Great Kills

by Kevin Fox

  Great Kills

  A Killian Collins Novel

  Kevin Fox

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  About the Author

  “Memories are the lies we tell ourselves to make sense of events we’ve suffered through. Each of us crafts a story that we call the truth, telling it in a way we can bear. In the end our story may be fiction, but even as fiction, memories are the most honest form of expression we can aspire to.”

  The Fiction of Truth

  “If you’re going to live a lie – make it a good one.”

  Graffiti on the wall of the Great Kills train station, Staten Island

  Chapter One

  …The glass shards embedded in my face started to burn, and blood flowed warmly into my eyes, forcing me to blink.

  Blinking didn’t help.

  I was half-blind, running headlong into the low hanging branches of oaks and maples that whipped my face and arms as my legs were torn open by the thorns of sticker bushes. There was nothing I could do about it, since I couldn’t see the branches through the rain and darkness.

  My head pounded, causing my vision to blur, and I lost my balance as sporadic vertigo set in. I stopped for breath and inhaled the pungent smell of wet leaves, damp earth, and the musty odor of swampy ground that mixed with the scent of decaying rot that wafted over from the nearby Fresh Kills garbage dump. As I tried to breathe, I gently touched behind my ear, where I felt a deep gouge, tender and soft. When I pulled my hand away, it was warm and sticky with blood.

  I was getting tired, but I had to keep going. The cold, sharp rain helped me focus and thinned the blood enough to wipe it away from my eyes so I could see. The only dimly consistent illumination was from behind me – from the headlights of the car I had run from, parked awkwardly off the shoulder of the road. Given the violent severity of the accident, the car should have been totaled, but it just appeared abandoned, with one window shattered. Just then a lightning strike illuminated the night with the sudden impact of electric blue daylight, giving me a momentary glimpse of the path ahead.

  The lightning complicated things. I wanted to be able to see, but knew that I didn’t want to be seen. Keep running. That’s what I had to do. I had to get away from that car, and find somewhere warm to hide, but it was getting harder to run. The ground beneath me was waterlogged and gripped my feet, tripping me with uneven roots and rocks as I heard something snapping twigs and crashing through the underbrush –

  – That’s when I saw the shadows to my right move. I tried to run faster but only wheezed and choked, giving myself away as a hulking figure emerged from the shadows, the shades of darkness resolving themselves into the silhouette of a man, twice my height and at least three times my weight. I turned to get away, never feeling the sting of the branches on my face nor the thorns that pierced my legs, now too numb to care. Everything blurred, and then, in that way it can be in dreams, I was somehow deeper into the woods, falling to my knees, listening to the metronome of the softly insistent rain, and the rustle of leaves in the dark. I turned to look for the source but only caught a glimpse of a lithe shadow as it fled into the woods, too small to be the man.

  Then flashlights ripped through the dark, their beams broken by the trees, reaching out to find me. They were coming. Again. I tried to stand –

  – Too late. The bright lights caught me in their glare, blinding me. I screamed, heart pounding, unable to move…

  …And the sound of my own scream startled me as I woke up in a confused panic. I tried to sit up but the blankets, twisted around me, held me bound. My throat was raw. I could taste my own blood… But it didn’t matter. The dream was over. For now.

  I knew this routine. I’ve had night terrors since I was seven. First, I had to unwind myself from the blankets, and then wrap them back around me to ward off the inevitable chill after sweating through my t-shirt. Next, I counted twenty deep breaths to get my heart rate back to something close to normal and identified all the shadows in my bedroom as ordinary. It took a moment for each of them to coalesce into their concrete forms – from the menacing man by the window into the suit hanging on the curtain rod, the gleaming knife into a belt buckle, and the half open closet door revealing not an eye gleaming in the darkness, but my detective shield hanging from a lanyard.

  After my heart rate slowed, I forced myself to listen to the sound of rain on the roof for almost a minute. It was the same rhythmic sound of tension that underscored my night terrors. As I listened, I used the self-talk a child psychologist had taught me almost twenty years before: ‘It’s just rain, just water. Just a dream, not a memory. None of that ever happened. Nothing bad happens in the rain.’

  It’s always raining when the dreams come, and in spite of the words of reassurance I use to calm myself, rain isn’t just water. Rain comes with hurricanes and tornadoes and floods, and dreams are more than dreams when they can make your heart pound and throat bleed from screaming.

  That headshrinker I once had, he knew jack-shit.

  He was only right about one thing, that while it was just a dream, it was based on something that actually happened – a car accident on a rainy night when I was seven years old. I was thrown from the car and my ‘Uncle’ Joe Corrigan, the driver – a man who was not actually an uncle, but worked with my father on a Federal narcotics task force made up of the NYPD, FBI, and DEA – was killed on impact. As my father’s best friend, Joe was closer than family, and the trauma of his death radiated through all of our lives.

  But I can’t remember any of it.

