Loud Pipes Save Lives

by Jennifer Giacalone

  Ainsley grabbed Khady’s hands. She wished she could reach back through time and unmake these things.

  “I started cutting myself when I was eleven. I didn’t really know why. Nobody ever saw the marks anyway, and I made the cuts shallow enough that there aren’t many scars hanging around. And I became violent. I got into fights at school. But once, I saw Aatifah getting mugged, and I ran up behind the guy and brained him with the first big, heavy thing I could find—a stray brick. He fell on his face and I just started kicking him, over and over… There was so much blood. Aatifah hated that I got into fights, but she was thankful for my violent tendencies that day.

  “I told her later on about what my brother was doing, and she had suspected anyway. But there wasn’t much she or anyone else could have done unless I told someone, and I wouldn’t. What would happen to me?

  “Then, when I was fifteen, my brother suddenly decided that he had to return to Nablus. He wouldn’t say why, but he just kept saying that it was too dangerous for me to go with him, and that the only way to be sure that I would be taken care of was for me to be married.”

  “You were fifteen! How is that even legal?” Ainsley shouted, horrified. Ainsley didn’t even notice how hard she was squeezing until Khady wriggled her hands free of Ainsley’s grip. Khady had made reference to being married before, but Ainsley never wanted to push her about it because it didn’t seem like something she wanted to talk about.

  “In New York State, it is legal with the permission of a guardian, which is who he was to me. He told me that I had no choice: I had to do as he said and marry this man. Aatifah’s father even offered to take me and become a temporary guardian while my brother was gone, so that I wouldn’t have to marry Khalil, but Vai didn’t want to hear about it. He didn’t want me to be a burden, he said, because he didn’t know when or if he would be coming back. It was only proper to have me taken care of by a husband under these circumstances, he said.”

  “Was he… I mean… Did he treat you okay? Your husband?” Ainsley dreaded the answer.

  Khady shrugged. “I guess. Khalil could have been a lot worse. I didn’t even know him, but he expected me to fuck him right away, because I was his wife now. But he didn’t hit me or anything like that. I think he tried to be kind, but he really didn’t know how to deal with a young girl.

  “I got pregnant pretty quickly and learned to be happy about it, because if I was carrying his child, it was insurance that he would continue to take care of me. And at some point, there was no way around it, I started to connect with the baby I was carrying. I started to be able to feel little movements and wonder what it was going to be, what it was going to look like. Khalil wasn’t a bad-looking guy; he was healthy and strong and very fit. I would have had good-looking children with him.

  “I lost the baby after nineteen weeks. It was … There was so much blood. And it hurt so much. The doctors said we should wait six weeks before trying to get pregnant again, but Khalil started pushing me to try again after only about two, as if he thought the doctor was lying or something. I got pregnant again, and I lost the second one too, much sooner than the first, probably because I didn’t get the recovery time I was supposed to.”

  Ainsley looked at Khady. A kind of deadness had come into her eyes as she was talking about it all. Ainsley didn’t know what to do but sit there, clutching Khady’s hands, and holding back tears. She couldn’t let herself fall apart about it all when Khady wasn’t. But her head started buzzing and something hot was rising in her chest.

  “He abandoned me after I lost the second baby. My brother had made me feel that it was wrong to go to Aatifah’s family, to make a burden of myself, so I…bounced around a lot, for a while.”

  “How did you… How did you survive?” Ainsley felt stupid for ever thinking she’d had a difficult time in life.

  “I did what I had to,” Khady answered, her voice unsettling in its quiet.

  Ainsley knew what that meant.

  She’d always had the same generalized feeling of disgust that most people do for that kind of intimate violence, for people who abuse the vulnerable, but now it was visceral, now it was real. Now it was righteous rage, and it flamed in her muscles and throbbed in her brain.

  “I eventually couldn’t live that way anymore. Aatifah and her family wound up becoming my family after all. They loved me, and they tolerated a lot from me when I was trying to heal myself.

