The Wolves of Fairmount Park

by Dennis Tafoya

  Trey pulled the trigger once, a detonating crack and a flash of light that lit the hallway and the top of the stairs stark white for an instant before the SWAT team answered fire and there was the clattering of the small H&K submachine guns they carried and the pinging of brass as a rain of empty shells ejected onto the hardwood floors.

  Trey tripped trying to back down the stairs out of the line of fire, and the shots from the cops perforated the old plaster walls of the stairwell, missing Trey but dumping dust and bits of lath down on Danny and on Trey as he fell hard on his ass and skittered down the dozen stairs to come to rest at Danny’s feet. The shotgun cartwheeled out of the kid’s hands, clipping him on the head and clattering out into the entryway. Big John picked it up while Danny pointed his pistol at Trey’s face and the kid lifted his hand to touch a smear of blood on his forehead and said, ain’t that a motherfucker.

  Danny went back into the sitting room where one of the SWAT guys pointed a gloved hand down at the coffee table. There between a pizza box and a street copy of a monster movie on DVD was a black TEC-9 with a matte finish. It was old and scuffed up, with dull white metal showing through where the paint was worn through. Darnell and his cousin Pook were on the floor in handcuffs. Danny bent over the gun and inspected it, sniffed at the barrel. He could hear Pook swear under his breath.

  CHAPTER

  7

  Orlando raised one eyebrow to look at the camera over Mexican Bob’s door.

  “Bob.”

  There was a long silence. Orlando half-turned to watch the street.

  “Bob.”

  There was a click from the intercom, and he could hear breathing.

  “Bob, man, I’m on the clock here.”

  “Lift up your face.”

  Orlando looked at his shoes.

  “You heard me, man. Lift up your face.”

  Orlando worked his tongue in his jaw, then finally lifted his head and looked at the camera. There was another long pause.

  “You get picked up, cops throw you a beating, and you do what?”

  “Bob, man.”

  “You come right the fuck back here?”

  “It wasn’t a cop.”

  “Orlando.”

  “It wasn’t, it was something else.”

  “That supposed to make me feel better? The man knows your business, he knows you got business with me, he knows whatever else.”

  “Bob, man.” Orlando looked into the camera, held up his shaking hands. “Don’t just cut me loose.”

  “Go home.”

  “I’m in trouble.”

  “Yeah, Orlando, you are.”

  The street was bright now, and Orlando stepped to the curb and tried to think what to do next. He rubbed his face, and his hand came away with blood over the black grit in the heel of his hand. He stepped nearer to a storefront with a plate glass window and angled his head to catch his reflection, licking one grimy finger to try to wipe off the blood at his temple and running along the hollow of his eye.

  He became aware that he wasn’t alone in the reflected image and turned to see a slender girl standing at his elbow, swaying slightly. She was staring at him, or staring at the blood on his head and in his hair, and her face was empty, her mouth moving. Orlando had seen her before but couldn’t place her, a skinny girl with caramel-colored skin, a girl who had been beautiful before whatever had gotten to her. Her lips were full and dark and her eyes were large and blue, but there was grime at the corners of her eyes and her hair was lank, and something stained her dress dark in circles and blotches. Over the dress she wore a jacket with crossed hockey sticks that didn’t go with her once elegant outfit, except that the jacket, too, was stained and ripped.

  She reached out one small hand to touch his face and he caught it and tried to catch her eye, but she was focused on the damage to his face and as he watched she began to cry. Her expression didn’t change, but clear lines of water ran from her eyes, making clean tracks in the sooty grime on her face. She pulled her hand back from his, but then again she reached for his face and he turned slightly to let her, ready to recoil if she tried to scratch him. He had seen enough street-crazy women, even beautiful ones, to know they were unpredictable and sometimes dangerous.

  She touched his temple gently, and the crying intensified. She looked down and let her mouth open, working silently, her breath feeding a sort of muted, barely audible howl. It was crying the way kids did it, inconsolable, bottomless, as if nothing could ever be right again.

