December Park

  “Kim Freeman’s brother is driving us,” Rachel said, then looked at me slyly. “You afraid the Piper’s gonna get me?”

  “You just gotta be careful,” I said.

  The bored-looking woman behind the counter said, “Next.”

  Peter shoved me forward. I ordered three hot dogs, then turned to Rachel to see if she wanted one. But she was already moving through the crowd to rejoin her friends on the bleachers.

  “You got a crush now or something?” Peter muttered.

  “Get bent.” I peered past him to Adrian. “And thanks for blabbin’ about my curfew, Benedict Arnold.”

  “Yeah,” Peter said. “Smooth move, ex-lax.”

  “What’s ex-lax?” Adrian asked.

  “You kids want these dogs or what?” barked the woman behind the counter.

  I set my money on the countertop, took the three hot dogs from her, and handed one each to Peter and Adrian. When the woman brought me my change, I stuffed it into my pocket, then carried my hot dog to the condiments table. I was pumping copious amounts of mustard onto my hot dog when a shadow fell across me.

  I looked up, hoping to find Rachel again. Instead, I found myself staring into the clear gray eyes of a police officer. He was young and vaguely familiar, though I didn’t know his name. I smiled timidly, then moved over to a bin of diced onions.

  The police officer held a hot dog under the mustard spigot. He pressed down on it, and the spigot farted bright yellow mustard onto the dog.

  “Excuse me,” I said, cradling my hot dog like a football and swerving around the police office to rejoin my friends.

  On the bandstand, Sasha Tamblin plugged a guitar into an amp. Some other guys from Stanton picked up their guitars, and someone else climbed behind a small drum kit. I recognized one of the other musicians as Billy Foote, a droopy-eyed kid who used to swallow rocks on the school playground to impress the older kids.

  “Let’s get closer,” Peter suggested.

  The five of us moved through the crowd and gathered around the bandstand railing.

  Sasha saw us and smiled crookedly. He pulled the guitar strap over his head, then walked up to the microphone at the front of the stage. “Happy Fourth of July, everybody,” he said, his voice resonating over the loudspeakers.

  Applause erupted from the audience.

  Sasha began strumming distorted power chords, and after two bars, the rest of the band jumped in. The song was melodic, powerful, catchy, and wholly unidentifiable. It was his; he had written it.

  We cheered him on.

  At 8:15, just as the county selectmen migrated toward the wall of black rocks that faced the bay in preparation for the fireworks, I told my friends I had to get home.

  “Dude,” Michael bleated, bouncing up on his heels. He had stolen crêpe streamers from one of the victory booths and had them taped to his arms and shoulders, three-foot-long tendrils flapping in the wind. “The fireworks, man! They’re gonna start in a half hour.”

  “I gotta be home by curfew,” I said.

  “Curfew’s lifted.”

  “Not my dad’s curfew.” I sucked at my lower lip and watched the people slowly migrating toward the water. Blankets were spread out in the grass. A few kids tossed around a Frisbee with their parents. “I’ll see you guys tomorrow.”

  “Later, skater,” Michael said. He flicked Scott’s earlobe and said, “Let’s get a spot closer to the show.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Adrian said to me.

  “Thanks,” I said, “but you don’t have to.”

  “No one goes around alone,” he said. “Remember?”

  “Yeah,” Peter said. “I’ll go, too.”

  “Really, you guys don’t have to—”

  “Who wants to look at some stupid fireworks, anyway?” Peter said.

  Scott looked out across the water and at the floating barge on which the fireworks display was set up. Then he looked at Peter and me. “Yeah,” he said. There was a dollop of ketchup in one corner of his mouth. “It’s just a bunch of bright lights flashing in the sky. Big deal.”

  “Are you kidding?” Michael countered. “Fireworks are the best part. Loud noises make all the babies cry.”

  “You’re a psychopath,” Peter told him.

  “Let’s just catch the first five minutes.”

  “Do what you want,” I said, already heading up Third Avenue against the crowd.

  My friends rushed up to flank me on either side, their footfalls falling in step with mine.

