The Eighth Day

by Joseph John

  They found the van in an alley two blocks away from the accident—a rental car stolen off the lot less than an hour earlier. No sign of the driver and no witnesses, nor had surveillance cameras picked up anything.

  It all seemed so surreal, like a murder mystery dinner on crack. If the medical center video turned out to be a dead end, tomorrow he’d have Jaffe walk him through the last several months, see if anything came up hot. Maybe it had to do with his work as an investment broker, one of the clients he represented, or something else outside of work.

  With a sigh of frustration, Sam moved his cursor over the fast-forward button and clicked, and the tiny people began moving out on the double. He kept an eye on the time in the lower right-hand corner, and when he clicked play again, the tempo of events returned to reality. The crowd ended its back-and-forth waltz and surged toward the exits, streaming out the doors like ants from a kicked anthill. The security guards tried to keep order as they gestured with their arms and pleading faces. A futile effort. When it came to matters of life or death, most people wouldn’t think twice about trampling whoever was in front of them to save their own skin.

  The swell of bodies toward the exits began to thin with no sign of anyone fighting the current to get inside. He’d figured whoever had planted the bomb had hidden somewhere inside the medical center, but sometimes luck was still a lady. This time, however, she was a cold bitch.

  When the lobby stood empty, he stopped the video and checked the clock. To hell with it. Sam powered off his computer, grabbed his jacket out of his locker, and plodded out of the office, out of the precinct, and into the decadence of the city and the death of another day.

  He got behind the wheel of his car and pulled away from the curb into the flow of vehicles that choked the streets and jockeyed for position as they fought their way out of the city. One driver pounded his palm against his horn, sending out a series of angry bleats. His face knotted in anger, and his lips moved in a string of silent obscenities that remained trapped behind glass like wild animals in a cage. The object of the man’s furor, a compact that changed lanes in front of him, had no one inside—a self-driving car, probably on its way to or from the parking garage. Yet the man continued to pound away at his horn, raging his mindless fury at a mindless machine.

  Sam Harrington rolled his eyes. He strummed his fingers on the steering wheel, the evening news background noise as he rehearsed the questions he’d ask Jaffe tomorrow. But driving through the city always brought back memories, and his mind wandered whenever a sight, a sound, a smell would shake something loose, like a rediscovered bauble, flawed yet beautiful even if clouded by time.

  A concession cart on the corner or a whiff of sauerkraut drifting in through the open window brought back memories of Hans Eberstark, the one-legged German vendor who’d regaled Sam with tales of his life in Germany, his wife and children, and the little village they’d called home. But why he now lived alone had gone untold, and Sam didn’t press him. He’d figured a man’s business was his own, and if he wanted to talk about it, he’d do it in his own time.

  Then one day, some Arschloch put a bullet in Hans Eberstark’s back, and the homicide investigation that followed revealed he’d been living under an assumed name and a stolen identity, like a hermit crab that had discarded an old shell for a new. What had led the German to New York City remained a mystery. The Sam of those days would have pictured a tragedy—an irrevocable twist of fate that had stolen everything he cared about. Nowadays, though, Sam knew better. He’d put his money on Eberstark having been a criminal and fugitive any day of the week.

  The 9/11 Memorial loomed in the distance, and he remembered a sound like the world tearing itself apart, remembered a younger version of himself gripping the sides of his school desk until his fingers ached, dust sifting from the ceiling, room shaking, sirens wailing. He’d left his books and his backpack and followed the other students into the street, looking back over his shoulder, stumbling and skinning a knee. The sky had been dark with smoke and filled with fire and soot, bodies tumbling end over end like discarded hopes and dreams.

  When he’d arrived home, he’d rushed into his mother’s arms, and she had enfolded herself around him like a protective cocoon. They’d sat huddled together on the couch while the television had shown jet airliners slamming into the twin towers of the World Trade Center again and again. They’d waited for Sam’s father, both of them praying for his safety, but their prayers went unanswered.

