The Four-Night Run Read online

  “I never saw you before in my life,” Scrbacek said.

  “You look mightily familiar.”

  “I have that kind of face,” said Scrbacek.

  “Nah, I seen you before.”

  “A course you done seen him before,” said another of the men. “You even knowed his name.”

  “What the hell nonsense you spouting?”

  “Tom. You called him Tom.”

  “Yo, Felix,” said a third. “Keep your mouth shut so everyone don’t know how truly ignorant you are.”

  “I ain’t ignorant. If anyone’s ignorant, it’s the Worm.”

  “You don’t even know what the word means,” said the small one, the Worm, with his brutal grin.

  “Sure I do. It means you got some fiercely ugly teeth.”

  “I seen him before. I know I have.”

  “Who the hell cares,” said another of the men. “I’ve seen you before, and it’s not doing Mickey a lick of good tonight. Turn around and shut up.”

  They laughed, and the little man with the grin stared for a moment more before turning away. Once more the red-suits were huddled over their dirty plates. Scrbacek waited a little longer, making sure they had lost all interest, before he sat down upon his stool.

  It was all there in front of him, the feast he had ordered. Even with the fright from the red-suits, his hunger blossomed at the sight of it all. He mashed a yolk into the potatoes, cut a piece of sausage, scooped it all together onto his fork and into his mouth. A wave of satisfaction rushed through him. Before the fork was out of his mouth, he formed another pile with the edge of his toast. He ate like a wolf, gulping the food with barely a chew. He finished the eggs and potatoes as if in a race, and went right to the pancakes, pouring the syrup until the thick liquid lipped off the plate.

  When the red-suits grabbed their fedoras and stood from their booth, Scrbacek froze, his fork stranded in midair. The men paid their bill and left, jangling out, laughing.

  “Later, Tom,” said one.

  “I tell you, dammit to hell, I seen his ugly face before,” said the Worm. “I know I seen it.”

  The hugest of them all grabbed a handful of toothpicks from beside the register and stuck one in his gaping mouth, sucking loudly through the teeth of his oversize jaw.

  When the bell tinkled and the door closed behind them, Scrbacek let out a breath he didn’t realize he had been holding and went back to his meal, eating more slowly now. Pancakes and syrup with the rest of the sausage. Hamburger, with ketchup doused atop the extra pickles. Peach pie, the ice cream melted into a creamy pool around its bottom crust. All of it washed down with his second, then his third cup of coffee.

  In the middle of his meal, he leaned over to the jukebox selector on the counter and turned the song menu inside the box. Sinatra. Sinatra. All Sinatra. A hundred selections of Sinatra.

  “What,” said Scrbacek to the waitress, “no Elvis?”

  “Ed likes Frank,” she said.

  Scrbacek shrugged, took a quarter of his change, slipped it in the slot, punched D7. He didn’t know the song, just liked the name. First, a flute, then a clash of strings, then nothing but a simple bluesy bass line to accompany the sweet voice as it eased its way through the speakers.

  As Frank sang about what his mother had told him when he was in knee pants, Scrbacek turned to the last dish of food before him, pale-yellow custard teeming with opulent beads of tapioca, glistening like pearls. There was no chance of really enjoying it—his stomach was too painfully stretched to accept another whit—but still he found himself unable to resist. He carved out a spoonful, put it in his mouth, tasted the clean burned vanilla, pressed the soft beads with his tongue.

  His mother had made him tapioca pudding just like this. When he was sick in bed as a boy, she would bring it to his room on a tray, a little ramekin full, along with a mug of cocoa, and he would savor the warm vanilla custard, fresh from the pot, and the large squishy beads. He took another spoonful and tried to lose himself in a past of split-level tract homes and red bicycles, of blue station wagons and Little League baseball games and warm tapioca pudding. It had been just like that, his early youth in a suburb across the river from Philadelphia. Playing Twister with the neighbor girls, and the Game of Life, playing basketball in Kenny Park’s driveway, tall glasses of lemonade, hot dogs on the grill, Saturday cartoons. The tragedy of his father’s death. The triumph of an intramural championship. Springsteen concerts. Fourth of July parades. Necking at the air force base with Audrey Boccelli. He’d go there right now if he could, to the innocence of his little suburb, go there in a heartbeat if his mom was still making pudding and his dad was still alive and Kenny Park was still shooting hoops and Audrey Boccelli was still putting out and he could be seven or ten or seventeen again.

