The Mercy of the Night

by David Corbett

  The other two?

  One was a cholo, all scraggly stache and banger tat and busting a sag on his Dickies. Sleek dude, like a razor, and that’s when the name came to her: Chepe Salgado.

  The fourth guy was tall, coffee-colored, that’s all she could see, his face buried in shadow from the hood of his sweatshirt.

  Misfit bunch, no gang ties binding them—if anything, they should’ve been at each other’s necks. Strange, really, their being together like this, no logic to it at all, nothing but the opportunity, fireman in his shiny red car, getting a wake-up knob job on a drizzly school day.

  She’d told him, not so close to the corner, Christ, not so close to the school—but listen? Fireman Mike, Mighty Whitey—even with that ridiculous gash on his head from two nights before, courtesy of his drunken face-plant on the sidewalk—nobody runs him off. Watch and learn, boys and girls. Behold Goliath.

  Verrazzo threw open the car door and bulled toward the circle of rock tossers.

  “Which one of you shitbirds pitched the rock hit my windshield?” He reached out, went to yank the hood off Damarlo’s head but D-Lo ducked away. “Come on, you don’t have to think about it—who?”

  God, he had a voice. Tough as they pretended to be, the boys shrank back a little, like the guy was a wall of heat. Mike Verrazzo—Sicilian, not Italian, he’d told her once. One more thing to swagger about.

  More kids came drifting through the yards, across the train tracks, up from the corner, down from campus, a dozen or more mulling forward, another dozen behind them, swarming from between the sad little houses and collecting beneath the elms and live oaks and chinaberry trees arching over the one-block street—shuffling little homies with backpacks, pierced girls in cornrows cradling their books, black and brown and trailer trash—responding to tweets and texts to check it out, fireman getting blown in his car by guess who, or just drawn by the catcalls and the flow, the laughing bodies.

  How, she thought, gnawing at her lip, am I gonna get outta here?

  For the most part the crowd gathered on the backside of the fight. She still had the same fifteen yards between her and most of the onlookers. Go on, she thought, crack open the door, slink away, if not now, when?

  Then something out there clicked, like a thrown switch. She saw it in Mo Pete’s eyes first, glowing with hate, then Chepe’s. Finally the gaunt one she didn’t recognize stepped forward and launched a haymaker from outer space.

  Verrazzo, she thought, he called somebody a porch monkey, nacho nigger, fudge nudger. Something.

  He took the punch like a drunk’s kiss, grabbed the kid’s wrist, bent it back, twisted. Kung Fu fireman. Like that could save him.

  The gaunt kid howled, buckling, and the other three just stared.

  Then another switch flipped.

  The four newfound road dogs snapped to, rallied, jumped on Fireman Mike, circling fast, a blur of kicks, fists—

  Wham to the lower back.

  Thwack to the knees.

  Pow to the back of the head.

  Verrazzo gave back as good as he got, for a while anyway. Then one savage punch from Chepe, up under the rib cage—boom, like that, Fireman Mike keeled sideways, hobble-kneed. It left him wide open, and sad dog Damarlo wound up for a free kick to the jellies.

  Even as far away as she was—bunkered inside the car, safe behind the windshield glass—she winced at the impact.

  Verrazzo closed up like a knife, dropping to the asphalt.

  D-Lo jigged and pranced, arms high: score!

  The onlookers circled in tight now, screaming, egging the fighters on: Light him up! Make him pay! Fuck him good! Boys mostly, but a few girls too. Other girls stood in tight little knots, rolling their eyes, playing too good for all this, like it was some new clip on YouTube, not a ratpacked man right there.

  I should honk the horn, she thought, get out there, do something. They’re gonna kill him.

  A lone guy drifted past the car from behind. Hoodie like the others but wrong style jeans and worn too high. Work boots, not kicks. How old, she couldn’t tell. A slouch in his walk, ambling quick to where Verrazzo lay curled up on the ground.

  The loner dropped to one knee, untucked his hands from the sweatshirt pouch. The rest wasn’t real clear, the guy blocking her view with his back. Maybe he grabbed Mike’s collar and shook, maybe he got in a few good licks, she couldn’t tell. Either way, the crowd went nuts, hoots and cackles and cheers.

