Red on Red (6 page)

“My baby … poor baby … My Lord …”

The three generations huddled as one on the couch, woeful arms
entangled, and grief seemed to flow through the bodies. Esposito picked up the license and stepped back a few paces. Nick had already given them room. The apartment was hot, and it felt like their wailing was using up all the air. Esposito waited for a minute, and then another, but no more. The Coles had lifetimes to mourn; the detectives did not.

“Miz Cole, when’s the last time you saw him?”

“Only yesterday.”

The disclosure struck Michael like cold water, and he sat up straight. “Ma, don’t tell ’em nothin’! They don’t care. They ain’t here to help us! They glad Malcolm’s dead! Shit, I bet they killed him!”

That was a turn that Esposito was not willing to let the conversation take; he didn’t expect to get much from them, but he would not allow Michael to open another front of the war.

“Easy now, Michael. We are here to help. And you gotta help us find out what happened, because whatever Malcolm did or didn’t do—I don’t know, I wasn’t there—it ain’t right what happened to him.”

Michael shook his head but fell quiet again, and the family slid back into grief. The glass toppled from the arm of the couch and broke on the floor. Nick picked up the bigger pieces and left for the kitchen.

“Let me get you some more water.”

The kitchen was narrow, and even though Nick was alone there, it felt crowded. A frying pan with a turkey leg sat on the stove, the grease congealing; the pot of rice was crusty at the edges. There was a clean glass in a cabinet and several dirty ones in the sink. He didn’t think Michael would take anything from him, not even a glass of water from his own house, but he washed an extra glass and filled up two. Nick was about to step out of the kitchen when the front door opened, and another young man walked in.

“Mama? What happen? What’s goin’ on?”

Though Nick had only seen his picture on the license, he knew it was Malcolm Cole. The air seemed to thicken now to a viscous gel, and no one could move through it; if any of them had tipped over, it would have taken half a minute to hit the ground. Malcolm looked ahead, at his mother and Esposito, then to Nick, a few paces away in the kitchen, close enough to cut off his escape. The possibilities played across his face, the simple switches clicking in his mind.
Yes or no? In or out? Fight or flight?

Miz Cole made the decision for him, in a weak, high, curiously singsonging voice: “Malcolm, these men …” Every Sunday of her life,
she had raised her hands to attest to the resurrection. Now she saw but could not believe. “These men told me that you was dead!”

“I’m all right, Ma.”

“But they said—”

Esposito took the ID and held it up. “Who did you give this to, Malcolm?”

Malcolm thought with effort, as if his mind now had to move through the sticky stuff that held their bodies. It was not a hard thing to remember, but he didn’t want to succeed with the recollection. He looked down at the floor.

“My brother Milton. To Milton, Ma. He wanted to go out tonight, to a club.”

“Oh … now … no.”

What sense it must have seemed to switch. Malcolm as Malcolm was a wanted man. Milton as Malcolm was a grown man. Stay out of jail, get into the bar. A win-win.

Miz Cole looked at Malcolm and smiled, as if determined to relish this one moment of the miraculous before she was subsumed by the next waves of grief. No, this would be all for today. Her eyes fluttered and then her head sank to her chest. Her arms loosened and the baby slipped down to her lap.

Nick picked up his radio. “We need an ambulance here, Central, forthwith … and send another couple of units for backup.”

“What’s your condition there?”

What was the condition here? Head-on collision of two tractor trailers loaded with bad karma? He didn’t want a hundred cops barreling in, but they might need reinforcements. Malcolm had rushed to his mother on the couch. He didn’t need to hear that he would be coming with the detectives, though he had to know it. Nick stepped back and muttered into the radio, “Cardiac, plus one under.”

“Can you repeat that?” Nick did not want to announce to the room that Malcolm was under arrest.

“Negative. Two units and an ambulance.”

Nick lowered the radio and checked his watch—11:35. A bad time, the shift change. The four-to-twelves had gone into the precinct, but the midnights had not yet come out. They had a few minutes, at least. Esposito helped the Cole brothers lay the mother on the floor, and said to Nick, “Stay back. Give us some air.” He meant for Nick to block the door. “Go
get a pillow,” he told Michael, which sent him to the back. Malcolm fanned his mother with a little towel. He looked up at Esposito and asked, in a jarringly plaintive voice, “Can I stay with my moms?”

