Just when the last car headed past me, my cell buzzed. It was Sarah.
“Hey, kiddo. What’s up?”
“The doctor says Mom can go home in a day or two. She’s doing much better.”
“No unexpected sightings? The sheriff’s still got someone watching?”
“Twenty-four hours a day, Dad. And no, no ghosts or anything.”
“And you’ve been keeping busy?”
“I go to the hospital twice a day and then I just hang, but I am kinda anxious to get back to school.”
“Good. I’m pretty sure we know who’s been behind this whole thing. I’m staking out his house right now.”
“Really?”
“Really. He’s the son of a dirty cop. I guess he blames me for his father’s death.”
“Were you, Dad… to blame, I mean?”
“No, but that doesn’t matter if he thinks I am.”
“Be careful.”
“You too, Sarah. We’ll talk in the morning, okay.”
I occupied myself with the concept of blame for a little while, a very little while. Then I hopped off that slippery slope, picked up the binoculars, and tried getting back to work. The deathly quiet of the place gave me the creeps. How did Aaron ever adjust to living out here? Brooklyn at its most quiet is noisy and that noise had been my lullaby nearly every day of my life.
Things were changing in the Martello house. The strobe and colored flicker of his TV stopped, the front window going pitch black. A lamp snapped on and there was a brief show of Ray Martello’s dancing shadow. About five minutes later, the porch and outside garage lights popped on. The electric garage opener whined, the door crawling up and out of sight. An engine rumbled. Puffs of exhaust fumes showed themselves like reluctant specters in the cooling night air. First brake, then backup lights flashed as the big SUV lumbered backwards down the driveway.
I supposed I was far enough away that he wouldn’t hear Carmella’s ignition catch, but I didn’t trust the way sound traveled out here and decided instead to wait until he either passed me moving north or drove in the opposite direction along the border of the golf course. The Yukon’s headlights rushed at me, sweeping from my left to right as the truck turned north toward Montauk Highway. I twisted Carmella’s key; the engine perked right up. Still, I waited a beat or two to let Ray Martello get a block ahead.
Then, just as I put the car in drive, a cold chill made me twitch. I noticed movement in the shadows across the way: a slender figure emerging through the country club gates and turning onto Martello’s street. I can’t say why exactly, but I couldn’t force myself to look away. I shouldn’t have cared at all. It was probably some kid who’d met his girlfriend for late night putting practice on the ninth green.
“Keep your eye on the ball,” I whispered to myself. “Keep your eye on the ball.”
But as I rolled off the lot, my headlamps caught the slender figure, briefly bathing him in a harsh circle of light. Turning back, he squinted, shielding his eyes with raised hands. And in that brief second, all that I knew to be solid and real flew away, because standing there in that circle of light was Patrick Michael Maloney’s ghost. Yes, this was the second time I’d seen him, but seeing him in the light that way… Christ, it scared the shit out of me. My heart thumped so that I felt it pushing my chest against my sweat-soaked shirt. Suddenly, all the tattoos and videotapes were rendered irrelevant. What you think you know doesn’t stand a chance against what you think you see.
I couldn’t afford to scare him off, not this time. Scaring off a ghost! Go figure. Although only twenty yards ahead of me, I’d never catch him if he took off toward the golf course. So I forced myself to move, to not hesitate, pulling quickly off the lot and driving up the block in the opposite direction. I had the steering wheel in a death grip to insure that my hands wouldn’t shake. Of course I knew how I should play it, but I wasn’t at all sure I could pull it off. Having made a U-turn at the first intersection and doubled back, I eased the car alongside him and let the servo suck the window fully down into the door before I spoke.
“Hey, buddy,” I said in as steady a voice as I could manage, “I’m kinda lost here. Could you tell me how to get to Brightwaters?”
The ghost kept walking, neither turning toward me nor away from me. All I could do was stare at his profile, at that too-familiar tattoo on his bare forearm, and the Shinjo Olympians on his feet.
“Listen, man, I-”
He stopped in his tracks. I stopped the car, clicked it into park. Slowly, I slid my right arm across my lap to the door handle and began tugging on it ever so gently. There was a frozen second there when it felt as if I could’ve watched an entire baseball game between breaths or counted the beats of a hummingbird’s wings. Then…
Bang!
He took off back the way he came, toward the golf course. The car was useless to me now, so I was out the door after him. He was agile and pretty damned swift, making it through the country club gates in only a few seconds. While I had some moves on the basketball court, speed-even before my knee went snap, crackle, pop-was never my forte. An additional twenty years, three knee surgeries, and fifteen extra pounds weren’t exactly helping the cause, but with my heart rate already up and adrenaline flowing, I actually gained some early ground on him.
It was an anomaly, not a trend. Once we both hit the grass and open ground of the golf course, I fell back. My deck shoes were no match for his track shoes. Although darker out here away from the street and porch lights, there was enough natural light to keep him from being completely swallowed up by the night. He kept looking over his shoulder to see how far he’d extended his lead over me or if I’d given up. If he thought I was going to quit, he really didn’t know me. I’d have to cough out my lungs and liver before my legs would stop moving.
