Chapter 56
I stood on the X, getting a grip on my breath and mind.
Someone certainly had a sense of humor, but I wasn’t laughing.
I’d burrowed up, Bugs Bunny style, from the basement into the storage locker behind the pub, and, least funny of all, the storage locker was padlocked. From the outside.
I moved some heavy boxes onto the giant X to weigh down the hatch and sat on the nearest one, exhausted and weak and trying to remember active-shooter training advice I’d picked up over time.
Could I just stay here until Quin had the situation locked down, until I heard the footfalls of cavalry and the ringing voices of authority?
Where were the police?
We’re just sitting ducks here.
Right. If Silent Jim and Ned had never come back to the storeroom, Quin and Lumpy Jim could still be stuck in there, waiting for something to kick off. Could Alex still be in the building, leading some kind of scavenger hunt for the record books?
What would Jim and Ned do when they finally realized there was no treasure?
What if Pascal and the group hadn’t made it out but had been shut up somewhere else? The walk-in?
I couldn’t wait for something to happen. I needed to make something happen.
But to leave this cozy little closet, I’d have to pry the door open, or try. It would be noisy, giving away my position, and once I did it, my hiding place couldn’t be barricaded again.
I was nervy, vibrating within my skin. I could feel adrenaline pumping through me like one of those cartoons of the circulatory system, red and blue veins chugging. I itched for freedom. I was so close.
Could I break open the door and make it to the alley? Was there a better plan?
I didn’t know if I could make myself move.
Then I heard footsteps, a voice, and drew myself in, quiet, small.
I wasn’t sure what I’d heard. A voice, the lift of a question, but no voice responding.
The door to the locker rattled and began to open—
I threw myself at the door, hard, fast, and met fleshy resistance and a human gut-groan. I gave an extra shove, darting out and away from a bark of surprise.
Behind the door, Ned held his face, blood gushing from his nose, and yelled something. Mike?
I dove toward the open door to the alley and the sweet stink of garbage and piss.
“I said—”
Silent Jim cut off mid-growl as I sprang through the open doorway. He turned his head, his eyes widening in surprise. I skidded, touching a knee to the pavement that I would feel later, palms scraping, then jumped back to my feet and scrabbled back through the door.
Ned was still bent over at the storage locker, blocking my way into the pub. “You bitch! You broke my nose.”
My guitar, my sweet Peggy Lee, sat where I’d left her at the corner near the door. It should have been Oona’s softball bat, but a bad workman blames her tools. I grabbed her by the neck and dashed for the stairs.
And then Ned was behind me and had the back of my sweater bunched in his fist.
“What are you gonna do, huh, Doll?”
Well, that was the question, wasn’t it?
I grabbed the handrail and spun, swinging Peggy Lee as a cudgel and bringing down the wrath of every country music done-her-wrong song ever sung.
Maybe Ned hadn’t expected me to sacrifice my guitar. She hit a discordant note against his bloody teeth and crooked nose that drove his head backward. His hands grabbed for air.
Jim, at the bottom of the stairs, reared aside to avoid Ned as he fell.
Neither of us waited to see which bits of Ned survived. I threw the last of Peggy Lee’s fret board and spun around, clawing at the railing.
I heard Jim coming up behind me, slow, all the time in the world.
“What do you think you’re going to do up there, cowgirl?” Jim said as I reached for the doorknob.
Locked.
Pull, jiggle—
“No landline. Your phone … a brick, you called it? You’re out of friends to call, anyway.”
I swallowed a sob at what that might mean. Alex, unaccounted for, Sicily, Oona, the band. Quin’s element of surprise might not have been enough.
Lift and push. Pop.
I had my hand on the knob—
“Turn around,” Jim commanded quietly.
I turned and pressed my back against the door, my legs liquid. I gripped the door handle to keep me on my feet.
He stood at the top of the stairs, the gun tucked into the front of his jeans. Hands crossed in front of him, a man at leisure.
