The Nameless Ones by John Connolly
Chapter LXVII
Tony Fulci was not stupid.
Of course, there were persons in Portland and farther afield who liked to joke that Tony was dumb as a rock, while his brother was dumb as two rocks, or half a rock, depending on where one stood on the whole dumbness/rock comparison index. They did not offer these opinions to Tony’s face, or not a second time, but Tony was aware that they circulated, and had taken note of the identities of those responsible. It wasn’t so much the aspersions being cast on his intelligence that bothered him as the mockery of his brother. Tony was very protective of Paulie and had promised their mother that he would always look out for him. The world was more confusing to Paulie than it was to Tony. It was frequently too loud, too fast. The unkindness of strangers toward those more vulnerable than themselves, whether human or animal, conspired to rouse Paulie to an excess of righteous indignation that tipped easily into outright violence; yet in all his life, Paulie, like Tony, had never hit anyone smaller than himself, not unless they really, really deserved it. Paulie lived by the principle that a man should punch up, not down. He might have struggled to express the range and complexity of his better feelings, and consequently the unobservant and judgmental concluded that he had no such feelings available to express, but Tony knew better.
When the opportunity presented itself, Tony would have a quiet word with individuals known to have belittled his brother. These conversations typically took place in alleyways or restrooms, and had a tendency to be very one-sided. They also generally resulted in a permanent alteration in behavior, because once Tony Fulci told you something, you stayed told.
To repeat, then: Tony Fulci was not stupid. But he was slow. He did not absorb information quickly, but absorb it he did, in the end. He had learned to listen carefully because he missed crucial details otherwise. Later, in solitude, he would contemplate all that he had heard and try to come to some conclusions about it. He would sit up late into the night when his mother and brother were asleep, his elbows on the kitchen table, his chin in his hands, and stare at the wall, lost in what appeared to be a trance. But the kitchen wall was made of bricks, and on each brick Tony had learned to visualize a word or concept. In his mind, he could then move the bricks around, although it was often sufficient just to leave them in place, having broken a subject down into manageable pieces. For particularly intractable problems, he would resort to writing on the bricks with a piece of chalk, making sure to wipe them clean before he went to bed. Mrs Fulci did not approve of people writing on her walls, not even in chalk.
Tony worried about appearing ignorant and was therefore reluctant to reveal his thought processes, or his doubts, to more than a handful of people. If he did not understand something, he tried to find somebody to explain it to him, someone who would not laugh at his lack of cognizance. This was why Tony and his brother liked the Great Lost Bear: Dave Evans, when he was not busy, or not looking perturbed by the Fulcis’ continued presence in his bar, was always willing to listen and offer advice. So, too, was his wife, who reminded the Fulcis a little of their mother, but without the accompanying terror.
For very serious matters, Tony would cautiously approach Mr Parker. Tony felt uncomfortable calling him by his first name – it just didn’t sit right – and referring to him by his last name alone seemed rude. Tony respected Mr Parker more than any man he had ever met, even Louis, and he secretly and not-so-secretly worshipped Louis. Tony had never before encountered one so willing to risk his own life to end another’s pain as Mr Parker. As far as Tony was concerned, the private investigator had a moral authority that even God lacked. If you asked God for help, there was no guarantee it would arrive, or that God had even listened. But with Mr Parker, if you were a good person in distress, and you asked for his help, you got it.
That was why Tony and Paulie stood by him any chance they got. The brothers had messed up a lot in their lives, and Mr Parker represented an opportunity to put some of that right by redressing any existing imbalance in favor of the good. Tony thought Angel and Louis had allied themselves with Mr Parker for a similar reason: because they had messed up, too – Louis especially, although Tony wasn’t about to judge him for it, even if Louis frightened him at times – and siding with the detective was a way to make up for it. Tony also secretly suspected that it gave Louis an excuse to shoot people and not feel too bad about it.
All of which was a roundabout way of explaining that Tony Fulci was neither as intellectually or as emotionally limited as some believed him to be. And like a lot of men and women who think slowly, he had a habit of coming to the right decision at the end of his deliberations. He had now spent ninety minutes sitting in the cab of the monster truck he shared with his brother, eating a box of Crown Fried Chicken and watching the two men parked over by Coastal Trading & Pawn. Earlier, by coincidence, he and Paulie had been five vehicles behind Parker as he drove along Forest Avenue to the Bear, where his car currently sat in the parking lot. Four cars behind Parker, and therefore immediately in front of the Fulcis, had been a blue Chevy Avalanche with New York plates and what looked like two male occupants. When Tony had stepped out of the Bear to call his mother – he didn’t like forcing others to listen to his cell phone conversations, especially not with his mom – the Chevy had been parked outside Skillful Home Recreation, still with two guys sitting in the front. It had since relocated twice while always keeping the parking lot of the Bear in view.
It hadn’t taken Tony long to figure out that the two men were watching and waiting for someone in the Bear and the available evidence, given the vehicles that had already entered and exited during the time that Tony had spent observing it, suggested it could well be Mr Parker. On the other hand, Tony knew, he might just be jumping at shadows where none existed. He could call Mr Parker and tell him what he was seeing, but then what? The investigator might confront the two men – because a certain rashness was part of his nature – but he was currently alone, Angel and Louis being elsewhere, and if the men in the car meant him some ill will, he would be walking straight into their sights. If the cops were called, they could only question them before moving them along, unless something offered probable cause for further action. Again, if the watchers meant Mr Parker harm, they’d either vanish only to materialize again later, or pass the job on to someone else.
Tony really wished Angel and Louis were around.
