by Ray Daniel
The door at the bottom of the stairs opened, closed. Maria was in the storm.
Bobby, sitting on the floor, his hand pressed to his bleeding shoulder looked up at me.
“Go!”
Seventy-Seven
I pounded down the stairs, praying that Maria would stop moving as soon as snow filled her canvas sneakers, that I’d be able to grab her up and get her inside. Pulled open the front door and jumped out onto the snow-covered pavement.
She was gone. Little sneaker footprints ran to the end of the court. I started to run after her, slipped, fell, got up, slipped again, and finally got myself under control. Trotted down the court to the snow pile and saw the little footprints climb up and over. Maria was in the street with the plows.
The pile was still soft. Tiny icy flakes stung my eyes. Tiny snow is cold snow. I figured the temperature to be in the teens. Maria wouldn’t last long in this. I half climbed, half sloshed through the pile and into the street. Looked up and down the street through the swirling snow. Didn’t see Maria. I took few steps in one direction, then backtracked.
That was when I saw the blood in the snow. It was black in the orange sodium light, steaming as it cooled. Did Maria get shot? I followed the trail. It led back to the snow pile and over.
Oh no.
I looked down at my Tom Brady UGG. Blood steamed over my ankle and onto the street. I felt around, found the hole in my jacket, reached in, and got hit with the burning pain as my finger came away covered in black blood. I didn’t have much time. I needed to make a guess. I guessed that Maria would run home.
Sal had been living only two streets from Maria this whole time. I ran down Commercial toward his house, wishing that I had never discovered the gunshot wound. It was starting to hurt, hot knitting needles in my side with every step. Reached Salutation, turned up it. I knew what I’d find. I’d find Maria, huddled against the front door, ringing the bell to an empty apartment. She’d be cold, and I’d pull her into my coat and dial 911.
I ran down alley-like Salutation and was rewarded with a tiny Keds print in the snow. Maria had come this way. I called out “Maria!” but the snow suffocated my call.
“Maria!”
I reached Sal’s apartment. I was wrong. The storm had drifted tiny flakes up against the front door. You couldn’t see the front steps anymore; they were covered and would remain covered until somebody shoveled them out. The pristine snowdrift told me that Maria had not even attempted to reach her apartment. One tiny print in the plowed snow pile told me that she’d given up almost immediately. More prints told me that she’d run on. Now I knew where she was going: St. Stephen’s Church or the fire station. She had to figure that someone would help her there.
I ran on down Salutation. I called “Maria!” again, but a wave of dizziness and burning told me to stop. Yelling wasn’t helping my gunshot wound. Friggin’ Angie. At the corner of Salutation and Hanover, I stopped, hands on knees, catching my breath. This wasn’t normal. I could run five miles a day—a sunny, warm day. But today, the blood loss, boots, and sliding snow were sapping my strength.
Looked down Hanover.
“Maria.” No oomph. Couldn’t even yell anymore.
I started down Hanover with a shuffling gate, leaned forward, and let gravity carry me into a run. The story ran every few years: a kid gets out into the storm and they find him or her dead in a snowdrift, ten feet from the front door. Hell of a headline for Rittenhauser: THE FALL OF RIZZO—DEATH OF A FAMILY. Visions of the Boston Globe swam in front of me as I shuffled on, looking through it for Maria. Footprints told me that she’d ignored the fire station. I made for the front door of St. Stephen’s Church. The empty street beckoned me on; brick buildings on either side housed the people of the North End, all safe from the cold, plows, and driving snow. All but one.
St. Stephen’s loomed up from the snow, but one look told me that I had been wrong again. No footprints. No break in the drifts. No evidence that Maria had stopped here.
Hands back on knees, I scrutinized the packed snow in the street. Saw one sneaker print leading onward. She might lead me, but I wasn’t certain how far I’d be able to follow. Blood ran down my UGG, flowing faster than before. I left a puddle a hand’s width across before I got myself moving again. Shuffling. Picturing a final goal, and the last place where Maria might have felt some comfort, where a frozen girl would think to go just before the storm snuffed out the last of her fire.
The North End, with its brick buildings, Italian posters, and narrow streets fell away behind a blackout tunnel. I kept myself shuffling forward, swinging my tunnel vision to the snow in front of doorways on either side. It occurred to me that I might just die doing this, wandering in a nor’easter with a gunshot wound until I passed out and got plowed. Why not? Sounded the right way for me to go. Shit, I might even win a Darwin award.
