Short Ride to Nowhere Read online

  Jenks looked at the photo of the crazy beautiful girl again. He took the reins again, as he was expected to do. “You think Hale was so nuts that he kidnapped a girl about his daughter’s age because he couldn’t distinguish reality from fantasy, that it? But you know that’s not the case.”

  “And how do we know that?” Nolan asked.

  “If it was, you’d have a missing child report and you’d know who the hell she was.”

  There went Wynn, grinning. He liked dealing with smart people, even if they were on the other side of the table.

  Hale had probably been offed for whatever he had in his pockets. How much could it have been? Ten bucks, maybe. This was the age of a new Depression. You had contemporary versions of Bonnie and Clyde roaming the highways. Middle age mutts like Jenks with no future and damn little past. With no homes and no money, no health insurance, no benefits, no stability. No chance, no choice but to watch their kids get jacked on meth with no hope for ever grabbing hold of the American dream. Jenks wondered what the next play was supposed to be. “What about the blade?”

  “What about it?”

  “Learn anything? Fingerprints? Where it was sold?”

  “No prints. It was clean but old. They used to be popular back in the fifties, sixties.”

  “Sure.” Jenks nodded, thinking about his old man. His father had once come home with a butterfly blade, flipping it around but unable to do it with any precision. He’d taken it off some mook who’d pulled it after being cornered in an alley. Jenks remembered blood on his father’s knuckles as he’d spun the knife trying to get the handles to line up, Jenks’ terrified reflection showing in the shining metal.

  He looked at the shrink. “Did he ever say anything to you that might’ve explained what happened to him?”

  “No,” the doctor said. Jenks waited. So did the doc. So did the cops. So did the girl and the other patients on the wall. Everybody waiting for the other guy to do something, explain something, give something.

  “Where are Hale’s belongings?” Jenks asked.

  “He had none.”

  “He had books. He sold books in Times Square. He had a wallet, pictures of his kids. The photos mattered to him. He once dropped his wallet over the stern while we were hauling in a net of bluefish and he went in after it.”

  Nolan glanced through his paperwork. Wynn studied Jenks. The doc’s socks made harsh judgments on the fate of humanity.

  “No wallet when he was brought in,” Nolan said. “Whatever other belongings he might’ve had must’ve been grabbed by the other–” Nolan thought about his next word carefully, even leaned in so he could whisper it with a touch of real meanness. “–skels.”

  Skels. Street shit. Gutter trash. Homeless fucks. It brought a chuckle up in Jenks. Nolan was purposefully trying to push his buttons, get him pissed, maybe mad enough take a poke at somebody, prove he had a temper. It made sense they’d try to rattle Jenks as hard as possible, see what might fall out of him. He liked that they were trying to do their job, at least.

  There were no other questions he could think of to ask, so he got up and left.

  3

  He had nowhere else to go so he went home.

  He’d been here before, watching the new family living in his house. He imagined that most guys who’d had their homes foreclosed did this kind of thing. Parked down the block and watched the folks who picked up a new mortgage for a song. If he’d only been offered a rate of under 6% he might’ve been able to make it. But the bank couldn’t come down, nobody would help him refinance, they just had to chase him out.

  He glanced over at Hale’s house, saw there was a black SUV in the driveway. He imagined the two owners of the houses sitting together on their patios sharing a beer, nowhere near as terrified and desperate as Jenks and Hale had been. Their kids much happier, their wives filled with breezy laughter, their dogs fatter, their gardens greener, roses redder. Jenks glanced up at his old bedroom and imagined some bastard making love to his woman there, eager and confident, reliant and with a low, slow laugh that blew her hair across her eyes.

  The edges of the lawn were nice and evenly trimmed, something he’d always failed to do despite his wife’s nagging. It made him want to climb out of the car and go kick up divots just to foul the perfection. His sweat had watered those seeds. He thought about tearing up the rose bushes and hurling them through the bay windows.

  He sat back in his seat, lit a cigarette, and took a deep drag. He stared in the rearview and saw his old man’s eyes staring back at him, urging him to quit whining and get on with it. Jenks started his car and headed for the city.

