Only the Dead Know Brooklyn

by Chris Vola

He hoped that the happiness that had overwhelmed Jennifer the previous week, when she’d found out about her promotion, was still flowing through her. Otherwise this conversation was going to get ugly. “I’m sorry,” he said, those two words almost automatic reflex at this point, “but I’m not going to be able to make it to Erica’s thing. It isn’t just that I’ve been so busy. Something crazy has come up and I—”

  “No, I’m sorry,” she snarled, cutting him off. “The only crazy thing is that I keep wanting you to be a part of my life, that I keep thinking you could be something more than just a random hookup after I finish with my Brooklyn clients. I hope you have fun with your fucking day-trading or whatever you do, because it sure as hell seems like the only thing you’re capable of caring about.”

  “I’m not just a random hookup.”

  “Oh yeah?” she snapped, her voice rising steadily. “How many of my friends have you met? What can you tell me about my apartment that isn’t in any of the pictures I’ve shown you? When do I normally do my laundry? Where do I do my grocery shopping? Why do you think I get upset that every time we hang out it has to be within walking distance of your creepy apartment? Go ahead, answer any of those.”

  Ryan exhaled. “I met Lindsay that night we got pizza at Rosemary’s, but other than that, I don’t…” He paused, trying to think of something he could say to stop the attack.

  “You know what? Just stop. I don’t even care anymore. When we first started seeing each other I thought that the reason you didn’t want to come over was that you were married, that you were a player with a stable of other girls on speed dial, which is fine. That’s New York, I can deal with assholes. But you’re worse than that. You’re a weird, lonely coward, afraid of commitment, afraid to step outside what you know, to take the next step. I’ve never met someone who I wanted to be with as much as I do with you, someone who seemed genuine, chill, and fun, but now I can see it was all a waste of time. Unless you can make it to the bar tonight, it’s over. I don’t want to see you again.”

  Scrolling unconsciously through his e-mails while Jennifer talked, Ryan came across an automated reply, a confirmation of the brunch reservation he had made for them at two P.M. the following afternoon in DUMBO, near the Brooklyn end of the Manhattan Bridge.

  “I’ve been a shithead to you,” he said, “and you don’t deserve any of it. Just let me finish what I need to say and you can do whatever you want, delete my number, forget the last six months ever happened.”

  She sighed. “Fine. Go ahead.”

  “No, I’m not going to make it tonight. As much as I want to, I can’t help it. But if you meet me for brunch tomorrow, I promise I’ll tell you everything, the whole truth about me, why I can be so evasive, why I haven’t been able to go to your apartment. If you still don’t believe that I sincerely care about you, then that’s it, and I’ve earned that. At least give me this one last chance.”

  There was a long pause followed by a painful groan. “I guess I can be there,” she said, “but don’t be surprised if something crazy comes up at the last second.”

  He could feel her sarcasm drip through the speaker.

  “Thanks so much, you won’t regret this,” he said, but she had already hung up.

  Ryan slammed the phone onto the kitchen island, screen side down, heard the crunch of glass that was less satisfying than he’d imagined. He closed his eyes, waited a few seconds, and turned the phone over to inspect the damage.

  Through the spiderweb of cracks the image of Seamus glowed up at him, leering.

  He closed the laptop, left the phone on the table, walked to the couch, and dimmed the track lighting before slumping down, the weight of the day’s chaos pressing him into submission, immobilizing him. He turned on the TV. The head and shoulders of a police spokesperson filled the screen, her taut lips moving, reading a statement. Something about a young man in Gowanus who had been shot in the stomach by an undercover officer a few steps from the housing projects where he lived: “Paramedics rushed the twenty-one-year-old to Lutheran Medical Center, but doctors were unable to…”

  Ryan was asleep before she finished the sentence.

