by Kevin Fox
“Go take a shower.”
“Fuck that. Come shower outside with me. It’s fuckin’ fantastic out there. The wind could blow a truck off the Goddamn bridge. Trees are crackin’ in half. The energy of it is tremendous.”
“They closed the bridges – and you’re out of your mind. It’s dangerous,” I said, stopping three feet from the door. I hate the rain. I hate when people tell me how beautiful the rain is even more. It’s wet. Cold. Makes my skin contract wherever it touches me and makes every muscle in my body tense.
“Christ on a cross. You’re an NYPD detective. Six foot three, two hundred twenty pounds of muscle and you’re afraid of getting a little wet? Is that why you’re here all alone?”
“Fuck you,” I said, giving her the standard Staten Island answer for everything. I moved further away, taking refuge in my old ultra-suede couch, turning on the television as I did.
“Not likely. You’re too good for me with all that Viking-red hair and piercing blue eyes. I used to think you were holding out for some Valkyrie, but maybe you’re just scared.” Kat teased and flopped onto the couch next to me, her damp hair brushing my cheek. Her assessment wasn’t too far off, but it wasn’t fear that kept me away. I stayed away because I was pretty sure she’d reject me the minute I tried anything – and because Kat was my friend.
I could play Call of Duty with her for days on end (even keeping up with her on good days), talk shit, admire the same women in a completely inappropriate and carnal way, spar in the middle of my living room as she showed me her new Jeet Kun Do moves, and enjoy meals she cooked for me just because she hated to eat alone. Why would anyone in their right mind fuck that up by starting a relationship? Kat snuggled in closer and I hit ‘play’ on the remote, trying to ignore the warmth of her.
“When was the last time you brought somebody home? Hell, when was the last time you went out?
“I go out.”
“Yeah, to The Annex, with Charlie Pederson and guys you’ve known since Little League – where the only women you might meet one, or all of you, already screwed in High School.”
“Maybe it’s not all about getting laid for me.”
“Right. You like being alone, hiding from the rain. You know, for a guy named Kill, with that scarface of yours, you’re a real pussy,” Kat muttered through a smirk. I ignored her, although I appreciate the fact that Kat likes my scars. Maybe they remind her of her own. She has two I’ve seen, one that runs two inches under her left breast through a groove between her ribs, and another on the outside of her left thigh that is long and deep and that she seems to display proudly whenever she can. It accents the muscular beauty of her lean legs – not that I’m looking – and is a badge of honor from her time in the Army.
Once, when we both fell asleep on my couch after a thirty-six hour tour de force on Call of Duty, I woke up to her fingers gently tracing the scar on my left temple. The scar makes me look tougher than I am, and Kat thinks that somehow my name, Killian Collins, matches the scar so well that I must have been born with it. I’ve told her it’s from the accident, but after reading my astrological charts, she called me a liar and claimed that there were no accidents in my life.
“My name’s Killian, not Kill,” I corrected her. “It’s Irish and doesn’t have anything to do with murder.”
“Well, it’s Irish and ironic. Look at my name – Katherine D’Angelo. Katherine means ‘pure’ or ‘chaste’ and D’Angelo is ‘of the angels’. You believe that shit?”
“Someone has a sense of humor.”
Kat ran her hand up my leg, stopping at the scar on my thigh, a half dollar-sized, spiraling blemish that my mother says was due to my own stupidity. Apparently, I pulled out the cigarette lighter in our old Chevy Nova and burned myself. Kat traced that scar too, trying to get a reaction. She did. I stood, pretending that I was getting up to get a beer.
“Seriously, Kill. The storm of the century, Frankenstorm, Stormzilla, it’s out there and you’re going to stay inside?”
“Now you’ve got it. Because I’m not crazy.”
“And I am?” she asked, and I just rolled my eyes. “It was Tommy, wasn’t it? I explained that,” she said, looking at me with wide innocent eyes.
“You stabbed him. A guy stumbling down the stairs with a fork in his ‘nads makes anybody think twice about your sanity.”
