The Wolves of Fairmount Park (6 page)

“You saw the gun?”

“Yeah, it was right out on the table in the dining room. A MAC-10, little thing but with that long clip.” Soap shook his
head. “Darnell likes machine guns. Seen
Scarface
too many times.”

Then Soap was gone and Danny was on the street talking into his cell. Setting things in motion. Later he'd think about this last couple of minutes, try to remember Soap leaving, Asa walking away. They must have said good-bye. He'd have told Soap thanks, said something to Asa. Later all of that would be important, but in the moment he just lost track of them. He was standing on Ridge Avenue, hunched against the noise of the traffic, talking to Rogan about wiretaps and surveillance, and when he turned around he was alone on the street.

Michael wouldn't wake up. The doctors said all the signs were good, but he still wasn't coming around and it had been two days. Kathleen held her son's hand and told him about everyone who had called and everyone from school who asked about him. The room was crowded with flowers, and Jeannette Sullivan from Michael's class came and stood shyly in the door and said she was praying for him, then walked down the hall in tears while Kathleen smiled and Brendan shook his head.

Brendan went to the door to watch her go, her shoulders heaving, strawberry blond hair shielding her face. He looked to Kathleen.

“Did you know about that?”

“I had my suspicions.” She got up and straightened two flower arrangements on the sill, pulling the cards to read the inscriptions.
“She was the one he bought the pendant for, when we were in Cape Cod.”

“Right, the mysterious pendant.”

“You gave him such crap about that.”

“I don't like secrets.”

“Teenagers need secrets, Bren.”

He nodded, then came back in and forced himself to look at his son's slack, pale face. He took a tissue from a box and dabbed it on his tongue and wiped a fleck of white crust from the corner of Michael's mouth.

“What else don't we know?”

Kathleen straightened things on the night table. “Hon, he's a good kid. He's not into drugs.”

“Did you know he hung out with little George? I thought that kid was gay.”

“I know the two of them talked once in a while. Michael has a lot of friends. People like him and he likes everyone.”

“It doesn't take a bad kid to make a mistake, Kath.” He slumped in a chair and looked at his hands. “Someone says, let's try this, and they do, and then it's anything goes. They could have been just curious, or stupid, or there because they dared each other.”

“When he wakes up, he'll tell us.”

“There's nothing, nothing on earth as dumb as a teenage boy.”

“He's a cop's kid, Bren. He's your kid. He knows right from wrong.” She went over and touched Brendan's hair and he caught her hand and kissed it. She was thin, red hair to Brendan's black,
with full lips that always drew his eyes. He knew that people fell out of love, but he knew it the way he knew people could eat insects or speak Estonian. Luis, his partner, had been married and divorced twice. Maybe it wasn't luck, though, maybe, he thought, he was just too stubborn to change his mind about anything that really mattered. You loved someone, you loved them, and how was that ever not true? His father, he knew, had loved Maire till the day he died, even though he had to leave her and get Brendan away from her when she went downhill, and in dying cried not for himself but for the loss of her.

“When he left the house, he said he was going to help little George with a project?”

“That's what he said, and Francine said George told her they were going to the coffee shop on Main to work on something for school.”

Michael's chest rose and he gave a strange, keening sigh and they both looked up, but there wasn't anything more and he settled back down. His head was swaddled in bandages, and his black hair peeked out from beneath them, sticking to his cheeks.

They both got up and stood over their son. Kathleen touched his forehead, as she had done a thousand thoughtless times, and Brendan fought to remember a prayer, any prayer from all those years at Father Judge. What he got finally was the Policeman's Prayer, which had been shellacked onto a piece of dark wood in his father's living room and which was somewhere in Brendan's attic now.
When I start my tour of duty, God, Wherever crime may be, As I walk the darkened streets alone, Let me be close to thee.
Jesus, he hadn't thought of that in years. It was the kind of weepy nonsense that kept him away from church, but when he was a kid he used to get a secret thrill from reading it, and every time he did, he'd known he'd become a cop.

