Leonard said, “Okay, okay. Okay? Fuck.”
A drawer was wrenched off its runners upstairs, and Cody screamed, “Eureka!”
I resisted the urge to toss a panicky look over my shoulder or up at the ceiling. I kept my voice calm and soft.
I said, “Leave, Leonard. Take the gun with you and walk away. Do it now and do it fast.”
“I—”
“Leonard,” I hissed. “Either the cops or Bubba Rogowski. Someone’s going to nail you on this. You know it. Cody’s strictly Toys ‘R’ Us in this department. No more fucking around, you piece of shit. You’re either in this to the wall or you’re walking now.”
Leonard said, “I don’t want to kill you, man. I just—”
“Then, go,” I said softly. “No more time. Now or never.”
Leonard stood. He placed a sweaty palm on the butcher block and took several deep breaths.
I straightened my back against the wall and pushed up, felt my head swim and a momentary numbness find my nose and mouth as I reached my full height.
“Take the gun,” I said. “Go.”
Leonard looked at me, his face a mask of stupidity and fear and confusion.
I nodded.
He ran a hand over his mouth.
I held his eyes.
And then Leonard nodded.
I resisted the urge to chuck a sigh of relief the size of a mountain out of my lungs.
He walked past me and let himself out the glass door that led to the back deck. He didn’t look back. Once he reached the deck, he picked up speed, lowered his head, and cut through the yard, let himself out the side gate.
One down, I thought, shaking my head and puffing air into my cheeks to try and clear my vision.
I heard Cody’s footsteps approach the staircase.
One to go.
11
I did several quick squats to return blood to my legs and sucked up as much of the oxygen in the room as I could.
Cody’s feet hit the top of the staircase and he started to descend.
I inched my way along the wall toward the corner of the kitchen.
When Cody came down the bottom of the stairs, he shouted, “Eureka!” again. He bounded around the corner and tripped over my foot, and a sheaf of brightly colored paper flew from his hands as he toppled into a bar stool and slammed his right hip and shoulder hard off the floor.
I doubt I’ve ever kicked anything as hard as I kicked Cody. I kicked his ribs and his groin, his stomach, his spine, and his head. I stomped on the backs of his knees, his shoulders, and both ankles. One of the ankles made a hard cracking sound as it snapped, and Cody ground his face into the floor and screamed.
“Where do you keep your knives?” I said.
“My ankle! My fucking ankle, you—”
I drove my heel down along the side of his head, and he screamed again.
“Where, Cody? Or I do the ankle again.” I thought of that gun in my face, that look in his eyes when he decided to take my life, and I gave him another kick to the ribs.
“Top drawer. The butcher block.”
I went around the butcher block and turned my back to the drawer as I pulled it open. I cut my fingers on the first knife blade, worked my way up to the handle, and pulled it out.
Cody rose to his knees.
I came back around the butcher block and stood over him as I worked the knife up between my wrists.
“Stay down, Cody.”
Cody turned on his side and pulled his knee up to his chest. He reached down and touched his ankle, hissed through his teeth, and rolled over on his back.
I worked the blade up and down against the twine, felt it slice through, felt my wrists begin to spread apart. I kept slicing and watched Cody roll around at my feet.
The strands around my wrist suddenly separated and my wrists pulled free of one another.
I placed the knife on the counter and shook my hands in small circles for a full minute to get the circulation back.
I looked down at Cody on the floor as he held his ankle aloft, gripped his knee, and moaned, and I felt an exhaustion that had become all too common lately—a bitterness with what I did and what I’d become that had taken residence in my bone marrow like errant T cells.
I’d had hopes, it seemed, of becoming someone else at some point during my younger life. Hadn’t I? What kind of life was this—dealing with the Leonards and Cody Falks, breaking into homes and committing felonious assault, snapping the anklebones of human beings, however putrid those human beings might be?
