The Duration Page 20

  Chickie snorted and swallowed and his chin fell forward. He opened his eyes, which were bleary and unfocused. I sat there, waiting. The bells went on forever.

  When they stopped, he shook his head and looked over.

  “Where are we?” he said.

  “Sink City. The bell tower,” I said.

  The words seemed to drip into his ears and leech their way to his cortex. Then he lifted his hand and put it out onto mine.

  “Sorry,” he said. “To make you come all this way.”

  I shrugged.

  “I had to be here anyway,” I said.

  Chick smiled. The best smile ever.

  “Sorry about,” he said, tilting his head in a way that I figured meant storming out of breakfast.

  I nodded. “Me too.”

  Glad that was cleared up. We sat there for a minute.

  “What are we doing here?” I asked.

  “I was about to ask you the same thing.”

  I looked around the cold, stone room. This was fun. But silly.

  “I hooked up with Ava Winston,” I said. I felt bad about it for a second, and then didn’t.

  Chick smiled again and tapped my palm.

  “I was hoping you’d say that,” he said. “She’s a sweetheart.”

  I nodded, more to myself than him.

  “Listen, your ride left. I’m going back to Boston to pick up some things and get sorted out. Come stay with me?”

  Chick breathed out into the cold air. For a minute he was quiet. Then he shook his head.

  “Naah,” he said. “I don’t think that would be a good idea.”

  I looked at him.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m not going to Boston. Appreciate it, but no.”

  “Well,” I said. “What are you going to do instead?”

  Chick looked around at the empty room and tried to smile again, but it was weak.

  “Doing it, I’m afraid.”

  “What?” I said, looking for a corner into which to spit the words but not finding one because it was a round tower. It was good too, because the last time I’d pressed too hard he’d split on me. I tried to modulate my delivery accordingly. “Get high and pass out?”

  “I know it’s not exactly ambitious,” he said. “It’s not what you or the other guys would do. But my options are limited.”

  I didn’t know what to say, so I just sat there. Eventually I thought of something.

  “Why’d you even call?” I asked. “When you got back. Why even call me if all you planned to do was fall down a hole?”

  Chick shrugged.

  “I knew you’d come.”

  Broke my heart.

  “I guess I shouldn’t have,” he added. “I didn’t mean to fuck up your stuff.”

  “No, man,” I said. “Are you kidding? It’s been great.”

  He laughed at that.

  “Look,” he said, straightening out his back and grimacing. “Let it go. Just let this all go.”

  He stood up.

  “We’re in different places, Pete.”

  I hated it when he called me by my name. It was never good.

  “That’s probably obvious,” he said. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but sometimes I don’t even know if we’re still friends. I mean, you know? Maybe we’re just guys who went through some shit together as kids.”

  Dude was just flat-out throwing bombs.

  He turned and walked out of the bell tower room, down the long, narrow stairs toward the choir. I followed, because what else was I going to do? In the narthex, where the latecomers would huddle during Mass, hoping to sneak over to a pew during a break in the homily, I dipped my finger in the holy water, blessed myself out of habit. Also it seemed like a good idea.

  Chick slid toward the open door, moments from vanishing again.

  “Where are you going to stay?” I asked him.

  He didn’t answer, just kept limping toward the cold city. He looked like a ghost on the skids.

  I felt the clock ticking. What were the odds here? Chick was one pill away from an overdose and didn’t seem to care. Jimmer wouldn’t be hanging around for too much longer, and Unsie was ready to wash his hands, sensibly, of the lot of us. I could just go back out to Boston, act like the past week and a half had never happened. Let all this stuff go. Look up that paralegal-turned-physician’s-assistant, see how her engagement had worked out.

  Wait for the call saying Chick was in the hospital, or jail. Or worse.

