Later Page 10

  Once the script was played out, she ended the call and put her phone away. “It’s not as strong as I’d like,” she said. “But will they care?”

  “Probably not, once they find the bomb,” I said. Liz gave a little start, and I realized she had been talking to herself. Now that I’d done what she wanted, I was just baggage.

  She had a roll of paper towels and a can of air freshener in the bag. She cleaned up my puke, dropped it in the gutter (hundred-dollar fine for littering, I found out later), and then sprayed the car with something that smelled like flowers.

  “Get in,” she told me.

  I’d been turned away so I didn’t have to look at what remained of my lunchtime ravioli (as far as cleaning up the mess went, I thought she owed me that), but when I turned back to get in the car, I saw Kenneth Therriault standing by the trunk. Close enough to reach out and touch me, and still grinning. I might have screamed, but when I saw him I was between breaths and my chest wouldn’t seem to expand and grab another one. It was as if all the muscles had gone to sleep.

  “I’ll be seeing you,” Therriault said. The grin widened and I could see a cake of dead blood between his teeth and cheek. “Champ.”

  26

  We only drove three blocks before she stopped again. She took out her phone (her real one, not the burner), then looked at me and saw I was shaking. I maybe could have used a hug then, but all I got was a pat on the shoulder, presumably sympathetic. “Delayed reaction, kiddo. Know all about it. It’ll pass.”

  Then she made a call, identified herself as Detective Dutton, and asked for Gordon Bishop. She must have been told he was on the job, because Liz said, “I don’t care if he’s on Mars, patch me through. This is Priority One.”

  She waited, tapping the fingers of her free hand on the steering wheel. Then she straightened up. “It’s Dutton, Gordo…no, I know I’m not, but you need to hear this. I just got a tip about Therriault from someone I interviewed when I was on it…no, I don’t know who. You need to check out the King Kullen in Eastport…where he started, right. It makes a degree of sense if you think about it.” Listening. Then: “Are you kidding? How many people did we interview back then? A hundred? Two hundred? Listen, I’ll play you the message. I recorded it, assuming my phone worked.”

  She knew it had; she’d checked it on our short three-block drive. She played it for him and when it was done, she said, “Gordo? Did you…shit.” She ended the call. “He hung up.” Liz gave me a grim smile. “He hates my guts, but he’ll check. He knows it’ll be on him if he doesn’t.”

  Detective Bishop did check, because by then they’d had time to start digging into Kenneth Therriault’s past, and they’d found a nugget that stood out in light of Liz’s “anonymous tip.” Long before his career in construction and his post-retirement career as an orderly at City of Angels, Therriault had grown up in the town of Westport, which is, natch, next door to Eastport. As a high school senior, he’d worked as a bag boy and shelf stocker at King Kullen. Where he was caught shoplifting. The first time he did it, Therriault was warned. The second time he got canned. But stealing, it seemed, was a hard habit to break. Later in life he moved on to dynamite and blasting caps. A good supply of both was later found in a Queens storage locker. All of it old, all of it from Canada. I guess the border searches were a lot less thorough in those days.

  “Can we go home now?” I asked Liz. “Please?”

  “Yes. Are you going to tell your mother about this?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She smiled. “It was a rhetorical question. Of course you will. And that’s okay, doesn’t bother me in the slightest. Do you know why?”

  “Because nobody would believe it.”

  She patted my hand. “That’s right, Champ. Hole in one.”

  27

  Liz dropped me off on the corner and sped away. I walked down to our building. My mother and Barbara hadn’t gone for that drink after all, Barb had a cold and said she was going home right after work. Mom was on the steps with her phone in her hand.

  She flew down the steps when she saw me coming and grabbed me in a panicky hug that squeezed the breath out of me. “Where the fuck were you, James?” She only called me that when she was super-pissed, which you might have already guessed. “How could you be so thoughtless? I’ve been calling everyone, I was starting to think you’d been kidnapped, I even thought of calling…”

  She quit hugging and held me at arms’ length. I could see she had been crying and was starting to again and that made me feel really bad, even though none of it had been my fault. I think only your mother can truly make you feel lower than whale shit.

