Authors: Dani Alexander
Impenetrable? Or was there something inherently good about him? How did someone come back from that with any kind of empathy for the world?
He set his beer down. “Three nights later I find Cai sitting on the sofa, gun in his lap and my father in his favorite lounger, a bullet through his brain. I remember the playoffs on the TV so
clearly. My dad’s team—the Dolphins vs. the Ravens. Dolphins were losing. Why isn’t dad yelling? Oh, might be that missing part of his head and face…”
Peter—Age Twelve
Peter’s faking laughter with Darryl as he opens the door, but the smell of blood and feces is enough of a blow to knock the smile off his face. It takes him a minute, maybe two, to comprehend what he sees.
The Dolphins game is loud in the background, cheering crowds celebrating through clouds of blood and brains. Cai sitting on the sofa, calmly, legs crossed, with a gun three times bigger than his hand resting in his lap.
“Police will be here soon I think, Rabbit,” Cai says, staring at Nikolai Dyachenko’s slack form.
“Motherfuck—what did he do?” Darryl’s sandals clack across the living room as sirens grow closer. “Oh, shit. He’s dead. Shit! Shit.
What’d you do, Cai?”
Peter’s still trying to assimilate the scene before him when Darryl grabs the gun and Cai, jerking both off the couch. It’s not Peter’s first dead body, but that’s his father. His papa who just a few hours ago made him eat spinach. He’s maybe not thinking as quickly as he usually does.
“Papa?” Peter says, staring at the corpse like it’ll stand up and grin, despite the cavern in its head.
“We gotta go,” Darryl screams, grabbing Peter by the hair and jerking him toward the kitchen. The sirens are practically on their doorstep by the time they all stumble out the back door, Darryl shoving Cai and yanking Peter the entire length of the lawn.
“I turned myself in,” Cai says, still calm. It’s such a rational voice that it reaches in and flips Peter’s switch to on.
“We’ll talk later,” Peter responds shakily, taking the gun as both he and Darryl physically shove Cai through the gate at the far end of the yard.
“They’ll see,” Cai insists. “They’ll see he needed to die. Let me go back. They’ll see.”
Fucking Cai and his logic. Peter can’t focus, can’t think about anything but getting away. He ignores the splatter of blood on his brother’s face, the chunks of something grey dangling in Cai’s black hair as they tear down the alley. “Cai, so help me,” he pants, “if you take one step to return, I’ll knock you out and carry you. Then we’ll all be fucked.” They run in silence after that, slowing down only so Darryl can find a car old enough to hotwire. It ends up being a relic from the 70’s or 80’s, a Camaro. Cai has to clamber over the center console to get in. Darryl’s already pulling a screwdriver out and working on starting it when Peter sits down.
There’s a collective holding of breath while they drive past two police cars. The smell of onions and garlic fog the air as Peter and Darryl breathe out the pizza from just half an hour ago. Had it only been 30
minutes since his life was normal?
“I drugged his drink, Rabbit. So it didn’t hurt.” “Not now, Cai.”
“He killed my dad, Rabbit.”
“I know,” Peter says. Darryl casts a sideways glance at Peter, gaze flickering on the gun.
“Are you mad, Petya?” Cai asks, in that bizarrely innocent voice.
“No, Cai. Never mad at you. Okay? Just don’t talk for a while—don’t say anything.” Darryl takes the gun and slides it under his own seat as he drives. Then he reaches over and grabs hold of Peter’s hand, squeezing it, before lacing their fingers together.
Peter stares out the window as Little Moscow turns into swamps, then rivers, then forests. “I’ve got forty bucks,” Darryl says after a few hours.
“We’ll need gas soon. How’re we going to get money after that?” They discuss robbing some place with the gun, but decide against that kind of attention. By day three on the road, they have a system of stealing wallets from guys whose pants are around their ankles in rest stop and gas station restrooms. Driving nights is all they can manage, since Darryl isn’t legal to drive and they can’t afford to be pulled over. The journey is long.
