by Tim Stevens
At the same time Craddock, heavier and slower, lunged at Venn, cannoning into his torso like a quarterback tackling high. Although he’d tensed his muscles in anticipation, Venn felt the breath knocked out of him as the younger man’s bulk slammed against him. He stumbled back a couple of steps until he was brought up hard against the side of a pickup truck.
Venn whipped one arm down around Craddock’s neck and gripped his wrist in his other hand, getting the other man in a headlock. Craddock tried twisting his head free but Venn hung on, squeezing tighter, even as Craddock’s weight bore down on him, pinning him against the truck.
Austin jabbed a knuckly half-fist toward Venn’s throat. Venn dodged, but not fast enough to avoid the blow completely, and he felt stars explode before his eyes and a sheaf of pain blast through his head. He let go his own wrist and used his free hand to hammer against Craddock’s ear. The man howled and brought a hand up to his ear, but Venn was waiting for that and grabbed the hand and bent the little finger back, not stopping when he felt resistance but continuing until an audible snap cut the air like a trodden-on twig.
Craddock’s weight lifted slightly from Venn and he brought a knee up, hard, connecting with the man’s belly just underneath his breastbone. Craddock staggered backward and Venn followed up with a second kick, right in the middle of the soldier’s belly. Craddock doubled over, an ooof escaping his lips. As he went down, Venn booted him in the face, pulling the kick at the last moment so as not to cause severe damage. He felt the man’s nose break and spread.
Austin was on him already, his blows swift and varied and professional, and Venn parried and dodged and rocked at the crashes of agony where the fists caught his face and chest. He staggered back against the truck, exaggerating the movement, but Austin was too skilled a fighter to be fooled and he pressed home his advantage, lashing out once more with his boot and this time almost, almost, connecting with Venn’s knee, a crippling blow if it had landed.
Venn darted aside, putting a few feet between him and Austin, and held up his hands.
“Wait,” he said. “Wait.”
He dropped his hands, poked Craddock with the tip of his boot.
“He’s down,” he said. “I’ve got no beef with you.”
For an instant, Austin looked down at his fallen comrade.
It was a mistake.
Venn wasn’t as fast as Austin. But he was taller, and his reach was longer. He used this to its full effect, leaping forward on his long legs and punching with his long arm, covering the distance between them before Austin had a chance to step aside and bring his own arms up.
Venn’s fist caught Austin square in the mouth, flattening his lips against his teeth and rocking his head backward like a puppet’s. He was lifted off his feet, to land heavily on the asphalt on his ass. Somehow, he managed to keep his head up so that it didn’t bang on the hard surface, but from the groggy way his eyes fluttered, Venn knew he was staying down.
Venn took a couple of seconds to catch his breath. He did a quick mental inventory, the way he’d been trained over many years in the Marines and on the force. All his limbs were moving. His vision was clear. There were little firecrackers of pain going off all over his body, and he’d be sore as hell over the next few days. But he was intact.
He glanced around the parking lot. One man had emerged from the bar and was making his way over to his car in the distance, but he was either too preoccupied or too drunk to glance over in Venn’s direction.
Venn picked his way between the two men, one prone, one supine, and gazed down at them in turn. Both of them were conscious, Austin less so than Craddock. Venn stooped and grabbed Craddock by the collar of his jacket and hauled him over, dumping him on his back. Craddock made a half-assed attempt to scramble away on his elbows, but he slumped, defeated, almost immediately.
Venn said, loud enough for both of them to hear: “Assaulting a police officer. That means jail time. And your careers in the Army are over, for sure.”
Neither man reacted, apart from a groan of pain from Austin, who was trying to sit up but seemed to have forgotten how.
“The thing is, though, there are mitigating circumstances,” Venn continued. “I provoked you. It’s your word against mine, of course, and I don’t think most juries would lose much sleep trying to decide whether to believe a couple of drunk Army grunts or a serving NYPD officer. Especially one who’s just kicked both of your asses.”
Craddock’s eyes blazed with hate.
