One Way or Another, page 2
As if he’d brought the damn war back from that desert with him.
Davenport and the rest of the tactical unit gathered around him. She held out her hand, helped him up and asked, “There’s no one else down there, Parker. You sure you’re okay?”
Parker shrugged. “Well. I thought I was. I don’t see how that guy got out of here, Sarge.”
He was taller than Davenport. “Lean over,” she said. When he did, she put both her hands in his hair and swept them over his scalp.
“What are you doing?” he asked, almost defensively.
“Checking to see if you took a blow to the head without realizing it. I don’t feel any lumps, but did you?”
“No.”
“Okay. So, you aren’t concussed. I’m gonna go with shock.”
“What?”
“You obviously blacked out at some point, Parker. Maybe after shooting this douchebag at such close quarters, in this tiny-ass hallway.”
An uneasy silence fell for a moment before she began barking orders to fold up the operation. She told one of her men, Baldwin, to stay with the body down the hall and told Ansel to head back into the club to help clear it. “I’ll stay here with Parker and Yeung’s body.” She added with a long sigh, “Let the captain know we’re back here when he arrives.”
Ansel nodded and melted away.
“That’s not possible,” Parker said.
“What’s not?” she replied.
“I didn’t black out.”
She looked at him sympathetically. “Look. Okay. Maybe not. But something happened, and if you did black out you might not remember it anyway.”
Parker’s frustration came to a boil. “I’m telling you, Sergeant, that I didn’t—”
Davenport cut him off and lowered her voice. “I’ve gotta have something to put in the report, Parker.”
He froze.
“You understand, right?” She looked him in the eye and nodded, as if to coach his answer.
Shit. I had a meltdown of some kind. I knew it. I’ve been slipping lately. And she knows it, too. Or suspects it. And now she’s trying to cover for me. Why?
Reluctantly, he nodded back.
“Good,” she stated flatly.
Slowly, he began to feel stronger. Before long, the paramedics showed up, confirmed the two deaths and called for the medical examiner. By then, Parker was ready to leave but Davenport was insistent that he sit back down and let the paramedics check him out one more time. He had some cuts and bruises from the mad scramble through the crowd, but that was it.
“Any ringing in your ears?” one paramedic, in his mid-thirties and with a thick beard, asked.
No ringing, but Parker could still hear him, Waheeb, screaming, his voice tiny now, from miles down in his brain.
“Well,” Parker said, glancing up at Davenport, “a little.”
He looked again into Parker’s ears. “Yeah. I don’t see any hemorrhaging. It should pass in twenty-four to forty-eight hours. If not, you might’ve damaged your eardrums and you’ll need to get it checked out, okay?”
Parker nodded, feeling guilty, but then realized that he wasn’t lying entirely. Maybe his ears were ringing a little.
So begins the long road to rationalizing all that’s happened here. Bullshit!
He told himself not to think so negatively, that this would all be explained somehow. Still, he had to see it for himself.
“Sergeant?” he asked, looking at Davenport.
“Yeah?”
“Now that we’re done here, can I take a look at that room for myself?”
Another hard look. It was obvious that she didn’t think it was a good idea, but she understood. “Sure. Let’s go.”
Parker stood again and made his way down the hall with Davenport. When they turned the corner and entered the room, the world almost went upside down on him again. Not because he saw the body of the bartender sprawled over a pallet stacked with bags of potatoes, nor because Baldwin was looking at Parker like he had a screw loose. Not even because Hector Villarosa was, indeed, nowhere to be found. No. Not for any of those reasons.
His world tilted because of the energy that was still vibrating in the room, like the sound of a tuning fork between each and every molecule in the air.
He’d experienced this sensation before. Only once. And what a coincidence; he’d been with Napoleon at the time.
It was in the driveway of Victoria Brasco’s house, during the Fasano investigation, right after that Gray Guy had come and gone.