  “Sienna.”

  That was her name. It came to his lips, somehow bypassing his brain, the way it sometimes worked. He had seen her around the neighborhood, in the bars and on the street. A party girl, maybe a hooker. He had taken her in on the periphery of things without registering her before. People moved through the scene, sometimes up and out, sometimes down, like now. The drinking and copping stopped being a party and became a job, a life, and people emptied their lives into the street and wandered, stunned and broken. It happened. It was where his mother had gone.

  She turned away, not answering, looking at the spot of blood on her hands that had transferred from his face, and talked fiercely to it, words he couldn’t catch or understand. When she turned, though, he saw the distension in her short dress, a swelling that might have been anything but that he was afraid meant she was carrying another burden. Looking past her now, he saw a white police cruiser slowing on the street, the driver looking his way, and he turned his head and looked back into the shop window, his head down until he was alone on the street.

  When Kathleen and Brendan came home there were two dozen messages. Friends and news reporters and kids from school. There were a few hangups, one with the breathy sobbing of a young girl. Kathleen came down from her shower to find Brendan playing it over, his lips pursed.

  “Listen to this.”

  “Why?”

  “Does that sound like Jeannette?”

  He pushed the play button again, and they listened while Brendan moved the volume slider. Kathleen shrugged.

  “I don’t know, Bren. One young girl crying sounds pretty much like another, I guess.”

  Before the phone hung up, they heard another voice for a second, an older woman in a distant room asking what everyone wanted for dinner.

  Kathleen shook her head. “I don’t know, Bren.”

  He opened the machine, pulled out the tape. “I’ll give it to the detective, what’s his name. Martinez.”

  “Put another tape in, Bren. People need to be able to reach us.”

  “Are you pissed at me?”

  “No, I just want to get back to the hospital in case Michael wakes up.”

  “If it was Jeannette with them, if she knows something about what happened—”

  “I don’t care what happened. Get dressed, Brendan.”

  “You say that now, but I want to be able to tell Michael . . .” He lifted his hand and made a fist, a dark look on his face.

  “What, what can you tell him? You think this is ever going to make sense?”

  “I need to understand this.”

  “You need, that’s right. You. You think a world where someone points a machine gun at children can ever make sense?”

  “I want to be able to tell him I did what I could. To know the truth of it.”

  She saw he was upset and put her hand on his neck, the way she did when he’d had a shift so bad he couldn’t talk about it but sat in his blues in the kitchen looking out the window while a cup of coffee went cold on the table.

  “I don’t believe in truth, Brendan. I believe in you. And Michael. This house and work and dinner together most nights. The rest of it is the world going by and I don’t care about it. Even if you find the man who did this? What will you know, really? And how many more people will be hurt in the finding out? The truth? The truth, you can have.”

  . . .

  Orlando walked stiffly up Ridge, feeling the places where his abraded skin was being rubbed by the rough fabric of h
is jeans. His head throbbed and his stomach lurched and he knew he’d have to score or he’d get weaker and dopesick. He walked past storefront churches with names hand-painted or sprayed on like graffiti. The Triumph Apostolic Church of the New Age, the Starlight Holiness Church. He walked past Chinese takeouts fortified like Ulster police stations with bulletproof glass and barbed wire. Men and women sat on lawn chairs on the street in front of their houses or their shops, hair places and unlicensed notion stores, and everyone had something to say, some wisdom to offer, seeing him lurch up the street with blood in his hair and one closed eye. They told him to get along home, to run and hide, to get right with Jesus. At Thirty-third he turned north and caught the bus for Roxborough.

  The time had passed to be discriminate in his choices. There were people he’d call if he needed dope, and then there were places he’d go when he really needed dope. It wasn’t all the same. The quality of the dope, the vibe off the dealer, it all mattered when he was thinking straight, but when he was in a bad way it mattered less, and then not at all.

  Near the hospital he turned south and found a three-story white frame house that leaned, canted toward the street like a drunk heading for the gutter. He tried to make himself inconspicuous, smaller somehow as he headed up the walk to the front door. He knocked and waited.