  Each generation has that “where were you?” moment. Where were you when they bombed Pearl Harbor? Where were you when JFK was shot? For Sam’s generation, it was, where were you on 9/11? But for him, that also meant, where were you when your father died?

  As he took the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel to I-278, he thought about the current generation’s moments—the VX nerve agent attack during the Oscars, the aerial drone laden with RDX and its kamikaze flight into the Super Bowl. Used to be these were once-in-a-lifetime moments, but the pace of tragedy was accelerating. What horrible event would come next and leave someone else fatherless?

  By the time he crossed the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge and got off on the Narrows Road West exit on Staten Island, the moon had seized the night with its pallid glow. Squat houses and grassy lawns replaced storefronts and office buildings, and Sam wove his way through the residential neighborhood to his home.

  The house on St. Johns Avenue reflected the American dream, or at least Sam Harrington’s dream—two stories, brick, with a small yard and a privacy fence. The driveway sprawled next to the house like a concrete canvas of abstract expressionism speckled with oil, dirt, and time. A bench swing sat motionless on the front porch, its wood worn by memories made sitting and gazing at the stars on a summer’s night. The lights inside the house still glowed, and Jenny stood framed in the kitchen window. Her lips moved as she sang to herself, cleaning the dishes on which she and Jason had eaten dinner.

  He climbed the short flight of stairs to the porch. As he did, something bit him on the side of the neck. He grunted and staggered sideways, clamping a palm against his neck. Blood oozed between his fingers. He’d been shot. No gunshot, though. The shooter was using a silencer.

  Sam threw open the front door. The foyer light spilled over him and framed him in the doorway. Fuck. He leapt inside and slammed the door shut, locked it.

  “Thank goodness,” Jenny said with a smile as she turned to him. “I was getting worried.” Then her smile melted and her brow furrowed. “Sam, what’s wrong?” She stood in front of the sink in a white and pink floral dress that reached just below her knees. Soap suds covered her hands. Above the sink hung the window through which he’d watched her moments before, and the window led to the shooter.

  Sam closed the distance between himself and his wife in three long strides. She let out a little cry of surprise as he bent low and wrapped one arm around her waist, pivoting and pulling her on top of him as he fell.

  The window above the sink exploded in a spray of glass, and Jenny’s cry became a scream. Sam hit the floor on his back and rolled, throwing himself over his wife and shielding her body with his own. The glass rained around them. He buried his face in her hair and the fragrance of her shampoo.

  The world disintegrated around them. A shower of bullets ripped into the baker’s rack on the opposite side of the room, and shards of china spiraled through the air. Plaster exploded from the walls as gunfire pummeled them. The refrigerator rocked, and the door fell open on one twisted hinge. With a thunderous crash, the glass on the oven door imploded.

  The gunfire was soundless and surreal, yet the noise in the kitchen was deafening, a symphony of destruction that drowned out everything else. Sam had the sudden urge to clamp his hands over his ears and scream, certain he’d go mad before it ended.

  Then it did end, cutting off with the violence of a guillotine. Jenny’s hitched sobs filled the silence that followed. Her chest rose and fell beneath his racing heart, a series of short, ragged gasps, but sh
e breathed.

  “You okay?” Sam asked.

  “I think so,” she said, her voice a hoarse whisper. She peered at him, her eyes searching his, and her gaze fell on his neck. “Oh God, you’ve been shot.”

  He pressed the tips of his fingers against the wound. Blood splattered onto the linoleum floor.

  “It’s just a graze.”

  Something small and solid hurtled through the shattered window, skidded across the floor, and rolled to a stop against Sam’s leg. It throbbed with a blue glow and let off a rising electronic whine. An energy grenade.

  His eyes widened. He let go of Jenny and scrambled for it, grabbed it, hurled it back out the window and into the darkness. An instant later it went off, a bright flash and crackle of electricity that lit the night. Someone screamed.

  Jenny shrieked. “Jesus!”

  Sam rose to one knee, pulled a snub-nosed revolver from his ankle holster, and pushed it into Jenny’s hands. “Take this,” he said. “Stay low, and go find Jason. Lock yourself in his room and call 911. Don’t let anyone in but me.”

