The Mercy of the Night

by David Corbett

  The kid rolled his neck, mumbled something. He was trembling.

  “I’m sorry, Damarlo, I couldn’t hear—”

  “I didn’t say I was angry.” His voice, for the first time loud, pinged off the walls.

  “Okay. I don’t mean to put words in your mouth.”

  “Then don’t.”

  “All right.”

  “Don’t know what happened, understand? Just remember the dude’s voice and him calling us out and Arian taking a swing and the guy fucking him up and then it started, ya know? There was just—I don’t know what to call it—just this thing, like it wasn’t me or the fireman or Mo Pete or nobody, it was something, like, outside us but it was in us too. Everywhere. All at once.”

  Blame the eerie, mysterious, enveloping thing, Tierney thought. If only we could.

  “What do you remember thinking?”

  “I don’t remember much of nuthin. That’s just it.”

  “Can you tell me what you do remember?”

  “I remember kickin him in the nuts.”

  “Okay.”

  “He was just, you know, wide open. Saw the shot, took it.”

  Sports as life, Tierney thought. For just an instant, he wondered what Cass would make of that. “Okay, then what?”

  “It’s all just kinda, I dunno, blurry and shit.”

  “Okay. That’s not unusual, actually. But I have to ask you one specific thing, okay? Do you remember kicking the fireman in the head, the throat, the chest . . .”

  The boy said nothing, hunched forward a little, shoulders tensed, as though expecting a smack. It was one of those things hard to get across to a jury—mom on the pipe seven years before she got clean, parade of strangers through the home. The secret beatings a kid took. Tierney wished he could turn him around, see his face.

  “I’m not blaming you, Damarlo. I just need to know.”

  “Don’t remember,” he said, murmuring into his shoulder.

  “Nothing?”

  Damarlo shook his head. Too bad, Tierney thought. Because there’s been a break in the case. Just not for you.

  “The problem, Damarlo, is that your buddy, Arian? He remembers clear as a bell. Or at least that’s what he told the detectives.”

  55

  Damarlo turned, not all the way, but eyes bulging again. He swallowed like he was trying to get a peach pit down.

  “Arian handed you up, Damarlo. He gave the police a statement saying you kicked the fireman in the throat—because that’s what killed him, so far as anyone knows just yet. A crushed windpipe.”

  It was like watching a time-lapse sequence of storm clouds—shadow and speed and threatening silence—the emotions whisking across his face. That tightness coiling around the eyes again, sinking into himself, the helpless twitch of his mouth as though words were whispering through his head but he couldn’t quite catch them fast enough.

  “He also says you bragged about it later, when you two were alone together.”

  “We wasn’t together.” The voice, like it was coming out of a different kid. No more put-upon thug—that vanished. This, finally, was somebody’s grandson, and scared.

  “Who were you with?”

  “Nobody. Mo Pete was like, you know, Scoot LeBoot, and Arian just kinda slinked off too. I went home.”

  “Remember what you did? If you watched TV, what program?”

  Another circus of facial tics. More silence. Tierney gestured him close. The boy leaned in, using his hand to shield his mouth from view through the one-way glass. “Had me some lean.” Like that was more damning than the fight.

  Fabulous, Tierney thought, a robotripper, picturing the kid stoned stupid, cradling a bottle of Purple Drank, Sprite turned the color of grape jelly from a spike of high-octane cough syrup: promethazine, codeine. “You high at the time of the fight?”

  “No.”

  “Was anybody with you at home?”

  A headshake.

  Jesus. Give me something, anything. “Did anybody see you go home.”

  “I don’t know.”

  Tierney turned toward Katsaros, they shared a hopeless glance. “I’ll check with the neighbors. Did you chat with anybody on the phone—where’s your cell?”

  “Cops took it.”

  Perfect, Tierney thought. Either they’ve already logged the kid’s calls or they’re just waiting for the warrant. It’d be days, longer, before he got a look. “Okay. But did you talk to anybody, a friend, classmate—”

  “I don’t know, I can’t . . .” For the first time, he sounded genuinely ashamed.

