Old School Bones (25 page)

NINJA Girl has a theory. She thinks Denise Pasteur is covering for her half brother. Thinks that Red Tooth is not the only villain in this mess. That they haven’t found Liberty’s killer yet. She says, like here we are in P-town, somebody ought to talk to that welder again.

Not me, says Awasha. She’s way past burned out. And you can’t send a high school kid in there, not to that cruel and arrogant man. “He’s a world-class bastard.”

So … at ten o’clock at night … it falls to Michael to put Gracie’s theory to the test. Alone, a refugee of love. Solo. While Awasha and Gracie vanish into the mardi gras of the weekend crowd on Commercial St.

The blue flame, the sizzling torch, draws him into the studio. He thinks about those dead girls. Thinks,
maybe if I just flat-out shock this dude, he’ll crack.

So he goes in firing. Not so much as a howdy-do.

“You want to tell me why you murdered Roxana Calderón?”

“I beg your pardon.”

“Your half sister says the Red Tooth boys didn’t kill Roxy Calderón. You did. May 31, 1975.”

The welder shoots him a cock-eyed look. “I don’t have to talk to you. You’re not a cop. You’re not even a real lawyer anymore. I know all about you. You’re a fisherman, Jazzbo. And you can tell Danny she can go piss up a rope for all I care.”

“She’s ready to go to the U.S. attorney with a story about how you used Roxy to spy on Red Tooth and knock them out of the drug trade at good old Tolchie.”

“Like hell she is!”

“She’s not the only one who has fingered you. I know all about how you cut off Roxy’s hair, dressed her …”

The welder turns his torch on Michael. “Get the fuck out of here. I already told your switch-hitting girlfriend Red Tooth plays for keeps. Go knock on their doors.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means they got Roxy. It was revenge for her helping me, the club. OK, got it? Now they’re at it again. That black girl who died. She probably found out something she shouldn’t have. Something they couldn’t let her live with.” There’s a big grin on Jean-Claude’s face.

“Bullshit.” He lets fly with more of Gracie’s hunch. “You really enjoy pinning it on the Red Tooth boys, don’t you? It’s such an easy way to slither out of this mess … I just don’t see where killing Liberty Baker fits into this all. But I’m …”

The welding torch pointing again. “Out! Go back to your twisted little harem, Romeo.”

“You and Snyder and Su and Merriweather. You had a plan. The ultimate turning of the tables on your arch enemies. You faked that Red Tooth graffiti in your club room in case anybody ever found Roxy. You really hated those bastards.”

“You’re out of your mind!”

“After all these years, you’re still at war with Red Tooth, aren’t you?

“You haven’t a fucking clue.”

“I think Roxy realized that you were using her, maybe that you prefer boys. She finally had enough. I think she was going to tell Red Tooth how you set them up to get hijacked. And I think you killed her to keep her quiet.”

“In your dreams!”

“And maybe Liberty Baker figured it out. After all these years. So you had to eliminate her too. Red Tooth is the fall guy here. Not you.”

The welder turns off his torch. Pulls the goggles off his forehead, sits down on his rocket/bomb sculpture. Suddenly it looks like a giant dick to Michael.

Jean-Claude throws back his head and laughs. “Fuck. You’re cute … but you’re dumber than a post!”

He feels a well opening inside his heart. The blood just rushing out into his chest. His vision going blurry.

“Think about this, hot stuff. Just for starters. How could I have killed Roxy Calderón when I was off campus for more than a day while someone was killing her? I just got back to school a half hour before we found her in the club.”

“You expect me to believe that?” He can’t hide the strain in his voice.

“Ask Marcus or Tom. I know you’ve been hounding them. Or ask Jason. Yeah, send your little China girl in to talk to Cousin Jason again. Let Chop open her innocent little eyes. He was with me.”

“What? Where?”

“We took the bus and the ferry to the Vineyard. Chappaquiddick Island, actually. There’s a place Jason liked to camp. We were probably fucking each other on South Beach when Roxy died … She was one stiff little piece of fluff when we found her.”

So much for Gracie’s theory.

J-C is beaming that arrogant grin of his again.
But why is his hand shaking as he lights a cigarette?

