Philadelphia Noir Page 3

  SCARRED

  BY SOLOMON JONES

  Strawberry Mansion

  Thunder clapped, and the street went black as if God had blown out the candles. A single flash of lighting streaked across the sky. After that, the only sound was the rain.

  That kind of quiet was rare at 33rd and Cecil B. Moore, the North Philly corner where a hodgepodge of crumbling housing and new development met the orchestrated greenery of Fairmount Park.

  Most autumn evenings, the corner rumbled with the sounds of the 3 and 32 buses, danced with the laughter of children at the water ice stand, and banged with the clatter of tools at the used tire shop. There was music to this corner, and the tunes went far beyond the rhymes of Li’l Wayne or the gospel of Kirk Franklin. The music had a distinctive rhythm, like the jazz of John Coltrane, who’d once lived a block away.

  But just like Coltrane’s house, the streets were empty and the rhythm was off, because the storm and the blackout had snatched the life from the streets, forcing everyone and everything indoors.

  The occupants of the new lofts who’d arrived with the long-gone real-estate boom were huddled in darkness, just like their impoverished neighbors. As rain poured down and lightning flashed, their differences no longer mattered. They all waited nervously for the lights to come on, because somewhere deep down, they understood the power of the heavens.

  But Richard and Corrine weren’t afraid. In their rehabbed three-story home at the end of a ramshackle block, the only power that mattered was love. And heaven? Heaven was between them, in every whisper, every kiss, and every touch.

  As the storm raged outside their window, the newlyweds welcomed darkness into a bedroom that overlooked the water ice stand. While neighbors shut their eyes against the blackout, the husband and wife christened their new home, joining themselves like instruments in a symphony of passion.

  The driving rain struck the windows as they poured themselves into one another, and as their bodies gave in to the moment, their whispers of love became shouts of joy. The harmony reached perfection. The symphony climaxed and ceased. Then their voices faded into the blackness of the night, with gasps and shudders and moans.

  Afterward, they lay in each other’s arms, listening to the rain fall. Corrine reached up and twisted Richard’s blond hair around her fingers. Even without light, she knew every part of his face. His pink lips were thin and sculpted. His jaw was square and strong. His blue eyes were set wide on either side of his sharply pointed nose.

  Her features were the opposite: cinnamon-brown complexion, silky black hair, eyes brown and bottomless, skin the texture of a ripened peach.

  They were an odd couple—the thirty-year-old white war veteran and the slightly older black nurse. At least it looked odd from the outside. But Richard never found it to be strange. They’d clicked the first time they met, when he saw her working in the physical therapy unit at the Philadelphia V.A. Medical Center.

  He’d asked her out for coffee after finishing his appointment and they went to the hospital cafeteria to drink cappuccino and speak of their pasts. He told her that he was a Special Forces soldier whose third tour in Afghanistan had been cut short by a roadside bomb. She told him that her only brother—a twenty-one-year-old grunt who was barely out of boot camp—had been killed by a grenade in Iraq.

  As the few minutes they’d intended to spend together stretched to hours, she told him that she hated working at the V.A. because of the misery and apathy she often found there. But she stayed in the hopes of helping other soldiers the way she wished she could’ve helped her brother. While doing a job she despised, she hid her pain from everyone around her; everyone, that is, except Richard.

  He instantly recognized her grief because it mirrored his own. It was the same emotional pain he’d hidden when he’d seen his comrades gunned down near Kabul. It was identical to the pain he’d suppressed when he returned home and found himself isolated. It matched the grief he felt whenever he thought of his past. That’s why it was so easy for him to see Corrine’s hurt crouching behind forced smiles. He knew he had to make her pain go away.

  For months, Richard and Corinne comforted each other, slowly drawing out bits and pieces of the things war had taken from them. Corrine told him that she’d lost her joy. Richard admitted that he’d lost his compassion. They both said they’d lost opportunities to love, and vowed not to lose one more.

