“Coral the adorable.” He tilts into me. His hairy arms are strong, and he pins me against the wall, shoves himself between my thighs. I push him away, jam my knee up, hard. He gasps and backs off. I grab a knife off the counter and stab the air. “I’ll cut it off, you jerk.” He reaches for my hand, the one holding the knife, and as we struggle, I feel the knife slice my palm.
Sharp. A lot of blood. I howl and Jerry jumps back. Warm blood runs down my fingers, but I don’t take my eyes off him. His smarmy expression is gone and his breath is noisy. “Hey,” he says, “just kidding around. Guess I’ll have to fire you now.”
“Do it. Do us both a favor.” My heart bounces in my chest. I want to slide the knife into him, right into his gut, rip him open like hari-kari. He reads my face and backs away, turns to go. I reach out and wipe my injured hand on him. He hurries out of the room with a bright red smear on the back of his shirt.
“Fuck you,” I holler after him. I wrap a clean dish towel around my hand. I’m exhilarated and a little dizzy from pain and the power of the knife. I put it in my pocket, it’s mine now, and useful, as Jerry seems to respect it. I close the door to the storage room and slide a carton of paper towels in front of the door. I’m trembling, not from fear but adrenaline, and I feel pretty good. Fuck him.
Sitting down on the box, I count my tips. Eighty-four dollars, excellent. Enough for Michael’s birthday present and some left over for diapers.
On the way home, I stop at the Paradise and buy two tickets for the concert.
MICHAEL’S TRUCK IS gone and our apartment is dark. Shit. That means Brandi still has the baby. I tap on her door, gently so I don’t wake anyone. Brandi lets me in. Patty is asleep on the couch.
“Sorry,” I whisper. “Michael didn’t pick her up?”
Brandi shakes her head. “I gotta talk to you. It’s trouble time, girl. Let’s go to your place.”
I don’t want to know about any trouble, I can’t take any more. I’m so exhausted I could sink onto the floor and sleep for a week. I ease Patty into her crib, then collapse onto the sheet-covered couch. Didn’t I clean up this morning? Dishes and toys litter the room. The trash bin has been tipped over, mess everywhere. “What happened?”
“Michael got Patty around three. About an hour later, I heard her in the hall, crying.”
“In the hall?”
“I look out, and all hell’s broken loose. Your door is open, and there’s Knotty Knickers holding the baby. Michael’s passed out on your sofa.”
Dear Jesus, that’s bad. Knotty Knickers is what we called Barbara Knicker, the social worker. DCF has been shadowing me ever since I aged out of foster care and got pregnant. Along with food stamps, I’m apparently entitled to my very own social worker.
“Knotty wanted to talk to you. Your door was wide open so she went in. Patty was into the garbage over there and Michael wouldn’t wake up. I told her you’d be home any minute now, I’d take care of the baby until then.”
DCF almost took my baby? I shudder, knowing what that meant. Once they take your child, it’s hell getting her back. Hearings and interviews and urine tests. Judges and social workers. And Michael being what he is . . . “What did Knotty say? Is she coming back?”
“She’ll be back Monday.” Brandi places her cool hands on my cheeks and turns my face until our eyes lock. “You can’t leave Patty with him. Ever.”
I rub my forehead. I’m tired yet every nerve twangs. “I know, but what can I do?” I feel sweat break out all over, and stand to unzip my uniform. It has a side zipper, it’s hard to take off. “Help me,” I say, and Brandi tugs the uniform over my head.
“What’s this?” She’s found the knife.
I tell her the story, embellishing only a little. “I kneed him in the nuts! Told him I’d slice his pecker off!”
Brandi squeals and pumps her arm in a victory salute. “You go girl! You are gutsy!”
“It felt so good. He knew I’d do it too.” I pull one of Michael’s tee-shirts out of the laundry basket and put it on.
“Hey, maybe you can use it to cut the knots. Get it? Knotty? Knots?” Though Brandi smiles, her eyes are worried.
I SLEEP LIKE a dead person all night, and don’t wake until the baby calls. I open my eyes—I’m alone in the bed. Michael is talking to her; he must have come in during the night. I stretch. It’s lovely to lie in bed though my hand feels sore. A bit of blood has leaked through the bandage onto my nightgown.