Bulldog or not, the reality was that my persistence would only count for so much. Eventually, he would get far enough ahead to duck out of sight, while I chased my own dick around out there in the dark. I didn’t have long to wait. Since we’d hit the grass-which couldn’t have been more than a minute earlier, but felt like an eternity-the ghost had been heading due south toward the ocean holes, but now he decided to cut sharply east toward where the sun would be coming up in only a very few hours.
Shit! I lost sight of him for a second behind a raised green, but caught a glimpse when I made it around the other side. He was gaining confidence as he went, getting a better sense of my physical limitations.
Hugging the first cut of rough as he went, he would dart in and out of the small outcroppings of trees that dotted this part of the course. Then, he darted in, but didn’t come out. I was about to go in after him when something four-legged and low to the ground shot out of the woods and skittered directly across my path. Two luminescent eyes stared back at me while I got my heart out of my throat. Free of the tree shadows and in the middle of the fairway, I could see it was a red fox. I hadn’t run across many red foxes in Coney Island. Stray dogs, water rats, and horseshoe crabs, yes. Red foxes, no.
Before I could reorient myself, the woods coughed up the ghost fifty yards ahead of me and, like the fox before him, he ran directly across the fairway into a much larger stand of trees on the opposite side. Running as hard as I could, I took a diagonal line right to where he entered the far trees. I kept my eyes focused on that point, trying desperately to ignore my aching knee and the stitch in my side that felt more like a gash. As I approached the woods, an uneasy feeling came over me. I didn’t sense danger necessarily. It was a feeling that there were more than foxes, owls, and fireflies in here. But whatever my concerns, it was too late to start worrying about them now.
In the woods, I knelt down behind a clump of thin-trunked trees. I could hear the ghost’s footfalls-ghosts didn’t have footfalls, did they? — on the dried undergrowth and fallen leaves that had accumulated over the years. Then I spotted him, but the irregular spacing of the trees made it difficult for me to follow his course. His silhouette flashed in and
out of view. There it was again, that weird feeling. I tried to ignore it, to keep my eyes on the next clearing between the trees where I thought he would come back into view.
There he is! I’d gotten lucky. By keeping my place, I had confused him and he was now heading back my way. In a few seconds he would be passing about as close to me as he had been when he was caught in my headlamps. I eased myself up from the kneeling position and braced my back against the trees. Then I thought I was hearing things. The ghost’s footsteps were now lost in an avalanche of crunching leaves. The woods were suddenly alive with a low thumping that had nothing to do with my heart. It didn’t matter. I was committed.
I sprang. My timing was perfect. The sudden activity confused him too and it took him a second to realize I was almost on him. I was ten yards away, five, two, one…I was just stretching out my arms when something brushed my leg, knocking me off balance, but not down, Then, at the last second before I grabbed the ghost, I saw a blur hurtling at me. Bang! The wind went out of me even before my kidneys connected with the big tree behind me. When I got to my hands and knees, I got kicked in the head, hard. Unconsciousness took a while to take hold. In the meantime, I let the thumping rock me to sleep.
It wasn’t quite light out when I opened my eyes, but there was light enough to see Patrick’s ghost was gone. The thumping was now exclusively in my head. I felt the knot above my left temple. It was tender and the hair over it was stiff from dried blood. The bleeding seemed to have stopped. I stood up slowly, in pieces, making sure I didn’t revisit any of my most recent meals. I had a pretty good headache, but was walking okay. I knew what day it was, where I was, and had a notion of what time it was. I took a leisurely pace as I headed back to Carmella’s car.
Stepping out of the woods with the first rays of sun over my back, I tripped over something in the deep rough. It was the half-eaten carcass of a fawn: no doubt the handiwork of the red fox. Across the fairway, in the smaller woods, a herd of about twenty deer tried to look inconspicuous, standing perfectly still, trying to blend in with the trees. One of them probably had my blood on its hoof. I wasn’t interested in finding out which one.
As I walked through the golf course’s front gate, an older gentleman out walking his chocolate lab stopped me.
“You don’t look so good, son. What happened?”
“I got mugged,” I said.
“Mugged! By who?”
“Bambi.”
That ended the conversation right there.
Carmella’s car was where I left it, about two feet away from the curb, parked facing the wrong way, and the driver’s side door ajar. At least I hadn’t left it running. I seriously considered finding another cozy spot and keeping up the stakeout. That notion lasted until I spied myself in the mirror. I was never going to look in a car mirror again. I looked like shit, smelled like shit, and felt like shit. I was nothing if not consistent.
I closed the car door, started her up, and limped back to Brooklyn. It was the smart thing to do. The way I saw it, I had no idea if Martello had returned home. If he was home, he was probably sleeping and I could get someone from the office out here by the time he headed in for his shift. If he was still out, not knowing where wasn’t as big a deal as it would seem. I had time to get coverage on him either here or at his precinct. Either way, there was little doubt that his young accomplice or stooge or whatever Patrick’s ghost was to him, had already told Martello about our running with the deer.
