Breakfall (14 page)

Sean felt him waver—something had changed in his attacker’s inner balance. “Here, I’ll call ya later,” the man said as he picked up Sean’s cell phone and fussed around for a bit until he found his phone number. He pulled a ballpoint pen out of his pocket and wrote the number on his hand. “I’ll call ya after the break. As I said. No cops, okay?”

“Okay.” Sean’s voice was small.

“Promise.”

“I promise.”

The attacker collected his ski mask and gloves and quickly dressed himself. He cast another heavy look at Sean before he vanished through the shattered antique door.

Sean realized he was freezing.

The door. Of course.

He found his sneakers in the dark and crunched over the broken glass to open his door, the regular one that led into the basement. He slipped out quietly. Unwilling to smudge the fingerprints on his cell phone, he stumbled up the upstairs to the antiquated payphone in the foyer.

The light was on.

Sean was suddenly aware of the tall, unshaded windows of the large Victorian house. The beautiful, airy space he enjoyed so much before made him feel exposed and vulnerable. He crouched low by the floor to dial 911, hoping to be invisible from the outside.

It briefly occurred to him that he was an oath breaker. He was also a fighter, though, and even though giving in to his attacker’s threats would have made him less so, the idea of obeying the violent stranger brought the taste of bile to his throat. He’d be an oath breaker, then, and he’d make that scum of the earth pay.

T
HE
TALL
policeman was a lot older than Sean, and lean and wiry. He looked around—Sean’s room was a crime scene now—with observant eyes. His partner stayed by the basement door, listening to Sean’s halting description of what had occurred. The officer crouched, almost touching the broken lamp in an absentminded effort to right it.

“I am so sorry,” Sean heard himself say. “I tried to stop him. I did. It was just… impossible.”

Prickles of tears threatened their appearance, and Sean sucked in some air and let it out in a long, ragged exhalation.

“Nobody could do nothing in a situation like that, son,” the officer said, his eyes taking in the trashed room. “How about you get dressed and we’ll take you to the hospital and then downtown to give a statement, all right?”

“I… I don’t need to go to the hospital. I am not hurt, not really.” Sean didn’t want to see anyone. Burning up in a toxic mixture of rage and shame, he just wanted to crawl into a hole and die. Well, maybe not die—just sleep for three years, until all of this blew over.

“We need to check you for evidence, son. You might have the perp’s DNA on you, right? The hospital staff will collect it and make sure you’re unhurt, then you can come over to the station and tell us all you know. Then you can stay with friends.” The policeman’s keen eye took in the contents of Sean’s room. “I see you do some martial arts. Can you stay with your teacher?”

At the mention of his teacher, a sob racked Sean’s body and he turned away, ashamed of his lapse of control. Burrows-sensei was in San Diego. Hell, Burrows-sensei was likely to be embarrassed for Sean’s failure to defend himself adequately. Had this happened to Burrows-sensei, there would be a dead body on the floor, and it sure as hell wouldn’t be his teacher’s.

“I am the teacher,” he choked out. “I… I cannot stay with any of my students.” His students who looked up to him, who did everything he said, who almost idolized him. How would they feel when they found out about his fall from grace? “All these years of martial arts, y’know?” His words were barely discernible from an involuntary sob. “All for… for nothing.”

“Not for nothing,” the man in the uniform said. “You kept your head about you, didn’t you? You observed, you survived, and now you’ll help us get this sonovabitch. You stayed as calm as possible—you did everything you could have. Nobody could ask anything more of ya.”

Sean lifted his eyes to him as they both rose. “You think?” he asked, uncertain and eager at the same time.

“I see a lot in this line of work. You did good. Don’t let anyone take that away from ya.”

The two residents on the third floor were roused, removed from their respective rooms, and interviewed. They had heard nothing. The cops crawled over the whole house. Sean’s room was now black with fingerprint powder, darkening his doorjambs and doorknobs. His cell phone was confiscated for fingerprinting.