  “Was it Liz?” And without waiting for an answer: “It was.” Then, in a low and deadly voice: “That bitch.”

  “I had to go with her, Mom,” I said. “I really had to.”

  Then I started to cry, too.

  28

  We went upstairs. Mom made coffee and gave me a cup. My first, and I’ve been a fool for the stuff ever since. I told her almost everything. How Liz had been waiting outside school. How she told me lives depended on finding Thumper’s last bomb. How we went to the hospital, and to Therriault’s building. I even told her how awful Therriault looked with half his head blown out of shape on one side. What I didn’t tell her was how I’d turned around to see him standing behind Liz’s car, close enough to grab my arm…if dead people can grab, a thing I never wanted to find out one way or the other. And I didn’t tell her what he’d said, but that night when I went to bed it clanged in my head like a cracked bell: “I’ll be seeing you…Champ.”

  Mom kept saying okay and I understand, all the time looking more distressed. But she had to know what was happening on Long Island, and so did I. She turned on the TV and we sat on the couch to watch. Lewis Dodley of NY1 was doing a stand-up on a street with police sawhorses blocking it off. “Police appear to be taking this tip very seriously,” he was saying. “According to a source in the Suffolk County Police Department—”

  I remembered the news helicopter flying over the Frederick Arms and figured it must have had enough time to chopper out to Long Island, so I grabbed the remote from my mother’s lap and flipped over to Channel 4. And there, sure enough, was the roof of the King Kullen supermarket. The parking lot was full of police cars. Parked by the main doors was a big van that just about had to belong to the Bomb Squad. I saw two helmeted cops with a pair of dogs on harnesses going inside. The chopper was too high to see if the Bomb Squad cops were wearing bulletproof vests and flak jackets as well as helmets, but I’m sure they were. Not the dogs, though. If Thumper’s bomb went off while they were inside, the dogs would be blown to mush.

  The reporter in the chopper was saying, “We’ve been told that all customers and store personnel have been safely evacuated. Although it’s possible this is just another false alarm, there have been many during Thumper’s reign of terror—” (Yup, he actually said that) “—taking these things seriously is always the wisest course. All we know now is that this was the site of Thumper’s first bomb, and that no bomb has been found yet. Let’s send it back to the studio.”

  The chromo behind the news anchors had a picture of Therriault, maybe his City of Angels ID, because he looked pretty old. He was no movie star, but he looked a hell of a lot better than he had sitting on that bench. Liz’s manufactured tip might not have been taken so seriously had it not caused one of the older detectives in the department to recall a case from his childhood, that of George Metesky, dubbed the Mad Bomber by the press. Metesky planted thirty-three pipe bombs during his own reign of terror, which lasted from 1940 to 1956, and the seed was a similar grudge, in his case against Consolidated Edison.

  Some quick researcher in the news department had also made the connection, and Metesky’s face came up next on the chromo behind the anchors, but Mom didn’t bother looking at the old guy…who, I thought, looked weirdly like Therriault in his orderly’s uniform. She had grabbed her phone, then went muttering i
nto her bedroom for her address book, presumably having deleted Liz’s number after their argument about the serious weight.

  A commercial for some pill came on, so I crept to her bedroom door to listen. If I’d waited I wouldn’t have heard jack shit, because that call didn’t last long. “It’s Tia, Liz. Listen to me and don’t say a word. I’m going to keep this to myself, for reasons that should be obvious to you. But if you ever bother my son again, if he even sees you, I will burn your life to the ground. You know I can do it. All it would take is one single push. Stay away from Jamie.”

  I scurried back to the couch and pretended to be absorbed in the next commercial. Which turned out to be as useless as tits on a bull.

  “You heard that?”

  Her eyes were burning, telling me not to lie. I nodded.

