Final Stroke by Michael Beres Read Free Book Online Page A

so-called “foul play.” Or maybe getting out a violin and play ing it until the guy pukes his guts out. Or maybe letting word out on the street so Marjorie’s husband’s old cronies blow into town for a final hit. He could almost see them crawling out of the woodwork of vari ous nursing homes around the country. They’d show up at Hell in the Woods in wheelchairs and walkers. They’d rough up a few aides and nurses. A Keystone Cops scene in which the cronies stagger after the aides and nurses, wielding their canes.
    Or maybe it would be different. The guards at the front desk would try to put up a fight, but the crew of cronies, like a wrecking crew come back from the dead, would mow them down with their canes—the canes, of course, having had rapid firing weapons con cealed in them James Bond style ever since the cronies went into the homes in case anyone ever sent in a hit on them.
    Was this a story he and Marjorie once shared? Or was it really that way? Hoods in nursing homes with loaded canes? Funny. So damn funny.
    He backed away from the door to the loading dock, turned and wheeled back to the puddle where the tracks originated. On the side of the puddle nearest the janitors’ closet, where the kid in new galoshes had splashed, he saw something else. He wheeled around the puddle. Yes, there was evidence here. Several specks on the doorjamb, hard to see because of the dark color of the doorjamb, but when he reached out and found that the speck he rubbed came off fairly easily, he knew it was blood and not paint. Perhaps there had been more blood, a puddle on the floor near the door and away from the urine puddle, the para medics wiping up a larger puddle of blood and missing the specks on the doorjamb. But if there was that much blood, why no investiga tion? Where was the yellow police tape? Where was the cop to protect the evidence? After all her theories about conspiracies, was this how Marjorie would check out? Slipping in a puddle of piss and no one even questions the circumstances or bothers to clean it up?
    As he leaned forward in his wheelchair rubbing at another of the reddish-brown specks and examining the stain transferred to his fin ger, something else bothered him. For a moment he thought he would fall out of the chair, and if that happened, he’d tumble end-over-end, not stopping until … until what? He sat up and closed his eyes and tried to think. Yes, something was there. A smell. A smell from ear lier while sailing down the hallway, but a smell that was not here. And now, as he sniffed, trying to detect an odor from the puddle on the floor, a memory came to him. A memory from the distant past that made him sit up and close his eyes.
    A stairwell. A feeling of being closed in. An unsafe place. The weight of a gun in his hand and he’s climbing the stairs and there’s the smell of urine. Must be from the time he was a Chicago cop. Even though he hadn’t known Jan then, she told him about it, saying she knew a lot of his old cronies and that she would teach it all to him again and he’d be as good as new. But this thing—climbing a dark stairwell with a gun in his hand and the smell of urine all around— this thing he did not remember Jan telling him. This thing came from someplace else, someplace dark and frightening. And now a phrase emerged. That phrase was simply, the projects .
    As he sat with his eyes closed recalling the smell of urine from a stairwell climbed long ago, he wondered why, although he had leaned forward in his chair and taken a deep breath, he had not smelled urine here.
    Then he heard a sound. Someone else on the stairwell in the proj ect. But when he opened his eyes, he saw the night LPN who every one called Betty-who-talks-too-much staring at him. Betty was from his floor. She stood on the far side of the puddle with her arms folded. She was smiling and he wondered how long she’d been there. Actually, he wanted to ask her this but, as usual, the words went