  “I went through an atheist phase, because how could this all have happened unless Allah had abandoned me, or there was no God of any kind at all? At some point, though, I realized that my faith was the only thing that tied me to myself, the only thing that was a tangible reminder of who I was before all of that.

  “I needed it, but in a form I could swallow, which means that in some ways, no… I don’t practice the way you’re supposed to. I had to carve things out of it to make it work for who I had become. And they love me no less, and tolerate my queer, motorcycle-riding, pot-smoking, naked-praying self the way I am. I’m lucky that way.

  “And now I have you.”

  Ainsley didn't know what to do but give her a long, soft kiss. Then she pulled back and stared hard into her eyes.

  “Did you tell all of this to Empress?”

  “No. Just that my brother was abusive, and that it was very bad. No details. But she knows how you feel about me. And she knew that you would accept the pick I made.”

  Ainsley pulled her close, felt her warmth and softness pressed against her chest, loved her as fiercely as she ever had. She found reserves of love inside herself that she didn’t know were there, and wanted to wrap Khady up in them, give her all of it, heal every last broken, hurt place she had. She understood so many things about her differently now, and felt so foolish about so many things she’d said and done. “Tell me your whole name,” she begged in a whisper.

  “It’s Khadijah.”

  Beautiful, she thought. “What does it mean?”

  “It was the first of Mohammed’s wives. One of the four perfect women.”

  “Do you know that you’re perfect to me?” Ainsley asked, fingers slipping over Khady’s hair, which looked silver in the light of the moon and street lamps.

  “Stop.”

  “It’s true,” Ainsley answered, pulling her in tighter. “I’m always going to do what I need to protect you. Tell me where your brother is, now, Khadijah,” Ainsley whispered into her ear. “I need to meet him.”

  The other girls never heard the whole story, but they were told enough to understand that Vaiteh was someone who needed to pay for what he had done to one of their own.

  There was a brief report on the news the next night about him having been found in an alleyway in Prospect Heights, broken, bloody, and comatose. Ainsley sat burning, satisfied and yet not. She suspected she could not have beaten him enough times to satisfy herself. Khady wept on her shoulder for a few moments. They held each other through the night. In the morning, they made love.

  They didn’t even know yet how it would change them, and they didn’t care, so long as they changed together.

  16

  The Bronx is Up, but The Battery’s Down

  “I’m going to the Bronx,” Lily had said into her phone. “It’s totally under the radar, I’m not supposed to be going, I don’t know what I’m going to find, and it might be dangerous. Want to come?”

  “Oh,” Miri had sighed, “I was just about to fold some wash and put on the Mets game, but that sounds like a lot more fun.”

  And now here they were, marching down Tremont Avenue in the teeming early autumn dusk of Sunday evening, past the record stores, drugstores, nail salons, and sketchy cell phone shops. Lily had never been to the Bronx before, not really.

  The Sparrs, of course, had season tickets to the Yankees every year when she was growing up, and the stadium was plunked smack in the middle of the Bronx, but the projects were just square brick hulks on the other side of the highway as they drove up; the neighborhoods were just th
e grime-dusted blocks they had to pass through on their way to the game, seen through the tinted windows of the air-conditioned, leather-interiored town car that ferried them there.

  But now she was assaulted with hip-hop thumping out of car windows and salsa booming from the shop fronts, and the smells of bus exhaust, cooking grease, fried chicken, and cinnamon churros from a truck on the corner. They passed a Chinese takeout place with bulletproof glass at the ordering counter. They glanced at each other and strode briskly on. This was not Ridgewood, Queens.

  Mrs. Hartwell wasn’t as elderly as she’d sounded on the phone, but there was a deep tiredness in her eyes that seemed rooted down in her very bones. She seemed surprised at Lily’s appearance, and even more by Miri’s. But she let them into her small apartment with its crooked floors.