“I told him no. He tried anyway. You’d never do that to me.”
“And Veronica?” I asked, popping open two beers.
“She fell.”
“Your ‘friends’ – seem to have a lot of accidents. I’d rather play it safe.”
“That’s the only thing you play, isn’t it? Is that why you’ve got food and sump pumps and generators and gas stockpiled?”
“I’m prepared,” I admitted. My house was well out of the evacuation zone and I wasn’t one of those recent immigrants from Brooklyn that had built on swampland, so I felt safe. Being a former Boy Scout and the son of a semi-paranoid conspiracy-theorist cop, I also had four ten-gallon cans of gas in the garage, a generator, water – both to drink and in the bathtub for flushing – and guns. I didn’t really expect any trouble, but there was looting during Hurricane Irene and this was Staten Island.
“If it becomes a zombie apocalypse, will you let me have one of your guns?”
“No.”
“Come on, you’ve got like three,” she pleaded. I had four actually – my on-duty Glock 19, my off duty .40 caliber Glock 22, a sawed-off twenty-gauge shotgun, and my father’s old .38 special with the ivory handle. As with most cops I knew, my general attitude was ‘loot me. I dare you.’
“I’d be murder with a shotgun,” Kat argued, swilling her beer.
“I have no doubt. In fact, you’re one of the reasons I have a gun safe.”
“I’m well-trained. By the best Goddamn Army in the world.”
“And not licensed in the State or City of New York.”
“Fine, see how quick I leave you behind when the zombies come… And why are you hiding out here anyway? Shouldn’t you be out on the streets doing some police thing? Evacuating evacuees? Taking on looters? Saving stranded stunads who didn’t evacuate?”
“I have three days off.” I’d barely finished speaking when the lights went out, leaving us in utter darkness except for the emergency flashlights that lit up automatically when the power went out. In their glow, I saw Kat smile.
“Locked in for three days. Lights out. No TV. No video games. No heat…”
She moved closer, grabbing a second beer. That’s when my cell phone rang. If I had bothered to look at the caller ID, I might have risked three days alone with Kat.
“Collins,” I answered.
“Kill. Hate to bother you, but two of my best Detectives just rode out to sea on their townhouses and my patrol guys are in it up to their asses – literally,” the voice of Lieutenant Demetrius, from the precinct in Tottenville, came through the phone. I owed Demetrius big time, since he’d saved my ass from a couple of white supremacist gunrunners and had never called in the favor. Until now.
“I’m off duty, Demetrius.”
“Nobody’s off. It’s a State of Emergency. Besides, it’s an easy call. It’s your neighborhood. In fact, you were requested.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“That same sultry sounding piece that’s been calling in tips for you for the last two years called.”
“She’s a stalker. I’ve never even met her. I’m not going out in this shit storm based on anything she called in,” I told him, determined not to leave the house.
“Right. Never met her. Sure. Then why’d she asked for the tall ‘killer’ who hangs at The Annex? Why’d she say she didn’t trust any other cops? And why’d we get a nine-one-one that confirmed her call two minutes later?”
“That was probably her too. Some cop groupie is lonely on a stormy night – that’s all this is.”
“No, it’s not. The nine-one-one was from the guy, you know the guy, a
‘friend of ours’, lives around the corner from The Annex, 502 Holten, right on the water there. The one with the classic Mustang. He backs up what your off-duty booty said. Added that he heard shots. Even thought he saw bodies outside his house or something.”
“Give it an hour and maybe the bodies’ll drift out to sea. It’ll be the Coast Guard’s problem,” I said, trying to weasel out of going anywhere in the rain.
“Yeah, I know, but if I don’t send somebody, everybody’s gonna know and then, you know… They said shots fired, Kill.”
“Yeah, I get it. Shots fired. There’s no more free beers at The Annex when this woman starts complaining I didn’t show.”
“Exactly. Not that I take the free beers or nothin’, but it’s community relations and such.” Demetrius didn’t need to explain to me. I grew up in Staten Island, and in spite of its size, the island still operated like a group of small towns. Everybody knew everybody else, or at least a sister or a cousin of everybody else.
