Their eyes met and stuck that way until the boy tore them apart.
Null thrust him through the door while Boyd stood before him, shaking slightly.
Rudy, the boy, screamed as he was thrown into the living room of the condo.
“This is what you wanted,” said Null coolly.
“I don’t want anything from you!” she cried.
Null pushed his way in as the boy, sweaty, dirty and panting, sat down on the rug. He slammed the door and for some unknown reason, despite being red-faced with emotion, maybe even anger, Boyd acquiesced. It was late, edging on 10 pm, and Boyd was tired, distraught, taken aback. She was full of need and confused repulsion.
“Can I have a burrito?” Rudy whined. “I’m hungry.”
“Not now,” said Null. “Later. But not much later.”
The boy slumped down, disgruntled.
“Who is this kid?” Boyd stammered.
“His name’s Rudy, and he’ll keep you busy.”
“I’m busy enough. Get him and yourself out of here—”
“Before you call a cop?”
“You know I won’t do that. I can’t really. What do you want from me?”
“It’s what you want from me that I can’t give.”
“So you say.”
“So I do, but you know it’s true.”
By this time, Rudy had gotten up and was foraging for food in the kitchen, which he found moving from room to room.
“Get back here!” shouted Null.
“Let him go,” said Boyd, grabbing his shoulder. “There’s not much food here and what he finds he can have. There’s not much for him to steal—what harm can he do?”
“He could set fire to the place.”
“But he won’t.”
“No, he won’t.”
“What do you want?”
“You know I don’t want,” he said icily. “It’s what you want.”
“I don’t get you. Really, you and him have to go. I have work tomorrow and I can’t handle this!”
“You need a drink.”
“I always need a drink.”
“Maybe you don’t really need it. Maybe it’s not a physical addiction. Maybe you need something else.”
“Like what?”
Null’s brow wrinkled. His lips were dry. “Love, of course. Love I can’t give you. But more importantly, love that you have to give. You need to love. And stupidly enough, you love me.”
“That can change,” she croaked. “It already has. I know what you are.”
“Yet you still love me. But I can’t love you back. I can’t love anything. Whatever the drug of the gum had given me has collapsed. Whatever sensitive humanity of feeling and grace that was there for you has crumbled away to nothing and left me with nothing. Bereft so much I cannot even grieve.”
Boyd plowed into him, hit him with her fists. “But there must be a way, a therapy, some method!”
“No,” said Null, grabbing her wrists. “Benway burned the bridge. Whatever was there just isn’t anymore. And I am left what I was after the treatment, crossing in the fire.”
“A zombie.” She sniffled, forcing back tears.
“Something like that. I’m not really dead, but I might as well be.”
“If a dimwit like Benway could come up with something, maybe the real geniuses can! You can’t give up!”
“Benway was an idiot savant. He came up with something no one else has. I don’t think therapies exist for my particular syndrome, whatever it is.”
“Please don’t give up.” She kissed his impassive face. “Please.”
“It’s done.”
She pulled away. “Fine,” she said. “I can’t argue you into having human feeling. I can’t make you be with me, even though it’s the best thing for you and maybe for me. Just destroy everything, kill it all dead. It’s what you do.”
“I only do one thing,” said Null in a dull, near whisper. “Just one thing. Remember that.”
“What about the, boy—where’s he from? “What’s he doing here?”
“He’s from a farm for pedophiles in Florida. His father is a dead man who saved my life a couple of times who was dying of AIDS, anyway, but was killed because of me. His name is Rudy, no real last name, no real records, a John Doe foster/adoption case if ever there was one. Look at him, sitting on your kitchen floor eating Ben and Jerry’s ice cream from the tub with his fingers. Desperate and pathetic. Full of need.”
“I can’t do anything for him.”
“Sure you can. If he were a dog, you’d take him in. He’s worth as much as a dog, maybe more.”
“There’s nothing I can do, Joey—I can’t. My life won’t permit it.”
“Your life demands it. You’re wracked with the need to love, isolated and lonely, deprived of intimacy. Here’s your answer. No-name Rudy. If he stays with me, then his lifespan gets very short. If you don’t take him in, I’ll have to leave him to the street where he’ll have a better chance but will still wind up worse than his father. Either he’ll grow up the kind of criminal you’d put a bullet in in a New York minute, or he’ll be fodder for the freaks until they fuck him to death. You are the final stop-gap. You’re the last chance to take this mutt and turn him into a person. You can do it. Further, I know deep within you that you really want to do it.”
She turned away from him with more tears. “I can’t handle it. I just can’t.”
He grabbed her, shook her. “You can and you will!” This time he shouted such that it made Rudy put down the ice cream for a moment. “You want to love something, don’t you?”
“Yes!” she screamed at him. “Yes, alright I do!”
