Valentino Pier (Rapid Reads) Read online

  “I used to see him with his mother in the neighborhood. I knew the devil got hold of her from time to time. When he showed up at the warehouse, I knew the devil had her again. We played a game, the lad and me. I would leave a bag of food by that hole in the fence. Books to read. He would pretend they came from God. There was always food for the dog on me stoop. I kept one eye out for him. No one caused him trouble. He caused none to others.”

  Gulliver told her Ellis was lucky to have a guardian angel like her. He was a bit disappointed Mary hadn’t given him anything to work with. He stood to go. Thanked her for the tea. Gave her some money. “For the dog and cat food,” he said, pressing the cash into her hand.

  She blushed a bit and took it.

  She called to him as he hobbled away. “Dowd. That’s Irish. Isn’t it?”

  He turned back to her. “It is. I chose it. I don’t know what I am, really. I was adopted.”

  “Yer a good soul, Gulliver Dowd. Bless ya.”

  He couldn’t speak. He took another step.

  “Mr. Dowd.”

  He turned back. “Yes, Mary.”

  “You did say to tell ya anything at all. No matter how small the detail.”

  “I did,” he said.

  “Well, the other night…”

  He stepped toward her. “What about the other night?”

  “Somethin’ woke me from me sleep. After fifty years I’m used to the sounds of the harbor. This was different. First a truck rumbled down the street. Men were shoutin’ at one another. Then there was some god-awful shrieking. ’Twas ungodly, I tell ya. Echoin’ down these streets. Scared the bejeezus out of me.” She crossed herself again. “Wailin’ like a banshee. Do you know of banshees?”

  “I’ve heard of them. I don’t know about them.”

  “They’re omens of death.”

  “Do you remember which direction the truck went? Where the shrieking came from?” he asked.

  “Down by the warehouse,” she said. “Do ya suppose the banshees have anything to do with what happened to the boy?”

  “I don’t know, Mary. But I mean to find out.”

  The first thing he did after leaving Mary’s house was head back to the warehouse. He walked around the whole of the building. At least as much as the sto.

  rem;

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  When he got back to the loft, Gulliver was beat. He had spent the rest of the afternoon on Ferris Street. Homes. Warehouses. Whatever. If it had a door, he knocked on it. If it had a bell, he rang it. Mostly everyone was cool. Eager to help. Happy to talk. Too bad they’d had nothing to say. A lot of guys had seen the kid and his dog—no one who saw Ugly could forget him. Man, that is one funky-looking animal. But nobody had come up with anything helpful. Not one person could think of a reason anyone would hurt the kid.

  Tired as he was, it felt good to have Ugly there to greet him. When he got this thing with the kid cleared up, he would get a dog. Gulliver would go rescue the runtiest runt at the shelter and make a home for it. Since losing his parents and Keisha, he had forgotten simple joys. He’d forgotten what it was like to have someone happy to see him. To have someone at home he wanted to see. Or maybe he hadn’t forgotten at all. Maybe it just hurt to remember.

  He took Ugly for a walk. Fed him. Then they curled up on the couch. They fell asleep watching tv.

  It was close to his chest. “d 88z seven when he opened his eyes. He was still groggy. But he saw that Ugly had moved onto his blanket on the floor. The dog was still asleep. Gulliver made himself a quick sandwich. Washed. Brushed his teeth. Then he headed downstairs. He had done enough walking for the day. He got into his new van and took off.

  His old one had been destroyed the year before. It happened while he was looking for Nina’s daughter, Anka. Anka’s real father had hoped that blowing up the van would scare Gulliver. Slow him down. Maybe even get him off the case. Not likely. Gulliver often said he was built low to the ground, like a hound. Once he got the scent, he didn’t let it go. He laughed. He and Ugly had a lot in common. This new van was great. It was customized with all the special controls that let him drive it with ease, and it also had cool tech stuff the old van hadn’t.

  He wasn’t sure where he was going. He just felt a need to go somewhere. Anywhere. Even though he was a small man, he often felt like the world was closing in on him. Like it was weighing him down. Sometimes he just wanted to get in his van and keep going. To run away. Far away. But he could not escape his problems. Not by running anyway. There would be mirrors to remind him wherever he went. And in the mirror Gulliver Dowd saw the truth of who he was. Of what he was. There was no running from the truth.

