Good Neighbors Read online

  ‘Fuck,’ she says as she falls, the first time she’s said an out-loud curse in a very long time, but she doesn’t care anymore. She just doesn’t fucking care.

  She slaps the concrete with the palm of her hand, and this time when the tears come, she doesn’t try to stop them at all.

  20

  Alan pulls his police cruiser to the curb in front of a small one-story house – near the corner of a one-way street where brownstone row houses give way to single-family Tudor-style homes with lots of dark half-timbering – and kills the engine. The front lights are on but the curtains are closed. The curtains are red, so the light splashing out through them and onto the lawn is red, too. Alan thinks the red curtains mean the guy’s either married or a fag, and Alan is guessing married – a fag wouldn’t have the stones to pull something like this.

  He pushes his way out of the car and walks around to the trunk. He pops the trunk and takes care of a couple things that need taking care of. Then he slams it shut and walks across the dewy lawn to the front door of the house. The door is white with a ridiculously large gold knocker on it, just below a peephole.

  Alan knocks on the door with his fist, then stands with his hands behind his back and waits.

  Only a few seconds later the door is pulled open by a fat man in his late thirties or early forties, reddish hair, ruddy face. His name is Todd Reynolds. Charlie told him that. Charlie also told him that the man had no prior convictions, not even a speeding ticket. Model citizen.

  Model asshole, if you ask Alan.

  ‘You made it,’ Mr. Reynolds says in a voice that sounds like it’s coming from just behind his nose and just above the roof of his mouth – thick and nasally, almost cartoonish. He smiles.

  ‘I made it,’ Alan agrees.

  ‘Good, good.’

  ‘You know, Mr. Reynolds—’

  ‘Todd.’

  ‘You know, Todd,’ Alan says, ‘I don’t want to tell you how to do business, but I gotta say, it’s not the smartest thing in the world, inviting a man you’re trying to extort to your home in the dead-dark hours of the night. Bad things can happen to a man at night. And according to recent statistics,’ he says, ‘eighty-seven percent of people who are murdered are murdered in their own homes.’ He smiles. ‘Your wife and kids in bed?’

  ‘Who says I have a wife and kids?’

  ‘You’re wearing a wedding ring and I saw a baseball bat on the lawn when I walked up here. Wife,’ he says, nodding at the wedding ring, ‘kid,’ he says, nodding toward the lawn.

  ‘Goddamn it,’ Todd says. ‘I told that little bastard not to leave shit laying around.’

  ‘Kids,’ Alan says.

  ‘Indeed,’ Todd says. ‘But to the point. You can’t frighten me, Officer Kees, if that’s what you’re trying to do with your talk of murder. If I come forward, not only will you no longer have a career, but there’s a chance you’ll do jail time; and we all know what happens to cops in prison. And the truth is, I don’t want that. All I want is a cut. Five thousand dollars. By tomorrow. I already told your friend, but he insisted on sending you here tonight for some reason.’

  ‘He wanted me to try to talk sense to you.’

  ‘My decision is made,’ Todd says. ‘I’m not negotiating.’ Alan nods.

  ‘You’re not negotiating and I can’t frighten you. Is that about how it is?’

  ‘That’s about how it is.’

  ‘Then you’re dumber than I thought.’

  Todd smiles. ‘Why’s that, Officer Kees?’

  Alan lets his arms drop to his sides, revealing gloved fists. In the right hand, a rusty tire iron.

  ‘Take a look at the man standing in front of you. Do I frighten you now?’

  Todd’s smile – the one that says he’s won and he knows it – vanishes.

  ‘Wait a minute,’ he says, taking a step back across the foyer’s gray tile.

  ‘Charlie thought you might be reasonable,’ Alan says, ‘but as soon as I heard you wanted five grand, which, by the way, is fourteen hundred more than Charlie and I have collected combined, I knew better. I knew you were beyond reason.’

  ‘Please,’ Todd says.

