But then comes a voice that’s different from Daly’s.
“Richard!”
I don’t have to pull my eyes away from Chris to know that Aviva is now inside the basement with us. I keep the pistol barrel pressed against Chris’s skull. He’s just staring at me, into me. He seems neither frightened nor angry. He just seems resolved. As if he wants me to pull the trigger. Or maybe he believes the power of the Great Society can protect him under all circumstances. Even from a bullet.
A hand on my shoulder. “Richard, please…You can’t do this.”
I wipe a tear from my cheek with the back of my free hand. “I can. For what that little girl must have suffered.”
“She’s gone. You know that now. Chris will go to prison and he’ll suffer…in prison.”
More footsteps coming down the basement stairs. Heavy footsteps. I feel my left arm grow heavy, until I begin to lower the pistol. Until I slap it to the dirt floor.
That’s when Daly reaches down, grabs hold of it.
“Good, Richard. Good,” Aviva utters. “You did the good thing.”
I wipe my face once more, look back up at Chris. He’s smiling again. But not at me. “Jonathan,” he whispers a half second before the explosion that takes off the right side of his skull.
When Chris Parker drops dead, he falls face-first onto Christina’s red dress. His young blood pools from his head, soaks into the raw earth.
Aviva screams and drops to her knees.
The police drag Jonathan to the floor, wrestle the automatic away from him, cuff him. He does not resist. Why they allowed him out here after killing Okey, Doc Robinson, and Erin, I have no idea. While Daly reads the navy man his rights, I stare down into the hole. I see a deep, dark blackness. It is blacker than my soul and it reflects the image of my own face.
Outside the basement I sit on a log. A blanket covers my shoulders and head. An EMT placed it there for me. Aviva stands off to the side. She’s smoking. I’ve never known her to smoke in the few months I’ve been with her. Jonathan is being led by the police through the woods to the Five Rivers parking area where the APD and the state police have set up an HQ. Or so I’m told. No doubt, the local media are also using the place as a staging area for their nightly news broadcasts.
Chief Daly stands over me, gut hanging out, red face all the redder while he chews me out for that “little stunt.” He tells me he can arrest me for breaking with procedure and leading Chris to the basement, never mind pulling a gun on him.
But with all that out of the way, he takes a knee. Painfully.
“Unofficially,” he says in a far softer voice, “I understand what you did, and why you did it.” Setting his hand on my knee, squeezing it. “Forensics will do their thing with that little girl’s clothing. Same for the other remains. They will be treated with the utmost respect. After that, they’ll be released to the families for burial.”
I stare at his hand resting on my knee. Nod. It’s precisely when my built-in shit detector speaks to me, revealing the sad truth.
“Bowman knew, didn’t he?” I say.
He allows his hand to slip off. “Excuse me?” the red-faced cop says.
“That’s why he killed himself. Not because he was in love with Joan. Not because he paid off O’Connor. Not even because of what Chris did to his lover’s face. But because he knew that when the truth came out about Chris, it would inevitably lead to all these deaths, especially Christina’s. Peter Parker knew all about Chris, what he had done. So did Joan. They tried to hide it by paying off Bowman. You got word of it last week when you left that phony note in place of the real one.”
Daly stands. He tries to talk, but stammers. Cops take care of their own. Especially blood brothers. Half-blood brothers, to be exact.
“You and Bowman are brothers. And your brother was bankrupt when he discovered how Christina Riley truly died at the hands of Chris and the rest of those Society cult freaks. He took Peter Parker’s money to keep quiet. You knew about it and you played dumb, but not too dumb. You made sure that your brother knew that you could blow the whistle on him at any moment. No wonder you allowed Jonathan to be in the right place at the right time. So you could kill everyone off before they faced a court of law. Big brother Jonathan knew what was happening the whole time. That’s what he meant when he told me that his kid brother wasn’t always evil. The Society made him evil.”
Daly stares at me with gray eyes colder than the sky. “You’ve had a rough day,” he whispers. “Maybe it’s time you stopped talking.”
By now the blue uniforms have surrounded us, including a plainclothes cop or two.
“What’d you do, Daly? Make your brother commit half his pension to you? Up your own retirement by fifty percent? Or is that just for starters?”
Daly smiles, but he isn’t pleased. Not by a long shot. He takes a look around at all the cops staring him down. I don’t have to say another word for them to know what I’m saying is spot on, or at least close enough to the truth. They probably suspected it all along.
One young cop with a baby face steps forward. “What he’s saying, Captain Daly, is it true?”
Daly exhales. “If I made a private arrangement with my late brother,” he says, “that’s his business and mine.”
And then it comes to me. Like a flash of bright white light. “Check his sidearm, kid,” I say to the young cop. “I bet you dollars to doughnuts it’s been discharged in the past seventy-two hours. I can also bet shit-for-brains never replaced the spent cartridge he used on his own brother.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Daly huffs. He turns away, starting for the woods.
But all it takes to stop him is for me to stick my left leg out. The big captain stumbles, drops like a big, dead oak tree, and just as loud.
The baby-faced young cop handcuffs him, begins reciting the Miranda.
I stand, just as the bagged body of Chris Parker is being lifted out of the basement. For his sake, I can only hope that he makes it to heaven before the devil knows he’s dead.
But then, just as quickly, I take it all back.
I’m standing at a long wooden bar inside a downtown juke joint called The Underground. The place is empty, except for Tony, the owner and bartender, and a rock band that’s setting up its equipment on the small stage. Drums, bass guitar, and electric guitar. The band’s name is stenciled in big black letters on the bass drum head. Black Cat Elliot. Punk rock for old people. Or so say the posters Scotch taped to the walls of the old, dark bar.