  “You’re right,” Michael commented, holding his arms out so that the crêpe streamers flared out. “Fireworks are for pussies.”

  Because I felt someone watching me, I turned around and glanced over my shoulder. The crowd was headed in the opposite direction, so I glimpsed mostly the backs of people’s heads. But one person stood among them, facing me, with an eerily stoic expression.

  It was the police officer I’d nearly bumped into at the hot dog booth.

  My pace slowed enough so that my friends paused, too.

  Peter followed my gaze, then tugged at my arm. “You looking for your girlfriend?” he said in a singsong voice.

  “I recognize that cop,” I said . . . and just saying it aloud brought it all back to me in a rush. This was the same cop who had been at the Ransoms’ house on New Year’s Eve when my father and I arrived. He had been the first one on the scene.

  Peter frowned. “So what? Half the cops in this town know who you are.”

  “That’s not the same thing,” I said.

  “That’s him,” Scott said. “Michael, take a look.”

  “Yeah,” Michael said, nodding. “Yeah, that’s him, all right.”

  “Him who?” I said.

  “The guy Michael and I saw in the woods. The guy who was going through our stuff.”

  “You didn’t say he was a police officer,” Peter said.

  “He wasn’t wearing a uniform,” Scott said. “But that’s definitely him.”

  “Sure is,” said Michael.

  Adrian swallowed audibly. “Why is he staring at us?”

  “He’s not,” Peter said, though I didn’t think he sounded too convinced himself.

  At that moment, the police officer turned and blended into the crowd. A moment later, he was gone.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  The Confrontation

  You said yourself that the Piper could be a cop,” Scott reminded me as the five of us walked home. The evening sky was full of stars, though there was still a banner of pinkish orange out in the west. The streetlights came on, the traffic lessened, and soon we heard the fireworks exploding over the water.

  “Yeah, but I wasn’t being serious,” I said.

  “So the same guy who was searching through our stuff down in the woods just happens to be first on the scene the night Aaron Ransom disappears?”

  “It does sound suspicious,” Peter added.

  “Why would the Piper be the first on the scene to his own crime?” I said.

  “To make sure he didn’t leave any evidence behind,” Michael said.

  I shot him a glare. “You’re on this bandwagon now, too?”

  “Hey! I saw him down in the woods that day. This shit is real, Angie. Just because you don’t want to believe cops can be serial killers—”

  “What do I care if it’s a cop or not?” I said.

  “Well, because of your dad,” Michael said.

  “My dad’s not the Piper, you dipshit.”

  Michael turned to Adrian. “What do you think? You’ve been pretty quiet.”

  After a few more moments of silence, Adrian said, “If the killer is a cop, we’re in a lot of trouble.”

  When we reached Solomon’s Bend Road, we were faced with the decision of either following the road all the way around the park to the highway or cutting across Solomon’s Field. I didn’t think I would make it home on time if we went the long way, so we opted for the shortcut.

  Solomon’s Field was dotted with lamppo
sts at intervals along a paved running track. On the street above, arc lights cast pools of sodium light onto the grass. The mouth of the underpass looked like a train tunnel that had been bored through the base of a mountain. As we drew closer to it, the signs posted along the walkway seemed to radiate out of the dark—

  Park Closes at Dusk

  By Order of the Harting Farms Police Department

  Just as we were about to enter the underpass, someone called out, “Holy hell! Look who’s here!”

  We all froze.

  “Holy hell,” Nathan Keener said again, materializing out of the dark. He stood spotlighted in the glow of light that spilled down from the road above, the light assigning a ghastly paleness to his complexion. He looked like a vampire.

  Denny Sallis and Eric Falconette were with him, all three of them clutching a bottle of Budweiser. Sallis’s face hosted a devious smirk that spoke of bad intentions, and while that was awful enough, it was no match for the psychotic wheels I saw turning behind the dead eyes of Eric Falconette. Sallis took a swig from his beer bottle, then lobbed it in our direction.

