Good Day to Die (9 page)

(I was tempted to put the word “terrified” in front of the word “public,” but the mood of the citizenry was closer to the early days of AIDS than to, for instance, the Son of Sam era. Faggots were being killed, not human beings. It was all very interesting, but not especially relevant. In fact, if it weren’t for the bizarre nature of the murders and the furious reaction of the gay community, the homicides probably wouldn’t have been newsworthy at all.)

A detective
had
visited Kennedy’s two living relatives: his brother, Robert, an upstate deputy sheriff, and his father, James. The father, as it turned out, was lying comatose in a Lake George hospital, a victim of lung cancer. The doctors had described his condition as terminal. The brother, backed by his wife, had claimed to be ignorant of John-John’s life in the Big Apple, though not of John-John’s sexual preferences. The two brothers had been estranged for years.

I put the files down and fetched a mug of black, bitter coffee from the ever-dirty pot near Pooch’s desk. He looked up and grunted as I passed, but I made no effort to begin a conversation. I wanted to get finished and out on the street.

The fifth file was even thinner than the fourth, but it did contain a surprise. Sitting right on top was an article from
American Psychology,
entitled “Sexual Murder.” I glanced over at Pooch, but he was pecking away at his computer. Had he put the article there to bust my chops? Was its presence a simple accident? Had he thought it somehow relevant? I skimmed the article quickly and just as quickly discovered the same bleeding-heart bullshit I’d been hearing for years.

Physical abuse; sexual abuse; psychological abuse. They beat me, whipped me, kicked me, gouged me. They sodomized me. They made me feel
inferior.

My first reaction was, “Gimme a fuckin’ break.” Followed quickly by, “How many times do I have to hear this crap.” Lots of kids go through hell without turning into criminal psychopaths. I oughta know.

Two or three times a month, as I’m drifting off to sleep, I have what amounts to a recurring vision. I don’t call it a dream because I’m not really asleep. But I’m not awake, either.

In the vision, I’m low to the ground. Perhaps I’m a child; I can’t be sure. A woman, her face contorted with rage, stands ten or fifteen feet away. Her eyes bulge; her skin is scarlet; her scraggly brown hair stands away from her scalp. The hair seems alive.

The woman is saying something, but I don’t know what it is. Perhaps she’s merely sputtering. She begins to move toward me and it’s only then I notice the determined set of her broad shoulders. I can’t believe how big she is; her body grows with each, deliberate step.

What I want to do is speak out, to apologize before it’s too late, but I don’t. Or I can’t. There’s no way to know.

The woman holds a length of two-by-four in her hands and slowly raises it over her head. The fact that her hands had been empty a minute ago terrifies me.

If I’m lucky, I fall asleep before the first blow descends, but I’m rarely lucky. I never wake up, though. And there’s never any pain. The woman, of course, is dear old mom.

How many days of school did I miss because I was too busted-up to walk the half mile to the bus stop? Or because my face was so bruised dear old mom was afraid even the deaf, dumb, and blind authorities of Paris, New York, would have to do something? Fifty? A hundred? Two hundred?

The most amazing part was that I did well in school right from the beginning. And I didn’t blame the teachers who knew and did nothing. Quite the contrary. I was glad when their eyes turned away from me. That way, I, too, could pretend it wasn’t happening.

“Means, you all right?”

“Huh?”

“You’re staring off into space like some kind of a zombie.”

“I’m all right, Pooch. Better than ever.”

I dumped the article on top of the other useless material and went back to work. Victim number five was Rosario Rosa, a twenty-year-old Dominican national with a forged green card. A Polaroid in the files showed him on the stoop of some anonymous tenement, arms defiantly folded across a broad chest. He couldn’t have been further removed from John-John Kennedy if Thong had dragged him out of central casting. Six-foot-three, two hundred and fifteen pounds, and dressed in a studded leather jacket, his black eyes glared at the camera. Rosa’s skin was swarthy, his cheeks pitted, his nose broken so badly it twisted an inch to the left. Every bit the top-man, he looked five years older than Kennedy, though he was actually a year and a half younger.

