Sunrise Highway Page 25

  He leaned against the Jeep. “I can’t believe I was with you all this time and didn’t know what you were capable of.”

  “I want you out of here by the end of the week,” she said. “Maybe I can ask the kids to help you move the rest of your things.”

  38

  OCTOBER

  2017

  The morning was already off-kilter when Lourdes approached the religious encampment near Jericho Turnpike, the day after talking to Delaney Patterson. For one thing, the sky was the color of drying cement and she’d thoughtlessly put on the boots with heels when she dressed, forgetting that she had to cross a field to get to Magdalena’s trailer. For another, she was working with John Gallagher, the state cop, instead of B.B. today, because she felt she could no longer trust Borrelli.

  “Here’s your problem,” said Gallagher, whose blocklike head and self-conscious swagger gave him a stature that his investigative abilities hadn’t earned him so far. “Your whore says this J tried to choke her out at a party more than twenty-five years ago. We’re showing her a picture of Chief Tolliver from five years ago. How’s she even going to recognize him?”

  “First of all, why is it my problem, instead of ours?” she asked. “Second of all, what’s this ‘your whore’? That’s not who she is anymore.”

  “Touchy.” Gallagher strode ahead. “I still say ID is going to be a problem. Chief Tolliver’s got a good reputation out here. He always backs up his men.”

  “Let’s just keep an open mind.” She hustled to catch up, soft ground sucking at her heels. “Anybody could be anything.”

  “What about giving a fellow officer the benefit of the doubt? There’s us and there’s them, detective. So be fair. When you got locked up, I figured there had to be a good explanation.”

  “Yeah, that was generous,” she muttered.

  “Hey, I’m riding with you today, instead of demanding they throw you off the task force. Which is what some people think should happen. So why can’t you give the chief the benefit of the doubt as well?”

  As they followed the firmer part of the path toward where Magdalena’s trailer was parked, Lourdes could see a local police car idling on the other side of the grounds some two hundred yards away. An officer in shades was using a pair of binoculars, as if it was standard practice to be hanging out at a trailer park without an obvious call to respond to. It didn’t look like any of the cops she’d encountered out here before, but from this distance, it was hard to be sure, and his unexplained presence turned her ribcage into a fluttering pigeon coop.

  A group of children were hanging out in front of Magdalena’s trailer. Five of them, between the ages of three and nine, different hues and different sizes, but some commonality in look. They all wore dark sweat clothes that didn’t quite fit and the stunned expressions that Lourdes had seen on abandoned children in the hallways of Family Court.

  “Oh shit.” Gallagher stopped. “What is this? A ghetto funeral?”

  Lourdes went up to the oldest, a chubby girl in a Yeezus hoodie and khaki shorts; her weight and grief made her old before her time. “Excuse me. You know Magdalena?”

  “My grandmother.” The girl turned and pounded the trailer door. “Yo.”

  The sky dimmed to a lighter shade of charcoal. Midday traffic hummed with indifference to personal tragedy on the nearby freeway. The cop in the squad car had put down the binoculars and picked up a cell phone, holding it in front of his face as if filming them.

  The inside door of the trailer opened and Magdalena appeared behind a screen door, wearing a baggy black tracksuit with double stripes on the arms and legs.

  “You again, huh?” She gave Lourdes a cold once-over, big white cross swinging from her neck. “I know you been calling, but I’m not answering.”

  “Ma’am, we’d like to just come inside and show you something real quick,” Gallagher said, jumping into the breach. “Won’t take more than a minute or two.”

  “Ain’t nobody got time for that.” Magdalena showed him the flat of her hand against the screen. “I need to get my ride to the beach and spread my son’s ashes on the water.”

  “Oh.” Lourdes put a hand to her chest. “Oh my God. Your son. What happened? I’m so sorry.”

  “You should be.” Magdalena glared at her without pausing now. “They killed his ass three days after I spoke to you.”

