Mook

Freelander formed an awning over his forehead with one hand and tried to see past the reflection in Peshko’s front window. He couldn’t, only his belly hanging over the belt. Turning sideways, he pulled in his gut, pushed it out, pulled it in then glanced back at Flynn, leaning against the ESU truck. Flynn wasn’t paying attention, studying his hands and chewing. He’d opened the pack of Juicy Fruit on the way over and jammed all six sticks into his mouth before getting out.

Freelander turned back toward the window, untucked his shirt and studied the reflection again: White cotton clouds floated across blue sky over the tenements behind. When he caught sight of his face, Freelander gripped the skin over his eyes with both hands and pushed upward. He held it there a moment then let it fall.

Freelander turned back to Flynn and was about to say something concerning his thirty-five years of public service, that the frown on his forehead was now welded in place. Flynn stared back at him blankly, chewing his gum like a horse. Freelander grinned instead and took two steps into the shadow of the coffee shop. He could see through the glass now: Mook was sitting at the counter, holding the barrel of a forty-five against his left temple, the severed head sitting on a plate in front of him. If Freelander hadn’t been told it was a head, he’d have though Mook had just ordered one of Peshko’s famous rump roasts.

Jelek Peshko blamed his macular degeneration on the fact he didn’t recognize what Mook was carrying as a head. He assumed he’d brought him another ham as Mook often came in trying to sell food he’d nicked off the back of trucks of various markets on the lower east side. Jelek had handed Mook one of his blue enameled serving platters and lowered his voice.

“Slide that underneath.”

Jelek held out a napkin and shook it.

“Cover it. I’ve got customers. Be with you in a moment.”

The place had been packed. Took all of ten seconds before the shrieking started and they all began falling out of their seats, clawing their way toward the exit. The customers had wedged themselves in the corner so tight no one had been able to pull the door open. They kept lunging against it until the frame gave way. People were still being treated up the block by EMS for glass cuts and broken fingers when Freelander arrived.

Jelek didn’t understand why everybody had all of a sudden gotten so upset and gawked at what was left of his door. He only installed it a week earlier. Jelek would jump in front of a subway car to grab a nickel and certainly wouldn’t have bought a new one if he had known the landlord was going to sell the building. The original wooden door with two cracked panels held in place by duct tape had done fine for the last fifteen years. The knob falling off had just been bad timing. The new owner, not from the neighborhood, doubled Peshko’s rent before the ink had dried on the contract and Jelek was forced to close his family business at the end of the month. The landlord was planning on gutting the restaurant and putting in an art gallery.

The Lieutenant watched Mook raise himself off the stool, still holding the gun against his temple, and examine the pile of donuts under a plastic dome. Freelander rapped on the window with knuckles of two fingers and Mook jerked his chin up and down. The Lieutenant stepped inside and stood, hands clasped in front of him as if he’d gotten into an elevator.

The forty-five looked like it was bolted to the side of Mook’s head, following his every motion. He watched Mook lift the dome with his right hand, place it on the counter, slide the bottom most donut out, place it between his teeth and drop the dome back down over the tray. Mook then sat and took a bite.

Freelander’s radio squawked. He fumbled to find the squelch and gave it a twist.

“Mook. OK if I take a seat?”

“Mmm.”

With two hands, Freelander lifted the bifocals hanging from the lanyard around his neck and slid the struts over the top of his ears. With one finger, he pushed the bridge down toward the end of his nose.

“I’m assuming you knew I was barbecuing and that’s why you asked for me specifically?” Freelander’s tone was dry as flour.

After the last customer had crawled over his crushed door, Jelek turned to Mook, the only person left in the place. Mook pulled the forty-five from his waist band at that point and placed the barrel against his temple.

“I’ll only speak with Lieutenant Freelander from the 9th. If anybody else shows up, I’ll blow my brains out all over your counter top.”

Freelander wasn’t sure if Mook understood his barbecuing joke. Whenever Freelander started grilling out back of the Precinct, he’d get a call; and it usually turned out to be a fiasco, like the one he had just walked into.