The school’s security force arrived a lot slower than the police did, all mighty sore at Sean for calling the police over what was, according to them, “an internal matter.”

An older lady from the dean’s office—who could hardly keep the car going straight, not being accustomed to being woken up under such conditions—drove him to the hospital. “Terrible. Just terrible. And imagine what could have happened to you if you were a girl!”

“Yeah… I guess,” Sean answered automatically. Something about the statement did not sit right with him. He’d figure it out later.

“You weren’t doing anything provocative, were you? Were you standing by the window in your underwear?” Mrs. Curry seemed to have her own ideas on how other people got into “situations like these,” and she wasn’t afraid to voice them.

He was mortified when the emergency room physician ordered a rape kit.

D
R
. V
ERBOSA
was short and plump. Her hair was bound in a ponytail festooned with a silk scarf, and her dark eyes were kind and sympathetic as she examined his bruises and lacerations.

“Here is my card, Sean. Call me if you need to talk. This is difficult. Don’t let anyone talk you into believing this is your fault. Not anyone. Not ever.”

“But the woman from the dean’s office, Mrs. Curry, she said….”

“What did she say, Sean?” Dr. Verbosa asked mildly.

Sean told her.

“Don’t worry about Mrs. Curry. I’ll take care of her. Now, the technician, Alicia, will do the fingernail scraping and swab your mouth for DNA samples, and the police will take you to the station to take a statement from you. Then you’ll need to go somewhere safe for the rest of the night.” She looked at him, her gaze penetrating. “Do you have anywhere to go, Sean?”

He thought real hard. Most of his friends and classmates were gone for the Thanksgiving break. Asbjorn… he didn’t want to bother Asbjorn. Nell and Dud and little Stella were crowded into that tiny apartment of Nell’s, and he didn’t want to impose. Gino was a long drive off, and he’d never tell Casey what happened, even if she lived next door.

He cast his eyes to the floor, finding his shoes suddenly very interesting.

“I thought so. Sean, my husband is my best friend and a very, very good man. If I vouch for him and our daughter, would you feel comfortable accepting our hospitality?”

Sean paused, then nodded. “Thank you.”

He felt exhaustion fall on him as rage and humiliation fought his pride over the control of his tear ducts. He wanted to scream, to hit something, to cry. He’d never felt this utterly helpless, forced to do things, forced to accept the charity of strangers.

He felt quite insignificant.

H
E
WAS
dressed in ill-fitting clothes donated to the hospital because his nightclothes entered the chain of evidence along with his phone and his bedding.

The black-haired man with a weathered face who picked him up introduced himself as Ken Swift and looked vaguely familiar. Sean’s mind felt stressed and a bit fuzzy around the edges, and he was unsure whether the familiarity was real or just a figment of his imagination. Regardless, Dr. Verbosa’s husband drove him from the hospital back to his room. The police were gone then, and only the yellow crime scene tape that sealed his room bore evidence to their activity.

“Just get what you’ll need. Your prints are all over the place anyway.”

“How do you know that, Ken?” He used the man’s first name, as instructed.

“I quit the police force a few years back. Don’t worry—I won’t let you get into too much trouble.”

After he got his duffel and backpack ready, Ken Swift drove him to the police station. They sat in a small interrogation room for maybe fifteen minutes, not talking. Two plainclothes cops showed up—a short blond guy chewing on an unlit cigar, followed in by an older, graying man with a swagger to his gait.

Their eyes met as recognition dawned along with astonishment. “Aren’t you Sean Gallaway?” the short guy asked, his eyes alight.

“Mark? From the warehouse, right?” Sean hazarded a guess.

“Wait. Aren’t you that new kid with Asbjorn and Nell?” Swift asked. “Small world.”

Sean looked at his host again. “I thought you looked familiar.”

“Yeah. Think two weeks ago.”

