Richard Montanari: Four Novels of Suspense: The Rosary Girls, the Skin Gods, Merciless, Badlands

by Richard Montanari

  No, Jessica thought. Not my life. Not this night.

  No.

  The world uncoiled, shot back to speed.

  “Gun!” Jessica yelled.

  By this time Detective John Shepherd, the homeless man on the stoop, was on his feet. But before he could clear his weapon, D’Shante spun and slammed the butt of the Tec into his forehead, stunning him, flaying the skin over his right eye. Shepherd collapsed to the ground. Blood spurted, cascaded into his eyes, blinding him.

  D’Shante raised his weapon.

  “Drop it!” Jessica yelled, Glock leveled. D’Shante showed no sign of compliance.

  “Drop it, now!” she repeated.

  D’Shante drew down. Aimed.

  Jessica fired.

  The bullet slammed into D’Shante Jackson’s right shoulder, exploding the muscle and flesh and bone into a thick, pink spray. The Tec flew from his hands as he spun 360 and collapsed to the ground, shrieking in surprise and agony. Jessica inched forward and kicked the Tec over to Shepherd, still training her weapon on Trey Tarver. Tarver, hands up, stood near the mouth of an alley that cut between the buildings. If their intel was accurate, he carried his .32 semi-auto in a holster at the small of his back.

  Jessica looked over at John Shepherd. He was stunned, but not out. She took her eyes off Trey Tarver for only a second, but that was long enough. Tarver bolted up the alley.

  “You all right?” Jessica asked Shepherd.

  Shepherd wiped the blood from his eyes. “I’m good.”

  “You sure?”

  “Go.”

  As Jessica sidled up to the alley entrance, peering into the shadows, back on the street corner D’Shante pulled himself into a sitting position. His shoulder oozed blood between his fingers. He eyed the Tec.

  Shepherd cocked his .38 Smith & Wesson, aiming it at D’Shante’s forehead. He said: “Give me a fucking reason.”

  With his free hand, Shepherd reached into his coat pocket for his two-way. Four detectives were sitting in a van, half a block away, waiting for the call. When Shepherd saw the casing on the rover, he knew they would not be coming. When he had fallen to the ground, he smashed the radio. He keyed it. It was dead.

  John Shepherd grimaced, glanced up the alley, into the darkness.

  Until he could get D’Shante Jackson frisked and cuffed, Jessica was on her own.

  THE ALLEY WAS littered with derelict furniture, tires, rusting appliances. Halfway to the end was a T-junction, leading to the right. Her gun low, Jessica still-hunted down the alley, hugging the wall. She tore the wig from her head; her newly cut short hair was spiky and wet. A slight breeze cooled her a few degrees, clearing her thoughts.

  She peered around the corner. No movement. No Trey Tarver.

  Halfway down the alley, on the right, the window of an all-night Chinese takeout poured out dense steam, pungent with ginger, garlic, and green onions. Beyond, the clutter formed ominous shapes in the gloom.

  Good news. The alley dead-ended. Trey Tarver was trapped.

  Bad news. He could be any one of those shapes. And he was armed.

  Where the hell is my backup?

  Jessica decided to wait.

  Then a shadow lurched, darted. Jessica saw the muzzle flash an instant before she heard the report. The bullet slammed into the wall just a foot or so over her head. Fine brick dust fell.

  Oh God, no. Jessica thought about her daughter, Sophie, sitting in some bright hospital waiting room. She thought about her father, a retired officer himself. But mostly she thought about the wall in the lobby of the police administration building, the wall dedicated to the department’s fallen officers.

  More movement. Tarver ran, low, toward the end of the alley. Jessica had a shot. She stepped into the open.

  “Don’t move!”

  Tarver stopped, hands out to his side.

  “Drop your weapon!” Jessica shouted.

  The back door to the Chinese restaurant suddenly flew open. A busboy stepped between her and her target. He brought a pair of huge plastic garbage bags out of the restaurant, obscuring her line of sight.

  “Police! Get out of the way!”

  The kid froze, confused. He looked both ways up the alley. Beyond him, Trey Tarver spun and fired again. The second shot smashed into the wall over Jessica’s head—closer this time. The Chinese kid dove to the ground. He was pinned down. Jessica could no longer wait for backup.