Possessive now, not plural.

“Sure, yeah. Of course.”

Michael returned with the pillow, and they gingerly lifted the head. She wasn’t breathing. The Coles looked on helplessly.

“All right, you guys. Your moms needs your help and I’m going to tell you how to do CPR. One of you has to breathe for her, and one has to press down on her chest. Five short pushes—lock your arms out, hands together—then one breath. Okay now. Ready?”

Esposito took Malcolm and had him crouch beside her. Esposito put an arm around Malcolm’s shoulder, then patted his back, his flanks, a friendly gesture that also felt for a gun. He guided Malcolm through the chest compressions, then told Michael to hold her nose for the breaths.

“Good. Let’s go now. One, two, three, four, five. Now a breath. One, two, three, four, five, breath. Good. Keep going. Michael, count out loud.”

Esposito stepped back to let the resuscitation proceed, despite its lack of promise. The Coles worked with visible anxiety and little aptitude. Malcolm’s compressions were jerky and light, and Michael’s breaths were shallow. Michael counted with hesitation, trying to follow his brother’s rhythm but throwing him off and being thrown off in turn. He called out each number with a soft uncertainty, as if he were taking a stab at a math problem. “Three … four? Five?” Malcolm stopped when the baby let out a wail and fell onto his grandmother’s breast. He picked up the child and laid him on the couch, returning to the compressions with still less enthusiasm. He stopped again when he knelt on a shard of glass—“Shit!”—and did not rush to return after he brushed it out. Nick checked his watch. Four minutes had passed. She was past saving, and they now operated purely on pretense, giving the Coles busywork until backup could arrive. Esposito would have told them to do calisthenics or a rain dance if he’d thought they would fall for it. His mission remained fixed, even as the Coles’ world changed as if struck by a meteor, with extinctions and evolutions proceeding with unreal speed.

The baby began to scream, and Malcolm stood to walk over, casting a last glance down, shaking his head. But whatever belligerent spirit left him did not linger long without a new host. Michael looked up from his
mother, his eyes hardening. He was angry again, and Nick could tell that Michael liked the feeling. Nick envied him, thinking back to his own apartment, his own mother, decades ago but just blocks away. Last breaths, but here a son held on, fighting, as if she would not go if he did not quit. Was love a gift of sight, or the refusal to see?

“Where you going? Get back here! Let’s go!”

Malcolm sat heavily down on the couch, picking up the boy to nuzzle his neck, burying his face in him. He seemed less like an adult with a child than a child with a doll. He closed his eyes, and Nick closed his, too, just for a second, to picture it—mother dead, brother dead, his own life a life sentence. Nick opened his eyes to see Malcolm lifting the boy, his nephew, to kiss him on the lips. This was all he had, this baby, this moment; he chose what he could hold, whom he might help, here, now.

“She gone, yo. In God’s hands. She gone.”

Michael breathed again into his mother, heavily this time, and moved around to press down on the chest. The compressions now were forceful and precise, and gave a drill sergeant’s percussive punch to his speech. “We don’t stop! Get over here! Now!” He was no longer sidelined by circumstance; he was suddenly in command. The walls could crack and shudder, the roof could buckle down on him, but he would not be kept from his purpose. His life did not matter, and even his mother’s mattered less than the stand he had taken—“Get up! Get over here!”—to hold fast without breaking against any disease, despair, or white boys the dirty world could send against him. Malcolm seemed shaken by the new man beside him, and stood up as summoned. He knelt beside his mother’s face to offer empty breath.

There was a knock at the door, and Nick opened it for two paramedics. A man and a woman, both young, one white, one Spanish. The woman was small and certain in her movements; the man less so, accepting her guidance as to the placement of the stretcher and oxygen. She stepped aside to let her partner and the Coles lift the old woman onto the stretcher. “Who lives here with her? You? Go get her meds.”

Malcolm went to the back, and Esposito followed him. Michael tensed visibly, and relaxed only a little when they returned with fistfuls of pill bottles. The female took them to study the labels as the male put an oxygen mask on Miz Cole. The male paramedic looked at the opposing pairs of men, taking in that this was not an ordinary ambulance run, that the detectives were not there merely or even mainly to help.

“So … who’s gonna ride with us to the hospital? Both of you?”

