The Concrete Pearl

PRAISE FOR VINCENT ZANDRI

“Vincent Zandri explodes onto the scene with the debut thriller of the year.
The Innocent (As Catch Can)
is gritty, fast-paced, lyrical and haunting. Don't miss it.”

—Harlan Coben, author of
Caught

“A SATISFYING YARN.”

—
Chicago Tribune

“COMPELLING…
The Innocent
pulls you in with rat-a-tat prose, kinetic pacing…characters are authentic, and the punchy dialogue rings true. Zandri's staccato prose moves
The Innocent
at a steady, suspenseful pace.”

—Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel

“EXCITING…AN ENGROSSING THRILLER…the descriptions of life behind bars will stand your hair on end.”

—Rocky Mountain News

“READERS WILL BE HELD CAPTIVE BY PROSE THAT POUNDS AS STEADILY AS AN ELEVATED PULSE.…Vincent Zandri nails readers' attention.”

—Boston Herald

“A SMOKING GUN OF A DEBUT NOVEL. The rough and tumble pages turn quicker than men turn on each other.”

—
The Times-Union
(Albany)

“THE STORY LINE IS NON-STOP ACTION and the flashback to Attica is eerily brilliant. If this debut is any indication of his work, readers will demand a lifetime sentence of novels by Vincent Zandri.”

—
I Love a Mystery

“A TOUGH-MINDED, INVOLVING NOVEL…Zandri writes strong prose that rarely strains for effect, and some of his scenes…achieve a powerful hallucinatory horror.”

—
Publishers Weekly

“A CLASSIC DETECTIVE TALE.”

—
The Record
(Troy, N.Y.)

“[Zandri] demonstrates an uncanny knack for exposition, introducing new characters and narrative possibilities with the confidence of an old pro…Zandri does a superb job creating interlocking puzzle pieces.”

—
San Diego Union-Tribune

“This is a tough, stylish, heartbreaking car accident of a book: You don't want to look but you can't look away. Zandri is a terrific writer and he tells a terrific story.”

—Don Winslow, author of
The Death & Life of Bobby Z

“SATISFYING.”

—
Kirkus Reviews

Also by Vincent Zandri

The Remains

Moonlight Falls

The Innocent (As Catch Can)

Godchild

Permanence

Pathological (A Digital Short)

Moonlight Mafia (A Digital Short)

True Stories (A Digital Short)

Concrete Pearl

By

Vincent Zandri

“In case you build a tower, you must also make a parapet for your roof, that you may not place bloodguilt upon your soul because someone might fall from it.”

—Deuteronomy, Chapter 22; Verse 8

“Hell has three gates: lust, anger, and greed.”

—Gita

For Ava, the light of my life

The naked man lies on his side along the edge of a steep trench. The newly excavated trench reeks of exposed clay, the rich stench wafting up from the moist floor. To the naked man, the red clay smells like the worms that seep out of a storm sewer after a heavy downpour. Naked man’s got worms on the brain when he feels a boot-heel press down against his ribcage; when he hears the words, “You’re gonna love hell, Farrell.”

He tries hard to pick his head up off the ground, but he’s lost too much blood from the .9mm round that’s entered and exited his left shoulder. Once upon a time he was the most gifted athlete on his high school football team. But now, twenty-odd years later, he’s no longer got the strength to lift his head up off the dirt. He’s got no choice but to lie on his side and accept the steel-toed Red Wing work boot that digs down against skin and bone; no choice but to gaze into the empty trench, the beautiful summer sun spilling down onto the wormy moist clay.

When the boot-heel pushes him forward, the naked man feels himself going over the edge. But the fall is not immediate. It happens in a kind of slow motion—his wiry, six-foot-plus frame going over the side, dropping into space, spinning one complete revolution before finally he feels the squishy impact of flesh against clay. That’s when all breath gets knocked out of him. He feels the pain in his chest; the pain in his wounded shoulder; the constriction of his diaphragm.

But he’s not afraid.

Maybe his fearlessness has something to do with blood loss. Or maybe it has something to do with simple resignation…knowing there’s no possible way he’s going to make it out of this trench alive. Maybe it has something to do with the peace and clarity of mind that accompanies a sure death sentence.

The left side of his face lies on the cold clay floor. The clay is moist from the ground water that seeps out of it. Like the clay, the water smells rank. As the noise from a cement truck pulling into position begins to fill his one exposed ear, a small bird flies down into the trench. The bird perches itself only inches from his face. Just a small tweety bird or finch, as the bird watchers call them, with rust colored feathers, a small black beak and opaque eyes. The bird flutters its wings, stares at the man with curiosity.   

The cement truck revs its engine. Then comes the clang-and-bang of the aluminum chute-extensions being constructed. Years ago the naked man might have been looked upon as a dumb jock. But he knows what’s coming, and he finds himself smiling. He doesn’t quite know why he’s smiling. But he knows it’s happening because he can feel his facial muscles constricting and contracting. He’s weak, nearly paralyzed from blood loss. But still he tries to reach his hand out to the little bird.

The cement truck above him roars and bucks. Its cylindrical holding tank spins counter-clockwise in order to spill its warm mud-like load. A sense of urgency grips the naked man. He feels an overwhelming desire for the bird to perch itself on his outstretched finger. If he can manage it, it will be his last act on God’s earth. As dumb as it seems, it would be a good, final dying act for a man who admittedly has lost his way in life.

