The Wolves of Fairmount Park

by Dennis Tafoya

  “Yeah? Who’s that?” Orlando finally rolled himself onto the seat, breathing through his mouth and fighting the urge to vomit. The guy had been right about that.

  “The kid that got killed, he was the son of a very rich and powerful man. Someone’s got to answer for that, right?”

  Orlando could see what was around them now, and he saw that they were moving east and south, toward the Delaware. A couple blocks from the circle that would lead to the Ben Franklin and Jersey beyond. He didn’t know what this crazy fucker wanted from him, but he didn’t want to find out, either.

  “Those kids were like a block and a half from you when they got shot. You see how it looks, right?”

  “How does it look?” He could see the doors were unlocked, the guy maybe depending on speed and reckless driving or just sheer force of personality to keep Orlando from bolting. Then the guy lifted his right arm and laid it over the top of the seat next to him, and there was the gun again. It was pointing down along the seat, not directly at Orlando, but the guy was idly fanning the hammer with his thumb.

  “You got a couple of kids scoring dope, no offense to the dead kid or his family. You got a known dope addict, the uncle of one of the kids, a block away. So inquiring minds want to know. Did those kids come to you? You knew those guys and told the kids where to go to cop?” Collins’s hand tensed and he cocked the gun and Orlando sat back straight and focused on the hand and the heavy black pistol until the guy thumbed back the hammer and let it slowly down. Jesus Christ.

  Orlando looked down into the mess on the floor and saw a thick green empty beer bottle. Moosehead. He looked up and saw they were moving down Race toward the bridge and he wasn’t going over any fucking bridge with this lunatic and whoever else was in his massive, red skull.

  He bent over and reached down into the pile of cans and bottles and his left hip ached and he retched a little, looking up at the pistol a couple of inches from his face, but his hands closing on the bottle and bringing it back up with him as he sat back.

  Collins turned. “Are you puking? What did I tell you, man? Sit still.” They were coming to the light at Eighth, the Volvo out in the middle lane. The light was red and the guy slowed but didn’t stop, letting the car coast toward the bumper of a Wawa truck and then cutting right into a gap behind a black SUV. Orlando pitched forward again and the guy lifted his gun hand and began to turn and Orlando hit him as hard as he could across the side of the head, swinging his tethered hands in a clumsy side-arc swing. The first time the bottle bounced off his skull with a hollow ringing noise and the guy swung the car hard right and it bounced off the curb so Orlando wound up again, half falling off the seat as the car swerved, but focused on putting everything he had into one more hard swing and this time the bottle broke and the guy screamed and dropped the gun and clutched at a bright ribbon of blood at his temple.

  Collins lost it, howling and pawing on the seat for the gun, and Orlando let go of the piece of bottle still stuck to his hand and grabbed the handle of the door and was holding it when the car stopped hard so that he was thrown forward, his forehead painfully connecting with the back of Collins’s head. Collins moaned and slumped.

  Orlando pushed at the door and had it half open, his left leg out, when there was a loud pop that he felt through the frame of the car as a green and white PECO truck slammed into the back of the Volvo. He bounced forward off the door and smacked down into the street, trying to catch himself on his cuffed hands, and then rolled with his hands pinned beneath him as more cars and trucks stopped short, rocking on their suspensions, and he heard a woman scream somewhere nearby.

  There was a quiet moment, a little pause, and he could feel cool air on his bruised face and grit from the street under the backs of his hands. He rolled onto his side, then drew himself up onto his knees. Finally, he rocked slowly onto his feet and turned to see Collins slumped over the steering wheel, and he took off, running slowly and then faster and faster, heading west back up Race and cutting between the stopped cars while two guys piled out of the PECO truck and hollered at him to stop. Already he could see cop cars coming out of the Roundhouse parking lot with their lights on, and he picked up speed, running flat out past people who took him in, his cuffed hands and bloodied face, and they looked surprised and some looked angry, the way people could get when something was so unexpected and strange and upsetting that it was out of the realm of what they could hold in their heads on a Monday morning on their way to work.

