Where the Monsters Live Read online

  "Sit your ass down," Popcorn said.

  "You want some of this?" Walker said, thrusting his crotch toward the larger man.

  "You best be gettin' your skinny dick outta my face." Popcorn picked up the discard pile from their Rummy game and threw the cards at Walker, who giggled and flopped back down on the couch.

  "Man, you're pickin' those up!"

  "Bullshit."

  Popcorn and Walker left the cards scattered on the ground and the ratty old sofa. I let the song play out, then skipped the next two. Still couldn't remember them, even if I tried.

  "Hey, I like that song," Walker groaned about the second, but the next song had already started, the haunting chords on a keyboard, the tss-tss-tss of a hi-hat.

  When George Michael began to sing in his raspy whisper, Gonzalez turned to me. He met my eyes for only a moment, but the shock was palpable, the guilt evident. He returned his gaze to the CD player, and as the song played out my eyes never left him. I felt them tearing up, thinking about what he must have done to my Nola, but I blinked it away. I couldn't let my grief, my anger, and a sudden disturbing rush of exhilaration from being so close after searching for so long come between me and my revenge. I studied Gonzalez with glistening eyes: this bland monster, this mild-mannered beast. I watched him and pictured my knife slipping into the hot meat between his ribs.

  "The fuck is that shit?" someone called over, tearing me from my fantasy. I allowed my gaze to move beyond Gonzalez to the black '80s Chevy Impala resting beside a spray-painted entreaty that had once made the papers: WE ARE NOT MONSTERS. A guy I'd seen around a few times sat hanging out the driver door. He had a little mustache and silky blond hair like a man on a box of hair dye, except the circles under his eyes were so dark they could have been bruises.

  "It's called music," Popcorn shouted back. "The fuck you think it is?"

  The blond dude got out of his car and approached, snapping bubblegum. "Why you listenin' to that faggot, huh?"

  "Actually, he's bisexual," Walker answered. "Not that it makes any goddamn difference."

  "You listen to that shit, you're no better'n a faggot yourself." Blondie came right up to the table and reached for the CD player.

  Popcorn swatted his hand away.

  "Don't you fuckin touch me, nigger."

  Popcorn's eyes narrowed. He grabbed the blond guy's arm and jerked it up behind his back, the kind of move a cop or someone who'd been trained in military might use, and I found myself suddenly glad to be up against Gonzalez instead of Popcorn.

  "That's uncalled for," a woman I knew only as Pip shouted over to us.

  Others crowded around. A man with a lisp and cargo shorts cinched high on his waist by a frayed piece of rope asked why we couldn't all just get along.

  In the fracas, the blond dude stomped down on Popcorn's foot, chewing his gum with a gleeful. The heels of his cowboy boots sounded hard, and Popcorn's sneakers had seen better days. They were bound together by duct tape and falling apart at the seams, his tube socks so dirty they were black in places visible at the sides. Popcorn's howl of pain just about matched Mick Jagger's, and he let go of the blond dude's arm.

  Blondie shook his hair as if Popcorn had just ruffled it instead of nearly breaking his arm, and then locked eyes with Gonzalez. The wretched little smelly man looked behind himself, shrinking from the cold gaze. Blondie had found his prey, a victim to reclaim his dominance. Before Gonzalez could scramble over the back of the couch, Blondie had yanked him back by his filthy jeans and began raining down on his back with balled-up fists, calling him queer and runt and pussy.

  Whatever he was, Gonzalez was mine.

  A surge of frenetic energy ran through me as I grabbed a fistful of Blondie's hair and yanked him away from Gonzalez, who used the distraction to squirm away. I threw a punch before Blondie could swing at me, clipping him in the jaw. Having never been in a fight before, only ever using my fists against inanimate objects, it stunned me how much of a rush I got from the feel of his jaw against my knuckles. The feeling was short-lived as Blondie slugged me hard in the gut. I staggered back, the breath knocked out of me, while Popcorn and Walker jumped in to pull Blondie back from doing me some real damage.

  In all the commotion, Gonzalez had gotten up and was slinking off. I gathered up my strength and followed him. The ruckus of the other three men struggling and the crowd either egging them on or jeering them grew quieter the further Gonzalez and I ran.

