The Wolves of Fairmount Park (28 page)

“I hear that. Where is it?”

Orlando pointed to where the van was pulled half up on a
rotting curb between two derelict buildings, down where Hope looked like a wide alley. Weeds cascaded over a broken fence and pooled around the tires of the van like it had been there for years. Audie kept moving, going quickly down the alley without looking back. He moved around behind the van and pulled at the door, motioning Orlando over.

“So what is all this shit?” He stuck his head in, and Orlando got a strange vibe, Audie's voice too loud, his eyes all over the place except on Orlando's face and acting busy with his head buried in the van.

“It's an amplifier, some speakers and cables and shit, from a church up on Pine. Everything okay there? Did you bring me anything?” Two pigeons wandered in the trash by the curb, and he thought how it seemed like the streets used to be full of birds and that you hardly saw them anymore.

Audie said, “Yeah, sure. Just seeing what's what.” He finally turned then, facing Orlando. Audie flicking his eyes over him and then up the alley the way they had come. Scratching at the bright tattoos on his arms, the dragons and kimonoed girls. The pigeons went up, lifting with a rattling noise, and Orlando took a step back and pivoted to look behind him. There was a guy moving down the street toward him, a guy with black hair and a ratty black raincoat whose face he knew but couldn't place. He was out of it, not thinking right, and when he finally remembered he'd gotten high with the guy in the dope house and that he'd played the music Orlando liked so much, he smiled and pointed.

The guy wasn't smiling back at him. He was going into his coat, concentrating on him with an intensity that finally set off
an alarm, but all Orlando could do was back up, hitting the wall with his elbows, looking fast at Audie, who was watching everything with a sick and fascinated look, one hand on the open van door.

He was too tired and beat down to run, Orlando thought, too out of it, stretched too thin over too many days, and the guy, the Irish guy, was closing the distance with his hand in his coat, his face sad, his mouth turned down. The gun came out then, a small black pistol pointed at Orlando, and his chest moved up and down, an exhalation that was a sigh of resignation.
Why would anybody shoot me?
He thought this, forgetting everything that had happened and falling back on his own image of himself as a wandering eye that took in everything without comment or explanation. Forgetting that he had asked a lot of people about murder, and that his quest had gotten him shut down on every corner he had ever scored drugs. Forgetting it all and thinking himself harmless in the last moment.

There was a squeal of brakes from Girard and a little red car stopped hard and they all turned to look, frozen. The car had blacked-out windows and there was music coming from inside it that got clearer as the passenger's side window went down. The music was loud, hard drums and a foreign language, and Orlando cocked his head to hear it. Audie actually said, “Is that French?” Then the big automatic rifle in the window opened up, a sawing roar bounced around the hard brick surfaces of the alley, followed closely by the ringing of the bullets as they punched through the metal skin of the van, making a line of holes, a wild track running left to right and up, finally smashing the rear window before catching Audie in the side so that he
made a noise, a hard plosive exhalation, and blood sprayed out of him over the weeds and the fence and the brick wall before he fell.

The Irish guy swung, somehow not hit that Orlando could see, and he walked toward the car, Christ, how was that possible? Who walks toward a rifle, the yellow sparks and gray smoke going like in a movie? But the black-haired guy squared to the car like it was nothing and had the pistol up in front of him and was pulling the trigger again and again, an arc of shells coming over his right shoulder and his shots breaking the rear window of the little red car and making small black holes in the door.

Orlando should have been running, but he stood against the wall and watched it happen. Audie lying on the ground, his legs jerking, his eyes open but unfocused, his hands plucking the air, blood on his face and coming out of his mouth. The Irish guy dropping the big pistol he'd been firing and going under his coat again. A kid, a skinny, tall kid with long braids getting out of the car, loosing a cascade of spent shells off the seat that chimed musically in the street. The kid unsteady, hurt maybe, leaning against the car door as he wrestled with a long belt of bullets that was draped around his neck. He was laying the belt into the gun and screaming something in French, hitting the bolt with his opened hand, when the black-haired Irish guy got another pistol free from the folds of his coat and fired twice fast, the bullets snapping through the kid so that he dropped his head, somehow still holding on to the rifle.

