CHAPTER TWO

Liberation

 

CASON NEEDS TO leave.

His skin itches. His brow is hot. He feels drunk—a drunk that see-saws between giddy, insensate bliss and a dispirited wave of vomit and disappointment.

Down the steps. Boots on plush carpet. Everything in dark wood and antique bronze. It used to feel rich and elegant: he a bulldog sitting in the lap of luxury. Now it all feels hollow and empty. Like a building on a studio backlot. The wallpaper seems to bubble up. The floors have lost their shine. Light bulbs flicker in rusted fixtures.

In the second floor parlor, he finds the Croskey twins.

Ivan is curled up in a fetal position on a glass-top coffee table. Biting into his own forearm—blood running down his jawline to his ear, to the table. As he bites, he sobs.

Aiden stands across the room, bashing his head against the slate-top mantled corner of the fireplace. He’s breaking his own skull. As Cason stands there, the corner finally cracks through the top of his head—a broken egg, the yolk scrambled. Aiden babbles something, then falls backward with a thud.

“Holy shit,” Cason says.

You have to leave.

Ivan continues to blubber and bite. Aiden’s heels twitch against the floor.

You’re free.

Cason unroots his feet from this horrible room and heads to the second set of steps. He almost falls down them, he’s so eager to escape, but he steadies himself. At the bottom, he sees the front door in the foyer—and the guard who was supposed to be manning the door is there. Joe-Joe Kerns. Big sonofabitch. Head like a waxed cue ball. And now he’s dead. Laying in a crumpled heap on the floor like a sack of spilled potatoes. Head bashed in with something.

Then: a boot scuff.

Cason wheels.

The man standing by the laundry chute—a wrought iron hatch now open—is in a dirty t-shirt and a pair of slashed-up grease-stained corduroys, but it’s his face that draws all the attention. Guy’s got a mug that looks like it’s been through a wood chipper. Eyes bulging wide, utterly lidless. Lips gone. Ears just puckered holes. Cheeks, forehead, chin, all puffy with the lacework of scars, curls and spirals, and hard, perpendicular slashes. At first Cason thinks—Was this guy in the blast? But the scars and wounds are old. Shiny and swollen with time.

“Who are you?” Cason asks.

Then he sees: the man holds a small black box with a pair of shiny antennae and two control sticks. A remote.

“You did this,” Cason says.

But the man just smiles—a smile made all the bigger by the lack of lips—and in this wretched rictus grin he offers teeth that are white, too white, and then he presses a finger to that grinning slit as if to say shhhhh.

The man drops the remote on the floor.

Then he dives headfirst through the laundry chute.

The iron door bangs shut.

Cason’s not even sure he saw what he saw.

It doesn’t matter.

It doesn’t involve you.

You’re free.

He goes to the front door, steps over Joe-Joe’s cooling body, and makes his escape.

 

 

HE’S HAD BUDDIES who did stints upstate, and buddies who ended up at Curran-Fromhold here in town—maybe assault, maybe battery, often robbery, never more than a dozen years in—and this, Cason thinks, is what it must be like to get out.

He steps onto the Olde City sidewalk. It’s night. Nobody’s around. The air is warm. It’s not like he hasn’t been outside for the last ten years, but this—this is different. He smells the air and it stinks of the chemical shit-stain that pervades Philly, but just now it doesn’t smell so bad. That bitter burn odor smells like freedom.

The air, crisper than usual. Everything, hyper-real.

Then: sirens rise in the distance.

The bomb.

Cason sees glass glittery on the sidewalk. He looks up: the upper floor windows are all blown out. Snakes of smoke rise from the holes, drift toward the starless sky.

The sirens get closer.

At first, he thinks—I don’t know where to go—but that’s not true at all. He knows exactly where he wants to go, and before he even realizes it, his feet are carrying him toward the corner of Chestnut (not far from Independence Hall, a fact that until now had been nowhere near appropriate but that suddenly felt utterly prescient).

Cars. Bleary lights. He looks at his watch: 8pm.

A couple ducks past him, arms linked at the crook. Giggling, suddenly stopping to mash their mouths together and play a speed round of tonsil hockey.

A homeless dude in Hawaiian shorts and a grungy polo sits nearby. Head leaning back against a brick wall, snoring. A skinny dog slumbers in his lap.

Across the street, two kids with skateboards scream obscenities and threats at one another: fuck you, no fuck you, you piece of shit, suck my dick if you think I’mma—

Whatever. Cason hates this town. Always has. Always will.

He flags a cab and gets in.

 

 

“WHERE TO, CHIEF?”

Big black dude driving the taxi; looks too big for the car. His accent is—well, Cason doesn’t know. African, if he had to guess.

“Uh, hold on,” Cason says. He pulls his wallet. Fishes through money—not much else in the wallet besides that—and feels a cold spike of panic lance his heart. He can’t find it. It’s not here. It’s not here.

But then, it is there. Tucked in the fold of a fiver.