Mook swiveled on the stool to half-face Freelander, powdered sugar sticking to blood on his chin. Mook’s shoulders had lowered about half an inch since Freelander showed up. People in the neighborhood frequently asked for the Lieutenant to be present at their domestic spats. When he received the Ukrainian community service award a few years back, Freelander’s barber stood up and nailed the reason why:

“Lieutenant Freelander is an honorable man. He doesn’t give a shit what people think and that’s why we trust him.”

“Barbecuing what?” Mook asked.

“Jerk chicken.  I bought two organic birds and had been marinating them for two days.”

On his way over to the counter, Freelander stopped by the window sill to touch a plastic rose stuck down into a dust covered crystal vase that’d been there forever, the one with the eagle and word Polska engraved on it. Aside from the clothes on his back, the vase was the only other thing Jelek’s grandfather carried with him in setting foot on Governor’s Island back in 1910.

“I’d finished my first basting when your bullshit came across. I got two more to do, Mook, so I trust that you, your gun and that goddamn head aren’t going to take up the rest of my shift.”

Freelander turned his mouth down, pointing at Mook. “The secret, by the way, is jerking the meat with deep cuts, stuffing the scotch bonnet in as far as it will go then marinating it for at least a day. I do two, or until it tastes like hot coals.”

Mook nodded and Freelander sat down two stools away. The seats had been upholstered in bright red vinyl at some point; but had long since worn and faded to pink, cracking above the chrome.

Mook leaned toward the Lieutenant, staring at his clothing, first at the collar then moving down the sleeves, stopping at the right cuff. Freelander figured this was part of Mook’s crazy. He’d been in and out of psychiatric hospitals since he was a kid and was a fixture in Tompkins Square, usually sitting on the same bench near the South-East corner. Locals called him “Conspiracy Man.” His all-time favorite rant concerned LBJ killing Kennedy, the grassy knoll thing along with the insidious influences of Brown and Root, Halliburton, and Texas oil companies. Mook told anybody who’d listen how he heard first hand from a close friend of someone involved that there’d been three shooters. Once he got started, he’d usually have the bench all to himself.

Mook pushed the rest of the donut into his mouth and wiped his hand on the napkin placed over the head. He began tapping the counter top with the tips of his index and third finger on his right hand. A long steak knife, caked in the strawberry Jello of congealed blood, white ligaments and brown slivers of muscle lay between the two of them.

Freelander gently placed his radio on the counter. With two fingers, he lifted a pack of Parliaments out of his shirt pocket and set it down. He slid a Bic lighter out of the same pocket and lay that on top of the cigarettes as if putting finishing touches on a floral arrangement. Freelander’s Baretta was visible in a worn liver brown shoulder holster that wrapped across his frayed button-down shirt. He had taken his dark blues off before climbing out of the ESU truck so Mook could see the strap was still fastened across his gun.

Freelander wouldn’t shoot if he didn’t feel the person deserved it. He killed three people in his career and taken one bullet in the chest, all on the same day; while he was with the 75^th in Brooklyn. When they arrived at the scene, several children were discovered having been tortured along with their mothers, disfigured with butane torches, a drug related revenge-on-the-family strategy. Freelander shot two of the men in course of the gun battle then, thinking he might be bleeding out from the bullet in his thigh, executed the third, the one who had shot his partner. The man had been rolling around on the floor, wounded when Freelander steadied himself in the doorway fifteen-feet away, took aim and watched the man’s head explode like a water balloon. There had been no enquiry. Freelander always felt dissatisfied about the whole thing; one of the kids had died and nothing was resolved to his mind. Otherwise, throughout the majority of his career, Lieutenant practiced due process.

He wasn’t certain what he felt about the head but sensed a disconnect between Mook and his weapon. Mook was treating the gun like a movie prop. He’d known Mook’s family from Ludlow Street, having grown up a few blocks away on 4^th between A and B. Mook’s mother had worked the same bakery as his had. In that way, he viewed the Peshko’s call as another neighborhood fugazy. At face value, things weren’t looking too good for Mook; him showing up, bloody head in one hand, bloody knife in the other, then brandishing the forty-five. From what he’d been told, Mook materialized out of the alley beside the restaurant, waltzing in as if delivering a pizza.

