Apaches (18 page)

“We got all the timing we need,” Dead-Eye said, his voice wistful. “Me for being a doorman and you for lifting a pasta fork.”

“You can’t walk away from this,” Boomer said, grabbing Dead-Eye’s jacket. “It’s all you know. And it’s all I got.”

“I’m sorry about your friend’s kid,” Dead-Eye said, slowly easing Boomer’s hand away. “And I wanted to help. But she don’t need me. She needs a
cop
to help her. A
real
cop. Not some guy trying to remember what it was to be one.”

Dead-Eye patted Boomer’s arm, braced his jacket against the cold, and headed toward Eighth Avenue.
Boomer stood and watched him, his breath still coming hard, the pain fading, tears rolling down the side of his nose. He walked over toward the front steps of a tenement, ignoring the stares of the cabdrivers on break. There were three garbage cans lined in front of the basement apartment. He flipped the lid off the nearest packed can, picked it up, lifted it to chest level, and heaved it into the street. He stared at the bags of waste as they weaved into the wind, loose strips of greasy foil and paper towels slapping against the sides of parked cars. He saw the dented can rumble down the sharp incline and come banging to a stop next to a no parking sign.

Boomer Frontieri looked over at the drivers, who stared back at him in silence. He took a deep breath and walked away, hands inside his pockets, leg still burning from the run, moving slowly down the quiet street, nothing ahead of him but time.

M
ALCOLM
J
UNIPER STOOD
in a dark corner of the one-room apartment and stared over at Jennifer Santori. The girl’s face was tear-lined and bruised; her bare arms were extended, wrists locked in a set of cuffs attached to the top of a radiator pipe. She was naked from the waist up, thin legs bunched against the sides of her hips, her frail body shivering in the cold emptiness of the room.

“You must be somebody special,” Malcolm said, eyes glaring down at the unformed breasts, “cops be chasin’ me way they did.”

Jennifer looked at the man she once believed would help her find her brother and tried to form the words to beg for her release. She forced her eyes to wipe away the blurry images and bring Malcolm Juniper into a clear focus. Her throat burned and her damaged body ached and she wanted more than anything to be back in the safe womb of the New Jersey home she so often used to think of as a dull prison.

It seemed like months since he had driven her around the Port Authority area for the better part of an hour, a concerned look etched across his brow, playing the role of Good Samaritan. He parked and ran out to buy her a Pepsi and a hot dog from an all-night stand, returning with the food, a smile, and a sincere reassurance that her brother would be found.

Jennifer grew tired, eyelids itching and burning from lack of sleep. Long bus rides tended to make her groggy, and that, coupled with the anxiety over losing Anthony,
made it all the easier for her to ease into the backseat of the car, as Malcolm suggested, and curl up to nap while he continued his search, looking for a boy he had no intention of finding.

She woke up with his mouth over her lips, his hands sliding up and down her body, both their pants down around the ankles, a sharp burning pain between her legs. Her eyes bubbled over with fear; his were lit by contempt.

He forced himself on her for the better part of three hours, slapping her face and arms, running lit matches down the sides of her thighs and across her breasts during his restful moments. He poured cheap whiskey down her throat, laughing with glee when she coughed up the foul taste. He lit a crack pipe and forced the smoke of the cooked cocaine into her lungs, holding her head back, pushing her down deep into the rear cushion of the car.

They were parked in an abandoned lot near the Fourteenth Street meat market, the windows rolled up and steamed with breath and smoke, an overhead streetlight casting the car in its cloudy glow. He cuffed her hand to one door handle and her foot to another and forced a handkerchief into her mouth while he went out for cigarettes. He came back a short time later with another man, stoop-shouldered, haggard, and crazed, and let him have at her for the price of a Big Mac and a large Coke.

She blacked out during the final rape, letting the pain, the drugs, and the drink whisk her away on a blanket of dreams.

When she woke, she was handcuffed to a radiator, head pounding, dried blood and semen caked to her body. She opened her eyes slowly, the room revealing itself in an array of shadows as streams of light flashed in from the streets outside. Her legs felt weighed down and her arms were cold and numb, dangling from the pipe above her head. She had trouble breathing, the insides of
her lungs and nostrils scorched from their cocaine and whiskey diet.

