by Kevin Fox
“…Then he said to tell you he wanted to know where you put everything else,” Kat added.
“’Everything else’? Like what?”
“How the fuck do I know? He just said, ‘Tell the Killer I want the rest.’”
“And then what?”
“Then I bit his hand and he tased me again. Next thing I know, you’re coming back in the door insulting me, my intelligence, and my observation skills. You know, if you gave me the gun when you left, none of this ever would’ve happened.”
I ignored the comment, dumped the rest of the beer in the sink and headed toward the closet for clean, dry clothes. Kat was right, not that I’d ever tell her that. If I had trusted her, she might have had a chance with the guy. Instead, somebody made it personal and fucked up my house and my… friend.
“Should we call the cops?” Kat asked, following me.
“I am the cops.”
“Maybe you should call Charlie Pederson or Tony Guinta,” Kate suggested.
“Not happening. Every cop in the city is working on Hurricane Sandy right now. I’ll deal with it,” I told her, pulling out a change of clothes.
“Not without me. I get tied up in a guy’s bed after he gets me drunk, I get breakfast. At the very least.”
“Kat, not now—”
“No. Bullshit. You’re not leaving me here alone. This place aggravates my PTSD. I’ll freak the fuck out.” Kat stepped in front of me, blocking my path to the door.
“Your PTSD? You’re admitting to it now?”
“Don’t be stupid. You know I admit to it when it suits my needs. That’s a symptom of my issues. I’m self-serving. I’m also serious.”
“I don’t have time to baby-sit,” I told her, rushing to get out the door before she made me feel worse. Kat timed it perfectly, waiting until I’d opened the door and had to face the rain alone. In that vulnerable moment, I hesitated, and she whispered behind me –
“Take me with you or I don’t tell you the rest…”
“I’m not falling for this shit,” I warned her, but I couldn’t call her bluff. If she knew more, I needed to know what it was.
“He spent a lot of time in the basement looking for something.”
She was telling the truth. As soon as she said it, I knew that it was true. It was the only thing that explained the mess downstairs. I’d seen a few of the photos that had been downstairs in boxes on the floor of the bedroom. I’d missed it because I was worried about Kat, and maybe because the photos didn’t mean much to me. They weren’t even mine. When I bought this house from my parents they’d left some of their stuff here in storage, since their new place didn’t have room for all the crap they’d collected over the years.
“He sat on the edge of your bed with a flashlight, going through them,” she went on, sure now that she had my attention. “…He was reading one, really interested, when your car pulled up.”
“And?”
“He went to shove it in his pocket when we heard the front door open, but it dropped. He never had the chance to pick it up. If you knew what was in that clipping that was so interesting…”? Kat’s voice trailed off, seeing the look on my face.
I moved back to the bedroom, scanning the floor – finding a yellowed newspaper clipping half-hidden under the bed. There was an old ad for ‘Korvettes’ on one side, a store that had closed in the early eighties.
I flipped it over and read the headline: ‘Small Plane Crash Near Sandy Ground, Two Dead’. It was a clipping from the Staten Island Advance, dated October 20th, 1985 – three days before the car accident that killed my memory. Three days before I found the ring that was just stolen. I read:
A fifteen passenger Beechcraft 99 Airliner operated by La Pureza, a Dominican company, crashed in a heavily wooded section of Sandy Ground late last night. Residents of Rossville reported that the small plane was flying extremely low in the fog and heavy winds that preceded last night’s thunderstorms. According to NYPD Detective James Collins, the first responder on the scene, the Beechcraft had taken off from Santo Domingo, bound for Teterboro. Whether it went off course in the storm or was intentionally off course has yet to be determined. Detective Collins had no comment when asked if the plane could possibly be involved in the drug trade, which has been an increasing problem in recent years. The investigation is ongoing.