Venn said, “So I’m not worried about any repercussions. But to be honest, I’d feel bad, knowing you were getting busted when I’d riled you in the first place. Which means, gentlemen, that I’m going to let this assault, this felony, slide just this once. Besides, you’ve been helpful. You’ve confirmed something about Dale Fincher that’s very useful for me to know.”
Venn knelt beside Craddock, grabbed him by the shirt collar just under his throat.
“Let me tell you something, soldier. I’m a Marine. I know what it’s like to serve the US in a military capacity. You may be Army, but the basic ethos is the same. Your job is to serve. To do what’s right for the citizens of this country. The citizens who, collectively, pay for your training and your food and shelter and your guns. What your job does not involve, is making judgment calls about how another person lives. You’re allowed to have opinions, of course. Even bigoted ones. Hell, it’s a free country. But when somebody lives their life in a way that’s at odds with the opinions you’ve formed, lives their life without hurting anybody else in the process... well, then you bite your tongue. You suck it up. Because it’s none of your business.”
He let go Craddock’s collar and the man’s head thunked against the asphalt.
Venn rose to his feet once more. He stared down at Craddock grimly.
“You’re lucky you’re not wearing a uniform right now,” he said. “Because you’d have disgraced it. And I’d see to it, personally, that you never wore it again.”
Venn turned to look down at Austin, who was by now sitting up. His eyes were hooded and not yet fully focussed.
“The same goes for you, asshole,” said Venn. “Though there may be hope for you yet. I get the feeling you’re not quite the son of a bitch your pal here is. Which leads me to assume that you’ve gone along with him, with his gay-baiting, because you’re too chickenshit to speak up against it. Which in turn makes me wonder if you’ve got any balls.”
Without a backward glance, Venn walked away to his Jeep.
Chapter 10
Her name was Alice Peters.
She was around twenty-eight or thirty years old, stood five-two even in slightly raised heels, and weighed perhaps a hundred pounds.
And she had the Sigma curse on her.
Sally-Jo studied her across the room, trying not to stare. It was hard not to. She was so perfect, so ideal, Sally-Jo had to remind herself from time to time to keep breathing.
Although there was a lectern up in the front of the hall, Alice Peters ignored it, simply standing without visual aids or notes of any kind and talking freely, fluently, while the audience listened, hypnotized by the cadences of her voice. She was plainly, casually dressed in jeans and a sweater.
Alice Peters had cafe au lait skin, smooth and clear. Most of the audience were African American or Hispanic, but there was a scattering of white people, too, including Sally-Jo herself.
After a full half hour of unbroken monologue, Peters came to a natural stop. She didn’t thank the audience, or ask them if there were any questions. Instead, the silence hung heavy in the hall, until the first handclaps started.
They rose like a swelling wave and broke over Peters. She didn’t look awkward or embarrassed or self-congratulatory. She simply smiled gently, gave a little nod of her head, and turned slightly to the reverend, who’d risen from his chair off to one side and was advancing toward her, joining in the applause himself.
The reverend hugged her in his great, bear-like arms, whispered something in he
r ear. Then he turned to the audience, some of whom were on their feet by now.
He said, his voice a rich, rolling bass: “Thank you, Ms Peters. Now, I guess there’ll be one or two questions?”
From her seat toward the rear of the hall, Sally-Jo watched in fascination as the forest of hands shot up, with some people taking a few steps forward in their eagerness to be noticed. The reverend laughed and pointed randomly to a young woman in the middle.
It went on for another half hour, the audience asking their questions and Alice Peters answering clearly and warmly. Every one of the questioners, without exception, thanked her for her moving story.
Sally-Jo learned a great deal about Alice Peters in that half hour, without asking a single question herself.
Peters had been giving talks and seminars at the church hall in Sugar Hill, and elsewhere across the city, for the last six months. It seemed her sessions had become so popular that busses were being laid on to transport people from as far afield as New Jersey. The demand was so great that Peters was booked up at the center for the next year.
