The Mercy of the Night

by David Corbett

  Jesus, he thought, thudding his hip against the counter, needing it for support.

  “Had a similar call earlier,” Mayweather said, “from the guy’s girlfriend. Sounds a little loose on deck, to be honest.”

  If only, Skellenger thought. Taken, Christ. “Thanks, Roy. Yeah. Seems a little far-flung. Fetched, I mean. Far-fetched.”

  “Well now there’s some kinda ruckus in the front yard, a fight maybe, we’re getting calls from neighbors.”

  Oh fuck me. He dug at his eyes with his thumb and forefinger till jags of splintered light etched the backs of his eyelids. “What kind of fight?”

  “Skelly, how the hell should I know? All the help we got yesterday’s been remanded, started once you guys made your arrests. Fuckers checked out like there was free food someplace. I’m down to ten cars again except for a couple deputies out of Dixon—don’t get me started on those two—and a few more guys checking in for OT in a bit. Been a goddamn jailbreak this morning. Some kinda minor riot at the high school, black gangs going after the Mex cliques on account of the arrests yesterday, everybody pointing fingers, snitch and bitch and fuck you. No guns thank God, not yet anyway. Plus I got two burglaries in progress, one at a pot dispensary downtown, hookers trolling the river road like it’s raining men, a jackknife out on Blood Alley, and a bunch of mouth-breathers boosting everything they can get their hands on at the mini-mart right near where Verrazzo bit it.”

  Rahim Salaam, Skellenger thought. Payback. For not being a coward fast enough.

  “And those are just the calls I can get to. Board’s lit up like it’s New Year’s.”

  “I’ll head over now to the Garza place,” Skellenger said, thinking: Damage control. At minimum. “Do me a favor? Run the address and give me any 415s or DVs while I’m en route. And see if we’ve got any probies or violators in the neighborhood.”

  “I can’t roll you any backup, not till—”

  “It’s okay,” Skellenger said. “Sounds manageable. If not I’ll let you know.”

  Tierney was already well on his way to getting his ass kicked—the small man had a savage right, even bandaged up, and it’d made its point twice to his midriff, once to his nose—when he heard the gunshot inside, followed by screams, two of them, Jacqi and her mother. The latter seemed barely human.

  Navarette’s man caught the sound too and stopped, fist poised in midair, head turned toward the house. Tierney saw his chance and with his left hand gripped the man’s windpipe like he meant to rip it out, grabbed his crotch just as hard, slipped his left leg behind Escalada’s right and took him down, kneeling quick for a strike to the soft spot at the edge of the six-pack, rectus abdominis. You should teach math. Cass’s words. You’d be brilliant at it. He staggered and turned, pulled back the screen door as Escalada scrambled to his knees, barking out an airless cough. Tierney had one hand on the doorknob when he felt first the hold on his coattail, dragging him backward, then the other thing, more than a punch, hotter and deep, a blade launched upward, sinking into his back.

  Confusion, then knee-weakening pain, then two more stabs and the small man, dazed and wheezing and shambling to his feet, pocketed his bloodied knife, pushed Tierney aside and down, kicking him for good measure.

  As the door opened and closed he lay there, realizing a lung was hit, a sense like drowning, sucking in breath, and he remembered from somewhere the importance of lying on his side so the wound was down, keep the good lung blood-free, as he dug through his pockets for his phone, only to remember that it lay in pieces on the roof across the street.

  Jacqi watched her mother kneel over Richie’s body, the back of his head a gruesome mess, brain ripped to pieces and exposed. His blood drained away, soaking the carpet, the woman keening, pulling the shattered head back, gripping the chin, forcing air into his mouth, into his irrelevant lungs. How much like a kiss, Jacqi thought.

  Navarette stood there, a few feet back. Jacqi could not remember a time he’d ever looked helpless, and never like this. At last he dropped onto one knee, rested a hand on her mother’s shoulder, but she shook it off violently, staring down at her dead son.

  The rest went so quickly Jacqi could barely register it. Her mother collected the blood-caked gun from beside Richie’s body, got to her feet, and fired two shots point blank, one into Navarette’s chest, the other his face.