Chris Black sat next to Angel Riordan in Angel's car, a beat-up Accord that Chris was embarrassed to be seen in, his long legs jacked up under his chin. Soap sat in the back firing up a joint and saying didn't they have some decent music, cause KYW Newsradio wasn't doing it for him. Mostly Chris wished he could get out at the next light and away from Angel Riordan, who creeped him out with his quiet way, the man like a black cloud lurking all the time. Said almost nothing unless you asked him a question, and even then he'd just stare at you from behind his shades, the little machine inside his head clicking away until he finally gave up an answer, weighing everything he said like each word cost him money.

Right now Soap thought they were taking him home, which was cool 'cause you never knew how people were going to react when they finally got what was going on. Though man, anyone who got in a car with Riordan had to be either stupid or not paying attention. They were moving along the river, Angel with someplace in mind, he guessed, 'cause he didn't ask Chris anything and he drove like he knew where he was going.

Soap sat with his legs splayed in the back, singing along with
the KYW news jingle, then asking them if they wanted to come with him to the club, meet some people, get some drinks. “Man, I knew your brother, man.”

“Yeah?” said Chris, not really interested. He had been hearing Shannon stories for years and was sick of it, like Chris never did anything and his older brother was a legend.

“Yeah, man, he was cool. I mean, he was crazy, all due respect, but he knew how to have a good time.” Soap laughed, and here it came. “I remember him down that strip club used to be down there off Front? Motherfucker gets up on the stage with the girls, starts taking off his pants, grabbing his johnson. The owner wants to get up in it, till he seen it was Shannon. Then it was cool.”

“Yeah,” says Chris. His brother was a borderline retard, truth be told, but he let it go 'cause pretty soon he wasn't going to be hearing any more stories from Soap.

“Hey man, where the fuck you all driving me to?”

Angel just turned his head to look at the kid, so Chris said, “Man, this is for your protection. Last thing you want is to be seen coming right from Asa's place and meeting with a cop, yeah?”

“Okay, yeah,” said Soap, and pinched off the roach and put it in his coat. “I get you, yeah, this some Wile E. Coyote shit.”

Chris nodded, but couldn't guess what the stoned kid was trying to say. Angel came to a turnoff near Fairmount Park that put them along the creek and drove down into the woods a ways, moving slow.

“Now it's the woods, huh.” Soap sang some more, his high voice filling the car, “KYW Newsradio . . . Ten Sixty.” He closed
his eyes. “Man, I didn't realize, this stuff is harsh, man, like getting hit with buckshot in the head, you know?”

Chris turned and said, “What?” and almost laughed. “Is it?”

“Yeah, I got this weed off my sister's boyfriend. This shit is powerful.”

Ahead of them the rear end of a car came into the headlights, a beat-up white Buick with its front end stuck in the weeds.

Angel spoke for the first time. “Come on, then.”

Soap roused, gathered himself up, and slid over to get out. Chris got out to stand by Angel, his hand making the unconscious gesture of touching the hard butt of the pistol through his shirt.

“This is better, yeah? We'll get you home in this other car, so no one sees anything, gets nervous?” Chris working it maybe too hard, not knowing how the man could be so dense to what was happening. Soap made a gesture, throwing up his hands like okay, whatever.

“Yeah, sure, we change cars. This is how they do it in the big leagues, huh?”

They were in a small clearing in the woods between the river drive and the water. There was the constant hissing susurrus of the cars going by behind the screen of the trees, and to their left was the vast black space in the lights that was the Schuylkill River at night. Across it they could see the expressway and the lights of the cars going by, bumping along in a stop-and-go stream like in something Chris had seen on TV about blood cells moving in a body.

They turned to look at it, Soap and Chris and even Angel. The river and the expressway and the trees, and behind that the city
and the lights. Chris was talking again, saying how Asa thanked him for coming out and helping with the thing with the cop, but Soap waved him off.

“Fuck that, he going to leave my sister out of it?”

“Yeah, Soap, that's right, man, you got no worries.”

Chris moved ahead to stand by the car, and Soap followed, still talking.