  Was that the past he was supposed to examine, according to the Contessa’s cards?

  Or was it the blur of college when, freed from the confining definitions of the suburbs, he found himself able to explore his inner self. Drugs, sex, Kerouac and Hermann Hesse, all to the sound track of Linkin Park and the Strokes. Studying philosophy and psychology, reading Kant and Camus, Goffman and Skinner. Getting nauseated with Sartre, trembling fearfully with Kierkegaard. He had tried to open his heart to the benign indifference of the universe, but the cap wasn’t a twist-off and there was no opener in sight. He toyed with being a writer, an artist, a photographer, he toyed with finding expression for all that flowed deep within him, but basically he toyed. He took his courses, wrote his papers, ingested whatever was around to be ingested, slept with whatever woman would let him slip between her sheets. He traversed the college years in a sincere haze only to discover, when the haze burned off, that he had found no inner self worth exploring.

  No, the Contessa had said there was a choice in his past that had led him here, to this diner in Crapstown, hunted and in fear, with a hole shot straight through his arm. When he looked into his far past, his boyhood and his collegiate years, he saw no real choices. Whether to ask Audrey Boccelli to the prom or one of the primmer, prettier neighbor girls? Was that the choice? He had gone with pretty and prim, asked Susan Winship, who looked great but gave him nothing, not a thing. Whether to major in psychology or philosophy at college? Philosophy, because the girls in the classes were hotter. Whether to mix ecstasy with beer or with vodka? Let’s try both. Whether to quit the lacrosse team after getting beat up for two straight weeks by guys a hundred pounds heavier? Quit, definitely quit. Whether to go to law school or business school? Law, because they accepted him and if he didn’t go, he would have had to find himself a job.

  There it was, the litany of his choices before he took his first step through the portals of the law. No, the Contessa must have gotten it wrong in telling him to look to the choices of his past, because in his past there was no choice that could have led him here. Nothing. Unless . . .

  Tinkle, tinkle.

  Scrbacek froze on his stool as the diner door opened. He didn’t want to look, hoped it was just another lonely soul heading to a booth for a late-night breakfast. But the footsteps came right up to his stool, and then something slapped down beside his pudding on the counter.

  A newspaper. With Scrbacek’s picture in full color beneath a banner headline that tightened Scrbacek’s throat so he could hardly breathe: MURDER SUSPECT STILL AT LARGE.

  And beside the picture, in smaller type, two tombstone headlines: SURWIN WIDENS SCRBACEK PROBE TO INCLUDE ARSON and BREEST LAWYER CONSIDERED ARMED AND DANGEROUS.

  “Early edition, Tom.” It was the smallest of the red-suits, the Worm, his hat tilted back on his head, his ugly grin ungainly and dangerous. “I knew I seen your face before.”

  Scrbacek said not a word, just stared at the paper.

  “There’s lots of folk looking for you,” said the Worm.

  “Just leave me alone,” said Scrbacek.

  “Offering lots of money.”

  “Get the hell out of here,” said Scrbacek, and he said it loud en
ough for the waitress to take a step back. She glanced at the window to the kitchen.

  There stood Ed, in the red glow of the heat lamps, looking with mute interest at the goings-on at the counter, the double barrel of his shotgun just visible in the window.

  The red-suit raised his face to the window and grinned at Ed as he said, “What the hell kind of name is Scrbacek, anyway?”

  “French.”

  “French? I never would have figured. Fucking Frogs. You know, that Jerry Lewis thing I can understand—that smile of his cracks my ass too—but Mickey Rourke? Fuck me with a crème brûlée, why don’t you? We’ll be outside, Tom. We’ll be waiting.”

  And then the Worm slapped Scrbacek hard on the back and stepped out of the diner.

