Hannig reviewed the earlier course of events. He’d been following the two human males to someplace called Pannaria! He’d maneuvered the ship in through the building’s walls—unseen, of course, despite staying close to the two males. Eventually, he was hovering there, in a back office area, watching them.
“That’ll be two bills. Last week’s protection along with this week’s,” the shorter man said.
The older, bald-headed man was angry. “I can’t afford this! Sales are way down. That new Olive Garden, two blocks over? How the hell do I compete with something like that?”
“Not our problem. Try fucking advertising, old man.”
Hannig watched as the bald man became more indignant, agitated at having to pay so much for this thing called ‘protection.’
The tall, skinny human slapped the older man hard across the face, and then hit him again. Hannig could almost feel the human’s humiliation, and he looked away, busying himself, ensuring the situation was indeed being recorded. Is this just one more reason to let the Wikk have them? Was there nothing redeemable about this human species? Hannig shook his head.
The two unsavory males took their payment and exited out through a back door. The old man, seemingly the proprietor of the establishment, tapped out a white tubular object from a rectangular package and placed it between his lips. “Fucking dirtbags!”
Hannig had chosen to follow the two unsavory males—passing his vessel through the rear walls, out into the night—into a darkened alleyway. He spotted the pair off in the distance. I need fresh air.
Leaving the secure confines of his Watcher Craft, Hannig stayed in the shadows, keeping close to the rubbish containers. He covered his nose and mouth and forced himself to ignore his own gag-reflex. Cockroaches, too many to count, skittered in and out of a half-opened pizza box. Something green and gloppy oozed down one side of a nearby garbage can. The wafting odors were beyond foul.
Edging closer, Hannig watched as the two humans counted out their currency. Money for protection.
“I say we pocket half the money Lasso just gave us . . . don’t mention we got him to pay for last week,” said the taller one.
“Are you fucking crazy? That’s how it starts. I’m not risking getting my balls flattened by a ball-peen hammer. We hand it all over.”
Hannig took one step closer. Balls? Perhaps he’d misheard him. What balls were these that would be flattened? Taking another step closer, staying in the shadows, he inadvertently brushed up against the lid of a small trashcan. It toppled over. The loud racket echoed off the surrounding brick walls, probably all the way out to the street. Hannig froze, paralyzed from the attention he’d brought to himself. And then there they were, rushing toward him—yelling and cursing profanities. He tried to run, to escape toward his invisible ship where he could disappear. Where he would be safe.
Hannig purposely avoided recalling the subsequent beating he’d taken, along with the endless spew of vile insults. Instead, he thought about the large human. The one who had said his name was Dom or Dommy. Why had he come to his aid? Why had that man put himself in jeopardy for someone he did not know?
Hannig, letting out a groan and lifting himself up on to his elbows, said, “System, did you record my . . . um . . . earlier activities within the alleyway?”
“Of course. The file has been compiled and logged and is ready for interstellar transmission.”
“Good. Very good.” He lowered himself back down onto his bed. For now, he needed sleep. Tomorrow, he would give more attention to this Dommy person. Hannig prided himself at having had the forethought to instruct the ship to follow the large human for the rest of the night, to his residence—wherever that may be.
Chapter 4
Dominic Moretti
I was awakened by an incessant, repetitive ringing. I opened one eye. Bright sunshine was streaming in through my bedroom mini-blinds. I fumbled for the iPhone charging on the nearby nightstand. Shit! Almost eight o’clock.
“Hello?”
“You’re still in bed. I can hear it in your voice. Damn it, Dominic, we had an agreement. You’d be on time. Make your appointments.”
“Good morning to you too, Georgina.”
“Let me guess. You were abducted by aliens last night, and that’s why you’ve missed your eight o’clock.”
At hearing her words, I jolted up in bed, my mind racing. I dreamt that, right? A haze of memories from the previous night formed in my still-groggy mind. Had to be a dream. And then I felt the pain in my hand, elbow and shoulder. I recalled that strange smell.
