Great Kills

by Kevin Fox

  That was bad news. As a former cop, my father answered every call as if it were a nine-one-one call. He refused to screen them because someday he might miss a call that was life or death.

  “Don’t you dare call your father, Kill. If he wakes up, there’s no telling what he’ll do. We’ll be home in ten minutes at most.”

  “He’s not answering.”

  “Maybe I gave him more Ambien than I thought,” Mom said, trying to reassure me, but I noticed that her speed had gone up as she reached over the back seat and in one swift motion snatched my cell phone.

  Never underestimate your mother when she’s angry, kids.

  “You can have it back when we get home,” she told me, sliding it under her thigh in case I tried to take it back.

  “Mom, I need to call the precinct. I need to know when they’ll be opening the bridges and the Arthur Kill to boats.”

  “They announced it on the radio. The bridges open at eight tonight. You can have your phone when we get home.”

  “This is ridiculous,” I told her, reaching for it. She slapped my hand, pissing me off. I had a little less than three hours to find Markov before he could move.

  “No. What’s ridiculous is that I can’t have a cigarette because of Miss I Can Pierce Holes in My Body But God Forbid My Lungs Have to Deal with a Little Smoke—and you expect me to be rational. Get over it.”

  Mom put her foot to the floor and Kat inhaled aggressively, as if she was taking what might be her last smoke-filled breath. All I could do was hope that my mother’s reaction times were still as good while she was driving as they were reaching back to grab my cell phone.

  I wanted her to slow down, but instinct told me that no matter how fast she was going, it wasn’t fast enough.

  The tires squealed as we rounded the corner, and I could see my parents’ house with the garage door and front door wide open. Something was wrong.

  “Did you leave the garage open, Ma?”

  “I don’t live in a damn barn. It lets out all the heat I pay good money for. Damn Ambien—never works the same way twice.”

  “So, you drug him often?” Kat asked, starting to relax as Mom slammed on the brakes, sliding to a stop.

  “I deserve a life, dammit,” Mom said, trying to convince herself more than either of us.

  I didn’t wait for the car to stop completely. I was out the door and running over the lawn even as Mom slowed. When I got to the open front door, I saw that its frame was splintered. Glancing left and right, I pulled my gun and went through, looking for anyone who might be inside.

  The house was torn apart, bookshelves emptied, couch cushions sliced open, tables overturned—just like my place had been. I heard water running in the master bathroom and ran through the bedroom, barely slowing to make sure the room was clear before trying to push open the door.

  It was stuck. Something heavy and unmoving was in the way. I shoved harder, looking through the crack, but all I could see was part of the shower curtain, the white enamel of the bathtub…

  …And the swirling red tendrils of blood in the flowing water at the bottom of it. My father was the heavy and unmoving object blocking the door.

  …And it was his blood in the water.

  Chapter

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  “Dad! Dad!” I yelled, pushing on the door. I was about to smash through it and take the damn thing off the hinges when it suddenly gave way and I stumbled in to see my father’s head hanging over the side of the tub. As I knelt to grab him, he turned.

  “Jesus Christ, calm yourself, Killian,” he said, lifting his head up. “I’m fine. Just cut my head on the faucet when they pushed me under. Scalp wounds bleed like fuck.” He grabbed a towel on the rack nearby and pressed it to his forehead just below the hairline.

  “Jimmy, there’s no need for cursing,” Mom admonished him, appearing in the doorway with Kat, “…and you’re ruining the good towels.”

  “Christ, Theresa. Can you show me some sympathy before you light into me? We’ve all heard ‘fuck’ before.”

  “I meant the ‘Jesus Christ’ bit.”

  “I was fucking praying, okay?” he lashed back at her as Kat slid between all of us, taking charge of the head wound.

  “Put pressure on that,” she told him, her body taking up what was left of the space in the small bathroom, making it unbearably close. “It doesn’t look deep. It should stop bleeding in a few minutes. Do you have any antibiotic gels?”