  He took Southern State Parkway in and watched as the trees and brush fell away and the road shifted into the Belt and led him into the Midtown Tunnel. He headed into the darkness along with the rest of the traffic, the tunnel dipping beneath the East River. His imagination ran wild the way it always did, his mind’s eye picturing the tunnel walls caving in and the flood waters rising, a rampart of charging white rapids sweeping in behind so that everybody had to abandon their cars and make a run for it.

  He came out of the tunnel and eased into Manhattan, thinking of his wife. She lived here now on the Upper East Side with her new boyfriend, an advertising exec who spent a lifetime making the average person feel stupid and ugly unless they bought his latest product. His wife had always feeling fat, was always asking him, “How do I look in this?” and showing off the latest dress, the newest underwear, the skimpiest bathing suit, and no matter what Jenks said, she’d always ball the clothing up and kick it across the room and bring it back for something else. Three or four times. She’d fall apart in the middle of the bed crying silently, muttering under her breath about how old she was, how disgusting she was, Jenks helpless to convince her of otherwise. And yet somehow this ad exec prick had managed to do something different, give her what she needed, even while he paid for ads that helped her to die inside without her even knowing it.

  Jenks crossed into midtown, pulled into the first parking lot that he could. The guy in the booth asked him how long he’d be. He lied and said, “I’ll be back in twenty minutes.” He might be here all day, but he wanted his car available as soon as he returned, and he didn’t want to wait while they dug it out from some back wall on the tenth level someplace.

  He came out, took a left onto Broadway, walked up to Times Square, and began looking for the Hyena.

  He’d met the Hyena when he’d tracked Hale into the city and found out that he’d been arrested. It wasn’t that hard finding a man without any place to stay. Jenks had checked the second hand bookshops all around Penn Station first, working in an ever widening spiral. He and Hale used to talk about their excursions into Manhattan to pick up signed first editions and other rarities when they were younger and the world was still wide open in front of them. They had shopped a lot of the same independent bookstores, knew some of the same store owners.

  Probably the worst moment of both of their lives–worse than losing the wives, the kids, the dogs, everything else they’d owned, was losing the book collections because they represented something greater than themselves. The books weren’t just a hobby but a part of history, their own and more. Books had been Jenks’ way of breaking from his old man. A way of holding on to a piece of time, a kind of love that was pure and couldn’t be touched. Ten million pages of stories that had a greater truth than you could ever live on your own.

  Those last six months Hale and Jenks had started selling the books off on eBay and elsewhere, making back maybe a twentieth of what the works were actually worth. Packing the books up with a sad love, driving every day to the post office to send the work in to someone else’s hands. Every day, the two of them in the post office line with their arms full of packages, unable to speak, unable to explain to anyone else why this was such a killing move, why they were dying the same way at the same time, as surely as if they both had cancer and were wasting away in the hospital side by side.

  So in th
e city he hit the bookstores and found out that Hale had been going around and selling some paperbacks he’d either stolen, found in the trash, or bought cheap at church sales, trying to turn a profit at the indie shops. Jenks kept asking around and shadowing Hale until he found the Hyena in Times Square, set up at a table selling knockoff Prada and Gucci purses.

  The Hyena was maybe twenty-five, what Jenks’ parents used to call mulatto but nowadays you said “mixed race” or you were being un-pc. Jenks had other things on his mind and just thought of the guy as black. The Hyena’s name was Ferdie, but when Jenks ran into him the first time he was wearing a T-shirt with the logo of a laughing hyena on it. Ferdie seemed to mimic the logo, smiling wide and always throwing his head back and laughing at nothing. He set Jenks on edge immediately.

  Ferdie said he knew Hale. He’d been set up beside him and had rented Hale a table to sell his crappy little piles of coverless and mildew-stained books. Ferdie gave Jenks the run-down on Hale, explaining just how low he’d gone in the few months since Jenks and Hale had worked the fishing rig and parted company. The guilt kept slamming home every time Ferdie mentioned some awful shit about Hale and then hit that hyena pose. Head thrown back, white teeth on display, no laughter coming up his throat but his body still trembling as if he was guffawing.