  Not a second later, Ben Escalada burst into the room, gripping a knife, its blade dull and dark from use. Her mother lifted the barrel and stepped deliberately toward him and fired two more shots, same placement, like she’d thought about this moment, planned for it somehow, over who knew how many weeks or months or years.

  Escalada jumped just a little from the bullets’ impact, as though stung, face dotted with the wound over his eye that quickly flared with blood as he collapsed—first onto one knee, then the next, before sliding down crookedly onto his back—looking numb with concentration.

  Skellenger didn’t see a fight when he pulled up. What he saw was a man in slacks and a sport coat lying very still on his left side, halfway up the porch steps.

  He thumbed his radio, waited through the squawks. “Mayweather. Skellenger here. I don’t care what you’ve got out there, you’ve got to roll me some backup, I’ve got a possible 10-10 at the Garza house. I need code 3 medic and an ambulance to stage while we clear. Over.”

  He knew he should wait for at least one more unit but he got out of the car and drew his weapon, thumbed off the safety. Neighbors peered out from windows, some holding cell phones, calling in or catching the action on video. As he crossed the yard he could see it was the guy named Tierney on the porch, drawing ragged breaths, but alive.

  Then the door flew open, Jacqi was there.

  He lifted his weapon, sighted on her chest.

  Jacqi saw the bloodstain on the back of Tierney’s jacket as he struggled to draw himself up. There was more blood on the ground and his whole midriff was soaked in it. His skin looked waxy and damp. She knelt down beside him, wondering what to do, as he reached into his pants pocket, trembling all over.

  “Go to my car.” The words hissed through his teeth, he tugged out his keys, nudging them into her hand. “Lock yourself inside.”

  No, she thought, I won’t, not again—trapped in a car, watching a man die. The inescapable pattern. “You need help, Jesus, what—”

  “Go to the car, the neighbors, someplace, call 911. Just go.”

  She didn’t really register Skellenger’s presence till she started down the porch steps. He was easing forward across the yard, his gun drawn, and for a thousand reasons the fact it was him pissed her off, the anger filling up all the empty places scraped out by her fear. She felt light, like if she spread her arms the wind just might take her, over the mossy rooftops, inflated with rage.

  “I want to testify, Skellenger.” Her steps thudded on the ground like fists. “Help me, help my friend, he’s hurt, he’s been stabbed, and I want to testify, understand?”

  The girl was talking—yelling, actually—but the words were just noise, a distraction from what was happening behind her. Nina Garza marched out of the house, onto the porch—dressed impeccably, caked with blood. Quickly, intently, she came down the steps and later he’d tell himself that the inexplicable oddness of that—the butcher-shop gore, even her face smeared dark with it, the eerie swiftness of her gait—it stopped him, confused him, and he didn’t see the weapon in her hand, didn’t register the movement as she raised it, aiming at her daughter’s back.

  He’d also tell himself that he didn’t have a clear line of fire, not at first—even if he’d gone ahead, taken his shot, he might have hit the girl instead. It wasn’t until the muzzle barked and the girl pitched forward that he had a clear bead, at which point he placed a three-shot group into the woman’s torso, the place of largest body mass. She stopped with a jolt and a dull-eyed shudder and yet kept pulling the trigger, hammer clicking, cylinder adv
ancing, even as she turned back toward the house, staggered, knees scissoring, then fell.

  He’d had no idea her gun was empty when he fired. He believed she posed a clear and present danger. The proof was the girl.

  For the slightest instant, he thought: We teach our children to lie.

  He hurried to where Jacqi lay, saw the smear of blood on the back of her blouse, high left side, and gently turned her over. The exit wound on her chest was huge—hollow-point round, he guessed—and so near the heart. Her skin had turned ashen, her eyes rolled back, lips trembling like she was freezing cold.

  “Stay with me,” he said, applying pressure to the wound. Blood surged up through his fingers.

  Her eyes fluttered and cleared for a second and with a weak smile she reached up, stroked his face with her fingers, her touch soft, like a feather. She whispered something, the words so faint he couldn’t make them out, and as he bent closer, his ear an inch from her lips, he thought he caught the words “honest dime,” but that made no sense, and she said nothing more.