  “There you go, see? She’s nice,” Dad said. My mother ignored the insult and pulled the towel away from him, handing him one of the frayed and faded ones from under the sink, as well as an antibiotic. I was glad Mom and Kat had it under control, but all three of them were so focused on the blood, they were missing something else.

  “Where’s Rigan and Dariya?” I asked.

  My father looked up at me from under the bloody towel, hesitant. “Gone,” he muttered from under the towel.

  “Gone where?”

  “Rigan tore out of here the minute your mother left.”

  “With Dariya?”

  “No,” he muttered, like an admission of guilt. “Dariya left with the Eastern European trash that smashed my head in.”

  “Damn,” Kat muttered, almost under her breath as she looked at me, “that sucks. You just keep losing people, don’t you?”

  “Not now, Kat,” I warned her, then turned back to my father. “What happened, exactly?”

  I needed him to be clear before he drifted off into an episode. If whoever had done this to my father had taken Dariya, we were running out of time—by my calculations about two hours and twenty minutes.

  “I was in my chair drifting off when I heard someone at the door. I thought it was Rigan coming back—until that asshole nearly tore the door off the frame and Dariya started throwing a bloody fit. Then suddenly some guy was bellowing at me in some commie language. Took me a minute to realize it wasn’t a dream.”

  “How many were there? What did they look like?” I asked, interrogating out of habit.

  “Jesus, Killian. Fucked if I know. It’s not like I’ve got the Russian Mafiya playing cards—but half of the one guy’s finger is on the kitchen floor if you want to get a print.”

  “Please tell me that’s a joke,” Mom said, looking down the hall toward the kitchen, disgusted.

  “I’ll clean it up, Theresa, Jesus… that girl had the stones to bite the damn thing off. That little bit of a thing is one tough motherfu—”

  “Jimmy,” Mom snapped, cutting him off.

  They started fighting as I stepped out of the bathroom and went toward the kitchen. It was a mess, what with the blood on the floor… and a small, very hairy finger. I stared at it as I heard my parents still arguing in the bathroom.

  “Don’t goddamn ‘Jimmy’ me, Theresa. Maybe if I wasn’t so fuzzy-headed I would have had a better shot at dealing with them,” he told her. “I know what it feels like to be drugged.”

  “You were getting paranoid. I had to do something,” she pleaded, turning toward me as I returned to the bathroom so she could throw me under the bus. “This idiot ran out of gas. I had to go get him.”

  “Ran out of gas? What kind of mental midget did I raise?” Dad asked.

  “The gas was stolen. Siphoned right out of my car. Please, Dad—focus. What did they want?”

  “Doesn’t matter. I told ’em jack-shit. Assholes thought it was the old-timer’s kickin’ in. They woulda killed me but they didn’t bother ’cause they thought I was ‘half-a-retard,’, he muttered, wincing as he put the towel back to his cut, putting pressure on it.

  “Wait. They called you a ‘half-a-retard’ or is that your phrase?”

  “What kinda mental midget calls himself ‘half-a-retard’?” Dad asked, making a good point.

  “So it was the same guys…” I said as I turned to look at Kat. She nodded, worried.

  “How do you know that?” asked Dad, getting up off the floor, more focused and interested th
an I’d seen him in a long time.

  “They called Killian half-a-retard too,” Kat explained.

  “Well, after he ran out of gas…” muttered Mommy dearest. Dad glared at her and she stopped talking. I just ignored her.

  “How’d they even find Dariya all the way out here on the ass-end of the island?” Kat asked, getting to the heart of the issue.

  “Dad. Mom said that you called people—and Morocco said they had people watching me all these years. Who did you call?” I asked, but his eyes slid away from mine. He didn’t know, and he was ashamed of it—or he was playing me again. It was so hard to tell with him.

  “I… don’t know. Maybe if your mother hadn’t drugged me –”

  “Again with this?”

  “Enough. Dad, if this was twenty-five years ago, who would you call?”

  He shrugged, thinking about it. “Everyone in the unit. I have the old list in my desk, in the office. The damn Russians went in there too.”

