Blvd. of Blood
Book 1, chapters 1–5
(This is the first installment; you have missed nothing; permanent table of contents here)
Book I: The Pawns Assemble
1.
Twenty years passed after his last arrest before Colin Lang began to think about killing someone.
In adolescence, Colin had been a little wild—just the usual high-spirits of any high school boy, really: underage beer parties and vandalism. An older kid in shop class taught Colin how to hotwire a car, and he went joyriding in his neighbors’ vehicles once or twice. Mostly, though it was beer and mailboxes, but even the mild vandalism of mailbox baseball could get you sentenced to community service, if you, or your friends, were stupid when you did it. Underage beer made his friends stupid, and Colin got caught a couple of times. The cops brought out the handcuffs, the judge hammered his gavel. It was all designed to strike fear into Colin’s young soul, but he knew that he’d get off with a few weekends picking up trash in a park. He shrugged it off.
But there was that final time. Colin had been driving around at night, drunk, with six friends in his neighbors’ stolen minivan. None of them had had a car large enough to fit the seven of them, so stealing a minivan had seemed like a good idea, and they couldn’t have even been speeding much, but—
The siren in the rearview. With seven total perpetrators, the cops ran out of handcuffs. Four boys got stuffed in the backseat of the cop car, but Colin was just standing idly by while the cops searched the minivan unsuccessfully for drugs. And while Colin stood there he noticed that the keys, the cops had left their keys.
In the ignition.
What happened next was (Colin’s lawyer later explained) a momentary lapse in judgment. It was a lapse in judgment that took Colin and his friends, all seven of them jammed on laps into the cop car, on a wild race across several counties and two states before Colin instinctively swerved to dodge a jogger, careening through a guard rail and off a low embankment into a marsh. This was suddenly something more serious than a swiped stop sign or a broken window. Colin was seventeen, and being tried as an adult was a real danger. Apparently driving a stolen cop car across state lines and wrecking it in Pennsylvania was frowned upon by the penal code. The road map the district attorney’s assistant laid out was a tangle of forbidding words and phrases: from “federal offense” through “hard time” to a ruined life, its shambles swept up into a halfway house.
Colin’s parents were wealthy enough to hire a good lawyer, though, and Colin admittedly dressed up very well. In the end the case never made it to court, and Colin never went to prison. For the first time, though, prison had seemed very real. “Scared straight,” Colin learned to say to the mandatory counselor, and he said it so many times it proved true. The youthful offense disappeared, like magic, from his record, and by that time Colin was already at a good college, studying for a good job, or at least a respectable one. By his mid twenties he was sitting at the actuarial consulting firm of Radcliffe Worth Partners and studying for his associate’s exams. The rest of his life was easy to see, and it was much less terrifying than the one laid out by the D.A.’s office had been. It was also dull. It was smotheringly dull.
At thirty-five, Colin was an actuarial fellow, and he had a nice house, a nice dog (which soon died), a string of unsuccessful relationships, and a fat bank account. He could not complain, because any time he tried to complain someone said, “You have it all; you just need to find a nice girl.” But nice girls did not stop him from being dead inside. He drove to work and he shook hands and he had a coffee mug with a cartoon pig on it and he was dead inside.
He tried skydiving, but he was dead inside. He tried Vegas, but he was dead inside. He saved up and tried booking, through a German company, a southeast Asian sex-junket, but he was dead inside.
One German tourist on the bus hinted broadly about a place in Russia where the very rich could hunt and kill prostitutes, but Colin knew he would never be able to save up enough for such a hunt. He thought back to the time he had stolen that cop car. He remembered the feeling of that long night into morning, a feeling he had not known since. He remembered his only regret: the jogger he had missed.
On his way to work, Colin began imagining that he might swerve his car into the bicycle lane, or a crowded sidewalk. What would happen? What could they do? He imagined people rolling up his car’s hood to smash against his cobwebbed windshield and rebound away, their helpless limbs flailing. How many could he sweep through?
He would get caught of course; he would do hard time if he tried any of that. His only sensible recourse, after running over the pedestrians, would be to cut hard into oncoming traffic, take out another car head on, a last gesture of defiance. Unsatisfactory, that ending; but he thought about it, turning it over in his mind like a jeweler with an unworked stone, looking for facets to polish.
Or perhaps he could do something from a distance: find a railroad bridge and crowbar up the tracks right in the middle, so the train would pitch over the side. A fine bridge spanned the river not far from his house in Cottinend; but it seemed to have only cargo trains. A waste of a good crowbarring.
