Atmosphere (2 page)

The cab's wheels screeched. A jolting gunshot sound blasted. Frank thought the cab had blown a tire or backfired, but soon realized with horror that the explosive sound was the result of the cab's cold hard metal striking the naked man.
  

The shocking sight caused Frank's eyelids to flutter. He swallowed hard and clutched his gut in reactive pain as the man's waist caved into an accordion shape at the point of contact, the opposite side of his body tearing open like a piece of citrus fruit, exposing a red swamp of liver, kidney, and entrails. The stricken man catapulted head over heels like a sailing gymnast performing an out-of-control cartwheel, struck the pavement and tumbled end over end on the concrete, like a fumbled football, pieces of his insides spraying about in a symphonic shower of red beads.

The cab screeched to a halt and the driver leapt out—just in time to see the body come to a dead rest fifteen feet away.

Frank raced to the body, hand cramping around his gun, finger wet on the trigger. The cab driver, wearing dark pants and a short sleeve Hawaiian shirt, sprinted forward on long, chicken-thin legs but abruptly stopped a few yards away, steeling himself in a surrender-like stance, arms in the air.

Frank focused on him, puzzled.

The cabby started yelling, face taut with panic, accent thick, "Don't hurt me! I-I did no see him! He come from nowhere!"

Frank scrutinized the driver's defensive posture, his timid reaction, following his line of vision which was aimed at his own shaking hands. The gun.

Ignoring him, Frank reached for his hand held radio but found only his empty belt. In the car! He had removed it earlier and placed it on the seat next to him. His brains too it seemed.

Instead he gently brushed the man's long stringy hair from his face, gazing at his empty features through the jagged headlight beams of the taxi. Young, he was in his late teens at most, his blue eyes dilated and bleeding and virtually devoid of life, staring through Frank at an invisible blackness that could have been death itself looming over them. His sharp jaw trembled in syncopation with his entire naked body.

Frank peered down along the length of the man's broken torso. A lemon-sized lump of guts emerged from the rupture in his waist.

But most unspeakable was the damage in his crotch area.

Hellishly bloodied, his penis appeared to have been shredded, as if slashed at repeatedly with a straight-edged razor or knife. His testicles were shrunken, like two small raisins, drawn in. Blood pooled on the cement between his legs. Frank felt a gorge rise in his throat, and he had to force a swallow to get the bitterness out from his mouth.

Lightly pained whines escaped the victim's trembling lips. He appeared to be trying to say something, and Frank focused his attention on him, listening intently, hoping to hear something, any pained morsel of information that may clue him into a reason for the tragedy.

But nothing came, only desperate wheezes. Shock was progressing upon him, cloaking his physical awareness. His weak whispering pleas were most likely instinctual.

"I did not see him!"

Frank jumped, nearly shot the cabby, who was now perching over him, arms wide in plea, clearly less scared of Frank now and more concerned with his own ass than with the condition of the man he'd just pummeled. Probably had visions of being deported back to his country.

For the second time tonight Frank had to control the urge to fire his weapon. He waved it in the cabby's direction and the driver stepped back, cringing like a child warding off the blows of an angry parent.

"Call for help. God damn it! Move!" He felt a wave of frustration race along his nerve endings. The cabby darted back into the cab and started shouting wildly into his CB radio.

Frank placed his free palm on the boy's forehead. Cold and wet. His lips chattered uncontrollably, blue and chapped, devoid of moisture. His skin had released its tone and was now gray like cold fish. Frank swallowed a dry lump clinging to the back of his throat. It seemed that there was nothing he could do to help the boy.

He still needed to find out what had happened.

He took a cursory glance around. Aside from the idling cab and wild cries of the cabby attempting to explain to his supervisor what had just occurred, silence dominated, just as it did only minutes earlier when he stepped from his car into the bloody water.

A breeze swept by, chilling the sweat on Frank's brow. It then seemed to blow down past Frank, through the boy's blue stuttering lips and into his dying subconscious mind, grabbing a single word from within.

"Atmosphere".

It emerged harshly, a barely audible whisper. Pained, yet emphatic. Garbled, but intelligible. But what did it mean? Was it possible that the boy could be trying to reveal a reason to his naked insanity?
 

"What? What'd you say?" Frank's own words stammered as much as the injured boy's breaths. They garnered no response. Suddenly he wanted so desperately to feed his frustration, scrape at the boy's lips with his fingers and vainly attempt to pry more information. But he did not, resorting to his sensible mind, allowing the situation to unfold without any harsh interference. This left him only one option. Satisfy his curiosity with what he had: only one word, it being all he would ever capture.

The boy's eyes sealed shut, two empty envelopes forever closed.

A police cruiser pulled up.

And Frank sat like a zombie in the wake of its madly twirling beacons, a dead body in front of him and a single word challenging his mind.

Atmosphere
.

T
he silent night surrendered to twirling siren lights and a whirlwind of activity. Four cruisers and an ambulance clogged the now cordoned off block. A few early morning enthusiasts watched from behind, craning their necks to get a good view of the commotion. Paramedics hunkered over the injured man, working frantically, administering anesthesia, taping his injuries with sheets of gauze. A few policemen from the 13th precinct gathered about the medical team, watching inquisitively, while others casually leaned on the cruisers and laughed amongst themselves. Frank heard them cracking gay jokes about the victim.

"So Smoky...what brings you out at this time of night?"

Frank recognized the voice at once. Smiling, he turned to face Captain Hector Rodriguez. Frank had worked his longest tour of duty with Hector at the 13th, nearly twenty years, before being promoted—and transferred—to the 12th eleven years ago.
 