  Orlando ran hard for a couple of blocks, uphill past a mural of smiling Chinese kids, then cut right over the expressway, slowing when he made the turn and trying to fold his hands against his stomach while he limped along, breathing hard and occasionally spitting to keep the nausea down.

  He zigzagged across the lanes of traffic on Vine, keeping his head down and moving north past a church covered with ideograms that looked like a secret message from an unknowable God. At Nectarine he spotted a ripped poncho lying in the gutter and picked it up, draping it across his cuffed hands. The effort of bending down as he walked filled his throat with a hot bile and he spit into the street to keep from being sick. His right eye was half closed with blood, his temple throbbed, and he could feel road dirt and glass in the backs of his hands as he moved.

  He walked blindly for a block, his head down, adjusting the frayed blue poncho over his hands. At the corner he stopped, looked back down Thirteenth toward Vine Street, watched an ambulance make its way down from Hahnemann along Vine. Turned and got his bearings, headed for home.

  . . .

  Danny Martinez sat in a van at the end of Lamport Road in Upper Darby, watching a house in the middle of the block with a pair of binoculars. It was a quiet street of cramped row homes backed by wide alleys. His dad had gone to St. Cyril’s, a few blocks away, and his grandmother had lived just off Long Lane in East Lansdowne and he could still see the kitchen of the tiny house in his mind’s eye though he hadn’t been near it in years, not since she’d died and they’d buried her at Holy Cross, out in Yeadon.

  Next to him sat Big John Rogan, folded almost double into a small chair, wearing a pair of headphones. Big John squinted with the effort of trying to hear the conversation going on in number 76, where the mother of Ivan and Darnell Burns lived. Ivan was the head of the Green Lane crew, and he was locked up on weapons charges, pulled over for driving drunk and high when it turned out he had an unregistered Glock on the seat beside him. Being too fucked up at the time to remember to cover it.

  Danny dropped the binoculars and rubbed his eyes. “What do we hear?”

  “Darnell wants breakfast from the Caribbean place up on Sixty-ninth. Trey wants Burger King.”

  “They getting into it?”

  “Nah, Darnell’s still playing boss and Trey’s pretending to get along. There’s no respect there, that’s all for Ivan. But Trey’s smarter than Darnell, so he knows how to play.”

  “Anything about the shooting, the kids, anything?”

  “Nah. Breakfast. Who’s driving the mother to lunch with her church friends. They’re talking about someone’s coming by for something they’re holding, and who they’d rather get next to from that show, Lost. Trey says Michelle Rodriguez, Darnell likes the tall girl.”

  “Michelle, definitely.”

  “I don’t know, she’s got problems.”

  “Yeah, but I got that rescuer complex. I think I can straighten her out.” Danny looked through the binoculars again. A gangly kid lounged on a folding chair on the front steps. He had a black muscle shirt under a red jacket and kept touching his stomach, where, Danny figured, there was a pistol stuck in his jeans. “They all got problems, those Hollywood girls.”

  Big John closed his eyes. “They’re too pretty. All pretty girls are trouble. I think they go crazy from not knowing anything except everybody wants to get with them.”

  “Yeah, it’s a burden. When does SWAT get here?”

  “Nine forty-five. They’re serving a warrant in West Oak Lane, then
we’re next.”

  “What if Trey goes out for breakfast? We’re going to miss scooping them all up.”

  Big John held up a finger. Danny watched him, his eyes raised.

  “Darnell’s mom is going to make pancakes.”

  Orlando stood at a corner on North Broad, watching the front of R and R Service. He lounged against the sign at the corner and tried to look normal, but a woman waiting for the bus caught him out of the corner of her eye and shook her head.

  “You run, baby. Don’t let them get you standing still.” She walked away down Broad, probably not wanting to be around when whatever trouble was chasing Orlando finally caught up.

  Orlando watched the attendants working the place, all suited up in blue coveralls with pinstripes. Calling to each other, giving each other early morning shit. Drinking coffee, orange and white cups from the Dunkin’ Donuts up Spring Garden. After a few minutes he made his way up the south side of the open lot in front of the garage and waited for one of the guys, a tall kid with shaggy black hair, to move closer to where Orlando stood.

