“I’d say you have an overactive imagination.”
“He’s been down the Combat Zone, Cat. Asking questions.”
“Why?”
“Because he wants to find his brother’s killer before we do. He wants to find him and he wants to kill him.”
31
FRANKLIN PARK is five hundred acres of urban parkland spread across three of Boston’s roughest neighborhoods—Jamaica Plain, Dorchester, and Roxbury. Daniel ducked into the park off Williams Street on the J.P. side. He knew the ground as well as anyone. He’d first run Franklin’s cross-country course as a freshman, coming out of nowhere to win the city title over a leaf-blown course in late October. His strategy that day had been to lie back for the first mile then accelerate over a hill called Bear Cage. After that, it was a two-man race between him and an Asian kid from Boston Tech. Daniel put away the kid from Tech on a winding stretch of wooded trail called the Wilderness. Daniel was in the Wilderness again, trees sloping all around him in the moonlight. Franklin Park was dangerous at three in the afternoon. Daniel assumed it was worse at night, even though he’d never met anyone stupid enough to find out.
He ran like a runner, easily, silkily, along the park’s dim thread of a trail. He was dressed in black from head to foot with dark socks over his hands and black tape covering the white flashing on his Tigers. Daniel kept his hood pulled up over his head and could feel the weight of Walter Price’s revolver strapped to the inside of his calf. He slipped off the trail about thirty yards in, accelerating as he went, blood surging, breath growing rank in the closeness of the woods. A warm current buzzed over his skin; bright bits of tinsel light flickered and flared at the edges of his vision. Daniel ducked to avoid a tree branch and felt his jawbone lengthen while his ears stood up and sharpened to points. A bristle of hair covered his cheeks and ran like a flame down his spine and along his flanks, his coat stiff and gray to the edge of blue, his eyes lasers of emerald and his tongue, thick and red and long and rich as it unrolled between a fanged set of teeth. Daniel dropped his muzzle, now fully formed, close to the ground, a lone wolf scenting the earth, making his map. The wind shifted and he could smell his own spoor and it comforted him. Another shift and there was something else to taste—ape, zebra, lion. The human part of Daniel’s brain told him it was only the Franklin Park Zoo, even as hackles rose on his back and his jaws glistened with fresh ropes of saliva.
Daniel began to run again, measured strides cutting tight and fast through the woods. He stopped just inside the tree line, making a small circle then dropping to his belly, swinging his head from side to side as he crept forward, stopping at the edge of an open field. There was something else out there, some fresh scent in the night that wasn’t coming from the zoo. Daniel buried his muzzle between his paws and covered himself in dirt, rolling around to get as much of the earth smell on himself as possible. Then he lay up against a bush and waited.
It took only a minute or so for the first to reveal himself, creeping along the tree line to Daniel’s left. The hyena carried a ridge of orange fur along his humped back, haunches spotted in black, long curved snout sniffing at wisps of purple moonlight. Daniel sought out the second animal and quickly found him, a pair of burnt yellow eyes buried in a baseball field a hundred yards away. There was a third somewhere behind and to the right, but he wouldn’t matter. Not if Daniel moved quickly.
The hyena to his left scratched at an ear, then raised his snout and gave a short coughing sound like a laugh. His buddy in center field offered a low grunt in return. Daniel took off. The laugher was first to give chase, barrel of a body folding and unfolding in a V as he pumped his short legs and cut a swath close to the ground. Among the trees the calculation might have been otherwise, but Daniel was moving across open ground now, the smooth, long strides of a gray wolf easily outpacing his rival. On Daniel’s right, however, it was a different story. The hyena closing from center field had an angle and knew how to use it. Daniel watched his back, a flexing whip of orange and black as the hyena moved to cut off Daniel and flush him back toward the woods. Daniel shifted imperceptibly, taking a straighter path then flaring out again, creating just enough space before turning to face his pursuer. The hyena was coming full bore, head down, muzzle streaming, claws extended. Blind. Daniel caught the animal clean, sinking teeth into a fleshy shoulder, scissoring his jaws and feeling the crunch of ligament and bone as the hyena went limp. Daniel immediately released, watching the hyena roll over so his spotted belly was exposed for a moment before he regained his feet and scurried off, tail tucked, limping into the darkness.