  If you’re gonna leave, she thought, do it now. Too stupid from shock to move.

  The stranger got back to his feet, tottering a little. His whole body shuddered, like a current running through him had shorted out.

  Mo Pete stood there, staring at Verrazzo, like a hole had opened up in the street, ready to swallow them all. Whatever he saw, it scared him so bad he turned around fast, pushed past Chepe and started to run.

  All eyes turned toward Mo Pete then, the chunky big man pushing past anyone in his way and damn near losing his hat as he fled. After that, it rippled through the crowd, like a pulse—mutters and curses, finally screams—bodies scattered, pinwheeling every which way, down the tunnel of oaks and elms and chinaberry trees, back between the shabby houses, pushing through gaps in the fences or scrambling over, making for the railroad tracks and beyond—hoodrats and cholos and hangers-on, even girls in heels. Some, still, were laughing.

  Verrazzo began thrashing on the ground, grabbing his neck with one hand, the other flailing around like he was drowning.

  Get out of the goddamn car, she told herself, help him, finally reaching for the handle and yanking—the door was locked.

  The loner stepped back from Verrazzo as the big man kept pitching back and forth in the street, then the guy pivoted, stuffed his hands back in his sweatshirt pouch and lurched back the way he’d come.

  Through the spider-web cracks in the windshield, his eyes locked with Jacqi’s.

  For a second she recognized the emptiness, the savage lonely punk nada. Then it came to her. The other night, at the hotel, the stranger who showed up at the end of the fight, drifting out of the shadows—this guy?

  With that, her own switch clicked.

  The cool gold hummingbird quivered at her breastbone, she was shaking, but she finally managed to unlock the car door, got out, stood up, shouted. “What the fuck you do?” Her voice sounding strange and small and far off. “Answer me, asshole—what the fuck did you do?”

  The guy glanced once her direction—the face still not clicking into recognition, long and bag-eyed and older than the rest of him, bony and thin-lipped—and for a second he hesitated and she thought to herself: Yeah, come on, finish it. But instead he just shuddered again, some invisible hand grabbing him by the neck, and he tucked himself down and kept moving.

  It was raining now, a wind-driven mist, that metal smell.

  Jacqi ran, knelt down in the damp street and pushed her hair back, turned Verrazzo toward her slow—he’d stopped thrashing around and now lay utterly still except for a kind of feverish trembling.

  His eyes hovered in their sockets, pale and lifeless, like sick fish. His skin had turned a waxy blue-gray and a curdle of blood flecked his teeth as his whitish lips pursed around an absent breath. Several new gashes joined the one from two nights ago and a deep florid bruise marbled his throat, like some awful birthmark.

  She started digging through pockets for his cell. “You’re strong,” she said, “strongest fucker I know, hang tough, come on.” She found the phone, thumbed in 911. Dispatch came on, a woman. “Somebody here got jumped, Goldenrod, the cul-de-sac up from the Pay-N-Go on—”

  The telltale beep in a blizzard of hiss. “Your name, please.”

  “He’s Mike Verrazzo, fireman, you know who I mean. He’s hurt bad.”

  “I need your name, miss—”

  Jacqi thumbed off, dropping the phone like she’d been scalde
d. It clattered against the damp pavement.

  “They’ll be here soon.” She took his hand, the thick palm heavy with callouses, icy, damp. “Can’t stick around, Mike.” Thinking of another voice, another time, her bearded Samaritan in the El Camino, the Santa Cruz hills. I need you to forget me.

  His grip clenched, not hard. A tic. Then he launched into one last seizure—locking up, shaking so hard he inched across the blacktop like death was rousting him out of a deep sleep. The sleep called his life.

  11

  “I told you before,” the woman said, fretted by shadow beyond the screen, “I haven’t seen her, I don’t know where she is.”

  A voice that could frost the lawn, Tierney thought: Nina Garza, late thirties, maybe older, raven-black hair in a wedge cut, part on the side, the face an impressive cage of angles, like you’d cut yourself going in for a kiss. Which apparently didn’t bother the man standing behind her, buttoning his cuffs.

