I was driving fast while the hood spit orange smoke. The rusty stink of burning oil filled the car. I watched the speedometer needle quiver upward, eighty-five, ninety, ninety-five.
The ice cream trucks ignored oncoming traffic, swerving around startled drivers, coming up on both sides like homicidal bookends, and smashing me in the middle. The Lincoln bucked and rocked, metal-on-metal echoing monstrously through the subterranean tunnel as I stomped on the brakes, ripped the car into reverse, and blew backward, away from the tinkling killers. One hand on the wheel, the other arm spread across the seat as I gaped through the back window, I wove wildly away from the cars that came up behind me, horns braying, until the mouth of an alley presented itself. I hit the brakes again, narrowly avoiding a moving van that rocketed past by inches, and flew into a murky dead end. In front of me was a short barrier, not much higher than a speed bump, where the street ended, literally—the other side was a suicidal drop of thirty feet to the next, deeper level of Lower Wacker, or “Lowest Wacker,” as the natives called it. But then it didn’t matter since the driver’s-side window exploded around me. Steely hands clamped around my neck and dragged me from the Lincoln in a jumble of punches to my head; me kicking and connecting, hearing the breath leaving something’s body. I dropped to my knees and scrabbled for the Lincoln but was dragged back by an ankle, shoved into the back of one of the trucks and thrown to the floor. It was a pair of them, their hands in constant motion—batting at me, pinning me down—and in the feeble glow of a dome light I saw two things clearly—Teardrop’s red eyes brimming with hatred, and the steely point of a hypodermic needle before it bit my arm.
The world grew feathery soft as hot pinpricks peppered my neck and face.
My arms were dense and useless as wet sandbags, and I blinked heavily at four crimson eyes watching and waiting. “Mi Belleza” was whispered in my ear, the rotten scent of a decaying tongue finding my nose, drawing me back, and then, “Te llevaste mi Belleza, y ahora voy a tomar tu cerebro.” My brain, trying to shake itself awake, filtered the words through Fep Prep Spanish—“You took my Beauty, and now I will take your brain”—as my eyes fluttered and my temples grew feverish. I lifted a sluggish hand, brushing at what felt like a wire, and heard Teardrop warn the other creature, “She’s moving.”
“She’ll be comatose soon,” it replied. “Juan said it would take two minutes.”
“Just be careful. Juan’s not always right. Él no es Dios,” Teardrop said coldly.
He’s not God, I translated silently. Juan . . . is not God. Juan is a Spanish name.
“She’s trying to talk,” Teardrop said.
“Hallucinating,” the creature said, and I heard fingers on a keyboard. “I’ll check the electrodes. Blood should be flowing through them by now.”
Spanish is the language spoken . . . in Argentina, I thought. The skin at my temples twisted beneath sharp metal pins, warmth oozed across my forehead, and my eyes popped open.
“She’s awake!” Teardrop said.
“It’s not poss—” the other creature said as I blinked once. The flame in my gut roared into a cold blue conflagration, and with every living ounce of my being, I willed the electricity to find the gold flecks in my eyes. It was instantaneous, the lightning bolt snaking through my body, racing for my brain, and I grabbed and yanked what was nearest to me, the silver ice cream cone dangling from the creature’s neck. Its red eyes bulged with shock, my blue eyes radiated a furious calm, and I saw red wires attached to my forehead trailing to a laptop where lines of letters and numerals like hieroglyphics flitted across a screen. In the next second it went blank, my hand began to sizzle, and I turned to see the creature’s eyes rolled back in its head, its black tongue flopping like a catfish out of water. Voltage crackled through my body, into my hand, and through the conductive silver cone and chain that hung from the creature’s neck, electrocuting it. All I had to do was let go and it might live. But it had tried to infiltrate my brain, and now I wanted to kill it. I’d fooled the other creature on the bridge into drowning itself, but it was different now—I needed to murder this one with my own hands. The muscles in the creature’s lean white face rippled, the skin at its neck popped with translucent bubbles, and its body began to vibrate. Gripping the silver cone with all of my strength, I turned my gaze on Teardrop and smiled, just a little, the look on its face not one of horror but surprise. It was obviously aware of ghiaccio furioso and had experienced the electricity firsthand when I nearly crushed its cheekbone, but it must’ve thought I’d be unconscious before the voltage occurred.