Daniel knew he only had moments and sped the rest of the way across the field toward vapor puffs of street light. He ducked into the trees, gliding silently among the bent oaks that bordered the perimeter of the park, listening as his pursuers called to one another in the night and turned this way and that, hot to pick up his trail. He stepped out of the park at Seaver Street and kept running, on two feet now, into the heart of Roxbury. At the corner he snuck a quick look back. Three kids were maybe a hundred yards up the block, standing in the middle of the street, staring down at him but not pursuing. They wore black jackets with slashes of orange on the sleeves and orange lettering across the front. Daniel took off at a run up Blue Hill Avenue.
* * *
When he finally stopped, he was in an alley. He slumped down between two trash barrels and pulled slowly at the socks he’d wrapped over his hands. One knuckle was smashed and his right pinkie finger was swollen and bloody. Daniel winced as he flexed the hand and noticed his sweatshirt was slashed at the shoulder as if someone had attacked him with a knife. He pulled off the shirt and T-shirt underneath, shivering and checking to see if he had any more injuries. Then he slipped the layers back on and stood up.
His hold on reality might be greasy, but Daniel knew he had to keep moving. Simon had made it clear he couldn’t push into everyone’s head. But if he did get entangled with someone—like he was with Walter Price—the connection seemed more or less permanent. It might wax and wane like a radio station that went in and out as you worked the dial, but it was always there if he just focused. And trusted. Daniel began to jog down the alley, picking up the pace as a police siren unwound and a pack of dogs answered, barking hard and angry against the night.
* * *
A mile later, he was sitting up against a chain-link fence and studying an arthritic three-decker. Price was somewhere inside. Daniel could feel his mind, fissured with heat, tongues of flame running fast and blue in the cracks. Fear? Hell, yeah. Price knew he was being hunted by half the cops in the city and knew it was just a matter of time. Remorse for killing Harry? Daniel couldn’t find a drop. He loosened the gun he’d strapped to his ankle and noticed the shake in his hand. It was the terror of beginning, the finality of a first step. He’d made the decision to take another man’s life. And now it was time.
Daniel climbed to his feet. The three-decker swayed above him, grinning like a skeleton in the night. He cut across the alley and up the back steps. One floor, two floors, three. The windows on the top were boarded up, the only door blown wide open. He stepped inside what had once been a kitchen. Crooked bars of light ran through the slats lighting up graffiti spray painted in wild slashes of black and green. Daniel followed one strand diagonally across a wall but couldn’t make heads or tails of it. His foot knocked against something round. An empty bottle of Wild Irish Rose rolled in a small circle and stopped.
Daniel crept to the doorway and a narrow hallway that fed into the black belly of the apartment. He slumped to the floor and sought out Price’s mind again, but there was nothing now. Snuffed. Daniel laid down the gun and flexed his hand, feeling the pain flare in his knuckles, down his fingers, and under his nails. He thought again about his run through the park. Part of him was terrified at whatever it was that was happening to him. The rest thought he might be seeing more than less, if only he’d trust it. On cue, a pair of eyes blinked to life at the far end of the hall. T
hen a second set. The scrabble of long claws on wood was followed by a whisper of air as something charged. Daniel reached for the gun but already knew he was too late. And then they fell upon him.
32
BARKLEY PULLED to the corner and watched his partner climb in. Tommy had barely closed the door before they were pushing away from the curb.
“What the fuck, B. Let me get in, for Chrissakes.”
“You got an address for our boy?”
“Course I got an address.”
Barkley crested a hill that ran down toward the water. “He still in Roxbury?”
“Dudley Square. What’s the matter?”
“Nothing.” Barkley hit his blinker and took a right.
“I told you it might take a day or so. The captain on our case?”
“We just need to make a collar.”