  4

  The rain was tapping against the window, blown sideways from the constant bursts of wind, relentless as always. From the rocking chair where he was sitting, he could hear the babble of the street below: squawking taxis, church bells, the bellowing of a ship’s horn. Everything faint and removed from the calmness of the tiny room on Grand Street that smelled of wood smoke, tobacco, and something sweeter. A Fred Astaire song was playing softly on the small RCA radio perched on the mantel above the fireplace, its slow tempo offset by the staccato punches of a sewing machine coming from across the room. He sighed contentedly, got up, and walked over to where she was sitting at the dining table, facing away from him, hemming a red and gold evening dress, her dark hair draped down past her nightgown-clad shoulders. She was singing softly along with the song, absorbed in her work. He moved behind her, ran his hands through her hair, pressed her shoulders gently. He leaned down to kiss her and Jennifer stopped sewing, turned her head to meet his, smiling until the skin and muscle suddenly started melting off her once-high cheekbones, pooling on the table and the dress in front of her until all that remained of her jaw was bone and cartilage, rotten and crawling with maggots and cockroaches, the hole that used to be her mouth still gargling out the lyrics in time with the radio—And I seem to find the happiness I seek, when we’re out dancing together cheek to cheek …

  * * *

  “Wake the fuck up, man! Come on!”

  The first thing Ryan noticed after he opened his eyes, as Frank prodded his chest with the barrel of a Glock 20 ten-millimeter pistol, was the blood. The fresh splatter stains that coated Frank’s neck and arms, interspersed with the bits of skull and brain matter that were plastered to his shirt like sticky kernels of pink and gray popcorn. And the overwhelming smell that filled the apartment—AB negative, all from the same person.

  As Ryan sprang up from the couch, fully alert and ready to defend himself, he saw something in the dim light that disturbed him far more than Frank’s clothing: the deeply furrowed lines that crisscrossed Frank’s forehead, his sunken but wide-open eyes darting crazily, the expression of a caged animal backed into a corner, coiling itself for one last desperate blitz before the inevitable slaughter.

  It was a level of fear that Ryan had never seen before, had never thought possible.

  Frank took off his gun’s safety catch. He started moving slowly around the apartment, pausing at the window. Shaken by a sudden tremor, he steadied himself on the ledge. “Jesus,” he muttered softly, after pulling himself together and peeking between the window blind’s slats. “When I came up and saw your door busted open, I thought they’d gotten to you already. And then when you were on the couch, sort of writhing around, I … this is bad, man.”

  “I’m fine,” Ryan said, walking past Frank into the kitchen, glancing at the microwave’s clock, which read 1:07 A.M. “I’m pretty sure I left my keys in my bedroom when I went to meet the donor, had to break in when I came back. I was going to have the super fix the door tomorrow. But more importantly, what the hell happened, Frank? And whose blood is that, Raj’s or Arianna’s?”

  “Raj,” Frank spat. “After I talked to you, the three of us went back to my place. I did some research, sent a few e-mails and found out some truly alarming stuff, made me believe that whatever’s happening is much bigger than I originally thought, much more than just Seamus, a chain reaction I didn’t think was even possible. I figured it would be best to talk to Natalia first, in person, see what she thought about it, and then call you and the others in for a council. It would be the first real one in what, forty-five years?”

  “Fifty-two,” Ryan said as he removed a tray of silverware from a drawer next to the stove and began prying the drawer’s false bottom open with a butter knife.

  Frank nodded, wiping a chunk of something off his arm and onto the floor. �
�Yeah, well, regardless, it’s been a while, probably too long. I called Natalia, made sure she was home, told Raj and Arianna to come with me because I figured it would be safer that way. We took the Beemer, Arianna driving, Raj riding shotgun, me in the back. They fired on us before we got out of the parking garage’s driveway. Two shots from two different angles, one bullet through the passenger-side window, one through the windshield. The first bullet passed through my neck, just a graze; it’s already healed. The second one hit Raj. A perfect head shot. This was some serious high-powered sniper shit, Ryan. These weren’t groupies. They were professionals.”

  “Who is ‘they’?” Ryan asked, lifting a Beretta M9 nine-millimeter pistol from the drawer, checking the ammo clip, “and do you think they’re trying to take us all out?”

  “I’m not completely sure,” Frank said, moving toward the apartment’s front door, “but I have some theories. What I do know is that it’s not safe here. We have to move now, and move fast. Arianna’s parked two blocks away. Natalia might be able to tell us something, if they haven’t gotten to her already. Grab whatever you need and let’s go.”

