The Reign of the Kingfisher Read online

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  For Mary Martinson

  PROLOGUE

  HERE IN THE BLACK-LIGHT NIGHT of another endless Chicago winter is a boy walking home later than he ought to be. The streets are barren, unrecognizable. Streetlights flicker a dull orange. Yesterday’s snow falls like ash from the rooftops with each gust of wind.

  It’s December 1983. The end of the beginning of a new decade.

  The boy moves in a skip-step, unaware of the blistering cold, the empty streets, the faltering lights, the whistling wind, the new decade. He tucks his pointed chin into his zipped-up coat and feels his breath thaw his frozen lips.

  Somewhere out from the brick tenements and the cars on blocks, he hears his mother’s voice asking him just where on God’s green earth he has been all day. He’s been hearing it all night. He answers her out loud, practicing for the moment itself, as he cuts into an alleyway to make up time. “When Portia’s dad came to pick her up after the Bulls game, I forgot to ask him for a ride, and I couldn’t call you because all the pay phones were used up or busted. Wires all tangled, cut loose, hanging from the wall. So I took the bus back to Halsted and walked the rest the way.”

  It was all true, or most of it. But at this time of night, coming home without notice, the truth didn’t count for much.

  He crosses the street and cuts into another alley.

  “You should have seen Reggie Theus, Mom, you should have seen him move. Might as well have been out there all alone.”

  To which his mother will say something about gangs and drive-bys and pedophiles and psychopaths and crack addicts—her litany of midnight dangers—but these things are impossible to take seriously on a night like this. A blanket of stars is suspended above the humming web of power lines running slantwise and longways over the tenement rooftops. Pulsing red lights of jet planes and satellites spinning, spinning, through space. He would walk like this all night if he could. He would tread each city block, hands in his pockets jangling sixty cents change, maybe stopping off outside of Portia’s apartment to try and get her attention without waking her father.

  He would wait for her face in the window.

  As he steps into another alleyway, a car passes behind him in the street. A white Lincoln Continental moving in a slow, slick crawl. He feels the heavy weight of a stare coming from behind the tinted windows, which are darker than the night itself. He freezes, midstep. Every muscle in his body contracts and holds. He becomes aware of the way the streetlights are spaced along the street and he sees that he is between them, shadowed, and so he doesn’t move and maybe prays for the car to pass him by.

  The engine picks up and the car pulls away, hesitantly. He waits until it turns a corner down the street and he listens until he hears nothing but the sound of his own heart, beating wild like a rabbit trapped in his chest.

  The street is empty again but he no longer feels alone.

  He takes off running, bounding over potholes and piled bags of trash. He’s got three more blocks to go before he reaches his building, but why is he just now worried about that? This is the same night that Portia laid a delicate, clandestine, don’t-tell-your-mother hand on his lap while Reggie Theus sunk six outside buckets like it wasn’t anything. He is invincible.

  He reaches the mouth of the alley just as headlights crawl up on his left. It’s the same Lincoln Continental, drifting malevolently beneath streetlights. He steps back into the shadow of the alley and presses himself against the wall, and he hears the engine settle into a steady whine as the car floats down the street, predatory. The passenger-side door opens and the car stops. A man steps out and his body unfolds. He wears a leather jacket that shines. Each crease and wave of the fabric ripples as he walks. He wears sunglasses in the moonlight. His hair is kept in a neat afro, recently trimmed. His shoes are snakeskin, and the color shifts from iridescent green to purple to black as he walks.

  The man brings one hand from his pocket and holds it out, his fingers curling inward to say, “Come here.”

  The boy is unable to do anything but to nod and to follow. He tells himself in a meek, compromising voice that if this man wanted to kill him he would have done it already. He tries to look confident and brave. He tells himself to breathe in deep and jut his chest out like a man, but he feels his shoulders falling inward and his head turning down. He is withdrawing, diminishing with every scattered heartbeat.

  The snow still falls, but he hears his mother’s voice, softer now, like she’s calling out to him from behind a closing door.

  “How old are you?” the man asks in a lacquered voice.

  “Thirteen.”

  “Thirteen. What are you doing walking around here at one o’clock in the morning, Mr. Thirteen?”

  “I was at the Bulls game.”

  “You were at the Bulls game?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Who won, then?”

  “Bulls.”

  He spits on the ground and twists his face. “What was the score?”

  “Eighty-eight to eighty-three.”

  “They play the Bucks, right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The man laughs sharply and stops. He studies the alley walls. “I fucking hate the Bucks, Mr. Thirteen. Hate them to hell.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Hey.” The man steps forward. “Come on now, look up at me.”

  He looks up and meets the man’s gaze. It is insistent, maybe halfway kind. His jaw muscles flex before he breaks into a smile as if he’d been holding it in. “You don’t have to talk to me like I’m your pastor or your daddy, all right? What’s the matter, Mr. Thirteen? You’re looking scared. What’s going on? You scared of me?”

  The boy shrugs and sniffs. He feels the cold for the first time and he shivers.

