Billy had been married twice. Divorced twice too.
Having to speak to Boone last night in the car, now that irritated him. The kid was a loose canon. Like Carter before he went away. Had been since Gossitch had brought him on two years ago. That vampire with the hat, walking outside in the morning like that. That irritated him. His father walking out on them…Billy dying…
He crossed the street and walked over to the boys.
The pretty young Asian lady from down the block walked by, pushing her baby carriage. She ignored the three guys even when one of them said something to her.
Bowie looked them over. The shortest of the bunch had a peanut head sprouting out of an oversized white t-shirt. He was sitting on the hood of a car that wasn’t his. The tallest and toughest looking of the three had a set of lips on him, looked like you could suction him to glass. The third kid had his hair pulled back into some sort of bun on the back of his head. He wore a dollar-sign medallion on a long square-link gold chain. The medallion looked diamond-encrusted. All three wore their jeans low-slung, showing their boxer shorts.
One nodded at the others and then at Bowie, who was placing his newspapers and lottery tickets on the hood of a car. Bowie put the bag with the prescriptions on top of the tickets and newspapers. There was no breeze this afternoon and he wasn’t overly worried they’d blow away.
He turned and faced the three, who all stood together looking at him.
“What?” The tallest one asked. He wore a pair of sunglasses on the top of his head.
“You guys hang out here every day.”
“Yeah. So?” challenged Lips.
“You know a lady walks by here? Big lady? Heavy lady with thick ankles?” As he spoke, Bowie looked at each one of them, testing them, seeing who would look down, who would look away.
“So what if we know the bitch?” Peanut head spoke up. He had a blank look on his face, like he was a criminal mastermind or mentally retarded. Maybe a little bit of both, thought Bowie.
“That’s Mrs. Coyle. Let me tell you about her.”
“Maybe we don’t want to hear about the b—”
Bowie cut him off with a smile and a raised index finger. “No, you’ll like this. Trust me. She’s been a den mother for the Cub Scouts for thirty, thirty-five years now. Any of you guys ever in the Scouts?” He didn’t wait for them to answer. “When all the crackers in the neighborhood were up in arms twenty years ago when they built the projects, she was one of the few voices in the community who said, ‘Wait, give these people a chance. They need a nice place to live, too.’”
The tall one with the lips was giving him the look. The other two were focused on Bowie’s sneakers.
“Do you know she named one of her cats after Leroi Jones? Do you even know who Leroi Jones is?”
The kid with his hair in a bun scoffed and looked at his tall friend.
“Your friend thinks what I’m saying is silly,” Bowie said to the tall kid.
“What choo sayin’ is fuckin’—”
Bowie ignored the kid with the bun and stepped closer to the tall boy, the kid as tall as him. Bowie was still smiling. “Maybe you give him a message for me, right?”
The tall kid looked wound up, ready to spring.
“Tell him,” Bowie held up his left hand, the fingers splayed, “This is my left hand. And this,” he raised his right hand and fluttered the fingers, “This is my pimp hand.”
When Bowie clenched his left fist three sets of eyes were drawn to it. But it was the open palm of his right hand with which he slapped the tall kid across the face, knocking him down.
“…and my pimp hand is strong!”
Peanut head reached for something in his pants but Bowie beat him to the draw, clearing the Glock.
“Whatcha gonna do? Huh?” Bowie waited to see what the kids would do next. The tall kid was on his hands and knees and those oversized lips on his face were bleeding, the blood mixing with his tears.
“Come on. Man the fuck up.”
None of the three looked like they were going to do anything.
“You ain’t gonna do shit,” said Bowie. “None of you. You—” he addressed peanut head, “Let’s see what you got.”
The kid reached into his pants and delicately returned a knife.
“You bring a knife to a gunfight? Boy, you are as stupid as you look. Drop it on the sidewalk.” The kid did what he was told.
The tall kid was sniffling, trying not to cry.
