Secret Rage

by Brent Pilkey

  “The fuck I am!” Myers pulled away from Jack while shoving him in the chest with his free hand.

  Myers wasn’t a big guy — Jack was sure the leather jacket he was wearing wasn’t concealing anything — and Jack barely felt the shove. Still holding Myers’s right arm, Jack grabbed his jacket and yanked him close, intending to finish the fight with a quick head-butt. Myers may not have been big, but he was fast and twisted his head away. Jack slammed his forehead into Myers’s neck.

  At the same time, Myers drove a knee up into Jack’s groin. But they were both off balance and Jack only took a glancing blow. It was enough, though, to shoot a flare of pain from his balls up to his throat.

  Fuck this.

  Jack stepped closer to Myers and flipped the smaller man over his hip, hauling him down. Jack’s rib screamed in protest. Myers hit the floor hard and Jack landed on top of him, making sure to drive a shoulder into Myers’s chest. The impact blasted the air from Myers’s lungs as it ripped agony through Jack’s side.

  Heidi was shrieking in the background. “Dean, stop fighting! Dean! Dean!”

  Jack snapped a look at Heidi to make sure she wasn’t about to latch onto his back and saw that Jenny was holding her by the couch. The girl seemed more intent on screaming than interfering.

  “You good?” Jenny called when she spotted Jack looking her way. She had her mitre in hand, ready to put over the assist.

  “I’ve got him,” Jack assured her through gritted teeth just as Myers bucked underneath him. Myers was squirming like a worm skewered on a hook, but even without the extra twenty pounds of equipment, Jack must have outweighed him by a good fifty pounds. Myers’s efforts weren’t amounting to much.

  Then the guy went for Jack’s eyes. Jack pulled his head back and felt Myers’s nails scoring the skin by his right eye.

  I don’t need another scar, fuckhead.

  “Stop fighting and calm down!” Jack yelled at him, hoping Jenny was keying her radio. Nothing like having a recording to play back when the asshole complains. “Stop fighting me! You’re under arrest!”

  But Myers wasn’t listening and his free hand was groping for Jack’s eyes again.

  The words of a defensive tactics instructor came back to Jack. Words to live by. Don’t fight to put on the handcuffs. Put them on after the fight is over. And Jack intended to finish the fight.

  See how you like being hit by someone bigger than you, fuckhead.

  Jack drove an elbow into Myers’s mouth and the busted lip, just beginning to heal, split open, spewing blood in a crimson fountain. Jack cocked his elbow back as Myers’s hand shot up. In surrender this time.

  “I give up! Don’t hit me again!” he pleaded and Jack wondered how many times Myers had heard those exact words.

  Jack grabbed Myers’s arm and levered him onto his stomach. Trapping Myers’s arm between his thighs as he knelt on the smaller man’s lower back and neck, Jack ordered Myers to put his other hand behind his back. Jack took out his cuffs and snapped the cold steel into place. Only then did he ease his weight off Myers.

  If this was a movie, I’d say something witty, Jack thought glibly as the sounds of crying filled the apartment.

  Heidi was on the couch sobbing into her hands, her frail shoulders hitching with each ragged breath. Rocky was on his feet in the playpen, chubby fingers clutching the dirty mesh as he wailed out his fear and frustration. His Transformers T-shirt had ridden up in back, revealing an old bruise colouring his side.

  “Ow! C’mon, boss, please. That hurts.”

  At Myers’s squealing, Jack realized he had unconsciously shifted his weight onto Myers’s neck. He got to his feet, making sure the little coward’s neck bore the brunt of his weight as he pushed himself upright. He hauled Myers off the floor. Once he was standing, Myers’s nerve reasserted itself. He turned to Heidi.

  “Don’t you say a fucking word, bitch! Not a fucking —”

  “Enough!” Jack grabbed Myers by the elbows and spun him into the stairwell, holding him over the steep drop at arms’ length. “Tell me why I shouldn’t drop you, you little piece of shit. I’d be doing Rocky a favour.”

  “Oh, fuck, boss. Please don’t,” Myers blubbered, the tough wife-and-child-beater gone. “I’m begging you.”

