The Wolves of Fairmount Park

by Dennis Tafoya

  “You bill me, I’ll write you a check.”

  Rogan smiled, and it was a terrible thing to see. “The clock is ticking.”

  “Why you keep saying that? Why does this bighead freak keep saying that about the clock? Goddammit.”

  “ ’Cause it’s true, Darnell. The DA is going to indict someone, and I mean right now, tonight. She doesn’t play. She doesn’t ask twice. Dead children and a gunfight and people known to be in the drug business? Meaning you, Darnell. Someone is going to jail.” Danny sat back and pointed at the clock.

  Big John said, “Tick, tock.”

  Darnell pulled up hard on the cuffs around his wrists, clattering the steel chain. “Get this big Irish mope the fuck out of my face.”

  “He’s doing you a favor, Darnell. When Ivan sat in that same chair, Big John helped him, too.”

  “You know Ivan?”

  “Everyone knows Ivan, Darnell.” Danny lifted a file and leafed through it, pointing to things Darnell couldn’t see. “You think Ivan only got fourteen months because the judge liked his face?”

  “Now you are telling me some bullshit. Ivan never talked to no DA.”

  Big John leaned in again, even closer, so that his sour, coffee-tinged breath could hit Darnell square in the face. “Everybody talks.”

  Danny smiled, pointed at John again. “There you go.” He tapped the open file as if it were proof of the truth of John Rogan’s words. “Ivan gave up two guys from Kensington who were moving dope for the Nigerians.” Who knew, it might even be true. “And whoever tells the story first wins, Darnell. That’s how it works.”

  “You got the wrong motherfucking guy. You need to go out and talk to someone else.”

  “No, we don’t need anyone else. We got a house full of suspects. Between you and Trey and Pook and poor Marcus, shot dead on your mom’s porch? We got plenty of suspects. So, no, we’re not talking to anyone else. We got the murder gun, and you have some hard fucking choices to make now. Who is Trey to you? Not family. He’s not even a cousin.”

  Danny slid closer to Darnell. “Man, whoever pulled the trigger on those kids is going away forever. Forever.” Darnell Burns looked down, slumping, and John looked at Danny and waggled his eyebrows. He reached behind him and grabbed a yellow legal pad and put it on the table and uncapped a pen.

  Danny was quiet, serious. “Was it a mistake? Of course. No one thinks those kids got shot on purpose. A couple of dumb-ass kids in the wrong neighborhood when those lowlife Nortes were being dealt with. By Trey King.”

  “Trey did that?”

  Danny said, “You didn’t send him.”

  “I never sent Trey to kill no Nortes.”

  John raised his eyebrows at Danny. Was this kid dense or honest-to-God confused?

  “Then, man, your conscience is clear.” He smiled and pointed at the gun. “This gun is in your house, but it’s Trey’s prints on it. Trey, acting on his own? Getting ahead of himself, maybe trying to impress you? Or Ivan? You can’t be held responsible if someone you know does something stupid, right? We have a little talk, make everyone feel good about you cooperating—”

  “I’m no snitch.”

  “No, no, no. Nobody is snitching, Darnell. But why take the weight for something you had nothing to do with? End up doing thirty fucking years? Just ’cause you happen to invite somebody into your mother’s house for pancakes turns out to be the world’s biggest dumb-ass? Motherfucker shoots two white children? Motherfucker shoots the son of a police? Motherfucker throws down on a SWAT team when they come? Like to get your mother shot?”

  “If Trey shot them kids, it didn’t have shit to do with me or my business.”

  “That’s right. This ain’t about loyal or disloyal, Darnell. This is about smart or stupid. Darnell, you’re the smart one. Ivan might be the face, but you’re the brain. Everybody in the neighborhood knows that.” He had to keep looking at Darnell. If he’d looked up at John, he’d have had trouble keeping his poker face. “But maybe Trey said something to you? Gave you like an indication of his state of mind?”

  Darnell Burns looked beat. He lifted his hands again futilely, the chain rattling. “Trey?”