  “You’re scared of me. I can tell it. I can see it. Look, you don’t need to go and get scared. I saw you back there.” He points in the direction of the street behind the boy. “My friend is driving and I see a kid and I think to myself, ‘It’s late. No thirteen-year-old kid ought to be walking around here so late.’ I asked my friend to pull up to see if you’d like a ride. That’s all that’s happening here. A helping hand to a kid. Thirteen years old.”

  “Thank you, but I’ll just walk.”

  “Kid your age oughtn’t be walking this late. You say you’re thirteen.”

  “I am.”

  “Oughtn’t be walking so late.”

  “I’m just three blocks away.”

  “Whole lot can happen in three blocks. Believe me when I say I seen it all.”

  “Like what?” he asks, voice cocked in pathetic defiance.

  The man raises his eyebrows, amused. “There are people here, Mr. Thirteen, people who just want to do bad. They don’t care if you just saw the Bulls play and they don’t even care if the Bulls whooped up on the fucking miserable Bucks. They just want to hurt you. They like hurting people. It makes th
em feel good to hurt people.”

  The man stands with his legs spaced and his arms behind his back, a military posture. The boy isn’t satisfied with the answer, too much left undefined, but he doesn’t press it any further. He doesn’t have a choice.

  “Let’s get going, Mr. Thirteen.” He points to the car behind him, coughing up a long tendril of exhaust, same color as the clouds gathering over the rooftops.

  The boy consents with a slow nod and the man walks ahead of him, holding the back seat door open and gesturing inside. The leather interior is warm and smells like cigarette smoke. Menthol. There is a woman seated next to him on the other side of the seat, her head turned away. Her hair is red, the glowing of embers in a dying fire. The man gets in the passenger seat and gestures to the driver, a large and varicose man whose catcher-mitt hands dwarf the steering wheel. “This is my buddy, Olander,” the man says, getting comfortable in the leather seat, pulling at his jacket.

  Olander nods, breathing heavy. His eyes are sleepy and bloodshot. His head is bald and wrinkles of skin fold over his shirt collar.

  “And that thing of beauty next to you, kid, that’s Miss May. Miss May, the woman with the heart of gold.” He smiles in the rearview, a half-hid grin. “Ain’t that right, Miss May? You got a heart of gold on you, don’t you? Maybe you should say hello to our guest, Miss May.”

  She doesn’t turn away from the window, but she raises a hand and curls a single finger through a stray strand of hair, and the boy watches this cryptic motion as though it could unlock every mystery he’s ever encountered in his thirteen years of living.

  R&B music filters through the radio in half-static frequency. It somehow matches the longing pitch of this night, the flicker of a distant streetlight.

  The interior of the car is polished and immaculate, the color of ice cream fresh and glistening in a bowl. There is a woman’s ivory hairbrush at the boy’s feet on the floorboards. He resists the sudden urge to pick it up and hold it in his hands, to run his fingers through the teeth for a stray hair to examine in the streetlight.

  The man turns the rearview mirror away from Olander so that he can keep an eye on the boy. His eyes float in the reflective surface. Snow begins to fall outside, scattered and lazy.

  “Where does he live?” Olander asks, his voice a hushed baritone.

  “Where do you live, Mr. Thirteen?”

  “West Lincoln Apartments. Just down that way.”

  “West Lincoln Apartments,” the man repeats, propping his feet up on the dash. His leather shoes reflect his face, his eyes moving back and forth between Miss May and the boy in imprecise intervals, lingering on her for moments that seem to pause and hold.

  Miss May wears a shiny skirt, like a disco ball. She wears a tank top that cuts off just above her belly button. She has tattoos that writhe on her skin. On her shoulder blade, a cartoon duck the boy recognizes but cannot name. She does not have a coat with her and the boy wonders how she could survive without a coat while standing outside on the street on a night like this. Because he knows what she is. He doesn’t have a name for it and he doesn’t understand the exact nature of it, but he knows as well as he has to what she is. And he can’t pull his eyes from her.

  Her hair is long and curled tightly into springs that bounce when the car turns.

  “I don’t want to work with the Mustang guy anymore,” Miss May says, her voice rattling from the window, hollowing out. “The guy with the Mustang. No more, no thanks.”

  No one says anything.

  “Did you hear me, Richie? I said no more guy with the Mustang.”

  “What’d he do?” Richie asks without turning around. “Did he do something to you?”

  “What does it matter what he did? I didn’t like him. End of story.”

  “It matters because he paid for something and if he did something else, I guess I’d consider it theft of some sort.”

  “It wasn’t like that.”

  “What happened, then?”

  “I didn’t like him. End of story. Give him to someone else. I don’t want any more of him.”

  “They’re not all Prince Charming, May. Not all of them can be Mr. Hotshot. You know this.”

  “He must have been seventy years old. Had an oxygen tube. It clicked and clicked. Distracting as all hell.”

  “Since when do you care? What’s gotten into you?”

  “He was rude and nasty, too. I don’t need that sort of stuff in my life right now. I got enough going on without that sort of nastiness.”

