by Brian Selfon
“So how’s she connected?”
“The short answer is, I don’t know. But when I passed by, she was talking with this detective. And I heard her say the name Emil Scott, and I was like, whuuuuuh?”
Someone walks past the bathroom, pushing something on squeaky wheels. They wait for the squeaker to pass, then Henry says, “These fucking ranks. Is the detective more or less scary than a field intelligence officer?”
“Well, she scares me more,” Starr says, “but he’s homicide. Total hotshot. That’s the first thing I wanted to tell you. I don’t remember the guy’s name, but he’s not usually at the station.”
Henry has mixed feelings about this. He remembers what his uncle said, about how with a mugging everyone gives up, but an intentional murder means an investigation. So while this homicide detective is bad for the family, could he maybe somehow be good for Emil?
“Any chance the homicide guy was there about a different case?”
“Possible. The detective could’ve been there for more than one reason. But the name I heard was Emil Scott.” Okay, very bad for the family—Henry accepts this now. The cops are paying more attention.
“And then I heard this other name,” Starr says, “a woman’s name. Something like Veh—” A banging at the bathroom door. When it stops, Starr finishes her thought in a whisper: “Seh-something. I don’t remember.”
“Could that be the cop with the hands?”
Starr shakes her head. “Her first name is Zera—seriously, that’s a name. But Geh was another victim.”
Another round of banging. From outside: “Get out of there!”
Henry bangs back on the door. “Just a fucking minute!” With more civility, to Starr: “A victim of what?”
“I couldn’t hear everything,” Starr says. “But one thing Montenegro said—”
Outside: “Get the fuck out of there!”
“—another homicide, another blunt instrument to the back of the head.”
chapter 33
“A partner is coming,” Uncle Shecky says in the dining room that afternoon.
Kerasha looks up from the padlock. Deceptively simple-looking, the Konnekt 1501: chrome plating, Russia-red spin dial, Cyrillic characters stamped on the back. A knockoff of the Master Lock 1500D, the Konnekt 1501 is made in Irkutsk and should be a joke. And yet six years ago Kerasha fell to the Konnekt 1501—locked in a utility closet, challenged and flustered and ultimately defeated by this silly twist of metal—and that was when they finally caught her. This is the Dr. Xu of padlocks, she decides: it defeats you not by cunning, but by its faults.
Uncle Shecky is chewing pink bubble gum. A piece from her own pack, by the look and smell of it. He probably grabbed the gum from nerves, didn’t even realize he was doing it. May not be totally aware it’s in his mouth now. Poor Uncle Shecky. This partner must be important. She asks if he wants her to leave.
“What? Leave? No. Kerasha, this is your home.”
He’s asked her to leave before, but she says nothing and waits for him to continue. “Vasya’s an old, old friend.” He nods as though someone else is speaking, and his response to himself is agitated agreement. “Okay, he’s not a saint. And the Paradise Club—as I understand it—it’s a kind of gentlemen’s club. I don’t know, I’ve never gone inside.” He shudders. Probably did go there at least once. “But Vasya’s among the trusted. And when I told him about the watchman, he was as concerned as if it were his own family getting peeped. He actually said that, just like his own family. He said he’d take care of everything. And listen, Kerasha, about that watchman…” His fingers, Kerasha notices, are dancing over each other. There’s a tremor in his voice, a shamed look-away every few seconds.
He wants so badly to be the one protecting us, Kerasha thinks. But now he’s asking for my help with something. Poor, sweet Uncle Shecky. He may be the least underworldly underworlder she’s ever met. So what does he want? A break-in, she suspects. A grab. A listen.
“Vasya’s among the trusted,” Uncle Shecky repeats. “He’s a partner with partners of his own, and he’s trying to get help for us. He doesn’t deserve to come under this thing.” Uncle Shecky points at the window, and indicating the pole cam mounted atop the cable switchbox, he delivers a line that could come from Tennyson: “This is the eye that never closes.”
“And you want me to close it.”
“I want you safe,” he says, just as he collapses into a chair. He rubs his chin with the backs of his hands, left and then right. “Everything I do comes from that.”
Kerasha presses her hook pick against the Konnekt and pulls on the ring. The padlock doesn’t give. Konnekt 2, Kerasha 0. She gets to her feet.