  “This is what it’s like to be in charge, Darnell. You have to make the hard calls. You have to know when someone has to go down so the rest of the team can make it. Ivan knew, he made his choice. I know it’s tough, ’cause it all falls to you. It’s just you, and us, and the DA, and the ticking clock. ’Cause you’re the smart one.”

  John reached one meaty fist down, holding the pen out to Darnell. “Be smart now.”

  Orlando walked Pechin Street like it was the deck of a ship in a storm. Headlong, he tilted in the direction of his movement, his heavy head pointing the way and somehow pulling him along toward home. The houses seemed to lean in and then away as he lurched, one hand cushioning his aching ribs as he squinted into the orange sodium night. The air was warm, the streets shining with a film of greasy water under black clouds that raced toward a thin blade of white moon.

  He turned the corner at the end of his block and stopped, canted his head, and tried to count windows, looking for the lit shade that would tell him Zoe was home, which he both wanted and didn’t. He wanted to feel her thin, hot arms around him, but he didn’t want to see her eyes when she took in how beaten in he was. He forced his eyes open wide, felt the stiff resistance of his gummed, bruised lids.

  He was afraid there was a calculus in the way she looked at him, measurement along the arc of his trajectory, and he felt there would be a point she’d pull back, float away as he picked up downward momentum. She’d retreat to some safer place, he thought, and he’d have to be ready for that. Maybe she’d go back to her parents out on the Main Line, maybe just on to someone with a less desperate need for the blackness at the center of everything.

  At the same time he felt disloyal for even thinking she’d cut him loose. She was tougher than he was, harder, carried a straight razor and would step in, ready to fuck up whoever looked ready to get in his shit. He wandered the world and she backed him up. He’d get caught up in dreams, lose days in watching the movement of people along the blocks, the repetitions and codes of the jugglers and whores, the runners and bagheads. Collected the stamp bags, the little glassine decks from the corners that had intricate little logos in wild colors; something about the underworld expressing itself plain in the light of day that set off strange harmonics in his head, as if he’d found pieces of a wrecked UFO at Third and Indiana.

  He was slowing, painfully lifting his head on his stiff neck, when he heard a car door open. He had time to wrench his head toward the street, to take in the big man moving fast, his face contorted with rage and seamed with livid cuts, the lines of the wounds on his temple and cheek black in the light from the streetlamps.

  Collins lunged up at Orlando where he stood balanced on the curb, jamming the short-barreled pistol against Orlando’s neck and tensing his finger on the trigger so that Orlando stopped, his body held in a stiff line that arced away from the outstretched arm.

  “I wanted to ask you questions.” Collins breathed through his mouth, his lips flexing as the air moved through so that he seemed like an alien struggling for breath in an unfamiliar atmosphere. “You could have been at least some help to that poor, bereaved man before you died curled up in some junkie squat.”

  Orlando said, “I don’t know—” but Collins shook his head and pulled back on the hammer with a dull click that Orlando felt through his collarbone where the gun was jammed into a hollow at the side of his neck.

  “I don’t even care,” said the older man as he looked up into the sky as if judging the lateness of the hour.

  “A few years ago, when I was on the street with the other brain-dead cops? When they still thought I was one of them? There was junkies started showing up dead. From the fentanyl, remember that? Shutting down their lungs.” He licked his lips.

  “Me? I thought great, let them go. But the brass? They’re going to do a p
ublic service, let the junkies know. Don’t do the fentanyl. They show them. On fucking TV! On fucking TV they show the powder, show the labels on the bags, tell the dumb-asses to stay away.”

  Orlando closed his eyes and tried to shift to the side so when Collins pulled the trigger, the bullet might pass through his shoulder. Collins reached out with his other hand and put it on Orlando’s head and grabbed a handful of his short blond hair and pulled him forward, angling the pistol inward, toward the center of his body.

  Collins kept talking, jumping back and forth between anger and a sad patience. “So what happened? Do you remember?”

  Orlando shook his head, then angled it up to see into the mad, bright eyes catching the moonlight.

