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  Dead Heat with the Reaper

  Copyright © 2015, William E. Wallace

  All rights reserved. No part of this electronic book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by electronic or mechanical means including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Published by Mike Monson and Chris Rhatigan

  Edited by Rob Pierce and Chris Rhatigan

  Cover design by Eric Beetner

  LEGACY

  BY WILLIAM E. WALLACE

  Frank Trask never guessed he had a drinking problem. “I drink; I get drunk; I pass out—no problem,” he’d say when people asked him about the large amount of booze he consumed.

  At least that was what he said until the Monday he passed out before he’d had his first drink. He walked out of his West Oakland hotel to buy a package of razor blades, turned right, and took four steps before everything went black.

  He woke up in Highland, the hospital for indigents, illegals, and the uninsured run by Alameda County. He could tell it was the county pill mill because the staff had stenciled its name on everything to keep patients from walking out with it.

  The news crawl on the idiot box hanging from the ceiling above his bed told him it was already Thursday. Trask groaned. He was supposed to spend Tuesday at Pete’s, his local bar, celebrating his 67th birthday with the closest thing to a family he had, his three buddies from the old steel mill.

  Instead he’d spent his birthday passed out in a no-hoper hospital with a bunch of losers who didn’t know where their next meal—or anything else—was coming from.

  He could have worked up a pretty good case of feeling sorry for himself if he’d had half a heat on, but ordering a drink in a county hospital was out of the question.

  Now THAT, he thought, is a drinking problem: not being able to get hold of booze when you really need it.

  A nurse who looked something like Dorothy, the big sardonic woman on “The Golden Girls,” seemed surprised to find Trask awake.

  “Well, welcome back,” she said, reviewing the readings on the machine next to his bed. “You’ve been out quite a while. How do you feel?”

  Trask eyed her. He’d never had much use for the medical profession. “I feel like home-made shit,” he said.

  “Ah!” she said, smiling. “A Village Fugs fan. Tuli Kupferberg rocks!”

  Her name tag said “Kennedy” in white letters on black plastic. Trask thought of asking her whether she was single and would like a husband; he hadn’t met a woman who’d heard of the Village Fugs or Kupferberg since 1967.

  “What’s wrong with me?” he asked. “Why am I in county?”

  She gave him a long look. “I’d rather your doctor talked to you about that, Mr. Trask.”

  “So where is he, at the driving range or something? How many times a month does he drop by?”

  She glanced at her watch and smiled. “You’re in luck,” she said. “Her tee-time isn’t until five p.m. today, so she should be by in about ten minutes.”

  He thought about that. So his doc was a woman; he wondered if she knew about the Village Fugs, too.

  The nurse finished recording information from the machine and took his temperature.

  “Looks like you’re semi-normal,” she said. “That’s a little like a miracle considering when you came in here, you were at death’s door. Please listen to what the doctor tells you and follow her instructions. You may just live to see your next birthday.”

  Trask laughed bitterly. “I wish I had seen the last one. It’s a hell of a thing to spend your birthday on your back in a hospital.”

  She put his chart back in the rack at the foot of the bed. “I can think of worse ways to spend it,” she said as she started for the door.

  “Yeah?” he said. “Like what?”

  She turned and said, “You could have spent it on your back in the morgue.”

  She left, humming the Fugs’ tune “Wet Dream.”

  ***

  He thought about the expression she had used: “death’s door.” He had probably heard that phrase a million times but never really paid any attention. Apparently death lived in a house. He had always thought of the skinny old motherfucker just wandering around aimlessly with his scythe over his shoulder, harvesting souls willy-nilly, sort of like the homeless guy with the torn straw hat and shopping cart he saw going through garbage bins near his hotel.

  His head was sore where he had banged it when he passed out. He could feel a bandage just over his left eye, and whatever was under it was tender when he touched it.

  When the doctor showed up—three minutes early—Trask initially thought she was an orderly sent in to change the bedpans or something. First of all, she was young, maybe all of 28 years old; second, she was black. Trask had never seen a black doctor who was a woman before. They had all been men. And every African American doctor he had ever met seemed to be at least 55. He’d been under the impression medical schools wouldn’t give a black doctor a degree until his hair was gray and he had a double chin.

  “Mr. Trask?” the young woman asked as she studied the clipboard she’d pulled from the foot of the bed.

  “Yeah.” Trask looked at the three other beds in the ward, all empty. “Since I’m the only person here, that must be me.”

  “I’m Dr. Lois Johnson,” the young woman said with a thin smile, holding out her hand.

  Trask took it, wondering what year in medical school doctors learn the hand-shaking tradition. To Trask, it made seeing a sawbones a little bit like visiting a used car lot.

  “You were brought in because you passed out on the street,” Johnson said. “Have you ever blacked out like that before?”

  Trask shook his head.

  “Ever feel dizzy or disoriented?”

  “Nope,” he said, then corrected himself. “Yeah, actually, I do. Sometimes when I wake up at night I feel dizzy when I stand up. My heart seems to beat fast then, too.”

  “Do you have trouble sleeping?” Johnson asked, writing something on Trask’s chart.

