Richard Montanari: Four Novels of Suspense (15 page)

This night, while her parents postured, Colleen had dutifully sat with them at their pantomimed dinner, lost in a book by Nora Roberts. Sometimes Byrne envied Colleen her inner silence, her cottony refuge from her childhood, such as it was.

Donna had been two months’ pregnant with Colleen when she and Byrne had gotten married in a civil ceremony. When Donna had given birth, a few days after Christmas that year, and Byrne had seen Colleen for the first time, so pink and shriveled and helpless, he suddenly could not recall a single second of his life before that moment. In that instant, everything else was prelude, a blurry overture to the duty he felt at that moment, and he knew—knew as if it had been branded onto his heart—that no one would ever come between himself and that little girl. Not his wife, not his fellow officers, and God help the first droopy-pantsed, sideways-hat-wearing, disrespectful little shit that came by for her first date.

He also recalled the day they found out Colleen was deaf. It was on Colleen’s first Fourth of July. They had been living in a cramped three-room apartment at the time. The eleven o’clock news had just come on and there had been a small explosion, seemingly just outside the tiny bedroom where Colleen slept. Instinctively, Byrne had drawn his service weapon and made his way down the hall and into Colleen’s room in a three giant steps, his heart slamming in his chest. When he pushed open her door, relief came in the form of a pair of kids on the fire escape, tossing firecrackers. He would deal with them later.

The horror, though, came in the form of stillness.

As the firecrackers continued to explode, not five feet from where his six-month-old daughter slept, she didn’t react. She didn’t wake up. When Donna arrived in the doorway, and took in the situation, she began to cry. Byrne held her, feeling at that moment that the road in front of them had just been repaved with trial, and that the fear he faced on the streets every day was nothing by comparison.

But now, Byrne often coveted his daughter’s world of inner calm. She would never know the silver hush of her parents’ marriage, ever oblivious to Kevin and Donna Byrne—once so passionate that they could not keep their hands off each other—saying “excuse me” as they passed in the narrow hallway of the home, like strangers on a bus.

He thought about his pretty, distant ex-wife, his Celtic rose. Donna, with her mysterious ability to clog a lie in his throat with just a glance, her perfect social pitch. She knew how to reap wisdom from disaster. She had taught him the grace of humility.

Deuces was quiet at this hour. Byrne sat in an empty room on the second floor. Most drug houses were filthy places, littered with empty crack bottles, fast-food trash, thousands of spent kitchen matches, quite often vomit, sometimes excrement. Pipeheads didn’t subscribe to
Architectural Digest
as a rule. The customers who frequented Deuces—a shadowy consortium of cops, civil servants, city officials who couldn’t be seen cruising the corners—paid a little extra for the ambience.

He positioned himself cross-legged on the floor near the window, his back to the river. He sipped the bourbon. The sensation wrapped him in a warm amber embrace, easing the impending migraine.

Tessa Wells.

She had left her house Friday morning, a contract with the world in hand, a promise that she would be safe, that she would go to school, hang out with her friends, laugh at some silly jokes, cry at some silly love song. The world had broken that treaty. She was just a teenager, and she had already lived out her life.

Colleen had just become a teenager. Byrne knew that, psychologically speaking, he was probably way behind the curve, that the “teenaged years” began somewhere around eleven these days. He was also fully aware that he had long ago decided to resist that particular piece of Madison Avenue sexual propaganda.

He looked around the room.

Why was he here?

Again, the
question
.

Twenty years on the streets of one of the most violent cities in the world put him on the block. He didn’t know a single detective who didn’t drink, hadn’t rehabbed, didn’t gamble, didn’t frequent the whores, didn’t raise a hand to his children, his wife. With this job came excess, and if you didn’t balance the excess of horror with an excess of passion for something—even domestic violence—the valves creaked and moaned until you imploded one day and put the barrel against your palate.

In his time as a homicide detective he had stood in dozens of parlors, hundreds of driveways, a thousand vacant lots, the voiceless dead waiting for him like a gouache of rainy watercolor in the near distance. Such bleak beauty. He could sleep with distance. It was detail that sullied his dreams.

He recalled every detail of that sweltering August morning he had been called to Fairmount Park: the thick buzz of flies overhead, the way Deirdre Pettigrew’s skinny legs emerged from the bushes, her bloodied white panties bunched around one ankle, the bandage on her right knee.

He knew then, as he had known every single time he had seen a murdered child, that he had to step up, regardless how eroded his soul, how diminished his instincts. He had to brave the morning, no matter what demons tracked him through the night.

In the first half of his career it had been about the power, the inertia of justice, the rush of the capture. It was about
him
. But somewhere along the way, it became bigger. It became about all the dead girls.

And now, Tessa Wells.

He closed his eyes, again felt the frigid waters of the Delaware River eddy around him, the breath being wrenched from his chest.

Below him, the gang gunships cruised. The sound of the hip-hop bass chords shook the floor, the windows, the walls, rising from the city streets like steel steam.

The deviant’s hour was coming. Soon he would walk among them.

The monsters were sliding out of their lairs.

And as he sat in a place where men traded their self-respect for a few moments of numbed silence, a place where animals walk erect, Kevin Francis Byrne knew that a new monster had stirred in Philadelphia, a dark seraph of death that would lead him to an uncharted dominion, summoning him to a depth to which men like Gideon Pratt only aspired.