“Asa Carmody is a freak, and you all freaks for working for the man. Motherfucker smiles but don't mean it. Bring family into business like that? Threaten my sister?”

“Nah, man.” Chris was heated, forgetting himself for a minute. “Nah, it ain't like that, it's just he thought you were cold, man, when he asked you for help. Asa's the kind of guy—”

The shot made him jump a little, a flat pop that hurt his ears, and he froze, his hand still out in front of him. Making some kind of point to Soap, who went down on his back, eyes open, his string pulled forever. Chris turned to Angel, who was already putting the gun away, bending to drag the kid by the foot to the edge of the water.

Chris said, “Jesus. What the fuck, man?” He held out his arms. “I thought you'd throw me a sign or something. That's uncool, man, I thought I was the one getting shot.”

Angel stopped in the action of dragging the body, bent to the task, one of Soap's oversized boots in his hand. He straightened and looked at Chris, said nothing, but cocked his head a little, like a dog. Like he didn't know who or what Chris was. He went back to it, shifting to get leverage on Soap's right leg and then making a quick jerk that let the momentum of Soap's body carry him down the slope of the last few feet to the edge of the water.

He got down on one knee over the body, fished in his jacket, and came out with the longest knife Chris Black had ever seen. Some kind of dagger, speckled with rust and as long as his forearm. Angel paused for one second, drew a breath, then placed the tip of the knife between two of Soap's ribs and pushed down. He pushed it hard, cords in his pale neck straining, working the grip in his hands until the hilt hit the kid's chest.

Chris stood, transfixed, saying,
Jesus, Jesus,
in his head. “What the fuck,” he said quietly. “I don't, um. What the fuck.”

Angel pulled the knife out, and it made a long and terrible noise as he worked it free. He set the tip against Soap's abdomen again, this time lower down, and pushed it hard. There was nothing in his face, no rage or disgust, nothing at all that Chris could see. It was just work.

There was an exhalation from Soap's body, a breathy hiss that made Chris jump.

“It's nothing.” Angel tugged the knife up again. “Just air.” He lifted the tail of Soap's shirt and wiped the blood off the knife in long smooth strokes. “See? You make some holes they go down and don't come up so fast. Otherwise he's there floating for all the world to see.” Chris caught the faint accent then, the hard, clipped tones of Northern Ireland. Chris had an uncle that sounded like that. Like the old man was working stones in his mouth when he talked.

Angel stood up again over the body and made the knife disappear into his coat again, then stood back and pushed the dead boy into the water with his foot. He pushed at his feet, then at his shoulders, the body rasping over the lip of river stones. When he was done, one of the kid's hands was still in the mud at the
lapping edge of the water, as if even in death he didn't want to go that way, and Angel toed it gently with his boot until the kid floated away toward the city and the lights.

Chris opened his cell phone while Angel stood still on the riverbank and watched.

Chris said, “Yeah, we're all done.” There was a pause. “Yeah.” He closed the phone, waited a minute.

“Angel, man, we got to go, we got things to do.” He shuddered a little, he couldn't help it. To see the kid's face go slack, his eyes go blank and dry. To know it again, that we're machines that can get turned off. And the other, Angel working like a butcher on the kid's chest and stomach. Hard not to cross himself, ward that off somehow.

He got back to the passenger side of Angel's car, wanting him to hurry up but not wanting to get into his shit when the man was in his shooting mood. Eventually, whatever Angel was doing was over and he came back and opened the door, looking over the car roof at Chris in the dark.

“You talk too much.”

“What? I talk too much?”

“Alla you people,” he said and got in. Chris got in, too, his mind going, chewing on what the fuck that might mean, hoping it would never be just him and Angel down here on the river.

The moon was a perfect white circle of ash, and Orlando and Zoe were laced together on the couch on the roof, her skirt around her hips, hair wild on her shoulders, both of them breathing
hard as winded sprinters. She dropped her head to his chest and he twined her hair in his fingers. She fished in her purse for her cigarettes and put one in her mouth. He took one from her and stuck it unlit in his own, felt the expansion of her lungs through his own chest as she pulled the smoke in, held it, let it go.