The Mercy of the Night

by David Corbett

  Skellenger’s stomach plunged five stories. For the last several hours, he’d dealt with nothing but hassles, insults and lies, dodges, innuendos, lined up like dragons. But this was the first time he’d felt truly worn down.

  He knew the cop who’d probably come up with all this—new recruit, specialized in Internet crime, spent at least a couple hours a day impersonating twelve-year-olds looking for “someone who understands.” Everyone on the squad called him Tiffany. Now this. What else did he know, Skellenger wondered. What were kids saying?

  “What’s your point?”

  “We don’t need another sideshow,” the chief said. “Press latches on to her and you, it’s all they’re gonna talk about.”

  “Which is an improvement maybe,” Pendergast said, “over the political angle, everybody thinking city hall put out the hit, but not by much.”

  They’re kicking me off, Skellenger thought.

  “Look, Jordie,” the chief said, “it’s politics driving this. I’ve already fielded calls from the mayor, Congressman Rinehart, a couple county supervisors, and just about every numbnut on council. Bankruptcy was bad enough. We turn back the clock to Cope and the whole kids snatched off the street business—”

  “Not to mention,” Pendergast said, “what’s she doing in the car?”

  “As it is we can’t float a bond to save our souls,” the chief said. “Add this? We won’t see new business here for a decade. Property values tank. Taxes dry up. Staffing gets axed even worse and God only knows what happens to pay, never mind benefits.”

  If the city’s still around, Skellenger thought. Could be nothing but meth labs and tumbleweeds by then. Hail Freedonia. “I’m not sure what you’re asking.”

  The chief said, “Can you solve this thing without her?”

  33

  Skellenger was turning to go when he saw the two blue uniforms at the door, strangers waiting to enter. Jesus fucking hell, he thought. What’s it gonna take to get outta here, dynamite?

  The first of the two came forward, crew cut, barrel-bodied, plowing the air with his hand—toward the chief, not Skellenger. The second, tall as a ladder and weak-chinned, shadowed behind.

  “Chief,” the hefty one said, “apologies for barging in, we’re kinda pressed.” He gestured over his shoulder with his thumb. “Your secretary said we should come in once your meeting here wrapped up.”

  He smiled emptily at Skellenger, nodded vaguely toward Pendergast. How much had they overheard?

  “I’m Nick Dugan, this here’s Mike Bernardo, we’re out of DC, representing the national offices for the hearings up the road in Sacramento. Got wind of what happened to Mike Verrazzo and drove right down. Only take a minute of your time.”

  The unions were making the rounds in the capitol, pushing mandatory mediation before a city could file for bankruptcy, hoping to forestall the kind of bloodletting that had happened here. Otherwise, it would’ve been curious, these two being local. Maybe it still was.

  “I’ve spoken with the executive board,” Dugan said, “and they’re stepping up, as I knew they would. This is a terrible thing, and we intend to send a signal. We’re offering a hundred-thousand-dollar reward for material testimony that leads to the arrest and conviction of Mike’s killers.”

  Skellenger glanced at Pendergast, who, from his expression, was suffering the same thought. “That’s a lot of money, especially this quick.”

  Dugan turned slowly Skellenger’s way, like the turret on a panzer. “Hi,” he said. The hand. “Nick Dugan.”

  Like I’m the help, Skellenger thought, taking the hand. “Thing is,” he said, “there was anywhere from thirty to fifty kids watching as the thing went down.”

  Dugan turned back to the chief. “It’s a lump sum. We’ll divvy it up once the issue’s settled after trial. Material testimony. Leading to arrest and conviction.”

  “We’re just saying,” Pendergast offered, “given what little we know just yet—”

  “Person or persons,” Dugan said. “Come one, come all. I don’t see the problem, to be honest.”

  He can’t be serious, Skellenger thought. A reward that size, this town especially, Pendergast and the chief already grousing about the online chatter. Wait till this hits the wire. Every moonrock who can count on his fingers and toes is gonna be hitting the hotline. In particular, Jacqi Garza. She’d all but hit him up for money so she could skip town. If the mother didn’t wrap her up before this news went out—and the girl had a knack for slipping through nets—she might well sit back and ponder the odds.

