The Dark Ones (4 page)
Authors: Anthony Izzo
He looked into her eyes, formerly full of hellfire, able to extract confessions from the heartiest of souls. Now, they were watery and red rimmed, the eyes of someone who had felt more than their share of pain. Eyes that were looking for the referee to call the fight. “Never, Mom.”
“Okay, Michael.”
He went upstairs, to the flat where he stayed, his guts feeling like a mess of knotted ropes. He had looked into the eyes of his dying mother and told the worst lie of his entire life. Taking a Heineken from the fridge, he unscrewed the cap and it gave a little pop. He took a swig. Right now it tasted like cigarette ashes in dirty dishwater. He set it down.
Just a few more jobs, then that was it. No more stealing. Or lying.
CHAPTER 3
“Chief, got a problem,” Laura said, and watched Dr. Lawrence McGiver as he looked over the contents of a manila folder. The comb-over that he effectively plastered to his head hung down onto his forehead, and his rimless glasses were on the end of his nose. His narrow face seemed even more pinched than usual. He looked like a man in perpetual pain.
“Pennington, what is it? I’m going over the DiLeo case here. Busy busy.” He snapped off his glasses and said, “Come in. Make it quick.”
Laura hurried into the office. The smell of McGiver’s cologne hung in the air, and under that, a whiff of the cigars she knew he snuck in here. The window to the office was cracked open, and she wondered if he had been sneaking one recently. She had an image of her boss bent over, craning his neck sideways and blowing smoke through the barely open window. She had to stifle a laugh at the thought.
“Well?”
“I have to leave.”
“You sick?”
“No.”
“What then?”
“It’s my father.”
“He sick?”
“I got a phone call.” One of the ER nurses had come running in while Laura was looking over a kid with an ankle sprain. At first she had thought someone was dead or hurt, but the nurse had only said, “Your dad’s in trouble.”
“What is it?” MacGiver asked.
Here goes. “He’s trying to stop the old Iroquois brewery from being torn down.”
“And that’s an emergency because?”
She felt her face get hot. Why did she always feel like such an ass explaining this to people? She wasn’t the one acting crazy. “He’s holed himself up inside the building. The machines are outside waiting to tear it down. He had the foreman on the job call me to come down. They’re going to arrest him.”
“Well, there’s something you don’t see every day.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Can we spare you?”
“Ostrow and Sampson are here.”
McGiver let out a long sigh.
“The brewery’s only five minutes from here.”
He put his glasses back on and picked up a pink form from the folder. She knew the DiLeo case was wearing on the boss. One of the docs had missed an irregularity on an EKG and sent a patient home. The patient had stroked out later that day and now the family had hired a billboard attorney to sue the hospital.
“Make it quick,” he said.
She left him to his reports and hurried for the parking ramp.
Laura turned right at the street sign marked Iroquois Alley, taking note of the bullet hole punched in it. The alley, a stretch of rut-marked dirt, led to an L-shaped brick building. It was four stories tall. Around it was an array of construction equipment: dozers, excavators, and dump trucks. The old brewery was close to becoming rubble. Iroquois had been popular when her dad was a young man. Outside of brewpubs, Buffalo had no breweries left.
She parked the car near a rusted red dump truck and got out. She still had her scrubs on, and she drew stares from some of the workers as she approached a man in a yellow hard hat. He had a stubbly face and thick jowls. He spoke into a cell phone. He appeared to be someone in charge, perhaps the foreman.
She looked at the building. A large doorway, one meant for trucks, was open. The smell of oil and diesel fuel hung in the air. Darkness filled the opening, and she could only see a few feet into the building. That made sense, for they would have shut the power off years ago. But somehow the darkness inside seemed more complete, total, than any darkness she had ever witnessed. She didn’t envy any of the demolition workers who may have to set foot in the old brewery.
Behind her, she heard one of the men say, “Hey, we got a nurse in case someone gets hurt.”
Laura turned around to see a lanky guy with bushy hair leaning against the cab of the dump truck. A cigarette dangled from his lip. He held a Styrofoam coffee cup in one hand.
“I’m a doctor. And if someone drops a brick on that pointy head of yours while I’m here, yes, I can help you.”
He took a drag off his cigarette and blew out smoke. “Okay, doc. Don’t have to be so touchy.”
She bit his head off. Maybe not necessary, but she was losing patience.
Now, the guy on the cell phone finished his call and folded the phone shut. He stuck it in a holder clipped to his belt.
Laura tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Laura Pennington. I’m looking for my father, Charles. Got a call he was here.”
“You’re the crazy dude’s daughter, huh?”
“He’s not crazy.”
“If you say so. Hang on a sec.” He walked over to a beige pickup truck, opened the driver’s side door, and took out a flashlight and a hard hat. He came back and handed her the hard hat. “Put it on. There’s some crumbling bricks in there. Don’t want you to get bopped on the melon.”
She put the hard hat on. It was loose and wobbly, but it would keep said melon intact.
“Pirrone,” he said, introducing himself.
He waved, indicating her to follow.
She followed him under the doorway to a set of stairs in a narrow case. In front of her, the flashlight bobbed and the stairs creaked underneath them. If not for the flashlight, the building would have been as dark and dank as a cavern. She wanted very badly to find her father and get back into the sunlight.
Pirrone stopped at the landing. Laura wound up next to him. In front of them, on the wall, was a wooden hatch with rusted steel strapping across its front.
