The Wolves of Fairmount Park (32 page)

He was half out the front door, turning with the gun, when Orlando clocked him hard with the Glock, holding it like a hammer by the barrel and chopping at Bennie's skull. One solid shot, so that the kid squeezed the trigger and discharged the gun with an unholy echoing roar that shattered the door frame. The gun dropped out of his hands and landed on Min's small foot. She screamed and hopped to the side of the door, and Orlando grabbed her and pinned her hard against the porch, then righted the pistol and pushed it into her cheek while Bennie moaned and rocked himself upright, rubbing the side of his head.

“What do you think, you're going to get rich? Dumb junkie fuck. You're going to score off me?”

Orlando said, “You know that's not why I'm here, so don't even start a game with me.” The girl moaned, something in Korean, and Orlando breathed hard through his mouth. “I don't know how this gun works. I don't know about guns.”

“I'll show you in a minute.” Bennie looked at the shotgun at his feet.

“Did you even know who she was, know her name? Was it just being, like, fuck it, who cares about her? Did you just think it didn't matter?”

Bennie watched the fire inside the door, making its way toward where they lay on the porch, his eyes red with the light. “I see all you come here. I used to think it was just partying. This life. People coming and having fun. Then, I don't know. I see
you stealing, whoring, fucking each other over. You all come around over and over and just turn to skeletons.”

Orlando felt the heat growing on his face. “She protected me. Why would she do that for me?” He held the pistol against the girl's temple, his mind empty, as if the gun were thinking for him, giving shape and volition to his acts. “What do I do without her?”

Bennie held up his hands. “I wouldn't hurt anyone just to do it. I do what I'm told. He sends those big apes around to collect the money, so I do what the fuck I'm told. You think you want to know, you're mad and you want to get at him, but you can't. He's too smart. There are so many people out there who take his money.” He leaned forward, his eyes darting back and forth between Orlando's wild eyes and the shotgun on the floor.

Orlando said, “You think I care about living or dying. I don't care. This isn't that. She was perfect. Something has to happen if she dies. The world has to end.” He pushed the girl down with the gun at her temple.

Bennie put one hand out slowly, touching the girl's foot. “I can tell you his name. I'll tell you. You think you'll learn something, but you'll just die.”

“If you lie to me, I'll know it. I saw the bag. I know every bag stamp in this town. I studied every way people get high.” There was a crash inside, things dropping and blowing up. Bottles of liquor, maybe. His hands were cramping, and he turned and breathed through his mouth, trying to keep from getting sick. He sat back, finally, and Min disentangled her hair from his fingers and climbed to Bennie.

Bennie said, “You already know, then why did you come here?”

“I wanted to hear you say it. I wanted to see your face and hear you say his name, tell me where he is.”

The heat was getting worse, and Min's hair lifted in little updrafts. She said, “Then what? You can't stop this. You can't stop anything. No one can. Not the police, not anyone.”

“No, but I'll get him. I'll get him somehow.”

The door swung on its own, as if the fire were a spirit taking control of the house. Bennie made a face. “You're sick. I can see it. Right now, you're sick. Does that gun even work? Is it loaded? You don't know.”

Orlando lifted it and they ducked, Bennie and Min. He pointed it at them, his face screwed up in anticipation of the noise. He swung it toward the open door and pulled the trigger, his hand shaking with the effort. There was a pop and Min gave a little shriek. For a while they all looked into the red interior of the house. Watched, fascinated, like animals in the dark for a minute, before Orlando finally got up and they followed him to the curb, to stand and watch the house burn. The house, whatever dope and money there was inside it. They watched expressionless, their thoughts unknowable. The fire trucks appeared at the end of the block, and people began coming out of the other houses to stand blinking with their children, like they had been called against their will.

Benigno said, “His name is Asa Carmody.”

Orlando dropped to the curb, exhausted, and folded his legs under him. He saw Bennie holding Min and watching the house as if they were any young couple losing their home, as if they were poor sodbusters watching a grass fire reduce their hovel on some prairie as coyotes circled and whined. He thought about
how everyone thought they had the right to do whatever they did. Everything, no matter what. People just built a little bridge of self-justified bullshit over whatever terrible things they did to each other. Orlando saw it all around him, and knew he had done it, too.