  “I’m sorry if I bothered you the other night,” Tierney said, “and I’m sorry to bother you now. I’m just concerned that if Jacqi doesn’t come back to Winchinchala soon, something unfortunate—”

  “I remember what you said.” Behind her, like an usher, the man cleared his throat. She refused to turn, an almost imperial calm, tinged with disdain. Queen of Mars. “Now please remember what I said: she’s not here.”

  “Could she be staying with her brother—Richie, right?”

  A faint recoil, like who was he to say out loud the name of her son. “I don’t know how else to say it—I don’t know where she is. Are we through here?”

  “Is there a problem?” The man stepped forward finally, a deft glide, easing the woman back from the door. Not tall, just compact, strong, wearing a violet shirt, pleated gray slacks, his thinning dark hair combed back.

  “Mr. Garza?” Playing dumb. Tierney knew where to find Joe Garza.

  The guy was still fussing with his cuffs. “What’s your name?”

  “Here.” Reaching into his sport-coat pocket. “Let me give you a card.”

  “I didn’t ask for a card. I asked your name.”

  Out of sight behind the door, Nina Garza let out an oceanic sigh.

  “Tierney. Phelan Tierney.”

  Across the street, some Mortimer in an old Le Mans cranked the V-8 cold and revved it hard. Hillbilly tune-up.

  The man at the door waited for the noise to die down, his face broad and flat, etched with worry lines but bright from a fresh shave, dark eyes bedded in folds of skin. A knot of cartilage creased the bridge of his nose.

  “Okay. Phelan.” The man smiled, like the name told him everything. “As I understand it, you’ve explained what the situation is. We appreciate that. It’s the family’s problem now. We’ll take care of things from here.”

  “I’m sorry, I’m still unclear on who you—”

  “Don’t get clever.” The man’s smile turned strangely warm, as though he could respect a stranger with a devious streak. Another place, another time they’d share a drink, a raunchy joke, a slap on the shoulder that was secretly a dare. He stepped back, started to close the door.

  “Look, I know I’m a pest,” Tierney said, “but I really have Jacqi’s best interests at heart. All I’m asking—if she gets in touch, have her call me. I need to talk with her.”

  “What you need,” the man said, nothing but a voice now, a hash-marked silhouette beyond the screen, “is to pay attention to what I told you.”

  “If you shut me out, the only thing you’ll guarantee is that in a few days or weeks it’ll be the police standing here. If Jacqi’s lucky, that is. I’m not so sure she hasn’t used up her luck.”

  The man eased forward toward the screen, his features discernible again behind the mesh. “Know what I think? You talk when you oughta listen.”

  “Yeah. I get that a lot.”

  “From where I’m standing? Not often enough.”

  “Look, no offense, but I need to ask—are you the reason she doesn’t live here anymore?”

  He’d realized finally there was nothing to lose. These people weren’t going to help except by ruse or accident. One rule he’d come to live by working in the law: never sacrifice the client on the altar of civility. And yes, he supposed Jacqi had become a kind of client. More than that. So shake the tree, he thought, shake it hard.

  “I mean, if things were great on the home front, she’d come around, right? But she doesn’t come around. She does everything in her power not to come around. Know how I learned that? I listened. To her mother right there, behind the door. Two nights ago when I spoke to her the first time.”

  He expected another burdened sigh from the shadows but none came. The man’s gaze narrowed, like he was peering through Tierney’s eyes to the back of his skull. It caused the knot of cartilage fusing his eyebrows to bulge a little more, like a knuckle.

  “I’m not doing this to make a point,” Tierney said. “She’s never coming back here. We all know that. If you care as much as you say, you’ll help me out. Talk to me.”

  Up the street, three kids in slickers, skipping school, trudged uphill beneath a canopy of rain-wet cottonwoods and laughed, pointing fingers, a listless shove.

  “You’re right,” the man said. The cagey smile turned businesslike. His voice was calm. “Jacquelina, she’s a troubled kid. Who wouldn’t be with all she went through? And like you say, she’s probably not coming back here, except—who knows? You wanna pin that on me, hey, have at it. Could be, though, you’re missing a big piece of the puzzle.”