  Goddamn. It wouldn’t even take much for things to break right. It was close already. I mean, there was Ava, and whatever that was, but promising, no? Ava and my new interest in probiotics and stretching and soon, soon, it would be spring. Jimmer was in love and Unsie was about to be a dad. March was the most dangerous month, the swing season, cold snaps still lurking and the occasional storm and then suddenly spring and it was light longer and the earth was wet and the creeks and lakes were thawed and you could get a glimpse of a distant summer. The trees woke up and the flowers returned. Chick said he didn’t want my help, but I knew he did. Or even if he didn’t want it, he needed it. If I could just get him through these next few weeks, just make it to April, everything would be okay. I mean, shit, Christ rose in April. We could too.

  Fuck it.

  “Okay, fine,” I called after him. “You win.”

  He stopped in the doorway. I took a deep breath.

  “About the rhino. The horn. You were right,” I said.

  He turned around and looked back at me.

  “It’s there,” I said. “At Fleur-de-Lys.”

  Nothing happened for a second. Then he raised his hands like touchdown.

  He was only mildly upset about the lying. Almost like he got it, got why I would lie. “Really?” he kept asking. He would ask, and then laugh, and then ask again. He wanted to know where it was, how it was displayed, whether, after all these years, it still looked sharp.

  We were sitting in the Escalade, still in Sink City. The street was mildly alive, a lunch crowd braving the wind for a smoke or a slice of pepperoni. Clouds were massing to the southeast, late winter checking its tank. The forecast called for snow.

  I told him what I could remember, which was everything. Three feet, almost, curved like a scimitar, black and gray as if charred. I told him about the whirlpool room where the horn sat shining in its niche, about how the room opened up onto the rolling back lawn. I also told him what Jimmer had said, about the value of the thing, both in real and in historical terms, what Jimmer’d said about the class of felony it represented.

  “What we’ll do, then, is wait until the heat dies down, then we can save some money and spend a weekend there,” I said. “I’ll show it to you then.”

  Chick looked at me like I was crazy.

  “Or we could go tonight,” he said.

  “We can’t go tonight,” I said. “You can’t go near the property yet. You’d go to jail.”

  “I’d only go to jail if I got caught, which I won’t. And don’t you still have a room there tonight?”

  That was true, actually.

  “So you go in, I hide in the truck, we go see the horn. Then we leave. That sounds pretty simple.”

  It did sound simple. Too simple.

  “It sounds too simple,” I said. “They’re keeping an eye out for you. The guards are on, like, DEFCON 2. They wand the cars. Plus, you can’t get to the spa area without walking through the lobby, which is where Ava and all the front desk people are. They’d recognize you.”

  Chickie sat and thought.

  “If I could get to the back of the tub room, then I could just come through a window or something.”

  I shook my head.

  “Those windows are locked. It’s winter.”

  Chick nodded.

  “We need someone on the inside.”

  He looked at me.

  I was scrambling.

  “Nope. Here’s an alternative. We talk to Ava, explain what they have in the
re, why we want it, she shows it to us, lets us spend some time with it, and then takes it from there. Maybe she puts the horn in a place of honor.”

  I thought about Ava’s face if I showed up with Chick and explained that my weekend there had all been part of a ruse to infiltrate Head-Connect’s inner sanctums and then raid them.

  “We can’t do that to her,” Chick said. “Plus, she’d never go for it.”

  He was right on both counts.

  “It’s got to be us,” he said. “We’re the ones who know. We’re the ones who’ve always known. These fucking thieves. Think about what they did to that thing, that poor scared bastard. They used him for their own amusement. Then he fights back and they cut his horn off.”

  Yeah, I thought, nodding. That would suck.

  “Least the rhino was already dead, though, right?” I said. “When they took the horn?”

  Chick shook his head.

  “Yeah, cuz the dude fucking shot it.”

  He was feeling it, feeling the truth.

  “A thousand sins, going back all the way,” he said. “They’ve all led us to here.”

  He looked out the window at the warehouses of east Sink City, then back at me. He smacked his hand against his thigh.