There was a book he’d had to read in high school English class that he half remembered; he remembered an ax. He imagined picking a random house and smashing through the patio door with an ax while the family was watching TV. They’d turn their heads to see him emerging from a glittering cocoon of flying glass, and then the ax would be upon them. At the gym he imagined his hands were hoisting not dumbbells but an ax, and the ax fell again and again.
These were just thoughts, of course. Idle fantasies of the kind he used to have, as a kid, about naked actresses, or Bond villains. Castles, he would have said to a counselor if a counselor had still been mandatory, in the air.
Soon he had no one to say it to. Those few friends he’d made drifted away. His coworkers he nodded to and smiled at, but nothing more. “Competent and professional,” they would have said about him.
He drove to work and he was dead inside. He called his mother on her birthday and he was dead inside. His dog died suddenly and he was still dead inside.
It was not until he met Bernie Feldstein that he bought the rifle.
2.
In high school, the doctor told Bernie Feldstein that he had won the shit lottery, which was not a nice way to put it.
People did not put things nicely to Bernie Feldstein. He was, perhaps, stupid, or perhaps he was simply not good at paying attention in school, but soon enough there was no difference between these two options. If you cannot pay attention in school they assume you are stupid, and put you in classes with stupid people until you’re stupid by default. Bernie sat in the class for dumb kids and bad kids, unaware, as most of them were unaware, that some of the kids were just dumb and some of the kids were just bad, and the only way anyone knew how to treat any of them was to yell at them to sit still and be quiet.
Everything was terrible, of course; but Bernie didn’t really understand it was terrible until the day Fernando Garcia arrived in town.
Bernie was in ninth grade at the time, when into the dumb kids’ class, which was also the bad kids’ class, came a new student. He was a recent immigrant from Mexico or (Bernie thought) somewhere like that, and he spoke very little English. He knew the words that were in movie titles, but that was it. Striking Distance. Three on a Match. Bikini Bank Heist. Nothing else. Welcome to the dumb kids, Fernando! Bernie didn’t give it a second thought.
After a few months, though, Fernando’s English improved, and he was taken out of Bernie’s class. He was put in a regular class. Like the regular kids.
Bernie was furious! His lot in life was to suffer in the bad kids’ class, the dumb kids’ class, and if Fernando had also been assigned this lot—who was Fernando to escape? Bernie decided that he would have revenge, and one day after school he jumped Fernando.
It was then that Bernie learned something about himself. He learned that he was not actually a “hard man.” The ballpoint tattoos and murder music did not make him a hard man. He learned that the element of surprise was not sufficient to keep Fernando from getting the upper hand and beating him, decisively, up. Bernie was sent to one doctor for his mashed nose, and another to see why he had started a fight.
“You won the shit lottery,” the second doctor told Bernie (somewhat unprofessionally) after a battery of tests. “If you’d’ve been a little bit dumber, you’d be in special ed., and no one would blame you. You’d be a good guy. And if you’d’ve been a little bit smarter, you’d be in the regular classes, and you’d be a good guy there too. But you’re not quite dumb enough, and you’re not quite smart enough, so you’re always going to be the bad guy. Whatever trouble you’re in is all your fault.”
Everyone yelled at Bernie for the assault, but he forgot about that quickly. He would have gotten yelled at anyway. What he did not forget was the doctor’s analysis. This analysis struck Bernie as grossly unfair, but, as it came from a doctor, he never thought to question it. The fact that he had missed out on special ed. haunted him. He wasn’t sure what the special ed. room was like, but he came to believe that it was some kind of paradise. A paradise he was barred from. Were there arcade games in there? Was there a strip club? Oh, you might know the answer is no, but you are probably smarter than Bernie Feldstein. You probably know more about how the world works. You may know that the special ed. room is full of all sorts of kids with different needs, each one of whom won a private shit lottery. “In fact, everyone’s won the shit lottery,” you might want to tell him. “It’s not just you.” But nobody told him.
So Bernie stood outside the special ed. room, fuming. Eventually a hall monitor would drag him away, back to the dumb kids’ class, the bad kids’ class, yelling at him all the way. And Bernie did what you might expect in this situation. He decided one day to jump one of the special ed. kids.
It was Alan Jancewicz; and that day Bernie was reminded of what he had forgotten. Bernie was not a hard man. Alan Jancewicz kicked his ass.
3.
That was the only fight Alan Jancewicz had ever been in. He didn’t get into trouble for it. Nothing changed because of it. He went to class, day after day. He graduated from high school, more or less. He grew up, but he was never going to be able to get a job, or live on his own. He lived with his parents. His sister left for college, so they got him a cat. He spent his days on his two passions, which were cars and porcelain frogs. He also watched game shows.