  “Is that you, Mazzone?” Keener said. His body seemed to fold over into a compact missile shape, his head forward on his neck, his shoulders slightly bladed as if he were preparing to jackknife off a high dive. He dug his boots into the dirt and crunched some dry sticks. For one horrific moment, I thought he was going to charge me like a bull. “Seems you and me got some unfinished business, huh?”

  “You the one who fucked up his truck?” Sallis executed two wobbly steps in our direction, and I could see that he was drunk, stoned, or possibly both. “He the piece of shit did that to your truck, Nate?”

  “Get over here,” Keener growled at me—actually growled. Teeth clenched, cheeks quivering. I could feel his eyes drilling into mine, and there was nothing but fiery golden hate shimmering in the depths of his pupils. “The rest of you get the fuck outta here.”

  No one moved.

  “I said split, fuckers,” Keener said.

  “You split,” Adrian said. His oversized glasses did little to cover up the fear on his face.

  Keener’s head swung in Adrian’s direction. “What’d you say, you little faggot?”

  “I said you split.” Frightened or not, his voice didn’t falter.

  “You little queer,” Keener said, his teeth still clenched. “You little cocksucker. I’ll kill you, too, you talk to me like that again.”

  Adrian stood his ground. “You’re not welcome here.”

  Jesus Christ, he’s going to get himself killed, I thought. Keener will kill both of us.

  Denny Sallis bleated laughter. His teeth looked like baked beans.

  Keener looked stunned. “Not welcome here? What the fuck is that?”

  “This park is ours,” Adrian said. “Now leave us alone. We weren’t bothering you.”

  “Shut up,” Peter muttered.

  Keener lifted his beer bottle and, holding it by the neck, cracked it against the stone wall of the underpass. The bottle broke, leaving him holding a jagged weapon that glinted in the lamplight. “How ’bout this? How ’bout I cut your fucking throats? All of you. I’ll carve your fucking eyes out of your skulls.”

  Michael made a sudden movement with his right arm, and Keener’s squared head swiveled in his direction. But Falconette kept his eyes on me, sighted in his crosshairs.

  Michael held up his switchblade, the one Scott had purchased for him in the spring.

  Sallis broke out into fresh laughter. He was like a busted toy, unable to do anything else.

  “You’ve gotta be fuckin’ kidding me,” Keener said. He sounded almost irritated. “I want to know which one of you motherfuckers messed up my truck.”

  “We didn’t do anything to your truck,” I said, finding my voice at last.

  “Bullshit.” He pointed the busted bottle in Scott’s direction. “Spill it.”

  “We didn’t do shit,” Scott said. His fists were clenched at his side.

  “Get lost,” Adrian said again. This time his voice cracked. He looked like he was about to be ill.

  “Let’s open ’em up, Nate.” Falconette’s voice was disconcertingly calm. “Let’s cut off some pieces.”

  “There’s five of us,” Michael said, “and three of you. And I got a knife.”

  “So do I,” Scott said, whipping his butterfly knife out from his pocket. He twirled the blade like a pro.

  “Yeah,” Peter said, pulling his switchblade from his pocket. The blade sprung out with a hollow clunk. “Get the fuck outta here and leave us the hell alone.”

  Sallis’s laughter died for good this time—it cranked to a slow and reedy whine until it wound down altogether. He shifted his bleary eyes to his discarded beer bottle, which was now lodged in the mud. He clumsily went for it, but Scott was closer, and he kicked it across the grass and into the shadows. Sallis stopped in mid-leap, a look of confusion etched onto his face.

  “You little shits don’t have the balls,” Keener said.

  “You little faggots,” Sallis cried.

  Adrian opened his knife and held it awkwardly at his side. I popped out the rusted blade of my knife, extended it so I was sure I had Keener’s attention, then turned it upside down and let it fall to the ground. It struck the mud blade-first.

  Anger gripped me. I felt a boiling heat rise through the core of my body. I was done running from these assholes.

  “You want to end this,” I said, “then let’s do it now. Just you and me. Fair fight. With just our fists.”