“Dommy?”
“Yes, Ma’am. I’m here.”
“Don’t call me Ma’am. Makes me feel older than I am.”
“Sorry.”
“I’ve rescheduled you for nine thirty. Can you make it?”
I tried to remember where it was I was supposed to be. Ugh, fucking Tremont. Had to be one of the worst places on Earth. I’d be lucky to get out of there with my life. “Yeah, no problem. I got this.”
“Good. Listen. This is important to me. Really, really important. It’s an eight-story walk up. One of the older brick structures. Stabilized rent controls. Building’s landlord will be waiting, same with the owner. He may be open to selling. You know how rare that is? To acquire that kind of real estate in an up-and-coming part of the city?”
“Yeah, super rare,” I said, rolling my eyes. I’d feel safer back in Kandahar than Tremont, but I wasn’t going to say that to my boss, a boss who owned one of the largest real-estate brokerage houses in lower Manhattan. I was her go-to-guy for appraising properties in “precarious”—her word, not mine—neighborhoods. There was a good chance no other soul in her office would volunteer to go into any of the rundown tenements I had made a practice of appraising over this past year. On average, people don’t screw with me. She knew it, and I knew it.
She clicked off and I went back to thinking about last night. Jesus, was it or wasn’t it a dream? Had to have been . . .
Half an hour later, I was standing at the curb, waiting for my Uber ride and finishing the last few bites of a jelly doughnut. I adjusted the leather strap of my satchel. Inside it were my tools of the trade—clipboard, various forms and checklists, tape measure, calculator, pens, pencils, four chocolate-flavored power bars, and my Nonno’s World War II–era stiletto knife. It sported a worn and yellowed horn handle. With a press of the inset button, a four-inch, razor-sharp blade would snap out and lock into place. A highly lethal, and totally illegal, weapon in the state of New York.
With a second cup of coffee settling in my gut, my mind had cleared enough to remember the previous night’s events in full cinematic detail. Above and beyond the obvious unsettling aspect, being in the presence of—whatever he was—when he then scampered off, on all fours, halfway down the alleyway he’d simply disappeared. Poof, one moment he was there, the next he wasn’t.
Honk!
My Uber ride, a ten-year-old tan Camry with a duct-taped-on front bumper, idled three feet to my left. Behind the bug-splattered windshield, the black driver made an annoyed ‘What’s the holdup?’ gesture, raising his upturned hands in the air.
I climbed in the back and buckled my seatbelt.
“Where to, brother?” the driver said while doing something on his phone.
“1226 Belmont.”
He spun around, glaring at me.
“Hey, your car will fit right in. No one’s going to give us a second look. Come on . . . there’s safety in obscurity,” I said.
The driver murmured something unintelligible as he pulled out into the morning traffic.
I spent the next thirty minutes staring out the window, thinking about my life in general. I’d never made it to my meeting with Tito Caputo last night. There would be a heavy price to pay for that. Something told me that any explanation that involved the rescuing of an alien wasn’t going to cut it. I shook my head. I’d worked so hard to avoid going in that direction. Into a life that would always put me an
d my family in danger, a life of crime.
Then I thought of Officer Ken Tedesco. He’d been a beat cop in the neighborhood growing up, and also the biggest influence in most of my life, perhaps all of it. Sure, I’d had my close friends as a kid. Gordo, Elmo, Carlo, and Carlo’s brother, Matteo. We were always in trouble. And Tedesco was there to keep us on the up and up. I couldn’t have loved those boys any more if they were family.
Eventually, I’d fallen for Anna in high school and was steered away from my raucous gang. At age twenty, though, I fell back in with them. I was one of six goofballs who broke into a closed liquor store. Our big haul was seven six-packs and four bottles of Jack. No robbing of the register or breaking anything. We just wanted to get a buzz on. All six of us were caught climbing down from the roof. We were arrested and hauled in front of a judge the next morning. Miraculously, I was the only one not charged. But there was one condition: Within a week, I would have to march myself down to the local armed-forces recruiter and sign up.