My legs kept going and I left them to their task. I couldn’t afford a stumble. I had one last idea, one last place. A place that I thought Maria could find and that I could find, and in which we’d both find some comfort.
And there they were, the tiny footprints fording the plow-piled snow. I followed, churning through the dirty snow and tripping on the curbstone. I fell into a foot of snow on the sidewalk. Footprints marked the snow. Tiny fresh sneaker prints, each one of them filling a little girl’s shoe with melting snow that sucked the heat out of that tiny body.
There couldn’t be more. I tried to stand, watched the world spin around me, found myself falling back into the snow. Not enough blood to stand. I crawled through the snow following the prints, finding a spot where Maria, wearing a cotton shirt and pajamas, had also fallen, then gotten up and shuffled on until she reached her destination.
The doorway of Cafe Vittoria.
Maria huddled against the doorway, leaning up against the plywood that covered the shattered glass, pawing at the door. I climbed the steps. Grabbed her.
“Maria.”
Maria stared into my eyes, struggled to get away, but I had her. I opened my coat front. Pulled her inside. She squirmed.
“No!” she said.
“Shh. Shh.”
“No! No!”
But as little as I had left, Maria had even less. Her tiny body pulled heat from me, leading me to shiver. She squirmed and got a finger in my bullet hole. I screamed, and she went stock still. I fumbled around in my pockets. So many pockets. Too many pockets.
Maria said, “Angie said you killed Ma.”
I tried to answer, stuttered. Just said, “Shh.” Found my phone, dialed 911.
The operator answered.
“Cafe Vittoria on Hanover,” I said. “We’re dying.”
I guess they came and got us. I don’t remember.
Seventy-Eight
I sat in a pew in St. Stephen’s Church. Jael sat to my right, having insisted upon coming. Hugh Graxton was next to her. Maria sat down front with her aunt—her new family.
A hymn filled the church.
For He is thy health and salvation …
Sal and Sophia’s caskets lay in front of the altar. I had helped push Sal’s down the aisle, though to be honest I had used the casket as support. I figured Sal wouldn’t have minded, but even if he did …
I don’t know if it was the blood loss or the blunt force trauma of the past two weeks, but either way I couldn’t focus on the proceedings. I watched them from a faraway place, my mind turning the simplicity of Maria’s kidnapping over in my mind. Such a simple idea: kill Sophia, marry Sal, raise Maria.
Was this all there was to evil? Was it just a simple cocktail of revenge and delusion? Angie had taken revenge for an aborted baby and a shattered uterus and had coddled the illusion that Sal would marry her, that they’d raise Maria together.
It had been easy for Angie to seduce a guy like Joey Pupo, the guy who had always tagged along, run behind. The guy tolerated b
y the cool kids, Sal and Marco. How simple for her to convince him to kill Marco, blame Sal, take Maria while Angie killed Sophia.
Of course, Joey didn’t realize he was just a cog to Angie. Maria had told me the story after we had recovered from the storm. Angie had burst into the apartment, shot the idiot Joey, and “rescued” Maria. They’d run down the steps from Joey’s and up the steps into Marco’s while I floundered around on the roof and Bobby argued with the Boston cops, a couple of morons in the snow.
“My brother was a good man.” Sal’s sister Bianca was giving the eulogy, reminding me of the one I had given for my mother. Good? I guess he was good. A good husband, a good father, a good cousin. A deadly enemy.
The dark mahogany of Sal’s casket peeked out from under its shroud. I looked away, shielding myself from the image of Sal’s eyes gazing upon a gigantic iron cross and losing focus. Thought about complexity theory instead. The power function. The notion that a single grain of sand, dropped on the right spot of a dune, can cause an avalanche. The right stock collapse can cascade through the stock market; the right slip on a tectonic plate can launch an earthquake that rips a city to shreds. Little things lead to the unexpected. Angie tries to steal Maria, and a gang war tears through the North End. Pistol Salvucci dies, a shipping container full of gore sails overseas. Jael takes a bullet in the chest, Cantrell gets one in the head. Sal dies under a cross in Orient Heights and Maria is an orphan.
Does evil always work this way? Does it always crawl into someone’s mind, sit in their brain, spin havoc and death in the name of justice? Did it all make sense to Angie? Did she think she’d earned the right because she let Sal get her pregnant? Was it even an accident? She’d chosen the abortion and the condo. Apparently the condo wasn’t enough.