“Fine. I’ll go look, but if it’s a mess you’re gonna have to get somebody else out there.”
“Perfect, Kill. You do me a solid, I’ll have your back,” he said quickly, and then hung up without a good-bye. I turned to find Kat glaring at me, half her second beer already gone.
“You’re going to leave me alone in the middle of ‘Stormzilla’? You’d rather potentially get shot at than be here with me?”
“It’s less scary,” I said, going to the closet with my gun safe.
“Damn. That’s cold.”
“Let yourself out. And don’t eat all my chips,” I called over my shoulder as I strapped on my gun and grabbed my gold shield off the shelf.
“Can I have a few beers?”
“A few. Like less than three.” I grabbed my Columbia raincoat and started to put my boots on. I hate the rain, but I’m ready for it.
“Less than three is a couple. A few is three or more,” she said.
“Drink what you want,” I told her, knowing she’d drink enough to piss me off, and no more. In spite of her issues, I understood and empathized with Kat. I once spent three months on loan to the Manhattan Special Victims Unit, and never did I have a more miserable time. I met a lot of women like Kat while I was at SVU. They were survivors, but fucked up enough that you could see that they went through some bad shit. Kat as much as admitted it to me on one of my bad nights. I think she wanted me to know that she understood what it felt like to wake up screaming.
Homicide was easy in comparison to Special Victims. The people you were standing up for were dead. They didn’t cry on you. Not that Kat would ever cry, or that she was somehow ‘damaged goods’. She wasn’t. Kat was stronger and smarter than any woman I knew – but she was complicated and I couldn’t be that sensitive guy that got her through things – not when I couldn’t even get myself through a rainy night.
I walked out without saying good-bye. Kat didn’t like good-byes anyway. She felt they were too final. The most you’d get out of her was a ‘see you later’ or ‘until the next time’. She made ‘good-bye’ bad juju somehow, and now that she’d planted the thought in my head that every time someone said good-bye it might be for good, I rarely said it.
As I opened the door to my ’73 Nova SS, I looked back to find Kat staring out the window at me. After a moment, she let the curtain fall, leaving me to wonder what might have been different if I’d met her a long time ago, or if neither of us had ever been damaged by life.
I didn’t wonder long. The wind was whipping the rain into my face like a spray of liquid needles, sharp and cold, reminding me that I’d just left a warm, safe place for no good reason. I decided not to think about it.
I was getting wet.
Chapter Three
Sandy was a bitch. I was driving through a maze of downed trees, sparking power lines, and flooded streets as rain pounded my windshield like it was trying to shatter it. I almost missed the left onto Wilbur from Seguine because my visibility was something like ten feet, but once I got on Wilbur the houses that stood between me and the ocean diminished the wind. Sticks and branches littered the ground, and I could hear the trunks of trees moaning to the point of snapping. When I made the right onto Holten the Raritan Bay was within ten feet of the road instead of its usual one hundred and fifty, and I saw the waves already pounding against The Annex, crashing seven feet up against its walls. Even then I knew the bar wouldn’t last the night, and wondered if someone had saved the grappa and the Macallan’s.
What a waste.
Rain. Enough said.
I slowed down, debating whether or not I’d be better off retreating to higher ground when two locals ran in front of my car, wearing garbage bag ponchos and waving their arms like lunatics. The guy, probably in his late forties but looking like a Medicare recipient due to what he’d undoubtedly call ‘good living’, was wheezing and out of breath. He could have been excited, or scared, or maybe just winded from the extra hundred pounds he was carrying around.
The woman was in worse shape. Apparently, she’d put on her makeup before leaving the house and it had run all over her face and sheer white blouse. Her hair, which was probably blown out at any other time, was plastered to her head and thinning. She was also wearing heels in the rain. I tried not to look directly at this Staten Island incarnation of Medusa, fearing that looking directly at her would damage my psyche permanently. Knowing my luck, my malfunctioning memory would choose that unfortunate image to hang onto. Hoping they wanted a ride to the shelter and had called in a bogus ‘shots fired’ call just to get it, I leaned out the window.
