Apaches (3 page)

In between, he always managed to make time for a little fun.

•    •    •

“I
DON’T KNOW
if I can do this,” the informant said, standing in the darkened vestibule, Boomer by his side.

“Do what?” Boomer said, his eyes farther up the corner, checking out a small circle of dealers. “Point out a friend?”

“They find out it’s me that whispered them out and they gonna smoke me for sure,” the informant said.

“You showing up at that job I got you?” Boomer asked, eyes still searching faces.

“That job sucks,” the informant said. “It’s long and hard and don’t pay for shit.”

“It puts money in your pockets and keeps you out of Rikers,” Boomer said. “That’s all your mother gives a shit about. Now, cut the chatter and let me have the dealer.”

The informant hesitated, his feet shifting nervously back and forth.

“Guy in black,” he finally said.

“They’re
all
in black,” Boomer pointed out.

“One with the panama hat,” the informant said. “He’s always got pockets full of change. Jiggles ’em all the time. Thinks it’s funny.”

“He got a name?”

“His boys call him Padrone,” the informant said. “Don’t know his real catch.”

“Disappear,” Boomer said, leaving the vestibule and heading down the front steps.

He walked down the street, one hand at his side, the other holding an old New York Telephone meter. It was thick, black, and heavy. It had a reading on it, running from green to red, with a white button at its center. A squeeze of the button and a thin black needle would move from the green area to the red.

The six men, huddled in a circle, turned still as stone the minute they spotted him.

“Five-O on the block,” one said.
Five-O
was the current street code for narc, derived from the Jack Lord TV series
Hawaii Five-O.

All of the men except for one carried 9-millimeter semis tucked inside their stonewashed jeans. The one they called Padrone, short and heavyset, a pockmarked face ringed with stubble, was clean. A nail clipper in his shirt pocket was his only brush with a weapon.

“What’s the matter, guys, library closed?” Boomer asked as he came up to them.

“We did our reading,” Padrone said. “Now we thinking about it.”

“Anything I might like?”

“I don’t know what you like,” Padrone said. “Don’t give a fuck either.”

The men around him snickered, and one, the tallest of the bunch, laughed out loud, baseball cap tilted over his eyes, the Rikers cut of his arms gleaming in the afternoon sun.

“So let’s forget books,” Boomer said, “and let’s talk drugs.”

“Got any on you?” Padrone said.

This time the laughter grew louder. Even Boomer smiled.

“Nope,” Boomer said. “But I know one of you does. The question is, which one.”

“That’s a good question,” Padrone said. “You gonna give us three guesses?”

“I thought you might just want to tell me.”

“Think again, badge,” Padrone said. “Even if we had the shit, which we ain’t, we gotta be dumber than sand to tell you.”

“Then I’ve got no choice,” Boomer said, lifting the old New York Telephone meter. “Gotta use the machine on you.”

All eyes shifted down to the box in Boomer’s hand.

“Fuck is that thing?” one of the men asked.

“It’s a drug detector,” Boomer said. “New. FBI brought it out. There’s a sensor in it picks up a drug scent. When that happens, the needle here starts to move. Tell you the truth, I’m not all that sure myself how it works. All I know is that it
does
work.”

“That’s bullshit,” Padrone said, one hand in his pants pocket, nervously jiggling coins.

“You got nothin’ to worry about either way,” Boomer said, staring directly at Padrone. “You’re clean.”

Boomer turned to face the man closest to him and pointed the box directly at his torso. Staring intently, he kept his finger away from the white button.

“Back off,” Boomer finally said. “You’re just a dope without dope.”

Boomer moved through the next two in the circle in the same manner.

Then he came up to Padrone.

“Mr. Clean,” Boomer said, smiling. “Time to read your fortune.”

Boomer held the box to Padrone’s face, slowly moved his finger to the white button, then pressed down. The needle jumped from green to red. Padrone, sweat already pouring down the sides of his face, swallowed hard, coins in his pocket jiggling at a trotter’s pace.

Boomer’s smile widened.

“Bingo,” Boomer said.

“It’s the change,” Padrone said, looking around to his men, desperation filling his eyes. “Like at the airport. They make noise, that’s all. Empty your pockets and they stop.”

