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

by Richard Montanari

  No more tuna for a week.

  | THIRTY-TWO |

  LILLY SCANNED THE FOOD COURT AT THE TRAIN STATION, MORE WITH her nose than her eyes. She thought back to her last full meal, a $1.99 breakfast special at a roadside diner on Route 61, a tacky plastic place with a water-stained ceiling and prehistoric gum under the stools.

  But now, forty-eight hours later, sitting in the food court of the Thirtieth Street station, her stomach rumbled like one of the trains passing beneath her.

  This was the life of a runaway. She knew what she had to do.

  Desperate times and all …

  THE MAN WAS WATCHING HER.

  Lilly had always had the ability to sense when someone was observing her, even if that person was behind her back, even if they were on the other side of the room or the other side of the street. She registered the feeling as a slight warming of her skin, a minute tingling of the hair at the nape of her neck.

  She turned, glanced at the man, then looked away. He could have been thirty, he could have been fifty. He sat two tables away. He moved closer.

  “Hi,” he said.

  Lilly took a moment, playing it out. Here we go.

  “Hi,” Lilly replied.

  The man’s face lit up. He clearly wasn’t expecting a response. He cleared his throat. “Have you just come in by train?”

  Lilly nodded.

  “Just now?”

  She nodded again, a little too animatedly. She felt like a bobblehead doll. She backed off on the act. “Well, just a few minutes ago.”

  “How exciting,” he said. “I love train travel.”

  Oh, yes, how exciting, she thought. Train travel. Let’s see: burnt coffee, stale sandwiches, smelly passengers, grimy windows, crappy houses passing by that were so low-rent they were built right on the train tracks. Yeah. This is my dream vacation. This and Cozumel. “It’s okay,” she said.

  “Is this your first time in Philadelphia?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He arched his eyebrows. “Sir?” He laughed, but it sounded phony. “I’m not that much older than you are. Am I?”

  He clearly was, and it was so gross. “No,” she said, trying her best to sound sincere. “Not really.”

  He smiled again. His teeth were the color of old mushrooms.

  “Well, seeing as this is your first time in the City of Brotherly Love, I’d be happy to show you around,” he said. “If you have the time, of course. It’s a great city. Lots of history.”

  Lilly glanced toward the doors that led to Twenty-ninth Street. It was almost dark. The lights on the street shone in the near distance, a grainy canvas of green and red and turquoise. She looked back at the man, assessing him. He wasn’t that much taller than she was, did not look all that strong. She, on the other hand, had played soccer and lacrosse since she was seven. She had strong legs and deceptively strong arms. And she was fast. Lightning fast.

  “That would be totally great,” she said, infusing the word with just enough enthusiasm.

  The man looked at his watch, then at the huge area of the food court. The evening commuter rush had long since faded. There were just a few stragglers.

  “Tell you what,” he began. “I have to make a few calls. I’ll meet you at the corner of Twenty-third and Walnut. We can take a stroll.”

  He didn’t want to be seen leaving with her. She understood the play. This told her just about everything she needed to know. “Okay.”

  “Do you know where that is?”

  “I’ll find it,” Lilly said.

  “Are you sure you can?”

  Lilly laughed. It sounded creepy, almost sinister, but she was certain this man would not notice. “I found my way to Philadelphia, didn’t I?”

  The man laughed with her. Those teeth. Ugh.

  A few moments later the man got up, looked at his watch again, and crossed the huge room toward the Thirtieth Street entrance. She saw him adjust the front of his trousers. She wanted to hurl.

  Lilly closed her eyes for a moment—not having any idea how she was going to handle this. She thought about her house, her bedroom, her TV and cell phone, her dog, Rip. Rip was a thirteen-year-old cairn terrier, almost blind. Lilly started to tear up at the thought of Rip and his scuffed white bowl, Rip bumping into door jambs, then retreating, embarrassed. She stopped herself. This was no time for weakness, for sentimentality or dependency on the past. She had something to do.

  HE TRIED TO MAKE small talk. He succeeded. It couldn’t possibly have been any smaller. “You know, Philadelphia was once the capital of the United States.”