  “Jack,” Jenny said softly. She shook her head when Jack looked at her.

  “You’re lucky this time, fuckhead.” Jack pulled Myers into the living room. “And if you have any brains in that head, you’ll keep your mouth shut. It’s a long way down to the scout car and we may take the stairs.”

  Monday, 23 July

  0820 hours

  “You’re useless, boy. Useless. I have no son.”

  Taylor knew he was dreaming, but every word of his father’s cut him, every punch, every slap delivered pain.

  “Please, Papa,” the young Taylor begged from his knees. “Don’t hit me anymore.”

  “Quit your mewling, boy. Take your punishment like a man.” His father’s hand, callused and strong from years in the mines, landed again and again. Taylor tried to protect himself, covered his head with his arms, but this only infuriated his father more. The miner swatted his thirteen-year-old son’s arms aside and rained more discipline down on his head.

  Minutes later, his father, a big man with a big belly, staggered away, gasping for breath. He collapsed onto the old, broken couch, a man old and broken before his time.

  “What are you doing lying on the floor?” he roared. “Get me another beer!”

  The young Taylor shuffled into the kitchen, his vision to the left already darkening as the eye swelled shut. He pulled open the fridge door, the squeal from the hinges a touch of normalcy in the boy’s chaotic world. But there was no beer in the fridge, nothing at all except for his father’s severed head.

  His father’s eyes, open but dead, cold but alive, glared at the boy. “You killed me, boy! You killed me just like you killed your mama and sis. You killed your family!”

  Taylor screamed as blood gushed from his father’s mouth; despite the gory torrent his father was still yelling. “You killed your family! You killed your family!”

  Taylor slammed the fridge door and threw his hands to his ears but still he could hear his father. “You’re useless, boy! You killed your family!”

  “Shut up!” Taylor shrieked. He ran into the living room, tripped, fell. When he looked up, Rico was smiling down at him, a needle in one hand, his dick in the other.

  “Want some?” he asked, waggling the syringe. “All you gotta do is suck me off.”

  “The boy can’t even do that right,” his father proclaimed from the couch. “He’s useless.”

  “Go away! You’re not real!” Taylor huddled on the floor, curled into a tight, protective ball. “You’re not real,” he sobbed. “You’re not real.”

  Then hands, gentle and caring, tugged at his arms. Taylor lowered his arms, his strong, muscular arms, to see Sherry kneeling before him. She had on the Maple Leafs jersey he had bought for her and the sun streaming through the balcony doors lit up her blond hair, blond with the faintest hint of red — his Dusty Rose, he had called her — so that it framed her beautiful face like a halo.

  “Sherry,” he wept, knowing this was a dream.

  “It’s okay, baby,” she shushed. “Everything’s going to be okay.”

  “No, it’s not,” he cried, feeling the old hate and revulsion stirring in his belly. An ugliness that needed, wanted, to be vomited out.

  “Let me make you feel better.” Sherry reached for the zipper of his jeans but he grabbed her wrists.

  “Don’t,” he pleaded, fearing what was to come.

  “It’s okay, baby. I don’t care.” Her hands, somehow free, were pulling down his zipper.

  “Don’t!” Yelling this time. He seized her wrists and the anger and hate inside him flowed free. “Don’t you
fucking touch me.”

  Sherry was on the balcony, the wind whipping her hair into a fury. “I’ll tell!” she screamed at him. “If you leave me I’ll tell!”

  Taylor went to her, his hands held out to her. In supplication or violence?

  Then Sherry was falling, falling, and the ground rushed up at Taylor.

  Taylor jerked awake.

  “Fuck me,” he muttered. He lay in his bed, watching the dust motes drift lazily in the hazy sunlight as he waited for his heart to slow its thundering pace. He wiped sweat from his forehead, not knowing or caring if it was from the dream or the heat building in the confining bedroom.

  He groped for his watch on the milk-carton night table. 8:20. So much for getting a decent sleep. He knew that, in the aftermath of the nightmare and the heat that was slowly converting the room into a sauna, sleep would be impossible. He went to the air conditioner and knelt in front of it as if praying, beseeching God or the gods or whoever the fuck was up there to put a hold on this heat. The pitiful breeze limping out of the labouring ac unit was just cool enough to dry his sweat-soaked skin.

