Father's Day (24 page)

She stood before him in a black bra and panties. He could hear her breathing through her open mouth. His lips glided over the warm skin on her neck as his hands ran down her back and over her hips. Her head lolled backward, her eyes fluttering beneath the swollen lids. He heard her say his name, repeating it again and again in soft whispers. The sound of her voice was like an echo, coming from a long way away.

He turned off the light, pushed her down onto the couch, and fell on top of her. They didn’t say another word. The wind outside howled and shook the windows of the old house, and a cold draft crept across the floor.

He held her there as their bodies cooled, his weight against her. He looked toward the window, at the reflection of the small room in the glass, at the infinite night behind it. He suddenly had the urge to run, run out into that darkness after all the invisible shadows that haunted him, after that part of himself he felt he’d lost. Sarah had fallen asleep beside him. He remained frozen beside her, paralyzed, lost in thought.

When she uttered his name again, there was fear in it, and suspicion. If there had been mockery in her voice, he wouldn’t have been surprised. It would have confirmed the direction his life was going, reinforced the part he’d played, the same part he’d always played, that of a defender of lost causes, a fool.

As a cop, he’d often compared the city of Philadelphia to a circus, and himself to a performer, traveling from one crime scene to the next. He’d be a strongman, his feats of strength legendary, a lion tamer with an illusion of control over a cage full of wild animals, an acrobat, the delicate balance of his life dangling by a thread, and a clown, with a painted face, laughing and absurd.

He rolled off the couch and walked naked to the sink. He wet the cloth again, let the cold water run, felt it penetrate his skin, watched the blood mix with water, and funnel down the drain. He adjusted the pillow beneath Sarah’s head. The muscles in her face had relaxed and the swelling seemed to subside. He draped the long mink coat, like a blanket, over her. He kept the cold compress on her head, slid into the jeans he’d picked up from the floor and sat in a stiff wooden chair in the dark.

He looked at Sarah and saw the face of Carol Ann Blackwell, her daughter, both of them survivors much as he was, as his daughter was. Survivors were always asking themselves the same questions. Why me? Why am I alive, while others are dead? They’re questions he’d wrestled with his entire life and had somehow learned to live with. There were no easy answers, none that seemed to make sense. Survival became a reason in itself, the will to live. He’d searched for some meaning beyond sheer survival and it had always seemed to elude him.

It could have been right in front of him all the time, right under his nose. Yet he’d been blind to it. He’d learned through his experience as a cop how to be objective, how to stay cool under pressure and make decisions for others, but never for himself.
He’d fallen flat on his face and always ended up back on his feet. “To Protect and Serve.” It certainly was a catchy slogan.

The few hours left in the night flew by while Sarah slept, he’d remained awake, the lack of sleep wreaking havoc with his senses. The liquor hadn’t helped, either. Stationary objects seemed to jump in the shadows. The edges of reality had become fluid, like ripples at the edge of the sea. What began as one long night was evolving into a damp, gray morning. The light cloud cover in the east had turned the horizon to red. He shuddered and ran the back of his hand against the grain of dark growth on his cheek and chin. His skin was as coarse as sandpaper.

Lou moved quietly went into the kitchen and started a pot of coffee. He sat at the table and lit a cigarette while the cold morning light filtered through the window and slowly lit the room.

Sarah was stirring on the couch. She moaned fitfully, the pain surfacing as she struggled to consciousness. Her head rolled as if she was floating in a lifeboat, abandoned in a current. He went to her, sat at the edge of the couch, and waited for her eyes to open. When they did, he smiled a faint, expectant smile. Her eyes closed tightly against the pain in her head. She slid her hand in his, a shallow breath escaping from her mouth. The phone on the table rang. The shrillness cut through them. Sarah’s eyes sprung open. The phone vibrated on the table like a wind-up alarm clock. Lou took his hand from her grasp and put the phone to his ear. He didn’t say a thing.

“Lou, are you there?” It was his ex-wife. She sounded worried, almost frantic. He’d rarely heard her sound that way and immediately knew something was wrong. She wouldn’t be calling him at the crack of dawn unless it was an emergency.

