Empty ever after

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Brian Doyle got relief, all right… me.

I was certain Martello had taken notice of my car after our confrontation in front of his house the previous day. With the man’s attention to detail and lust for revenge, he no doubt already knew my car and tag numbers. He probably knew my total mileage and how much longer I had before my next oil change. To guard against being easily spotted, I switched cars with Carmella Melendez. While she may have been a great detective and meticulous about her looks, the woman’s car was a disaster area. There were enough old newspapers, gas receipts, and food wrappers in there to start a toasty bonfire and enough half full coffee cups to put the fire out. Still, the car smelled of her grassy perfume and that more than compensated for the mess.

I parked across Great River Road from the turn onto Martello’s block. I nestled the car into a dark, cozy corner on the lot of a half-completed neo-Victorian just down the street from the theme park house, Night had long since settled in and the construction crews were well gone. My position afforded me a clear view of Martello’s house, but it would be impossible for him to spot me without night vision equipment. I could also see the nose of Brian Doyle’s Sentra. He was parked on Martello’s block in amongst several cars that lined both sides of the street. Apparently, one of the neighborhood kids was having a pool party. I punched up Brian’s number.

“Yeah.”

“Okay, Brian, I’m in position. You can get going.”

“You sure you don’t wanna wait till my fuckin’ bladder explodes?”

“Piss in a coffee cup, shithead. That’s like on page one of your guide to surviving surveillance.”

“Whaddayu, nuts? I got like ten people on the porch over here. I’m not gonna provide entertainment for the evening.”

“Anything happening?”

“Nah. He got home from his shift around four forty-five and he’s been in there jerkin’ off ever since.”

“Okay, go home and get some rest. I got him now.”

It didn’t take Brian long to split. He must not have been kidding about his bladder.

About three hours later, the pool party was breaking up. As the departing cars took turns passing me by, the blast and thump of hip hop fractured the silence of the suburban night before fading away in the distance. I was sort of glad for the action. My wrists were aching from holding up the binoculars. And when I checked the sun visor mirror, I noticed funky circles on my face from the binocular eyepieces. I looked like the oculist’s billboard in The Great Gatsby. T. J. Eckleburg, I think that was the guy’s name. It’s weird what you remember sometimes, but stakeouts’ll do that to you. The boredom fucks with your head.

Just when the last car headed past me, my cell buzzed. It was Sarah.

“Hey, kiddo. What’s up?”

“The doctor says Mom can go home in a day or two. She’s doing much better.”

“No unexpected sightings? The sheriff’s still got someone watching?”

“Twenty-four hours a day, Dad. And no, no ghosts or anything.”

“And you’ve been keeping busy?”

“I go to the hospital twice a day and then I just hang, but I am kinda anxious to get back to school.”

“Good. I’m pretty sure we know who’s been behind this whole thing. I’m staking out his house right now.”

“Really?”

“Really. He’s the son of a dirty cop. I guess he blames me for his father’s death.”

“Were you, Dad… to blame, I mean?”

“No, but that doesn’t matter if he thinks I am.”

“Be careful.”

“You too, Sarah. We’ll talk in the morning, okay.”

I occupied myself with the concept of blame for a little while, a very little while. Then I hopped off that slippery slope, picked up the binoculars, and tried getting back to work. The deathly quiet of the place gave me the creeps. How did Aaron ever adjust to living out here? Brooklyn at its most quiet is noisy and that noise had been my lullaby nearly every day of my life.

Things were changing in the Martello house. The strobe and colored flicker of his TV stopped, the front window going pitch black. A lamp snapped on and there was a brief show of Ray Martello’s dancing shadow. About five minutes later, the porch and outside garage lights popped on. The electric garage opener whined, the door crawling up and out of sight. An engine rumbled. Puffs of exhaust fumes showed themselves like reluctant specters in the cooling night air. First brake, then backup lights flashed as the big SUV lumbered backwards down the driveway.

I supposed I was far enough away that he wouldn’t hear Carmella’s ignition catch, but I didn’t trust the way sound traveled out here and decided instead to wait until he either passed me moving north or drove in the opposite direction along the border of the golf course. The Yukon’s headlights rushed at me, sweeping from my left to right as the truck turned north toward Montauk Highway. I twisted Carmella’s key; the engine perked right up. Still, I waited a beat or two to let Ray Martello get a block ahead.

