Fresh Kills
Authors: Reggie Nadelson
FRESH KILLS
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Version 1.0
Epub ISBN 9781409008842
Published by Arrow Books, 2007
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Copyright © Reggie Nadelson 2006
Reggie Nadelson has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
First published in Great Britain in 2006 by William Heinemann
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For Helena
FRESH KILLS
A journalist and documentary film maker, Reggie Nadelson is a New Yorker who also makes her home in London. She is the author of six previous novels featuring the detective Artie Cohen (âthe detective every woman would like to find in her bed'
Guardian
), most recently
Red Hook
. Her non-fiction book
Comrade Rockstar
, the story of the American who became the biggest rock star in the Soviet Union, is to be made into a film starring Tom Hanks.
ALSO BY REGGIE NADELSON
Bloody London
Skin Trade
Red Mercury Blues
Hot Poppies
Somebody Else
Comrade Rockstar
Disturbed Earth
Red Hook
Tuesday July 5
1
The steady noise of the engine above me changed, I sat up, opened my eyes, squinted into the sun. The small sightseeing plane flying low over Coney Island stuttered across the sky and I held my breath, waiting for the crash. Next to me on the beach, my nephew Billy was stretched out. One hand holding a radio tuned to a Yankees game, his big adolescent feet in black sneakers, laces trailing, propped up on an empty pizza box from Totonno's.
The plane disappeared behind backlit clouds, probably heading for some airstrip nearby where tourists caught sightseeing flights.
It was Tuesday, a mild July day when only a few people, maybe a couple dozen, were stretched out on the sand near me catching some sun. Two old guys sat on low green plastic beach chairs and played gin rummy. A couple of women, their wives probably, wearing pull-on velour pants and matching windbreakers in pink and blue, sat near the men, reading Russian newspapers that rattled in the breeze. A Pakistani family ate lunch from metal containers, the compartments stacked up on each other, chatting in Urdu, probably Urdu,
maybe imagining they were back home taking the afternoon off on some beach in Karachi. In Midwood, in the interior of Brooklyn around three miles from Coney Island, there was a big Pakistani community. I could smell the food. It made me hungry.
At the edge of the water, a chubby teenage girl with carrot-colored hair jogged heavily, her feet pulled down by damp sand. Two boys ran gracefully past her. An electric blue mermaid, also near the water, picked up her sequined blue tail, and scuttled up towards the boardwalk. The plane appeared again. Everyone on the beach looked up. No one moved now. Sun glinted off the mermaid's blue tail.
All this seemingly in slow motion, while music came from a boom box somewhere â Otis Redding's “Dock Of The Bay”, which I'd always loved. I realized that the mermaid was one of the girls who dressed up every summer to march, if you could call it that, in the annual Coney Island Mermaid Parade.
The plane, out of control, zigzagged across the blue sky over the ocean, flew away from the beach, dipped down, one of its wings hanging loose, like a wounded insect. I got up, stumbled on the sand, found my phone in my jeans, called 911. It was too late. In a slow spiral, the plane lost altitude and then suddenly, snagged by gravity, fell.
In the windows I could see two faces looking down. Maybe they could see blue water coming up at them, Russians reading newspapers, a man running from Nathan's clutching a hot dog with a wiggly line of yellow mustard on the dog. I wondered if the people in the plane could see the mustard, and what they were thinking, or if there was time. Then the plane hit the sand and broke. People on the beach backed away, terrified, expecting an explosion, smoke, fire.
Next to me, Billy was already on his feet. Around us, people were grabbing their bags and towels, toys and cards, newspapers,
chairs, radios, coolers, looking up, running towards the boardwalk, then stopping, unsure which way to go.
Is it terrorists, I heard a woman say to her husband. An attack? The boom box kept playing; on it, the music changed, the Drifters singing “Up On The Roof”.
The silvery plane lay near the edge of the water a couple of hundred yards away, crushed like a Coke can. The surf bubbled onto the beach and washed the pieces of the plane. I could just make out the bodies, half in, half out of it, including a little girl who was maybe three years old. She didn't move.
“Is anyone dead? Is the little girl dead?” Billy was staring at the plane, rigid with attention.
“Let's go,” I said to Billy. “Come on.”
He didn't move.
We had come out to Coney Island because Billy said the first thing he wanted when he got home to Brooklyn was to eat a pie from Totonno's. That and to sit in the sun and look at the ocean, and catch a few rays, he'd said, posing, his face up to the sky, hands on hips, like some guy in a TV commercial for suntan stuff.
“Now,” I said.
Cars and trucks were screaming in the direction of the beach, driving onto the sand. Emergency crews were all over the wreck, pulling out the bodies, loading them into an ambulance. I thought I recognized a detective in a red jacket I'd met someplace. Smoke trailed upwards from the wreck. I grabbed for Billy's hand, he tossed his knapsack over his shoulder and we ran.
“Artie?”
“Are you OK?” I said to Billy. We were on the boardwalk, leaning against the railing, looking at the plane wreck, brushing sand off our clothes.
“This is really weird,” he said. “I'm glad you're here.”
“Let's get out of here.”
“You think everyone's OK?”
A girl of about ten was standing near us with her mother, crying. Billy turned to her.
“It'll be OK,” he said. “Hey â it's OK. It's over now. You all right?”
Billy Farone, who was my half sister's kid, was fourteen, lanky, broad shouldered, and nearly six feet tall already, as tall as me, almost. Last couple of days we'd been together, mostly he seemed to take things as they came. For an adolescent, he was pretty easy-going. He was interested in what people said and how they felt, and it was disarming. People liked him. He was a charming kid.
Thick black hair fell over Billy's forehead, his blue eyes lit up his face which, with the faint Slavic cast, cheekbones, chin, that kind of thing, reminded my of my father. Once in a while, hands shoved in his pockets, the big sneakers, the shoelaces undone, swaying a little side to side as if he was growing too fast to keep it all together, Billy was still a kid. Now, making sure the girl who'd been crying was OK, he seemed almost grown up. Black jeans, red T-shirt, a dark blue Yankees jacket, he leaned against the railing. He looked out at the water and the plane, worried.
“You think they're alive?” he said. “The people in the plane?”