Teardrop pointed its gloved hand at me like a gun and leaped from the truck.
With a shudder, the other creature stopped moving.
A final sour gust of air leaked from between its lips, it wilted and fell forward, and I shoved the thing away from me.
The electricity dissipated, and I hadn’t even felt it go. The electrodes were still stuck in my head. I pulled them out, gasping in pain, my fingers warm and sticky. I looked at my hands and realized it wasn’t the wires that were red; it was me. They’d been siphoning blood from my head directly into the computer like electronic mosquitos. And then I glanced down at the creature, seeing it for what it was—a dead human being. Its face was similar to Teardrop’s and the others, bleached and angular, absolutely free of extraneous flesh, and young. It was barely twenty, if that, and I was suddenly nauseated. I knew it was from the injection, but it was also because I’d stepped to the other side of a chasm from which I could never return. I’d saved my life but lost something as valuable in the process, and a warning issued by my old boxing trainer, Willy Williams, came to mind. It was when I’d come close to shooting Poor Kevin. Willy cautioned me that murder put a cancer on one’s existence. It was precisely how I felt—alive, but as if a deeper part of me had contracted a fatal disease.
A wave of sickly heat washed up my neck and clogged my throat. I barely made it out of the truck before I threw up, gasped, and did it again. Glancing back to where the creature lay motionless, I saw the laptop.
In a queasy blur, I grabbed the computer and jumped into the Lincoln. Quickly, I dropped it into reverse, jammed down the gas, and bumper-shoved the ice cream truck out of the way. Lower Wacker was momentarily empty, and I squealed out backward, stuntman style, just as the side mirror blew to bits. Teardrop was behind me in another ice cream truck, having gone old school with a handgun large enough to shoot a helicopter out of the sky; if it couldn’t use electrodes to access my skull, bullets would do. And then the back window shattered, and I sped away, the Lincoln shaking and smoking but still able to fly. Teardrop rammed into my trunk as we wove down a stretch of the drive nicknamed “the Emerald City” for its glowing green warning signals. But the old car was too heavy and the truck too light, and Teardrop actually pushed me forward while bumping itself back dozens of feet. And that’s when I saw it—a quivering gray mass pouring out of the drainpipes and up through the sewer grates. Hundreds of beady eyes reflected green light, hundreds of worm tails curled in the air. After I sped past, a wide flowing river of Nunzio’s rats rippled across Lower Wacker Drive.
Teardrop never had a chance to brake.
The truck plowed through the undulating rodents, which detonated beneath its wheels like little grenade sacks packed with oily guts and greasy fat. Slip-sliding in the bloody stain, unable to regain control, Teardrop smashed into a concrete pillar and was showered in flickering bits of jade glass. I sat in the middle of the lane as the Lincoln rattled beneath me and offered a silent thank you to the rodent martyrs who had given their lives for a Rispoli, while the remaining survivors scuttled away.
And then a car flew past, blaring its horn, and another, and I proceeded on my way, the very model of a cautious driver.
13
SIX DOLLARS IN QUARTERS WAS THE BEST MONEY I ever spent.
After leaving Lower Wacker and reemerging into sunlight, I showered at a self-serve car wash on Kimball Avenue—first the battered Lincoln
and then de-puke-ifying myself. I changed into extra clothes stored in the trunk, fashioned a headband to cover the bloody pinholes at my temple, pulled my hair back, and glanced in the rearview mirror, surprised that showing more of my face looked, well . . . good. And then I paused, staring at my reflection but not recognizing myself.
I’d purposely, physically killed another human being.
