Hellhound

A Bones Adventure

Mark Wheaton

Southbound Films—2012

D
evaris couldn’t tell if the smell was something blowing in off the East River or boiling up from the sewers. As if the acrid stench wasn’t bad enough on its own, the street lamps, yellowed by oxidation, cast the block in a dog’s breakfast of bilious colors: toxic green, blood-piss orange, and the congealed gray of yesterday’s oatmeal.

East Harlem near Jefferson Park was its own particular brand of hell on a midsummer’s night. Too hot for anyone to get comfortable doing much more than fucking in a shower or getting high in a meat locker.

Devaris had already done the latter while double-shifting at Triple A the past sixteen hours. He was looking forward to doing the former once he found out if Ro was home. And if she wasn’t, wasn’t it about time he knocked on that girl Sheila’s door over in Building 2?

He smiled as he turned the corner on 111
^th
and 2
^nd
. It may have been two o’clock in the morning, but Devaris Clark wasn’t afraid of getting jacked. Everyone knew he was out of the game. If they didn’t, he knew all the right scary names to drop.

Besides, he knew he didn’t look like he was worth the trouble. A skinny guy with an empty backpack slung over one shoulder and a single Parliament jammed behind his right ear probably wasn’t rolling in it.

It didn’t hurt that he smelled like blood and dead animal flesh. Gloves, aprons, helmets, boots, and goon suits kept the blood off his T-shirt and jeans, but the smell of the Liberty Avenue slaughterhouse where he worked got in everywhere. It was under his fingernails, hanging in his eyelashes, and sweating out his balls. He’d seen its effect on animals here and there. A cat giving him a long cold look as if he’d smoked every other pussy in its litter before skinning its mother. The crows that would call to other crows to get a look-see. The dogs that went crazy, their eyes sparkling and their lips smacking like they wanted a taste.

But they all gave him room. How were they to know he wasn’t willing to add a couple more victims to those three hundred hogs he’d killed that day?

“Heeey, you ready?” cried a voice from across the street.

Devaris looked over and saw a girl in booty shorts dancing down the steps to a waiting car, two girlfriends hanging out the window.

Damn, where were
they
going
?

He stared at the girl’s thighs where they met the straining-at-the-seams shorts. Half an hour from now, she’d be bouncing that thing over some brother at a club that wouldn’t be him. He’d have to settle for the girl across the hall who’d give it up for little more than the time of day.

But one day things would be better. One day that better come soon.

He popped the ear buds into his ears and kept walking, turning up his iPod until the last word he made out from Booty Shorts was a reference to her pussy.

•  •  •

The Triborough Projects loomed large over in East Harlem. Also known as Neville Houses, they consisted of sixteen high-rise brick apartment buildings that wove across four square blocks. Designed by an architect who’d rookied in designing Texas prisons, Neville Houses was packed with thousands of people. There were families, old people, singles like Devaris, multi-generation immigrant clans, and then a handful of illegal squatters, the apartments rented out by Nigerian gang lords who filled up rooms with assholes fresh off the boat that they’d call INS on a day after they’d drained their last cent.

The buildings themselves were identical, but their relation to one another created a labyrinthine effect. Instead of being on a grid, the towers slanted at odd angles that, if seen from above, looked like some kind of modernist sculpture.

But if you were on the ground, or worse, had to live in there, you’d pack for minotaur any time you had to cross the threshold.

Devaris didn’t mind. It was better than his brother’s place in the South Bronx and a hell of a lot better than the streets, a shelter, or lockup. He’d had plenty of experience with all three.

That’s why, when he felt the eyes watching him from the side-view mirror of the one car parked facing west in a row legally obligated to face east, he did nothing to adjust his gait. Only prey runs. When the doors of the car swung open and the footsteps approached him from behind, he couldn’t help but tense, though he demanded his heart resist the temptation to accelerate.

“Hands out of your pockets!”

Devaris did as he was asked. The ear buds were popped out of his ears and a hand placed between his shoulder blades.

“Police. Turn out your pockets and put your hands on the wall.”

Devaris turned to find two men, a black guy and a Latino, standing behind him. The black one was Phil Leonhardt, a ten-year veteran who’d done all his time in Harlem’s notorious 22nd Precinct. The precinct had earned much of its reputation from two inglorious distinctions: one of the highest geographical concentrations of violent crime in the country, and then one of the highest rates of police officer suicide.

The Latino, Ramon Garza, was a five-year veteran who’d only recently transferred in from the 34
^th
Precinct in Washington Heights.

“You ain’t cops,” Devaris grunted.

Garza pulled out a badge. “Got anything else to say?”

Slow as you please, Devaris turned to face the nearest wall, spread his legs, and placed his palms against the bricks. This apparently wasn’t good enough for Garza, who kicked Devaris’s legs apart even further, almost knocking him down.

“You think we’ve got all night, asshole?” the detective asked.

“You think I’ve seen your calendar?”

“Wow, you hear this guy?” Garza asked Leonhardt, slipping on latex gloves. “I don’t know what you’re heard, kid, but this is New York. Cops here have a pretty low threshold for assholes.”

“I’ll remember that.”

Garza gruffly shoved Devaris’s head back down before beginning his pat-down. “Anything in here we’d be interested in?”

“Dunno. Depends what you’re into, I guess.”

Leonhardt stifled a laugh. Garza scowled.