  He headed for the washroom but avoided the mirror; the person inside it was someone he didn’t want to face today. Not after last night.

  “Fucking Rico.”

  With his name, memories of last night rushed back and Taylor quickly dropped to his knees over the toilet, spewing out what little there was in his stomach. His stomach heaved repeatedly, painfully, but there was nothing left in him. He dropped the lid, flushed and weakly pulled himself up till he was able to sit on the edge of the tub, his forearms braced on the toilet.

  No, there would be no more sleeping today, perhaps not for quite some time.

  He pushed himself to his feet. “Might as well get my ass to the gym.”

  Blevins Place was a little blip of a road — more a pretentious driveway, really — looping off Shuter Street in south Regent Park. It boasted two of the five high-rises in the southern half of the housing complex and there was nothing about 14 Blevins to differentiate it from any of the other filthy, worn-out, run-down government housing buildings. It looked the same, it smelled the same. And it didn’t smell good.

  They met their complainants, two housing guards, as they headed for the elevator.

  “Hey, guys,” Jenny greeted. “You called about abandoned children?”

  “Yes, we did,” the older of the guards confirmed, speaking with a soft Jamaican accent. His lean frame was tall and proud in his immaculate uniform and the lines in his dark complexion, plus the fringe of grey hair, proclaimed a lifetime of experience, not old age. His partner looked young enough for this to be his first summer out of high school; he hadn’t blinked since laying eyes on Jenny. Jack hoped the kid didn’t start drooling.

  Jenny introduced herself and Jack to the pair.

  “A pleasure, miss,” the senior gent stated with a dazzling smile. He took Jenny’s hand. “I’m Autry and this young pup is William.”

  “Bill,” the pup corrected and Autry rolled his eyes.

  “What do we have, Autry?”

  Autry waited as the elevator doors slid open; he stepped aside to let the police in first. Inside the metal box — it stank worse than the lobby: fermented urine — Bill punched the button for the eighth floor while Autry pulled out his memo book. He flipped to the proper page, seriousness sliding over his face.

  “The neighbour in 812 called,” he began as the elevator laboured upward. “She heard the baby crying, but no one answered when she knocked. She called us because the mother likes to go out and leaves the children behind. Last month, we found the boy down in the lobby.”

  “How old is he?”

  “Three,” Autry said sadly. “Somehow he got on the elevator.”

  “Where was mom?” Jack asked.

  “I believe she and one of her boyfriends were busy getting drunk somewhere.” Autry did not sound impressed.

  “But we don’t really know if the kids are alone right now?”

  Autry cocked a skeptical eyebrow at Jenny. When the elevator reached the eighth floor, he led the way down the hall.

  Hm, not the end of the hall, Jack noted with surprise when Autry stopped halfway along the hallway.

  Jenny knocked, a civil Come to the door, please. When no one answered, she banged, a standard Police, open the door, and a baby started crying somewhere in the apartment. Out came the baton and Jenny clanged its metal butt against the metal door. More of an Open the fucking door, now knock.

  Still no answer and the crying sounded as if the baby was the only one coming to the door.

  Autry handed Jenny the pass-key and judging from the set of her jaw and the way she thrust the key into the lock, Jack figured the mother’s only chance of getting out of this alive was if she was in the apartment and already dead.

  Jenny opened the door and nearly tripped over the baby sitting on the floor. The little guy — or girl — was sniffling pitifully and wearing nothing but a diaper — and had been for some time, if the smell had anything to say about it. Jenny scooped the baby up and handed him, dirty diaper and all, to Autry. The guard had no choice but to accept the infant, but by the way he folded his arms protectively around the little guy, Autry didn’t seem to mind. With a thumb lodged firmly in his mouth, the baby gazed at Autry in awe. His other hand sneaked out to pat inquisitively at the old man’s face, as if he was saying, Hey, we’re the same colour. How about that?