  She knew this. Every school kid in America knew this. “I didn’t know that.”

  “Do you know who discovered the place?”

  Gee, she thought. Penn and Teller?

  “William Penn, of course.” He pointed down Market Street, toward city hall. The statue of William Penn glowed in the dusk.

  “Wow.”

  She felt his hand reach out, try to hold hers. Gross. She reached around to her backpack, covering. She unzipped it, pulled out some gum. She didn’t offer him any. He didn’t notice. Every time she caught him looking at her he was staring at her chest.

  “There’s something down here I think you should see,” he said. “ There’s history everywhere.”

  They walked down the alley, around a corner. They stopped. There was nothing to see.

  “You know what?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “You’re very beautiful.”

  And there it was. On top of it, she knew it was a lie. She looked like crap. She probably smelled, too. She was a runaway. Runaways were skanks. “Thank you,” she said.

  “Can I ask you a question?”

  Lilly almost laughed. “Sure.”

  “Do you like me? Even, you know, a little bit?”

  Oh, about as much as a blister or a cold sore, Lilly thought. “Of course,” she said. “I’m here, aren’t I? Why would you ask me that?”

  “Because boys are insecure,” he said with gnarled smile.

  Boys. She was just about ready to puke. Time to get this party started. “You know, you don’t strike me as all that insecure.”

  “I don’t?”

  “Absolutely not. You strike me more as the Matt Damon type. Older—like my father’s age—but still pretty cool.”

  He smiled again. It was the last thing she wanted.

  “You know, I was thinking,” he said. “If you’re a little short of cash, I could help you out. You being from out of town and all. I did the Jack Kerouac thing myself when I was a little younger. I know how it can be.”

  “Well, I’ve never been to Philadelphia before,” she said. “I have no idea how much things cost.”

  “It can be expensive. Not quite like New York, but pricier than, say, Baltimore.”

  Lilly smiled, winked. “How much do you have, big spender?”

  Another laugh, as phony as the others. He reached into his back pocket, extracted a camouflage nylon wallet—pure class. He opened it. It bulged with plastic cards, business cards, ID cards. He pulled them all out, and she got a glimpse: Visa, Macy’s, American Express, a Borders gift card. She also saw what looked like a lot of cash. About an inch or so. It might have been all singles, but still.

  “Wow,” she said. Girls her age were supposed to say “wow” a lot. Like they were all Hannah Montana. “How much is in there?”

  “I don’t really know,” he said. “But I’d be willing to—”

  At this moment Lilly turned away, pivoted, and slammed her knee into the man’s crotch. Hard, and fast as lightning. He didn’t have a chance. The man blew a lungful of sour breath into her face, then folded instantly to the ground.

  Lilly looked behind her, to the mouth of the alley, then at the windows of the buildings on either side. All dark. All good. They were completely alone.

  “Why?” the man managed on a ragged breath. He was curled in a fetal position on the ground, knees to his chest

  “W
hy? Are you kidding me? What planet are you from?”

  “I don’t—”

  “You’re like a million years old,” Lilly said. “And I’m not even legal, dickhead.” She picked up his wallet, took his driver’s license and the money. “What did you think was going to happen?”

  “I thought we might—”

  “You thought what?” Lilly asked. “That we were going to fall in love? That we were going to have a romance?”

  “No,” he said. “It was just …”

  Lilly got down on the ground next to the man. She lay back, then pulled up her T-shirt, baring her breasts. She worked her right arm around the man’s neck, as if they were two drunken people at a wild frat party, or at some tequila-blast on spring break in Panama City. In her left hand she held up her digital camera, the lens facing them. She snapped a picture of the two of them together, then another for good measure: Mr. Mushroom Teeth and his topless teen cohort. Film at eleven.

  The flash was bright blue in the darkened alley. It blinded her for a second.

  “Now we have a record of our lovely time together,” Lilly said, pulling her top back down. She stood up, brushed herself off. “And keep in mind, if you tell anyone about this, if anyone comes looking for me, they’ll find this camera, okay?”

