Shotgun Lullaby Read online

  But it wasn’t black and white. It was red mist. I felt it. Didn’t trust myself to speak.

  “Wish everything was binary for me,” Gus hollered. “You’re drunk or you’re sober. You’re fer us or agin us. Join the Barnburners or we’ll burn down your barn.” He laughed.

  He came out with the bag slung over his shoulder. Jeans, gray T-shirt, camouflage backpack. Smoking a cigarette. He started to wise off again but took a good look at me and decided to be quiet.

  I was staring at the bong. At the joint where the aluminum bowl met the plastic tube, a toy action figure wearing a blue helmet was perched. A typical stoner joke.

  I recognized the action figure.

  I stepped to the table, held up the toy. “Where’d you find this?”

  “Oh. I had a buddy over yesterday. We got a little high, as your cop friend clearly told you. My buddy found that little guy under the dresser. I told him to leave it be, but he didn’t listen. We goofed with it. Sorry, man.”

  I hit Gus with a looping right. He took two crossover steps, dropped his bag, and fell sideways. His head hit the hardwood floor.

  After that, I only half-knew what I was doing. Dragging Gus across the floor, beating him, kicking him, screaming in a voice I barely remembered. I opened the door, pulled him from the apartment by his backpack, got a work boot on his hip, shoved him down metal stairs in an ugly tumble. Threw the trash bag after. Stormed the apartment, grabbed the bong, came outside, whipped it down at him, didn’t miss by much.

  Screaming the entire time, tunnel-visioned from the red mist. After a while, I recognized what I was hollering: “It was all there for you! You should’ve been one who made it!”

  Over and over, Gus looking up at me from the bottom of the stairs.

  I only stopped screaming because my voice gave out.

  Then there was a weird near silence. A man working under the hood of a Civic across the street had stopped turning his wrench. Two boys on the corner who ought to be in school looked at me over orange sodas.

  Gus said, “I need help.”

  I closed the door.

  * * *

  I picked up the action figure. Sat on the sofa, looked it over. It’s a cheap GI Joe knockoff, a three-inch-tall soldier. Oversized biceps, gold bandolier on each shoulder. Vaguely Asian features, visible rivets. His arms, legs, and torso move. When you stretch him, you can see the elastic cords that hold him together. His right foot is missing, snapped off at the ankle.

  I bought him at a flea market in Grafton when my son was four.

  I was freshly sober. After maybe a dozen phone calls, my ex had agreed to bring Roy for a visit. By then, the two of them had moved to the Berkshires.

  It was a good weekend. Sunday morning, I took Roy to a big flea market on Route 140. There was a lot to see, must have been five acres of junk for sale. Roy sat on my shoulders, pulling my hair like a horse’s reins when he wanted to change direction. I’ll never forget that.

  I told Roy I would buy him one thing. Anything, but just one thing. He wanted to examine all his options. He’s still that way. He steered me to every table. I carried him on my shoulders for two hours. He finally chose the action figure. I paid a buck. It was a big deal.

  To both of us.

  Then we went down the hill to Dunkin’ Donuts. In line, he dropped the cheapo toy. Its foot broke off, just like that. We didn’t have time to go back for another.

  With Roy staring at the action figure in one hand and the broken-off foot in the other, tears welling, I had to think fast. I named the toy Brokenman, said now he was special. Then I launched into the first in a series of stories: “The Adventures of Brokenman.”

  Brokenman got the bad guy every time, see. But it always cost him a foot.

  I wouldn’t meet one-footed Randall Swale for more than a decade. Funny how life works out, huh?

  Roy loved Brokenman stories until he was seven. Then he didn’t. One weekend, he left the toy on his bedside table at my apartment. I called and promised to put Brokenman in the mail the next day.

  “That’s okay, Dad. You keep him.”

  I remember the way my heart dropped in my chest when Roy said that.

  I did keep the toy, though, kept it a long time—right up until I’d moved from this apartment. The time had seemed right to pass Brokenman along. I guess I’d pictured a little kid starting his own series of adventures.

  I hadn’t pictured a stoner goof.

