A Christmas Killing

by Richard Montanari

  “Thanks,” Byrne said. “Can you tell us where you were tonight?”

  “What time?”

  “Around eight o’clock.”

  “Tonight?”

  “This very one.”

  Farren waved a hand at the bar, but did not take his eyes from Byrne’s.

  “I was here,” he said. “I’ve been here all night.”

  “Then why ask what time? All night is all night.”

  Farren said nothing.

  “Do you know a woman named Miranda Sanchez?” Byrne asked.

  “I know a lot of women.”

  “Are any of them named Miranda Sanchez?”

  Farren feigned thought. “Name doesn’t ring a bell.”

  “What about Misty? Know any women named Misty?”

  “No, but I like that name better.”

  Byrne once more pointed at the Malibu. “Have you had this in for service today?”

  “Today?”

  “I can speak louder if you want me to,” Byrne said. He did. “Yes. Today.”

  Farren didn’t see the humor in this. “No.”

  Byrne walked around to the back of the Malibu. The thin line of light amber liquid led around the corner, on the same side of the street as the bodega, a half block away.

  Byrne crouched down, touched a finger to the fluid, smelled it. He returned to where Farren stood. But not before looking into the passenger side of the car. There was blood on the front seat. It looked almost black in the sodium street light.

  Byrne held out his two fingers. “Smells like brake fluid.”

  Farren shifted his weight. “Had to put fluid in tonight,” he said. “That a crime?”

  “The only crime is what they charge for it in a food market.”

  No response.

  “Where’s the empty can?” Byrne asked.

  “I threw it out.”

  “Where?”

  Before Farren could answer, Byrne sensed movement to his right. There, coming up the sidewalk, fewer then twenty feet away, was Patrick’s brother, Danny. Behind him walked two boys, both about ten years old.

  Danny Farren, a few years older than Patrick, wore a long black leather coat, a black knit watch cap. He had his right hand in his coat pocket. When he rounded the corner he made eye contact with his brother, and knew.

  If Patrick Farren was the family pit bull, Danny was the Rottweiler. He had done ten years in Rockview for manslaughter.

  Byrne unbuttoned his coat. Frank Sheehan did the same. Sheehan bladed his body toward Patrick; Byrne, toward Danny.

  “Now, about that brake fluid can,” Byrne said.

  Patrick snapped his fingers. “I remember now. I threw it out the window.”

  “Where?” Byrne asked. “It’ll still be there.”

  “Can’t recall.” Farren took a step backward, toward the middle of the street. Byrne watched his hands. He hadn’t made his move. Yet.

  Byrne put away his notebook. He needed both hands free.

  “Here’s what happened,” Byrne said. “You know Miranda Sanchez. You’ve seen her before. In fact, I have an eyewitness who can put her in your bar on more than one occasion. What happened tonight was, you pulled over on Christian a few hours ago, and sent Miranda into that bodega to buy some brake fluid. You put the fluid in your car, and then Miranda said the wrong thing, or looked at you the wrong way, or dropped your last rock in the snow, and you beat her senseless. She’s fighting for her life at Graduate right now.”

  Farren took another step away, which put him closer to Frank Sheehan. Sheehan closed the gap with a step of his own.

  Byrne glanced at Danny. Danny Farren now had both hands in his pockets. The two boys huddled in a doorway behind him.

  “You…you got some balls, brother,” Patrick said. Despite the cold, sweat began to bead on his forehead. “You come down to my neighborhood, on Christmas Eve, with this shit? You got a wild fuckin’ imagination.”

  “Do I?” Byrne asked. “Then tell me where you tossed that can of STP, brother. Tell me where it is, I’ll go get it, and we can wrap this up. I’ll admit my mistake, I’ll buy you a Bushmills, and we can go about our lives, spend Christmas with our loved ones. Sound good?”

  Farren didn’t move, didn’t speak. Byrne nudged the hem of his coat back a few more inches.

  “See, you could tell me where that empty can is, but you won’t,” Byrne said. “You won’t tell me because we both know it’s in the back of your car right now. You know as well as I do that the lab can match that exact fluid to what’s in your car, and you also know that we’re going to find Miranda Sanchez’s fingerprints all over the can.”

  Patrick Farren stole a glance at his brother. Something silent passed between them. Something dark and violent. Something primal.

  “And I’ll bet that her blood is on the front seat of your car,” Byrne said. “Prove me wrong. Let’s go home early.”

  Patrick Farren unbuttoned his coat.

  “Don’t do it,” Byrne said. He eased his hand onto the grip of his weapon. “Let’s resolve this. Nobody has to get hurt.”

  “Fuck you.”

  A light came on in Byrne’s periphery. At first he thought someone had turned on their Christmas lights, but the light was too big, too bright. In that instant—the chasm between a thought and an action—Byrne realized it was the traffic light on the corner.

  And in that instant somebody screamed.

  Byrne glanced over to see that it was one of the boys, the smaller of the two. Before Danny Farren could stop the boy, he ran off the curb.

  “Uncle Pat!”