  “Marty.”

  The kid jumped a little, took in Orlando standing there, the ratty piece of plastic over his folded hands, his face bloodied and his clothes torn.

  “Jesus. What the fuck, man?”

  “Marty, it’s me.”

  The kid stood with a lug wrench in his fist, moved back a couple of paces, but Orlando just raised his covered hands.

  “Orlando?”

  “Hey.”

  “Fuck, man. You scared the shit out of me.”

  “Sorry, man.” He looked over his shoulder at the street. A cop car went by, cruising slowly up North Broad, and Orlando canted his body slightly to give it his back.

  Marty watched the car go by, turned back to his friend. “You’re in trouble.” It wasn’t a question.

  Orlando shook his head. “Tell the truth, I don’t even know.”

  Marty cocked his head, and Orlando snorted.

  “Yeah, okay, I’m in trouble, I guess I don’t know with who. Some guy picked me up, but I don’t think he was a cop. He was just some pissed-off asshole.”

  Marty pointed at Orlando’s hands with the wrench. “What’s going on under there?”

  Orlando stepped closer, trying to shield himself from view with the side of the tool chest. He flipped his hands up, caught the scrap of poncho, and showed his wrists to Marty. The plastic had bitten through the flesh, and there were long tracks of blood disappearing into the cuffs of his jacket. Marty looked at Orlando’s hands for a minute, then lifted the poncho and dropped it back over them. He looked hard at Orlando’s face, too, at the bruises and cuts there, then back over his shoulder into the garage. He stood there for a long time, then dropped his head like he was praying.

  “Marty.”

  “Go up around the corner to Sixteenth Street.” He dropped the lug wrench and turned his back. “I’m on my break in a couple minutes. Go up there and I’ll be up in a minute.”

  Orlando stood against a chain-link fence and moved his arms and legs against the cramps that were starting to form at his shoulders and knees. The bruise at his right eye had drawn up into a hard knot, and his stomach twisted, telling him he needed to start thinking about dope.

  He looked up in time to see Marty rounding the corner, the metal beak of the tin snips sticking out of his coverall pocket. He’s straight, Orlando thought. It was something you could see in the lines around his eyes, a flatness and a distance from the world that he recognized.

  He thought it was something like the look that he’d heard vets talk about. The thousand-yard stare. They’d seen something, the ones who’d kicked, and it was always there forever in their eyes. They’d been where Orlando went every day and it changed them, but now they were on the other side of things and it wasn’t there for them anymore except as an image burned onto their retinas like the floating red ghosts of bright lights that had been turned off.

  Now he smiled at Orlando and held his hands out for Orlando’s cuffed arms under the parka, but the look on his face was the tolerant and sorrowful gaze of an older brother whose wild days are long over. Orlando stood patient as a child while Marty fit the snips around the cuffs and worked them back and forth, the plastic turning a hard white before slowly giving up and parting.

  Orlando grimaced and worked his wrists in his hands one at a time while Marty looked up and down the street, flinging the plastic wraps over the fence into some weeds.

  “Thanks, man.”

  Marty shook his head, no problem, but looked like there was more he wanted to say.

  “What?”

  Marty just looked down. “Take care of yourself, Orlando.”

  “How’s Mary? Zoe saw her with the baby.”

  “She’s good, man. You should . . .” He shrugged.

  “Yeah.” Do what? Come by? Come have dinner? Or talk over old times? When they’d walked the lines of parked cars on Frankford at three in the morning, trying doors to find one open? Not even to steal, some nights, but just to find a place to sleep? Or the time they’d rolled a drunk behind a bar on Girard, the guy’s smell bad enough to make them gag while they poked through his pockets for a couple of dollar bills soggy with urine?

  Marty fished in his pocket and came out with a crumpled ten and folded it in Orlando’s blackened fingers. Orlando nodded, looked up the street and said, “thanks, man.” Wondered what Marty saw when he looked at him.

  Marty turned away, and Orlando said, “What’s it like?”

  The big kid turned back, threading the snips into his pocket. Orlando tried to remember how old Marty was. Twenty-three, twenty-four? There were white wires threaded in his black hair and deep hollows beneath his cheekbones.