  Dizzying, really, the turnarounds. Just a moment ago he’d been told to pretend she didn’t exist. Not just that, the chief had his back. Now they were throwing money at her.

  “I still think it might be wise,” Pendergast said, “to hold off mentioning the reward for now. We’ve got a bit of an information overload as is.”

  “And we’re already ready to make some arrests,” Skellenger said. “Why throw your money away?”

  Dugan turned to the chief. “May I speak frankly?”

  Without asking permission, the quiet one, Bernardo, went and closed the door.

  “Perhaps I’m not making myself clear,” Dugan said. “One of our own was murdered in this shithole today.”

  Some kinda gall, Skellenger thought. Guy comes from DC.

  “I know there’s tension here between you and the fire department,” Dugan continued, “but let me make this plain as fucking day. There are no issues for us. None. I had my differences with Mike, we were both very honest and open about that. But come something like this? The ranks close. He was my brother. You don’t want to tell people about the reward? Fine. There’s a roomful of reporters out there. They’re waiting for somebody to say something. I’m happy to oblige. Am I getting through?”

  34

  Skellenger went downstairs, retrieved his vest from his locker, shook off his sport coat and donned the bulky Kevlar, decade old at least, strapped up the Velcro, shouldered back into his jacket.

  Climbing the stair to the main floor, he noticed how much the walls needed paint—the scuffs and cracked grout, the riverine cracks and powdery gouges in the plaster, they all acquired an almost hallucinatory clarity—then all of a sudden the light closed down, the air felt close.

  He suffered a sudden blizzard of zagging dark spots—clutching the handrail, waiting a moment for his head to clear. Instead a space opened up in his mind and a memory slipped in to fill it, the night of his last drink, the Malibu drifting at high speed from the road like an angry dream as his head lolled on his neck and his eyes shuttered, the car fishtailing across the slick grassy downslope, almost rolling, then slamming into a surprisingly sturdy, noisy, thrashing mass of cattails before thudding to a stop in the drainage-ditch muck. That eerie, ticking silence, like God’s clock. Ice-cold water ripe with stench seeping in through the door cracks, soaking his socks and shoes, and glancing down he noticed his slacks and boxers bunched at his knees, unable to recall how they’d gotten that way but pretty sure he hadn’t been taking a crap as he drove, then noticing the blood, slathered on his hands and lap, wondering in a sick panic of guilt if he’d severed an artery—his? someone else’s?—or cut his own throat, causing the accident, then the thunderclap awareness of pain in his face and he realized he’d crushed his nose on the steering wheel.

  Minutes later the humiliating slur of words into the flashlight of the first cop on the scene—guy named Bertsler, working somewhere upstate now—the whirling red and blue of his squad car’s strobe atop the incline. Back at the station, the tidy little cover-up commenced. With its big condition.

  Shaking his head, he snapped back to the here and now, thinking: You need to eat. Instead he found a pack of gum in his pocket, slipped a stick into his mouth, waited for the jolt of sugar to kick in.

  Hundred thousand fucking dollars, he thought. Call center’s gonna
explode.

  Outside the dispatch center he gathered with Holmes, Rosamar, and Copenhaver, passed out warrants and divvied up uniformed units, a final brief on who they were after.

  “Don’t turn a blind eye to what’s in plain view,” he said, “but this isn’t a scavenger hunt. We’re after four guys. Keep it simple.”

  On his way out to the car he passed the door to the briefing room—filled to overflow: firefighters, city staff, reporters, TV cameras. Pendergast stood at the podium, brow dotted with sweat, squinting from the glare as from somewhere in the back of the room a voice pumped with attitude called out: “We’re hearing from various places that Jacquelina Garza was with the victim, Mike Verrazzo, at the time of the killing. Could you comment on that?”

  35

  Tierney stood in the ER waiting room, face raised to the TV, joining everyone else assembled there, the whole room mesmerized.