  “I’m good,” Ryan said.

  Frank was leaning against the wall next to the doorway, gun raised, craning his head to check for movement outside. He motioned for Ryan to follow and darted for the stairs.

  Ryan tucked the pistol under his belt and scanned the apartment, wondering for a second if it was the last time he would see it, what he was going to tell Jennifer if he did make it back. He shook the thoughts off, cleared his mind, and followed Frank into the hallway.

  5

  Arianna was waiting for them in the lobby near the bottom of the stairs, partially concealed in the poorly lit alcove reserved for the building’s mailboxes, her right hand hidden under a black Nets hoodie, clutching what looked, from its outline, like a large carving knife. When she stepped entirely under the lobby’s flickering tube lights, Ryan noticed the same distress boiling under her eyeliner-stained cheeks that Frank had shown earlier, but also more than a little relief that he and Frank were okay.

  “I’m sorry about Raj,” Ryan whispered while tucking the pistol under his belt, not knowing what else to say, not knowing if she and Raj had been anything more than just coworkers.

  Arianna nodded, let go of her weapon, and wiped most of the smudged makeup off her face. “Thanks. I’ll be fine. Better when we find the assholes that did this. I’m glad they didn’t get to you.”

  Frank was already at the lobby’s entrance, gun lowered at his side below the glass part of the door, scanning the street.

  “Looks quiet,” he said, his voice low, almost cracking. “The car’s parked east on Union, less than a block. We need to move fast.”

  Outside the building, the intersection of Nostrand Avenue and Union Street was mostly still, nothing out of the ordinary. A black restricted-license cab drove slowly by and a pair of men wearing white Muslim tunics walked into Crown Fried Chicken where a sleepy employee was reading a copy of AM New York, the free paper that was distributed on street corners and in subway stations. Luis and his folding-chair mafia had retired for the night. The nearest pedestrians were walking in the opposite direction, at least a block and a half away. First Frank, then Arianna and Ryan, turned onto Union Street in single file, speed-walking in the shadows formed by the sidewalk’s maple trees.

  Ryan could just make out the hood of Frank’s black BMW 7 Series sedan, parked a few dozen yards away, in the darkest midpoint between two streetlights. He remembered giving Frank a bunch of crap about the car when Frank had bought it a few years earlier, how gaudy and obvious it was for someone with Frank’s current business interests, the potential irony in getting detained not for being a 345-year-old freak of nature but for being a dreadlocked black dude getting chauffeured in a ninety-thousand-dollar car with twenty-four-inch black chrome rims and tinted windows only a rapper, athlete, or DEA agent could love, how Frank could barely even drive.

  The vehicle, as Ryan approached it, actually did look like a case of unmistaken identity, a drug deal gone horribly wrong. Bullet holes through the windshield, rear window, and rear passenger-side window, heavy scarring along the entire passenger side from a recent collision, the black outline of a body slumped against the rear driver’s-side window, as if sleeping.

  “A bit of a mess,” Frank said, stating the obvious, standing next to Ryan at the front passenger-side door as Arianna circled around to the driver’s side. “We didn’t want to leave him on the street. Ryan, you sit up front. Ari, do you remember how to get to Natalia’s?”

  Arianna fished a key fob out of her pocket and pressed a button that caused the headlights to flash. “Head south on Nostrand, then a left on Linden Boulevard, right?”

  Before Frank could respond, a gunshot rang out from across the street and Arianna’s body immediately slammed into the side of the car as if she’d been shoved, causing Raj’s corpse to topple on its side in the backseat. Mouth agape in shock, she let out a sound halfway between a gurgle and a wail and collapsed onto the concrete.

  The bullet from a second shot tore into the skin beneath Ryan’s neck and settled in his left shoulder blade, knocking him back a few feet. From the way the metal expanded after penetrating the muscle, he assumed it was a hollow-point bullet, probably fired from a .45 caliber cartridge. It had been almost eighty years since he’d been shot, when the owner of a drugstore had found him crouching over a nearly drained counter girl in the back room of the shop. But the shrapnel from the pharmacist’s pocket-sized pistol had been like a bee sting compared to the ammunition that was currently lodged in his body, being attacked and dissolved by whatever regenerative processes had kept him young for so long, faster than usual because of his recent feeding.

