The Unrepentant, page 27
Tony put his earbuds in, moved forward, and left the park smiling. If the pod followed his directions, they’d end up in the East River.
CHAPTER TWO
At the Bedford Avenue subway station, several blocks from McCarren Park, commuters filed non-stop into and out of the entrance like they were on conveyer belts. This was not rush hour. This was three o’clock. On a slow afternoon. Tony merged into the queue and inched down the stairs with the riders. A train was rattling in, but the people in front of him walked at a zombie’s pace, as if they weren’t in the greatest city in the world where things were supposed to move fastfastfast. Tony zigzagged around the zombies, swiped his MetroCard at the turnstile, and hopped down the stairs to the sweltering underground platform.
An L train was pulling in from Manhattan.
The train disgorged itself of dozens and dozens of commuters, but it remained full. Tony shrugged off his messenger bag and slid sideways into the heavily air-conditioned subway car, which smelled, as New York City subway cars tended to do in warm weather, like hot dog broth, sweet coffee, and dried urine.
Some yutz wearing a backpack almost large enough to hold an average American child leaned against the middle pole, blocking its use by anyone but the yutz. So Tony was forced to squeeze past him and hold onto a bar above the seats. Below him was a hipster couple, holding hands and reading their devices. The woman had arms green with tattoos and hair blue with dye, and she nibbled on a half-eaten scone. Her beloved wore an abundant Smith Brothers beard, covered with stray crumbs.
The train lurched into motion.
With a rattle of doors, a subway preacher came in from the next car and, neck veins bulging, exhorted the passengers (a trapped audience) to find salvation in Christ. This was why scientists created earbuds. Tony turned up the volume on Tom Waits.
At the Montrose Avenue stop, he got out and walked four blocks to a brick-faced apartment building. A three-unit row house with shingled siding that looked like pieces of an ugly, fuzzy-but-comfortable green and pink and gray sweater. Two-bedroom, heat and hot water included. Tons of dining and shops, and laundry literally steps away. Tony let himself in with his keys.
“Hey, Ma.”
Tony’s mother was as solid as a stove and not much taller than one, with a soufflé of gray and copper hair. “Niño. Entra. Entra,” she said. “Sit down.”
“It’s warm in here.”
“I just turn on the air condition.”
“Just now? You should keep it on all the time in this heat.”
“I’m not married to Con Edison,” she said.
She put a plate of spaghetti with chicken and a bottle of beer in front of him. She always kept beer in the house for Tony. There was no telling her not to. Although he would’ve preferred if she spent the money on something else. She sat down and watched him eat.
The kitchen was lined with dark fake-wood paneling that had likely gone up in the ’60s. The stucco ceiling was just as ancient.
“You look skinny,” she said.
“I’m fat.” Tony smacked his soft middle.
“You’re skinny.”
“You always say that. Anything new?”
Both of her hands shot up in papalesque fury. “They closed my ninety-nine-cent store!”
“The one here on Bushwick Avenue?”
“Right at the corner,” she said. “They close. Now I have to walk three more blocks.”
“It’s important to get those ninety-nine-cent bargains.”
Picking up on the sarcasm in his voice, she said, “Smartypants. They cheap. Everything is so expensive at the supermarket.”
“You’re completely right. It’s probably going to turn into another CVS or TD Bank,” Tony said. “Just what the world needs.”
“You want some more spaghetti?”
His plate was still half full. “Give me time to eat this, Ma. What’s up with the landlord, by the way? Anything happen with that?”
“They still going to raise my rent. Nine hundred dollars! That’s double.”
“Almost double.” Tony couldn’t help correcting her. “You’ve been very lucky so far. But that’s why you need a lease. Needed. I told you.”
“I live here ten years with no lease.”
“That was with Norma’s mother. But Margarita died, and now Norma can do whatever she wants because you didn’t sign a lease.”
“Margarita was my friend. She no raise my rent for eight years.”