  FINAL ENTRY

  Three a.m. and I was lying there wide-awake with this line from Iris Murdoch banging around inside my brain: “Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.”

  It seemed to echo down every hallway of my life, and I thought of all the Something Others I’d not entrusted with reality. Like you.

  I know, I know, how puzzling to say that to someone who’s dead. But you know how it is. Sleep pulls a runner this time of the morning and I find myself in the dark and frightened, even with Cass sleeping so peacefully beside me, and I lie there wanting something to steady the nerves, calm me down.

  It’s not death that scares me so much as the sense that death is just a disguise for something else, something bigger. And not kind.

  I’ve resisted this impulse to write for a while, as you know. I see the poison in it. So Irish, this business with spooks and fairies and doom, granting the greater reality to the dead and the misty wherever. Follow that path too long, you end up very alone.

  So more and more I’ve tried to find my solace among the living. Those mysterious, Murdochian others. Not somethings. Someones.

  But this morning, one last time, I felt a need to write to you.

  I found this journal in the old house—we’re cleaning it out, pitching the clutter, getting it ready for sale—found it in a drawer. Checking the pages, I noticed it’s well over a year since I wrote last, the entry before this one dated not long after Cass and I first got together. Perhaps that’s for the best. Perhaps I should stop now and just put this thing away. But there’s much to report, and I need to get it clear in my own mind.

  Recovery’s not untroubled, but by and large we’re fine. The lung itself has come along nicely—luckily I took a blade, not a bullet—but this odd nerve thing. Still get this weakness down the right side, the knee buckles for no conceivable reason. The ghost in the machine.

  But I cut a rakish and Joycean figure, brandishing my walking stick—old maple, with an ivory lion’s-head grip. Grady found it in an antique store near Union Square in San Francisco, his tribute to the wounded brother-in-arms.

  The girl wasn’t so lucky. The bullet tore her up pretty bad inside, eight hours of surgery, good 50 percent of one lung cut away, then post-op hemorrhage and shock.

  The legalities were a mess—mother and brother dead, father in Soledad, an aunt living somewhere back east who first couldn’t be found, then couldn’t be bothered. Cass petitioned the court and got a temporary medical directive, power of attorney, and that gave the hospital a piece of paper to stick in the kid’s chart so they were off the hook and everybody seemed happy.

  It was rough, those first few months, fox-trot forward, cha-cha back, but little by little she got her strength, the lung cleared of fluid. Developed a bit of a dependency on the inhalers and the Percocet but, with Cass’s help, she worked through that. Doing better than me, truth be told, oh boo hoo. Health, like youth itself, gets wasted on the young.

  We filed the paperwork to step up as foster parents, even got her dad to sign off, but she turned eighteen before FCAS stopped dithering, so we just rented an apartment for her around the corner. Every now and then, she still talks about heading off for Mexico, but for now she seems content. She’s close enough she’s always welcome, far enough away nobody’s snarling over bones. But she’s at the house at some point almost every day, dinner at least, and some nights, when the nightmares are bad, she slips on over, lets herself in, curls up on the sofa.

  Cass volunteered to coach girls’ basketball at St. Catherine’s and we got Jacqi enrolled, a second shot at senior year, and get this, she made the team. Small but mighty, Cass calls her, a beast in the paint, outhustling way taller girls on the boards—while missing half a lung. She has to come out every five minutes or so, sits there gasping and rasping, but it’s impressive, her toughness. Not that she’s the next LeBron. “Can’t knock down a shot to save her soul,” Cass says. “Posts up and lets it fly like she’s trying to hit the wall.” But she leads the team in assists. Imagine that. Jacquelina Garza. Team player.

  Her testimony at Damarlo’s prelim—talk about a media zoo—proved crucial, especially her testimony about Teddy Buker confessing to Verrazzo’s murder. Cal Katsaros filed a motion for a 707 hearing and Damarlo got notched down to juvie. He took a plea for aggravated assault and got eighteen months, almost a miracle, really. He’s doing the time at Chaderjian YCF in Stockton, not too far, his grandparents get over maybe twice a month.