The service ground on. We stood. We sat. We knelt. I let words and prayers and music and whimpering and tears and emotions pass through me, leaving me untouched. I didn’t want to be touched anymore.
Next I knew I was standing at the graveside, alone in a crowd. A ring of trampled snow separated me from the others. Graxton had taken Jael home to rest. Sal and Sophia’s family didn’t trust me and were huddled together in grief. Sal’s friends didn’t know me and stayed away. A spray of flowers graced the two caskets sitting next to a hole that had been chiseled through the frozen earth.
The family circle broke. Maria stepped out. Maria had overheard my fight with Angie in the kitchen. Left with nothing to believe and no adult protectors, she had run. But she was safe now, living with her aunt, still in the North End. Maria reached for my hand, pulled me across the circle of snow and among her family members, who made room for the interloper. I picked her up. She hugged my neck. Cried into my shoulder.
“Shhh.”
It was cold. It was always cold. Every friggin’ day was colder and darker and snowier than the one before. Piles of snow consumed us, pushed by plows, lifted by front-end loaders, dropped by trucks. Still the piles grew, turning black in the polluted, exhaust-filled air.
Sal didn’t care. This was one winter he’d miss.
Seventy-Nine
Maria and I stood at the top of a hill after a snowstorm. A bright blue March sky blazed above us. The sun had rediscovered warmth and snow plopped to the ground around us as it fell from the bare branches of the trees that graced the cemetery.
“Auntie Adriana says that it’s not right for it to snow in March,” said Maria.
“She’s right,” I said.
The past two months had brought changes to the North End. Adriana had taken in Maria and had, in a nice turn of justice, upgraded her living situation by moving into what had been Angie’s condo. She had set up a dumpster outside the condo and had hired guys to “get rid of that bitch’s shit.” Then she’d moved in with her wife, Catherine, plus Maria.
Caroline and I were still friends, but the benefits were off the table since Caroline had taken over Angie’s legal defense. I had tried to start a fight with her about it, but she would have none of it.
“You’re defending the woman who killed Sal,” I said as we sat in Zaftigs.
“Do you want lox on your bagel?” asked Caroline.
“She doesn’t deserve someone as good as you.”
“You know, it’s early, but I’m thinking that it would be fun to have a mimosa.”
“Are you listening to any of this?”
“It’s better for you that I’m not. So lox, or just straight up?”
“Seriously?” I asked.
Caroline gave me a raised eyebrow.
“Okay, I’ll have the lox.”
That was the last time we had talked. It turned out that I was a witness for both the prosecution and the defense. The prosecution wanted me to tell the story of how Angie shot Sal, and Caroline wanted me to tell the story of how Angie was crazy.
Either way, there would be no benefits until the trial was over.
Maria and I started picking our way down the hill, walking among the snow-covered graves. Most of the stones were still covered by last night’s storm, but some had been brushed off. It was Sunday morning and Maria had wanted to come to say hello. Sal and Sophia had been buried in the Rizzo family plot, their names added to a list of deceased Rizzos. My mother’s name was on the list.
Maria said, “You brush off your mother’s side and I’ll brush off my mother’s side.”
“Deal,” I said.
When we were done, Maria looked at the stone. “I miss them,” she said.
“I know,” I said. “I miss my mother too.”
Maria swept her arm across the graveyard. “Do you think all these people are in heaven?”
“Absolutely,” I said, hoping I was right.
“My feet are cold,” said Maria.
I picked her up. “Can you see your house from up here?” I asked.
“You’re silly.”
“Yeah, but I’m tall.”
“What’s that?” asked Maria, pointing.
The base of the black Rizzo headstone had warmed enough to melt the snow around it. A small purple smudge had pushed its way through the snow. A flower.
“That’s a crocus,” I said. “It means spring is coming.”
the end
About the Author
© Lynn Wayne
Ray Daniel is the award-winning author of Boston-based crime fiction. His short story “Give Me a Dollar” won a 2014 Derringer Award for short fiction, and “Driving Miss Rachel” was chosen as a 2013 distinguished short story by Otto Penzler, editor of The Best American Mystery Stories 2013.
Daniel’s work has been published in the Level Best Books anthologies Thin Ice, Blood Moon, and Stone Cold. Child Not Found is the third Tucker mystery, following Corrupted Memory and Terminated.
For more information, visit him online at raydanielmystery.com and follow him on Twitter @raydanielmystry.