by Kevin Fox
“I’m not sure your mom and I would’ve lasted together in that small of a space.”
“Why, what’d she say to you?”
“Asked if I was a lesbo and if we met because you arrested whoever it was that abused me,” Kat said with a smirk.
“She’s very subtle.”
“And observant. Likes to use what she sees against people, doesn’t she?” Kat asked as we got into the car. I turned the key and put it in drive as she slammed the door.
“S’all right. I gave it back to her. Told her if she was even ten years younger I’d be lookin’ at her instead of you.”
“Lovely. Glad you’re sexually harassing my mother.”
“We have an understanding now. She can be mean to me and I can piss her off by being nice back. I feel like part of the family already. What’d your dad tell you?”
“Nothing. Just confirmed that these two cases are connected and that woman at the yacht is involved. Hinted that it has something to do with what I might’ve seen the night Uncle Joe was killed.”
“Your Uncle Joe?”
“Well, not really my uncle. He worked with my father on the Federal Task Force. They were close. Really close. Joe was driving the night of my accident. My Dad also said something about ‘the last time I went messing around’, and about ‘the bastards breaking something’.”
“Breaking something? What does that mean?”
“The only thing I ever remember getting broken was my father’s jaw, but I don’t see how the two are connected.”
“What do you remember about ‘the last time you went messing around’?”
“Not much.”
“Well, there’s something we all can count on. Killian Collins’ memory,” she muttered, but it wasn’t quite true that I didn’t remember. There were some things… and talking it out might do some good –
It was the summer I had turned thirteen, and I’d gotten interested in both the accident that took my memory and my life before it. My mother wouldn’t talk about it, and my father gave me either vague descriptions of baseball games I’d played when we lived on the North Shore, or stories about what my now-dead grandparents were like. None of it filled in the blanks for me, and the less I knew the more I felt the need to find out what had happened to me during the two days I’d been wandering in the woods.
I’m not sure why I needed to know more that summer, but it might have been because that past May, Valerie Marie Salerno, a twelve-year-old girl just a year behind me at Totten Intermediate School, had gone missing. Her body was found on the last day of school in June, at the end of Maguire Avenue in the woods between Parkwood Avenue and Bloomingdale Road.
The crime scene was only about two miles from where I had been lost after my accident. When I read about it in The Staten Island Advance, my night terrors had come back. Of course, Valerie wasn’t the first girl to go missing only to be found later, half eaten by the wild dogs and raccoons that still roamed in the woods of Staten Island. Holly Ann Hughes was a legend by that time, and Judy Somerville was still a recent tragedy, found buried in a shallow grave behind Tottenville High School just a few years before. I had started collecting articles about all of them, becoming obsessed with young girls disappearing in the woods where I had wandered. I knew that I was obsessed because my night terrors had returned, this time with horrific images of a girl in danger – and that the dream was a way to control reality. According to my doctor – it was a way to right the wrongs I couldn’t otherwise. Some days I wondered if the same impulse was what drove me to become a cop, but back then, the dreams just scared the shit out of me – and I was having more trouble sleeping than I ever had before.
If there had been anything else that summer to take up that space in my brain that was occupied by morbid thoughts and dark daydreams, maybe I wouldn’t have gotten caught messing around in the frames of the homes under construction where the woods I had grown up in used to be – but Charlie Pederson, Tony Guinta, and even Tommy O’Connell were all gone for the summer. Tony and Charlie were away at camps, and Tommy was in summer school for failing math.
So there I was, reading lazily on the second floor of a half-built house on a Saturday. I was in the middle of Robert Heinlein’s story “All You Zombies” when I noticed that the words were drifting away in shadow. I was tired because the dreams had been keeping me awake, and the sun felt so good that I shut my eyes –
…And I was running again, my legs torn open by the thorns of sticker bushes. My head pounded and I was getting tired, but I had to keep going.