  Tinkle, tinkle.

  19

  MICKEY’S HARD BOYS

  He sat on his stool and closed his eyes, let the terror ratchet through him, felt it escalate until it filled every space, constricted every breath, twisted every thought. He let the terror run through him until he found an equilibrium between the terror outside and the terror in his heart, and in the center of that equilibrium he felt the first stirrings of a calm. Where it came from, he had not the vaguest idea, but with his eyes still closed he concentrated on that calm, tried to expand it as far as it would go, which wasn’t much, but it was something—enough to let him take a full breath, enough to let him open his eyes, enough to let his mind turn to something other than the fear.

  They were waiting for him outside, the bastards in the red fedoras, ready to turn him over to whoever would pay the most. And he held little doubt that the price had a dead-or-alive tag attached to it, maybe even more for the dead. He had to get out of this diner and past the bastards in the red fedoras and find a place to hide.

  He turned around and saw the Worm grinning at him through the window. He turned around again.

  The newspaper was still on the counter. He looked good in the picture, his cheek unbruised, his jaw clean-shaven, his hair coifed. The face of what he had been just two days before, when he still had an office and a career and never had to pay before being served. He pushed the pudding aside, spread the tabloid out before him, and read the article as if reading about someone else.

  Noted criminal attorney J.D. Scrbacek, a named suspect in the bombing murder of Ethan Brummel, is still at large. Once considered a possible target of the bombing of his Ford Explorer behind the county courthouse, Scrbacek is now thought to have set the device himself. This comes on the heels of a fire that destroyed his office and home late last night. After putting out the blaze, firefighters discovered in the basement of his building, protected by a tarp and undestroyed by the fire, a cache of illegal weapons, along with three blocks of plastic explosives of the same type used to destroy Scrbacek’s truck. Because of the weapons, Scrbacek is to be considered armed and dangerous.

  A motive for the murder has only been hinted at by the County Prosecutor’s Office, but one theory holds that Ethan Brummel, Scrbacek’s intern, had discovered something incriminating in his boss’s files and Scrbacek murdered him to stop him from talking to the police. Supporting that theory is a call from Ethan Brummel, logged the day before his death, to the State Bureau of Investigation, a record discovered only after Scrbacek came up missing. Also, in what has been described as a strange visit to the victim’s family after the murder, Scrbacek allegedly sought to determine if Brummel had disclosed to his family anything he had learned about Scrbacek’s practice. According to sources in the police department, the victim’s mother assured Scrbacek that her son had told her nothing, which may be why her life was spared.

  Caleb Breest, Scrbacek’s former client, recently released from jail, issued a statement through his new attorney, Cirilio Vega, claiming that Breest knew nothing about the killing of Ethan Brummel or why his former lawyer might have turned so brutally murderous. In the statement, Breest sent his deepest, heartfelt sympathies to the murder victim’s family.

  Scrbacek slammed the counter with the flat of his hand and felt the delicious slap of pain within the wound on his palm. Cirilio Vega, that bastard. He had been a friend. They had shared together their dreams and aspirations. And now, the betrayal: Vega taking over Breest’s representation and bad-mouthing Scrbacek to the press. How dare he? He slammed again his hand upon the counter.

  Stop, he told himself. Keep calm. Cirilio was only representing his new client; Scrbacek wouldn’t have done any differently. It wasn’t Cirilio that was framing his ass, it was someone else. And it wasn’t enough just to try to kill him, no. Now there were enough clues planted to make him the prime suspect in his own attempted murder. How insanely clever was that? And with Scrbacek considered armed and dangerous, a cop could shoot first, plant a small silver pistol in his deadened fist second, and no one would be the wiser. A righteous shooting, they all would say as they shook their heads over his riddled corpse. Totally righteous. With the magician grinning in the background.

  He slammed shut the paper and turned it over to hide his picture. The back of the tabloid told him the Phillies had won. How nice for them. He turned again to look out the window. They were still out there, the red-suits, waiting with patience for their quarry, laughing and cracking wise, and perhaps not paying as close attention as before.