“I know, Ma. When would the new lease start?”
“No sé. She said maybe August.”
“You know,” he said, “you could move in with Jerry.” Tony’s brother Geraldo—who insisted on being called “Jerry”—was a successful stockbroker who left the neighborhood the first chance he got. He lived in six-bedroom McMansion in Montclair. “You’d have to babysit his four kids.”
“They nice kids.”
“You called them dirty brats. And you hate his wife.”
Tony’s mother shrugged. “She’s nice.”
“First of all, you called her a two-face and a drunk.”
“A little.”
“Second, they have two cats.”
“Ai, gatos!”
“The brats and the wife are fine,” said Tony. “But it’s the cats that upset you.”
“We see,” she said, patting his hand. “I love this apartment. This is my home.”
“I know, Ma, but it’s not a horrible idea to move to Jerry’s. I have no room at my place.”
“Ai, but you could move back here. You eat good every night. Your room is there ready.”
Tony’s mother had moved here from the apartment where he had been born (literally, in the kitchen) and raised in Los Sures (the Southside), after the landlord had hiked her rent. Somehow she had kept his old bedroom intact, like a museum exhibit, all those years.
Moving back home made financial sense, but it had taken him years after college to save enough to move out, and there was no way he was coming back, not for all the spaghetti and chicken and beer in the world. “Not happening, Ma.”
After dinner, she watched her favorite novela while Tony read through the news on his laptop.
First, the Daily News. Groping teacher’s aide. Shooting at a concert. Owner of hipster BBQ spot stole overtime pay. Nothing on the slasher attacks. The Post, same. Gothamist, New York Times, nada. He worked on the Times crossword.
When Tony got up to leave, his mother said, “Already?”
“Yep.”
At the door, she said, “You have to be careful. Somebody cut those people on the news. Two people got stabbed.”
“Technically, they were slashed. But, Ma, those happened late at night, way on the other side of the neighborhood. You don’t have to worry.”
“That girl they got was by the big bank, right over here.”
“That’s a mile away. And it’s not the Williamsburgh Savings Bank anymore. It’s a gallery. Or a CVS. Or a TD Bank. Something like that.”
“They said it was a guy on a bicycle.”
“I also heard it was ten guys on motorcycles. I don’t know which one is true. Maybe they used hoverboards.”
“You have to be watching. Remember what happened to my friend Rosa.”
“That was a year ago and completely unrelated.”
“You should find out what happened. You could do it.”
“Not my job, Ma. Not anymore. I’ve got smaller fish to fry.”
“You want some ice cream before you leave?”
Without waiting for an answer, Tony’s mother served him a bowl of ice cream, and when he finished it he asked her if she was okay for rent. She said she was fine. He kissed her goodnight and took his last ten bucks and handed it to her.
“You keep it,” his mother said, gently pushing it back to him.
“Ridiculous. Take it.”
“I’m not ridiculous. You’re ridiculous,” she said. “You need it more than me.”
She was right, of course. He said, “About your rent—”
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I find a way.”
On his way home from the L, Tony stopped at a corner to change his music. Too much Tom Waits and your brain turns to cigarette tar. The night air was dense with humidity, and Tony pinched and pulled the front of his T-shirt to unstick it from his skin.
The traffic light was against him, and like any New Yorker he would have crossed anyway, but there was a car service car, a couple of Titanic-sized SUVs, then a Mini Cooper, and so he waited. He felt the weight of the pétanque balls, the laptop in his bag, the thick sweat on his face.
Directly across the street, some dude, wearing huge headphones and texting away, walked straight into the traffic. A car screeched around him.
“Just asking to get killed,” Tony said to himself. As the oblivious dude walked past, Tony gave the dirtiest look he could muster.
So Tony didn’t see the cyclist rocketing down the sidewalk behind him until he zipped by, inches in front of him. The spokes of the bicycle wheels ticked madly away.
“Sesquiculus,” Tony swore. Asshole and a half!