  I started moving that way before he even finished. He called out after me:

  “Whatever they found, they said something about knowing right where to find the bitch. That’s when they left to catch up to Rigan.”

  Fuck me. That meant they knew where to go, and that they had found some clue in the office. I made it down the hall and slammed through the door… and lost all hope. The drawers had been pulled out of the desk, the couch sliced open, and books torn off the shelves. Papers were strewn everywhere. I stared at them all as the rest of them came in behind me, taking in the mess.

  “The guys who were here, tell me the specific questions they asked.”

  “He doesn’t recall,” Mom interrupted.

  “Stay out of this, Theresa,” Dad told her, maintaining eye contact with me. “There’s no point in hiding whatever I can remember anymore. He’s got to know.”

  “Know what?” I asked, but Dad was already moving, reaching for an electric outlet next to the recliner. It had nothing plugged into it and he pulled the whole thing out of the wall—no wires attached. His hand went into the empty cavity and pulled out two manila envelopes.

  “So that’s why you never fixed that damn outlet,” Mom muttered under her breath.

  “Everything I can tell you is in those,” he said, handing me the envelopes.

  “Can tell me, or will tell me?”

  “Whatever’s on that paper is better than what’s in my head at this point. More reliable, anyway. Take what you can get, Killian,” he warned as I opened the first envelope. “Those are the crime scene Polaroids.”

  I knew what crime scene photos looked like. They were never pretty.

  “Dead kids?” I asked, just to clarify. He nodded, solemn and fully aware for once. I hesitated, and then opened the envelope anyway. The dead kids were there, some of them thrown from the plane, limbs torn from their bodies, deep lacerations from aircraft aluminum and glass leaving them bloody. The pilot and another man lay dead in the cockpit.

  The next photos were close-ups of the kids. Rigan wasn’t in them—because she had survived, obviously. I kept going, looking at the close-ups. I took it all in, knowing there was a lot of the story left untold in these pictures. I turned back to my father, who was still in the present.

  “Where was Rigan when these were taken?”

  “We found her right after that. But look closer. Tell me what you see in the lower right corner of the photo, inside the fuselage,” he said, nodding toward the photos of the fuselage. It was in the shadows of the photo, but I knew what it was as soon as I saw it:

  A metal box, half hidden by an oilskin, about two foot square.

  “The cash was in that box, wasn’t it? It wasn’t lost.”

  It had been there. Markov and Morocco and all the rest weren’t wrong. Uncle Joe had seen what they said he did, and he died knowing where it was.

  “It wasn’t lost then, and look at the size of the box. I did the calculations. If it was filled with hundred-dollar bills, there could be close to ten million in that box,” Dad muttered. “We had it all right there until Joe moved it. When we got there that night we expected to find drugs, even money, but not kids. Joe didn’t seem surprised, but he was worried that someone in the unit might be corrupt and could show up any minute, so he had me get the kids somewhere safe, and he stashed the cash, figuring we could use it to lure out whoever was dirty.”

  All the complications in my life suddenly started to make sense.

  This is why Mangy Mustache and the Toothless Giant had come after me, and why Markov and his guys thought Rigan and I knew where everything was. That’s what Morocco meant when he said they had guys watching me. They all thought that I remembered where Joe Corrigan had hidden their money.

  “Uncle Joe hid it? You need to tell me where it is. Now. We can tell Markov and trade that for the girls.”

  My father shrugged hopelessly. “I can only tell you where it was. Joe told me what he did with it and was going to move it the night he was killed, but no one knows if he ever got there. He’s dead, and you don’t remember. For all I know, you could have helped him move it. You were alone in those woods for three days, Killian,” Dad said gently. “If Joe had shown it to you, you would’ve had time to hide it.”

  “Me?” I asked, concerned that all of this was my fault somehow.

  “You had the memento mori when you came back,” Mom pointed out helpfully. “If you could remember where you put anything, things would have been a lot simpler.”