  He got on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and headed west, toward the Brooklyn Bridge. Maybe he would take the bridge to Manhattan. Surprise Rabbi. Show up at his apartment with a bottle of red wine. They would sit and talk. Maybe Rabbi would tell him about all the women he was dating. Rabbi was tall. Movie-star handsome. But he could never find the right woman. In a way, he was lonelier than Gulliver.

  Gulliver changed his mind when he saw the sign for Atlantic Avenue. He pulled off the expressway. Found a parking spot. Waddled half a block to University Hospital of Brooklyn. Finding Ellis Torres’s room number was easy enough. Too easy. That worried him. Someone had tried to kill the kid after all. The cops should have been more careful. Gulliver’s heart raced. He was afraid the cops had left the kid unguarded.

  He was right to be afraid. When the elevator doors opened, an alarm was sounding. Nurses and doctors were scrambling. Running to a room at the end of the hall. An announcement came over the loudspeaker: “Code Blue. Code Blue.” Uh-oh. A patient’s heart had stopped. It was all hands on deck to save his or her life. Was it the kid? What had gone wrong? Would he be okay? Then he saw that medical staff were running in the opposite direction of the kid’s room. It wasn’t Ellis Torres who needed their help. Gulliver let out a sigh. He relaxed.

  The relief didn’t last long. He looked down the corridor to where the kid’s room was. Just as he had feared, there was no cop guarding the room. And with the Code Blue alarm, no one was paying attention to Ellis Torres. Gulliver hurried as best he could. But he kept bumping into people running the other way. He felt like a salmon swimming against the stream.

  Now he noticed something else that really scared him. All the other doors along the corridor were at least partially open. Some were wide-open. The only closed door was the one to Ellis Torres’s room. Now Gulliver ran. Or what passed for running.

  He had overcome many things in his life. But there were things that all the trying in the world couldn’t fix. Uneven legs was one of them. What was just a hobble when he walked was much worse when he ran. It was also hard to keep his balance. But he had to. He had to get to the kid’s [enedk, room fast.

  He didn’t knock. Instead, he shouldered the door paddle. The door flew back. A big man dressed in hospital scrubs was leaning over Ellis Torres. He was holding a pillow over the kid’s face.

  The big man turned to look at Gulliver. He had pale white skin. His eyes were such a light blue that they almost didn’t have any color at all. He sneered at him. Laughed. As if to say, “What is a little bug like you going to do?” And then he turned back to the kid, pressing the pillow down.

  Gulliver thought about shooting the man, but knew he couldn’t. Hospital rooms had all sorts of pipes and tanks in the walls. He couldn’t risk hitting a compressed-gas line or oxygen tank. He couldn’t risk the bullet setting off a fire in a place full of flammable chemicals. And the walls were thin. A stray bullet might pass right through and hit someone in the next room.

  Instead, he slid his hand under his jacket and felt for the handle of his knife. Pulled it out of its sheath. Laid the blade along his fingers and palm and reared his arm back. Then let the knife fly. The big man screamed in pain. The knife handle was now sticking out of his right shoulder blade. The back of his scrubs turned wet. Red. Soon the back of the shirt was soaked with blood.


  The big man let go of the pillow. He tried to reach the knife and pull it out. He couldn’t. He turned away from the kid. Turned to Gulliver. He charged. Gulliver stepped to his right and, as the big man got to him, snapped a side kick at the charging man’s thigh. But this guy was good. He, too, had martial-arts training. He blocked Gulliver’s kick. Grabbed his leg. Shoved him. Gulliver stumbled backward iete and brick

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Detective Patrick looked as unhappy as Gulliver Dowd felt.

  “We did have a uniform guarding the room. They found him unconscious in the stairwell.”

  “What happened to him?” Gulliver asked.

  “Doesn’t remember. He took a pretty good knock on the head. Got a bad concussion.”

  “How about the guy who tried to kill the kid? I’d like to get my knife back.”

