Authors: Katia Lief
“From his
number
, not his phone.” As if it should be a given that he would know the tools of an identity thief – soul thief and life thief that he was.
“Darcy …” Courtney was close enough now that I could see her face beneath the taped eyes. Her left cheek was bruised. One nostril was caked with dried blood. And her hair, her spectacular golden hair was matted where it wasn’t taped against her head. I yearned to reach for her but his gun was still there, biting my ribs. “Don’t let him close the door.”
Joe then turned and walked quickly to the door that hung open into the night and air and freedom. It was open and we had to get through it before he could lock us both inside this dungeon.
Free of him, I grabbed inside my purse for my gun. He had just started to push shut the door, inspiring that awful screech, when a voice rang out from the distance.
“Mom?”
“Nat!” I hurried toward the door – closing, almost closed.
“Mom! Where are you?”
“Nat –
run
!”
Joe’s face transformed from self-satisfied victor into a gargoyle molded and etched on a blade of rage. All the plans and dreams and emotions and hopes and delusions that had led him to this moment seemed to explode beneath his skin as his face twisted into a picture of terrifying determination. He had not worked this hard for nothing. Like dominoes he had felled his obstacles, one at a time: Hugo, Rich, Courtney. And now it was Nat’s turn to be obliterated for the cause …
“Mom! Are you in there?” His voice was louder, closer.
“Run away, Nat!
Quickly!
”
As soon as Joe abandoned the door, I burst out of the container into the crisp night air and saw the lunatic racing straight for my son. He lunged with overwrought steps, holding his arm stiff in front of him. The gun shook in his hand but never lost sight of its target.
Nat froze in place. He was terrified. I needed to reach him, comfort him,
save
him.
“
Run
, Nat!”
But he couldn’t move. Or speak. Or apparently even
think
. He had shut off at the worst possible moment. It was as if his mind had fled his body, abandoned it on the brink of attack. Was that what had happened to Hugo in the moments before he crashed and died? Had he been aware of having been forced off the road by another car? Had he caught a glimpse of Joe in the car behind him and wondered why this nut was trying so hard to rear-end him?
“Nat!” I ran, pausing to switch off the safety of my gun, and then ran harder.
Joe gained speed. He was close to Nat now.
My Nat
.
And then … Joe stopped. His whole body trembled as he leveled the gun on my child.
I ground to a halt and raised my gun. Pictured the target. No bull’s-eye for me but the real thing: a human silhouette, black as coal, a sinister void.
“She’s
mine
.” Joe’s voice sailed into the sky and spread across the river, trailing three successive echoes:
she’s mine, she’s mine, she’s mine
. As his last word faded, my mind seized on the caving flesh of his forefinger as it pulled in on the trigger of his gun. The creases of flesh below both knuckles. The trigger itself pinching the soft pad of his skin.
A shot rang out, ringing more echoes into the sky. Echoes with the exuberance of chimes. An announcement.
Joe’s head spun to face me. I could see in his eyes that he couldn’t believe it. It was as if he only now saw that I really didn’t want him.
“If you don’t, I won’t,” he said, as if we were bargaining out the final stages of a relationship.
We weren’t. My bullet had simply missed. So I shot again.
And this time I hit him: right on the shoulder. He staggered backward as I came at him again, aiming for another shot. My third bullet entered his cheek with fortuitous precision.
Joe’s arms flew out to either side as if he were raising his wings. The gun arced out of his hand and landed fifteen feet away, falling with a crash into a pile of stones. His body succumbed to gravity as his wings, having failed to levitate him, flopped overhead then bounced up and down beside him when his body hit the ground. Blood drained out of the hole in his head like oil out of a spent engine. Glassy-eyed, limp, he died before my very eyes, as the sky flooded with angry ghosts waiting to receive him.
I dropped my gun and ran to Nat, down whose face tears were streaming. He was holding his middle as he convulsed with sobs.
“How did you find me?” I wrapped Nat in my arms and felt his arms, shaking, come around my back. We held each other as tightly as the night we lost Hugo, when we thought things couldn’t get worse.
“When you weren’t home,” Nat whispered in my ear, “I got worried. I went out to look for you. When I called your cell, you cursed at me and called me Joe.”
“That was you who called?”
“Why did you call me that?”
