The 8th Circle (26 page)

U
nder a cloudless sky, Danny lay on the beach and let the sun warm his exhausted body. Conor dumped bucket after bucket of white sand on him as waves washed up against the shore.

“If we lived on this island, we could come to the beach every day,” Conor said. “We could always be like this.” He poured sand and patted it down. A warm blanket on Danny’s legs.

“Could we stay here, Conor?”

Conor dumped another bucket of sand on Danny’s stomach. More and more sand. “We could always be together, Daddy. I miss you.”

“I miss you too. I miss you so much.”

Conor smiled. He patted the sand until it felt firm around Danny’s body. Then he leaned close. “Mommy’s dead. She’s in the ground.”

Danny struggled to sit up, but he couldn’t move. The sand had hardened like concrete. Conor sat back on his heels and folded his arms. His eyes grew distant. Cold.

“You can’t stay.”

Danny tried to answer, but he couldn’t speak.

Conor shook his head. “You can’t stay. You let the bad man hurt me.”

Conor stood and walked away, and Danny heard the tide rush in. When he called out, black water filled his mouth and poured down his throat.

*

Danny jerked up in the hospital bed and waited for his heart to slow. It would. Eventually. He’d stop shaking, and his breath would come. He closed his eyes, lay back against the pillows, and willed himself to relax.

He knew he was in a private room in the hospital. He’d been here a week, as close as he could determine, while they reinflated his lung, pumped him full of antibiotics, x-rayed his broken ribs, and ran a full spectrum of tests. He no longer cared what they were for.

They told him he would heal with a minimum of scarring and kept him doped up for the first few days. It dulled the horror a little.

Kate waited for him on the edge of consciousness, and he could almost touch her and smell the lingering scent of her perfume before she melted into darkness. The old man was right. Kate should have stayed away from him. She offered him salvation, and he had gotten her killed. Was that what she meant when she made her deep-sworn vow? She knew somehow they would be parted? She sacrificed herself for him, and a miserable sacrifice it was.

To what end? So he could lie in this bed and remember what an idiot he was and then be snowed under only to dream of Conor. Always of Conor. Because he couldn’t bear to think of Conor when he was awake. To do so was to slide along the edge of the razor blade into the dark pool of despair. Then he’d lie there and listen to his heart race and watch the numbers on the monitor jump higher and higher until the nurse came with a needle filled with something that sent him back to oblivion.

He promised himself that he’d start to write, and he’d tried to put some words together on the laptop Kevin brought him from home. He wanted to do it, but nothing was there.

He had opened the door, become the monster.

“Don’t let me down,” Andy had told him that last day outside Linda’s room in this same hospital. Andy would be pretty goddamn disappointed if he were here right now. Danny stared at the dark-brown stain on the ceiling tiles. It looked like a rabbit with a drooping ear or maybe like someone giving the finger.

He picked up the shopping bag full of mail Kevin brought and set it on the bed. Kevin was solicitous. Kind. He fetched clothes, the laptop, everything Danny asked him to bring, and he hovered like a St. Bernard whenever he was here. Danny almost preferred the old head-smacking Kevin to this new and improved model. He felt like a bastard for thinking it.

He hadn’t seen Novell, and Kevin wouldn’t talk about him. Kevin was the censor to all information. He wouldn’t allow the television to be turned on. Danny had no newspapers. No telephone. A cop lived outside his door twenty-four hours a day. Danny wasn’t sure whether Kevin was protecting him or keeping him under some new form of house arrest.

He was surprised Kevin brought him the mail. Danny rooted through the red shopping bag he’d ignored until now.

He pulled out a flyer for a singles night at the Church of Good News. Across the bottom was written, “I’d love to see you. Please call if you don’t want to go alone. Carrie Norton. P.S. Enjoy the cookies.”

She left her phone number, and Danny tried to remember who Carrie Norton was and then decided it didn’t matter. When he was hanging out with Mason, she was sipping Christmas punch with the Christian singles. Maybe he’d call her just for the hell of it and explain why he’d been unable to attend. Somehow, he didn’t think she’d find it amusing.

He dumped contents of the bag on the blanket. Christmas cards and junk mail tumbled out along with one package wrapped in brown paper. It fell onto the bed with a soft thud, and Danny recoiled as if it were a snake. He reached for it with shaking fingers. He didn’t have to read Michael’s handwriting to know what it was.

The writing was smudged as if with tears, the paper splotched with dark-brown stains. Michael’s blood. All the time they were looking for this goddamn package, Carrie Norton had it in a red Christmas gift bag.

Danny pulled the paper off to find five discs in thin plastic cases and a small cardboard box of photographs with matching negatives. All bore the logo from the cards, though they were black, divided with a thin gold line and had that gold tear-shaped flame. One DVD was labeled “Tophet.” The last DVD was labeled “For Danny Ryan in the Event of My Death.”

