Apaches (16 page)

“He did,” Carlo said. “By the time we got back, Tony was already over at the midtown precinct. We took him home, sat by the phone, and waited. We were still waiting when Annie told me to call you.”

“Who’s on it?”

“Maloney’s the lead guy,” Carlo said. “Somebody you know?”

Boomer shook his head. “But I’ve been away awhile.”

Carlo drained his glass of wine and sat in silence, his eyes lost in the distance. He looked over at Boomer, his face flushed. “Tell me she’s not dead, Boomer,” he managed to say. “Please, I beg you. Tell me my baby’s not dead.”

“I can’t tell you what I don’t know,” Boomer said, reaching a hand across the table and gripping Carlo’s forearm. “I’d only be guessing.”

“Take the guess,” Carlo said, tears sliding down his face.

“You don’t have the kind of money that screams ransom.” Boomer tightened his grip around Carlo. “And Jenny’s not the runaway type. Not from what I remember.”

“Which leaves us what?” Carlo wiped his eyes with the back of a sweater sleeve. “The truth, Boomer. I want bullshit, I can get it from any other cop.”

“Raped and left for dead.” Boomer’s eyes were like hot magnets burning through Carlo’s skin. “Or waiting to be sold to a flesh buyer.”

Carlo didn’t flinch. He almost looked thankful. “I want you to find out which it is,” he said quietly. “I don’t want to find out from some fuckin’ stranger.”

“I’m a retired cop with half a lung and a limp,” Boomer said, releasing his grip. “And I’ve been off the job closing in on two years. There’s not much I can do except put out a few calls, make sure there’s the right kind of follow-up.”

“She’s just another name to them,” Carlo said, his sadness bolstered by defiance. “But she’s a face to you. I’ve known you all my life, Boomer. I don’t think you’ll be happy just making a few phone calls.”

Carlo stood, reached for his hat and coat, and looked down at Boomer. “I’ll be home with Annie,” he said. “She’s counting on you too.”

“You’re betting on an old horse, Carlo.” Boomer sighed. “That’s not a smart thing to do.”

“I’m betting on a friend,” Carlo said. Then he turned and left Nunzio’s, tables now filled with cold and hungry customers.

Boomer looked away, staring out at the windy streets of a frigid winter night. He rubbed at his leg again, the pain always sharper when the temperature dipped below thirty. He thought back to that day in the hospital bed, his small room at Metropolitan shrouded in darkness. The chief of detectives standing above him, smile on his face, a gold shield and a small medal clutched in his hands. “It’s over, Boomer,” the chief whispered. “You can rest now.”

Resting was all he’d been doing these last two years. There were no more doors for him to kick in, no more junkies to roust, no more dealers to take down. And he missed all of it. The stakeouts, the dives into dark rooms, the split-second walk between life and death. They were now only memories.

Boomer was forty but had enough scars and twisted bones to add another ten years to his body. Carlo had walked in and asked him to go back into a game he might not be able to play anymore. A game he shouldn’t be playing. The smart move would be to call his friend and tell him the truth, admit that he was too beat up, in too much pain to do the job he needed done. That he was now a runner who could barely walk.

Admit to his friend, and to himself, that he just wasn’t a cop anymore.

Boomer wasn’t afraid to die. But he was afraid to fail. He had come to terms with being crippled and tossed from a job he loved. He could never come to terms with being a failure.

He looked up at a night sky filled with rumbling gray clouds and watched the snowflakes start to fall.

•    •    •

D
AVIS
“D
EAD
-E
YE
” W
INTHROP
stood behind the glass doors and watched the man from apartment 17B double-park
a pea-green Jeep in front of the building. He saw him run from the driver’s side, slip and dodge his way through slush and ice, then wait as Dead-Eye held the door open. The man was in his early twenties, dressed more for a safari hunt than life on the Upper East Side. He handed Dead-Eye the keys to the Jeep.

“There are a few boxes in the back,” he said in a voice that dripped with privilege. “Get them out for me, would you? I’ll be waiting upstairs.”

“I can’t leave the door,” Dead-Eye said, watching the man disappear around a wall and toward the elevators.

He lifted the collar of the brown doorman’s coat, pushed down his hat, and pulled on a pair of brown gloves. Dead-Eye opened the door and stepped into the cold air. He stared inside the back of the Jeep, crammed with six heavily taped packing boxes. Car horns blared as he swung the trunk lid past his face and reached for the nearest box.

