Last Safe Place, The (8 page)

After that, they went directly to Mama Rosina’s in Little Italy for dinner before the show, dressed in their new duds with their old clothes in Macy’s sacks. Mama’s was a family-run Italian restaurant with lots of atmosphere, which meant it was dark as an old maid’s underwear drawer, lit only by candles on the tables that had dripped mountains of wax down the sides
of their wine-bottle holders. The place instantly made Theo uncomfortable because it looked just like the restaurant in the first
Godfather
movie where Mikey Corleone shot the crooked cop and the drug dealer Sollozzo. Which maybe was what had given Gabriella the idea.

Halfway through the salad, Theo got up and excused himself and went to the restroom—just like in the movie, only not to pick up a gun hidden behind the toilet tank. The restrooms were in a small hallway off the kitchen with a back door at the end leading to the alley. A red sign on the door warned: “Emergency exit. Do not open. Alarm will sound.”

He came back to the table a short time later, his gimpy limp a little more pronounced than usual, as the pasta was being served. They all ate, talked, didn’t laugh though. They couldn’t pull that off. Right after the main course, Ty started to get sick. Within minutes Gabriella had to rush him to the bathroom so he wouldn’t puke on the table, with P.D. only a step behind, of course. They stayed there a long time, didn’t return for the rest of dinner or the tiramisu dessert.

Theo figured if you’d been hired to keep track of the folks who’d gone to the bathroom, you’d have to be a special kind of stupid not to notice they never came back out. There was likely a lot of yelling going on somewhere on the subject. But by that time, Gabriella, Theo, Ty and P.D. were driving through the Holland tunnel into New Jersey in a bunged-up, five-year-old Honda Accord with so much mud on the license plate you couldn’t read the number.

After the meal, the old black man seated at their table used his napkin to discretely wipe off his silverware, glass and the two, crisp $100-bills he used to pay for the meal—told the waiter to keep the change. He gathered up all the Macy’s bags, pulled his red sweater close around him against the chill in the air and took a cab to the Warwick Hotel. He got in the elevator, punched every button so it stopped on every floor all the way up. When the doors finally opened on the 38th floor, the only thing inside the elevator was a pile of Macy’s bags.

Three hours later, the afternoon shift maintenance crew supervisor, an old fellow who’d been called Drumstick back in the day, punched out on the time clock in the hotel basement like he’d done just about every day for the past thirty-seven years. Dressed in his blue jumpsuit uniform, the old, bald black man with coke-bottle-thick glasses made his way down the hall past
the garbage chute that was the final resting place for the tiny, snipped-up pieces of a fedora and a red sweater and went out through the Sixth Avenue staff entrance. He walked the two blocks to the subway entrance on Seventh Avenue and Fifty-Third Street and took the D train home to Harlem—with $5,000 in crisp, hundred-dollar bills tucked snug in his hip pocket.

Least that’s the way he and Theo had planned it and Theo assumed that’s the way it’d worked, prayed that it had.

The man who’d played drums in Theo’s band forty years ago had exchanged the keys to the Honda for Theo’s red sweater, his hat and a 30-second demonstration of Theo’s limp in the bathroom of Mama Rosina’s. Folks had joked back in the day that they was twins separated at birth and even after all these years they were still the spittin’ image of each other. Except Drumstick didn’t have a hair on his head anymore. And he could barely see. Hated contact lenses, though, only wore them to Mass on Sundays, weddings, funerals … and other special occasions. Drumstick arranged for the car to be parked outside the restaurant’s back door—between two dumpsters that blocked the view from both ends of the alley.

The alarm on the back door in Mama Rosina’s hadn’t worked since the Eisenhower administration.

Soon as Gabriella, Ty and P.D. hopped into the car, they laid over in the seats and Theo covered them up with blankets. He had already gotten that crazy wig situated on his head with the dreadlocks hanging halfway down his back and put on the mirror sunglasses that made him look like a pimp.

Only thing Gabriella said was: “Did your friend get what I asked for?”

Theo wordlessly nodded to the glove box and she opened it. Inside was a .38 revolver. Serial number filed off. Untraceable. The whole transaction had cost $20,000.