“We will. Tonight.”
“The kid’s been down the Combat Zone.”
“What kid?”
“Harry Fitzsimmons’s brother, Daniel.”
“How do you know that?”
“Someone saw him. Said he was talking to the photographer.”
“How’d the kid find him?”
“Who the fuck knows? Hang around down there long enough and you meet every weirdo and asshole pervert in the world.”
“I thought the photographer was all right.”
“He is, but you know what I mean.”
Carson Beach rolled past on the left. Barkley could just see the dark line of sand. Beyond it, waves curling white under the still moonlight.
“Relax,” Tommy said. “So what if he talked to this guy. He’s a fucking kid. Besides, the photographer . . . Toney’s his name?”
Barkley nodded.
“Toney doesn’t know where Price is.”
“He’s down the Zone. He could have heard something.”
“And you think he’d tell the kid?”
“Maybe he thinks there’d be no harm in it.”
“That’s my point. What’s a fucking kid gonna do?”
“I’m pretty sure he’s got a gun, Tommy.” Barkley told his partner about his visit to Latin School and the handgun that had gone missing during the brawl.
“And the kid was involved in the fight?”
“The kid was involved in the fight. From what the headmaster told me, he could have easily grabbed the piece.”
“Did you ask him?”
“Says he never saw a gun.”
“And we don’t believe him?”
“Here’s my thought. Daniel’s in the car when his mom dies. He’s eight years old and can’t do a fucking thing about it. But it eats at him. Maybe he doesn’t know it eats at him, but it does. And then big brother’s murdered. Butchered in an alley and again Daniel draws a front-row seat. This time, though, the kid’s sixteen and not gonna let it pass. No fucking way.”
“You think he’s hunting Price?”
“We just need to get there first.”
Tommy rubbed his lower lip and stared out the window. Barkley flicked on the radio. Gladys Knight was singing “Midnight Train to Georgia.” There was something about Gladys that dug deep in his belly. Maybe it was three generations of Alabama slaves, people he’d never met, voices he somehow knew as well as his own, their blood in every note and every line of Gladys’s music. Up ahead there was a dark tangle of traffic at K Circle. Barkley flicked on his siren and the cars parted. He accelerated, pounding over the expressway and down the oil-slicked roads of Dorchester, toward the smoke and lights of Roxbury.
* * *
Barkley was driving a low-slung, midnight-blue snarl of a Camaro. He pulled the car to the curb directly across from the address Tommy had given him. If Price was in there, they didn’t have time for subtlety. Truth be told, it had never been their strong suit anyway.
The Camaro had barely rolled to a stop before Tommy tumbled out the door. He had his gun low by his side and ran in a crouch across the street. Barkley followed, .38 still on his hip as he flattened himself against the side of the three-decker. The place looked deserted, most of the windows boarded up with a couple of lights burning here and there. Tommy nodded at a set of stairs that accessed the three-decker’s back porches. They’d agreed to start on the top floor, work room by room and stay together. Hopefully, Price was alone. And hopefully he didn’t do anything stupid. Halfway up the second flight, Barkley’s flashlight caught a smear of blood on the banister.
“The kid?” Tommy said.
“Could be.” Barkley pulled his gun. “Go ahead.”
On the third floor Tommy stepped through an open door into a kitchen. There were boards on the windows and curling trails of graffiti, exhales of glitter and smoke covering the walls from ceiling to floor. Tommy held his gun in two hands in front of his chest. Barkley had his piece in his right hand, the flash in his left.
“Easy now, bud.”
Tommy nodded and took a half breath before ducking out of the kitchen and into a connecting hallway. Barkley leaned against the doorframe, stirring the darkness with his light. Tommy started to creep along one wall; Barkley hugged the other. A third of the way down, they found another door that opened to a staircase diving into the bowels of the building. Tommy wanted to take a look. Barkley nodded and watched as his partner disappeared. So much for sticking together.
