The Wolves of Fairmount Park (11 page)

Orlando finally pointed at the red-haired guy and smiled. “Asa, right?”

“Yeah, that's right.” Orlando knew him vaguely from the life, had heard his name, seen him pointed out by Bob or someone but couldn't think where. Asa didn't look particularly pleased to be recognized, but he put out a smile and invited Orlando to sit down with a wave. “Benigno thinks we ought to discriminate against you, given your brother's a cop.”

Orlando counted out a few bills and held them in his fist. Asa pointedly walked away, looking at Benigno, the Puerto Rican kid, who took the money and vanished into a back room. After a few minutes a young girl with a sweet face but ancient, guarded eyes came out of the back and waved Orlando into a darkened room off the empty kitchen.

She carried in a tray and set it down on a scarred table while he sat in a plush chair under a ratty green slipcover that glowed slightly in the dark room. The girl shaped her mouth into a
smile that carried nothing, but set up a candle that she lit with a wooden match. She lit a second match and ran it over the butt of the candle and stuck it to the table, then pulled a length of tube off the tray, set it down in front of him, then pulled out a bag, a needle, a spoon.

Orlando, who noticed such things, lifted the glassine bag to his face and saw the logo, a green skull surrounded by lightning bolts and the word radioactive in block letters. He looked around him into the dark room, and the weak yellow light of the candle showed he wasn't alone. In what looked to be an identical chair across the table there was a humped shape that revealed itself to be a man when he put a cigarette to his mouth, the end glowing silently as he pulled on it.

“Don't mind me,” the man said, his voice quiet, rolling with dope and drink and a soft Irish accent so that his words seemed to curl in on themselves. “You go ahead, man.” Orlando sat for a moment, gathering himself, then lifted the spoon and opened the little bag.

He cooked up, tied himself off, and found the vein with his finger in the dark, a humped, sinewy wire at the crook of his elbow. When he fired the dope into his arm the man across the table lifted a bottle of Irish whiskey from the floor and slid it across the table. Orlando lifted it quick and put it to his lips, feeling the astringent burn of the liquor on his swollen lips and taking a quick swallow before the dope landed hard in his heart and he had to put the bottle down and roll back in the chair, his eyes drooping.

“There you go, yeah?”

Orlando couldn't speak, but nodded, his head falling off the
stalk of his neck as if unmoored. He saw the man reach to the floor again, and he must have turned up the volume on a CD player or a radio, because now there was music, louder in the room. A song about wolves in the snow, with a strange and high and reedy sound that drifted in Orlando's head and set up vibrations in the echoing dark of his brain.

“Beautiful,” Orlando said, or thought he did, and the man nodded but said nothing. The song ended and another came on, something very different. Violins, arcing and keening in a way that suggested sleek and shadowed things moving in a black sea, so much that Orlando peered around him in the dark, half expecting to see long shapes curling around the legs of the table.

“This music,” he said, shaking his head.

“Oh, yeah,” said the man, reaching to grab the bottle and taking a long pull so that Orlando could see the hard knot at his throat working in the dark. He put the bottle down again, lit another cigarette. “It makes me see them,” he finally said. “Calls them to mind.”

Orlando shook his head. “Who?”

“The ones out there, in the river. The ones moving in the river at night.”

Orlando said nothing, watching the cigarette glow and fade, glow and fade in the dark.

“Do you think of them?” The man moved, and Orlando could see he was wearing dark glasses, even here. The man lifted a hand, held it in front of his face in the near dark. It glowed white in the flickering light of the green candle. “I think of them. Moving, slow, down the bottom of the river. Nothing to stop them, nothing to hold on to. Even if they could reach out, what
would there be? Just the silt, that slick black silt? The smooth stones and cold water and nothing to stop them till they come to the sea.”

Orlando stared, straining to see the man, part of him there in the room and part of him in the river with the blue, drifting bodies. The man moved his hand, and Orlando could see it there in the space in front of him. The darkness and the mud. Smooth stones below and the cold river all around. The moon overhead, bloated and misshapen by the view from the river bottom. A body, twisting slowly, arms wide, hands empty and luminous in the black water.