No one cared anymore about who he used to be; they knew him only for what he was. It had taken eight months for Dead-Eye’s wounds to heal after the elevator shoot-out. Doctors were forced to remove half his stomach and a kidney. There would always be a numbness in his throat, from a bullet fragment that had shredded pieces of his vocal cords. He had caught two shots to his right hip, which made running painful and walking a chore. The muscles on his right arm would never be the same.

Dead-Eye was no longer a cop, the disability check sent to his home twice a month a constant reminder of that. His only action now was opening and closing doors and reminding old ladies to button their coats against the winter weather. He never talked about being a doorman, not to anyone, he just did it. He handed out packages and dry-cleaning to smiling faces who didn’t need to know his name, buzzed in delivery men dropping off take-out Chinese and pizza boxes and complained about the Knicks and Yankees to the UPS and FedEx drivers on his route. Then he went home to his family and tried to forget it all.

He managed to get the first box to the door, straining for breath, the muscles in his back tight against his coat. Dead-Eye went for physical therapy three times a week, fighting to keep his body in one piece. He still worked out, ignoring the pain it caused, and he ate what little he could hold in what was left of his stomach. He was a cripple, but a damn stubborn one.

It took him a full hour to get the boxes up to the front door of 17B. He was sweating and his breath came out in a wheeze as he pressed the buzzer. The man opened the door holding a glass of white wine.

“I thought you forgot about me,” he said. He pointed to the den. “Put them in there. Gently, please.”

Dead-Eye did as he was told, refusing to let the man see his struggle, closing his eyes to the pain. He put the last box in the den and walked out the door, tipping the lip of his cap to the man.

“Wait,” the man said.

Dead-Eye turned and watched the man reach a hand into his pocket. He pulled out a thick roll of bills, peeled off a dollar, and handed it to Dead-Eye. “This is for your troubles.”

The man closed the door. Dead-Eye stood there, sweat running down his face, his right arm trembling, his stomach cramped with pain, holding a dollar bill in a gloved hand.

He crumpled the bill, tossed it on the mat in front of the door, and walked into the elevator for the ride back down. To finish off his shift.

•    •    •

B
OOMER SLID HIS
Cadillac into an open spot next to a fire hydrant, shifted the gear to park, and let the engine idle. The windshield wipers were still on low, slowly clearing away heavy streaks of rain. He put five slices of Wrigley’s spearmint gum into his mouth and watched the man walk toward him, his head down against the rain, collar of a brown leather jacket turned up to brace the wind. The
sounds of Ry Cooder’s rendition of “Little Sister” filled the car’s interior.

The man was less than ten feet from the car when Boomer leaned across the front and flipped open the passenger side door. He smiled when the man drew a .44 semiautomatic from his leather jacket and aimed it at the steering wheel.

“Thought you’d lost your touch,” Boomer said, watching the man shove the gun back up his sleeve and slide into the car, slamming the door shut.

“Lucky for you I’m in a good mood,” Dead-Eye said, lowering his collar with one hand, rainwater dripping on the brown interior. “Spotted you at the corner. Could have taken you out before the light turned green.”

Boomer looked over at his ex-partner and smiled. The two had remained friendly in the years since their retirement, each helping the other through the dark days of therapy and inactivity.

Dead-Eye’s father had lost his battle with cancer less than six months after his son was shot in the elevator. They spent those months together, the father dying, the son often wishing he were dying too. The two men talked, cried, sometimes laughed, tightening their already strong bond. It was during those precious months that Dead-Eye’s father learned how much being a cop meant to his son and how a crippled future opening doors for blank faces could bury him faster than a bullet.

It was difficult for the other cops to understand. For many of them, getting
out
was the goal. Pocketing the pension and working an easy second job the ideal way to leave the department. But to Boomer and Dead-Eye, a life void of action was a death sentence. Unwillingly dragged from a front-row seat to what they considered the greatest show on earth, the red gauge on their adrenaline tanks was brushing on empty. They lived to pin a badge to their chest. Now, left to tend to their wounds, stripped of the work they loved, they felt abandoned,
living out the remains of a still-youthful existence in silence.