  This is it, I thought, feeling stronger and almost hyperaware the closer I got to my quarry. I didn't think about going back home. I didn't think about Nola. All I could think of was blood and blood and blood…

  I SUPPOSE I should tell you about the rabbits.

  The day Nola ran away, Marnie and I had been fighting. Silly argument. She'd caught me smoking, something I hadn't done since she was pregnant—as far as she knew—and we'd gotten into it. She accused me of not caring to live long enough to see Nola graduate from college, and I accused her of not letting me relieve my stress the way I wanted. Nola heard us. She'd packed up some things in her knapsack: her stuffed lion Julio, which she spelled with a W-H-O, her favorite book about the elephant king, a bag of marshmallows (mushmellows, she called them), and a flashlight. I suspect she was going to camp out and roast her mushmellows over a fire, but how she'd planned to light one, I don't know. I suppose the thought might never have crossed a six-year-old's mind.

  Whatever she'd gotten in her head, Nola sneaked out the back door while Marnie and I argued in raised whispers, knowing full well she could hear us despite the closed bedroom door. Somewhere after the corner of Day and Matilda, where a crossing guard told police she'd scolded Nola about crossing the street without looking both ways, our little girl disappeared.

  Marnie noticed she'd slipped away just when we'd gotten to the root of the argument. At first, we thought she'd been playing. Nola had always loved hide and seek. So we looked in all the usual spots we might find her: behind the curtains, crouched behind the big ficus in my office, in the basement shower, or in her closet, under a pile of stuffed animals.

  Nowhere. Anxiety grew to full-blown fear. She knew enough not to run away, but if she'd heard us arguing...

  We searched outside, in the front and back yards, Marnie running out into the street and calling out her name. We phoned her friends, spoke to baffled, concerned parents. Finally, we called the police. Fifteen minutes later, officers showed up at our door. Marnie kept tugging at her shirt sleeves, pacing the room while the two officers took down what we had to tell them: what she was wearing, how old, hair color, about how tall, could she have gone to a relative's? I'd been watching Marnie unravel the whole time until she finally exploded, screaming at the officers, "Somebody's taken my baby and you're wasting our fucking time!" They'd looked at each other, offered their apologies, and then put out an AMBER alert.

  While Marnie waited at the house for Nola to return, the both of us sick with the absolute certainty that at any moment they would call back to tell us they'd found her body in a ditch somewhere, I drove up and down the neighborhood. I scoured the grounds at Liz Virrick Park, where we often took her when neither of us were busy on the weekend. I even went to Nola's school, where Marnie taught the fourth grade, and I taught drama part-time to finance a failing career in screenwriting. Being there filled me with the dreadful certainty Nola would never have her mother as a teacher because some monster had taken her life.

  Lost. Gone. Dead. My little girl is dead. These thoughts circled my mind as I drove through the neighborhood, once, twice, three times, certain I'd missed somewhere, hoping to return home to find her eating peanut butter out of the jar with her fingers, laughing at cartoons with her mother. But each time I returned, Marnie had been pacing the porch, or sitting, tugging at her shirt sleeves, and the house had been empty. I feared—we feared—there would never be laughter in that house again. So, back into the car, driving down the same streets, shouting her name as the neighborhood darkened.

&n
bsp; It was just after 8 p.m. when the police called. My sweaty hand shook so badly the phone slipped into my lap. I pulled the car over and listened to the officer speak, holding the cell in a trembling hand as my heart pounded in my throat.

  Imagination can be a terrible curse. I never saw it with my own eyes, but the image still haunts every waking moment of my life. It drove me to live among the sex offenders. It compelled me to find the monster who did it, the Rabbit Man, and to put him six feet in the fucking ground.

  The sick fuck had left Nola naked beside a trash bin on the bare asphalt in an alley in Little Haiti. Eventually a busboy from a nearby restaurant had come out to dump his mop bucket and saw her shivering there. He'd called the police without going to her—worried, perhaps, that even attempting to help a naked child might be misconstrued as sexual abuse.