Danny Martinez sat with John Rogan in a bad room that hadn't been painted in so many years he couldn't say what color the walls were anymore. The furniture was ancient dark wood and steel speckled with rust, and there were posters on the walls going back years—public service posters and wanted flyers and interoffice memos taped and tacked over each other like sedimentary deposits on the walls of some lost cave of the civil bureaucracy.

On the table between them was the gun that had been used to shoot George and Michael. Ballistics would take a while, but that's what Danny believed the tests would show. Handcuffed to a ring on a chair nearby was Darnell Burns, the star of this play, though he didn't know it yet; his head up, looking defiant in the chastised schoolboy way of low-level criminals.

“Darnell, tell us about the Nortes.” Danny squared off a stack
of files on the chair. They were arrest reports he'd grabbed from John's desk, but they made a large pile and Danny would pat it while they talked, letting Darnell think what he would about what was in the files.

“They ain't shit to me.” Darnell thrusting out his chin.

Big John raised an eyebrow at Danny, turned away to hide his smile. This wasn't even sport.

“But they come to Green Lane, disrespect you, disrespect Ivan . . .”

“Let them come, see what happens.”

“We know, don't we, John?” John Rogan turned back, working his pen in his hands the way he did. Clicking, twirling, clicking. “We know they came down, and someone had to do something. Set up on one of your blocks. Act like Green Lane don't mean shit.”

“Ivan says, never let them think they can move, or they will.”

“That's right, that's right. You had to head it off. You had to send a message about what's what. Who runs what. You had to let them know that they had crossed the line. So you sent Trey to do something.”

Darnell's brow creased. “Trey?”

“See, we got Trey's fingerprints on this gun, and we know this gun did the murder at Roxborough Avenue.”

“I don't know nothing about that business. That gun showed up—”

“Yeah, we heard that story before. That the gun was thrown in with some dope you bought yesterday.”

“Yeah, I told you—”

“Darnell. You got to think clearly now.”

John leaned in at Darnell and spoke for the first time, the squared-off plain of his giant forehead looming. “The clock is ticking.”

Danny nodded and pointed at John. “See, there you go. You can sit there and say I don't know, and it wasn't me, but in another room just like this one, Trey and Pook and all of them are trying to explain why the murder gun is on your mother's coffee table. What do you think they're going to say, Darnell?”

“Bullshit.”

Danny smiled. “The DA is coming, Darnell. And the DA is going to get a story and go see the judge. She ain't waiting on Darnell Burns.” Danny got up, went to the coffeemaker and poured a few inches into a gritty foam cup, and set it in front of Darnell.

“This is a mess, Darnell. I don't know if you get it. A child is dead. A white child, and we both know what that means. Another child is shot, and that's the child of a policeman.” He shook his head. “I know you know what that means, too. And we come to your house, and we bring the SWAT, and Trey comes out shooting, almost gets killed, and you have any idea what all that costs the city? It ain't cheap, a gunfight. Every single bullet they fire costs money, and all the paperwork and the time and all that.”

“You bill me, I'll write you a check.”

Rogan smiled, and it was a terrible thing to see. “The clock is ticking.”

“Why you keep saying that? Why does this bighead freak keep saying that about the clock? Goddammit.”

“ 'Cause it's true, Darnell. The DA is going to indict someone,
and I mean right now, tonight. She doesn't play. She doesn't ask twice. Dead children and a gunfight and people known to be in the drug business? Meaning you, Darnell. Someone is going to jail.” Danny sat back and pointed at the clock.

Big John said, “Tick, tock.”

Darnell pulled up hard on the cuffs around his wrists, clattering the steel chain. “Get this big Irish mope the fuck out of my face.”

“He's doing you a favor, Darnell. When Ivan sat in that same chair, Big John helped him, too.”

“You know Ivan?”

“Everyone knows Ivan, Darnell.” Danny lifted a file and leafed through it, pointing to things Darnell couldn't see. “You think Ivan only got fourteen months because the judge liked his face?”

“Now you are telling me some bullshit. Ivan never talked to no DA.”

Big John leaned in again, even closer, so that his sour, coffee-tinged breath could hit Darnell square in the face. “Everybody talks.”

