by Thomas Pluck
Police had found alcohol and marijuana in Strick’s system, but were befuddled by his lack of clothing and identification, and the scarcity of whole fingerprints due to the road rash. He was so torn up they hadn’t found the bullet hole.
Jay sipped his coffee.
Strick had abandoned his boy without a name. It would be fitting if he were buried in an unmarked grave. Mama Angeline’s kind of justice.
His phone rattled across the countertop. Ramona’s number. He’d want to say goodbye, for good. Might as well get it over with. He answered. “You couldn’t tell me?”
“Tell you what?” Ramona said. “How could I tell you anything anyway, you never answer your phone.”
“Maybe there’s nothing to say.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? Stop acting like a child. I have the house to myself, I thought you might like a swim.”
“So you can make movies for Matt to jerk off to? I’m not some chew toy for you two to fight over.”
The waitress cleared her throat as she made a pass with the coffee pot.
“What are you talking about? If this is messing with your head, come over and we’ll talk about it. If you have better things to do, I’ll swim laps by myself.”
He drew in a breath to respond, but she had cut the line.
Jay lay in bed at the dead old man’s apartment, reading. The yellowed white walls might’ve been Rahway, for all the difference. He wondered how much gas money he’d need to get to Louisiana. He could find a job in a service shop there. Or go door to door, taking jobs that shade tree mechanics couldn’t handle.
His phone hummed again and he raised to throw it across the room.
Louisiana number.
He flipped it open and let Mama Angeline listen to him huff angry breaths.
“So, did you like what he had to say?” Hairdryers whined in the background among laughter and bustle.
“No,” Jay said.
“Didn’t think you would,” she said, and puffed her smoke. “But the truth’s what you wanted. Usually it hurts.”
“It’s true?”
“You know who your real father was,” she said. “All that other one did was dip his wick. That ain’t fathering.”
“So how’d you meet him?”
“You’ll have to ask him if you want to talk ancient history,” she said, and paused for a puff. “Or have you had enough truth for a while?”
“He can’t answer.”
“That’s my boy,” Angeline said, hacked a laugh. “Had a feeling he’d get what’s coming.”
Jay kneaded his temples. “Did he really kill Andre?”
“Well he as good as did, putting us on the run like that.” she said. “Just about did in the both of us.”
“Aw, Mama.”
Her voice took on grit. “Don’t you pity him none. And why don’t you go see that hard-ass cop next?” She laughed until it turned into a wet cough. “Strick went to Leo when we showed up with you. He thought up a solution, like a regular King Solomon.”
“Don’t care about that,” Jay said. “Wish I could’ve seen Andre again. Talked to him.”
“Okie told us what a fine young man you turned out to be,” she said. “Made your Papa real proud. You know what I think about wishing, son.”
She’d always said, wish in one hand, shit in the other. See which hand gets full first.
“How’d he…how’d he go?”
“We left Louisiana for a lot of reasons,” she said. “We should’ve stayed gone, but that’s where Andre’s people are. Mine, I wouldn’t piss on ’em if they were on fire, not unless I was pissing gasoline. Anyways, a job went sour. That’s all there is to say, at least over the phone.”
“And you,” Jay said. “Butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth, would it?”
“All I did was save a little boy,” she said. “And I’ve paid for it ever since. You remember. You didn’t remember much, but you remember the Witch.”
“I was what, five?”
“Does it matter? We raised you right, took care of you. When no one else would. Ever hear ‘how sharper than a serpent’s tooth, to have a thankless child?’ Well that tooth’s cutting right now.”
“Strick said you shook him down.”
“I’d call it child support,” she said.
“But…but you’re my mama. Aren’t you?”
“How dare you? Listen, son. You want to judge me, do it to my face. I’ll be waiting.”
The phone hit the receiver like a slammed door.
Jay ran his thumb over the buttons, thought about what she said.
But before he left, more men needed killing.
The sally port protecting the SHU was abandoned, the gates locked. Jay and Cheetah slumped against the cold green walls, exhausted from the fight. Okie put his fingers in his mouth and whistled through the bars.