  “It’s okay.” He lifted one shoulder, let it drop. “It’s okay. We eat breakfast on Sundays, up at Bob’s. I talked to my mom last month. She’s coming to see the baby. Maybe she is. I did so much stupid shit when I was high, I wouldn’t blame her if, you know, she was done.” He smiled. “It’s not jail. I don’t feel sick in the morning. I read a fucking book last week. Some days everything looks like shit, food doesn’t taste like anything. I don’t know. But it’s not prison and I go home every night.” He was talking to himself, too. “I just got to believe this is better, you know? Staying alive is better.” Marty shrugged again, that was all he had. He turned away.

  Orlando watched him go. He got his bearings off the street signs, stretched, struck out north.

  There was a shot. Danny heard it, out in the world and then in his earpiece a half second later, the stony pop ricocheting around the neighborhood, and his heart did that thing in his chest like it was turning over, registering that things were going wrong and he wasn’t in control of events.

  Danny crouched at the edge of a stone wall at the foot of Lamport Road. He had on a Kevlar vest and held his pistol between his legs, pointing down. It was a good pistol, an H&K USP .45 he’d gotten the year before when his mother had given him a couple thousand dollars of the insurance money she’d gotten when his father had died of a stroke at the side of 95 during rush hour.

  He’d been on his way to teach a class in HVAC at Bucks County Community College. He’d lived long enough for the medics to get him on the ambulance. To see his face while he tried to say whatever was in his head. He’d opened and closed his mouth, crying with frustration at whatever was stuck behind his thickened lips. His father had always been quiet, the kind of man who observed things from a wry and considered distance, and it bothered Danny for a long time that he’d held on to something he’d wanted to say and never got it out at the last.

  Now Danny tensed and dropped a little lower. So did Big John, but he was already so exposed it hardly mattered. They both looked up reflexively at the door two houses up the street where the SWAT guys were standing over the kid with the red jacket sprawled half in and half out of the chair and someone on the radio said, “Shit.”

  The SWAT guys Danny knew were good guys, careful an
d rehearsed and economical in their movements and when they were involved things usually went well, but they were there because sometimes things went wrong and people didn’t always want to go quietly, and once in a while someone reached for his waistband instead of giving it up and things got bad.

  Now the people in the house knew they were there and the guys at the door yelled go, go, go, and the door was breached by a short guy with a shaved head who swung a squat battering ram that popped the lock.

  Danny got up and ran up the walk and took the stairs two at a time, Big John loping after him on his bad knees. Martinez reached the top of the stairs where two SWAT guys were hunched over the kid who’d been shot, one of them pushing a compression bandage down on the kid’s chest and shouting into the radio, but the other one was looking over his shoulder at Danny with pursed lips and no fucking way in his eyes.

  Danny went in, his pistol up, touching the back of the last SWAT guy to tell him he was there and watching them clear the rooms. His heart was beating hard, vibrating in his chest with a fast pulse so that he could feel the blood jetting out to the ends of his arms, and he knew he could never do SWAT because he’d become addicted to that feeling, that rush of going heavy through barricaded doors and pushing the shotgun out in front of him to get them down on the floor, and then he’d be no good for anything else.

  In the living room he saw Darnell go over, pushed down on his face and his hands jerked behind him by two black helmets working with a furious economy while his mother moaned, a shrill, oscillating whine that leaked around the hands she had clapped over her mouth, fat tears standing on her cheeks. Another tall kid dropped wearily to his knees, his hands splayed across the back of his neck. Shaking his head, shit, not again.

  Danny heard more shouting from overhead and went back toward the front door to get a view of the stairs leading up to the second floor. He heard the deep voice of one of the SWAT guys barking orders and then saw Trey King back to the top of the stairs with an expensive-looking Mossberg shotgun that was too big to swing in the little row house, trying to cover all the SWAT guys that were no doubt arrayed against him. He was a big kid, bulked up from jail and wild with the coke they’d been doing all morning. He was stripped to the waist, wearing only low-slung, baggy black shorts, and his back was slick with sweat.