  Trey Tarver disappeared behind the Dumpster. Jessica hugged the wall, heart pounding, Glock out front. Her back was soaking wet. Well trained for this moment, she ran through the checklist in her mind. Then she threw the checklist out. There was no training for this moment. She edged toward the man with the gun.

  “It’s over, Trey,” she yelled. “SWAT’s on the roof. Give it up.”

  No reply. He was calling her bluff. He would go out with a blaze, becoming a street legend.

  Glass broke. Were there basement windows into these buildings? She looked to her left. Yes. Steel casement windows; some barred, some not.

  Shit.

  He was getting away. She had to move. She reached the Dumpster, put her back to it, lowered herself to the asphalt. She peered beneath. There was enough light to see a silhouette of Tarver’s feet if he was still on the other side. He wasn’t. Jessica edged around, saw a mound of plastic garbage bags and loose refuse—piled drywall, paint cans, discarded planks of lumber. Tarver was gone. She scanned the end of the alley, saw the broken window.

  Had he gone through?

  She was just about to return to the street and bring in the troops to search the building when she saw a pair of dress shoes emerging from beneath the pile of stacked plastic garbage bags.

  She drew a deep breath, tried to calm herself. It didn’t work. It might be weeks before she actually calmed down.

  “Get up, Trey.”

  No movement.

  Jessica found her wind, continued: “Your Honor, because the suspect had taken two shots at me already, I couldn’t take a chance. When the plastic moved, I fired. It all happened so fast. Before I knew it, I had emptied my entire mag into the suspect.”

  A rustling of plastic. “Wait.”

  “Thought so,” Jessica said. “Now, very slowly—and I mean very slowly—place the gun on the ground.”

  After a few seconds, a hand slid out, a .32 semi-auto ringed on a finger. Tarver put the gun on the ground. Jessica picked it up.

  “Now get up. Nice and easy. Hands where I can see them.”

  Trey Tarver slowly emerged from the pile of garbage bags. He stood, facing her, hands out to his sides, eyes darting from left to right. He was going to challenge her. After eight years on the force, she knew the look. Trey Tarver had seen her shoot a man not two minutes ago, and he was going to challenge her.

  Jessica shook her head. “You don’t want to fuck with me tonight, Trey,” she said. “Your boy hit my partner and I had to shoot him. Plus, you shot at me. What’s worse, you made me snap a heel on my best shoes. Be a man and take your medicine. It’s over.”

  Tarver stared at her, trying to melt her cool with his jailhouse burn. After a few seconds, he saw the South Philly in her eyes and realized it wouldn’t work. He put his hands behind his head and interlaced his fingers.

  “Now turn around,” Jessica said.

  Trey Tarver looked at her legs, her short dress. He smiled. His diamond tooth glimmered in the streetlight. “You first, bitch.”

  Bitch?

  Bitch?

  Jessica glanced back up the alley. The Chinese kid was back in the restaurant. The door was closed. They were alone.

  She looked at the ground. Trey was standing on a discarded two-by-six. One end of the board was perched precariously on a discarded paint can. The can was inches from Jessica’s right foot.

  “I’m sorry, what did you say?”

  Cold flames in his eyes. “I said ‘You first, bitch.’ ”

  Jessica kicked the can. At that moment, the look on Trey Tarver’s face
said it all. His expression was not unlike that of Wile E. Coyote at the moment the hapless cartoon character realizes the cliff is no longer beneath him. Trey crumpled to the ground like wet origami, on the way down smacking his head on the edge of the Dumpster.

  Jessica looked at his eyes. Or, more accurately, the whites of his eyes. Trey Tarver was out cold.

  Oops.

  Jessica rolled him over just as a pair of detectives from the Fugitive Squad finally arrived on the scene. No one had seen anything and, even if they had, Trey Tarver didn’t exactly have a big fan club in the department. One of the detectives tossed her a pair of handcuffs.

  “Oh yeah,” Jessica said to her unconscious suspect. “We gonna do some bidness.” She clicked the cuffs shut on his wrists. “Bitch.”

  THERE IS A time for police officers, after a successful hunt, when they decelerate from the chase, when they assess the operation, congratulate each other, grade their performance, brake. It is a time when morale is at its peak. They went where the darkness was and emerged into the light.