  A second later Byrne saw the car coming around the corner, a big Delta 88 Royale. The driver had apparently anticipated the green light on Carpenter Street and had not slowed before making the turn.

  The car slammed into the boy, hitting him just below his waist, tossing him high into the air. Byrne heard the air punched from the boy’s lungs. His body came down on the icy street with a sickening thud, his head cracking on the pavement.

  The other boy screamed but, in that moment, all Byrne heard was his own heart.

  “You motherfucker,” Patrick Farren yelled. He pulled his weapon from his waistband, and picked a target. Sheehan was closer.

  But Frank Sheehan had already drawn. He fired three times, hitting Patrick Farren in the center mass of his chest in a tight pattern. Farren never got off a shot. He was blown to the ground, falling next to the boy, the snow-dusted street now pooling with their blood.

  Byrne spun, leveled his weapon at Danny Farren. The older Farren brother slowly raised his hands into the air.

  The second EMS wagon left at just after midnight. There was no need to hurry for Patrick Farren. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

  Patrick’s ten-year-old nephew, Michael, sustained multiple injuries, as well as serious head trauma. He was currently in an induced coma at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital.

  As the Crime Scene Unit towed the Malibu to the police garage, where it would be processed for evidence, Detectives Kevin Byrne and Frank Sheehan gave their statements, and were cleared to go off duty.

  An all but empty can of STP brake fluid was found on the floor of the Malibu, just behind the driver’s seat.

  They sat at the bar at McGillin’s Old Ale House on Drury Street. Since leaving the station house, Byrne had called his contact at Graduate Hospital every fifteen minutes. Miranda Sanchez’s condition had been upgraded from critical to stable.

  Byrne had also called U of Penn. There was no news about Michael Farren.

  It was somewhere around the bottom of their second Tullamore Dew that Frank Sheehan finally spoke.

  “Thirty-six fucking years, Kevin,” Sheehan said. “Second time I’ve ever fired my weapon on the job.”

  “It was a clean shoot, Frank.”

  Sheehan shrugged, spun his glass. The juke played Sinatra’s “I’ve Got the World on a String.” The fireplace, and the Dew, began to cut the chill.

  “He�
��s still dead,” Sheehan said. “And that kid’s in a coma.”

  Byrne chose his words carefully, hoping they were the right ones. “I don’t know much, but I do know this,” he said. “You didn’t put either of them on that corner tonight. What happened tonight is squarely on the Farrens’ doorstep. It has been for a long time.”

  Sheehan drained his drink, corralled the next one.

  “One of these days that might make me feel better,” he said. “Today is not that day.”

  Ten minutes later, as Frank Sheehan got off the stool to put on his suit coat, Byrne glanced at the man’s inner forearms, saw the evidence of a number of IV needles: the black and blue marks, the scarring, the bruising. He wondered when the chemo had started for Sheehan. Frank always wore a hat, even indoors, as he was now—and didn’t have that much hair to begin with—so hair loss wasn’t a clear indicator.

  The weight loss, however, was.

  And now this.

  Byrne decided that, as much as he wanted to ask the man about his health, there would be another day, another time.

  Back at the station house, they stood for a long moment in the parking lot. Neither man knew how to end this night.

  “Sometimes this city can get pretty quiet,” Sheehan finally said. “Ever notice that?”

  It was true. Byrne could all but hear the snowflakes land on the ground.

  “Merry Christmas, Frankie.”

  Sheehan smiled, but there was no joy in his eyes.

  At just after two am Byrne drove back to the Pocket. He parked across the street from The Stone, got out.

  A few minutes later, the door to the tavern opened. Danny Farren emerged, stood on the sidewalk, under the green neon sign. His eleven-year-old son, Sean, stood next to him.

  The two men found each other in the night, standing on opposite sides of the street, opposite sides of the law.

  Byrne looked at the boy, thought about the song that had been playing in the bodega, “The Little Drummer Boy.”

  A newborn king to see . . .

  Byrne would head home for a few hours’ sleep, then return to the station house, continue to type what would ultimately be a mountain of paperwork. An officer-involved shooting, a dead suspect, a critically injured ten-year-old boy. He’d be lucky if he was done with the paperwork by New Year’s Day.

  The street had been plowed, a fresh coat of snow covered the sidewalks. If you had not been present on this Philadelphia street on this Christmas Eve you would never know that a man lost his life here, or a boy, his childhood.

  These were the sorts of things that, in time, faded into the lore of a neighborhood.

  Even if the people forgot, Devil’s Pocket would remember.

  The Pocket always did.

  A Preview of

  Shutter Man

  In February 2016 Mulholland Books will publish Richard Montanari’s Shutter Man. Following is an excerpt from the novel’s opening pages.

  Who are you?

  I am Billy.

  Why did God make it so you can’t see people’s faces?

  So I can see their souls.

  I

  The Pocket

  This is the hate my father gave me, this was in my mother’s milk,

  this is you and me and all of us in a world of hoodlums…

  —Carl Sandburg

  1

  July 4, 1976

  On the last night of his life, Charles Martin Flagg, sixty-eight, a childless widower with mild arrhythmia and a limp he’d picked up courtesy of a mortar round while serving as an Army chaplain stationed at Guadalcanal, stood at the western edge of Schuylkill River Park, near the baseball diamond, facing east.