“I got lucky,” Jay said.
“No you didn’t,” Cheetah said. “I got smart.”
Mack shifted from foot to foot, cracking his knuckles.
A heavily tattooed barrel-gut buffalo lumbered to the locked gates. Four muscled Latinos backed him up. Verdad kept his receding hair tied back in a thin ponytail. He gave them a death stare. “Where’s my sister?”
“Ran off with Dante to Ad Seg,” Okie said. “We did our part.”
“Not all of it,” Verdad said, and turned his broad back on them.
Okie, Mack, and Cheetah traded glances.
“I’ll get her,” Jay said, stretching his taped knuckles. “Let them in.”
Verdad narrowed his eyes to octopus slits. “Don’t come back alone.”
Jay put a taped fist through the bars. “He’s my sister too.”
Verdad punched Jay’s knuckles with his brown tattooed meathook. He opened the gates, and Jay turned down the corridor. Mack slipped him a shank.
“Kid,” Okie called. “Be careful.”
“Save it,” Jay said, and jogged wearily toward Wing Four.
Jay tested the shank on the crumbling plaster. Slim spring steel wrapped with duct tape. Solid. The roar of the riot echoed through the walls like a savage ghost. The gates to Ad Seg lay open, the guardroom rifled. Two big-armed Italians sat inside, wincing between gulps of hooch.
“Welcome to the jungle,” one sang, and laughed. “Had to beat the mool, didn’t you?”
“Seen Dante?”
The men traded glances. “He’s on a date. Best leave it alone.”
Jay raised his fists, shank held out like an ice pick. “Where?”
They told him.
Three cells down Jay found Rene curled on the floor, cupping her face. He knelt and cradled her to his chest. “You’re okay, sister. Come with me.”
Rene trembled. “Hope they didn’t make me as ugly as you.”
Jay helped him to his feet. “Hell, you’re making my pecker hard as this shank here. Dante do this?”
“Kenny and some friends of his,” Rene said. “Took him that way.”
Jay passed her the shank and they stalked down the hall. As they passed the familiar solitary cells, ice crystals formed in Jay’s belly. Four white walls that became movie screens for his nightmares. A choked off keening echoed from the only open door.
Dante’s fish-belly white legs kicked at the floor and a rivulet of blood trickled toward the center drain. Two cons sat on his arms while Kenny, the big-nosed bastard Jay had clocked out, ground a bloody nightstick deep between his cheeks.
Rene fell on Kenny with the shank, arm pistoning like the needle of a sewing machine. Jay knocked the other two sprawling with a jab and a cross. Only one got back up. His boxing-taped hands were hard as brass knuckles. He mashed their faces to shreds.
Dante howled and the nightstick clattered to the floor. He held it by the unbloodied end, and hollered for them to stop.
Jay pulled Rene off Kenny’s whimpering, perforated bulk.
Dante pointed the bloodied nightstick toward the door. “Go.”
Jay and Rene leaned on
each other, and they staggered onto the tier.
Dante stepped gingerly toward Kenny, his legs striped with blood. The nightstick cracked flesh and bone, echoing the hallways as they made their way back to their brothers.
Chapter 35
The Bello house was a Queen Anne nestled in a woodsy cul-de-sac called The Enclosure, the site of a former artists’ colony from which Nutley took its name. It abutted a mucky swell of the Third River that everyone called the Mud Hole. Jay crossed the railroad trestle into the park beneath a fingernail clipping of moon, carrying the baggied revolver in one pocket and the lockpick gun in the other.
A steady hot summer rain hushed his footsteps and pattered off his hoodie as he crept along the old pines lining the far side of the pond. He spied the single lit window in the house’s turret. No silhouette broke the yellow square after five minutes of watching. Jay approached the picket fence.
The Bellos had no other children. Jay recalled Mrs. Bello at the trial. A large woman with dark curls spilling over her slumped shoulders. A drained sadness in her eyes, her lower lip twitching as the prosecutor shared every gruesome detail.