“I’ll bite,” Boomer said. “Empty your pockets.”

Padrone hesitated, running a beefy hand across the stubble.

“Like you ain’t got all the fuckin’ cards in your hands already,” Padrone finally said, lifting the back of his flowered shirt and handing two five-pound heroin bags over to Boomer. “Now you got yourself a fuckin’ machine too. What am I gonna do?”

“Three-to-five,” Boomer said, taking the drugs in one hand and pulling Padrone away from his cronies.

•    •    •

B
OOMER LIVED IN
a well-kept two-bedroom apartment on the second floor of a four-story brownstone on West Eighty-fourth Street, between Columbus and Amsterdam. The living room furnishings were simple, boiled down to one frayed blue couch, two dusty-gold wing chairs, and a marble coffee table. He kept his twenty-one-inch Zenith in the bedroom and had small stereo speakers in every room. His extensive record collection, jazz, blues, and Sam Cooke mostly, filled the left side of
the living room. A framed photo of Rocky Marciano landing the knock-out blow to Jersey Joe Walcott’s chin in their 1952 heavyweight title bout hung over the mantel of the shuttered fireplace. A small statue of the Blessed Mother rested on a bureau in the hall, left to him by his mother.

The kitchen was well stocked, although Boomer was hardly ever home long enough to make himself a meal. He picked up fresh fruits and vegetables from the nearby Fairway market. But for fish he traveled all the way down to the Fulton market and for meat to Murray’s on Fourteenth Street. There, old man Hirsch himself would cut up the rib steaks and chops, wrapping them tight in butcher paper. Murray Hirsch had been his father’s employer and closest friend. Two immigrants from two different cultures, trying to make a go of it in a new country. Whenever Boomer saw Murray, he always came away with the feeling that Hirsch missed his father as much as he did.

Boomer dated an assortment of women, staying with them long enough for companionship but never long enough to fall in love. Some were cops, a couple worked in bars he scouted, one was an ex-hooker now earning a living as a meter maid. There was even a college professor he helped clear on a marijuana bust. Of them all, the only woman Boomer Frontieri ever gave any thought to marrying was Theresa.

They met at a cookout at his sister’s home in Queens. She was tall and thin, had red hair flowing long down her back, and hazel eyes that twinkled mischievously from an unlined face. She worked in the check reconcilement department of a Wall Street branch of the Chase Manhattan Bank while taking night courses at St. John’s, crawling her way toward a business degree. They both spoke Italian, drank coffee with their pizza, and loved music but hated to dance.

She never asked about his work, or complained when
he disappeared for days or canceled long-standing dates with last-minute calls. From the go, she understood the nature of his job. Boomer could relax around Theresa, put down his guard as easily as he would slide his gun inside a desk drawer. He felt safe, instinctively knowing she would never betray him and would always be honest with him, tell him what was in her heart whether he wanted to hear it or not. He knew life for a cop’s wife was, at best, difficult and lonely. But he trusted Theresa could handle that part. It was the other end of the table that troubled him, the steady gaze of death that hovered above him, the chill of a late night ringing phone or doorbell. It was there that his doubts rested.

•    •    •

“I
T LOOKS BAD
,” Theresa said to him, sitting on a plastic chair across from his hospital bed. Boomer looked back at her and smiled. His hands were bandaged, his chest wrapped tight, and his face marked with bruises, welts, and stitches, the results of a drug raid gone sour.

“Feels worse,” he said.

“Who’d you piss off?”

“My aunt Grade,” Boomer said, still smiling. “You ever meet her? She’s got some kind of a temper.”

“She’s got a knife too,” Theresa said, sadness touching her voice.

“It’s nothing,” Boomer reassured her. “Doctor says I can be out of here in two, maybe three days.”

“They arrest the guy who did it?”

Boomer stared at her through blurry eyes.

“They didn’t have to,” he said.

She nodded and didn’t talk about it anymore. But Boomer saw the look and knew that it was over. It lasted less than a second, and most men wouldn’t have noticed, but Boomer stayed alive reading faces, and he knew what this one reflected.

Theresa could handle the parts of the job that most
women couldn’t, even his dying. But she could not get used to the fact that he would have to kill in order to stay alive. That would haunt her, keep her awake when he wasn’t there, make her shudder in her sleep on empty nights.

