The Mercy of the Night

by David Corbett

  “Not solid as a rock,” Rosamar said, “but I think he’s good on this.”

  “Said a shot caller for the Nuestra Familia inside Folsom flew a kite on Jimmy Palanque, Southtown Krazy Raza? Not paying his taxes. He’s split for places unknown.”

  “Means there’s a vacuum,” Rosamar said. “Cutties and Punks, their turf butts up against the SKR’s. Our numbers where they are, the goofs are rolling and tolling, nobody wants to mess that up. Peace means profit. This was something of a conclave, midlevel lieutenants, way to feel things out, manage the transition—brothers keep thizz and coke, cholos get crank and skag, pot goes where it goes.”

  “The other two toads,” Skellenger said, “they’re who?”

  “Tall dude on the edge.” Copenhaver finally chiming in—thin as a whistle, shortstop eyes. “First guy to throw a punch?”

  “Arian Lomax,” Rosamar said with a smirk. “Otherwise known as Itchy Homo. Booked him on his last pop. Kid was any dumber he’d have antlers.”

  “Guy here beside Lomax,” Copenhaver said, tapping the screen, “we hear he’s named Damarlo Melendez.”

  “Yeah,” Skellenger said, “but who are they?”

  Copenhaver shrugged. “They’re kinda from nowhere.”

  “Itchy Homo ain’t hooked up.” Rosamar, still grinning.

  “But the Melendez kid, what’s his name, Dumbardo?”

  “Damarlo.” Copenhaver shook his head. “Not really nailed that down just yet. I got a name and a guess from my guy. That’s all he had.”

  “They could be our ticket.” Skellenger wondered when one of the men would bring up Jacqi Garza. He’d been mentally rehearsing. “If they can hang a visual on the last guy in, the one who finishes it, they’ve got an ace to play.”

  “I’m not so sure,” Rosamar said, “I’d jump to conclusions just yet on who finishes what. This Damarlo kid, he’s flying wild. Kicks like a chorus girl.”

  Copenhaver chuckled. “Putting in work.”

  “More to the point,” Rosamar said, “he’s up near Verrazzo’s head, his neck. Coroner’s still being cagey but he admitted the COD is most likely a crushed trachea.”

  “I heard the same thing,” Skellenger said, “from one of the paramedics at the hospital.” He fished out his notes, thumbed through pages. “Said Verrazzo already coded by the time they reached the scene. Trachea crushed, couldn’t breathe. Load and go.”

  “They got there in what,” Holmes said, “six minutes?”

  “Five. They knew who it was. So no beefs about response time. Figure he had maybe four minutes tops after the windpipe caved in. More like three. No way an ambulance could’ve gotten there that fast. En route to the hospital they tried to pass an ET tube, couldn’t get it through the ruptured cartilage, so they took out the needle and did a quick crike. Surgeons went at him another twenty minutes in ER, so nobody could say they gave up too soon. Waited for the wife to show before coding him for good.”

  Rosamar, cocking an eyebrow: “You talk to the lovely bride?”

  “Yeah.” Skellenger tapped his notepad against his knuckles. Gina Verrazzo—fortyish, plump, blond with dark roots, peach-colored sweats. Called Mike a man of the people. “She took the time to put on lipstick before getting to the hospital.”

  Rosamar grinned. “Pucker up, buttercup.”

  “There’s rumors,” Copenhaver said, “she and Mike, they’d packed it in.”

  “Yeah, well, this point?” Rosamar pointed at Verrazzo on the ground. “I’d say divorce counsel’s off the clock.”

  Copenhaver acquired a bemused, studious look. “Skelly,” he said, “you think the wife might be good for this?”

  Skellenger sighed. “Do I think the grieving widow hired a pack of teenage porch punks to whack her faithless fuck of a husband? Not really. But I’ll keep an open mind.”

  “What if she hired the last guy up, the one we don’t know?”

  “That’s a different matter.”

  Rosamar shook his head. “I still say, look at this Damarlo kid—”

  “Vid ain’t gonna prove diddly,” Holmes said. “Make it say damn near anything.”

  Copenhaver sighed. “Slow it down, frame by frame, blow by blow.”

