WEAPON AND THE WOUND
Under the shadows of the Tower—hidden deep within the festering weeds—the abandoned public library sat in its prison of solitude and decay. The sun had descended behind the rim of the razor thin ridgeline that ringed the county. Muted light slowly shrank away from the faded columns and tall dark glass paneled façade of the library.
Silence enveloped the dying core of this city of artifice and pollution. The blithe zephyrs moved through the uncut grass, cycling through the black wrought iron fences onto the surface of the vacant boulevard that surrounded the green that was necessary in all of New England’s old towns and villages, because the Puritans as we all know loved lawn bowling and frolicking on Sundays.
Horizontal stripes of red brick and mortar rose along the outer frame of the Tower hiding the rusted steel superstructure from the unsuspecting and uncaring public. As it stood isolated on its lonely perch above the empty city green, birds and squirrels scurried across the fields searching for food in garbage and the fallen seeds of the shade trees and quad pathways. The slow moving current of the murky brown serpentine river was broken up by the stained boulders and black alluvial loam rising out of the paved in channel.
The shadow of the Tower fell obtusely as the wind shot through the sky and the open air entrances and porticos of the downtown office buildings. On the observation deck at the top of the vertiginous stairway beside the mothballed belfry acid-rain disfigured stone gargoyles stared over the sprawl of the city towards the reddish rocks of the mountain ring that contained Cranbury Vale.
A sudden white flash emanated from the Tower’s pulpit. The gas exploded out from the barrel as the bullet was sent hurtling down rapidly towards the earth hundreds of feet below. The shot whizzed over the hood of a green and black squad car and ricocheted off the sidewalk into the foregrounds of the state courthouse behind the cordon.
The Shooter put his cigarette on the end of his rifle and squeezed the trigger. A single shot rang out from the Tower, and in less than a second, the hollow point took down an unfortunate officer, who had unknowingly crossed in front of the Shooter’s rifle scope. The lead entered through his ear, immediately underneath the rim of his black stormtrooper helmet, and was deposited where his brain met his spine.
The boy lay shaking violently in the left turn lane underneath the traffic light that continued on its timed cycles. His body was strewn out. His arms were mixed up with the jumble of his now flaccid legs. His bright blue irises remained dilated as he passed.
The Shooter stood back from the wall of the pulpit retreating calmly into the belfry holding his rifle tightly against the brick edifice. The Shooter pulled the smoking butt out of his rifle’s end and took a long drag. He breathed out with and watched the fluid vapors of smoke inundate the belfry walls and dissipate out into the wax paper orange of the setting sun beyond the ridgeline.
The Shooter fired off another round. The shot burrowed itself through the dead boy’s shoulder blade escaping out his back into the pavement. The weary ERT soldiers fled for cover behind the rows of crudely parked police cars forming the security cordon.
“He can see every fucking thing we try to do. Every breach. Every approach. Every goddamn play we run!” Major Templeman threw his hat to the ground and proceeded to stamp it out agitatedly as if it were on fire. He crouched down to the road and retrieved it, dusting it off before he put it back over his balding head.
Lieutenant Rakove, wearing his earphones around his neck like a doctor’s stethoscope, took the opportunity to add his thoughts to the general discussion. “He’s got the higher ground. Nothing even comes within a thousand feet of the Tower. No hostages. No demands. No nothing. He wants blood.”
Rakove shrugged his shoulders as he pulled the black Red Sox baseball cap from his head of retreating of platinum gray hair. He looked over to Templeman with the expression of disappointment that was closer to apathy than sadness. The Shooter, in unmistakable control, was long past listening to their reason and waited for the expected suicide-by-SWAT.
Major Templeman dismissed Rakove away through the picket lines and returned to his command post on the hood of his totaled car. Rakove cleared his throat, loudly, as he walked past the gathering masses of gawkers, whom he callously referred to as the carnal masses or simply morons. He tasted the faint metallic treacle of his blood and grimaced in disgust.
Rakove itched the heavy bags that hanged underneath his bloodshot eyes. He was infinitely tired—run ragged by his passionless job. For a few months now, he had been the lone negotiator in the Vale. Bezzeg had filled in for often three or four other positions in the Department in the absence of those who had been arrested, moved on to greener pastures, or were killed. Rakove thought to himself, no one escapes this place. And even you came back to the Vale with your wife, if you can call her that, despite it all? What a poor fuck you are, Beg.
Policemen dressed in black uniforms ran behind the first row of Crown Victorias leaving a film of red behind as they pulled the limp body away. That kid looks fresh out of high school, still a virgin. I was that age when records were still on vinyl, when Grand Funk Railroad, Boston
Rakove deferred them passage first and he continued back to his car. He opened the rear trunk of his Ford Contour and stowed away his Kevlar vest, windbreaker and various other articles of his work equipment. Beads of shaded light burned their last flicker down his neck forcing him to grasp the affected places and pick up his pace. He was eager to reach his home before nightfall.