Cody’s breath was coming in harsh sucking hisses as the shock wore off and the pain took hold.
I stepped over him and picked up the brightly colored sheets of paper he’d dropped on his way in. There were ten of them, all addressed to Cody, all written in a girlish scrawl.
All were signed Karen Nichols.
Cody,
At the club, you seem to love your body as much as I do. I watch you with those weights and the sweat beads on your skin and I think of running my tongue up the inside of your thighs. I wonder when you’re going to make good on your promises. That night in the parking lot, didn’t you see it in my eyes? Haven’t you ever been teased, Cody? Some women don’t want to be courted, they want to be taken. They want to be ground down and held down. They want you to shove yourself in, Cody, not slide. Don’t be gentle, asshole. You want it? Come take it.
Are you up for that, Cody?
Or is it all just talk?
Waiting,
Karen Nichols
The rest were more of the same—taunting, pleading, daring Cody to force himself on her.
Among the pages, I also found the note Karen had left on Cody’s car, the one I’d balled up and stuffed in his mouth. Cody had smoothed it out, kept it as a souvenir.
Cody looked up at me. There was blood in his mouth, and a broken tooth or two rattled when he spoke.
“See? She asked for it. Literally.”
I folded nine of the pages, put them in my jacket. I kept the tenth and the note I’d shoved in Cody’s mouth in my hand. I nodded.
“When did you and Karen finally have, ah, sex?”
“Last month. She sent me her new address. It’s in one of those letters.”
I cleared my throat. “The sex, Cody, was it good?”
He rolled his eyes back into his head for a moment. “It was mean. A good mean. The best mean I’ve had in a while.”
I wanted to get my gun from my glove box and just unload it into him. I wanted to see parts of him rip free of his bones.
I leaned back against the wall for a moment, closed my eyes. “Did she protest? Did she fight you?”
“Of course,” he said. “That was the game. She kept it up until I left. Even cried. She was a twisted sister, totally into the game. Just how I like it.”
I opened my eyes, but kept them on the far counter and fridge. I couldn’t look at Cody for a moment or two. I couldn’t.
“You held on to this note she left on your car, Cody.” I dangled it by my leg.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him smile through the blood and move his head on the floor in an approximation of a nod.
“Of course. That was the beginning of the game. First contact.”
“You notice anything different between the note and these letters?”
Now I looked directly at him. I forced myself to.
He said, “Nope. Should I have?”
I squatted by him and he turned his head to look up into my face.
“Yeah, Cody, you should have.”
“Why’s that?”
I held the letter in my left hand, the note in my right, and placed them in front of his eyes.
“Because the handwriting doesn’t match, Cody. It’s not even close.”
He tried to roll away from me, his eyes bulging with horror. He flinched violently as if I’d already hit him.
When I stood, he rolled again, flattened himself below the sink.
I staye
d where I was, watched him try to burrow into the wood cabinet. Then I took the butcher knife and walked into the living room. I found a lamp with a long cord, and I cut the cord, came back into the kitchen, and tied Cody’s hands behind his back with it.
He said, “What’re you going to do?”
I said nothing. I yanked his arms back and tied off the end of the cord to the steel leg of his refrigerator. It was a small leg, and thin, but stronger than four Codys even after a day of rape and workout.
“Where’s my wallet, car keys, stuff like that?”
He tilted his head up at the cabinet above the oven, and I opened it, found all my personal belongings in there.
As I stuffed them in my pockets, Cody said, “You’re going to torture me.”
I shook my head. “I’m done hurting you, Cody.”
He pressed the back of his head into the refrigerator and closed his eyes.
“But I am going to make a phone call.”
Cody opened one eye.
“See, I know this guy…”
Cody turned his head, looked up at me.
“Well, I’ll tell you about him when I get back.”
“What?” Cody said. “No, tell me. What guy?”
