Headstone City by Tom Piccirilli Page A

how it affected him. How important it might be to speak to his mom again.
    What the hell did it say about you when the dead looked at you like they wanted to cry?
    He knew some guys who walked out the door at sixteen and never looked back. Others, in the joint, who'd whacked their parents for insurance or in a lunatic rage. One huge Nazi Lowrider by the name of Buford, telling his story in the cafeteria one afternoon. Explaining how he'd never gotten over the fact that his mother had thrown all his comic books away. He's thirty-five and firing machine guns with all the other white supremacists up in Michigan. They have a bonfire afterward, where they bring their children out and everybody dances around to kill-the-Jew songs with German lyrics. One of the kids is about eight, wearing a swastika on his sweatshirt and a baseball cap with the Batman symbol on it.
    Buford left the rally, drove back down to Indiana, walked into his mom's place, and put nine rounds into her face.
    There were insignificant microtraumas that could eventually turn your conscience to dust.
    Dane still couldn't get beyond his mother's death and never would, he realized. There was an unmined anguish there that he needed for some reason. Maybe it made him more human when he needed to be that, and more inhuman when he had to become something else.
    “What does she want?” Dane whispered. “Why doesn't she visit?”
    “She can't. Because you need her too much.”
    He watched Angie, wondering if he really could keep her sane in hell, or if she'd gone over the edge. Or if it was just him. “Of course I need her.”
    “Too much. If she came back, it would ruin you. Who you are and what you've got left to do. You're always this close to death.”
    “Hey, Angie, you think you're telling me something new?”
    He could see his ma, languishing day by day, for years. Withering in darkness, tormented by her own body. It made him want to drive a fist inside her and squeeze out whatever was doing this to her. His mother, torn in half, peeling away from the inside out. Dad unable to bear witness, working longer and longer hours.
    You can give yourself blood poison by tearing open your scabs. You dig into a scar long enough, it'll crawl forward on its own, cover you up until your mouth, nose, and even your eyes are sealed.
    “You should go,” he told the dead girl he'd sort of killed.
    “She wants you to know—”
    “I don't want to hear.”
    “But you do, Johnny, you really do.”
    He glared at her, a girl who'd spoken her last words to him, and kept right on speaking them.
    “I don't give a shit, Angie. That's enough.”
    Glory blowing the guy off the bridge with the rocket.
“I'm gonna rock your world, baby!”
    “You ever gonna go back to Bed-Stuy and settle the score for me?” Angelina asked.
    “Yeah.”
    “When? When are you gonna do it, Johnny? Please tell me. Tell me!”
    The current of the past took him again and rolled him along. Drawing him one way and then hurling him another. It brought him back to the last time he'd seen her alive. A red awning over the door. Flower boxes filled with petunias. The cop with his hand up.

 
    ELEVEN
     
    H e hadn't been a very good cab driver either, because he didn't gun it up and down the streets driving like a maniac, rushing all day long trying to make a buck. You'd think it would've played into his strengths, his instincts, being a driver and always digging the speed, but it just didn't work like that.
    Fatigued most of the time for no reason but his own inertia. Bodies at rest tend to stay at rest. It was either a Newtonian law or somebody in a mortuary talking about the plastic-faced cadavers laid out on gurneys.
    The Olympic Cab & Limousine Company would've fired him after the first week, except the guy in charge at the time knew Dane had a tenuous connection to the Monticelli clan and didn't want to kick him free. Not until he had a clearer idea of how much trouble he could expect from it later