Comeback p-17 Page 5

  "He's got a girl friend," Dwayne said, with no inflection.

  Archibald raised an eyebrow. "Has he? So much for the monastery. Is she part of the problem, do you think?"

  "Probably. Don't know for sure."

  "Perhaps I should talk to them both together."

  "She isn't here," Dwayne said. "She isn't one of us. She lives back in Memphis," he explained,

  Memphis being Archibald's home base, where he had his Eternal Jesus Chapel and where his television ministry was taped.

  "Well, I don't think we should postpone the issue until we get back to Memphis," Archibald said. "I'll talk to Tom this afternoon, after the crusade, and if necessary, talk to the girl later, when we get home. What kind of girl is she?"

  "Don't know," Dwayne said, and shrugged. "Mary something. Don't know a thing about her."

  2

  Just around the time William Archibald was whistling in the shower, Mary Quindero was beginning to die. She knew it, or suspected it, or feared it, but couldn't warn her murderers because they refused to hear anything except the answers to their questions, and she had no more answers. They, Woody Kellman and Zack Flynn, didn't know she was dying because they had no idea of the cumulative effect of the strangle-and-reprieve, drown-and-reprieve methods they were using to get the answers they felt she was still holding back. And her brother, Ralph Quindero, couldn't know what was happening because he was over at Zack's place, watching an old horror movie on the VCR, unable to be present while his friends pressured his sister, and not realizing just how stupid they were.

  "Don't hurt her, or— You know, don't do— She's my sister, you know, I gotta ..."

  "Don't worry, Ralph, when she sees we're serious, what's she gonna do? What's her choice? We gotta pressure her a little, that's all, so she knows we're serious. That's all."

  That it hadn't worked that way was simply a miscalculation on everybody's part, starting with Ralph, who hadn't believed his pals would actually harm his own sister, and continuing with Woody and Zack, whose knowledge of the world came from movies and TV, which hadn't told them that, in real life, you could kill a person by repeatedly holding her head underwater in a bathtub, and finishing with Mary herself, who was motivated by a foolish desire to protect her dumb younger brother and who couldn't believe until too late that he wouldn't at some point come in and make them stop. But he didn't.

  No. Ralph watched the horror movie until the finish, then brooded at the telephone while the tape rewound, wondering if he should call Mary's place, just see what was going on. This was taking longer than they'd expected, wasn't it? An hour and a half. What could take an hour and a half? How much information could Mary have, after all, and how long before Woody and Zack got it out of her?

  Without the movie to distract his thoughts, he found himself worrying a little more about his sister in the hands of those two guys. They wouldn't. . . fuck her or anything, would they? No, they wouldn't do that, because they knew she'd tell him about it afterward, and they knew he'd kill them if they went too far, if they even— if they did anything except what they'd already agreed on: Lean on her a little, get whatever else it was Tom Carmody had told her about the guys who were out to grab the preacher's money, then phone him here to go downstairs and wait at the curb.

  When Woody realized her eyes were open underwater, and that some new kind of sullen limpness had come over her body, different from the times when she'd passed out, he had an instant of panic, quickly buried. Ignoring the knowledge he already possessed, he pulled her back up out of the tub and stretched her out once again on the white-die bathroom floor. Her eyes stayed open, water drops standing on them, not at all like tears.

  "Passed out again," Zack said, disgusted, looking over WoodyV looming back, his view obstructed.

  Woody felt a sensation he hadn't known for years, had completely forgotten: Being a little kid on a swing, going too high, until his balls felt like they were being sucked downward right out of him, drawn into the frozen middle of the earth. It had been a scary, exciting, unpleasant but fascinating feeling then; now it only made him sick. "Aw, shit, Zack," he said, and moved to the side, a strong and heavyset but clumsy guy, to let the skinnier tenser Zack have a clear view.

  When the tape rewound, Ralph popped it out of the machine and into its box, and considered the rest of Zack's tape library. The three of them, punks in their mid-twenties, inseparable schmucks since high school, were occasional burglars, and Zack loved to break into video rental stores, copping armful after armful of tapes while Ralph and Woody searched the cash register and drawers for chickenfeed.