And there it was again: the number one lesson, above all other lessons, that Napoleon had told Parker during his training.
There was no such thing as coincidences.
Hector Villarosa was sure, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he’d started to lose his mind within seconds after he’d murdered David Fonseca, the bouncer at The Mayan nightclub who had stolen Marisol, Hector’s longtime girlfriend.
Tonight was supposed to have been a one-two-three kinda moment. One, he’d set up Burro, a member of his crew who was angling to usurp Hector, to kill David. Two, in one move, he’d eliminate his rival for Marisol’s heart and free himself from the gang life, effectively giving Burro a crew that Hector no longer wanted to lead anyway. And three, since it was the gang that had cost him Marisol’s love in the first place, he’d get her back. Instead, the entire world flipped upside down and gave him a one-two-three kinda moment he never could’ve imagined.
It started with the appearance of the businessman in his gray suit, who had crackled into existence out of nowhere and spoken to him like some angel of God, and now this: an exploding tunnel of light that vibrated with an energy that made his bones hurt beneath his skin. There was color, then darkness, then a kaleidoscope of images, before Hector realized he was being whisked through a tour of the memories of his life, most of them blurry holograms of himself that his eyes could barely take in and his mind could hardly comprehend.
Then, finally, there was here and now. They had come to a stop, to one moment in particular: the night when the Giant Fried Chicken Leg had blocked the doorway to his bedroom.
He was seven. It was a ridiculous nightmare. How in the world could a chicken leg ever hurt you? But that was when he first began to understand that anything you feared could hurt you.
Or, more importantly, anything that hurt you should be feared. The Gray Man’s voice was like a bow across a cello, deep and reverberating.
“W-what are you talking about?” Hector stammered. “And who the hell are you?”
Hell has nothing to do with me, boy. And who I am is not important right now. This is about who you are, Hector. Focus. What happened on the night of the chicken leg?
Their swerving, topsy-turvy ride here had come to a static halt, in this bedroom, twenty-one years in the past. Hector was nauseated, but he couldn’t tell if it was from the travel or the destination. Still, he felt compelled to think, hard, by the man that was now talking in his mind, so he did.
“I called out. I was scared.”
Who did you call out to?
“My mother.”
And what happened?
“She didn’t come.”
Did she hear you?
“Yes.”
He could see himself curled up against the headboard, his Iron Man sheets pulled up to his throat and clenched so tightly in his hands that his little knuckles were turning white.
How did you know?
“Her bedroom was right down the hall, close to mine. She shouted out to me.”
She shouted “out” to you, or “at” you?
Hector thought, long and hard. There was no sound to the memory, just sight. “I dunno. I can’t hear her.”
No, Hector. It’s because you do not want to hear. Now, hear.
As if an amplifier had been plugged in somewhere, Hector winced as he heard his seven-year-old self screaming. “Mom. Mom! Mom!”
Then his mother’s reply. “Hector! Kayate! Shut up!”
He’d woken her, and she was upset. But he didn’t care. She didn’t understand that the chicken leg had come for him. To eat him. To show him what it was like to be chewed and gnawed on.
Menacingly, it was rocking from side to side now, the fatty base at one end sinking into the carpet, the knotted bone at the other banging against the top of the doorframe, trying to jerry-rig its way in. Stupid, stupid nightmare. He must’ve had Kentucky Fried Chicken that night for dinner. It was funny now, but not really. It would’ve been. Could’ve been if . . .
If what, Hector?
“If what happened, hadn’t happened.”
His mother kept shushing him, but when you’re seven, the possibility that a chicken leg has sharp, vicious teeth hidden just beneath the folds of its crispy, fried skin is just as real as any shush could ever be. So he kept on screaming, and before long the room became smaller, as a deep voice from within his mother’s room shouted out, startled and confused.
That was when he realized that the Mean Man had decided to stay the night, to have a “sleep over,” as his mother called it. And that Hector had awoken him.
