The Thomas Berryman Number

A white Chevy came barrel-assing down the dirt road leading into the junkyard. It was doing seventy or eighty, then it skidded and u-turned. Kids. Joy-riders.

“Y’see Tom Berryman is real concerned with his own safety,” Ben Toy explained to Wynn. “He’s a real brain. Takes zip chances. He’s obsessed sometimes. But he’ll be here. Don’t worry. Stop worrying.”

Wynn had his arm across the back of the leather seat and he was looking off at the apartment buildings. His head was at a good angle for a portrait. He was showing his nice white teeth just right.

“I’m sure Berryman doesn’t take chances,” he said.

The two men were sitting around, talking like that, and then Ben Toy very suddenly reached out of his jacket, and shot Harley Wynn in the side of the forehead.

The action was completed totally on impulse. Toy kept saying

now, now, now, now,

and when it felt real, when he believed it somewhere in his body, a small black .38 flashed out, the trigger snapped back. The sound was deafening, a sound Toy would never forget. Pink flesh and blood splatted onto the vinyl roof and the windshield. Wynn’s head went out the open window and hung there.

Toy left the southerner spreadeagled across a pink flowered box spring in the junkyard. His blond hair wasn’t even mussed.

Before driving away, Toy had the presence of mind to fire a second shot into the back of Wynn’s head. That second shot distorted the handsome face considerably.

Because of that second, meaningless bullet, the evening papers in New York reported the killing as gangland style. No identification was found on Wynn. No one claimed the body until November. By that time, it was hopelessly lost in Potter’s Field. New York simply sent a large skeleton down to Tennessee.

Directly after the shooting, Ben Toy called Berryman to tell him it was done.

Then Toy spent four days in Mill House Sanitarium in upstate New York. He barely spoke to anyone at the private hospital, especially the doctors. He sat around a sunny parlor overlooking the Hudson River, and whatever he was feeling got worse.

Toy thought he was the only person at the hospital who wasn’t drying out. Who wasn’t getting B

₁₂

shots. He was also the only one hallucinating. One afternoon he heard a black woman’s voice that announced it was James Horn’s mother. One night in his room he heard his father’s voice and saw flashes of light outside his window.

Very confused in his mind, he walked off to get a drink one afternoon. He strolled down a country road with farms and seminaries all around. He eventually called Reva Baumwell from a tavern under rocky mountains over the Hudson.

“I told Tom I wouldn’t be able to kill anybody,” he said. “I was right. I was right this time. That fuck thinks anybody can do it. Shit, everybody isn’t built that way. Jesus Christ, I’m hearing voices, Reva.” He almost started crying over the phone. He was losing control and it was horrible.

“One message at a time,” Doctor Baumwell said. “What’s

kill?

Hurt someone, you mean? Hurt who, Benjamin? Hurt yourself? Hurt me?”

Thomas Berryman watched teenagers crowding the steps of Carnegie Hall. A silvery sign with attached glossy photos announced that Blue Oyster Cult was appearing that evening.

Berryman was in a pay phone directly across the street from the concert hall on 57th Street. He was calling a man in the Belle Meade section of Nashville, Tennessee.

A gruff southern man’s voice finally came on the other end of the line.

Berryman spoke in a slow, deliberate monotone. He gave out his name. He said he was calling in reference to a man named Harley Wynn.

“What about him?” The southern man seemed to be an authoritarian.

“He’s dead. I just had to have him shot,” Berryman continued the monotone.

The southern man’s voice cracked. “You had him what?”

A city bus applied loud air brakes a few feet from the glass booth window. Berryman found himself looking at a naked blond man promoting

Viva

magazine on the side of the bus. “Hello, hello?” he could hear in the receiver.

The bus started up with a sick, heavy grumble.

“You knew my rules,” Berryman began to talk again. “I don’t know what Wynn saw around here. He was supposed to pay us some money, then go back to Tennessee.”

“Well, I don’t know about that part,” the southerner said. “He told me he had other business keeping him in New York. I had no intention of interfering with you.”

“I don’t believe you,” Berryman said flatly. He’d decided to take the offensive.

“Goddamnit, I didn’t,” the other man exploded. “Listen you …” he started to say.

Berryman raised his voice over the man’s next few words. “I’ve already begun on your business. I have your money,” he said, “the first half anyway. I’ve had to spend some of it. Do you want me to continue?”

The southerner spoke without hesitation. “Of course continue. Go on with it. Wynn is a very small part of this thing.”