Shovel Ready (2 page)

Waste disposal. Like I said.

It’s an old joke, but I like it.

Truth is, I never spend the money.

I start at the camps. The biggest one’s Central Park. At first the rich at the rim of the park hired private guards to chase them out, tear down their tents, send them scurrying, by any means necessary. Then there was a couple of incidents, a few headlines, then a skinning. Private guards got creative. Peeled a kid and hung him upside-down from a tree. That didn’t play well, even in the
Post
.

All that’s over now. The rich never come out to the park anymore, could give a shit about Strawberry Fields, the camps have been here three, four years, long past anyone caring.

Dozens of pup tents, like rows of overturned egg cartons. Dirty faces. Drum circles and dreadlocks.

I ask around.

The first person who knows her has a forehead full of fresh stitches.

Bitch cut my face.

Band of white peeks up over his waistband. Not boxers. Bandages.

Looks like she didn’t stop there.

He picks at a stitch.

Hardy-har-har.

Kid nearby pipes up.

I knew her. Cute girl. Quiet. Pink knapsack. Wouldn’t let anyone near it.

You know what was in it?

Drugs, be my guess. That’s what most people hold on to tightly around here.

He’s a skinny kid with a shaved head, sprawled out on a ratty towel. Sleeveless t-shirt and sweatpants and thousand-dollar sneakers, barely smudged. The kind of kid who’s used to having other people run his errands for him.

I ask him the last time he left the park.

Me? Why? Truce with the cops seems cherry enough.

You have everything you need right here?

More like I don’t have anything I don’t need, you feel me?

Pretty girl peeks her head out of his tent before he shoos her back inside. Then he shoots me a look like, What can you do? Duty calls. I ignore it.

How well did you know her?

Persephone? Not as well as I would have liked. Common theme among the dudes living here, by the way.

You make a move?

Ask my friend with the stitches how that would have worked out.

So where did she go?

Just left in the night, far as I know. I woke up and all her stuff was gone. Most of my stuff too.

Any clue where she was headed?

No. But if you find her, tell her I want my blanket and my stash of beef jerky back.

You mind if I talk to your friend in the tent?

Smiles. Shrugs.

She’s all yours.

Pretty girl. Young. Far from home. Overalls and a red bandana tied over hair she cut herself. Seems sisterly. Figure she’s more the type Persephone might have opened up to.

I tap on the tent, then we walk out of earshot.

—we weren’t close. Talked a few times. Then I heard she left.

Why?

Made too many enemies. Or rather, unmade too many friends. Headed to Brooklyn, was what I heard. Maybe towards family.

That helps.

By the way, you’re not the only one come asking around for her.

Do tell.

Southern guy. Buzz cut. Those mirrored glasses, what do you call them—

Aviators.

That’s it.

How long ago?

Maybe a day. Maybe yesterday.

I say thanks. Then ask her a few things I shouldn’t.

How long you been here?

Me? A year, give or take.

Where’s home?

Here.

Before that?

Don’t matter.

And how old are you?

Look, you can’t fuck me, if that’s what you’re asking.

That’s not what I’m asking.

Well, maybe you can. Don’t give up too easy.

Thanks for your time.

Viva la revolución
.

So it turns out my Persephone has a reputation. Everyone knows someone who knows someone who knows. The people who got too close to her usually have some memento. Something permanent, in the process of healing.

Like I said, I don’t like Manhattan.

Like Brooklyn even less.

Personal reasons.

But I don’t like Brooklyn.

Never been to Staten Island. The Bronx only on business.

Queens I could take or leave.

But then, I’m from Jersey. Wrong side of the river. So maybe my aversion is hereditary.

Though to tell the truth, aversion and hereditary are both words my father never would have used. Might have cuffed me if he heard them coming out of my mouth.

He was a garbageman. A real one. The kind with garbage.

Didn’t like pretension.

Didn’t like the word pretension.

But he loved Jersey. That much he gave me.

I even tried to live in Brooklyn once, believe it or not. Didn’t take. But I tried it. Thanks to my wife.

I had a wife.

Believe it or not.

And I was a garbageman too, if you’re interested, a real one. The kind with garbage, like my dad. Left that too. Left most everything eventually.

Whatever hadn’t already been taken away.

Now I kill people.

The end.

People get upset when you say you kill people.

Fair enough.

But wait.

What if I told you I only kill serial killers?

It’s not true, but what if I told you that?

Now what if I told you I only kill child molesters? Or rapists? Or people who really deserve it?

Wavering yet?

Okay, now what if I told you I only kill people who talk loudly in movie theaters? Or block the escalator? Or cut you off in traffic?

Don’t answer. Think it over.

Not so self-righteous now.

I’m just kidding.

There’s no such thing as movie theaters anymore.

Subway, wheezing, barely makes it over the bridge, though I swear I feel that way every time.

The problem in this city used to be too many people. Now it’s not enough. And when only poor people use something, no one takes care of it. Roads, schools, neighborhoods. Subways too.

Rusted-out, empty, watch the track-slats pass as we travel. Moaning drunk curled in a corner, already done for the day. Pissed his pants, and not recently either.

Now to Brooklyn, that victim of tides.

