The Mercy of the Night

by David Corbett

  Meanwhile one cop started with the scroll of yellow tape, marking off the scene like an animal pen, another directed traffic at the intersection. A third, some kind of sergeant maybe, pointed another two toward the houses on either side of the street and those two started working their way up the cul-de-sac, knocking on doors, talking to anyone dumb enough not to pretend they weren’t home.

  Even from this distance, she recognized a few of the officers, ones who’d arrested or hassled her, names a blur.

  And no doubt they’ll know me, she thought. What would she tell them once they figured out it was her in the car?

  I was with him, yeah. We’re, like, lovers. He was taking me with him to Visalia. He’s done with his greedy slob of a wife—bet you didn’t know that—nothing left but the movers and the paperwork. He’s gonna sneak me onto his dental plan, major medical too, set up a little fund, my education, name me in his will, put me up in his tricked-out condo. Lightning strike me down, I’m lying. Gonna have me look after the place, weed the flower beds, sweep the patio, toss the junk mail. Come dinnertime I’ll order us some Filipino takeout—he’s crazy for lumpia, bet you didn’t know that either—then I’ll put on a lacy dress and gauzy white stockings so he can fuck me like a bride.

  She licked her lips, wet from rain, and they tasted like greasy metal. A vibration stirred in her pocket, the telltale hum, and she took out her phone. A text:

  Yr so-called tutor showed up again. Who is he really? If he bothers us one more time—

  She snapped the phone closed, dropped it back in her pocket. Like I can do jack about it, Mother.

  Both had coffee, neither drank.

  He should’ve been gone by now, things to attend to, the casino guys from Thunder River to meet, work out a deal on the cash machines. But this nonsense with the girl, Jacquelina. Bad enough she was out there half-cocked, now they were coming for her. The hump at the door. Tutor my ass.

  “Nina,” he said, “I’ve told you hundreds of times. The things you’ve been through. Woulda broke most women straight down the middle.” He traced the edge of his cup with a fingertip. “Not you. You stayed strong.”

  He sat across the table from her—minuscule kitchen, original tile, art-deco pink and green. Kinda place you expected to find somebody’s grandmother. Nina wouldn’t move. Sentimental, if that was the word. Stubborn, more like.

  “Put your whole heart and soul on the line for that girl. But what’s it gotten you?”

  Stare a hole right through the woman, he thought, still she wouldn’t look up. It’d come to that between them.

  Quietly, she said, “I don’t need you to tell me what I’ve done or not done.”

  He sat back. The woman could test the patience of a stone.

  “Fine. You wanna take offense, your privilege. All I’m saying, I’ve seen it, I’ve been here, I know. But it’s outta your hands now.”

  She glanced up, finally, and quick. Eyes like onyx. “What’s out of my hands?”

  “You know what I’m saying. No shame in it. She’s messed up in the head. Totally understandable. But not acceptable.”

  “What,” she said, “is out of my hands?”

  “This doesn’t affect just you. I’m in this just as much, more maybe. I’m not her old man, okay, I get that, but in everything but blood I’ve been the one who’s stepped up. That means I have a say.”

  Her eyes dropped to her cup again. “When have I ever denied you a ‘say’?”

  Let it go, he thought. “Kid’s like a bottle rocket, and that mouth. Just no way to be sure which way she’ll go. She could say anything, just to get even with you. With me.”

  The business card lay on the table between them, a bad luck charm, nothing but a name, a PO box, a phone number. Phelan Tierney, what kinda name was that? Smacked of the chummy-and-clubby set—prep school, yachts and ponies and welcome to my vineyard—but the guy was built like somebody’s sparring partner and he talked like a judge. Or a cop. Tell him “No,” he hears “Try harder.”

  “I know some people out of town,” he said, “people we can trust. Run a private school up outside Chico, about ten miles south of Mount Shasta, near the casino. She’ll like it up there. Let them knock some sense into her head, teach her some manners.”

  “You think I haven’t tried to teach her manners?”

  “You got nothing to feel guilty about, Nina. But it’s time for me to step in here. Past time, maybe. And if that’s the case I apologize. Irregardless, what’s it gonna be?”