  I locked the apartment and walked down the stairs. Took Brokenman with me. I would offer him to Roy again.

  You never know.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  I said, “Balboa the explorer dude was beheaded?”

  “Yes!” Leaning across the table, Sophie whacked her plate with a breadstick. “Pedrarias claimed Balboa was setting up a rogue government, but really he was just jealous—”

  “The hell is a Pedrarias?”

  “I told you on the ride over, he was the new governor of the colony! A total political hack.”

  “What colony?”

  She dropped her breadstick, grabbed her head with both hands.

  Jessie said, “He’s screwing with you, Sophie.”

  “I know.” She grabbed her breadstick. “Anyway, Balboa got back from…”

  Charlene and I smiled at each other across the table and let Sophie build a head of steam. Charlene looked at her watch. We were at an Olive Garden in Marlborough, across the road from a mall. A kid with spiked hair and two different-colored eyes had taken our order, brought us salad and rolls, and disappeared. Charlene gets testy if the main course doesn’t hit the table in fifteen minutes.

  Dinner out was a way to fold Jessie back in, according to one of the experts Charlene was paying to figure out the anorexia deal. When I’d picked up the ladies, Charlene had palmed me a note: Per shrink, don’t mention J’s eating.

  All I could think about was Gus, out on the street with his gear in a trash bag. I would have skipped the dinner to look for him, but it was one hell of a big deal—the first time we’d been able to talk Jessie into going anywhere with us.

  Sophie wore a blue, gold, and white Windbreaker that said COLONIALS on its left breast. Against all odds, and for no reason Charlene and I could figure, she’d joined Pop Warner cheerleading in her final year of eligibility. Most of her teammates had been doing it since they were six, and Sophie’s lack of experience showed at every practice. But she was gung ho, and the other girls were less snotty than I would’ve predicted, so it was fine by me—something new for a kid who maybe spent too much time by herself.

  What we hadn’t known when Sophie signed on was that these days, cheerleading is a sport unto its own damn self. Hell, it’s a whole lifestyle if you let it be. When Pop Warner football ended, the cheerleading competitions kept rolling along. And wouldn’t you know it: the Colonials were damn good this year, which meant at least one road trip a month to Boston, Hartford, Kittery, Albany. I didn’t mind, but the cheer fests, with the makeup and the primping and the stomping and the hugging and the crying (win or lose), were quietly driving Charlene nuts. She wasn’t wired for that kind of thing.

  We made small talk, everybody keeping a sneaky eye on Jessie. She hid behind her hair and mostly looked at her plate. But she gave us reason to hope, too. She’d agreed with Sophie that the waiter was cute, with his blue eye and his brown eye. And while the rest of us pretended not to look, she scooped a few spinach leaves and olives onto her salad plate and even tore off a quarter of a roll. Whenever she took a bite I held my breath, felt Charlene doing likewise.

  More than anything else recently, that hitch in my breath when Jessie lifted a roll made me understand parenthood.

  Jessie. The older one, the one Charlene had always butted heads with. Her face as I remembered it was frank, strong, dominated by powerful eyebrows and nose. It was more handsome than pretty, maybe a tough face for a girl to grow up with, but a damn fine face for a woman once she knew what she was about. But you had to wonder if Jess
ie would get that far: now the face was slack and pale and formless, collapsing into itself behind a wall of dyed black hair. She’d been a jock until sophomore year in high school, when the usual combo—the addict’s gene, the things she’d been through—had shunted her to self-puking, pills, and parties she was too young for. She’d put Charlene through hell.

  Which Charlene said she deserved, and then some.

  When the Department of Social Services took the girls away, Jessie was eight and virtual mom to Sophie, who was a toddler.

  Eight years old. Imagine the weight.

  “Phew,” Charlene said to the waiter when our food finally came. “We thought you’d fled the country.”

  Sophie rolled her eyes. She tried to make a joke of it with her sister, but Jessie hid behind her hair.

  I ate chicken parmigiana. Sophie talked about Balboa. Charlene talked about the great gal managing her new office in Augusta, Maine.