I put Rosa’s picture next to Kennedy’s and stared at them for a minute. Bouton had been right again. Thong hadn’t made his selections on the basis of physical type. More likely, he’d imagined himself to be on some sort of a crusade. Maybe he was a trick who’d come down with AIDS and blamed all male prostitutes.

Rosa’s DD5’s were no more revealing than Kennedy’s. He’d been working on West Street when he’d been taken, but nobody had seen anything of significance. His last known address was Rikers Island. Acquaintances described him as a mean, unpredictable bastard.

I glanced at the autopsy photos and found the same powder burns, the same entry wound. Rosa had been facing away from his killer, that much was certain, but it was impossible to imagine Rosario on his hands and knees. That wasn’t how top-men operated. Besides, tricks who like to dominate would have no interest in studs like Rosario Rosa.

“Hey, Pooch,” I called.

He snapped off the computer and turned to me. “What’s up?” He seemed relieved to be away from his work.

“You have any idea how Thong controlled his victims? I’m looking at Rosario Rosa here and the mutt’s completely butch. I can’t see him turning his back long enough to get taken.”

Pooch laughed happily. “Means, you want a definite answer to that one, you’re gonna have to get it from the killer.”

I
MADE ARRANGEMENTS TO
leave the material with Pooch for a few hours, then hit the streets. That box with its little mountain of information was depressing enough for me to abandon it until the wee hours when I was usually depressed, anyway. Though I never lack for energy, I don’t sleep much and never have. Before my exile to ballistics, I used to walk the streets at night, sometimes looking for trouble, but just as often to soak up the available energy. Urban renewal of the soul is what I called it.

New York, despite the popular misconception, does not cool off at night. No, while all those well-meaning, well-intentioned day people are sitting in front of their fifty-inch Mitsubishis watching the late news and wondering if they still have the energy for sex, the city actually
burns.

Most people equate light with energy. According to conventional wisdom, the world is supposed to slow down when the sun drags its fire below the horizon. But this is bullshit, and I advise all those who believe it to spend one night in a virgin forest without benefit of tent or lantern. If there’s nothing out there, why are you so afraid? You know full well those bats and possums roaming the night forest can do you no harm. That the
only
thing you inspire in their tiny brains is a desperate need to avoid you at all costs. That
you
are the great monster in
their
forest.

So, why are you afraid?

I was somewhere around six years old the first time I was exposed to that particular fear. The edge of the forest, a grove of fifteen-foot hemlocks whose branches swept the ground, came to within fifty feet of the house. I’d made a little tunnel into the hemlocks during the day (when I was usually free to explore while Mom scoured the town for booze or the money to buy booze) and somehow found it again one night when Mom went berserk. I seem to remember that her anger wasn’t directed at me, but at one of my “uncles.” They were fighting, but it wasn’t the kind of picky argument usually associated with that word. Mom and her lover of the moment were pounding the crap out of each other.

I was already experienced enough to know that Mom was as likely to shift targets in midstream as she was to pass out on the bed. The door happened to be open, so I ran out of the house, but instead of standing in one of the elongated patches of light cast through the windows, I kept on going. I plowed into my little tunnel and came to rest in a small hollow where three hemlock trunks met the forest floor.

It was funny, in a way. I was sitting on a scratchy mix of forest earth and dead needles, delighted with my narrow escape, when the lights in the house went out. Maybe it was Mom’s way of punishing me for evading her tantrum. More likely, she and her lover had decided to patch it up between the sheets and Mom had no idea where I was. Either way, I was stuck with the dark. And the noise.

I spent the night waiting for the “cannibal injun” to come and get me. The cannibal injun was Mom’s invention, the boogeyman she used to control me when she was too tired or too drunk to use her hands. Seven feet tall and red as a fire engine, the cannibal injun came in the night to sink his glistening white teeth into the soft flesh of disobedient children. Like half-Indian me, of course.

At five years old, with no one around to say, “Oh, Roland, there’s no such
thing
as monsters,” I fully accepted the cannibal injun. As well as my own badness. The forest is never really silent. The wind moans in the trees just like a monster yearning for the flesh of a tiny child. Small animals (mice, voles, skunks, rabbits, raccoons) stir the dried branches and dead leaves, breaking into occasional panicked flight at the approach of (who else?) the cannibal injun.