The car drifted forward a few feet, and Orlando could see the guy in the driver's seat slump forward, his head hitting the
steering wheel and setting off a long, loud blast of the horn. The Irish guy stood still, the pistol pointing straight out at the kid with the rifle, whose own head was down as if he were thinking hard or just acknowledging the damage the Irishman's gun had done. The kid stood weaving, the rifle in one hand, the barrel pointing down and out.

They all stood there for a minute, the car horn going, the shot-up guy in the braids trying to lift the barrel of the gun, and then Orlando took a step back, and then another, and then he was running flat out, past Audie and south down Hope Street into the fog. Past the beat-down empty factories with their grilled windows, across the old concrete-bottomed lots dotted with rain and through the rusted, gaping chain-link fences. He ran south and then west, losing himself in the flat, empty spaces before throwing himself down behind a hedge on American Street and staying there, prone and still, his heart going in his chest.

The whole thing had looked simple to Angel. The way it should go. One junkie pointing out another on the street so Angel could shoot him. Asa Carmody wanted to tell him about it, about why it had to be done. This guy, Orlando, a junkie from around the neighborhood, was asking questions of mutual friends about their business, but Angel wasn't interested. Angel kept shaking his head, holding his hand out for the burglar's number, telling Asa not to confuse it with details about who said what. He would ride with the older junkie, the burglar from
Fishtown, down to Girard to see the younger junkie, who was some kind of half-assed thief, and Angel would shoot the young guy and solve Asa's problem.

So Angel had seen it all in his head, the way he always did, but it didn't play out the way he'd seen it. There was no way to see what was coming today. The African's man throwing down on him with the giant machine gun from the other night. Somehow missing him from how many feet away? Though it was hard, he knew, making a big, belt-fed gun like that do what you wanted while you were hunched over in a little car. It was dumb luck, for sure, but then also on him not to panic, to stand his ground and empty his guns until the kid went down, those magnificent braids spread all around him in the mud on Hope Street. The man's mouth open in something like a smile, and blood in his teeth. Angel would remember that.

It was a good trick, the African picking him up somewhere and following him here. Part of him admired the man for doing that and was sorry the man was dying in the street, small bubbles opening in the blood on his chest. Ruining his shirt, a bright print with tall black girls and African colors. Angel got the smell of rain and weed and gunpowder.

Asa had set it all up, called Angel and told him what to do, got the thief with the dragon tattoos on his arms to cash in on his friend, the junkie Angel was supposed to kill. It was tough the little thief got shot up, but he had turned on his friend, and Angel thought,
There you go
. Fuck him for informing. Himself, he'd always been lucky, never even nicked by a bullet, but of course it wasn't just luck. It was something he'd learned, and so early it was like he'd always known it. To keep going, stand
your ground and fight it out and not run. To keep your head. It was a talent, or just the way he was, but it served him. He liked how the big African kid fucked with him, called him out in French, and he wished he knew the language to know what it was the guy was saying. Now they were his last words. Imagining wild, flamboyant insults that maligned his family, his manhood, the generations that spawned him—but who knew? He felt bad again, seeing the guy lying there with the rifle in his open, useless hands. His eyes blinked once, twice, then opened finally in the rain, and Angel wished he knew his name.

Angel had lowered his head to get a view of the driver, dead, slumped across the wheel, laying on the horn with his forehead. Bad enough to have a gunfight on the edge of fucking Girard Avenue in the middle of the day; now the horn was going so that everybody for two blocks was looking their way, and he'd have to move. He shook his head to see the two cars ruined, the dead man lying stretched out in the street. Next to the van was the other one, Audie, the rat, the one who'd put them onto the little junkie he'd come here to end. Audie was lying on his side, drawn up, his face gray. Spitting blood onto the side of the shot-up silver van. Trying to talk around the blood.

Angel stood over him. “You're Murphy?”

Audie moved his mouth, but only blood came out.

Angel shook his head. “You're Irish, you should know better. It's what comes to the informer.” He spat.

