Fuckin' Lie Down Already

CHAPTER TWO

Sometimes you can surprise the hell out of yourself, stepping into a scene like this and still not losing all your cool.

So he’d walked in the door to see Kath lying there on the couch with a pink scrunchie tied tightly around her arm, the syringe on the floor but the broken needle still jabbed in a vein.

Her chest was covered in vomit, one thickly encrusted breast exposed. Legs wide open, knees bent and propped with her feet wedged into the corner cushions. The torn panties had been thrown across the room and hung off one of her high school cheerleading trophies on the mantel. Clay could tell she was dead by the effortless, smooth look of serenity and release in her slumped body.

A blur of motion broke to his left. He turned, reaching for his gun, and recognized the face-pissant hustler from the neighborhood name of Rocco Tucci. Chuckie Fariente must’ve hired him, paid him off with a few grams of skag. God damn it, nobody took care of their own business anymore.

Rocco was holding one of Clay’s throwaway.32s. He must’ve been in the house for a while, tearing the place apart, to have found it inside the cutaway panel behind the night stand. If he’d kept digging he would’ve discovered two others, all with their serial numbers filed off, untraceable. Rocco gave a quick smirk of triumph, aimed from his hip, and pulled the trigger.

Lunging forward, Clay let out a bark of fury even before the agony exploded in his belly. The force drove him back against the wall and he almost went through the cheap plaster before he dropped to the carpet. The smell of his own cooking flesh filled Clay’s nostrils and nearly made him go into a fit of sneezing. Rocco grinned and Clay could guess why. There was a man-shaped hole in the stucco. Must’ve looked pretty damn funny from where the bastard was standing.

Rocco fired twice more but he was coming down off his high and the fear had started to get hold of him. Both shots went wild, striking the floor on either side of Clay’s head. The screen door banged shut, and Rocco’s terrified footsteps receded down the sidewalk to where he’d parked his car in the shopping center at the end of the block.

As Clay lay there, still trying hard not to sneeze, he heard Mrs. Fusilli’s yapping Chihuahua, Cuddles, barking its little ass off next door. The thing didn’t stop for ten seconds all day long. It was no wonder the neighborhood was filling up with addicts-listening to that mutt would drive you out of your head if you weren’t on your way already.

“Cuddles,” he whispered into the rug, tasting fuzz, “give it a rest.”

Clay heard the sound of gushing and couldn’t believe he was still alive with that much blood running out. The worst he’d ever seen was a guy who’d had his throat slit by his teenage son in an argument over the best wide receiver in the league. You never knew what could do it to you.

Guy was lying in a two-inch deep pool, vocal cords sliced through, but still flailing and trying to talk. Clay was the first on the scene and just kneeled there with his fingers stuck in the man’s carotid and jugular veins, doing his best to plug the holes, arterial pressure blasting blood all over the place. But the guy just wouldn’t die.

Maybe it was like that here.

Clay looked down shocked to see that there was hardly any blood at all. The wound was nearly cauterized by the bullet. His flesh sizzled but the rip was there, opening wider. He’d never been shot before, not even nicked, in his fifteen years on the force, but he’d heard about this kind of thing happening on occasion. You heard it all eventually. After being shot you joined a different kind of club, stuck behind a desk usually, and had nothing to do but tell stories.

Clay’s shirt smoldered and threads of smoke twined into his face. He gasped and managed to shift and turn over to smother the sparks. He thought about just going to sleep right then, but the water was running.

“Oh Christ,” he begged, “no…”

He’d heard the bath.

Overflowing.

You do what you have to do, there’s nothing else. He tried to make it to his feet but wasn’t quite there yet.

So he crawled to his son.

Edward bobbed face-down in the water, with his blonde hair floating above like a golden lily-pad, wreathing his crown. Fingers of his left hand were touching the side of the tub the way a swimmer would reach for the edge of a pool. His other hand lay beneath him, bent awkwardly under his chest. The red and blue toy boats had drifted out of the flooding tub and now lay sideways, trapped under a steady stream of soapy water sluicing onto the floor.