  “Very funny, Dowd. We got him on video leaving the hospital through a side entrance,” Patrick said. “There was a car waiting for him. It was a stolen car. F Brooklyn University Hospitalvkzound it in Mill Basin. Motor still running. Seat covered in blood.”

  “Any leads at all?” Gulliver asked.

  “The car’s being gone over by the Crime Scene Unit. If there’s anything to find, they’ll find it. We’ve alerted all hospitals. Walk-in clinics. Doctor’s offices. They have to report anything like a knife wound to us. So where did you say you hit him with the knife?”

  “In the right shoulder blade. Got him good. Went in pretty deep. I didn’t want to risk killing him by hitting him in the left shoulder blade. Too close to the heart.”

  Patrick stroked his cheek with his right hand. “I wonder what the kid saw that made it worth trying to kill him a second time.”

  “Sure bet it involves a lot of money,” Gulliver offered. “You don’t take the kinds of risks this guy took just for the hell of it. He’s good for three counts of attempted murder. Two on the kid and one on a cop. That’s a lot of years in prison right there.”

  Patrick said what they were both thinking. “Drugs. It’s gotta be drugs.”

  Gulliver nodded in agreement. He thought of telling Patrick he’d found out where the kid had set up house. About talking to Mary Shea. About talking to all the people along Ferris Street. But he decided against it. Detective Patrick had warned him to stay out of this. Gulliver couldn’t risk the cops stopping his investigation. Not yet. Besides, there really wasn’t much for him to tell the detective. Only an old lady’s story about a loud truck and screaming banshees. He could only imagine what Patrick would say to that.

  “What were you doing here in the first place?” the detective asked.

  “I was out for a ride. Then when I saw the exit for the hospital…I decided to stop.

  It wasn’t planned.”

  “Well, good thing for the kid you stopped by or he’d be dead.”

  “You going to put more men on the door?” Gulliver asked.

  “Better than that. We’re moving tn. He kept pre

  CHAPTER NINE

  He had trouble sleeping that night. At one po]nedhat happenedint he just gave up. He put the leash on Ugly and went for a walk. The days might have been feeling like spring, but the nights still bit hard like winter. The chill of the early morning rattled Gulliver to his bones. And without any fur, even Ugly was shivering a little.

  This was Red Hook at its scariest. When no one was on the street. When the buzzing of cars along the expressway was the only sound you heard. That and the beating of your own heart. When random noises shook you. When a helicopter passing overhead sounded like the end of everything. When menace hid behind each shadow.

  It was strange how strong the smell of salt was in the air. Then he realized where they were.

  Gulliver hadn’t planned on walking the dog to Ferris Street. But that’s where they found themselves. He stood in the middle of the road. First looking to his left, toward Valentino Pier. Then to his right, toward King Street.

  He stared at Mary Shea’s house. He stared at the warehouse where the kid had lived. It was easy at this time of night to see how the old woman could have imagined banshees in such a place. Not much scared Gulliver Dowd. He had proved that earlier. He hadn’t flinched when he dealt with the guy trying to kill the kid. The big man was a good two feet taller than he was. More than a hundred pounds of muscle heavier. Gulliver hadn’t cared.

  He didn’t believe in evil. People did bad things. Evil acts. Some people seemed to have nothing but hate inside them. But evil as a thing unto itself wasn’t real. Yet… as he stood there on the empty street, he was uneasy. Something was going on here that he didn’t understand. And Gulliver didn’t think it was as simple as drugs.

  A car turned onto Ferris Street. At any other time of day, Gulliver would not have even noticed it. But this wasn’t any other time. Maybe the driver had taken a wrong turn. It was easy enough to get lost in Red Hook. All it took was one left where you should have made a right. It had happened to him when Keisha first moved to the area. The streets were winding. They sometimes didn’t seem to connect.

  The car rolled to a stop. Okay, that made sense. The driver was just trying to figure out where he was. Where he had made the wrong turn. Where he should go next.

  “Come on, Ugly,” he said to the dog. “This guy’s lost. Let’s help him get out of this maze.”

  He took a few steps toward the car, then froze. The front license plate was missing. Through the glare of the headlights he looked at the driver. Uh-oh. The driver’s face was covered by one of those wool caps that pulls down to protect against cold weather. Gulliver calmly turned and walked in the other direction.

