It was a quiet day, so the Walmart hack canceled the rest of Sal’s shift. They pulled this bit all the time. Sal needed the hours, but what are you going to do? Go home, that’s what, because where else are you going to go? But lately, Sal was not going home, opting instead for a motel room overlooking the traffic jam on the Belt Parkway. The place was so close to the airport that he dreamed of 747s crashing into his bedroom, which was also his living room and kitchen. The place smelled like mold and sex work; the stuff was ground in there deep, deeper than the gum on the carpets. Sal’s choice came down to this: go sit in his dirtbag motel room and turn Netflix up so loud that you can’t hear the girl next door selling blow jobs, or go finish your divorce with your soon-to-be ex and your kids that hate you. He had run option A for so long that his pending divorce case seemed like the better option.
For the last year, he figured Beth might change her mind, give him another chance. But he knew something had shut off inside her. He was like the dream that died. He didn’t blame her. If the situation were reversed, he would have shut her off a long time ago.
He wrote to her in a text message. I’ll be by later today, if that’s ok.
Ok. Came the reply.
The ride from Ozone Park to Brooklyn Heights is quicker than you think. The A train stops at Aqueduct Racetrack and runs express to Brooklyn Heights. After thirty minutes on the train, he could have been in another state, another country, another time zone entirely. The doorman at his old apartment recognized him. Sal had forgotten the guy’s name. Mark or Max or Mack. It was clear from Mr. M’s face that he remembered Sal.
“Hey,” said Sal, hoping that maybe this guy would just let him through. Maybe there was some kind of mercy rule upheld by doormen for the down and out.
“Who are you here to see?” This was no kind of question because Mark or Mike or whoever he was knew the score.
“I live here. You know that, Mitch.”
“It’s Marion. I’ll call Ms. Gallo.”
“I’ll call Mrs. Gallo too,” said Sal. He held up his phone as if it were a bill of rights.
When he stepped off the elevator, Beth was waiting for him. The place seemed empty, none of the usual noise—rap music in one room and the deep-bass explosions of Call of Duty in the other. The place also seemed huge and luxurious, all high ceilings and hardwoods. He tried to imagine the time when he lived here. There was a piano, for Christ’s sake. Where did that come from? It seemed as if his stuff, which was conspicuously missing from the apartment, had occupied space in a way that made everything else seem broken and dirty. Sal resolved not to remark on any aspect of the renovation.
“Kids at your mom’s?” he said, running his hand along the marble countertop. He was sure that it was there when he lived here. Maybe she had it refinished.
“Amber’s at Colin’s house and Luke’s working.”
He didn’t know anything about this Colin. He settled on, “It’s a school night.” Beth looked at him as if to say, go on. She hadn’t taken off her power suit but had swapped out her heels for terry cloth slides. There wasn’t any dinner. He didn’t expect any. Beth usually worked late and then ate a bowl of cereal while watching true-crime dramas. Sal popped a coffee pod in the Keurig and looked at the papers on the dining room table. “I see you got it all laid out.”
It was a fair deal from her standpoint. “More than fair,” as she put it. He gets the apartment, and she gets everything else. She was right. Place like this—three-bed in Brooklyn Heights, harbor views—would sell for three million easy. Sal could never afford the taxes and HOA fees, but selling the place would set him up for the rest of his life if he were smart about money. But he had never been smart with money, and a part of him wondered if Beth wasn’t giving over the apartment so that he’d have the means to kill himself in high style.
“You don’t even need to send child support. I don’t need it.” These days, she made about 50 times what he made, and his prospects for getting back on track were somewhere south of zero.
“I’d like to do something. I know you don’t need it.”
“So send a birthday card.” And after a long silence, she said, “I didn’t mean it that way, Sal.” She reached out and touched his arm—her first hint of compassion for him in a long time.
“Suppose I moved to L.A.?” Too soon. I said that too soon. He almost punched himself in the face for the unforced error. “Not with you. I get it, but if we were all in the same city.”
She sighed. “There may come a point where they want you as part of their lives, but Amber’s 13; she’s her own person, and she’s going through that thing where they separate from you. There’s not much I can do about what she thinks right now. And Luke? By September, he’ll be away at college.”
“Where’s he going?”
“He’s an adult. If he wants to tell you, he will. And he’s free to have the relationships he wants to have. I don’t think your being in L.A. makes a difference. Besides, you seem to have found a rehab community here and—”
“Can you remember a time before all this?” he asked. This was the question that drove him out of rehab.
“We both made decisions, Sal.”