He remembered then what Gary had said and what his mother had said. Tony liked to think of himself as brutally logical, but he couldn’t stop the goosepimples rising along his arms and the hair standing up on the back of his neck. Ridiculous.
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Chapter 1
San Francisco
The door to the construction shack swung open and banged against the wall, causing the overhead florescent lights to stammer off and on for several seconds.
Kurt Thorsen snapped his head around and saw the hulking figure and scowling face of Benny Machado, his lead foreman.
Thorsen jumped to his feet and slammed his coffee mug to the desk sending a spray of hot coffee onto the project blueprints. He was a tall, well-built man in his early sixties, his once blond hair now a silvery gray and worn in a lion’s mane style. “What’s up, Benny?”
“You better come with me, boss. I think we got us a problem.”
Thorsen grabbed a hardhat from a peg near the door and followed Machado out to the construction site.
It had been a cool summer, interrupted by a tropical storm from the Mexican coast that dropped several inches of rain on the city. Dark, cauliflower-shaped cumulous clouds dominated the sky. The bay waters were the color of gunmetal. The wind, stronger than it had to be, tossed food wrappers and old newspapers around like wounded birds. The air was filled with the smell of diesel smoke from the tractors, backhoes, and trucks lined up to haul away the mud Thorsen’s crew was moving to enable the placement of underground parking garages and foundation pillars.
Thorsen had to hand it to his employer, Cinco Construction Company, for having the guts to build a sprawling fifty-seven-story Art Moderne-style complex, featuring a hotel and conference center, along with retails stores, office space, and high-priced condos, in this undesirable section of the city—eleven acres of raw, deserted land, parts of it running right alongside the bay, consisting of crumbling, rat-infested piers that were once attached to thriving shipyards, abandoned commercial hot houses with every single pane of glass missing, and railroad tracks that had sat idle for fifty years.
Before accepting the job, Thorsen had checked out Cinco with people he trusted in the construction game. Cinco had built complexes similar in size and scope to this one in cities up and down the East Coast. Six months ago, the firm was taken over by a man by the name of Henry Chung. Chung was Chinese, via Brazil, having run a construction firm in São Paulo for several years. He was a nervous nail-biter who spoke Cantonese, Portuguese and English with equal ease. According to Chung, Cinco was well-financed and committed to the project. There would be no worries of work stoppages from banks or insurance carriers due to a lack of funds.
Thorsen hurried to catch up to Machado. “Are you going to tell me what’s going on, Benny, or am I just supposed to guess? Don’t tell me it’s another garden snake.”
His last big job, a high-rise on the peninsula, had ground to a halt when a single garden snake, an endangered species, the size of a licorice stick was found under a rock.
“No snakes, boss. Bones. Lots of them. Over on section A-six.”
The construction site was divided into sections. A-six skirted the bay’s shoreline.
“Bones? What kind? Cats? Skunks? What, Benny?”
Machado, a hatchet-jawed man with a thick neck and the heavily muscled shoulders of a wrestler, increased his pace, the hammer in his tool belt slamming against his thigh like a cowboy’s six-shooter. “Human.”
A ring of workers—laborers, carpenters, electricians and plumbers—were standing around the end of a ruler-straight foundation trench, four-feet wide, ten-feet deep, stretching out some fifty yards. The dark green backhoe that had been digging the trench stood silent, the tilted digger-bucket at the end of the two-part articulated arm looking like a yawning, prehistoric animal.
Thorsen peered down into the trench and swore silently. There were several ravaged bones and small skulls lying in the clammy, foul-smelling mud. He sat down and dangled his feet over the edge. “Give me a hand, Benny,” he said, holding his arms above his head. Machado grabbed both of Thorsen’s wrists and lowered him into the trench.
