annie wants, she’s got, long as I’m alive. And when I’m gone, she gets—”

  “Shut up, Pop,” Ann said, punching him on the arm hard enough to make a lesser man wince.

  The old man just chuckled. “You sure I can’t come along?”

  “No, Pop. But you’re in the plan, I promise.”

  “Honey, think about it, all right? I can drive. I can pull a trigger. Maybe not like I could, but good enough. What difference would jail make to me now? Be about the same as here, way I see it. They’d have a TV there, I could watch the games. You’d still come and visit. Food’s food
. And ever since my Sherry left, I don’t care nothing about . . .”

  “Jail’s not like that,” I told him. “Not anymore.” Gently, so he’d know I wasn’t being disrespectful.

  He gave me a long, hard look. Nodded. “I see Sherry every night, before I go to bed,” the old man said softly. “She’s smiling. At peace. I know she’s waiting for me.”

  Ann was silent for the first half-hour of the drive back. “You never asked me,” she said, suddenly. “About Pop.”

  “What’s to ask?”

  “If he’s my real father, or . . .”

  “He’s your real father,” I told her. “Biology’s got nothing to do with things like that.”

  “You have . . . ?”

  “Family, too? Yeah. Back home.”

  “You miss them?”

  “You going to miss him when he’s gone?”

  The mobile home hadn’t been mobile for decades. It lurched on its cracked concrete slab as if held in place by the endless guy-wires running from it to the ground. Maybe it had been painted green, once. Now it was impossible to tell. Driving up the rutted dirt road, obeying the signs that said “5 Miles Per Hour!!!” in self-defense, I had mentally placed the trailer about midway up the prestige scale in that particular park. The whole place looked like an insane breeding farm for kids, dogs, and satellite dishes.

  Ann said, “We’re right up the road,” into her cell phone.

  When we approached the door, it opened before she could knock.

  “About time!” a tall, wasp-waisted woman with shoulder-length, improbably red hair yelled at Ann, grabbing her in a hug hard enough for me to hear the air pop out.

  “I told you we’d be here,” Ann said, as soon as she could get her breath.

  “This him?” the redhead asked.

  “B. B. Hazard, meet SueEllen Hathaway.”

  “Hmmm . . .” she said. “What’d you look like before you had your face rearranged?”

  “I was so good-looking, women used to give me presents.”

  “Is that right?” she said, flashing a grin. Her teeth were way too perfect for a trailer-park diet.

  “Yeah. But the clinic always had a cure for it.”

  “I’ll just bet,” she said, laughing. Then, over her shoulder to Ann: “And, honey, that’s SueEllen Fennell now.”