The article went on with suppositions and descriptions of the weather without adding any real facts, but there was enough in what I’d read for me to start asking questions. Why was the task force investigating a plane crash, and why were detectives with the Narcotics Task Force the first ones on the scene? I unfolded the last bit of the article, but there wasn’t anything more other than a grainy black and white photo of a cargo plane, a twin-engine turboprop that looked familiar. It looked like something out of Goldfinger or You Only Live Twice.
“Is that a real clipping? From a real paper?” Kat asked, trying to read over my shoulder.
“No. Just the Staten Island Advance. From 1985.”
“Who keeps a piece of paper that long? Why save it when you could just look it up on the Internet?”
“My dad’s a guy who never trusted technology and was used to filing away evidence in storage boxes.” He’d kept it for some reason, but why? Would he even remember if I asked him? I knew now that it was connected, all of it, from my ring to the Russian yacht, the plane crash – maybe even One-eyed Willie – everything. But how?
I had a lot of facts and a lot of information – but there were too many missing pieces. I knew that Burke was right and that there were no coincidences, only patterns and evidence and pieces that fit a bigger puzzle. I just need to see the big picture. Remembering the piece of the puzzle I’d originally come here to fill in, I turned back to Kat.
“You know some crazy lady from down by The Pond? Some Wiccan, or Voodoo priestess or something?”
“Why would I?”
“You’re into all that ‘alternative lifestyle’ stuff. You talk to dead people and told me you were into woo-woo shit like that, a cult or something.”
“I said I was a hedonist. That’s not a cult – that means I like pleasure,” she said, defensively. So much for Kat’s help.
“Damn. I was hoping you’d be useful.”
“Thanks, now I’m useless?”
“I didn’t mean it that way,” I apologized, hoping to avoid a Kat-fit. “I’m just frustrated. All I’ve got right now is bad dreams, a twenty-five-year-old plane crash, and some guy that wrecked my house chasing two teen girls that were kidnapped and brought here along with millions of dollars’ worth of pure heroin on a Russian billionaire’s yacht.”
“Sounds like a lot to go on. What’s the issue?”
“The issue is that it all leads to the same place,” I told her, frustrated.
“Right… To your father. And you don’t want to go there,” Kat said flatly. It wasn’t a question. She knew me too well.
“You don’t know what he’s like…”
“Don’t need to. Apparently, we both have ‘daddy issues’,” she said with a smile, grabbing one of my jackets out of the closet.
“I love my father.”
“I know. That’s your issue,” she said, stripping off her shirt to change. I turned my back – not that she cared. “…But are you really going to let some asshole catch up to those two girls just because you don’t want to deal with your dad? Seriously?”
“He’s got problems.”
“Like you don’t?”
“He lives in Tottenville. The streets are blocked. Cordoned off. I heard no one’s allowed in or out.”
“You have a badge.”
“I’m injured. And the streets are dangerous.”
“I’ve driven Humvees through Third World nations while avoiding sniper fire and IED’s. I’ll drive,” she said, walking past me wearing one of my shirts, my jacket, and the same pair of yoga pants she was wearing when I left. “I need to go with you anyway. I’m not staying here alone again without a
gun.”
“No.”
“Your choice – the gun or the keys.”
“I said no, Kat.” I wasn’t going to let her pressure me, but she held out her hand, waiting for the keys.
“Really? Tell me, Killer, what’s the statistical average young girls survive running away from the Russian Mafia? Twenty-four hours? Thirty-six? Tick-tock…”
I glared at her. She was right, I knew that, but I wasn’t going to cave.
Ten minutes later, at the eighteen-hour mark, we were past the barricades set up at Page Avenue. They stopped all traffic to the Outerbridge and to Tottenville. The ghouls had already started to head down to see the destruction, and the NYPD didn’t want to give free reign to looters.
Kat was also driving. We’d compromised. I let her drive, but she would have to wait in the car at my parent’s place. A flash of my badge had gotten us past the checkpoint, and the uniform there reassured me that the bridges were still closed. That meant the girls couldn’t get off the island, but neither could Josef Markov – for now. I still had time to find them all.
