Finders keepers, p.15
Finders Keepers, page 15
"Full of those fat goldfish that look like they're coming out of a coma?"
"Koi. No. No koi. They're pathetic looking. Something more exotic. That's why it's not finished. It'll have to be a lot deeper for the fish I want. Maybe I'll just forget it, fill it in. Or make it into a fountain."
"Beautiful flowers," she said. "You're the gardener?"
"Yeah. But I get help from the others. Most of these are indigenous. The palms were already here." There are six of them along the back property line, forty-feet tall and leaning in from a lifetime of bending to the wind. "I put the fence sections up between them to keep people from cutting through that way and damaging the flowers." The fence is wrought iron, a Philip Simmons design I had seen years ago in Charleston and had made over here. With Simmons' permission and my payment for the privilege. I'd have liked it more if he'd made it but the freight stunned me out of that idea.
The path led us to a wrought iron gate, the final section of the fence, that's perpendicular to a high hedge that separates me from the house next door. I unlatched it and it squeaked as it always does and we stepped on to the beach.
The Pacific Ocean, Kailua Bay actually, was in front of us across fifty yards of beige sand. Leanne and Sally sprawled on a couple of big towels, halfway down. Dark, heavy clouds roiled in the distance. The bay was dotted with sails.
"We keep this outrigger canoe," I said, pointing to the right, "and the nets,"--they were strung up along a rig of poles--"for fishing for our dinner. And this Boston Whaler." It's a seventeen-footer with a center console and a 90-horsepower Mercury. It's on a trailer that we wrestle to the water with a cable and winch rigged to one of the palms. "We fish from it, too. And daytrip to some of the smaller islands."
"Do you own the beach, too?"
"No. Nobody owns the beaches in Hawaii. They belong to all the people. The tree line is where my property ends."
"I'm impressed. Are you a man of means?"
"Men of means don't have a mortgage like I've got."
"Owning this," she said, "doesn't quite fit with what I expected."
"From an ex-con? Yeah. Especially one squared up."
"What's the history of this place?"
"The military built it sixty years ago as a retreat for the brass. It was pretty beat up when we bought it two years ago. The government was in one of those phases they go through where they want to sell obsolete assets. My partner used to live in Hawaii and knew of it and we were bucks up and flew over for the auction. We won."
"Bucks up?" she asked with a little tilt of her head.
"Yeah. It works as a business. Pays for itself with a little cushion for the landlord and gardener. I get real good rates and, even at the prices, I can be pretty picky about the people I rent to. Which is important, living like this."
"Apartments, not condos?"
"Yeah. They want to buy and if I could be sure the people here now would stay forever, I'd go for it. But things change, and it'd be hard for me to reserve the right to approve the people they might want to someday sell to. That scares me some."
"Yes. One bad apple..."
"Been lucky so far."
I walked her back through the gate and along the hedge past the herb and vegetable garden to the front and her car in the wide gravel turnaround flanked by a six-carport.
She reached for the door handle but I got there first and opened it for her.
"Thank you," she said, and smiled right at me. "Chivalry. A lost art."
"I'm old fashioned."
"You build the front wall?"
"With help." It's ivy-covered brick, seven feet tall, open only at the gate. Did it to remind me of Wrigley.
"Nice touch," she said. "Reminds me of Wrigley."
"Thanks. See you in the morning." I closed the door and she drove off with one hand in the air in a wave.
Hmm.
***
I met Packy MacGillicuddy a while back when I came up from the hole for the third and last time and found him sitting on a bunk in my cell. He was playing four hands of twenty-one against himself as the house, all the cards face-up. He put a big, full-faced smile on me and I stood there stonily as the hack slammed the self-locking door behind me and trundled down the walkway.
"Patrick Aloysius MacGillicuddy at your service. Federal Bureau of Prisons number 748, dash, 340, dash, 9922. Call me Packy. Pleased to meetcha."
"You haven't met me."
"Prob'ly will, though, sharing a cell with you. Harry Pines, right? Relax, brother. You got no worries with me. Much trouble as you go to to keep from getting butt-fucked, I sure ain't gonna bring any more down. I do easy time. It all plays with me. I'm just getting by."
In the six months we celled together, my last six, I came to like Packy more than anybody I met inside, not that there was much competition. He was right about doing easy time. He never had a bad day or even a bad mood. He was decent, funny, and interesting, had a lot of stories to tell and he never seemed to be hiding anything as he told them. But he was. They all are.
He had grown up tough, fought professionally, as a welterweight, and when he got tired of taking punches he went to Las Vegas and got hooked on the bright lights and non-stop action. He dealt for a while, then played the tables, then cheated the tables and the slots, and then took to supplementing his income by doing favors for people, one of whom set him up with a guy who wanted to buy a silencer. The guy was an ATF undercover agent. Packy's pal gave them Packy to reduce his own pending sentence and when Packy handed over the silencer he was on his way to spend five years of his life at the Federal Correctional Institution at Terminal Island in the Los Angeles Harbor. That's where I met him.
"Silencer! Sonofabitch wasn't nothing more'n a piece a pipe, loud as shit, sounded like a atom bomb when they shot it off in court, hundred and fifty dollars I got for it." It made him laugh.
