Good Neighbors (12 page)

‘What is it?’ John says behind him.

‘What?’ David says.

‘You said, “son of a bitch,”’ John says. And then, after a moment, when he doesn’t reply, ‘David?’

‘What?’

‘What is it?’

‘Oh,’ David says. ‘I know him.’

‘Who is he?’

‘Just someone I know,’ David says. ‘Someone I used to know. Let’s get him into the ambulance.’

19

Kat doesn’t know how long she’s been out here, she doesn’t know how long ago the man with the knife left, but she knows she has to do something. She can’t just sit here forever. She can’t just sit here and bleed.

For a while, though, she doesn’t know what else to do. There’s something wrong with her head. She can’t think. Why can’t she think?

There’s a bench there, not ten feet away. She can get to the bench. She’s almost sure of it. Anybody could get to the bench. It’s right there, not ten feet away.

She can get there; she knows she can.

She gets on hands and knees and starts crawling in that direction.

Her fingers are very cold. Her nose is very cold. Her lips are very cold, and when she licks them, because they’re dry, dry and cracked, she can barely feel them. It’s almost like they’re not her own. Somehow, it reminds her of when she was a little girl. She used to love to ride her bike. She would ride as fast as she could, and then stop pedaling, and just coast as long as she could, smiling away, the cold and wild wind rushing against her, freezing her knuckles and her nose and her lips, but she didn’t care because she was flying.

Flying.

A brief smile touches her cold, cracked lips as that memory passes through her head, but it’s quickly gone.

Every thought that enters her head is quickly gone. She can’t think. The pain overwhelms. Every time she moves at all, the pain seems to be the only part of the world that’s completely real. Her right side, inside her body, under her armpit – that’s where it’s the worst. It itches. It feels like it’s frozen and on fire simultaneously. And it itches.

All she wanted was a gee-dee bath.

She doesn’t understand what happened. Why did that man stab her? She had never seen him before and she didn’t do anything to him so why did he stab her? She’s sure she never saw him before tonight.

She reaches the bench and puts her arms against the seat of it and pushes herself up. The paint has been worn away by weather and the seats of jeans and she can feel the coarse grain of the gray wood beneath her arms. She hears herself groan as she lifts herself, as she straightens herself out, and she feels more warm, coppery-smelling blood pouring down her back, and jabbing pain in her armpit, and the groan turns to a scream, but she doesn’t stop pushing herself up. She doesn’t stop until she’s pushed herself to her feet. It feels precarious, but here she is, standing. She feels herself swaying left, then right. Black out-of-focus dots dance in front of her eyes, moving this way and that, like insects, like dust motes in a beam of light. She feels dizzy, but she’s standing – she’s standing.

She can feel something warm running down the front of her now, too, and she remembers the second attack, and she looks down at herself, and she sees four more holes in the front of her dress, her light blue dress, her new dress that she got from Woolworth’s only a week ago, a treat from her to herself for working so hard last month. She’d gotten some compliments on it earlier tonight and she was glad she bought it.

She looks around. Most of the faces that were looking down on her before are gone. Most of the living-room lights have turned off. But a few living rooms are still lit up, and in others, even with the lights off, she can see people standing behind the glass, looking at her. Maybe they turned off their lights to get a completely unobstructed view, maybe not; either way, a few faces with white eyes still look down on her.

‘Help . . . me,’ she says. ‘Please.’

She meant for it to be a shout, but it’s barely a whisper. A weak breeze. A rustling of leaves. She has strength for very little more than that – but she tries.

‘Someone,’ she says, her voice breaking, ‘help! Please!’

She hears desperation in her own voice.

The people standing in their living rooms watching her do not move.

Maybe this is just a nightmare. It feels like it must be nothing more than that. It feels like that’s what it has to be. When she was a teenager, Kat used to lie in bed, wondering if her whole life was nothing but a dream. She would lie in bed and she would be afraid to go to sleep because she thought when she woke up she would be waking into her real life and in her real life she was an old woman already – or something like that. So she would lie in bed, thinking this life was a dream, but it was a good dream, a dream she didn’t want to wake from, in part simply because she didn’t know what she’d be waking to – what was reality? – but now she wishes this were a dream. She hopes it’s a dream. No matter what she wakes to, it has to be better than this. She closes her eyes and wills herself to wake up, but when she opens them again, she’s still here, surrounded by concrete and glass, the courtyard empty but for her.