Beth let him stay on the couch that night. Amber came home after 8. She made a point of not saying anything at all to him, checked in with her mother and then closed her door. Sal could have sworn he heard Amber shut the door and then the sound of a chain sliding into a metal slot. Did she install a chain lock? He was going to ask about it, but then figured that Amber saying “What?” with her face divided by her new door chain would only cause problems. Luke came home after 11. Everyone but Sal was asleep. The kid said, “Hey.” He took a plate of leftovers from the fridge and then closed the door to his room. Sal thought the kid was high, but didn’t suspect he could say anything about that either. If there was a topic he had negative leverage on, it was that one.
#
Can you remember a time before all this? A time before all this, thought Sal, would have been a decade. Amber would have been three. She didn’t remember a time before all this. Luke was eight, so maybe he had a few memories in the same way he had stray Pokémon cards under his dresser. About a decade ago, the whole family was playing Monopoly—at least to the extent you can do that with a three and an eight-year-old. Sal kept the fake money in his real wallet. Amber thought that was funny, and it was the sound of her laughter that he remembered, clear as a mountain spring. But on follow-up—always with the follow-ups—he realized that 30 minutes of Monopoly did not qualify as“a time before.” It was just one moment of peace, like the eye in a hurricane that raged and raged.
Go back. Go back two decades. “I dropped out of law school.”
Did you want to be a lawyer? Everyone was looking at Sal, which Sal thought was stupid because they already knew the answer.
“No. That’s why I dropped out. Plus, all the goddamned reading.” But it was in school that he met Beth, or more accurately, Beth chose him in the way one chooses a deaf dog at an animal shelter. Everyone needs a project. “I was happy I dropped out. I had ideas.”
But there was only one idea, and it involved an online platform for horse race betting. Two decades was not, apparently, “a time before all this.”
“Three decades?” asked Sal.
If you think that’s a useful place to dwell. This group loved dwelling. That’s all they did; they sat around and dwelled.
“No. I don’t think so. Thirty years ago, I was five. I don’t remember anything.”
“Thirty years ago, you would have been…thirteen or thereabouts. A lot of times, people act out patterns. Can we find a time before the current pattern was in place?”
The couch was less than comfortable, not that he could have slept anyway. By 2:00 in the morning, he pulled on his pants and splashed a handful of water on his face. He looked at the bedroom doors, each one of them closed. They’d all be happier if he were gone by morning. He signed the papers in each of the places where Beth had left a sticky note. He took another sticky off the pad and considered writing something but couldn’t think of anything worth saying, so he took out his last 20 bucks and set it on the table. For ice cream, he wrote and set the sticky on top of the money.
Sal made it home sometime before sunrise and passed out exhausted on his sandpaper sheets. He woke up late for work, and while his hack of a boss had no problem letting him go early at even the slightest sign of a slow day, any lateness, even five minutes, was viewed as a moral failing. He’d need to race downstairs unshowered and uncaffeinated to catch the bus just right to make it on time, but you could never catch the bus just right. Every day the same routine: Bus is supposed to be there at 8:10, and it’s 8:20, 8:30, still no bus. At 8:35, three buses show up all at once. The first two are packed to the point where people fall out when the doors open, but the third one’s empty—only everyone’s still trying to get on the first bus. When you finally get on a bus, the traffic along Conduit Avenue means that walking the three miles is the faster option.
Sal pushed an umbrella into his back pocket and resolved to walk. As he closed the door to his dump of a room, he noticed that the woman in room 33 had left her door open—again. Last month, Sal had found her face down between the bed and her wall, a reality show blasting away on max volume. He knew the score. He’d been there himself. The EMTs shot her up with Narcan and took her out on a stretcher. Two days later, he bumped into this woman in the motel’s clankety elevator. She was wearing a baggy sweatshirt with the print of an owl on the front. Maybe she was 21, maybe 17. It was hard to tell. Feeling awkward for the ten seconds it took to descend the 3 stories, he said, “How are you?” She looked at him as if he were a voice from the ceiling tiles. Sometime after that, listening to the sounds of her sex through the wall, he came upon her OnlyFans page, whether by chance or some per-ordained administration of the algorithm he did not know. But WillowYou? was the woman next door. He was sure of it. In real life, she looked smaller than in her photos and carried in her face a fragile hunger that made him feel uneasy. But her page was all bikinis and lip gloss with the promise of more for a small subscription fee. It was just a lark, and nothing would come of it anyway, aside from some hackneyed sexy talk and a few topless photographs “for my ONLY fan 😘💋 😘.” Sal doubted that WillowYou? even knew that he was one of her paying customers. Besides, he was going to cancel the subscription before next month because when you’re making grilled cheese sandwiches on your motel room iron, every dollar counts.
