The Thrilling Sequel to “Old Man Winter – Heavenly Gates”

Prologue – Monsters Create Monsters

North Philadelphia – Friday, January 20, 2017, 8:03 pm

The smell of winter was thick in North Philly as Frank Collazo took it in through flared nostrils, nostrils that looked more angry than curious. His window was cracked open a little, and he leaned in toward it. He was looking for the precious air that might tame his anxiety but was unable to find it. Not in that moment, that day, or that week. Frank’s psyche was ravaged by his circumstances, and his face showed it.

“It’s a little chilly in here, Frank. You want to roll up that window there, buddy?”

“Monsters create monsters, Penny. I keep telling you that.” Frank exhaled fully. “But you keep giving people the benefit of the doubt,” he said as his partner sat quietly in the passenger seat.

“Yeah, yeah,” said Penny, staring out of her window.

Moments later, the city-issued, unmarked Dodge Charger pulled over on a dark corner, and Penny got out. Frank rolled down the window for parting words when Penny leaned in and said, “Let me tell you something, Frankie. I choose to keep on believing, and you should too. That hate’s gonna eat you up, boy.”

“Sure, whatever, Penny,” Frank was dismissive.

Before the window went back up, Penny said, “Anyways, get home safe, Partner. Wherever home is these days?” she smirked.

“Yeah? Well, you need to get you and your mom out of that tinder box!” Frank yelled back. “That place is one match away from going up in smoke!”

“Frank, This place has been here since I was a little girl,” yelled Penny, “and it ain’t going nowhere. And neither is my mom! See you Monday, Frankie boy!”

Penny gave Frank one last look and smiled before disappearing into a stairwell that led up to a one-bedroom apartment. The place she shared with her mother sat benignly above an old fabric store. The store had been owned and operated by a woman who’d lived just behind it and had been in business since 1988.

As Frank drove off, he’d reasoned that Penny thought most people were good and kind but knew very well what the City of Philadelphia’s dark side had to offer. “How could she not,” he said aloud, “with the scum we deal with every day?”

Frank had just dropped off his partner, fellow Homicide Detective Penny Bristow, at her mother’s apartment above Fabrics’ linen store. The tiny store sat on the less than modest corner of West Coulter and Germantown Avenue in Penn-Knox, Germantown’s Northside. To its left, the historic St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, built in 1811.

Since her divorce from her abusive ex-husband, Dan, Penny had been staying with her Mom, Bonnie. It’d been a little more than six months since Penny’s separation.

Bonnie Ross, a long-retired Nurse with Philadelphia’s American Red Cross, was a vital part of the movement to pass the Equal Rights Amendment back in the early seventies. Penny’s father was a cop who died in the line of duty back in 1996 when she was just fourteen years old. He was shot and killed in a shootout with bank robbers who’d been cornered on a dead-end street in Rhawnhurst. Her mother never remarried, and Frank was sure that Penny wouldn’t either. Not after what her ex had put her through, he thought.

“That guy’s lucky I never got involved. He wouldn’t have lasted thirty seconds with me,” Frank mumbled to himself as he revved his engine and turned onto E. Chelten, heading west over to Manayunk.

The road was slick but without curves, allowing Frank to negotiate the North Philly grid in the dead of another miserable winter. The clapping of the wiper blades on the Dodge Charger helped to drown out the noise in his head. Like Penny, Frank, too, was working through the remnants of a failed marriage. He didn’t miss his soon-to-be ex-wife but was having trouble only seeing his son on the weekends. The custody battle was raging, but Frank knew he had no chance of winning custody of his little man, Conner. In Frank’s line of work, no judge in his right mind would allow a little boy to be put in harm’s way.

Detectives had enemies, people they’d put away or were trying to. Frank knew the game and knew that being a cop in the big city had consequences. Consequences his wife, Joanne, wanted none of. Consequences that included a bullet through the back of his Dodge Charger while stopped at a gas station at the intersection of Fox Street and W. Abbotsford six months earlier. It was never determined if the bullet was meant for Frank or the perp who fired it, but it was the final straw for his wife. A Judge agreed, awarding custody to Joanne pending a jury trial.