“It’s late,” he said to her. “You should get home. One of us has to get up early in the morning, and I know it’s not me.”

“Will it hurt if I kiss you?” she asked, standing. The force of her beauty now struck him as she stared down at him, less than a foot away. He knew he would never be this close to love again.

“It’ll hurt more if you don’t,” Boomer said.

She leaned down and they kissed for the last time.

•    •    •

I
N
1978,
A
small but effective group of radical black extremists bent on overthrowing the government declared war on the cops of New York City. In a span of four weeks, six officers were chosen at random, then shot and killed in cold blood. It was open season on anyone in a blue uniform. Boomer Frontieri, taken off narcotics and assigned to a special unit of the NYPD set up to go after the radicals, quickly and quietly declared his own war.

Boomer squeezed his street informants. He spread out photos of the suspects to all the hookers who trusted him, the ones he kept off the paddy wagon in return for a tip. He had coffee with organized crime members, mutual respect spread across the table, both sides calling a temporary halt to their separate struggles. He went to see the ministers of the black churches in the neighborhoods he worked, banking on their friendship for answers to a horror that plagued all.

He hit the streets and banged around dealers and pimps, roughed up the chicken hawks and seedy flesh peddlers, tossed Miranda out a nearby window, and let fists and fear take him to where he needed to go.

It was his search for the black extremists that, in 1980, led Boomer to a Brooklyn tenement, where his back was to the wall, gun drawn, flak vest under his black leather jacket. He had a .38 caliber cocked in one hand and a .44 semiautomatic in the other. He tilted his head toward a red wooden door only inches away. Across from him was another detective, Davis “Dead-Eye” Winthrop. Boomer nodded at his partner and smiled. Winthrop smiled back. Boomer didn’t know much about the man other than that Winthrop was twenty-seven, black, had lost a partner two years earlier in a botched buy-and-bust, had won the NYPD marksmanship award three years running, and was always eager to go through the door first. In Boomer’s book, that gave Winthrop points for guts and incentive, but shooting at wooden targets on a grassy field wasn’t the same as a shoot-out in a one-bedroom apartment, lights blown out, six gunmen with nothing to lose on the other side.

A normal cop would have been on the talkie asking for backup. Boomer hated backup. He felt it lessened the odds in his favor. Cops are usually the worst shooters around, most of them lucky enough to get off a couple of rounds in the general direction of the perp. More likely to kill those with badges than the guys without. If Winthrop was as good a shot as they said, he would be all that Boomer needed.

Behind the locked red door, Skeeter Jackson sat at a poker table filled with cash. The apartment was well furnished, with two of Skeeter’s men sleeping on a soft leather couch, guns resting across their chests. Three others were in the kitchen off the main room, one smoking dope, two munching on cold heros and drinking from bottles of Bud. Guns were spread across the table next to the cold cuts.

Skeeter was a dope courier working for Jimmy Hash’s gang in Bed-Stuy. His take alone was $15,000 a day. Seven
days a week. Skeeter hadn’t even hit his twenty-first birthday and was already looking at a million-dollar haul.

In his free time, Skeeter Jackson shot young cops in the back, charging $500 for each bullet that pierced flesh. Boomer had known his name and reputation for a long time. A hooker on Nostrand Avenue had given him what he didn’t have—an address.

Boomer leaned across the door and crawled toward Dead-Eye.

“You want to put in a call for help, I understand,” Boomer whispered.

“How many in there?”

“They tell me six, all heavy,” Boomer said. “Probably got more bullets in their pockets than we’ve got in our guns.”

“So, what’s the problem?” Dead-Eye asked with a smile.

“Talk to you after the dance,” Boomer said.

He crawled back to his position against the wall, checked his watch, and signaled over to Dead-Eye.

One minute till the Fourth of July.

They went in with their guns drawn. Boomer came in high, his shoulder against the door, running right toward Skeeter, who stared back at him, stunned. In his hand was a wad of cash. Dead-Eye came in low, took a short roll into the foyer, and popped up on both legs, guns aimed at the two men on the couch. The three in the kitchen came out running, bites of sandwiches still crammed in their mouths. Their semis were pointed straight at the two cops.