“See how easy that was?” Kat asked, smugly.
“I don’t like rain, or water, or Tottenville, that’s all.”
“…Or bridges, or tunnels or anything that goes over or under water. In fact, you don’t like anything that connects you to anything else. Like new experiences, or new people, or a simple kind word or touch,” Kat lectured, reaching across the front seat to touch me. I pulled away and she jerked the wheel, almost sending us into a downed telephone pole.
“Stop.”
“See? You can’t even let people touch you. What caused your PTSD?”
“I’m fine. I connect.”
“Yeah, over the Internet. By playing Call of Duty with a Dragunov sniper rifle and about three ounces of lead. It’s not the same… Somebody really fucked you up when you were a kid, didn’t they?”
“Maybe. I don’t remember.”
“Don’t, can’t, or won’t? They’re not the same.” Kat said, and then sat in silence for a moment. “Must be nice,” she finally muttered.
“What must be nice?”
“Not remembering. Wish I had your gift.”
I left it at that. I have enough problems without arguing with Kat over the benefits of remembering or forgetting. I had enough issues to face today.
Like my parents.
Chapter Ten
We drove past Yetman Avenue and saw a half dozen houses that had been flattened, saw neighbors lifting roofing and siding and walls off of piles of building material that had once been homes, drove on as they lifted limp corpses from under water-soaked mattresses.
There wasn’t much else we could do.
Whoever could be saved had been, except for Dariya and Alina. They still had hope at least. A few blocks on, inland, we turned up the street my parents had lived on since they sold me the house I grew up in. We found my mother sitting in a beach chair at the end of her driveway, as far away as she could get from her new pre-fabricated, Americans-with-Disabilities-Act-approved, two-bedroom bungalow and still be on her own property. A sun umbrella kept the rain off and a private cloud of cigarette smoke shrouded tightly around her. The Marlboro Menthol she sucked on glowed red in the dim light, and as she saw my car pull up, she quickly put it out under her foot. Five other butts were already there, but she waved away the smoke as if that was the only thing giving her away. The cigarette was her major concern as we parked. Not the tree on the house across the street, cutting in virtually in half, nor the smoking ash of the destroyed front porch three doors down, incinerated when a power line fell. Yes, my mother’s priority was not getting caught smoking in the middle of a natural disaster.
Kat looked at my mom trying to disperse the smoke and then stared at me for a moment. “Crap, you came from that? I don’t see it.”
“I haven’t smoked and pretended not to for over forty years. I also don’t keep gin in the toilet tank. Keeps me young and pretty,” I told her, taking a good hard look at my mother, Theresa Collins. Her skin was as soft as worn leather, and too tan for Irish skin due to years of abuse. The stress of Joe Corrigan dying and having her only son not remember who she was afterward drove her innate predisposition for grim pessimism over the edge.
“Sure you don’t want me to come with you?”
“Positive. I’ll get enough shit on my own.”
I got out. By the time I was halfway across the street, Mom started laying down the ground rules for my visit.
“I don’t want to hear a word out of you, understand? I’m not smoking in the house and I’ve got to deal with him twenty-four hours a day – with no help from you. I don’t need your judgment.”
“Did you hear me say anything?”
“You’re thinking too loud. I can see it in your face. Might as well be screamin’ at me.” Her voice was slurred, like she’d been drinking already. “His nurse is in Stapleton. Says she can’t come out because the storm was too bad and they won’t let nobody in or out. Typical of her kind. And yet here you are. The boy who melts in the rain.”
“Glad to see you too, Ma. And the police do have Tottenville shut down. I had to use my badge to get past the barricades, so I’d take it easy on Rosie if you don’t want her to quit,” I told her, trying to talk her out of firing another home healthcare nurse. She was especially hard on them, being a former nurse herself and one of the most critical women I’d ever met.