  ‘Now, I’m a good police officer, Mr. Reynolds. Todd. Given the current situation, I can understand your not believing me, but it’s true. I am. But here’s a fact you might not be aware of – cops put their lives in danger every day of the week, and for that we are paid a pittance. I found a way to make a little extra money. I have a new wife at home, Todd, with a bun in the oven. I want to give my wife and child the kind of life they deserve, the same kind of life you want to give your family. Now maybe the way I found to make that extra money isn’t legal, but you’ll be the first person it’s hurt – just about the first person, anyway – and that’s because you’re threatening my family, Todd.’

  ‘Now, hold on,’ Todd says. ‘Hold on a minute. We can still work this—’

  ‘And when people threaten my family,’ Alan says, ignoring Todd completely, ‘when people threaten to destroy my family, that forces me into the position of having to destroy them. It’s not something I enjoy doing, Todd. It’s something I have to do. It’s something you’ve made me do. You’ve forced my hand, Todd – that’s all there is to it.’

  And then the tire iron in Alan’s fist is whistling through the cold night air. There’s the sound of something hard and unforgiving smashing into something soft and hollow. Blood splatters the white front door, paints the gold knocker red. Todd whips around, his jaw hanging like a door with a broken hinge. He spins in a full circle before he hits the ground. He looks up at Alan. The lower half of his face is carnage, the face of a feasting lion, only the blood is his own.

  ‘Please,’ he says through swollen jaw and destroyed mouth, flakes of teeth falling out of it like crumbs, hanging from blood and spittle on his chin, falling to his shirt.

  ‘No,’ Alan says.

  Todd reaches for Alan’s leg, but he’s slow, and Alan steps aside easily.

  Then swings the tire iron again, swings it straight down as if he were chopping a cord of wood and this was his final piece. There is a wet sound when the tire iron makes contact, a sound like a melon breaking open and spilling its sweet contents.

  That sound is followed by silence.

  Alan hopes it remains silent. He hopes that Todd’s family is accustomed to his late nights, hopes they’ve learned to sleep through whatever noise he’s in the habit of making. He would hate for them to have to meet the same fate, but he’ll do what he has to. Read the Old Testament: sometimes the sins of the father are paid for by the son: God takes His pound of flesh from whomever He can.

  Alan simply stands and listens for a long moment.

  Blood drips from the clawed end of the tire iron in his hand.

  After a minute has passed, Alan is satisfied. He steps over Todd and into the house, tracking Todd’s blood past the tile foyer and onto an area rug.

  ‘Fuck,’ he whispers under his breath.

  He smears the blood he tracked onto the carpet so no one will be able to tell shoe size or type. Then he walks to the television sitting in the corner of the room, unplugs it, and hefts it up. It’s a heavy son of a bitch, but at least it’s not one of those enormous oak models; those things weigh a hundred pounds or more. He carries it outside and to his car – cord dragging behind him – and sets it down by the sidewalk, on a narrow strip of dead grass there. Then he walks to the trunk, opens it, and puts the tire iron back inside. Next, he opens the back door of the cruiser and hefts the TV into the passenger’s seat.

  ‘You’re under arrest,’ he tells it, smiling to himself, and then slams the door shut on it.

  With that part done, he walks back up across the lawn – past a child’s baseball bat – and back into the Reynolds house. He scans the living room, looking for a phone, and finally sees it, hanging on the wall by the doorway to the kitchen. He picks it up to dial, then stops. He hangs it up. Not yet, he thinks. Film first, then phone.

&
nbsp; If I were 8mm film, he thinks, where would I be? He scans the living room, not seeing any decent hiding places, then walks into the kitchen and – as quietly as possible – opens several cupboards and drawers but sees nothing. He doesn’t even know whether the guy had the film developed or not. Maybe it’s already been developed and is sitting on a spool somewhere waiting to be watched; or maybe it’s just a small can of undeveloped celluloid tape. No, it’s been developed. Maybe he developed it himself in a bucket, but it’s been developed. This was a man who was certain of what he had – so certain he’d probably watched it over and over again projected onto the concrete wall in his basement.