Malcolm Juniper stood above her, wearing only a pair of brown socks, a crazed smile on his face, crack pipe in his right hand, kitchen knife dangling from his left.

“We’re low,” Malcolm said, running the crack pipe past her eyes. “More’s on the way. Junior’s gettin’ over a fresh load that’ll turn your eyes. Won’t be long.”

Jennifer stared up at him, biting down on her lower lip, her teeth breaking through the cracked and sore exterior, droplets of blood forming on the edges.

“Are you going to kill me?” she asked.

The words pressed themselves out slowly, each one enclosed in layers of pain and embarrassment. She wanted so much to cry, to shout out for help, but couldn’t muster the strength required. Instead, she took in another long, painful breath and asked him again, “Are you going to kill me?”

Malcolm Juniper crouched down and rested the crack pipe on the floor between them. He brought the sharp end of the knife up across the side of Jennifer’s neck and pressed it tight against her skin. He reached up and rubbed her arms with his free hand.

“Killin’ you be like burnin’ money,” Malcolm said in as soothing a voice as he could muster. “You worth way too much. I’m gonna make me a killin’ all right. But it ain’t the kind you be thinkin’.”

“I just want to go home,” Jennifer said to him, the rush of his acid breath warm on her cheeks. “I won’t say anything about this. Or about you. I’ll just say I got lost.”

“You gonna be goin’ home, baby,” Malcolm said, still in his seductive voice. “Be a different home, is all. But that’s down the road a ways. Right now you and me got to be thinkin’ about Junior and how we need to make him a happy man.”

“Why are you doing this to me?” Jennifer wailed, more with confusion than with anger.

“You pay the good price for good smoke,” Malcolm said, looking past Jennifer, eyes and mind adrift on their own. “And nobody’s got better smoke than Junior. It’s worth it. Whatever the price, it’s gonna be worth it.”

“Why? Tell me why?” Jennifer begged in the soundless room, her upper body trembling from the sharp wind creeping through the cracked walls.

“Junior ain’t normal like you and me,” Malcolm said, easing the knife away from Jennifer’s throat. “He don’t give a five-cent fuck about money. So you can’t just up and pay him out for the smoke. Cares even less about pussy, so there ain’t no sense askin’ him to a slow dance with you.”

Jennifer closed her mouth and eyes, rushing breath through her nose, choking back a violent need to vomit.

“Junior’s religious,” Malcolm said, standing now, brushing the knife against the sides of Jennifer’s arms. “Fucker walks around prayin’ all the time. He’s into that voodoo shit, where you kill a cat or a dog, drink the blood, burn the bodies. But he always keeps somethin’ for himself. Bone, tooth, nail, eyes. Hangs them on a gold chain around his neck. Keeps away what looks to do him in.”

Jennifer coughed up a mouthful of thick bile and spit it out on the floor, inches from the crack pipe resting on its side. Malcolm ignored it, running the knife slowly between the fingers of the girl’s hands.

“So I’m thinkin’ you and me, we gotta give Junior a little present,” Malcolm said. “Somethin’ he’s gonna wanna have hangin’ around that chain. You know what that present’s gonna be, don’t you, baby?”

Jennifer’s eyes widened, the sudden rush of fear forcing her back to push against the wall and her hands to clench into tight fists. Malcolm whistled Otis Redding’s “Sittin’ by the Dock of the Bay” as he undid the fingers of Jennifer’s left hand. She kicked her legs at his side and tried to get close enough to bite, but he shouldered her head away and pried loose the index finger.

“Don’t fight me, baby,” he said in a vacant voice. “It’s only a gift.”

She saw the sheer look of insanity mixed with glee that filled Malcolm Juniper’s eyes and knew she was in an unholy place that promised her no avenue short of torment and death.

She looked up and watched the sharp edge of the knife close in on the soft flesh of her finger, Malcolm’s staccato laughter cutting through her cries.

Outside, on the cold streets of a cold city, a young girl’s screams cascaded down past a silent army of empty cars and distant faces.