She was a part-time teacher to kids with learning disabilities, as well as a motivational speaker. She was twenty-nine years old. Nine years ago, things had been very different. From the age of thirteen, Alice had been a prostitute and a heroin addict. She’d first been arrested at the age of nine for shoplifting, and then again several times through her teens for vandalism, pickpocketing and disorderly conduct in public. Petty offenses, but they built up on her rap sheet. By age sixteen, she was well and truly hooked on the needle, and was living a semi-conscious, mostly nocturnal existence in a condemned slum tenement in Harlem along with seven other girls, kept like a zoo animal by a gang of pimps who readily resorted to violence if Alice or any of their other slaves tried to escape or to defy them in any way.
When she was nineteen, Alice’s best friend, one of the other girls she was housed with, died of a heroin overdose after being beaten up by one of the gang. It was never clear whether the overdose was accidental or not. In many ways, as Alice said, it didn’t matter.
That was when she decided to turn her life around.
She’d gotten out one night by hitting the john she was with over the head and escaping though a window, to avoid the pimp sitting in the car outside. Utterly bewildered by the maze of Manhattan streets she found herself lost in, Alice had undergone a night like Virgil’s journey through hell in Dante’s Inferno. It wasn’t helped by the fact that she hadn’t had a fix in over twelve hours – the pimps always withheld the treat until after the girls had finished a job, as an incentive for them not to pull a double-cross.
Eventually she’d wound up at a refuge for battered and abused women near Tompkins Square, and the process of recovery had begun. It had involved a prolonged period of hospitalization, during which she’d undergone opiate detox and been treated for a variety of illnesses including several STDs and a mild pneumonia. Alice had at times fought against the process, longing for the comfort and certainty of the life she’d been living. But she’d stuck with it, and gradually, painfully, her life had changed.
She’d gone back to school. Achieved a diploma in teaching. And, through it all, she’d been determined not to turn her back on her old life, but to face it. To understand what she’d been through, and to help others break free.
She spoke, in her talk and in the questions afterward, of hope. Hope for those in the audience who had kids or siblings or friends who were trapped in the brutal spiral of addiction and exploitation at whatever level. Hope for the younger people listening, who might feel their lives were heading that way. But her message wasn’t just a supportive, emotional one. She also provided hard, practical advice on what to do: phone numbers to call, drop-in centers to visit. She was candid about what she’d found useful and what not.
Sally-Jo couldn’t help but be affected by Peters’ tale, and the way she told it. She felt a stirring within her, deep down and primal, which she didn’t try to deny. At several points, she felt a tightening in her throat, the sting of tears in her eyes.
It almost caused her to abandon her plans. Almost.
Sally-Jo had been searching for the past two days, wandering the streets in the more run-down parts of New York, seeking out centers just like this one in the hope of finding somebody suitable. She’d lucked out with Alice Peters, had never imagined she’d find somebody who fit the bill so perfectly.
Sally-Jo was dressed in a heavy, shapeless coat several sizes too big that she’d picked up in an Army surplus store on Canal Street. Her tracksuit pants were dirty and a little frayed, and her chestnut hair was bundled up under a wool beanie with the Yankees emblem. She wore no makeup. Her naturally pale face, her shambling, hangdog gait, made her invisible. Nobody so much as glanced at her as she strode the streets, not even the men.
An ability to disguise herself, to hide who she really was, had always been one of her strong points, Sally-Jo reflected.
The audience began to drift out, many of them passing by Alice Peters to thank her. Peters stood with the reverend, drinking coffee and chatting with him and a couple of other workers at the church. Sally-Jo hung around awhile, not wanting to approach Peters yet – the reverend or one of the others might remember her – before picking up her rucksack and shuffling outside and loitering down the block. She pulled the hood of her jacket over her beanie and hunched against the biting cold and watched the entrance to the center.
Twenty minutes later, Alice Peters emerged, bundled up in an overcoat and scarf. Sally-Jo was in luck: the woman was alone.