  “Good. If you see her again, you run like hell. Home. And tell me. Do you understand?”

  I nodded again.

  “Okay, right right right. I’m ordering take-out. Do you want pizza or Chinese?”

  29

  The cops found and defused Thumper’s last bomb that Wednesday night, around eight o’clock. Mom and me were watching Person of Interest on TV when the station broke in with a special bulletin. The sniffer dogs had made lots of passes without finding anything, and their Bomb Squad handlers were about to take them out when one of them alerted in the housewares aisle. They’d been in that one several times before and there was no place on the shelves to hide a bomb, but one of the cops happened to look up and saw a ceiling panel just slightly out of place. That’s where the bomb was, between the ceiling and the roof. It was tied to a girder with stretchy orange cord, like the kind bungee jumpers use.

  Therriault really blew his wad on that one—sixteen sticks of dynamite and a dozen blasting caps. He’d moved far beyond alarm clocks; the bomb was hooked up to a digital timer very much like the ones in those movies I’d been thinking about (one of the cops took a picture after it was disarmed, and it was in the next day’s New York Times). It was set to go off at 5 PM on Friday, when the store was always busiest. The next day on NY1 (we were back to Mom’s fave) one of the Bomb Squad guys said it would have brought the whole roof down. When asked how many people might have been killed in such a blast, he only shook his head.

  That Thursday night as we ate dinner, my mother said, “You did a good thing, Jamie. A fine thing. Liz did too, whatever her reasons might have been. It makes me think of something Marty said once.” She meant Mr. Burkett, actually Professor Burkett, still Emeritus and still hanging in.

  “What did he say?”

  “‘Sometimes God uses a broken tool.’ It was from one of the old English writers he used to teach.”

  “He always asks me what I’m learning in school,” I said, “and he always shakes his head like he’s thinking I’m getting a bad education.”

  Mom laughed. “There’s a man who’s stuffed with education, and he’s still totally sharp and in focus. Remember when we had Christmas dinner with him?”

  “Sure, turkey sandwiches with cranberry dressing, the best! Plus hot chocolate!”

  “Yes, that was a good night. It will be a shame when he passes on. Eat up, there’s apple crisp for dessert. Barbara made it. And Jamie?”

  I looked at her.

  “Could we not talk about this anymore. Just kind of…put it behind us?”

  I thought she wasn’t just talking about Liz, or even Therriault; she was also talking about how I could see dead folks. It was what our computer teacher might have called a global request, and it was all right with me. More than all right, actually. “Sure.”

  Right then, sitting in our brightly lit kitchen nook and eating pizza, I really thought we could put it behind us. Only I was wrong. I didn’t see Liz Dutton for another two years, and hardly ever thought about her, but I saw Ken Therriault again that very night.

  As I said at the beginning, this is a horror story.

  30

  I was almost asleep when two cats started yowling their heads off and I jerked fully awake. We were on the fifth floor and I might not have heard it—and the clatter of a trashcan that followed—if my window hadn’t been cracked to let in some fresh air. I got up to shut it and froze with my hands on the sash. Therriault was standing across the street in the spreading glow of a streetlamp, and I knew right away that the cats hadn’t been yowling because they were fighting. They had been yowling because they were scared. The baby in the Papoose carrier had seen him; so had those cats. He scared them on purpose. He knew I would come to the window, just as he knew Liz called me Champ.

  He grinned from his half-destroyed head.

  He beckoned.

  I closed the window and thought about going into my mother’s room to get in bed with her, only I was too big for that, and there would be questions. So I pulled the shade instead. I went back to my own bed and lay there, looking up into the dark. Nothing like this had ever happened to me before. No dead person had ever followed me home like a fucking stray dog.

  Never mind, I thought. In three or four days, he’ll be gone like all of them are gone. A week at most. And it’s not like he can hurt you.

  But could I be sure of that? Lying there in the dark, I realized I didn’t. Seeing dead folks didn’t mean knowing dead folks.