His room was four walls of dirty paint. The one to his left had posters of Mike Piazza and Raúl Mondesi, his favorite Dodgers.
Because your father loved the Dodgers, didn’t he?
“Shut up. I won’t . . . I can’t . . .”
Hector loved baseball. Sometimes, one of the boys in his neighborhood would play whiffle ball with him and it was great fun. On the other wall was a board with hooks on it, where his jackets and sweatshirts were hung, looking like colored ghosts now with the eerie glow of the hallway night-light as it shone dimly through his half-open doorway.
Dirty walls. Dirty light.
“I don’t want to think about this anymore,” Hector mumbled.
But he did anyway. Because some memories, he knew, were like roller coasters; once they got going, you couldn’t hop off.
Tufts of frayed carpet stood up on the floor. Their apartment smelled and had roaches that sometimes got into the bread bags and ruined your toast. But none of that mattered now because an argument had broken out in his mother’s bedroom, and well, she was losing.
She was small. Tough, but small. And the Mean Man was big, like a bear, with eyes that scared Hector.
Then? Silence, before his mother called out to him. “It’s okay, Hector, honey, go to bed now. We have to get some sleep, okay?”
That’s when he felt the chicken bone smiiiiling. He couldn’t see the smile, mind you. No. But he just knew, somehow, that it was. And the bone at its top had now ducked and angled its way into the room. Hector watched in dismay as it rocked . . .
back . . . and
forth . . . back . . . and
forth . . . moving a few inches forward at a time. Confident now that no one was coming to save him.
Hector couldn’t help himself; he screamed out all the louder.
“No. I won’t remember this. I won’t,” Hector said in a daze, remembering that there was still one thing you could do with roller coasters that you didn’t want to be on: you could close your eyes.
The room, the moment, the memory went dark.
The Gray Man was back in his head. That will not help you, Hector. Not in the long run.
“I don’t care about the long run. I only care about now.”
And that, my boy, is why you have come to this moment in your life. Now. Open your eyes!
When Hector did, he saw her coming—his rescuer, his hope. The hall light came on, brightening his room and vaporizing the chicken bone. First, he saw her shadow and then she came, her pretty hair in a tousled mess, her outline dark, before her yellow pajama pants and a white, over-sized “Homeboy Industries” T-shirt came into view. His relief was so great that he almost wanted to cry. Throwing off his covers, he opened his arms and—
Darkness. He’d closed his eyes again.
He was grown now. This was silly. It was all the way in the past, and here he was, crying like a fool. “This is stupid!” Hector yelled, looking over his shoulder at The Gray Man, whose arms were spread wide, as if he were holding the incandescent bubble around them in place.
No, The Gray Man said, sounding sad. This is the truth.
Hector opened his eyes just in time to see his mother descend on him, her small hands grabbing at him fiercely as her long nails dug into his arms, just below the shoulders. “I told you,” she screamed through gritted teeth, “to shut the hell up!”
She pushed him backwards, into the headboard, and then she slapped him, three or four times, across his face and on the top of his head, his shock and dismay turning him cold as ice. She’d spanked him before, yeah, but this was worse. Way worse. The blows hurt, badly.
His tiny voice was piercing and desperate. “Mom? Mom? Stop! Mom, please! Stop.”
But she didn’t. She kept hitting you, didn’t she?
Hector leaned against the bubble with one arm outstretched, staring at his childhood in the third person. “Yeah, man. She did. And . . .”
His mother gave him one last smack, across his face, and that’s when the light from the hallway illuminated the left side of her face and he saw the welt there, just below her eye, fresh and swollen. He wasn’t the only one taking a beating that night.
Her noticing that he’d noticed it helped nothing. “Are you happy now? Do you see!” she yelled at him, pointing at her face. “Do you see what you’ve done?!”
And he did.
“I’m sorry, Mom,” he squealed as she forced his covers over him and violently tucked him in.
