Marine Park: Stories by Mark Chiusano Read Free Book Online Page B

hood over his head, and Aurora shivers down next to Vincent. The cop cruiser is getting closer, an NYPD SWAT team in black and blue. One of them is extending a finger and pointing at the
Napoli
.
    At first Benducci doesn’t mean it. He’s holding the gun out in the rain and inspecting it when it discharges, and then he looks out to the cruiser. There are warning shots from them, and then Benducci is heaving side to side, gasping every time he pulls the trigger. He’s shooting more than the cops, who look like they’re just trying to get closer, but this is the
Napoli
, and she’s a fine motorboat. Vincent hears the wind of a bullet as it passes by over their stern. They spit over open water to hug the islet next to the bay, and it’s too close for the cops, who veer offshore. At some point Benducci has stopped heaving. Vincent makes a cut around the land barrier and the cruiser looks motionless, uncertain, so far behind.
    At the dock, behind their white house, Aurora climbs up onto the wood. But Vincent is looking at Benducci, with his hands over the side next to the motor, one eye open and no longer breathing, his bloody mouth on the mounting bracket. Hell, he says. Shit, shit. He’s crouching in the middle of the boat, and he slams a fist on the plastic siding. Bendy, goddamn. Aurora stands on the dock, her hands on opposite shoulders. The blood is all down Benducci’s neck, and it has soaked his sweatshirt, though it’s hard to tell from the rain. In death already his face has set, and there is an ugly, wet smell.
    They turn when the motion-sensor light goes on. Out of the alleyway comes Tommy, who’s holding a mobile in his hand. But then he stops.
    Mom? he says.
    And then they see the searchlights from the police cruiser getting closer, a quarter mile away, and Tommy says, Get inside, and then he runs to the
Napoli
and jams the powerhead back. The blood that dripped from Benducci’s neck is washed away by the wake of the
Napoli
leaving, and Vincent can see Benducci’s gruesome dead hand, hanging over the side of the white boat where he had left it, in his last moments.
    As the
Napoli
pulls away and the drone dies down, Vincent and Aurora watch in the rain, before they go into the house. Vincent keeps opening and closing his fists, to feel them still numb. They watch from the back porch as the
Napoli
flees into the salt marsh, where the Lenni Lenape hunting grounds used to be, where their bones were buried and the boys used to catch tadpoles off the back of the boat, on family excursions. They can tell from the way the searchlights are flitting around and around that the cruiser is stationary, looking for the
Napoli
in the tall reeds and the stormy dark. But they do not know the salt marsh, and they do not enter its depths. Then the cruiser turns around and heads for Rockaway, Beach Channel, where everyone knows the Mob holes up today, at the edge of civilization. And Tommy, perhaps Tommy knows this.
    They go inside. It is an old house. The tree branches are scratching against the siding. In the dark it looks run-down. It won’t be until almost morning, when the storm is spread over only half the sky, the city clearing up, that Tommy will nudge the boat back into its home slip—once the police are gone, the body disappeared and sunk in the swamp, the boat clean and empty—the motor off for the last hundred meters, like he used to cut it when he was a teenager and his parents slept. Vincent can’t imagine that time. He knows it will be upon him. It’s a funny thing, the succession of things happening. He knows that he can sit in his chair and do nothing, and still in the morning Tommy will come home, and explain himself, or else the police will come with strange, sad looks in their eyes. He knows that he has the power to wait for it, and that waiting alone is his one hopeful thing.
    They have lived in this house for a long time. There is the water through