•    •    •

B
OOMER STOOD HALFWAY
down the alley, back resting against a Jimi Hendrix poster, eating a cold slice of anchovy pizza and holding a cup of hot black coffee. He was wearing an unzipped black leather jacket, crisp jeans, work boots, and a blue Yankee cap. He had a .22 in the front pocket of the leather and a .38 special tucked in the back of the jeans. He chewed the pizza, sipped the coffee, and studied the early morning Harlem street, filled with blue collars on their way to union jobs, and on-the-nods half hanging near tenement doorways, dreaming of the next place to score.

Boomer took a final bite of the pizza, dropped the crust into the coffee container, and tossed them both into an open garbage can.

He took a deep breath and walked out of the alley.

He hadn’t slept all night, sitting straight up in a lounge chair in his silent apartment, staring out into the cold air of an open window. For the first time in memory, Boomer Frontieri was a frightened man. He had adjusted to living with the pain of his disability, soaking the throbbing aches in his leg and chest not with pills doctors prescribed but with daily doses of the homemade red wine Nunzio had stored in his basement. It was the vague discontent that ate away at Boomer and ground his insides
into thick masses of bubbly tension. He felt adrift and helpless.

Boomer wasn’t expecting much when he retired from the job, and he wasn’t disappointed. There were no official notices, no members of the top brass walking up to shake his hand and thank him for all the long hours he put in and for all the years he spent crouched in danger, waiting to give or take a bullet. He had made more than eight thousand arrests in his career with a conviction rate that needled out at 94 percent, and that didn’t even get him so much as a nod from the file clerk behind the mesh cage who took his retirement papers, stamped them, and turned back to her coffee and soap opera.

It was a sad way to end a career, but not an unusual one. Some took it in stride, shrugging it off to departmental indifference. Others brought the parting home with a bitter taste, letting it simmer beneath the surface as they mentally relived their great moments. For these men, both past and future eventually melded inside the dark haven of a local bar.

Boomer was facing a long and shaky break in his road.

Retirement didn’t suit him as well as it might have a less complicated man. He didn’t have enough money to live well and travel, but he had too much just to sit and lounge around a table in the only restaurant he trusted enough to relax in. It was not his way to mix it up with everyday life, to settle into and find comfort within the confines of a routine. He set his own clock as a cop and resented having the timepiece snatched from his grasp at a time when he was too young for the early-bird special and too old for the after-hours clubs.

It was one of the reasons he was on the Jennifer Santori case. He knew it was a crazy notion. How could he chase down a missing girl when he was better suited to sit in a lounge chair and let the sun soak his wounds while he listened to a ball game on the radio? Bringing in Jennifer was a risk, and Boomer knew the smart thing for him to do would be to walk away from it. But Boomer
had always lived for the risk. And now risk was all that he had left.

Common sense told him that the girl was either dead or long gone from the area. But the cop inside shoved common sense aside and let the power and ego of the shield take charge. If she was alive, and if she was to be found, then Boomer Frontieri was the only cop, disabled or not, who could bring her home. He believed it with all the strength left in a body that had so recently betrayed him during that futile chase down a Manhattan side street.

It was why he had stayed up all night and why he was back there now, coming out of an alley off a Harlem corner, heading for a brownstone brothel run by a 350- pound madam with a glass eye.

If Boomer Frontieri’s ride as a cop was going to come to an end, he wasn’t going to let it be with him leaning against the side of a yellow cab, clutching at the cold air for breath, a circle of foreign drivers mingling around him, as indifferent to his plight as the pencil stubs down at One Police Plaza. After all the years and busts and chases and gunfights, Boomer needed to stamp a better ending to it all.

The ending required him to find Jennifer Santori. And maybe, if luck traveled down the same path, he would die in the triumph.

•    •    •

B
OOMER CROSSED THE
intersection, ignoring the light and walking against oncoming clusters of gypsy cabs on the prowl for downtown passengers, and headed toward the well-kept brownstone. He had his hands in his jeans pockets and his head down from the wind, lost in a whirl of thought. He heard the footsteps of the man coming up behind him, and saw the shape of the large shadow start to overtake his own.

He stopped walking and turned.

“Don’t tell me,” Boomer said. “You could have taken me out anytime you wanted.”

“Back in the alley,” Dead-Eye agreed. “Head shot right into the garbage can.”

“I thought you were too old and shot up for this shit,” Boomer said, looking over at him. “Or am I going deaf too?”