Bad Men

It had been driving okay earlier in the day, but now, just when he needed it to run, the engine was turning over with a click. The battery was new, so it couldn’t be that. Inside his garage, with the lamp hanging from the hood, Carl took a rag and wiped the oil from his hands. It could be the starter, he figured, but that would take time to repair and he didn’t have that kind of time. He had people to meet, and if Scarfe was telling the truth, they were the kind of people who wouldn’t take kindly to being kept waiting. He didn’t want them to wait, either. The sooner they got what they wanted, the sooner he would get what he wanted, which was a big dead policeman.

Carl was a coward. He knew he was a coward, although sometimes, when he was liquored up, he liked to tell himself that he was just smart, and that men like him, smaller and weaker than those around them, had to find other ways to fight back when people did them a bad turn. If that meant stabbing them in the back, then so be it. If they hadn’t crossed him, they wouldn’t have had to worry about their backs anyway.

Carl’s brother was different-strong and hard and, hell, maybe even kind of mean, but a real man, one who had stood up for his little brother time and time again. And because Ron had been a stand-up guy for Carl, when the time came, Carl had been a stand-up guy for him.

Carl still remembered the call. They’d both been out drinking in Portland, and Ron had headed off with some woman he’d picked up in Three-Dollar Dewey’s. She looked kind of familiar to Carl. According to Ron, she was Jeanne Aiello, all grown up. Generations of Aiellos had lived out on Dutch until Jeanne’s parents had grown tired of the isolation and had left for more “civilized” surroundings. Now little Jeanne was back in Maine, working in one of those tourist stores in the Old Port, and seemed real happy to be making Ron’s acquaintance once again.

Carl left them to it, and because he was still thirsty and had a beer appetite, he took a cab out to the Great Lost Bear on Forest Avenue and got himself a big basket of wings. It wasn’t Carl’s favorite bar, owing to the fact that the Portland cops liked to drink there, but he was hungry and the Bear was one of the few bars that served food late at night. He was halfway through his wings when his cell phone started ringing and he heard his brother’s voice when he answered the call. Ron wasn’t panicked, though, or afraid. He just told Carl to get in a cab and head over to Windham, and Carl had done just that, leaving the cab about a half mile from the address his brother had given him, as he had been instructed to do. Ron was waiting at the door of the house when he got there, and waved his brother in quickly. There were cuts on his face.

The woman was lying on the bathroom floor, and her face was all torn up. The mirror above the sink was shattered and there was a big shard of it in her eye. Smaller pieces were embedded in her cheeks and her forehead. Carl looked at his brother’s right hand and saw that some of the woman’s hair was still caught in his nails.

“I just lost it, man,” said Ron. “I don’t know what happened. She brought me back here and we was drinking, fooling around. We head for the bedroom and I try to get it on and next thing she’s pushing me away, calling me an animal. We started fighting, she ran to the bathroom, and then I was just pushing her against the wall and I couldn’t stop.”

He began to cry.

“I couldn’t stop, Carlie. I couldn’t stop.”

It was Carl’s finest moment. He told his brother to go find some rubber gloves and cleaning products, anything that could help them clear the scene. While Ron wiped everything, Carl wrapped the woman in sheets, then double-bagged her with black plastic garbage sacks, using tape to bind her tight as a fly’s ass. They washed everything down, until the house was cleaner than it had ever been before, then filled a suitcase with clothes, makeup and what little jewelry they could find. There wasn’t much that could be done about the broken mirror, so Carl just removed the last pieces from the frame and put a small vanity mirror from the bedroom on the bathroom sink. That way, he hoped, anyone who saw it would think that Jeanne had broken the bathroom mirror herself and was content to use the vanity mirror until she got around to replacing it. They put the suitcase and the body in the trunk of her car and drove down to their boat. Jeanne was loaded into the cabin and covered with a tarp, and then Carl parked her car on India Street and walked back to rejoin his brother. When they were half an hour out of port, they weighted her body with Carl’s old toolbox, which they kept in the boat for emergencies, and then dumped her overboard. She was never seen again by any living person, her body descending beneath the waves, lost to the eyes of the world and watched only by the ghost of a boy, for this was his place.