Once they got away from the restaurant, Gabriella took the wheel and the others remained covered up with blankets for the next two hours. Theo had spent most of that time praying—that the “watchers” hadn’t spotted them and that Gabriella’d stop soon so he could go to the bathroom before he wet himself. She drove through the night, getting off the expressway every thirty or forty miles, watching the exit ramps to see if any suspicious vehicles got off, too. Nothing. Maybe that didn’t prove they weren’t being followed, but it was all she could do.

They was eating McDonald’s big breakfasts in the car in Salisbury, North Carolina, when Gabriella asked Theo where he wanted her to drop him off now that his part in this wild ride was over. She apologized for dragging him into her nightmare, thanked him for his help and said she’d give him plenty of money to get by on—because they both knew he was in Yesheb’s gunsights now, too, and he’d have to vanish his own self for the next couple of months.

Theo shoved a syrup-slathered hunk of pancake into his mouth and said, “I ain’t goin’ nowhere ’cept with you.”

Her look of shock would have been comical if her face wasn’t all puckered up on one side—Smokey’s handiwork.

“You’re going with us, Grandpa Slappy?” The instant of pure joy on that boy’s face made Theo’s throat draw up so tight he couldn’t swallow his own spit.

“Oh no, he’s not!” Gabriella said.

“How you figure to do this if I don’t? Face like yours ain’t ’xactly gone blend into a crowd. Every time you check into a motel, or go in some convenience store to pay for gasoline, or buy a box of fried chicken at a drive-in window—somebody gone see you. Anybody ask ’em later, they gone remember.”

Gabriella couldn’t argue that.

“But a old black man ... don’t matter what they say, most white folks still think all black people look alike. And ain’t nobody looking for a old
bald
black man. Under all this nappy cotton, I bet I look just like Denzel Washington.”

“Theo, this is … dangerous.”

“Ya think?”

“You won’t like where we’re going.”

“I don’t like where we been! You ever notice how many fat women they is in the South?”

“Theo, I’m serious.”

“So am I. That woman over there, she got so much flab on her arms she look like a flying squirrel.”

Ty tried unsuccessfully to stifle a giggle.

“And them spandex pants. They’s stretched so tight over them thunder thighs, she try to run, her legs gone rub together and start a fire.”

Ty lost it then, laughed so hard he spilled his syrup and Gabriella used cleaning up his mess as an excuse to drop the subject. She didn’t bring it up again.

They stopped at a Walmart in Charlotte and bought suitcases, toiletries and bare-essential clothing—they had to travel light. Made it as far as the suburbs of Atlanta before Gabriella crashed. Next day, they went into the city and got Gabriella a laptop and Ty a Nintendo 3DS and just about every video game ever invented. They drove to Nashville then and spent the rest of the afternoon and most of the next day going from one music store to another until Theo found what he was looking for—a vintage Selmer Mark VI tenor saxophone. Wasn’t no way he planned to spend eight weeks in exile without a sax to keep him company.

That’s what it was supposed to be. Two months. Gabriella said if she could hide from him through two more full moons, the Beast would be screwed and Yesheb wouldn’t be after them no more.

Theo figured that Yesheb giving up the chase was about as likely as successfully milking a chicken. He hadn’t known a whole lot of madmen in his life, but the ones he had known didn’t take losing real well. Yesheb might not be able to marry her two months from now, but that wouldn’t keep him from killing her. Would make it even more likely, from where Theo sat. He didn’t say that out loud, of course. He didn’t have to; Gabriella wasn’t no fool.

* * * *

All the color drains out of Yesheb’s face.

“Say that again, slowly,” he says into his cell phone. His modulated, television-announcer voice quakes, his hand grips the small device so tight it might shatter.

“Sir … I have teams out, more than a dozen men sniffing for her trail—we’ll find it. Our techies have hacked into her credit cards, we’ll know as soon as she uses one. We—”

“Explain to me how you
lost
a scar-faced woman, an old man, a little kid and a dog!”

“We had tracking devices in their luggage, which they left in the hotel room. We had one in the heel of the woman’s shoe and one in the boy’s … but she bought new shoes and left the old ones—”

“How did they
get away?”

“We had eyes on the subjects every minute. They went for dinner at an Italian restaurant and the team leader posted a man in front of the restaurant, one inside and two more out back—one at each end of the alley.”

Yesheb listens with rising fury as the man explains the bathroom fiasco.