That’s when I saw the girl for the first time. She no more than eight, with her long auburn hair tied back, darting and dodging through scattered moonlight and the trees like a mythical deer that had taken on human form. My psychologist at the time said I’d created her from all the dead girls I’d been reading about, but she felt more real than that, and when I touched her in my dreams she was solid, soft, and smelled of earth and sweat and was running in denim shorts and t-shirt, which were useless for protection in the cold October night air. There was mud caked on her calves and her legs were scratched and bloody above the mud line. She never hesitated, running flat out, never stopping as her hair caught on the branches. I thought for sure she would get away –
Until I saw the shadows behind her move.
When I inhaled to scream and warn her, I only wheezed and choked. A hulking figure emerged from the shadows, the shades of darkness resolving themselves into the silhouette of a full-grown man. He didn’t try to talk to her or warn her, he just extended his arms, holding what looked like an iron bar – and clotheslined her as she ran. Both of the girl’s feet left the ground and her neck snapped back.
Somehow the man didn’t hear me as I ran toward them, amped up on adrenaline and anger. Maybe he was too focused on the girl, kicking and clawing at him as he pushed her flat on her back in the mud, straddling her, ripping her shirt and backhanding her across the face.
“How do you like that, little bitch? Teach you to make me run,” he growled as he grabbed her by the hair and pulled her face close to his. His voice was muttered and indistinct in the rain, something about it different, maybe foreign.
I slowed, coming up behind him. The tire iron he’d hit her with was on the ground between us – but I hesitated.
The sour acid of cowardice made my stomach tighten and I stood absolutely still for a moment, afraid to grab the tire iron. In the silence, I heard his words, still muffled by the white noise of the rain.
“…break you in. Make you worthless,” the man muttered, as he ripped open the young girl’s shorts.
That’s when I saw the scar on her thigh. It looked almost exactly like my own scar – a spiraling blemish the size and shape of a cigarette lighter from an old car. The only difference between the two was that her scar was on her left thigh and looked as if it were brand new and barely healed.
The scar gave me the courage I needed. With both hands I grabbed the tire iron and lifted it over my head, exhaling with a scream, swinging it like an axe, aiming for the soft spot at the base of his skull.
The metal struck, vibrating. It made my hands flare with pain and then go numb. Nothing happened for a second… And then the man turned and looked right at me, stunned, but unaffected by the blow. I tried to step back and away, I lost my balance. Falling, I lashed out with the tire iron, feeling the metal strike and stop abruptly, sending pain shooting up my arm. He’d grabbed me, and as I tried to keep his wet, slick hand off my neck I felt it go slack and something slid off into my fist.
His other hand must have still had a grip on the tire iron, because he was on top of me and had me pinned in the mud and I couldn’t pull it back to hit him again. That’s when something warm and wet dropped onto my cheek and oozed, slug-like, across it. I struggled against him, but the man wasn’t moving.
At all.
The mud was forgiving and let me slip to one side, wriggling out from under him. When I glanced down at him I saw that he loo
ked at me with only one eye. Where the other had been was the tire iron. He was dead. I’d killed him, but I felt nothing. Heard nothing. I saw nothing but his eyes and the tire iron for a long moment, my hands balled into fists at my side, something small and hard in my right one.
Then the sound slowly filtered back – first the softly insistent rain, then the rustle of leaves. It was the girl. I turned to look for her as I heard her move, wanting to help her, but I only caught one last glimpse of her as she fled. I can’t forget that image as she sprayed mud up behind her, looking as if like she had been born to run wild. It was then that I heard distant voices – other men, looking for us. They were coming, and I was standing over their dead friend. I need to go –
– I bolted upright, chilled. As I opened my eyes, I thought at first that a cloud had passed in front of the sun, but then saw it was starting to dip below the horizon. As I looked out to see it, I noticed two men at the tree line, silhouetted. Both men looked like both cugines – in sweaty wife-beater T’s, with gold chains and half dollar-sized Christ heads, tattoos on their biceps and the ripped muscles that were most likely from steroids, raising the specter of ‘roid rage’. They each had shovels and a pickaxe and were digging at the edge of a shallow, seasonal creek bed. The shorter of the two men was in the shallow creek up to his knees. He was built like a fireplug, with a mangy mustache and thinning hair, but the taller one was a ripped V-shaped guy that looked like he was way too big to be messed with.