My father took me to the beach once, pointed toward the water, eighty yards out. I thought, No way that ocean ever gets back to here. Two hours later, it was lapping at our ankles. And I thought, stupidly, No way it ever goes back out to there.

Money comes, the people come. Money goes, the people recede. After the blackouts they left, then after the boom they came back, then after the attacks they left again. Not everyone, of course. Just the people who’d tried to turn Brooklyn into the suburbs, got a whiff of a dirty bomb, figured fuck it, and moved to the regular suburbs.

Anyway, tide’s out now.

Brownstones are back to being barren. Concrete blocks where windowpanes went. Concrete blocks are the blind man’s stained glass, someone once told me.

After the attacks, the second ones, the whole borough emptied out. A boom, bust, and bang economy. The squatters and lesser vagrants just moved right back in. Like they were returning from a long vacation.

The Brooklyn camps in Prospect Park are more scattered, less crowded, less refugee pile-up, more Cub Scout jamboree. Tambourines and Hacky Sacks. Come nuclear winter, Hacky Sacks will prevail. A lone sack, being hackyed, on some burnt-out horizon. We’ll know civilization, and jam bands, survived.

I ask around. Same stories. She moved through here, quickly. I could have guessed. Not long for camps. She seems to attract the unwanted element in the open air.

Luckily the next step isn’t too hard to figure. Supposedly she’s headed toward family. And it turns out that her father, T. K. Harrow, the most famous evangelist in America, has a famous financier brother living in Brooklyn.

Yes, I know the word financier. Just don’t ask me to say it out loud.

In my business, the disadvantage of the famous is that they draw more attention. The advantage is that you can find
out almost anything you need to know in about fifteen minutes, either online, from public records, or through a few well-placed calls. Because you know who has a good idea of who lives where?

Garbagemen.

They notice. Know addresses. Not everyone. But the notable ones.

So I make a few well-placed calls.

Find out a certain Lyman Harrow lives in a mansion in Brooklyn Heights. Likes to throw things out. Expensive things.

Keepsakes.

People remember.

Which is why I keep a few well-paid contacts who are still in the garbage business. They’re not nosy.

I just tell them I work on missing persons.

Don’t tell them how the persons end up missing.

I don’t care at all, and even I find this house beautiful. Brownstone, limestone, some kind of moneystone. Real stained glass, the kind for people with eyes. And four armed guards, making their hardware visible.

I wait and watch from across the street.

I used to ride this route, back when I lived in Brooklyn, back before Times Square, so I can remember when neighborhoods like these were basically sponges to soak up all the excess cash sloshing over from across the river. All these grand old brownstones, bought up and gutted. Scaffolding like skeletons. Blue tarps like funeral shrouds. Crews of Mexicans tearing out the drywall. Armed with hammers. Wearing dust masks. Eating lunch on the stoops, dusted white.

Haunting these houses like ghosts.

No one ever wanted to keep the insides of these old houses. Just the facades. That’s what they always said about brownstones.

Good bones.

So it was out with the old, in with the expensive-and-new-designed-to-look-like-it’s-old. Gut renovations. The insides torn out and tossed in a dumpster out front.

I know, because I used to pick up all the trash.

But then disaster struck and Brooklyn got seedy. Now gangs of men with masks and hammers might still visit your brownstone, but they’re not coming to renovate your kitchen.

Still, a few stubborn holdouts hang on. Wall Street types like Lyman Harrow, who can’t stomach the thought of ever running from anything. Everyone leaves, Lyman Harrow hires security. Everyone scurries, Lyman Harrow hunkers down. Lyman Harrow, his butler, and his four armed guards. And he assumes his money should function like a moat.

Which, in his defense, most of the time, it does.

Wall Street types. Funny to call them that.

Given there’s no such thing as Wall Street anymore either.

A nurse comes. She’s an unusually pretty nurse.

Rings the bell. Butler answers. Honest-to-God butler in white tails and everything.

Disappears behind a heavy door.

This seems straightforward enough.

I ring. Same butler.

I’m here to see Mr Harrow.

Regarding?

It’s about his niece.

Follow me.

The butler leads me inside and up a curved staircase. The whole place is wood, highly polished, like it’s all been carved out from the trunk of one giant dead tree.

At the top of the stairs, the butler motions for me to stop. I glimpse that same pretty nurse disappearing through a different doorway down the hall. Her hands held high. Elbows at an angle. Like she’s prepping for something sterile.

Butler’s short but solid. Brazilian maybe. Built for more than polishing silver. Not a linebacker but definitely the kind of guy who, if you ever find yourself in a cage with him, he’s the one who winds up walking out.

Holds up a white-gloved hand. Asks politely.

Arms out please.

He gives me a quick once-over with a metal-detector wand. Traces my outstretched arms. Brushes my coat pockets.

Wand squeals.

He reaches a white-gloved hand gingerly into my coat pocket and pulls out a metal Zippo lighter. Flicks it open, fires it, then snaps it shut and places it on a silver tray on a table by the door.

Swipes again. Down each inseam. Over my boots.

Wand squeals.

I shrug.

Steel-toe.

He seems satisfied. In any case, he’s mostly just putting on a show. He wants to let me know that, in this house, he’s the last line of defense, and he’s got more skills on his résumé than just answering the door.