When Carney knocked Oakes, and the campaign, he was knocking her hopes for herself. Oakes was crooked, but Elizabeth didn’t know that. She believed what she set down in the Women for Oakes pamphlets: that change was coming.
Elizabeth read Marie’s message. “Ventilator?”
“Isn’t it great? The boy’s doing okay.”
“Who?”
“The boy upstairs from the store.” He ran it down but her face remained blank. Was it possible he hadn’t mentioned it? “The main thing is that he’s getting better.”
“I didn’t realize you knew him.”
“Of course I know him. Arnold is my tenant.”
“Albert.”
“Albert, Arnold—that’s not the point.”
The front door rattled in its frame. The doorbell rang for a blink, as if it had shorted.
There had been some break-ins on their street, taking advantage of the back alley. Elizabeth looked at the skillet on its peg by the stove. One time they thought they heard an intruder and Elizabeth had armed herself with the cast-iron skillet as they roamed the house after the source of the noise. They never did figure out what it was. “They have keys,” Carney said. The kids wouldn’t forget their keys at the same time. “I got it,” Carney said.
It wasn’t a druggie or a wino. He recognized the windbreaker through the window in the door. The door fell inward under Pepper’s weight. His face was swollen, slick with sweat and blood, and he collapsed on the floor of the vestibule before Carney could catch him.
FIVE
Professional bruisers recognize the distinctive thump generated by a baseball bat striking human muscle or fat. It’s not a squishy, soft-tissue sound, or a pulverize-fingers sound. It is substantial, meaty and authoritative. That Friday evening on 104th Street, Pepper reckoned that it was better to produce that sound as the slugger and not the sluggee, offering up one’s thighs, small of back, or skull as a drum. He’d been distracted by his annoyance at Carney’s assignment and his nostalgia for more daring jobs, and they got to him. Okay: Get back in it.
There were three men, one to oversee and two to clobber. Pepper drew himself from the concrete. The next blow smacked his lower back and his knees buckled. Like he was struck by lightning—but the lightning kept going. He writhed on the pavement. The man in charge yelled instructions. They carried Pepper into the backseat of a red Cadillac DeVille. The car pulled out.
The boss barked from the passenger seat, one hood drove, and the other recited his favorite threats and dug the muzzle of a revolver into Pepper’s cheek. Pepper relaxed his body and slumped on the vinyl seat, staring into the floorboard. It helped with the pain. The man with the gun reeked of bad cologne that had evaporated into crappier cologne. Pepper wheezed in and out as he attempted to regain mastery over his body.
“…uptown.” Pepper recognized the voice. Vicious, rumbly. From where? He had been on a job. Not with this man; he had been warned to keep an eye on him. Security. Security for one of Corky Bell’s poker games. Not lately—before Corky kicked the bucket. Loudmouth bitch, taunting better players: Reece something. Enforcer and top lieutenant to Notch Walker. What the hell was his problem? Get out of the car and figure it out later.
The driver cursed and beat the horn three times. There was traffic. Friday evening—people dressed up and walking slow to show off their fancy clothes, taxis to dinner and movies, yokels driving into the city for a night out. They didn’t put one in the back of Pepper’s head, so they wanted information or a different location to torture or kill him for some reason to be determined later. The car stopped short. Reece said, “Watch the fuck out!”
Pepper was bent in a slump behind the driver. The gun eased off his cheek. Pepper shifted his weight toward the door and Bad Cologne said, “Don’t fucking move!” and bonked him on the head. The light changed—the Cadillac lurched forward.
“Some goddamn cops,” the driver said.
“Chill,” Reece said.
Bad Cologne moved the gun from Pepper’s face and fixed his posture to look less hinky. “Speed up a little,” Reece said.
The three of them looking around, trying to play cool, Pepper figured. Gun, hood, door.
He reared back and slammed his shoulder into Bad Cologne, pinning him. Pepper got a grip on Bad Cologne’s gun hand. They grappled in the backseat as Reece said, “Chill, chill!” The gun went off—floorboard. It was loud. The driver stepped on the gas. The motion knocked Pepper and Bad Cologne backward. Reece cursed. Bad Cologne’s fingers loosened. Pepper gained control of the piece, fumbled with the lock, and rolled onto the pavement. The green moving van tailgating the sedan almost obliterated him. Motorists struck up a honking match, trying to out-noise one another. Pepper hobbled south down Third Ave, ducking. Was the Cadillac still headed uptown or had it stopped? A little girl eating ice cream stared at him, mouth smeared with vanilla, agape, as her mother recoiled in horror. Blood running down his face? Blood running down his face. He didn’t see the police car. He crossed 119th, staggering and hopping. They’d have to follow him on foot, no way to reverse in this traffic. Them: boxed in. Him: dizzy and panting. At 118th, he veered west, opposite the flow of traffic, saw no one chasing him as he rounded the corner. Eight doors down, he stumbled into the cubby of shadow beneath the stoop of a boarded-up brownstone and shut his eyes.
The next time he opened them he was in Carney’s living room. No—he’d gotten there under his own power somehow, which implied he had opened his eyes. Had he been run over by a green light’s worth of vehicles on the way? He lifted his head—let it drop again.
Carney and Elizabeth whisper-argued in the hall.
“I don’t know that he wants to go to a hospital.”
“What? Look at him—he needs a hospital.”
“He doesn’t like doctors. You know he’s a big baby underneath.”
“I know what kind of man he is, Ray. Don’t try that.”
“He made it here—it’s where he wants to be.”
Pepper closed his eyes again. It was still dark when he next woke. Curled on his side. Bath towel under his head. A rubber bag of melted ice had slid off his face. He tried to move and it felt like his blood had turned to broken glass and shot around inside him. He counted to ten and shuffled into the kitchen, where the radio was on low. News station. Gas prices out of control.
Elizabeth was up reading a big hardcover book—Centennial. She observed his slow progress into the kitchen with pursed lips. The yellow paint job was new, he thought. She held her hand out, indicating the seat across from her at the breakfast table. She rose to aid him when he tottered, but he made it to the chair. The Felix the Cat clock over the sink said it was past three.
Bleary as he was, Pepper had no trouble discerning his host’s sour mood.
“I got jumped,” he said.
“Jumped! By what, a Mack truck?” She mumbled something.
“What?”
“I said you better not get blood all over my goddamn couch.” She rose. “Let me get more ice for that pack.”
She twisted the ice tray. They say these new plastic ones were better than the metal ones with the lever, but he wasn’t buying it. Elizabeth refilled the ice bag and told him she was going to bed. His room was made upstairs if he wanted to sleep in. “Otherwise the kids are going to wake you. And they’ll have questions about ‘Mack trucks.’？”