“You killed him because—”
“He taunted me constantly at work. Whenever he was in town. I was like his fucking project. I reported it all to HR. It was harassment. I don’t think they took it seriously. But he asked me out to dinner, said he wanted to apologize. Claimed he’d back off but only if I agreed to let loose for one night, do whatever he thought might be fun.”
Hyde took a hard breath. He sat up straight. He gave Furlong that same glare from the bank door. That darkness. That flipped switch.
“He gets me in the strip club. We’ve had a couple of drinks. He’s been taking photos all night — meals, cocktails. He’s got an opinion about every single bite. Whatever. He’s posting every freaking thing along the way. Fabulous this and fantastic that. I’m trying to play along, figuring it will be over soon. At the club, more drinks. He buys me a private dance in the back. Small room with one big red chair. We both go back there and he gets the dancer—”
“The one today?”
“Yeah.”
“And he’s taking pictures the whole time. Boobs in my face. He wants my tongue out. I’m being humiliated right and left. I want to crawl into a hole. I felt sick to my stomach.”
“And?”
“And the taunting didn’t stop. Now, he’s got photos. Now, he says he can post them online to prove I’m party hearty.” Air quotes. “His words.”
“And you go back to see the dancer—”
“Marlena. Yes, once a month. To tell her that wasn’t me that night. To tell her I’m a better person than—” Except Tyler Hyde spots the problem with trying to take the moral high ground about how he did or did not treat women when he’d put a garrote around Billy Duncan’s neck and cut off his head. He put a hand to his eyes. Covered them. “Humiliated,” he said. “Every bone in my body.”
“So you took care of business.”
Hyde stood. He nodded. He shrugged. He walked calmly to the sliding glass door. He gazed out. He tilted his head back. He opened the door and stepped onto the balcony.
Furlong felt the cool air rush in and wondered if Tyler Hyde could let one whole day pass without thinking about what he had done, without wondering if he would ever get caught.
Furlong reached for his phone to turn off the recorder and dial Glendale PD. He watched, helpless, as Tyler Hyde climbed over the railing and dropped out of sight into the dark, dark night.
“Sort of right there in plain sight,” said Katy Cutler. Same booth as the first meeting. She slid an envelope across the table.
“Sort of.”
“That’s what I call closure.”
“In a way,” said Furlong, thinking of the fresh terror for those who heard Hyde’s body slam into the cold hard ground. Who went to investigate. Who saw what eight floors of free fall will do to flesh. And bone.
“And now all the chittering, blathering types can move on down the road. Find another case to muck around with.”
“But maybe if there had been no endless stirring of the pot, you might not have called me.” Furlong had given it all some thought. “And Tyler Hyde would have lived to be an old man.”
“So you’re saying these leeches... did some good?”
A server arrived with a small plate.
Furlong studied the morsel. A red goo, flecked with shards of pink, sat atop one slice of cucumber. The substance reminded him much too much of what he’d found when Hyde splattered. Furlong’s appetite withered.
“Amuse-bouche,” said Cutler. “Avocado and chili sauce aioli with roasted black tiger shrimp.”
Out of politeness, taking one for the team, Furlong put the tidbit in his mouth. The shrimp were afterthoughts in the sea of garlic. The cucumber failed to crunch. The spice was lost.
“Interesting,” said Furlong. The remnants of sauce left a weird texture in his mouth. “Believe me when I say I’m no expert. Now I’m the amateur lobbing in unsolicited opinions. But something’s not quite right. I’d look at everything. Every element. You know, ingredient. You might think something is there — but really, it’s not.”
Northside Nocturne
by Manuel Ramos
Northside
I didn’t give it a second thought when the young white man was shot outside Gaetano’s at Tejon and Thirty-eighth. Way I saw it, that wasn’t news. People been shot in the Northside for years, didn’t matter that the Chicano barrio was quickly turning into something else, something whiter, something with more money.
I figured the dead guy was new to the neighborhood, part of what Petey, my cousin who went to college, said was gentrification, and that he’d crossed the wrong homeboy. Most of the time I didn’t understand Petey and this was one of those times. All I knew was that the Northside was changing, and white people were buying up houses, tearing them down, and building two or three ugly boxes on lots where gente like my Aunt Julia had lived in one house for fifty years and more, and where she’d raised five children, four cats, and about a dozen parakeets.
Some of us natives stayed, we weren’t totally gone, but no denying it was different. For years, brown had outnumbered white on the Northside, but now raza was back to being a minority. I didn’t recognize the old hood, and I felt like a stranger in my hometown.
Change ain’t never easy, conflict and drama and that kind of bullshit, and even I’d tangled with a couple of the newcomers stepping out of one of the remodeled breweries after last call over on Thirty-second. The drunks were loud and rude and belligerent, and it looked like it was chingasos time until Petey stepped in, risking his pretty face, and calmed down me and the two bearded jerks.
The guy who crashed through Gaetano’s plate-glass window must’ve tried too hard to win the argument, and without Petey’s negotiation skills in play, it wasn’t hard to imagine that the situation spiraled out of control until someone said, Hell with it, and concluded that only a bullet through the throat could end the conversation.
Like I mentioned, I didn’t give it much thought. I’d learned long ago to mind my own fucking business. Not that I wanted to intrude. Not my style. Not anything I needed. I didn’t mingle with young white boys or old-school bangers with guns. But when a second young white guy was shot a week later, this time coming out of Chubby’s with a beef-and-bean special in his hand, I admit it gave me pause. It looked like someone had declared war on gentrification, and odds were that I knew that someone. I’d probably gone to Horace Mann Middle School with the dude, and if he hadn’t dropped out or checked into juvie or knocked up some shorty and was hiding out from her old man, we might’ve sat in the same row of desks in Mrs. Calabrese’s history class at North High.
The second shooting caught everyone’s attention. “The Denver Shooter” became the hot topic at family dinners or when we watched the Broncos games. Old friends I ran into had wild opinions and speculations about the killer, and radio talk show hosts spewed even wilder conspiracy theories meant to explain the shooter. I never brought up any of my own ideas. My thinking got as far as a crazy dude with a gun, which, in my experience, was all anyone really needed to know.
TV news reporters flocked to the area, where they waited to interview people coming out of bars and restaurants in what they called the Highlands and LoHi — what we called the Northside. I heard one of the reporters talk about rising tensions, community town halls, and city council debates, and then ask a smiling couple pushing a baby carriage if they felt safe walking the streets of their new hometown. They kind of giggled and shuffled their feet and then they said, “Of course” — what else could they say, right? No way they wanted their mama and papa back in Chicago or their friends in Boston to think they’d made a mistake moving to a million-dollar house in Denver. So, hell no, they weren’t afraid.