“What’s the problem?”
“The problem? You blind? It’s the Goddamn apocalypse out here,” he answered.
“Besides that? You called in gunshots? Bodies?” The woman looked at me in shock, then at my car, as if the two didn’t match.
“Oh, shit. You’re the cops?”
I’d forgotten that I was in my own car and pulled out my gold shield, wondering what other moron besides a cop they had expected to show up here on a night like this.
“Detective Collins. Did you or didn’t you hear shots?
“Well, yeah, but that was like an hour ago. Take a look,” the fat man said with a tone of accusation and pointed down the block. Through the rain and darkness, I couldn’t see anything.
“I don’t see nothin’ but water.”
“Goddamn, he’s either blind or fuckin’ stupid. Go closer,” the Medusa-woman screeched. I got out reluctantly and walked to the edge of the water, flowing up the middle of Holten, avoiding the kids’ toys, bikes, and an entire Playskool kitchen set that the tide had washed up. The darkness beyond the house at 502 Holten suddenly took on a shape and became clear.
It was a ship – a yacht really, over one hundred feet long and taller than any of the houses –definitely not the kind of boat that usually made port in Staten Island.
“Fuck. That’s a nice ride,” I muttered, summing it up as best I could.
“Yeah. There’s a problem for ya. Waves breakin’ against my bedroom window and a Goddamn boat in my yard, slamming up against my house. I can’t go inside – and I can’t leave with that monstrosity tryin’ to wreck my house. I want to know what gazillionaire owns it so I can file a claim. He can buy me a new Goddamn mansion. That’s my fuckin’ problem in a nutshell,” the fat man cursed.
He had a point. His whole house was swaying to the rhythm of the waves, groaning and creaking. Every tenth wave would send the side of the yacht crashing against the house so hard that it looked like it might slide off the foundation.
“What am I supposed to do about it?” I asked. I mean, I’d be happy to stay and watch the inevitable tragedy, but what else could I do?
“Listen,” the fat man ordered, waving his hand as if he could silence the storm. I heard the house groan, the wind, the constant white noise from the rain, and some banging. There was nothing… and then there was. Maybe. It was almost drowned out by the storm, but it was distinctive enough to
make chills run up my spine.
“Was that…?”
“Give it a second. You’ll hear it again.” The woman shivered, and I understood why as I heard the high-pitched and terrified scream of a young girl.
Shit. I looked at the fat man, still unable to look at his wife in her sheer shirt, which by now had been painted in vibrant colors by her melting face. The Fat Man looked grim. He knew I’d heard it too.
“She’s been screaming since right after I heard them gunshots.” Perfect. This was just what I needed – gunshots and screams from inside an enclosed space that was pitch dark and was being pounded by waves in a hurricane. I’d have to deal with a possible shooter, a victim, medical issues, and the floor moving under my feet, all while being in the dark on a wet, slick deck.
“Are you sure there were gunshots?” I asked hopefully.
“I know gunshots when I hear ‘em. They weren’t fired professional-like though. No three shot bursts. Just random, like somebody didn’t know what they was doin’,” the fat man answered, confidently. I wondered what family he was connected to, but I didn’t doubt him. There had been gunshots. There was someone on that yacht…
“And the bodies you saw?” I asked, procrastinating.
“That many shots, there’s bodies. Didn’t need to see ‘em.”
“You call the Coast Guard?”
“Tried them. Told me to go fuck myself.” I contemplated following their lead, but then I heard the screams again.
“You know how to swim?”
“I look like I exercise? Fuck you,” he answered. Like I said, ‘fuck you’ was the standard Staten Island response to just about everything.
I was on my own.
Glancing up the street, I looked for something to inspire me. The house looked like it was the only way to get up high enough to get onto the deck of the yacht, but it wasn’t a great option since the house was swaying from the force of the waves and would be torn off its foundation if I didn’t move… quickly.