  “Is there a way out the back of this place?” he asked the waitress.

  “Not for customers, hon.”

  “It’s a special case.”

  “Everyone thinks he’s a special case, believe me. Every damn one.”

  He pulled out his wad, rolled off another hundred, slid it across the counter. “For you and Ed if I can go through the back.”

  She held it up to the light, checking its security features, and then leaned into the window to the kitchen. “One to go out with the garbage,” she said.

  Ed nodded.

  “Do me a favor,” said Scrbacek. “Fill up my coffee cup and then stand in the doorway to the kitchen for a moment, like you’re having a deep philosophical conversation with Ed.”

  She cocked her head at Scrbacek as if he had just asked for ketchup with his pie. “A conversation? With Ed?”

  “Give it a try. You never know. I need to hit the head.”

  Scrbacek stood from his stool, leaving the newspaper on the counter. Without looking to the windows, he headed for the restroom as the waitress filled his cup with coffee. He left the door slightly open as he went inside.

  He immediately dropped to the floor. On his elbows and knees he slithered out the open door and scooted behind the counter where he was hidden from the windows. His left arm screamed in pain, but he ignored it as he crawled through the open door to the kitchen, brushing the waitress’s legs as he crept by. The door closed shut behind him.

  He crawled into something large and immovable and looked up. There stood Ed, in his dirty whites, a slab of a man with a cleaver in the tie of his apron, his heavy arms cradling a shotgun. Ed stared down at Scrbacek with disapproval.

  “The back door?” said Scrbacek.

  “I done heard about you,” said Ed, his voice a rumble so deep it shook the pots hanging over the stove.

  “Good things, I hope.”

  “Not necessarily.” Ed frowned down a moment more before reaching out and opening the back door.

  “Thanks,” said Scrbacek, crawling toward the opening. “By the way, dinner was marvelous.”

  Then he was outside, falling down a set of cement stairs, rolling into the side of a large trash bin. Lit by a bare bulb sticking out from the back of the diner, he looked around.

  Nothing.

  He darted to a shadow by the edge of the Dumpster and looked around again.

  Nothing.

  He was in a narrow alley between the diner and the solid brick wall of a low, long building. The smell of a week’s garbage caused his full stomach to churn. There was a gap at either end of the alley, and so the question was which way to run—to the right or to the left.

  And then he heard a
call, dark as the night, deep as his troubles, soft as a shiv in the gut.

  “Oh, Tom,” came a calm voice from the left. He peeked out from his shadow, peered down the length of the Dumpster, and saw the silhouette of a man in a fedora standing at the end of the alley, his legs spread. “We’re waiting for you, Tom.”

  Not to the left, he decided quickly. Definitely not to the left.

  Staying close to the brick wall, keeping the Dumpster between himself and the man, he headed to the right, skittering forward as fast as he could while still brushing his side tight against the brick. He looked behind him, saw that the sight line of the man was still blocked by the Dumpster, and then hurried on, turning forward, only to see another, bigger silhouette standing in his path.

  Scrbacek froze.

  “I see the sucker,” said the bigger silhouette.

  Before he could think it through, Scrbacek was headed back to the Dumpster, back to the yellow light of the diner. But instead of stopping and cowering, he charged forward, gaining speed, running past the Dumpster, running toward the smaller of the silhouettes, running right at the silhouette, lowering his right shoulder into a collision of pain that sent the silhouette tumbling and Scrbacek flying through the air.

  He landed on his back, sprawled on the asphalt.

  The moon was full in the sky overhead. The walls of the alleyway were gone. The ground felt soft on his back, soft like a feather mattress. He was sinking into the soft, lovely asphalt until he reached the bottom, which was hard and full of pain.

  He shook his head to clear his brain. Slowly, painfully, he rolled onto his front and fought to climb to his feet. He rose to his hands and knees, but when he tried to rise higher something stopped him, something kept him down. His mind still fuzzy, he wondered what it could be until something hard as a boot stomped him to the ground. He rolled again onto his back and saw two faces staring down at him, their sharp-brimmed fedoras neatly in place.