Freelander pushed his bifocals down almost to the end of his nose and tilted his head back. Mook looked and smelled like he’d worked the slaughterhouse night shift without an apron. The head was just as much a mess as he was: One eye dangled from a socket, skin and muscles on that same side sagged like melted wax, most of the blood had already dried; the head’s mouth gaped, forming an O, the skin dusky and gray. The one intact eye turned upward, filmed over, reminding Freelander of a fish. He figured the time of death was several hours before; could have even been the previous day.

“You use that head as a seat cushion, Mook?”

Mook scraped powdered sugar off his nose with the tip of the forty-five then reset it against his temple.

“I was laying on it when I woke up.”

Freelander tilted his head to one side in exaggerated surprise. His mouth twitched. He was hoping Mook hadn’t actually done what it looked like he’d done.

“Just don’t forget to mention that detail to the jury as it could only be viewed favorably.”

Mook bit a bloody fingernail on his right hand, stared at Freelander before resuming his tapping.

“So, Mook, what, you must be pushing about forty years?”

“Thereabouts.”

“Uh huh.” Freelander pointed with his lips toward the head. “Going through a mid-life crisis, are you?”

Freelander scratched his cheek with a thumb, resting his hand on the cigarettes and lighter. He lowered his voice. “I know you can’t smoke in here but I like to have my Parliaments out wherever I go. It’s beyond my control but at the same time, not much to ask, right?”

Mook glanced at the Lieutenant’s pack of cigarettes and asked, “You want a donut?”

Both knew Jelek made his donuts from a secret sugar-fat-flour recipe that’d been in the Peshko family since Roman times. After deep frying, he’d inject them with home-made jam, exactly the kind of donuts Freelander imagined they served in heaven, nothing remotely healthy about them.

“Are you kidding?”

Mook lowered the gun for a moment and pushed the tray toward Freelander with its barrel. The lieutenant lifted the dome, snatched a donut off the top and pushed it back towards Mook with an elbow.

“Could you either put the fucking gun down or keep it pressed against your head, one or the other? You, that head and that gun are giving me agita and forcing me into my old emotional eating patterns.”

Freelander pushed half the donut into his mouth. Powdered sugar fell down the front of the shirt and onto the handle of his Baretta. He chewed once then shoved the rest in.

“Shee.” More sugar fell onto his cigarette pack and lighter. “Awwgta.”

Mook finally grinned.

Freelander knew Mook was a good kid; missing a transistor, but basically good. When he heard what happened, he figured there was probably a saga behind it. Years previous, Freelander had escorted Mook to Bellevue a few times, after he had introduced PCP into his already schizo-affective addled brain; even recalling one of their conversations en route. Freelander swallowed the last of his donut, placed both hands flat on the counter, and cleared his throat: “Mook, you still think the world is flat?

“Why wouldn’t I?”

Freelander ran a forearm across the back of his mouth.

“How can you even think that? There is so much scientific evidence . . . No, I’m really curious why an intelligent guy like you would even think that.”

Mook pushed his tongue against the inside of one cheek. Freelander went on.

“The Kennedy theory is more plausible. See, I remember what you told me: About working for that Texas company and hearing about what happened from . . . it was a foreman, right?”

“Good memory.” Mook stared at Freelander, his mouth opening as if he was about to say something else. He didn’t and continued tapping a little harder on the counter.

After the service, Mook had been hired by a military buddy in Houston to work for the Brown and Root construction company on a pipe laying barge in the Gulf. Mook met a deck foreman who told him he knew somebody who arranged transportation for the Kennedy shooters in Dallas. Mook, in turn, told Freelander as well as hundreds of other people the story.

“He picked them up afterwards and drove them to this little airport outside Ft. Worth. Each took a separate single engine job. The foreman’s friend told him they all just sat there reading newspapers like it was another day at the office.”

Mook had mentioned the deck foreman told him his friend disappeared. The others had as well.

Freelander glanced over his shoulder at half the 9^th parked outside, guns drawn, leaning over the hoods of the seven RMPs draped around Peshkos like a garland. Freelander hadn’t asked for additional units but heard more sirens approaching. The whole shabang already seemed like overkill.

“So, Mook. First time in Peshko’s with a severed head?”

Mook pushed his bottom lip out with his tongue.

“Me too. Where you living now anyway; still on Ludlow?”

“Yep.”