  Jenks hadn’t been surprised to hear how Hale had bottomed out. But it had been a little startling to hear that Hale had actually become talkative for a time. Telling jokes with his customers, a happy figure on the street. As if the homeless life somehow agreed with him. What the fuck, maybe it did. It couldn’t be worse than flopping out of the middle class. The worst thing about having a normal suburbia lifestyle with the wife and kid and dog was trying to keep it all. Once it was gone, Jenks had to admit, so was the pressure of fighting for it. You were never so free.

  With his mouth still tugged into a big smile but his eyes dark, Ferdie couldn’t tell Jenks anything about the girl or the knifing. After a few weeks selling his shit books and doing the occasional shill for the Gucci bags, Ferdie said that Hale had disappeared. Left all his stuff. Ferdie said.

  “Where was he living?” Jenks asked.

  “The Central Hotel.”

  Ferdie’s little joke. He meant that Hale would pack up and drag all his shit up Seventh Avenue and then scuttle over to Central Park where he’d dug himself out a niche under a bridge alongside a few other homeless guys living in boxes and tents. The cops tried to keep everybody moving along, especially during tourist season. They made an effort to get the addicts relocated at the rehab clinics. The psychotics back on their meds. The runaways home again. And guys like Hale, the new impoverished with nothing and nowhere to go, the cops just tried to get them to fucking Jersey, let the Newark police flush them out of the tri-state area.

  “Whereabouts? You know?”

  Ferdie thought he did, thought it was somewhere close to the fountain.

  Jenks had gone around and asked the cops about Hale, and eventually picked up on the arrest report and hospital paperwork.

  So far as Jenks had been able to figure the timeline, Hale had vanished out of Times Square and turned up three days later with a knife in his side and a dead girl’s blood all over him. What the hell had happened during those seventy-two hours? Who had he run across who had wanted him and a little girl dead?

  Now Jenks found the Hyena’s stand in Times Square again, but Ferdie wasn’t running it today. Instead, some teenage black kid was hawking the bags. The business had expanded a little. The kid kept holding up other purses and amiably calling out names: Prada, Coach, Dolce, and Gabbana. Tourist ladies flocked to the teen and watched as he replaced the metal inlaid generic cheapo logos with the expensive ones. The ladies oohed and ahhed and paid out fifteen, twenty bucks to show off and fake out their sewing circle back in Peoria. Everybody wins.

  Jenks dropped back to a store front, smoked a cigarette, and pretended to window shop, watching the kid do his thing in the plate glass reflection. The teen seemed to be better at it than Ferdie was, so far as Jenks could tell. The Hyena’s smile was intimidating in its own way, those teeth overpowering. But the kid had a natural way about him, an easy way of approaching folks and talking to them.

  Finally there was a break in the action as the crowds thinned. Jenks saw his chance and walked up to the kid. Before he got a chance to say anything the teen snapped at him, “You’ve been eyeballing me for twenty minutes, man. What you want?”

  You had to give it to him, he was sharp; a lot sharper than Jenks was, thinking he was being slick. “Where’s Ferdie?”

  “Not here today.”

  “Where is he?”

  “What do you care?”

  “It’s important.”

  The kid eyed him, not liking the look of Jenks. Couldn’t blame him for pulling a sneer. “What do you want with him?”

  “Just tell me where he is?”

  “Man, I don’t gotta tell you nothing.”

  “You’re right.” Jenks figured he might as well try to lie. “I had a side deal going with him moving some of the Prada bags out onto the Island. I know someone who has a shop, we could move maybe fifty a month. I need them by Wednesday. I need to talk to Ferdie.”

  “You can’t,” the teen said. “He’s dead.”

  “What?”

  The kid raised his eyebrows, saying, how stupid are you anyway? “I said he’s dead. You want me to say it again?”