  “Smoke one and relax.” He passes a soft pack behind his shoulder to her. “You’ve had a long night. So have I. So have we. So has everyone else in this shit-show city. All of us tired and griping.”

  She takes two cigarettes from the pack and throws it back up front. She takes one cigarette in each hand and offers one to the boy, who stares at it, trying to make sense of the offering. He finally shakes his head and she shrugs, stuffing the extra cigarette behind her ear and lighting the other. When she strikes her lighter, he can see her face in the orange glow. She is older than he thought she would be, maybe his mom’s age or a little bit younger. She holds her cigarette between her thumb and her forefinger the way he’s seen other kids hold joints. She’s beautiful. She exhales smoke into the space between the two of them, as if to cloud his line of sight. He thinks he sees her smile before the smoke masks her.

  Olander pilots the Lincoln slowly through the snow-littered street. They sit without speaking. The car’s heat blasts through the vents. The back of Olander’s head sprouts pear-shaped droplets of sweat. His breathing is loud. They are two blocks away from his apartment.

  Then there is a crashing noise. Unannounced. The crush of metal. So loud that it can’t be real. The car jerks and spins across the snowy street, and the boy falls against the window and May presses against him, her hair falling in his face. The car finally comes to a rest and they are quiet. Ears ringing. The snow has picked up, falling in a dense curtain, rendering the outside world invisible.

  “What the fuck was that?” Richie asks.

  “I don’t know,” Olander answers, his hands still gripping the wheel. “I don’t know, Richie.”

  May sits back up. She still has the cigarette between her fingers and she takes a long drag.

  “You two all right?” Richie asks, turning around.

  May nods. So does the boy.

  “Far-out shit,” Richie says, and then he starts to laugh. “I thought we were going to fall right off the earth. Down, down, down.”

  The driver’s-side door suddenly swings open and Olander’s body is pulled out into the snow flurry. One single motion. It happens so fast that no one responds, the remaining three simply staring at the open door, the thick falling snow now drifting into the warm leather interior.

  On the radio, someone sings, I’ll be true to only you.

  A piercing cry, high and shrill. The oxygen empties out of the car. The boy moves as close as he can to the window, trying to peer through the snow, his face against the glass, but all he can see is white. He grips the leather seat to steady himself.

  Another cry, the same pitch, but this time it takes shape into a word and it is the voice of Olander screaming, “Richie.”

  Richie stares wide-eyed out the open driver’s door, then reaches behind his back and removes a polished six-shooter. He counts to himself, “Three, two,” and then he throws open his door and jumps out. The door slams shut behind him.

  From the lessening curtain of snow the boy sees shapes, defined by rough contours, shifting suddenly to nothingness. He sees movement, but movement is all he is sure of.

  The boy tries to listen to what is going on outside the car but his heart pounds loudly in his ears and the wind howls. Blues riffs crackle from the radio. The streetlights illuminate the snow in flashing intervals, giving the impression that time has broken, pausing and then lunging forward. He tries to count the seconds.

  He hears a voice, Richie’s, scream, “No!”
>
  A face careens from the snow and smacks with a heavy thud against the boy’s window. He jumps back with a shriek. The features of the face are distorted against the glass. After a moment, he can tell that it is Olander. The large man’s tired countenance is replaced with a gaping mouth, split-lips, and a twisted, bleeding nose. Three of his teeth are chipped and one is missing. He looks to be gasping for one last breath, which fogs the window. His crazed eyes spin lazily in their sockets and he looks to the boy in a way that is desperate and scared, but in the next moment he is jerked back into the swirl of snow, disappearing like a magic act.

  May sits next to him, smoking patiently on her cigarette.

  The boy frantically pushes down on the locks on the doors that he can reach, his palsied hands fumbling. He feels sick. Streaks of Olander’s blood cover his window like paint from a brush.

  The snow parts momentarily. He sees a man, much taller than Richie and much thinner than Olander, his skin and his clothes the same midnight shade, standing pin straight against the brick wall like he’s waiting for a ride. His face is covered and then he’s gone, the snow resuming its torrential fall, but his image burns brightly in the boy’s mind.

  Something thunders atop the hood of the idling car and rolls off. The car shakes under the tumultuous weight.

  On the radio, a trumpet angles up along an arpeggio.

  A few seconds pass. The boy thinks of getting out of the car and running as fast as he can, but his ears still ring with Richie’s bloodcurdling scream and his eyes still ache with Olander’s bloodied face, pulpy and broken against the glass. He breathes like he’s just run a mile and he feels like he has. Every muscle of his body is tied up in knots and he wants only to fall asleep in his bed.

  A shadow passes over the window, the unmistakable outline of a man. The boy closes his eyes and pulls his knees to his chest, wrapping his arms around them, as if to hold himself together.

  “Are you happy?” May shouts, her voice echoing from the car windows. At first the boy thinks she is talking to him, but then she adds, “I know you’re out there. I know you can hear me. You can hear everything, can’t you? Can’t you?”