It had been Tedesco’s doing; he was the one who’d smoothed things over with the judge. Apparently, a favor was owed. That’s how a lot of the place worked—one favor leading to another. I smiled. Good ol’ Officer Ken. He was now the Chief of Police at the 7th Precinct over on the Lower East Side. Tedesco had been the reason I’d gone into the Marines. And I’d had every intention of becoming a cop as soon as I got out. But things hadn’t worked out that way.
“Out you go, man,” the driver said without looking back.
As the Camry sped off, leaving me in a cloud of exhaust fumes, I took in the big, nondescript building at 1226 Tremont. What a pit. Fifty-two individual one-, two- and three-bedroom units. The front of the place looked pretty much like I’d imagined it would. Colorful gang tags and other graffiti rose up to the mid-point of the brick building.
Faces turned my way, mostly black- and brown-skinned men standing around in small clusters. But there were Whites here too. Poverty had little in the way of ethnic boundaries in this place. Breath vapors rose in the morning chill as the desperate-looking men blew warmth into their cupped palms. As menacing as this place looked during the day, I knew it would be far worse later on. At night, this place would come alive. Junkies and dealers—the recently paroled, or those who just had never escaped this level of poverty. I knew that most of the occupants of that building were families. A good many were single mothers raising sons and daughters alone on the little they earned, often forced to hold down two or even three jobs at once. I turned around suddenly, feeling as if someone was right behind me on the street. The hairs on the back of my neck bristled. I took in the barren landscape but couldn’t see anyone there.
Once inside, I searched until I found the door with MANAGER in brass lettering, all the way at the back of the building on the first floor. I knocked and listened for any kind of movement. I waited a minute before knocking again. The door swung open.
“I heard you. Knocking once is more than sufficient,” the man said. He was short and probably Puerto Rican, by my guess. A series of pointed metal studs ran a perimeter all around his mouth, with a large tat of the Virgin Mother taking up his entire left cheek. He eyed me up and down. “What do you want? No vacancies here . . . try back in a month or two.” He moved to close the door.
“Nah, I’m the appraiser. You talked to Georgina, right?”
He nodded, then shook his head. “I’m just the manager.” He pointed to the letters on the door. “Owner’s running late. Maybe twenty or thirty minutes. But I got the keys to—well, whatever you need to look at. Basement, laundry room, several units that are, um, in transition. That be enough for your appraisal work?”
“Should be.”
He disappeared for a minute and returned with a large metal ring of keys. The tops of each were wrapped in oversized wads of masking tape. There were black letters written in sharpie: LR, BSMT, UTLY . . . “Do I need to explain what’s what with these?” he asked.
“I think I can figure it out.”
He handed me two additional individual keys. “Unit numbers are marked. Make sure I get all those keys back before you head out.”
I nodded and moved off down the corridor. Light spilled in through a set of double glass doors at the far end of the hall. My eyes were drawn to the linoleum floor’s black-and-white checkerboard pattern. Twenty paces in front of me, the pattern was altered—everything suddenly looked skewed. I briefly wondered if I was having some kind of hallucination, but quickly discounted that. It was as if I were peering through curved glass, distorting the optics. I probably wouldn’t have noticed anything but for the particular floor pattern—all those straight vertical and horizontal boxes, interrupted.
I stopped and stared, squinting my eyes a bit. There! It was barely even an outline of something, more like a visual change in temperature. Like that wavering heat you can see rising off the afternoon blacktop on a hot summer day. The mostly transparent shape slowly moved from left to right, and then it was gone. It had disappeared into the right-side wall. Last night might have been an aberration—chalk it up as an isolated, odd Twilight Zone moment. But now this? No. Something was happening, and I wasn’t sure what the hell to do about it.
Chapter 5
I hoofed it up three flights of stairs to the fourth floor. As I strode down the narrow hallway, looking for unit 432, muted sounds emanated from beneath closed doors: competing TV stations, mariachi music, a crying baby. On the neighboring door, 430, the wood casing was all torn up and splintered. The door had clearly been forcibly kicked in at some point. Voices were coming from inside, a man and a woman having a heated conversation—not quite arguing, but I’d lay odds that that was coming next.