“This kid got blow job lips,” Bowie said to the boy with his hair in the bun, speaking of his friend. “Look at him now, crying like a little bitch.” He addressed Lips. “Man up, son. Man hits you in the face, you hit him back. Or you weak, get it?
“And you.” He returned his undivided attention to the kid with the bun. “You like to talk shit.” Bowie reached out and yanked the chain and medallion off the kid’s neck. “I hear a lot of bitch in your talk. But you ain’t sayin’ shit now, huh?”
He held the pistol on the kids and held the medallion up so he could appraise it.
“Piece of shit.” He tossed it back to the kid, who dropped it and looked like he didn’t know if he should pick it up or not.
“Get the fuck out of here. Now. And don’t come back ever. You see that old lady, you don’t say shit to her. You see that Chinese lady just walk by with the baby—you look the other way. Now get the fuck out of here I said.”
The three scampered away without looking back.
Bowie stuffed the pistol back in his jeans. He kicked the knife on the sidewalk down the storm drain in the street. He ignored the medallion on its chain, leaving both there. Bowie retrieved his papers, instant lottery tickets and the bag with his mother’s prescriptions.
When he got to the apartment where they lived, his downstairs neighbor, Lou, was nodding his head approvingly.
“Punks,” said Lou.
“Yeah,” agreed Bowie. “Punks.”
33.
3:12 P.M.
Her brother called himself Boone, and though it wasn’t the name their parents gave him when they adopted him, Jennifer cared and respected him enough to call him by the name he had chosen.
“Boone, pass the ketchup, please.”
Four year old Greg and his six year old sister, Jill, were on their Uncle’s lap and Boone was bouncing them up and down.
“Have you been to see dad lately, Boone?” Jennifer knew he hadn’t. Their father was in a nursing home in the grips of dementia.
“I don’t want to see him like that, Jen.” Jill had hopped off his lap and Boone had a hand on either of Greg’s little arms.
“I think he’d like to see you,” Jennifer said. “He likes seeing the grandkids.”
“Is that right?” Boone asked the boy sitting on him.
“Yeah!” affirmed Greg.
“Yeah, but sometimes he calls me other kids’ names,” said Jill.
Boone smirked.
“Boone, you want some coffee or tea?” Derrick called from the kitchen.
“Coffee.”
“What about you dear?”
“I’ll have a glass of tea,” Jennifer answered her husband.
“This little piggy went to the market.” Greg’s big toe disappeared between his uncle’s thumb and index finger. “And this little piggy stayed home…”
Jennifer did not get to see her brother as much as she would have liked. He was a tough man to get close to, and she felt she and her family were as close to him as anyone could be. Derrick liked Boone, though she could tell he was also wary of him. Boone was like a pit bull, loveable in spite of their reputations. The verdict was out on whether they were bad by nature or upbringing.
But what a life her brother had had. One summer when Jennifer was twelve and off from school, her mother and father had taken her to Europe to visit an orphanage. They’d been negotiating with broker agencies to adopt a child. Jennifer clearly recalled the barely concealed squalor of the orphanage, and the hard and cruel manner of the
adults in charge of the children there.
She remembered very well the first time she saw the boy Boone. He was seven and the orphanage attendants, both burly men, struggled to manhandle the child into the room where Jennifer and her parents waited. He’d had a black eye, which the director of the orphanage in his broken English chalked up to the child having fallen. At the time, Jennifer’s parents had thought that Boone might have been fighting with the other children, but something inside her had told Jennifer that the adults of that inhospitable place had done this to the boy.
When the attendants left, Boone had sat quietly in the room with Jennifer and her parents. The boy had been silent and guarded. Her mother and father had sat there smiling dopily at him, saying kind things to him in voices better suited for a three year old.
There was a seriousness and an intensity to her brother even when he was seven. Jennifer, who, with Derrick, had adopted her own two children, wondered if she would have adopted the boy Boone twenty years ago if she had been in her parents’ shoes. She hated to admit it to herself, but she thought she probably wouldn’t have.
