Good Neighbors Read online

  Where did it go?

  Where could it have gone?

  It was right there a second ago.

  ‘Oh, God, you bitch,’ the man on top of her says, and she can feel him building to a climax, and she hurts down there. He’s tearing her down there.

  She opens her eyes and his face is only inches from hers, and sweat is beading on it and dripping from it, and his eyes are bloodshot and cold and desperate.

  And she sees the knife now, in the corner of her eye. The man grabbed it, grabbed it from the soil; he grabbed it and he is holding it. She can see it in the corner of her eye.

  She feels the man spasm inside her, and she wants to be sick – it makes her sick inside; it makes her feel like her insides have gone rotten; he’s made her rotten inside – and if she ever gets out of this she’s going to scrub inside herself with bleach, with hot water and bleach, until she feels clean again, if she ever can feel clean again.

  ‘You cunt,’ he says.

  He thrusts himself into her and pushes his upper body away from her.

  He spasms again, and he brings the blade down into her chest, and she hears a pop – it pops as it breaks through her breastbone – and pain shoots outward, explodes outward, and her chest is on fire, and the fire spreads to every other part of her body, and she screams but the scream is silent. She can’t even scream out loud anymore, but the sound still fills her head, her aching, echoing head.

  And when she looks toward the sky, toward the gathering gray clouds, when she looks toward the sky and God, to ask why, all she sees are the bloodshot eyes in the face in front of her. The eyes of the man with the knife. They go wide as she looks into them, those eyes, and then suddenly they’re not cold anymore; they go wide and scared and soft.

  ‘I’m . . . oh, my God,’ the man says.

  He says that and he falls away from her. He scrambles to his feet, and he looks down on her with wide, terrified eyes.

  ‘Oh, my God,’ he says again.

  He wipes at his eyes.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says, and then he turns and he runs away from there.

  She can hear his footsteps thumping away, the sound of his big construction boots pounding against concrete. Then she hears a car door squeak open and slam shut. She hears the loose, jangly sound of his car’s engine starting. She sees, in the corner of her eye, the splash of headlights against the oak trees growing in front of the Hobart Apartments. She hears the sound of the car driving away, and the splash of the headlights is gone.

  Kat feels like she is drowning.

  She looks down at her chest and she can see the wood handle of the kitchen knife sticking out of it. She can see the handle throbbing with the beat of her heart as if the knife itself had a pulse.

  If God wanted her dead this badly, He could have at least made it quick – made it quick and painless – He didn’t have to make it torture.

  ‘Fuck you, God,’ she says to the gathering gray clouds above her. ‘Fuck you,’ she says. ‘I’m not going to die.’

  36

  Frank sits in the back seat of the police cruiser, hands cuffed behind his back – cuffed tightly, so that the flow of blood is cut off.

  His fingertips are going numb. Blood drips down from an egg-shaped lump on his forehead. He can see several cops digging through his trunk. There are now three more police cars parked on the side of the road, and half a dozen cops, most of whom appear to have nothing to do, wandering about like lost puppies.

  Frank watches Kees walk up to one of them and say something but he cannot hear what he says and it probably doesn’t matter; the other cop nods and Kees turns away, walks toward his cruiser with Frank inside, pulls open the driver’s side door, and falls into his seat.

  Pulling the door shut behind him, Kees looks back at Frank over his shoulder with a second lieutenant smirk on his smug face. There is crusted blood in his right ear.

  ‘You still think you’re smarter than me?’

  ‘I think most houseplants are smarter than you.’

  This guy’s gonna do what he’s gonna do; he’s doing it; pretending respect at this point serves no purpose. He’s framing Frank whether he calls him sir or not, so fuck him.

  The smirk vanishes.

  ‘You still haven’t learned your lesson, huh?’

  ‘I’ve learned a lot of lessons, son,’ Frank says. ‘I’m not a young man.’

  ‘And I’m not your son.’

  Kees turns back around, starts the cruiser, puts it in gear. Then puts it back in park, and looks back over his shoulder.

  ‘If you’re so smart, what the fuck are you doing in the back of my car with your hands cuffed?’