  "How can we call him? Jesus Christ, Zack, his sister's dead!"

  "He doesn't know that. He doesn't know that till long after we got the money, till we're gone and history, man."

  "Jesus, Zack."

  "Call him, goddamit. You wanna run with money, or without?"

  Ralph touched the rows of tapes. Was it too early in the day for porn? Nah; he selected a tape, and turned toward the VCR as the phone rang. And now he was almost reluctant to answer.

  In the living room of Mary's apartment, the bedroom and bathroom doors both closed, Woody stood holding the phone, while Zack glared at him. They were both sopping wet, and hiding their fear from one another. "Remember!" Zack hissed. "She's locked in the closet! She's okay!"

  Woody nodded impatiently and said into the phone, "Ralph? Okay, everything's done here. She's fine, we locked her in the closet, you can let her out when we get back."

  Zack stared, wild-eyed, a ventriloquist no longer sure he controls his dummy. Woody said, "Well, she didn't want to tell us for a while."

  Zack looked alert, worried, imperiled. Woody said, "You know, she always wanted to keep you out of—wants to keep you out of trouble. You know how she is."

  Zack silently pounded the sofa back in frustration, and Woody said, "Well, she seen we weren't gonna take no for an answer, that's all, so then she opened up. She didn't know much more than she already told you, by the way. Not as much as we figured."

  Zack nodded in exasperated agreement—so much effort, such a rotten accident, for so little return—and Woody said, "Except the name of the motel where Carmody's supposed to get in touch with them, if anything changes. Yeah, where they're gonna be today. So that was worth it, huh?"

  "I don't know," Ralph said, hefting the porn tape in his other hand, thinking about how mad Mary was going to be, even when he came back successful, even when he had more money than God in his hands and all her irritating little doubts and sermons and putdowns were proved for once and all to be wrong, wrong, wrong. "I guess so," Ralph said. "Okay, I'll see you downstairs."

  It was a five-hour drive from Memphis to where William Archibald's crusade had latterly taken him; they should get going, if they wanted to be there in time for the robbery. "Ten minutes," Ralph said into the phone. "Right."

  He watched five minutes of the porn movie, rewound it, and went downstairs.

  3

  Lunch for the staff on crusade days was simple and short; bowls of salad, slices of bread, plastic cups of tea or apple juice, all laid out on long folding tables in whatever arena they found themselves. It's true this was an inexpensive way to feed a crowd, but Archibald's motives went beyond the squeezing of a dollar. He wanted his angels, his choir, his assistants, all his boys and girls to be cheerful and energetic and sparkling during the crusade to come, not bogged down by great sandwiches of cheese and meat, dulled by rich desserts, logy with milk shakes. And the staff enjoyed it, too, enjoyed the camaraderie of paper bowls and plastic forks, the rough fellowship of bleacher seats while eating and big open barrels for their trash afterward, the sense of coming together in peak condition to face the long and arduous campaign ahead: the saving of souls.

  Dwayne Thorsen always ate like that anyway. He didn't see how people could stuff their faces with all that bad crap available to the idiots of this world. He'd eaten sparingly as a child back in Kentucky, out of necessity—they were poor—
had turned necessity into virtue, and now virtue had become mere habit. But a good habit.

  Among the first to start lunch, and the absolute first to finish, Dwayne discarded his implements in the empty trash barrel and began a roving tour of the facility, a kind of stubborn prowl, movement mostly for its own sake, to relieve the pressure he felt, the weight of responsibility on his shoulders. The rest of them could laugh and joke together down there in the bleachers, take it easy, pay no attention to their surroundings, and if something screwed up they'd just shrug and go on about their business. Because avoiding the screw-ups was not their business. Not even Archibald's business, not really. The smooth functioning, the seamless progress, the glitch-free continuation of the William Archibald Crusade; that was Dwayne's business.

  This is what he'd learned in the Marines: Do not ask why, only ask how. That's the philosophy he'd carried out of the Marines and into his work with Archibald, and it's what made him so valuable. Irreplaceable. Whether Archibald were sincere or a phony, or some mingling of the two, wasn't Dwayne's concern. His only concern was that the crusade go forward with no bad publicity, no awkward snags, no loss of money, no distractions from the task at hand. None.