Why isn’t anyone helping her? If this isn’t a dream, why isn’t anyone helping her?

Because it’s a nightmare, a voice says.

Tears stream down her pale face.

She can’t feel them, but she knows they’re there.

And for a moment she allows herself to just let go. To cry. Her body shakes with the crying, convulses with it, and the convulsions send sharp pain shooting into her, send more blood seeping out of her, but she allows herself to cry anyway because she knows it’s coming whether she wants it to or not.

Then she makes it stop. She simply shuts it off. She can’t allow herself to bleed to death out here. She can’t allow that. She has to do something. She has to get inside, that’s what she has to do, and crying won’t get her there.

She looks in the direction of her apartment, the direction from which she crawled. Her eyes follow the trail of blood leading around the corner. So much blood. It looks brown under the courtyard’s light, brown instead of red.

Where is her purse?

On the front porch. She dropped it on the front porch.

Where are her keys? She closes her eyes, trying to think.

They’re in the door, but she doesn’t need them. The door is open. She remembers opening the door, so the door has to be open.

Sometimes, when it’s hot outside and she wants to let a breeze blow through the apartment, she keeps the door open so the wind can blow in through it and out through the window. She insisted on getting one of the complex’s eight garden apartments for just that reason. She has to prop it open, though, because sometimes the wind blows the door shut again. But that didn’t happen this time. She would have heard the door slamming if it had. That means the door is open.

All she has to do is get there.

An attainable goal.

Easy-peasy.

She can see herself doing it. She just walks to the door one step at a time. She’s dizzy and it’s not easy to stay on her feet, but she holds her arms out, away from her body, to keep her balance – the way she did when she was a little girl and trying to walk along something narrow like that short wall that surrounded the shrubbery in front of her grade school; she would pretend she was a high-wire act in a circus and she was world-famous and she would close her eyes and hold her arms out, away from her body for balance – and she walks, one step at a time, and then she can see it, her front door, open not closed because she would have heard it slam if it was closed, and she just has to put her arms forward and push it the rest of the way open, and so she does that, and then she’s inside, and there’s her couch and her favorite chair and the throw pillows she bought a couple months ago that match the curtains and the pictures of her family, and the phone, there’s her phone, and she walks straight to it on the end table in her living room and she picks it up and she puts it to her ear and she says, Hello, operator . . .

‘Hello, operator,’ she says, still standing in the courtyard, her body swaying in the night air. ‘Hello, I’ve been . . . stabbed. I need an ambulance.’

Yes, she thinks. That’s what she’ll do.

It’s an attainable goal.

Like pouring a drink. Like changing a tire.

Easy-peasy.

She concentrates only on what she’s doing, and she takes her first step toward her apartment. Her left knee wants to buckle as she moves her right leg forward, but she manages to keep it locked in place – shakily, true, but it holds – and then she puts her right foot down. That’s one step. She’s one step closer to being saved, one step closer to saving herself. She locks her right knee and drags her left leg up even with her right leg. She stands, breathing hard. Okay, she thinks. Again. She puts her left leg forward, carefully, carefully . . . but then, suddenly, without warning, her right leg gives up, just quits, I’m done, and that’s it, there’s nothing under her but ground, and she simply breaks into pieces and crumbles to the concrete surface beneath her.

‘Fuck,’ she says as she falls, the first time she’s said an out-loud curse in a very long time, but she doesn’t care anymore. She just doesn’t fucking care.

She slaps the concrete with the palm of her hand, and this time when the tears come, she doesn’t try to stop them at all.

20

Alan pulls his police cruiser to the curb in front of a small one-story house – near the corner of a one-way street where brownstone row houses give way to single-family Tudor-style homes with lots of dark half-timbering – and kills the engine. The front lights are on but the curtains are closed. The curtains are red, so the light splashing out through them and onto the lawn is red, too. Alan thinks the red curtains mean the guy’s either married or a fag, and Alan is guessing married – a fag wouldn’t have the stones to pull something like this.