  Tierney rested one hand gently on the young man’s shoulder. “I need you to sit back down, Damarlo. Okay? I need you to think hard and write out the names of the people you may have called, or who called you. Even if you’re wrong, that’s okay, I’ll check it out. If you can remember numbers too, that’d be great.” Fat chance, Tierney thought—who remembers numbers anymore with speed dial?

  Damarlo nodded, still only half there. They returned to the table and sat back down. Tierney tore a sheet off his notepad, handed the kid a pen, and Damarlo bent down to his task, encircling the paper with his arms, holding the pen like he was a little scared of it, his handwriting boxy, the letters large.

  As he finished writing, he said, “What about the guy who came up late?”

  “Don’t worry. I was getting to that.”

  “Cuz I didn’t see nobody die.”

  Trust me on this one, Tierney thought. That’s not the issue.

  “I mean, I know he’s dead, I’m sayin he was alive when I ran.”

  “Why did you run?”

  “Everybody else was takin off, thought somebody’d seen somethin.”

  “What did you see, Damarlo?”

  “What you mean?”

  “When everybody took off, did you look around, notice anything?”

  “You mean as I was runnin?”

  “Before you ran.”

  “I told you, things was crazy, I wasn’t payin much—”

  “I need you to focus on this for me, Damarlo. I need detail. The police, they’re only showing the front end of the video, the first ten seconds or so.”

  “We won’t get our hands on the full video for weeks,” Katsaros said. “And that’ll be way too late. The police will have locked in everybody’s story by then, true or not so true. They’re gonna try to lay this all on you. We’ve gotta get there first.”

  “I need you to tell me exactly what happened after the fireman hit the ground.”

  The kid tensed up again. “Look, I’m not tryin to be a bitch about this, but I’m sayin, it’s all, like, a blur, okay?” He put his hands to his temples, like his fingers were electrodes. “There’s, like, just craziness.”

  “Start from the end and work back. This guy came up . . .”

  Damarlo shrugged. “Don’t know him, don’t know where he came from.”

  “Was he white?”

  “Yeah. Think so.” Damarlo dug into his shoulder, scratched. “Didn’t get much of a look, t’be honest. But yeah, white.”

  “Could you pick him out from a photograph?”

  Tierney glanced down at the travel bag full of the yearbooks, the defense version of a photo lineup. Poor man’s eight pack.

  “Look, I was kinda off at that point, okay? I mean, I saw somebody come up, figured it was just some fool from the crowd, wanted to get in one last lick. Snatch a little boast wit’ his boys. At that point I was hangin back, felt wore out. Felt dizzy. All this screamin and shit, and I was breathin hard, ya know? There were these girls creepin in close, tellin us to fuck him up. And so this guy drifts in, it’s just part of the flow.”

  “What did he do?”

  “Hammered the dude on the ground.”

  “You saw it.”

  “I musta
, but I don’t have, like, a picture in my head. I mean, I remember, but it’s all mixed up. I just remember Mo Pete takin off. Big dude, you notice when he’s movin. Kinda remember Arian draggin me by the arm or some shit and everybody’s goin off, like, all sudden, and I’m still just thinkin, ‘Take that, loudmouth motherfucker.’ I got no idea he’s, like, dyin.”

  56

  LeQuan let Jacqi catnap. Screwed though the situation was, she cherished the time alone, the chance to curl up on her side, back to the door, turn the light out, be still. Let her thoughts swim around. Swim away.

  Still, she didn’t take her shoes off.

  Maybe later she’d shower, throw her clothes in the washer—LeQuan with a washing machine, there’s a trip—try to stitch back together some sense of being human. Maybe even eat, if she could keep it down.

