Sarah Sparrow - A Guide for Murdered Children

He put it on the unused emergency Visa with the $6,500 limit.

Willow seethed with anger while the doctor yanked and suctioned. You were a terrible Cold Case guy rang in his head like the voice-over flashback of an old B movie—a fair description of what his life had become, or maybe always was . Some folks just don’t have the aptitude ! Which royally pissed him off because in his mind he knew he was the “black art” prince; hell, he was a fucking Marvel superhero. But looking back on his time in the Cold Case unit, he was ashamed. He winced as he saw himself futzing around the Spirit Room like some Barney Fife. He would never be able to share with Rafael—or anyone—how he made himself that way by suppressing his natural gifts.

The Spirit Room… where DNA, rape kits, and cartons of flatlined cases were stored. When he first took the tour (a month before crossing over from homicide), the voices overwhelmed. It’d been so long since Willow had heard voices like that—the symphonic choir of the departed—and this time he felt them. When he finally joined Cold Case, they grew quieter over the months, a muffling result of the mixture of self-will and opiates. It made him physically sick to hear them. Still, he was drawn to the Spirit Room, where he torturously loitered, wandered and even sometimes napped. How had he been so arrogant to believe he could acclimate himself to the radioactive field of the forgotten, unburied dead? He could dial down the voices (a skill he’d honed since boyhood, after the death of his Nana), though in so doing Willow suffered the consequences. The expenditure of energy required for their suppression had the effect of turning him into a caricature of incompetence bordering on the cretinous. (Enter Barney Fife.) For the first time in his profession, he felt like a fool. His cohorts nicknamed him Special Needs and he laughed it off but it hurt. Whenever Rafael was on the brink of firing him, Willow allowed himself to briefly tap into his verboten gifts; the voices led to small and occasionally larger triumphs. But most of the time he came off like an ass, a dunderhead, a misfire.

Like some kind of mutant mistake—

With his Visa drained and a face numbed by Novocaine, Willow walked to Duane Reade to get the Vicodin script filled. He bought a can of Diet Dr Pepper and a box of straws. Stepping outside, he stood on the sidewalk sipping his soda and peering into space, captive to the black void of his mood. When he came to, he was staring at the bar across the street. Like a man under hypnosis, he walked toward it in a straight line through traffic.

The darkness and quiet pleased him more than it seemed possible. The bartender was unfazed when he pulled a straw from the box to suck up his Tom Collins. The first taste was so good that he wouldn’t have cared if it were his last. The second was even better because he used it to wash down three Vikes.

What now?

His thoughts turned to confidential informants…

Willow wondered just how “inneresting” Marlon’s shit might be. He fantasy-calculated the size of a score that would make his life, at least temporarily, copacetic—25K? Thirty? What would make it more than copacetic too… a hundred large? Hell yeah. If whatever Marlon was promoting was in the neighborhood of ten grand—or five—or three—would it even be worth the risk? Possibly. Hadn’t he already risked everything (or what was left of it) with the relapse? Hey, 2K and change would at least pay for the root canal… What he really needed was a lotto-size win, something over a mill. Five mill had a nice ring to it. He’d buy Pace a house on a few acres and give her a mill for herself. Maybe buy Geoff a Harley, just to be sportsmanlike, and put two million in trust for Larkin. Then maybe he would move to Maui. Smoke ganja and star in Harrelson home movies for the rest of his days.

He felt a warm buzz from the booze, though it’d be another twenty minutes or so before he came on to the pills. Liquor would potentiate their effect and he was looking forward to that— old times , he thought, before amending it to not so old times . As he waited, Willow reminisced about his legendary caper from yesteryear. When he first joined the NYPD, he worked narcotics and within a few years had a sweetheart deal with Marlon, his CI—Willow robbed dope houses Marlon tipped him to. His method was to smash in, cuff the dealers and then take the money while calling in the bust. They never got too greedy because the whole enterprise was risky, to say the least. There were a lot of moving parts. And they couldn’t do a “lick” too often because Willow always needed a plausible reason why he’d gone in without backup.

So Marlon told him about a trap house that always had at least $25,000 on hand, guaranteed. The plan was for Willow to pocket fifteen and give his CI five (leaving five for show), which he did. But the stash was closer to 200K and Willow took 125. When the dealers made bail, they somehow found out about Marlon and tried to assassinate him. Unfortunately, the attempt occurred at the very moment the dirty detective was giving his partner his cut outside Katz’s Deli on East Houston. Willow saved the CI’s life by blowing two of the felons away but was shot in the leg in the process. The tabloids made him a hero, which made it easier for him to transfer to homicide a few months after leaving the hospital. Getting shot was the best thing that could have happened, because his hero status had the effect of tamping down, temporarily anyway, the rumors of illicit gain that had been spreading in the department to explain the source of income behind Detective Wylde’s whoring, gambling and Rolex sprees—

—Oh. Oh…

Now he was stoned and fuck if it didn’t feel good. Nirvana time. And with that sumptuous, familiar feeling, his plan of action became clear. As Willow worked himself up to making the call to Marlon, he killed time by reflecting on the Meadows. He wondered where Renata and the black fireman and the Rimbaud boy were—wondered if they were sitting somewhere loaded, like him. In the same way he had sleepwalked to the bar, he slid off his stool and strolled to the pay phone outside the restroom.

He put his hand in his pocket, feeling the paper with the CI’s “digits.” Then his copness kicked in. He went back to his perch, laid down a twenty and told the barkeep, “I shall return.”

He sun-blink sauntered to Duane Reade and bought a disposable phone—a burner that couldn’t be traced. Returning to the sepulchral quiet of the bar, he stood at the pay phone and dialed. A voice answered:

“This is Detective O’Connor, who’s calling?”

Startled, Willow hung there a beat before frantically searching for whatever button would end the call.

What the fuck?

Had he been set up?

No way—no way would Marlon would pull a stunt like that… and for what reason?

The phone had been answered with that flat, clue-seeking aggressiveness of a cop at a crime scene.

He left the bar in a panic-sweat and stomped the burner into pieces. Threw them in multiple trash bins, just like the asshole perps in his favorite cable shows. A battered Lincoln Town Car pulled up. The gypsy driver asked where he was going.

“Penn Station,” said Willow, his heart nearly hammering him into a blackout as he settled into the backseat.

4.

He had come by train and was glad to be leaving that way. Airplanes and airports made him nervous. Trains brought out the Dr. Richard Kimble. They were romantic and catered to his fugitive sensibilities. He swallowed five more painkillers at Tracks, the bar in the station.

It was time to put a smiley face on the wreckage. He had a few hours before embarking and was way, way high. He had a brainstorm and vacated his stool; there was a place he urgently needed to visit. He approached an Amtrak employee—in retrospect, the man looked closer to some kind of scruffy, patchwork character in a dream—to ask directions.