  Jenny nodded. He kissed her cheek and tasted tears. Then he drew his other pistol from its shoulder holster and wove his way through the debris toward the front door. From beyond the shattered remains of the window above the sink, the empty blackness of night stared back at him. Ceramic and glass crunched beneath his feet with each step, and fear knotted his gut into tangled cords. Splintered bullet holes riddled the door. He cracked it open and sighted his pistol through the narrow opening.

  A man lay in the front yard. He’d been hit by the energy grenade Sam had lobbed back out the kitchen window, and he smoldered and twitched as sporadic arcs of blue electric current pulsed over his body. He was trying to crawl away but wasn’t having much luck. His body kept convulsing every few seconds as another burst of electricity coursed through it.

  On the far side of the lawn, two shadowed silhouettes armed with rifles crept toward the house. Sam aimed his pistol and fired twice. One of the silhouettes crumpled with a wordless thump, like a discarded duffel bag. The other grunted and dove for cover behind a hedgerow. Sam fired three more shots into the hedge and ducked back into the house.

  He considered taking up a defensive position here, in the kitchen, but if anyone came in through the back door, he’d have no cover if they ambushed him from behind. Or worse, they’d find Jenny and Jason first. Instead, Sam retreated to Jason’s room to check on his wife and son, batten down the hatches, and wait for the cavalry to arrive.

  Clint Nelson took a long drag on his e-cig, savored it, and exhaled through the half-closed window on the passenger-side of the police cruiser.

  Half-open, his wife’s nagging voice rang in his ear. The window is half-open.

  “Whatever,” he said under his breath. The vapor curled up and away.

  Mandy Nelson had been Mandy White when they first met, a waitress at a hole-in-the-wall diner where he and a couple of the boys happened to stop for coffee one morning, and when Clint saw her, he knew he wanted a piece of that action. She wore one of those pink and white striped aprons, a skirt that came about halfway down her thighs, and a pair of legs that wouldn’t quit. He went back to the diner the next day, one thing led to another, and she’d wrapped those legs around him. Like a black widow spider, he later thought. But at the time, oh man, it had been bliss.

  They got married two months later, and after they moved in together, Clint discovered his mistake. His blushing bride was a nagging bitch.

  “Huh?” Leonard Devine asked.

  Even a night spent cooped up in the cruiser with his partner, fat-ass Lenny the eating machine, was better than one spent at home listening to Mandy’s endless nagging.

  Clint, don’t drink out of the carton.

  Clint, take your shoes off, I just vacuumed.

  Clint, don’t leave your uniform lying all over the bedroom.

  Clint, stop leaving your dirty dishes in the sink.

  Clint, nag, nag, nag.

  “Clint?”

  “Nothing,” Clint said and took another drag on his e-cig.

  Leonard shrugged and bit into a donut.

  Clint’s lips curled back in contempt as the crumbs and white powder fell onto Leonard’s uniform and cascaded over his ample gut. Mandy would have had his balls in a glass jar.

  “You know what chaps my ass?” Leonard said. At least, that’s what Clint thought he said. It was hard to make out when spoken through a mouthful of half-chewed donut.

  Clint, tell Lenny to quit being such a worthless prick.

  Clint smiled. On this, he and his wife agreed.

  “It’s when guys like—”

  “Hold up,” Clint said. Someone had come out of the building where Shawn Jaffe lived, head down and hands jammed into the pockets of a jacket. “What the hell’s he doing?”

  Leonard followed Clint’s gaze. The man crossed the street and loped toward them with purposeful strides.

  “Hey, pal,” Leonard said.

  He moved with the quickness of a rattlesnake strike. One second, he stood next to the open window of the cruiser. The next, he reached into the car, drew Leonard’s piece, and pointed it at Leonard’s fat head.

  Leonard didn’t have time to scream.

