Right behind his store.
Ah, who gives a shit? Tony thinks. He is loaded, there’s a foxy little bitch nearby, and he hadn’t smoked a joint in five years. “You’re gonna get in trouble smoking that shit,” Tony B says, smiling, staggering over to the Dumpster. “Got a hit for your Uncle Tony?”
The boy looks at the girl. She nods. The boy hands the giant joint to Tony B.
“Man,” Tony B says, drunkenly examining the double-long spliff. “Where the fuck you from, Jamaica?”
The boy and the girl both break into stoned laughter. Tony B takes a huge, lung-rattling drag on the joint. He holds it for a few moments, his cheeks puffed out like Dizzy Gillespie.
More laughter. It causes Tony B to lose the hit. “Hey… quit makin’ me laugh,” he says, already feeling some of the effects of the pot. “Damn,” he adds. “This is good shit.”
“Only the best,” the boy says. “Take another hit. Help yourself.”
What the fuck, Tony B thinks, and complies. This time, after holding it only a few seconds, the pot begins to excavate the top of his brain. Street sounds from Euclid Avenue, a half-mile away, are suddenly crystal clear. Somehow, he can smell the trash from behind China Garden, all the way up on East 105th! His mind is unclouded but, suddenly, his limbs weigh a ton. “I don’t…” Tony B says. “How come I-”
The kid laughs. “You’ve been dusted, man.”
“What?”
“You’ve been dusted. Angel dust.”
Before he can react, Tony B remembers the girl. He wants to get a good look at her with this new, scary buzz on. He turns on his heels and can suddenly smell her perfume-rich and flowery and sexy. He starts to get hard even before she steps out of the shadows and opens her blouse to reveal two of the most perfectly shaped breasts Tony B has ever seen. Ever. “God almighty,” he exclaims. “God. All. Mighty.”
The girl covers up, giggles.
“How much?” Tony B asks.
“How much?” the girl answers.
“Don’t play with me. How much? You say it, it’s yours.”
“How much do you have?”
Tony B rummages his pockets. He has cash everywhere. “Six hundred,” he says.
“Six hundred will get you everything you want,” she says, stepping very close. She begins to unbutton his shirt.
“What about him?” Tony B answers, nodding at the boy, who is now back next to the Dumpster, in the shadows, his eyes staring out like lucent black stones.
The girl removes Tony B’s shirt, letting it fall to the ground. “He doesn’t care,” she replies, unzipping his pants, backing him over to the pile of flattened cardboard boxes against the building. “He likes to watch.”
Tony B knows this is a huge mistake, just as he knows that he isn’t going to stop. Within a minute or so he is completely naked-save for his short black socks and soiled Reeboks-and half-sitting, half-leaning against the waist-high stack of boxes, the sultry night air pouring over his body, the angel dust and the alcohol in full control of his reflexes.
The girl backs up a few paces. She removes her white blouse and begins to dance, topless, in front of him, gently swaying her hips to one side, then the other.
Jesus jumped up Christ on an Easter palomino, Tony B thinks. I’ve died and gone to fuckin’ heaven. He glances over at the Dumpster.
The boy is gone.
Then, for Tony B, everything begins to happen at once; all of it shrouded in a pasty gray light, all of it lurching to a maddeningly unsyncopated beat.
Movement to his left. The crunch of gravel. A young man’s rhythm.
A shadow from Da Nang? Tony B wonders. Am I back in country?
The beautiful girl in front of him begins to exaggerate her slow, liquid movements. A pale arm lashes out in the moonlight; the curve of a young breast flashes before him.
Now-hot breath on his neck. Sounds from behind him. Sliding sounds.
Now-the girl’s leg rises toward him. Fast. A cobra strike from the darkness.
The kick to his exposed testicles is so swift, so precise, that at first Tony B thinks it is part of her dance routine. He knows he should feel it, but, for the moment he does not. For the moment, he cannot feel anything.
