The door snicked shut and I sat on the houndstooth couch, intending to close my eyes for just a minute. One minute I was staring at the cracks in the ceiling and the next utter exhaustion took over. I was out. Gone.
It was good to finally let go.
Sometime later—it must have been early afternoon—my cell phone rang. Through a curtain of gray haze I saw the caller was Frankford Hospital. My mom was probably in my grandpop’s room and wanted to bug me about visiting him. I let the call go to voice mail and rolled back over. Maybe the drool would run down the other cheek, even things out. A while later the phone rang again. Please stop, Mom. Let me enjoy my coma here in peace. Then again. And a fourth time. So I finally picked up the phone and called into voice mail to see what the big panic was about…
But it wasn’t my mother. It was Grandpop Henry, calling from the hospital. I redialed the number. He answered.
“Mickey?”
“Grandpop? You’re awake?”
“Yeah, I’m awake. Been awake for a while. I need you to come here right away.”
XI
The Night Watchman
Grandpop Henry was covered in blankets. A catheter tube ran down the side of the bed to a plastic container, but it was only partially obscured by a thin piece of blue linen. His piss was on display for the world to see.
He looked at me and I swear he had tears in his eyes.
“Your arm.”
His voice was croaky and weak. I looked down at my right arm in its sling.
“I’m fine. It’s nothing. And hey, you’re the one in the hospital, remember?”
“You got that going back, didn’t you?”
“That happened to you, too, huh?”
“I haven’t been able to move my left arm for two years. But never mind that. Tell me everything you did.
There isn’t much time.”
“What I did?”
“Yeah, I could hear you just fine last time you were here. You found the pills.”
“How about you start telling me everything you did, Grandpop? Because I’ve spent the past week trying to figure it all out.”
“There’s no time for that. I need to make sure you didn’t screw anything up.”
Oh, that was rich. Me screwing things up? I didn’t want to stand here and be lectured. I wanted to know what this was all about. All of my life, my family had been talking around me instead of to me. I was sick of it.
“No.”
“What do you mean, no?”
I looked him in the eyes.
“I’m not telling you a thing until you explain everything to me.”
“Feh.”
“I want you to say the words. You were trying to go back in time to kill Billy Derace, the man who killed your son. My father.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“You’re denying it?”
“Yes, I’m denying it. Actually, I was going back in time to kill Billy Derace’s father.”
“After your father was killed there was no trial. Nobody could place Derace at the bar, so he stayed where he was—that loony bin up the road. Well, that wasn’t good enough for me. I wanted to look into his eyes, to know if he’d done it or not. Then I’d do what I had to. But I knew I’d never be able to set foot within a mile of that place if I told them who I really was.”
“So you got a job there.”
“Hey. Who’s telling this, you or me? So yeah, I got a job there. This was years later—1989. But before that I waited. Paid attention to the newspapers, just in case they were to spring him early. I read all the local papers cover to cover looking for any mention of him. I saw all the pieces about those tramps he murdered—but I had no idea it was him. Nobody did. Nobody does. You wrote that story a few years ago—”
“You read that?”
“Yeah, I read it, I read everything you wrote in that paper, even the things you got wrong, and you got plenty wrong. Now will you stop interrupting me? I don’t have that much time. Anyway, you wrote that story a few years ago and by then I knew, I knew what he’d been up to because I was living there and I found DeMeo’s notes and then I knew what he could do.”
“DeMeo was killed in 2002.”
“Yeah, by that shadowy son of a bitch. I’m not crying for him, though. DeMeo deserved what he got. He knew about the hooker murders, but didn’t say anything because he thought Billy was his big breakthrough. After all those years of pumping people with that poison, he finally finds somebody who can do this cockamamie walking out of your body stunt. Only problem is, it’s this nut-job kid who raided his drug stash when his whore mother wasn’t looking.”
“Erna Derace.”
“Erna Derace, yeah. DeMeo’s journal said—”
“Wait. We didn’t find any journal. We looked all through the desk and didn’t find any journal.”
“I know. ’Cause I burned it. Once I figured it out, I didn’t want nobody seeing this stuff. Nobody’s business but mine. Now. You’re my grandson, you’re the only flesh and blood thing on this earth that I care about, but if you don’t shut up and let me tell this story I swear to God I’m going to pop you in the kisser.”
“Sorry.”
“Sorry, sorry, yeah, we’re all sorry. Anyway, it was around 1980 and this kid, Billy, had grown up to be a real piece of trash. He’s drinking at thirteen, doing the dope when he’s fourteen, stealing shit and mugging people when he’s seventeen. By that time, he also starts breaking into DeMeo’s office, hoping to score pills. He scored pills all right.”
“Wait—he started back then?”
“He started back then. He realized what he could do. I went back to those papers and read about all of these little break-ins up and down Frankford Avenue back in 1979. A real one-man crime wave. Nobody could figure it out. But I did. Only, it was too late to do anything about it.”
I thought about my first experiences with the pill, and yeah, even my mind went to larceny. I was a thirty-seven-year-old guy with a fairly decent moral compass. Billy Derace, though, was an abused kid with a mother who drank and whored herself out to the fat doctor upstairs and pretty much felt the deck stacked against him. Of course he would goof around on those pills. He must have felt like a superhero with new powers. Only he didn’t go back in time. He was able to astrally project into the present. He could do whatever he wanted.
One thing didn’t make sense though.
“So why did he kill Dad?”
Grandpop looked at me, annoyed.
“Because he was a nut, why else? Like I was saying, I started working at the hospital in 1993. They did a background check, but it wasn’t a very good one, because they didn’t know I had a son. I’d been divorced since 1959, so I guess they didn’t dig back too far. And your dad was using that stupid name, so no one put it together. Anyway, by that time DeMeo already had Derace over in this maximum security wing—”
“How did Derace end up there in the first place?”
“He overdosed in the summer of 1979. And surprise, surprise, the crime wave ended. His mom begged DeMeo to put him somewhere safe, not turn him over to a state-run hospital. I guessed it worked, because he had his own bed over at the loony bin.”
“So he was at the Adams Institute when my dad was killed.”
“Yeah. Only he wasn’t. I think he started going for walks outside his body full-time, since his own body was more or less out of the picture. Like me.”