  “Who did?” Lourdes asked.

  “The police.” Magdalena scowled toward the officers in the Suffolk County police car. “Like you didn’t know. Shot him at the Exxon station just down the road. After they pulled him over for some bullshit crack in his back windshield. His girlfriend was right next to him when he pulled out his phone to tell me what was up. And then they shot him right there. Said they thought he was reaching for a gun. Those lying motherfuckers.”

  Gallagher put his hands up like he was about to caution her about talking this way in front of the little kids, but Lourdes shook her head at him. They’d probably heard way worse. By their age, she had.

  But this was beyond what she’d gone through. Because when she’d decided to become a cop, it was because she had some vague idea that there was a system that could protect people, if it could only be made to work properly. From the looks on the kids’ faces, she could see they had no such illusions. The system was there to hurt them and take what little they had, and they were learning that there was nothing they could do to change that.

  “Twenty-four years old.” Instead of crying, Magdalena gave a pugnacious sniff. “Left me with three goddamn grandchildren to raise on my own. Because their mothers are all babies themselves. Like he was. And now I got his ashes in a jar. Do you know what that’s like, miss?”

  “I do,” Lourdes said quietly, hanging her head.

  She could picture herself on tiptoe as she tried to hoist Izzy high enough to kiss the urn on the mantle that held their brother Georgie’s ashes. The ritual. Good night, Georgie.

  “Yeah, I believe that.” Magdalena opened the screen door and spat at Lourdes’s feet. “Same as I believe you’re pregnant, like you told me the last time. How come it looks like you lost weight? Lying bitch.”

  Lourdes’s hand dropped from her chest to her belly.

  “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me,” Magdalena said. “I’m done talking to you. Get the hell away from my door and don’t come back. Some of us have real families.”

  She slammed the inner door, shaking the trailer and leaving Lourdes to deal with the weight of everyone staring at her.

  39

  AUGUST

  2012

  Joey’s father’s house was on a dead-end street, near the ocean side of Rockaway. Jamaica was on the opposite side of the thin peninsula, less than three blocks north. The front yard was bare concrete but it was surrounded by a brick wall, like a convict’s arm around a plate of prison food. But that was the old man. Acting like he had something to hide, when no one really cared enough to take what he had.

  The old man had always been a little suspicious and paranoid. Which was why he’d collected so few friends from the job. After he’d moved back to Queens, following the divorce, he’d only got worse. Shades drawn all day in the three-story house with one gable peeking from behind another, as if trying not to be noticed. Three standard locks and a heavy padlock on the front door. A Beware of Dog sign on the mailbox—even though his dog had died back in the Clinton years.

  The neighbors always knew enough to avoid him, since he muttered conspiratorially to himself on the street and only went to the beach when it was empty. When he fished in the bay, he brought a boombox on his rowboat and turned it up to max volume to drive other boats away when they got too close, not caring if the fish scattered as well. Inside the house he was a hoarder, naturally, living with stacks of old Life magazines, ammo boxes, gallons of water, saltine crackers, flashlight batteries, and various other doomsday items that he’d accumulated in anticipation of blackouts or race war. Both of which he thought were inevita
ble.

  When he died, no one found him for a week. He was only discovered when a Con Ed meter reader detected a foul odor from the porch. It took Joey months to get rid of the smell. Not that he came that often, at first. It was a long way from the place he’d moved into in Babylon after Beth kicked him out and there were a lot of bad memories on this side of the city border. On the other hand, the house was his now, no other family members to claim it, and it was a piece of property that might eventually be worth something when the real estate market came roaring back from the recession.