I left him there and let myself out the sliding glass doors onto his porch. I left the yard through the tall wooden gate, then through Cody’s side yard and reached the front of the house. I picked up the morning Trib off the front steps, stood for a moment, and listened to the neighborhood around me. It was still. No one about. While my luck was holding, I decided to make the best of it. I walked to my Porsche, hopped inside, and drove up Cody’s driveway, stopping at the garage. Here, I was covered from prying eyes by Cody’s house to my right and the long line of thick oaks and poplars that formed the edge of Cody’s property line to my left.
I let myself into the garage through the door Bubba and I had left through last time, and used my cellular as I stood in the cool dark by Cody’s Audi.
“McGuire’s,” a man’s voice said.
“This Big Rich?”
“This is Big Rich.” The voice was wary now.
“Hey, Big Rich, it’s Patrick Kenzie. I’m looking for Sully.”
“Oh, hey, Patrick! What’s going on?”
“Same old.”
“I hear that, brother. Yeah, hang on, Sully’s in back.”
I waited a moment and then Martin Sullivan picked up the line in the back room of McGuire’s tavern.
“Sully.”
“What’s up, Sul?”
“Patrick. What’s shaking?”
“I got a live one for you.”
His voice darkened. “No shit? No doubts?”
“None whatsoever.”
“And someone’s tried to reason with him?”
“Uh-huh. Conversion seems out of the question.”
“Well, it’s rare,” Sully said. “That disease is like Ebola, man.”
“Yeah.”
“He waiting?”
“Yeah. He’s not going anywhere.”
“I got a pen.”
I gave him the address.
“Look, Sul, there are some extenuating circumstances here. Barely, but they exist.”
“So?”
“So don’t make the damage permanent, just severe.”
“All right.”
“Thanks, man.”
“No sweat. You be there?”
“I’ll be long gone,” I said.
“Thanks for the tip, brother. I owe you.”
“You don’t owe anybody anything, man.”
“Peace.” He hung up.
I found a roll of electrical tape on a shelf and then let myself back into the house through the other door in the garage, came out into a rec room, empty except for a Stair-Master in the center, a few curling bars on the floor. I walked through that and opened another door onto the kitchen, took two steps, and was standing over Cody Falk again.
“What guy?” he said immediately. “You said you knew a guy. Who are you talking about?”
I said, “Cody, this is very important.”
“What guy?”
“Shut up about the guy. I’ll get to him. Cody, listen to me.”
He looked up at me, all sweet and harmless and willing to please suddenly, the fear treading water like mad behind his eyes.
“I need an honest answer, and I don’t care what it is. I won’t blame you on this one. I just need to know. Did you or did you not vandalize Karen Nichols’s car?”
The same confusion I’d seen in his face that night I’d come here with Bubba filled it again.
“No,” he said firmly. “I…I mean, that’s not my style. Why would I fuck up a perfectly good car?”
I nodded. He was telling the truth.
And some small alarm bell had gone off in my head that night in the garage with Bubba, but I’d been too angry at Cody’s stalking and rape history to listen to it.
“You really didn’t, did you?”
He shook his head. “No.” He glanced at his ankle. “Could I have some ice?”
“Don’t you want to hear about this guy?”
He swallowed and his Adam’s apple bobbed. “Who is he?”
“He’s a nice guy mostly. Regular dude, works a job, has a life. But a decade ago two sick fucks broke into his house and raped his wife and daughter when he wasn’t home. They never caught the guys. His wife recovered as best women can after encounters with assholes like you, but his daughter, Cody? She just locked herself up in her brain and floated away. She’s in an institution now, ten years later. She doesn’t talk. She just stares out into space. Twenty-three years old now, and she looks forty.” I lowered myself to my haunches in front of Cody. “So, this guy? Ever since, he hears about a rapist, he gathers this, I dunno, posse, I guess you’d call it, and they…Well, you ever hear the story about that guy a few years back in the D Street projects—they found him bleeding from every orifice with his own dick cut off and stuck in his mouth?”