Her dead hazel eyes haunted Jay’s long nights in his cell at juvenile. If he saw them again tonight, he would have to close them forever. Something twinged in his gut at the thought.
To clear his mind, he thought of her husband’s little smile as he pinched Joey’s bandaged fingers when he took Joey home from school. The same smile Joey Junior would use when he had his prey nailed down in torment.
Jay hopped the fence. A chill in twitched his shoulders as he neared the house, as if Andre’s ghost hand reached to stay him. The rear door had an awning over it, and he crouched beneath it on the wooden steps. The revolver dug into his crotch. He fed the pick gun into the lock and slow-cycled it over the pins.
Mrs. Bello’s dead stare bored through him. Like he had cut out her heart and replaced it with a nest littered with the tiny skeletons of orphaned birds. Jay rested his forehead on the doorknob.
Joey had needed killing. So had Frankie Dell, and his mother was probably a Catholic saint wielding a sauce-stained wooden spoon.
All their victims’ mothers cried, too.
Okie’s voice told him to shoot, not think. Two in each face. Drop the gun, and watch Leo’s world fall apart from a bayou honkytonk over a mess of mudbugs and a schooner of beer.
Jay crushed his eyes shut and let the rain beat his brain in. He’d come without a plan. He squeezed the knurled grips of Leo’s revolver through the zip bag, thought on Brendan’s words.
Was Joseph Bello Senior his to kill?
He’d tried to whack him in prison. He might try again.
The more he thought on it the more he knew the man needed killing.
Hot breath misted his neck. A growl filled his ear.
Jay launched off the stoop and snapped the wooden railing with his shoulder. A thick Rottweiler bulled him over and clamped its jaws around a chunk of his thigh. Jay groaned and popped a quick hook to the dog’s ear. It bowled over and shook its head, then snarled and charged.
Jay bolted for the fence and felt teeth graze his ass. His hand was numb. It was like punching a brick wall. The dog ripped his jeans to the knee and he tumbled over the fence and skidded down the pine-needled embankment. His boots splashed in the muck.
The dog planted paws on the fence and howled in triumph. Jay quick-limped toward the car. Mr. Bello’s voice carried across the water. “Caesar, get the hell back here.”
Lights flicked on through the pines. Warm blood slicked the back of his thigh. He probed the punctures with his blue-gloved fingers and plugged the biggest with a fingertip. He spread a trash bag on the seat and staunched the bleeding with a handful of Popeye’s napkins from the glovebox. He loped back to his den to lick his wounds.
Jay limped to his apartment. In the third floor hallway, music thumped from one door and indignant shouts came from another. He rested his head on his door jamb and sighed. His leg had stopped bleeding, but throbbed like the dog still had a grip on him.
Okie would have had a field day. Cons get caught for being stupid, kid. Not for breaking the law. People break the law every day, and make good livings doing it. You get too greedy for cash, gash, or payback, and that’s when you go down, Okie would have said, and fingered the star-shaped bullet scar beneath his copper-white beard.
The dog’s bite felt like poison. A childhood flash lit Jay’s brain, pre-Witch. Andre had a blue leopard Catahoula named Bebe. Little Jay played in the grass with her, when a fat black moccasin lunged from its stump-roots hideaway.
Bebe thrashed the snake to death, and dragged Jay back to the house by his shirt.
Angeline cradled Little Jay and swore through tears. Andre tried to siphon out the poison, but Bebe snapped at him and dragged herself under the porch. He crawled after her with a bowl of water.
Hours later, Papa Andre came out with his face red and puffy and walked alone toward the canebrake. He stomped the snake’s writhing coils until there was nothing left but a mess of blood.
Andre buried Bebe, and clutched Little Jay so tight that he could barely breathe.
Jay keyed the deadbolt, turned the knob. The clack of metal on metal. He paused and stared at the spot on the white paint of the door jamb where he had slicked a hair each time he left.
The hair’s absence punched him between the eyes.
Jay leapt for the stairwell.
A head-sized hole shredded the door. Splinters raked his side. He bounced the fire door open and stumbled into the corner at the top of the stairs. A masked figure exited his apartment and swept the hallway with a short-barreled shotgun. The fire door swung closed as the gunman racked the pump.