  Trask nodded. “Only at night,” he said. “Days I can nod off on the bus, or while I’m eating lunch. Night’s a different deal. When it’s dark out, I only wake up to pee. It seems to happen to a lot of us old farts.”

  Johnson made another note. “Do you have abdominal pain? Stomach aches?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “How often?”

  Trask considered the question. “Maybe three, four times a week. I think it’s indigestion. I take antacids for it.”

  “Do they help?”

  He thought about it. “No. Not really. Eventually it just stops. Or else I stop noticing it.”

  “When was the last time you saw a doctor?”

  Trask thought a moment.

  He remembered the last time he’d talked to a doctor, but he didn’t think that was the kind of conversation she meant.

  ***

  It was in 2003. The line boss, Mike Conrad, had pulled him off the floor for a meeting in his little glass cubicle.

  “Frank, we got a call a few minutes ago,” he said.

  “Yeah?”

  The foreman nodded. “We’re sending you home for the day. Actually, we’re sending you home for as long as you need.”

  He handed Frank a piece of paper.

  “What’s this?”

  “It’s the address for the Permanente Hospital off MacAr
thur Boulevard near Mosswood Park,” he said. “Have Mildred in the front office give you a twenty out of petty, okay? Take a cab, not a bus; you don’t have time for a fucking bus.”

  “What am I going to Kaiser for? There’s nothing wrong with me.”

  “It’s your sister, man. She’s in the hospital there,” Conrad said. “We think you should go see her right away.”

  Gladys, his older sister, was his only living relative. She was four years older than Frank, but her health was good. He couldn’t recall the last time she was in bed with so much as a cold.

  Frank stared at the paper dumbly. “What happened?”

  “I don’t know, man, but the people at Kaiser said she was in a bad way. They told us to have you hurry. You may not have much time.”

  Frank didn’t even remember the trip to the hospital. His only clear recollection was sitting on a little bench outside the intensive care unit with Millie’s doctor, a guy named Wagstaff. The doc told him Millie had stopped at a mom and pop over on Piedmont Avenue to buy a pack of cigarettes. She’d walked in the door while a pair of robbers was walking out.

  The whole thing had been captured on video: one of the stickup men had a gun. Surprised by her sudden appearance, he pulled the trigger and the bullet hit her in the forehead. Wagstaff said she was in a coma.

  “Is she going to be okay?” Frank asked, even though he was already pretty sure of the answer.

  The doctor looked guilty as he shook his head. “We did what we could, but I’m afraid she isn’t.”

  ***

  They made Frank put on one of those little masks to protect Gladys from his germs, not that it made much difference: the only reason she was breathing was because of some big ass machine they had her plugged into. Germs were the least of her worries.

  He sat holding her hand for two and a half hours, but she never opened her eyes or said a word. He finally let go when they unplugged her and she immediately flat-lined.

  ***

  The man who ran the mom and pop was a Korean fellow named Jeon. He apologized to Frank about Gladys, who worked at a dry cleaners down the block and was one of his regular customers. Jeon filled him in on the details of what had happened.

  The two goons who killed Gladys were Eddie Johnson and Raheem Ransom, two street guys who hung around the corner outside Jeon’s store. The neighbors thought they were hop-heads, but Jeon said he’d never seen them using anything stronger than those 40-ounce bottles of malt liquor that members of the baggy pants brigade guzzle when they’re standing on street corners pretending to be bad asses.

  Eddie and Raheem ran after the shooting and the cops were still looking for them. Mr. Jeon didn’t know where they might have gone, but he was an old-school gentleman: the cops had taken his security camera DVD of the stick-up with them, but the hard disk was untouched and Mr. Jeon let Frank watch it so he could get a good look at the thieves.

  “These two are locals?” Frank asked Jeon when he’d finished reviewing the video.

  “Yes,” Jeon said. “They live in big apartment up on Webster Street, top of hill. Drink at Egbert’s.”

  Frank nodded. Egbert Sousé’s was a popular bar on MacArthur and Piedmont, only a few blocks from Jeon’s convenience store.

  Trask had never been the kind of man who sat around moping about bad luck. He liked to take action, even though he sometimes decided what to do while he was in the middle of doing it. That made for poor planning—or no planning at all. This was one of those times when planning was strictly an afterthought.

  Frank figured the apartment would be crawling with homicide detectives, so Egbert’s would be the best place to look for the men who had killed his sister.

  He took the 57 bus back to San Pablo to pick something up at his apartment, then returned to Broadway and walked around the corner to Kaiser. He sat outside the hospital until the sun set, strolled to Egbert’s, ordered a pint of Bud and a shot of Jim Beam Rye, and sat at the end of the bar that was nearest to the window. He pretended to watch the TV hanging over the back bar while he kept an eye peeled for Eddie and Raheem.

  The only person in the bar when he got there was the bartender, a big blond woman with a Scandinavian accent. He had just ordered his second beer when the guys he was looking for walked in.

  The bartender wiped a spot on the plank about two yards from Frank and put a couple of cocktail napkins down on the damp.