“He’s in there,” Pirrone said.
“What is it?”
“When this place was a brewery, they had rollers in there, used them to slide the cases where they needed to go, I suppose.” He crouched down and opened the hatch.
Laura crouched next to him, taking in the odor of cigarettes and aftershave. He handed her a flashlight, which she shone in the opening. Ten feet inside, she saw her father, dressed like he was going to play eighteen at the muni golf course. He wore a dark cardigan with a polo underneath it, and khakis, which were now stained with grease at the knees. He gripped a flashlight whose beam sputtered in the darkness.
What have you done now, Dad?
“Hello, Laura.”
“Interesting place you’re spending your free time these days.”
“They won’t listen any other way. Not the councilmen, not the planning board, nobody. This will get their attention.”
Pirrone stood up, his knee popping. “The cops are on the way, you know.”
Laura looked up at Pirrone. “Did you really have to do that?”
Pirrone tilted his hard hat back with his finger. “I’ve got machines sitting idle, and idle machines don’t make my bosses any money. I need him out of here. Yesterday.”
She looked back down the tunnel. Hopefully she could talk him out before the cops got here. “Dad, the cops are coming.”
“I need to save this building.”
“You can’t fight it from jail,” Laura said.
“As soon as they pull me out of here, this place will be rubble. I can’t get the city to stay the demolition. And even though that moose standing next to you would probably like to bust my schnoz right about now, I don’t think they’ll tear the building down around me.”
“Don’t be so sure,” Pirrone said.
Laura stood up. “That’s my father you’re talking about.”
“Yeah?”
“You remove one brick while he’s in there and I’ll find the most rabid pit bull of a lawyer I can and sic him on you.”
“That old man is trespassing and you know it.”
“His name is Charles,” Laura said.
“
Charles
is trespassing, then.”
Charles
is trespassing, then.”
“Let me talk to him,” she said, and crouched down again. “Dad, you have to come out.”
“You have no idea what’s riding on this, Laura. None.”
“They don’t let you golf from jail, you know.”
Dad made a disgusted noise. “They’re not sending me to jail.”
“That cardigan won’t match with a prison jumpsuit.”
The creases in his forehead unfolded and a smile crossed his face, and then disappeared. He didn’t want to give in, but she had gotten a quick smile. Perhaps she was breaking through.
“Let them move me.”
Laura heard footsteps. She looked around and saw two Buffalo cops, both roughly the size of refrigerators, climbing the steps. The one in the lead was sliding a baton into his belt. The one behind him had a flashlight.
“Glad you guys are here,” Pirrone said.
“Where is he?” The first cop said.
Pirrone pointed to the opening.
“Who are you, ma’am?” The cop said. Laura stood up, looked at his name tag. It read: SLOWINSKI.
“I’m the trespasser’s daughter,” Laura said. “I’m trying to talk him out of there.”
“What’s he doing in there?” Slowinski said.
“He’s trying to save this building from demolition.”
Slowinski raised his eyebrows. “Better ways to do that.”
“The Common Council didn’t listen to him.”
“I’ll give him a chance to come out, but if he doesn’t, and I have to go in after him, he’s getting arrested.”
Her dad wouldn’t last half a day in jail.
Laura started to speak and stopped in midsentence when she saw her father emerge from the tunnel. Cobwebs littered the back of his sweater, and his fine gray hair stood askew.
“You going to leave now?” Slowinski said.
“I can’t fight from jail, can I?”
Can’t fight what, Dad?
“I suppose not,” Slowinski said. “We’re out.”
The two cops felt their way down the stairs. Pirrone muttered something under his breath and motioned for them to follow. At the bottom of the stairs, Laura gave him back the hard hat and he gave her a thumbs-up as a big engine coughed to life.
Laura looked back at the building. Even the rats might stay out of a place that dark and dreary.
She walked toward her car, her dad next to her. She put her arm around him, gave him a squeeze. “You had me worried.”
He gave a quick smile, then turned and looked at the building with a measure of sadness. No, not sadness, it was more like worry. The same look he used to get before she left on a date with a new guy, as if Dad feared she had brought home the Boston Strangler.
“What is it about this place?” she said.
“They don’t know that they’re doing. The only reason I came out was because in jail, I can’t do any more.”
“Do any more of what?” Laura said.
“Getting ready.”
“For?”
“Honey, can you get out of here, pack up, leave?”
The question caught her off guard. She felt as if she’d been rocked back a bit. “There’s this little thing called the hospital, and they like me to show up now and then.”
“Don’t get smart, girl. I’m not kidding. Can you?”
“Why would I leave?”
He placed his hands on her shoulders. “Things are going to get bad, Laura, and it all starts with this building coming down. That’s all I can tell you, but very soon you won’t want to be in the city. Not if I think what’s going to happen does happen.”
Was he drifting into the early stages of dementia or Alzheimer’s? Or maybe the stress of fighting to keep the brewery open had cracked Dad. Either way, the prospect of him slipping into some sort of mental abyss was disturbing.
“Dad, maybe you should get checked out. We’ve got a real good psychiatrist at the hospital, Dr. Pham, or maybe start you out with a physical.”
“Always the doctor, aren’t you?” He dropped his hands. Behind them, metal squealed as an excavator rolled to the building. The operator raised the boom and the metal claw bit into the brick and sent up a puff of dust. Again, Dad looked back at the building, his face taking on a pinched look.
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