The Wolves of Fairmount Park (19 page)

In the car now, Gerry kept looking over at Chris until he said, “What?”

Gerry put his hands up. “I'm just saying. I see how the man treats you. You must get something off it, I guess.”

“I'm making money.”

“And you have to eat shit from that little freak, huh? It comes with the territory.”

“Fuck you. You know how much more I made with Asa than all that time we did strong-arm in Fishtown?”

“Okay.”

“Yeah, I'm making money, so back the fuck off. This, right here? This is me doing you a favor 'cause we go back. This is me throwing you a bone. What do you got to show for all that fucking around, getting in bar fights in every joint on Frankford Avenue? What do you got for two years in the can, Gerry?”

“Nothing. I got nothing. But nobody talks to me like I'm a fucking idiot. That's what I got to show.” He looked out the window while he said this, like a little kid with a fuck-you attitude being dragged along on an errand by his mother. Chris shook his head.

Gerry talked to the closed window. “How much is in the briefcase?”

“Shut your mouth.”

“I'm not saying shit.”

“Shit is all you ever say. Why did I call you?”

“That's right, why did you call me? You called me 'cause you needed me here to pull your head out of your ass. You knew. You knew exactly what I'd say. You knew I'd take one look at this here setup and tell you exactly what you needed to hear. The man's got you turned around. Doing his errands, taking his risks. Where's the man going to be when we're down on Broad Street with the shine? Do you even fucking know? Asa Carmody. Who the fuck is he? Nobody knows him. You say that name on Frankford Avenue, you get blank looks. Gerry Dunn, they know. Chris Black, they know. Shannon Black, God rest, they knew.”

“That's what he wants, shit-for-brains. The man is invisible. He moves without getting his fucking hands on things. Without his fingerprints showing up. He's got a guy who runs his corners in North Philly, and another guy who runs the corners in West Philly. Guys from Frankford and Christ-knows-what-all. He's got guys I've never even met. He's the puppet master.”

Gerry finally turned back and leaned toward Chris. “Yeah? What's that make you, then?”

Before they went into the old hotel, he called Asa. Gerry shook his head, and Chris gave him hard eyes.

“You ready?”

“Yeah, Asa. I know what to do.”

“What the fuck's wrong with you?”

“Nothing.”

“This is easy. You walk in, show the man his money, he shows you what he brung, you walk out. This is a test. It goes good, we get the whole thing.”

“I know. I'm not stupid.”

“You're giving me a bad feeling. What's up with you?”

“Nothing. How many times I did these things for you, you don't have to tell me every fucking thing.”

There was a long silence on the other end of the line. “I have to be there? You got your head right on this?”

“No, it's okay, you don't have to come down.”

“Anything goes wrong, come right back out to the street where you are right now. Angel's got the street in front, you understand?”

“Angel.”

“Yeah, he's covering the street. You come right back out here, let him take care of it. Why do I have the feeling you're not listening to me?”

“I'm listening. We got trouble, Angel is out here to cover us.”

“That's right.”

Angel took out his cell and laid it on the asphalt, fit an earpiece, and leaned back on the crate, the barrel of the AR-15 resting on the metal lip of the low wall at the edge of the roof. He watched a long, old car pull up in front of the hotel and idle there. The doors opened slowly, and there were a lot of pauses and discussion as Chris Black and Gerry Dunn got out on the curbside,
then Frank pulled slowly away to circle back around at Brown Street. The glass in the hotel windows was frosted with dust and grime; the street was quiet except for sirens far away.

Chris had a briefcase under one arm, and he stood talking to Gerry for a minute in the rain, his shoulders hunched, before Gerry punched him lightly on the arm and turned to the front door, his hand on something at his waist. They squared themselves to the door like gunfighters and went in, Gerry stopping to slowly push the old barricade aside where it had been loosened to let them in.

Then the street was empty and quiet for a while. The music changed at the party up the street, the drumming faster, louder, and there was a cry, maybe the sound of one dancer encouraging another. Frank's car reappeared on Fairmount, coming back west toward Broad, and he edged it to the curb and idled, killing the lights. Angel took his hands off the rifle one at a time and wiped them on his shirt under his jacket. He waited, staring at the empty face of the old hotel.