  More important, there were vacant lots on either side and nothing across the street, at least at the moment, which meant he could do what he wanted without drawing too much attention. After the close call with Leslie Martinez and the bad bust-up with Beth, he’d decided he needed to cool it awhile, let time pass, show some restraint. Most people who’d done this never seemed to have asked themselves the hard questions. But he was in a separate class from the disorganized dirty car drivers on one end of the spectrum and the hyper-ritualized, obsessive-compulsive fetishizers on the other end. His deal was different and, to be honest, better. He’d read the books and watched the video confessions, he’d lectured about serial killers at the academy, he’d seen where they tripped up and gave themselves away, like they wanted to be caught all along if the cops hadn’t been busy looking in the wrong direction.

  He waited several hours after he was done at work and then drove to Queens under cover of darkness. He parked the Jeep in the garage his father had built behind the house and went in through the rear door. Nearly three years he’d had the place, he was fairly certain that no one on the block had ever seen him. The kitchen was more or less the way his father had left it. Same Whirlpool refrigerator and gas range from the mid-eighties. Same crappy peeling linoleum on the rotting floor that he had to get around to replacing himself one of these days.

  He got out his keys and unlocked the door to the basement, a blanket under one arm and a paper bag in his other hand. The landing was as bad as the kitchen, just four splintered planks of lacquered wood that would surely give way if he put his full two hundred pounds on them. He took care to step over them to get the ladder and extend it down to the basement. He’d torn out the regular stairs when he dug out the cellar floor to make it deeper and less accessible from the upstairs. Then he’d put egg cartons on the ceiling for sound muffling and attached a metal handcuff bar to the wall he’d replastered over Memorial Day weekend.

  “Honey, I’m home.”

  Corny joke, but if you couldn’t make corny jokes under your own roof, what was the point of having a second house? The steps made a homey grumping sound as he descended. The lived-in creak of a man in his proper place, the king returning to his castle and escaping his worries about sending money to his vicious ex-wife. This was the sound his own father probably longed to hear, if only he could have stilled the noise in his own head. If only he could have controlled himself, controlled his woman, and had the family he really wanted.

  “You miss me?”

  * * *

  She’d seen a t-shirt with the saying before she knew it was part of a poem: “Hope is the thing with feathers.”

  But now she was starting to think that was wrong.

  Hope was the thing with teeth.

  It tore into you and wouldn’t let go. And once it got in deep enough, you couldn’t pull away without losing a piece of yourself and nearly bleeding to death.

  She’d given up on her family a long time ago.

  She’d given up on friends coming to rescue her.

  She’d given up on this being any kind of normal situation where some official person like a doctor or a lawyer would come in and say, “What the hell, man?”

  But she hadn’t quite given up hope that she would somehow get out of this alive. And that was what kept her on edge all the time, every minute of the day, like some feral beast had clamped its jaws on her leg.

  “How’s it going?” he asked.

  Like this was some kind of normal situation. Like she wasn’t handcuffed and connected by a fifteen-foot-long chain to a cuff on a handicap bar he’d installed on the basement wall. Like she hadn’t been living for who knows how many weeks in this dampish underground dwelling with a toilet and sink he’d put in the corner and the half windows above her head filled in with bricks.

  “Oh, you know.” She held up her cuffed wrist. “Just living the dream.”

  She’d decided to stop cursing and crying for now. Just like on the outside, calling someone “stupid” and “diseased” didn’t get you treated better. The difference was that in here, being mouthy didn’t just get you backhanded or thrown out of a bar before closing time. It meant you didn’t eat for two or three days. That you might not get soap or toilet paper. That you might get tortured and abused in ways that even the skuzziest truck stop whores couldn’t imagine in their worst nightmares, so that you might yearn for sudden death as much as your grandmother’s forgiving embrace.

  He dropped a thick red quilt on the filthy mattress in the corner.

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  “Something to make you a little more comfortable. I know it gets cold down here nights. Sorry about that. I did most of the work myself. And I can’t hire a plumber to put in radiators, because, well, you’re here.”