Of course, I thought they were burying a body – I was thirteen and having nightmares about dead men and tire irons and girls in danger. Morbidly curious, I walked through the framed-out wall to the next window opening and leaned out, not noticing a block of wood sitting on the sill. I must have brushed up against it and it clattered off the plywood exterior as it fell.
When I looked up again, my eyes found the two men in the woods, looking right at me. They saw me.
“Get to the front. I got the back,” the shorter of the two men yelled as he dropped his shovel and started running toward the house I was in.
I ran. Instinctively.
My bike was in the weeds, closer to Sharrotts Road. If I could get to it, I knew some trails that cut off the corner and would take me straight to the one-way service road, Drumgoole Road West. If I could get there, the two cugines wouldn’t be able to follow me –even if they had a car close by.
Luckily, the big guy was muscle-bound and tight, and couldn’t run. Definitely more of a fight guy than a flight one. At thirteen, I was all flight. I was fifty yards down Sharrotts Road on my bike before the big guy even hit the pavement and I was on the dirt trail before I heard the gravel churning up beneath the car’s wheels.
I didn’t stop until I made it out the other side and was coasting down the service road, listening for the sound of their car. I heard nothing. The car was gone. Relieved, I started pedaling steadily, in the orange glow of the setting sun that lit up the roadway behind me. The pavement was smooth and clear and the adrenaline was washing out of my system as I enjoyed the wind in my face, tearing ass down the hill.
…And then I heard the roar of a busted muffler, right behind me. A white pickup was less that forty feet back, coming down the wrong way. It had been coasting silently in neutral, but now it was racing toward me as I saw the big guy and his buddy in the front seat. I pumped the pedals as hard as I could.
It was no use.
The truck was suddenly alongside of me and the big guy’s arm was reaching out the window. I tried to swerve, but the big guy caught my arm and the bike was pulled out from under me as the back tires of the pickup rolled over it, crunching metal and snapping plastic. My feet hit the ground as I yanked away from him, and then I was free…
…falling and rolling onto one shoulder, asphalt scraping away skin as I rolled. I finally stopped as my hip hit the curb. I didn’t move. The pain was starting to throb its way into the whole right side of my body as the blood rushed to the surface.
The sound of the pickup’s doors slamming motivated me enough to try and get up, but hadn’t even taken a step when I felt a giant hand slam me hard between the shoulder blades. Falling face first into the weeds, my wrists caught my full weight, going numb as my right elbow collapsed. I kicked at his arm, flailing, but had no traction and nothing to hold onto as he pulled me backward by one ankle. I wasn’t going anywhere.
“Motherfucker. Look at that,” the smaller guy mumbled, and then casually kicked me in the ribs to stop me from fighting. With the wind knocked out of me, I saw what he was looking at – the scar on my thigh.
“Where’d you get that scar, Red?” He asked, calling me by a name I hated. My hair wasn’t really red, but when I was a kid it was lighter, and in the summers the sun would bleach it so that the brown went a bit reddish/auburn.
“From your mother—” I muttered, answering his question about the scar as any Staten Islander would. He kicked me again, harder. Through teary eyes, I could see the bigger of the two men smile. He was missing one of his canine teeth and was at least six-five. Steroids was now a definitive diagnosis, and he had a bad case, including the ‘roid rage that went with it.
I just lay there for a moment as he moved closer to look at my scar. When he was close enough, I snapped my other leg straight out, planting my heel into the bridge of his nose. I heard it crack a millisecond before I felt the warm spray of blood on my shin. The big guy roared in pain and was about to put a fist through my chest when I heard a familiar mechanical whine and a shout.
“Let the kid go or I’ll blow your fuckin’ head off,” a deep voice said as I recognized what the sound had been – a tap on a police siren. The big guy let go, putting his hands in the air as a uniformed cop approached, his gun pointed at the bigger man. The cop’s younger partner was flanking the smaller guy, who also had his hands where the cops could see them.