Thorsen landed in a heap, dropping to his knees before righting himself. All three sides at the very end of the trench were layered with bones of various shapes and sizes, exposed when the backhoe had taken its last gulp of mud. There was no sign of coffins—just bones. He looked up at the ring of faces staring down at him like mourners at a funeral. Only these guys weren’t mourning for the dead. It was for their jobs.
Thorsen removed his hard hat and slapped it against the trench wall. “Okay,” he shouted out. “We’re through here for the day. You’ll all get full pay for your shift. I’ll get in touch with you and let you know when we can get back to work.”
He squatted down near one of the skulls. It was small, mud crusted, no sign of teeth. He stood up and wiped his hands on his pants.
There was a thudding noise and Thorsen turned to see Benny Machado placing the butt end of a ladder down into the trench.
“I got a hunch,” Machado said from above. “This many bones, I think they’re Indians. A burial ground maybe.”
“Indians? Like in cowboys and?”
“Yeah, but from before the cowboys. The Bay Area was home to a lot of Indians—then the missionaries came around and killed them. I worked on a job in Oakland and we found an Indian burial ground there.”
“What happened to the job?” Thorsen wanted to know.
“Scratched. Some tribe from up north claimed the land. I think it’s a trailer park now.”
Thorsen took out his cell phone and began snapping photographs. The mass of bones hadn’t been buried very deep. Three feet, maybe less. He was about to climb up the ladder when something caught his eye. He moved cautiously, then dropped to one knee and gently massaged the mud from one long bone, a leg, with the foot still attached at the bottom of the ten-foot-deep dig. There was a thin link chain encircling the ankle. As he picked away at it with his fingernail he realized it was gold. An ankle ID bracelet? He moistened his finger with his tongue and carefully wiped at the piece until he saw two initials: a V and an A. Thorsen didn’t know much about native Indian tribes, but he was certain they weren’t into gold ID anklets.
He took several more pictures and then climbed up the ladder and onto relatively solid ground.
A sudden crack of arrowy lighting was followed by a drum roll of thunder. Raindrops the size of nickels began falling as Thorsen headed back to the construction shack.
“What are you gonna do, boss?” Machado asked.
“Call Henry Chung, call the cops, and get drunk. But maybe not in that order, Benny.”
“Chung’s already here. I saw his car coming through the gate when I went back for the ladder.”
“Good, I’ll let him handle the police.”
Chapter 2
Beverly Hills, California
San Francisco Police Department Homicide Inspector Rick Jarnac pulled the airport rental car into the same Reserved for Guests stall at the Carlomont Nursing Home that he’d parked in earlier that morning. It was evening now, a few minutes after six.
He opened the car door and was greeted with a wave of heat. He straightened up and rubbed both hands against the small of his back. Jarnac was tall and slender, with a lean, angular face and strong jaw. He was in his shirtsleeves, which were rolled up to his elbows. His collar was unbuttoned, his tie at half-mast. He sighed, rolled down the sleeves, slipped into his suit jacket, buttoned his shirt and cinched his tie. It was oppressively hot, but he felt the least he could do was look professional when he delivered the news to an elderly woman that her missing daughter’s remains had been found and that she had been murdered some forty years earlier.
Jarnac walked along a herringbone patterned brick path bordered by a head-high privet hedge. He noticed an elderly man in a light blue bathrobe leaning back against the hedge, one hand cupped around a cigarette. He had a bald pate and his face was a grainy white color, like boiled rice. He inhaled with cheek-sunken concentration. His eyes got that deer-in-the-headlight look when he spotted Jarnac.
Jarnac nodded a hello and the man held a vertical finger to his lips and said, “Shhhh,” before giving Jarnac a conspiratorial wink.
The front entrance to the pink stucco, four-story nursing home was guarded by a stand of towering royal palm trees.
He trotted up the steps and into the lobby. The walls, ceiling, and the carpeting were in various shades of beige. Plush chairs and couches in pale floral designs sat empty. The smell of freshly popped popcorn hung in the air. The only person in sight was a young dark-haired woman sitting behind the check-in counter.