  He’d been having trouble dragging himself away from the hospital. After his tête-à-tête with Cass in the cancer ward he’d come away sensing that he’d only made things worse, and so he’d meandered a bit, trolling the endless hallways like a ruminative maze rat, finally landing in the canteen, where he’d sat for the past thirty minutes or so, sipping the execrable coffee, working his phone, answering calls and e-mails and texts, trying to feel productive.

  Finally, he’d risen and headed on out, making way past the ER desk toward the electronic doors, when he’d spotted the scene in the corner of his eye, through the doorway, the roomful of uplifted faces gazing at the TV screen.

  A kind of gravity nagged at him, telling him to stop, drawing him in.

  Local news, a network affiliate, North Bay bureau. The screen showed a grainy video of maybe a half-dozen kids kicking six shades of hell out of a curled-up figure on the pavement, framed by a tree-lined cul-de-sac.

  Other kids rimmed the scene like a chorus—ghostly, pixilated, edging in and out—egging the brawlers on or just milling around, a party, a laugh, a goof. A fire captain’s car with its distinctive red gumball sat midway up the block.

  The crawl read: Firefighter’s Union Head Murdered in Rio Mirada . . . Key Figure in City Bankruptcy.

  Then the video cut away to a still photo, and Tierney felt a haunting jolt—the image a decade old, the slender fox-eyed brown-haired girl, scrappy little heroine.

  The scene switched back to the cul-de-sac, live now, a male reporter, fluttering parka, wind-mussed hair, notes in one hand, microphone the other. The ER staff had set the TV’s sound to murmur level so Tierney had to edge forward and lean in to catch the words.

  “. . . won’t confirm or deny just yet that she was at the scene, but the Internet is literally on fire with comments linking Jacquelina Garza to the incident, saying she was in the car when Verrazzo stepped out to confront the crowd—the crowd you just saw in that disturbing footage. If that’s true, if she was at the scene, it adds another intriguing element to this already shocking story, Gwen. The girl whose testimony proved so crucial ten years ago is back. And once again she may find herself on the witness stand in a case that could rock this city to its bankrupt core. Reporting live from Rio Mirada . . .”

  Tierney noticed again the gutted streetlight flashing red in the northerly haze on the river road. The same storm system lingered over the bay, a low shifting mass scudding in across the coastal range, turning the afternoon air a steely twilight blue. In the distance, an intrepid cyclist pedaled toward Napa.

  No Jacqi in the bus shelter, but the old girl was there: Mattie, skeletal and wigged and wearing nothing but a red, long-sleeved sheath, canvas slippers.

  He stopped, got out of the car.

  She greeted him flatly, “Hey there,” the voice slurred from ruined teeth. “Aren’t you handsome.”

  He collected his wallet, fingered a twenty, reconsidered, decided on twice that.

  “Not out here, hon.” A birdlike hand reached out to cover the money, the dark skin soft and deathly cold. The stiff black wig pivoted as she glanced up and down the two-lane road. Other than the faraway cyclist, no one.

  “I’m looking for Jacqi Garza,” he said, and tucked the folded bills into her palm, wrapping his warm hand tight over hers so she’d feel some sense of kindness and know as well the money was hers to keep.

  She glanced up, met his eyes, a quiver in her chin—lipstick patchy, thick here, gone there.

  In an idle moment on the web, taking time off from his searches concerning Jacqi, he’d pulled up Mattie’s arrest records and discovered her real name was Buttonwillow Hazeltine, and she’d been born in Flowood, Mississippi. He wondered who she’d been back there, back then, how she’d looked and talked and felt when she’d been a girl like Jacqi.

  “She’s in kind of a spot. It’s important I find her as soon as possible. Any idea where I might look?”

  She lifted the money to the hollow nook that served as her cleavage, stuffed it inside her tatty bra. “There’s other men’s looking for her too, you know. You ain’t the only one.”

  36

  Taking in the welcoming tang of freshly cut limes and jalapeños, Jacqi ordered her food at the bar from Ilena, the matronly cook, then collapsed into the nearest booth.