I used one of the keys the building manager had given me to open unit 432. The first thing I noticed was the god-awful smell. An unmistakable smell—death, the putrid stench of decomposing human remains. Clearly, someone had died here and been left to rot for an indeterminate amount of time. Sure, I knew there was no rotting corpse here. But still, I thought it odd the super would even let me in. Especially before the place had had a good cleaning—a scouring, really. Were death and decaying bodies such a common occurrence in this building?
Off and on, I buried my nose and mouth into the crook of my elbow and breathed through the fabric of my sweatshirt. The place was still fully furnished, a sad collection of rickety and mismatched possessions, all soon destined for a dumpster out back.
I got to work. First, I measured each room’s square footage. Then I went down my checklist of what was typically included within a given unit like this, such as the various kitchen appliances. I took in the condition of the carpeting—pretty bad, and there was an oblong, rusty brown stain in the bedroom. This, to no surprise, coincided with being the foulest smelling of all the rooms. I made a note on my clipboard form.
The voices coming from next door had now elevated to full-out yelling. I stopped and listened for a moment. I couldn’t make out what was being said. If I were a cop, I’d be calling this in about now. A 10-23, domestic disturbance. I’d probably call for backup too; the male’s deep baritone was reverberating off the walls like a big diesel engine.
Ignore it. Not your problem.
I checked the single three-piece bathroom and notice the toilet seat was missing and the shower door was hanging askew. Rust stains encircled the drains in both the shower and the sink. I checked more boxes, making more notes, and then felt my phone buzz in my pocket. There were three voice messages from Gordo and seven texts. I read the most recent ones, from last night.
Gordo: WTF! Where are you?
Gordo: Doing my best to cover for you here. Call me!
Gordo: Tito’s not happy . . .
Gordo: You got a death wish or what?
This morning’s texts were even more concerning.
Gordo: Dommy—call me. Let me know what’s what.
Gordo: Buddy best for you to get out of town for a while.
I heard several loud thumps coming f
rom that same apartment next door. I moved back into the bedroom and stared at the wall. A high-pitched woman’s scream was followed by a series of faint sobbing noises. Another thump, and the sobbing stopped. My eyes leveled onto the carpet’s rust-colored stain. Fuck! I strode back into the small living room and then out the front door. I was surprised to see a small crowd had assembled in the hallway. Men and women—all staring at the door to unit 430. I brushed right by them. I didn’t bother knocking. I used my size-14 boot heel to kick in the door. Ripped from its hinges (again), the door crashed inward. Someone yelled angry obscenities behind me.
I found the woman on the floor, slumped against the bedroom wall—the wall adjacent to the bedroom I’d just vacated. Above her, the drywall was cratered inward where her shoulder or maybe her head had been shoved. She looked to be of Indian or Pakistani descent. Unconscious, her face was bruised, and there was a trickle of blood coming from her left nostril. One of her eyes was swollen shut. The other one opened slowly, taking me in. I crouched down next to her. She looked at me with confusion and then seemed to remember how she’d gotten to where she’d ended up on the floor.
Her words were slurred, barely a whisper. “You should go . . .”
“Yeah . . . may be a tad too late for that,” someone said from behind me in heavily accented English.
There was both a wanting and a wariness in those large chestnut eyes of hers. As if any prospect of hopefulness had been stolen from or driven out of her long ago. Perhaps at a young age—maybe as a child, even. Men, too many bad and abusive men, had made being hopeful a luxury she could ill afford in her tenuous world.
I reached a hand out and gently touched the woman’s wrist. “I need to get you to a hospital. Just as soon as I deal with the riffraff.” I gave her a reassuring smile, hefted myself up, and turned around.
“Sergei . . . look at the size of that big guinea wop,” said one of them.
Guardian Ship Page 3
