Short Ride to Nowhere Read online

  Short Ride to Nowhere

  By Tom Piccirilli

  Crossroad Press & Macabre Ink Digital Edition

  Copyright 2010 by Tom Piccirilli & Macabre Ink Digital Publications

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  1

  After they foreclosed on his house and he lost his wife, the kid, the dog, his signed first edition book collection, and found himself on the meth-heavy streets with a butterfly blade dug in about two inches between his short ribs, his hands covered in a seven-year-old girl’s blood, they packed Hale up and told him to go play with clay.

  At Sojourner State, he spent a couple months severely sedated, making ashtrays the way the pretty nurse had taught the mostly cataleptic group, his powerful fingers kneading the clay until it was almost hot to the touch. He carved smug faces in with his fingernails and then pummeled those arrogant grins out of existence. He’d recovered from the knife wound and his lung had re-inflated by then.

  At the end of each week the nurse would hand out ribbons for the best piece of “art” and he won every time. She would come over, put the ribbon on his the lapel of his robe, leave it there for about a minute, and then take it back again to reuse the following week.

  Hale’s ashtrays went for around eight bucks at the open street fair on Howard Avenue where the orderlies sold all the patients’ crafts. The woven baskets, stuffed pillows, crocheted blankets, figurines, and pottery added up to nice take. They turned half the profits over to the hospital and spent the rest of the cash on a small but booming hydro marijuana-growing operation hidden behind the utility shack on the east side of the grounds.

  Another enterprising orderly tried to set up gladiator matches between the paranoids, firebugs, chronic masturbators, bi-polars, claustrophobes, the disassociatives, the sociopaths, and depressives, going so far as to dressing them in suits of armor made from garbage can lids, PVC piping, and heavy foam rubber. But the depressives would just take a beating without raising a hand, the claustrophobes would run for open space, the masturbators would immediately begin to strangle their bishops, and the rest of them would just kinda lope in and try to kick the other guy in the balls.

  Bad enough, all that, until a shifty firebug figured out how to smuggle in some lighter fluid and a Zippo and nearly burned Ward C down to the ground.

  Hale roused once while the flames licked up the walls of the corridor outside his room a moment before the sprinklers came on. He watched the fire eating away at the childish scribbles one of the disassociatives had scratched into the blue paint with a bent paperclip. The picture showed the stick figures of a girl and a dog flying a kite under the rays of the sun. The bubbling paint eventually stripped away the picture and a name forced its way up his throat and prodded at his lips. After the sprinklers burst to life he stood under the streaming water falling over him like a heavy spring rain and he whispered, “Sandy.” It was his daughter’s name, though he hardly remembered.

  The cops were furious that the doctors kept Hale so tranqued up. They had a lot of questions about what had gone down the day they brought him in. They still didn’t have an ID on the girl. There was no missing persons report that matched her. It wasn’t Benjamin Hale’s daughter, Sandy, who was a little older than the D.B., aged twelve.

  They still didn’t know who had stabbed Hale, but they all thought that doing it with an old school butterfly blade showed some style. The cops braced the shrinks and tried to get them to let Hale go cold turkey, but every time he was weaned off his meds he’d get out of control and start shouting for his dog and his books and throwing the wet clay around at everybody.

  The lead Homicide detective figured Hale was faking it. He’d been around at the end of the goombah families’ run New York when the old mob bosses wandered the streets of Brooklyn in their pjs pretending to be senile so they could avoid a RICO indictment.

  He’d seen hardcase murderers claim they were suffering from repressed memory flashbacks, night terrors, or fits of violence due to an overabundance of anti-depressants or satanic intervention. The list of reasons why someone could butcher an old lady with a potato peeler and walk on a temporary insanity defense was getting ridiculously long.

  The firebug was a psycho little shit who’d offed his parents years before at the age of eight. Mom and Dad had told him not to play with matches. But after setting fire to the cat for the third time Daddy got radical and held a lit cigarette to his boy’s wrist. That night, the Bug stood in their doorway watching them sleep and sprinkled the gas can Dad kept in the shed for the mower all over the bed. He didn’t even have to light the match. First thing his father ever did when he woke in the morning was reach for his Camels and flare up.

  As the sound and smell of sloshing gasoline drew Dad awake, he peered at his son standing in the doorway of the bedroom and asked, “What’s the matter? Can’t sleep? What’s that stink?” He perched a cigarette off his bottom lip and reached for his lighter as Ma roused with a sneeze and said, “My nose is burning.” In an instant, it was, along with everything else about the Bug’s parents and the bed and the room and the house and, soon, half the block and six other people.

  The Bug had other skills besides. He was a hoarder and a hider and a thief.

  Hale said another name this time, his expression one of sorrow. “Christine.”

  Then his features shifted, first showing confusion and then a reluctant kind of aggressive happiness, as if he’d been given a dark vision and told that he would be forgiven his mistakes and failures in the afterlife, and someone else was about to take on his burden.