I’m on my second beer, a fresh shot of Jack sitting in front of me. My ankle still hurts, but the shots are anesthetizing the pain. For the past hour, I’ve been trying to erase the memory of what happened to Steve Ferrance inside that basement, but the vivid brain-video of it all just won’t go away. His upside-down-hanging body. His nakedness. The axe in Robinson’s hands. The swinging of the axe…
Is there evil in this world? Does it really exist? Is it a part of the human condition? Or is it really Satan-made? Is it something we must accept as human beings, or can we fight the demon with all our might? The answer is about as simple and uncomplicated as the fleeting memory of a dream.
But I suppose there’s good, too. People who want to do good. People who want to help other people. People who care. My dad once told me about a woman and a man he met in a park in Los Angeles. He was on shore leave from the navy. He was wandering the park, frustrated that he was too young to buy beer. This nice couple had been watching him. They offered to buy the beer for him. My dad remembered that the couple was about his own parents’ age. They seemed sad and, even though they were together, they seemed very much alone in the world. They bought him a quart of beer and asked if they could sit and talk to him while he drank it. It was only after he left them back in the park that he realized that they must have had a son, and that he must have died in the war. He didn’t know for sure, but his gut instinct told him it was true. They were heartbroken, but good people. Having lost someone, they now on
ly wanted to do some good.
They wanted to make someone happy.
I stare down at my drinks, and somehow I feel the bullet in my brain. It’s not pain that I feel, but a real presence, the same way some people will sense their imminent death. I know it’s coming, waiting for me. I know it will happen when I least expect it. But then, isn’t that the way it is for us all? Who really knows when his time is up? The point is to be good until that time comes. The point, as I see it, is to seek out the truth.
I reach into my back pocket, pull out an old newspaper photograph that I printed off my computer just this morning. It’s a photo that I had to blow up before all the faces in it were revealed at least enough for me to positively identify them. It’s a photo of Christina’s mom, dirty dancing. It’s one of the pictures that the whole world picked up on and that sealed her fate. I stare down at the people surrounding the miniskirted woman on the colorfully lit dance floor. There’s a young man dancing behind her. Only a small portion of his face is visible. But he’s tall and wiry. His hair is dark and thick. He’s well dressed and looks like a million bucks, even if one day the truth will reveal that he doesn’t have a pot to piss in.
It’s a nineteen-year-old Christopher Parker.
The other attractive young woman pressed up against Christina’s mom is also wearing a short, tight skirt, an even tighter wife-beater T that bears the word “Pink” on the front across ample breasts. You can make out only a portion of her face, but I also have no doubt about it.
The young woman is Erin.
In the background, seated at the bar, are four men to whom, under different circumstances, I might not have given a second glance. Some of the men are far older than the young people cutting it up on the dance floor. Unless you were looking for them, you wouldn’t pay them the slightest attention. But to me, Doc Robinson, Maxwell Okey, Chief Daly, and, standing off to the side, an angry Jonathan Parker are plainly obvious. The photograph was taken in the summer, not a week before little Christina was kidnapped by the Great Society and killed. Why they chose to set up Megan Riley by seducing her, I don’t know. Why they simply didn’t snatch up her daughter, Christina, when given the chance and be done with it, I also don’t know. But if I had to guess, it must have meant something for Chris to know he had the power to seduce the mother of the child he would hand over to the Great Society. It isn’t all that different from what he did to Robinson, from the way he teased the vet, and from the way he played with the man’s emotions. Played with them so effectively, in fact, that he was able to convince Robinson to take a fireman’s axe to his parents’ heads. That’s the kind of seductive power Chris Parker possessed. And to this day, I have no idea how many innocents were abducted and killed before or after Christina. I only know that now there will be no more victims, now that Chris and the Society—the collection of psychopathic serial killers—has been effectively disbanded, the two remaining members, Jonathan and Daly, currently under suicide watch in separate cells in the Albany County Jail.
My mobile rings.
I feel it vibrating inside the pocket of my leather jacket. I stuff the picture back inside my jacket pocket and at the same time pull the phone out. The number displayed is my ex-wife’s. I punch Send, and put the phone to my ear.
“Moonlight.”
“Dad!”
It’s the Bear. My heart lifts, my eyes immediately fill.
“Jeez, dad, where ya’ been? When can I come for a visit? I’m getting As in school. Mom said you’d be real happy. When can I come home for a visit, Dad? Dad, you there?”
“Yeah, Bear,” I say, through a tight throat. “I’m right here, killer. God, I miss you.”
“So when can I come?”
“Hang on a sec, Bear!”
Pulling a twenty from my pocket, I set it down on the bar. I shoot Tony a wink, turn, pull the collar up on my leather jacket, and head out the front door into the cold dark, neon-lit night. As I pass by the big bar window, I glance over my right shoulder and see Tony down my shot and dump the beer in the sink. He slips the twenty into his pocket instead of the till. Good old Tony.
I walk the city street alone, the cell phone pressed up against my ear, the beautiful sound of my son’s voice coming to me all the way from sunny California. Sure, I think, there’s good in the world after all. The Bear proves it. The Bear is my son, and I love him. The Bear means I’m not alone. Not really.
“Have Mommy pack your stuff, Bear,” I tell him. “I think it’s time you came home for a while.”
Photograph by Laura Roth, 2012
Vincent Zandri is the best-selling author of Godchild, The Remains, Moonlight Falls, The Concrete Pearl, Blue Moonlight, Moonlight Rises, and Scream Catcher. He is also the author of the best-selling digital shorts Pathological and Moonlight Mafia. The New York Post called his novel The Innocent “[s]ensational…masterful…brilliant!” He has worked as a foreign correspondent and freelance photojournalist for RT, GlobalSpec, and IBTimes, among others. He lives in New York.
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