Peters turned right, away from Sally-Jo, and headed up the street toward the subway station on the corner. Sally-Jo set off after her, keeping well back. She saw the woman disappear down into the station and picked up her pace a little.
Sally-Jo had no particular aptitude for tailing people, but Alice Peters was easy to keep up with, mainly because she carried herself with an air of serene openness, as if it would never cross her mind that somebody might be stalking her. It was late morning, and the subway carriage was moderately full. Peters took the train south, then the cross-train toward Brooklyn. On the way she busied herself with an iPad, as if she was checking notes or preparing a presentation.
She alighted at Prospect Avenue and hesitated at the exit from the station, looking about as if uncertain of her surroundings. That was good, Sally-Jo thought. It would be easier to take her in an unfamiliar setting.
Peters studied her iPad, then set off at a brisk pace down the street. Sally-Jo thought she’d probably oriented herself using Google Maps. The district was a bohemian, slightly grungy one, teeming with locals more than obvious tourists. They provided good cover for Sally-Jo as she followed Peters.
The woman paused halfway down the street, then took a left through the gates of a park after consulting her iPad again. A shortcut, Sally-Jo assumed. She crept after Peters and entered the park.
A wide path skirted a pond covered in a jigsaw of ice sheets. On either side, rolling lawns led up to a ring of dense trees. Usually, in a park like this at this hour, there’d be early lunchers sitting on the benches or picnicking on the lawns, thought Sally-Jo. Now it was just too cold for that. The only people around were mothers pushing strollers containing bundles of woolen clothes inside which babies were hidden, and the inevitable jogging fanatics, pounding by with red faces.
Peters made her way swiftly across the park, angling left. Sally-Jo examined the environment quickly, aware of her quickening heartbeat. This was going to be a difficult one. She’d have to move fast.
She broke off the path and headed across the lawn in an arc, ending up walking parallel to Peters but thirty yards away from her. Sally-Jo skirted the treeline, keeping Peters in sight. She glanced into the thicket of trees. There was nobody there she could see.
She saw Peters disappearing toward the other side of the park and another gate there. Quickly, Sally-Jo ran across the lawn after her, waiting till she got close before she cried out: “Mi
ss? Can you help me?”
Peters whirled, fear in her eyes. She relaxed a fraction when she saw it was a woman approaching her, but the wariness was still there.
Sally-Jo stopped short a few feet from Peters. Her own eyes were wild, and she’d set a look of panic on her face that she thought was convincing, judging but the way Peters’ expression was rapidly turning to one of concern.
“What’s wrong?” Peters said.
“It’s... my boyfriend,” Sally-Jo gasped, feeling hysteria rising inside her. “He’s... he’s...”
This time Peters took a step closer, staring at Sally-Jo all over. “What is it? Has he attacked you?” Peters gazed past Sally-Jo over her shoulder, as if seeking out a pursuer.
“No, no.” Sally-Jo shook her head frantically. “He’s - I think he’s ODed. Smack. I think he’s taken an overdose.”
That pushed Alice Peters’ buttons immediately. She took another step forward until she was at Sally-Jo, and she gripped her arms, firmly but not painfully.
In a low, calm voice, she said, “Where is he, honey?”
Sally-Jo gestured frantically back across the lawn. “We were over there. In the trees. He just... collapsed. Started spitting, frothing. I can’t wake him up. I can’t wake him up.”
Sally-Jo knew she was running a risk. The woman might pull out her cell phone right there and call 911, and then the whole thing would have to be abandoned. Sally-Jo would have to make her excuses and run off, and hope no more was said about it.
But Peters pulled on her elbow and said, “Come on. Show me,” and Sally-Jo felt a surge of triumph.
She led Peters over the lawn, not running – that would attract the attention of anybody who might be passing by – but instead moving in a stumbling lope. Peters didn’t rush her. They reached the tree line and Sally-Jo began to claw her way through the depleted foliage.
She stopped, stared around her as if unsure of the way. Peters too was gazing about.