  “Gonna come down to who says what.” Holmes again. “Best shot we got, grab these first four melonheads, stick ’em in the rooms, see who gets down first.”

  “Mo Pete, Chepe—sheets they got?” Copenhaver crossed his arms. “They’re gonna lay this off and fast. Put it on one of the nobodies.”

  “My boy Itchy,” Rosamar said, “he’s not quite nobody. Two strikes. And he ain’t a juvie.”

  “Good,” Skellenger said, nodding. “That’s good.”

  He thought it through, weighing the angles. Despite the tensions—younger cops with Skellenger, all of them with Verrazzo—the motivation level in the room felt good. Nobody wants to look flat-footed, so to speak. They’d put aside their contempt, their resentment, rise above it all and close this thing if only to prove they could. Mike Verrazzo, the man who all but killed this city, would not himself die in vain. And that was just about a million times better than he deserved.

  True, they’d need every one of these juvenile jokers in the courtroom. Nobody’d walk, but it’d be open season, each man for himself. The thing was in play. There were options. “We got warrants yet?”

  “They’re moving, first four anyway, ones we know.” Holmes hit fast-forward till the Dude Outta Nowhere appeared at the bottom of the screen, hunched forward, hood pulled tight, plodding forward. “This fool’s still a mystery.”

  They watched as the nameless stranger shuffled up to the melee, knelt, did whatever—three quick blows? Try to slap Verrazzo conscious? Shake him? Then Mr. Nameless wobbled to his feet, stared down at Verrazzo. Mo Pete Carson reacted to something he saw, turned and ran. That quick, the other three astronauts panicked, everybody else followed suit, all except the stranger, who just turned and started humping back the way he’d come.

  “Tried to blow this section up,” Holmes said, “but the thing just falls apart. Can’t make out any detail on the face.”

  Copenhaver said, “Techs in Video Forensics, they’ll perk it up.”

  Holmes shrugged. “Gotta hope so.”

  The door of the red Crown Vic flew open, Jacqi popped out. Despite himself, Skellenger flinched. Rosamar said, “And now, ladies and gentlemen, the star of our program.”

  Holmes adding, “We rely on her, we lose. Turn this into a goddamn circus.”

  “Like it’s not already,” Copenhaver said. “Anybody catch the news?”

  Skellenger froze. News?

  Holmes stretched, those albatross arms, palms touching the ceiling panels. “Michael Dominic Verrazzo, former head of the firefighter’s local, major mover in the city’s misfortunate bankruptcy, treats his big important self to a tasty little eye-opener.”

  “Making the scene with our favorite teen,” Rosamar said.

  Skellenger tasted bile in the back of his throat. “They’re saying that?”

  “Not yet.” Holmes retracted his arms from the sky. “Matter of time.”

  “Fucking Mike Verrazzo.” Copenhaver unwrapped a stick of gum, plowed it into his mouth. “Guy was a total muff missile. If it had a pussy and a pulse, he launched.”

  Holmes shrugged. “Maybe he was trying to turn the girl around.”

  “Only reason that fat fuck ever turned a girl around,” Rosamar said, “was to nail her from a new angle.”

  “True connoisseur of corner cunt.” Copenhaver popped his gum. “Living the dream.”

  They watched Jacqi confront the stranger, scream at him.

  “Whatever’s going on between her and him, there’s heat,” Holmes said. “She’s howling.” Shaking his head. “We gotta get out in front of this.”

  Copenhaver: “Jordie, yo
u know her, right?”

  “Not well.” Skellenger stared at the screen. At her. “Not anymore.”

  “Any chance you could put the touch on her, bring her in for a chat?”

  Everybody turned.

  “Like I said, I don’t know her that well anymore.” Changing channels: “Any word on the house Stritch and Manzello ID’d in their door-to-door?” He fanned the pages of his notebook, looking for the number. “On this block, jerry-rigged electrical—”

  “Didn’t pan out,” Holmes said. “Place was trashed but empty.”

  “How recent the tenants leave?”

  “Can’t say.”