Frank had been a detective for the Philly P.D. since 2010, working out of the 39th District in East Falls. He and Penny had been partners for the last three years, and some in the station house whispered that it was their partnership that put an end to each of their marriages, but they were wrong. Frank, a seventeen-year veteran of the department, took on Penny as his partner just after she’d been promoted to the rank of Detective. Penny, in her thirteenth year on the force, had grown close with her partner.

Sexual tension crept into their relationship from time to time, but Frank never seriously entertained the notion of compromising their working relationship. Working long hours together brought them close. Tip-toeing near it, as recently as Christmas, neither had ever stepped over the line. Even if they had, it’d be hard to blame them. Both were lonely, newly single, and desperately trying to fill a void that could never be filled.

Frank also lost his father, Sal, who was on the job back in 1992 when a serial killer named Vincent Charmaine Walker set a trap for the unsuspecting Salvatore Collazo, a twenty-year man with the Philadelphia P.D.

Like Penny, Frank was just a kid, fourteen, and had no siblings and a mother who’d refused to remarry. Frank, like his partner, had to become a cop. It was the only way he could get revenge on his father’s now-deceased killer. ‘Get all the other bad guys off the street,’ a mantra that he and Penny shared.

Frank Collazo knew that for every monster taken off the streets, two more were waiting in the wings, practicing their craft on rabbits, kittens, and puppies. Waiting until they’d built up their confidence and graduated to killing their ultimate prey, unsuspecting human beings. Regular people, just trying to make sense of the hand that life had dealt them, thinking that things couldn’t get any worse, until they did.

Frank and Penny were still trying to figure out what happened to retired detective Frank Bruno in the early morning hours of Christmas Day, 2016, when a well-known socialite and philanthropist and the daughter of a famous Philadelphia lawyer went missing on New Year’s Eve. Belinda Mereby was last seen getting into a limousine outside of the historic Strawberry Mansion after attending a private, black-tie affair in the early morning hours of New Year’s Day.

Just hours after Mereby went missing, the limousine was found partially submerged in the Schuylkill River, a favorite dumping ground for murdered victims and vehicles involved in criminal activity on Philly’s northside.

No less than ten bodies a year had been found on the north banks of the Schuylkill since the 1980s. Its polluted water and savage undercurrents seemed to go hand and hand with Philadelphia’s dirty under-belly.

Who picked up Belinda Mereby that night, and where was she now? Detectives in the 39th were all brought in on the high profile case as the city’s mayor, Donovan Taylor, and Mereby’s father, Clinton Mereby, were once close associates in a notorious and long-defunct law firm in the 1970s. In the early seventies, the firm was famous for representing the plaintiffs in FalconClaw’s MK-Ultra mind-control experiments case. The press and local politicians all had their eyes on the investigation, and anything less than a quick capture and prosecution of the perpetrator would be unacceptable.

Frank drove around for a while before parking his car down the street from his second-floor, one-bedroom flat above The Mad River Bar & Grill, on the intersection of Main Street & Shurs Lane in Manayunk. He tried hard not to be there, sometimes even sleeping in his car overnight. The tiny apartment reminded Frank of a patient who was in a coma. When he was there, he knew he was alive but not really living. When Frank saw his son on the weekends, he never took him there. He didn’t want his son to see what’d become of him. Instead, Frank’s wife, Joanne, let him stay at his old house, not trusting their son to be with Frank outside the house since the shooting incident six months prior. Frank would sleep on the floor next to his son’s bed. He’d hold his son’s hand until he fell asleep, and most mornings when he awoke, his son would be curled up next to him on the floor.

Frank was a regular guy, just trying to make sense of the hand that life had dealt him, thinking that things couldn’t get any worse, until they did.

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About the Author

Michael Cook is a published poet, author, accomplished business professional, and entrepreneur. Michael is also the owner of the #7 Escape Room experience in the World, Odyssey Escape Game, located in Atlanta, GA and Chicago, IL.

Originally from Ohio, by way of New York City, Michael is a resident of Suwanee, GA. Michael Cook is a father to four children, a husband, a brother, and a friend.

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