Mark produced a cup of sweet coffee with creamer in it and two donuts. “Here. It’s not much—but it’s my standard treatment for recalcitrant witnesses such as yourself.”

Sean felt oddly touched by the offering, obediently tasting the cloying coffee and the fried, sugar-covered dough.

The graying detective coughed to get their attention. “I’m Detective Hastings and this is Sergeant Falwell’s first case as a plainclothes detective, so let’s get to work here. I’ll expect a regular statement from you guys. We can catch up on our extracurricular activities later.”

Sean stirred, hoping to wake up. If he just woke up and took his shower now, all of this would turn out to just be one very bad, very embarrassing dream.

N
ELL
CROSSED
the Charles River, taking Storrow Drive west toward Newtonville. Asbjorn rode shotgun through the thick holiday traffic, paying attention to the lay of the land.

“Next time you go, you can just take the Green Line out and then take the bus or walk. It’s not far.” Owning a car in Boston was expensive—the cost of legal parking was easily a full third of a monthly rent.

Soon they made a left into an old residential neighborhood and wound their way to a house at the end of a dead-end street. It was one of those venerable structures that always turned out to be bigger on the inside than the outside. Its white paint was complemented by the requisite black colonial shutters, and a four-car carriage house was connected by a walkway sheltered under a shingled roof.

“Is this the dojo?” Asbjorn asked, eyeing the property with curiosity.

“No, that’s Kenny-sensei’s home. We’ll be here tomorrow for Thanksgiving, but today we’ll go straight to the school part. There’s a
salle
in the carriage house, but he teaches most of his classes at the Watertown YMCA. There wouldn’t be enough space otherwise.”

“What’s a ‘salle’?”

“A fencing hall. The word is French, but he does mostly Asian weapons. You’ll see.” Nell parked nose-in at the carriage house and they got out.

After entering through the side door, they removed their shoes and placed them under a wooden bench. “The rooms with the mirrors are where we change. Or have private lessons.”

Asbjorn looked around. The narrow hallway ended in a small office. A wall of trophies was reflected in a large, wall-mounted mirror, and the functional sink and counter revealed that the room used to be a kitchen.

Nell bowed, entered, and checked the calendar above the desk. “Nobody else’s scheduled for today. It’s the day before Thanksgiving, is why. Asbjorn, the door on the right is where the men change. The left is the women’s, and that small door is the bathroom. See you in a couple of minutes.”

Asbjorn entered the former bedroom, with its stained-glass, bowed window. The walls were blue, the woodwork white and aged. Mirrors covered two walls. The fireplace mantle behind him held several trophies and a dying ikebana flower arrangement, and the scent of dying flowers mingled with a hint of sandalwood incense. Oriental artwork was interspersed with various weapons, hanging on the walls or leaned in corners. The weapons and the walls bore signs of frequent use. His eyes drifted to two Japanese watercolor landscapes above the fireplace. They looked old, but even their gilded frames showed signs of occasional abuse, as though they had been hit with accidental stray blows.

He dressed in his white gi and black
obi
, his special-occasion white hakama pants, and pulled the split-toe
tabi
socks on his feet. The surfeit of weapons around him made him feel empty-handed. He opened the door just as Nell emerged from the women’s changing room dressed in a gray
kosode
, black hakama, and white tabi. A real Japanese sword was slid through the black obi around her waist. Right next to it, he saw a folded white paper fan.

“What’s the fan for, Nell?”

“It’s a sign of rank.”

Nell beckoned him to slip on a pair of
z
ō
ri
sandals and led their way outside, making use of the sheltered walkway.

Asbjorn noted the ordinary landscaping on the street side: a grouping of trees overgrown with ivy and several obligatory rhododendrons hugging the sides of the house. The private side of the walkway looked a lot more interesting. There was a little pond, large rocks, stunted shrubs, and trees. A Japanese stone lantern peeked from underneath a pine tree across the lawn.