  Oh fuck me, Skellenger thought. Didn’t mean it couldn’t still be useful, though. Only Verrazzo and Jacqi knew what they were doing there, one was dead, the other soon to be gone—hopefully—that meant it was anybody’s guess, and Skellenger had every intention of keeping that hole card close.

  “As for all the other kids,” Holmes began.

  Rosamar: “The ones standing around?”

  “Not standing around,” Copenhaver said. “Cheering. As a man gets pounded.”

  “Too bad we ain’t got guys posted in the schools anymore,” Holmes said. “We’d have more names than we would handle by now.”

  “I may have something.” Skellenger found the page in his notebook, read off the names Jacqi had given him.

  Holmes wrote them down. “Where’d all this come from?”

  “You guys aren’t the only ones tickling Elmo.” He flipped the notepad closed, tucked it into his pocket. “And we’re gonna need plenty more. Everybody put a hat on a hat. Somebody out there knows who it is we want.” Jacqi was still on-screen, kneeling beside Verrazzo. Calling to mind how she looked at the hospital, that red-eyed ten-mile stare. “They’re kids, they talk to each other. Christ, it’s all they do.” That and draw unsettling nudes. “Get in on the conversation. We need names.”

  31

  Stopping for a moment in the arched entrance of the chemo unit, Tierney looked at the high-backed vinyl recliners, some discreetly obscured by curtains, most open to view. Maybe a dozen patients sat hooked up to their infusion pumps—medicinal poison dripping into their blood, like nods to a fix—drifting in and out of various states of distraction, some napping, some lost in thought, others trying to read or watch the TV perched high in the corner.

  His eye gravitated to the chair Roni had always preferred, near the window, so she could look out at the oat fields coursed with winding sloughs, the first of the valley’s pear orchards, the westerly sky. No one sat there today.

  He smiled at those who glanced up as he passed, then found Cass poring over a chart at the nurse’s station. Big Red, he thought. My girl.

  “Hey.”

  She glanced up, face like a stone apache. “What brings you here?”

  Patting his pockets, “I seem to have misplaced my melanoma.”

  She closed the chart and tossed it onto a nearby stack. “Clever.” The nurse’s aide beside her struggled against a grin.

  He nodded toward the hallway. “Give me a minute?”

  Out in the corridor she leaned against the wall, arms crossed. “I’m kinda busy, we’re short a nurse.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay, it’s just that things are—”

  “No, I mean I’m sorry about what happened earlier.”

  One eye shuttered slightly as she took that in. “Okay.”

  “I shouldn’t have just left you sitting there. It was rude.”

  “I told you it was okay,” she said.

  She began slipping her foot in and out of its clog, reminding him of his botched response to her affection. The articulations of his guilt seemed endless.

  She said, “Wanna know why I left before you came back to the table?”

  “I can imagine. But yeah, I’d like to hear.”

  Her eyes shifted, as though searching out some critical detail in his face. “I know you’ve got a job to do, or that’s how you’re thinking about it. And I know sometimes, even when you tell yourself it’s just a job, there’s somebody who, for whatever reason and for however long, steals your focus. I’ve been there. Happens a lot here, actually. But sooner or later you gotta snap back, see the bigger picture, or you’re being unfair.”

  Glancing past her into the clinic, he saw the sad, stoic patients lashed to their medicine. “I don’t mean to be unfair,” he said.

  “Doesn’t matter much what you mean. Hardly ever. It’s what you do.”

  He resisted an impulse to reach out, stroke her cheek. “If it’s any consolation, not even Jacqi wants me in her business anymore.”

  Almost imperceptibly she leaned a little deeper into the wall. “Yeah?”

  “Down in the cafeteria, let’s just say we failed to reach a meeting of the minds.”

  She seemed to turn his words over a few times, began to say something, checked herself. A moment later she couldn’t look at him anymore and glanced back toward the clinic doorway. “And that means what—you’re gonna drop it for good or dig in that much harder?”

  “Cass, I came here to apologize.”

  “I get that. But the part that comes after—the part that goes, ‘It won’t happen again’—that part I’m not hearing. Not really.” She pushed off from the wall, turned back toward the clinic. “Gotta get back to work. It’s Thursday. Couple minutes we start the pediatric clinic, and I gotta get ready for my kids.”

