“Hey, mister,” the cab driver said, dragging him back up to the real world. “We’re here.”

The woman had a soft, pleasant voice with a roundness to her vowels and a heavy sound to her ‘t’s. Freddy blinked and ground a fist into his dry, gritty eyes. The cab driver smiled at him in the rearview mirror. There was a peaceful understanding to her eyes. “Can you wait?” he croaked.

“Do you have a credit card?”

Freddy tossed her the orderly’s wallet and pushed open the door, stepping out into deserted residential street. The houses were the same, squatting on small plots of lawn behind chain link fences. The neighborhood had gone neither up or down hill since his last visit, but there was something decidedly missing. The house on the corner, with its little round windows peeking out from under the eaves and its misaligned brick porch, it just wasn’t his anymore. He didn’t have to go inside to see it, but he did. He opened the window in the garage and slipped into the house, staring at the strange furniture and the strange photographs in the blue light of the moon. The people in them looked happy enough and the rich, new carpet felt good under his cold bare feet.

The spare bedroom door opened and out of it came a solemn sleepy looking girl, not much older than five, with a mop of frizzy, brown hair and an over sized Batman T-shirt. She padded to the middle of the living room, then looked up at him and blinked.

“Hello,” she said.

Freddy smiled at her in an attempt, and likely failure, to avoid looking intimidating. She eyed him suspiciously for a long moment.

“Are you a friend of Mommy’s?” she asked.

Freddy shook his head.

“I was getting a glass of water,” she explained. “Can I get you something?”

“Do you have a phone book?”

She led him into the kitchen with a childish confidence. Freddy wasn’t sure if she was blissfully stupid or half convinced she was dreaming. Either way, she flipped on the light, dragged a stool from the corner to the kitchen sink and got herself a glass of water. The kitchen was a subtle yellow, very different from the color Freddy had picked so long ago. The cabinets were new too, in a solid, modern style that made the space look smaller, but more imposing. The child put her glass in the sink, returned the stool to its corner and then pulled a phone book out of its cubby underneath the answering machine.

She stood there watching him with wide eyes as he opened it on the counter. There were no Newandykes listed and Freddy panicked silently for a moment before paging back to H.

OMG NOOOOO. LARRY HOW COULD YOU?

*sobs*

This ain't gonna be pretty...

They looked at him with wary disbelief, their sandwiches in their hands, their mouths full of potato chips and bottled cola. They looked at one another. Freddy smiled, took the Glock from his side holster and shot the nearest man in the shoulder.

Blood spurted out wildly, coating the surface of the bar, the man screaming. Everyone lurched for their guns too late and then, looking up at Freddy, awkwardly raised their hands in the air. A moment later the men were crowded together, mumbling and shouting as Freddy herded them through the back of the bar into the bright, active flurry of the kitchen. The waitresses and bus boys flew out side exits and dove behind the slop sinks and the stoves. The dinner prep, half completed, went tumbling across the steel tables and onto the floor. There was the heavy smell of garlic. They moved through into the dining room proper, all bright polished wood and subtle lighting and then out onto the casino floor. Freddy had cased the place that morning, few exits, fewer places to hide, lots of mirrors to see everything and lots of heavy sturdy slot machines to take cover behind. He told the guys to hit the carpet and they did and then the doors to the hotel opened and the cavalry arrived.

More men came, wave after wave of them, looking pissed and frightened and aiming their guns everywhere but where they were supposed to.
Afterward, Freddy always remembered the next part in montage, rapidly edited and shot on an angle.

Throwing himself behind the nearest row of slot machines, the glass and plastic and the cheap plaster of the wall behind him exploding into dust and fragments, raining down on his head.

The wild desperate shots he took as he skidded under a craps table, firing at legs and reloading and firing again.

Someone coming up behind him with a heavy revolver. Grabbing the man by the wrist and forcing the gun up to fire through the ceiling tiles.

Coldcocking someone blindly as he came around a corner and watching him go down in a perfect nosedive.