Like I said, it was funny, in a way. (And from a distance.) The only thing I could do was sink
deeper
into the darkness between the hemlock branches, hold my breath lest the slightest noise lure the monster to my hiding place. I had to embrace the night and the life that came with it simply in order to survive. A life that, as I came to understand later, fed on me even as it sustained me.

Do nocturnal animals fear the sun? Fear it the way humans fear the dark? By the time dawn made its appearance, by the time I could see my uncannibalized flesh, I was no longer afraid. Even at five years old, I knew dear old mom would never follow me into those deep, dark woods. Like any other night-blind human, she could only pass the hours of darkness in a safe, well-lit den.

(What I think I did was become Mom’s cannibal injun. Big joke on Mom, right? Not that I eat human flesh. Like any other wraith, I feed entirely on spirit.)

Later, after I came to New York, I discovered an unsuspected truth. The special life that emerges after sunset has nothing to do with the absence of light. Because it was there waiting for me in the Big Apple, despite the fact that New York (like every other place where humans dwell in numbers) both fears and fights the dark. High-intensity streetlights; shimmering, hissing neon; blazing restaurant windows; glowing theater marquees; the great white fucking way—none of it matters because there’s nothing humans can do to restore the sun, to hold off the boogeyman.

It was still early when I left Pooch to his misery. The sun had been down for an hour or so and it was raining lightly. I flipped the hood of my jacket over my head and rammed the PBA cap into my pocket. PBA stands for Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, and the errand I had in mind called for some small measure of concealment. I say “small measure” because the drug dealers in New York would solicit a ham sandwich if it had the money to buy a quarter of a gram or a ten-dollar bag.

I made my way up Tenth Avenue, cruising through the neighborhood called Chelsea toward Midtown and Times Square, the sleaze capital of America. Chelsea is one of those “used to be” neighborhoods the real estate industry keeps trying to resurrect. They’d succeeded in one, the Upper West Side, and partially succeeded in another, Hell’s Kitchen, but Chelsea had eluded their best efforts. Perhaps it had something to do with the Robert Fulton Houses, a three-square-block housing project as grim as any in Manhattan.

The dealers were out in force when I strolled by, preying on coke and dope junkies who, in turn, preyed on local citizens. I could feel their eyes scanning me as I walked past; this was not the neighborhood for a casual hike. An emissary approached me on the second block.

“You wanna party, bro?”

I stopped and turned to face a tall, slim Latino. He had sharp
Indio
eyes, somewhat like my own, though his skin was quite a bit darker. I stared at him for a moment, then flipped my shield in his face.

“I have no business with you; you have no business with me.
Comprende?
”

His eyes widened momentarily, then he laughed. “You sure don’t look like no cop!”

“What do I look like?”

His laugh actually deepened. “You look like me.”

I left him to pursue his trade, continuing Uptown. I was looking for a lone dealer, but I didn’t expect to find one until I got to Times Square. The street dealers on the deuce usually come from distant neighborhoods. True entrepreneurs, they rarely work in packs, preferring to set up shop on the quieter side streets and pick off whatever business happens to walk by.

I found the man I was looking for on Forty-fourth Street, between Eighth and Ninth avenues. A short black kid in a soggy, hooded sweatshirt, he couldn’t have been more than seventeen. I tossed him a questioning glance and he whispered the magic words.

“Coke? Coke?”

I hesitated, started to walk away, then turned to him, wiping my nose with the back of my hand like any other coke junkie.

“What I’m looking for is an eight-ball. Can you handle that?”

An eight-ball is an eighth of an ounce, three and a half grams. Not every street dealer can (or will) sell that much to a stranger.

“No pro’lem, bro. Cost you three Franklins. Up front.”

I cocked my head to one side and regarded him skeptically. His head barely came up to my chin, but he looked like a runner.

“You think I’m stupid?” I asked. “You think I’m just gonna hand you three hundred dollars? Do me a favor, man, don’t disrespect me.”

He gave me a hard look, but I held my ground. I didn’t want to threaten him, but it wouldn’t hurt if I came off like I’d spent a few years in the joint.