My little sister, now, she was the heartbreaker. Looked just like my mother. She was only five years old, but I remember what a beauty my baby sister Emily was.
I had a week to go before my birthday. I was riding my red, white, and blue Huffy up and down the street, Star Wars toys rattling in my backpack. As I came back up the street, I could see my neighbors milling nervously in front of the house we rented.
Angry voices were pouring through the screen door onto the sidewalk. Again.
Our elderly next-door neighbor, Mrs. MacAllan, was saying to the air and anybody in earshot that she was going to call the police. Mr. Dominguez, the man who lived opposite us, grabbed me by the shoulder. He thought it might be a good idea if I waited outside until “things blew down in there.” I shrugged him off and ran inside.
Most of the yelling was coming out of my mother’s recent ex-boyfriend, Teddy. Teddy was a mechanic, a tool belt always around his waist. I didn’t like Teddy. He didn’t take his tool belt off at the dinner table. I thought that was rude. Whenever he shook my hand, he ground my knuckles together until tears welled in my eyes and then smiled when I winced.
I followed the yelling into our kitchen. Teddy had my mother gripped by her shoulders, pinned against the sink with his thick arms. I saw one of Emily’s frightened violet eyes and the bright blue marble eye of her stuffed dog, Blackie, looking out through a crack in the yellow kitchen pantry door.
Teddy screamed at my mother, face inches from hers, calling her a lying, cheating slut. My mother was crying. I didn’t know what a slut was, but nobody was going to make my mother cry. I grabbed a fork off the kitchen table and drove it right into Teddy’s ass cheek. It stuck there, dangling like a silver tail.
Teddy yelped as he plucked the fork out of his khakis. He turned and unloaded a punch to the side of my head that threw me across the room. Blunt pain exploded through my body. I skidded across the kitchen table and crashed to the floor in a heap. I didn’t lose consciousness. If I had, maybe things wouldn’t have ended the way they did.
My mother roared like an enraged lioness and was on Teddy, fists beating, nails clawing at his face. He got in a punch to her temple and she crumpled to the floor, blood streaming from her head.
I was hurting badly, in ways my eight years on the planet hadn’t prepared me for.
Teddy wasn’t done with my mother. He pulled a small gun from his waistband and pistol-whipped my mother across the face, saying no man would want her when he was done.
He hit her again.
And again.
Then, for the first time ever, the world turned red.
I shrieked and attacked him, the rage in control, strength flowing through me like nothing I’d ever imagined.
It wasn’t close to enough.
I bit a good chunk out of Teddy’s bicep, blood warm and salty in my mouth. His scream of pain was sweet music. Then Teddy cracked me across the face with the gun butt, shattering my nose and cheek.
Then he turned his grip around and fired point blank into my chest.
The gunshot slammed me against the wall with a wet smack. I fell to the floor, my body no longer responding to my will. The strength to inhale and exhale, inhale and exhale, was all I had left.
As badly hurt as she was, face battered to pulp, my mother stood on shaking legs. With a howl, she grabbed a butcher’s knife from a wooden block and drove it into Teddy’s throat. Teddy gurgled, took three steps, and shot my mother twice before he fell backward, dead.
So much blood. I couldn’t move. The last thing I remember is my mother reaching out to me as the light left her beautiful violet eyes. I wasn’t sure what were sirens and what were Emily’s screams.
After that, it all fades in and out. I remember biting a paramedic. I remember doctors yelling. I remember asking for my mother, asking for Emily. I remember asking where is she without knowing which one I was asking for.
I never saw either of them again.
“What happened to Emily?” Kelly said softly, a hitch in her breath.
“I don’t know. I don’t know how long I was in the hospital for. A lot of that time, I spent in one coma or another. The State did what it had to. As far as I know, we had no next of kin.”
“You’ve never looked for her?”
“Nope.”
“Why not?”
I had to think about it. I had reasons, lots of them. But I’d never put any of them into words. “I’d like to think that her life has been… better. If it hasn’t,” I shook my head, “I don’t want to know.”