  “I’ll rip you apart,” Keener sneered. Fire still danced in his eyes.

  “Yeah,” I said. “You probably will. But I’ll hurt you, too. You won’t walk away from this without hurting. I promise.”

  “We all promise,” Adrian added, touching the tip of his nose.

  “Then that’ll be the end of it,” I said.

  “Kill him, Nate,” Sallis shouted. His face was stricken, pale, trembling with anger. “Bust his fucking face in half.”

  I pointed at Sallis. “But it’s just me and him. You try to jump in on it, and my friends will cut you up.” I looked at Falconette. “Goes for you, too.”

  Falconette’s grin was as hideous a sight as anything I had ever seen. But he didn’t challenge me, and I had gone too far to back down now.

  “And what about your friends?” Keener said. “They gonna shiv me in the back while I’m whooping your ass, fucker?”

  “No.” I looked at each of my friends. “No one steps in. No one gets involved.” I held my gaze longest on Scott, who looked ready to rush over to Keener and fillet him with his butterfly knife. “It’s just him and me.”

  Their faces were a maelstrom of varying emotions. Yet they all nodded.

  “There we go,” I said, turning to Keener.

  The rest happened quickly but also in slow motion.

  Keener dropped the busted bottle and launched himself at me. He tackled me around the waist, knocking the wind out of my lungs. When I hit the ground, my teeth shook like ball bearings in my skull, and my vision dispersed in patterns of fiery light like the fireworks at Market Square. Straddling me, the son of a bitch struck me repeatedly in the small of my back. Out of instinct I pulled myself into a fetal position, but that only exposed more of my back and spine to Keener’s punches. I bucked my hips and knocked him off me.

  I rolled away, my ribs and back aching, my heart thumping fervently in my throat. Just as I scrambled to my feet, Keener charged me again, swinging. I jerked backward and watched a fist roughly the size of a wrecking ball whiz past my face. As his arm then shoulder blurred by, I fired a right hook at the exposed white flesh of Keener’s right cheek. The punch connected, and it felt as though my wrist collapsed like a telescope under the force.

  Keener grunted. The momentum of his poorly calculated punch kept him moving forward. I threw a second punch that connected with his right shoulder blade. He whirled around, and in that instant I saw nothing but burning yellow
eyes and the gnashing teeth of a bloodthirsty predator. He collided with me, all his furious weight knocking me to the ground again.

  In my mind’s eye, I saw my father teaching Charles and me how to defend ourselves in our backyard, the borrowed sparring gear from the police station scattered about the lawn. I saw Charles throw punch after punch, his dark hair glistening with sweat, the smooth muscles of his arms moving with each jab. There was a controlled fluidity to his movements. Then I thought of him blown apart in a foreign country, the bloody tatters of his military uniform and the pieces of his body strewn about like refuse after a storm, and the empty coffin buried next to my mother’s grave on Cemetery Hill . . .

  When I returned to real life, I was on top of Keener, thrashing his face in a furious barrage of punches and slaps. At one point I grabbed him by the cheekbones and drove his head down into the mud. Repeatedly. I smashed the front of his face with a fist and heard the sound of his nose breaking. A spume of blood, impossibly red, spurted up into the air and spattered in an arc across his left cheek and my knuckles. Then, in the blink of an eye, all I saw were monochromatic shades of gray—bands of gray blurring into one another and filing by like the image on a television set whose vertical hold needs adjusting.

  Someone’s arms looped around my waist. I howled, my eyes blurry with tears, and thrashed back and forth, clawing at the person’s arms that had slid up and were now secured across my heaving chest. As I was dragged off Keener, kicking and shouting, the color gradually seeped back into the world: beneath the sodium lights, I saw the bright red blood on my hands, my shirt, and on Keener’s face as he lifted his head drunkenly off the ground.

  “Stop,” someone whispered very close to my ear. The command came over and over and over again, although never changing pitch. “Stop. Stop. Stop.”

  I ripped the person’s arms off me and spun around to find Peter standing there. He held up both hands, as if offering proof that he had finally let me go.