“Where’s that wink of yours, Doll Devine?” he said. “Where’s your song?”
“If you’ve hurt Alex…” My voice twisted away from me. “I will rip your tongue out of your mouth and write a song about it.”
He made a fake impressed face. “Not bad. Look, it didn’t have to come to this, kid. I never laid a hand on your boyfriend.”
“Alex isn’t my boyfriend. He’s…”
I couldn’t make the words come out of my mouth, and would the words do anything at all to save me, or Alex, or anyone? They were just words.
I had heard a small noise somewhere behind me in the apartment. Who could be left to be inside? I was out of friends.
“You don’t know what Alex is to you, either?” Jim said with a grin.
Not Oona—
Then I heard that huffy, deep bark of warning Bear always used to start a conversation.
The dogs.
The dogs were still in the apartment. I could hear the tap of their nails as they shifted their weight paw to paw and waited.
Now I had to worry about the dogs, too?
“Alex is my best friend,” I said.
“Isn’t that sweet? Anyway, I meant the banjo player,” Jim said. “That wasn’t me.”
He stepped back to include the moaning pile of Ned below us.
“Your short-order cook down there is the one who got the banjo kid involved. He did the killing and he did the desecrating of his corpse.” He straightened his shoulders.
“I’m only guilty of suggesting Ned find another place for the body. Couldn’t have the cops nosing around.”
“You didn’t count on our landlord bringing Joey’s body back. Being the same kind of scum as you.”
“I always count on people being scum,” he said, somehow filling out, filling in. “If it’s one thing I’ve learned,” he said, “humanity is a failed experiment.”
Something I’d said had touched a live wire against his spine, and I could see him, the real him. Taller, wilder, more dangerous. This man was no longer the empty shell of a Jim. He was someone specific. Someone come alive, fueled and filled by hate. What a waste.
“No,” I said. “That’s not true at all.”
“Oh, because of music, right? Art? You think just because people can bang on drums, that’s some kind of get-out-of-jail-free card?
It’s not enough. Look around at this society we’ve built, kid.
It’s all set up to make you believe you’re swimming in a warm pond.
But it’s piss.” His arms spread wide to encompass everything around us, and beyond.
“You think music is enough to make up for the rest of it? You’re still a believer, huh?
You still believe there’s some big net below to catch us?
If there’s war, you’ll be spared? If there’s disaster, you’ll be saved?
You can’t possibly be on the losing end, not you.
Your health, your job. Your family, your faith.
Faith in your fellow man, in doctors, in your government, in systems. You think you’ll always have a soft place to land? ”
Something in this diatribe sounded true.
Earned. Silent Jim—but that wasn’t his name.
Mike, Ned had called out to him. Mike wasn’t singing someone else’s song.
This was a riff on the conversation he’d had with Quin the day I’d left the bar unlocked—the conversation Quin had baited him into having, about his troubles. His job. His injury. His—
“You’re not special,” he said now, leaning close enough that I caught the meaty, masculine stench of him.
Of desperation. His eyes were black, barren.
“One slip down the ladder of life, and they’ll forget they ever heard of you.
The only people looking for you will be the people you owe money to and the goons they send to your door. ”
Alone in the pub the other night, someone pounding at the door. Carpets pulled from the floors and doors yanked from their hinges. How much of that had been Edith’s client trying to convince Alex to sell the pub, and how much was it this guy bringing his creditors to the front door of McPhee’s?
“Mike,” I said. “Mike Jordan.”
He blinked and the hand at his side twitched in surprise.
“Did you have your mail forwarded to the pub?” I asked.
The old fury came roaring back. “One of the ex-wife’s little jokes,” he said. “She can afford them now that she has a new husband, new name. New dad for our kids. It’s all laughs for her. She can start over, that’s fine. But she didn’t have to tell my boys—” His voice cracked.
Below us, Ned moaned dully.
“My sons think their dad is some deadbeat. Some stoner.”