“It’s me.”

“Maggie didn’t come home last night.”

“Last night! And you’re just calling me now?”

“I thought maybe she’d gone back to your place. I don’t know. I don’t know what I thought. I guess I hoped she did. She said she wanted to take a walk, down to the Wawa to get a sandwich. I didn’t see anything wrong with that. And when she didn’t come home, I didn’t want to think the worst. So I waited. But I couldn’t wait any longer.”

“Call the police.”

“Can you do it, Lou?”

“Just call the fucking police! And call me back if you hear anything. I’ll have my cell.”

Lou laced up a pair of running shoes, threw on a black sweatshirt, and a black leather jacket. It was the same one he’d kept polished in his closet since he’d worked undercover narcotics. There were days on end when that jacket had never come off, followed by years when it hung in his bedroom closet like a dry, dusty skeleton. The silver snaps on the cuffs dressed it up and the pleats along the back gave it extra room for a shoulder holster. The collar could zip up over his neck, blocking the wind, and the pockets were deep. He zippered the jacket, slid the Glock into the holster, and thought about why his wardrobe had softened from leather and wool to cotton and nylon.

“Get dressed. We’re leaving.”

“What’s wrong? Where are we going?”

“Maggie didn’t come home last night.”

“Vince has got her, Lou. I know he does.”

“How do you know?”

“I overheard Vince talking to Tommy, last night at the party. Tommy told him he had the girl down at the warehouse. I thought he was talking about Carol Ann. Vince told him not to hurt her, just to keep her on ice for a while. I didn’t know he was talking about Maggie, Lou. I swear.”

“What warehouse are we talking about?”

“Vince owns a few warehouses down by the waterfront. I don’t know what he uses them for. I’ve never been down there.”

“Well, now’s your big chance.”

The early morning air
had grown lighter. He inhaled deeply, filling his lungs as he took Sarah’s hand, and practically dragged her toward the car. His pulse quickened, his heart thumping in his chest like a drum. His thoughts were now only with his daughter. He’d made life-and-death choices before, but the lives at stake were distant lives, a changing cast of characters whose lives ceased to exist at the end of the day. This had suddenly become very personal.

He’d crossed the line between justice and retribution already, knew the price that came with taking the law into his own hands, had suffered the consequences. In the process of upholding the law, he’d broken it. There had been regrets, but if it was any consolation he’d received nothing but gratitude from the victims and their families. He’d never seen condemnation on the faces of his fellow officers, who’d stood with him and knew that cracking skulls was sometimes the only way they could make up for a system that had failed to protect the innocent. He knew now more than ever that he’d do anything to
protect his daughter, whatever he needed to do, and that he couldn’t count on anyone to help him—not his friends, not the police, not anyone.

The ride seemed unbearably slow, though he was passing cars at every turn. Early morning commuters on their way to the office with another day’s newspaper on the seat next to them, a bagel on top of that, a steaming coffee in a holder on the dash. He tried to maintain a steady pace, go with the flow of traffic, not draw attention to himself. He didn’t want a police escort. He wondered how normal people got around. The pace was too slow. Since when did everyone’s life become so trivial, so common, he asked himself? When had his life been anything but?

There were so many old abandoned warehouses down near the shipyards that he didn’t know where to start. There was a time when the area bustled with activity, ships floating in and out with an endless supply of cargo. Before he became a cop, Lou had spent a long summer working at one of the oil refineries in Port Richmond. He’d lost ten pounds that summer, though he’d spent every minute he wasn’t working sitting on a barstool at the Port Richmond Pub. His skin had tanned and then turned black with oil. His arms had become as hard as the steel pipes he’d handled all day.

Rows of three-story brick warehouses bordered both sides of the Delaware River. Railroad tracks ran behind them, rusted steel rails extending in both directions as far as the eye could see. A train hadn’t run on those tracks for decades. Most of the buildings were abandoned. Some were still used for storage. The streets were littered with potholes and loose asphalt. There were rusty iron bridges every few blocks where you could cross the murky black water. Being down there reminded Lou of the old railroad tunnels where he ventured as a kid, dark and stale and thick with the odor of decay.

