Lou Manfredo - Rizzo's Fire

Rizzo, breathing deeply, willing his heartbeat to slow, extended a gentle hand to his wife.

“Yeah,” he said, more breathlessly than he would have liked. “Yeah, hon, fine. Just a dream. Shut the light, Jen, go back to sleep.”

Jennifer sat up, glancing at the clock. “It’s okay,” she said, studying the near feral, yet bewildered look in his eyes. “I have to get up soon anyway.” She put her hand on his shoulder. “Are you sure you’re okay?” she asked again, gently.

Rizzo ran a hand through his hair and managed a smile. He tossed the bedcovers back, away from his body, allowing the cool air of the room to touch his damp skin.

“Yeah,” he said. “Just a friggin’ dream, that’s all.”

Jennifer’s dark eyes reflected warmly in the bedside lighting.

“A dream ?” she said. “Looks more like a nightmare to me.” Now she squinted, peering at him more closely.

“Was it that dream, Joe?” she asked, her tone neutral.

Rizzo nodded, using his T-shirt sleeve to clear sweat from his eyes.

“Yeah,” he said. Then after a moment, he shook his head in disbelief. “Can you imagine this? With all I’ve seen over the years? The dead babies, the dozens of murders, the burned corpses, the shooting vics, every goddamned thing. All of that, never a nightmare. But that one kid, that one poor kid, still haunting me after all these years.” He shook his head again. “It just doesn’t make sense.”

Jennifer shifted her body, facing him more directly.

“Well,” she said, rubbing gently at the knot of muscle in his powerful shoulder. “Like I’ve said before, you were just a kid yourself. Probably the same age she was. And you had just started on the force. An experience like that can stay with you.”

Rizzo reached to his night table for a Nicorette packet. “Yeah,” he said, tearing at the cellophane. “But still. Twenty-seven years later, almost. Enough already.”

Jennifer nodded, unsure of what else to say. “Well, it’s over now. Try to relax.”

Later, as he lay in bed listening to Jennifer’s shower hiss from the master bath, he replayed that long-ago day in his mind for the thousandth time.

It had been his very first morning tour, in the old Seventy-fifth Precinct, on the Brooklyn-Queens border. It was a Sunday morning, just past seven a.m., less than an hour remaining on the tour. His training officer, a twenty-year veteran who had harbored no ambition beyond a sector car patrol, had parked the Plymouth on a wooded, deserted stretch of ser vice road lying north of the Belt Parkway. The cop, Sonny Carusso, sat asleep behind the wheel. “Cooping,” the old-timers had called it back in those days.

Rizzo had watched the skies over Jamaica Bay dawn with a new April morning and now sat struggling with the Sunday News cross-word. Then suddenly, the old Motorola shortwave, hanging in silence from its bracket on the under dash of the Plymouth, crackled to life.

Magically, at the sound of the dispatch, Carusso’s eyes opened. With hooded lids, he glanced first at the radio, then to Rizzo.

“That’s us, kid,” he said, glancing at his wristwatch. “Bad fuckin’ timin’ to be pickin’ up a call.”

Rizzo reached out and took the hand mike, keying it and sending a terse “ten-four” back to dispatch.

Carusso sat up in his seat and slipped the car into gear, wiping the sleep from his eyes with his left hand.

“Write the time on the recorder sheet,” he told Rizzo. “Oh-seven oh-six. And the job location.”

Carusso accelerated harshly, the valve train in the battered Plymouth V-8 rattling with the sudden strain. He raced eastbound along the ser vice road, the car’s red dome light swirling, then slowed sharply, swinging a harsh U-turn and hurling the car onto the westbound entrance ramp of the Belt Parkway.

They reached the scene in moments. Rizzo noted the half dozen autos randomly scattered on the highway, blocking two of its three westbound lanes. Carusso wove the radio car deftly through the crowd of citizens who stood in the roadway, touching the horn rim and sporadically sounding short “wup-wup” siren bursts.

A body lay facedown on the concrete of the highway, straddling the entrance merge and right-hand traffic lanes.

Rizzo hurried to the body, that of a young woman-blond, naked, her body raked with bloody scrape marks. The back of her skull glistened with gray-red slime, the bone crushed, blood and exposed brain matter pulsating with each of her rapid heartbeats, welling from the skull and flowing in meandering rivulets across the pale skin of her neck and back.

Rizzo bent to one knee, his throat constricting, his own heart rate rapidly increasing. He tentatively reached out a hand, unable to bring himself to touch the naked flesh.

“It wasn’t my fault!” he heard someone say, and Rizzo turned to look over his shoulder. A man, about thirty, tall, hair disheveled by the wind blowing across the highway, was imploring Carusso. “She ran out right in front of me, right out of the bushes, right in front of my car. I swerved, I tried to miss her, but… but… I couldn’t.”

Carusso took the man by the arm, leading him toward the shoulder of the roadway.

“Joe,” he said as he walked, “get on the horn… see what’s holdin’ the ambulance. Hurry up.”

Rizzo stood on weakened legs, turning and running back to the radio car. Frantically, he radioed for expedited medical backup. Then he went back to the girl, again kneeling at her side.

During his four years of ser vice as an Army M.P., Rizzo had seen some ugly things, things he preferred not to think about. But never had he seen anything like this. As he looked down at the woman, the girl, an eerie, dry hollow rattle suddenly sounded from deep within her chest cavity. Simultaneously, the pulsating blood from the head wound went oddly still. It began to pool within the skull, filling the depth of the depression and again spilling slowly onto the already bloodstained pavement.

Rizzo glanced up over his shoulder at Carusso, now standing above and behind him. “She just died,” he heard the older cop say. “It’s over.” Rizzo stood slowly, his hands trembling, his breath coming in short, shallow gasps.

Carusso took him by the arm.

“Hey, kid,” he said softly. “Get hold of yourself. Stiffen up. Go see if there’s anything in the trunk. We gotta cover her up a little, give her some dignity. She don’t need to have her ass out here on display. Go ahead. Go find somethin’.”

Later, Rizzo examined the abandoned car hidden in the bushes off the side of the highway. It was an old Dodge, the engine still hot, ticking in the April morning air with an eerie cadence.

The woman had been stripped naked, sexually assaulted, and savagely beaten in her own car. The medical examiner would later determine there had been at least two assailants involved. At some point, the girl had broken free, terrified and panicked, running blindly from the car and into the path of oncoming highway traffic. There she had been struck with violent force and dragged under a car, then ultimately thrown free from its undercarriage. The terrified driver, hearing her body thump and thrash beneath the floorboard, swerved and skidded off the roadway onto the grass shoulder.

The responding detectives examined the Dodge, but it had yielded no usable clues. The case remained open, no arrest had ever been made.

Now, nearly twenty-seven years later, Joe Rizzo lay on his bed staring at the ceiling.

The dream came periodically. Often, at first, then once or twice a year. Lately, he had gone nearly two years without having it, and Rizzo thought he knew what had triggered it this time.

He swung his legs off the bed and sighed, sitting up and rubbing at his face.