  His face attained a strange kind of mad joy. It was nothing new in this place, but unfamiliar to him. His head tilted listening to the voice saying that someone closer than his own blood would reciprocate the wrongs done upon him. And that from the pit of human rage would unleash an awful and lethal punishment. He saw a shadow striding forward in his dark vision and finally realized who it would be. He had known all along, of course, and let out a bark of laughter before whispering, “Jenks.”

  With no voice left at all, he mouthed; Maybe I can sleep now, and hurled himself at the reinforced window. He bounced back into the room among a scattering of broken glass and tried again. And again. A young nurse ran in and did nothing to stop him, just screamed for the orderlies, who were checking on the hydroponics. Hale flung himself at the window twice more until shards had worked their way deep enough in his throat to nick his carotid.

  With arterial spray arcing all over the day room, spattering the catatonics and firing up the carrot-waxers, the depressives, and the paranoids, the Bug looked at the rain of blood and began to dance in it cheerfully, clapping his hands and laughing because it looked exactly like a rain of flames falling from the sky.

  2

  It had taken Jenks two weeks to follow Hale’s trail to the New York City streets, another few days to find out about the arrest, and more than three months before he could hunt Hale through the system and track him to the proper mental facility. By the time the right people had been contacted and all the correct forms had been processed, and Jenks got his visiting privileges okayed by the docs, Hale was dead.

  The chief shrink told Jenks to come in anyway; he had a lot of questions.

  Jenks showed up at Sojourner State’s security booth where a guard who wore a sidearm stormed around
the gate with military-like proficiency. Jenks hadn’t had much sleep the last two days, lying in the back of his car parked in rest stop where the Freightliners came in off the Expressway like hurricanes. His eyes burned and he was on a razor-wire edge.

  The guard let him through and Jenks was immediately met by a pair of hardcase cops named Nolan and Wynn.

  They took him into one of the group therapy rooms. A doctor wearing a button-up sweater and plaid socks sat in the corner with one leg draped over the other, his penny loafers on parade, a notepad in his lap. He didn’t introduce himself. Jenks figured this was the chief headshrinker who’d botched the job on Hale.

  Nolan was sipping from a Styrofoam cup of coffee. He hummed softly when he drank. He was a bruiser from way back with a busted pug nose, heavily lined face, angry eyes, and a bitter twist of scarred mouth.

  The other one, Wynn, looked a little bored. Younger, almost handsome, knees crossed just like the doc. At the moment he was staring at a tack board where patients had put up photos they’d taken, some kind of creative therapy. Lots of pictures of them taking pictures of each other, eyes to cameras, grinning like homicidal maniacs focusing in on the last breath of some terrified teenager about to get smoked.

  Jenks wondered what they really saw through the lens. And what the shrinks noticed when they went flipping through the print-outs. Could a trained eye tell how emotionally delicate you were by the composition and framing?

  You take a picture of a tree and I take a picture of a tree and the doc comes in and looks at one and goes, “Jesus, we need to up your Thorazine.” Looks at the other and says, “My, you’ve come a long way, you’re ready to leave now.”

  You and I look at each other wondering, which of us is going home? Which of us is falling deeper into the bin?

  Nolan finished humming and swallowed. He glared at Jenks and said, “Thank you for coming all this way to talk with us, Mr. Jenks.”

  “I didn’t know I would be,” Jenks said. “I didn’t realize you’d be here at the hospital waiting for me.”

  It stopped Nolan, made him resettle in his seat. He wasn’t used to people talking back to him, jockeying to lead the conversation. He was ugly enough to usually run the show from the word go.

  He met Jenks’s eyes and held his gaze for longer than was necessary, the two of them getting each other a little more in focus. “Would you mind telling us exactly what was your relation to–”

  The cop trailed off, hoping Jenks would just jump right in, finish the sentence. But Jenks was eager to find out how they were defining Hale now. The patient? The victim? The killer? He could see that Nolan wanted to clear the books and blame the girl’s death on Hale. Wynn just kept angling his chin as he checked out the photos on the board, viewing faces and gauging the sickness of others. Somewhere in the hospital someone screamed, “Mama!”

  The doc hadn’t started scribbling yet. His pen was poised and his socks told everyone, I am plaid. I am on display; I rule the world and brook no opposition.

  “He was a friend,” Jenks said.

  That wasn’t the complete truth, but it was a part of it, a tail piece of it, and as much of an answer as anyone here was looking for. The fact was he and Hale hadn’t really liked each other much, but they were neighbors and loners by nature, and they didn’t mind sharing reading copies of their books. They were strange mirror images of each other–the same age, the same desperate tension in their eyes, and most of the same worries. The mortgage, the wife, the anxiety brought on by nightmares of their fathers’ faces.

  Jenks’ old man had been an ass-kicker, a third-rate boxer and manager of other third-rate boxers. Someone who always provided for the family no matter what he had to do to bring in some extra cash, whether it was making book or maybe breaking someone’s arm for the local syndicate boys. Hale’s old man had been a professor of philosophy, an educated man who always gave Hale a heartbreakingly sad smile whenever he botched tests or papers in college. Whenever he switched majors, whenever he dropped classes, whenever he brought a girl home who said ‘supposebly.’ Jenks and Hale used to have a beer on occasion, seated on one of their patios, glancing around at the yard and trying to think of themselves as men of property even with the banks completely fucking with their interest rates, property taxes going wild, the credit card companies coming in for the kill.