Gunfire. Blood. Screaming. Him dodging from them. Them dodging from him. The give and take of it. The back and forth of it. The blind hate in their eyes against the place inside Freddy that stayed quiet and calm throughout the whole mess and kept him running and sliding, reloading and firing and then, when it became obvious there were too many of them, told him to kick aside a table and scramble up on top of one of the slot machines and climb into the drop ceiling out of sight.

The men below circled, putting their backs together and staring at the ceiling. There was a creak as the weight on the ceiling studs shifted and a hail of bullets tore through the tiling ten feet from Freddy’s right.

Freddy flinched, stepping back against something huge and metal. He glanced back and made out a monstrous industrial air conditioner, barely clingy to the studs above it, an insurance disaster just waiting to happen. Freddy smiled, took a few steps back and putting his handgun away, took careful aim with the sawed off and looped his arm around a nearby beam.

The men below circled again. Someone muttered an order and a young man broke from the group to deliver a message upstairs.

There was one muffled blast from the shot gun. The men flinched, but no one was hit. Something creaked, low and ominously. The men held their collective breaths and then the ceiling fell down on them with a heavy groan of sheering metal and the high sounds of breaking tile and wrenched wood. It all hit the floor at once with a loud, earth shattering thump, decimating anything and anyone standing beneath it.

The dust settled briefly and then Freddy let himself drop neatly down, landing in low crouch.

The woman was just as beautiful as Freddy had expected her to be. She was no longer young, exactly, but she had a bubbly, effervescent smile set beneath a pair of huge gold sunglasses. She lay back on a blanket, watching a man and a boy romp in the weeds by a muddy lake a few hundred feet away. The man had an eye patch. The boy looked just like him.

“Hello,” Freddy said.

The woman had caught his eye as he approached and gestured for him to sit. He knelt at the edge of the blanket with his hands folded between his knees. He jacket gaped to show his holstered gun.

“He told me to expect you,” the woman said in deep, rich, Southern tones. “That is if you’re the skinny fucker with a broken nose who walks likes he’s pushing through a crowd and you’re called Orange.”

“I’m not called Orange.”

“Yes you are,” she said, looking back at the duo by the lake with a calm smile. “By him.”

“Where is he?”

“That poor sweet man,” she said dreamily. “He never knows what he wants until its years too late to get it. It was the same way with us.” The boy had caught a frog, raising it to her triumphantly. The man turned to them, concerned.

“Alabama,” Freddy said. “Where’s Larry?”

She snapped to attention immediately, beaming at him warmly. “Wisconsin,” she said, “Do you have a pen?”
-
A little boy, six or seven, in a huge nylon jacket and garish floral printed snow boots was running around in the snow, making angels and falling over and flailing in the banks. He had a lot of freckles and a lot of pale blond hair which peaked out from under his grey nylon hat, damp with snow and plastered to his narrow face. Freddy stopped in the road and stared at the boy for a long time. The hat had little threads of silver in it and they shimmered in the lengthening dusk. The boy noticed him and stopped running, winding down slowly as he took Freddy in.

"Hello," the boy said.

Freddy was staring at the little house in the snow, reading the address again and looking at the boy with an expression somewhere between confusion and stunned understanding.

“Is your name Freddy?” the boy asked, giddy and giggling, and when Freddy nodded the boy rushed him and hugged him around his middle. “You’re almost late for dinner.” He stuck out his hand and Freddy took his cold, skinny fingers and walked with him into the house.

The sudden rush of heat made his face sting. It smelled good inside, like cigarettes and cooking and furniture polish. The front room was a mess of plastic army men and discarded tea party place settings. The kid took off his coat and hat, hanging them on a peg by the door and then sat on the floor to remove his boots.

“Pop!” the kid yelled as he wrestled with the right one. “Guess who I found?”

“Who?” someone yelled back in a loud, cheerful voice and Freddy recognized it a split second before the door opened. It was Larry and Freddy inexplicably froze, hand spasming as it failed to go for his gun and then Larry was hugging him, taking his face in both hands and kissing him on both of his cheeks and then hugging him again in hot, heavy arms. “You made it home for Sunday dinner,” Larry said, and then softly but lovingly in his ear, “You always did have the worst fucking timing in the whole goddamn world.”