He thought he heard a pop, then one of the windows to the right of the door blew out and suddenly the place was full of light. There were two more shots, then the steady clacking of an automatic weapon and bits of the door sprayed the street. Angel put the front sight of the AR-15 on the window where he'd seen the small flare of light and fired three shots, starring the glass.

The front door opened and Chris came out fast, his empty pistol locked open and two cases under his arm. Gerry Dunn was right behind him, limping, his left arm hanging and dark with blood. Angel walked the AR-15 over the windows, shooting
blind, and when he'd emptied it he picked up the duffel and banged through the door to the stairs, jamming the long gun into the bag and pulling the pump gun out as he dropped fast down the dark stairway.

At the bottom of the stairs he dropped the duffel and ran across the street, where Frank Dunn had run from the corner and was unloading his AK into the front door of the hotel while Chris passed him going the other way. Chris jumped into the car and ground the gears, his face white and sweat standing out on his face and darkening his shirt. Angel ran up the three stairs to the door and kicked it off its hinges, putting the Remington out in front of him and stepping into the glare of two portable halogen work lights set up on the stairs across the lobby.

Angel crab-walked sideways from the door, keeping the shotgun up, but there was no more shooting. The walls were pink, mottled with brown water stains and decorated with old panel moldings and medallions outlined in black dust. The floor was littered with expended shells, long rifle casings standing in a bright puddle at the base of the stairs and squat, dull shells from the pistols Chris and Gerry carried scattered around near the front door. In the center of the floor was the African, sitting upright in a pink chair, his eyes open, still trying to talk. Angel crossed the room fast to stand flat against the wall.

He reloaded the shotgun and lifted it to shoot out the light standing on the floor near an elevator door. The single blast echoed in the long room and the light heeled back, spraying glass across the far wall and leaving one lone bulb working, throwing long shadows in the room so that each shell casing left a long tail on the floor and the shadow of the African in his chair suddenly
loomed on the wall by the front door. Blood ran in vivid streaks down the short legs, as if the chair itself were bleeding out.

Angel dropped low and sighed, then pushed himself out in front of the stairs, raising the gun to his shoulder and firing three times fast, working the short pump as he took the stairs two at a time to reach the landing and kick over the blind the African's man had made. The stacked doors collapsed onto the sagging mattress; the walls were pocked with holes from the pistols and now from the buckshot in Angel's Remington. There were more bright shells from a rifle and Jesus, belts of ammunition for a machine gun. Long trails in the white dust leading back down the hall, but there was no blood, no body. The man with the rifle was gone.

Angel walked back out through the lobby to the street, where he found himself alone in the rain. He went around the corner to Fairmount, where Frank Dunn's old Firebird idled at the curb, leaking blue smoke. The streetlights were ringed with white circles of fine drops. Frank got out from behind the wheel, holding a hand up as Angel rounded the edge of the building.

“We got to go.” His voice was strangled with the effort to keep himself in check. “Gerry's shot and we got to go.” He stepped away from the open door to point back into the car and then there was a loud rattling that became a roar of rapid-fire pops from the blackness down the block toward Thirteenth. Bullets cracked and sang, punching through windshields and parked cars. Frank Dunn grabbed at his throat and went down, spraying the open car door with his blood. Angel dropped behind a rust-colored Escort a few feet away and listened to the wet coughing noises Frank made as blood poured out of him into the
street. From inside the car Gerry screamed and thrashed, trying to get to his brother in the street while Chris struggled with him.

Angel shook his head and made a motion with his arm as if pushing something away. “That's what he wants,” he said under his breath, but Gerry was winning the fight with Chris, pulling his own huge upper body out onto the street to clutch his brother's legs. There was more firing, the cracking noise of the rifle echoing down the street. The big 7.62 rounds Angel had seen in the hotel that didn't stop when they hit cars or walls. The bullets missed Gerry but punched through the open door, splintering the glass and knocking the door handle off to clink down onto the pavement a few feet from where Angel crouched. A thin rivulet of blood moved past his shoes carrying bits of paper, a cigarette filter with a band of gold.