Michael answered, “Both of us.”

Esposito said, “Malcolm’s gonna come with us, try to help with Milton.”

“No. No he ain’t,” said Michael. “You took enough of my family today.”

Nick went to the door and held it for the paramedics, waving them on. They moved forward, pushing the gurney. Malcolm hesitated; he was past fighting, but he could not lose face in front of his younger brother. It was a deadlock, for the moment, but it could have been worse. Nick ran through the possibilities: The detectives could stay with Malcolm until the paramedics left, and bring him to the precinct later; they could bring both Coles in and leave Michael outside while they talked to Malcolm, all night if necessary. They could not let them both go to the hospital, and they were not staying here with them. If they went outside, there was a chance Malcolm would run; he had run before, and they were low on living Coles to draw him back uptown.

“Go on, Mike,” said Esposito. “Go ahead with your moms.”

“The name is Michael.”

“Okay, Michael.”

Michael stepped in front of his brother, hands on hips. The male paramedic paused near the door, where he was leading the stretcher—“Well, who’s going with us? We can’t wait!”—until the female shoved him ahead with an audible thud. Nick was beside them as the stretcher slipped past, clearing the door. As the wheels bumped over the threshold, Miz Cole’s arm slipped off and dangled. Esposito stepped between the Coles, one arm holding Malcolm, the other guiding Michael forward.

“Look! Your mom! She moved her hand, she waved!”

Nick was taken too by the unreasonably hopeful turn, reaching down to the wrist to feel for warmth, a pulse. He didn’t think it was possible, and knew at once that it wasn’t. As Nick tucked the hand back onto the gurney, Michael spat at him, “Don’t touch her! Get your hands off her!”

Nick stepped back. They were at the elevator, and one of the paramedics had already hit the button. Michael was losing control, his facial muscles electrified with twitchy anger. Nick tried a line that Esposito might have ventured, though it had the disadvantage of being true.

“Michael, I’m sorry. I know—I lost my mother—”

“Fuck your mother.”

“Fuck yours.”

Though Nick regretted it the instant he said it, the insult lifted him to a higher level of animal readiness. Michael’s eyes did not leave his own; they were radiant with hate, and Nick could picture them blazing in the dark. Was hate a way of seeing, or not-seeing? Michael whirled and threw a punch, wide and weak. Nick caught it with both hands as if it were a tossed softball, twisting Michael’s arm, lowering him to the floor.

“You muthafuckin’ cops! I will kill you! Dead men! Dead! Dead!”

“Stop. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”

The ease of his takedown was a further indignity, and Nick held the arm firm, letting Michael feel how easily it could break. He felt the breathing slow, the rage abate. Or maybe it was just better controlled.

“You can go with your mother, or you can go to jail,” Nick said, with civil indifference. “It won’t be with your brother. You can do some good for your family, or you can screw up everything for yourself. Go on now. Your mom’s at the elevator. Don’t leave her alone.”

Michael twisted his head and glared at Nick. The hatred in his face was no less, but it was cold instead of hot; Nick took it as a cease-fire and released him. Michael shuddered and rolled over, stood and stared again at Nick. He would never be frightened again, he knew, but he had learned that he could be fooled. The paramedics were at the elevator door, which thankfully opened. Michael looked at them, at Nick. Michael began to walk to them, still fixing Nick’s eyes.

“No way this is over. No way.”

Nick looked at him without answering and withdrew back toward the Cole apartment, trusting that Esposito could handle whatever went on inside. Michael knocked at the apartment door next to the elevator, and when an old woman answered, he told her she had to take care of the babies, he had to go. The woman stared at the stretcher, at him, at Nick, and nodded. When Michael Cole turned away, Nick waved on the female paramedic, who patted Miz Cole’s arm, offering soft assurances that from now on, all things would be good.

Nick could only guess at what oaths Michael uttered in the next hours of his vigil, as grief seeped from him to harden into tougher, stranger stuff. But Nick was reminded of his own agreements, sometime before dawn. They were back at the squad, and Nick had stepped out of the interrogation room to get coffee, when his cellphone unexpectedly rang. The number was blocked. His wife’s office line was blocked, but it
couldn’t be her, not now, not from there. Nick hesitated, then decided to answer. The caller did not identify himself. Nick did not know him, nor did he need to ask.