Kiss Of Evil

49

NEY YEAR'S EVE

CLEVELAND, OHIO

The boy is a man. Thirty years of age this day. In his time, he has broken every law of God, almost every law of man. In his time he has taken the lives of eleven people, including a cholo who once approached him in a Sinaloa cafe, a foul-breathed wretch with a pedophile’s eyes over slick yellow teeth. He had been so revolted by this man’s repeated advances that he had paid for the man’s drinks well into the night, left with him, then lured him to a dark place and gutted him like a pescado. He had been fifteen. He had fed the man’s insides to some strays.

Another life became his around the time his mother had been walking the streets near East Fifty-fifth Street in Cleveland. One night she had brought home a man who looked and smelled like a hobo, someone who rode the rails. In the morning the boy had seen the man searching the kitchen, looking for cash. The man found the cookie jar that held sixty-one dollars. The boy had dressed, followed the man to a vacant building on Prospect. He watched while the man made an elaborate job of hiding the money in a coffee can. He watched while the man curled up on a stinking mattress.

When the boy was certain the man was sound asleep, he sneaked up on him and, with one powerful blow, pounded a rusty wood chisel into the man’s left ear, deep into his brain, killing him instantly. The boy had been twelve at the time. He and his sister had then dug a hole in the lot behind the building and buried the man. Two weeks later, they stood across the street as the building was torn down, filled in, leveled. A month later it was paved over.

The sixty-one dollars was replaced in the cookie jar before their mother even knew it was gone, as was an additional four dollars and ten cents the boy had found in the dead man’s pockets.

As the clock winds down to a new day, a new year, the man knows his future is uncertain, as unpredictable as death itself. And yet, as he showers and shaves and readies himself for the day, he knows one thing with certainty.

He knows that Detective John Salvatore Paris will die, by his own hand, before this day is out.