“Sweetie, I was cursing at
him
. I thought he had you. I came here to find you.”
“I had a feeling you did. I remembered his address from the answering machine.”
“You’re my hero.” I pressed my wet eyes into his neck. Soon he would be taller than me. He would grow up and leave me. My little boy.
“I love you, Mom.”
“I love you too, Nat. I love you
so much
.”
“He was such a
freak
.”
“You can say that again.”
And then a three-ring circus of sirens and lights blasted apart the silence and vanquished the moon as this barren slice of land was overrun with police. A dozen cop cars must have pulled up practically all at once.
“I called that detective guy,” Nat whispered in my ear.
“Good,” I whispered back. “That was smart thinking.”
Within moments we were standing at the epicenter of a circle of armed police, their weapons uniformly spoked in the direction of Joe. Dead Joe. Funny how much attention he attracted when he posed the least threat.
Jess entered into the circle, breathless from his run from the street. He looked at Joe. Then at us.
“You OK?”
“We’re fine. Thanks for coming.”
“Darcy—”
“No, I mean it. You’re here. A few minutes earlier and you could have had the honors.”
“So he had her in there.” Jess had spotted Courtney, now sitting outside the container, picking at the electrical tape wound around her eyes. “Someone go help the lady – over there!”
Two officers hurried to Courtney’s side. Both crouched beside her. One spoke to her, apparently calming her, eliciting nods. The other gently worked to free an edge of tape and carefully unpeel it.
“He has supplies in there,” I told Jess and he knew what it meant though I didn’t want to spell it out in front of Nat: it was where Joe had intended to keep me for himself. Obviously he had planned it carefully, organized things for a long-term stay.
The circle of police had slackened as officers
grouped
to different tasks. An ambulance arrived. Two EMS workers spoke with one of the cops before zipping Joe into a body bag and arranging him on a stretcher. Others inspected the inside of the container. One came over to Jess, who stood with me and Nat.
“I found the murder weapon,” the officer said.
“Don’t make any assumptions,” Jess corrected him.
“It was self-defense.” I couldn’t stop the quake in my voice. The officer had called it a “murder weapon”. Was that where this would go now? I had just killed someone. But was killing your stalker
murder
?
“You did what you had to do,” Jess said. “Don’t worry. You’ll have to spend some time talking to Homicide but I’ll be with you every step of the way. I know those guys and believe me, they’ll get it.” His eyes settled on the gun in the officer’s hand: the small, light, familiar gun. Angela’s weapon of choice.
“Nice gun,” Jess said with a hint of something in his tone – complicity? “Good shot for a beginner.”
EPILOGUE
Names of the Dead
By Darcy Mayhew and Courtney Saks
Brooklyn, New York – As the New York City District Attorney’s office prepares to defend itself against accusations of corruption that have shaken City Hall at its highest echelons, the New York City Police Department’s forensics laboratory has completed a much awaited analysis of a group of human bones found at a building lot on Pacific Street in Brooklyn earlier this year.
The lot is the former site of a cleaning chemical factory built in 1978 by Tony Tarentino, Sr, the father of Tony Tarentino, Jr who owned the property until recently. The
factory
was demolished last fall after the lot was sold to Livingston & Sons, a developer, as part of a far-reaching order of eminent domain used to clear over two hundred parcels of both privately and publicly owned land to make way for what has become known as the Atlantic Yards project, the centerpiece of which is to be a basketball arena. Separate investigations have been launched into undisclosed terms of Mr Tarentino’s sale of land, which included a total of nineteen lots in the Atlantic Yards footprint, and the provenance of the bones.
Since the discovery of the bones, New York City residents have clamored for information about their origin. DNA testing has now confirmed their identities. An investigation by the
Times
has yielded brief but telling biographies of the long unaccounted-for dead.
Ralph “One Eye” Caruso: died 12 April 1978. A cog in the wheel of the Figaro family crime empire, Ralph ran drugs for Vinnie Figaro whose son Vinnie, Jr later took over as head of the family. Mr Caruso was blinded in one eye while defending himself in a gunfight in which a police detective was killed. Mr Caruso spent two years in prison, from 1975 to 1977, for his role in that incident while another Figaro soldier received a life sentence for the
detective
’s murder. Forensics testing of Mr Caruso’s bones revealed a gunshot, probably to the back of the head, based on the condition of upper lumbar fragments found buried in the Pacific Street lot. Mr Caruso was twenty-five years old at the time of his disappearance. Forensics testing of his bones verify that age.
