The Wolves of Fairmount Park (10 page)

Orlando watched him go. He got his bearings off the street signs, stretched, struck out north.

There was a shot. Danny heard it, out in the world and then in his earpiece a half second later, the stony pop ricocheting around the neighborhood, and his heart did that thing in his chest like it was turning over, registering that things were going wrong and he wasn't in control of events.

Danny crouched at the edge of a stone wall at the foot of Lamport Road. He had on a Kevlar vest and held his pistol between his legs, pointing down. It was a good pistol, an H&K USP .45 he'd gotten the year before when his mother had given him a couple thousand dollars of the insurance money she'd gotten when his father had died of a stroke at the side of 95 during rush hour.

He'd been on his way to teach a class in HVAC at Bucks County Community College. He'd lived long enough for the medics to get him on the ambulance. To see his face while he tried to say whatever was in his head. He'd opened and closed his mouth, crying with frustration at whatever was stuck behind his thickened lips. His father had always been quiet, the kind of man who observed things from a wry and considered distance, and it bothered Danny for a long time that he'd held on to something he'd wanted to say and never got it out at the last.

Now Danny tensed and dropped a little lower. So did Big
John, but he was already so exposed it hardly mattered. They both looked up reflexively at the door two houses up the street where the SWAT guys were standing over the kid with the red jacket sprawled half in and half out of the chair and someone on the radio said, “Shit.”

The SWAT guys Danny knew were good guys, careful and rehearsed and economical in their movements and when they were involved things usually went well, but they were there because sometimes things went wrong and people didn't always want to go quietly, and once in a while someone reached for his waistband instead of giving it up and things got bad.

Now the people in the house knew they were there and the guys at the door yelled
go, go, go
, and the door was breached by a short guy with a shaved head who swung a squat battering ram that popped the lock.

Danny got up and ran up the walk and took the stairs two at a time, Big John loping after him on his bad knees. Martinez reached the top of the stairs where two SWAT guys were hunched over the kid who'd been shot, one of them pushing a compression bandage down on the kid's chest and shouting into the radio, but the other one was looking over his shoulder at Danny with pursed lips and
no fucking way
in his eyes.

Danny went in, his pistol up, touching the back of the last SWAT guy to tell him he was there and watching them clear the rooms. His heart was beating hard, vibrating in his chest with a fast pulse so that he could feel the blood jetting out to the ends of his arms, and he knew he could never do SWAT because he'd become addicted to that feeling, that rush of going heavy through barricaded doors and pushing the shotgun out
in front of him to get them down on the floor, and then he'd be no good for anything else.

In the living room he saw Darnell go over, pushed down on his face and his hands jerked behind him by two black helmets working with a furious economy while his mother moaned, a shrill, oscillating whine that leaked around the hands she had clapped over her mouth, fat tears standing on her cheeks. Another tall kid dropped wearily to his knees, his hands splayed across the back of his neck. Shaking his head,
shit, not again
.

Danny heard more shouting from overhead and went back toward the front door to get a view of the stairs leading up to the second floor. He heard the deep voice of one of the SWAT guys barking orders and then saw Trey King back to the top of the stairs with an expensive-looking Mossberg shotgun that was too big to swing in the little row house, trying to cover all the SWAT guys that were no doubt arrayed against him. He was a big kid, bulked up from jail and wild with the coke they'd been doing all morning. He was stripped to the waist, wearing only low-slung, baggy black shorts, and his back was slick with sweat.

Trey pulled the trigger once, a detonating crack and a flash of light that lit the hallway and the top of the stairs stark white for an instant before the SWAT team answered fire and there was the clattering of the small H&K submachine guns they carried and the pinging of brass as a rain of empty shells ejected onto the hardwood floors.