Their relationship had never been as close as Jennifer would have liked. Boone was a tough cookie to crack and always had been. He was constantly in trouble with his school and the local authorities, which caused a great deal of stress for their parents and his relationship with them. Boone was the kind of kid who adults spoke of as a “problem child,” the kind of kid the public school labeled as emotionally disturbed, the kid the police escorted home on more than one occasion. And that didn’t count all the times their parents had to go and retrieve him from the precinct.
But Jennifer never doubted that Boone loved her and her parents as much as he could. When she was twenty and home from college, Jennifer went on a date with a boy she had known in high school. They had a few drinks and one thing led to another and Ian got aggressive and wouldn’t take no for an answer and Jennifer wound up walking home with a black eye. Her parents were outraged and demanded to know what had happened so they could call the police, but Jennifer had brushed them off as she’d wiped the tears from her eyes.
She vividly remembered Boone’s reaction. Fifteen-year-old Boone had walked over to where his sister sat without a word. He took her chin in one hand and turned her face up to the light so he could study the black and blue around her eye socket. He hadn’t said a word. He’d gone outside at ten o’clock at night and got on his bike and rode off into the dark. Their parents were too busy crowing over Jennifer and how she needed to contact the authorities that they hadn’t noticed Boone’s absence.
When the police showed up at their door at midnight it wasn’t the first time, but this time the story was different. Boone had bicycled over to Ian’s house, knocked on his door, shouldered past Ian’s father, marched up to the young man’s bedroom and promptly set upon him in his bed, beating his savagely. When Ian’s father intervened, Boone had thrown him a beating, breaking the fifty-something-year-old man’s arm. Boone beat Ian to a pulp in his own bed until he was satisfied, Ian’s mother screaming frantically and watching the whole thing. Boone had calmly walked out of Ian’s house and sat down on the front porch, waiting for the police.
Boone was fifteen years old. Ian had suffered two broken eye sockets, a broken jaw, five broken fingers on one hand, a broken clavicle, and two fractured humeri. His ribs had been smashed and one of his lungs had been punctured as well. Ian, everyone said, had been lucky to have lived, but Jennifer had believed that Ian had lived because Boone hadn’t wanted to kill him that night.
Jennifer was forthright about her date with Ian and the presiding judge showed mercy on her parents, giving Boone six months of supervised living in a group home and a couple hundred hours of community service instead of a stint in juvenile hall.
By the time of Boone’s sentencing, Ian was dead. Two weeks after he’d come home from the hospital, Ian had mysteriously died in his bed. The coroner stated that Ian’s death was not attributable to the beating he’d taken at her younger brother’s hands, which kept Boone from facing a murder charge. The police had come to question Boone and his family, of course, and of course Jennifer had said her brother was home all evening the night in question, listening to his heavy metal in his bedroom. But she had known, even then. She had known who killed Ian, and she had never said a word. And she never would.
On the night Ian died, Jennifer had walked past Boone’s room and knocked on his door. When he hadn’t answered, she’d pushed it open and looked inside. She would often find Boone lying on his bed with his hands behind his head, staring up at the glow-in-the-dark solar system their father had affixed to the ceiling when they’d brought him home from the orphanage. But that night her brother’s bed was empty and the window was open.
No, Jennifer knew, her younger brother loved her very much in his own way, and she knew he loved her family now. Boone was just emotionally incapacitated, unable to express that love. His relationships…Boone hadn’t had many friends when they were growing up. Early on he’d been attracted to what her father labeled the “wrong crowd.” But Boone inevitably wound up alone, usually after a knock-down dragged-out brawl with one or more of those boys.
And the girls he brought home….Jennifer suspected her brother was sexually active from a young age, but the girls and women he was with weren’t ones her mother and father would have approved of. They were usually covered with tattoos and piercings and might as well have been labeled damaged goods. Boone never seemed to want any of the girls he knew to meet his family anyway.