“They must have slipped out the back door. Employees of all the shops on the street park in the alley, but only four cars left during the time the subjects were in the restaurant—no passengers in any of them. We photographed them all, standard procedure and we’ll pull license plate numbers—”

“The old man, the grandfather!”

“Had a team waiting in his hotel room prepared to extract the location of the woman and boy with a minimum of noise and blood. But … our man followed the old man into a crowded elevator in the lobby and just as the doors were closing, the old man managed to slip out—”

“He’s a gimpy old man!”

“We’re searching the building for him now, sir, have operatives on every exit.
Nobody
will get past them! We will wait him out. Eventually, he’ll make a break for it and we’ll have him.”

Yesheb speaks two words through gritted teeth before he breaks the connection.

“Find her!”

He pauses, then places another call. He instructs the person on the other end of the line to arrange for the man he had just spoken with to meet with a tragic and untimely death. Suicide. A swan dive off one of the balconies of the Warwick Hotel.

* * * *

For a moment, Gabriella didn’t recognize her own reflection in the polished metal mirror in the rest stop bathroom on Interstate 70 west of Ellis, Kansas. Oh, it wasn’t just the bilious light from the flickering fluorescent bulb overhead—the kind that’d make the winner of the Boston Marathon look like he was dying of pancreatic cancer. Gabriella’s hair was curly now, forming a yellow cloud of ringlets on the top of her head. The curl was natural; the butter color wasn’t. It was L’Oréal Honey Blonde, because she was worth it, but it wouldn’t be long before her natural blonde grew
out enough to blend with the color out of the bottle. The short style was courtesy of the not-too-shabby haircut Theo had given her right before he shaved his head.

When he’d finished both jobs, he’d turned to Ty and asked, “You know the difference ’tween a man with a bad haircut and a woman with a bad haircut?”

Here it comes.

Theo didn’t wait for an answer, of course.

“Six weeks.” Theo paused; timing was everything. “A man with a bad haircut thinks, ‘In six weeks it’ll grow out.’ Now a woman … she get a bad haircut, she be calling Judge Judy. She be going into therapy!”

From there it was one small step into Dueling Groaners.

“Know where you find a one-legged dog?” he asked Ty.

“Wherever you left it,” Ty said, and fired back instantly, “Knock, knock.”

“Who’s there?”

“Dwayne.”

“Dwayne who?”

“Dwayne the bathtub, I’m dwowning.”

“Know how to prevent diseases caused by biting insects?” Theo’s volley.

“Don’t bite any insects.”

Gabriella was sure that by the time they reached their destination, Ty would be able to repeat the whole trouble-in-River-City sequence from the
Music Man
in under a minute and burp the melody of the
Star Spangled Banner.

And who knew what else he might learn from his Grandpa Slappy, aka Theodosius X. Carmichael. Theo never told her what the X stood for, if, indeed, it stood for anything at all. He did tell her, the first time he showed up unannounced after she and Smokey were married, that “with a name like Theodosius, you learn to fight early and dirty.” He also told her he was likely the only man she’d ever meet who had a nickname for his nickname. As a jazz saxophone player for half a century, he’d been known as Slap Yo Mama Carmichael. That was shortened to Slappy when he added standup comedy to his act. After a while, everyone in his life called him Slappy. Except Gabriella. She called him Theo. It seemed respectful. She could tell he appreciated it, too, though torture and the threat of imminent death wouldn’t have forced him to admit it.

The old man had never come around much. Ty’s father had hated him. The train wreck of Smokey’s life was rooted in his childhood—a mother who died when he was a toddler and a father who crawled into a bottle in his grief and didn’t return for twenty years. Gabriella still had no idea why Theo had suddenly appeared out of nowhere. All he’d said was, “I only got me a little while ’fore I got to be somewhere important. I’ll be moving on in a day or two.”

He’d been in residence at the guest house almost two weeks when Yesheb showed up.

“Did you hear about the parrot that walked into a bar,” Theo began, “and said to the bartender—?”

“Ding! Ding! Ding!” Gabriella had reached her limit. “That sound you hear is the Corny Joke Alarm. Evacuate the building!”

It was feast or famine with Theo. He often ignored what was said to him, acted like he didn’t hear it. And other than an occasional dribble of the conversational ball, the old man had only spoken in monosyllabic grunts since they turned west from Evansville, Indiana, and headed out into the flatlands.