His boy’s naked back had broken the surface and was dry and warm to the touch. Clay placed his palm there and wanted to leave it for a while, but he realized he still had motions he had to go through.

In his career he’d saved perhaps a half dozen people through CPR. He worked on his son for fifteen minutes-mouth to mouth, thumping and massaging his chest, pounding at his boy’s heart. He thought he might be crying but wasn’t sure and didn’t want to check.

Every now and then a whine slid deep within him but it wasn’t like any sound he’d heard before. It could be a different kind of death rattling around, hungry and mewling and wanting out, but Clay kept a tight hold. He wasn’t going to go yet, and he continued working at his boy until he couldn’t take the frozen, insane glare in Edward’s eyes anymore.

Clay kneeled with his forehead to his son’s face, the fiery pain in his belly growing and the flames clawing up through him to settle in his brain. Something in his chest throbbed for a moment and then a sob broke. Clay threw his head back and thought he might howl like a dying dog, but all that came out was a guttural snarl.

Taking the towel from the rack, Clay dried his boy carefully. He was beginning to move a little better now-the vicious twinges of pain made him grunt and gnash his teeth, but at least he could stand. He headed back to the living room, stumbling and shouldering his way along the walls, seeing clues everywhere and knowing exactly what had happened.

It was a wicked way to go through the world. Always capable of putting the pieces together quickly, in the correct order. A hell of a talent when he needed it, and something much uglier the rest of the time.

He could picture how it happened, all right, that’d always been the easy part-walking through the crime scene, adding one fact on top of the other. The angle of blood spatter, heaving arc of the knife.

His father had been the same way-the man would wander in and glance into your face, and he’d know everything you’d been doing, everything you might be trying to hide. On the job thirty years until he’d retired to Fort Lauderdale, started planting flowers and tending fruit trees. He was dead six months later with a head full of tumor.

Clay nearly went down. His own brain was stuffed with rot now. He twisted sideways, came to a rest against the edge of the couch, and felt the blackness welling up behind his eyes. His mostly digested breakfast trickled out of his torn guts and between his fingers.

The urge to sit beside Kathy grew overwhelming. Another moment to play house, just fade off into the night and pretend it was all going to work out on the other side of hell. He tugged her feet free from under the cushion, sat, and laid her legs across his stinking lap.

“Just need a minute to rest,” he said. “But I swear, it isn’t over. Trust me. This isn’t how it’s going to end, baby.”

He hadn’t called her that in a while. Things had begun creeping downhill again the past couple of months, and he still wasn’t certain why. His fault probably-a better than fair chance at that. He had fallen into cliché, which was something he’d been hoping to avoid all his life, but failing at most of the time. At thirty-seven, his middle age crisis had sprung out at him from behind a fucking bush and sent him sprawling. He tumbled into the predictably routine dismay of having more of his life behind him now than out in front. Where was the grace and wisdom you were supposed to find as your gray patches started to fill in? He didn’t know.

Kath had been even more fidgety the past few weeks as well-snappish, moody, quickly depressed and really pining for the good life that had somehow eluded them. He couldn’t get over the feeling that he just hadn’t tried hard enough.

Maybe if he’d pushed just one extra inch along the way they could’ve made it over the line to whatever they’d been missing. The slightest brushing against the larger dream.

She’d gone through the same sort of thing a couple of years earlier, after a cervical cancer scare. He’d seen that kind of thing jolt people into becoming wheat germ and Yoga nuts. For others, it swung them around in the other direction. Kathy wound up screwing around with H for a couple of months, but she fooled with it the same way he’d had a brief period of binge drinking. Trying to find other ways to deal with the burden of high school hopes that kept tugging at your ankles after all these years.

Being a drunk and an addict didn’t help either, so they stopped after a while, quick and easy as that. Then the baby came and the world began to have straight angles and clear-cut corners again. A texture, direction, and simplicity that mattered.