Barkley clicked off his light and continued down the hall, aware of the old floorboards wincing under his tread and Gladys, back now, crooning low and smooth and sweet and wet in the deepest part of his brain where nothing lived but the stuff that spanned time and memory and never knew death. He came to the end of the corridor and an open space, cold with a current of something heavy that tugged at his legs, prickling the skin on his thighs and tickling his balls. He was tempted to click on his flash but knew Gladys would stop singing if he did and he wanted her in his head. His foot nudged up against the wooden bump of the threshold and he stepped across it. The wall to his left moved away from him, telling him the room was probably an oval. And big. Barkley could feel its depth and the height of the ceiling and wondered how and why they made a room so big in this neighborhood. Then he remembered Roxbury used to be a wealthy neighborhood, home to Boston’s Jewish population thirty, forty years back. He thought of this even as another voice, the cop voice, told him he had a gun in his hand and should pay the fuck attention to what was or wasn’t in the fucking room and a third voice told him Gladys had quit singing and that probably wasn’t good.
He stopped near a window, boarded up tight so just tiny rivers of light leaked through. Tommy’s lecture on instinct crawled out from under a rock in his brain and Barkley knew before he could know what was about to happen. Not the exact play-by-play, but he had the gist all right. Fuck, yeah, he had the gist. The detective backed up until he felt the crumble of plaster against his back and pointed his gun toward whatever was staring at him in the darkness. He made words in his mouth but no sound came out as whatever it was charged. He should have fired, could have fired, but something stayed his trigger finger. Then they were on him. Furnace breath, slit-back nostrils, and flashing teeth slick with saliva. The gun clattered from his fingers and skidded across the floor. After that, the only sound was the tearing of clothes and working of jaws as the two beasts fought silently over their prey.
33
TOMMY DILLON was in a common stairwell that circled to the bottom of the building. He ignored the second- and first-floor apartments, heading straight for a door that led to the basement. Tommy didn’t try to hide his approach, pounding down a broken set of steps and stepping around an old coal bin fixed under a boarded-up chute. Against one wall sat a coffin filled to the brim with car batteries and resting on a pair of runnerless rocking chairs. Beside it stood a six-foot cigar-store Indian wearing a Tribe cap. Tommy took a quick look at both and kept moving.
The tiny room bled out to a long passage covered in a chunky layer of dirt and trash. Tommy picked through the strata, trying to determine who’d been where and when
. He found a McDonald’s bag and fresh burger wrappers stuffed into a crack in the wall. On the ground nearby was a half-melted cup of ice. Bingo. At the end of the corridor he leaned lightly against a final door and listened. Like any cop who’d been around awhile, he knew the layout of these old three-deckers and knew the door probably led to the building’s boiler room. And a dead end. He shouldered his way in, smelling the rankness of stale water and scanning right to left with his weapon. Walter Price was in the far corner, huddled against a hunk of scrap iron that might have once been a furnace. Tommy could see his hollow eyes, dancing in the dark like a couple of question marks, and the blued steel of a gun, stretched out and pointed square at the detective’s chest.
“Drop it,” Tommy said, and took a step forward.
* * *
“Someone cut their vocal cords.” The boy sat between the two beasts, one lying with his massive head in the boy’s lap, the other sitting upright, jaws open, tongue hung like a fresh offering between a wet set of teeth. Neither had taken their eyes off Barkley, sitting still as a stone against the wall some ten feet away.
“You know what they are?” Barkley said.
“Big.”
“They’re called Presa Canarios, Daniel. Great dogs if they’re trained properly.”
“And if they’re not?”
“What do you think? Make pit bulls look like puppies. They just gonna stare at me the whole time?”
Daniel looked down at the dog’s head in his lap and the dog looked back and Barkley saw worlds upon worlds spinning in the compass of the boy’s gaze.
“They don’t trust humans,” he said.
“But they trust you?”
“I listen.”
Daniel had placed Barkley’s flashlight on the floor so it threw out a pale canopy of light between them. The detective’s gun was close by the boy’s side. Barkley moved to get up. He could see the Presas tense, smooth muscle quivering under tight coats of skin.
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