The Borzoi Killings

9.

It was Wednesday. Juan was in the kitchen. He washed by hand the bowls and spoons that Mariana and her kids had used to eat breakfast. The brown dishwasher was broken; it was stuffed with paper and plastic bags. With a small checkered towel he dried the bowls and spoons and carefully put them in the area of the brown cabinets that was reserved for the four of them.

Just as he closed the cabinet door, he heard the siren. From the kitchen window he saw beyond the yellow and orange trees the revolving red lights of the first of three police cruisers. In that instant he had no doubt that they would stop in the cluttered driveway. Juan ran to the broken deck behind the house. The screen door slammed behind him. There were woods nearby-the deep groves of yellowing leaves that finally led, almost a mile away, to the town dump. He heard the first cruiser squeal to a stop, its sirens now emitting a shrill beep-beep sound. He glanced around the edge of the ramshackle house. The cruiser stopped on the driveway’s broken tar. He thought he saw Joan Richardson in the back seat. There were two men in uniforms in the front seat. More cruisers abruptly stopped in front of the house, lights flashing.

When he heard the cruisers’ doors open, Juan vaulted over the deck’s wooden railing and dashed across the weeds and fallen branches of the back yard. Juan heard the insane bedlam of the multiple sirens at full volume and the loud, excited voices of the cops.

Juan was a fast runner. He cruised easily through the woods, dodging the rampant branches and the fallen limbs. Behind him angry voices shouted: Stop, stop, stop. The motherfucker’s over there. Get him.

Juan was in another world: he imagined he could outrun these heavily uniformed, clumsy men and make his way over the small hills of the dump and speed through the woods toward the ocean three miles away and then swim in the Atlantic to his real home thousands of miles to the south. He had the advantage, he thought, of strength and speed and fear and dreams.

But then he stopped. He was afraid. His blood throbbed. He shouted, “Here, here I am.”

An angry voice screamed: “Don’t move. Don’t move. Let me see your hands!”

Juan saw the shapes of at least six men twenty yards away in the chaotic undergrowth of the woods, all converging in his direction. He saw, too, the glint of sunlight on pistols and rifles. The branches cracked under their feet.

“Show me your hands! Show me your hands!”

Juan held out his hands.

Two of the men rushed at him, knocking him to the ground. His face was pushed into the newly fallen leaves. His hands and arms were pulled up behind him. Pain seared his back and chest. One of the men held a pistol against his temple. He smelled the odor of dirt and fallen leaves. Plastic handcuffs locked around his wrists. He was yanked to his feet. Pieces of leaves and dirt hung from his face and nose. Stumbling, he was pushed from behind toward the police cruisers, their lights flashing regularly, swiftly, all bedlam.

As he approached the lead cruiser, he saw every feature of Joan Richardson’s rigid face. The window was open half-way. There was no curiosity or hatred or concern in her expression. She was impassive. For a moment, he expected her to help him, given all that had happened between them over the last half-year-the times when they drank iced tea on the pool terrace or when she worked with him in the garden, and the quiet hours inside the house when Brad and everyone else were away.

He wasn’t able to look at her for long, or to find out whether she would help in some way, because as he was pushed toward the cruiser a truncheon struck his back near his kidneys, forcing him against the door of the car. His nose and mouth smashed into a window and began to bleed. He tasted the blood. A man with red hair, his hat off, leaned near him and shouted in his ear, “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be held against you. You have a right to a lawyer. If you can’t afford a lawyer, you’ll fucking get one for free, you spic.”

Juan’s head was pressed so forcefully against the window that he couldn’t say anything. He was choking. He was less than a foot away from Joan Richardson. A cop yelled, “Is this him?”

She shook her head up and down: the silent yes.

Juan was jerked away toward another cruiser. It had a wire mesh between the front and rear seats. The rear door opened. A powerful hand on the top of his head pushed him down and into the cruiser. A woman in uniform sat to his left. She held a wet towel and wiped his face to clean off the blood and dirt. She didn’t want his face smeared with blood or visibly bruised when he was led into the red brick Southampton police station, where television news trucks would be filming him on the short walk from the cruiser to the door of the station. The police had already announced his arrest and he had already been endowed with a name.

Juan the Knife.