Cody ground the back of his head into the fridge and gagged.
“So you’re familiar with that story,” I said. “That’s not urban legend, that’s fact, Cody. That was my buddy and his crew.”
Cody’s voice was a whisper. “Please.”
“Please?” I raised my eyebrows. “That’s good. Try that with this guy and his friends.”
“Please,” he said again. “Don’t.”
“Keep working at it, Cody,” I said. “You almost got the hang of it.”
“No,” Cody moaned.
I pulled a foot of electrical tape from the roll, snapped it off in my teeth. “See, I figure with Karen, maybe half of it was a mistake. You did get those notes and you are dumb, so…” I shrugged.
“Please,” he said. “Please, please, please.”
“But there have been a lot of other women, haven’t there, Cody? Ones who never asked for it. Ones who never pressed charges.”
Cody tried to drop his eyes before I could see the truth there.
“Wait,” he whispered. “I have money.”
“Spend it on a therapist. After my buddy and his friends get through with you, you’re going to need one.”
I slapped the electrical tape over his mouth and his eyes bulged.
He screamed and the sound was muffled and helpless behind the tape.
“Bon voyage, Cody.” I walked to the glass doors. “Bon voyage.”
12
The priest who presided over the noon mass at Saint Dominick of the Sacred Heart Church acted like he had tickets for the Sox game at one. Father McKendrick strode up the front aisle at the stroke of twelve with two altar boys who had to jog to keep pace. He riffled through the greeting, penitential rite, and opening prayer like his Bible was afire. He zipped through Paul’s Letter to the Romans as if Paul drank too much coffee. By the time he slammed through the Gospel According to Luke and waved the parishioners to sit, it was seven past noon and most of the people in the pews looked wiped.
&nbs
p; He gripped the lectern in both hands, stared down into the pews with a coldness bordering on disdain. “Paul wrote: ‘We must wake from darkness and clothe ourselves in the armor of light.’ What does that mean, you think—to wake from darkness, to wear armor of light?”
In the days when I went with any regularity, I’d always liked this part of the mass least. The priest would attempt to explain deeply symbolic language penned almost two thousand years ago and then apply his explanation to the Berlin Wall, the Vietnam War, Roe v. Wade, the Bruins’ Stanley Cup chances. He’d wear you out with his grasping.
“Well, it means what it says,” Father McKendrick said as if he were talking to a room full of first-graders who’d ridden in on the short bus. “It means get out of bed. Leave the darkness of your venal desires, your petty bickerings, your hating of your neighbors and distrust of your spouse and allowing your children to be raised and corrupted by TV. Get outside, Paul says, out in the fresh air! Into the light! God is the moon and the stars and He is most definitely the sun. Feel the sun’s warmth. Pass that warmth on. Do good things. Give extra to the collection boxes today. Feel the Lord working in you. Donate the clothes you like to a shelter. Feel the Lord. He is the armor of light. Get out and do what’s right.” He thumped the lectern for emphasis. “Do what’s light. Do you see?”
I looked around the pews. Several people nodded. No one looked like he had the first clue as to what Father McKendrick was talking about.
“Well then,” he said. “Good. All rise.”
We stood back up. I glanced at my watch. Two minutes flat. The fastest sermon I’d ever witnessed. Father McKendrick definitely had Red Sox tickets.
The parishioners looked dazed, but happy. The only thing good Catholics love more than God is a short service. Keep your organ music, your choir, keep your incense and processionals. Give us a priest with one eye on the Bible and the other on the clock, and we’ll pack the place like it’s a turkey raffle the week before Thanksgiving.
As the ushers worked backward through the pews with wicker donation baskets, Father McKendrick ripped through the offering of the gifts and the blessing of the host with a look on his face that told the two eleven-year-olds assisting him that this wasn’t JV, this was varsity, so step up your game, boys, and make it snappy.
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