  Too late. The squeal of spinning tires filled the night. Gulliver looked over his shoulder to see the car bearing down on him and Ugly. He reached down. Scooped up the dog. Made a dive for the doorway of a small factory building. The car hopped up you do, do no

  CHAPTER TEN

  Wasn’t it always the way? That’s what Gulliver was asking himself as he looked in the mirror. There was a white bandage on his forehead. Under the bandage were ten stitches. He’d only realized how bad the gash was when he got back to the loft and washed off the blood. Then he saw the damage above his left eye.

  He’d wound up at Brooklyn University Hospital for the second time in only a few hours. He told the er doctor he had fallen down. Which was half true. The part he left out was that it was while someone was trying to kill him. And he hadn’t called Detective Patrick. This was personal now.

  Gulliver had an interesting romance with the truth. Like everyone else, he lied. Only when he had to. Did he stretch the truth? Did he sometimes leave out parts of the truth? Yes. But mostly he tried not to hide from the truth. How could he? And so here he was again. Looking in the mirror. At the bandage over the stitches. Why couldn’t the guy have tried to run him over after his date with Mia?

  “Poor me,” he said to himself, half joking. “I haven’t had a date since Nina. Now look at me.”

  He laughed a sad laugh. But he figured he would be okay. He hoped a few scratches and a bandage wouldn’t matter to someone like Mia. He would find out soon enough. The bell rang. Ugly ran to the door, his ratty crooked tail wagging like mad. Gulliver’s heart was beating just as fast as Ugly’s tail was wagging.

  He didn’t know what to expect. They hadn’t really made any plans. He hadn’t been sure how to dress. So he went casual. A light gray sweater over jeans and boots. For most of his life, he hadn’t cared much about clothes. What did it matter what he wore? Clothes weren’t going to make him tall. Muscular. Normal. But once he was a PI, he got with the program. He understood that dressing well was a way to impress clients.

  Gulliver pulled back the door. Mia seemed to have read his mind. She, too, wore a gray sweater over jeans and boots. They looked at each other and laughed. Ugly didn’t care. The minute he saw Mia he rolled onto his back. The message was clear. “Rub my belly. Rub my belly.” Mia understood dog body language. The first thing she did was rub Ugly’s belly for a few
minutes.

  Ten minutes and one glass of red wine later, they were downstairs. They had decided to drive to Arthur Avenue in the Bronx for Italian. The first little crack in the evening happened then. Gulliver turned left, to where his van was parked. Mia turned right, to her car.

  “Where are you going?” she asked.

  “To my van,” he said.

  “You drive?”

  The surprise in her voice cut like a knife. He reacted without thinking. “Yeah. I tie my [" class="tx" aid="edhat happenedown shoes and cut my own meat too.”

  She walked up to where he was standing. “God, Gulliver, that’s not what I meant. I’m sorry.”

  “No,” he said. “I’m sorry. Yes, I drive. Here’s my van.”

  The drive to the Bronx was going smoothly. Gulliver asked Mia about where she was from. “Roseville, Michigan. Outside of Detroit.” How big her family was. “There’s five of us. Two big brothers and me.” What her parents did for a living. “It’s Detroit. Mom works for GM, Dad for Chrysler.” Where she went to school. “Eastern Michigan University.” How she wound up in Brooklyn. “I took a wrong turn at Indiana. No, really, I moved here with a boyfriend. It didn’t last.”

  Gulliver asked every question except the one he wanted to ask, which was “Why did you want to go out with someone like me?” He was an adult in every way but one. When it came to love, he was still a scared teenage boy. A boy who could never see himself as worthy of love and caring, things he wanted more than anything. Because he’d never liked himself very much, he could not trust that other people did. The only people whose love he had ever trusted were his parents. Keisha. Rabbi. He had trusted Nina once. Never again.

  But Gulliver burned to know. Why had someone so pretty asked him out? Why had a woman who could have any man want him? So when they pulled off the Cross Bronx Expressway onto the streets, he asked the question. He asked in a different way. And it came out all wrong.