“If you wanted to help, you’d be here more often and you’d shut your mouth with all your judgment,” Mom mumbled, then nodded over my shoulder toward my car.
“You gonna innerduce us?” she asked, slurring even more.
“You’ve met before. That’s Katherine, my tenant.”
“Kat,” Kat corrected from six inches behind me, daring to smile at my mother, offering her hand.
“Right. I guess I didn’t recognize you without the metal in your face.”
“Nose ring,” Kat kept smiling and shook my mother’s hand. It was well played, making her feel guilty for being rude.
“Right. So, are you two finally a thing?” Mom asked, changing the subject.
“No,” we both answered at the same time.
“Why not? Should I be worried about you? You’re a good lookin’ kid. Maybe too good lookin’.”
“Is he here?” I asked, nodding toward the house.
“Mentally or physically?”
“Either. Both.”
“Hard to tell. The Old-timer’s gets worse in the rain. He’s like you that way. Just sits in the sun room with the shades down.”
“I need to talk to him.”
“Good luck. You might just be talking at him.” Without thinking, Mom reached for the pack of cigarettes. I should have known the condition my father was in from the way she was chain smoking in the rain. I didn’t blame her – part of the reason I didn’t come to visit was the tension created by his illness. I started for the house, wanting to get it over with. Kat followed me, and I didn’t even try to talk her out of it.
“Take off your shoes when you go in, I just vacuumed,” Mom called out after us, lighting another cigarette.
I did take off my shoes, if I didn’t she’d remind me every time I saw her for the next six months. Kat followed suit, catching up to me about halfway down the hall to the sunroom.
“Is she always like that?”
“No. She used to be better, when my father was well enough to take care of her. She resents him now, almost as much as she resents me.”
“Why you?”
“My mother thinks I don’t appreciate what it cost to raise me, give me food and clothes and take care of my ‘mental defects’. She also thinks that I should be here every day working off my debt to them. It’s probably because I didn’t remember who she was after the accident.”
“Damn. Harsh. You get fucked in the head and your own mom holds it against you. I’m starting to see why you’re so fucked up.”
I stopped at the door
to the sunroom. The dim light coming in through the drawn shades was refracted by the rain-soaked window, bathing the room in wraithlike shadows that danced across the floor in the gloom. My father, the former NYPD Detective James Collins, sat in his leather recliner with a Guinness. He stared out the only window that didn’t have a drawn shade, watching the rain fall.
“Hey,” I called out, a bit sharply. He didn’t even blink. “Dad,” I said, a bit louder. Nothing.
“Is he dead?” Kat asked, echoing my grim thoughts. As if in answer, he silently sipped his stout.
“We never should have come,” I muttered, taking a step back to get out, but Kat was in the way, blocking the door.
“Stop bein’ a wuss. Go ask him. I didn’t drive out here for nothing.” I tried to step around Kat, but she just shifted her weight, like she was ready to wrestle me into submission.
“Ask. Now.”
“Why bother?” I whispered, as if he’d understand, even if he heard us. “He’s got Alzheimer’s. Half the time he thinks I’m his father, or his old partner.”
“So? Just means his head’s in the past. Your questions are about the past, right?” Kat asked with a grim logic.
“You want me to fuck with his head?
“His head’s already fucked. You’re just playing inside the delusion. Hell, it could be less confusing for him. Kinder…”
“You’re so full of shit.”
“Ask,” she said again, putting one hand on my chest, pressing me back into the room. I gave up. It was worth a shot. I turned and walked up slowly behind him… laid a hand gently on his shoulder.
“Hey.”
He jumped, turning to look at me, his right hand coming up toward me. That’s when I saw it – his old service revolver that was in his lap – and was now pointed at my face.
Christ, I thought, he better recognize me this time.
“Damn. Don’t sneak up on me like that,” my father said, his hand shaking as he lowered the pistol. What the fuck was Mom thinking, letting him have his gun?
Then it hit me.