Although I was far worse for wear and had failed to get my hands on the kid, my concerns about Ray Martello were confirmed: the asshole was behind it. You’d have to be from Pluto to think the kid’s appearance at Martello’s house was a coincidence. Now I had some choices to make. I could go to Vandervoort or the local cops with what I had, but, truthfully, I had bupkis. I had suspicions, a series of unlikely coincidences, and Ray Martello’s palpable hatred for me. Unfortunately, none of it would stand up in court. That’s why my screwing up with the kid really hurt. If I just had him, he could make the case for me. On the other hand, I didn’t have to go the legal route. Judge and jury Moe had all the evidence they needed. There were ways to get back at people without taking them to court. If anyone could understand that concept, it would be Ray Martello Jr.
Driving back up Great River Road to Montauk Highway, I passed by a roadkill mother possum and two babies. I squeezed my eyes shut as I went, but all I could see in my head were the skittering red fox and the wrecked body of the dead fawn. I had had quite enough of the suburbs, thank you very much. It was time to get back to a place where I better understood the relationship between predator and prey.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The ringing in my head woke me up.
First, I felt for the lump on my head, then I reached for the phone. The swelling had receded a bit and the blood-stiff hair was gone. Hot showers are mostly forgettable events, but there are times when they’re just a notch or two below desperation sex. This morning’s shower was the stuff of top ten lists. My long nap had reduced my headache from crashing cymbals to the tinkle of a lone triangle and I no longer smelled like Sunday at Augusta.
“Yeah, what?” My voice was thick with sleep.
Silence.
“Okay,” I said, “I don’t have time for this bullsh-”
“How is your head?”
The voice was unfamiliar and it took a few seconds for the question to register. I guess there were parts of me other than my voice still thick with sleep. Who knew about my head? No one. I hadn’t wanted to bother explaining about my getting KO’ed by Bambi, so I’d left that part out of my call in to Carmella and she was the only person I’d spoken… Holy shit!
“The head’s better. What should I call you?” I asked.
“Patrick.”
“Don’t be an asshole, kid.”
“No, really, that’s my name. It’s weird, right?”
“After all this, why are you calling me now? We could have saved ourselves a lot of trouble and me a headache if you’d have just talked to me this morning.”
“I’m scared of Ray.”
“Ray Martello?”
“Yeah. When I spoke to him he was crazy mad at me for letting you get that close.”
I started noticing things about the kid’s voice. His accent was mostly flat with a bit of a nasally twang. Half the kids that Sarah went to the University of Michigan with had that same accent. I thought about what approach to take with Patrick, if that was his name. Should I play the understanding, avuncular stranger or the outraged victim? Should I play softball or hardball? I went with hardball.
“Ray’s a scary guy,” I said. “What do you want from me and why the fuck should I care? Don’t forget, kid, you’ve spent the last few weeks terrorizing my family and committing felonies.”
“I didn’t know. I swear to God I didn’t know.” His voice cracked.
“What did you think you were doing?”
“Making a movie.”
“Don’t bullshit me, kid. I’m from Brooklyn and you’re not.” I threw a high hard fastball under his chin. “You need cameras to shoot a movie. Seen any of those around lately? Maybe when you got the job you believed that movie crap, but not anymore.”
“Okay, you’re right. I’m really sorry about what I did to your wife and all, but I was in too deep to…”
I had him and it was time to start pressing my advantage.
“How did Martello get a recording of Patrick’s-?”
“If I come in, can you protect me?” His voice took on a real urgency.
“Sure.”
“You don’t sound so sure,” he said.
“You blame me for not trusting you? Why should I believe a fucking word you say?”
“I swear to God, Mr. Prager, I’ll come in. I just want to get away from this guy. He’s got a crazy temper. I thought he was going to kill me this morning.”
“That’s twice you’ve invoked God in this conversation, kid. Stop swearing to God and start giv
ing me some proof I should trust you. Where did Martello get a tape of Patrick Maloney’s voice?”
“I don’t know. I swear to-Okay, forget that, but I really don’t know. He hasn’t let me in on any stuff that doesn’t directly involve me. I don’t even know why he hates you so much.”
“That one I have the answer to. Who’s the guy with the eye patch?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I guess he’s an old cop friend of Martello’s dad. He drives me around some of the time. That’s all I know about him. We don’t talk much.”
“All right, kid, come on in.”
“No, you have to come get me.” It was his turn to play hardball.
I thought about calling his bluff, but couldn’t afford to let him get away again. Besides, if what he was saying about Martello’s temper was accurate-I had every reason to believe it was-and he sensed the kid was ready to bolt, he would cut his losses and get rid of the hired help. Bottom line was, I needed the kid alive. Without him there was no case.
“You win. I’ll come to you.”
Silence. He was having second thoughts. He might be scared but he was also likely sacrificing the most money he’d ever made. I helped his thought process along.
“Listen, Patrick, I’ll pay you to come in and I’ll do my best to shield you from the cops.”
“Twenty grand.”
“That means he’s paying you ten, some of which you’ve already received. Five,” I said, “and I’ll have it with me when I pick you up. If you help me put this cocksucker away, I’ll take care of you.”
“Okay. Two hours.”
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