Where It Hurts

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  Tommy D. looked scary enough, if he wasn’t exactly the behemoth Felix had hinted at. Maybe six three at most, not a whole lot taller than me. Felix hadn’t exaggerated about the tats. He’d gotten that much right. Delcamino was inked up pretty good. His hands were blue, green, and red with tattoos, many of which seemed to be continuations of designs hidden by the sleeves of his tan, dust-covered Carhartt jacket. But it must have been the barbed-wire tat that swirled around his neck and the streaks of red-inked blood leaking out of where the prongs appeared to cut into the skin of his throat that had freaked Felix out.

  Delcamino held out his big right hand. “Officer Murphy,” he said. “You don’t need to carry. You got nothin’ to worry about from me. You always treated me with respect. More than a dildo like me deserved.”

  I shook his hand without much enthusiasm. He may not have been much taller than me, but he was bigger, broader, and thicker through the chest and limbs. His hand dwarfed mine. The skin of his palm and fingers was rough and callused.

  “You behaving yourself these days, Tommy?” The words came out of my mouth by reflex. As if it mattered. As if I cared.

  He lit up. “Yeah, yeah. I got a job as a laborer with a company that does masonry and paving over on Long Island Avenue in Holtsville. I live in a trailer over there, too. Watch the yard, work on the trucks. It’s hard work, you know, but it pays good.”

  Tommy looked fierce, but he wasn’t. It was a Technicolor feint, a lion’s roar from an alley cat. The Tommy D. I knew would probably have preferred fading into the backdrop. The stuff I’d arrested him for was all petty shit: possession of stolen property, minor drug sales, ripping stereos out of car dashboards when that still made sense, like that. None of that is to say Tommy couldn’t take care of himself. If you pushed him hard enough, he’d push back harder.

  “I’m glad you got your shit straight, but why are you here, Tommy? How’d you find me?”

  He thumped back down in the booth. I kept my feet. I wanted the high ground if it came to that.

  Head bowed, he said, “I went to your house, like, two weeks ago and the woman renting the place told me you didn’t live there no more. She said she didn’t know where you lived. Nice lady. You know, you should really get your driveway redone. I can get you a real good discount. My boss—”

  “How did you know my address?”

  He shrugged. “The Internet. You can find anybody on the Internet.”

  “And here. How did you find me here? There’s nothing on the net about me being here.”

  “I asked around.”

  “What the fuck does that mean, you asked around? Who’d you ask? You don’t start giving answers I need to hear, I’m gonna—”

  He looked up, his eyes rimmed in red. He held up his palms in surrender. “Sorry, Officer Murphy. I didn’t mean no harm. I swear.”

  “I didn’t ask for apologies or explanations.”

  “Just around. Then last Friday night a guy I grew up with was in the dance club here. He was telling me about it and mentioned you was working the door. He recognized you, is all. If he didn’t say nothing about it to me yesterday, I guess I never woulda found you.”

  I sat down across from Delcamino. “Okay, that’s how you found me. Now tell me why.”

  Tommy D. looked everywhere but at me. He was struggling with himself, searching for the right words. “It’s my kid, my son,” he said, his booming voice oddly brittle.

  “I didn’t know you had kids.”

  “I don’t. I mean, I don’t, not no more.”

  I felt myself burn beneath my skin. “What the fuck, Tommy?”

  He reached down beside him and put a faded green canvas backpack on the table. He unzipped it and took out a folded newspaper story. He unfolded it, smoothed it out, and laid it on the table in front of me with a kind of religious reverence. “He was murdered.”

  I was confused. “Who was?”

  “My son, TJ. They murdered him. They put a beatin’ on him, fuckin’ tortured him. Broke all his fingers, broke his kneecaps. They burned him, too. They tied him up and burned him. Then them motherfuckas dumped him in a lot in Nesconset like a bag a garbage or something.”

  “Christ,” I heard myself say. I started to cross myself and stopped.

  Delcamino couldn’t talk. He was crying, his chest heaving so that I could feel it through the table. He wiped his tears and snot on the sleeve of his jacket, leaving a smear of gray cement dust on his cheek.