I looked up. His injury. His addiction. That’s what Quin had pulled out of him that day at the bar. But addiction didn’t have to be a dead end. I had to believe it. I had seen it. “If you’re struggling, you can get—”
“I’m not an addict!” Mike roared, his face going red.
Behind the door, Bear barked once, but Mike didn’t seem to hear.
I pressed myself against the door as he leaned in and spoke in a low, patient voice.
“Every last person you know is a single catastrophe away from the street. From doing anything to survive. Anything. Your boyfriend. Your best friend,” he spat. “Even you.”
“Joey wasn’t like that,” I said. “Alex…” My throat closed up, but I fought through it. “And Oona, all my friends you threatened. They’re good people.”
“I’m a good person,” he said. “I was. I am. Nobody was supposed to get hurt.”
He blinked over his shoulder for a second, a shadow passing over his face. I realized I hadn’t heard a whimper out of Ned in a few minutes.
I couldn’t think about it. Couldn’t be distracted thinking that Alex might be lying somewhere, too. I’d already had to begin folding Joey’s death into myself, make it part of my reality—but I couldn’t do the same for Alex.
“If you got what you came for,” I said through tears, “just leave.”
“You know I didn’t,” Mike said, with something like pity. “The treasure isn’t real—you warned me and I didn’t listen.”
“The treasure is real,” I sobbed.
He narrowed his eyes at me. “Are you saying—”
“But you’ll never find it, because you’ll never value it,” I said. “The pub is the treasure. The community Alex built, all the people—”
“You’re a speech giver on top of everything else?” he said. “All right, I’ll meet you more than halfway. McPhee’s Tavern is a gall’durn gold mine—is that what you need to hear?” He looked at me with real sadness, the silence around us stretching. “Okay,” he said. “Open the door.”
I was shaking, the door handle rattling gently in my hand, and I heard it again, the shuffle and clatter of the dogs, expectant, on the other side. An open door meant a walk.
“Open the door, Dahlia,” Mike said. Almost kindly.
An open door meant a friend. An open door meant—
An open door meant a human who could reach the kitchen counters. An open door meant a treat.
I didn’t have time to wonder if it would work. I swung the door open, diving wide of it.
“Wufers,” I called. I curled my hand into a fist and flung my opening hand into Mike Jordan’s startled face.
The guy reared back as though I had thrown a grenade. As the dogs thundered out at him, he reached for the gun, and he nearly had it out when they struck, low and hard, knees and crotch, just as Oona had trained them.
He buckled but stayed on his feet, hunched, his hand reaching again for his waist. But before he could straighten up, I lifted my right boot into the underside of his chin.
The gun flew out of his hand and clattered down the stairs as he was thrown backward—nearly catching himself on the railing.
At his feet, the dogs were spinning fur, snapping teeth.
Lemon’s weight bounced off his forward leg and he twisted, losing his footing and his grip.
My hand shot out to catch him, instinct, as he tumbled backward over the railing.
The dogs tilted their heads at the howl—
Cut short.
I ordered the dogs both back into the apartment, threw out two Wufers apiece from the jar, and collapsed on the floor.
What had just happened?
What had I just done?
The apartment door stood open. I stretched out and kicked it shut, then reached up to flip the dead bolt. I put my back to the door and balled up against it, shuddering, while the dogs finished their treats.
They came to lick at my face and hands and let me know it was long past time for a walk.
I pulled Bear toward me and cried into his thick neck, for Joey and Alex and even Ned and what had just happened and everything, everything.
There was always so much, and now I wasn’t sure how much I had suffered and how much suffering I had caused.
Lemondrop nudged in against me, her head pushing against my hand to pet her. Bear sat next to me, and I clung to his neck. I didn’t know what else to do.
Sirens were wailing along Milwaukee Avenue, finally, finally, too late. Lemon’s ears pricked up, listening, and then she lifted her head and joined in, howling-ow-owling along. Singing at the top of her lungs.