  Hard to believe, she thought, just twelve hours ago life felt okay. Not yet up and dressed, lying with Snickers in the back of Bettye’s, waiting to head off for her hookup with Fireman Mike. Still had her $193—Christ, still had her clothes—and the future had a plan tucked inside it. Now the future, if you could call it that, meant just two things: where she could hide, and what she’d have to put up with to stay there.

  She didn’t know how long he’d been standing in the doorway, but finally she sensed it, someone there. LeQuan, she figured, eyeing her like a Lotto Scratcher, laying claim. And it would come to that, she knew. One of those things she’d have to put up with. She made him wait, pretending to sleep, until she couldn’t.

  She rose up on one elbow, looked over her shoulder.

  Not LeQuan.

  Strange how the body knows so much quicker than the mind. Before she placed him her stomach knotted up, her skin felt cold—the long, bag-eyed face, older than the rest of him. The lonely angry nothing in those eyes.

  Say it. Put it away someplace in your mind where you can’t never lose it.

  “Hey,” he said. Timid smile. “Mind if I sit?”

  He didn’t wait, just stepped inside the room, closed the door. No chair to be had, just the bed, so he perched on the corner, far enough to show respect, close enough to touch her. He’d tossed the hoodie, wearing a leather jacket instead, a T-shirt underneath bearing the logo for a band—the Pretty Things, a concert tour called Rage Before Beauty. Made him look different, vaguely more normal, reminding her of someone, the name just out of reach.

  Teddy Buker shook his head, laughed softly. “Some kinda day.”

  Her neck hurt, a needlelike ache in the muscle, then a flare of real pain. She hadn’t moved, her body all locked tight, ready for a blow. Or worse.

  “Yeah,” she said, looking closer at him, wondering, hoping she’d been wrong. The eyes weren’t truly empty. Someone was there. Someone she could bargain with. Maybe the emptiness was inside her.

  “Fucked up, how it turned out.”

  “Yeah.” Stop saying that, she thought.

  “You knew him. Mike Verrazzo, I mean.”

  “No,” she said.

  He seemed to find that amusing. “You were in the car.”

  “I didn’t know him.”

  “I saw you with him before. After the city council meeting, at the hotel.”

  That settled that—it was him after all, that eerie presence just beyond the door. “You’re wrong.”

  “Few times before that, too.”

  “What are you, a cop?” She pushed herself upright, swung her feet to the floor. “Need to get LeQuan in here.”

  “I’m no cop,” he said, like he still found her comical. “LeQuan knows it.”

  “Some undercover ass-toad then.” On her feet, her head swam.

  “Sit down.”

  “You follow me around?” She felt sick, felt shaky. “You’re somebody’s bitch.”

  “Not you,” he said, unfazed. Reaching out a hand. To steady her. “Him. I was following Verrazzo. And I’m nobody’s bitch.”

  She dropped back onto the mattress like it was all she could do, chafing her arms for warmth. But the chill wasn’t coming from the air. “No reason to follow him around except to nark him out to somebody.”

  “True.”

  “So who then?”

  “Not important. What’s important is what you think you saw today.”

  57

  Tierney checked downtown first, corners outside camera range, the ones the girls often worked, then the bars. He even returned to Los Guanacos, hoping maybe she’d circled back, ordered a second round of pupusas con loroco, actually finishing this one instead of leaving it behind like a piece of performance art, something for him to contemplate as he reintroduced himself to Navarette’s goon squad.

  Widening the circle, he moved on to the more notorious motels, both those along the interstate and the ones near the White Slough interchange, where the Napa Highway intersected Blood Alley heading west.

  He scanned the nearby sidewalks first, and if a girl stood there in a sheltering doorway just outside a drizzly patch of lamplight, he’d roll down the window, mention Jacqi by name, ask if she’d been around. One after the next, bending down into the window, fingering back the curtain of wet hair, the girls offered variations on a theme: “Forget her, baby. I’m standin right here, right now.”