  ‘I didn’t say anything about myself,’ Frank says. ‘I said you were an idiot. Anyone who thinks they can’t be touched is bound to get hit the hardest; they won’t have their guard up when it finally comes down.’

  Kees makes a face like someone made him suck a lemon and turns around. He puts the car in gear and pulls it out into the street.

  ‘You don’t know shit,’ Kees tells him. ‘You think you do but you don’t.’ He looks at Frank in the rearview mirror and Frank looks back. ‘I’ll tell you something about the way the world works, old man. In this world,’ he says, ‘you’re either the teeth or the throat they sink into, and there ain’t no in between.’

  Frank thinks Kees might be right to a point. But then there’s always a bigger set of teeth, isn’t there? And that’s what he hasn’t learned yet. The seal might eat the little fish – but the shark eats the seal. Frank has learned it, though. He’s learned it because he’s been bitten many times in his life. And now he’s been bitten again. He just hopes this bite doesn’t end him; he’d like to see his wife again without bars between them.

  The police cruiser pulls up to the station and comes to a stop. Kees steps from the car, walks around to the back, pulls open the door, and tries to yank Frank out bodily. Frank is a big man, though, and Kees’s hand simply slips away from Frank’s t-shirt.

  Frank looks up at the man, waiting.

  ‘Get out of the car,’ Kees says.

  Frank does, he steps from the car, and Kees pushes him forward toward the police station. Frank glances at the man over his shoulder as he walks toward the station, and the guy’s got an expression on his face like a fisherman who’s landed a big one; Frank’s hands clench behind his back, forming fists.

  Kees shoves Frank inside.

  He’s trying to think of a way out of this mess. The guy planted enough evidence on him to make him look guilty no matter what he says. He doesn’t want to go to prison. If he had to be locked up in order to avoid the same happening to Erin, if that were the case, he’d go willingly. He wouldn’t like it but he’d do it – and willingly. But that’s not the case. Erin killed no one. She simply ran over a child’s toy with her car – a stroller with a doll inside. That’s all. And that’s not a crime. He doesn’t want to go to prison, but he can’t think of how to get out of it. But he’s already decided once they get him in the interrogation room he’s not talking. He might have already talked too much. He’s not talking because he doesn’t want to tell the cops why he was where he was in the first place. Doesn’t matter that a baby in a stroller wasn’t hit and killed. He doesn’t want to tell them and he won’t. He doesn’t want to tell them anything. He knows cops. They can find ways to put innocent statements in a context that makes them sound terrible – in a context that can convince a jury to convict a man. Especially a colored man. Frank might be going to prison, but he’ll be damned if he’s gonna help this son of a bitch put him there.

  As Kees pushes Frank through the station, an older man in a cheap suit that’s wearing out at the elbows – whose face is seamed together with wrinkles, whose gray hair looks heavy and flat and unhealthy and brittle, whose nose is a burst of broken capillaries and covered in blackheads – walks over to Kees and grabs him by the arm, not gently.

  ‘Let’s take a walk to my office,’ the guy says.

&nb
sp; ‘With all due respect, sir,’ Kees says, his tone suggesting the amount of respect due is exactly none, ‘I’ve got a suspect in custody.’

  Sir, Frank thinks, despite the tone. Sir: someone more important than him – someone with bigger teeth.

  ‘Did I ask you what you were doing?’ the guy in the suit says. ‘Did I? Because I don’t remember doing that.’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘If I didn’t ask, why are you telling me?’

  ‘I’m just saying, sir,’ Kees says, and now there’s a hesitation in his voice, ‘that I think . . . our conversation . . . can wait?’

  ‘Well, I don’t give a good goddamn what you think, Officer Kees. What you think doesn’t matter. What I think is what matters. See, this is a hierarchy, and you’re at the bottom.’

  Kees says nothing for a long time. Then: ‘Yes, sir.’ Then: ‘What do you want me to do with the suspect?’

  The guy in the suit looks at Frank, nods his head at him. Frank nods back.

  ‘Mr. Riva,’ the guy in the suit says, ‘can join us in my office.’