His eyes looked at her, glassy, unblinking, beady yet liquid, and he spoke softly, “Then love him.”
Boyd looked into the cold, dead eyes of Yonah Shimmel bound to a pivot board in an ancient Arlington basement as she pried them open. He was tripping his brains out. Tactical had canvassed the house, clearing each and every room. Just as Benway had said, he had left his aunt’s house for greener pastures and renegade Mic-Mac Indian Filmore Lakeworry, ace button man for the Ork gone rogue, was nowhere to be found, yet might return, running out of places to hole up while figuring out his own exit. She put Hundertwasser and another uniform cop on stake-out off Mass Ave. and had the team gingerly put the house back in order while removing the unconscious Shimmel to the awaiting pizza wagon.
She had a bigger dilemma than just daycare for the unruly Rudy, a five-year-old ball of madness, rage and pain, unpredictable and wild, who had been sprung upon her like a trap, or like an epiphany.
She had to decide about Null.
Boyd had told Null that Filmore Lakeworry, a.k.a. Lumpy or Heap, had contacted her directly from his deadman’s phone asking that Null deliver the gum for the release of Yonah Shimmel. She prevailed on him to do it, giving him the deadman’s phone number for time and place. Two quick texts and it was all set. Of course that was before Benway called in to give Lumpy up and surrender Shimmel as further good faith. As for turning himself in, well, sadly no. Benway was going to go on a long vacation and he hoped Boyd would never hear from him or of him again. He explained that Lumpy was likely to return to his aunt’s house and Boyd and company could catch him there, stake it out. Regardless and coldly, she let Null go and work his magic on Lumpy rather than see to it with Boston Police. She was sure it would be worse for Lumpy that way.
Typically, Null refused to take the gum. “I won’t need it,” he said. “And soon, nobody else will need it either.”
Did she think Null risked death heading after him?
She did.
But he agreed in an instant to do it, anyway.
“I only do one thing,” he had said again. “Just one thing.”
But she couldn’t bring herself to stop Null, especially now that the meeting was superfluous as a means to arrest the Indian, and that there would be no one there to do that. Just Null, stopping him in his own inimitable way.
She resolved not to go there, not to bring backup, to flush all knowledge of the impending incident away.
She was not going to help him.
She was not!
Yet when it came time, she was there in the shadows.
It was late that night on Atlantic Street past the North End at one of the waterfront construction high rises, a skeletal mass of girders and scaffolding. She was tempted to call for backup,
She didn’t.
She could see them at the top of the structure by a service elevator, two silhouettes, one short, one tall.
They collided into one another in what looked like a modern dance ballet against the moonlit, cloud-streaked sky.
There were gunshots and she couldn’t see them clearly amongst the distant shadows for a moment. Boyd held her breath, watching the mass of slow shifting shadows.
They were up and dancing again, clearly colliding against one another, yet seemingly reaching out for one another.
There was yet more dancing, again more shots, but none of the two fell. She grabbed her Android phone, ready to make the call, but didn’t. She was sweating, feeling stupid, feeling guilty, feeling hatred.
Then a scream, a loud muffled word, and a silhouetted figure went over the side of the girders and scaffolding—
And just hung there from a chain or a rope. Just hung, motionless.
The word escaped her mouth loud into the night. “Null!”
There was no response.
She started walking toward the structure, her Android phone clutched tightly in her hand.
This is what Lieutenant Kay Boyle, Organized Crime Specialist for the Boston Police, missed at such a remove from the semi-constructed high rise off Atlantic Avenue. She saw the two figures; could not really distinguish one from the other and could not certainly hear them. It went like this:
Null, late for the appointed time, took the scaffold elevator up ten flights to meet Lumpy at the pine board landing, supported by girders, plywood, joists and indeterminate scaffolding. He emerged at the final flight, unsteady and cautious regaled soon enough by Lumpy’s loud, jovial voice.
He said, “Hey, Joe, you got gum?”
“I should find that funny, but I don’t find anything funny anymore.”
“You’re carryin’, right?”
“I’m carrying, but not gum. You Filmore Lakeworry?”
He was breathing hard, feeling tired from his wounds and lack of sleep, but he could still handle this straw man. “Call me Lumpy. Everyone else does. Or Heap. Nobody calls me Filmore.”
“Not even your mother?”
“Never had one of those. I’m a child of the state.”
“Tell me where the criminalist is.”
“Gimme the gum and I’ll tell you where to collect the mope.”
“I’m empty. No gum.”
“Then tell me where I can get it.”
“You ain’t got nothin’ comin,” said Null evenly.
“That’s okay. You’re gonna give me the gum, anyway.”
“And how am I going to do that?”