  “What’s it going to be, honey,” she said, showing a dimple to the bigger of the two men, a fat dark-skinned guy in a stingy brim and a Raiders jacket whose pants were so loose his ass crack looked like it might swallow the bar stool he hung it over.

  “Jack and Coke, Inga,” he said, looking around the place casually.

  “How about you, Eddie?” she asked the other man, a skinny fellow in a weather-beaten leather coat with a knit watch cap pulled down far enough to almost conceal the gold stud that peeked from his ear.

  “Same, honey,” he said, showing grille work that would have been at home in front of a 1963 Corvette.

  Trask sized them up. The clothes they were wearing were the ones they’d had on when they robbed Jeon’s convenience store. Smart criminals would have changed outfits, but Frank could tell neither of these guys was bright enough to illuminate a pissant’s parlor.

  He slipped off his stool and picked up the narrow leather cylinder leaning against the wall behind him.

  “I’ll be right back, miss,” he told the blonde as he made his way to the men’s room, slinging the case over his shoulder.

  The skinny guy in the watch cap flashed gold at him. “What, you going to shoot some pool in the shitter, old man?” he said, nudging his cruiserweight friend with an elbow.

  Frank gave him a hint of a smile. “Nope.”

  “Then why you takin’ your cue with you, man?” the fellow in the watch cap said, glaring at Frank with open hostility. “You think you leave it here us niggas gone steal the motherfucker?”

  Frank gave him an even stare. “No—I’m not worried about you two chocolate drops,” he said in a flat voice. Jerking his head toward the back of the bar, he added. “There’s a couple tables back there. I might knock a few balls around when I finish taking a piss.”

  He turned and headed for the toilet without so much as a backward glance.

  ***

  In the bathroom, he took a leak, washed his hands and dried them with the hot air blower on the wall, then opened the leather case and pulled out the thick end of his McDermott. It was appropriate: Gladys had given the cue to him on the birthday when he rolled the hard ten.

  He’d been shooting a lot at Pete’s at the time, using one of the bent sticks in the rack on the wall. She’d join him on Friday nights to sip a Bud while she watched him tear up some felt.

  “Couldn’t you shoot better if you had a good cue?” she asked one night when he narrowly missed sinking the eight.

  “This piece of shit’s all right,” he’d answered. “It’s a poor workman who blames his tools.”

  She hadn’t said anything more, just handed him a heavy oblong box at Pete’s when he showed up for his birthday get-together with his chums. He found the McDermott inside.

  Gladys had spent more than 200 bucks on the damn thing, making it the most expensive present he’d ever received. But you could tell by her grin when Frank tore off the paper that she felt it was worth every penny.

  Frank loved the cue; he was convinced it had improved his game from the moment he unwrapped it. Most importantly, it reminded him of Glad. As he looked at it in the John at Egbert’s, a tear rolled down his cheek.

  He thought about screwing the forearm to the shaft for a moment then abandoned the idea, dropping the skinny half back into the leather tube and hanging it over his shoulder. It would be easier to handle broken down. He hefted the cue in his hand. The solid maple felt sleek and heavy.

  Clutching the heavy wooden rod close to his side so it was harder to see, he walked back out of the toilet.

  The
way he looked at it, the big guy—the one Jeon said was named Raheem—was the most dangerous. He was close to six-five and weighed 280 pounds, minimum. But the little guy was probably quicker and more likely to be carrying the gun they’d used on Gladys.

  Frank knew that guns can give you a false sense of confidence and slow your reaction time. If you’re caught by surprise, you can be packing heat and still be at a disadvantage against somebody who is ready, willing, and able to strike first.

  Frank was that guy.

  He walked back to the bar and used his cue like a whip to backhand the big fellow in the brim sharply on the ridge of his brow, the connection making a pulpy crack that sounded like someone splitting a melon with a hatchet.

  The blow rolled the big man’s eyes back up into his head and flipped him off the stool, his feet following him over in a nearly perfect backwards somersault.

  “Hey, damn it!” the man in the leather coat said, his eyes wide with surprise, his mouth an “O” of shock.

  Frank continued his swing with the end of the pool cue, crushing Eddie’s right eye socket with the wooden rod. Blind but still dangerous, Eddie dragged a dark automatic out of the map pocket inside his coat. As he did, Frank jammed the end of the cue under his chin, burying the maple an inch deep in the soft tissue at the front of his throat.

  Gagging and choking, the man in the watch cap dropped the gun with a clatter. He grabbed his neck with both hands, his eyes bulging as he struggled to breathe.

  Frank raised the cue and swung it down on the crown of Eddie’s head, driving him back against the plank. Then he did it again. By the third stroke, the blows were spraying the blond with blood across the bar-top, leaving a pool of red that drowned the cocktail napkins and the glasses of soda and whisky on top of them.

  The blond cowered against the back bar, her hands alongside her face, squealing with terror. Frank picked up a cocktail napkin and wiped gore off the cue, then swung the case off his shoulder and dropped it inside. Panting with exhaustion, he squatted next to the big man and made sure he had no pulse. He didn’t have to bother with Eddie: the man in the watch cap had slid down the front of the bar when Frank stopped hitting him. His body was still.