  Now Kees’s face goes pale and takes on a greenish tint.

  Apparently, Frank thinks, this is not standard operating procedure.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Let’s go.’

  Frank is escorted into a small room, maybe twelve by ten, that smells of wet plaster, mold, and whiskey sweat. He sees by walnut slab and engraved brass plate on the desk that the guy in the suit has a name, and it’s Captain Busey. Pretty convenient that his mother named him Captain, Frank thinks.

  There is already a man in the room, sitting, facing the desk, his back to the door. There is white gauze wrapped around his head. Red blood has seeped through and dried to burgundy.

  Busey reaches into his pocket and pulls out a wad of keys and uncuffs Frank.

  ‘Sir,’ Kees says.

  ‘No.’ Then Busey looks at Frank. ‘Have a seat, Mr. Riva.’

  Frank nods.

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  He walks to a chair that sits to the left of the man with the gauze on his head. The guy looks at him from the corner of his eye and nods a greeting. Frank nods back thinking this poor bastard sure took a worse beating than he did. His entire head is wrapped in gauze and the lower left half of his face is one enormous purple bruise that has split open and is leaking a thick clear liquid about the consistency and color of aloe juice, red floating in the liquid like it’s a fertilized chicken egg. His mouth is slightly open and Frank can see what’s left of his teeth: little jagged pieces of them sticking from his bloody gums like shards of glass left in a window frame when the window’s been shattered. A little bit of blood starts to drip out of his mouth over his teeth shards. The guy makes a liquid sucking sound and the blood disappears.

  O God, smash their teeth in their mouth.

  Frank looks away.

  Behind him Kees says, ‘What’s going on, sir?’

  ‘You mean why am I here when I should be home in bed beside my warm wife and beneath my comfortable blankets? Why don’t you ask Mr. Reynolds that question, Kees, since he knows the story better than I do?’

  Frank looks over his shoulder at Kees and sees that he’s looking even sicker. He simply stares at the back of the gauze-covered head next to Frank. Frank can see the wheels spinning behind his eyes.

  ‘I don’t know what this man told you, sir, but whatever it is, it’s not true.’

  ‘You don’t know what he said, but he’s lying?’ Busey shakes his head. ‘Sit down, Officer Kees.’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘Sit the fuck down!’

  Kees does not respond to that, apparently thinks the time for talking might be over. He walks to the last empty chair – save Busey’s – which is just to the right of the guy Busey called Mr. Reynolds, and he sits down.

  ‘Mr. Reynolds,’ Busey says, ‘have you ever seen Mr. Riva before?’

  Mr. Reynolds looks at Frank. More blood starts to drip from his mouth and he sucks it back in. Frank avoids cringing, but a brief tic afflicts his right eye, the tense muscle there having an anxious spasm.

  ‘No, sir,’ Mr. Reynolds says, the words sounding wet somehow. ‘I have not.’

  ‘This man received serious head trauma, sir,’ Kees says. ‘He has no idea what he’s saying. I’ve never even seen him before. I don’t—’

  ‘Shut your fucking mouth, Kees.’ Busey shakes his head. ‘You have caused me far more trouble than you’re worth.’

  Busey walks to the black fabric chair behind his desk. Frank can see a dark triangle in the middle of the chair’s back where Busey has sweated into it, and white flakes on the arms of the chair that he thinks are fallen bits of deodorant powder or dandruff or both. Then Busey sits. A sigh escapes his mouth. He puts his elbows on his desk – something he must do often, as there are two areas on the desk’s surface that have had the finish rubbed away – and puts his face into his open palms. He rubs his face. His callused hands against beard stubble make a sound like sandpaper. He snorts the liquid out of his nose, into the back of his throat, and swallows.

  He looks up at Frank and Mr. Reynolds.

  Franks waits.