He goes to hand the little piece of paper across the seat, but the cabbie’s behind a Plexiglas divider. Instead, he reads it off.

The cabbie laughs. “That’s... that’s not in the city, my man.”

“I know. It’s up in Bucks County.”

“Yeah. Yeah. I don’t drive there.”

“Please. You have to.”

“No. No. This isn’t—this isn’t what I do, chief. You find another cab. Okay?”

“Not okay. Here, look—” Cason starts pulling out money. “Hundred bucks. Fifty now. Fifty when I get there.”

The cabbie turns and stares at him through the scratched up Plexiglas. Guy’s got a stare that could make a tiger show its belly. “Seventy-five now. Seventy-five when we get there. That’s it. That’s the deal, man.”

“Fine. Yeah. That’s the deal, then.” Cason fishes out money. Counts it. Pops it in the little drawer and pushes it through.

The cab pulls away from the curb.

 

 

THE CRACKLE OF fire.

Windshield glass on asphalt.

Blood on the road.

Cason tries to get his hands under him, but it’s they’re like rubber bands without any tension and everything feels slippery and melty and scorched like burned butter—

He rolls onto his back. His head feels ten times bigger. A medicine ball on a broomstick. Feeling like a dozen kids are kicking it all at once. Whoomp whoomp whoomp whoomp.

Smells smoke.

Oh, god. God, no.

Alison. And Barney.

No, no, no, no, NO.

He sits up—whole body feels like he’s been in the ring with all the fighters he’s ever fought, Muay Thai and Jeet Kune Do and Greco-Roman motherfuckers all at once—but somehow he hinges his body and pushes through the pain to sit, then stand.

His car, the Honda, is off to the side of the road. The white SUV that t-boned them—a Yukon full-size—has a crumpled front-end but otherwise looks fine. No driver there.

But the Honda is on fire.

Cason runs toward the vehicle that’s bright and hot like the tip of a flare.

Alison starts to scream.

It’s not a horror movie scream, it’s not a just-saw-a-mouse-in-the-kitchen scream. It’s a jagged, jerking thing, as alive a thing as it can be—it’s the scream of someone burning to death.

Alison is burning.

And Barney—

 

 

“HEY, MAN, YOU from Philly?”

Cason shudders awake like a man rising out of cold water. He sucks in a hard gasp of air and looks around. The cab. Plexiglas. Torn-and-taped seat. Big dude driving.

“What?” Cason asks.

“You asleep?”

“What? No; well. Was.” He shakes his head, pushes the sleepiness back to the margins. Still hears the distant echo of that scream in the back of his mind. “What’d you wanna know again?”

“I didn’t mean to wake you, chief. I just ask: you from the city?”

“Kenzo. Kensington.”

“Yeah, man. I know Kensington.”

“I don’t live there anymore. Area turned to shit. It’s all drugs and jailhouse tats and—it’s trouble. Everything there is trouble.”

Outside, the sodium lights of the turnpike whizz past as they head north.

“You got family back there?”

Cason blinks. Family. “A brother.” A useless insane fuck of a brother. “You?”

“Got a big damn family, man. Big damn family. Brothers and sisters and cousins and my mother and more cousins and—you know. Big damn family. Right? Still live with them over in Gray’s Ferry.”

“Sorry to hear that,” Cason says, regretting the words as soon as they tumble out of his mouth, like so much ash. “Wait, hold up, I don’t mean anything by it—”

“No, chief, you’re right. It’s shit there. It’s all shit. Everybody mad at everybody else. Last week a woman got stabbed there, you know? Right on the corner. Drug corner or something. They don’t know if one of the dealers did it or one of the white-boy Catholics who are mad at the dealers, but it doesn’t even matter. Because a woman is dead.”

“That’s Philadelphia.” That’s why I hate this town.

“My brothers all want to pray, you see? They want to pray it all away.”

“They church folk?”

“No, no, Islam. Nation of Islam.”

“You’re Muslim?”

“Not me, man. Not me. I don’t believe in made-up fairy tales, right? That’s all bullshit, man. It’s all bullshit. You believe in that?”

I just saw a man turn to a skin-suit filled with feathers. A man who made me his indentured servant for the last five years because of a ‘bargain’ we made. A man who had a power over other people like I’ve never seen before and will hopefully never see again.

He says none of that. Instead he just says, “I don’t know what I believe anymore.”

“That’s the truth, man. That’s the truth of it all.”

“Truth.” Cason rubs his eyes. “Yup.”

“Where we going, anyway?”

“I told you. Bucks County. Doylestown. You need the address again?”

“No, man, I got that, I mean, what you got there? Who you got?”

“Family.”

“Not the brother.”

“Different family.”

“Parents?”

Cason shakes his head. “Both dead.”

“Wife? Kids?”

“I, ah, don’t know.” It’s an honest answer, but not a good one.

“Okay, okay, that’s cool, chief. That’s all cool.”