The loud thwack, thwack, thwack of descending rotor blades covered the noise of Pavel’s 9mm. Scanlon’s head seemed to explode, pieces of it flying off in all directions. Joe, still standing, somehow immune, could feel his right leg afire. He looked down at the red puddle forming around his shoes, blood pulsing out of his femoral artery. As his leg buckled, Serpe gazed across the room to Pavel. He smiled back at Joe, tossing his handgun away. A knife appeared in its place, as if by magic. The Russian slit open his left palm and made a show of licking his own blood. He waggled his red tongue at Joe. Pavel strode over to where Serpe lay, bleeding out.
“I hope you like sushi,” the Russian said, wiping his bleeding palm across Joe’s face.
Then he raced toward where Marla struggled to free herself from beneath the corpse.
The backdoor blew off it’s hinges and helmeted men in full body armor poured in like the sea. There was a riot of noise, a chorus of guns firing at once, empty shells pinging off concrete. Joe Serpe heard only the angels singing, some of them spinning in the air above him. He looked for Vinny amongst them, but his brother was not there. Then he heard a voice calling to him as if from at the end of a long tunnel.
“Joe! Joe!”
“Vinny?” he said.
“It’s me Joe, Bob Healy.”
There was another voice. “He’s lost a lot of blood.” Then there seemed to be a million voices. Joe could hardly hear himself think.
“Marla?” Joe asked. “She’s alive.”
“Donna’s in the yard,” Joe said.
“What?”
“Donna’s in the yard, in Cain’s secret hiding spot. She’s in the oil yard.”
“It’s okay, Joe. They’ll find her. Take it easy.”
Serpe felt Bob Healy take his hand. No, he was slipping something into his hand.
“What’s this?” Joe asked, raising his closed fist.
“Something that never should have been taken away from you in the first place.”
Serpe looked back up at the ceiling, but the dance floor was empty. The band was on break. It seemed as good a time as any to sleep.
Epilogue
They found Donna in Cain’s secret place between the cyclone fence, which mistakenly marked the rear limit of the oil yard three feet short of the actual property line, and the brick wall beyond, overgrown with ivy and the skeletons of other dead vines. Even if Frank hadn’t parked the 81 Mack he used for spare parts up against the fence in the rear corner, Cain’s spot would have been safe from detection. If to the rest of the world it was an insignificant, forgotten patch of dirt, to Cain it had been as important as his hose monkey shirt or the feel of Donna’s hand in his. Cain had had the need as much as any man to carve out a corner of the world, put a flag in it, and proclaim it his own. This three by ten piece of dirt, rusted fence, brick, and weeds was his.
Near frozen and half-dead with a gash in her shoulder from where the bullet ripped into her, Donna remained absolutely silent until she heard Marla’s voice. The cops and EMTs had tried to stop the psychologist from going with Healy back to the yard to find the Down’s girl, but Marla wouldn’t hear of it. She would have the rest of her life to suffer through the trauma of reliving this night. Maybe she would get over it, maybe not. She knew, however, that she would never heal if she simply abandoned Donna.
The two woman embraced when Donna crawled out through the hole Cain had cut in the fence and out from beneath the undercarriage of the 81 Mack. They rocked there together, on the soot black, packed down snow that had never fully melted away since the night of Cain’s murder. Nothing remained of the makeshift memorial the people from the group home had constructed. That Cain’s patch of the world had provided Donna with a safe place to hide was memorial enough.
“You look bad and your breath smells,” Donna said. Marla broke down, finally.
On the following Monday, Ken Bergman was given a traditional Jewish burial. In spite of their shock and grief, his parents could not help but wonder who the four strange men were who stepped forward and offered their respect to the dead man by each throwing a shovelful of earth on their son’s coffin.
Bob and George Healy, Skip Rodriguez and Detective Schwartz never identified themselves. They all knew, of course, that Ken Bergman had been a hero. Not in some amorphous way, but in the most meaningful way possible. He had literally sacrificed himself so that others could live. Marla had described Bergman’s actions to Healy as they drove to the oil yard the night of the massacre in the unfinished gym, but she pleaded with Bob to keep it quiet until after the funeral.
“Let his family have their grief, please.”
On the Tuesday morning following the burial, all three New York tabloids featured headlines concerning Ken Bergman’s heroics. Even the sacred New York Times carried the story. But with men and women being blown apart by roadside bombs in places like Najaf and Tikrit, they didn’t feel one man’s sacrifice for unrequited love was worth the front page.
For weeks the papers featured stories about that bloody Saturday night and the fallout from the investigations that followed. As Joe Serpe had anticipated, Black Sea Energy was the silent partner in at least two dozen small and medium-sized C.O.D. heating oil companies in New York City, Nassau and Suffolk Counties, Northern New Jersey and Connecticut. The federal investigation involved several government agencies and stretched all the way from Brighton Beach Avenue to the oil fields of Bakku. There was enough corruption and enough bad guys left alive even after that bloody night to make the feds and the local cops happy. None would remember the two ex-cops, old enemies who had come together to find justice in a world without any. Nor would they recall that it all began with a can of spray paint and a loyal retarded man who had wanted to do only the right things.
When Joe Serpe woke up, it was Healy’s puss staring down at him, not Marla’s.
“How long…” He tried to speak, but his throat was so dry it burned. It wasn’t the only part of him that hurt. His left leg was a menu of pain. He grabbed it, panicked that it might be gone.
“Take it easy, Joe,” Healy said, pushing him gently back down by the shoulder. “Let me get the nurse for you.”
“Donna?” he rasped.
“They found her right where you said she would be. She was hit by a bullet, but she’s okay.”
“Marla?”
“She had it pretty rough, but she’s been here every day. That woman’s tougher than me and you put together. Even though you almost got her killed, she still loves you. I guess there’s no accounting for taste.”
“Guess not.” He held his hand out to Healy.
“You did good, Joe,” he said to Serpe, squeezing his hand. “You made it right.”
After the nurse and doctors left, Healy watched Serpe sleep for a little while, then got some coffee and dinner before coming back to the hospital.
“Christ, you again!” Serpe said, still a bit groggy from the pain killers. “The bullets shattered my femur and cut my artery. They say I’m probably gonna have a limp.”
“A limp’s like gray hair for a man, it adds character.”
“Fuck you, Healy. Get me a baseball bat and I’ll give you some character.”
They both had a laugh at that. Then they just sat there together in comfortable silence for about a half-hour.
“Joe, I’ve been meaning to tell you something for a very long time. That’s why I came to the kid’s funeral that day. I’ve been trying to tell you ever since, but the time never seemed right.”
“Go ahead and say it, Healy. I pretty much owe you my life and Marla’s.”
“Remember what I said about your old partner Ralphy giving up two C.I. s and a cop?”
“Yeah, what about it?”