Ordinary Bear, page 21
“No. Stealth is part of the job description.”
“For a bouncer?”
“For a Snake Eater,” she said. Special Forces.
“I was army too.”
“Special forces?”
“No.”
“Infantry?”
“No. Military Police.”
Dolly sighed. “Better let me go first. I’ve got about an hour before the girls start arriving to get ready. Let’s make it count.”
She ascended the metal fire escape with a lightness Farley would not have predicted. He followed her, his own angry, tired legs rebelling, and from the top she saw him struggle and turned away. A simple gesture, allowing him to protect his dignity. He wondered how much of her life had been spent fighting similar battles, how easy it should be to allow people such things. He studied the plywood covering the window nearest the landing. The graffiti did not deviate from the standard fare of barely legible tags, crude drawings, and antipolice slogans, but it looked weathered from long-term exposure to the sun and rain. Not recent.
“Some of the nails have been removed,” she said when he reached the landing. “See? There’s just one remaining along the top.”
“What does that mean?”
With one hand, she grabbed the edge of the board and pushed. It pivoted on the nail, opening a gap at the bottom corner.
“It means we have our point of entry.”
“Here we go,” Farley said, but Dolly put her other hand on his shoulder.
“I go first.” She had an iron grip.
“This is on me.”
“That girl is no more your responsibility than she is mine. We go as a team, but I take lead. You’re not moving clean and it’s going to take some dancing to get you in that window. That’s an operational liability if he’s in there. Let me clear the hallway before you come inside, make sure our approach is good.”
Farley knew she was right. He just didn’t like it.
“You don’t have to do this.”
Dolly met his eyes. “Neither do you.”
He nodded, once.
“What are our rules of engagement?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, are we going to kill this piece of shit or just fuck him up?”
Though her words made real the terms of the situation, they also created a cognitive dissonance delivered from a brightly lipsticked mouth set in a heavily made-up face. Whatever they were heading into, Farley hoped they made it out OK so he could thank her properly.
He closed his eyes to think. In the blackness he saw Olive and Abril, he saw Lissa’s fear and Nirva’s tears. In that moment he knew there was no length he would not go to, no line he would not cross. He opened them again and met her stare.
“This is a rescue,” he said. “Whatever it takes. Just don’t let the girl see it. She’s been through enough.”
Dolly pulled her sidearm from her pants and a small Maglite from an inside pocket of her bomber jacket. With the lit flashlight between her teeth, she climbed through the small window into the darkness. The board swung back into place behind her. Just like that, she was gone.
As soon as she disappeared, Farley’s phone buzzed in his pocket. He grabbed it without looking to quickly silence it.
“Lissa,” he said.
“You hung up on me, you fat, foul piece of shit.”
“Still not a good time.”
“You’re a goddamned waste of oxygen. You’ve never done anything useful in your whole pitiful life.”
“Hold that thought,” he said and disconnected the call. It felt good to hang up on her, and he wondered why he’d never tried it before. The phone rang again almost immediately.
“I mean it,” he told her. “This is not a good time.”
“Why do you continue to take my calls, Farley? I’m so hateful to you. So cruel.” The word had two syllables the way she said it. “All I do is insult you.”
“Because it seems important to you.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“Thank you, Farley,” she said, shocking him. “Maybe I only blame you because otherwise I have no one else to blame but God.”
“I blame myself too.”
“That’s because it’s your fault, you pathetic—” He hung up before hearing how she intended to finish her sentence. As he silenced the ringer, the plywood swiveled on its nail, and Dolly poked her head out. She saw him holding the phone.
“Are you bored?” she asked.
“No. I ordered us a pizza in case we get hungry.”
“Hallway is clear. Two doors. Two apartments. One looks like it hasn’t been used in a while. The other’s got a pretty new-looking hasp screwed into the door and jamb.”
“Is it padlocked?”
“No.”
“Then he’s in there.”
“What’s your intel?”
“A bunch of people usually use this crash pad. When our guy moved the girl in there, he started locking everyone else out with a padlock.”
“He can’t padlock it if he’s inside.”
“Right.”
She nodded. “Let’s get this fucker, Farley.”
“Roger that,” he said.
42
A GIRL SCREAMED
Dolly held the board open. Farley stepped over the windowsill with his good leg and lifted his bad leg through with his hands. When she released the board, the hall went dark. She clicked her Maglite and swept the walls with the beam as it came to life. Bags of garbage, food wrappers, empty beer cans, broken bottles. Filth. She grabbed Farley’s hand and put it on her shoulder so he could follow her in the dark, and so she’d know his location without needing to speak or look back. Then she raised her sidearm in front of her and advanced toward the door near the end of the hall.
She pointed beside it and held up five fingers. Farley stepped past it and stood with his back against the wall as she counted down silently—four, three, two, one—and then kicked the door, hard, just right of the knob. The wood splintered, but the door did not swing open.
Dolly took a step back and kicked it again, and then a third time, but still the door held.
“Fuck,” she said.