Still, the woman’s door was open, and Sal felt as if he knew her in some way short of intimacy but more than the way one knows a random motel-room neighbor who has headboard-banging sex forty times a month.
“Good morning?” Sal said through the crack between the door and its frame. “Do you want me to close your door?” He should have just walked past the door and toward the bus stop, but some mixture of his pending divorce and his distaste for his dead-end job made him look through the crack in the door jamb to see the edge of this woman’s unmade bed, one foot still in its Chuck Taylor on the crusty sheets.
“Hello? It’s Sal, your neighbor?” No answer. “I’m just going to close your door, okay?” He could call management, but that would be less than useless. He could call the police and ask for a wellness check. Also useless. If she were dead, then it would take as long as it took for her to smell before anyone did anything. He also recognized that had his neighbor been a man, he would have let the dude rot in place.
But she wasn’t a man, so he grabbed the doorknob and knocked six times, hard enough to make his knuckles hurt. If he were in her line of work, he’d have a gun in the room. He didn’t want her to shoot him by accident. “Everything ok in there?” After a pause and no response, he tried, “I’m just going to come in a second.”
It was hard not to see some echo of Amber there on the bed, curled up as she was, holding a teddy bear to her stomach as if she had a bellyache, as if the bear held the power to warm and protect her in ways he did not. Sal remembered checking on Amber in the room that now had the door chain. Now there was a time before all this—maybe not totally before. Maybe there are no times before—just course changes toward the inevitable. This woman on the bed had been still for some time. Her teddy bear was no longer of any use. Of this much, he was certain. He thought back to the last time he passed her door. Was it open then? He could not say. He pulled the strands of hair from her face and tucked them behind her ear. Maybe there was no time before for her either. Now she has no time at all.
Sal called the cops, then his boss. His boss told him that there were no callouts. Long-standing policy is that everyone is responsible for their own shift. If you bang in sick, you’ve got to find coverage. “Everyone has to demonstrate individual responsibility. If you sweep your own front porch…” The front porch speech was part of every team meeting. “I know about the porch. It’s that the police are here, and this woman is dead.”
“Did you kill her?”
“This is someone’s daughter, ok? Do you get that? I called 911. The police are on the way. I’m going to tell them what I found, and then I’ll come in. I’m not calling out. I’m just calling you so that you know what’s going on.”
“You know what, Sal? Don’t even bother.”
“Don’t bother what?”
“With anything at all. I tried to help you out. Give you a chance. Whenever you want to come in, talk to HR. They’ll have all the paperwork and your pay up to yesterday. Or don’t come by. It doesn’t matter. We’ll mail everything to you.” Sal wasn’t sure whether he had hung up on his boss or just hung up. It’s a fine line when you don’t say goodbye.
There were two uniformed police officers outside the motel. They told Sal to sit on the curb. He didn’t want to sit on the curb, and it was starting to rain, so they told him he could sit in the patrol car. A cop in a white uniform shirt showed up, followed by a gaggle of detectives in ill-fitting suits. They walked in and out of the motel for probably an hour. When Sal stepped out of the car, the uniform turned around.
“What do you need?” she said.
“I think I’m just going to go,” said Sal. “I don’t want to lose my job. You have my phone number.”
“Hang on a second.” After several hundred seconds, one of the ill-fitting suits stopped by and talked to the uniform. Sal had to go to the bathroom by this point.
“Sal Gallo?” he said. The guy looked like he hadn’t slept since Tuesday. If there was a way to make your body look worse than two decades of hard drug use, this guy had unlocked the level. Sal figured him for a handle of vodka a week, not counting happy hours. “I’m Detective Brad Sterling. You were a client of the deceased?”
“I’m her neighbor.”
The detective had a bunch of other questions. When did you last see her? Did you hear anybody going in and out? Did she mention having problems with anyone? “How often were you in her room?” he asked.
“Just the one time before. The EMTs came, revived her with Narcan.”
“You used drugs together,” said the detective.
“No.”
The detective raised a don’t-bullshit-me eyebrow.
“I’ve been sober for over a year.”
“So today, you were in there for sex?” The suit looked him up and down as if Sal’s penis didn’t work.
“No. I thought she had—like last time—I thought she was messed up because she didn’t answer, so I opened the door.”
“You said it was already open.”
“It was,” said Sal.
“Or you opened it. Which one?”
“I opened it. But it was already open a little. It was ajar, like I said. I called and no one answered, but I could see her foot there at the edge of the bed, so I went inside.”
“Can I see your phone a sec?”