  Slowly they began to leave war behind. Richard allowed his military high and tight to grow out until his hair reached his shoulders. Corrine’s sad demeanor gave way to an easy smile. Their whirlwind courtship led to marriage, and when they bought the house on the corner of 33rd and Cecil B. Moore, rehabbing it with their own hands, the imperfect neighborhood was just like their lives. It was somewhere between the horrors of war and the safety of peace. The direction they took from there would be up to them, or so they hoped.

  On this night, as they lay in each other’s arms, waiting for the blackout to end, they both realized that some things were beyond their control. These things included the scars they’d suffered in the past. They’d already dealt with the emotional ones, but for Richard, especially, some physical scars remained.

  As Corrine lay in his arms, she reached for one such scar. It was ugly and purple, and it knifed down the left side of his powerful chest. When her slender fingers touched it and lingered there, Richard braced himself for the inevitable question.

  “Where did this come from?”

  “We’ve been over this, Corrine,” he said, gently moving her hand away from the old wound. “It happened in the war.”

  “I know that, but—”

  “Look,” he said with an edge to his voice. “I told you about every fight we won, every guy we lost, and every civilian who died. The truth is, I don’t remember where this scar came from and I don’t know if I want to. But I do know I love you, and that should be the only thing that matters.”

  “You’re right Richard. It’s just that…”

  “What? You think I’m hiding something from you?”

  She lay back and ran her palm along his face, searching in the darkness until she found his eyes.

  “Yes, I do,” she whispered playfully as she wrapped herself around him. “And you’re going to make me use everything I’ve got to get it out of you.”

  Richard leaned back and looked at her, trying to see her face beyond the shadows. Then lightning flashed, filling the room with brilliant blue-white light. She smiled and he buried his face in her hair, whispering her name as only he could.

  “Corrine.”

  She giggled and reached for him as the rain smacked against the windows. But just as their lips were about to touch, the soothing sound of the downpour was interrupted by shattering glass.

  Corrine sat up in bed. “What was that?”

  “I don’t know,” Richard answered, reaching down to grab his pants from the floor. “Stay here.”

  He got up and walked briskly down the hall. Then he descended the steps two at a time, his feet padding silently on the hardwood floor. When he entered the kitchen, he saw that one of the windows over the sink was broken.

  “Probably the wind,” he said to himself, and reached up into a cabinet for a candle.

  He lit it and searched the cabinet. When he found the roll of duct tape he was searching for, a shadow crept across the wall. The shape of it was unmistakable. It was a man.

  Richard didn’t look up. Instead, he reached down into a drawer as his eyes darted back and forth across the room. He released the tape, wrapped his fingers around a kitchen knife, and hoped that he’d imagined what he’d seen. But when he turned around, he knew that it was real.

  The man crashed through the kitchen door, lunging as Richard brought the knife down with all the force he could muster. The man yelped, like a dog, and stumbled back onto the counter as the blood from his wounded arm soaked through his shirt.

  “Richard!” Corrine yelled from the bedroom.

  “Stay there,” Richard
managed to bark out as he slashed the man’s cheek with a sideways stroke of the knife.

  The man ducked when Richard swung the knife back in the other direction. His fist pounded Richard’s kidney, knocking the breath from his body and forcing him back into a cabinet. The man rushed toward him. Richard gripped the knife with both hands and swung upward. The man grunted, and warm blood flowed from the ragged gash that extended the length of his stomach.

  A second passed, then two. Richard’s heart beat wildly. The weight of the dead man pressed against him, pushing him into the cabinet as the blood saturated his clothes. The wind moaned and whisked through the broken glass in the kitchen. The rain fell in a thousand tiny drumbeats, tapping out its own timeless percussion.

  As Richard pushed the man’s body to the floor, another sound tore through the house, biting into him like nails against a blackboard. The sound was Corrine. She was screaming.

  “Help me!” she shrieked, and the wind seemed to fade into the echo of her voice.