14

MONDAY, 8:00 PM

It is night in Philadelphia.

I am standing on North Broad Street, looking toward Center City and the commanding figure of William Penn, craftily lighted atop city hall, feeling the warmth of the spring day fading into the sizzle of red neon and long, de Chirico shadows, marveling once more at the two faces of the city.

This is not the egg tempera of daytime Philly, the bright colors of Robert Indiana’s Love or the Mural Arts Program. This is Philly at night, a city rendered in thick, violent brushstrokes, an impasto of sedimentary pigments.

The old building on North Broad has witnessed many nights, its cast pilasters standing silent guard for almost a century. In many ways, it is the stoic face of the city: the old wooden seats, the coffered ceiling, the carved medallions, the worn canvas where a thousand men have spat and bled and fallen.

We file in. We smile at each other, raise eyebrows, clap shoulders.

I can smell the copper of their blood.

These men might know my deeds, but they do not know my face. They think I am a madman, that I pounce from the darkness like some horror movie villain. They will read about the things I have done, at their breakfast tables, on SEPTA, in the food courts, and they will shake their heads and ask why.

Could it be they know why?

If one were to peel back the phyllo layers of wickedness and pain and cruelty, could it be that these men might do the same if they had the chance? Might they lure each other’s daughters to the dark street corner, the empty building, the deep-shadowed heart of the park? Might they wield their knives and pistols and bludgeons and finally utter their rage? Might they spend the currency of their wrath and then scurry off to Upper Darby and New Hope and Upper Merion and the safety of their lies?

There is always a morbid contest in the soul, a struggle between the loathing and the need, between the darkness and the light.

The bell rings. We rise from our stools. We meet in the center.

Philadelphia, your daughters are not safe.

You are here because you know that. You are here because you do not have the courage to be me. You are here because you are afraid of becoming me.

I know why I am here.

Jessica.

15

MONDAY, 8:30 PM

F
ORGET CAESAR’S PALACE. Forget Madison Square Garden. Forget the MGM Grand. The best place in America—some would argue, the world—to watch a prizefight, was The Legendary Blue Horizon on North Broad Street. In a town that had spawned the likes of Jack O’Brien, Joe Frazier, James Shuler, Tim Witherspoon, Bernard Hopkins—not to mention Rocky Balboa—The Legendary Blue Horizon was a treasure, and, as goes the Blue, so goes Philly fisticuffs.

Jessica and her opponent—Mariella “Sparkle” Munoz—dressed and warmed up in the same room. As Jessica waited for her great-uncle Vittorio, a former heavyweight himself, to tape her hands, she glanced over at her opponent. Sparkle was in her late twenties, with big arms and what looked like a seventeen-inch neck. A real shock absorber. She had a flat nose, scar tissue over both eyes, and what seemed to be a perpetual game face: a permanent grimace that was supposed to intimidate her opponents.

I’m shakin’ over here,
Jessica thought.

When she wanted to, Jessica could affect the posture and demeanor of a shrinking violet, a helpless woman who might have trouble opening a carton of orange juice without a big strong man to come to her rescue. This, Jessica hoped, was just honey for the grizzlies.

What it really meant was:

Bring it on, baby.

T
HE FIRST ROUND BEGAN with what’s known in boxing parlance as the “feeling out” process. Both women jabbing lightly, stalking each other. A clinch or two. A little bit of mugging and intimidation. Jessica was a few inches taller than Sparkle, but Sparkle made up for it in girth. She looked like a Maytag in knee socks.

About midround the action started to pick up, with the crowd starting to get into it. Every time Jessica landed even a jab, the crowd, led by a contingent of cops from Jessica’s old district, went appropriately nuts.

When the bell rang at the end of the first round, Jessica stepped away clean and Sparkle threw a body shot, clearly, and deliberately, late. Jessica pushed her and the ref had to get between them. The ref for this fight was a short black guy in his late fifties. Jessica guessed that the Pennsylvania Athletic Commission thought they didn’t need a big guy for the bout because it was just a lightweight bout, and female lightweights at that.

Wrong.

Sparkle threw a shot over the ref’s head, glancing off Jessica’s shoulder; Jessica retaliated with a hard jab that caught Sparkle on the side of the jaw. Sparkle’s corner rushed in, along with Uncle Vittorio and although the crowd was cheering them on—some of the best fights in Blue Horizon history took place between rounds—they managed to separate the women.

Jessica plopped down on the stool as Uncle Vittorio stepped in front of her.

“Muckin bidge,”
Jessica muttered through the mouthpiece.

“Just relax,” Vittorio said. He pulled the mouthpiece out, wiped her face. Angela grabbed one of the water bottles in the ice bucket, popped the plastic top, and held it near Jessica’s mouth.

“Yer droppin’ yer right hand every time you throw a hook,” Vittorio said. “How many times we go over this? Keep yer right hand
up
.” Vittorio slapped Jessica’s right glove.

Jessica nodded, rinsed her mouth, spat in the bucket.

“Seconds out,” yelled the referee from center ring.

Fastest damn sixty seconds ever,
Jessica thought.

Jessica stood as Uncle Vittorio eased out of the ring—when you’re seventy-nine, you ease out of everything—and grabbed the stool out of the corner. The bell rang, and the two fighters approached each other.