He was conscious of them moving, now, Bennie herding Min with furtive movements away from the light and commotion on the street. Orlando got up and followed, all of his body flaring with pain so intense he thought it should be audible, a high whine like a drill. They began to pick up speed, both of them in their underwear, weaving around neighbors and firemen. Orlando caught them at the end of the block, jammed the pistol discreetly in the hollow under Bennie's ribs.

The tall kid sagged. “All right, then.” He closed his eyes, said something in Spanish. Crossed himself. A few steps away, Min put her hand across her face, a kid at a scary movie, wanting to see and not see.

“No,” Orlando said, “not that.”

“What?”

“Can I borrow your car?”

Bennie shook his head, wiped at the tears at the corner of one red eye. “Jesus, I pissed myself.”

The bar was loud, the place on South, crowded with young people, and Angel pushed his way slowly to the end of the bar to claim a seat where he could see her. To see Hannah, finally. The sight of her giving him a physical rush of pleasure as if he'd
touched her. He'd had to move slowly, one foot in front of the other, concentrating on staying upright, staying awake. It was ending, he knew, and he was glad of it. He hadn't thought he'd be so ready, thought he'd fought it all those years, used his skill to ward it off, but he saw plain that he'd been looking for his own death for a long time.

He held himself erect, watching her take the orders, the way she had of cocking her head, her hair coiled in the braids he liked so much, changing colors under the lights, gold and then red and then gold again. He grabbed a handful of napkins from the bar and stuffed them inside his shirt, trying not to be noticed. The music was going, something he didn't know, but he liked it, about living fast and dying young. The girls moved around him, dancing, looking at each other but doing it for the boys. Their hands up, arms cocked, making circles in the air with their slim hips. Smelling of perfume and sweet drinks and the sweat of dancing.

He'd never danced with Hannah, but watching her work was like that, so he'd take it with him. She was making her way down the bar, grabbing glasses and soda guns, doing her practiced thing, people calling to her and everyone happy, everyone wanting their drinks. Soon she'd turn and see him and then he could relax and sit back and let go. He just needed that one more time, that smile. That crooked line across her broad face, her lips dark. What was that geometry that added up to beauty? Lines, points along a curve. That was all.

It was hard to wait. He wanted to grab her, take her outside, stop traffic, open his coat in the street. Fire his guns at the moon, hold her close while he smiled with blood in his teeth
like the dead African boy on Hope Street. This was all right, though. As good as anything, as good as anywhere. Someone slipped behind him; he heard voices, and a girl screamed about blood on the floor. The place was loud, roaring, so nobody noticed, but it was hard to hold his head up, hard to wait for her to see him. His hands were wet from holding himself together, and he was tired.

Finally he had to let his head down on the bar. Somebody's drink was spilled, somebody was touching his arm and wanted to talk, but he was focused on her, and she was turning, finally. Seeing him, and there it was, the smile. He reached up, took his glasses off. Put them on the edge of the bar and smiled back. Closed his eyes. Wondered if he'd dream.

Danny was sitting in his car in the dark in front of Rodi's, drinking Old Grand-Dad from a pint bottle. Officially, he was on leave. There had been some kind of meeting, he knew, between the Captain and Lieutenant Barclay, and then Barclay had called him into the office and told him to take three days. The lieutenant was talking fast, his head down, moving him toward the door as if he were afraid Danny would infect him with something. He'd called Rogan, but the phone just rang through to his voice mail, and Danny had hung up without leaving a message. He'd gone home just long enough to change, then gotten back in the car and started driving. The Grand-Dad had calmed him down, muted the frantic feeling he'd had since seeing Derrick Leon.

His phone rang and it was Brendan, a little wild, a little doped up, telling him about the gunfight and Zoe and his brother out looking for whoever poisoned his girlfriend. He could hear Brendan struggle against whatever they'd given him for pain.