  I also can’t remember anything from before the day of the accident – the night of October twenty-third, 1985. Today they call it ‘Traumatic Brain Injury’, but as a kid growing up in Staten Island, the other kids called it ‘fucked in the head’. Both terms are accurate.

  I’ve tried to recover any memory I can, sifting the facts from the dreams and I’ve learned to discard any recollection that doesn’t have corroborating physical evidence, since my memory can’t be trusted. My mind deals with things by creating these dreams, elaborate fictions that the psychologist claims I use to heal traumatic sense memories and take control of what I can’t control in my waking hours.

  The most factual detail I’ve come up with about that night is the sound of the rain, drumming on the roof of the car. The National Weather Service confirmed that for me. In my dreams the sound is distinct and clear, full of the musical tones and complex rhythms of raindrops on real metal – not some alloy that banged dead flat like modern cars would now. It was also confirmed when I tested the memory on an old Volkswagen Beetle that I borrowed, made the same year as the car Uncle Joe was driving the night of the crash. I sat in the borrowed car for ten minutes in the rain, getting chills, feeling my heart rate spike as I forced myself not to flee, until finally I hyperventilated and almost passed out. The sound of rain on a metal roof still makes me cringe and sweat.

  In spite of the sound being a genuine memory, that sound somehow feels the most dream-like. The rest of it, from the car tires on the wet road, to the windshield wipers rubbing the gl
ass, and even the last image I remember, a bright flash of red, white and blue light followed by a painful deafening sound, well, that’s all debatable. Psychologists have told me that the light and sound are my mind’s way of interpreting the lightning flash that they theorized startled Uncle Joe, causing him to pull the wheel of his 1973 VW Bug too sharply making it hydroplane off the West Shore Expressway, near Sharrotts Road.

  The rest of what I know about that night comes from what the accident investigators pieced together afterward. I was thrown from the car, landing in the cattails that lined the highway. Two days later I was finally found. Somehow, I’d managed to get up and walk away, disoriented and bleeding. I still have a scar that runs from behind my left ear to the top of my forehead, made when some piece of metal went through my skull, creating a groove that hugged the inside of the bone until it exited at the soft hollow of my temple.

  It’s no surprise that I can’t remember much.

  The two days I wandered through the woods after the accident are lost to me, but it rained the entire time, and late on the second day the temperature plummeted from sixty degrees to the low thirties.

  I guess I’m lucky they stumbled across me when they did – wedged under a tree, covered in fallen leaves, clutching some costume-jewelry ring that I must’ve picked up while wandering in the woods, which was one of the former illegal dumps that used to be common in Staten Island. The ring was faux gold – one of those fake, overly ornate signet rings with a sword and star over a red shield – the kind that always seem to be featured on the retro-antagonist in graphic novels. My dad calls it my memento mori, which he thinks means it’s a memento of when I almost died. I looked it up. It’s actually a phrase that means ‘remember that you will die’. Cheery.

  Eight days after they found me, I was released from the hospital, and the next thing I remember after that is two months later, at Christmas. It rained that Christmas, and I stayed inside for three days, too afraid to step out the door.

  The doctors tell me it was the traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder that caused my memory loss and hatred of the rain. Both still cause me problems, but they’re manageable and every once in a while, when I’m stressed, I lose some time. I have over thirty years of memory that plays like a silent film, scratched and missing a few reels. Chunks of the year I was ten have gone missing, fourteen is a blur, the entire summer I dated my first girlfriend is gone (God how I wish I could remember what we did in her parent’s basement), and my first year of college amounts to three months of time spent at bars and parties. I’ve been told that kind of memory loss is almost normal, but for me it’s been that way my whole life.

  I know that if I could find a way to remember the accident and the person I was before that night, the night terrors would end. I just need the facts. Maybe that’s why I became a homicide detective with the NYPD, so I could learn how to turn facts into a coherent story, to control my dreams by knowing what really happened. I guess that was one reason, the other being that police work was a family business, since my father had been a detective as well. My best friends from elementary school, Charlie Pederson, and Tony Guinta were cops now as well and even Tommy O’Connell – the brains of our group – was working at the U.S. attorney’s office. That’s the way Staten Island was – if you weren’t a cop, you were a fireman, or worked for the MTA – if you didn’t join the other side and get yourself involved with the mobbed-up service industries like private carting, or construction.

  Either way, being a detective helped me piece together who I was. It still does, and I use those skills to piece together the last memories of the dead, of homicide victims, forever lost when they were murdered. So, I guess my curse is in a way a blessing, because even with my issues, I’m more effective than most on the department. Not that I’ve told the department I have memory blackouts. No, they’re not aware of my problems. Thank God for HIPAA laws.

  I was still lying in bed, trying to remember if there was anything in this dream that was different than the rest and was trying to get my heart rate back to normal when my phone buzzed. I didn’t need to look to know it was a text, and I didn’t need to read it to know what it said. I did anyway, hoping to distract myself.