  I turned on my father, wondering now how much he’d really known. “Do you know what that ring really was?”

  “You mean, did I know Mikhail Markov went missing?” he asked sadly. “Bodies don’t bury themselves, son.”

  No shit. So my father covered up Markov’s murder and knew that the location of all that money could be in my fucked-up head all these years—and all I had were glimpses, in dreams—in dreams…

  “What if I know where the cash is now?” I asked.

  “What do you think you know?” my father asked cagily.

  “Actually? Nothing. But Markov doesn’t know that. If I can get him to believe that I know where the money is…” I let my voice drift off. A plan was forming.

  “You can bluff him and tell him you’ll trade it for Alina,” Dad finished, getting it.

  “And now Dariya too.”

  “And when you don’t give it to him?” Mom asked, the ever-practical pessimist.

  “He’ll kill you,” finished Kat. They were both so helpful.

  “Maybe. One step at a time. First, I have to get to Rigan before he does. Then I need to set up a trade for the two girls,” I told them, going for the desk drawer to get the GPS tracker that I could use to lure Markov in, but the GPS tracker in the bracelet and its battery were both missing. On the desk was a note: “I can’t risk losing you. I’m sorry. Rigan.”

  I glanced at the desk, the broken lock, and the files all over the floor and had an idea of what she might be planning.

  “Dad, did the Russians break into this desk—or was it Rigan?”

  “Does it matter?” he asked, avoiding the question.

  “Yes. What did she find?” I reached down to pick up the files. Two were empty. I pulled them out, and one lone paper that was stuck to the back of a file folder floated to the floor. I saw nothing on it except my parent’s signatures, the signature of a priest, and the raised seal of Saint Joseph’s Catholic Church, our local parish when I was a kid.

  That was it. There was no indication what the paper was the signature page to, but the end of the last sentence on the previous page had carried over onto this one and read “…to be located in Zone C, Section 43, Pt. 541.” It was also dated July 17, 1985. Three months before the accident that took my memory. I could see the pressure marks of a pen on the paper, where someone had written an address on the page that was once above it: “926 Clove Road.”

  “I need your keys.”

  “What’s going on?” Kat asked.

  “Rigan foun
d something in my father’s desk and took off. She’s going to try and find Alina on her own—and whatever it was she found, the guys who took Dariya found it too. They’re going after her.”

  “Damn, that bitch is crazy,” Kat muttered. I glared at her.

  “Don’t look at her with that tone of voice. Rigan’s unbalanced,” my mother said, defending Kat, looking for a fight.

  “Theresa, stop. We should have told him a long time ago.”

  My mother stopped. Kat stopped.

  “Told me what?” I asked, trying to make sense of the non sequitur.

  “The kids in the plane, the ones didn’t make it,” he admitted. “It wasn’t pretty… we buried all of them.”

  “Before or after Joe died?” I asked, knowing it was important.

  “Before. There was no family. We had them buried the day he died. Why?”

  “Did he make any arrangements?”

  “The caskets… That’s what Rigan was on about. Shit,” he muttered, putting it together the same way Rigan had. Too late. “We buried them at Saint Peter’s.”

  Saint Peter’s Cemetery in Staten Island was on Clove Road. 962 Clove Road. That’s why the address looked familiar. It was the cemetery where we used to drink and party in high school, because the cops never bothered the dead and the headstones made perfect backrests when you were too drunk to sit up on your own. I grabbed my father’s car keys from my mother and headed for the door.

  “What are you doing?” my father called after me.

  “Finding Rigan,” I told him, never slowing down. “And maybe that money.”

  I was already in the car when Kat came out the front door. I didn’t even try to stop her this time, but I also didn’t slow down. The car was already moving as she got in at a run, slamming the door as I hit twenty miles an hour.

  “I can’t protect you—and ask me for a gun and I’ll shoot you myself,” I told her. For once Kat didn’t push it. She just glared at me as I rounded the corner, already doing forty.

  Chapter

  Chapter Twenty-Three