“THERE’S something he’s not telling us,” Awasha says when she hears what just went down with Jean-Claude. Michael has her on the cell phone as soon as he’s ten steps out the studio door. “Don’t leave there, Michael. Watch that bastard!”

“Watch?”

“I got a really bad feeling about this guy. I think you spooked him, and he’s going to bolt. Gracie and I will get my car and meet you!”

Suddenly flames are surging through her fingers, toes.

Nooshun kesukqut.
Our Father.
Wuneetupantamunak kooswesuonk.
Who art in Heaven …

The Saab’s rolling slowly toward the Rausche Studio, its headlights off, when she spots Michael. He’s hiding in a shadowy garden outside an Italian restaurant across the street from Jean-Claude’s.

When she pulls to the curb, cuts the engine, he slips into the back seat. Gracie has shotgun.

“What’s happened?” Her voice a husky whisper. “He just turned out the lights.”

“Hey, is that him?” Gracie asks.

A shadowy figure emerges from the gate in front of the wharf/studio. Tall, slender. Jeans and a white T-shirt. Carrying something bundled in his right arm. Maybe a jacket or a hoodie. He crosses the street, unlocks the door on an Eighties, black Porsche 911. Gets in. Starts the engine.

“That’s our boy.”

She’s pumped. Images of street racers from
The Fast and the Furious,
screaming through dark city streets, flick through her head. The flames from her fingers, toes, now rising behind her eyes as she slips the Saab into first gear.

But even before J-C has the Porsche out of P-town, she sees that there will be no Hollywood chase scene. This is worse. Despite the hot Porsche, Jean-Claude is a slow, steady driver. He drives less than the posted speed limit as he heads west down Route 6. His taillights are so easy to follow, she wonders whether he knows she’s back here. Whether he’s making it easy for her to tail him. Leading them all somewhere.

The Saab’s low beams barely cut the darkness as Gracie quizzes Michael about what happened in the welder’s studio.

But she can’t listen. Doesn’t notice the car behind her. Something else, other sounds, are filling every corner of her head. And she can’t tune them out. An approaching army.

Tribal drums. Then Flutes. Dulcimers … Beating. Again.

And Aaserah’s voice, after three weeks of no contact, pleading from the cell phone she gave Ronnie.
“
Do you still love me?”

He tells her yes, beyond all reason.

“Would you leave everything you know and love to be with me?”

In a heartbeat!

For a long time she says nothing, as if she is trying to feel his love rising from her phone.

Finally, she speaks.
“
Then,
Allah akbar!
I have found a way, Nippe Maske. When all is ready for us, I will come to you. Wait for the call. It will be soon.”

He pictures the internet images he has seen of Dubai, its high-rises, streets of gold, discos, banks. With his skills he can get a job in security. Or, maybe there is lobster fishing in the Persian Gulf. He wonders how much a boat would cost. Wonders if he is fortune’s fool.

IT’S not until she has followed the Porsche down a winding road near Wichmere Harbor in Harwichport, sees it stop in front of a shingled summer mansion, that she realizes she’s in a driveway. There’s a car rolling up behind her, its quartz headlights glaring. She can’t turn around, or back up. Like Ronnie that day in Baghdad.
Shit!

He’s in the make-shift gym spotting for a buddy doing bench presses—when the phone buzzes in his shorts’ pocket. He takes the call in the men’s room where no one will see, hear.

“I’m in my blue
hijab,”
she says.
“
Outside the gate to your camp, I think. I can see the concrete barricades across the road. And the guards.”

“Stop,” he says.
“
Don’t come any closer.”

The sentries are nervous. The last two weeks two other FBOs have been attacked. One when someone drove a van full of explosives right into a convoy of Hummers leaving the base. Another when a teenage flower girl, a bomb hidden beneath her
abaya,
approached a checkpoint at the Green Zone and blew herself up, taking three marines with her.

“Tell me you love me!” Her voice sounds strange, desperate.
“
I’ll be out with the next patrol.”

The headlights sear them from behind. “Jesus!”