  “I remember. They lined up. Around the fucking block.”

  Orlando could hear him panting, a whistling through the older man’s thin lips, and he could smell the curdled sweetness of the wine on his breath and the meaty smell of the blood that ran down his ruined cheek into his collar.

  “They wanted it. The junkies. They came from Jersey, from Wilmington. From fucking . . . Scranton in junkie caravans. They wanted it. They wanted it so bad the dealers couldn’t keep up. They’d bang up in their cars and pass out. Run off the road. Hit fucking trees half a block from where they scored. The dealers ran out of it. They were putting phony labels on the regular shit so the stupid bastards would think they were getting the poison.” Collins moved closer, pulling Orlando’s head down and moving close enough to whisper.

  “Know what it was called, that poison dope?” Collins shook Orlando’s head hard, pulling his hair, and Orlando grabbed at the muscled forearm. “Of course you do, you probably did some of it. ‘Die Trying.’ How you like that? How fucking perfect is that? That was when I saw it, the insanity of it. And I stopped being a cop right then and there. When people like you run toward their own death? Line up for it? What can I do but give them what they want?”

  He started to pull the trigger. Orlando felt the increased tension in Collins’s hand and grabbed the extended arm with both hands, and it was lack of balance and general weakness that saved him. He fell off the high curb as the pistol made its hollow, concussive pop under his left ear, the blast from the muzzle deafening him and blowing bits of his jacket and shirt collar over the sidewalk behind him.

  He pulled desperately at the man’s arm, clawing for the gun and screaming with the pain in his ear as he went down and Collins was pulled down with him as Orlando fell between the bumpers of two parked cars. Collins grabbed uselessly at the wet, cracked-open rear of the Volvo and went down hard, his arm pinned under Orlando and giving way with a hard snap as the bone parted between his wrist and elbow.

  Collins screamed and Orlando grabbed the rubber bumper of the car and pulled himself up, the pistol clattering out of the older man’s useless hand and disappearing under a rusted-out Caprice with a bumper sticker that read FLYERS HAT TRICK ’76. Lights had begun to come on, and Orlando saw some curtains opening to white, annoyed faces. Collins tried to sit up, moaning and cradling his arm while Orlando staggered back, trying without success to pull himself up straight.

  It was then he saw the blood, a jet of dark crimson liquid that had spattered his hands and the Volvo’s wet windows and left a dark streak in the ruins of his once-white shirt. He’d been shot. He put his hand over his shoulder and finally felt it, the adrenaline that had been protecting him from the shock of it leaking away and a dull ache at his collarbone under his left ear turning into an insistent whine and a bright pain flaring in his neck and shoulder.

  He had time to take a few steps toward home, to register the whine of sirens somewhere, the sobs of the big man trying to pull himself up from the curb with one good hand. To think of Zoe standing at the mirror, putting on lipstick, running a brush through her black hair and smearing shadow over one brown eye. Wearing a red top, listening to a Cuban song, slow and sensual in a way that made her move her hands with an exaggerated, liquid grace. He saw more—Bob and LaDonna dancing in a dark space, holding each other and swaying; his brother and his wife in the dim lights of a hospital room. Machines humming and green LEDs, Kathleen asleep curled in an orange chair and Brendan at the window, staring out at the night. The Irish guy from the dope house standing at the canal in Manayunk and looking at the water, his hidden eyes blank with terror. Orlando dropped to his knees, lifting his bloody hands to see them one last time. Then he went over hard, skidding down into a widening pool of his own blood so that the last thing in his eyes was the bright slice of moon reflected, inches away, white against the spreading black.

  CHAPTER

  8

  There was a press conference, with Danny standing by the Captain and pictures of Trey and Darnell and pictures of the murder gun and the crime scene splashed with blood. The Captain bounced his hand on Danny’s shoulder and flashbulbs went off, and the city’s children could sleep safe and order was restored. It all made Danny, sweating in the lights, unaccountably tense.