In 1968, his first month as a rookie cop, Frank had been posted at the corner of Bleeker and 3rd, three blocks from an open air concert being performed by the Grateful Dead. Greenwich Village in the late sixties always offered a great deal of culture to look at: drunk and stoned kids roaming the streets, all living life to its fullest, sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Frank was just a kid himself at the time, and being from Brooklyn, had had many friends participating in all the far-out activities thriving at the time. The day of the concert he had been perched at the corner watching the semblance of activity, wondering with a bit of envy what his life would have been like had he not chosen to become an officer of the law. He pictured himself dressed in bell-bottom jeans, a tie-dye shirt, headband, John Lennon specs, and a cigarette dangling from his lip.

As he daydreamed, a group of teens approached him, most of them proudly sporting marijuana joints. They jeered him, and Frank—as young and as naive as they got at the time—just stood there against a brick building as frozen as a snowman while they all took turns blowing pot smoke into his face. He felt so helpless that they probably could have helped themselves to his gun. It was a good thing they didn't; he wouldn't have been a cop today.

As it happened, the whole episode was simply a harmless prank on the part of the hippies, and as far as they had been concerned, were simply spreading the 'word',
love, peace and happiness, man
. Frank had gotten so stoned he needed to wait until the following day before he could write up a report on the incident. Of course by that time he had completely forgotten what any of the teens looked like. It was an incident that would haunt him for the rest of his career, and it was how he got the nickname 'Smoky'.

"Please don't call me that, Hect."

"C'mon," Hector said, his voice rife with sarcasm. "I couldn't imagine calling you by any other name." He gave Frank a smile and a wink.

Ballaro returned the playful gesture with a grin of his own. It took effort given the circumstances and the exhaustion racing through in his veins, but Hector was a pal, and deserved his respect. "Well...how about 'Frank'. That has a nice ring to it." He wondered how Hector, especially at his age, found the energy to be so vibrant at this early hour.

Rodriguez gave Frank a soft tap on the shoulder. "Okay. You got it. No more Smoky jokes...if I can help it." Another wink.

Frank took a good look at his old friend. Lines adorned every crevice of his face, around the eyes, nose, mouth. And his hair looked like vanilla frosting, white tufts escaping the brim of his cap. Lord, how times flies. He had to be pushing, what, fifty-nine, sixty?

"So what are you doing here? And when in God's name are you going to retire?" Frank pointed a thumb towards the paramedics, who were now racing the body on a stretcher along with an IV rig toward the ambulance. "You don't need this crap anymore."

"Can't Frank," he answered succinctly, tipping his hat—a motion handled subconsciously. "This is my life. Call me crazy, but I love this, crap and all."

Frank knew quite well how Hector Rodriguez felt. He inexplicably felt the same way. It was something special deep inside, something that compelled him to seek out answers to every challenging mystery confronting him. Take criminals off the streets where they could threaten the innocent. He had no idea why all his life he urged for this lifestyle. Growing up, his parents never made any efforts to steer him towards a career of law enforcement. On the contrary, they had painstakingly tried to avert his enthusiasm for becoming an officer, constantly pestering him about all the money doctors and lawyers made, reassuring him that he'd quit his job as soon he saw his first dead body.

That was nearly thirty years ago, and he'd seen many bodies since then, murdered ones, raped ones, kidnapped ones. Terrible encounters that tormented him with nightmares, migraines, an ulcer. But not once had he wanted to leave the force. It all seemed worth it when an opportunity arose to shut a piece of filth away, expunge all the crimes that he or she might have committed had they continued roaming the streets. It was almost like playing God: he could intervene, he could make a difference and put an end to one bad person's string of crimes. And as far as retiring, well, every time thoughts of packing it in toyed with his mind, he would suffer sick visions of Jaimie in the grasp of some scum-of-the-earth, and he'd find the will to continue. "Takes a crazy man, huh Captain?"

With this, Rodriguez asked the inevitable. "Speaking of crazy men, what the hell're you doing out here? What happened?"

Frank rubbed his tired eyes with a thumb and forefinger. "It all happened so quickly." He went on to explain how he had worked late on the Lindsay case, parked the car, heard the scream. The cabby, flailing wildly—it seemed he was good at this—was now telling his version to an officer who took notes on a small scratch pad.

"Must be something in the air," Hector said, watching the ambulance pull away from the scene.

"That time of year, Hect. Weather gets cooler, people get depressed and toss themselves in front of moving vehicles."

Hector pointed up 4th street. "You said you were standing on the corner when you heard the scream and came running?"
 

"Yes, I...wait..." Frank stepped away towards the curb. "There's something else..."

Hector followed.

"Come, look." Frank crouched down next to the curb. The rain had stopped altogether, and although the sun had not yet broken over the East River, it started to grow lighter out and he was able to see the blood more clearly than before: dried now, thin stains streaking along the crevice joining the curb and the street.

"This is what originally caught my attention. Don't ask me what made me look down, I just did. I stepped in it as I got out of my car tonight." Frank stood back up, stretched out his right leg and displayed his shoe to Hector. There were crustlets of dried blood edging the sole. "Look, see?"

Hector peered down, his interest obviously piqued. "You sure that didn't come from the naked boy?"

Frank shrugged his shoulders. "Could've. But not while I was trying to help him."

"So you heard the scream then stepped in the blood?"

"No, the other way around."

"So he'd been injured
before
the cab hit him."

"Yes, I'd say so. Assuming all this blood came from him. When I got to him, his genitals were badly mutilated. My guess is that
that
injury occurred
before
he fled into the street."

"Probably much before," Hector said. "It'd take time for the rain to carry the blood around the corner."

"That means the kid was tortured by someone."