“I’ll pluck the eye for you, Uncle Shecky.”
“Jesus fuck, I got you so twisted up in this,” he says. “Your poor mother, what would she say?”
Got my meds? Unfunny, but Kerasha is in no position to turn away defense mechanisms. When memory tosses your devil back at you, a bitter smile can be your only friend. She pictures Mama’s smile, that forced, side-cracked grin she adopted after Kerasha became her supplier. The half-hopeful, half-shamed look she had when Kerasha walked in the door. Kerasha took to leaving Mama’s daily bag in a sugar bowl on the kitchen table, slipping in and out just to avoid that look.
“I swore to her grave I’d look after you,” Uncle Shecky says. “And now look what I’m doing. Sending you out into—wait a sec. Speaking of danger.”
Kerasha stops at the doorway.
“Henry’s crazy friend, the one who was here the other morning. She came back.”
Kerasha nods, having already smelled Lipz’s cigarette fug in the kitchen. Having seen the boot prints on the floor. She’d been wondering when Uncle Shecky was going to fill her in.
“I haven’t said anything to Henry yet,” Uncle Shecky says. “Haven’t decided what to do about her. She wants Red Dog’s money, and that’s a fair ask. But she’s also a legitimate psychopath.” Uncle Shecky gets up, goes to the window. “Watch out for her.”
Kerasha gets her backpack and heads out. She walks around the block and buys a new pack of bubble gum. Continues through a rubble lot, doubles back across Lacey Atkinson’s yard, and spots the old lady through a window. Kerasha pops a disappointed bubble. She had hoped to slip into the house. Wanted this to be an easy job.
Can’t go through, skinny Kerasha coaches her, gotta go over.
She comes to the alley where the cats fuck. The fire escape hangs off yellow-splashed bricks. She moves a battered folding chair beneath it, climbs up, and grips the coarse, rusty metal. Pull-ups used to be like breaths. Now she strains, grunts, and all but herniates herself before she can kick the chair away. Hurt but alive, she’s on the first landing. Catching her breath. Looking down at the chair as ugly memories come at her.
In her years at Franklin there were four suicides. Two were inmates on kitchen duty. Each shotgunned a half bottle of lye, one just a week after the other. The second was an “apparent copycat suicide,” the warden explained over the intercom. Kerasha hated this, found it offensive. If the method of self-destruction was sometimes borrowed, the act was always personal. Ask any junkie. Ask her daughter.
The third suicide slit her wrists with glass.
“Where’d she get the glass?” everyone wanted to know, as though the death were beside the point.
Kerasha is remembering the final suicide as she slips through an open window. Moves through a grimy apartment and then enters a cigarette-butt-littered hall. Gets into a utility closet, climbs a ladder to the roof. The final suicide took place in Franklin’s movie room. The lights weren’t even dimmed for the movies—for the “inmates’ own safety,” as the warden liked to remind them—but it wasn’t until the credits were rolling that someone noticed. In the back of the room, while everyone else had been watching Pitch Perfect 2, one of the inmates had managed to hang herself in perfect silence. Kerasha remembers how she marveled at the chair on the floor, that it had landed noiselessly on a towel. Wh
at tradecraft.
From the roof she looks down and sees a grill, wooden lawn furniture, an empty hammock lazing in the breeze. Sees irregular potato-garden rows, and in them the blue rubber ball she placed there herself before heading up. Her marker.
She positions herself so that the blue ball is directly below her line of sight. Beneath her now, though obscured by a drainpipe, is the pole camera. She opens her backpack and takes out a coil of rope and loops it around and around the TV satellite dish. She descends. At her feet now is a slender concrete ledge splattered with bird shit. A few inches beneath it: a steel box with a glass half-dome. This is it, the will, the force, to do her family harm.
Well I have a will, little box. I am a force. Dr. Xu, if you’re watching from inside my head, please take out that silver pen. Scribble this, Dr. Xu: this recalcitrant patient has fate caught in her web.
From the back pocket of her jeans she takes out a garbage bag with drawstrings. She nets the pole cam. Pulls the drawstrings taut, and just like that, she’s blinded the watcher.
How do you like that, little box? World gone dark—welcome to my Brooklyn.
