I walk over to Marcus. “Marcus, are you sure about this?” “Yuh.”
“This guy is very dangerous. Will you be really careful?” “Yuh.”
“And you’ll try your best to avoid killing him?”
“Yuh.”
I wish I could let that be the final word.
AS SOON AS WILLIE AND I leave the room, I grab his arm.
“What’s the matter?” he asks.
“Sshhh,” I say softly, putting my fingers to my mouth to emphasize that I want him to be quiet. I look around, trying to find a vantage point from which I can watch what happens in the room.
Fortunately, there are literally holes in the wall, and I find one that lets me see Marcus and Childs clearly, yet it is small enough that they’re unlikely to know I’m there. “I can’t just leave him like this,” I whisper to Willie. “If something went wrong, I’d never forgive myself.”
“Marcus will be really pissed,” he says.
“Only if you tell him.”
“What are you going to do if Marcus is losing? Shoot Childs?”
I shake my head. “I could never do that. It’s still a human life we’re talking about. You can shoot him.”
Willie just shakes his head in disapproval, but he quickly finds another place from which he can see as well. I also notice that he has one of the guns out and ready.
We watch as Marcus goes over to Childs and starts to untie him.
As he does so, Childs laughs and says, “You’re a bigger asshole than I thought.”
Marcus doesn’t answer; he just continues freeing Childs from the bonds. At the moment he is free, Childs lashes out and punches Marcus in the face. The sound of fist hitting face is a sickening thud, and Marcus staggers back a few feet.
Childs is up and at him like a cat, showing frightening quickness for a man his size. He lands two more punches, one to the side of Marcus’s head and another that glances off his shoulder. Marcus backs up a few more steps.
I can see Willie’s grip tighten on the gun to the point that I’m afraid he’s going to shoot himself. But we keep our positions; it seems too soon to intervene.
Suddenly we see a slight movement, and Childs screams in pain. The punch from Marcus was so quick and short that it was hard to detect, but it leaves Childs holding his stomach and gasping in pain on the floor.
Marcus moves toward him and Childs somehow summons the strength to punch at him again. This time it’s done with far less force, probably because it’s difficult to punch and wretch at the same time.
Marcus leans down and grabs Childs, lifting him off the floor and over his head as if he were a rag doll. He throws him halfway across the room, and Childs lands in a heap. It is the most astonishing thing I have ever seen in my life.
Marcus walks across to Childs, who is unsuccessfully trying to get up. Marcus pulls his fist back and lifts him halfway up by his collar, preparing to hit the defenseless man in the face. There is no doubt in my mind that it will kill him, and even though I have a great desire to look away, I can’t.
I’m cringing, waiting for the blow to be delivered, when Marcus thinks better of it. He relaxes his hand and lets Childs go, and watches as he crumples to the floor.
Willie looks at me, and I just nod. We turn and go down the stairs. I think Marcus can handle the rest of this on his own, and I sure as hell don’t want him knowing we stayed to see what happened.
Laurie is sleeping when I get home. I’m certainly not going to wake her, so I don’t get to tell her about the events of the lovely evening spent with Marcus and Childs. It’s probably just as well: She needs a lot of rest, and dealing with this lunacy can’t help.
She’s still sleeping when I get up in the morning, and only wakes up after I shower and have coffee. She wants to be updated on the evening’s events, and I take her through it. She’s anxious to hear from Marcus to learn if he got Childs to talk, as am I, but thinks I did the right thing by leaving when I did.
Two off-duty policemen show up, whom I am hiring to guard the house while Laurie is in it. They will alternate with two other cops, so that the house will always be covered, at least until we decide it’s no longer necessary. Even though Marcus has been able to deal with Childs, the fact is that he was hired to shoot her, and whoever did the hiring can find someone else to attempt the job.
Laurie’s daytime nurse and two physical therapists show up a few minutes later. I make a note to stock the refrigerator; these people are going to have to eat and drink. I have seemingly overnight gone from hermit to host, and it’s not a role I’m used to.
Satisfied that Laurie is well taken care of, I head for the office, where Kevin and Edna are waiting for me. Edna has taken to coming in relatively on time since Laurie was shot; she seems to want to be around to help if she can. It’s a side of her I haven’t seen before, mainly because it hasn’t existed before.
Laurie sleeps late and Edna is coming in to work early. I have undoubtedly entered the bizarro world.
Kevin has characteristically analyzed our case and laid out the things we need to do to really get started. First on the list is a trip down to the Walter Timmerman murder scene. He knows that I always like to start at the beginning and get a feel for myself what happened. I know I’m not going to magically find some evidence that the police missed, but it helps me feel grounded.
We still haven’t heard from Marcus, and I’m starting to get a little worried. I also haven’t heard from Pete Stanton, though Marcus was supposed to bring Childs to the police when he was done with him.
Kevin and I arrive at the murder scene, and my guess is that if you had given friends of Walter Timmerman’s ten thousand guesses as to the location where he might someday die, this actual place in downtown Paterson would have placed behind Mozambique and Mars.
I’m sure the feeling Kevin and I have is different from what we would experience if we came here at night, which is when Timmerman took the bullet. At this hour of the day the feeling is dreary and hopeless; it seems as if all available energy has been sucked out of the neighborhood. The unemployed, many of them probably homeless, get through the day talking on the corners and reclining on the curbs. For some reason I think of the line in the Simon and Garfunkel song, “A good day’s when I ain’t got no pain. A bad day’s when I lie in bed and think of things that might have been.” By that standard, these people seem to be experiencing a good day, but their lives have surely long ago started “slip-sliding away.”
Were we here at night, we would likely be afraid. It would be a threatening, dangerous environment. Of course, the only way Kevin and I would come here at night would be in an army tank, encased in a bulletproof bubble, guarded by a marine battalion and Marcus.
I can’t stop thinking about Marcus. What if Childs somehow prevailed after we left? Maybe he hit Marcus over the head with a pipe when he wasn’t looking. Marcus is not invulnerable; even Luca Brazi sleeps with the fishes.
Timmerman was shot in an alley behind a convenience store.
Kevin and I enter the store, which seems to only sell items identified by their Spanish name, and we talk to the clerk behind the counter. He’s about eighteen years old, and watches us approach with obvious indifference.
“Hi. We’re investigating the murder that took place in that alley awhile back. We’d like to look around, if that’s okay with you.”
He doesn’t say a word; I can’t tell if he doesn’t understand English or is just not interested in the way we are using it.
“So we’ll just look around, all right?”
Again not a word.
“Kev, you want to jump in here?” I ask.
“No, you’re doing great.”
“Thanks.”
I reach for a package of Mentas, which looks and sounds like it must be mints, and hand the clerk a twenty-dollar bill. “Keep the change,” I say, and for the first time I see a flicker of understanding.
“We’ll be out back,” I say, and Kevin and I leave the store.
“Out back” is little more than a few Dumpsters and some garbage that didn’t make its way into one of them. It is no longer a protected crime scene, but there remains the faint outline of a chalk mark that identified where Timmerman’s body was found. It is covered by an overhang from the building, which is why it hasn’t been completely washed away by summer rains. There are also what appear to be faded bloodstains on a cement wall nearby.