  And in that instant I was underwater, back down the hole I had just begun to crawl out of. All I saw in Delcamino’s tears was my own rage and grief. It was all I could do not to smack him or cry myself. I sat there watching him, nausea welling up in me in a way it hadn’t since the day we buried John Jr.

  His tears stopped eventually and his heaving chest calmed, but then he started ranting.

  “What the fuck kinda chance did a son a mine ever have with a piece a shit like me for a father?” he asked, not really wanting an answer. “What kinda life was a kid a mine gonna have?”

  “Take it easy, Tommy.”

  “Take it easy! How the fuck can I take it easy? The cops won’t even give me the time a day. I call the detectives and all they say is they’re working the case and hang up on me. Look, Officer Mur—I mean, Mr. Murphy, I know I been a fuckup my whole life and that my kid was following right behind me, but that don’t mean he was garbage. Don’t he deserve some justice, too? Am I wrong? He was a fuckup like me. Sure he boosted some shit to pay for his drugs, but he was trying to get straight. He didn’t do nothing so bad that he deserved what he got. He didn’t deserve to die like that. Sometimes I can’t sleep thinking about how afraid he musta been and how much he musta suffered alone like that. I swear there are nights I wake up hearin’ him screamin’ for me. I wasn’t there to stand up for him when he was alive. I gotta stand up for him now. You can understand that, right?”

  I nodded. “When did this happen, Tommy?”

  “Last August,” he said, tapping the newspaper article with his index finger. “It’s all in here. See, that’s him there in the picture.”

  “Handsome kid.”

  Delcamino smiled, then his lip turned down. “I mean, I been patient. I tried to let the detectives do their thing, you know? I know how this shit works. I know it ain’t an easy job, but I gave ’em a list of TJ’s asshole friends, the dickheads he used to run with. I got it all written down, what I gave ’em. I gave ’em copies of pictures, names, addresses, phone numbers.” He patted the backpack. “I even did a little askin’ around myself, got the names of the dealers he used to score from. Guys, you know, TJ mighta owed money to.”

  “And?”

  “And nothing. I went back to some of the people I talked to and they said the detectives never even contacted them. I mean, for fuck’s sake, Officer—”

  “Gus. Call me Gus.”

  “Gus.” He smiled, trying it on for size. I figured it felt like a small victory to him. It sure felt like one to me. It had been a long time since I made someone else smile.

  “Why come to me?”

  “Because you was always the rightest cop I ever met. You treated me like a person, like a human being.”

  “Look, Tommy, there’s channels for this kind of thing, a chain of command, people to talk to.”

  “I done that. I talked to them till I’m blue in the face,” he said. “I been up one side of that ladder and down the other. Either they don’t listen or they don’t give a fuck. Who am I, right? I’m a skel, a mutt, a piece a shit. And my kid wasn’t no better. None of ’em said it, but they didn’t have to. I may be stupid, but I ain’t blind neither. Half of ’em thought, with TJ dead that was one less headache for them to deal with down the line.”

  I wanted to tell him he was wrong, but I didn’t because he wasn’t. Maybe he was a little harsh about it. Harsh was what he understoo
d. I’d been on the other side of it. Any cop who tells you he doesn’t judge some people as better than others is a liar. I did it. We all did. Like the badge and gun, judgments came with the territory. The trick was not treating people differently. The church teaches you that you’re judged for your thoughts and deeds, but in the cathedral of the street, thoughts count for little. Deeds talk loudest.

  I asked, “Have you tried hiring a PI?”

  He reached into the backpack and came out with a fist-sized, rubber-banded roll of twenties. He put it on the table, right on top of the newspaper article. “That’s three large there, give or take. It’s all the money I got in the world.”

  “What’s it for?”

  “For you, Gus. I went to a few PIs. All they wanna do is suck you dry an hour at a time with no promises of finding nothing. I’d be drained in two, three weeks tops.”

  I could feel that burn beneath my skin again. “Who told you about my son?”