Out with the power socket wrench, out with the wire cutters. The pole cam, detached from the switchbox, looks like a dead crab, the kind Mama’s last and worst man used to eat at their kitchen table. Cracking the legs with his fingers, spitting bits of shell on the floor.
Kerasha climbs down. Reaches ground level, where, as she passes through the alley, a scent brings her all the way back. It’s acrid and chemical and sweet. It’s nutmeg and it’s vinegar, and it’s that inimitable, uncategorizable something extra—she turns slowly, unable not to, but already knows what she’ll see.
This is the vinegar-and-mud smell of shit-grade heroin.
The smell of her childhood, and Mama, whom she half expects to see.
Only Kerasha’s spider eyes take in no one and nobody. She is alone in this alley.
But the smell must come from somewhere—currents and breezes, of course that’s the explanation. And yet to Kerasha at this moment, the smell seems to emanate from the dark material of the universe itself. Nowhere, everywhere, it’s inside and out. She doesn’t need Dr. Xu to explain this.
It’s in her.
She sprints from the alley, skinny Kerry coaching her: Eyes on your feet, big strides, you’re riding through a tunnel, darkness all around, eyes on your feet, eyes on your feet …
But when her concentration slips, she catches sight of a basement window. And though the angle is bad, the glass smeared and grass-covered, somehow, through a slant of an angle of a crack, she sees her.
A girl, couldn’t be more than twelve. Cross-legged on the floor. Putting a needle in her arm. And this girl Kerasha sees through the impossible slant of the angle of the crack—she looks up at just that moment. And when she meets Kerasha’s gaze, she pushes in the plunger, and it’s almost a physical blow to Kerasha, the face of this girl.
Little Kerry, I know you.
chapter 34
Crazy texts come that day, and the first are from Lipz. Go hardware, she writes. Get fire exting.
WTF? he writes back. Uncertain whether this is code or a relapse. She’s been off the hard stuff for years, but this is cray-cray, even by Lipz standards.
Red Dog rising, she writes. Don’t die.
At first Henry is just annoyed: Lipz is no stranger to the panic button. Then she in-boxes him a picture of a burning mattress.
Going dark now, she writes. Love you.
Henry’s chest contracts. Red Dog rising? Love you? He’s still feeling out a response when his other phones—the runner phones—all start screaming. Calls, texts, photos, videos, variations on a common theme: scorched car. Garbage can ablaze. Crack house blackened.
What this shit? one of his runners writes. You know?
Henry re-texts this exact message, using a fresh burner, to the number from the card Kerasha found on Emil’s door. The message goes through, but 646-555-0144, whoever it is, never responds.
Henry climbs through the attic skylight of his uncle’s house and surveys Brooklyn from the roof. Gray sky over Bushwick, here and there a spot of fire. Draw this, his inner Emil tells him. His phone vibrates, a new image has arrived: a shopping cart—burning, of course—a big woman stands beside it. Her dead-eyed look brings Henry back. He is seven and before him is Mom’s casket. He is ten and he’s taken the bus to Dad’s psych ward for his weekly visit, and the orderly, without looking up from her phone, says Dad “went” two days prior and is already at the funeral home, “waiting for whatever.” This dead-eyed woman and her burning shopping cart—Smelly Terri, Henry recognizes her now—has the look of someone from whom all has been taken. Draw her, Emil says. These are your people.
Henry climbs down. Hasn’t found a pencil when a voice from behind says, “Go down into the basement.”
Uncle Shecky, arriving home with his own phones bleeping, has become a different man. A blur of movement, a field commander rising up under fire. He opens doors, opens windows. Pulls down curtains, turns on the sink, fills a bucket, takes it somewhere, limps back. “Henry, do you know where the generator is?”
“Y-yes.” Almost a stammer. Henry is unused to seeing his uncle like this. “Behind my weight bench.”
“Get it,” Uncle Shecky says, tightening his belt. “Check the valve, make sure it’s all the way closed. Then lift with your knees, and get that thing out of our house.”