  From somewhere in the kitchen he caught a whiff of mold, fruit going bad in the basket over on the counter maybe. The one wrong note in the whole house. Including you know who. Day off from work, still she’d put on a white blouse, pencil skirt, stockings. Makeup like an etching. Woman didn’t know the meaning of take-it-easy. That was the problem.

  “Nina?”

  She let out a ragged breath. “If you’d stop talking, I could think.”

  Couple years ago, he woulda backhanded her for that. Now he just felt tired.

  “Have I not been good to you? Your kids? Joe, even.”

  He reached across the table and cupped her cheek and after a second, finally, she met his eyes. How many thousands of miles farther I gotta reach, he wondered, to touch what I want?

  Three engine crews pulled up, two pumpers and a hook-and-ladder, firemen spilling out of them like paratroopers over a drop zone, then four more black-and-whites arrived, misery lights carving up the drizzled grayness. The street swarmed with cops and firemen charging around or huddling up, a show of force, solidarity, hail the fallen comrade—practically every uniformed mope in the city on the scene, plus a handful of mucky-mucks: mayor, couple council members, whoever the stubby guy in the trench coat was.

  I need to find a good hide, Jacqi thought, grab my stuff from Bettye’s, track down somebody willing to tuck me way. Christ, who?

  She clung to the fence one-handed, fingers twined in the chain-link, soaked through now. Her hair clung to her face and neck. Do it, she thought. Take off. The cops going door-to-door edged closer to the end of the cul-de-sac, one glanced up her way.

  But that wasn’t what nailed her in place.

  Distance didn’t matter. He stood out—plainclothes, skinnier than she remembered but unmistakable, know him anywhere—fighting through the crowd to duck inside the tape, checking in with the sergeant on scene, making notes, a pat on the shoulder, then heading off toward the corner mini-mart.

  Ten years, memory like a stab in the mind.

  Skellenger.

  He’d seemed a little kinder than his partner, but kindness is a trick—Christ, even Cope knew that—maybe the oldest trick of all. Sat beside her in the examination room, the hospital in Santa Cruz, asked her how she liked the cocoa, gave her a packet of Fig Newtons, adjusted the blanket around her shoulders. Smiled that fatherly fuck-you-up smile cops are born with.

  Take your time, he said. But I need to know what he did to you.

  What was she supposed to tell him? I was there, but I wasn’t there.

  13

  Dim light washed down from the mini-mart’s dusty fluorescents, one of them near the back flickering like a dying thought.

  Skellenger, gloved up, dug through a cardboard box containing the behind-the-counter trash: crumpled pop cans, candy wrappers, used coffee filters thick with damp grounds, and a white takeout tub mulched with boiled cabbage, rich as a nursing-home fart.

  A few feet away, Rahim Salaam, the storekeeper, watched from a folding chair, hands knotted into a single fist that he pounded softly against his chin. His beetle-browed eyes were dark but soulless, his smile a habit learned from an unhappy man.

  “That was all there, I tell you, when I came this morning. All of it. You have questions, ask DeMontel, night shift.”

  Do yourself a favor, Skellenger thought, and stop. Sure enough, deep within the cru
d, the shiny telltale disk glistened. He felt pissed off and sad and lucky, finding it—how stupid does this chucklehead think we are?

  The man must have waited too long, he thought, devil on one shoulder, angel the other, only getting the nerve to make his move once the squad cars pulled up outside, then too scared to haul the trash out to one of the bins around back, afraid he’d get made.

  “Looks to me we have a decision to make here, Mr. Salaam.”

  The habit of a smile stiffened. The blank eyes fled further back into their emptiness. “Those criminals are my customers—understand? Every day, three o’clock. One half buys so the others can steal.”

  Amazing, Skellenger thought, how quickly an accent can fade. Not to mention the oily rectitude and deference that come with it. “I can bag this as is. Or it’s possible this is all a mistake, it really was in the tray all along.”

  Hennessey, one of his uniforms, stood at the door, nobody in or out.