Suddenly she thinks she sees what is happening here. What has been happening ever since Christopher Columbus used the Caribs to supply his men with Arawak concubines. Since the Pilgrims enlisted the friendship and good will of her ancestor Massasoit, sachem of the Wamponaogs, her namesake Awashonks, squaw sachem of the Sakonnets. Only to hoist the head of Massasoit’s son Metacomet on a pike to rot for years as a warning to bad Indians. Only to drive Awashonk’s people from their homelands.

“Goddamn it!”

“What?”

“If you know your friend Lou’s number, now would be the time to call him.”

“Why?”

“You ever heard of Wounded Knee?”

By the time he’s gotten his weapon and dressed in his cammies, vest, helmet—his civies hidden beneath, twenty-six hundred dollars in his pocket—his skin is oozing sweat. He’s burning to go. But he can’t just walk out the gate. No one gets off base without a pass. He’s got to wait, fall in with a patrol that’s heading out. Just as he always did when he was going to see her. Blending with the crowd, traveling under the radar. Old-time survival skills for an Indian.

It’s more than a half hour before he sees a group of boys from Bravo company assembling for a foot patrol, two platoons massing at the gates. He joins them.

“Hotter than hell,” someone says as a sentry waves them out onto the sun-bleached street.

“Global fucking warming.”

“Fry City, man,” says a black G.I.

“Word, dude!”

Suddenly he sees her. She gets out of a shit-brown Nissan parked up the block, starts walking toward the clutch of three dozen Americans. Her black
abaya
blowing in the blistering wind.

“Hey, heads up,” calls a sergeant.
“
Check that bitch!”

“Lock and load,” says someone.

“Here we go again.”

One of the grunts makes a sound like a police siren. What the hell is she doing?

He wants to pull out the cell phone, tell her to get out of the street. These guys aren’t taking any chances, several of them already have their weapons pointed at her as she walks toward them. A hundred yards away. Right in the middle of the street.

“What’s she doing?”

“Crazy fucking gash.”

“Stop. Hey, lady, stop right there!”

Then in Arabic, “
Qiff. Qiff!
Stop goddamn it!”

But she keeps coming. Her hands seem to be cradling something that is beneath her
abaya.

“Nippe Maske?”

“We got a situation here, Lieutenant!”

Is she nuts? Right here? Middle of fucking Baghdad? How in all hell does she …

“Hey, hey lady. Stop. Stop!
Qiff!!!
You understand? Down on the ground!” A sergeant is screaming, pointing at the street with both his M-4 and his free arm.
“
Down!”

“Jesus Christ,” someone says.
“
She’s crying.”

She’s only about thirty yards away. He can see her cheeks glistening with tears. Her eyes searching the soldiers.

“Nippe Maske?”

“Fuck. She’s got something under that robe!” A G.I.’s voice screams, “She’s packing!”

He shouts her name.

She hears him. Her eyes widen as they find him. Her lips moving in prayer, maybe love.

“Bomber!!! Take her out!”

“NO! DON’T SHOOT!!!”

He’s running toward her when someone fires.

Then a hail of bullets hit her. She staggers, eyes sewn on her Indian brave … as she topples. Something, her guts maybe, squirming, bloody, spilling from under her
abaya
as she goes down.

“This is a trap, Doc P?”

“I’m soooooooo sorry.”

“Aw fuck!”

She’s dead. Along with the Persian cat she had hidden under her
abaya.

And him with a broken nose, concussion, five broken ribs. After the squad turned on their brother-in-arms. Fucking madman Indian traitor.

When the MPs come to him in the hospital he says, “Yeah, OK, I knew her. She was a widow and a law student from the neighborhood. A kind person. All she wanted was a life. A little kindness and understanding.”

“You got her killed, asshole. How’s that make you feel?”

Recognizing the car jamming up against her rear bumper, she finally—fully—hears the truth in her brother’s secret, Aaserah’s death. In the blood of warriors beating through her heart. She gets it. At last. The old tribal lesson. About friendship and love, jealousy and revenge. About sleeping with the enemy.

She knows the killer who has come for them all.

HE hears the crack of the gun, smells the smoke, sees the tears freeze on Gracie’s cheeks as the muzzle blast parts the hair above her right ear. The round just missing her scalp before it hits the ceiling with a thud, a puff of plaster.