Adrenaline and muscle and nothing else, Henry sprints downstairs, pulls up the tank. Forgets to check the valve—a splash of propane, and droplets land on a long-forgotten canvas. A painting Henry began in high school, and it’s been sitting here, unfinished, for years. Starlight Friend, he was going to call it. It shows Lipz when she was a cokehead, Lipz the way she looked when the powder was just kicking in, and she’s twirling like a little girl. Her outstretched arms, her open-mouthed smile—but now the propane has bled the colors.
It hurts him, to see Lipz disfigured like this. He checks his phone, activates WeChat, the messaging app he uses just for her. Gone dark still. No, worse, gone dark yesterday. The messages he’d been reading, he now sees, were all sent almost twenty hours ago. WeChat apparently chose today to fuck with him. Mental math: the time between now and Lipz’s messages, twenty hours. The time between the messages and the bakery bathroom, where Starr played that recording for him: seven hours. The time between the bakery bathroom and the meeting Starr had recorded: no fucking idea. So drop the math and face the thought. Messages from Lipz, silence since then, and sometime during this silence—
A second murder, the one Starr told him about: another crushed head.
Henry humps the dripping tank upstairs and out the front door and down the block. In Maria Hernandez Park he stashes the tank behind a pair of bent trees. A deflated kickball underfoot, Henry catches his breath. The air is gritty. His hands are oily, his eyes sting. Red Dog rising, Lipz wrote. And Brooklyn is burning, and Lipz dropped the L bomb, and is there still a girl he can love back?
In the house, the television is blaring. A local newscaster stands before a burning car and says, “Still no explanation.” Turning, Henry almost trips over Uncle Shecky. “Thank Jesus,” Uncle Shecky says. “You’re safe.”
“You sent me out,” Henry points out. He goes to the kitchen, washes the propane off his hands, and comes back wiping them with a dishcloth. “Lipz thinks it’s Red Dog. And she’s missing, by the way.”
Uncle Shecky opens his mouth to say something. Closes it. Shaking his head, he rubs his forearms as if trying to warm his hands. “We can’t rule out the possibility,” he says at last, “that this whole show is about us.” Then he limp-marches off.
Henry follows, watching his uncle pull out the oven and secure the gas line. “Us how?”
“Right now every firehouse is empty,” Uncle Shecky says. “Every patrol car is out.”
“And Red Dog wants attention?”
“He’s directing it.” Uncle Shecky pushes the o
ven back, takes the dishcloth from Henry, and wipes his hands. “This is the kind of chaos that could cover a murder.”
Or three, Henry thinks. Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars doesn’t die alone. Lost money means lost lives, and then a question hits him like a punch: “Where’s Kerasha?”
Uncle Shecky shakes his head.
“Fuhhhhk,” Henry says. “This could mean—” He stops himself. Sees the pain and worry on his uncle’s face, and takes the fear out of his voice. “Kerasha looks after herself. I’m sure she’s okay.”
“She’s a person,” Uncle Shecky says. “We’re all vulnerable.”
Henry nods. He goes into the basement and gets his gun.
The Cobra .380 is small and light. It holds five bullets, and has enough firepower to fluff a pillow. It’s all he has. He double-checks that it’s loaded, puts it in his pocket, and finds his uncle in the upstairs office, standing over his coded ledger.
“Uncle Shecky?”
His uncle turns a page in his ledger. “I’m here.”
“There’s something I haven’t told you.” Henry swallows. “I spoke to Starr.” Another swallow. “She said there was another murder.”
Uncle Shecky closes the ledger. His body trembles as he turns to face Henry head-on. “She said what?”
“A second murder, maybe connected to the first. The name—” Henry tries again to keep the fear out of his voice. Fails. “Someone whose name sounds like Seh. But she wasn’t sure.”
His uncle pales. “Could it have been Keh?” Swaying a little, he puts his hand to the wall. “It was a girl?”
“I was worried it was Lipz,” Henry says quickly. “She still hasn’t written me back. And she knew about the fires, and she said Red Dog was behind them. I didn’t think … I mean, I thought…” Henry looks down. “I didn’t think about Kerasha.”
Uncle Shecky straightens. He picks up the ledger, walks to Henry, and cracks the great book across his face.
Henry finds himself on the floor. More shocked than hurt, he looks up at his uncle. Who’s still holding the book. And Henry sees Uncle Shecky large again, the man who appeared out of nowhere and took him in. Who held Henry when he was small and had no one.