  When Officer Sam Higgins arrived, he found a feral child huddled with her arms around her bruised knees, matted hair tangled in her face. Bleeding not just from the places she'd been violated, but from dozens of raised marks forensics later determined to be tiny scratches. Higgins wrapped the emergency blanket from his trunk around Nola, told her everything was going to be okay, that he was going to bring her to her mom and dad. At these words she leapt into his arms, latching around his neck, smearing his uniform with her blood.

  The police were taking photographs of her injuries when I burst through the door, demanding to see her. Officer Higgins got in the way. Three officers had to hold me back from punching him, and if not for Sam's interference, I might have been charged with assaulting an officer. Sam and I hashed it out later. With two daughters himself, he keenly understood my rage. The Special Victims Bureau had taken over the case, but he'd promised to update me personally.

  Marnie, Nola, and I went to the family therapist together. Dr. Ambrose had us explore our emotions in excruciating detail. She wanted us to open up, to work through our feelings, but each Thursday at 2 p.m. I begrudgingly entered her office and sat on that plush sofa entirely numb while Marnie droned and Nola played with toys in the corner. I saw no point to those visits; we were picking at scabs. While their meaningless words filled the terrifying silence, I sat alongside my wife, brewing hatred. My most violent fantasies were born in that room: gruesome acts I suspected I'd never be able to stomach even if the opportunity arose—thoughts which belonged to the monster growing inside me.

  Eventually Dr. Ambrose accused me of stalling progress. I questioned her methods, her motives, called her a sadist. She asked me to leave. I apologized and she'd allowed me to return to the room. I'd lose myself in fantasy again. Several sessions passed this way, until our time was up.

  Detective Rosario called a few weeks into this routine to inform us the lab had analyzed the white hairs they'd found on Nola's skin. Turned out to be animal fur, not human hair. They suspected the rapist kept rabbits, which kicked off a wide search for rabbit hutches in backyards and on rooftops.

  Rosario didn't seem hopeful. By then, most registered sex offenders were living under the Tuttle Causeway, many of them already wearing ankle monitors.

  I found myself driving several miles out of my way after work, slowing down over the water, catching a look at their tents and vehicles before driving ponderously back home. I'd seen them gathered down there, huddled from the rain, sharing food they'd scrounged, arguing, laughing. It all seemed normal and yet so alien to me. I wondered how they lived.

  I wondered how they'd bleed.

  Since I couldn't deal with the injuries to Nola's privates, I'd saddled Marnie with the unenviable task of applying ointment for several weeks before they healed. We spoke to each other less and less. We ate in front of the TV. I spent hours each night in the garage, pretending to work on the car. Mostly I would read my dad's old hunting magazines, fantasizing.

  Late one night, Marnie entered the garage where I'd been sitting on a stool reading an old magazine, not even bothering to cover for the work I wasn't doing, and handed me the portable phone with no discernable expression in her gaze. I took it, listened to Sam Higgins apologize while feeling the floor drop out from beneath me, and mechanically thanked him for his help. Special Victims had made no progress in their search, and Nola had been unable to remember any details despite my coaching and our increasingly acrimonious sessions with Dr. Ambrose. Barring anything new, the case had effectively fizzled out. Went cold, like the darkened corners of my heart. After that, we never heard from him again. The Rabbit Man had gotten away.

  That night I aimed to make sure it never happened again.

  BREATHING HEAVILY, I caught up to Gonzalez near the fence at the base of the bridge and jerked him around roughly to face me.

  "Hey! What gives?"

  My vision was on a dimmer, timed to the unsteady beat of my heart. After that sucker punch from the blond dude and chasing after Gonzalez, I was on the verge of blacking out. But I would make sure he looked me in the eyes as the life drained out of him. I would make sure he knew what he'd done.

  "Nola," I said. I shook him by his lumberjack jacket, raising a cloud of dust. "Nola, Nola," I blubbered, "my fucking daughter, you sick fuck!"

  Mortified, Gonzalez threw his filthy hands in the air, a gesture of innocence. "Hey, no wait, man, I haven't—done that—for ten years! I slipped up once. I would never—I've never—I…"

  I saw it dawn on him: first disgust, then fear, shock… and then confusion, suspicion. He looked over my shoulder, where the altercation had died down and Blondie was walking backwards to his car, shouting curses and kicking the dirt. "You have a daughter?"

