He thought he heard a pop, then one of the windows to the right of the door blew out and suddenly the place was full of light. There were two more shots, then the steady clacking of an automatic weapon and bits of the door sprayed the street. Angel put the front sight of the AR-15 on the window where he’d seen the small flare of light and fired three shots, starring the glass.
The front door opened and Chris came out fast, his empty pistol locked open and two cases under his arm. Gerry Dunn was right behind him, limping, his left arm hanging and dark with blood. Angel walked the AR-15 over the windows, shooting blind, and when he’d emptied it he picked up the duffel and banged through the door to the stairs, jamming the long gun into the bag and pulling the pump gun out as he dropped fast down the dark stairway.
At the bottom of the stairs he dropped the duffel and ran across the street, where Frank Dunn had run from the corner and was unloading his AK into the front door of the hotel while Chris passed him going the other way. Chris jumped into the car and ground the gears, his face white and sweat standing out on his face and darkening his shirt. Angel ran up the three stairs to the door and kicked it off its hinges, putting the Remington out in front of him and stepping into the glare of two portable halogen work lights set up on the stairs across the lobby.
Angel crab-walked sideways from the door, keeping the shotgun up, but there was no more shooting. The walls were pink, mottled with brown water stains and decorated with old panel moldings and medallions outlined in black dust. The floor was littered with expended shells, long rifle casings standing in a bright puddle at the base of the stairs and squat, dull shells from the pistols Chris and Gerry carried scattered around near the front door. In the center of the floor was the African, sitting upright in a pink chair, his eyes open, still trying to talk. Angel crossed the room fast to stand flat against the wall.
He reloaded the shotgun and lifted it to shoot out the light standing on the floor near an elevator door. The single blast echoed in the long room and the light heeled back, spraying glass across the far wall and leaving one lone bulb working, throwing long shadows in the room so that each shell casing left a long tail on the floor and the shadow of the African in his chair suddenly loomed on the wall by the front door. Blood ran in vivid streaks down the short legs, as if the chair itself were bleeding out.
Angel dropped low and sighed, then pushed himself out in front of the stairs, raising the gun to his shoulder and firing three times fast, working the short pump as he took the stairs two at a time to reach the landing and kick over the blind the African’s man had made. The stacked doors collapsed onto the sagging mattress; the walls were pocked with holes from the pistols and now from the buckshot in Angel’s Remington. There were more bright shells from a rifle and Jesus, belts of ammunition for a machine gun. Long trails in the white dust leading back down the hall, but there was no blood, no body. The man with the rifle was gone.
Angel walked back out through the lobby to the street, where he found himself alone in the rain. He went around the corner to Fairmount, where Frank Dunn’s old Firebird idled at the curb, leaking blue smoke. The streetlights were ringed with white circles of fine drops. Frank got out from behind the wheel, holding a hand up as Angel rounded the edge of the building.
“We got to go.” His voice was strangled with the effort to keep himself in check. “Gerry’s shot and we got to go.” He stepped away from the open door to point back into the car and then there was a loud rattling that became a roar of rapid-fire pops from the blackness down the block toward Thirteenth. Bullets cracked and sang, punching through windshields and parked cars. Frank Dunn grabbed at his throat and went down, spraying the open car door with his blood. Angel dropped behind a rust-colored Escort a few feet away and listened to the wet coughing noises Frank made as blood poured out of him into the street. From inside the car Gerry screamed and thrashed, trying to get to his brother in the street while Chris struggled with him.
Angel shook his head and made a motion with his arm as if pushing something away. “That’s what he wants,” he said under his breath, but Gerry was winning the fight with Chris, pulling his own huge upper body out onto the street to clutch his brother’s legs. There was more firing, the cracking noise of the rifle echoing down the street. The big 7.62 rounds Angel had seen in the hotel that didn’t stop when they hit cars or walls. The bullets missed Gerry but punched through the open door, splintering the glass and knocking the door handle off to clink down onto the pavement a few feet from where Angel crouched. A thin rivulet of blood moved past his shoes carrying bits of paper, a cigarette filter with a band of gold.