At the end of the block he thought he saw the junkie pivot and turn west, just a flash of the leather jacket, but that could wait for another day. Would have to, now. He could hear sirens going, even over the racket of the horn. Took one last look back
and had to shake his head again, smile at the man who tracked him down and opened up on him. Not give a shit where or when, just roll down the window and blast away like an old-time gangster and fuck it all. He found a hole in the fence and stepped through.

Zoe knocked on the door of a house on Shurs Lane, and the guy who ran the house let her in. They didn't like the place, she and Orlando, though she couldn't exactly say why. It was partially the people who ran it, the tall Puerto Rican kid, Benigno, who had kind of a superior attitude, or the spacey Asian girl with the half-smile. It was run-down, but all the places they knew were run-down. There was a lot of trust in going in to a place to score, or hang out and get high, and whether the people or the place seemed cool was a complex and a shifting thing.

She sat for a while and talked to a girl she recognized from the neighborhood, somebody she'd met at Fluid, a club down on Fourth Street. She was there waiting on her boyfriend and lounged on a sprung couch draped with an Indian print, and they talked about people they knew, bars they liked, the vintage place down on Third where the girl had gotten her dress, a bright blue chiffon with a beaded neck that Zoe coveted.

It took a while, longer than it should have, and the Asian girl just ignored them with her strange smile, and the Puerto Rican kid pled a slowdown and asked could they wait, which was fine
with Zoe, there being nowhere to go since things were all fucked up with Orlando. Her body was tired, but her mind was alert, up half the night at Mary's, talking the thing with Orlando out and drinking coffee. They were straight, Mary and Marty, which was cool for them, but she had come away wanting to get high. The baby was beautiful and well-behaved, but something about the quiet, the order of the house, got under her skin and made her edgy in a way she couldn't bring into focus.

The girl in the blue dress had a flask of something sweet in her purse, and she shared it with Zoe, who took a bigger hit off it than was probably polite. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and called for dope, dope, and the girl laughed and took it up, calling, “We want to get high.” They went back and forth with the flask, getting to be best friends, Zoe feeling the drinks fast, laughing too loud and too easily. The girl's boyfriend came back from wherever and she left with him, waving and making extravagant promises now about how they would get together, go somewhere, and hang out.

The Asian girl came out and put something in her hands, and Zoe touched her cheek, now everybody's friend, but the smile didn't change. The tall kid, Benigno, with the bushy Afro, hung back in the doorway, talking on the cell, and she had the crazy idea it was about her, and that made her laugh, too. She wanted to do the dope there, but the guy came out and said they were done for the day and she should take the dope and go. In fact he was pulling the girl into the back, waving Zoe off, turning off lights like it was a fucking bar at closing time.

She almost ran home, crossing the few blocks to the house and half hoping Orlando would be there, though she didn't know how she'd be when she saw him. She'd been angry and tired and he'd been frantic. Still, he'd raised his hand to her, something he'd never done, that she hadn't thought was in him, and that opened a lot of bad doors in her head, thinking about her father standing over her, breathing hard, his eyes red and heavy fists hanging. When she'd first met Orlando she'd slept with the razor on the nightstand, close by, and would wake up to check it was there. He knew that, knew all of it, and should have never. Not ever.

So now she sat with the little glassine bag on the scarred table in the kitchenette, looking at it, feeling antsy, wanting to wait and not wanting to. Wanting to talk to Orlando and not wanting to, wanting to mark his thin white skin with her small hands, pull his hair, feel his hands on her, feel him move inside her. All of it, and where was he? Did it mean anything, that he was cut off, or was it just paranoia or him acting up at a corner and taking it for conspiracy, as if Orlando Donovan were at the center of things in the world?

She laid out the dope, then got out the spoon and the little velvet ribbon he used to tie himself off and a clean needle from the exchange down on Girard. She opened her Japanese puzzle box and took out her iPod from its secret drawer, put on her headphones, and dialed up an Algerian CD Orlando had found at Beautiful World down on Passyunk. Her heart went faster, timed to the echoing drums and bursts of distorted guitar. The words were in a language she didn't know, but they made her think of seduction, of nameless longing. The word “abandon,”
the word “bereft.” She lit a red candle and opened a bottle of wine and waited. Looked at the dope, went to the window and watched the street. Watched the flame gutter, listened to it hiss.