Alan had a problem with his brain, which had grown, in his adolescence, in a strange shape and to an uncomfortable size. Doctors had has to cut holes in his skull to accommodate the way his brain was growing. Metal plates covered the holes, and the scalp, re-sewn on, covered the plates; but of course the metal plates could not lie flush with the skull; his head, consequently, had a lumpy quality. The kids said he looked like an alien, which was cruel, but Alan didn’t mind. Looking like an alien wasn’t so bad. If he didn’t collect little frog figurines, he might have collected little alien figurines.
Every morning his mother took him for a drive, so he could look at cars. Their route was precisely the same every morning. Up past the park, around through the Shopping District, and then down Blande Boulevard and home. They’d been doing it for years. And for the last six months, every morning as they drove down Blande Boulevard, they would pass, going the opposite direction, a man driving a car, a man Alan had seen now and again over the years, although they had only interacted once—not spoken, really, but interacted. That man was Bernie Feldstein, and his eyes, visibly from across a median, would track Alan’s car; and they were smoking with hate.
4.
Alcohol just made Colin feel dead inside, or deader inside, but it was an experiment he returned to every once in a while. He didn’t like talking to people as he drank, though, so he varied the location. Here he was, sitting in a dark corder of the Munster Pub with shots lined up in front of him. It was after work, so he was dressed in work clothes; he was dressed better than anyone else in the establishment. “Even the hookers,” he thought, unkindly.
He was neither enjoying nor not enjoying the beginning of a drunken night, when a younger man sidled over. He was wearing a denim jacket with the sleeves ripped off, and a ratty goatee. He was carrying a chair. He looked eager to explain something.
It was a cold and desolate October, almost Halloween.
5.
Bernie was a regular at the Munster. He’d told his stories too many times to every other denizen of the bar, so whenever a fresh ear wandered by, Bernie zeroed in. When he spotted the stranger, Bernie was already drunk—as he was, of course, every night. He didn’t have to be at work until ten thirty A.M. now—his latest employer, a pizza parlor, opened at eleven, and someone else fired up the ovens—so there was no impetus to get home with only a light buzz. The sullen, gaunt stranger hardly looked like a promising audience. He was too well-dressed, too unfriendly, and probably a decade or two older than Bernie. His hair was parted precisely. But “any port in a storm,” as Bernie’s father used to say.
“Bernie,” he said by way of introduction as he slid his seat over near stranger’s table. “I won the shit lottery.”
“Join the club,” the man said. He said it absently, but as he said it he looked up, and his eye caught Bernie’s. Was there something in Bernie’s eyes, the shame and the rage? The impotent pain of someone who knows that if he started the fights he wanted to start he would lose instantly? What did the stranger see in him?
Must have been something. “Tell me about it,” the man said. And the incoherent drunken rant that Bernie spewed out may have made little sense, but the stranger was nodding like a man who understood. The crappy job, the no girls, the long life of humiliation.
“Perhaps,” the man ventured, “you’re angry enough, you sometimes think about killing someone?”
Had Bernie mentioned that? He didn’t remember mentioning it, but it was true. Bernie admitted he thought about shooting someone, shooting from one car and into another car, every day of his life. Every day on Blande Boulevard.
Blande Boulevard? The man stopped a moment. He might have been trying to orient himself. Probably he was not a lifer in Cottinend, as Bernie was. The long, dead stretch of Blande Boulevard, a gentle S-shaped curve with nothing but trees on either side.
“From car to car?” the man asked.
Yes.
“Do you have a gun yourself?”
Bernie did not.
“A car?”
Ah, that Bernie did. It was registered in Pennsylvania because that’s where he’d bought it, and he’d never bothered to—
“Pennsylvania plates?” the man asked, cutting him off.
Indeed.
“Do you live alone?”
Once again, yes.
The man leaned in conspiratorially. He whispered close to Bernie’s face a few short sentences. Then he added, “Bernie, my boy, you have been chosen for something important. Don’t tell anyone about this conversation. Don’t tell anyone about me. Write your name and address on this napkin. I’ll come see you in…” (he glanced at his phone) “…six months.” He named a day in April. April 10. “Make sure you’re in, and alone. I’ll come to you. Can you remember that date?”
“I’m not retarded,” Bernie said.
“You’ve been chosen for big things,” the man repeated. “Glorious destiny. You must keep this absolutely top secret. If you see me around town, you must not acknowledge me. My name is Theodore Anderson.” He paid his bill with cash and left, perhaps a little faster than your average patron.
Bernie sat there nursing his beer slowly enough that he began to sober up. He wasn’t sure whether Theodore Anderson worked for the military or the mafia, but he held both in equal reverence and didn’t much care. By the time a weary waitress shook his shoulder and murmured: “Closing time,” Bernie was stone cold sober.