We sat there until the water went cold.
I got up early the next morning and decided to cook breakfast. I had bread, eggs, and milk, so I tried French toast. What I wound up with was some type of eggy paste with a burned crust that somehow stayed gummy inside. Smelled pretty good, though.
Kelly came out of the bedroom in nothing but a pair of panties and naked morning glory. She scratched at her head and sniffed. “What is that?”
“It’s breakfast. I think I invented French toast pudding.”
“You are useless in a kitchen, aren’t you?” She tiptoed up and placed a tender kiss on my face.
“You’ve never tasted my Hamburger Helper Almondine.”
She made a disgusted face. “I’m not even sure what almondine is,” she said.
“You just throw a handful of mixed nuts into Hamburger Helper.” I recognized the sharp squeal of brakes from the front of my house and the familiar cough of Miss Kitty’s dying engine. “Aw, shit.”
“What? What’s the matter?” Instinctively, Kelly covered up her boobs.
“It’s Junior,” I said. I could already hear his boots stomping on the front steps.
“Better get one last good look then, Mr. Malone.”
Kelly did a playful pirouette, and I did indeed soak up that one last look. She trotted off to put on some decent clothes for our visitor. A visitor whose ass I planned on sticking a wad of French toast pudding up. I grabbed a handful of goop and headed to the door, stopping dead in my tracks when I opened the door and saw his expression.
Something was wrong. Something was very wrong.
I stood there dumbly with a fistful of raw egg and singed toast. He stared back at me, a heavy weight suspended in the air between us. Yellow goo dribbled down my forearm.
“She’s dead, Boo.” Junior’s voice cracked.
“No.” I shook my head. “Don’t even kid—”
“She’s dead.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Junior’s words struck Kelly like an open-handed slap. She ran to the bathroom, and I could hear her crying behind the door. Junior kept clearing his throat and stalking back and forth in the room.
I wondered where my anger was. It should have been there, coursing through me. Empowering me. It was there for Seven. It was there for Derek. Hell, it was even there for Underdog. Why wasn’t it there for Cassie?
A demon whispered in my ear. You’re used to losing women.
Of course. Of course, she’s dead.
You were supposed to be her hero, Boo.
Could you ever have been her hero? Anyone’s?
No, my demon said. You never saved anyone. You never could.
And you never will.
“What happened?” I finally asked.
“She ran away again. Two kids found her in the Dutch House. A step let loose or something and she fell. She must have broke her neck.”
“Did anyone see her?” My voice was as flat as a machine’s.
“See her what?”
“Did anyone see her fall?” I stared past Junior, to my front door, to the street.
Junior gave me a look. “No, Boo.”
“So if nobody saw—”
“Don’t do this. There’s nothing to figure. It’s a big rotting squat. You know that. Who the fuck knows if anybody saw anything? If they did, you can get yourself a nice list of junkies and degenerates as witnesses. Fucking place has been condemned as long as we’ve been i
n Boston.”
“Witnesses to what?” I turned away from the street.
Junior flopped down on my couch, slouched over. He stopped massaging his hands and paused. “What?”
“You said I could make a list of witnesses. Witnesses to what?”
“I was just saying—”
“Don’t bullshit me, Junior. You wouldn’t have said it if you didn’t think there might be witnesses to something.”
“To what? Witnesses to anything! To her falling! To somebody finding her. Shit, at the Dutch House, you’re probably likely to find more than a couple witnesses to alien abductions.”
“Try to find Paul. Ask him if he knows the kids who found her.”
“Boo, the cops already looked into this. Don’t make it into something it’s not. She’s the daughter of the goddamn DA. You think they didn’t look into every fucking detail?” There was no anger in his reprimand, just pity. Telling Ahab that there was no white whale.
“They didn’t know every detail. We do. We just yanked that kid away from a kiddie porn—no, a snuff porn—freak who’s the nephew of the most dangerous man on the Eastern Seaboard. We don’t know who had a copy of that movie. We don’t know what kind of maniac watched it and jerked off in his mother’s panties every time she died. Maybe… maybe one of them saw her walking down the street and… and…” I was reaching, and I knew it.