  My grip on him lessened. I grabbed him harder, attempting to embolden myself. "Bullshit!"

  "I swear, I haven't—" Gonzalez couldn't say the words, as if his own crime disgusted him. "Not since, you know, back then. I served my time. She's forgiven me. I swear to Jesus, man, I haven't done it again since!"

  I felt the monster inside me step back from its cage. Gradually, I let Gonzalez go. He brushed his jacket off as if I was the one who'd made him dirty. "I'm sorry," I said as a cloud of dust rose around us.

  "It's okay. I'm fine." With another look over my shoulder his eyes narrowed, and he returned his gaze to me. "You know, I knew there was something not right about you when you first came down here. Something about the way you moved. Not quite Walker's swagger, more like you were looking down your nose at us." He shook his head. "And that story about your niece? The things you said you did to her…" Gonzalez trailed off, swallowing hard, avoiding the unpleasant terminology.

  I'd noticed him wincing as we listened to Walker describe his escapades in nasty detail. All this time I thought Gonzalez had just been putting on a show, the way some of the most vile politicians and religious figures act sanctimonious when inside they were repugnant.

  "I didn't buy that for a second," he finished.

  "You didn't?"

  Gonzalez shook his head.

  "Why not?"

  "It's like there was nothing there," Gonzalez said, and gestured toward his own face. "In your eyes. No regret. No pride. No lusting, like the way how Walker talks about his…" Another hard swallow. "Just this blank look. A dead look."

  I regarded him silently.

  "So you think somebody here—what? They—did something—to your little girl?"

  I nodded, feeling like a fool. All this time it had been so plain to Gonzalez I was a fraud, it must have been obvious to the others. Fear crept into my nerves, setting the monster back on edge. I would have to be more careful.

  "Why did you think it was me?"

  It took a moment for me to realize what he was asking. "The song," I told him. "The way you reacted to it, I just figured..." I didn't need to mention the rabbit. It didn't seem smart to reveal such evidence.

  "Which song? That '80s one?"

  I'd nearly blown it all because of that song. Again, I nodded.

  "It wasn't the song," Gonzalez said. "It's the tape player. It's the exact same…" He shook his head, his eyes downcast, and with t
hat look I understood. His own victim must have had the same CD player. He hadn't been reacting to the song at all. "Anyway," he said, "I wasn't the one acting strange. Popcorn and Telly, those guys started a fight over it."

  "Telly? He the blond guy?"

  Gonzalez was about to speak when the blip of a siren startled us both. We turned to look as a police cruiser crawled into the center of camp, parting the crowd. Miami P.D. swinging by for a routine check, although just as often they came through to harass the residents. Some of these men and women had parole terms stating no alcohol or illicit drugs. Others weren't allowed to be within a certain distance of other offenders, which didn't make much sense under the bridge, where everyone was here for the same basic reason. Most of the cops who came through here were just looking for a reason to use unacceptable force. For the most part, I wouldn't say I could blame them.

  Gonzalez shifted nervously in the dirt. The cop got out of the car and headed over to a huddled group of sex offenders. As he turned in the direction of the scuffle, fear struck me and I hid my face, muttering, "Shit!"

  Officer Sam Higgins' bald head gleamed as he patted a woman in boxer shorts and galoshes on the shoulder and passed a bottle of water to an elderly man I didn't recognize. New people wandered in here every day, as more and more were forced to sign the registry, many for petty offences. Higgins checked on a guy's ankle monitor. The guy—Dolph, I think—offered his hand, and Higgins shook it without hesitation.

  It amazed me to see how humanely he treated these people, knowing some of them could easily have victimized his own children. It was clear he believed in basic human decency, though if he'd caught these same people in a crime I was certain he wouldn't hesitate to tackle the prick and put him in the back of his cruiser, maybe put a little more elbow into the bust than was necessary. He was a cop after all, not Gandhi. But the fact that a man who dealt with the absolute worst of humanity every single day could still find a moment to be charitable gave me a glimmer of hope.