Previously on Old Man Young and the Bronx Avenger
Detective Paul Young has been a homicide detective for a long time and it’s right to assume that he has seen quite a few dead bodies. Over the years, death just became a part of the job and Young learned to separate the sometimes gruesome nature of his job from the other parts of his life, but that became extremely difficult when his career took off and he was tasked with the worst of the city’s homicide caseload. The crazier the perpetrators he was tasked with finding, the harder he worked to apprehend them in hopes of keeping his family safe from humanity’s worst monsters. Many of the crimes he solved were crimes of passion or rage, but Young hoped that his dedication to the work, his dogged pursuit of the guilty, was enough to deter would-be murderers because of the likelihood that Young would find them and lock them up. He sacrificed a lot to strike fear in the hearts of criminals and he hoped that it would all mean something in the end.
Detective Young is not a young man anymore, he is approaching fifty and has decided to double down on his image as a top rate detective. Which means that there is a lot more death in his future.
This week, at the Knoxville, TN Morgue
The new morgue assistant, Ivan, is a young man but he is taller than Young, and he seems to be in much better shape.
“You should think about joining the force,” Young said to him when they met earlier in the day. Young was called to view a body that may be related to a recent case he’d opened jointly with narcotics, an investigation of a drug syndicate that was controlled locally by a man named Yuri. “Seriously, you could take down anybody, we could use some muscle on the force.”
“Maybe in a couple of years. I just finished high school, took some summer classes so I could take this job.” Ivan said, as he took Young to the body as his boss had instructed him to do.
“According to IDs found on the body, this is Yuri James, but a search of the fingerprints didn’t match.” Ivan and Young stand in the room with the bodybag containing the corpse of a recently deceased male.
If it is Yuri, then Young’s case is as dead as the corpse, but then he wouldn’t have to worry about his new friend Sandra. Young’s history with Yuri is brief, though Yuri had been the subject of a narcotics investigation for about five years. Sandra, a woman close to Young’s age who had lost her son to the drug life in TN that Yuri orchestrated, had agreed to assist detectives in their investigation. She’d known Yuri since his youth, a fact that cuts both ways as Young learned when Yuri revealed to him that he knew Sandra was working with him. Young feared for her safety and since his last face to face encounter with Yuri, Sandra has been living with Young, sleeping in his bed while he curls up on the couch.
“Who the prints say it is?” Young asks as he opens the bag. It definitely isn’t Yuri, in fact, he seems to be younger and his skin is darker.
“A Mr. Gary Michaels,” Ivan reports. “He’s just 16, they found him out a road, bullets in his chest and head.”
“This ain’t Yuri,” Young says grimly. He puts a hand to his cheek, feeling the sag of the skin, then he swipes his hand down to his beard. He does that when he is overcome by his emotions and he needs to collect himself. “But I think I know who this is.”
Young remembers his first encounter with Sandra, after the gas station explosion. She had recently reported her son missing, and to the day that Young stands in the morgue with Ivan, she has not heard from him. Sandra had assumed that her son was living with his father, who didn’t have a house of his own but he usually slept at the same house every night near the corner he normally worked selling drugs. “He swear he something,” Sandra said of her husband when she and Young talked at his house late one night. “That man is a scared little boy, just like his son. If you look at him wrong he think he gotta jump on you, scared somebody bigger than him will see him being disrespected. That’s what jail did to him, made him jumpy and sensitive, scared to show weakness. He been on the same corner since he was eighteen. He too scared to move up cause the business get more dangerous the more important you make yourself, and he don’t worry about the boys younger than him.”
Young stares down at the body, and then he calls Sandra. “Just meet me down here, soon as you can make it.”
“Who was that?” Ivan asks.
“I think it’s this boy’s mama. They tell you anything about the IDs they found on him?” Young fingers through the file that Ivan had been reading from.
“Nope, said the pictures matched though, that’s why we were so surprised the fingerprints didn’t match.”
Young feels the sag of his cheek again; he think, It’s obviously a message, but why would Yuri risk being tied to a murder by switching his IDs? It’s something to ponder until Sandra arrives and Young is happy that Ivan is there; the young man consoles her as she doubles over in grief at the sight of her son in the body bag.
“I just can’t believe it. I was sure that I would get to talk to him again soon. I was praying…I prayed.” Sandra says through sobs.
“He’s at peace Ms. Michaels,” Ivan says. “It’s hard to comprehend at first, that someone won’t exist as you knew them ever again, but trust me, he’s finally at peace. Every worry he had is gone, he is no longer afraid.”
Young watches Ivan, surprised at his maturity. Young is a caring man, but he has struggled to console Sandra in her grief since the two have lived together. He was afraid to convey any romantic aspirations and he usually overcompensated, creating a friendly but awkward relationship between the two of them.
As Young and Sandra leave the morgue, he calls Detective Marcus Colston in narcotics. “I identified the body, it’s not Yuri James. Find him and bring him in for questioning.”
Meanwhile, somewhere in the Bronx, NY
Sonny has had a rough time without his partner Corey. Since Corey was wounded in a drive by shooting and was left recovering in a hospital, Sonny has been contemplating his counter move. He figures that Fire, a former colleague and current rival of Sonny’s boss and Corey’s uncle Darker, had something to do with the shooting, and Sonny is planning bloody revenge. He has never killed anyone, but then again Sonny has never encountered the man who killed his father and Darker has never asked him to kill anyone. He has every intention of avenging his friend who nearly lost his life.
Sonny has been waiting to have a meaningful conversation with Darker since the shooting, but it seems that Darker has been distracted. Today, though, Sonny meets Darker in the backroom of a deli that he owns. Sonny hates the way it smells when he walks in, like unrefrigerated meat and he never eats any of the sandwiches the deli offers even though it is free to him.
The back room is lit with fluorescent light, but the light flickers, leaving the room a partial, rotating darkness. Darker is mostly obscured by shadows.
“What are we gonna do Dark?” Sonny asks.
Darker hands Sonny a photo ID that Sonny reads aloud.
“Yuri James? Who is this?”
“Fire’s nephew, his sister’s son. Big player down south. That’s one of Fire’s main men. Or he used to be.”
PRL Serials 