  She’d told him about it, the sad parade of young ones, some still reasonably healthy, some little more than drawn skin and withering bone, all coming in for their toxic promise. How trivial his preoccupations must seem, he thought, next to hers.

  “Talk about this more tonight?”

  She glanced back. “And say what?”

  32

  Tom Pendergast—public information officer, shirt and tie, sleeves rolled up—sat perched on the edge of the chief’s vast desk, staring at a TV on a roll cart in the corner, the screen locked in freeze-frame: grainy blowup of Verrazzo lying motionless, small in the background, the Dude Outta Nowhere caught in midstep trudging toward the camera as Jacqi Garza, standing beside the car, bellowed something: an insult, a dare, a name?

  Pendergast said, “The press situation’s getting hard to control.”

  Skellenger glanced back and forth—Pendergast, the chief—then shrugged. “Tell them to wait. What’re they gonna do, leave?”

  “Jordie,” Pendergast said, “the spin’s getting ahead of you.”

  “Investigation’s what, five hours old?” We’re marginally smarter than criminals, he thought, but guess who has to be perfect. The speed, though, every day faster.

  “We’re going with the video,” the chief said, hands tented, enthroned in his chair, all done up in his best dress blues.

  “An edited version,” Pendergast added.

  “Edited how?”

  “Ten seconds tops. Near the beginning of the fight.”

  So that’s it, Skellenger thought. Things had to be skewing weirdly haywire if forty kids standing around laughing as a fireman gets kicked to death is the better story.

  He walked over, tapped on the glass, the stranger, the wild card. “What about him? We know nothing about him. He could be anybody. He could be a pro, he could be a skeleton out of somebody’s closet, the mayor’s, some councilman’s, anybody with an ax to grind.” Gina Verrazzo, he thought. One of us.

  “It’s talk like that,” the chief said, “we’re trying to avoid.”

  “What if it’s true?”

  “You’ve been busy,” Pendergast said, “and may not have a full grasp of what’s happening in the background.”

  “Come on. Tom, trust me, we fuck up the front end of this thing, the back end’s gonna make whatever problems you’ve got now look like a bachelor party.”

&
nbsp; “Let me show you something.” Pendergast dug out his cell phone, then thumbed a key, lifted the display so Skellenger could read it. “The thing’s blowing up. You got reporters at the scene, the hospital, Verrazzo’s house, here in the building. They’re posting every rumor they trip over. Worse, you got the Topix site with a comment thread, and the yahoos can’t type fast enough. Same with Facebook, Nextdoor. Like they opened up a sewer.”

  “It’s cancer,” the chief said.

  Skellenger could only imagine, with Verrazzo murdered, the kinds of things people were posting. During the bankruptcy cops became nigger-bashing night riders, firemen wannabe mafiosos and shakedown artists, together they turned public safety into a protection racket, while the sex lives of every council member got dissected in vivid, skin-crawling, homoerotic detail.

  “There’s a protest planned,” Pendergast said.

  The chief: “Pitchforks and torches.”

  “Plus a counterprotest. We get hit with a riot, manpower shortages we’ve got?”

  “We’ve had calls from four lawyers already,” the chief said, “representing our elected friends. They want a stop to the slander. Like we’re to blame. One of them actually said ‘lynch mob.’ Point is, we’ve gotta get ahead of this thing. Stop the speculation. Give people something to look at and say, ‘Oh, that’s what happened.’”

  Skellenger rapped at the TV screen again. “Back to this guy. What’re you gonna say about him?”

  “For now,” Pendergast said, “nothing.”

  Skellenger waited for more. None came. “That’s gonna look like a cover-up.”

  “Not if we handle it right,” the chief said. “He’s just one more body in the crowd.”

  For a second it was like a group scan, everybody’s eyes tracking everybody else’s. Then Pendergast cleared his throat, wagging his phone.

  “There’s something else. You’ve got these little corners of the web, semiprivate comment sites, on Tagged or Path or Highlight or Roamz. There it’s kids talking. And everybody knows it was Jacqi Garza in Verrazzo’s car.”