  Her favorite place, Los Guanacos—hole in the wall, beer signs glowing in the misted window. Christmas lights rimmed a Salvadoran flag above the bar.

  She slipped off her shoes, rubbed some warmth into her sore feet through her tights, then tucked her legs up under her.

  Rudolfo, Ilena’s brother, stocked the bar, thumping boxes on the dark hardwood, clanging beer bottles into the fridge, getting ready for the dinnertime rush—and every now and then a glance up at the corner TV as he worked.

  She followed his gaze and caught the end of a Viagra spot snapping into a newsbreak, and quick as that the screen went from a gray-haired couple riding horseback along a sunset lake to a grainy clip, like a postcard from a nightmare: Mo Pete and Chepe and Damarlo and the fourth guy she didn’t know stomping Fireman Mike.

  She untucked her legs and slipped her shoes back on, feeling naked suddenly. Feeling a need to run.

  The footage, she assumed, came from the camera Skellenger had mentioned—well at least he hadn’t lied about that. Small comfort.

  Then the clip cut off and guess who.

  There she was, on-screen, ten years younger. The girl I’ll never be again and can never stop being. The girl I hate. The girl I miss.

  Now absolutely everybody knows I was there, she thought—how’d it happen so quick? No time to regroup, get her mind around the thing. They’re gonna come after me, Mo Pete, Chepe, maybe even the cops—Skellenger can’t pull off every dog.

  Then the kicker: a reward. A hundred goddamn thousand dollars. How far could you go on that? Far enough. Long enough. Mexico. For good.

  Yeah, like you’d live long enough to collect.

  She felt a humming buzz in her pocket. Her cell—she’d forgotten to turn it off after checking it last. Stupid. Dangerous. She fished it out, checked the display—a text:

  Why haven’t you answered my messages? It’s all over the news.

  Don’t be fooled and go to the police. It’s a trick, the money. You know how they are. Do what they want and they’ll just make life miserable for us all.

  The TV chingados have shown up outside. Don’t come here. Call me, talk to me, tell me where you are. I’ll come get you. We know a place where you’ll be safe.

  Jacqi found herself staring at the words, as though they were a kind of optical illusion. Look at them this way, they appear to be this. Then turn them like so—see? Now they resemble that. Except they didn’t resemble anything. They weren’t, in any actual sense, even real. They were there but not there.

  So much for Come home, she thought, snapping the phone closed. Let alone Te amo. Now turn the thing off, like you’ve been told. Or go to the door and chuck it hard and far. Cuz they’re out
there looking for you, all of them, this minute. Hunting you down. You know how they are. Yes, Mother, I do. Just like I know what “we” means.

  The restaurant door opened with a rattle and a chime, and despite herself she jumped. A man. It took a second, the light behind him, but then he stepped forward, got close. The silhouette acquired a face.

  “Okay if I join you?”

  Tell him you’re leaving, she thought, but then Ilena arrived with her food. Busted. Wiping her hands on her apron, the plump salvadoreña glanced toward Tierney, and he gestured he was fine. Ilena trundled back to the kitchen and he just stood there, waiting.

  She had trouble looking up at his face. “What are you doing here?”

  “I saw the news.”

  “You know what I mean. Why are you here?”

  Rudolfo lowered the TV volume and began humming some nameless corrido behind the bar, letting them know he was watching, wary of trouble.

  “The friend you went to see at the hospital,” Tierney said. “I guessed right. It was Mike Verrazzo.”

  That’s how easy it’ll be, she thought, for the whole damn town to put two and two together. And come up with whatever they want. “Answer my question.”

  “He was the man you were hoping would step up, help you leave town.”

  She swallowed what felt like a wad of wet hair. “What if it was?”

  “You watched him get killed. That’s a hard thing to go through.” His voice was gentle. “I felt concerned. Thought it wouldn’t hurt to have someone to talk to. If you’d like that.” He gestured to the other side of the booth. “Mind if I sit?”

  She wanted to believe him. So tired of being lied to. So tired in general. “First you gotta tell me how you found me.”

  “If it’s any consolation, this is the fourth place I looked.”