  She smiled like she understood and didn’t blame him. Which in a way, she didn’t. She’d been so high on heroin when he found her on Cherry Street in Wyandanch, right before Independence Day, that he could have brought her to the moon and she wouldn’t have noticed. So it was kind of her fault. Like the circumstances of everything in her life. The mirror he’d put on the wall was gone now; she’d smashed it the night after he brought her here. Because she couldn’t stand to see all the bad history and grade-A mistakes reflecting back at her.

  “It’s cotton,” he said.

  “What?”

  She started to rub her itchy nose on her forearm and then stopped, remembering he didn’t like her doing that.

  “The quilt I just brought. It’s forty-five percent cotton. Fifty-five percent polyester. It breathes. So you don’t wake up sweating like a pig in the morning.”

  Her heart leaped at the mention of morning. With all the bricks in the window, she couldn’t tell day from night anymore, let alone how much time she’d been down here.

  “Where’d you get it?” She started to reach for the quilt.

  “Target,” he said. “They had them on sale.”

  “It’s pretty,” she said, barely able to brush a corner with her fingertips because of how the handcuff held her back.

  He smiled, which made his already beady eyes look smaller. Like dice dots, she thought. The rest of his face wasn’t that weird. His regular expression had that half-sluggish, half-hungry look she’d seen on other cops and regular schmoes who came into the Squire when she was stripping there. Like they were sleepwalking through life until they saw something they wanted and didn’t want other men to have.

  “Thank you.” She rubbed the fabric between her thumb and forefinger, glad to have something clean to hold. “I think it’s going to help a lot.”

  “You know, it’s still possible that I’m going to kill you,” he said, so casually and offhandedly that she wasn’t sure that she’d heard him correctly.

  “Pardon me?”

  “You hear something dripping?” he asked. “I just fixed those fucking floors upstairs before you moved in.”

  “Excuse me? What’d you just say to me?”

  “I just don’t want you to get the wrong idea. I might still kill you. Or I might not.”

  He turned back. His smile was more distant now, his eyes even smaller.

  “What’s going to make you decide?”

  She pulled up the corners of her mouth, like she was smiling back at him. Like this was a running joke between them. But her skin felt fake on her face, the way it did when she smoked PCP or inhaled bath salts. Like her flesh was some thin plast
ic barely covering her skull that could easily be peeled off.

  “Hard to say.” He tugged up on his gun belt. “Sometimes it’s just a feeling you get.”

  “You’ve done this before?”

  Her voice, bouncing between the poured concrete floor and egg carton ceiling, sounded eerily calm and unaffected. But then her outside never had much to do with her inside. People were always telling her she looked good when she felt bad, and thinking her natural monotone and blank expression meant that she was in control of herself.

  “Yeah. Maybe once or twice. Maybe more.”

  “And did you ever let anyone go?”

  “Sure. I got a few out there that I see from time to time.”

  “I don’t think I believe you.”

  “Why don’t you try yelling your head off again and see how much good that does you? But I don’t think you liked the results last time. Did you?”

  She sank to the stone floor and covered her scraped-raw knees with the remains of her tattered denim miniskirt, her wrist developing a worrying dark purple ring from the cuff being on too tight.

  “I think you’re going to kill me no matter what.” She looked up at him.

  “But you can’t be totally sure.”

  “Why would you let anyone go after you did something like this to them?”

  “Because there’s a relationship.” He stared down at her. “Do you even know what that means?”

  She hissed—half in contempt for him and half for herself.

  “Yeah, dude. I know what it means.”

  “I’m not talking someone sticking their dick into you once in a while or you giving blow jobs to pay the rent. I’m talking about really getting to know and accept someone, so they can just be themselves around you.”

  “Who the fuck are you to say that?” She yanked on the handcuff chain. “Doctor Fucking Phil?”

  “Hey.” He raised a foot like he was about to kick her in the head. “What’d I tell you about having the wrong attitude?”

  “All right, all right.” She flinched and curled away like a prawn. “You got me. I don’t know anything about relationships. Teach me. Please.”