Then, a loop of wire is cast over his head. “Razor wire,” the boy whispers in his ear. “Concertina.” The boy is behind him now, kneeling on the boxes. “You move an inch you puncture your jugular vein. Don’t fucking move.” Wearing thick leather gloves, the boy continues to wrap Tony B’s head in the razor wire, slicing tiny cuts and nicks in the man’s head, neck, shoulders.
Tony B’s mind is a mire of confusion, indecision, anger.
You’ve been dusted.
“She’s dead,” the girl says.
Dead? Who’s dead? Tony B wonders. And why can’t I move my hands, my feet? Why does everything weigh… a fucking… ton?
“She’s finally dead,” the girl repeats. “You’ve finally killed her.”
And, in an instant, Tony B knows.
Jesus Christ.
Lydia.
He begins to cry as his daughter takes his now-flaccid penis in her right hand.
The sobs become a deep, soughing wail as his son produces a single-edge razor blade and examines it in the heat-shimmered moonlight.
Tony B tries to scream, but the pain now generated by his crushed right testicle, the fear generated by the razor wire at his throat, prevents him from making any coherent human sounds.
Instead, Anthony del Blanco opens his mouth, and all that pours forth is a series of small, wet whimpers, sounds of fear and defeat and failure and humiliation, sounds that return to his ears with full dynamic range and echo like a young woman’s footsteps across a long, dark gallery of remembrance.
For five minutes, they do not stop. The baseball bats they had fitted with the single-edge blades first demolish the man’s head, pounding the razor wire deep into his flesh, caving in his forehead, occipitals, cheekbones, jaw, clubbing his upper torso into a crimson mess, snapping his collarbone into dozens of pieces.
In spite of the girl’s wishes, in spite of her decade of prayers, her father is dead by the time the two begin work on his ribs, stomach, hips, legs.
When they are finished, heavily lathered after such a workout in such heat, the boy reaches into the Dumpster and retrieves the gallon plastic bottle he had placed there earlier in the day. He completes his task by pouring the contents-the full measure of two thirty-ounce cans of beef broth-over the length of his father’s corpse.
The boy and girl agree that they have done the world a favor. Of course, the law enforcement agencies will not see it that way. And thus they must split up. She will return to her foster home, where she is, at that very minute, on the third floor, asleep. He will take the Greyhound to San Diego. From there, a cousin will bring him into Mexico, a place where he will be safe.
They hold each other in a long, silent embrace, just as they had held each other in that doorway nearly a decade earlier. Then, for her own safety, the girl gets in her car, a car belonging to her foster mother, a late-model Toyota for which the girl had made a duplicate key months earlier. She meets her brother’s eyes one last time as he readies the key at the back of the van. He had stolen the van earlier in the day and will leave it a dozen or so blocks from the Greyhound bus station at East Thirteenth Street and Chester Avenue.
They had collected the dogs for the past two weeks, alternately starving them, then throwing them the slightest morsels of rancid beef. The dogs are ravenous, insane with hunger, and long bereft of any notion of their place as domesticated animals in a civilized world. There are four of them in the back of the van. Two Rottweilers, two Dobermans.
The boy opens the door and carefully, one by one, removes their muzzles. Within seconds, the four big dogs are out, their huge paws chewing up the gravel to get to this fallen cousin so freshly and mortally wounded in the primordial mist of their need.
As the boy and girl look on, the dogs descend upon the bo
dy with a viciousness that has lived in their beings, untapped, for centuries. The boy and girl understand completely, for they too have carried a dark violence within them for years, a visceral craving for this moment.
And so they watch, still and silent and rapt, two children of the same mother.
But, at this moment, their thoughts are one.
Rest now, Lydia.
Rest.
The girl pulls out of the lot first, leaving the boy in the driver’s seat of the van, idling, lights off, watching the last of the carnage unfold.
Mexico, he thinks. He does not know it yet, but Mexico is a place where he will learn the way of the road, the way of the night, the way by which all things must pass at least once as the devil smiles upon them. The way beside which all other ways pale.
In Mexico, he will learn the way of the saints.