It’s not until the fourth week that Peter gives his first blow job to a trucker outside a roadside diner. No risk, no fuss, no screaming asshole scrambling after them with his pants down. Though that did happen once when Peter used his teeth because the guy shoved his head down and made him choke.
Easy sailing after that. Between Darryl and him they can pull a hundred bucks a night if they stop at busier spots.
Jealousy, Thy Name is Austin
“The original plan was to go to California,” Peter told me, either ignoring my dismay or too busy visualizing his past to pay attention to me. “We were passing through Denver when Darryl said he was done driving for a while. So we settled here. Was only supposed to be for a month or two. We just never left.” “I don’t get it,” I said, my voice hovering between horror-struck and disbelief. “You were okay with him killing your father because your father killed his?” “No. Cai…Cai is super smart, Austin, but he’s not
street smart. He didn’t kill my father for revenge. He did it because he thought it was right. He was eight. And angry and scared.
Intellectually he was off the charts smart, but emotionally he
was just eight years old.”
I thought back to the show I’d watched about this killing.
Some news magazine show aired it about a year after I was graduated from the Police Academy. Cai’s voice on the 911 call was so small, but eerily cool.
“Hello? I just killed my Uncle Nikki.” This whole story didn’t mesh with the Cai I had met. “They’ll have his fingerprints in the system. They’ll get a match eventually,” I said, still in a state of shock.
“How long will that take?”
“A week, probably less. They’ll run it in AFIS, but then someone will have to visually identify the prints. It’ll depend on how many partial matches AFIS spits out and the quality of the old crime scene prints. And all they’ll have are the prints at the scene, not a name to match the prints. Unless he’s been arrested before?”
“No, never arrested.”
“They’ll have his prints from back then. That’s all.” “They find out who he is, and all they’ll see is the boy who drugged and killed Nikki the Nail. They won’t understand. And they won’t believe he didn’t kill Iss.” “
I
don’t believe he didn’t kill Iss. A neighbor saw him leaving the premises. And with what you’ve shared tonight, his being capable is no longer a question for me.” “I’m telling you he didn’t do it!” Peter jumped off the counter, fists clenched at his side.
“How do you know? You obviously think he’s capable of it, too. You keep saying ‘didn’t’. ‘He didn’t’. Not he
couldn’t
,” I said, repeating myself.
“Cai doesn’t lie to me, Austin. He’d never lie to me.” I made a scoffing sound. “You don’t even understand. He had a break down after what he did to my father.” Peter folded his hands in front of his face as if in prayer and took a deep breath. “For a year afterward he’d start crying hysterically just out of the blue.
Then he’d go silent for days on end. We had to drag this rocking chair through ten states because he wouldn’t sleep without me or Darryl rocking him.”
“He’s bipolar,” I argued.
“The cycles don’t last that long in kids. Trust me, I know all about his condition, Austin. It’s asking a lot, but just trust me.
Please. He didn’t do it.”
“Because you know who did?”
“No. I’d fucking turn them in if I did.” “Even if it was Darryl?” I asked quietly, remembering the ‘emaciated’ blond that Millicent had described.
“Darryl was with me,” he reminded me.
“The whole night?”
Peter had the grace to blush, though I didn’t read it as embarrassment as much as shame. “We…did a show.” Oh, Christ. I downed the rest of my beer and went in search of something stronger.
Johnny Walker and Austin Glass: A Love Story “I don’t want to know,” I said, pointing my bottle of whiskey at him from the coffee table.
“I needed a mortgage payment.” He followed me, trying to take the bottle.
I moved it out of reach and countered with, “What you need
is a fucking leash and some goddamn morals!” “Morals are for rich trust fund babies whose worst problem is their daddy doesn’t love them,” he spat.
Whiskey, glass, pour, toss back, glare. Repeat. “Cop out,” I slurred in retaliation, pointing the empty glass at Peter.
“Don’t get drunk. Fuck. I need you sober,” he yelled, snatching the glass out of my hand.