Now the hot barrel of the Beretta is burning a red crescent on her temple. A long forearm chokes her neck.

He knows at this rate they’ll all be dead before Lou and his crew get here.

“That was just a warning. The next bullet goes through her head! Everybody sit on the rug, hands behind your necks!”

Awasha is the first to drop to the floor of the nearly dark living room. Just a table lamp with a stained-glass Tiffany shade lit in a corner. He settles beside her on the worn red and blue oriental, their backs almost brushing a coffee table.

“I said sit, Jean-Claude, make yourself at home. Just your bad luck, mother’s not here when you come running home with another pack of your problems … But she would want you to be comfortable in her house. Didn’t she tell you she was going to be in New York this week?”

“Piss off, Danny. If mother were here, she would disown you once and for all. You think she still doesn’t know you’re queer.”

“You should talk!”

“Hey, I’m out. Mother may not approve of me. But she admires my courage.”

“She calls you a fiddlestick!”

“You know, she always suspected you had something to do with Roxy.”

“Shut up and sit down or this girl dies right now.”

He ignores her, swaggers over to the grand piano, looks at the sheet music propped above the keyboard. Debussy.

“Fucking shoot her, love. You think I care about these people? It’s because you can’t keep your dildo in your pants they’re here. Because of you the spotlight’s back on your lovergirl after all these years.”

“Sit! I swear to god I’m going to blow the top of her head off!”

“Doc P, help me!”

“Don’t do it, Danny. Don’t make things worse than they already are.”

“Shut up, Awasha.”

“It was you. You killed Liberty didn’t you? She found out about your secret life. So you—”

“Just shut the hell up. I trusted you. I loved you. And you threw all that back in my face. For what? A third-rate Lancelot? A fisherman?”

Jean-Claude sits down on the piano bench, kicks his legs out in front of him. “Oh, sweethearts, this is getting good. Don’t you think, hotstuff? An honest-to-goodness cat fight. Right here in Mother’s living room. Gun and all.”

His half sister pinches the girl’s neck harder in the vice of her forearm. Gracie’s eyes start to glass over as Danny points the gun at Jean-Claude. “Get on the floor. Now, J-C!”

He makes a show of sliding off the chair, a man of rubber. “Have it your way, bitch.”

“Michael?” Gracie’s voice is little more than a gasp. A faint plea from a distant beach.

Her eyes black, wet. Begging a question he can’t hear.

But he can imagine it.

After all these years of wondering. Of putting Cassie’s face on it. Of asking his father tiresome questions about his mother, about Vóvó Chocolate. His African blood. He sees. It’s not a black question, a white question, an Indian question, an Arab question, an Asian question. It’s just a human question. About compassion. The one we ask when we find our fate bound dangerously with others. A call to take a stand.

Like now.

He looks around for a weapon, a distraction, sees nothing. But knows he has to do something. Knows as surely as he knows his mother’s been dead, gone, for more than a year. Everyone in this room except the shooter is going to die if he doesn’t act now.

He puts a hand on Awasha’s shoulder, rubs it gently. Gets to his feet.

Danny points her gun back at Gracie’s head. But something about her has changed. Her skin’s paler, her chest heaving a little faster beneath her violet fleece. Eyes jittering around the dark room.

“Oh god, please …” Gracie says. A faint prayer.

Awasha puts her hand on his. The blood is burning out through her pores. His pores. As before … when they were diving through silver fish together. Racing into the planet’s hot soul.

But now a child is calling. Children pleading. Some from their graves, secret attics. From Over-the-Hill. The heart’s molten core.

Tribal drums. Flutes. Dulcimers. Pounding. Surf thundering offshore on a reef. Marley singing from the bar. About Zimbabwe. About Revolution. The blood of cheetahs, wild seals scorching every vein. And Aaserah’s shouting to Nippe Maske and her god.

He’s lowering his head, shoulders. To make a smaller target. To charge. To kill …

When she leaps. Awasha. Springs toward Danny. A blaze of torment, anger, rising from under his left hand. Howling. Black hair flying out from her scalp.

Her arms, hands, stretching. To tackle, choke. Tear.

The first shot breaks the air.

Then a second. A third. A fourth.