The vestigial gasping rays of sun cast the city in a hallowed reddish buff. The refracted illuminations lit up the remnant clouds in rich auburns and titians that gave way for dunkler pinks and heller purples the further from the light source. The day was fading fast and at long last the police could hide their movements from the both the Shooter and the throngs of on-lookers under the cover of darkness.
At the operational headquarters at the front of the cordon, stammering about behind the green and black checkerboard panda car, Major Templeman continued on his absent tirade. As they watched the Major descended further into his madness, the ERT Commander and the aldermen of the Police Commission patiently chose their moments to pressure him to a decision.
“Ask Lou—Sergeant Bezzeg if he’ll do it,” Templeman retorted.
“He was suspended forever,” the ERT Commander said sharply.
“For what now?” Major Templeman was livid.
Commander Jaskilka answered. “Well, the Grand Jury indicted Bezzeg for, involuntary manslaughter, racketeering, bribery, excessive force, and about a dozen more counts.”
“It’s always something with Bezzeg, idn’t it? Well, Commander tell that limey bitch SAC to get him here right now, before another one of our boys or girls gets their brains shot out through the back of their fucking skulls!”
“Sir, she won’t give much of a shit about this—.” Jaskilka spoke slowly to Templeman, who remained heated, as evident in the bulging blood vessels that suffused his forehead, face, and neck in a skein covering the canvas of his pale skin.
“I want this settled now! Get the best man for the job and end it. Bust him out of house arrest I don’t care—just fucking get him here!”
“Inspectors Swarbrick and Pizarro from Vulture squad could retrieve Sergeant Bezzeg. He was their shift commander.” The Chief of Detectives, Aguinaldo, pointed to the tastelessly dressed detective constables at another car smoking cheap Tampa cigars.
“Fine, Chief.” Templeman assented as Aguinaldo shouted over to them.
The two caught Aguinaldo’s signal and reacted immediately. They got up and quickly came to the situation commanders. Both stood at loose attention against the starboard side of the shot out police car.
“Get Bezzeg. No questions. Just get him here. And tell that cunt wife of his anything you’d like. We can’t have her fucking anything else up for us.” Templeman said to the detectives.
The older and somewhat grizzled detective, Swarbrick, in his usual tone and heavy indecipherable Scottish dialect, grudgingly accepted the rescue assignment and asked, “Will we be getting any hazard pay out of this, Major?”
“Yeah, if we had the money to pay you. How about some store credit?” Templeman quipped.
The partners walked away from the operational headquarters, through the fray of local television reporters, many of which were the masturbation fodder for the entire department and most of the boys (ages 10-85) in the viewership area. It was difficult to find other endeavors to mollify this kind of ceaseless boredom that pervaded modern life. Many of these reporters, surprisingly, or in total denial of the existence of youtube or “News-I’d-like-to-Fuck (NILF)” internet sites, were unaware of such enthusiasm for their appearances on the endless half-hour newscasts that aired throughout the day on cable, podcasts, on-demand HD channels and regular local television broadcasts.
Swarbrick had dated a few along with his many wives as had various others in service of the County, but Pizarro wisely stayed clear of such extra-curricular carnal activities for fear of his wife and mother-in-law from Ecuador, who lived with them above the carport listening all-day to Luis Miguel as if he were the second coming. He could not hide anything from them and feared for his penqueno regularly and any further risk was ill-advised.
“Where does he live?” Pizarro said as he opened the door to their sienna Crown Vic sedan.
“Up 88 aways in Cathedral past the Tunnels. Think the Feds got that place bottled up tighter than your twat.”
“Shut-up with that shit. I thought that the tunnel collapsed three years ago.” Pizarro closed the door behind him after he sat down in the driver’s seat. Swarbrick, who never drove on account of his various drunk driving arrests, sat in the passenger seat drumming his fingers against the dashboard to the Dire Straits song on the radio in efforts to further exacerbate his partner.
“It did.”
“Well, either way we go . . . the Feds are still cocksuckers.” said the shorter Pizarro as he backed the car up inside of the cordon.
“We’re not talking bout priests, here buddy. We’re talking more bout tha—
“Shut the fuck up, you Calvinist prick.”
“Knoxist. I am Presbyterian. Church of Scotland. Calvin’s Swiss. When you make your slurs you should make sure to get them correct.”
“All you Wasps are the same.”
The beat officers removed one barrier segment of the cordon, granting the detectives passage. They drove on through the thickly spread crowd and quickly faded from sight into the darkness provided by the shadows of the closely packed skyscrapers of the old downtown.