“Not? Not?” I hear Patty ask, then Michael brings her into our bedroom with a bottle. He leans down and kisses my forehead. He’s shaved and he smells like soap. He doesn’t look sick, so he must have gotten money somewhere.
“Glad to see you, babe,” I say. “Happy birthday.” He smiles. Once upon a time, that little curl to his mouth made me melt, made me want to lick him all over. “Where were you last night?” Patty drinks her milk, her crystal blue eyes moving from me to him, kicking her legs up and slamming them down on the bed.
He winces. “You don’t want to know. It was rough.” He lies down to face us.
I squeeze his shoulder, run my hand down his arm. I love his body, like a sleek animal’s. “Be home tonight? I have a birthday surprise for you.”
“You’re an angel.” He kisses me again, this time on the mouth, a lingering kiss that sends a charge from head to toe. Something to be thankful for.
“Knickers came by yesterday,” I say.
He looks blank. “When?”
“Before I got home. Michael, she almost took Patty!”
“Why?”
“You were out of it, according to Brandi. Asleep.”
“Fuck, I’m sorry.”
He has a kicked-puppy look. Are those tears in his glazed, dead eyes? I don’t feel pity. When do I get to cry? “Go to work, okay?”
“Sure, no worries.” He half-smiles, squeezes my feet.
It will be a good day—no bus, no Jerry, no greasy pork and fries. I re-bandage my hand—the wound looks clean. I make a cup of ginger tea, feed Patty oatmeal and cooked apple, and decide to think positive about Knickers. The rent is due today so I dig in my old parka at the back of our closet for the Band-Aid tin where I keep my tip money. Money for food, rent and laundry, never enough.
The tin is empty.
A wave of panic dizzies me and I close my eyes until the spinning stops. I turn the parka pocket inside out, feel around on the closet floor. Nine hundred and forty-eight dollars, three weeks of serving up greasy fries and burned pork and slabs of lemon meringue pie, smiling at the ten percent tips, dodging old coots who want a hug. All gone.
I pull myself onto the bed, feeling weirdly numb and disconnected. Is this the worst that could happen? No. The worst is ahead of me. I have fourteen dollars. Michael doesn’t get paid for two more weeks. We’ll have to live in his truck. Knickers will take the baby.
I check the Vinnie Paz tickets—non-returnable. Perhaps I can go to the Paradise, stand around in the parking lot, scalp them. Be calm, think. Get it together, girl.
WHEN PATTY GOES down for a nap, I take the chicken out of the fridge and carve it into pieces, using the utility knife I filched from the restaurant. The knife slices sweetly through the skin, the meat, the tendons, effortlessly. I dip each piece in egg, then flour, sprinkle the pieces with salt and pepper and slide them into sizzling fat. I rehearse what I might say to him. Sugar. Got any ideas regarding the rent? What about your truck payment? As I scrape the sweet potatoes, sending the peelings flying into the sink, I imagine his hurt puppy look, his silence.
I read the Sylvia Plath poem again, out loud this time, but softly, so I won’t wake Patty. Some lines I read twice: I would not mind if it were bones, or a pearl button.
Bones, like a skeleton. I think it wants me. I like the sound of the words.
MICHAEL EXCLAIMS OVER the concert tickets, the meal, the poem. He reads it out loud and laughs. “This is perfect, baby. It means more than you know. Sylvia Plath on my birthday.”
Feelin
g generous, I smile at him. I watch Michael eat. He’s gentle and funny, yummy-looking, with his long legs and dark hair that flops in his eyes and makes me want to push it up over his forehead. I remember our early days when just scrambling eggs together, or walking in the woods, I’d lean against him and feel blissful and safe. How his hands trembled when he reached for me, the peppery taste of his skin.
But his looks are like varnish sprayed over termite-riddled wood, shine over rot. A ghost picking at a chicken thigh.
IT’S TIME TO leave for the concert. I borrow some of Michael’s clothes—a long-sleeved tee-shirt, a flannel shirt, a camouflage jacket. I don’t want to attract attention, where there will be five guys for every girl.
