Richard Price - The Whites

The mirror had glanced off Pavlicek’s temple, drawing a little blood. Bracing for a brawl, Billy set his feet, but instead of warring back, Pavlicek simply stanched the thin flow with the heel of his hand, then looked off down the street. At first Billy was thrown — Pavlicek had been erratically explosive for weeks — but now it was as if anger over his son’s impending death had somehow gone beyond expressible fury to a higher, finer level, making Billy’s rage in comparison seem so pedestrian that it hardly merited a reaction.

Three silent but alert white men in jeans and sweatshirts came out of 1522 into the predawn stillness and headed toward the Lexus, Billy recognizing one: Hal Gurwitz, carrying a Yankees bat bag, a defrocked cop who had done some time for putting a handcuffed prisoner in the hospital with a ruptured spleen. He guessed that the other two, younger and a little more tense, might still be cops.

They eyed the long scrape on the SUV’s body and then Billy’s sedan, slant-parked in the wrong direction.

“Everything OK up there?” Pavlicek asked.

“Yeah,” Gurwitz said, taking the question as an all-clear sign. “I believe the moving van should be coming somewheres around midmorning.”

“Everything OK down here?” the youngest of the three asked, looking directly at Billy.

“Absolutely.” Pavlicek pulled out a wad of cash as thick as a rolled washcloth and distributed what looked like a few hundred dollars to each of them. “I’ll be in touch.”

The men walked off as a group, each in turn casting an eye back toward Billy and the cars, until they all piled into a minivan in front of an elementary school at the far end of the block.

“Some of my tenants on the fifth floor were confusing their apartment with a dopeteria,” Pavlicek said, stooping to pick up his side mirror, then tossing it into the backseat. “You’d think everyone around here would know the score by now.”

The van slow-rolled past them on its way to wherever, the three cops inside throwing deep shade Billy’s way one last time.

“Do they know?”

“Know what.” Then: “What do you know?”

“Just…” Billy felt his adrenaline abandon him in a reverse rush. “Where is he.”

Pavlicek took a breath, tracked the last of the moon as it slipped between two dead walk-ups at the end of the street.

“You know, when I heard Bannion bought it at the train station that night? I wept with happiness. To go to Thomas Rivera’s parents and bring them news like that: Somebody sliced up your boy’s murderer, he died in his own blood on a filthy subway platform…”

“Did you tell them you killed him?”

“I didn’t kill him.”

“Right, that’s right, you were sleeping at the hospital that night. I saw your name on the sign-in.”

Pavlicek threw Billy a look that had him taking a step back.

“I didn’t kill him, and that’s a fact. But justice, real justice, Billy, it’s like the getting of grace. The closest thing to peace on earth.”

“Where is he.”

Pavlicek crossed the narrow street to 1522, then waited at the entrance until Billy understood to follow.

Cuffed hand and foot like a bagged deer, Curtis Taft lay curled on his side in the smaller bedroom of a ground-floor vacant, his eyes widening then narrowing at a rapid tic-like pace, the tape across his mouth tugging redly at the trapped curls of his beard. A second strip, half the size of the gag, was pasted across his forehead.

“Jesus!” Billy hissed, backing up until he hit a wall.

At the sound of Billy’s voice, Taft’s eyes slowed and then focused on a section of baseboard inches from his face.

Billy knew he should leave and call it in, but he didn’t. He knew he should cut Taft loose, but he didn’t do that either.

Taft twisted his head so he could look at Billy directly, the oh-shit sight of his five-year hunter making his chest begin to rise and fall — but not so intensely that anyone could describe it exactly as heaving— and despite everything Billy found himself nakedly wanting some kind of more — a tape-muffled plea, a widening eye, a stream of uncontrolled piss — and he found it enraging that his White wasn’t giving it to him.

“Cut him loose,” he said faintly.

Pavlicek dropped into a squat alongside Taft, peeled the smaller strip of tape off his forehead, and held it between his fingers.

“I heard that the only family member who showed up for Shakira Barker’s arraignment last week was her grandmother,” Pavlicek said, his eyes never leaving Taft’s face. “The same for the funeral of the kid she killed. No one but Grandma. Thank God for the grannies, huh?”

“Get him up.”

Pavlicek removed the tape from between his fingers and placed it across Taft’s nostrils, Billy’s already gagged White immediately beginning to writhe, his eyes bulging like eggs.

Billy finally started across the room, but Pavlicek removed the tape before he could get there.

“It’s not my place,” he said, extending the strip to Billy on a fingertip.

Billy returned to his spot on the wall.

“It’s nothing,” Pavlicek said, still offering the tape. “It’s like applying a band-aid.”

“Get him up, John,” Billy said, looking away.

“Peace on earth,” Pavlicek said, rising to his feet, crossing to Billy, and pressing the tape into his bruised chest on his way out of the room. “Nothing like it in the world.”

A moment later the apartment door slammed shut, Pavlicek leaving Billy and Taft staring at each other from opposite corners of the empty room.

Helplessly trussed though he was, Taft sensed that Billy wasn’t going to take the bait. His eyes began to recede back into their sockets, then droop with supreme contempt, the same contempt that had allowed him to kill those girls and then go back to bed, the same contempt he’d displayed whenever Billy’s efforts to bring him to justice invariably came to nothing.

Billy plucked the strip of tape from his chest, stepped forward, and then, as Pavlicek had, hunkered down above his prisoner.

Taft began to look bored, his eyes dimming in his head. Billy affixed the tape to his nostrils. Taft’s expression remained the same.

Like he had Billy’s number. Had it since day one.

Billy got up and left the room to explore the rest of the apartment, the smell of the freshly painted walls reminding him of the day he had moved into his first home with his first wife.

When he returned to the bedroom, he saw that Taft no longer looked so bored, and that a pinkish mist had begun to seep into the whites of his eyes. Billy left again, this time to splash cold water over his face in the kitchen, wiping away the excess on the sleeves of his jacket, then drying his hands on the back of his slacks.

When he settled over Taft this time, the pink of his eyes had turned poppy and completely flooded the scleras. A few seconds after that, his hog-tied body began to repeatedly jackknife, then arch in pure animal spasm.

Billy stood up and returned to his original position against the far wall. “If you even think of flagging down a patrol car,” he said evenly, “or walking into a police station? Or picking up a phone and calling 911?”

The room abruptly blossomed with the stench of involuntary evacuation.

“You see how easy he found you? You see how easy that was?”

Standing next to the Lexus, they watched in silence as Curtis Taft, mustering as much dignity as possible given the circumstances, walked toward the intersection of Vyse and East 172nd Street, his stride a little off-kilter.

He was smart enough not to look back.

“I didn’t really expect you to go through with it,” Pavlicek said after Taft finally turned the corner. “But you got a taste of how it would feel, right?”