Trey tripped trying to back down the stairs out of the line of fire, and the shots from the cops perforated the old plaster walls of the stairwell, missing Trey but dumping dust and bits of lath down on Danny and on Trey as he fell hard on his ass and
skittered down the dozen stairs to come to rest at Danny's feet. The shotgun cartwheeled out of the kid's hands, clipping him on the head and clattering out into the entryway. Big John picked it up while Danny pointed his pistol at Trey's face and the kid lifted his hand to touch a smear of blood on his forehead and said,
ain't that a motherfucker.

Danny went back into the sitting room where one of the SWAT guys pointed a gloved hand down at the coffee table. There between a pizza box and a street copy of a monster movie on DVD was a black TEC-9 with a matte finish. It was old and scuffed up, with dull white metal showing through where the paint was worn through. Darnell and his cousin Pook were on the floor in handcuffs. Danny bent over the gun and inspected it, sniffed at the barrel. He could hear Pook swear under his breath.

Orlando raised one eyebrow to look at the camera over Mexican Bob's door.

“Bob.”

There was a long silence. Orlando half-turned to watch the street.

“Bob.”

There was a click from the intercom, and he could hear breathing.

“Bob, man, I'm on the clock here.”

“Lift up your face.”

Orlando looked at his shoes.

“You heard me, man. Lift up your face.”

Orlando worked his tongue in his jaw, then finally lifted his head and looked at the camera. There was another long pause.

“You get picked up, cops throw you a beating, and you do what?”

“Bob, man.”

“You come right the fuck back here?”

“It wasn't a cop.”

“Orlando.”

“It wasn't, it was something else.”

“That supposed to make me feel better? The man knows your business, he knows you got business with me, he knows whatever else.”

“Bob, man.” Orlando looked into the camera, held up his shaking hands. “Don't just cut me loose.”

“Go home.”

“I'm in trouble.”

“Yeah, Orlando, you are.”

The street was bright now, and Orlando stepped to the curb and tried to think what to do next. He rubbed his face, and his hand came away with blood over the black grit in the heel of his hand. He stepped nearer to a storefront with a plate glass window and angled his head to catch his reflection, licking one grimy finger to try to wipe off the blood at his temple and running along the hollow of his eye.

He became aware that he wasn't alone in the reflected image and turned to see a slender girl standing at his elbow, swaying slightly. She was staring at him, or staring at the blood on his head and in his hair, and her face was empty, her mouth moving. Orlando had seen her before but couldn't place her, a skinny girl with caramel-colored skin, a girl who had been beautiful before whatever had gotten to her. Her lips were full and dark and her eyes were large and blue, but there was grime at the corners of her eyes and her hair was lank, and something stained her dress dark in circles and blotches. Over the dress she wore
a jacket with crossed hockey sticks that didn't go with her once elegant outfit, except that the jacket, too, was stained and ripped.

She reached out one small hand to touch his face and he caught it and tried to catch her eye, but she was focused on the damage to his face and as he watched she began to cry. Her expression didn't change, but clear lines of water ran from her eyes, making clean tracks in the sooty grime on her face. She pulled her hand back from his, but then again she reached for his face and he turned slightly to let her, ready to recoil if she tried to scratch him. He had seen enough street-crazy women, even beautiful ones, to know they were unpredictable and sometimes dangerous.

She touched his temple gently, and the crying intensified. She looked down and let her mouth open, working silently, her breath feeding a sort of muted, barely audible howl. It was crying the way kids did it, inconsolable, bottomless, as if nothing could ever be right again.

“Sienna.”

That was her name. It came to his lips, somehow bypassing his brain, the way it sometimes worked. He had seen her around the neighborhood, in the bars and on the street. A party girl, maybe a hooker. He had taken her in on the periphery of things without registering her before. People moved through the scene, sometimes up and out, sometimes down, like now. The drinking and copping stopped being a party and became a job, a life, and people emptied their lives into the street and wandered, stunned and broken. It happened. It was where his mother had gone.