On the way Michael makes a stop at an apartment complex I don’t recognize. He jogs into the building to buy drugs. When he comes back, I ask what he bought.
“Got me some E. Gotta have it for the mosh. You’ll mosh with me, won’t you? It’ll be awesome.” He loves the mosh pit, the pushing, head-banging, body-surfing. The uncontrolled violence where anything could happen.
At the arena, Michael shoves his way in, past tattooed skateboard kids, death-rockers, bikers, dazed surfer dudes. He drags me up to the front. A strong smell of weed makes me queasy. As the overhead lights dim, roving spotlights picks up the ripple of swaying bodies. When the band starts, the music is so amplified that my ribs vibrate, my head feels muffled in sound. An explosion booms from the stage, pocketed with bursts of white flame. At first we are on the edge of the mosh, then it engulfs us. Bodies bump me, their elbows prod.
I slip behind Michael and put my arms around his waist, tug on his arm until he leans down. “Happy birthday, baby,” I say into his ear. He can’t hear me, he is shouting, possessed by the crowd’s energy and the drug and the noise. He’s so thin I can count his ribs, feel his heart pulsing. All around us the crowd writhes and lurches. I slip my bandaged hand into my jacket pocket and feel the knife, wrapped in a small towel. Someone is being passed overhead, hand to hand, and he kicks Michael in the head. Michael staggers but the crowd holds him upright. I press myself to him and hold him tight, hold on to my sweet boy’s life.
The Years of the Wicked
THIS WARD’S LIKE Death Row, all of us in line for the big compost pile. Can’t stand the waiting. Or the noise. Beep, drip, whoosh. Who knew I’d end up hooked to machines? Sometimes it’s hard to hear the TV. I like 48 Hours and Cops. Bad boys, bad boys . . . Someday they’ll make a movie about my last case but I’ll never watch it. I’m sliding to eternity too fast. Damn. I’d like to see that movie, find out what I’ve forgotten.
One thing I’ve learned recently, talking helps me remember. See, even us old guys can learn, something Rhianna wouldn’t believe. “You’re a rigid thinker, John,” she’d say. An ex-wife can get bitter and say unkind things. But I don’t play that game. It could get back to our daughter that I’d said something mean about her mother, and I’m already on eggshells with that one. She just turned fifteen, kind of another rigid thinker.
The paint hasn’t dried on my last case. It irks me that the headlines blazed “Serial Killer!” It terrified the citizens of our quiet town, a fine place to live if you’ve got nerves, like I do. In my twenty-nine years on the police force, we never had a single homicide until that one bloody week.
The first death looked like a mugging. Early Sunday morning, Sam Klinkevals—a lawyer known for sucking lifeblood out of the gullible—looked out the back window of his office and saw a body in the alley. Once Sam figured out there was no profit in it for him, he called the cops.
I don’t work Sundays but I’ve always got the scanner on, another thing that drove Rhianna nuts, out of the house, and into the arms of that scrawny accountant. I’d just come back from visiting my Momma’s grave when the static broke and Drum’s shaky voice said, “10-54, possible dead body.” I pulled on my uniform and drove to the crime scene.
The body—really dead, not just possible—was a sixtyish male, a little soft around the middle like most of us. He lay face up, staring at a row of garbage pails. His nose had been relocated and his face was bloody, so he didn’t look like himself, but I knew him. I pulled up his jacket sleeve to show Drum a fading tattoo, a bulldog just like mine. Semper Fi, another Marine. I’d met him the night before. His name was Roman Falco.
I’d been chewing the fat with the bartender, a good buddy of mine, in Nam about the same time as me; he’d been a chopper pilot and I was infantry. That history marks you, gives you a bond. When Falco walked up, we saw the tattoo, and the three of us had a drink together, playing who-did-you-know and where-were-you-at. Hell, we even joked about post-traumatic stress and who had it worst. I won with my story about the time a helicopter flew overhead and set off a flashback, and I locked Rhianna in the bathroom for a day while I stood guard against the hordes of Cong yelling outside our front door. That was the first time Rhianna threatened to leave me, though I didn’t brag about that.