When the raw ready mix begins pouring down on his bare feet in a warm white flow of gravel clumps and wet sandy lumps, the now frightened bird flies away to safety. The naked man however, has no where to go. He’s about to become a permanent fixture of this new construction.

It’s then that the realization sinks in, and along with it, the fear.

The concrete buries long legs. Lime burns pale skin. The naked man opens his mouth wide, lets out a scream. He screams for someone to save him. Anyone.

“Please! Help! Me!”

But this isn’t like the good old days. Now when he cries out there’s no one around to hear him; no one to attend to his dire need. No one who cares to save his life, that is. 

There is quite simply nothing left for him—the former silver-spoon-fed-who-cares-about-school-books “golden boy” who had the world gripped by the short hairs.

Nothing left at all. Not even regret.

Only the smell of worms, a deep trench, and the soft concrete that entombs his living body, fills his gaping mouth.

Chapter 1

How does a headstrong girl like me learn to survive in a man’s construction racket? You learn to survive by taking your old man’s advice, even if it does come to you from six feet under.

After all these years I can still hear the proud baritone pouring out the mouth of the late great John Harrison. He used to say that a building erected by the Harrison Construction Company wasn’t meant to last for two or even three hundred years. Like the great Egyptian pyramids, it was meant to last forever.

I can see the short but sturdy man standing on the edge of a high-rise jobsite, concrete foundations already poured and cured, structural steel newly erected, a big American flag perched high above us off the top most section of rust-colored I-beam.

“You want a tower to last, A.J.?” he’d say, taking my small hand in his, callused fingers squeezing me tight. “You don’t skimp for nobody…You build it right the first time. No matter the cost.” 

But I guess even he had to admit that there were those times when a perfectly executed construct might begin to fall apart for no apparent reason. Nothing apparent to the naked eye anyway. Maybe a tack-welded roof joist works itself loose. Or maybe a crack forms in a concrete foundation and over time expands its way up the length of a twenty-story bearing wall. In both cases the destruction is so slow and subtle you might not take notice until it’s too late.

Life is like that too.

Destruction isn’t always something that hits you over the head like a claw hammer. Instead it’s something that’s been building up for a long time, more like the rain that seeps into a brick wall and freezes during the winter months. The ice expands, cracks and eventually destroys the mortar.

Case and point: my own personal Jericho came crashing down on me on Monday, June 15th, barely a half hour into a hot and humid workday. Call it woman’s intuition or a sharply honed, built-in crap detector, but I knew something wasn’t right from the moment my Blackberry started vibrating against my hip.

I’d been trying to expedite the demolition of the Albany Public School 20 basement utility room, using my equalizer (an old 22 ounce grizzly bear-clawed framing hammer) to rip down the old plywood utility panel backer-board. But even with those four inch claws wedged in between the old, dry plywood and the brick wall, the bitch just wouldn’t budge. Which might explain why I barked into my Blackberry instead of answering it with good old, lady-like professionalism.

“What!”

“Yeah and good morning to you too, chief,” said my assistant and former Harrison mason laborer, Tommy Moleski. “Sorry to interrupt, but we’ve got a bit of an emergency up here. One which requires your ah…utmost undivided attention.”

I pictured the sixty-something, blond-haired, blue-eyed Vietnam vet with the trailer phone pressed to his ear, a lit Marlboro Red balanced precariously between his lips.

“A drop everything kind of emergency, Tommy?” I said. “Or an it-can-wait-until- coffee-break emergency?”

“Need you front-and-freaking-center-now emergency, chief.”

“Meet you in the trailer…and don’t call me, chief.”

Pocketing the Blackberry, I grumbled something about how much Monday mornings sucked, even when you got to be your own boss. Then I grabbed hold of the equalizer’s rubber grip and pulled like nobody’s business.

The old board tore away from the wall and crashed down at my Durango cowboy-booted feet. But then so did half the plaster ceiling. Guess this old broad didn’t know her own strength after all.

Leaving the mess for later, I high-tailed it out of the room and up the concrete stairs. As usual, I had a fire to put out.

Chapter 2

At the top of the stairs, I exited the utility room’s metal access door and felt the hot summer sun slap me in the face. With the equalizer gripped in one hand, I used the other to slap plaster dust out of my dark hair. Tommy called this an emergency situation. A front-and-freaking-center emergency. And by all appearances, he wasn’t screwing around.

Under normal conditions a commercial construction site is a three-ring circus filled with burly laborers and tradesman shouting out orders or carrying them out. Paint and taping compound-spattered boom boxes blare classic Zepplin or Ozzy. Maybe a hung over mason is mouthing off about the hostile summer heat or lying his ass off about getting some serious action inside the bed of his pickup over the weekend.

The construction site that I’d known my entire life was a rough but hyperactive place where the concrete vibrator was a “horse cock,” the Port-O-Potty was the “shit house,” and where an aluminum casement window that didn’t quite seem to fit a specified masonry opening was a “curly hair off.” So you might not think of it as the ideal setting for a thirty-eight year old, liberal arts college-educated widow and mother of none.

But when I made my way out that utility door only to see a dozen subcontracted workers standing in front of a scaffolding-caged school with large coffees in their hands, eyes fixed on an OSHA Emergency Response van, I knew instinctively that the ready mix wasn’t about to hit the fan.

The ready mix had already hit and spattered.

I jogged across the site to the construction trailer. Inside I found Tommy standing by the far window directly to my left.