  “Yeah, I saw everything,” she answered frankly when Lily asked her. “He wasn’t resisting no arrest. He had his hands up when they shot him. They shot him...forty times, fifty times, I don’t even know. And one of the cops put their hands in his back pockets after he went down.”

  “Taking something?” Lily asked. Not unusual to check the pockets.

  Mrs. Hartwell shook her head. “Didn’t look like it. Checking for something, maybe. Leaving something. Couldn’t tell if his hand had something in it when it went in, but it was empty when it came out.”

  Her father’s wallet had been found, according to all four reports, in Lamont’s back pocket.

  “Was there any conversation between him and the officers?”

  “I heard them say he was under arrest and tell him to put his hands up. He been through the drill before, you understand. He knew damn well when you got cops with guns on you, you don’t go reaching for nothing but the sky. Probably isn’t a black boy in the Bronx that doesn’t know that.”

  “So they told him to freeze, and he did, and then did you hear him say anything?”

  “Not real clear, but he said he didn’t do nothing. He was still standing there with his hand up and one of them yelled, ‘He’s got a gun!’ I’m telling you right now, that was no mistake. He didn’t have nothing in his hands, and his hands were up.”

  “Did anyone else see it go like that?”

  “Yeah, you know. Couple of neighbors. But who’s going to listen to us?”

  “Would you be willing to testify to that?” Lily pressed. “Do you think those neighbors would?”

  Mrs. Hartwell eyed her with suspicion. “Why do you even care?”

  “Because the man they said he killed was my father,” Lily told her. “I think it’s a lie. And I need to find the truth.”

  Miri had to go home, so Lily went back down to the station and looked at the file again. She looked at the names of the four officers involved and tried to look them up in the system. One appeared to have been killed in the line of duty. Two had been given what appeared to be indefinite medical leaves.

  Medical discharges were not unheard-of after shooting a suspect; sometimes the mental health ramifications of killing someone were too much for an officer to return to duty for a long time, if ever. But nevertheless, three of the four were no longer in evidence in the department’s system.

  Only Officer Franks remained, had since been promoted to lieutenant, and was now working on the Special Investigations Unit, a hotly coveted, high-prestige assignment working on—allegedly—important cases for important people. She pulled up what she could find on Franks; what she found was a quick rise for a guy with a thin resume.

  She pulled up what she could find on the two with the medical discharges. There wasn’t much remarkable in their files. They were both ex-army, had worked in plenty of tough neighborhoods and made loads of collars each. Lamont wasn’t even close to the first shooting for either of them. It made no sense.

  It was getting pretty late by the time she uncovered an address and phone number that seemed loosely attached to the former Officer Dooley. It belonged to a business called “SD Transports,” but when she called, the phone rang endlessly and never went to voicemail. The address seemed to be in the Brooklyn Navy Yards.

  She looked at her watch. It was almost ten. She might be a cop with a badge and a gun, but she still wasn’t thrilled with the prospect of skulking around the Navy Yards alone at ten p.m. on a Sunday.

  But tomorrow was Monday, and she’d have to be back on the biker thing. With Ramirez around, she felt less comfortable nosing around in things that had nothing to do with what she was supposed to be here for.

  She kept smoothing her jacket with her palms to feel the reassuring bulk of her sidearm as she walked briskly among the rows of looming, square metal structures by the water. While it was true that ships came in at all times of the day and night, right now the place was pretty goddamn dead.

  She kept her breathing steady, counting the steps from one pale yellow circle of sodium-lamp light to the next, listening to the distant whisper of the highway, ticking off the numbers on the sides of the rows of corrugated metal warehouses, looking for Building 113. It was closing in on eleven p.m. at this point, and she didn’t even know what she was looking for.