“I’m not Anglo-Saxon, you dumb retarded shit. Scottish ain’t English, but don’t tell Al Sharpton. He might take it the wrong way.”
Pizarro drove southward through the sleepy downtown past the Frost office building to catch State Highway 88 North towards the mountain hamlet of Cathedral. The road was empty. The city’s rush hour was just a short hitch in the usual quiet of another dog day.
“. . . I still think that Shooter was the worst movie since Commando.”
“Rhona Mitra is fucking hot. Any movie with her in it cannot be half bad.”
“I still think the movie was shit and I don’t care who sues me. I liked the Parallax View the first time I saw it. Besides . . . Nick Memphis, what kind of character name is that? Sounds like a wrestler from the 50s. Let me pick the fucking movie next time and no Marky Mark and the funkless bunch.”
“It’s just a movie, relax, aios mio bendejo.”
Swarbrick was incensed as was the case when it came to the bad trips to the cinema, the Hartford New Haven
Pizarro sped up the entrance ramp and took to the fast far left-hand lane. The car spewed out its heavy gray exhaust complimenting the summer haze. This perpetually supernal smog belt of spent carbon gases truncated the waning hours of the day.
“Why is this road always so shitty?” Pizarro asked himself.
He sat awkwardly in the driver’s seat without the seatbelt. That was really not his fault; none of the radio cars had seatbelts and none before them. The County would not waste money on such ridiculous and unnecessary expenditures that is unless some one died and they lost the inevitable lawsuit to a personal injury lawyer who advertises on television during Jerry Springer and Maury Povich. You are not the Father! The chances of that were steadily increasing.
The car sped calmly north. The further from the city they traveled the more trees flanked the quiet highway. The northbound and southbound lanes weaved in between dense stands of firs, birches, and rock maples. The embankments and grounds were lined with vetch, heather, and Penn’s Gift which rose alongside the gentle slopes closer to the detached hamlet and the dormant ski areas that could never hope to advertise themselves as resorts.
The unmarked obvious to all police car bounced hard against a yards wide pothole as they entered the Cathedral tunnel. The wax paper yellow light of the conduit tube illuminated the sedan for the two minutes spent driving under the mountain. The rim of their front wheel came loose and was promptly crushed by an eighteen-wheeler, scrapping bright yellow sparks across the circular hole. The truck was filled with urinal cakes bound for the Berkshires as it would take the Jacob’s Ladder once it entered Massachusetts about another thirty miles north of the Vale.
Meanwhile far from the Cathedral Tunnel, Lieutenant Rakove arrived at his home in the Cavalier Lake section of the Vale, which lay eight kilometers south of the Wycliffe campus near the southern ridge that separated the county from the interstate and the distant lights of Danbury and Meriden. He left his gear in the car and closed the garage door manually before entering the mudroom to be greeted by his eager dogs. They showed him the kind of undying loyalty that reminded him of the stark difference between his wife’s equivocations and the certainty of the dogs’ love.
After the dogs gave him their obligatory welcome, rolling on their backs and urinating blindly into the air, they ran back upstairs to the master bedroom to sleep in his empty bed. He fumbled through the refrigerator finding nothing but those items well past their expiration date.
He decided to drink what was left of the alcohol supply that his wife had not taken on her most recent and unannounced departure. She left a bottle of Jim Beam behind a mold infested Grey Goose underneath the kitchen sink among the leaking plastic containers of household cleaners. She hated the taste of bourbon, finding its aftertaste uncivilized.
Rakove took his seat at the circular pine table in the center of the kitchen underneath the hanging lamp. He set a shot glass next to the bottle of bourbon, which he promptly poured. He proceeded to raise a toast for Bezzeg and began to pound them down singing along to his Blind Faith record, at least the Steve Winwood parts forsaking Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker and that other nameless guy.
The music of his living memory was comforting, a welcome change of pace from his day talking down suicides, liquor store gunmen, and junkies, but more so from the artificial traumas that his wife selfishly fabricated to run-away to her mothers in Thomaston and complain incessantly.
The bourbon burned on his throat before his bloodstream became infected with the poison. His brain numbed to a level of unbreakable tranquility. This peace would end the following morning when she made her grande entrance, rife with all the eccentricity and melodrama of a good telenovela. Ivonne was trapped in her childish petulance and John’s steadily growing apathy for life. This was the nature of their non-committal relationship. Everything was a part of an unwinnable game of spite and accusation, which she overtly enjoyed, where escape and divorce were forbidden. He put his gun into his mouth. The final cymbal crash of Can’t Find my way Home ringed in his ears as he fell to the floor.
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