  The man remained silent. As expected. He was in pain.

  “Then later tonight I’m going to take some naked pictures of myself,” Lilly continued. “Full naked. And all of these pictures will be right in a row.” She slipped the camera into her bag, took out a brush, ran it through her hair. When she was done she put away her brush, pulled off the rubber band she always kept on her wrist, snapped her hair into a ponytail. “And your wife, your kids, your boss—the cops—they’ll see the pictures, too. Think about it. How many of them are going to think you didn’t take these pictures?” She put her bag over her shoulder, struck a pose. “I’m fourteen, dude. Think about that.”

  It wasn’t true. She was older. But she looked fourteen, and she was an unrivalled drama queen to boot.

  Lilly stepped back a few feet, waited. She reached into her bag, took out the printed photo she’d carried for two months, turned it toward the man. “This is your house, isn’t it?”

  The man tried to focus his eyes on the photograph of the big house with the woman standing in front of it. A few seconds later he did. “My … my house?”

  “Yeah. You live here, right?”

  “Are you crazy? That’s not my house. Who is that woman? Who the hell are you?”

  Lilly already knew the answer to her own question, but none of this would have made any sense if she didn’t ask.

  Seconds later, she put the photograph away, took a deep breath, composed herself—after all, she was not used to things like this, even if she had lived it all in her mind for a long time, over and over again—then stepped out of the alley, onto Market Street. No cops. Cool beans. After a block or so she slipped into the shadows, took out the wad of cash, counted it. She had 166 dollars.

  Oh, yes.

  For a street kid—which was what she was now, officially—it was a fortune. Not Donald Trump big, but big enough.

  For tonight.

  ON EIGHTEENTH STREET Lilly slipped into a diner, wolfed a hoagie, gulped a black coffee. Twenty minutes later, back on Market, she raised her hand, flagged a cab. The driver would know an inexpensive hotel, she thought, if there were such a thing in Philly. Right now all she cared about was a clean tub and a soft bed.

  A few moments later a cab pulled to the curb. Lilly slipped into the backseat. The driver was from Nigeria. Or maybe it was Uganda. Whichever, he had a wicked bad accent. He told her he knew just the hotel. Cabbies always did. She would tip him well.

  He was, like her, a stranger in a strange land.

  Lilly sat back, sated, in charge. She fingered the thick roll of cash in her hand. It was still warm. The night air rushing in the window made her sleepy, but not too sleepy to think about the next few days.

  Welcome to Philadelphia.

  | THIRTY-THREE |

  JESSICA GLANCED AT THE SPEEDOMETER. SHE WAS TWENTY OVER. SHE backed off, but not too much. The day was closing in on her and she wasn’t doing a very good job of shutting it out. She usually could.

  She remembered when she was small, her father coming home after a tough day, a Philly-cop day. In those days, the days when her mother had already passed and her father, still a patrolman, was juggling his career and two small children, he would drop his cap on the kitchen table, lock his service weapon in the desk in the living room, and circle the Jameson in the hutch.

  He always waited until the sun went down. Tough to do in summer. Daylight savings time, and all. Even harder to do in Lent, when he gave it up all together. Once, during Lent, when Jessica was four, and her family was still intact, her father made it all the way to Easter Saturday on the wagon. After dinner he walked down to the corner bar and got tanked. When he got home, and Maria Giovanni saw his condition, she proclaimed that her husband—probably the whole family—was hell-bound. She marched Jessica and her brother Michael down to St. Paul’s, banged on the rectory door until their pastor came out and blessed them. Somehow, that Easter came and went without the Giovanni family bursting into redemptive flame.

  Jessica wanted to call her father, but stopped herself. He’d think something was wrong. He would be right.

  __________

  SHE GOT IN just after eleven. The house was quiet, save for the sound of the central air, save for her husband Vincent’s world-class snoring upstairs. It sounded like a lumberjack competition on ESPN2.