  “We are the avengers. We’re the wrath.”

  He gave me a righteous look, then broke into a smile.

  “Shit,” I said. “And here I thought we were just a couple of guys who went through some shit together as kids.”

  Chick smiled wider.

  “We only went through it together because we’re friends.”

  At this point it was too late, but I took a last shot at mitigation.

  “Listen, we cannot steal the horn. And by ‘we,’ I mean you. That’s real trouble, long-term trouble. I need you to work with me on this. There are people, people with resources. Maybe we should call, like, the Sierra Club, or PETA. Get them to come in and take up the cause. Or the Franchise. They’d do it.”

  Chick looked out the window. I wasn’t sure if he was listening. I was parked at a corner and we could see down a rolling avenue across the canals to long brick warehouses. Most of the windows were boarded up, but some of them weren’t, and the glass looked new, and some of the doors showed signs of fresh paint. Maybe it was possible. Sink City by its bootstraps.

  But maybe I was projecting.

  “So, how about this?” I said. “I go in, you meet me at the back of the building. I show you the horn. Then we leave. We leave, we call in the reinforcements, make a big deal out of it with the newspapers, human interest stuff, get them to, like, find the rhino, excavate it or something, do a whole ceremony. A nice thing. Head-Connect has the money for that. They could spin it, make it marketing. Can you get behind that?”

  Chick was still looking down the avenue.

  “That would take months,” he said.

  “You’re right. Months of sobriety too. But it’ll be spring, at least. Not too hot. Blossoms and shit. And then in the summer we can hang out with Unsie, hit the Bowl, go canoeing.”

  Chick took a deep breath and looked out the front window. He seemed to resign himself to something. Then he nodded.

  “That sounds good, man.”

  “Right?”

  He nodded.

  I nodded back.

  “So we’re good? We’re going to do this?”

  He nodded again.

  He was nodding too much.

  “Guy, I need to hear you say it.”

  “We’re good,” he said. “We’re going to do this.”

  Now we were getting somewhere. I reached out and tapped him on the knee.

  “Keep it together,” he said.

  He slept most of the ride back. I took the Pike again. This was no time for introspection, this was time for focus. In and out. No hassle. I called my office. This time, one of the partners got on the phone. Don Huey, who was a big deal at Huey Huckle, especially since Bill Huckle was dead.

  “What’s going on, Mr. Johansson?” he said.

  It took me a minute to figure out who it was, and then to tame my sense of being betrayed by my assistant. I rarely heard Don Huey speak. I’d once stood next to him at the urinals in the men’s room and came away convinced I’d pissed on his shoes, but after a few minutes of reflection I concluded that it was unlikely.

  “Mr. Huey,” I said. “Nice to speak with you.”

  “It’s nice to speak with you too,” Don Huey said. “I understand that you’re out in western Massachusetts?”

  I nodded reflexively. “That’s right.”

  “Never liked western Massachusetts,” Don Huey said. “Prefer the Cape.”

  That’s what everybody in Boston said.

  “It’s God’s country out here,” I said. “We should open an office.”

  Don Huey snorted, apparently a connoisseur of gallows humor.

  “Maybe we will,” he said. “Tell me, what specifically brings you out there? I understand there was a hearing on Monday?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Uh, it’s the Van Nest estate.”

  I let that hang. I wasn’t sure how well Don Huey knew the open matters in the office, or if he knew that the Van Nest estate was not one of them.

  “How did the hearing go?”

  I felt like I was talking to a spider.

  “Went pretty well,” I said. “We have some work to do, but things look good.”

  “Will you be in the office tomorrow?”

  “Yeah, I think so. I’d hoped to be back today but some things came up,” I said, as vaguely as I thought might be tolerated. “Should be back by noon.”

  “Well, listen,” said Don Huey, a pleasant enough spider but a spider all the same. “I suspect a large part of this is bullshit, but I’m going to let it ride. I’d like you to stop by my office, though, when you get here tomorrow at noon, so I can get a clearer picture.”