  “How were things at the shop?” she finally said, looking down at her veal something or other, trying for casual and almost making it. But I knew her too well to buy it: Charlene and Floriano had been chattering. They did every day. I wished they didn’t, but there wasn’t much I could say about it: she holds the paper on the garage.

  I looked at Sophie while I answered. “You know the junker F-350 we use to plow the lot?”

  She nodded.

  I felt Charlene’s stare but kept my eyes on Sophie’s. “Things were great,” I said, “until Floriano totaled it.”

  “What?” Sophie’s eyes went big.

  “On purpose.”

  “What?”

  “To take out a pair of gangsters who were tailing me.”

  “Holy shit,” Sophie said.

  “No shit,” I said.

  Charlene threw her napkin on the table, rose, walked out. Never looked back.

  “Crap,” I said.

  Behind her hair, Jessie smiled for the first time since she’d come home.

  * * *

  The four of us headed back to Charlene’s place. It was a quiet ride, though I tried.

  “We talked this through,” I said.

  Charlene said nothing. Left her arms folded.

  “Me, I’ve got my Barnburner thing,” I said. “You, you’re no Martha Stewart. And you don’t want to be. Remember?”

  Charlene said nothing.

  Which was too bad. I would’ve liked to talk with her—with someone—about Gus. About tough love. About zero-tolerance policies. About how rotten they feel.

  They sound good in meetings, in counselors’ offices.

  But try to live tough love. Try to throw a kid out on his ass for smoking a little weed.

  It’s harder on the thrower than it is on the thrown.

  And the thrown know it. They leverage it. They leverage anything, everything. Drunks and Junkies 101.

  Which is why tough love is the way to go.

  Full fucking circle.

  I parked Charlene’s Volvo SUV in her driveway. We all climbed out. I handed Charlene her keys, unpocketed my own, unlocked my truck.

  She didn’t ask where I was going.

  * * *

  I spent an hour prowling Framingham. Gus wasn’t answering his phone. I wondered if it was the GPS kind that could tell you its location. Probably. But how did you go about that? Cops? Court order? I thought about calling Lima. Decided against. Asked myself why, decided it was con’s instinct. You don’t tip your hand to the law. Period. Not even if he seems okay, as Lima did.

  So you’re on your own. Think like a junkie who’s got a few hundred bucks in his pocket and is on foot. And favors cocaine.

  The map in my head told me after being chucked down the stairs, Gus would’ve headed a few blocks south to Route 135, gravitating toward noise and traffic and shops. From there, east would mean Natick and nicer towns. West, on the other hand, meant Framingham’s downtown—train station, Salvation Army, alleys, and all. It’s not a big city, not hardly, but Gus could find what he needed there.

  West it was.

  I crawled the little downtown. Hit every street, every loading dock, every doorway. Framingham’s mostly made up of workers. Blue-collar: too tired on a weeknight to raise much hell. But there are some places you don’t want to be after dark.

  I looked in those places.

  Tough love.

  No Gus.

  I asked a dozen creeps in a dozen spots. White kid, probably looking to score? All his stuff in a backpack or a trash bag slung over his shoulder?

  Nobody’d seen him, or would cop to it. A Bahamian outside the train station wearing three hoodies mumbled and pointed enough so that I stuck a pair of fives in his hand, which was missing its ring finger. “Well?” I said.

  “Thatum,” he said, pointing west. “Or thatum.” East. “You got a light, mon? You got a smoke?”

  I took back my fives.

  “Aw, mon,” the Bahamian said to my back.

  I kicked my truck’s tire out of frustration. Climbed in, heel-rubbed my eyes, checked my watch. Midnight. Thought about calling the Framingham cops, but Matt Bogardis was the only one I trusted, and what were the odds?

  “Hell,” I said out loud to nobody.

  And called Luther Swale.

  “Sorry,” I said when he picked up on four and a half rings. “It’s late, I know. But I’m looking for a kid.”

  I listened to Luther breathe for maybe fifteen seconds. “How old?” he finally said.

  “Twentyish.”