Danny smiled, pointed at John again. “There you go.” He tapped the open file as if it were proof of the truth of John Rogan's words. “Ivan gave up two guys from Kensington who were moving dope for the Nigerians.” Who knew, it might even be true. “And whoever tells the story first wins, Darnell. That's how it works.”

“You got the wrong motherfucking guy. You need to go out and talk to someone else.”

“No, we don't need anyone else. We got a house full of
suspects. Between you and Trey and Pook and poor Marcus, shot dead on your mom's porch? We got plenty of suspects. So, no, we're not talking to anyone else. We got the murder gun, and you have some hard fucking choices to make now. Who is Trey to you? Not family. He's not even a cousin.”

Danny slid closer to Darnell. “Man, whoever pulled the trigger on those kids is going away forever. For
ever
.” Darnell Burns looked down, slumping, and John looked at Danny and waggled his eyebrows. He reached behind him and grabbed a yellow legal pad and put it on the table and uncapped a pen.

Danny was quiet, serious. “Was it a mistake? Of course. No one thinks those kids got shot on purpose. A couple of dumb-ass kids in the wrong neighborhood when those lowlife Nortes were being dealt with. By Trey King.”

“Trey did that?”

Danny said, “You didn't send him.”

“I never sent Trey to kill no Nortes.”

John raised his eyebrows at Danny. Was this kid dense or honest-to-God confused?

“Then, man, your conscience is clear.” He smiled and pointed at the gun. “This gun is in your house, but it's Trey's prints on it. Trey, acting on his own? Getting ahead of himself, maybe trying to impress you? Or Ivan? You can't be held responsible if someone you know does something stupid, right? We have a little talk, make everyone feel good about you cooperating—”

“I'm no snitch.”

“No, no, no. Nobody is snitching, Darnell. But why take the weight for something you had nothing to do with? End up doing thirty fucking years? Just 'cause you happen to invite somebody
into your mother's house for pancakes turns out to be the world's biggest dumb-ass? Motherfucker shoots two white children? Motherfucker shoots the son of a
police
? Motherfucker throws down on a SWAT team when they come? Like to get your mother shot?”

“If Trey shot them kids, it didn't have shit to do with me or my business.”

“That's right. This ain't about loyal or disloyal, Darnell. This is about smart or stupid. Darnell, you're the smart one. Ivan might be the face, but you're the brain. Everybody in the neighborhood knows that.” He had to keep looking at Darnell. If he'd looked up at John, he'd have had trouble keeping his poker face. “But maybe Trey said something to you? Gave you like an indication of his state of mind?”

Darnell Burns looked beat. He lifted his hands again futilely, the chain rattling. “Trey?”

“This is what it's like to be in charge, Darnell. You have to make the hard calls. You have to know when someone has to go down so the rest of the team can make it. Ivan knew, he made his choice. I know it's tough, 'cause it all falls to you. It's just you, and us, and the DA, and the ticking clock. 'Cause you're the
smart
one.”

John reached one meaty fist down, holding the pen out to Darnell. “Be smart now.”

Orlando walked Pechin Street like it was the deck of a ship in a storm. Headlong, he tilted in the direction of his movement,
his heavy head pointing the way and somehow pulling him along toward home. The houses seemed to lean in and then away as he lurched, one hand cushioning his aching ribs as he squinted into the orange sodium night. The air was warm, the streets shining with a film of greasy water under black clouds that raced toward a thin blade of white moon.

He turned the corner at the end of his block and stopped, canted his head, and tried to count windows, looking for the lit shade that would tell him Zoe was home, which he both wanted and didn't. He wanted to feel her thin, hot arms around him, but he didn't want to see her eyes when she took in how beaten in he was. He forced his eyes open wide, felt the stiff resistance of his gummed, bruised lids.

He was afraid there was a calculus in the way she looked at him, measurement along the arc of his trajectory, and he felt there would be a point she'd pull back, float away as he picked up downward momentum. She'd retreat to some safer place, he thought, and he'd have to be ready for that. Maybe she'd go back to her parents out on the Main Line, maybe just on to someone with a less desperate need for the blackness at the center of everything.