“The kid's all fucked up, I don't know what he'd do. He's got, he's all messed up. And he's sick. Withdrawing, I'm pretty sure.”

“He said where the dope came from? That made his girlfriend sick?”

“A place around the corner. Shurs Lane. I don't know the address, but he told me what it looked like.”

The house on Shurs was Asa's, he knew that now. He'd cruised it three times, watching the people go in and out, seeing the bars on the windows and the reinforced door. It was in Asa's mother's name. One of the ghosts that held all the paper on Asa's life.

“Who's he looking for, Danny? Do you know?”

“Same person I am.”

Danny cranked the ignition on his car and picked up his notebook. He'd been driving by places Asa owned all day long. The places were in other names. His mother's, a brother who'd died when Asa was four. There were three houses in West Philly where people were probably processing or storing dope. The place on Shurs, a small apartment building in Kensington. A couple of bars, a workingman's place down in Chester, and Rodi's, and Danny was cruising them figuring he'd run into Asa at one of them. Now he lifted the notebook and looked at the last place on the list, a garage on North American, up above York.

Danny opened the window and threw the pint hard at the front of the bar so that it broke open on the stucco front. A guy in a Flyers jersey swore and ran over to the car, and Danny opened his coat and pulled his piece. The guy stopped short, and Danny laughed and said, “Yeah, I thought so.”

Chris's mother had lived in the same house for fifty-three years, on Tulip Street in Fishtown. The real Fishtown, below Norris Street, not the made-up one going all the way up to Lehigh Avenue. Chris would have to listen to this rant once a week from his mother, about how everybody wanted to be in Fishtown now and they should have seen it twenty years ago, by which she meant forty years ago, when it was just the run-down places and the bars and Goodwill stores, not the galleries and restaurants full of young couples tattooed and pierced, even the women. Chris had to wake her up before he left, show her the girl, who carried the stale pastries with her and sat in the corner of the living room, rocking, doing her prayer, talking to the unborn baby. His mother stood with her hands on her hips, asking what she was supposed to do with her and saying she wasn't the welfare office and then stamping back upstairs to watch her TV shows.

He should be used to it. It had been worse when Shannon was alive. His older brother would come home cut, fucked up from bar fights, running from the cops, asking his mother to sew up a hole in his cheek, asking her to put up some rummy
he'd met in a bar, asking her to hide a gun. He'd been her favorite, and when Chris asked for the smallest thing it was a big deal and she whined and started the litany about raising two boys on her own, so he would just pick her up, drop her off, give her money, and keep moving. When Shannon had showed up dead she wailed, tore at her hair, performed the whole opera for her friends, the priest, all the neighborhood people who'd turned out for the funeral, and most of them looking at his body in the casket the way you'd look at a bloodied shark on a dock.

He let the girl hug him one more time before he left, getting something off her small hands on his back, smelling her crazy-girl smell of glazed sugar and cherries and soot, and then went back out and started the Navigator. He pulled the gun out of the console and put it on the seat next to him. He realized there was no one he trusted, and if things had gone different he'd have brought Gerry and Frank with him to go see Asa, and for the first time he missed them.

She stood at the window and watched him, then ran to the door and came out to pull open the back door and climb in.

“Go inside.”

“It's okay. I'm not here.”

“It's not safe.”

“No, she smells bad. The baby doesn't like her. Thy womb Jesus.”

“Yeah, she does kind of smell bad, huh? Like I don't know. Cabbage and Bengay or something.” He laughed and listened to her settling down onto the floor behind his seat. “Stay down low, okay? You hear me?”

“Defend us in battle. Saint Michael.”

“My name is Christopher.”

“He's not a real saint.”

“No.”

Danny crossed Diamond and pulled up half a block from the garage on American, letting his car coast to a stop against the side of a dark job-shop. He got out slow, a little unsteady from the bourbon, though it was burning out of his system quick enough. He took the small H&K pistol out from under his coat, snapped off the safety, and moved through the quiet night, trying to see into each of the few passing cars that went by and staying close to the shadowed and shuttered buildings looming in the dark.