It wasn’t nearly the same thing as tricking the other creature into driving off the bridge. There had been a chance, however slight, that I could’ve escaped Lower Wacker Drive without committing murder. Instead, I’d succumbed to the desire for revenge and left a dead body behind. That truth was lodged in my gut, and I knew I’d have to carry it with me. I owned it now.
By the time I arrived at the bakery, I’d mentally removed myself from what had happened—what I’d done—only an hour earlier. I was growing used to burying my sense of self in order to do what the moment demanded. When I pulled to the curb, Uncle Jack and Annabelle were waiting at the front door. I was struck again how similar his appearance was to Grandpa Enzo, but on our second meeting I saw differences too. Uncle Jack was thicker where my grandpa had been wiry. There was also the California tan and graceful way of moving that must’ve been the result of decades in show business. He kissed my hand while Annabelle went full Italian, pecking, pinching, and patting each of my cheeks. I let them inside and showed them the pantry and how things worked in the kitchen, careful not to dwell on the Vulcan. Annabelle gestured while Uncle Jack concentrated on her hands. “The molasses cookies you asked her to bake,” he said. “They’ll be ready when you need them.”
“Thank you,” I said to Annabelle, smiling through the sense of dread at my impending sit-down with Lucky.
She winked and began bustling around the kitchen. When I turned to Uncle Jack, he was staring into empty corners. “This old place whispers to me,” he said. “The voices of family and friends, all gone. Besides Enzo, their names are lost. I see faces but then they fade away, like ghosts in my mind. I remember what it felt like to be around them. Sometimes it was wonderful, warm.” He paused, his smile draining away. “Other times it was very cold.” His eyes looked inward rather than out. My heart ached for him, the old man terribly lost and losing his way more each day. I was learning, however, to smother my emotions, and I cleared my throat while unfolding the copied pages of “Volta.”
“Remember my school project? Translating it to English from Buondiovolese?”
He accepted the sheets, gazing at them and then at me. “It looks like my handwriting.” I didn’t reply, just allowed him to drift, until he said, “Of course, that’s impossible. It’s a story, you said. Fiction?”
“Completely made up,” I replied, seeing blank indifference in his eyes.
“It must be this place,” he said, “but I have a memory of writing something . . . for my father. His name was . . . what was it? It was . . .”
“Nunzio.”
He squinted, focusing all of his strength on the murky past, and began to speak as if I weren’t there. “My father’s eyes. So blue, and as he grew old, so weak, like electric bulbs on a Christmas tree that burn out. Was he . . . going blind?” he asked. I was unsure, but it made sense since the handwriting changed toward the end of Nunzio’s time as the keeper of the notebook; obviously, he’d used his young son as a transcriber. “My father spoke and I wrote . . . letters, I suppose,” Uncle Jack continued. He kneaded his forehead as if trying to loosen up memories, and said, “I think . . . I think my father told me Enzo was too busy, so I would have to do it . . . but that writing was all I was allowed to do. His voice was very slow and calm, and I put the words to paper,” he said, confirming my guess. He stared into the pages and murmured, “Perhaps I wrote this.”
“No. It’s fiction, remember?” I said carefully. “None of it is real.”
He nodded slowly and then his face lit up. “I wrote something. Of that, I’m completely certain! A screenplay,” he announced in the confident tone he’d used when recalling his show-business career. “I very badly wanted to make the transition from TV to film, so I wrote it for myself! I tried to sell it but alas, no studio would take a chance on a B-list boob-tube actor. It, too, was fiction, just made-up criminal nonsense. Remind me, my dear, and I’ll show it to you.”
“I’d like that,” I said. “But in the meantime, will you try to translate those pages for me? If you’re able to recall Buondiavolese, that is?”
Uncle Jack’s gaze was as warm as a little campfire when he said, “For family, anything.” After he released me from a hug, I left the bakery and leaned against the front door, pleading silently that he’d succeed—and that Annabelle wouldn’t torch the place. When I looked up, Heather was on the sidewalk staring at me.
“Looks like a hangover,” she said, lifting her sunglasses to inspect my face.