Sal took out his phone. Beth was always losing her phone. She would say, “Can I see your phone a sec?” just like that and then call herself. As soon as he had the phone out of his pocket, the detective took it and said, “Hang out here,” and walked off.
“Hey, wait,” Sal followed, but the uniform stepped in front of him.
“Just hang out here,” she said. “Be cool.”
The medical examiner van pulled onto the sidewalk, and the driver and passenger wheeled a stretcher from the back of the van into the motel lobby. It was past 11:00 now, and the city moved with pre-lunch energy: delivery trucks came and went, women with children and carts of laundry shuffled in and out of view. The medical examiner crew came back out with their stretcher, three straps secured a black bag to the top—chest, hips, and shins. Sal realized that he only knew WillowYou? as a series of pictures and sounds. He felt sick, like he might puke if he even swallowed his own spit.
He stepped out of the patrol car.
“I’m going to go.” He wouldn’t have reported this fact to anyone, but he needed his phone back.
The uniform waved a hand, and the detective came over.
“Don’t do that,” said the detective.
“Just give me my phone back.”
“If you go now, I’m going to have to book you. It’s Friday. By the time you’re processed and everything, it’ll be Tuesday before you’re arraigned.” The detective spoke as if he were describing a tiresome variety of car repair. Now there was a time before. At one time, being arrested would have seemed impossible, unimaginable, terrible. Being arrested would have prompted a full battery of Beth’s lawyer friends to make phone calls and send emails directly to assistant district attorneys, and during the first DUI bust, that is exactly what happened. Now, a dozen arrests later, Sal had no one to call. On the bright side, he didn’t really give a shit about a weekend in the holding tank.
“If you want to arrest me, do what you got to do,” said Sal. “I got to piss, and if you keep me waiting, I’ll piss in your car.”
“You hungry? You look hungry. It’s been a long morning. Let’s go to the station. We’ll get you to a bathroom, get lunch, and work this out. It’s like you said. Someone died here, so help us out.”
Sal was escorted to the bathroom at the station, and as promised, they gave him lunch—pizza and a Pepsi. He ate alone in a little room with a stainless-steel table that had been bolted to the floor. Sal didn’t have a watch and there was no clock in the room, no windows either, but he had been in there a while. Long enough to be hungry again. To need the bathroom again. He tried to remember WillowYou? as she appeared to him this morning, her room, the position of her body. Nothing seemed out of place. The same detective from this morning opened the door and sat down.
“Have you figured out it’s not me, yet?” said Sal.
“Help me understand your relationship. You called 911 in October?”
“I guess so. Her door was open—ajar—like it was today. She looked like she wasn’t breathing, so I called 911.”
“She should have been grateful,” said the detective.
“I guess.”
“You save someone’s life like that, they owe you something. A debt of gratitude, at least.” Sal didn’t say anything. Hard experience taught him that no one owes anyone anything. They just looked at each other for a while. “Shit. I get it, my guy. You save this woman, and she doesn’t give you a discount? You got angry. It’s not like you planned anything. You got angry. We all lose our temper sometimes.”
“I didn’t lose my temper.”
“But it was after you saved her life that you became her customer.”
“I’m not her customer.”
The detective slid grainy 8x10s photos across the table. Sal recognized the shots from his phone, a topless WillowYou? making a kissing face at the camera. The caption said, “Let’s just stay in bed today.” Sal had no idea how they opened his phone but figured that leaving the passcode as 1234 had something to do with it.
“It’s illegal what you did.”
“You gave me your phone, and I appreciate your helping us out with this. You lost your temper, like I said. You didn’t mean for anything bad to happen. You help us out, we’ll help you out.”
“I want a lawyer.”
The detective picked up the photos and studied them. “She’s a tweaker, but a nice piece of ass still. You couldn’t get it up. You got angry.”
“Lawyer.”
“You’re not under arrest, my guy. You want to walk out, go. It’s cool. Tell you what happens, though, guy like you. Her pimp is pissed, lost one of his ladies. The word is out about you. It’s dangerous out there. Guy like you, walking around? Next thing you know, someone takes a nail gun to your head.” The detective brought his hands down hard on the steel table and the sharp bang rebounded off the steel and tile. Sal flinched but quickly regained his composure. Head games. “Or you get worried, so you run. We put an arrest warrant out. You get pulled over somewhere, small-town Pennsylvania. Sheriff thinks you’re reaching for a gun; maybe you are. Either way, my case is closed, problem solved.”
“I said I want a lawyer.”
“Fuck off and get one.” The detective opened the door and put his feet on the table.
“It was just an OnlyFans account. It was like a joke. I see how it looks.”