  Behind the door, Nina Garza coughed.

  “That’s kinda my point,” Tierney said, thinking: Just keep him talking. “I’m missing something. I know that.”

  “You have yourself a real nice day.”

  The door shut a lot more gently than Tierney expected, but that didn’t change much except the thud.

  12

  Jacqi stood at the end of the cul-de-sac, near a gash in the chain-link fence, an easy getaway over the railroad tracks and across the soccer field in the rain—but she wasn’t too clear on how she’d gotten there. Maybe she’d had another one of her episodes, second in two days, which sucked. She hadn’t had one in a while. Now all this.

  Once again, she thought, I’m here but I’m not here.

  She imagined herself back at Mike’s side, kneeling in the street, brushing the hair off his face. Face of a guy she’d kinda grown to like. Face of a guy who walked into burning squats and dragged out the losers inside. Saved old folks in the Casa Mirada fire. And once, jaws of life and the whole bit, flipped car up on Hillcrest Road, smoke and flames and the mother hanging dead in her harness behind the wheel—he reached in, backseat, saved the little girl.

  Not me, though, she thought. Never quite got around to saving me.

  Most guys don’t want you looking at them, they do you from behind or bend you over their crotch or some creeps even wrap a T-shirt around your head, right before they pound the crap out of you. Mike liked being looked at. Sure, as a kid, he was probably an ugly lump of a dude, teased by girls, mocked by boys. It turned him into a brawler. Pretty much stayed that way, she supposed. And the people in his life, from his enemies to his buddies to the women he didn’t pay for, they saw what they wanted to see, his bull-like attitude, his cage-fighter smarts.

  But I was the one who actually looked at him.

  A pair of squad cars came howling up, first one then another real quick, gumballs flashing in the hazy drizzle. Two cops ran straight to Mike, one dropping down to his knees on the pavement at Mike’s side, the other leaning over right behind.

  She heard the spectral wail of more sirens careening in from all directions, getting close. The paramedics would roll up soon and take him away, and she pictured herself riding along in the ambulance. She’d cradle his face in her hand—I’m the one who looks at you—let him know: I’m here.
>
  But she wasn’t. She wasn’t anywhere. She’d seen that scared hateful emptiness in his eyes and it was like a pair of hands reached out of the sky, pitched her down into that sneaky gap in time, the crazy nightmare fissure in the world she’d first discovered ten years ago. The day she became famous.

  Tierney took out his phone as he walked to the curb outside Nina Garza’s house, sneaking a picture of the Lincoln in the drive. Once he got behind the wheel of his Honda he pulled up the image, enlarged it till he could make out the numerals on the license. Memorized the sequence, hit speed dial.

  Racheline, the receptionist, came on the line, quick as a hiccup, New Zealand accent. “Matafeo and Associates.”

  “Hello, happiness. Caffeinated yet?”

  “If it isn’t my favorite fella—Phelan! I trust you’re well.”

  O she will sing the savageness out of a bear.

  “I was just instructed to have a real nice day. I’m doing my best. You?”

  A chuckle gauzed in a sigh. “Not quite peachy but pert near plum, as my dear dead nana was wont to say.”

  “Dead nanas do say the darnedest things.” He leaned over the console, glanced back through the droplets on his passenger-side window at the small tidy house. California Craftsman, low-pitched gabled roof with overhanging eaves, transomed windows. The very picture of working-class rectitude, even in the rain. What are Mrs. Garza and Mr. Knuckle-Nose talking about in there, he wondered. Arguing over. Deciding.

  He glanced at his watch, then told Racheline, “I’d like you to run a plate for me, my dear. Assuming Mr. Matafeo approves.”

  The paramedics came, tumbling out of their ambulance and onto the street to work their magic. A moment or two of fussing, some business with the jaw, then they hoisted Fireman Mike onto the gurney, slid him into the ambulance, and it took a moment or two, longer than Jacqi expected, but finally it pulled away, swirling red strobe, the siren only kicking in once they got around the corner.