  Delcamino tilted his head at me like a confused puppy. “Gus, I—”

  “What, you think I’ll help you because of what happened to John Jr.?”

  He started talking, but I couldn’t hear it. I shot up off the booth cushion, the fire now burning inside me and out. “Get outta here, Tommy D. Take your fucking money and get outta here!” I pounded the table, his coffee cup crashing to the floor, shattering. “I’m sorry about your kid, but don’t you ever dare try to use my son to mess with me again. Understand? You want justice, well, fuck you! There isn’t any. None. Not anywhere in this world. Now get outta here! Get outta here!”

  When I calmed down, Tommy Delcamino was nowhere to be found. Felix, hand on my forearm, was standing next to me. He was peering up at me, his nearly black eyes filled with an odd cocktail of fear and admiration. Paolo, the dishwasher and busboy, was sweeping the broken shards of the coffee cup into a plastic dustpan. When I looked back at the table, I saw that the money and backpack were gone, but the newspaper article was still there.

  4

  (WEDNESDAY, EARLY MORNING)

  I sat in the driver’s seat, a howling wind buffeting the van as I waited on the 4:37 to pull into the station. We didn’t get many calls for pickups at Ronkonkoma this early in the morning, but weather delays in the Midwest had caused someone to switch to a Southwest flight out of MacArthur later that day. The station was a cold and lonely place at that hour, and when a winter wind kicked up, blowing litter around in whirling eddies, hurling pebbles and grains of road sand into your windows, it felt like the end of the world. Maybe it was. I felt so fucking guilty about how I’d treated Tommy D. that I found myself hoping so.

  I never used to be a guy who felt guilty much, mostly because I didn’t think I had that much to feel guilty about. People live their lives somewhere on a scale of Have-to-dos and Want-to-dos and I was always the kind of guy who turned have-tos into want-tos. When it snowed and I shoveled my driveway, I’d shovel my neighbors’ driveways, too. Not because I felt obliged to or because I thought I’d get some kind of payback, but because I wanted to. I’d had a happy nature once in spite of my miserable drunk of a dad and my shy, almost invisible mother.

  Maybe it was because I never wanted for much. It was my experience that the real name of the devil was “wanting.” I’d gotten those few things in life I did want: a loving family, a good job, a nice house. Simple things made me happy: watching a ball game, reading a book, sitting in the sun in my backyard. When you aren’t ambitious, when you don’t covet. When you keep your dreams simple and your grasp short, there’s not much to lie about, no need for scheming or deception. Absent that stuff, what is there to feel guilty about? I don’t know, until John Jr. died, I felt like I had my little piece of the world by the balls. I thought I understood the order in the universe. Turned out I understood nothing, let alone everything.

  As I sat, waiting for Mr. Lembeck’s train to show, I reread the newspaper clipping Tommy Delcamino had left behind. I didn’t know why I was reading it again except to punish myself some more for acting like such an asshole. Whether he knew about my son or not was beside the point. If anyone on the planet should have understood Tommy D.’s frustration or had empathy for him, it should have been me. I had been exactly where he was now: lost, guilty, and grieving. I wondered if Tommy D. had other family—a wife, maybe, brothers and sisters. I wondered if they had done what we had done when we found out the hurt doesn’t stop. That there is only you and your wife and your daughter. And somehow, blameless or not, you all wind up blaming each other and burning down everything you have because you have to do something with all the pain.

  One thing was true, Tommy hadn’t exaggerated about what they’d done to his kid. I could only imagine the mess those autopsy photos must have been. I wondered what it must have been like for Tommy D. to go identify his son. I’d been around the morgue enough to know the horror involved when a parent comes to identify a child. If there’s anything that’s wrong in the world by its very nature, it’s that—a kid in the ground before his parents. For that reason alone, I should’ve at least heard Tommy D. out.

  I knew the spot where they’d left his kid’s body. It was only about five minutes north of the Ronkonkoma station. That area around Nesconset and Lake Grove was full of these little wooded lots choked with poison ivy, prickly vines, and shrubs in the summer. Mean with bare, twisted limbs and fallen branches come the cold. Places where the little neighborhood kids went to build forts or explore, and their older brothers and sisters went to drink or get high or study anatomy. As was often the case, a man walking his dog found the kid’s body.