“I see how it is.”
“A picture on my phone does not mean I killed her. She had guys in and out there five times a night.”
“And you got jealous. I get it. You’re not a lunatic. You didn’t go in there with a machete. I seen that one too, but that’s not you. You cared for her. That’s why, after you strangled her, you pulled her hair back from her face, tucked it behind her ear. A gesture of tenderness. You felt remorse.”
“I didn’t do that.”
“You’d be amazed today. Science. I don’t know shit about it, but your lips on that Pepsi can and the pizza crust is all the DNA we need for a match.”
“Yeah. I have DNA. So do you.”
“A match is what I’m talking about. You didn’t beat her up that much, and there’s no semen because you can’t get it up, but you did pull her hair back and scratched her behind the ear. Probably with that chewed-up fingernail you got there.” The detective pointed at Sal’s hands, and Sal curled them into a naked fist. “That scratch was postmortem. That means after you killed her. You felt remorse, like I said. That feeling is your first step in the right direction. I’m not saying it won’t be a long road, but someone is dead. We got to make this right, Sal.”
“Jesus. To hell with you people. I’m going to go. You going to shoot me for that?”
“Go ahead and leave. I’m trying to be a friend to you. Friends are honest with one another. You don’t got a lot of people, Sal. In fact, I don’t think you got any people. That’s a dangerous position to be in.” The detective slid a business card across the table. “You take that, call me back when you’re ready to be honest. But don’t wait too long. It’s like I said—one way or the other, this case will be closed. Will you have a heartbeat when that happens? I don’t know, but at this point, I’m the only person who cares about the answer.”
Sal thought about leaving the card on the table but took it anyway. He tried to go home—or at least back to his motel room—but WillowYou?’s murder had set the bureaucracy in motion. The entire motel was blocked off with yellow tape. NYPD, fire department, building inspectors. Every New York City sticker you could possibly imagine was smacked onto the lobby doors that were now closed with a chain and padlock. The place looked ready for the wrecking ball. Sal held his hands up to the glass. Inside, there was nothing but a darkened front desk. He looked up and down the street, which seemed more dangerous than it had this morning. Head games, he said to himself. Still, the problem of not having a place to stay remained.
He texted Beth. “I was hoping to stop by.”
“Not today, Sal.”
“Just to say goodbye. I’ll be quick.”
“My assistant will set up a goodbye dinner. My treat. Stay tuned.”
Sal walked down the block, past the gas station, and over to Aqueduct. The old racetrack had seen better days, or maybe it always looked collapsed under the weight of cigarette smoke and failed trifecta tickets. The city had tried to turn the place into a casino, a convention center, a concert venue. It was a landfill, a goddamned landfill built on top of a marsh and then they built a racetrack. A layer cake of misery. Sal cut behind the closed parking lots and walked along the fence line of the old stables. He sat on the ground, his back against the cold steel of a dumpster. He considered jumping in. Maybe he would spontaneously combust into his own burning dumpster fire. Sal only heard the first three sounds. POPOPOP! Puffs of air that stung. In fact, fifteen stings ran in a line across the back of his head. When his face hit the ground, he was no longer able to scream, but he let out a sound. Or maybe it was just air pushed from his convulsing body.
#
The brad nailer is one of the most common nail guns in the world. Go into any hardware store, and you’ll find five or six different kinds. You use them for trim work, like putting in baseboards. Battery-operated cordless or pneumatic are the two main types. In this instance, you’ll want the cordless model. The brad nail is made from 18-gauge wire, not very thick at all. The nails run three-quarter inch to two inches. The inch-and-a-half nails are the best. Also important is the trigger. There are sequential fire triggers and bump fire triggers. The first kind is a bit safer—one trigger pull fires one nail. If you mess up, you only drive one nail through your hand or leg or whatever. Bump fire is what it sounds like. You pull the trigger once and hold. The nail gun fires each time the front end impacts the surface. Bump fire is a lot faster. Guys doing piece work, where you get paid based on the number of nailed-together widgets you make, prefer the bump fire setting for its speed. For the present application, bump fire is preferred as well.
Brad Sterling tossed the nail gun into his trunk and dumped three spark plugs of vodka into a Dr. Pepper Big Gulp. Once on the road, he merged onto the Belt Parkway, drove past the airport and over the Marine Parkway Bridge. There was no moon tonight, but in the southern sky, Jupiter shone brighter than the airplanes. Brad let the window down and the cool ocean air blasted his face, sixty miles an hour, seventy, eighty. He reached a finger into the roaring wind, as if to touch the great planet across 500 million miles of sky.