A
foursome in black leather sipped neon-green drinks and watched one naked girl whip a second. Chained to a slab of granite, the second girl’s body bowed back and her face contorted in a silent scream. Bloody stripes crisscrossed her buttocks. The girls couldn’t have been more than fifteen or sixteen.

An older man Danny recognized as a district justice lay on a similar slab while two young boys pissed on him and a third whipped him.

The pictures got worse.

The Inferno. Its membership list read like a Who’s Who of Philadelphia society. Who would guess so many high-ranking civic leaders and philanthropists nursed such peculiar tendencies? Maybe it shouldn’t have surprised him. According to Andy’s disc, Robert Harlan was the leader of the pack. Unfortunately, while there was hard evidence on most of the other members, there was nothing definitive on the senator. He invested in Bruce Delhomme’s enterprises. So did half of Philadelphia’s elite. It didn’t mean they were all into underage sex or sex clubs.

But Andy wouldn’t have accused Robert Harlan if he hadn’t been sure. Senator Family Values. It would almost have been funny if it weren’t so horrific.

For enough money, the Inferno performed useful services for its members. Sex. Blackmail. Murder.

The senator had presidential ambitions. Danny imagined that was why he wanted to get rid of his prying son-in-law. Maybe that was part of the reason Beth had become so shrill in her warnings to leave her father alone. Who would know better what a dangerous man he was?

Danny didn’t understand why they hadn’t finished the job.

He closed the file and then glanced at the “Tophet” DVD that lay on the bed. It contained, among other highlights, the torture and murder of at least three kids performed by Mason Scott himself.

Did Bartlett Scott know about his son’s horrific employment? Did he care? Maybe it didn’t register. Perhaps he considered it the lot of children born to endless nights.

He watched Andy’s disc, a confession of his involvement with the Inferno, articulated in Andy’s typical style. No bullshit, no apology. He pushed his computer away. Soon the aide would bring him a tray with a bowl of consommé and containers of green Jell-O and orange sherbet. He was stuck in this bed, and those bastards still walked around like they owned the goddamn universe.

It wasn’t a conspiracy. It was a club, and one had to be in a certain tax bracket to join. Danny realized with some irony that he now qualified to be a member. It made him more than a little nauseated. Beth always said everyone had nasty little secrets. Maybe she was warning him.

Kate had warned him, but he was Danny Ryan, righter of wrongs, too full of his own shit to listen; now almost everyone he cared about was dead.

Danny watched the IV fluid drip down from its bag and run through the tube into his arm. This time he wasn’t sinking into the black hole, and he wasn’t going to let Kevin hide him away for his own protection. He dragged himself out of bed and began to go through the nightstand drawers. No wallet. No cash, credit cards, or driver’s license. He clutched the bed, a little dizzy, but it didn’t matter. He was getting out.

He ripped the IV out of his left arm. It burned like hell, and blood dribbled down his arm. He ignored it, switched off the heart monitor, peeled off the little wires and adhesive pads, and hoped no one would come to check him. It was a hectic time. Shift change. He might be able to slip out unnoticed if he planned it right.

At least Kevin brought him clothes. Thank Christ he remembered to bring shoes and a coat.

Danny stuffed the pictures and discs in his coat pocket and crept to the door. He could see the Philly cop assigned to guard his room chatting with the cute blonde nurse at the central station. The cop leaned against the desk, gave a quick look up and down the hall, and then settled in for some serious flirting. The nurse didn’t seem in any hurry to get rid of him, not by the come-a-little-closer smile on her face.

An aide helped an elderly woman in a walker, and the woman from housekeeping pushed her cart toward the nurses’ station. When she rolled past his room, Danny took a breath and slipped around the door. The stairs were at the end of the hall, and he wanted to run to them. The trick he knew to becoming invisible, however, was to pretend he belonged. He took his time and made no eye contact, but he didn’t try to avoid anyone either.

It was like he was in one of those dreams where he was walking but not making progress. When his fingers finally touched the metal handle of the fire door, he yanked it open.

He took the stairs two at a time.

*

Danny ducked in and out of the lunch crowd at Reading Terminal Market and hustled spare change. He needed to put some space between him and the hospital, and it was easy to get lost here in the crowded market. Women were the easiest mark. He looked cleaner than the average street person, and most of the women were charitable enough to believe his story about being mugged. It wasn’t much of a stretch. He was still wearing a hospital bracelet. When he caught a glimpse of himself in a store
window, he barely recognized his face. No wonder they hadn’t given him a mirror.

He looked not quite human. Or maybe all too human. Most people winced and took a step back from him before they shoved a dollar or two in his hand, but one gray-haired woman bought him a cup of coffee and a sandwich before she gave him a twenty.