  But Clint did, and when the pistol roared and the side of Leonard’s head exploded and splattered him with brains and gore, Clint began screaming, crying, and laughing all at the same time. His smartphone rang, and he had the crazy idea it was Mandy, calling to tell him what a mess he was, and if he thought he’d come waltzing into the house with Leonard’s brains dripping off his uniform, he had another thing coming, buster. This got him laughing harder.

  Then the pistol roared again, and only the flat, dead bleat of Clint Nelson’s smartphone followed.

  Sam stood guard in the hallway outside of Jason’s room, pistol clenched in his hand, listening for the sound of intruders in the house. He checked the windows. Outside, a night wind stirred the branches of the trees and the bushes, and their shadows moved like wraiths in a waltz, but nothing else stirred. Even his neighbors remained behind locked doors. Sam wasn’t surprised.

  When at last the echo of police sirens drifted through the night in a strange and artificial requiem, Jenny opened the door, and he wrapped his arms around her and his son. They held on to each other as if letting go meant forever.

  A procession of police cruisers rolled to a stop at the curb, and a whirling strobe of lights lit the night in a chaos of color. Sam went outside to greet them, hands raised in a plaintive gesture of surrender.

  “I’m Detective Sam Harrington, Midtown North. I called in the shooting. I’m gonna reach into my pocket and show you my ID.”

  “Is anyone hurt?”

  “It’s nothing serious.”

  The neighbors had begun to emerge from their homes like skittering cockroaches, eager to help now that the danger had passed. Hesitant treads carried them across sloping lawns toward the street, and uniforms moved to intercept them.

  A fire engine and ambulance arrived, and one of the paramedics cleaned and bandaged the gunshot wound on Sam’s neck.

  “An inch to the right, and we wouldn’t be having this conversation,” he told Sam.

  “Let’s keep that between you and me,” Sam said, glancing at his wife and son, who were giving their statements to the police. Jenny caught his gaze and smiled, and he smiled back.

  Sam thought he’d killed at least one of the men, maybe two if the guy hit by the energy grenade hadn’t made it, but there were no bodies. There was plenty of blood, though, and forensics cordoned off the area and went to work.

  When his wife and son finished with their statements, Sam said to Jenny, “Why don’t you and Jason wait by the car? I’m gonna see how it’s going inside.”

  Jenny nodded and stood on tiptoe to kiss his cheek. He turned and trudged toward the house. Inside, crime scene investigators from the 120th Precinct sifted through the ruins like archeologists at a dig site, using la
ser trajectory kits and 3-D imaging cameras to capture every angle of devastation. Sam stood in the doorway. The anger had faded like an old photograph and left him numb.

  The destruction was absolute. The bullets had reduced the walls and cabinets to splinters. Deep grooves marred the wooden top of the kitchen table, and the force of the slugs had tossed the chairs that surrounded it to the ground. The refrigerator door swayed, and rivulets of milk streamed out of bullet holes in the carton and spattered onto the floor in opalescent pools. Shattered dishes and glasses littered the countertops and floor. The carnage consumed everything.

  Sam took it all in, shattered furniture and appliances and memories lost—the vase that had belonged to his grandmother, Jenny’s treasured collection of china, the painting he’d bought her during their vacation in Venice. The sons of bitches had taken it all.

  One of the investigators glanced in his direction, eyebrows raised in alarm. “Sir, please stay outside until we’re finished.”

  “I’ve been on the force for thirty-two years. I know the drill.”

  “Oh. I didn’t realize.”

  After recreating a digital version of the wreckage, the investigators began collecting the slugs. Instead of a surgical extraction, they cut out whole chunks of drywall, the jigsaw snarling as it tore through the wallpaper, and plaster dust drifted to the floor.

  Rather than risk contamination during transport, they used a portable mass spectrometer to conduct an on-the-scene analysis of the slugs and gunshot residue. When the results appeared, the investigator who’d run the analysis sat up and frowned at the screen.

  “What is it?” Sam asked.

  “I got a match on the gunshot residue,” he replied, and Sam knew before he said it which case it would be. “A homicide this morning at the Café del Mar.”