  Ryan didn’t feel any pain. He barely heard Frank—squatting next to him, yelling at him to duck down behind the car. Instead, he was consumed by an animal-like rage that caused his entire body to throb, that sharpened and focused his senses. He quickly scanned the area and pinpointed a dark figure sprinting on the sidewalk across the street almost two blocks away, running in the opposite direction.

  Ryan kicked away Frank’s hands, which were trying to pull him down, and bolted down the street after the shooter. In a few seconds he was running parallel with a pale, flabby kid with a wispy goatee who couldn’t have been older than nineteen or twenty, wearing a black tracksuit and red baseball cap, separated from Ryan only by the row of parked cars. Noticeably winded, the kid fired several desperate shots at Ryan while trying to maintain his pace, until his foot caught on the wire of an empty tree planter and he crashed onto the sidewalk, sprawled out on his back. Not breaking stride, Ryan leapt over a Honda Accord and was on top of his prey in a moment. The kid fired one last shot into Ryan’s stomach and Ryan ripped the gun away, taking most of the kid’s trigger finger with it.

  A part of Ryan knew he should stop, that he should let the kid live, at least until he and Frank could figure out what his motives were, who he was working for, but the all-consuming anger, the immediate and uncontrollable desire to eliminate any threat, was far too powerful.

  “Don’t, don’t, don’t…” the kid kept repeating, convulsing, his soft, double-chinned face frozen in the same grimace of shock and horror as Arianna’s.

  Ryan plunged two fingers and a thumb, bowling-ball-style, into the kid’s eye sockets and mouth and rearranged them in one brutal twist.

  Ryan stood up, wiped his hand on his pants, looked down at the face that was no longer a face, and listened to the night that, besides a distant horn blare and a few other less distinct traffic noises, had gone completely silent. Whatever primal instinct had taken over after he’d been shot was now leaving his body in a powerful gush, leaving only a throbbing soreness in his gut and shoulder, an intense dizziness, and a liquid warmth expanding across the front of his shirt.

  As he reached out to steady himself against the Honda, his vision narrowed, then blurred; his knees gave out and he crumpled to
the ground, suddenly paralyzed by exhaustion. He heard a woman’s screams coming from one of the upper floors of the nearest building, the squeals of multiple sets of brakes. A fast-approaching siren.

  But as he stared up at the light-polluted sky, none of it mattered.

  Not the swirl of neon blue and red that would soon be surrounding him, the frantic voices demanding answers. Not the missed calls and texts from Jennifer that would trickle to nothing once she made herself stop caring about him. Not Frank, who was shaking him, then pleading for him to get up, then finally dragging him across the pavement toward the battered BMW.

  There was only the night air, pulsing auburn and purple in time with the energy exiting his pores, lifting him up and calling him home.

  It was the closest he’d felt to being alive in almost a century.

  6

  They sat in silence for a long time, absorbed in their thoughts, in the heaviness of the moment.

  Frank drove south for about two miles on Nostrand Avenue before turning onto Church Avenue, a mostly nondescript intersection flanked by a Walgreens and a McDonald’s in what might have been the northern end of Ditmas Park or the western end of East Flatbush, depending on the latest real estate trends.

  Ryan was staring at the hole in the windshield that was on a level with his forehead, reflexively rubbing the hole in his shirt just below his sternum where the bullet had entered his abdominal cavity. Where there was now only smooth skin. He could tell from every swerve of the car that Frank was constantly taking his eyes off the road, checking the rearview and side-view mirrors, Ryan assumed, for any indication that they were being followed. But there was nothing to suggest that the shooter had been a part of a team, and if he had been, his collaborators were doing an expert job of remaining invisible. And attracting any police attention seemed unlikely at this point. Every cruiser in the vicinity had most likely been summoned to Crown Heights as backup in the aftermath of the shooting, creating roadblocks that they had somehow evaded, though Ryan couldn’t exactly say how; the immediate details were still more than a little fuzzy.