Angel stood up and fired the shotgun down the black street, seeing only rows of parked cars lining the north side of Fairmount where the man must be hiding. He ducked back down again and more shots splattered against telephone poles and the old brick hotel. There was a pause and then two more shots, one kicking up water and chips of asphalt from the wet street and one smacking Gerry Dunn in the band of white belly exposed as he leaned out of the car to grab at his brother.
Angel shook his head and stood up then, running into the dark between the streetlights and firing down the line of cars. The heavy steel shot rang dissonant chords off the car bodies, bits of plastic and bright cubes of glass spraying the wet asphalt. He kept moving, pumping the gun fast and putting the sight on each car in turn, trying to drive the man out into the street. There was a lull when he dropped behind a green Acura and reloaded, and then he heard laughing and the man yelling something in French.
He popped up again, the gun at his cheek, in time to see him, the African’s man, running flat out with a rifle in his hands, rounding the corner on Thirteenth Street. He was tall, wearing a red shirt, and had long plaits of dark hair and limped slightly as he ran, appearing under a streetlight at the corner and then moving fast out of the circle of light. The machine gun, a big FN with a handle on the top, Angel thinking, Jesus, that must weigh a ton. Angel ran the last yards to the intersection and turned, his breath coming hard. He could hear the sound of the tall man running, the rhythmic slap of his feet on the wet pavement fading into the tapping sounds of the rain.
After a minute he jogged back up toward Broad. People had begun to come out of their houses on Thirteenth, cell phones stuck in their ears. He got up to where Frank’s car had been and found it gone. Frank and Gerry lay on the street, their blood running in long lines toward the gutter and diffusing in the rainwater. Frank’s eyes were open, his face slack and white. Gerry lay on his stomach, one arm thrown across his brother’s chest and his right ear to the blacktop as if listening for some noise from under the ground.
Brendan drove north along Memphis Street, counting houses from the little park, and there it was. The house he’d been raised in, the house his half brother had been born in. He tried to picture them all together, his crazy mother, his damaged brother, his straight-arrow father, trying to think of when they’d been a family and not getting a single image of them in the same room at the same time.
The place was empty, it looked like. Plywood covered one of the downstairs windows, the front speckled with holes as if some war had been fought out on the street. Some kind of notice stuck to the door. Foreclosure, seizure for back taxes, something.
Staying out of the house and away from her, that was the thing. He’d come home from school to find her holding court in a room full of rummies from some bar she’d been in all day. Having a party, she’d called it. Hanging with the mushmouthed drunks, talking about how she was going to Florida, about all the people who fucked with her who were going to get theirs.
The day he’d packed and left. His mother gone somewhere, his father moving fast, looking at his watch. Taking out the little plaid suitcase, grabbing his trophy from Little League and jamming it into a box from Beer City. His father trying to hurry Brendan along and it making him nervous, afraid of what she might do if she came back.
There wasn’t anything of him in that house, he thought. His
father had taken him to live in South Philly, and when he’d grown up and gone onto the force he’d moved into Manayunk with Kathleen. He couldn’t even call up the inside of the place he’d grown up, even sitting on the street outside, but got little snapshots. He remembered hiding from his mother in an upstairs closet. He remembered spying on her in the kitchen while she drank and muttered to herself. He remembered taking his little brother down to the corner store to buy ice cream, and watching the kids who sat on the stoops and smoked, who watched the two of them go by and called to them, laughed and looked at each other, passing some signal, their mouths open with their terrible, feral smiles.
Had he made some promise to Orlando? To go back and get him, to rescue him from their mother, the strange, bitter drunk she’d become? He’d been a kid himself when his father had taken him away. He’d have taken his little brother with him if he could have. It wasn’t his fault. What happened to Orlando. Where he ended up, what became of him. Where he landed when he fell.
Angel stood in Hannah’s small living room in the middle of the night. His shirt was off and he’d pulled his jeans over his skinny hips. He looked back in through the open bedroom door to where she slept, her yellow hair splayed out over the pillow. She screwed up her features and muttered something in German. Her half of an argument playing out in her dreams, he figured. A mother or father and some argument she could never win, no matter how she laid it out in her head every night.