  They weren’t really friends; they were just two guys living side by side who both felt the world heaving beneath their feet. And they both lost everything practically at the same time.

  “And how many years were you friends?” Nolan asked.

  “Before he wound up on the skids, I knew him for four years or so. We were next door neighbors.”

  Nolan’s pug nose practically begged you to give it a jab. “Before he lost his home.”

  “Before I lost mine.”

  “I see.”

  The cop didn’t see shit, but it hardly mattered. Jenks wasn’t here to help anybody solve anything, he was here to worm as much information out of them as he could before getting back on the street to find out what the hell had happened to Hale.

  “And you two were close?”

  “We lent each other books from time to time.”

  It seems to be a satisfactory response.

  “Can you tell us exactly when Mr. Benjamin Hale became homeless and began living on the streets of Manhattan?”

  One face in particular caught Jenks’ attention. A young woman, maybe twenty, beautiful, blonde wavy hair the kind you love to run your hands through, that practically owns the wind, with a tilted alluring smile, should be on every magazine cover on the checkout line, and she was wearing the Sojourner pajamas.

  Jenks said, “We both got divorced and lost our houses at about the same time, a year or so ago. We partnered up and worked on a fishing boat off Montauk after that.” Jenks gave Nolan the name of the captain and the rig. “At the end of the summer we were cut from the crew. I stuck around the eastern end of the island doing odd jobs, but Hale had started to withdraw, couldn’t make the effort to talk anymore.”

  The doc perked up, bounced his leg a little, kicked his foot out a little. “You recognized that he was becoming cataleptic...unresponsive...and you made no effort to get him professional help?”

  The plaid socks said, I curse you. I spit at thee. My minions will cut out your heart.

  Jenks said, “You mean why didn’t I put him into a mental institution where he could either burn to death or cut his own throat?”

  It shut the shrink down, jotting more notations.

  Jenks continued. “One day he just wandered off. I trailed him to the train station where he took the commuter in to Penn. I hunted around for a couple of weeks before I picked up his trail. He was selling books he found in Dumpsters on a folding table in Times Square. He was known in the area. People liked him. Especially the local book dealers. Hale seemed to be rousing some.”

  Wynn nodded. He’d heard this part before. They’d questioned everyone in the area too. They knew the story. But the cops didn’t know anything after that. Who the girl was or what had led to Hale’s knifing or why he’d taken such a big step backwards into catatonia. Or catalepsy the shrink had said. Jenks didn’t know the difference. He didn’t trust that the fucking doctor did either.

  “And where do you reside now, Mr. Jenks?”

  “I live out of my car,” Jenks said.

  “That’s called vagrancy.”

  “Only if I stay in any one place for too long. And I don’t.”

  Jenks had been sleeping out on the beaches. He was tan, more fit than he’d ever been before, and keenly aware that there wasn’t a person in the world who would give a shit if he went out of the game the way Hale did.

  “Has anyone told his wife?” Jenks asked.

  They all ignored him. They’d been waiting for a significant question from Jenks, just so they could ignore it and prove who was in charge.

  “Your friend is suspected of murdering a nine-year-old girl,” Nol
an said with a growl. It was a well-practiced growl. It proved just how serious he was, a purveyor of truth, a fighter for justice, who did not like nine-year-old girls being murdered. Like if you didn’t growl, you must just love it when children get knifed. “She was stabbed.”

  “How often?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “How many times was she stabbed?”

  Again he was ignored, except that Wynn perked up and the doc’s plaid socks said, Oh ho, oh, so you vish to know about zee details. Zees details, zey arouse you, yes?

  “And your thoughts?” Nolan asked.

  “My thoughts?”

  “Yes.”

  “My thoughts are he didn’t do it. My thoughts are that he got knifed trying to protect the little girl. And you have nothing to dispute that. Because if you did, you wouldn’t be asking me my thoughts.”

  “You went looking for him.”

  “I did.”

  “Why? Why do you even care?”

  “I already answered that.”

  “Not to my satisfaction.”

  “Fuck your satisfaction.”

  Nolan’s jaw muscles tightened, adding a lean feral appearance to his face. His upper lip skinned back as he began to argue the point, his huge hands tightening into fists, applying enough pressure to the table so that his Styrofoam coffee cup began to dance in place. Jenks wondered how many wormy criminal suspects had cracked thanks to Nolan’s theatrics. Enough of them for him to keep up the act. But how Nolan he think it was going to play out with Jenks, a guy who was here voluntarily, to help out, a guy with nothing left in the world to lose?

  Wynn shifted his body slightly and came around to face Jenks. “We don’t know who the girl was. Do you have any idea?”

  “No.”

  “He had a daughter about the same age.”

  “Yeah. Sandy.”

  Wynn let it sit out there, calmly waiting. The only sound their heavy breathing, the doc scratching, distant shouts from patients and some slamming doors. No wonder Hale had decided to off himself. After this, what else was there? Where else could you go?