Farley crossed the hall, pushed off from the opposite wall, and hit the door with the full weight of his body. It crashed open, swinging violently on its hinges, and he fell sprawling into the dim room, knocking the wind out of himself as he hit the floor.
“So much for the element of surprise.” Dolly stepped quickly and efficiently over him, leading with her gun and clearing the corners of the room with the flashlight as she moved without hesitation. Gasping for air on the floor, Farley could see stained mattresses in the beam of her light. A couple of coolers, a metric ton of trash. More graffiti on the walls. The air reeked of sulfur and sweat and mold. She moved through a doorway into another room, and the light disappeared with her, plunging him into darkness.
Flat on his stomach, fighting for breath like a fish on the deck of a boat, he could not believe that for the second time he somehow found himself helpless, powerless, reduced to a spectator by his own initiative at the decisive moment, and hoped he would not fail a second time.
Dolly shouted something from the other room. He heard a crash. She shouted something else, and he saw back-to-back muzzle flashes as two gunshots filled the small apartment with a wall of noise that faded quickly, replaced by the ringing in his ears and the burnt, sour smell of gunpowder.
A girl screamed. High-pitched. Terrified.
“Olive!” he yelled, or tried to, his breath still a stranger to his lungs. Pushing through the pain, he got to his feet, unbalanced, broken, just as somebody came through the doorway Dolly had entered. He could not make out the face or features in the dark, but he could tell it was not her. The figure rushed at him. As it did, it raised something over its head to swing.
For one breathless, oxygen-starved moment, Farley left the decrepit crash pad, left the smell of puke and mold and sweat, and reappeared in the Arctic. Not face down on some piss-stained carpet but in the cold, sharp gravel as the bear rushed at Abril. The air changed, dry on his tongue, his weakened breath visible as it left his mouth. Rebecca’s wail pierced the night. As his chest spasmed, he wondered if it was not his lungs at all but his heart exploding as he watched his daughter die again, watched her taken again, his life gutted again, his body destroyed again.
And then the vision released him. Back in the cramped and cluttered apartment, the approaching figure—no longer the dirty ghost white of a bear but a man in a hood—swung something hard and fast. It hit Farley in the head, and he disappeared not just from the Arctic or the crash pad but from consciousness itself.
43
SOMETIMES ALL YOU CAN DO IS WAIT
“What did your friend say?” Freddie asked when Lissa got off the phone with Farley.
“He thinks he found her. My daughter. He’s going to get her.”
“That’s good! That’s good. He say where?”
“Old Town.”
“Mmm-hmmm. That’s mighty close.”
“But he doesn’t think I should be there.”
“I think he’s right, miss. I think it might be better if you at home waiting for them when they get there.”
“What if something goes wrong?”
The panic inflaming her system had worked its way back into her voice, and Freddie heard it.
“It won’t.”
He leaned across the table on arms thin as straws. Up close she saw he was older than she’d thought, white stubble beginning to appear on his cheeks and chin, the topographic lines at his eyes and brow.
“This Mr. Farley sounds like he knows what he’s doing. Not like you and me, miss. We’d just get in the way.”
“What am I supposed to do? Just sit around and wait?”
“I been driving an automobile for a living for most of my life, miss. A big part of what I do is wait around for something. People go into restaurants for dinner, they tell me to wait. People go into stores to shop, they tell me to wait. I sit at the airport waiting for aeroplanes to arrive with my passengers. Sometimes all you can do is wait.”
“I’m worried something will happen.”
“My mother used to say that worry was like a rocking chair, miss. It gave you something to do but it didn’t get you nowhere. Now, a 1967 Lincoln Continental automobile like the one we have parked outside? That can get you anywhere you want to go. I’d be honored if you’d let me drop you off at your place on my way home.”
“On your way home?”
“I hate to say it, miss, but I worked the airport night shift.” He picked up his butter knife and studied his reflection in it. “Maybe it don’t show, but I need my beauty sleep.”
For the first time, she saw how tired he looked, the redness in his eyes, how gravity seemed to be exerting an increasingly strong pull on him with each passing minute. She smiled and put her hand on top of his. The gesture surprised him, but nearly every gesture he’d made since he pulled up outside her apartment had surprised her. It felt good to return it even a little. Lissa knew she’d have been climbing the walls all day without his company.
“Yes, please,” she said.
They said goodbye to Rosaree and Walter—a hug and a nod, respectively—and went back out through the kitchen into the wet alley. Freddie helped her into the car and scooted himself across the front seat. Once underway, they rode in silence, but she could see him checking on her every few minutes in the rearview mirror. When they pulled up outside her building, he got out of the car and held her door. A light rain fell on them. Under the building lights, he looked even more frail. Older. He must be in his seventies. Up all night working, and she’d kept him up all day too.
“I’m sorry, Freddie,” she said.
“Miss?”
“For being a hysterical mess. For making you miss your sleep. For putting you out today.”
“Well, I can’t think of a better way to spend a day than keeping a fine young lady like yourself company and eating my favorite meal. Anyway, this is what you do for your people.”