Dead-Eye at least had a job to fill his idle time. Boomer’s plate was empty. He refused to take any of the standard ex-cop details, passing on offers to work security, tend bar, bodyguard the rich, or turn private investigator and chase deadbeats for short money. For Boomer it was either be a cop or have nothing, and right now he was standing up against a blank wall.

Boomer and Dead-Eye could look at one another and sense the pain of what each had lost. They wore a mask of anger alongside the rigged scars of battle, frustrated to be pulled from the game at such an early stage, fearful of journeying toward that final step taken by many disabled cops. The one where a single bullet was all that was needed to free them of their misery.

A bullet fired from their own gun.

“You didn’t bring me any coffee,” Boomer said to Dead-Eye. “I had my heart set on a black.”

“The only black you gonna see in this car is me,” Dead-Eye said. “Besides which, I don’t drink that shit anymore.”

“Suppose you don’t have any smokes either.”

“Cigarette’s just the thing for a guy with one kidney and a scarred lung,” Dead-Eye said. “Got a mint. Would that do you?”

“I’ll stick with the gum.” Boomer shifted the Caddy into drive and pulled away from the hydrant.

“Where we going?” Dead-Eye asked, popping the mint into his mouth.

Boomer ignored the question and stopped at a red light. “You working door detail tonight?”

“Start in two hours,” Dead-Eye said.

“Can you call in sick?”

“Depends.”

“On what?”

“On what you need,” Dead-Eye said.

Boomer put his right hand into his jacket pocket,
pulled out a photo of Jennifer Santori, and handed it to Dead-Eye.

“She’s twelve years old and I need to find her,” Boomer said.

“Snatched?” Dead-Eye asked, staring down at the smiling girl.

“Three days ago,” Boomer said. “Over at Port Authority. Cops working it got nothing. Father’s an old friend. Called me to see what I could do, and I called you.”

“Pull over by that phone booth on the next corner,” Dead-Eye said. “Next to the deli.”

Boomer eased the car between a dented Chevy Caprice and a VW with Met and Yankee stickers covering the front and back fenders. Dead-Eye searched his pockets for loose change, found it, and opened the passenger door.

“While you’re out there,” Boomer said, “would you get me a coffee?”

“Fuck no,” Dead-Eye said, and slammed the door behind him.

•    •    •

B
OOMER AND
D
EAD
-E
YE
worked the city streets for two full days and nights. They walked into old haunts looking to scare up some familiar faces, only to end up staring at blank eyes. They drove past familiar corners and saw new players in control, players who didn’t even bother to give the two ex-cops a second look. Two years away from the action is a lifetime in the underbelly, and the names Boomer and Dead-Eye dredged from their memory banks were now either dead or doing hard time upstate. They felt old and rusty and were in constant pain. But the more they came up empty, the more determined they grew.

They were in the final hour of their second day when they spotted the reed-thin pimp in the black leather raincoat and purple felt hat. He smiled when he saw the two
ex-cops walk up to his Times Square station. The rain had let up, replaced by a soft mist.

“Didn’t know you two had any taste for the deuce,” the pimp said, his smile exposing a long bottom row of silver teeth.

“Cleve, that tinfoil look you got is gonna catch on,” Dead-Eye said, patting the pimp on the shoulder and pointing to his mouth. “Let ’em laugh much as they want. You stick with it.”

“Be hostile, bitches,” Cleve said. “I’m still happy to see your asses.”

“We’re lookin’ for a girl,” Boomer said, reaching his hand into his jacket pocket.

Cleve held his smile. “Don’t know what your action is, Boom-Man, but I’m sure I got the muff to cover it.”

“A
missing
girl, asswipe,” Boomer said, jabbing Jenny’s photo against the lip of Cleve’s leather flaps. “Dropped out three days ago off a Jersey bus.”

“I don’t buy runaways, Boom,” Cleve said. “My birds fly pro. Any trim I break in, I marry.”

“She’s not a runaway,” Dead-Eye said. “She’s lifted.”

“To sell or snuff?” Cleve asked, eyes searching the street beyond the ex-cops’ shoulders, making sure his ladies were walking their beat.

“You play the market,” Boomer said. “Not us.”

“Street ain’t the same as you left it,” Cleve said, shaking his head, voice almost nostalgic. “This crack shit that’s movin’ got everybody flyin’ in crazy ways.”