“Officer. This is just a misunderstanding,” said the smaller guy, pasting on a smile under his thin and patchy mustache.
“He’s full of it. They chased me down. My Dad’s on the job,” I yelled as quickly as I could. That phrase was like a magic incantation when recited to any cop in New York City. The older cop’s eyes narrowed as he tested my bona fides.
“Where’s he work outta?”
“The six-o. Coney Island Homicide,” I answered, the way only a cop’s kid would.
“I don’t give a rat’s ass who his father is. He was vandalizing the construction sites,” protested the smaller guy.
“I wasn’t doin’ nothin’ but reading. They were digging in the woods with shovels. Like they were burying something.”
“That true?” Asked the older cop, obviously the senior partner.
“It’s a construction site. People dig. Go look if you want,” muttered the big guy. “I think the little shit broke my nose.”
“That’ll teach you to pick on someone your own size. What’s this about digging? It’s Saturday. Nobody digs on Saturday.”
“We do. Ever hear of Swamp Pink?” the smaller guy asked, smugly.
“Swamp what?”
“Swamp Pink. It’s a flower. An endangered species. Helonias bullata. Some damn tree huggers are making us transplant every last one of ‘em before we can bulldoze.” The cops exchanged a look and the junior partner shrugged.
“I buy it. Whose gonna make up somethin’ like ‘Hell-on-us Bulls-tatas’? “And you’re really doin’ that? Transplanting flowers?”
“We’re paid to do it. Supposedly the damn weed’ll go extinct if we don’t. That’s how we caught this kid in the houses. We were doin’ our job,” said the smaller guy, putting his hands down, starting to get irate.
“We had stuff stolen from the site. Then we see this little shit—” The Toothless Giant continued until the older cop held up a hand, interrupting.
“—So you go the wrong way down a one way and run him over?
“It was an accident. He swerved into us.”
“Bullshit,” I said, trying to make su
re the cops didn’t lose sight of the fact that these guys had been trying to kill me.
“Fine, I get it. It’s a he said-he said, and everybody’s wrong. Anybody want to go to jail today?” The cop asked, looking at all of us. Nobody reacted, so he went on, talking to his partner. “Write these guys up for reckless driving. I find you near this kid again, I will shoot you, understood?”
“Understood,” said the smaller guy, before the big guy could say anything.
“And you, kid,” the senior partner said, looking at me. “I catch you near them houses, I’ll take you in, charge you, and then call your dad. Now get in the car. We’ll take you home.”
“I’m okay.”
“I ain’t asking’, kid,” he told me, and then helped me get the bike into the trunk of the patrol car as his partner wrote up the two guys.
I watched them, and they watched me. None of us watched the cops. Finally, I got into the car and told the cops my address. We had to go the long way around because of the one-way streets. The pickup followed us, about a half a mile back, slowing down as we turned onto my block. The bored cops didn’t seem to notice, or care, probably assuming their warning as ‘The Law’, had put an end to the issue.
They were wrong.
I saw the guys in the pickup looking at me as I climbed out of the police car, and then they slowly continued past.
They knew where I lived.
Chapter Twelve
I got lucky. My father saw the bike before he saw me.
That meant, of course, that he was worried that I was dead or permanently disabled by whatever accident had mangled it, so he was relieved that I was fine when he did finally see me and had already blown his ability to feign anger. Dad grounded me for a week.
I didn’t really mind, because every night for the next week my Dad would arrive home to find me peering out past the heavy drapes, as if I was waiting for him. He thought I was bored, but to be truthful, I was afraid – watching for that pickup with the man with the mangy mustache and his giant friend. Worried that I was becoming a lonely, housebound loser, my father offered to take me to the movies, just the two of us, a week after my bike got wrecked. I even got to choose the movie. My mother must have felt badly as well, because she decided to go with us. The offer was almost worth the beating I took, especially since the guys in the pickup couldn’t find me if I wasn’t at home. I’d be safe at the movies.