When he first came over he used to write postcards to his mother, long dead by then. He’d been a strange and a lonely kid, and he’d swiped a handful of postcards from a store down on Market near the river for no reason other than the owner’s back was turned and there they were. At night he’d lie on the floor by the oblong of light coming under the door to his room, forming each letter with painful slowness. He’d start each one Dear Ma, and he’d write a line or two about school, as if he were still going, or how kind the Devlins were to him, though he was terrified of them both and would stay away for days at a time. He’d leave the cards at St. Peter’s in Fishtown, stuck between some votive candles in their red glass holders.
One winter night when he was seventeen Tommy Devlin had driven him up to Frankford and pointed out a garage where a roofing rig stood half out of the bay, the thing black with tar, and handed him a rolled-up newspaper and a heavy lighter. He’d wedged the paper under the tank and lit it and the thing went up, burning with a stingy blue flame and black, stinking smoke. Angel had watched it go up from the street, his thin raincoat gathered around him like a cape, and was standing there still when a guy came out and went for the hose. The guy was big across the shoulders, with curly black hair. He was wearing a purple robe flapping open to show thermal underwear and ripped work pants, and his feet were stuck in unlaced boots with lolling yellow tongues. The tap was frozen solid and the guy swore and kicked at it and one of the boots came off.
He finally took in Angel standing there, shaking in the cold. The guy screamed something at him and grabbed him by the arm, going up and down on the one boot. Angel dropped to his knees, pulling the guy off balance so that he flapped his free hand in the air and swore. Angel grabbed a piece of cinder block that had been used as a chuck for the rig tires and brought it hard up into the man’s temple and the guy went down, blood springing from his head like a tap opened in the street. The man moaned as the rig slowly drifted into the road, burning tar dripping behind as it rolled. Tom Devlin honked then, one long blast from the horn, and Angel dropped the block in the street and walked away without looking back.
He went home that spring, back to wander Belfast like a ghost. His aunt’s house had been torn down to make way for a market and his friends were all scattered. He saw two little kids in Clonard in the shadow of the ragged wall they called the peace line, playing with a junked bike turned over, spinning the wheels. He asked where everybody was and they’d said they’d buggered off, and laughed a secret laugh to each other and told him he should bugger off, too.
He got a tattoo in Wellington Place, a wolf biting a sword and the words NEITHER COLLAR NOR CROWN. He had a picture he’d given to the girl at the shop, his father at eighteen sitting on a parked car, the same beetle brows, the same full lips, wearing a white shirt with one sleeve rolled up and the tattoo fresh and bloody on his arm. He’d pointed it out to the girl and apologized for the small size of the picture, but she’d said it was a design she’d seen before on some of the old-timers around the Falls and Shankill and she’d sketched it for him in fast strokes on thin white paper.
He’d gotten it in the same place as his father, his lower right bicep, and standing in Hannah’s narrow living room he held it up to a small mirror on the wall near the front window. It was black in the weak yellow light from the street. On the left arm was a design he’d gone back and gotten the next day, before leaving again for Philadelphia. A cross with a flaming heart wrapped in razor wire. Below that were the words BY KNIFE, BY GUN and twelve tick marks in small neat groups. The last small mark was still fresh, surrounded by a penumbra of red.
. . .
Orlando got off the bus on Lancaster Avenue, pulling at a suit jacket Zoe had picked out for him from the Goodwill on Front Street. It was too big, but it made him look like he had shoulders, and he ducked to catch himself in the sideview mirror as the bus pulled away, turning one way and then the other, admiring the effect. Zoe followed and stood by him, pursing her lips. She was dressed in a white blouse and a dark skirt and had makeup on and pale lipstick that softened her features. He felt something, a flush of heat in his chest that he knew was guilt at seeing her looking like a young girl again. Which she was, or had been, before she’d met him.
