The 24th Letter

SEVENTY

O’Brien awoke to the guttural sounds of feral cats challenging each other. Their long, throaty snarls and hisses echoed off the brick walls in the alley. The shrieks reverberated, like two cats at the bottom of a well, backs arched, falsetto cries calling out in the dark. He opened his eyes. Through one eye, he could see the gang graffiti painted all over the walls. Through the other eye, the graffiti was blurred, like looking through a keyhole to read an eye chart where the letters were in soft focus.

He was lying on his back in an alley, having been tossed between leaky plastic garbage cans and wet newspapers. The stench of cat litter, acrid urine, and feces came from a broken, black plastic bag near his head. His shoe and sock were soaked. He lifted his foot from a pothole filled with rainwater. A single light bulb burned above the back entrance to a place called Lucy’s Lounge.

O'Brien touched his face, feeling the dried blood around his mouth, eyes and nose. He touched a torn piece of flesh, the size of a nickel, which hung over his eyebrow. He struggled to sit. He could feel the Glock under his belt near the small of his back. Somehow he had slept with the pistol grip pressed against his spine. He propped himself up against the wet brick wall and wondered if he had suffered brain damage. He whispered: “Name: Sean O’Brien. Birthday: December twelfth…mother’s…maiden name…Lewis…”

He looked at his watch. It was 5:29 A.M. How long had he been lying there? Where was he? Where’s the car he borrowed? What happen to Ron Hamilton?

Salazar. Was he dead?

O’Brien looked at the flesh torn off two knuckles on his right hand and one knuckle on his left. He tried to stand, inching himself against the wall. He checked his pockets. His car keys and wallet were still there, and so was his phone.

All the witnesses. The video cameras. If he’d beaten Salazar to death, it was self-defense. As he leaned against the wall, he could feel the rain begin to fall, the cool water rolling down his sore and bloodied face. O’Brien started to walk, slowly, his ribs on fire. His head pounding, and his body felt like it had been beaten with a mallet.

When he got to the end of the alley, he stepped out onto the sidewalk and looked for a street sign. Biscayne Street. O’Brien knew where he was. He stood more than ten blocks from the Sixth Street Gym. Somebody had dumped him there, dumped him in the garbage far enough away from the gym to keep an ex cop out of their trash.

O’Brien went to the right. He was less than a block from the ocean. At this point, the sea would be his best friend, his best place to begin recovery. He walked through the deserted streets, an occasional car trolling by-buyers and sellers-slowing and moving on when they saw O’Brien’s bloody face.

A black man, homeless, crouched near the front door of a closed print shop. He sat under a yellowed shower curtain he’d wrapped around him to keep off the rain. As O’Brien walked slowly by, the man said, “Hey, my man. You look like somebody’s walkin’ bad dream, dog. You covered in blood, dude. You need some hep. Hospital ain’t that close enough for you to be walkin’ to it. You might bleed out.”

O’Brien nodded and turned to walk. The man said, “I hate axkin’ you this, seein’ is how you look worse than me, but you hap’en to have a dollar, cap? I can get me a doughnut in an hour or so when the shop opens.”

O’Brien’s hands were sore, bloodied, and he could barely open the wallet. He pulled out a ten-dollar bill and handed it to the man who stood up. “Thank you so much, I do appreciate your generosity.”

O’Brien nodded, walked on, following the sound of the sea in the distance.

It was a blue world-at least fifteen minutes before the sun crept over the Atlantic Ocean and the sea and sky merged in a palette of cobalt. O’Brien stood alone in the diffused morning, no wind, no people, and few cars passing. He stripped to his boxer shorts, folded his clothes neatly, covered his gun and phone, left them at the base of a tall palm tree, and then he walked out into the flat ocean. When he got to where the warm water came up to his chest, he leaned back, lowering himself into the sea. He held his breath and let the salt water soak into every pore on his body. Then he floated on his back, gazing up at the sky that was beginning to lighten with the approaching dawn.

The moon hung over the South Beach skyline like a pumpkin, a perfect chamber of commerce poster. O’Brien looked at the face in the moon and thought about what Dave Collins had said: “You have to see this.”

What was the moon going to reveal that the death match he somehow survived had not? Was Salazar lying when he was down? He admitted beating Barbie, but said he never heard of the others. “That’s something between you and Russo…”

O’Brien dropped back under the dark water. The warm thermos in the shallows felt good. The gentle swells scrubbing the poisons, the potential infections, from his open cuts. He knew the cut above his eye would require stitches. His rib cage needed to be held in place. He walked out of the water, back to the tree. O’Brien sat on a park bench and used his cell to call a friend’s home-a man he hadn’t seen since Sherri died.

Doctor Seth Romberg answered the phone in three rings. “Dr. Romberg, here.”

“Seth, it’s Sean O’Brien.”

“Sean, how are you?”

“I’ve had better mornings. I need a few stitches. Maybe a tetanus shot. I would have waited a little later to call you, but I’m on a deadline.”

“Deadline? I know I spent a lot of time with you and Sherri. But you might want to try the emergency room. I don’t — ”

“Seth, I never would ask you this if it were not a life and death situation.”

“Are you hurt that severely?”

“No, but someone else will be if I’m delayed. Please, meet me at your office.”

“Forty-five minutes, my office.”

O’Brien disconnected. After he was stitched up, he would call Ron Hamilton to see if they found a body-Salazar’s body. And he would learn if they were going to charge him with murder.

But now he would see a Sunday morning sunrise. The horizon was building in soft strokes of orange and deep scarlet reds. The flat sea was indigo blue. A pelican flew across the purple sky, flapping its wings only twice and sailing the rest of the distance as an ocean dressed in colors for a new day.