Jay’s ears rang from the shotgun’s report. He slid on his ass down the first flight of stairs and screamed as the wound tore open. He jumped the rest, pain jolting up his thigh. Above, the fire door hit the wall. Shouts echoed down the stairwell.
Jay burst out the exit to parking lot. A black Lexus flicked its high beams and launched forward, clipping him with the mirror. Jay spun against the bricks and ran for the Challenger, one leg dragging. Pulled Leo’s gun from his pocket and forced his finger through the guard.
The Lexus reversed, spitting asphalt.
Jay fired through the baggie and the revolver bucked in his hand. The Lexus swerved and Jay staggered between parked cars.
The Hammerhead started on the first try. Jay ducked low and backed into the nose of the Lexus, bullying the sedan into a row of cars. A shout then a blast, and the rear glass shattered and pellets tore the seat cushions. He ripped the bumper off the car next to his and hit the empty street.
The blacked-out Hammerhead flew onto Franklin Avenue on autopilot. The instinct to go to ground brought him to the familiarity of his hometown. Jay flicked the switches to kill the brake lights. Behind him, a one-eyed pursuer ran the red light he’d just blown. Adrenaline flushed through his insides and worked his limbs for him.
The trestle. The tracks. Ramona.
Where he’d felt safe, once.
He stomped the brake and side-skidded past a turn on the damp macadam. Engines and squealing rubber woke the sleepy ’burb. He spun the wheel and doubled back, roaring toward his pursuer head-on. The Lexus buried its nose in the pavement. Jay toed the brake and cut the wheel like Ramona showed him, rocketed down a side street. The railroad trestle towered above.
The Lexus roared past a police cruiser, jumped the curb and cut over a corner of grass, jerked left and clipped the Hammerhead’s rear corner. Jay held the pedal a second too long. The nose veered right and the fat tires gripped, shooting the Hammerhead through the hedges into the park.
Branches slapped and clattered against the paint. The car exploded out the other side and took air over the creek’s brownstone banks.
Jay felt the car loft, and for a split second he thought the Hammerhead could fly like the General Lee on The Dukes of Hazzard and make the other side.
T
he car jolted with the crash and the steering wheel crunched his ribs, his forehead shattered the windshield.
Jay tumbled out the open door into the brook’s dirty babble, unsure of how much time he’d lost after he knocked his head. His hands slipped on algae-slicked stones and he choked on a mouthful of the Passaic’s finest. The Challenger’s rear bumper was suspended on the opposite bank, its nose buried in the water.
Jay watched the stream bank, waiting for a shotgun to blank out his misery. A roil of clouds flashed gray and a thundercrack shook his spine. The sky opened up and pelted his face with hard droplets. He crawled beneath the spinning rear tire and watched the driveshaft spin out its last.
Blue police lights flickered like silent lightning, sparkling atop the water and illuminating the railroad trestle. Jay unbagged the revolver and tossed it downstream. He crawled the other way until the creek wall was short enough to climb.
Flashlights cut the rain sheets and lit on Jay’s swollen face. He held up his hands, let them drop. He felt like a filthy rag wrung dry of turpentine.
“You can walk on that water,” one of the policemen said. “He goes in your cruiser, not mine.”
Jay crawled toward the embankment. His arms felt like petrified wood. A cop with tattooed arms and bulging sleeves hefted him out of the water with a steel grip.
“EMTs, we got injuries,” the officer called. He peered at Jay’s eyes with his tactical flashlight, raindrops bouncing off his poncho. “You drive like that, you oughta wear your seat belt. You got a concussion for sure.”
Jay cracked a smile. He flopped onto his back and curled like Bebe in the cool dark beneath the porch slats, let the rain hammer his eyelids closed.
Chapter 36
Seagulls circled overhead and pierced the calming shush of the surf with their cries. A gray day down the shore. A gull dropped a shell from above and it cracked on the jetty beside the boy’s head, splashed his cheek with hot brine.