He pushes his way out of the car and walks around to the trunk. He pops the trunk and takes care of a couple things that need taking care of. Then he slams it shut and walks across the dewy lawn to the front door of the house. The door is white with a ridiculously large gold knocker on it, just below a peephole.

Alan knocks on the door with his fist, then stands with his hands behind his back and waits.

Only a few seconds later the door is pulled open by a fat man in his late thirties or early forties, reddish hair, ruddy face. His name is Todd Reynolds. Charlie told him that. Charlie also told him that the man had no prior convictions, not even a speeding ticket. Model citizen.

Model asshole, if you ask Alan.

‘You made it,’ Mr. Reynolds says in a voice that sounds like it’s coming from just behind his nose and just above the roof of his mouth – thick and nasally, almost cartoonish. He smiles.

‘I made it,’ Alan agrees.

‘Good, good.’

‘You know, Mr. Reynolds—’

‘Todd.’

‘You know, Todd,’ Alan says, ‘I don’t want to tell you how to do business, but I gotta say, it’s not the smartest thing in the world, inviting a man you’re trying to extort to your home in the dead-dark hours of the night. Bad things can happen to a man at night. And according to recent statistics,’ he says, ‘eighty-seven percent of people who are murdered are murdered in their own homes.’ He smiles. ‘Your wife and kids in bed?’

‘Who says I have a wife and kids?’

‘You’re wearing a wedding ring and I saw a baseball bat on the lawn when I walked up here. Wife,’ he says, nodding at the wedding ring, ‘kid,’ he says, nodding toward the lawn.

‘Goddamn it,’ Todd says. ‘I told that little bastard not to leave shit laying around.’

‘Kids,’ Alan says.

‘Indeed,’ Todd says. ‘But to the point. You can’t frighten me, Officer Kees, if that’s what you’re trying to do with your talk of murder. If I come forward, not only will you no longer have a career, but there’s a chance you’ll do jail time; and we all know what happens to cops in prison. And the truth is, I don’t want that. All I want is a cut. Five thousand dollars. By tomorrow. I already told your friend, but he insisted on sending you here tonight for some reason.’

‘He wanted me to try to talk sense to you.’

‘My decision is made,’ Todd says. ‘I’m not negotiating.’ Alan nods.

‘You’re not negotiating and I can’t frighten you. Is that about how it is?’

‘That’s about how it is.’

‘Then you’re dumber than I thought.’

Todd smiles. ‘Why’s that, Officer Kees?’

Alan lets his arms drop to his sides, revealing gloved fists. In the right hand, a rusty tire iron.

‘Take a look at the man standing in front of you. Do I frighten you now?’

Todd’s smile – the one that says he’s won and he knows it – vanishes.

‘Wait a minute,’ he says, taking a step back across the foyer’s gray tile.

‘Charlie thought you might be reasonable,’ Alan says, ‘but as soon as I heard you wanted five grand, which, by the way, is fourteen hundred more than Charlie and I have collected combined, I knew better. I knew you were beyond reason.’

‘Please,’ Todd says.

‘Now, I’m a good police officer, Mr. Reynolds.
Todd.
Given the current situation, I can understand your not believing me, but it’s true. I am. But here’s a fact you might not be aware of – cops put their lives in danger every day of the week, and for that we are paid a pittance. I found a way to make a little extra money. I have a new wife at home, Todd, with a bun in the oven. I want to give my wife and child the kind of life they deserve, the same kind of life you want to give your family. Now maybe the way I found to make that extra money isn’t legal, but you’ll be the first person it’s hurt – just about the first person, anyway – and that’s because you’re threatening my family, Todd.’

‘Now, hold on,’ Todd says. ‘Hold on a minute. We can still work this—’

‘And when people threaten my family,’ Alan says, ignoring Todd completely, ‘when people threaten to destroy my family, that forces me into the position of having to destroy them. It’s not something I enjoy doing, Todd. It’s something I have to do. It’s something you’ve made me do. You’ve forced my hand, Todd – that’s all there is to it.’