“What? No, I was just . . . thinking.”
“Me too, about killing my mom,” she said, lifting a cup filled with icy brown liquid. “Nowadays, whenever I find myself, to quote Rancho Salud, in an ‘emotional tornado,’ I have to get one of these, stat.” She took a sip, staring at me. “I lied to you.”
“About what?”
“You know what they say about the earth being, like, seventy percent water? That’s about how much of an addict is caffeine. I told you smoking was my last bad habit, but uh-uh . . . without coffee, I’d be screwed. Although a smoke would help.”
“Go ahead. I don’t mind.”
“Here?” she said, glancing through the door and shaking her silken head. “My mom gave me,” she paused, furiously signing words with her hands, “massive shit for smoking in the alley with you the other day . . . actually for smoking at all, anywhere. I swear to God, her ears jump at the strike of a match or flick of a lighter.”
I thought about it then, the times when I was at the bakery and wanted to get away from everyone and be alone. Moving toward the alley, I said, “Follow me.”
“I told you, she has the hearing of a bat.”
“Just wait,” I said, leading her around the corner to a narrow metal ladder attached to the wall. The bakery was four stories high, but Heather followed me up without question, deftly balancing the dripping coffee. We reached the pebbly surface and I led her to the skylight where Annabelle was visible in the kitchen, making cookies, while Uncle Jack sat staring at the pages and slowly scratching his head.
“Can’t they hear us? Our footsteps?”
“Nope. Trust me, this old bakery is pure cement and brick, built like a fortress.” Heather grinned, produced a cigarette, and lit up. I watched smoke snake into the air and turn invisible. “So . . . why do you want to kill your mom?”
“Because I’m going to Fep Prep after all,” she said grimly. “It’s not the going part. I have to graduate somehow, right? It’s the not being asked part . . . just being told.” She bit her lip, ashing the cigarette. “I know I haven’t exactly been responsible, but having something foisted on you by your parents—sorry, parent—sucks. You know?”
Yeah, I knew. There wasn’t anything cheery about my existence, and my mom and dad were responsible. I bumped through periods of resentment, always putting it aside, but the feeling ran deep. I said, “It’s really . . . annoying.”
“Annoying?” She snorted. “That’s a nice way of saying it.” She flicked away the cigarette and smiled. “I’m celebrating today . . . a month sober. Squee.”
“That’s great,” I said, trying to mean it despite a thorn of anger at my parents.
“It’s mostly due to an amazing counselor I had at Rancho Salud. Hey, are you into martial arts at all?”
“Yeah . . . I mean, I box.”
“There’s this Brazilian thing called capoeira, a very badass mixture of fighting and dancing that . . . well, anyway, my instructor at Rancho Salud was also my therapist, which is very L.A. The whole point was that achieving wellness has to be a mind-body experience.” She sipped the coffee, set it aside, and faced me. “I want t
o feel good about my sobriety. I want to be clear of all negative feelings toward my mom. All it takes is some mind-body,” she said, extending her hands. “You can help me, SJ.”
“I . . . can?” I said, unsure what caught me off guard more—her reaching out to me, or the “SJ,” which sounded like something a friend would say. I took her hands tentatively and said, “Um, how?”
“I used to do this thing at Rancho Salud called the ‘Trust Test.’ You’re my mom, and I say everything I feel, and you answer as if you’re her. It really flushes out the rage. It’s important that we’re connected,” she said, giving me a light squeeze, “so don’t look away, okay?” Before I could respond, she took a breath, closed and opened her eyes, and said, “Why didn’t you include me in this school decision, Mother?”
“I . . . I didn’t think you . . . would make the right choice?”
“How would you know if you didn’t ask?”
“It’s just . . . the things you’ve done in the past . . .”
“But isn’t my past partly your fault? Didn’t you step aside and let Dad use me as his little tween-queen avatar without preparing me for the consequences? You never taught me how to make decisions on my own,” she said, chewing the words. “Why? Didn’t you think I was smart?”
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