“I’m figuring you didn’t walk all the way from home carrying the noggin, bright sunny day as it is. 911 would have backed up like the BQE on a Friday afternoon. So, where’d you come from?”

Mook stared straight ahead, tapping.

“You know, I’ve got a few really gorgeous Chinese history books at home. Turns out beheadings were in back in the twenties. Boxer rebellion. Americans not so much. Americans liked their hangings. But in one of these books, there are a ton of photos of heads piled in town squares, heads in baskets, heads on platforms, heads on posts, heads everywhere. So what you’re doing wouldn’t have seemed that out of place back then and wouldn’t have caused much of a commotion. But here, in Peshko’s, it’s different. If anything, you owe Jelek a new front door. I honestly don’t think he cares that you brought in a head, only that his door got busted. I think he let his insurance lapse, between you and me.”

Mook tapped his right hand on the counter top louder still.

“Anyway, my working theory is you don’t really believe the Earth is flat. You’re basically stubborn as fuck. Your ma told me that. So, whose head is that?”

Mook stopped tapping, picked the head up with the napkin, turned it and set it back down on the plate, this time facing Freelander. He moved the napkin away from the face. Freelander stuck a thumb inside his right nostril and probed for a second. He need to pick his nose at some point but the timing wasn’t right at the moment. The face looked like mush to him.

“You said you woke up sleeping next to the body?”

“Sleeping on top of the body.”

Mook stayed still as a statue, the gun pressing against his temple a little harder now, fingers of his right hand jerking up and down. Freelander tried to lift his eyebrows to appear jovial but couldn’t manage it.

“What made you carry the head into Peshko’s, of all places? Hoping for a few free blueberry blintzes?”

Something streaked over Freelander’s head and he jerked, swatting the air. The red dot jiggled in the middle of Mook’s forehead. Freeland turned and saw the sharpshooter’s tripod on the hood of an RMP. Tactical was outside. He hadn’t requested them but recognized Captain Farley, wearing a black suit, standing next to his ESU truck. Farley was speaking into a headset. Freelander twisted the squelch knob on his radio: Nothing. The sharpshooter was wearing a similar headset, a fancy one, with an antenna. Farley had his office down at One Police and only showed up for high profile events. To Freelander’s mind, this wasn’t high-profile by a long shot, more of an EDP call that really shouldn’t be getting much attention. Farley looked agitated, like a kid whose mother just found out he’d spent all her cookie jar money on Bazooka and Milky Ways.

Freelander turned to examine Mook, who hadn’t moved and was making even more of a racket with his tapping. Mook turned to stare into Freelander’s eyes, shoulders rising, grip tightening around the forty-five.

“Mook, I’m in charge of this scene and can tell you I didn’t authorize a sharpshooter. I don’t know what these clowns are doing here or who authorized them.”

“You were never in charge of this scene, Lieutenant.”

Right after Mook spoke, another red dot appeared, jiggling more erratically than the first. Freelander turned his radio’s volume up and swiveled, looking outside. He keyed the mike.

“Negotiation in progress. No threat at present. Stand down.”

He released his mike and heard only static. Radio silence was common radio procedure during tactical operations. They had either switched to another channel or were using encrypted radios. Freelander turned his volume down.

The interview with Mook was bread and butter. Freelander had felt comfortable with their rapport. He tilted his head forward and peered more closely through the glass door, recognizing the sharpshooter on the car, a man named Lemming, ex-marine sniper. Freelander noticed a metallic glint behind the curtains of a second story window across the street, the scope of a second shooter. He placed his hand on his knee and leaned farther still. A third had set up over the lip of the opposite roof. That one didn’t have the angle for Mook but his laser guidance wobbled on the edge of the counter, next to the Lieutenant’s pack of Parliaments. Freelander slid them over by the salt shaker, out of range.

Mook rapped even louder, this time startling Freelander, who was reminded of another conversation they’d had during an ambulance ride: Freelander and Mook both served in Army communications; both had mastered Morse Code it turned out. And Mook was tapping to him in Morse Code.

Freelander picked up a teaspoon behind the counter and tapped Dih dih dah dah dih dih, a question mark.

Mook stopped for a moment then began again, a little slower. Freelander lifted one of the napkins from the plastic box, removed a pen from his pocket and wrote: Cuff cuff cuff. He turned the napkin around and pushed it toward Mook.