  Basement.

  Alan only takes a minute to find the door, and then he trudges his way downstairs. The light switch is on the wall at the bottom of the stairs – that way you can kill yourself trying to get to it in the dark, he thinks – and he flips it and a naked bulb hanging from a frayed brown wire comes to life, illuminating the room. There are cans of paint stacked in a corner, various colors running down their sides; baskets of laundry nearby, overflowing with dainties; boxes labeled Xmas. And there’s a projector on a small card table surrounded by several spools of film. One spool of film is already loaded onto it, and it’s aimed, just as Alan thought, at a concrete wall.

  The part of the wall it’s aimed at has been painted white, runny and uneven.

  Alan walks to the projector, turns it on; a rectangle of white light splashes onto the wall.

  Alan plays the film, the projector adding a familiar clicking soundtrack to the proceedings. It was shot through a window. The colors are strange, greenish and dull, and the film is very scratchy, so Alan suspects that Mr. Reynolds – Todd – did, in fact, develop it in a bucket down here rather than have it professionally done. Maybe he wanted to keep its subject-matter to himself. He imagines hundreds of amateur pornographers have done the same thing with their films. Despite the discoloration and the scratches, it’s obvious what’s going on. There’s Alan and Charlie stepping from a vehicle, meeting another man, Big Fish, who is walking – limping: Alan really laid on the charm – out the front door of a brownstone. Big Fish pulls a white envelope out of his inside jacket pocket and hands it to Alan. Alan opens the envelope, thumbs through money, nods, and he and Charlie walk away, walk back to the car. The film continues, jittery and handheld, as Alan and Charlie start the car, as the car drives away, as Big Fish stands and watches till Alan and Charlie are out of sight, as he flips them the bird once he’s sure they can’t see, as he turns and heads back into the brownstone – but the important part is the hand-off. Then there’s a cut, flickering white overexposed frames, and then a picture again. Front of the same brownstone. Big Fish is handing something that’s not money off to some spic, a big manila envelope that he shows is full of small bags. The spic takes a bag at random and sticks a pinky into it and tastes it, then he nods. The two talk. Then they separate, both walking out of the picture. The camera shakes and turns around and an out-of-focus Todd gives it a grin and a thumbs up. Then the film ends with some more flashing white frames, and then blackness.

  Alan grabs the spool of film and heads back upstairs.

  Upstairs, by the kitchen, he picks up the phone a second time.

  ‘Hello,’ he whispers into the phone, not wanting to wake the family, ‘I need the police. It’s an emergency.’

  He tells the police his name is Todd Reynolds. He tells them someone is trying to break into his house, a Negro man is trying to break into his house. He tells them the address. He says, ‘He’s coming in! He’s coming—’ and he hangs up the telephone quickly, smiling to himself.

  That was perfect. He should have been an actor. He could play a policeman on TV. The pay would certainly be better.

  He walks back out into the night, careful to step over the gathering pool of blood this time. The last thing he wants is to slip and fall at this stage in the night. He peels off the rubber gloves as he walks toward his police cruiser. His hands are wet with sweat and his fingers have already begun to prune. He’ll have to put the gloves back on one more time before the night is finished, but until then, he wants to give them a chance to breathe.

  21

  William pulls the long station wagon into the driveway, parking it over a metal tray lined with sand. The car’s been leaking oil lately but he hasn’t had time to get it fixed. A tray to collect the oil is the best he can do for now.

  He sits behind the wheel and stares at the white garage door. It is dented where he pulled in too far about three months ago and tapped it. It’s also beginning to rust inside the dent, where the pinching of metal caused the paint to crack. Another thing that needs fixing.

  And now he’s got blood on his work boots.

  And maybe someone will be able to identify him.

  At least he left when he did. The police are probably there right now, so it’s good he left when he did.

  He pushes the station wagon’s door open and steps out. He looks at his boots in the moon’s light. The blood looks almost black out here, and there is a lot of it, but he might be able to scrub it out. He hopes so. They’re almost new and he would hate to have to replace them already. He just broke them in.

