DIRTY SALLY
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2
9:30
A.M. East Twelfth Street
Death
approaches from the left, a medic once told me. Its
cold form moves up beside you from the left, touches
you and takes you. In desperate situations, medics
park themselves on a patient's left side to get in
death's way.
I
badged the patrolman on guard and parked in the commandeered
lot at Casa Rosa Apartments, a two-story modem complex
with a wrought-iron outside staircase and puke pink
stucco. Fire Department, EMS and APD uniforms crowded
the scene, crossing each other's paths like they were
all chief surgeon at the Mayo Clinic. Ambulance lights
flashed uselessly while techs blocked the street and
held reporters and gawkers back with yellow crime-scene
tape so they could measure the space between skid
marks, chunks of broken headlight and detached extremities.
Low-end lawyers who heard about the accident on the
police band, scampered up to sniff for manslaughter
charges or a juicy wrongful-death lawsuit. A ghostly
white patrolman cornered me with a paper coffee cup.
"Sergeant
Reles? I'm Flenniken, sir." Looking past Flenniken,
I thought I saw Joey in the crowd and I blinked hard.
It was a husky dark guy, but a decade younger and
alive. Joey's body got pulled from his car, autopsied
and buried six months ago, I reminded myself. But I
never got to say goodbye and I still kept half-expecting
him to sneak up, slap me on the back and yell, "Dañel!
Let's get 'em!"
I
gulped half the lukewarm coffee. "How'd ya know
it was me?" "Dispatch told me to look for
someone who ... who looked like he might want a cup
of coffee, " Flenniken said.
"Nice.
What'd she really say?" A fire truck headed off
to find a fire. I looked at the sky.
He
coughed. "She said you were muscled and handsome
in a busted-up boxer sort of way. You'd look like
you got your clothes off the floor. And you'd need
coffee. Sir."
"Jesus,
nine-thirty A.M. and it's baking already. What month
is it?"
"September."
The
coffee kicked in. I swallowed the dregs and handed
him the empty cup. "Good. Only five months left
of summer. What happened here?"
According
to Flenniken, Rick Schate left his girlfriend's house,
paid for a breakfast taco at a stand on the south
side of East twelfth and shot across the street—the
driver and four passengers confirmed this—to
catch the number 6 westbound bus just as the number
6 eastbound bus slammed into him, threw him twenty
feet, then hit him again and rolled over him as its
brakes squealed, catching his rib cage on its axle
and dragging him another fifty feet before it came
to a full stop on the overpass above the creek, a
bloody stripe of Schate mapping its path. The Fire
Department, first on the scene, backed up the bus
and dislodged his crushed torso from the axle. They
respirated and CPR'd him, bunched up on his left,
then watched his face turn a cyanotic blue and felt
a cool presence move through them as his last heartbeat
blipped across the tiny screen.
Flenniken
led me to the area in front of the bus where the medics
had already slipped what was left of Schate into a
clear bodybag—head, crushed torso, left leg,
detached right leg, left arm, separated section of
left hand. "Where's
his right arm?" I asked. Flenniken and the medics
looked around like they forgot their homework. "Christ,
Flenniken, go back to the point of impact. One of
you go with him."
I
climbed down the sandy slope into the ravine, muttering
about sniffing for lost arms on a bullshit case that
came down to protecting the city from a legitimate
lawsuit. A tiny creek trickled south under East Twelfth
Street. A paved footpath ran parallel to the creek,
through the underpass. Someone thought to tape off
the pass north and south, to keep the area clear of
morning joggers and kids getting high before school.
I scanned the underpass: gang graffiti splattered
its walls alongside hieroglyphics of overturned champagne
glasses and the declaration I LOVE BROOKLYN spray-painted
in block letters, probably by an exile like me. Mosquitoes
swarmed in the vapor. In the shadow against one wall,
I saw something that made me blink. It looked like
a woman lying near the wall but the head and arms
were barely formed, as if they were melting, real
but not real. I got closer and blinked again, tried
to focus my eyes in the sudden shade. I saw it was
a sculpture, a sloppy sculpture of a woman made of
sand and dirt, the head a big formless clod of gravel,
the arms spread, one leg straight, another pile of
dirt that was probably supposed to be the other leg
bent at the knee. Something about it felt wrong. I
stepped closer and bent over her. She was fake, sand
and gravel fake, not even a good job of it, in the
head, arms, and legs. But the rest of her, from the
collar down—breasts, midsection and pelvis—was
real, human, naked and very dead.
I
stumbled toward the sunlight, wide awake now, and
yelled at the first tech I saw. "Send Flenniken
down here with a print kit and get the medical examiner.
We have a homicide!"
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