A Christmas Killing (3 page)

In February 2016 Mulholland Books will publish Richard Montanari's
Shutter Man.
Following is an excerpt from the novel's opening pages.

July 4, 1976

On the last night of his life, Charles Martin Flagg, sixty-eight, a childless widower with mild arrhythmia and a limp he'd picked up courtesy of a mortar round while serving as an Army chaplain stationed at Guadalcanal, stood at the western edge of Schuylkill River Park, near the baseball diamond, facing east.

It was a muggy night. A damp breeze crawled off the river, bringing with it the industrial smells of the power plant, a pungent mix of ozone and copper.

On every special occasion since his confirmation at St. Paul's, in 1919, Charles Flagg had worn a long-sleeved shirt buttoned at the neck and cuffs, as he did this night, even though the temperature, at just after 8 PM, was 81 degrees. Even as a child, he'd held the belief that respect came from inside and radiated outwardly. Clean of thought, clean of body, clean of spirit.

The world did not always share his faith.

It had been forty years to the day since he'd lost his only child to violence, a sweet-natured girl named Cynthia June—aged ten years, ten months, ten days when her spirit took wing. Cyndi June had loved butterflies and quilts and jigsaw puzzles, by nature beguiled by symmetry.

On the day she died, a puzzle piece went missing from Charles Flagg's life, a place where Cyndi June used to be. No other part ever snapped neatly into that space again, its trebled edges always the slightest bit off.

The intervening years—especially the twenty-five since Charles Flagg's wife, Annie, lost the good fight against a low beast called leukemia—had been a collage of charity food drives, Chinese takeout, garage sales, tepid baths; a frameless tedium that one day settled coldly at the bottom of Charles Flagg's heart, always watching, always waiting for the return of his two girls.

They never came back.

He had taken on the role of block watcher in every neighborhood in which he'd lived since Cyndi June's passing: Nicetown to Swampoodle to Torresdale to Grays Ferry. Instead of the leather-bound edition of the King James Bible with which he'd made fellowship with the fallen and wounded men in Guadalcanal, he now carried a walkie-talkie and a two-way radio.

He was part of the South Philly neighborhood group called Block Safe.

The organization did not carry weapons, of course, nor did it have the authority to arrest or detain. Instead, their purview was to observe and report. Charles Flagg had always been good at this, had always been a discerning and vigilant man.

On this night, among the crowd that had gathered to watch the fireworks, there was not much to witness. The previous year there had been a handful of drunk and disorderly arrests, open containers, one misdemeanor assault. Mostly it was families. Hardworking, blue-collar families gathering to watch the glittering display.

As the fireworks reached full and gaudy plumage, fanning the sky over South Philadelphia with red, white, and blue light, Charles Flagg looked down at his feet and saw it. In some ways the sight was so inharmonious with the hard earth and tufted grass that it didn't seem real. In other ways, Charles Flagg had known it would be there.

It was an odd sensation for him, this knowing and not knowing. He imagined it to be a little bit like faith, a trusting acceptance in things unseen.

Charles Flagg believed in things unseen.

He closed his eyes for a moment, remembered with cruel clarity coming home that day of terrible rains, seeing Cyndi June's body. He'd called out to her, as if he didn't see the truth in her pooling blood. She didn't answer, didn't move.

Somehow that was forty years ago, almost to the hour. He glanced around the park, at the oblivious men and women and children, all of them consumed by this summer evening that did not promise rain. He wondered what they would make of this, what they would make of Charles Flagg standing in this place, this thing at his feet.

He was a protector, after all, a man of the cloth.

He was a custodian.

Later that night, a scant mile away—as yellow tape cordoned off the park, and officers from the PPD Crime Scene Unit walked a tight and rigid pattern—Reverend Charles Martin Flagg, retired, brushed his teeth, combed his hair, opened a fresh box of Friskies, poured some into Lulu's bowl, and tipped the box onto the worn linoleum.

Lulu heard the sound and nuzzled his leg, silent as snow.

Charles Flagg then sat in in his favorite easy chair, facing the window that overlooked Grays Ferry Avenue, the echo of forty years of grief and sadness a canto that rose and fell with the reading of his sins.

At just after midnight, his family photo album in his lap, Charles Flagg put the barrel of a Smith and Wesson .32 revolver against the soft palate at the roof of his mouth and pulled the trigger.

His last thought was not of the bright yellow tape that circled the southern end of Schuylkill River Park, but rather of a different kind of ribbon.

A pale yellow ribbon tied in a bow.

Richard Montanari is the internationally bestselling author of
The Doll Maker, The Stolen Ones,
The Echo Man, The Devil's Garden, Badlands, The Rosary Girls, The Skin Gods, Merciless,
and more. He lives in Cleveland, Ohio.

richardmontanari.com

@RRMontanari

RichardMontanariBooks

The Doll Maker

The Stolen Ones

The Killing Room

The Echo Man

The Devil's Garden

Badlands

Merciless

The Skin Gods

The Rosary Girls

Kiss of Evil

The Violet Hour

Deviant Way

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