  ‘Being a police officer on the streets of this city is a stressful job,’ Busey says. ‘I’m not excusing what Officer Kees did, understand; I’m simply saying that sometimes good men snap and do bad, or stupid, things.’ It already sounds like a rehearsed speech to Frank and he wonders if Busey stood in the bathroom, staring into the water-spotted mirror, practicing, some guy grunting out his last meal in a toilet stall behind him. Frank would bet yes; he’d bet green money on it. ‘What officer Kees did,’ Busey continues, ‘was both. Stress gets to a person; sometimes the streets can turn a good smart man simple and violent. Recently there was some trouble related to a Negro protest. Some people got hurt who maybe shouldn’t have. One young man got killed. You might have read about it in the papers. If what happened tonight gets out, combined with what happened at that Negro protest – well, it will undermine the credibility of the department. You’re both law-abiding citizens, good citizens. You have jobs, you pay your taxes, you vote. You’re the kind of people who know that a compromised police department cannot do its job, that a police department needs the faith of the public in order to operate. The kind of people who understand that police business is important business. The kind of people who know and understand that this city is dangerous and the police department needs to be able to do its job.’

  Busey licks his lips.

  Frank hears a liquid sucking sound coming from his right.

  Kees is silent.

  Frank looks down at his hands – laced together, resting in his lap – and then back up at Busey. He’s still waiting – waiting for the punchline. Most people don’t start a joke without one in mind.

  ‘Okay, then,’ Busey says. He looks down at a couple sheets of paper that are sitting on his desk between his elbows, then he picks them up and hands one to Frank and one to Mr. Reynolds. Frank looks at his.

  ‘I am prepared,’ Busey says, ‘to offer you both a significant cash settlement if you’re willing to sign this agreement saying that the department is not at fault and that you will make nothing that happened tonight a matter of public record. How does that sound?’

  ‘How significant?’ Mr. Reynolds says, followed by the liquid sucking sound, which is, itself, followed by the sound of swallowing. Frank imagines eating a raw egg.

  Busey writes a number on a piece of paper and slides it across the desk.

  ‘That applies to both of you.’

  Frank and Mr. Reynolds look at it.

  Then Mr. Reynolds looks up. ‘It doesn’t seem fair,’ liquid suck, ‘that we get the same amount,’ liquid suck, ‘when I’m,’ liquid suck, ‘in so much worse shape.’

  Busey purses his lips and whistles between his teeth, presses his palms together, touches them to his chin, and then takes them apart again.

  ‘Okay,’ he says, finally. ‘Add fifty percent.’
r />   Mr. Reynolds nods.

  ‘Okay,’ he says.

  Busey smiles.

  ‘That’s what I like to hear. Good man. Mr. Riva?’

  Frank doesn’t answer for a long time. He simply stares at the sheet of paper with the blue-ink number scrawled across it.

  ‘What’s going to happen to Officer Kees?’

  ‘He’ll be reprimanded and receive a two-week suspension.’

  ‘With pay?’

  Busey nods. ‘Most likely.’

  ‘So his punishment,’ Frank says, ‘is a paid vacation. This motherfucker tried to kill a man, and he tried to frame me for it, and you’re saying in two weeks he’ll be back on the streets dressed in blue? He should be in prison, not putting other people there.’

  Ten minutes ago Frank thought he was going to prison. Now he knows he’s not, and part of him thinks he should just be glad he’s getting out of this at all, but he’s not. He’s not glad. He’s furious. He’s known the world is broken for a long time, he’s known that, but sometimes he’s amazed at how broken; even now, at this point in his life, nearing fifty years old, he can stumble across something that makes him realize all over again that the world is not only broken, but beyond fixing. No amount of glue can ever make it right. And yet, you have to focus on your little part of it, don’t you? You have to focus on your little corner of the world and glue what cracks you can. Otherwise there’s no hope at all.

  Captain Busey is saying, ‘A black mark on an officer’s record is a serious matter, Mr. Riva. A serious matter.’

  ‘As serious as murder?’

  Busey sighs – an exasperated father.

  ‘I can appreciate your point of view,’ he says, ‘and I can even understand why it’s going to be hard for you to sign that agreement, monetary benefits notwithstanding. But,’ Busey says, leaning forward on his elbows, glaring with creepily-light gray eyes, bloodshot and yellow at the corners, ‘you will sign, Mr. Riva. It’s no longer a request.’

  ‘And if I don’t?’