Mook nodded, shoved the napkin back and began tapping again. This time Freelander wrote the word bugged.

Freelander stood and took one step to his right. He checked Mook’s forehead. No red dots. He had moved into the line of sniper aim and imagined the lasers now jiggling across the back of his own head. He heard Farley curse through the closed door, glanced down at his cuff then focused on Mook while running his fingers across and underneath the cotton. He felt the metal, turned the cuff inside out and glanced down. Something round, smaller than a camera battery, was clipped next to the button.

Twenty minutes before getting the Peshko’s call, Freelander had been carrying his grill into the small courtyard at back of the ESU station, when he was introduced to a suit, someone he’d never met, a government liaison assigned to work security for a presidential detail arriving at the end of the month. Fred Dieter, from downtown, had pointed Freelander out, the man approached, and they shook hands. The man brought his left hand up and had grabbed Freelander’s wrist.

“Lieutenant Freelander. Pleasure. Will look forward to working with you,” he had said.

“Mook, can I see that steak knife you used to saw that man’s head off for a moment?”

Mook slid the knife across the bar. Back to the window, Freelander hacked at his cuff, digging the disc out. He raised the disc to his mouth and spoke:

“Take your protein pills and put your helmet on.”

Mook gazed up and exhaled. “That wasn’t a good idea, Lieutenant.”

Twenty seconds later, Freelander’s radio came to life: Farley’s voice.

“We need you to wrap things up in there. We’re calling this one.”

Freelander turned his volume all the way down and crushed the transmitter with the bottom of the knife handle. Mook began talking.

“They put me in a room overnight then dropped me in the alley. I didn’t see the car. They said I couldn’t turn around.”

“Who put you in a room?”

“Whoever did this.”

“You didn’t cut the man’s head off then?”

“No.”

Freelander didn’t get the sense Mook was lying but knew the kid had always been stuck in his delusions like a mastodon in a tar pit.

“They drugged me. I woke up in the killing room.”

“Who’s they?”

“I put everything I found out in my chat room and on the website. Two days ago. I figured it out, the whole fucking thing and know I’m right. I’m the only one who knows. It took years.”

Mook pulled the napkin fully away from the head.

“This is Senator Nelson Masterson. They gave me the gun, the knife and told me to come in Peshko’s. If I didn’t they would kill Cynthia.”

“Your sister?”

Mook nodded. Freelander caught the flash of another laser in the mirror over the counter. He turned, and shielded his eyes from the red beams, squinting at a fourth shooter now set up one story above the second. He slowly turned around to face Mook again.

“What did you figure out?”

“That they were planning on killing the Senator. That’s what I posted. Then the rest of it, which was even worse. No, I don’t believe the Earth is flat. But I got one or two of their pieces finally, they fit together like a glove and it all made sense, so I decided to put it out there. The next day I wake up with the Senator’s head as my pillow. They told me they had Cynthia and her three kids. She moved to New Rochelle last year and had been doing good, finally.”

“Who are these people?”

“The forty-five isn’t even loaded, Lieutenant.”

“What did you figure out? You need to tell me, now. I am going to try to keep you safe, but you have to . . . “

Freelander stopped speaking, now seeing Mook peer past him, at something over his shoulder; then watched Mook’s body sag in disappointed as he began to lower his hand holding the gun. Freelander’s body was shoved forward against Mook, their heads cracking together like two bowling balls, bursting open with brains and skull hurtling toward the old rest room doors that’d been there since Jelek’s father opened the place. Their bodies hit the floor at the same time, Freelander sprawling over Mook as if shielding him.

Outside, Farley grimaced and relaxed, turning toward the building behind him. The two windows were both empty now, their curtains had settled back in place. Farley allowed himself to get angry.

“Who gave the order to fire? What the fuck just happened?”

He glanced up. The shooter on the roof was gone as well.

“Officer down, officer down,” Farley bellowed into his megaphone.

The ESU Sargent and officers from the Ninth came running into Peshko’s like water swirling down a drain.

Biography
A.F. Knott’s recent work has appeared in Shotgun Honey, Yellow Mama and Cowboy Jamboree. His second novel Ramonst, is available on Amazon through Hekate Publishing.