  There was a banging on the van door window that had nothing to do with the wind. I looked up to see a man’s angry face staring in at me. I looked beyond the face to see the train sitting in the station and noticed a few passengers fighting the wind and their exhaustion to get to their cars. I hopped out, opened the door for the rightfully angry Mr. Lembeck, and tossed his bags in the back of the van. There would be no tip for me at the end of this ride. That was okay. Mr. Lembeck couldn’t punish me any more than I was already punishing myself.

  5

  (WEDNESDAY, EARLY MORNING)

  Pulling up to the hotel, I noticed a car parked to the left of the main entrance. It was a car I didn’t want to see. Its presence could only mean trouble in one form or another.

  After unloading Mr. Lembeck’s bags and apologizing once again, I thought about driving off. But Lembeck needed help with his bags. Slava Podalak, our crazy night bellman from Warsaw, was nowhere in sight, so I carried the bags to registration. When I got there, Rita, who sometimes worked the night desk, welcomed Mr. Lembeck. As he looked down, reaching for his credit card and ID, Rita tilted her head toward the Full Flaps Lounge, mouthing, She’s in there.

  The lounge was dark, almost lightless, but I was as familiar with her shape as my own. She was half-asleep, curled up on a row of old airline seats that were part of the bar’s décor.

  “What’s up, Annie?” I asked my ex.

  She unfurled herself and stretched her long, graceful body. I tried not to look at her dark figure, but couldn’t help myself. For two plus decades, this woman had been the object of my love and desire. Since the day we got the call about John Jr., Annie and I had systematically taken each other apart. We’d ruined ourselves and our marriage, and we’d probably ruined ourselves for anybody else. I read once about this rare breed of wildcat, the Asian fishing cat, that were so ornery, so territorial, and such loners that they could only tolerate the presence of one of their own kind to mate. Even then, they often tried to kill each other after mating. That was us now, Annie and me. Every few months we’d find an excuse to get together to fight and then fuck our brains out. Then, afterward, we’d go back to our corners and wait for the bell to ring for the next round of war.

  Why did we do it? I used to think it was our way of remembering our son and how he came to be in the first place. Or it was our way to numb t
he pain, sex as novocaine. That wasn’t it. It was just another way to empty ourselves, a way to beat the remnants of love out of each other. Each time we walked away from those episodes, it felt like there was less of who we once had been. As I looked at her, I hoped that wasn’t why she was here. I wasn’t in the mood for any more punishment, self-inflicted or otherwise. Even in the dark, she could read my face.

  “Don’t worry, Gus,” she said, reaching into her bag for a box of Newports. “I’m not here for that.”

  I didn’t bother telling her she couldn’t smoke in the hotel. She wouldn’t’ve listened and to defy me would have only increased her pleasure in the act. She flicked the lighter and its flash framed Annie’s lovely face. She looked older now. Near defeat, not defeated. Her hair was still that beautiful shade of rich dark brown. Her eyes still hazel. Her nose, perfect as if the work of a sculptor, but her skin was etched with deep ragged lines around her eyes and at the corners of her mouth. The flame, I thought, made them seem worse. The tip of her cigarette glowed there between us in the dark like an accusation. Then she stood and blew the smoke into my face. I didn’t react.

  She strolled out of the lounge into the light of the lobby. Annie’s lean body cut through the air like an arrow. I followed at her heels, waiting for the hammer to drop. Slava had reappeared, but made himself scarce at the sight of my ex. He may not have known my story, yet he knew to avoid Annie and me. Rita and Mr. Lembeck were gone as well. Annie stopped, turned, and looked at me. Brushed her hand dismissively across the chest of my uniform jacket.

  “Aren’t you embarrassed by this job?”

  “It’s a job.”

  “God, I used to think you were so hot in your cop blues.”

  “I still get to wear a uniform,” I said, poker-faced, pointing at my Paragon Hotel jacket.