“What’s that, exactly?”
“Anything, miss. Anything at all.”
She surprised him again by hugging him. He felt distressingly thin, birdlike, a skeleton in a suit.
“I’m afraid, Freddie,” she said, alarmed by her honesty. “I’m really scared.”
“I know, miss.” He took her hand between both of his and squeezed it reassuringly. “But your little girl? She’s gonna need you to be strong when she gets home. That’s the best thing you can do for her. That’s the best thing you can do for yourself too.”
She bit her lip and nodded.
“You ever need a ride again, you reach me through my cousin. Or anytime you and your daughter just want to eat turkey and pie with an old man.”
He tipped his hat.
“Goodbye, miss. And good luck.”
Lissa reached for her cigarettes as the big car pulled away. She could smell the rain, could smell Freddie’s lingering cologne, a bit of sage from their lunch together. She almost felt good about things. Not good, exactly, but confident in Farley’s success. Confident she’d see Olive soon. That everything would be all right.
But the gift of calm that Freddie had given her faded with his brake lights, and the panic quickened within her, the nicotine a catalyst for the guilt she felt about not doing more to find her daughter, about not keeping her safe in the first place. Each angry drag fed that guilt and the ensuing fear, and the fear and the guilt drove her to each successive angry drag like a snake eating its own feelings until she could boil the puddle at her feet with her rage.
When her phone rang, she almost dropped it in her haste to answer it.
“Farley?” she said.
“Who the fuck is Farley?”
“Who the fuck is this?” she said, fully engulfed.
“I’m the guy who has your daughter.”
44
A WOMAN’S BEEN STABBED
Farley woke for the sixth time that day to find himself face down, nose in something wet and warm and foul-smelling. For a few moments, he could not remember where he was or why he felt a pressing urgency. Once he did, he tried to get to his feet. His entire body in revolt, he managed only to roll onto his back.
His head ached, a dull pain throughout and a focused, sharp pain on the crown. When he reached for it, he felt a lump the size of a walnut crusted with dried blood. The blood ran down along the slope of his nose and covered his lips like a paste. He wiped it on his arm.
“Welcome back.” Dolly spoke in a low register, her natural octave. She sounded tired. “Have a nice nap?”
Farley sat up as best he could. The darkness hung close. He could not see very far in front of him, could not make out Dolly or anything else.
“How long was I out?”
“No idea. What day is it?”
“I can’t see a fucking thing.”
“Still got that cell phone?”
Farley patted his pants pockets for it and found the flashlight app. The bright LED lit up the room. Dolly sat against the wall, legs in front of her, clutching her stomach. Blood covered her hands. He angled the light for a better view and saw more blood soaking the carpet beneath her, a trail leading from the other room.
“Are you shot?”
“No. Fucker ganked me.”
“The Ferryman?”
“Maybe. There were two of them. One charged when I entered the room. I took him out. The other got me from behind, tried to let the air out of me.”
“How bad?”
“I’ll live.”
“The one you shot?”
“I don’t think he will.”
“The girl? Olive?”
Dolly shook her head.
“Took her with him after he knocked you out. She was crying and sounded scared, like she was in shock, but she didn’t look hurt.”
Aching like a motherfucker, Farley got unsteadily to his feet. The uneven light created a kind of vertigo, or maybe it was all the bumps he’d taken to the head that day. He limped into the other room, found the body slumped in the corner, and aimed the light at it. Not The Ferryman, and not anyone he recognized. A dark stain covered the chest. Farley put his hand on the man’s neck, looking for a heartbeat and finding none. It came away wet. He refocused the light on the torso and saw two bullet wounds grouped an inch apart.
“Is he dead?” Dolly asked from the other room.
“He’s dead.”
“Just call me Double-Tap Dolly.” Her voice sounded weak.
Farley saw a folding chair near the door, a mattress against the back wall, McDonald’s wrappers on the floor beside it. A couple of empty soda cups. Scrap paper and crayons. Wincing with the effort, he squatted for a closer look. The papers were covered with a child’s crayon drawings.
As he made his way back to the other room, he kicked something that rolled across the floor with a clanking sound. Dolly’s flashlight. When he bent to retrieve it, he got dizzy but recovered and pushed the button. Nothing happened.
“Battery’s dead,” she said.
“I’ve been out a while.”
“He’s been gone too long to chase. They’re in the wind again.”
He stared at her in the dim light. “You know,” he said, “one of my mother’s boyfriends took us on a road trip to the Great Smoky Mountains when I was younger. We spent a day at Dollywood. I don’t have many happy memories from that time in my life, but that’s one of them.”
“You figured it out,” she said, her voice restored. “Maybe that blow to the head made you smarter.”
When he nodded, his head played an arpeggio of pain.
“I should be a fucking genius by now.”
“You can’t be that handsome and smart too, honey. That would just be greedy.”
It even hurt to smile.
“Let’s get you to the hospital,” he said.
“Just get me to the alley. Call 911 from there. Nobody will blink at a drag queen getting jumped by a dumpster. Happens on the regular.”
