The boys are ten and eleven. They are supposed to be watching television in their grandmother’s basement, but, instead, they are standing at the corner of Fulton Road and Newark Avenue, across from the St. Rocco’s rectory, passing a Winston Light back and forth, cupping it in hand as they had seen the older kids do.
At a few minutes after ten they see a cop car trolling Fulton, so they work their way down the alley that runs behind the strip of stores that begins with Aldonsa’s Tailors and ends with that heebie-jeebie voodoo place on the corner.
The younger boy looks around the Dumpster for a piece of foil in which to wrap the sacred remains of their last smoke. There is foil all over the place, courtesy of the takeout, but it all seems to be covered in barbecue sauce or spilled Pepsi.
Too short to see inside the Dumpster, the younger boy reaches over the rim, feels around the debris, and feels something wet. Something thick and viscous and sticky.
More barbecue sauce?
“Shit,” the boy says, pulling back his hand. And realizes immediately that it doesn’t smell like barbecue sauce at all. In fact, it smells like shit. Actual shit.
The two boys hoist themselves up to the rim of the Dumpster.
The corpse inside was, at one time, a man. This much is obvious, due to the fact that the man is naked. But there is also a huge hole where the man’s middle used to be. The area from his throat to his groin is cut into a long, flayed crescent, the fat and skin and muscle pulled to the sides in a surprised rictus of a smile, the contents glistening beneath the overhead vapor lights like maroon slabs of liver at the West Side Market.
The boy had reached directly into the man’s lower intestine, into fully digested arroz con pollo.
Although the dead man has rings on every one of his fingers-huge shiny stones that shimmer like multicolored prisms-the boys do not take them. Instead, they run as fast as they can, wind-whipped and mind-shattered, and do not stop until they reach West Forty-first Street and the arms of Jesus in the close, blessed safety of their grandmother’s basement.
Light snow, bitter cold. Ten-fifteen P.M.
The Ochosi task force, eight officers strong, is deployed in two locations, neither more than a block from the Westwood Road house. One team of four SWAT officers is in an unmarked tech van at the corner of Edgerton and Fenwick Roads. The other is in an SUV down the street from the Westwood Road address, at the bottom of the hill, a distance of less than half a mile. Within ninety seconds, both teams could arrive at the scene.
Sergeant Carla Davis sits in an unmarked car a half-mile away, in the Kaufmann’s parking lot, dressed in civilian clothes. The raid is scheduled for midnight, now less than two hours away. The task force has established a scrambled command frequency, so even if someone in the house is monitoring the channels, they will not pick up the task force traffic.
The bad news, on Westwood Road, is that it appears as if every house on the street is having a party. Every few seconds another car passes the tech van’s position, brake lights aglow, looking for a parking space, a space that is becoming harder and harder to find. People seem to be coming and going from every house on the block.
A half-mile north, Carla Davis tries to reach Jack Paris.
Greg Ebersole’s cell phone rings at ten-twenty-one. He is on Cedar Road, heading to the Cain Manor apartments. Bobby Dietricht is in the car behind him.
“Greg Ebersole.”
“Detective, this is Tonya Grimes.”
“Yeah, what’s up, Tonya?”
“I can’t reach Jack Paris. I talked to him ten minutes ago and now I can’t find him. Is he with you?”
“No. I just left him, though. What do you have?”
“Got one Jeremiah David Cross, attorney at law.”
“I’m listening.”
“Mr. Cross is a Caucasian male, twenty-nine years old, six feet, one-eighty-five, brown over brown. Got his law degree from American University in Mexico City. No wife, no kids, no-”
“Address, Tonya. Address.”
“Mr. Cross lives at 3050 Powell.”
“Where is that exactly?”
“Cleveland Heights. Right near the Cain Towers apartments.”
Five minutes later, Greg Ebersole, Carla Davis, and Robert Dietricht meet at the Lee Road entrance to Cain Park.
All three police officers have something to do before midnight.