  His roving of the stadium showed the security weak spots, showed the crowd-control difficulties, but showed also the advantages of the terrain, the narrow-funneled egresses, the vast clear space at the center of the stadium that meant no troublemaker could get very close to Archibald during the crusade without being seen and intercepted.

  Dwayne visited the money room—fairly well concealed, fairly well protected—he visited the temporarily erected cubicles where counseling would be available at the end of the crusade, he visited the sexually segregated changing areas where the choir and angels would soon be getting into uniform (he didn't think in terms of 'costumes' but 'uniforms'), he visited the public restrooms and the refreshment area, he personally tried every door that was supposed to be locked and opened every door that was supposed to be unlocked.

  Half an hour before the gates were to be flung wide to the paying public, Dwayne noticed from high in the stands Tom Carmody making his way across the Astroturfed field toward the dressing rooms, and even from way up here something about the man's posture snagged his attention. When something within Dwayne's area of responsibility was wrong, out of alignment, not exactly where or how it should be, he'd always spot it right away, and in this moment he could see that something about Tom Carmody was well and truly bent out of shape. The discouraged slope of those shoulders, the defensive clench of that ass, the fatalistic half-grip of those dangling hands as he made his way across the great open space; if they'd been back in the Marines together, Dwayne would know those signals could only mean one thing. A fellow bent on desertion.

  But desertion? Here? If that were it, if Tom Carmody were merely planning to quit this livelihood and take his miserable long face somewhere else, Dwayne Thorsen would do nothing but cheer him on his way. Help him pack. But Tom wasn't leaving, not willingly, Dwayne was sure of that much. And here, in William Archibald's crusade, what would be the equivalent of desertion?

  Dwayne followed Carmody into the dressing rooms, and came upon him hanging up his angel robe on a hook on the wall of the small and simple doorless cubicle he'd been assigned. His makeup tubes were already laid out on the narrow white Formica shelf in front of the mirror. His jacket was tossed on the floor in the corner; another bad sign. Dwayne said, "How you doing, Tom?"

  Carmody jumped, guilt all over his face and in his every move. Guilt about what? Had the son of a bitch already found his reporter? Was he in here wired? Was he walking around with camera and tape recorder to expose the villainy of the William Archibald crusade? Dwayne considered, for just an instant, having Carmody searched, right here, right now, but realized at once and reluctantly what a mistake that would be if it turned out he'd jumped the gun, if Carmody were still merely gearing up for his betrayal, whatever form that betrayal would take.

  The son of a bitch can't even look me in the eye, Dwayne thought, as Carmody said, "Oh, hi, Dwayne," and busied himself with an unnecessarily long search in his canvas tote bag for his clothesbrush.

  Dwayne stood in the cubicle doorway and watched Carmody brush the robe, too hard and too long. Unconsciously echoing the counselors who would be at work in nearby cubicles in just a few hours, he said, "Anything you want to talk about, Tom?"

  "What? No, Dwayne, everything's fine!"

  Scared eyes, weak mouth, defensive hunch of shoulders. Oh, you'll bear watching, my lad, Dwayne thought. "Well, if you get troubled about anything, Tom," he said, doing his damnedest to put some warmth into his voice and failing even more than he knew, "I want you to think of me as somebody you can count on, somebody you can trust. A friend." He choked on the word, but got it out pretty smoothly, all in all.

  A panicky smile played like summer lightning over Carmody's ashen sweating face. "I appreciate that, Dwayne," he said. "Thank you for— Thank you for worrying about me."

  "Oh, I worry about everybody," Dwayne told him, with his own ghastly smile. "You know me."

  "I sure do, Dwayne," Carmody said.

  Dwayne nodded, and turned away. I wish I could send the son of a bitch on night patrol, he thought, and shoot him.

  4

  Zack sat behind the wheel of the maroon Honda Accord, Woody beside him, Ralph in back. In the parking lot at the Seven Oaks Professional Building—three law firms, three dentists, one interior decorator, one office for rent—diagonally across from the Midway Motel, they remained in the positions they'd held since they'd driven away from Memphis. There was nothing to do now but wait.