“I ’member you, Mista Ryan,” she said. “You wrote them stories ’bout the city closin’ the library in my neighborhood. You said children needs books, and you got Mrs. Bartlett Scott to come in and get her husband to donate one million dollars. They calls it the Bartlett and Emily Scott Reading Room, but I said it should be called the Daniel Ryan Reading Room ’cause them rich folks never would have gotten involved if it weren’t for you.”

He kissed her hand. He’d forgotten the library. He’d forgotten so much. He used to care. What the hell had happened to him?

He had almost forty dollars in his pocket when he reached the Broad Street Subway. Once, he’d been a relentless hustler, desperate for the cash he knew brought independence from the old man. The fact that he looked young for his age always gave him an edge.

Vic Ceriano called him his gold mine, and Danny knew if it weren’t for the weird quirks of fate, he might have ended up pushing drugs for Vic. He might have ended up in jail for real. He might have ended up like those poor kids in the video. A thousand ifs: if the old man hadn’t caught him selling dope, if his English teacher Mrs. Taylor hadn’t sent in that essay, if Andy Cohen hadn’t taken him under his wing.

Danny peered down the tunnel. He could see the subway headlight glow in the semidarkness and feel the vibration of the train. He leaned back against a pole to breathe in the dank odor of mold and piss.

He’d spent countless hours waiting for the Broad Street Subway. The day he’d left for college, he’d packed a duffle bag, walked out the door, and took it away from his old life.

The old man had laughed at him, called him a goddamn jackass for wanting to study something as idiotic as journalism. The
Ryans became cops. Or junkies like Theresa. He’d been furious when Danny got the letter informing him that he was the recipient of a full scholarship to Temple.

“I give you a week,” the old man had said, and his eyes had lit up with a malevolent gleam. “Two at best. You might have some fancy scholarship, but you gotta live down there too. Don’t expect any handouts from me. See how long you last, Einstein. You’ll be back.”

He hadn’t returned until the old man’s funeral. Didn’t know or care what happened to the things he left behind. Those stupid copybooks filled with crap. It was all trash. He thought he knew so much, but what did he know about life then? About anything?

When the subway rolled into the station, Danny slumped into a molded plastic seat. The door smacked shut, and the train lurched away.

That first day, he’d found a care package waiting for him in his dorm filled with the kinds of things parents normally packed for their kids to take off to school. Sheets, towels—the basics he had no clue he needed. At the bottom he’d found a lunch invitation from Andy Cohen, and he’d realized that this too-good-to-be-true scholarship had been a setup.

When he’d met Andy at the Four Seasons Hotel, Danny expected he’d at least pretend ignorance, but Andy just laughed. “What did you think, kid? That Temple just has money to burn on South Philly juvies? What do you care where it came from?”

“I don’t want to owe anyone.”

“Don’t be an idiot. Isn’t pride one of the seven deadly sins? I thought you Irish were big on sin.” Andy had downed his scotch.

“So why are you so interested in my welfare?”

“Why do you think, kid?”

“Are you gay?” Danny had been sure that Andy would throw him out or smack him. Generosity without a catch was unknown in his world. If Andy was offering money, Danny had figured he wanted some kind of favor.

“Hell, no!” Andy had laughed until tears ran down his face. “Are you?”

Danny had frowned, half annoyed, half embarrassed that Andy had found him so ludicrous. “Why do you give a shit about me? What’s in it for you?”

Andy’s face had turned pensive. “You’re a little young to be such a cynic, aren’t you? Must be your old man’s cop vibes rubbing off on you.”

The waiter had set down Danny’s grilled chicken, and Danny had been so hungry, his stomach was doing flip-flops. But he hadn’t picked up his fork.

“You know my old man?” The old man had always been his hair shirt. The man who’d single handedly faced down gangbangers in North Philly with nothing more than a Smith & Wesson and a sneer.

“Thomas Patrick Ryan. The most kills of any active cop in the Philly PD, and the most decorated cop in the history of the department. He’s a fucking legend, kid.”

“That’s him. Dirty Harry without the conscience.” Danny had tried to sound flippant, but his voice had grated against his throat. “My brothers are cops. Runs in the family. I’ve always been the oddball.”

“Well, I still have that essay you wrote. You’re a hell of a talent, my friend. Suitably tormented.” Andy had signaled the waiter for another scotch. “Let me ask you this. What are you more afraid of? That you’re like your father or you’re not?” Andy had held up a hand before Danny could reply. “I don’t really give a shit what your answer is. You want to know why I’m so interested in you? You’re my mitzvah, kid. My good deed. I’m a Jew, and we’ve all got to do our mitzvahs. But I’m also a smart Jew, so when I look at you, I know that my good deed will pay me big dividends.”

Danny rested his head against the window. He still didn’t know the answer to Andy’s question. All he knew was he ached in chunks and wished he could shut it off the way he used to. But it was too late. No matter how hard and fast he ran, he couldn’t escape the surge that dragged him under. His body swayed with the rhythm and rumble of the train, the only real thing in a world of shattered dreams and dark water and desolate ghosts.