Good Day to Die by Stephen Solomita Page A

can’t be sure. A woman, her face contorted with rage, stands ten or fifteen feet away. Her eyes bulge; her skin is scarlet; her scraggly brown hair stands away from her scalp. The hair seems alive.
    The woman is saying something, but I don’t know what it is. Perhaps she’s merely sputtering. She begins to move toward me and it’s only then I notice the determined set of her broad shoulders. I can’t believe how big she is; her body grows with each, deliberate step.
    What I want to do is speak out, to apologize before it’s too late, but I don’t. Or I can’t. There’s no way to know.
    The woman holds a length of two-by-four in her hands and slowly raises it over her head. The fact that her hands had been empty a minute ago terrifies me.
    If I’m lucky, I fall asleep before the first blow descends, but I’m rarely lucky. I never wake up, though. And there’s never any pain. The woman, of course, is dear old mom.
    How many days of school did I miss because I was too busted-up to walk the half mile to the bus stop? Or because my face was so bruised dear old mom was afraid even the deaf, dumb, and blind authorities of Paris, New York, would have to do something? Fifty? A hundred? Two hundred?
    The most amazing part was that I did well in school right from the beginning. And I didn’t blame the teachers who knew and did nothing. Quite the contrary. I was glad when their eyes turned away from me. That way, I, too, could pretend it wasn’t happening.
    “Means, you all right?”
    “Huh?”
    “You’re staring off into space like some kind of a zombie.”
    “I’m all right, Pooch. Better than ever.”
    I dumped the article on top of the other useless material and went back to work. Victim number five was Rosario Rosa, a twenty-year-old Dominican national with a forged green card. A Polaroid in the files showed him on the stoop of some anonymous tenement, arms defiantly folded across a broad chest. He couldn’t have been further removed from John-John Kennedy if Thong had dragged him out of central casting. Six-foot-three, two hundred and fifteen pounds, and dressed in a studded leather jacket, his black eyes glared at the camera. Rosa’s skin was swarthy, his cheeks pitted, his nose broken so badly it twisted an inch to the left. Every bit the top-man, he looked five years older than Kennedy, though he was actually a year and a half younger.
    I put Rosa’s picture next to Kennedy’s and stared at them for a minute. Bouton had been right again. Thong hadn’t made his selections on the basis of physical type. More likely, he’d imagined himself to be on some sort of a crusade. Maybe he was a trick who’d come down with AIDS and blamed all male prostitutes.
    Rosa’s DD5’s were no more revealing than Kennedy’s. He’d been working on West Street when he’d been taken, but nobody had seen anything of significance. His last known address was Rikers Island. Acquaintances described him as a mean, unpredictable bastard.
    I glanced at the autopsy photos and found the same powder burns, the same entry wound. Rosa had been facing away from his killer, that much was certain, but it was impossible to imagine Rosario on his hands and knees. That wasn’t how top-men operated. Besides, tricks who like to dominate would have no interest in studs like Rosario Rosa.
    “Hey, Pooch,” I called.
    He snapped off the computer and turned to me. “What’s up?” He seemed relieved to be away from his work.
    “You have any idea how Thong controlled his victims? I’m looking at Rosario Rosa here and the mutt’s completely butch. I can’t see him turning his back long enough to get taken.”
    Pooch laughed happily. “Means, you want a definite answer to that one, you’re gonna have to get it from the killer.”

EIGHT
    I MADE ARRANGEMENTS TO leave the material with Pooch for a few hours, then hit the streets. That box with its little mountain of information was depressing enough for me to abandon it until the wee hours