Keith DeCandido: Four Walls

"Hey, Dina, what's up?" Jeanie said in her perky little voice as she stepped off the bus. She was wearing, as usual, all pink: light-pink Hello Kitty shirt, hot-pink shorts that came up to the top of her thighs (she had the legs for it; Dina was embarrassed to show her own thighs in public and wouldn't go out in shorts that short if you put a gun to her head), and pink flip-flops.

"Okay. I just arrived," Dina said. "How are you?"

"Slept through the alarm. Thank God for Goldie."

Dina smiled. Goldie was Jeanie's dog, a golden retriever. "Your backup alarm?"

Jeanie chuckled as she rummaged through her purse. "Yeah. If I'm not up by quarter after six, he's all over my face with his tongue." She shuddered. "Kinda like my ex-boyfriend."

To that, Dina said nothing. The only ex-boyfriend she had was the boy she left behind in Russia. She still missed Sasha. Of course, she'd been hit on quite a bit since coming here, both in college and at the bakery. The one guy who was there all the time, Jack something, he was an outrageous flirt. Dina had been flattered until she noticed that he flirted with everyone else, too, which took a lot of the fun out of it. Still, his compliments certainly seemed genuine.

But nobody had seriously caught her interest. In fact, most of the ones who hit on her here, including Jack, were a lot older. In Dina's experience, older men never treated younger women with respect.

Jeanie finally excavated the key from her purse and inserted it into the lock, turning it to the right.

The key made a thunking noise and stopped before it could go all the way around. "What the hell?" Jeanie said with a frown. She turned the key back around and pulled it out.

Then she pulled on the door, and Dina was shocked to see it open. The door had never been locked the night before.

Dina looked up. The lights were all out, like they were supposed to be-but the door was open? That didn't make sense.

"Who closed last night?" Jeanie asked.

"How should I know?" Dina asked back.

Jeanie shook her head. "Right, you weren't working yesterday." She closed her eyes. Dina imagined she was visualizing the schedule. "It was-right, Maria and Annie."

That surprised Dina. Both Maria Campagna and Annie Wolfowitz were very conscientious. If it had been Karen Paulsen, Dina would have understood-that girl was what Jeanie called a flake -but not Maria or Annie.

Dina had never liked Maria all that much. She always kept gloating about how well she was treated by her boyfriend and how he bought her so many nice things, like the eighteen-karat-gold necklace she always wore. Sasha couldn't even afford to take Dina out with any regularity, much less buy her presents, expensive or otherwise.

So, perhaps uncharitably, Dina hoped it had been Maria who'd forgotten to lock up.

When they entered the bakery, Dina moved around to the back while Jeanie went to turn on both the lights and the air-conditioning. Dina planned to get the cappuccino maker going, then start taking the cannoli out of the refrigerator in the back.

Flies buzzed all over the place. Dina was looking forward to the AC driving them away.

Oddly, the flies got worse as she came around behind the counter. And something smelled-

She screamed before her conscious mind recognized Maria Campagna lying on the floor, her eyes open, her face pale, flies buzzing around her body.

"What is it?" Jeanie said as she ran around to the other side of the counter. "Dina, what is it?"

"It's-it's-it's Maria!"

Dina had no idea how Jeanie reacted, because she couldn't take her eyes off Maria. Dina had never seen a dead body-Jewish tradition kept caskets closed during funerals. For all her uncle's dire warnings about how dead bodies lined the streets in New York, she'd never seen a corpse before, except on those police shows on television.

Maria's body looked different from what she expected. For one thing, she figured someone who was dead would be paler. And there wasn't any blood that she could see.

But she knew that Maria was dead. For one thing, she wasn't moving at all. Dina had never realized before just how still someone could be.

And she had dead eyes.

Then Dina heard a distant, tinny voice say, "911." Turning, she saw that Jeanie had taken out her cell phone-a razor-thin phone that was the same shade of pink as her shorts.

"I'm at Belluso's Bakery on Riverdale and 236th. There's a dead body here."

OFFICER TIM CICCONE WAS seriously hungover.

He had only gone to the bar last night intending to unwind after another long day at the Richmond Hill Correctional Facility. He'd spent half the day filling out paperwork and the other half standing out on the baseball diamond while the inmates played a ball game. Skinheads versus Muslims, and what dumbass bureaucrat had thought that was a good idea? COs like Ciccone knew that it was the same story in virtually every prison: race stayed with race. A disproportionate number of inmates in RHCF were either white men who hated black people or black men who hated white people.

When Lieutenant Ursitti had told his shift about the ball game, Ciccone had assumed it was a joke. He'd laughed and everything. So, of course, Uncle Cal had to put him on that detail. At least the weather had been nice-only in the sixties. Perfect baseball weather, unlike today. On the drive over from his place on Van Duzer Street this morning, Ciccone nearly got baked alive. He really needed to get the AC in his Camry fixed.

Ciccone, a lifelong Jersey Devils fan, didn't even like baseball. Unlike hockey, which was a man 's game, baseball was a pansy sport. Well, except when Muslims and skinheads went at it. Greg Yoba hit a ground ball to Brett Hunt, he flipped it to Jack Mulroney-but Vance Barker did a takeout slide. Naturally, a fight broke out.

After a day that included an outdoor brawl, Ciccone had desperately needed a drink. He'd been born and raised on Staten Island, and he never wanted to live anywhere else. It was far enough away from the rest of the city that it felt like the suburbs, but close enough that he could go into Manhattan and take advantage of all the cool stuff you could do in a big city. Like any good suburb, his neighborhood had a bar where everybody knew everybody else. In this case, it was the Big Boot. It catered to goombahs like him-Italian-Americans who'd lived on Staten Island since the big immigration wave in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries-and was right around the corner from his apartment, so it was within stumbling distance of home. Ciccone figured he'd have a few beers at the Boot and call it a night.

That was before Tina DiFillippo walked in. Ciccone hadn't called Tina for weeks, and Tina wanted him to make it up to her. So he did shots with her throughout the night: Jдgermeister, Harbor Lights, and some other things that Ciccone could no longer remember.

He didn't remember taking Tina home, either, but there had apparently been sex, based on the used condom he'd found on the floor.

Eventually, Ciccone would regret being too trashed to remember the sex. Right now, he just wanted someone to get the brass band the hell out of his head.

Ciccone had already downed enough coffee to float the ferry, and he still could barely keep his eyes open. But he did his usual routine, hoping to hell that Uncle Cal didn't notice anything.

First up was shaving. Ciccone had always thought allowing the inmates to shave was kind of stupid. Let the assholes grow beards; it wasn't like they needed to look good in here. But a lot of these guys had parole hearings, so they had to look their best, and besides, not letting inmates shave was the kind of stupid thing lawyers liked to sue the state over.