  Richard turned and ran toward the bedroom, slipping on the blood-soaked linoleum of the kitchen floor. He ran, pushing himself toward the sound of his wife screaming. He ran, forgetting the body that lay in his kitchen, the pain shooting from his side, the blood covering his hands. He had only to get to Corrine. And when he did—when his feet had carried him up the steps and into the bedroom—all he could see was a shadow in the darkness, straddling his wife as she struggled to free herself from its grip.

  Richard charged into the room, slashing into the back of Corrine’s assailant with the knife. The man rolled onto the floor, arching his back against the pain when Richard brought the knife down again. Corrine joined the fray, her tiny fists striking the man’s head angrily. Richard pushed her away and raised the knife high into the air—a madness playing in his eyes as he delivered the killing blow.

  A split second passed. Then something whistled through the air. Richard was momentarily blinded by a white flash of light as a burning sensation gripped the back of his leg. He dropped the knife and grabbed at the bullet wound, then turned around to see yet another shadow coming toward him.

  Corrine screamed when the shadowy figure aimed a gun with a silencer. There was another whistling sound. This time, the heat glanced Richard’s shoulder. He reached for Corrine. There was a final silenced shot, and as the shooter lowered his weapon and retreated down the stairs and into the windswept rain, Corrine’s blood spilled onto Richard.

  He wrapped his arms around his wife, and as her eyes went vacant, Richard’s mind went to a place he thought he’d forgotten. It was a place with bullets flying, people running, tires screeching, and a hell-bound cloud of black smoke filling the air.

  He winced, not at the pain he was now experiencing from the wound in his leg, but at the pain he had once caused. Then he pulled a T-shirt from his drawer and wrapped the wound tightly, clenching his jaw while he tried to ignore the pain of the present and the past.

  Suddenly, he saw a light penetrate the darkness. He looked down slowly and realized that his iPhone was glowing through his pocket as a text message came through. The light was like an alarm, awakening something that Richard had long since laid to rest. He watched it blink for a few seconds more. Then he pulled the phone from his pocket and saw his memories come to life.

  No matter where you go, we’ll always find you, the message said. We’re attached, Richard. We’re family. Now leave the house and come out through the back door. We’ll be waiting.

  There was no number. The text was from a private caller. Not that he needed a number to know who they were. After eight years, they’d found him, just like he’d always known they would.

  He slipped the phone back into his pocket and kissed his wife’s cold lips. “Goodbye, Corrine.”

  Richard took off his wedding ring and placed it gently against her breast. Then he rooted under the bed for the 9mm Ruger he’d always kept, waiting for this day to come.

  He snapped in a clip and chambered a round, quickly throwing on a T-shirt and sneakers. He took a deep breath and told himself it didn’t matter if he made it through the night. By daybreak, his past would be buried, one way or another.

  Richard held the gun at his side and crawled down the steps to the kitchen. The dead man who’d crashed through the window was still slumped against the counter. Richard made his way over to him the way he’d been taught, flat against the ground and pulling himself forward with his forearms.

  Quickly, he searched the body. In his right pocket, there was nothing. In his left, there was a Glock 9mm with a silencer. Richard took it, then crawled to the stove, extinguished the pilot, and turned the knob.

  “Richard!”

  The voice calling from outside his house was familiar. It was a sadistic verbal smirk that was at once arrogant and deadly.

  Richard didn’t answer.

  “Come on out, Richard,” the man said. “We can talk.”

  Richard knew that talking was the last thing they would do. He had crossed the line with them. And once you crossed the line with people such as these, there was no turning back, there was no statute of limitations, and there was no reprieve. They could never allow him to live. He knew it, and they knew it. So as the kitchen filled with gas, Richard ripped a piece of cloth from his pant leg and wrapped it around his face. Then he knelt down next to the dead man and hoisted him up from his seat on the floor.

