Richard Montanari: Kiss Of Evil

“Yes.”

“Do you really?”

Dolores looks deeply into Paris’s eyes. She holds him there for an instant, suspended, giving Paris hope that he will hear the words that will put his heart at ease. Instead, she offers him a sexy half-smile, nothing more. And, in that moment, Paris sees the twenty-four-year-old Dolores Alessio he had met so many years ago, the street-talking firebrand who had stolen Michael Ryan’s heart.

“First call for boarding, USAir flight 188, nonstop to Tampa, Florida…”

They both glance at the entrance ramp. The steward begins to roll Carrie Ryan’s wheelchair onboard.

Dolores slides her hands around Paris’s waist, hooking her thumbs through his belt loops. She regards him, slowly, head to toe, and says: “You know, there’s something I’ve always wanted to tell you, Detective Jack Paris.”

“Uh-oh,” Paris says. “An airport confession. I’m not sure I’m ready for this.”

“It’s a good thing.”

“You sure?”

“Yes,” Dolores says. “I’m sure.”

“Okay. Let’s hear it.”

“I always thought you were the handsomest of Michael’s cop-buddies.”

Paris blushes a little. “I’m shocked.”

“Shocked?” Dolores asks. “Why on earth would you be shocked?”

“Michael actually had other kinds of friends?”

Dolores laughs, pulls Paris into her arms, and the two of them embrace for a full and solemn minute, holding each other with a passion forged of secrets, a bond of silence they both now realize, in their hearts, can never be broken.

Ten minutes later, as Paris watches the 727 make the final turn on the runway, readying for takeoff, he reaches into his coat pocket and removes the old crime-scene photo of Anthony del Blanco’s mutilated body lying in the parking lot. He also removes the crumpled piece of paper, unfolds it, smoothes it against his chest. He reads it for the fiftieth time.

Please leave the newspaper in the wooden box until Sunday. Thanks!

Paris isn’t sure when the seed first took root within him. Maybe it was the moment he recalled seeing the red wig in the hatbox while rummaging around in bay number 202, the first time he visited My-Self Storage. Or perhaps it was when he had parked on Denison Avenue two days ago, binoculars in hand, the day Dolores Ryan sold her yellow Mazda to an elderly couple.

He looks at the back of the old photo, at the words written in the same blocky style, the same red ink as Dolores’s note to the paperboy:

Evil is a breed, Fingers.

The jet engines roar.

Paris closes his eyes for a moment, imagining the madness of the final few hours of Sarafina del Blanco’s life. Deep inside, where his own guilt lives, he knows it just might have been Dolores Ryan, in her red wig, drinking at the Gamekeeper’s Taverne with Sarafina that night. He knows it just might have been Dolores Ryan who sat with Sarafina in that car, on that hill in Russell Township, polishing off a bottle of whiskey. He knows it just might have been Dolores Ryan-a woman who had now lost both her father and her husband to a murderer’s bullet-who had then splashed gasoline all over the interior of the car and, mad-eyed with rage and hatred and vengeance, tossed a match.

As the last of the exhaust from the 727 dissipates high above the runway at Hopkins International Airport, as Detective John Salvatore Paris turns on his heels and heads for the parking lot, and the city beyond, there are two thoughts that track him, two thoughts he hopes will bring closure to the insanity that began on a hot July day twenty-six years ago, two thoughts that will be at his side, later that night, as he sits upon the rocks at the Seventy-second Street pier, as he makes a pile of photographs and negatives and yellowed police reports and handwritten notes, as he starts a small, purging fire of his own:

You square it with your God, Dusty.

I’ll square it with mine.

He is six-five, two-seventy. A Goliath, even in here.

We are in the laundry, in the northwest corner, a spot furthest from the guard station at the southernmost end of C Block. We are both serving life terms at the Ohio State Penitentiary in Youngstown.

“My name is Antoine Walker,” the big man says, blocking my path. “Ring a bell?”

I take a half-step back. The bullet with which Jack Paris had surprised me had shattered most of my right hip. The small stumble is not lost on the predator in front of me.

“The world is full of Walkers,” I say.

“Not anymore,” Antoine says, inching closer. “One less now.”

“Is that right?”

Movement behind me.

“Man by the name of Willis Walker. My daddy. Got his motherfuckin’ dick cut off.”

“I might have heard about it.”

“Me too,” Antoine says. “We all heard about it. Heard about that voodoo shit, too. They say you’re some kinda witch. That true?”

“No.”

Antoine steps closer, towering over me. Hawk and rodent.

“The pain is coming,” Antoine says. “You know that, right?”

I remain silent. I sense a presence behind me. I feel hot breath on my neck.

“The man ax you a question,” the presence says. “He ax you a question.”

“Yes,” I say, without turning around. “I know the pain is coming.”

“But you don’t know when, do you?”

“No. I do not.”

“I’m doin’ life plus twenty,” Antoine says. “You?”

This time, my silence suffices.

“See? We got much time,” Antoine says as he unbuttons the fly on his prison scrubs. He does not take his eyes off me. “Much time indeed.”

I feel a crowding of men behind me. The damp, ripe assemblage of a dozen or so bodies. When Antoine Walker places a heavy hand on my shoulder, I sink slowly to my knees, my mind and body and soul returning to another time, to a stifling room above a Tijuana bodega, thinking:

I am nkisi. I am brujo.

I will survive.