“Here we go.” Derrick came in with the coffee carafe and tea pot, placing each on hot plates on the dining room table.
“How’s work, Derrick?” Boone asked.
“It’s nice to have the week off.” Derrick worked on Wall Street, trading things Boone had never heard of. Jennifer had heard of derivatives but couldn’t tell you what they were or how they worked. What mattered was that Derrick knew them inside and out and did rather nicely for their family. That, along with the money she made as a school psychologist, afforded them a comfortable lifestyle in a five bedroom house in the suburbs.
Derrick, Jennifer knew, wouldn’t ask Boone about his work. Neither would she. The few times they had asked in the past, Boone had some bullshit story about what he did for a living. She didn’t like putting him on the spot, putting him in a position where he had to lie. Her brother didn’t dress rich, but the fact was the guy was always flush with cash, showering gifts and money on his niece and nephew. If asked, Boone said he was an independent contractor, but never gave any details as to what that meant or what his business was.
Jennifer wondered if her brother wasn’t somehow involved in the drug trade. But didn’t drug dealers drive fancy cars? And Boone, the little seven-year-old boy who got off the plane at JFK International Airport with Jennifer and her parents and moved into their modest home in Queens, had never owned a car or possessed a driver’s license in his life. Even today, Derrick had picked Boone up at the train station and drove him over, and when it was time for him to leave tonight they would drop him off at the same station and he would get on the train and go back to whatever his life was.
“No big family vacation, huh?” asked Boone, pouring himself a cup of coffee.
“Not this week,” Jennifer’s husband answered. “The kids started school this week.”
“Already? Damn.” Boone looked at Jill. “Hey, what are you, in the first grade now?”
“Second.” Bea said it proudly.
“That’s right. I forgot, you’re like super-smart and all.”
“Did you like school, Uncle Boone?”
“Me? School?” Boone snorted. “No. I hated the place. But you know what I wish now?”
“What?”
“I wish I had paid better attention and not been so busy trying to get in trouble.”
“You got in trouble at school, Uncle Boone?” the little girl looked like she couldn’t imagine it.
Boone loo
ked at Jennifer and they shared a smile. “Once or twice.”
There were many mysteries and things Jennifer didn’t understand about her sibling, and she chose not to pursue them. To do so risked alienating him.
Jennifer didn’t kid herself that her brother’s business, whatever it was, was shady. And whatever it was, her kids were the recipients of Boone’s largesse. Every time he came to visit—which wasn’t as often as Jennifer would like—Uncle Boone would hand his sister a roll of money on the side, telling her it was for the kids’ college education. Derrick did quite well downtown, but she didn’t tell him about the money she got from her brother. It wasn’t that Derrick would have been insulted. He would have been concerned about where the money was coming from.
Jennifer had her concerns as well, but again, she wasn’t going to start asking questions about an arrangement that had unfolded over the years.
“We’re looking at going to Europe this winter when the kids and Jen are off from school,” Derrick was saying to Boone. “You should come with us.”
“Europe, huh?”
“We’re thinking France and Italy,” added Jennifer.
“We’ll see.” The way he said it Jennifer knew he wouldn’t be coming with them. She didn’t think her brother had ever left the States since he’d arrived as a child, much less gotten outside of New York City much.
“Make a muscle, Uncle Boone,” asked Greg.
Boone held up an arm, pulled back the sleeve of his FUBU rugby shirt, clenched his big, ugly fist and squeezed. His biceps contracted and popped up off his arm, a split in the middle.
Greg laughed and clapped and wrapped both of his little hands around his uncle’s enormous arm.
“How much can you liff, Uncle Boone?”
“I can lift an elephant.”
“No you can’t!” The kid laughed.
“You’re looking bigger than last time,” noted Jennifer.
“Been taking my vitamins,” replied Boone, then reached down to his baggy jeans and retrieved his pager. He looked at the screen. “Okay if I use your phone?”
I Kill Monsters: Fury (Book 1) Page 14