“Sorry, nothin’! You go to sleep! And don’t make another sound, you hear?”
He nodded meekly and watched her storm out of his room. A second later the hall light went out.
He couldn’t stop crying, so he jammed the Iron Man sheets deep into his mouth as his body shook in the effort to contain his sobs.
It would be better, he thought, if he could read one of his books. There was The Cat in the Hat and The Giving Tree, which he’d gotten for his birthday that year, and the one his Uncle Roberto had gotten him as a surprise: Charlotte’s Web. But that one was a little hard to read by himself. It didn’t matter anyway, they were all on the small bookshelf against the right wall, near his hanging jackets and sweaters. He didn’t dare get up to get them for fear that he’d make noise.
So he curled into a ball, unable to sleep for a long, long time, staring at the hallway with a guarded eye, not afraid that the chicken leg would come back, but that his mother would.
And that’s when Hector Villarosa learned, for the very first time, that it wasn’t safe to love anybody in this world.
Not even your own mother.
CHAPTER TWO
When Father Soltera left Gabriella, it was just past eleven thirty and well past visiting hours. He waved goodbye to the floor nurse, Jessica, who smiled kindly at him, and the janitor, Carlos, who was making lazy eights with his mop as he worked his way down the hall.
He knew all the staff here and most of them knew him as the kind priest who came to pray for one of the members of his church. Which, sadly, was the same as saying they didn’t really know him at all. He kept his visits short each month, no more than an hour, so as not to appear inappropriate, and the late hours of his visits were easily explained away as church business. Most of the floors shut down at ten, but he got the same nod as any family members who wanted to stay a little longer would.
Still, leaving was never easy, and always done with a slow, labored walk, his feet filled with the same heaviness as his heart, the image of her continually thinning face weighing on him. Oftentimes, the pumping sounds of the ventilator and muted beeps of the EKG machine would linger in his ears for days, a sort of morbid soundtrack to the flickering images in his memory: the invasive appearance of the tracheotomy tube going down her throat, the IV and arterial lines that wove in and out of her body like sewn threads, the eerie red glow of the pulse monitor on her index finger.
That long, slender finger that seemed to be pointing at him as he stood at the foot of the bed when it was time to leave. Accusingly. Mute, lost in a world of darkness, she still seemed to be reaching out to him to say, “If you’d just been brave enough to love me, I wouldn’t be here.”
The room was so small. But not as small as her mind now. She was trapped in there, somewhere, her body withering away in a sort of sad grace, still fighting, still holding the line, trying to anchor her to a place where her consciousness could return.
On the table next to the bed there was always a small pot of flowers, brought by her mother. The staff told him that she still visited every day, but for not as long now. When Father Soltera had first started coming, he would often see sheets on the tiny couch beneath the only window. Her mother used to sleep over. Now, from what he heard, she hardly slept. That was the price, he imagined, of seeing your child this way. Every day.
He was jarred from his thoughts by the ding of the elevator. The doors opened and he stepped inside, feeling gravity give a bit as he descended back to his life. Or what was left of it. From the lobby he would retrace his path back to church.
Sometimes he would think of his cancer when he did this. Other times, he’d focus on his to-do list for the rest of the week. But most of the time he would engage with his Lord, in hard-fought debate, over justice and injustice, mercy and cruelty.
There was a time he thought these discussions to be both shameful and horrid, a complete regression of the development of his faith. But now, he felt differently. Each step on the sidewalk, each passing streetlight that the metro sped by, was another road marker on his journey to greater understanding. Why it took pain to bring greater clarity, either spiritually or intellectually, was a mystery that greater men than he had tried to solve.
As usual, he stopped at Harry’s, a 24-hour diner that was located between metro stops. Eating this late at his age was nothing but an invitation for heartburn later, but on these nights, he’d usually get home so wired that he couldn’t sleep for hours anyway.