Loretta Amelia Scarpeletto: died 12 April 1978. The fiancée of Ralph Caruso, they had been childhood sweethearts who had grown up on the same block in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn. Loretta worked as a secretary in the office of P.S. 58, a local elementary school, and planned to marry Ralph in the summer of 1978. A forensics examination of her bones did not reveal the exact cause of her death, but as no elements of her spine, neck or skull were found, authorities believe she was killed with Mr Caruso, also execution style. She was twenty-four at the time of her disappearance.
Lionel Antonio Scarpeletto: died 12 April 1978. The younger brother of Loretta Scarpeletto, Lionel was twelve years old when he disappeared the same day as his sister and Ralph Caruso. Loretta often stayed with him at their home after school while their mother worked. Authorities surmise that Ralph may have been with them at their home when they
disappeared
. Lionel, known for his sharp sense of humor, was in the sixth grade.
Antoinette Scarpeletto, eighty, was a widow at the time of the disappearance of Loretta and Lionel, her only children. Her reaction to the news that the recently discovered bones belonged to her children: “It helps to know what happened to them and when it happened, but it doesn’t change anything. I never liked Ralphie Caruso. I knew it had something to do with him when they all vanished at the same time. I light a candle for my babies every single day at St Mary’s Star of the Sea. I’ll keep lighting them. Why stop now?”
“Whoa, Mom. That boy, Lionel … he was only in sixth grade.” Nat dropped the newspaper onto the living room floor and looked at me. We lay head to toe on our blue velvet couch, still in our bathrobes on a Sunday morning. Tonight was New Year’s Eve; because we planned on a late night, we’d allowed ourselves a lazy start to the day. Sara and her family were coming for a two-day visit and would be arriving in time for dinner. Courtney had offered to come early to help cook though I was sure that was an excuse; since her abduction she had grown nervous staying alone for long. We saw her often in our Brooklyn house and always welcomed her visits.
I’d
told her to come early, but we wouldn’t cook. We could order in. I had a better idea for how to spend the afternoon on the last day of the year.
“Poor kid,” I said. “He got caught in the middle of something and probably never even knew what it was.”
“But, Mom – why does it seem so much worse when it happens to someone young?”
“Because children are precious, pure and innocent.”
Nat snorted and rolled his eyes; but I was right and he knew it. He was thirteen, practically a baby, nowhere near as sophisticated as he thought he was. He snuggled closer to me in physical confirmation of what he refused to verbally admit: that no matter how big he got, we still had years together as mother and child. A lifetime.
“Let’s get dressed and have something to eat,” I said. “Courtney and Rich will both be here in a little while and then we should get going.”
“Why Coney Island? It’s
December
.”
“Exactly.”
Two hours later, Nat, Courtney, Rich and I were walking along a deserted boardwalk in the grey winter chill. To our right: ocean. Endless, green, cold water extending to the end of the earth as far as we could see; shivering granite ocean and a cloud-hazy whitish sky barely separated by a tremulous horizon
line
in the far distance. The boardwalk, which in summer was noisy with beachgoers and amusement park riders, was all ours today. The quiet was exquisite. We might have been on a beach at the Vineyard if not for the stacks of buildings and the swoop and sway of the famous old rollercoaster to our left.
I kept my view trained to the right, toward the water. A wind slapped my face so unexpectedly I gasped and looked at Rich, who walked beside me. Had the sharp gust hurt him? It was hard not to worry about him all the time; but when I turned to him he lifted the good side of his face into his new smile, his
I’m still here so don’t treat me like an invalid
smile. Most of his body, beneath his clothes, was fitted with a sausage skin of flesh-covered pressure garments designed to make movement more comfortable and also discourage scar tissue from stiffening him into a living corpse. The good news had been that his burns were treatable by a combination of artificial skin grafts and physical therapy; but all that would take time. Meanwhile he kept moving, kept living, had recently started painting again, and planned to return to teaching next fall. One thing he’d had to give up, for now, were his treasured Wednesday afternoon horseback riding lessons. But it was a small price to pay for his life; in fact, if not for those lessons, he might have been
killed
when his tampered-with gas oven caused his house to explode.