24
She is horrified. Disgusted. More than a little afraid. And completely bewildered.
Here’s what she knows. Or thinks she knows.
Jean Luc and his sister beat their father to death because their father was an animal and abused their mother. Then they let dogs eat him.
But how does she know the story is true? How does she know that Jean Luc is really the boy in the story? And what can it possibly have to do with her? Did he tell her that story just to frighten her? On top of the blackmail?
She looks up to see him cross the room, pick up Isabella’s photo.
Fighting her growing nausea, she sprints across the room, takes the photograph from him, as forcefully as she dares, and places it in the end table drawer. “What do you want from me? Just tell me what the fuck you want from me.”
“Tonight? Nothing.” He takes her chin in his right hand, angles her face toward his. “But tomorrow. Tomorrow is Christmas Eve.”
“Yeah? What about it?”
“It is a magical night and I want you to have the best time possible.”
She remains absolutely still, silent.
“Tomorrow night you are going to a party,” he continues. “A party filled with laughter and goodwill and all the other joys of the season.”
She looks at his handsome face, thinks about him as a thirteen-year-old boy, a bloodied baseball bat in his hands. She considers the will that must have propelled that fury. She feels it seething from him as he moves ever closer. She retreats, little by little, until her back is to the wall. Is any of this true? She has no idea. But she is a realist, if nothing else, and knows the box score. As long as Jean Luc has those pictures of her at the Dream-A-Dream Motel, it doesn’t really matter if the story is true or not.
Jean Luc says: “All I want you to think about, between now and tomorrow night, are three little words.”
He touches her cheek.
For a moment she feels, what, charmed?
In the middle of all this?
“What three words?” she asks.
He tells her, counting each word off with his fingers.
“Merry Christmas, Jack.”
25
Jack Paris stands in the checkout line at the Rite Aid drugstore at East 113th Street and Euclid Avenue, a ridiculous parody of a Christmas tree in his hands. Actually, he is holding a box no bigger than a boot box, a box that allegedly contains a “full 36-inch-tall Christmas tree, great for small spaces!”
He has decided that he will not let this Christmas pass without some sort of cheer in his otherwise cheerless apartment.
The line is moving slowly, but that is not the worst of it. The worst of it is the incessant, mind-scrambling ring of the Salvation Army bell, courtesy of the Santa-clad volunteer standing just outside the door. Paris, like everyone else in the store, would like to take Santa out with a spinning back kick and stomp that bell flatter than a tuna can on the freeway.
Instead, after paying for his tree in a box, he nods at Santa as he passes him and, as per routine, walks another ten feet or so, spins on his heels, saunters back, and dumps a buck in the bucket.
“Thank you,” Santa says. “And Happy Holidays.”
“Yeah, whatever,” Paris answers, his grumpiness a receipt for his small generosity.
Paris reaches his car and opens the trunk. At least one-third of his life stares back at him. After some clever maneuvering, he is able to slip the Christmas tree box into the left side, next to the gym bag containing workout sweats that have already survived two full years in the trunk without ever having seen the inside of a gym.
Then, from behind him, a sunny voice says: “What a softie.”
Paris turns around to see Mercedes Cruz. They had planned to meet here and she is right on time. “Hi,” he says.
“Saw you give in to the Christmas spirit there, detective.”
“Don’t let it get out, okay?” Paris says, slamming the trunk, hoping, for some reason, that Mercedes hadn’t seen his pathetic tree-thing. “Cops have four million charities and I’d never have a minute’s peace. In fact, tonight is the annual Cleveland League Christmas party. Bunch of conscience-plagued cops and inner-city kids. I go every year. It’s my penance.”
“You are a softie. I admire that in a… married man?”
“Divorced,” Paris says.
“I admire it even more,” she says, then instantly covers her mouth with a magenta-mittened hand. “Oh my goodness, was that sexual harassment?”
“Let’s see. Who has the power here?”
“I’d say it’s equal. I’ve got a pen. You’ve got a gun.”
“Then it was a compliment.”
“Whew,” Mercedes says.