Junior knew it too. “You listening to yourself?”
“I don’t believe in three things, Junior: the Easter Bunny, a loving God, and coincidences. Just call Paul.” My failed breakfast experiment was drying into glue on my hand. In my numbness, I’d forgotten to wash it off. I nearly tore off the faucet head turning the water on.
Defeated or just too worn out to argue, Junior said, “Fine. We’ll look into this. But I’m only giving it a week, Boo. Our answering machine at the office is flooded. We’ve spent enough time with this. Curtis is pissed that you never called him back about last weekend, so we lost our Drop Bar account to Ironclad Security.”
I soaped up my hands and ignored him.
“We’ve got a dozen more waiting to hear back from us. I’m not losing 4DC over this. Our job ended when we handed her over. This is business I’m talking now, Boo. It’s a fucking tragedy and I’m sorry she’s gone but we have a goddamn business to run. One week.” With that, he marched out the door and drove off.
I drove Kelly back to her apartment in a heavy silence. We parted with the quiet intact, sorrow stripping us of our words.
Junior gave me one week. It only took two days.
I went alone that night to the Dutch House. A decade and a half ago, fire had gutted most of the old house. Not too long after, a local assemblage of homeless addicts, nutcase bums, and runaway teens moved right in. Some kids would just hang out there and get high, away from the street. A place they could call their own, burned, rat infested, moldy, and dangerous as it was. Since day one, Mr. Dutch always had a motley assortment of stragglers coming and going.
I knew the place all too well. I bunked there for a spell when I first came to Boston, jobless and homeless.
Mr. Dutch had probably moved himself in before the place stopped smoldering. Nobody knew Dutch’s full story. Since he lived at the house that bore his name, I guess he wasn’t technically homeless. Nobody knew how old he was or where he’d come from.
I found him across the street from the house, nervously twisting on his lanky, graying dreadlocks. For a vagrant, Dutch was always well-groomed and articulate. He spotted me as I walked down Brattle Street.
“That you, Boo?” Dutch cupped a hand to his mouth and blew out a long stream of marijuana smoke.
“It’s me, Dutch.”
“Well, hell’s bells, white boy. What you doing in this neck of the woods? You lose your lease?” He cackled and offered me his joint.
“No thanks,” I said, my eyes locked on the house across the street.
“Make your leg feel better.” He pointed the joint at the brace on my leg. “Help heal that shit up fast.” Dutch would tell you marijuana could cure everything from hepatitis to Republicans.
“No thanks. Got my own pills for it.”
“Got any more?”
“Sorry.”
“Whatever. Might at least help knock off that ugly gorilla face you wearing. Good for the heart and the mind.” He tapped a finger off his chest, then head. Dutch practiced what he preached. A lot. But he never seemed stoned. “Whatever did you do to yourself?”
“I got shot.”
“Mm-hmm.” He didn’t seem surprised at all, which bothered me. “You sure do know how to piss off the wrong people, dontcha?”
“Guess I do.” It was hard not to smile for Dutch, but I wasn’t feeling anywhere close to the humor he usually brought. “What can you tell me about the girl?”
He didn’t have to ask which girl. He knew.
“Aw, don’t tell me she was a friend of yours. That poor thing was just a baby.” Dutch shook his head and comforted himself with another toke.
“I knew her, yeah.”
“I’m so sorry for that, Boo. I guess the old stairwell just couldn’t hold no more.” Dutch shook his head sadly for his poor house falling down around his ears.
“Did you find her?”
“Nah. By the time I got here, there was cops and lights and shit all over the place. Thank God. Thing like that’ll stay with a man. Wish I could’ve been here to help her, but I sure am glad I didn’t find that poor child.”
“Was anybody there at the time?”
“Shit, if they was, they got themselves the hell gone when they saw the police coming.”
“Anybody say anything when they came back?”
“Nobody came back but me. Damn police scared away all my tenants.”