  Like the Whiteside apartments where they had arrested Mr. Girlfriend-Beater Myers, the units in 14 Blevins were two storeys. The stairs leading down to the lower level — so steep Jack wouldn’t want to navigate them in the dark, stone sober — were steps from the front door. And there was nothing blocking them off, nothing preventing the baby from suffering a lethal tumble if he ventured too close to the precipice.

  Jack caught Jenny’s eye and gestured at the stairs. She nodded, a grim, pissed-off expression clouding her face. She drew a deep breath and bellowed, “Police! Anybody fucking here?”

  The rooms on the entry floor — the bedrooms — were empty and Jenny asked, concerned, “Where’s the boy? The three-year-old.”

  She took the lead down the stairs to the lower level and they found the baby’s brother asleep on the parquet floor in front of the television. The room was as hot as an open furnace and Jack felt light-headed as the heat wrapped around him. The closing credits to an animated film scrolled across the tv screen, flickering light across the sleeping boy’s body.

  Curled on his side with only his arm for a pillow, the boy never stirred as they approached him. He was shirtless and even from across the room, he appeared frail and sickly thin, his ribs far too prominent beneath his dark skin. Jack’s anger, already seething from finding the baby next to the stairs, began to boil.

  “Someone’s going to answer for this,” he swore quietly.

  Jenny nodded in agreement as she knelt to wake the boy. While she bundled him up unresistingly in her arms — is it good or bad that he goes to a stranger that easily? — Jack picked up the DVD case. Disney’s Aladdin. He flipped it over and his anger reached new heights.

  He held the case up to Jenny, speaking through clenched teeth. “The running time is ninety minutes. Does that mean their mother has been gone that long?”

  “Could be. The call was already forty-five minutes old when we got it.” She ran a hand over the back of the boy slumped in her arms. “Call for an ambulance, Jack. He’s hot and his skin is bone dry.”

  Jenny carefully climbed the stairs, one hand supporting the boy, the other gripping the railing. Jack followed her up, keeping close in case she slipped under the child’s weight, although Jack doubted Jenny considered the boy a burden. Going up the stairs, Jack had the dispatcher order up an ambulance, amazed the mitre worked within the apartment. The Service’s portable radios were notoriously crappy when . . . well, just n
otoriously crappy.

  Jack watched the muscles in Autry’s jaw bunch with tension when he saw the boy in Jenny’s arms.

  Jenny headed for the door. “Let’s get them downstairs. We can meet the ambulance out front.”

  They gathered in the hall outside the apartment and while Jack was locking the door, he heard Autry say, very quietly, very furiously, “That’s the mother.”

  A rather rotund black woman was walking toward them, her beaded braids swinging with each ponderous step. They watched in silence as she approached, Jack — perhaps all of them — waiting and hoping for some sign of concern or apprehension on the mother’s face. After all, how often does a mother find her young children in the arms of police officers outside her apartment?

  Apparently, for this mother, often enough.

  She calmly stepped up to Autry and reached for the baby, no more troubled than if she was taking a bag of groceries.

  Jack stopped her with a hand on her arm. “Are you these children’s mother?”

  She spared Jack’s hand a disdainful glance. “Ya,” she spat, the word heavy with Jamaican patois, before sucking her teeth derisively at him. “Give me my baby,” she demanded of Autry.

  “I don’t think so,” Jack declared. “You’re under arrest.” The hand on her arm went from stopping to gripping.

  “What?” she shrieked. “What for?”

  “For abandonment,” Jack explained, an angry, satisfied tone to his words. “For leaving your children alone and in danger. Now, put your hands behind your back.”

  “You can’t arrest me,” she yelled as she tried to pull free of Jack’s hold. “Ah ain’t done no’ting wrong.”

  Jack clamped her arm, his fingers sinking into flabby flesh. He jerked her toward him and snarled in her face, “You’re under arrest. If you keep this shit up, you’ll be going to the hospital first. Understand?”

  “Oh, Jesus, help me!” she cried and flung herself to the floor. The sudden drop caught Jack unawares and her sweaty arm slipped free. “Jesus, Jesus! Help me,” she wailed as she rolled on the dirt-encrusted floor.