“There’s the problem right there. You need me sober. You need my help. You need something from me.” I laughed, tossing the bottle on the sofa, ignoring the glug glug glug as it emptied over my cushions. “And I just need you.” “Need me to what?” He asked with a huff, tipping the bottle right-side up.
“Nothing. I just need you,” I whispered and flopped into a nearby recliner.
I heard his swallow over the drumbeat of blood in my ears.
“You don’t even know me.”
“Which makes it really weird to be falling for you, don’t you think?” A pleasant numbness spread throughout my body. I didn’t care about what I just said to Peter. Didn’t notice the awkward silence or care that I was giggling and suspended from my job and being used by a whore to help a sociopath. I just closed my eyes to it all and let Johnny Walker lead me back to our honeymoon suite.
I Will Never Drink Again. I Need a Drink.
Sometime during the night I began dreaming about Feudal Japan. It was a specific interest of mine, developed accidentally due to a combined lack of elective choices during my second year of college and an open class in Asian History. The dream, in hindsight, was surely my mind’s way of desperately searching for common ground with Peter. It found a miniscule thread of commonality in the fact that Peter spoke Japanese, and I had a fascination with samurai warriors. A less-than-slim thread. A fucking gossamer strand of spit. But my brain latched on, and thus began my nightly fantasies of swords colliding. Which, in turn, birthed my hangover.
Mid-battlefield my samurai dream-warriors began stabbing into the grass while a team of gong ringers marched behind them. “Sweet Jesus, make it stop,” I whispered, grabbing my head as I woke. A supernova of light hit my eyes before I fell off
the bed, shutting my lids tight. The gongs continued in the form of my doorbell, as the teeny samurai began work on the sides of my skull.
“I’m coming,” I moaned, stumbling to my feet and nearly falling into the hallway. I staggered downstairs, head held tightly between two curled fists. Peter’s shirt tangled around my feet on the last step. While I tried to lose its hold on me, my shoulder hit the wall, my leg the sofa. And after stubbing my toe on the umbrella stand, I finally answered the door hopping on one foot, green cotton still dangling off my ankle.
Between my cries of “Ow, fuck, shit, ow”, I wasn’t sure whether to soothe my broken toe or block the sunlight lasering into my pupils. I did manage to kick off the shirt, soccer-style, past my partner and onto my front stoop.
“Morning, Sunshine,” Luis said, shoving a Styrofoam cup of coffee in my hand. At least I thought it was coffee. There was a vague aroma of espresso, but the cup surely held the contents of Satan’s stomach.
I mumbled a gruff, “Hey”, and raised my eyes from the cup to thank him when my gaze caught something as the door clicked shut. I blinked twice and canted my head to see around Luis, hoping I was only imagining one of my steak knives buried through a piece of paper and driven into my four-
thousand
-dollar, custom-made door.
Fucker.
“Nice outfit,” Luis motioned at my boxers and then frowned, turning to follow my line of sight. He pulled the note off the door, reading it aloud—with way too much volume, in my opinion. “I borrowed the Jag. I didn’t steal anything. Unless you
count your…anal virginity,” Luis choked out the last words pretending to cough into the fist holding a laptop bag.
“Changing,” I growled, wincing at my headache and snatching the note from Luis’s fingers. I was fucking blushing as I stalked upstairs to change. I wanted to stomp up them, but I had a thimbleful of dignity left. I wasn’t wasting it on a tantrum.
Upstairs, standing under the shower spray, I actually checked my ass—like I wouldn’t have already known if someone had been up in there. Jesus. I needed my head examined. My hangover chose that moment to remind me of the samurai battalion still digging their way out of my skull. Mother of God, I needed a drink.
No need for a suit today. I felt a pang of loss in my gut.
Dressed in chinos and a light cotton shirt, I returned downstairs, headed past Luis who sat poring over files on my table, and grabbed good old Johnny off the corner table for another round of oral pleasure.
“I need a drink.”
Luis checked his watch and gave me a bemused frown. “It’s ten in the morning.”
“I’m aspiring to maximum cop cliché.” He just gawped at me.