  They gathered at the Melrose Diner, a twenty-four-hour spoon on Snyder Avenue.

  They had taken down two very bad people. There was no loss of life, and the only serious injury came to someone who deserved it. The good news was that the shooting, as far as they could tell, was clean.

  Jessica had been a police officer for eight years. She was in uniform for the first four, followed by a stint on the Auto Unit, a division of the city’s Major Case Squad. In April of this year she had joined the Homicide Unit. In that short time she had seen her share of horrors. There was the young Latina woman murdered in a vacant lot in Northern Liberties, rolled into a rug, put on top of a car, and dumped in Fairmount Park. There was the case of the young man lured into the park by three of his classmates only to be robbed and beaten to death. And there was the Rosary Killer case.

  Jessica wasn’t the first or only woman in the unit, but anytime someone new joins a small, tightly knit squad in the department there is the requisite distrust, the unspoken probationary period. Her father had been a legend in the department, but those were shoes to fill, not walk in.

  After her incident debriefing, Jessica entered the diner. Immediately the four detectives who were already there—Tony Park, Eric Chavez, Nick Palladino, and a patched-up John Shepherd—got up from their stools, put their hands against the wall, and assumed the position in tribute.

  Jessica had to laugh.

  She was in.

  3

  SHE IS HARD to look at now. Her skin is no longer perfect, but rather torn silk. The blood pools around her head, nearly black in the dim light thrown from the trunk lid.

  I look around the parking area. We are alone, just a few feet from the Schuylkill River. Water laps the dock—the eternal meter of the city.

  I take the money and put it into the fold of the newspaper. I toss the newspaper onto the girl in the trunk of the car, then slam the lid.

  Poor Marion.

  She really was pretty. She had about her a certain freckled charm that reminded me of Tuesday Weld in High Time.

  Before we left the motel, I cleaned the room, tore up the room receipt, and flushed it down the toilet. There had been no mop, no bucket. When you shoot on a shoestring, you make do.

  She stares up at me now, her eyes no longer blue. She may have been pretty, she may have been someone’s idea of perfection, but for all she was, she was no Angel.

  The house lights are down, the screen flickers to life. In the next few weeks the city of Philadelphia will hear a great deal about me. It will be said that I am a psychopath, a madman, an evil force from the soul of hell. As the bodies fall and the rivers run red, I will receive some horrendous reviews.

  Don’t believe a word of it.

  I wouldn’t hurt a fly.

  4

  Six days later

  SHE LOOKED COMPLETELY normal. Some might even say friendly, in a doting, spinster-aunt sort of way. She stood five three and could not have weighed more than ninety-five pounds in her black spandex one-piece and pristine white Reeboks. She had short, brick-red hair and clear blue eyes. Her fingers were long and slender, her nails groomed and unpainted. She wore no jewelry.

  To the outside world, she was a pleasant looking, physically fit woman nearing middle age.

  For Detective Kevin Francis Byrne, she was a combination Lizzie Borden, Lucrezia Borgia, and Ma Barker, all wrapped up in a package resembling Mary Lou Retton.

  “You can do better than that,” she said.

  “What do you mean?” Byrne managed.

  “The name you called me in your mind. You can do better than that.”

  She is a witch, he thought. “What makes you think I called you a name?”

  She laughed her shrill, Cruella De Vil laugh. Dogs three counties away cringed. “I’ve been at this almost twenty years, Detective,” she said. “I’ve been called every name in the book. I’ve been called names that aren’t even scheduled in the next book. I’ve been spat upon, swung upon, cursed in a dozen languages, including Apache. I’ve had voodoo dolls made in my likeness, novenas offered up for my painful demise. I assure you, there is no torture you could possibly conjure that has not been wished upon me.”

  Byrne just stared. He had no idea he was that transparent. Some detective.

  Kevin Byrne was two weeks into a twelve-week physical therapy program at HUP, the Hospital at the University of Pennsylvania. He had been shot at close range in the basement of a house in Northeast Philadelphia on Easter Sunday. Although he was expected to make a full recovery, he had learned early on that phrases like full recovery usually involved a lot of wishful thinking.