With a gentleness he didn’t know he still possessed, Clay touched Kathy’s face, nudged her chin back and forth feeling how the jaw was broken. Rocco had to knock her down first, tear the scrunchie from her hair, tie her arm off while she struggled weakly.

So Chuckie Fariente knew more about them than Clay had figured. That prick put the word on the street until some dealer came forward and gave him details about the dark corners of Clay’s and Kathy’s life. All right, that was fair. Clay had spent the last few years crawling through Chuckie’s garbage bags and listening to the most goddamn boring wiretaps in all of mobster history.

Chuckie sends Rocco out to do the deed, thinks it’s a nice gag to make it look like a drug deal gone bad. Cop’s wife with a needle in her arm. Tends to muddle the situation, brings the past into play, casts doubts on Clay’s character. Makes him look like a dirty cop who’s into Christ knows what. His own department squelches the investigation in case there’s more to be found and it leads to other officers. Nobody needs the bad publicity nowadays. Just goes to show how easy it is to cause total chaos in the NYPD.

Good move, Chuckie.

There it was.

Clay slid Kathy’s feet off of his lap and saw they were now streaked with his blood. He got up with a growl, made his way back to the bathroom, carried Edward to the bedroom and dressed him in a new outfit that Kathy’s mother had bought. Blue shorts, little black suspenders, white collared shirt. Kathy didn’t like it for some reason, but Clay did. It made his boy look a little older, as if there’d been more time for him.

He brought Edward out to the car. It took a few minutes but he got the car-seat working, strapped his son in. Cuddles was still going at it, barking with such a frantic high-pitched whining that Clay was beginning to enjoy the noise. The tiny dog dug feverishly at the chicken-wire fence separating the driveways.

Back in the house, he dressed Kath in something comfortable-a white sweater and jeans, a light blue jacket, so that she looked, somehow, the way she did back on the cheer squad while he watched from the stands. She didn’t feel like dead weight. He could almost believe that she was helping him-because she knew they were all in this together now.

He said, “You finally got the vacation you wanted, baby. We’re going to take a little road trip. A family outing.” He wasn’t quite so far over the edge yet not to realize how crazy he sounded. It was all right though, he didn’t mind much.

Whatever it took.

He grabbed a handful of paper towels and stuffed them against his belly, holding in a shriek. If he let it out he’d never stop. Took the roll and a can of potpourri out to the car, then looked around the place, wondering what else he might need. He slung Kath over his shoulder and hauled her out to the Caprice, feeling her hands swaying back and forth over his ass, the way she used to fool around with him on the dance floor. He went down to one knee twice but finally managed to get her into the passenger seat.

Another wave of pain flared beneath his heart but it was only a sliver of sorrow. Clay forced it back down, checked the rearview mirror and saw Edward’s eyes were still half-open. He wanted to tell his son that he wasn’t missing as much as the boy might think, that life was uglier than wherever he was at now.

Backing out, Clay felt a slight thump under the rear left wheel and knew instantly that Cuddles had dug his way under the fence and gotten loose. The hell was going on? He got out and looked down at the crushed dog. The sudden and intense silence on the block brought Mrs. Fusilli rushing to her front door. She spotted Cuddles lying there, bloody with tire tracks over his snapped back, and started screeching.

Clay picked the Chihuahua up and tossed him into the back seat next to Edward. The boy’s eyes seemed to light a bit so maybe it was the right thing to do.

If he packed enough death around him maybe it would insulate him from his own murder for just long enough.

Mrs. Fusilli really had a set of pipes on her. Tits down to her girdle and lungs to match. He looked over his shoulder at her and said, “Sorry, lady, but that little bastard has been driving me fuckin’ nuts for two years. Go buy a nice goldfish.”

The expression on her deranged face actually made him grin. He beeped the horn and gave a quick fluttering wave before stomping the pedal and tearing down the street towards seething damnation.