Just then the Chevy pulled away from the curb and headed east along Forest Avenue toward the entrance to I-295. Rain had been falling steadily since morning, and the streets were nearly empty of people. Tony waited, and a minute or two later the Chevy reappeared in his rearview mirror, passed him, and pulled up at the intersection with Ashmont Street. The driver kept the engine running as the passenger got out. He was shorter and less well built than Tony – there were parking garages less structurally impressive than Tony Fulci – and was, in theory, not the kind of individual Tony should have been inclined to hit. But Tony, who was essentially a good person, had an unerring sense of badness in others. God did not always mark the worst of men, but He did brand some of them, and He had certainly taken the time to differentiate this one from the rest of the herd, if only – because say what you wanted about the Divine, He had a sense of humor – by giving him virtually no distinguishing features at all. From the top of his smooth head to the soles of his no-brand shoes, here was an unfinished man, a moral absence given human form.
Tony knew this because he had encountered similarly incomplete versions of such an entity before, often in prison and even, on occasion, in positions of authority. The best of them were willfully cruel, either to distract themselves from the prospect of their own inevitable damnation or to indulge their basest impulses, seeing no merit in depriving themselves of entertainment if their perdition was already assured. But in others nature and nurture had conspired in a grave error, giving the resulting creations no other option but to behave as they did, just as a bullet fired from a gun can only go in one direction until stopped by an impact or rendered harmless by the laws of energy and decay. They did not recognize concepts such as viciousness and sadism, just as any attempt to explain their opposites would be met with stares of absolute incomprehension. They were as content to inflict hurt as not to inflict it, and if they dreamed, they did not recall their visions. In repose, they gazed out on a featureless vista and heard only white noise. They were humanity’s detritus and the devil’s foot soldiers.
And now one of them was entering the parking lot of the Bear, carrying a brown paper bag in his right hand and supporting its base with his left. All this time, he and his companion had been waiting for the perfect moment: rain, temporarily empty streets, an almost deserted lot. Tony alighted from the cab of his truck and moved toward the Bear, ignoring the Chevy and its driver for the present because he could deal only with one man at a time. He arrived at the lot to see the human doll kneeling by Parker’s car, one hand under the front-left wheel well. The doll looked up to see Tony Fulci standing above him and reacted swiftly, his left hand leaving the wheel well while his right moved simultaneously toward the inside of his coat. Tony let the tire iron slip from his sleeve to the palm of his right hand before swinging it in a single sharp motion toward the doll’s head. It caught him just behind the right ear, and Tony heard the bone crack. The doll’s eyes rolled upward as he toppled, and blood began to flow from his ear canal.
Now Tony heard footsteps behind him and turned to face the new threat. The driver had emerged from his vehicle. In his right hand he held a short-barreled revolver. Tony threw the tire iron, missing the driver’s head by inches.
‘You fucking asshole,’ said the driver in an accent Tony did not recognize, but Tony was by then already charging at him like a rhino in polyester. If Tony was going to die, he intended to make his killer work for the pleasure, except that the ground was slick with rain, and Tony might have had bulk but he did not have speed, not until he’d built up momentum. He needed more distance than he had, but he realized this just too late.
Which was when the head of a bear hit the driver full in the side of the skull, followed shortly after by Tony’s considerable weight impacting on his chest from the front, and seconds later by Paulie Fulci’s own bulk connecting with him from the right. The revolver went off, but it was pointed at the sky, and by then the driver had hit the ground with the best part of a six hundred pounds of prime Italian-American beef on top of him. His ribs snapped like dry sticks, and his left arm and left leg immediately shattered. A number of his vital organs either burst or collapsed, and that was before the blows began to land, rendering him mercifully unconscious.
Figures appeared, but Tony saw them only through a red mist. Paulie, by contrast, didn’t see them at all, so absorbed was he in pummeling what was left of the life from the man with the temerity to have pointed a gun at his brother.
‘Motherfucker!’ yelled Paulie, as another bone broke beneath his punches. ‘Motherfucker!’
When a combination of Dave Evans, Charlie Parker, and a handful of off-duty Portland PD officers finally managed to drag the brothers away, it came as a surprise to them to find that the driver was not dead, although it was not for want of trying. Neither was his companion, who remained unconscious where he had fallen. Attached by a magnet to the wheel well of Parker’s car was a device composed of five pounds of plastic explosive, two pounds of nails and shotgun pellets, and a mercury tilt switch so delicate that it would have been activated as soon as the car began to pull out of its parking space.
The two seriously injured men were carrying New York State driver’s licenses in the names of Borko Zorić and Miroslav Tomić. Both were naturalized US citizens, originally from Serbia but now living in Queens. They’d been in and out of prison, if only for misdemeanors and minor felonies, but the gun used by the driver, Tomić, would later be linked to fifteen murders, including those of three women and two children. It was, Tomić would subsequently tell prosecutors through wired jaws, his lucky gun, and he hadn’t wanted to throw it away. As for Borko Zorić, he would not utter a word during his interrogation or subsequent trial, not even to confirm his own name, and appeared totally indifferent to his fate.
But all that was to come. For now, there was a bar to be evacuated while the police dealt with the car bomb, and later a bear head to be reattached to a wall. Local and national news media would interview the Fulcis. The front page of the following day’s Portland Press Herald, featuring Tony and Paulie flanking their proud mother, would be added to the memorabilia collection of the Great Lost Bear. The Fulci brothers had saved the Bear, but in doing so had become part of its structure and history, forever inseparable from both.
It was, Dave Evans would later reflect, one of the worst days of his life.