Angel stood up and fired the shotgun down the black street, seeing only rows of parked cars lining the north side of Fairmount where the man must be hiding. He ducked back down again and more shots splattered against telephone poles and the old brick hotel. There was a pause and then two more shots, one kicking up water and chips of asphalt from the wet street and one smacking Gerry Dunn in the band of white belly exposed as he leaned out of the car to grab at his brother.

Angel shook his head and stood up then, running into the dark between the streetlights and firing down the line of cars. The heavy steel shot rang dissonant chords off the car bodies, bits of plastic and bright cubes of glass spraying the wet asphalt. He kept moving, pumping the gun fast and putting the sight on each car in turn, trying to drive the man out into the street.
There was a lull when he dropped behind a green Acura and reloaded, and then he heard laughing and the man yelling something in French.

He popped up again, the gun at his cheek, in time to see him, the African's man, running flat out with a rifle in his hands, rounding the corner on Thirteenth Street. He was tall, wearing a red shirt, and had long plaits of dark hair and limped slightly as he ran, appearing under a streetlight at the corner and then moving fast out of the circle of light. The machine gun, a big FN with a handle on the top, Angel thinking,
Jesus, that must weigh a ton.
Angel ran the last yards to the intersection and turned, his breath coming hard. He could hear the sound of the tall man running, the rhythmic slap of his feet on the wet pavement fading into the tapping sounds of the rain.

After a minute he jogged back up toward Broad. People had begun to come out of their houses on Thirteenth, cell phones stuck in their ears. He got up to where Frank's car had been and found it gone. Frank and Gerry lay on the street, their blood running in long lines toward the gutter and diffusing in the rainwater. Frank's eyes were open, his face slack and white. Gerry lay on his stomach, one arm thrown across his brother's chest and his right ear to the blacktop as if listening for some noise from under the ground.

Brendan drove north along Memphis Street, counting houses from the little park, and there it was. The house he'd been raised in, the house his half brother had been born in. He tried to
picture them all together, his crazy mother, his damaged brother, his straight-arrow father, trying to think of when they'd been a family and not getting a single image of them in the same room at the same time.

The place was empty, it looked like. Plywood covered one of the downstairs windows, the front speckled with holes as if some war had been fought out on the street. Some kind of notice stuck to the door. Foreclosure, seizure for back taxes, something.

Staying out of the house and away from her, that was the thing. He'd come home from school to find her holding court in a room full of rummies from some bar she'd been in all day. Having a party, she'd called it. Hanging with the mushmouthed drunks, talking about how she was going to Florida, about all the people who fucked with her who were going to get theirs.

The day he'd packed and left. His mother gone somewhere, his father moving fast, looking at his watch. Taking out the little plaid suitcase, grabbing his trophy from Little League and jamming it into a box from Beer City. His father trying to hurry Brendan along and it making him nervous, afraid of what she might do if she came back.

There wasn't anything of him in that house, he thought. His father had taken him to live in South Philly, and when he'd grown up and gone onto the force he'd moved into Manayunk with Kathleen. He couldn't even call up the inside of the place he'd grown up, even sitting on the street outside, but got little snapshots. He remembered hiding from his mother in an upstairs closet. He remembered spying on her in the kitchen while she drank and muttered to herself. He remembered taking his little brother down to the corner store to buy ice cream, and
watching the kids who sat on the stoops and smoked, who watched the two of them go by and called to them, laughed and looked at each other, passing some signal, their mouths open with their terrible, feral smiles.

Had he made some promise to Orlando? To go back and get him, to rescue him from their mother, the strange, bitter drunk she'd become? He'd been a kid himself when his father had taken him away. He'd have taken his little brother with him if he could have. It wasn't his fault. What happened to Orlando. Where he ended up, what became of him. Where he landed when he fell.