  It was a muggy night. A damp breeze crawled off the river, bringing with it the industrial smells of the power plant, a pungent mix of ozone and copper.

  On every special occasion since his confirmation at St. Paul’s, in 1919, Charles Flagg had worn a long-sleeved shirt buttoned at the neck and cuffs, as he did this night, even though the temperature, at just after 8 PM, was 81 degrees. Even as a child, he’d held the belief that respect came from inside and radiated outwardly. Clean of thought, clean of body, clean of spirit.

  The world did not always share his faith.

  It had been forty years to the day since he’d lost his only child to violence, a sweet-natured girl named Cynthia June—aged ten years, ten months, ten days when her spirit took wing. Cyndi June had loved butterflies and quilts and jigsaw puzzles, by nature beguiled by symmetry.

  On the day she died, a puzzle piece went missing from Charles Flagg’s life, a place where Cyndi June used to be. No other part ever snapped neatly into that space again, its trebled edges always the slightest bit off.

  The intervening years—especially the twenty-five since Charles Flagg’s wife, Annie, lost the good fight against a low beast called leukemia—had been a collage of charity food drives, Chinese takeout, garage sales, tepid baths; a frameless tedium that one day settled coldly at the bottom of Charles Flagg’s heart, always watching, always waiting for the return of his two girls.

  They never came back.

  He had taken on the role of block watcher in every neighborhood in which he’d lived since Cyndi June’s passing: Nicetown to Swampoodle to Torresdale to Grays Ferry. Instead of the leather-bound edition of the King James Bible with which he’d made fellowship with the fallen and wounded men in Guadalcanal, he now carried a walkie-talkie and a two-way radio.

  He was part of the South Philly neighborhood group called Block Safe.

  The organization did not carry weapons, of course, nor did it have the authority to arrest or detain. Instead, their purview was to observe and report. Charles Flagg had always been good at this, had always been a discerning and vigilant man.

  On this night, among the crowd that had gathered to watch the fireworks, there was not much to witness. The previous year there had been a handful of drunk and disorderly arrests, open containers, one misdemeanor assault. Mostly it was families. Hardworking, blue-collar families gathering to watch the glittering display.

  As the fireworks reached full and gaudy plumage, fanning the sky over South Philadelphia with red, white, and blue light, Charles Flagg looked down at his feet and saw it. In some ways the sight was so inharmonious with the hard earth and tufted grass that it didn’t seem real. In other ways, Charles Flagg had known it would be there.

  It was an odd sensation for him, this knowing and not knowing. He imagined it to be a little bit like faith, a trusting acceptance in things unseen.

  Charles Flagg believed in things unseen.

  He closed his eyes for a moment, remembered with cruel clarity coming home that day of terrible rains, seeing Cyndi June’s body. He’d called out to her, as if he didn’t see the truth in her pooling blood. She didn’t answer, didn’t move.

  Somehow that was forty years ago, almost to the hour. He glanced around the park, at the oblivious men and women and children, all of them consumed by this summer evening that did not promise rain. He wondered what they would make of this, what they would make of Charles Flagg standing in this place, this thing at his feet.

  He was a protector, after all, a man of the cloth.

  He was a custodian.

  Later that night, a scant mile away—as yellow tape cordoned off the park, and officers from the PPD Crime Scene Unit walked a tight and rigid pattern—Reverend Charles Martin Flagg, retired, brushed his teeth, combed his hair, opened a fresh box of Friskies, poured some into Lulu’s bowl, and tipped the box onto the worn linoleum.

  Lulu heard the sound and nuzzled his leg, silent as snow.

  Charles Flagg then sat in in his favorite easy chair, facing the window that overlooked Grays Ferry Avenue, the echo of forty years of grief and sadness a canto that rose and fell with the reading of his sins.

  At just after midnight, his family photo album in his lap, Charles Flagg put the barrel of a Smith and Wesson .32 revolver against the soft palate at the roof of his mouth and pulled the
trigger.

  His last thought was not of the bright yellow tape that circled the southern end of Schuylkill River Park, but rather of a different kind of ribbon.

  A pale yellow ribbon tied in a bow.

  About the Author

  Richard Montanari is the internationally bestselling author of The Doll Maker, The Stolen Ones, The Echo Man, The Devil’s Garden, Badlands, The Rosary Girls, The Skin Gods, Merciless, and more. He lives in Cleveland, Ohio.

  richardmontanari.com

  @RRMontanari

  RichardMontanariBooks

  Books by Richard Montanari

  The Doll Maker

  The Stolen Ones

  The Killing Room

  The Echo Man

  The Devil’s Garden

  Badlands

  Merciless

  The Skin Gods

  The Rosary Girls

  Kiss of Evil

  The Violet Hour

  Deviant Way

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  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Welcome Page

  A Christmas Killing

  A Preview of SHUTTER MAN

  About the Author

  Books by Richard Montanari

  Newsletter

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.