  “My name’s Jenks. Ferdie, he knew a friend of mine, a guy–”

  “Look, man, I don’t want your life story. Ferdie’s dead. Now go on about your business, unless you need a Prada bag for your lady.”

  “What’s your name?” Jenks asked.

  “You don’t need to know my name. I don’t want to know yours; you don’t want to know mine. Go on now, like I said. We don’t want trouble now.”

  “You’re right, but this is important. I just–”

  The teen getting up into Jenks’ face now, but not wanting to, doing his best to keep from going too far as he looked around at the foot traffic, seeing the ladies walk by and knowing he was missing out on a chance to profit. The frustration rose into his eyes. He dumped the purses in his hands onto the table and reached out to swat Jenks across the temple. It was the same kind of dismissive slap that Jenks’ father used to give him when the old man was miffed about something and just wanted to be left alone.

  “Nothing you got to say is important,” the boy said. “Not to me. I already told you to move on. Now you got to go!”

  Jenks’s head rang with his own past, hardly feeling the little slap at all, but somehow it lit up the borders of his vision. Jenks couldn’t take the way the kid was talking to him. Banishing him the same way that the mortgage specialists had at the bank, the credit card folks, and his wife’s new boyfriend. Everybody looking right through him, nobody wanting to hear him out, not even letting him finish a sentence. He wondered how his life might have been different, how much tragedy might have been sidestepped, if only he’d been able to make himself heard. If they had seen him for who he was, or believed he was, instead of just taking everything he had and hustling him off.

  So, all right then, he thought, and the rage was suddenly on him.

  It came up and moved through him like a scrabbling animal, scratching him up inside, tearing, its claws catching hold along his ribs and climbing higher and higher, all the way up into his heart and then ripping at that. His pulse snapped painfully in his neck, pounded in his wrists so hard that it actually felt like his skin might break and he’d start spurting all over. He felt himself grinning.

  The kid knew something was up and tried to turn away, fear igniting his eyes as Jenks threw a left hook that landed solidly in the center of the teen’s chest. All the air gushed out of the kid and into Jenks’ face. He smelled everything the boy had eaten over the last three days: Pizza, fish tacos, a couple of Mexican beers, Dos Equis, mediciney mouthwash. He threw another short jab into the teen’s gut and thought, Jesu
s, I’m beating up a boy in the middle of Times Square.

  So what. There were ten thousand people crowding the streets, the taxis ripping up down Seventh and Broadway and 42nd. Four cops in sight and none of them looking this way across the foot traffic. A few people checking the scene and immediately moving on. Nobody gave a shit.

  While the kid was doubled-over Jenks sneaked a hand into the boy’s pocket and pulled out his wallet. It was stuffed with cash, Jesus. Even at his most flush Jenks had never had that much green on him. He checked the address on the license. The kid’s name was Bobby Rodriguez and he lived in the West Village.

  “Okay, Bobby,” Jenks said, still smiling, the anger still there, amping him, but starting to drain off and starting to leave him nice and mellow. “Was Ferdie your brother?”

  “No. A partner. Sometimes.”

  “What happened to him?”

  Bobby was almost kneeling on the sidewalk, glaring up at Jenks, breathing through his teeth. Saying nothing.

  “Tell me what happened.”

  “Look, man–”

  “Did you know Hale?”

  “Who?”

  “The guy who sold books at the table next to yours.”

  “That guy never used to talk much, just sat there and read most of the time.”

  “What happened to Ferdie? Was he knifed?”

  “Man–”

  “What he?”

  “Yeah, he had his throat cut. You happy now? That what you wanted me to say? You get off on that?”

  A squat middle-aged woman stopped at the table and started looking through the fake Prada purses, asked Bobby how much they were. The was still having trouble breathing right but he was back on the clock, in form, smiling and working the lady, promised if she bought three he’d give her a big discount. They haggled for a couple minutes while Jenks stood there thinking; what did Hale get into? Something somehow attached to Ferdie, maybe to this spot. What, the mob pushed in on them, wanted a cut of Hale’s stink book biz?