  Worst moment: when they brought Francine Parkman in, and Jesus Christ, who would even do that? He put out his hand, her eyes bright with whatever they were pumping her full of to keep her upright and walking. He took her cold fingers and felt a repeating tremor, like she was being electrocuted, a shuddering he swore he could hear in her rattling bones.

  Then someone walked her away and he didn’t know where to look, but there was a hot sensation on the back of his neck, something he hadn’t had since he was a kid and his father had taken him to some hobby shop out in the suburbs somewhere and caught him stealing a little plastic figure from a display. Danny had watched the tacky strings of separating glue lengthen as he pulled the fine, hand-painted man up to his eye and was wondering silently at the perfect little daubs of paint on the eyes and lips when he became aware of his father moving fast, crowding him, pulling the plastic man roughly out of Danny’s hands and sticking it hard down in the oblong shadow where it had been moored. His old man didn’t say anything, didn’t make a face or shake his head—but the violence in his motions, the rough way he’d taken the soldier and quick, panicked way he’d pushed the little man back into the glue, made Danny back away, and the terrible feeling, that guilt, that spreading circle of heat on the back of his neck as if a feverish hand were placed there, that was the feeling he had watching the mother of the murdered boy being moved down the hall and away from the lights.

  Brendan’s partner, Luis, didn’t like mess. He had been a cop for nineteen years and knew it wasn’t about catching bad guys or pulling the gun like on TV; it was about keeping the noise down, moving people along, and cleaning up the damn mess. People called the cops when their neighbors came home drunk, when they locked their keys in their cars, when the UPS truck blocked their driveway again, when they couldn’t handle their own goddamn kids. They called from vacation houses in Bermuda because they thought they left the gas on or a window open. People called cops the same way they called plumbers or locksmiths or doctors or their mothers. When they just didn’t know what the fuck else to do.

  So he had never liked any of this shit with Brendan’s kid brother. His partner’s brother was a junkie, that was old news now. Getting locked up for petty theft, for being on the nod in some nice store and generally freaking people out. Sure, at first Brendan would run over to see if he could help, get the kid out of whatever jam he was in and turn him loose with a kick in the ass. Come back to the car looking embarrassed and pissed off, and Luis would wave it off. What the hell could you do? That was family. Anyway it only happened a couple times and then Brendan stopped going. No one had to tell him anything; he just knew enough to know the kid was his own worst enemy and there was nothing to be done about it.

  But now this thing was all blown up. Brendan’s kid had been hurt, and now the brother was upstairs shot, and here they were, standing again in the fucking emergency room, Brendan hot, looking like he wanted to kill somebody, and that fucking lunatic Collins cuffed to a bed in an observation room while the
y waited to ship him out to Northeast Philly. In there raving and clanking his chains, one arm in a cast.

  Luis knew who Collins was, remembered all the bullshit that had happened when Brendan had seen Collins tuning up some poor junkie on Indiana, hitting the kid over and over. Collins saying later the kid had gone for him, which was a fucking joke. Luis had looked the other way and kept his mouth shut, but it had bugged Brendan and he’d said something in the hearing of an inspector and the whole thing got out of hand and then Collins, the asshole, had gotten written up. It hadn’t cost him the badge, not by itself. The fact that Collins was a nut, the fact that he came in drunk, that was the shit that got him yanked. The thing Brendan and Luis had seen—Collins banging the poor junkie’s head against a parked car—that wasn’t the first time or the last time Collins had gone off on someone.

  It was the way things were. Everyone stood by and watched while somebody went off the deep end, everyone thinking, Somebody should do something about this guy, and then when somebody finally did, like Brendan, everybody looked sideways at him, and to Collins they all said, “Yeah, that was a bum rap,” like Brendan should have kept his mouth shut. Even though they were all glad the crazy, drunk fuck was gone.

  Not gone enough, of course. He had just moved to South Jersey and pretended to be some kind of private investigator, that’s what the detectives told him and Brendan. Drank and got even more bitter, and if it was possible even more crazy, until he saw a chance to come back and fuck with Brendan and his family.