  Ralph leaned his forearms on top of the front seat, so he could be part of the conversation. If you could call it a conversation; Zack said almost nothing, and Woody kept babbling on and on about nothing at all, as though silence were something to be feared, like a fatal disease. As he babbled, they all kept looking at the station wagon parked across the way at the motel, in front of room 16. The woman and one of the men were in that room, George Liss and the other man next door. They were tough-looking, all of them, even the woman.

  Mary had pointed out George Liss to Ralph a couple of weeks ago, as the crook her friend Tom Carmody was mixed up with, that she was so worried about. (So worried, in fact, that she'd made the mistake of talking it over with her stupid kid brother.) The hardness of Liss's face had been daunting, but nevertheless, the instant he'd heard Mary's story Ralph had known what he had to do. And while he and Woody weren't real tough guys, Zack was, wasn't he? Zack could front for them in the toughness department. And Ralph, the way he saw it, was the brains.

  Nothing happened for a long time, except that Woody just kept on talking, never saying anything at all interesting but never letting up. After a while, Ralph took his forearms off the seat and sat back to relax, not needing to follow every word. And when he looked out the left rear window, he could still see that station wagon over there, just as well.

  The chatter was getting to Zack, too. He started saying things like, "You already told us that, Woody. Shut up." Or, "Who gives a fuck, Woody?" Finally, he turned around in exasperation and said to Ralph, "Remember that pizza place? Back a couple blocks."

  "Yeah?"

  "Go get us something. Maybe if we put a lotta food in this asshole's mouth he'll shut up a while."

  Woody said, "I'm just filling the time, Zack. Jeez, what's wrong with just—"

  "Shut your face"

  Ralph said, "What if they go before I come back?" Gesturing at the station wagon across the street.

  "They won't," Zack said, and looked at his watch. "It's an hour before the fucking crusade even starts. They won't go before the money's in."

  "Boy, am I gonna spend that money," Woody said, grinning like Bozo the clown at the two of them. "I dunno, do I get a Jap bike, or a Harley?"

  Woody had already thrown this question out to general consideration twice before. Zack leveled a furious glare at Ralph: "Go. "<
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  "Okay, okay," Ralph said, and got out of the car.

  Zack watched in the rearview mirror as Ralph went sloping away in the sunlight, goofing along like some stumblebum on his way to the soup line. Woody continued to yak away. When Ralph passed out of sight, Zack took the spring knife out of his pants pocket, opened the four-inch blade, turned sideways, and slipped the knife point past Woody's arm and into his side, maybe a quarter-inch deep, just above the lowest rib.

  Stunned, scared, Woody recoiled against the door to his right, and Zack pursued him, pressing the blade against his flesh, maintaining that slight and dangerous penetration, his expression grim and intent.

  "Jesus, Zack! Jesus! What are you doing?"

  Quiet, but very serious, Zack said, "If Ralph tumbles, what happened to his sister, I'm putting this in there to the hilt."

  "What'd I say? Jeez, all I—"

  "You been too jumpy," Zack told him, holding the knife in place. "Too jumpy just for what we're doing here. You're running off like an idiot. When Ralph comes back, you shut up."

  "Come on, Zack—"

  Zack pressed the knifepoint into Woody's side just a little deeper. "Wake up, you fucking asshole."

  "Don't, man! That hurts!"

  In the rearview mirror, Ralph was coming, a six-pack of soda on top of a pizza box. So soon. Zack frowned at the mirror, then at Woody. "You will shut up now, asshole, or I start cutting. You got me?" He gave the knife a quarter turn.

  "Aaaaa!That hurts!"

  "And, he figures out what happened back home, you're dead meat. You got it, Woody?"

  "Yes!"

  Walking back toward the parking lot in the sunlight, carrying the pizza box in front of himself in both hands like a page boy carrying the queen mother's crown, Ralph saw Zack leaning way over to talk at Woody, and from the menacing shape of Zack's posture Ralph knew Woody was being told to shut up. Scaring the shit out of him, Ralph thought, and grinned at the idea. Yeah, Zack would be their tough guy, against those other people.