  She made herself a sandwich, wrapped more than half of it and put it in the fridge. She cruised the cable channels, twice, then shut off the TV, padded upstairs, looked in on Sophie. Her daughter was awake, staring at the ceiling.

  Jessica left the hall light on, the door open slightly. A wedge of gold light spilled across the bedroom. She sat gently on the edge of the bed, smoothed her daughter’s hair. It was getting so long.

  “Hi, sweetie,” Jessica said.

  “Hi, Mom.” Her daughter’s voice was tiny, distant, sleep-thick. She yawned.

  “Did I wake you up?”

  Sophie shook her head.

  “How was school today?”

  It was Sophie’s third day at school. When Jessica was her daughter’s age she recalled starting the new school year well after Labor Day. That was a thing of the past.

  “We had a drill.”

  It took Jessica a moment to realize what she meant. Then it clicked. Grade schools had recently begun to run through lockdown drills with their students. Jessica read about it in one of the school bulletins. She had called the school principal and was told that, for the little ones, they couched the idea in nonthreatening hypothetical terms like, Suppose a mean dog got loose in the school, and we needed a way to make everyone safe.

  The principal said the kindergarteners usually thought the idea of a dog running through the halls was kind of funny. Parents rarely did.

  “We did triangles, too.”

  “Triangles?”

  Sophie nodded. “Eca-laterals and sossalees.”

  Jessica smiled. “Sounds like fun.”

  “It was. I like the sossalees best.”

  “Me too,” Jessica said. Her little girl’s face was bright and scrubbed. She looked older somehow, like Jessica hadn’t seen her in a few months, instead of only about sixteen hours. “How come you’re not asleep?”

  Sophie shrugged. She was at the phase in her life where she considered every answer very carefully, a stage twice removed from the three-year-old’s programmed responses to every question, the juncture where all children are all like miniature witnesses for the prosecution.

  We don’t want to go into that store, do we?

  No.

  Big girls always bring their dishes to the sink, don’t they?

  Yes.

  Jessica missed that phase. On one hand she wanted her daughter to be the smarte
st girl ever born, to be clever, inquisitive, resourceful, and successful. On the other hand, she wanted Sophie to remain that sweet, innocent little child who needed help buttoning her cardigans. “Want me to read something?” Jessica asked.

  The Junie B. Jones series of novels were Sophie’s current rave. On a few nights in the recent past Jessica had caught Sophie reading a Junie B. in bed with a flashlight. She wasn’t zipping through the pages yet, but she was definitely ahead of most of the kids in her class when it came to reading and comprehension. In the books, Junie B. was a maverick six-year-old. To Jessica, it seemed like just yesterday that her daughter was into Curious George and Dr. Seuss.

  Now it was renegade first-graders.

  “I could get out one of the Junie B. books. Want me to do that?” Jessica asked. “Or maybe some Magic Tree House?”

  Sophie shrugged again. In the moonlight coming in the window her eyes were fathomless pools. Her lids began to close.

  “Maybe tomorrow?”

  Sophie Balzano nodded. “ ’Kay.”

  Tomorrow, Jessica thought. You always think there is going to be a tomorrow. Caitlin O’Riordan and Monica Renzi thought there would be a tomorrow.

  So did Eve Galvez.

  “Okay, my love,” Jessica said. “Sleep good.” She kissed her daughter on the forehead. In seconds, Sophie closed her eyes. Moments later, she was sound asleep. If there was a more beautiful sight in all the world, Jessica couldn’t imagine what it might be.

  __________

  SHE TOOK A QUICK SHOWER, emerged from the bathroom in a towel. She took a jar of moisturizer from the nightstand. She sat on the edge of the bed. Vincent was still fast asleep, dead to the world.

  Jessica tried to rid her mind of the events of the day. She failed utterly. Three boxes.

  Was the number significant? Were the colors important? What about the way the boxes were aligned?

  She knew that Dino and Eric had met with the victim’s parents, and the parents were on their way to Philly to try and make a positive ID, but there was little doubt in Jessica’s mind who the victim was: Monica Louise Renzi, late of Scranton, Pennsylvania.