  As his wounded leg began to throb, sweat dripped down into his eyes. The rain seemed to tap harder against the broken glass. The wind whipped up angrily. He counted to three. Then he was up, running toward the door and bursting through it as he held the dead body like a shield.

  Bullets whistled from muzzles equipped with silencers. A barrage poured in through the kitchen window, sparking a blast that ignited the house and lit the night sky.

  Richard dropped the body and leaped to his left, running across 33rd Street and into the park. The rain poured down thicker, and as four men emerged from the gutted school bus at the old tire shop across the street, they lost sight of him for just a second. It was long enough for him to disappear.

  “Okay, he’s in the park,” said the hefty man with the smirk in his voice. “My guess is he went southwest, but I think he’s hit, so he couldn’t have gotten far. Tyson and Robinson, you two take the right side of Reservoir Drive. Me and Montgomery will search the woods on the left.”

  “And if we find him before you do?” Tyson asked.

  “Try to take him alive.”

  The men fanned out and melted into the shadows of the blackout while Richard disappeared into the park. He passed by the driving range with its dilapidated caddy shack and ancient golf cart. He moved through the heavy foliage surrounding the Frisbee golf course. He heard sirens from fire engines and police cars blaring in the distance.

  As the pain from the bullet wound in the back of his leg intensified, he stopped with his back to a tree, panting and looking over his shoulder at the flames from his burning house. He imagined Corrine, trapped inside without him, her body being consumed by the fire. The thought of it was grisly, but he’d gladly trade places with her now, because the hell of living without her was far more severe than the flames that were cooking her flesh.

  He looked away, his bitter tears mingling with the rain. In that instant, the grief she’d spent months helping him to overcome rushed back. A moment later, the grief was gone, and it was replaced with an emotion he knew all too well—anger.

  Richard checked his pockets. He still had the phone. He had his Ruger, and he had the Glock with a silencer he’d taken from the dead man in the kitchen.

  He looked out from behind the tree once more and saw dome lights whirling outside his house. If he were anyone else, he could’ve tried to make his way back to the house. He could’ve told the police that the same people who’d killed his wife had tried to kill him. He could’ve clarified that he’d acted in self-defense. But Corrine was right. Richard had something to hide, and it all began with the scar o
n his chest.

  Chambering a round in the Glock, Richard stuffed the Ruger into his waistband. A second later, his phone buzzed and his pocket glowed as he received another text message.

  For a moment, he considered ignoring the message and leaving the phone behind, but he wanted his pursuers to use the phone to track him. That would bring them closer, and make them that much easier to kill.

  Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out the phone, cupped it in his hand, and read the message while the rain pelted the screen.

  We know what happened in the mountains at Tora Bora, the text said. Surrender and you might live.

  A chill went through Richard’s body as he reread the message and checked the source. The text had come from a phone number with a 202 area code, which meant they weren’t trying to hide their identities anymore. They were CIA, just like the teams he’d fought alongside in Afghanistan.

  He’d learned two things about those teams during the war: the only thing that mattered to them was the objective, and they didn’t care how they reached it.

  Pocketing the phone, he crawled through the slippery, leaf-strewn grass to the edge of Reservoir Drive—the road that snaked through the park from 33rd Street. Then he limped across and climbed a rain-slicked hill until he reached a chain-link fence.

  The faded sign on the fence said, No Trespassing. Property of the Philadelphia Water Department. He ignored it and scaled the fence, squeezing past the barbed wire that topped it. There was a reservoir on the other side of the fence, and the water inside was rapidly rising.

  Richard lay on his stomach on the reservoir’s concrete embankment and held onto the fence with both hands. He was flat on his belly and the rain pelting his wounded leg felt almost soothing. Then the fence rattled, and any comfort he felt disappeared.

  Sliding into the water, Richard flipped onto his back and allowed himself to float while holding the Glock he’d stolen from the dead body. When the first of two men came sliding along the slippery embankment to see if he was alive, Richard remained still. When the man got closer, Richard opened one eye. When he was almost upon him, Richard sprung into action.