  There was some rustling inside, some discussion, then he heard someone say, “We’re closed,” but before he could walk away the door opened and a young guy with red hair stood there, waving him in and shooing away a lean Puerto Rican kid who was shaking his head and pointing at Orlando.

  “I told you, just don’t say I didn’t tell you, right?”

  The red-haired guy smiled and propelled Orlando with one hand into the living room, which was stripped bare except for a sprung green couch and a chipped Formica table. The place smelled of burned dope and scented wax from a half-dozen candles stuck to the fireplace mantel. He could hear soft music from somewhere and voices upstairs and remembered that there were still people for whom dope was a vacation. Fun.

  Orlando finally pointed at the red-haired guy and smiled. “Asa, right?”

  “Yeah, that’s right.” Orlando knew him vaguely from the life, had heard his name, seen him pointed out by Bob or someone but couldn’t think where. Asa didn’t look particularly pleased to be recognized, but he put out a smile and invited Orlando to sit down with a wave. “Benigno thinks we ought to discriminate against you, given your brother’s a cop.”

  Orlando counted out a few bills and held them in his fist. Asa pointedly walked away, looking at Benigno, the Puerto Rican kid, who took the money and vanished into a back room. After a few minutes a young girl with a sweet face but ancient, guarded eyes came out of the back and waved Orlando into a darkened room off the empty kitchen.

  She carried in a tray and set it down on a scarred table while he sat in a plush chair under a ratty green slipcover that glowed slightly in the dark room. The girl shaped her mouth into a smile that carried nothing, but set up a candle that she lit with a wooden match. She lit a second match and ran it over the butt of the candle and stuck it to the table, then pulled a length of tube off the tray, set it down in front of him, then pulled out a bag, a needle, a spoon.

  Orlando, who noticed such things, lifted the glassine bag to his face and saw the logo, a green skull surrounded by lightning bolts and the word radioactive in block letters. He looked around him into the dark room, and the weak yellow light of the candle showed he wasn’t alone. In what looked to be an identical chair across the table there was a humped shape that revealed itself to be a man when he put a cigarette to his mouth, the end glowing silently as he pulled on it.

  “Don’t mind me,” the man said, his voice quiet, rolling with dope and drink and a soft Irish accent so that his words seemed to curl in on themselves. “You go ahead, man.” Orlando sat for a moment, gathering himself, then lifted the spoon and opened the little bag.

  He cooked up, tied himself off, and found the vein with his finger in the dark, a humped, sinewy wire at the crook of his elbow. When he fired the dope into his arm the man across the table lifted a bottle of Irish whiskey from the floor and slid it across the table. Orlando lifted it quick and put it to his lips, feeling the astringent burn of the liquor on his swollen lips and taking a quick swallow before the dope landed hard in his heart and he had to put the bottle down and roll back in the chair, his eyes drooping.

  “There you go, yeah?”

  Orlando couldn’t speak, but nodded, his head falling off the stalk of his neck as if unmoored. He saw the man reach to the floor again, and he must have turned up the volume on a CD player or a radio, because now there was music, louder in the room. A song about wolves in the snow, with a strange and high and reedy sound that drifted in Orlando’s head and set up vibrations in the echoing dark of his brain.

  “Beautiful,” Orlando said, or thought he did, and the man nodded but said nothing. The song ended and another came on, something very different. Violins, arcing and keening in a way that suggested sleek and shadowed things moving in a black sea, so much that Orlando peered around him in the dark, half expecting to see long shapes curling around the legs of the table.

  “This music,” he said, shaking his head.

  “Oh, yeah,” said the man, reaching to grab the bottle and taking a long pull so that Orlando could see the hard knot at his throat working in the dark. He put the bottle down again, lit another cigarette. “It makes me see them,” he finally said. “Calls them to mind.”

  Orlando shook his head. “Who?”

  “The ones out there, in the river. The ones moving in the river at night.”