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Here's a sample from J.L. Abramo's Gravesend. It is now available from Down and Out Books.
PROLOGUE
1
Mid-January. Well past midnight.
He moans in his sleep.
His wife tries to wake him gently; using soft, steady pressure to his shoulder.
Her efforts interrupt a bad dream.
Another terrible dream.
The dreams have been recurring more frequently as more time passes since the day he lost his job.
Bad dreams.
Nightmares, manifesting the fear, have crowded his waking hours as well; the terror of not being able to provide for and protect his family.
He wakes gasping for breath, for words.
"What's wrong?" he asks, choking on the question.
"It's Derek. He's been vomiting all night and he's burning up with fever," his wife answers. "I called the doctor. He said we should rush Derek to the emergency room. He said that he would meet us there."
"Get the boy ready. I'll take him over myself," he says, throwing off the bed sheet and blanket. "You need to stay here with the baby."
2
Coney Island Hospital is a fifteen-minute drive; there will be little traffic on the Belt Parkway at this hour.
His wife straps the five-year-old boy into the child seat in back as he climbs behind the steering wheel of the relic they call an automobile.
"Call me."
"I will," he promises, and pulls away from the curb toward the parkway entrance at 65th Street. He gazes across the underside of the Verrazano Bridge as he races past the Fourth Avenue exit. The boy has cleverly managed to free himself from the restraining belt of the child carrier.
The other car comes from out of nowhere, barreling into the right lane from the Bay Parkway entrance, smashing into his right quarter-panel. His car spins a hard ninety degrees. He desperately tries to brake, but he is unable to avoid crashing head-on into the chain-link fence separating the parkway from the service road. The impact bounces his forehead off the steering wheel.
The boy lies on the seat beside him after hitting the dashboard on the passenger side.
The boy is bleeding from a wide gash above the eye.
The small body looks terribly broken.
He tries to start the car with no success. He tries to locate the other vehicle. The other driver has stepped out of the second car and is slowly walking toward them. The man suddenly stops and quickly turns away. He watches in stunned silence as the other driver climbs back into the second car, rolls slowly past them and then speeds off.
The license plate on the BMW reads TITAN1.
He is terrified at the thought of leaving the boy there alone, but he is afraid to move the battered body. He removes his own coat and uses it to cover and protect the boy from the bitter cold.
He viciously tears a sleeve from his own shirt and wraps it around the boy's head, trying to slow the bleeding. He jumps from the car, runs to the exit and up to the service road. The area is dark and isolated. There are only retail businesses here, shut down for the night. He turns onto 26th Avenue and runs under the parkway toward the nearest house.
It is nearly three in the morning; he has not shaved for two days. His shirt is roughly torn. He beats on a door for help, crying that his son is hurt badly, and he needs to use a telephone. The woman on the other side of the door will not let him in. She is alone she says, her husband out of town. He pleads until he can hear footsteps moving her back into the depths of the house. He cries out after her, begging her to call for an ambulance to the scene of the accident. He looks at the house address and then turns from the door not knowing what to do, where to go.
A yellow taxicab approaches, heading in the direction of the parkway. He waves his arms wildly, like a madman. He is becoming a madman. An off-duty sign quickly lights on the roof of the taxi as the cab speeds past him.
The number on the rear of the cab is 4354.
His head is filling with numbers.
He runs back to the car. The boy is still breathing. He finds an old blanket in the trunk. He carefully wraps the boy, lifts the body out of the car and begins walking blindly in the direction of the hospital.
A panel truck approaches from behind, slows briefly and then drives on. The lettering on the side of the truck reads Addams Dairy. There is a white bumper sticker on the rear with two words in bold black lettering.
Got Milk?
His head is filling with words.
He turns to the sound of another approaching vehicle. A tow truck has stopped at his abandoned car. He reverses direction and hurries back, the boy limp in his arms.
3
The tow truck driver drops him and the boy at the emergency room entrance off Ocean Parkway.
A nurse rushes up and grabs the boy from his arms as she shouts for a room and a doctor.
He tries to follow, but he is held back by another nurse.
He asks for the boy's physician, insisting that the pediatrician was to meet them there.
He is told that the boy's doctor never arrived.
Ten minutes later he is informed that his son is gone. His firstborn has died.
"We did all that we could do," says a nurse. "The boy lost so much blood. It was too late."
His legs go out from under him; he is helped to his feet by the nurse and a security guard. They sit him in a chair, a glass of water appears and a young doctor quickly checks his blood pressure.
"Just sit for a few minutes," the doctor says. "You're going to be alright."
"Never," he replies.
Everything, everyone, every thought is blurred.
"Is there someone we can phone?" asks the nurse.
He looks up at the woman, trying to regain focus.
"My wife," he says weakly. "I need a telephone. I promised her I would call."
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Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Epilogue
David's Biography
Acknowledgements
Other Titles by David Housewright
Other Titles from Down and Out Books
Sample from Bill Moody's Czechmate: The Spy Who Played Jazz
Sample from Terry Holland's An Ice Cold Paradise
Sample from J.L. Abramo's Gravesend
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David Housewright, Finders Keepers
