Richard Montanari: The skin Gods

He was getting away. She had to move. She reached the Dumpster, put her back to it, lowered herself to the asphalt. She peered beneath. There was enough light to see a silhouette of Tarver's feet if he was still on the other side. He wasn't. Jessica edged around, saw a mound of plastic garbage bags and loose refuse-piled drywall, paint cans, discarded planks of lumber. Tarver was gone. She scanned the end of the alley, saw the broken window.

Had he gone through?

She was just about to return to the street and bring in the troops to search the building when she saw a pair of dress shoes emerging from beneath the pile of stacked plastic garbage bags.

She drew a deep breath, tried to calm herself. It didn't work. It might be weeks before she actually calmed down.

"Get up, Trey."

No movement.

Jessica found her wind, continued: "Your Honor, because the suspect had taken two shots at me already, I couldn't take a chance. When the plastic moved, I fired. It all happened so fast. Before I knew it, I had emptied my entire mag into the suspect."

A rustling of plastic. "Wait."

"Thought so," Jessica said. "Now, very slowly-and I mean very slowly-place the gun on the ground."

After a few seconds, a hand slid out, a.32 semi-auto ringed on a finger. Tarver put the gun on the ground. Jessica picked it up.

"Now get up. Nice and easy. Hands where I can see them."

Trey Tarver slowly emerged from the pile of garbage bags. He stood, facing her, hands out to his sides, eyes darting from left to right. He was going to challenge her. After eight years on the force, she knew the look. Trey Tarver had seen her shoot a man not two minutes ago, and he was going to challenge her.

Jessica shook her head. "You don't want to fuck with me tonight, Trey," she said. "Your boy hit my partner and I had to shoot him. Plus, you shot at me. What's worse, you made me snap a heel on my best shoes. Be a man and take your medicine. It's over."

Tarver stared at her, trying to melt her cool with his jailhouse burn. After a few seconds, he saw the South Philly in her eyes and realized it wouldn't work. He put his hands behind his head and interlaced his fingers.

"Now turn around," Jessica said.

Trey Tarver looked at her legs, her short dress. He smiled. His diamond tooth glimmered in the streetlight. "You first, bitch."

Bitch?

Bitch?

Jessica glanced back up the alley. The Chinese kid was back in the restaurant. The door was closed. They were alone.

She looked at the ground. Trey was standing on a discarded two-by- six. One end of the board was perched precariously on a discarded paint can. The can was inches from Jessica's right foot.

"I'm sorry, what did you say?"

Cold flames in his eyes. "I said 'You first, bitch.'"

Jessica kicked the can. At that moment, the look on Trey Tarver's face said it all. His expression was not unlike that of Wile E. Coyote at the moment the hapless cartoon character realizes the cliff is no longer beneath him. Trey crumpled to the ground like wet origami, on the way down smacking his head on the edge of the Dumpster.

Jessica looked at his eyes. Or, more accurately, the whites of his eyes. Trey Tarver was out cold.

Oops.

Jessica rolled him over just as a pair of detectives from the Fugitive Squad finally arrived on the scene. No one had seen anything and, even if they had, Trey Tarver didn't exactly have a big fan club in the department. One of the detectives tossed her a pair of handcuffs.

"Oh yeah," Jessica said to her unconscious suspect. "We gonna do some bidness." She clicked the cuffs shut on his wrists. "Bitch."

Thereis a time for police officers, after a successful hunt, when they decelerate from the chase, when they assess the operation, congratulate each other, grade their performance, brake. It is a time when morale is at its peak. They went where the darkness was and emerged into the light.

They gathered at the Melrose Diner, a twenty-four-hour spoon on Snyder Avenue.

They had taken down two very bad people. There was no loss of life, and the only serious injury came to someone who deserved it. The good news was that the shooting, as far as they could tell, was clean.

Jessica had been a police officer for eight years. She was in uniform for the first four, followed by a stint on the Auto Unit, a division of the city's Major Case Squad. In April of this year she had joined the Homicide Unit. In that short time she had seen her share of horrors. There was the young Latina woman murdered in a vacant lot in Northern Liberties, rolled into a rug, put on top of a car, and dumped in Fairmount Park. There was the case of the young man lured into the park by three of his classmates only to be robbed and beaten to death. And there was the Rosary Killer case.

Jessica wasn't the first or only woman in the unit, but anytime someone new joins a small, tightly knit squad in the department there is the requisite distrust, the unspoken probationary period. Her father had been a legend in the department, but those were shoes to fill, not walk in.

After her incident debriefing, Jessica entered the diner. Immediately the four detectives who were already there-Tony Park, Eric Chavez, Nick Palladino, and a patched-up John Shepherd-got up from their stools, put their hands against the wall, and assumed the position in tribute.

Jessica had to laugh.

She was in.

She is hard to look at now: her skin is no longer perfect, but rather torn silk. The blood pools around her head, nearly black in the dim light thrown from the trunk lid.

I look around the parking area. We are alone, just a few feet from the Schuylkill River. Water laps the dock-the eternal meter of the city.

I take the money and put it into the fold of the newspaper. I toss the newspaper onto the girl in the trunk of the car, then slam the lid.

Poor Marion.

She really was pretty. She had about her a certain freckled charm that reminded me of Tuesday Weld in High Time.

Before we left the motel, I cleaned the room, tore up the room receipt, and flushed it down the toilet. There had been no mop, no bucket. When you shoot on a shoestring, you make do.

She stares up at me now, her eyes no longer blue. She may have been pretty, she may have been someone's idea of perfection, but for all she was, she was no Angel.

The house lights are down, the screen flickers to life. In the next few weeks the city of Philadelphia will hear a great deal about me. It will be said that I am a psychopath, a madman, an evil force from the soul of hell. As the bodies fall and the rivers run red, I will receive some horrendous reviews. Don't believe a word of it. I wouldn't hurt a fly.

Six days later she looked completely normal. Some might even say friendly, in a doting, spinster-aunt sort of way. She stood five three and could not have weighed more than ninety-five pounds in her black span- dex one-piece and pristine white Reeboks. She had short, brick-red hair and clear blue eyes. Her fingers were long and slender, her nails groomed and unpainted. She wore no jewelry.

To the outside world, she was a pleasant looking, physically fit woman nearing middle age.

For Detective Kevin Francis Byrne, she was a combination Lizzie Borden, Lucrezia Borgia, and Ma Barker, all wrapped up in a package resembling Mary Lou Retton.

"You can do better than that," she said.

"What do you mean?" Byrne managed.

"The name you called me in your mind. You can do better than that."

She is a witch, he thought. "What makes you think I called you a name?"

She laughed her shrill, Cruella De Vil laugh. Dogs three counties away cringed. "I've been at this almost twenty years, Detective," she said. "I've been called every name in the book. I've been called names that aren't even scheduled in the next book. I've been spat upon, swung upon, cursed in a dozen languages, including Apache. I've had voodoo dolls made in my likeness, novenas offered up for my painful demise. I assure you, there is no torture you could possibly conjure that has not been wished upon me."