She turned away, not answering, looking at the spot of blood on her hands that had transferred from his face, and talked fiercely to it, words he couldn't catch or understand. When she turned, though, he saw the distension in her short dress, a swelling that might have been anything but that he was afraid meant she was carrying another burden. Looking past her now, he saw a white police cruiser slowing on the street, the driver looking his way, and he turned his head and looked back into the shop window, his head down until he was alone on the street.

When Kathleen and Brendan came home there were two dozen messages. Friends and news reporters and kids from school. There were a few hangups, one with the breathy sobbing of a young girl. Kathleen came down from her shower to find Brendan playing it over, his lips pursed.

“Listen to this.”

“Why?”

“Does that sound like Jeannette?”

He pushed the play button again, and they listened while Brendan moved the volume slider. Kathleen shrugged.

“I don't know, Bren. One young girl crying sounds pretty much like another, I guess.”

Before the phone hung up, they heard another voice for a second, an older woman in a distant room asking what everyone wanted for dinner.

Kathleen shook her head. “I don't know, Bren.”

He opened the machine, pulled out the tape. “I'll give it to the detective, what's his name. Martinez.”

“Put another tape in, Bren. People need to be able to reach us.”

“Are you pissed at me?”

“No, I just want to get back to the hospital in case Michael wakes up.”

“If it was Jeannette with them, if she knows something about what happened—”

“I don't care what happened. Get dressed, Brendan.”

“You say that now, but I want to be able to tell Michael . . .” He lifted his hand and made a fist, a dark look on his face.

“What, what can you tell him? You think this is ever going to make sense?”

“I need to understand this.”

“You need, that's right. You. You think a world where someone points a machine gun at children can ever make sense?”

“I want to be able to tell him I did what I could. To know the truth of it.”

She saw he was upset and put her hand on his neck, the way she did when he'd had a shift so bad he couldn't talk about it but sat in his blues in the kitchen looking out the window while a cup of coffee went cold on the table.

“I don't believe in truth, Brendan. I believe in you. And Michael. This house and work and dinner together most nights. The rest of it is the world going by and I don't care about it. Even if you find the man who did this? What will you know, really? And how many more people will be hurt in the finding out? The truth? The truth, you can have.”

.   .   .

Orlando walked stiffly up Ridge, feeling the places where his abraded skin was being rubbed by the rough fabric of his jeans. His head throbbed and his stomach lurched and he knew he'd have to score or he'd get weaker and dopesick. He walked past storefront churches with names hand-painted or sprayed on like graffiti. The Triumph Apostolic Church of the New Age, the Starlight Holiness Church. He walked past Chinese takeouts fortified like Ulster police stations with bulletproof glass and barbed wire. Men and women sat on lawn chairs on the street in front of their houses or their shops, hair places and unlicensed notion stores, and everyone had something to say, some wisdom to offer, seeing him lurch up the street with blood in his hair and one closed eye. They told him to get along home, to run and hide, to get right with Jesus. At Thirty-third he turned north and caught the bus for Roxborough.

The time had passed to be discriminate in his choices. There were people he'd call if he needed dope, and then there were places he'd go when he really needed dope. It wasn't all the same. The quality of the dope, the vibe off the dealer, it all mattered when he was thinking straight, but when he was in a bad way it mattered less, and then not at all.

Near the hospital he turned south and found a three-story white frame house that leaned, canted toward the street like a drunk heading for the gutter. He tried to make himself inconspicuous, smaller somehow as he headed up the walk to the front door. He knocked and waited.

There was some rustling inside, some discussion, then he heard
someone say, “We're closed,” but before he could walk away the door opened and a young guy with red hair stood there, waving him in and shooing away a lean Puerto Rican kid who was shaking his head and pointing at Orlando.

“I told you, just don't say I didn't tell you, right?”

The red-haired guy smiled and propelled Orlando with one hand into the living room, which was stripped bare except for a sprung green couch and a chipped Formica table. The place smelled of burned dope and scented wax from a half-dozen candles stuck to the fireplace mantel. He could hear soft music from somewhere and voices upstairs and remembered that there were still people for whom dope was a vacation. Fun.