Then, just as I put the car in drive, a cold chill made me twitch. I noticed movement in the shadows across the way: a slender figure emerging through the country club gates and turning onto Martello’s street. I can’t say why exactly, but I couldn’t force myself to look away. I shouldn’t have cared at all. It was probably some kid who’d met his girlfriend for late night putting practice on the ninth green.

“Keep your eye on the ball,” I whispered to myself. “Keep your eye on the ball.”

But as I rolled off the lot, my headlamps caught the slender figure, briefly bathing him in a harsh circle of light. Turning back, he squinted, shielding his eyes with raised hands. And in that brief second, all that I knew to be solid and real flew away, because standing there in that circle of light was Patrick Michael Maloney’s ghost. Yes, this was the second time I’d seen him, but seeing him in the light that way… Christ, it scared the shit out of me. My heart thumped so that I felt it pushing my chest against my sweat-soaked shirt. Suddenly, all the tattoos and videotapes were rendered irrelevant. What you think you know doesn’t stand a chance against what you think you see.

I couldn’t afford to scare him off, not this time. Scaring off a ghost! Go figure. Although only twenty yards ahead of me, I’d never catch him if he took off toward the golf course. So I forced myself to move, to not hesitate, pulling quickly off the lot and driving up the block in the opposite direction. I had the steering wheel in a death grip to insure that my hands wouldn’t shake. Of course I knew how I should play it, but I wasn’t at all sure I could pull it off. Having made a U-turn at the first intersection and doubled back, I eased the car alongside him and let the servo suck the window fully down into the door before I spoke.

“Hey, buddy,” I said in as steady a voice as I could manage, “I’m kinda lost here. Could you tell me how to get to Brightwaters?”

The ghost kept walking, neither turning toward me nor away from me. All I could do was stare at his profile, at that too-familiar tattoo on his bare forearm, and the Shinjo Olympians on his feet.

“Listen, man, I-”

He stopped in his tracks. I stopped the car, clicked it into park. Slowly, I slid my right arm across my lap to the door handle and began tugging on it ever so gently. There was a frozen second there when it felt as if I could’ve watched an entire baseball game between breaths or counted the beats of a hummingbird’s wings. Then…

Bang!

He took off back the way he came, toward the golf course. The car was useless to me now, so I was out the door after him. He was agile and pretty damned swift, making it through the country club gates in only a few seconds. While I had some moves on the basketball court, speed-even before my knee went snap, crackle, pop-was never my forte. An additional twenty years, three knee surgeries, and fifteen extra pounds weren’t exactly helping the cause, but with my heart rate already up and adrenaline flowing, I actually gained some early ground on him.

It was an anomaly, not a trend. Once we both hit the grass and open ground of the golf course, I fell back. My deck shoes were no match for his track shoes. Although darker out here away from the street and porch lights, there was enough natural light to keep him from being completely swallowed up by the night. He kept looking over his shoulder to see how far he’d extended his lead over me or if I’d given up. If he thought I was going to quit, he really didn’t know me. I’d have to cough out my lungs and liver before my legs would stop moving.

Bulldog or not, the reality was that my persistence would only count for so much. Eventually, he would get far enough ahead to duck out of sight, while I chased my own dick around out there in the dark. I didn’t have long to wait. Since we’d hit the grass-which couldn’t have been more than a minute earlier, but felt like an eternity-the ghost had been heading due south toward the ocean holes, but now he decided to cut sharply east toward where the sun would be coming up in only a very few hours.

Shit! I lost sight of him for a second behind a raised green, but caught a glimpse when I made it around the other side. He was gaining confidence as he went, getting a better sense of my physical limitations.

Hugging the first cut of rough as he went, he would dart in and out of the small outcroppings of trees that dotted this part of the course. Then, he darted in, but didn’t come out. I was about to go in after him when something four-legged and low to the ground shot out of the woods and skittered directly across my path. Two luminescent eyes stared back at me while I got my heart out of my throat. Free of the tree shadows and in the middle of the fairway, I could see it was a red fox. I hadn’t run across many red foxes in Coney Island. Stray dogs, water rats, and horseshoe crabs, yes. Red foxes, no.

Before I could reorient myself, the woods coughed up the ghost fifty yards ahead of me and, like the fox before him, he ran directly across the fairway into a much larger stand of trees on the opposite side. Running as hard as I could, I took a diagonal line right to where he entered the far trees. I kept my eyes focused on that point, trying desperately to ignore my aching knee and the stitch in my side that felt more like a gash. As I approached the woods, an uneasy feeling came over me. I didn’t sense danger necessarily. It was a feeling that there were more than foxes, owls, and fireflies in here. But whatever my concerns, it was too late to start worrying about them now.