She turned to him, opening a small makeup case, and rubbed her finger on a pad and then smoothed a pale line onto his brow to cover the bruises there. He caught her hand and kissed her fingers, and she smiled and shook her head. They walked up a long drive from the street, past a wrought-iron fence and wide fields of grass that were a wet, hypnotic green. Kids stood in clumps and couples, sweaters tied at their waists, book bags swinging. Ahead were redbrick buildings and old trees hanging over slate walks.
Orlando got quiet, so Zoe tapped the arm of a boy wearing a blazer and tie and asked him some questions. He pointed to where some kids stood around a girl with bright red hair sitting on the steps to one of the buildings. Her hair was growing out, but Orlando recognized her from the picture in George Jr.’s room. Marianne Kilbride. She wore a white shirt and a tie, red sneakers that set off her hair. When she looked up to talk to another girl, Orlando could see thick mascara around her pale green eyes.
“Marianne?”
She looked up, her eyes guarded, and lifted her book bag into her lap as if trying to hide behind it. She looked from Orlando to Zoe, took in his scuffed boots and her cheap bag, and dropped her gaze to her own hands plucking at the strap of her bag.
“Are you reporters?” She lifted the bag higher on her lap and looked around her as if for help.
“No.” Orlando took in the jagged black lines she’d inked on her forearms when her sleeves rode up.
“There have been a bunch of fucking reporters. They ask you all these questions and they don’t even listen to goddamn answers and then they put all this shit in the paper that you never said.” She looked at him fiercely, suddenly the girl in the picture come to life.
“I’m Michael Donovan’s uncle.” He told her his name and put out his hand, and she shook it.
“You’re the one, then? I heard they were on their way to see you or something? Did you see them? That night?” She lifted her small hands, looking from him to Zoe.
“No, Marianne.” He kept his voice low, conscious that other people were watching them talk. He saw a kid with a fauxhawk of moussed hair walk fast toward a parking lot at the side of the building.
Marianne Kilbride dropped her head. “Like it matters now. What happened to Geo. Like anybody can do anything.”
Zoe sat on the bottom step
and tried to catch her eye. “We’re trying to figure out what happened, Marianne.”
“I heard Michael was awake or whatever. What did he say?”
Orlando knelt down next to Zoe. “He’s still in pretty rough shape. He doesn’t remember much yet. He might not ever get it all back.” Somewhere a bell rang, and kids began to drift into the buildings. “Marianne, the cops think Geo was going to score in that house. Do you think he was getting high?”
She looked up and her eyes went wide, and Orlando became conscious of a shadow falling across his shoulder as a big hand grabbed his sleeve and jerked him to his feet. It took Orlando a minute to place the face—the big kid from the picture, holding George Jr.’s arm up and wearing a cap and gown. Now the kid had Orlando bent backward over the iron railing of the fence and was pushing him hard, squeezing the breath out of his lungs.
The kid’s hair was shorter than in the picture and he had on a blue button-down shirt with the name ken over the breast pocket. His eyes were huge and black and his breath hissed in his nose, which Orlando could see had been broken and reset. A brawler, Orlando thought. He tried to get a purchase on the kid’s enormous hand as it bore down on his chest, but he couldn’t draw a breath and was starting to get panicked. He could feel the stitches at his shoulder cutting through his skin.
“Ken!” Marianne Kilbride snapped her fingers at him, like trying to wake a sleeper. Orlando looked over at her and saw her face change, a little thrill of fear in her eyes. There was a bright flash over the kid’s shoulder and Zoe laid her straight razor against his throat. She had to reach up, tweaking his Adam’s apple with the blunt edge of the blade.
“Calm down, go-tard. Ease the fuck up.”
“Jesus, Ken, will you settle down?” Marianne Kilbride moved closer and put her small hand on the kid’s huge bicep, and he seemed to register her for the first time and let up on Orlando’s chest and blink as if coming awake. More slowly, Marianne put her hand under Zoe’s and lifted it away from Ken’s neck. There was a pause, and Orlando rubbed at his chest and flexed his back, feeling a knot where it had been bent back over the railing. Ken touched his neck and looked at his fingers.
The Wolves of Fairmount Park Page 15