  “And yet you called him a kid. When I was twenty, I was a supply sergeant down at Otis.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Yeah yeah yeah. And these days they’re boys until they’re thirty, and even then half of ’em want to take the easy way out and be stay-at-home daddies. Hell in a handcart. We’ve covered all that, amigo. But I’m helping this one.”

  “Helping. The way you help. Your Barnstormer pals.”

  “Barnburners.”

  He sighed. “What do you need?”

  “He might have hopped on the commuter rail, looking to get out of Framingham and score. If you take Boston, I’ll take Worcester.”

  “You don’t even know what direction he went in?”

  I said nothing.

  “What would he be after?” Luther finally said. “Ups or downs?”

  “He’s a cocaine boy. Limited funds, so I’m guessing crack.”

  “Mattapan by moonlight, looking for a white boy who’s looking for a rock. That ought to make for a nice evening.”

  I gave a twenty-second description of Gus. “Luther,” I said, “I owe you.”

  “You made it off paper,” he said. “You don’t owe anybody anything.” Click.

  Parole officer’s view of the world. You’re on paper or you’re off.

  I headed for Worcester.

  “I need help.” The last thing he said to me. Junkie leverage, like when the dog gives up the fight and shows his belly.

  And the hell of it is, it’s true. He does need help, and he knows it. But he’s also showing his belly to play you, to con you. Truth and bullshit both.

  I pounded the steering wheel. Shook my head, felt stupid.

  * * *

  Felt stupider at daybreak, having burned half a tank of gas, dodged two stickups, and found not a whiff of Gus.

  Luther hadn’t made out any better. We’d called back and forth every hour on the hour. At five, I’d told him to go home. He’d said why bother, he was headed for a diner.

  Both Swales, father and son, must curse the day I clown-shoed into their lives. I brought them nothing but hard work and misery.

  I gassed up, tried to think.

  Downtown Framingham, such as it is: ruled out. Cocaine safari to Worcester or Boston: hard to say definitively, but rule that out too.

  Home? Sherborn?

  Could be. Family was family.

  But Rinn Biletnikov had told me Gus and his father weren’t exactly seeing eye to eye. No, it’d been more powerful than that. Gus was on terrible
terms with his father, she’d said. Peter is the last person Gus would have confided in.

  I’d overlaid that on my own situation with Roy, had found it easy to believe.

  Which is why you didn’t check Sherborn first, I admitted. Which you should have done out of common sense. It’s home and it’s close.

  It was time to visit Peter Biletnikov.

  I felt bad over what I’d put Luther through.

  I would feel worse soon.

  Because about the time I flipped down my sun visor at an off-brand Worcester gas station and aimed my truck at Sherborn, somebody blew a hole in Gus Biletnikov.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Haley, the nanny, answered the door. She wore running gear—had an iPod clipped to her upper arm and everything—but held a baby on her hip in that way that looks so natural for women. In her other hand she held a plastic baby bottle and wadded-up earbuds. How she’d managed to open the door I couldn’t figure.

  It took her half a beat to remember me. Then she said, “Oh,” and looked at her runner’s watch.

  “Early, I know,” I said. “But I figured this for an early house. Looks like I was right.”

  “You were,” Haley said, nodding me in and kicking shut the door. “Usually I can squeeze in five K on the treadmill before she wakes up. But you were a restless, hungry girl this morning, wasn’t you, sweetie? Wasn’t you? Is she not the bee’s knees?”

  “I guess.” Never have gotten the hang of baby talk. It makes me grind my teeth. “Uh, how old? Is she, I mean.”

  “Just over six months. And perfect. Seventy-fifth percentile for length, weight, and head size.”

  I guessed that was good.

  We stood in the warm front hall. Slate floor opening onto a massive, cathedral-ceilinged kitchen and great room.

  Haley nuzzled noses with the baby. Who seemed okay with it. Maybe she was cute. I’m the wrong guy to ask.

  “Well,” I finally said. “Is Peter here? Awake?”

  “Peter,” she said. “Interesting.”

  I looked a question at her.

  “Because Rinn can’t stop talking about you and your compadre, Randall.”

  I said nothing.

  “You fascinate her. She finds you very genuine, very real.”