And odds were, those former tenants would be impossible to find even if I knew who they were. Finding a girl was one thing. Tracking homeless nomads in a city like Boston was another problem entirely.
“I need to see the house.”
Dutch pressed his lips together and shook his head. “I wouldn’t go in there right now.”
“Why not?”
“I got a double-crack in there right now, losing his got-damn mind. That’s why I’m out here.”
“What’s a double-crack?”
Dutch smiled, a little embarrassed. “A cracker crackhead. No offense.”
“How long has he been in there?”
“He just showed up today, looking for Louisa. Louisa ain’t been here for months. He’s flipping out, saying he won’t leave till she gets here.”
“I’ll be right back,” I said, crossing the street. From my backpack, I pulled out a thick Maglite flashlight and lit up the front of the house.
The front porch gave an ominous creak as I walked up the steps. Yellow police tape fluttered, broken in the breeze. I pulled a short piece off the rusted iron rail and stuck it in my pocket. I don’t know why I wanted it, I just did. The air wafting out the missing front door was heavy with dark odors of rot and waste. The smells brought with them overpowering memories of the time I’d lived here as one of Dutch’s tenants.
I moved aside the blue nylon tarp that covered the doorway and walked through. A plastic mop bucket that had been used for a latrine sat by the door. I gagged as I passed by and pulled my shirtfront over my mouth and nose.
“Louisa?” A gruff voice called out from the darkness toward the back of the house. My dealings with the chronically fucked-up have given me an ear for the difference between drinkers and brain-damaged lifetime addicts. The guy’s voice sounded like he’d made a career out of huffing any chemical he could soak in a sweat sock.
“Time to go, man. Louisa ain’t coming back,” I called out as I turned my flashlight his way. Roaches scurried away from the sharp glare cast on the floor.
“The fuck’re you?” the voice asked as my eyes detected a flicker of motion in what was once the kitchen.
I held the light low, so as not to blind the doub
le-crack and freak him out further. He was wearing a grimy T-shirt reading Baby On Board and filthy cutoffs with sandals. His skin was so crusted with muck that it was difficult to tell where the dirt ended and the man began.
“I’m the fella who’s kicking your ass out of here. Now move it.” I flicked the flashlight toward the door, in case he’d forgotten how to get there. I hoped my no-bullshit tone would pierce his addled brain.
“I ain’t doing nothing until Louisa comes back.” He emphasized his point by waving a short piece of rebar menacingly in the air.
My thin patience snapped, and I brought the bright flashlight beam straight into his face. “Hey!” he yelled. He defensively brought the metal post up over his head. In one motion, I flipped my hold on the flashlight and brought the handle down hard on the knobby bone in his wrist. The junkie howled in pain as the rebar clunked onto the floor.
From behind, I slipped the flashlight between his legs, turned it flat against his thighs, and pulled back. I grabbed a handful of his slimy hair and pushed his upper body forward. Trick of the trade. A ten-year-old could pull off the move against an NFL linebacker. I had no trouble maneuvering a skinny crackhead. He was like a smelly marionette in my grip.
As I scooted him toward the door, he lurched sideways to escape. Not only didn’t it break my grip, but his aim was terrible. Using his own momentum, I dunked him head-first into the shit bucket. His screams quickly gurgled out as I held his face down in it.
“Oh, God! Lemme go! Please! I’ll leave!” he begged when I let him up for air.
“How long you been here, you fuck?” I snarled.
“I—I just got here this morning, man. I just wanted—”
I cut him off with another dunking. His screams gurgled up through the viscous fluid.
“Were you in here on Saturday, you dirty fuck? You like to put the hurt on little girls? Huh? Answer me, shitbird.”
Thick bubbles rimmed around his submerged head as he screamed. His arms and legs whipped around wildly, clawing for any purchase. He grabbed at my pants legs, my arm, my shirt. I held him down harder.
I stopped when I heard Mr. Dutch pleading, “Boo, let him go! He wasn’t here. He really did just show up today. He was in lockup.”
The Hard Bounce Page 23