In the woods, I knelt down behind a clump of thin-trunked trees. I could hear the ghost’s footfalls-ghosts didn’t have footfalls, did they? — on the dried undergrowth and fallen leaves that had accumulated over the years. Then I spotted him, but the irregular spacing of the trees made it difficult for me to follow his course. His silhouette flashed in and out of view. There it was again, that weird feeling. I tried to ignore it, to keep my eyes on the next clearing between the trees where I thought he would come back into view.

There he is! I’d gotten lucky. By keeping my place, I had confused him and he was now heading back my way. In a few seconds he would be passing about as close to me as he had been when he was caught in my headlamps. I eased myself up from the kneeling position and braced my back against the trees. Then I thought I was hearing things. The ghost’s footsteps were now lost in an avalanche of crunching leaves. The woods were suddenly alive with a low thumping that had nothing to do with my heart. It didn’t matter. I was committed.

I sprang. My timing was perfect. The sudden activity confused him too and it took him a second to realize I was almost on him. I was ten yards away, five, two, one…I was just stretching out my arms when something brushed my leg, knocking me off balance, but not down, Then, at the last second before I grabbed the ghost, I saw a blur hurtling at me. Bang! The wind went out of me even before my kidneys connected with the big tree behind me. When I got to my hands and knees, I got kicked in the head, hard. Unconsciousness took a while to take hold. In the meantime, I let the thumping rock me to sleep.

It wasn’t quite light out when I opened my eyes, but there was light enough to see Patrick’s ghost was gone. The thumping was now exclusively in my head. I felt the knot above my left temple. It was tender and the hair over it was stiff from dried blood. The bleeding seemed to have stopped. I stood up slowly, in pieces, making sure I didn’t revisit any of my most recent meals. I had a pretty good headache, but was walking okay. I knew what day it was, where I was, and had a notion of what time it was. I took a leisurely pace as I headed back to Carmella’s car.

Stepping out of the woods with the first rays of sun over my back, I tripped over something in the deep rough. It was the half-eaten carcass of a fawn: no doubt the handiwork of the red fox. Across the fairway, in the smaller woods, a herd of about twenty deer tried to look inconspicuous, standing perfectly still, trying to blend in with the trees. One of them probably had my blood on its hoof. I wasn’t interested in finding out which one.

As I walked through the golf course’s front gate, an older gentleman out walking his chocolate lab stopped me.

“You don’t look so good, son. What happened?”

“I got mugged,” I said.

“Mugged! By who?”

“Bambi.”

That ended the conversation right there.

Carmella’s car was where I left it, about two feet away from the curb, parked facing the wrong way, and the driver’s side door ajar. At least I hadn’t left it running. I seriously considered finding another cozy spot and keeping up the stakeout. That notion lasted until I spied myself in the mirror. I was never going to look in a car mirror again. I looked like shit, smelled like shit, and felt like shit. I was nothing if not consistent.

I closed the car door, started her up, and limped back to Brooklyn. It was the smart thing to do. The way I saw it, I had no idea if Martello had returned home. If he was home, he was probably sleeping and I could get someone from the office out here by the time he headed in for his shift. If he was still out, not knowing where wasn’t as big a deal as it would seem. I had time to get coverage on him either here or at his precinct. Either way, there was little doubt that his young accomplice or stooge or whatever Patrick’s ghost was to him, had already told Martello about our running with the deer.

Although I was far worse for wear and had failed to get my hands on the kid, my concerns about Ray Martello were confirmed: the asshole was behind it. You’d have to be from Pluto to think the kid’s appearance at Martello’s house was a coincidence. Now I had some choices to make. I could go to Vandervoort or the local cops with what I had, but, truthfully, I had bupkis. I had suspicions, a series of unlikely coincidences, and Ray Martello’s palpable hatred for me. Unfortunately, none of it would stand up in court. That’s why my screwing up with the kid really hurt. If I just had him, he could make the case for me. On the other hand, I didn’t have to go the legal route. Judge and jury Moe had all the evidence they needed. There were ways to get back at people without taking them to court. If anyone could understand that concept, it would be Ray Martello Jr.

Driving back up Great River Road to Montauk Highway, I passed by a roadkill mother possum and two babies. I squeezed my eyes shut as I went, but all I could see in my head were the skittering red fox and the wrecked body of the dead fawn. I had had quite enough of the suburbs, thank you very much. It was time to get back to a place where I better understood the relationship between predator and prey.