  As for the others—Mo Pete Carson, Arian Lomax, Chepe Salgado—they’re heading into court one by one, the cases severed, as Grady predicted from the start, albeit cagily. No surprise, they can’t jump on Jacqi’s story fast enough, crowing they saw with their own eyes what Buker confessed to, a killing, just not theirs to own. Some of the kids Jacqi named who were there—not many, admittedly, just a few—came forward to testify and that’s helped point everyone toward the exit, too. I think she had a hand in that, set an example they couldn’t ignore. At least, that’s what I like to tell myself.

  Meanwhile the city continues its slouch toward Bethlehem. Verrazzo’s murder seems to have made people stop, look at themselves and this place, back away from the abyss. Some, anyway. There’s a tacit agreement to lower the volume if not the heat.

  There’s also a realization, thanks to Jacqi, that Teddy Buker wasn’t just some crazed loon. An angry young man, sure, with a grievance most people can understand: kids with no future, adults without work, promises broken at the whim of money.

  None of which has changed much, obviously. Things remain a bit of a train wreck around here, just less so, and that’s about as good as it gets in America right now.

  We had to put Noble down. Inside he was a mess, lesions and tumors everywhere, and the seizures started coming quicker and harder. Jacqi held his head and kissed him as Cass clutched him to her chest and, sure, we all cried. Good old dog.

  I’m working, after a fashion. The ethics board cleared my bar card, but I’m not slipping back into that routine. Have the PI shingle as well, which makes me even more of a jack-of-all-trades—maybe I’ll get a therapist’s license, too, the trifecta. My business card reads simply “Professional Services.” I help people start over. I’m not listed anywhere. The people who need to know who I am, know who I am.

  Grady tosses me something here and there and the number of lawyers who get what I do call from time to time with a problem they think I can help with. Basically I go into my office, close the door, read my Spinoza and Schopenhauer or Ed McBain, maybe a bit of Hardy and Wright, The Theory of Numbers, and then go out and make the world safe for fuckups.

  Which brings us to the real news, happened just two days ago, which may be why I can’t sleep. Still rolling it around in my head.

  Jacqi met with the detective, Skellenger, and asked me to come along. S
he still felt a need to tell the truth, come clean about her testimony against Cope, but the hang-up was how.

  She’d thought about it good and hard, and we talked it out some too. I told her what I’d come to realize, that truth isn’t an abstraction. It’s not in a book or a courtroom and it’s not this big, airy, perfect thing hovering all around us like the ether. It exists between people. We share the truth, or we share a lie.

  There was nothing at issue anymore with her mother or brother or Pete Navarette. The dead, like I need tell you, bear no responsibility. They’re beyond that. And whatever happened to Clint Burkhead, poor Eastwood, is largely moot.

  But what happened between her and Skellenger wasn’t.

  She picked the Chowhaus, this dive along the water where they slather everything in cornmeal—Christ, I’m surprised they don’t deep-fry the silverware—but it’s reasonably quiet and there’s the river to look at, easing south toward the bay.

  He looked better than I remembered, Skellenger I mean, and in passing, as I’d worked out his sitting down with Jacqi, he let it slip that he’d made some strides with his family, helped his son face some sort of jam at school.

  I wondered if I should leave the two of them alone, but Jacqi insisted. She was a completely different girl the last however many times they’d spoken, and she wasn’t sure how the new Jacquelina would hold up. Pointless worry, of course. She was stellar.

  He began with an odd confession. He’d gone to the Office of Professional Responsibility—the local version of Internal Affairs—and admitted what had happened when he and his partner first interviewed Jacqi. He knew they’d had a duty to report any allegation of child abuse, but they’d hidden behind the fig leaf of deeming the girl confused, then waiting for the mother—an inexcusable lapse, letting the parent dictate.

  The OPR held a hearing and it went pretty much as you’d imagine, from what Skellenger said. His word against his partner’s. Men in uniform, like men everywhere I suppose, tend to hate it when one of their own starts turning over rocks. The most reliable evidence existed at the time, they said, and absent anything prima facie that would contradict the record, they saw no point in reinventing history.