  Orlando said nothing, watching the cigarette glow and fade, glow and fade in the dark.

  “Do you think of them?” The man moved, and Orlando could see he was wearing dark glasses, even here. The man lifted a hand, held it in front of his face in the near dark. It glowed white in the flickering light of the green candle. “I think of them. Moving, slow, down the bottom of the river. Nothing to stop them, nothing to hold on to. Even if they could reach out, what would there be? Just the silt, that slick black silt? The smooth stones and cold water and nothing to stop them till they come to the sea.”

  Orlando stared, straining to see the man, part of him there in the room and part of him in the river with the blue, drifting bodies. The man moved his hand, and Orlando could see it there in the space in front of him. The darkness and the mud. Smooth stones below and the cold river all around. The moon overhead, bloated and misshapen by the view from the river bottom. A body, twisting slowly, arms wide, hands empty and luminous in the black water.

  Danny Martinez sat with John Rogan in a bad room that hadn’t been painted in so many years he couldn’t say what color the walls were anymore. The furniture was ancient dark wood and steel speckled with rust, and there were posters on the walls going back years—public service posters and wanted flyers and interoffice memos taped and tacked over each other like sedimentary deposits on the walls of some lost cave of the civil bureaucracy.

  On the table between them was the gun that had been used to shoot George and Michael. Ballistics would take a while, but that’s what Danny believed the tests would show. Handcuffed to a ring on a chair nearby was Darnell Burns, the star of this play, though he didn’t know it yet; his head up, looking defiant in the chastised schoolboy way of low-level criminals.

  “Darnell, tell us about the Nortes.” Danny squared off a stack of files on the chair. They were arrest reports he’d grabbed from John’s desk, but they made a large pile and Danny would pat it while they talked, letting Darnell think what he would about what was in the files.

  “They ain’t shit to me.” Darnell thrusting out his chin.

  Big John raised an eyebrow at Danny, turned away to hide his smile. This wasn’t even sport.

  “But they come to Green Lane, disrespect you, disrespect Ivan . . .”

  “Let them come, see what happens.”

  “We kn
ow, don’t we, John?” John Rogan turned back, working his pen in his hands the way he did. Clicking, twirling, clicking. “We know they came down, and someone had to do something. Set up on one of your blocks. Act like Green Lane don’t mean shit.”

  “Ivan says, never let them think they can move, or they will.”

  “That’s right, that’s right. You had to head it off. You had to send a message about what’s what. Who runs what. You had to let them know that they had crossed the line. So you sent Trey to do something.”

  Darnell’s brow creased. “Trey?”

  “See, we got Trey’s fingerprints on this gun, and we know this gun did the murder at Roxborough Avenue.”

  “I don’t know nothing about that business. That gun showed up—”

  “Yeah, we heard that story before. That the gun was thrown in with some dope you bought yesterday.”

  “Yeah, I told you—”

  “Darnell. You got to think clearly now.”

  John leaned in at Darnell and spoke for the first time, the squared-off plain of his giant forehead looming. “The clock is ticking.”

  Danny nodded and pointed at John. “See, there you go. You can sit there and say I don’t know, and it wasn’t me, but in another room just like this one, Trey and Pook and all of them are trying to explain why the murder gun is on your mother’s coffee table. What do you think they’re going to say, Darnell?”

  “Bullshit.”

  Danny smiled. “The DA is coming, Darnell. And the DA is going to get a story and go see the judge. She ain’t waiting on Darnell Burns.” Danny got up, went to the coffeemaker and poured a few inches into a gritty foam cup, and set it in front of Darnell.

  “This is a mess, Darnell. I don’t know if you get it. A child is dead. A white child, and we both know what that means. Another child is shot, and that’s the child of a policeman.” He shook his head. “I know you know what that means, too. And we come to your house, and we bring the SWAT, and Trey comes out shooting, almost gets killed, and you have any idea what all that costs the city? It ain’t cheap, a gunfight. Every single bullet they fire costs money, and all the paperwork and the time and all that.”