  He’d apologize for the waste of time, then head for the nearby motel serving as mother ship, ease into the parking lot, get out, scan the catwalks and doorways before heading in to chat up the desk clerk.

  Most cases, the guy was Pakistani, exile from the land of hoteliers, otherwise an occasional Sikh, one dour Filipina—the lone female—one slyly agreeable young buck brother in a jumpsuit, spangled with bling.

  A couple times a girl sat slumped in one of the office chairs, legs crossed, skirt hiked high, nosebleed heels, thumbing her phone or slathering on a fresh coat of eau de Walgreens. Some of them lived there, coordinating with tricks over the net, only venturing out on the street when business turned slow.

  He gave out Jacqi’s name, provided a description, asked if she’d come around. In return—speaking of performance art—he earned himself a monotony of calculating stares, dark chuckles, easy shrugs.

  Never say die, he thought. Chisel that on my headstone.

  As he widened the circle farther, sometimes driving at the mercy of whim—glimmering streetlights mirrored in lakes of rain, neon storefronts hazed with mist—he’d mentally assess the new state of things.

  Damarlo had been worthless with the yearbooks, tentatively naming a mere five kids beyond the perps—didn’t hang much at school, he’d said, and kept to himself when he did—and no ID at all on the last guy there, the mysterious walkup.

  And so, with a level of irony worthy of Kierkegaard, it all came down to the girl with a knack for vanishing who somehow never vanished. Quite possibly her alone.

  No need to save her anymore, he thought, no more stumbling over my own sincerity. She’ll appreciate that. Or not.

  Time to save someone else. You were there, Jacqi, no pretending you weren’t. And fate’s put a young man’s freedom in your hands, maybe his life. You can step up, be the plucky heroine again, redeem the past ten years. Or you can double down on life as you know it. And if that’s your choice, just remember, Damarlo Melendez—with his young dead mother, his withering sorrow and fathomless rage, his fondness for lean, his unheard demo, his mercurial thugstar dreams—gets sent away for a long, long time.

  Maybe that’s something you can live with. But I think you’re bigger than that.

  Every now and then he thought he spotted her in the corner of his eye, practically gave himself whiplash braking, craning to look. Each time he turned: nothing.

  Sometimes it almost felt as though the girl was right there, sitting in the passenger seat—crayon eyeliner, sparkly lipstick, knuckle of gum—like it was yesterday morning all over again, always had been, always would be, now and forever. The
sense of her, like a hologram, near enough to touch but untouchable.

  He realized then that he wasn’t just obsessed. He’d become the obsession itself. If she didn’t exist, neither did he. He had no idea why, any more than he knew the honest why of anything. But every time he thought of packing it in, realizing he might never find her, she was gone, spirited off by the family, never to be seen again, he remembered that last real conversation with Roni, when he had to tell her the cancer had won—it was time to stop fighting and start dying—then his throat would clench, his stomach would pitch, and he told himself he hadn’t given up at all, never, he was still fighting.

  Chisel that on my headstone.

  58

  “Little-known fact, guys my age had better luck finding a job back in the Depression. No lie. Think college makes a difference? Fifty percent, recent grads, unemployed. Yeah, give me a shot at that. Think I wanna be tricking out grow houses? Work’s work. Union’s got nothing. Under forty, no seniority? Sorry, bub. Know why? Fucking Mike Verrazzo.”

  He’d been rattling on like that, knee bouncing like a jackhammer, muscles in his neck all corded and tense. Voice a murmur, angry and jagged. Little-known fact—he said that a lot, a kind of mantra, like he was the only one who knew.

  But there was something else too, a fierce, almost defiant loneliness, like the truth was a vantage point no one could share. Nobody wants to hang with the hangman.

  “Too bad he’s dead, you know? Too fucking bad. Then again, he had it coming.”

  Half listening, she tried to think up some way out. LeQuan would be watching the door. And this guy—Teddy Toolbelt, Teddy Buker, the name tattooed to her memory now—no chance he’d let her just slip out the window.