Chief Jerry asked me to find out more about the dead guy. It wasn’t hard. His car keys came from an agency at the airport; I advised them we’d have to impound the car and they wouldn’t get it back for a while. Notebooks and binders in the car told me Falco was traveling through, selling aluminum windows. I found a key to the Town Motor Lodge and went over there to check out his room. Just clothes, a ditty bag, a Ludlum thriller—nothing to suggest a motive for a murder.
Falco’s body went to the morgue. The medical examiner said he’d been killed when a single punch drove his facial bones into his brain. He’d been drunk, blood alcohol content of 0.13, which didn’t help his reflexes.
Two days later we were still investigating the Falco murder when the leech lawyer Sam Klinkevals killed himself. At least that’s what it looked like—he was in his car in his garage, car windows down, garage door shut, engine running until it quit when the car ran out of gas. Sam’s wife found him around noon and called 911. I was on patrol and got there in minutes.
She’d pulled Sam onto the garage floor. He was already stiff, bright pink from the carbon monoxide. He was dressed in his usual black suit, white shirt, striped tie—undertaker clothes, suitable for someone always delivering bad news. He’d been Rhianna’s divorce lawyer, a contributor to a very sorry chapter in my life. His wife went into the house to look for a suicide note but I waited with the body. I didn’t mind. I saw plenty of bodies in Nam. I’m not superstitious about them, though I stood behind so his eyes weren’t aiming at me.
The medical examiner pronounced carbon monoxide poisoning as the cause of death, wrote “suicide” on the death certificate, and that’s where it rested, until the next day, when the mayor was stabbed to death in her garage.
The mayor’s son called the police station in hysterics. I got him to stop snuffling long enough to tell me his mother had been hurt. I paged Chief Jerry, because I knew the mayor was her friend. She was getting her hair done and said she’d be there soon. Oh yeah, Chief Jerry’s female. Built like a shoebox with a bit of a mustache, but still, a female. My buddies kidded me about being replaced by a woman, but I was glad to give it up. Any time a citizen didn’t like my style, I’d hear about it from town hall. She’s better than I was at the personal stuff. She knows the right words.
The mayor’s house was in the historic district, in a colonial full of cats. Her son led me into the garage. He wasn’t fond of me, remembering the times I’d driven him home against his will because I knew his mother didn’t want him associating with riff-raff. Well, now he could associate with anyone he wanted to since his mother lay face down on the garage floor. I felt for a pulse in her neck, then lifted an eyelid to check her pupil.
“She’s dead, isn’t she?” the boy said. His face crumpled and tears spilled out of his eyes. I told him I understood, that my mom had died recently so I knew how hard it was. Momma was eighty-four years old, living on her own, gardening and playing cards right up until she went into the hospital. Maybe she didn’t feel so great, since she was ne
arly dead by the time the doctors finally figured out what was wrong. That’s water under the bridge, though I wished the boy wasn’t the one to find his mother’s body.
By the time Chief Jerry arrived, I had taped off the garage and started dusting for fingerprints. She looked prettier with her hair streaked blonde, but the moment wasn’t right to mention it. I can be sensitive, contrary to public opinion.
She knelt by the body and touched the mayor’s hand. “She was a good person. Makes you believe in evil.”
I shivered. Momma would have said someone was walking over my grave. “It’s the second homicide this week,” I said.
“I’m going to ask the State Bureau of Investigation for help. We need someone to direct the lab work and talk to the medical examiner. When’s the last time you read an autopsy report, John?”
“Umm, never?” I was trying to decide which of about a thousand greasy fingerprints to lift from the door.
“The SBI can get bank and cell phone records. Background checks. Credit card transactions. We don’t have those resources.” Her voice trembled, and for a second I thought she might cry. She took a few deep breaths and made the call to Raleigh. Females, they’re tough as Marines sometimes.
THAT AFTERNOON, DRUM and I were at our desks when we heard a car pull up. We looked out the plate glass window, like we always did, to see who it was. A dark-haired woman not much older than my daughter got out of a Dodge Intrepid. She opened the car’s back door and took out a briefcase and a red jacket.
Drum whistled. “Well, lookee that.”
“Don’t whistle. Makes us look like pea brains.”
Restless Dreams Page 5