  Someone once told me that the way to survive in a law firm was that whenever a partner asked you a question, any question, you should say, “The answer is twelve,” firmly and with enthusiasm.

  “No problem,” I said. “Twelve it is.”

  Don Huey hung up and I considered the pretty distinct possibility that I was less than twenty-four hours away from losing the only real job I’d ever had. My link to a world that was starting to effervesce. I looked over at Chickie, who was asleep against the window. We had crossed the gorge and were climbing back up into the hills. It wasn’t yet five, but behind us, the Pioneer Valley was already darkening. Clouds were coming up the Hudson, off to the south, bringing snow. The east was still clear.

  Chick was still asleep when we got into Gable, so I drove uptown and parked between Asgard and the Heirloom, which felt sort of like the poles of a dilemma—the alpha and omega, the future and the past. Too much? Yeah, I thought so too. And just then who walks out of the Heirloom but Tim-Rick Golack, both of him.

  I rolled down my window.

  “What’s up, buttercup?” I said.

  It felt weird talking to him, like talking to someone who’s sick, whose prognosis has circulated.

  Tim-Rick came over and peered into the truck.

  “Ah,” he said. “The prodigal son returns.”

  “Me or him?” I asked.

  Tim-Rick just smirked.

  “What’d you do, tranquilize him?”

  I looked at Chick, whose head had sunk into the collar of his coat.

  “Hit him with the truck,” I said. “You want to get some shots in?”

  Tim-Rick smiled.

  “Nah. I’ll wait until he wakes up.”

  “Might be a while.”

  “Is he high?”

  I shook my head.

  “Not this time.”

  We were having an actual conversation.

  “How’s Ginny?”

  Tim-Rick looked back at the Heirloom.

  “She’s good. I think. She doesn’t tell me much.”

  “Smart lady,” I said.

  He shrugged and tu
rned his collar up against the snow, which had started to fall.

  “I don’t want to know much, actually. Less the better. The details make me nervous.”

  He shifted gears, looked up into the flakes.

  “This weather’s badass. Almost spring, though.”

  I nodded. That seemed like a promising thought, a safe thought. Couldn’t quite let the heavier stuff go, though.

  “So, like, are you in a good place now?” I asked. I don’t know why I asked it. I guess it just felt like I could. He did seem like he was in a good place, relatively speaking, and I was interested in how he’d gotten there. I could use the info for Chick, maybe.

  Tim-Rick shrugged. “Pretty good, I guess.”

  “You burying hatchets?”

  He looked at Chick.

  “In anyone I can,” he said, but he was smiling.

  “How’d you get there? In a good place?”

  Tim-Rick sort of squinted at me. It felt like he was wondering what I knew, how much and from where. Like he was weighing his openness. He waited a second, then shrugged.

  “Time. Effort. Love of a good woman, maybe.”

  I must have looked doubtful, because he followed up fast.

  “And therapy,” he said. “A lot of therapy. You should look into it.”

  “Let’s not get carried away,” I said, trying to convey some sort of jocularity.

  Chick snorted next to me and raised his head. I checked on him, seemed like he was waking up. I turned back to Tim-Rick.

  “Listen, dude. I hope things work out for you. Really.”

  He looked at me for a second. Then he laughed.

  “Appreciate it,” he said, shaking his head. “I guess.”

  He kicked the front tire of the Escalade and looked at the darkening sky.

  “If I was you I’d hit the road.”

  And with that he walked away.

  Chick and I drove up the dead-end street on which we’d lived as kids and parked at the top, where the houses met the forest and trailheads snaked off into the woods. Near the road, a big sugar maple wore a skirt of buckets. We sat in the truck. I sipped Gable’s version of bodega coffee, a latte with foliage drawn into the foam. Chick had pounded the espresso I bought him. He was distracted, twitchy, his knees bouncing like they used to do before basketball games.