  He should have known better than to wear them tonight. But then, he wasn’t thinking clearly; he wasn’t thinking at all. He just wanted. He still wants. His stomach is tight with want and his erection is painful with need. It won’t go away. It’s all-encompassing, that need, and he had to run, so it’s still there. He has to ignore it. It will go away eventually. He hopes.

  He slams the car door and is halfway up the path to the house when he remembers the knife. He walks back down to the car, grabs it from the passenger’s seat, and, with it in his hand, heads back up the path toward the house.

  Once inside, he pushes the front door closed quietly, not wanting to wake his wife or the kids, and locks the dead-bolt and the chain.

  Then he walks to the kitchen and turns on the light above the sink. He sets the knife in the metal basin and turns on the hot water. He squirts dish soap onto his hands and scrubs them. They’re rough and callused and hangnails are peeling themselves away, revealing the meat beneath. He feels like the blood will never wash off – but he felt that way last time this happened, too.

  He rinses his hands under the steaming tap. The water is almost painfully hot. It makes his hands tingle. He watches the pink water run down the drain in a counterclockwise swirl.

  He picks up the large kitchen knife and scrubs the blood off with a green sponge and once it’s washed and rinsed he puts it in the dish drainer where he found it earlier this evening.

  His erection has not gone down and it aches but he tries to ignore it.

  Think about something else, he tells himself, which only makes him think of the attack earlier this evening, the interrupted attack. He almost had her. She was almost his.

  He shakes his head, trying to dislodge the thought.

  He shuts off the light above the sink and walks out of the kitchen.

  William pushes a door open and looks inside. He can see his two daughters lying together in their bed, hugging each other. He knows it’s only from the street lamp’s light coming in through the window – coming in between the dusty slatted blinds – but they appear to be glowing. They look like angels to him, beautiful shining angels. He can’t imagine how someone as vile as himself could be even partially responsible for creating them. How could they possibly have come from him, all shining and beautiful and new?

  The eight-year-old lifts her head up and looks at him.

  ‘What are you doing, daddy?’

  ‘Go back to sleep, honey,’ he says, pulling the door closed.

  In the bathroom, William puts down the toilet lid and sits on the toilet. Using the brush his wife usually uses to scrub the bathtub, he goes at his boots. He scrubs at them for a few minutes, rinses the brush under the hot water running from the tub’s faucet, and then scrubs some more. But he’s not thinking about
what he’s doing. All he can think about is that girl. He doesn’t know what’s wrong with him. He wasn’t raised to be like this. And that poor girl. It could have been anyone. If another woman had walked by five minutes earlier it would have been her instead. Or if he’d found a different place hidden in shadows. Or if that man who’d bummed a smoke off him had asked him why he was just standing around out there. That poor girl. He feels sad about it, and yet he wants nothing so much as to go back and finish what he started. He wants nothing so much as that. He aches for it.

  He rinses the brush under the hot water one last time, then turns off the bathtub faucet.

  Someone should have stopped him.

  Goddamn it, he wishes this erection would go away. He unties his boots and pulls his sweaty feet out of them. Then he stands and steps out of his jeans. They got blood on them, too, but it’s not much. After a couple of washes it won’t even be recognizable as blood.

  He takes off his sweater and his undershirt and walks out of the bathroom wearing only his dirty-water colored underwear.

  *

  As William falls into bed, Elaine rolls over to face him, flipping her pillow as she does. He can see her eyes looking at him and he wonders if she can hear his heart pounding in his chest. She must be able to; it’s like a drum.

  She smells good, like shampoo and cocoa butter and sweat.

  ‘Where you been?’

  ‘Went for a walk.’

  ‘I heard the car.’

  William doesn’t want to talk. He reaches out and strokes Elaine’s breast, but she pushes his hand away. He leans forward and tries to kiss her, but she turns her head away, too, and he ends up kissing her neck.