The invader picked the wrong house, and it was up to Peter Charkin to make sure that he knew it.
It was an obvious robbery attempt … a home invasion. The guy had shown a gun, so Charkin had no choice but to submit to being tied to the chair. He also couldn’t prevent the same thing happening to his girlfriend, Tina Welker.
It was Tina’s house, which made it a strange choice. Tina was not wealthy, and she lived in a working-class neighborhood. But this was the house the guy had chosen, and Charkin had the misfortune to be there when the robber entered.
The robber was a big guy; the truth is that he was a lot more than Charkin could handle under any circumstances, gun or no gun. But the guy didn’t seem as if he intended to hurt anyone, and he had said so up front. He seemed calm, as if he had done this before. No sense antagonizing him.
“Everybody cooperates, and life goes on,” the guy had said.
But just to be sure, Charkin had told him he was making a mistake, picking on the wrong people. “You know Jerry Donnelly?” Charkin asked him. “Ever heard of Big Jerry Donnelly?”
The guy had just about done a double take; the Donnelly name was an important one. “What about him?”
“So you know who he is?”
“I know who he is. I said, what about him?”
“He and I are friends. Partners.”
“Yeah, right.”
“He’ll know you did this,” Charkin said, before realizing that he had just given the thief a reason to kill him, so as to prevent him from squealing to Donnelly. “I won’t tell him, but he’ll know.”
“You’d better not tell him.”
“I won’t if you walk away now. There’s nothing worth anything here anyway.” Charkin winked at the frightened Tina, tied to a chair about six feet away from him. It was his way of telling her that everything would be okay. She did not seem convinced.
“He does know Jerry,” Tina said, though she had no idea if that was true and doubted it was. She had never even heard of Donnelly, but that didn’t stop her from throwing in her own lie. “And so do I.”
The guy looked at her, didn’t say anything, and did something that made Charkin think that maybe this wasn’t going to end well. The guy punched him in the mouth. Not that hard; the guy could have crushed his face if he wanted to.
Charkin’s head went back in the chair. He was stunned by the punch, and by the taste of blood in his mouth. “What did you do that for?” he managed. “We’re cooperating.”
The assailant didn’t answer; instead he quickly took the gun back out of his pocket, put it to Charkin’s head, and pulled the trigger. It happened so fast that Charkin did not realize it was coming.
Tina Welker was not so lucky. She experienced the full measure of panic and dread before her life was ended in the same manner as Charkin’s.
Then the killer got to work preparing the scene.
The last thing he was worried about was Jerry Donnelly.
We have started taking family dog walks.
Occasionally, usually on the weekends, Laurie, Ricky, and I take Tara and Sebastian for a walk all together. We go from our house on Forty-second Street in Paterson, New Jersey, down to Park Avenue and Thirty-third Street, and then to Eastside Park.
We go to Park Avenue to stop and get bagels and muffins, then we sit and eat them at picnic tables in the park. Tara and Sebastian each get their own plain bagel. Tara, a golden retriever, eats slowly and delicately, while Sebastian, a basset hound, chows his down in about ten seconds. He then looks at Tara, hoping she won’t finish.
Good luck with that.
Laurie usually holds Tara’s leash. Tara displays a typical golden retriever’s interest in her surroundings, eagerly sniffing new discoveries even though she has made this exact walk hundreds of times. Ricky walks Sebastian, and even though Sebastian outweighs him, he has no difficulty handling him. That is because Sebastian walks with the speed and dexterity of your average refrigerator/freezer.
My job, which Laurie and Ricky unanimously assigned to me, is to be the bearer, and user, of the plastic bag. As you can imagine, it is not a job I relish. In Tara’s case, it’s no big deal; she does her business neatly and delicately.
Sebastian is a different story. Even though he eats the same amount of food as Tara, for some reason there is a clear difference between the input and the output. There are occasions when I could use a forklift to remove Sebastian’s “deposits.” If he’s embarrassed by it, he hides it well.
Today we make a slight detour, stopping on Thirty-ninth Street to drop Ricky off at the house of his best friend, Will Rubenstein. Will’s father, Brian, is outside mowing his lawn. My preferred method of lawn mowing is to hire someone. If such people were suddenly to become unavailable, I would choose to cover the whole thing with cement.
With Ricky no longer with us, I take Sebastian’s leash and we’re back heading to Park Avenue. Sebastian keeps us going at a snail’s pace, which is fine with me. He and I share the same point of view: we are going to get there eventually, and neither of us are angling to make the Olympic walking team.
We’re one block from the bagel store when I hear a dog yelping, apparently in pain. It’s an awful sound, and I quickly look down to make sure it is not coming from Tara or Sebastian. It isn’t.
The yelping stops momentarily, but then starts again. Laurie and I look up at the same time, and we see that across and down the street, a man is kicking his dog. The dog is lying on the ground, and the creep is pulling on its leash and kicking it at the same time. He also starts yelling at the dog to get up. The moment is so horrifying that it takes a moment to digest it, to confirm that it’s really happening.
Spoiler alert: you are about to learn one of the many differences between Laurie and me.
While we are both horrified, my first reaction is to figure out what to do. Laurie’s first reaction is to do it.
She drops Tara’s leash and runs across the street toward the creep, yelling at him to stop. He looks at her with what seems to be disdain. He is not aware that she spent years as a cop and could likely handle three of him with ease. Therefore, he is also not aware that if he doesn’t stop what he’s doing, he’s going to get his ass kicked.
I grab Tara’s leash, and the two dogs and I belatedly start to move toward the action as well. But then I hear more yelling; a different man’s voice this time, and I see another guy running toward the creep and his dog. He is also yelling at him to stop, but it is falling on deaf ears.
The other man, clearly a hero, is closer and arrives before Laurie. The creep drops the leash, whirls, and throws a punch at the arriving hero, which proves to be a major mistake.
The hero proceeds to dismantle the creep with a series of punches. By my count there are at least six of them, evenly distributed between the gut and the head. If you really want to know how fast and crisp the punches look, go on YouTube and check out some Muhammad Ali fights.
The creep goes down as if shot. Laurie yells at the hero to stop hitting the creep, but it’s unnecessary, since he’s already stopped. He’s not leaning over to hit the guy again, though the creep deserves it. All the hero is doing is picking up the dog’s leash.
I can’t hear what he and Laurie are saying to each other until I get close. The first thing I hear is the guy saying, “I can’t stand when people hurt a dog.”
The dog at the center of this, an adorable pug, has gotten to his feet and seems none the worse for wear. Though his owner is still on the ground, the pug makes no effort to go over to him. I don’t blame the dog.
I see other people watching from across the street. I assume one or more of them called 911, because sirens are blaring as police cars approach. I am surprised to see a look of concern, if not panic, in the man’s eyes; as a defense attorney, I have seen the look before.
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