Transparency by Charles Royce (children's books read aloud txt) 📕

casting golden shards onto the boats, while deckhands unload giant wooden boxes onto the pier. Behind the workers, Brooklyn begins to awake in slivered splendor across the river, the blues and pinks of the sky circling the buildings like saltwater taffy.

She takes her phone from her armband and begins to film the scene.

Two anglers wrap chains around giant boxes marked COD and STURGEON in stenciled letters. After hoisting the chains onto the crane, they each give two thumbs up.

The crane struggles to move the box from the boat to the dock, the fisherman confused why the crane can’t lift it. They rush around, try to push the boxes with their bodies. Finally, the crane jolts into submission, able to lift the fish into the air to clear the lampposts that surround the dock.

The woman zooms her camera in on the box. She hears a commotion on the boat, voices speaking a language she doesn’t understand in a tone that frightens her. She shifts the camera to the fishermen, some waving their hands in front of their noses. She thinks it odd. She pans the camera back to the box, tilts down.

A blackened body dangles from the bottom of the box, something hanging on a chain around the dead man’s neck.

The woman screams, runs toward the basin, filming the entire time.

C h a p t e r   3 6

“JOSH!” TRACY YELLS from Josh’s living room. She closes the door, locks it. She walks past the kitchen. “Joshy, you okay? I know you’re here. Thanks for unlocking the door, I wasn’t sure my key would work in the new lock. Josh? I’m just trying to find you.”

“In here.”

She hears a voice coming from the bedroom down the hall.

“There you are.” Tracy enters the room. A rancid stench fills her nostrils, the smell of unwashed sheets mixed with rotted food crumbs from the looks of things.

The drapes are drawn, a splinter of afternoon sunlight slicing Josh’s bed right down the middle. Josh is facedown, under the sheets, his arm draped over the side of the bed like a corpse. Only a small bedside lamp is on. The shade is crooked thanks to an empty pizza box tucked between the bed and the side table.

Josh’s television is on an episode of Golden Girls. Rose is telling some story about being back in St. Olaf while Blanche and Dorothy are rolling their eyes.

Tracy grabs the remote, turns off the TV. She walks to the windows, rips open the curtains.

Josh turns his face. “God!”

“Jenna told me to expect something like this.” She begins picking up paper plates of half-eaten ham-and-cheese sandwiches and barbeque chip remnants. “But this is some next level bullshit.”

“Leave me alone.”

Tracy jerks the sheets off of him. Josh’s naked butt stares at her.

“Whoops.” She tries to put the sheets back on him. “Didn’t know we slept that way in the middle of the afternoon.”

“Stop.” Josh doesn’t move.

Tracy grabs a bottle of pills next to the bed. “Xanax? Is this where we are?”

“Yes.”

Tracy looks at the bottle. “This is from that guy on the Upper West Side. Doctor Pre—”

“Doctor Prescription. Yes, I know. It was an emergency. I was panicking again.”

“You need a pill for that?” Tracy places the bottle back on the nightstand. “You people and your white people problems.”

“White people problems? Someone shot at me.”

“Three weeks ago. Did you die? No.” Tracy looks at her watch. “Josh, you need to get up. I have a surprise for you at three p.m.”

“I don’t like surprises.”

“You’re gonna love this one.” She continues to pick up trash around his bedroom.

“What is it?”

“You have to get up to find out.”

“Is it West? Fucker’s been calling me nonstop for the past two weeks.”

“That’s because you’re in charge of New York’s most publicized grand opening in history, happening in less than a month.” She slaps the sheet covering his behind. “I’m surprised he hasn’t fired your ass.”

“Or had someone kill me.”

“Good thing you’ve hired the best and let them do their thing, otherwise this event woulda gone straight to hell.”

“If you say, ‘Here’s to the West Way,’ I’ll kill you.”

Tracy pushes the trash she’s collected into an overfilled garbage can in the corner, then lays the pizza box beside it. With the tips of her fingers, she picks up some underwear from a club chair and tosses it to the floor. The absence of the boxer briefs reveals a bowl of coagulated cereal lodged sideways between the cushion and the arm. She places it on the window ledge.

“Time to take a shower.” Tracy sits on the chair and settles in. She can feel her jeans sticking to some sort of liquid leftover. “It’s over.”

“What’s over?”

“Billy.” She says the name matter-of-factly. “Billy Donovan. Haven’t you seen the video? It was all over the news.”

“What video?” Josh flips over, tucks the sheet around him.

Tracy pulls out her phone, searches. “New phone, no one knows I have it, so it’s safe.”

“Glad I could teach you something.”

She sits on the bed beside him, hits play. “Some random white girl on the Hudson Greenway, filming the sunrise.”

She fast forwards through the sunrise, the men pulling the crate over the lampposts. She lets the rest play out.

“Holy shit.” He watches the man swing from the hook. “That burnt man hanging from the box is Billy Donovan?”

“Yep.”

“The same guy who shot at me, the man you recognized on the steps the night Walter was killed? Are we sure?”

“Wallet, phone, all Billy’s.” She zooms in. “See that?”

“There’s something around his neck.”

“That’s Lennox’s hard drive,” she says. “The one that was stolen from police evidence during Micah’s trial.”

“My God.”

“They scraped the char off the bottom of the drive, and the serial number was a match. Other than that, it was destroyed, unusable. They say Billy was probably still alive when they tied his hands, put the hard drive over his head. Then they torched him until he died, threw him in the water, then hooked him to a crate at the 79th Street River Basin.