“But let’s keep it to a minimum,” Paris says. “First it’s compliments, then the next thing you know people will think the press and the police are getting along.”
“I won’t let it happen again.”
“By the way, I met your brother. He took a few photos of this crooked face and busted nose.”
“You’ve got to be shittin’ me,” Mercedes says.
“What?”
“My brother actually did something I asked him to? Unbelievable.”
“Nice kid,” Paris continues. “Good-looking, too.”
“Yeah,” Mercedes says, rummaging in her bag. “He’s a real thief of hearts, let me tell you. Girls have been knocking on our front door ever since Julian turned twelve. I’m just stunned he stopped by.”
“It was painless,” Paris says.
“Good. Maybe getting these pictures published will get him off his ass.” She gestures toward the city. “So, where to first, detective?”
“West side,” Paris says. “I think it’s time to visit the botanica.”
“Want me to drive?” Mercedes asks, holding up her key chain, pointing to a sparkling, midnight blue Saturn.
Paris looks at his listing, rusted car, caked with road salt, and makes his first mistake of the day when he says: “Sure.”
They are on Detroit Avenue, going thirty-five miles per hour, sliding on ice, and about to slam into the rear end of a primer-prepped old Plymouth; a Plymouth whose driver decided to pause, at a green light, to empty his ashtray into the middle of the street.
In the middle of a snowstorm.
On the way, Paris and Mercedes had stopped at Ronnie’s Famous for a few minutes and Paris had switched Thermoses. He had also turned Mercedes Cruz on to Ronnie Boudreaux’s vaunted beignets. She had agreed instantly. World’s best, no contest.
Now, though, as they hit a patch of ice on Detroit Avenue, Paris can feel the coffee and the beignets in his stomach begin to head north. They do a three-sixty. Then another. Then, the Saturn comes to a full stop, somehow pointed in the right direction, somehow just inches to the right of the Plymouth. No damage.
Yet.
Mercedes gathers herself, waits a few beats, lowers her window, smiles, gestures to the other driver to do the same. He reaches over, a confused look on his face, and rolls down the passenger window.
“Hi,” Mercedes says, all charm and innocence.
“Hi,” the drive
r says.
“Chinga!” Mercedes yells out the window. “Chinga tu MADRE, tu PADRE, tu ’BUELA!”
Although Paris is monolingual, having plenty of trouble with English alone, you don’t have to be Antonio Banderas to know what Mercedes just said about the other driver’s sainted mother, father, and grandmother. The driver, a fair-sized young Latino kid, promptly flips Mercedes the bird, then floors it, fishtailing his way down to West Thirty-eighth Street, where he makes a hurried left turn and disappears into the squall of falling snowflakes.
Winter silence ensues for a few moments. Mercedes looks at Paris. Paris speaks first, realizing he had just witnessed the temper Mercedes’s brother Julian had mentioned. “You okay?”
“Fine. Sorry about that.”
“No harm done.”
“I said a bad word.”
Paris laughs. “A bunch of them, actually. Nice talk for a Catholic gal.”
“You understood that?” she asks as she carefully scans her side mirror and gingerly pulls back out into traffic.
“Well, if you work the inner city, you learn the f-word in many languages. I had an Arab flip me off in Farsi once. I’m sure of it.”
“I’m so embarrassed.”
“Don’t be. I offer the same sentiment to my fellow Cleveland motorists quite often. Usually in Italian, though.”
“You’re Italian?”
“My grandfather on my father’s side was named Parisi. The i got chopped off at Ellis Island somehow. My mother’s father was Italian, too. What about you?”
“Puerto Rican on my father’s side. My mother’s family is English/Irish.”
“Which heritage do you feel more strongly?”
“I guess I consider myself Hispanic. My brother and I are both pretty close to my ’buela, my grandmother. She is a wonderful woman. My role model. I look a lot like her when she was younger. I think we’re the same type.”
“Type?”
“You know. Independent. Mysterious. Darkly exotic.”
“I see.”
Kiss Of Evil jp-2 Page 13