  ‘U dead? Heard u scream like a little girl’

  Typical Kat. She was a sweet but damaged woman just a year or two younger than me. I had rented the upstairs apartment in my little Cape Cod to her on the recommendation of Charlie Pederson, who I’d known since the year after the accident. Charlie told me that Kat was some kind of charity case, a native Staten Islander and friend of his sister who’d come back from serving two tours with the U.S. Army’s Criminal Investigations Division in Afghanistan with PTSD and a bad attitude.

  At the time it didn’t matter to me what her issue was, I needed the rent. Then I met her, saw that she was beautiful and charming, and felt like I’d known her all my life. She would’ve been a serious temptation to me – if I hadn’t discovered pretty quickly that she was completely bat-shit crazy.

  I’m not sure if Kat was always unstable, but after she got back from overseas, she was in rough shape. Kat never talked about it, but from what she hinted at, whatever had happened to her involved serious retribution from a well-connected Colonel who didn’t appreciate Kat’s apparently career-ending investigation into his sexual kinks with unwilling junior officers.

  Despite her PTSD, Kat never hesitated to jump in where angels feared to tread. In fact, the first time Kat heard me scream from the night terrors she broke into my place with a butcher knife to come save me.

  I almost shot her. That’s when we worked out the texting procedure.

  ‘Just had a dream about you and a butcher knife. Go back to sleep.’ I texted back, then turned on the radio to keep me company until the sun rose. Unfortunately, all the talking heads wanted to yammer on about was the rain and whether or not ‘Sandy’ would be a tropical storm or a hurricane by the time it made landfall. The only thing I got out of it was that the rain was going to fall for a long time.

  Good thing I had the next few days off. I could hunker down, turn on my television and pretend nothing was going on outside. I found a classic rock station and turned it up loud to drown out the sound of the rain, wondering what memories had been washed away so long ago, not aware that in less than twenty-four hours Sandy was going to bring them back in a flood…

  Chapter Two

  Once the sun rose, I fell back into a dreamless sleep, until even the radio wasn’t enough to drown out the storm. The gutters were rattling and the windows whistling as the wind forced its way through their seams into my sixty-year-old Cape Cod in Great Kills – the unfortunately named town in Staten Island. Apparently, the Dutch that originally settled Staten Island called streams ‘kills’ in their native language and the name stuck. Apparently, no one ever thought enough of the real estate here to try and rebrand the neighborhood.

  I ignored the din until they announced the time on the radio: 6:30 P.M. I’d slept the day away, so I dragged myself out of bed. I was about to go prep the nachos and beer for a Game of Thrones marathon on the big screen, when my heavy oak front door slammed open, the handle denting the sheetrock behind it. The wind brought rain spraying into the foyer, followed by Kat – all five-foot-nine of her, pierced and tattooed, with her hair dyed jet-black and her wide blue eyes looking for some excitement.

  I didn’t want any.

  “I’ve come to save you from your misery,” Kat announced, dripping all over my hardwood floor.

  “Not in the mood, Kat.”

  “You’re never in the mood. I think it’s low testosterone, but I have a cure.” She grinned, coming in, sweetly sweaty and only slightly less pungent than usual. Her long, glistening hair was plastered as tightly to her head as her spandex was to her trim body.

  Kat, maybe from being a woman in the military and living in close quarters with men, seemed to be very comfortable in her own skin. Or maybe she just liked to keep people off balance. Eit
her way, in addition to having PTSD she’s an exhibitionist, bi-polar, and bisexual (which I only know about because she broke the water bed in her apartment one night and after saving my television from the flood that followed, I rushed upstairs to find a disturbing scene that included a man, a woman, and a knife, but that’s another story). She also hints at her dark past before she signed up and other things that happened later, while she was stationed in Afghanistan. I once asked Charlie about it, but all he would say is that she enlisted to leave the series of foster homes she grew up in behind. My background check didn’t turn up anything worth noting except that two of Kat’s former foster parents were currently incarcerated and that she had a sealed juvenile record. Lucky for Kat, it was expunged when she volunteered for the Army.

  “Let’s go play in the rain, Killian. It’s the storm of the century.”

  “I’m having nachos. Beer. The rain stays outside, I stay inside,” I told her, looking pointedly at the puddle she was leaving as she ran a hand over the spandex, flicking off the excess water, spraying it everywhere.

  “You have your own entrance, my door was shut, and you smell like the gym.” I looked away. Kat likes it when people stare. I wasn’t about to give her the satisfaction.

  “So what? I did two hours of Jeet Kun Do and I’m just getting warmed up. You like the way I smell.” It wasn’t exactly true. She smelled like a healthy woman, and in her spandex, she looked soft and curvy in all the right places and like she could kick most guys’ asses – but a little less pungent would have made her a lot more attractive.