  “Do you even listen? You want that disk, fine, good. Hey, good citizen, we love America. And the news comes on the TV, everybody sees, all those kids. See their faces maybe. And they know it was me, this store, with the camera. Think they’re scared of me? Of you? How long before they show up? How long till, like you, they just come behind the counter, drag me out? Douse me with gas from my own pump, strike a match. You have what, with the bankruptcy, maybe eighty cops now. Used to be one-fifty. You’ll protect me?”

  A clipped, bitter chuckle. He dug deep at his eyes, rubbing hard.

  “I’d like to take a look at this, Mr. Rahim.”

  Skellenger dropped the disk into its tray, pushed the load button, and waited for the outside feed to flicker off, the play function to take over. Once it did he maneuvered through, checking the time stamp till he found his way to shortly before the 911 call came in. He thumbed the tracking till he found the moment Verrazzo left the car, then went back a little more.

  Reaching up behind the tails of his sport coat, he lodged his hands deep into the back pockets of his slacks, feeling bone where his ass used to be—he could barely remember what an appetite felt like, luxury from a forgotten time, the era of money and mucho OT, full staffing and happiness—gazing up at the monitor.

  The image was grainy and distant and rough. But it is what it is, he thought, and it’s all we’ve got. For now. The dead-end street seemed even drearier in the harsh black and white, the houses low-slung and drab, patched roofs and rusty gutters, stucco speckled with mold.

  It was hard to tell where exactly the first group of kids came from. Suddenly they were just there, coming out from behind a wall-like hedge, pointing down the street. Four of them, saggy pants and hoodies, one in Raiders gear. And no sign of Verrazzo, just the RMFD Crown Vic, the kids ten to twenty yards away, huddled near the curb, stealing glances and thumbing at their phones.

  He made a mental note: Get those numbers, track those calls.

  Then one of the four picked up a rock, a knuckleball heave, direct hit, the windshield. That got them going. The others started pitching stones too. Meanwhile stragglers shuffled up here and there, through the fence near the rail bed at the cul-de-sac’s far end. Others drifted in through the yards, between the houses.

  Finally Verrazzo made his grand entrance, charging out of the car, plowing forward, and Skellenger couldn’t help but think: You deserve what you got, you miserable prick.

  Who else would bull-rush four dickheads all but screaming their gang colors as more and more other kids crowd around? How exactly was this supposed to end well?

  Old Rahim was right, the force was down to almost nothing, ten cars on day shift patrolling the whole city. Now this. Mayweather, the watch commander, had already called out not just to the guys off duty but to neighboring cities too, manpower needed. Now. This case would bleed them dry, work every cop in the city to the bone, and for what? An arrogant ass-clown who didn’t have the sense to let something go.

  Verrazzo had been the one to dig in, lasso the unions together, push the city to the brink—dare the council to file for bankruptcy, thinking it was just one more round of chicken. Told his members: the city’s lying, the general fund may be dry but they’re hiding money in other accounts, they’ve got assets they can liquidate, land they can sell, they can honor our goddamn contract or face the wrath of God. Meaning him.

  Even as the cops got smart, cut themselves loose and struck their own deal with the city, Verrazzo pushed on. Armed with some grand jury revelations about financial mismanagement—city hall filching from the sanitation department to keep the general fund afloat, borrowing from the water district to pave streets, shelling out millions to buy property for a solar panel farm that went nowhere, all culminating in five years of rigged books to make it look like the city was solvent—Verrazzo sweet-talked the IBEW into following him into the breach. God only knew why they agreed.

  Donny Bauserman, head of the IBEW, always seemed better equipped to hang in somebody else’s backdraft than take the lead, and Verrazzo told him there was no way they’d lose.

  Finally the bankruptcy judge laid it out as plain as he could to all concerned: I’m about to rule on whether the city can void your contracts. And one side or the other is really, really not going to like the way things turn out. Not just you. This is federal court. My decision will have repercussions far beyond this case. Sit down, talk, work it out.

  But Verrazzo had bullied the mayor, the council, the city manager for so long, mocked them, pussified them, outmaneuvered them, he became blind to the future. After so many years of ruling the roost he couldn’t imagine this time might be different. He’d risen to the top with one credo: Hang Tough, Fight Rough. Why back down now?