  The bullet, the one with his name on it, had lodged in his occipital lobe, approximately one centimeter from his brain stem. And even though there was no nerve involvement, and the damage was all vascular, he had endured nearly twelve hours of cranial surgery, six weeks of induced coma, and nearly two months in the hospital.

  The offending slug was now encased in a small Lucite cube and sitting on his nightstand, a macabre trophy courtesy of the Homicide Unit.

  The most serious damage came not from injury to his brain, but rather from the way his body had twisted on the way to the floor, an unnatural wrenching of the lower back. This move had caused damage to his sciatic nerve, the long nerve that runs from each side of the lower spine, through deep in the buttock and back of the thigh, and all the way down to the foot, connecting the spinal cord with the leg and foot muscles.

  And while his laundry list of ailments was painful enough, the bullet he took to his head was a mere inconvenience compared with the pain generated by the sciatic nerve. Sometimes it felt like someone was running a carving knife up his right leg and across his lower back, stopping along the way to twist at various vertebrae.

  He was free to return to duty as soon as the city doctors cleared him, and as soon as he felt ready. Until then, he was officially IOD: injured on duty. Full pay, no work, and a bottle of Early Times every week from the unit.

  While his acute sciatica was about as much agony as he had ever endured, pain, as a way of life, was an old friend. He had tolerated fifteen years of savage migraine headaches, ever since the first time he had been shot and nearly drowned in the icy Delaware River.

  It had taken a second bullet to rid him of the malady. Although he wouldn’t recommend getting shot in the head as a therapy for migraine sufferers, he wasn’t about to second-guess the cure. Since the day he had been shot for the second—and hopefully final—time, he hadn’t suffered a single headache.

  Take two hollow points and call me in the morning.

  Still, he was tired. Two decades on the force of one of the toughest cities in the country had drained his will. He had put in his time. And although he had faced some of the most violent and depraved people east of Pittsburgh, his current antagonist was a petite physical therapist named Olivia Leftwich and her bottomless bag of tortures.

  Byrne was standing al
ong one wall of the physical therapy room, against a waist-high bar, his right leg propped parallel to the floor. He held the position, stoically, despite the murder in his heart. The slightest movement lit him up like a Roman candle.

  “You’re making great improvements,” she said. “I’m impressed.”

  Byrne glared daggers at her. Her horns receded and she smiled. No fangs visible.

  All part of the illusion, he thought.

  All part of the con.

  ALTHOUGH CITY HALL was the official epicenter of Center City, and the historical heart and soul of Philadelphia was Independence Hall, the city’s pride was still Rittenhouse Square, located on Walnut Street between Eighteenth and Nineteenth streets. Although not as well known as Times Square in New York City, or Picadilly Circus in London, Philadelphia was rightfully proud of Rittenhouse Square, which remained one of the city’s toniest addresses. In the shadow of posh hotels, historic churches, towering office buildings, and fashionable boutiques, on a summer day, at noontime, the crowds on the square were enormous.

  Byrne sat on a bench near the Barye sculpture Lion Crushing a Serpent in the center of the square. He had been nearly six feet tall in eighth grade, and had grown to his height of six three by the time he was a junior in high school. In his time in school and in the service, and in all of his time on the force, he had used his size and weight to his advantage, many times shutting down potential trouble before it began by merely standing up.

  But now, with his cane, his ashen complexion, and the sluggish limping gait caused by the pain pills he took, he felt small, unimportant, easily swallowed by the mass of humanity on the square.

  As with every time he left a physical therapy session, he vowed never to go back. What kind of therapy actually makes the pain worse? Whose idea was this? Not his. See you around, Matilda the Hun.

  He distributed his weight on the bench, finding a reasonably comfortable position. After a few moments he looked up and saw a teenaged girl crossing the square, weaving her way through the bike boys, the businessmen, the vendors, the tourists. Slender and athletic, feline in her movement, her fine, nearly white-blond hair was pulled back into a ponytail. She wore a peach sundress and sandals. She had dazzlingly bright aquamarine eyes. Every young man under the age of twenty-one was thoroughly captivated with her, as were far too many men over twenty-one. She had about her a patrician poise that can only come from true inner grace, a cool and enchanting beauty that said to the world that this was someone special.