He started up Lincoln, crossed over South Hyde Park and
circled back on Washburn Street. He stopped at a long red light and lit a cigarette. Sarah sat next to him, looking around for something she might recognize, a sign, a name. He cut through a long empty parking lot and came out on Pettibone Street. It seemed like the only businesses still thriving in Philadelphia were churches and funeral parlors. Lou kept the windows down and crawled along. There wasn’t much traffic, even at that time of the morning.

Lou pulled into the deserted parking lot of Franchelli Foods, a polite name for a slaughterhouse, and looked through a layer of condensation forming on the windows. The front door had a “closed” sign hanging on it. There was a car in the corner of the lot, a wood panel station wagon with ten years of garbage under it—wind blown brown leaves, newspapers, plastic bottles, and tin cans under four flat tires. The traffic signal at the corner continued to cycle from red to yellow to green, a few ragged-looking delivery trucks rolling through. He tossed the cigarette out the open window, watched it roll into a muddy puddle of water.

He stuck another cigarette between his teeth and lit it. He heard a sharp beeping, almost like a car alarm. He recognized the sound. It was a delivery truck backing up to a loading dock. It was difficult to determine where it was coming from, bouncing off the maze of surrounding buildings. Another massive brick structure across the street could have been a mill, a brewery or a sweatshop, its telescopic smokestack looming above it like a monument. He blew more smoke out the window and turned the car toward the warehouse across the street. It looked fore boding and ominous like a statue that might have stood for centuries, collecting memories in silence, staring into the wind with a hard, defiant face.

He pulled around to the rear where a truck was dropping a monstrous green Dumpster against the back of the building. It
had a red cab with the letters TRI stenciled, white and large, on both doors. Lou drove up and gave the driver a friendly wave. The man didn’t seem to notice, his eyes shielded under a dark blue baseball cap. He had a full beard and wore a dirty green sweatshirt with the sleeves pushed up to his elbows. He was pulling off a pair of gray cowhide gloves. His skin was the color of rusted metal, a combination of dark tan and six layers of dirt. There was as much black hair on his arms as on his face. His teeth were the same burnt orange as his skin.

“Excuse me!”

Lou yelled over the beeping and the grinding of steel. He tapped the horn twice, which got the man’s attention. His head slowly pivoted. His eyes were black as coal, shiny and wet.

“What can I do for you, pal?”

“I’m looking for a way onto the interstate. Somehow I must have gotten turned around.”

“No problem. You ain’t far. When you pull outa here, make a right and go down about three lights and you’ll see the overpass. Make another right and the ramp is about a quarter mile down.”

“Thanks, I appreciate it.”

“You’re welcome.”

Lou put the car back in gear, as if their conversation was done, but left the window open.

“That’s a big old building, huh?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“What do they do there, anyway?”

“Not much of anything any more, place is pretty much closed up. There’s an auto parts warehouse. A wholesale outfit uses some of it. Their trucks are out here in the morning loading up. I know some of the guys that drive for them. Other than that, the place is empty.”

“A lot of wasted space, huh?”

“You bet.”

“What was it before it closed?”

“One of the biggest silk mills in the county, made lace too. I had a sister and a cousin, both worked there. Both got pregnant and had to quit before it closed down for good. Put a lot of people out of work. Whole company picked up and moved to Mexico. They pay fifty cents an hour down there. But here they used to pay ten bucks. Union didn’t do shit. That’s why I been driving, last ten years. Drivers always find work.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean. I don’t mean to be a pain in the ass. It’s just that I used to live around here, when I was a kid, and I like to do a little catching up.”

“Oh, yeah. What part a town you from?”

“Green Ridge, way up near Capouse. Technically, it’s Pine Brook but my mother always called it Green Ridge, made it sound high class.”

“No shit. My mother worked at the Jetson Shirt Factory right there on Penn Sreet. Man, the only thing that lady could do better than sew was cook. I don’t get back over there much myself. I’m in Chester County now. Hell of a lot nicer, better for the kids.”

“Yeah, I tried the same thing. Didn’t work out.”