“I’m gonna trade you for a box of Benway’s Chaw, a wad of cash and a ticket back in to the good graces of the Ork.”
“And how do you think you’ll do that?”
“Easy, Bro’. You ain’t too steady on those girders. When I come to do you, you’ll likely fall before I gut you like a pig, anyway. I’ll take a photo of you afterward with my phone.”
Null lunged forward and almost stumbled from his uneasy purchase on the girder.
Lumpy danced over to him mirthfully in a balletic parody and gestured at Null with his knife. Null fell backward onto a plywood board precariously situated between joists. Lumpy stomped on the board and Null fell one full story onto a narrow girder. He wheezed hard. Lumpy followed him down, easy and precise, swinging from a girder to alight on the main girder. Null fired at him with the Glock and missed. He fired again, but Lumpy gingerly ducked with athletic timing. They stood at opposite ends of the girder.
Null motioned to fire again and Lumpy knocked the gun out of his hand with a hanging winch on a chain.
They collided as an awestruck Boyd watched them below, visualizing it as a dance devoid of the actual struggle that couched and defined it. It was an awkward wrestling, a conflicted knot and Lumpy cut his sides with smooth knife strokes several times in vain, angling each time for an organ shot but deflected each time by a surprisingly agile Null. They broke apart and Null pushed Lumpy with everything he had to the edge of the scaffolding and Lumpy wavered, waving his arms frantically to keep his balance, jerked, then stopped. He said, “Whoa.”
He stood at a seemingly untenable angle, jerking about in spastic parody then dancing back and forth at the highest angle of the edge, ultimately making fun of Null. He made it plain that he had faked losing his balance.
“Try this, you wildcat zombie fuck, and you go over like a pancake. You can’t survive up here, but this place is my meat and potatoes.” He spun about, secure on one foot. “I’m gonna play with you before you die, like I did with the toads when I was a kid back at Assault n’ Stall.” He pseudo tap-danced on the edge for good measure, never missing.
Null tried to approach him and nearly went over. So he paused, drew the Colt .45 semi-automatic, and fired twice. Lumpy was suddenly nowhere.
Then he was behind Null, giving him an arm bar to the neck and the Colt fell far below while the Glock was only one story down resting on plywood. “How you wanna go, bro? Down to the street or by my knife, set you up like a scarecrow to meet the working stiffs tomorrow in the A.M.? “Tell me you zombie fuck!”
Null felt hot moisture by his side. He thought he might already have been stabbed.
But no, it wasn’t him. He wasn’t bleeding that much. It must have been Lumpy.
And then he knew.
Even as Lumpy reached with his free hand to draw his knife out again and slice Null up the gullet, Null located Lumpy’s unstitching wound with his finger and with a single punch reached in and drew out his liver, casting it down to the street. Lumpy stumbled, released Null and drew back, stunned and pained. The knife clattered down to the sacks of concrete at the foundation. Lumpy cradled his belly like a baby drenched in blood and moaned when he realized he was also cradling his viscera.
Null grabbed a rope swinging from the above story dead-ended to a winch and threw it hard against Lumpy’s head, whereupon it rebounded. He threw it again as Lumpy stood swaying, dismayed and almost tearful, with blood covering his arms and midsection, and wrapped it around his neck.
“You’ve lived a wasted life. You were thrown away like garbage from the very start and this is where your ending was marked, whether it was going to be me or someone else who gave it to you.”
“Shut up zombie fuck!” Lumpy wailed.
Null grabbed him firmly and opened his wounds further with his hands. Lumpy screamed.
“You’re a tragedy,” Null intoned. “A walking causation and cavalcade of death. How many did you kill Lumpy, since a child?”
“I don’t know, he shrieked, but you’re tearing me apart!”
“I am, yes, but life did that long before I ever laid eyes on you.” Null stuck his arm into the wound on the opposite side near his back and clawed deeply.
Lumpy screamed like a teenager being raped.
Null rattled it off: “Fetal alcohol syndrome, abandonment, torment, bullying, sodomy, survival and crime, you’ve had it all, Lumpy, and now you have this.”
Lumpy gritted his teeth, struggled to fight more, but Null just yanked a kidney out of his side, dropped it on the plywood and Lumpy sagged, crying pathetically like a child.
“If I could feel anything at all!” Null shouted to him. “I would feel for you!”
“Please,” Lumpy whimpered, buckling so as to be held up entirely by Null, vulnerable yet cringing. He flinched as Null moved.
Null whispered softly to him up close. “Death is for you,” then threw him over the side with the winch rope wrapped around his neck, wondering if it would hold strongly enough against the ragged scaffolding to break his neck.
He heard him call out one word as he went down.
In a curious moment to Null, it seemed to him that Lumpy had cried out loudly for the mother that he had never actually known.