“Now you’ve gotten on my bad side,” the Latino detective snapped.

“A real man would’ve hit me by now.”

Leonhardt jumped in. “We’re going to find you for something, kid. You won’t be laughing when they set your bail.”

“Yeah, right,” Devaris retorted. “For what?”

“Vagrancy, resisting…” Garza spat.

“
Possession
,” Leonhardt added evenly.

Devaris met the black cop’s gaze, scrunching his brow. “Bullshit. I ain’t holding.”

“Oh, you must have something,” said Garza. “My partner’s a one-man K9 unit. If he says you’re holding, you’re
holding
.”

•  •  •

From across the street, the men were being watched by two sets of eyes. As Garza searched Devaris’s clothes, Leonhardt tossed the backpack. The watchers could see, could practically
smell
Devaris’s sweat. Even better, the sweat was activating the blood the young man had rightly surmised was caked into every pore in his body. Within seconds, a new aroma joined the sick of the streets.

The watchers liked this.

•  •  •

Leonhardt turned the backpack inside out. He
knew
there was something in it, but its position was eluding him. As he searched the pockets yet again, he could see Devaris’s body relaxing in his peripheral vision even as the detective’s frustration grew.

When even Garza glanced over with concern, Leonhardt shrugged and handed the bag back. “It’s clean.”

Garza shot him a look of
are you sure?
Leonhardt glanced away. Garza slapped the backpack into Devaris’s hands.

“Tomorrow night, then?” Devaris asked.

“It’s a date, fucktard,” Garza flung back, spittle ejecting from his mouth.

Devaris smirked, threw the backpack over his shoulder, and walked on down the sidewalk.

As soon as he was out of sight, Garza turned to Leonhardt.

“You slipping?”

“Nah, he had something. I just couldn’t find it. It happens.”

Garza grunted and moved back towards their car. Once the two were inside, the Latino detective gunned the engine and peeled away, as if hoping to wake up half the neighborhood.

•  •  •

Devaris watched the cops leave but then took off his pack. Pulling the right strap close, he withdrew a thin joint from a tiny hole in the seams. He lit up with a smile. The first puff tasted even better than he’d imagined it would.

He headed onto the Neville Houses grounds, trampled grass and rocks demarcating the lot borders better than the sidewalks. Building 7 was directly ahead of him and inside, Ro’s ass just waiting to get fucked. He lowered the joint from his lips knowing that if he showed up with less than half, she’d pout, but he’d already gotten a buzz on.

It was going to be a lovely evening.

But that’s when he heard it. The sound of running feet echoed down the walls of the buildings, causing Devaris to look up. All the way on top, he could just barely make out the form of a little kid running along the roof, his shiny jacket illuminated by the moon.

“Oh,
shit
,” Devaris muttered before raising his voice. “Hey! HEY!! Get back from there! C’mon, man!”

But the kid didn’t answer. Devaris even thought he heard a taunting laugh.

“Shit,” he repeated.

Booking it into the building, he found the elevator broken.
Again
. Turning to the stairs, he shook his head.

“Kid, your momma better be an appreciative piece of ass.”

Extinguishing the roach and stuffing it in his pocket, Devaris began making the long climb.

The view from the top of Neville Houses was nothing special unless you knew just the right angle. Taller buildings surrounded the projects except at the front corner where, on a clear day, you could see all the way to the river, to the RFK Bridge, and even to Randall’s Island on the other side.

Devaris had never seen that angle and, busting a lung as he tried to catch his breath, wouldn’t be doing so tonight. The stairs had taken it out of him. He wasn’t happy by the time he burst out onto the roof.

“Kid? Where the fuck are you, you little prick?”

When there was no answer, Devaris made a circuit of the roof, looking everywhere for the little boy.

“Come out, come out, wherever you are!” Devaris joked, feeling just a little fucked-up. “Better get in before you trip your ass right over the edge!”

But as he kept walking, he saw no sign of any kid.

That’s when he saw it: a paint stirrer propped up next to the ledge, a shiny and torn jacket hanging from the top.

“What the hell?” Devaris muttered, moving in close.

He picked up the paint stirrer, eyeing the jacket with its two arms jutting out either side. It looked like a scarecrow.

“Oh, fuck this,” Devaris exclaimed, throwing it to the ground.

He didn’t hear the footsteps this time, didn’t even feel the push. As he tumbled over the edge of the building, the sensation Devaris felt more than anything was the rush of air being forced out of his lungs by the enormous pressure his own drag was building against his diaphragm. He couldn’t breathe, his eyes looking in every direction as his body focused on only one thing: re-catching his breath.

Just when it looked like that might never happen, the action proved unnecessary as Devaris’s body completed the sixteen-floor drop and smacked onto the pavement directly in front of Building 7. The instantaneous buildup and release of pressure within his body caused his skin to rupture in multiple places, muscles, sinew, and blood showering out of his corpse, deflating it like a balloon.

A motion-activated light flickered to life almost immediately, illuminating the body in a bluish-yellow halo for a full thirty seconds before, figuring its job done, it flickered back out.

The watchers emerged from the darkness then and moved over to where the body had fallen. A hand reached down and touched Devaris’s crumpled forehead before moving away, leaving half a shoe print in the slowly expanding pool of blood.

A moment later, and the neighborhood was still.

“B
ones?”