The Wolves of Fairmount Park Read Free Page B

then some other piece of unsupportable horror would come their way and then that would be the priority and this would allfade. It would matter to his friends, to Shawn and Luis and the guys he knew and worked with. To him and Kathleen and whatever was left of Michael.
    He heard a strangled wail from down the hall and all three of them turned, watched as Francine Parkman bent double, ripped at her husband’s coat, her mouth wide. A line of spit hung from her lips, and for a minute Brendan thought she was going to sink her teeth into her husband’s arm.
    The Captain and Danny Martinez looked down, but Brendan kept watching. In uniform he’d have turned away, too. Left them in their terrible moment, averted his eyes and looked at the floor or just walked away, but this was different, because they were here together, him and Kathleen and these strangers and their dead son. What was happening was happening to them all.
    When they were done, the Captain off to wherever brass was always on its way to, and the kid back to the crime scene, Brendan went back into the chapel and sat down next to Kathleen and she picked up his hand and squeezed it and he nodded. He looked at her then and she raised her eyebrows and he shrugged. There was nothing to report, nothing to tell her. He didn’t know anything.
    It was the most profound truth he had picked up all those years riding in a Radio Motor Patrol car going out into people’s houses in the middle of the night or the middle of the day and listening to them tell their stories. Nobody knew anybody.Nobody knew the first goddamn thing about their wives or their husbands or their kids or their friends. He’d look at Luis and they’d laugh or shake their heads or just stare into the middle distance and wonder at what people were capable of.
    To be fair, maybe he’d already known it. It wasn’t some cynical thing he’d broken his head against, this knowledge of the strangeness of life. It wasn’t like he’d gone out the first day starry-eyed and full of hope and he’d been blindsided by the terrible things people did to each other. He’d grown up with Maire and knew how she was and how no one had ever stepped in to stop her until his father had finally gotten him out of the house. They left Orlando there, all of four years old and already a sensitive and sad kid who knew too much about madness and fear and disappointment. Brendan would ask his father if they could go get him, but his father had tried to explain about the judge and custody and that Orlando wasn’t theirs to take, but it all confused him and he’d wake up in the middle of the night and listen to the quiet and think of his little brother, trapped in a haunted house with a mad drunk.

CHAPTER
2
    When Danny went to the station house off the river drive he’d been up twenty-four hours. His eyes burned, his mouth tasted of acid and coffee and mints, and he had stopped taking new facts in and was chewing on what he had learned. He hadn’t been pressed this hard in a long time, not since the last couple days he’d spent working Derrick Leon, and he sat down on the hard bench outside the Captain’s office while the old man finished a phone call. The sun was going down, and the house was fading around him. The place was hot as a sauna, and the pipes rang and clattered like it was an old submarine going deep.
    Danny remembered Derrick Leon and the high he’d gotten off those last hours and sticking a shotgun in Leon’s face in the garage on Thompson Street. The terrible parts, the crime scene on Second Street where Leon did his girlfriend and his mother or seeing the dead patrolman down on Oregon Avenue, the kid who had pulled Leon over and gotten one in the face—those things didn’t hit him until later. It was the parts that worked, getting the tip from Asa about the kid from Leon’s crew who had fucked up one too many times and was ready to