  Realistically, nobody knew for sure how the judge would rule. But when he did and the decision went against the unions, voiding their CBAs, it was like the floor disappeared. Everybody cashing a muni paycheck from here to Miami knew Verrazzo’s name and either looked up to him like a figurehead, the union movement’s John Brown, or hated him, not casually but with a special vengeance, knowing he’d made all of their wage and benefit packages nothing but smoke and a handshake. Cities wouldn’t tumble into bankruptcy in a giddy rush, but it wasn’t unthinkable anymore, either. The proof: Stockton, San Bernardino, Detroit. Mike Verrazzo had erased the future.

  The firefighters cobbled together a contract they could live with—early retirements and transfers for the older guys, layoffs for some others, two-tier wage and bennies, the new guys getting pummeled—while the IBEW, with Bauserman at the lead, got told by the city the sad and bitter truth: last man standing gets screwed the worst.

  Sure the fire crews took it in the teeth, but it was nothing compared to the pipe job delivered to Bauserman’s guys, the carpenters, electricians, maintenance crews who actually made the city run. They had to carve four million a year off their payload to the city, which meant a bloodbath: layoffs, givebacks, hiring freeze.

  Meanwhile the cops, even with the early deal they struck, still had to gut the force to half its former strength, sacrificing staffing to keep wage and bennie levels worth the bother, at least for the time being. Guarantees were nil. Crime had jacked up with fewer bodies to deal with it, and the foreclosure mess just compounded the problem, turning the city into a magnet for dirtbags—what the policy wonks prosaically called an Area of Opportunity. Stress had transitioned from occupational hazard to modus operandi—guys were chasing Xanax with vodka in their squad cars, and don’t even mention ye olde home life.

  That was Mike Verrazzo’s legacy. Arrogant didn’t come close, really.

  Now this. Taken out by a pack of teenage nitwits. Oh, the poetry.

  14

  “Hail Freedonia,” Hennessey said, edging up behind Skellenger as he watched the video.

  “Remind me, that’s . . .”

  “Duck Soup.” Hennessey sniffed at the freshened stench of cabbage and coffee wafting up from the trash
basket. “Best of the bunch, except for maybe Horse Feathers.”

  It was a running gag with him, comparing the day-to-day madness in the city with a Marx Brothers bit.

  “Freedonia,” Skellenger said, “that’s the country that goes bankrupt, right?”

  “Due to the Honorable Rufus T. Firefly. That fucking perfect or what?”

  Hennessey had no more use for Verrazzo than anyone else on the force. Skellenger had little doubt the wisecrack would spread—he could hear it now in the locker room, shouted aisle to aisle: Who killed Rufus T. Firefly?

  They watched the blurry screen as words went back and forth between Verrazzo and the hoodrats, some long-armed shoving, schoolyard stuff. Then the tall skinny kid on the right struck out, sidearm whiplash punch, lucky to land, followed by a feint and counterpunch from Verrazzo, dropping the kid hard, a bit of cringing from the others, then more barking, a swing here, a dodge there, Verrazzo with his arms up like a boxer, protecting his head, a crushing punch landing underneath the rib cage and finally a circling, hammering flurry of blows until the four of them got Verrazzo down on the pavement and started to kick the living Jesus out of him.

  “That’s Mo Pete Carson, fat one on the left.” Hennessey’s hand appeared over Skellenger’s shoulder, pointing at the screen. “Pretty sure.”

  “Javon Carson’s brother?”

  “Cousin, I think. Both of them Cutties, though, from Brickyard. I tagged this goof last year, knife fight at the Bump Room, Juneteenth, had a personal stash of Skittles in his pocket, Triple Stack Superman tabs. Should still be on parole for that. We’ve got free rein, search and seizure.”

  “What about these three?” Skellenger reached up, tapped the screen. “Recognize any of them?”

  In the corner of his eye, he saw Rahim Salaam pretending not to pay attention.

  Hennessey said, “Guys in SCU will, I bet. Could get lucky.”