  At last I went back to the window and peeked around the shade, sure he’d still be there. Maybe he’d even beckon again. One finger pointing…and then curling. Come here. Come to me, Champ.

  No one was under the streetlight. He was gone. I went back to bed, but it took me a long time to go to sleep.

  31

  I saw him again on Friday, outside of school. There were quite a few parents waiting for their kids—there always are on Fridays, probably because they’re going somewhere for the weekend—and they didn’t see Therriault, but they must have felt him, because they gave the place where he was standing a wide berth. No one was pushing a baby in a carriage, but if someone had been, I knew that baby would be looking at the empty spot on the sidewalk and bawling its head off.

  I went back inside and looked at some posters outside the office, wondering what to do. I supposed I’d have to talk to him, find out what he wanted, and I made up my mind to do it right then, while there were people around. I didn’t think he could hurt me, but I didn’t know.

  I used the boys’ room first because all at once I really had to pee, but when I was standing at the urinal, I couldn’t squeeze out even a single drop. So I went out, holding my backpack by the strap instead of wearing it. I had never been touched by a dead person, not once, I didn’t know if they could touch, but if Therriault tried to touch me—or grab me—I intended to hit him with a sackful of books.

  Only he was gone.

  A week went by, then two. I relaxed, figuring he had to be past his sell-by date.

  I was on the YMCA junior swim team, and on a Saturday in late May we had our final practice for an upcoming meet in Brooklyn, which would take place the following weekend. Mom gave me ten dollars for something to eat afterwards and told me—as she always did—to make sure I locked my locker so no one would steal the money or my watch (although why anyone would want to steal a lousy Timex I have no idea). I asked her if she was coming to the meet. She looked up from the manuscript she was reading and said, “For the fourth time, Jamie, yes. I’m coming to the meet. It’s on my calendar.”

  It was only the second time I’d asked (or maybe the third), but I didn’t tell her that, only kissed her on the cheek and headed down the hall to the elevator. When the doors opened, Therriault was in there, grinning his grin and staring at me from his good eye and the stretched-out one. There was a piece of paper pinned to his shirt. The suicide note was on it. The note was always on it and the blood spattered across it was always fresh.

  “Your mother has cancer, Champ. From the cigarettes. She’ll be dead in six months.”

  I was frozen in place with my mouth hanging open.

  The elevator doors rolled shut. I made so
me kind of sound —a squeak, a moan, I don’t know—and leaned back against the wall so I wouldn’t fall down.

  They have to tell you the truth, I thought. My mother is going to die.

  But then my head cleared a little and a better thought came. I grasped it like a drowning man clutching at a floating piece of wood. But maybe they only have to tell the truth if you ask them questions. Otherwise, maybe they can tell you any kind of fake shit they want.

  I didn’t want to go to swim practice after that, but if I didn’t Coach might call Mom to ask where I’d been. Then she would want to know where I had been, and what was I going to tell her? That I was afraid that Thumper would be waiting for me on the corner? Or in the lobby of the Y? Or (somehow this was the most horrible) in the shower room, unseen by naked boys rinsing off the chlorine?

  Was I going to tell her she had fucking cancer?

  So I went, and as you might guess, I swam for shit. Coach told me to get my head on straight, and I had to pinch my armpit to keep from bursting into tears. I had to pinch it really hard.

  When I got home, Mom was still deep in her manuscript. I hadn’t seen her smoking since Liz left, but I knew she sometimes drank when I wasn’t there—with her authors and various editors—so I sniffed at her when I kissed her, and didn’t smell anything but a little perfume. Or maybe face cream, since it was Saturday. Some kind of lady stuff, anyway.

  “Are you coming down with a cold, Jamie? You dried off well after swimming, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah. Mom, you’re not smoking anymore, are you?”

  “So that’s it.” She put aside the manuscript and stretched. “No, I haven’t had one since Liz left.”

  Since you kicked her out, I thought.

  “Have you been to the doctor lately? To get a checkup?”