  She finally found it, all the way down at the end, furthest from the dock and the giant cranes. There were a number of placards for different businesses on the side of it, SD Transport being the smallest, and written by hand. She saw a grey van parked around the side of the building, with the same name stenciled on it in black. She walked around, but the only windows on this building were too high up to be of any use. She walked back over and decided to peer into the van.

  It sat silently. Its windows were slightly tinted, but not enough to obscure the interior. She stood up on tiptoe and peered in, her heart beating hard and loud in her ears, though she wasn’t sure why. She saw a couple of cushioned seat covers, a metal grate that closed off the cargo area in the back, an empty coffee cup, and a nudie magazine lying open on the front seat. What the hell am I even expecting to find? I need to come here at a time when this Dooley guy might actually be around, instead of–

  “You looking for something?” a male voice growled in her ear. Two huge, heavy meathooks of hands spun her around by the shoulders and threw her back up against the van. She found herself staring into a heavily scarred face with blazing eyes, jawline half-covered in a scruffy beard, and surrounded by a tangle of dark, greasy hair.

  By the time he’d finished spinning her around to face him, though, her hand had already flown to her waist, drawn her Glock, and thrust the muzzle up under his chin. She met his gaze with as much cool as she could find, watching him process the situation. His scarred face slowly broke into something almost like a smile. Or a grimace. She wasn’t sure.

  He let go, put his hands up and backed away. “All right,” he said, much calmer now.

  “This your van?” she asked.

  “Maybe.”

  “You’re Dooley?”

  “Who’s asking?”

  Her free hand crept into her coat and pulled out her badge. She held it up, her gun still trained on him. “Detective Sparr. NYPD. Let’s try again. Is this your van?”

  He shook his head and began to shake out a wheezy kind of laugh. “Un-fucking-believable,” he exclaimed. “Yeah, that’s my van. Yeah, I’m Dooley. And you’re Graham Sparr’s brat. I heard you were a cop; I couldn’t believe it.”

  He wheezed and laughed some more. “I still don’t believe it. You can put the piece away, sweetie, I’m not looking for any trouble.” His voice was like gravel, and he had that outer boroughs accent that had become so familiar to her ears. Old-school, working-class Queens Irish, she guessed.

  Lily held steady for a moment. “I want to talk to you about—”

  “I know why you’re here," he interrupted irritably. “And I don’t have shit to say to you, okay? Not about your daddy, not about the shooting. I got a shipping business, I’m retired from the force, and I want to live out the rest of my miserable life without any more trouble.”

  She looked at him, coolly assessing him.
He hadn’t gotten the plum assignment. He hadn’t gotten “killed in the line of duty.” He’d gotten medical leave. He’d cooperated, but she suspected probably under duress. “You didn’t want to set that kid up, did you. If you'd been a true believer, you’d have gotten SIU just like Franks. Right? So who wanted it?”

  “You’re looking for answers that are above both our pay grades,” he grumbled.

  “Do you know, or don’t you?” she persisted.

  Dooley shook his head, looking exhausted, angry, and haunted. “My orders came from where my orders always came from. If you want to know more about where his orders came from, that’s another story. I can’t help you. But if I learned one thing when I was on the force, I learned the old saying is true. Most of the time, you follow the money, it’ll lead you to the right place.”

  He looked around nervously.

  “I SAID I GOT NOTHING TO TELL YOU!” he shouted suddenly. “Now get the fuck out of here before you get us both ‘killed in action.’”

  She nodded once and stuffed her badge and gun back where they belonged as she jogged back the way she came, into the night.

  17

  The Low Road

  Erik had the misfortune of being in his sister’s office when the young aide came in, dropped that morning’s issue of the Borough Record on her desk without a word, and walked out. Lina sat there looking at it for a moment, processing what she was seeing.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  She held up the paper. His sister’s late husband had been a womanizer, everyone knew it, but to have supposed evidence of one of his bastard children pop up, under the context of a drug arrest, and even worse, under a headline that seemed designed to hang this kid and everything he represented around Tommy’s neck…