“When tomorrow?” Ray ran the edge of the blade up the front of Beatrice’s coat.
“I’ll meet you here,” Bobby said. “Same time.”
“You think your little junkie’s tellin’ me the truth?” Ray asked Beatrice.
“My son is a junkie,” Beatrice said, putting a hand on Ray’s raincoat, bunching a small corner into a ball. “But you are much worse. You live off junkies. And that makes you nothing but an animal.”
“This is between us, Ray,” Bobby said. “Keep her out of this. Please.”
“You’re the one that brought her,” Ray said.
“Take your blood money.” Beatrice pulled out the envelope with the five hundred dollars from her coat pocket, then shoved it against Ray’s chest. “And go.”
Ray took the envelope with his free hand, stood up, put it in his pocket, and turned to look at Bobby.
“Forget the rest of the money,” Ray told him. “After tonight we’re even, you and me. You want any fresh shit, you hustle it someplace else. Anyplace but me. Deal?”
“Deal,” Bobby said, nodding his head. “Thanks, Ray. I appreciate it.”
Ray smiled at Bobby, turned back to Beatrice, grabbed her hair, and pulled it back with a hard snap, waiting until he saw her neckline under the glimmer of the overhead light.
He brought the blade down next to Beatrice’s throat, his eyes gleaming, a relaxed smile on his face. He ran the blade against her neck, one long cut from the edge of the left ear across to the bottom of her right jaw. He watched the blood gush out in thick rolls and held on to her hair until he saw the life float from her body. He watched Beatrice slump down the side of the park bench.
Ray Monte cleaned the sides of the knife against his victim’s coat, snapped it closed, and walked off into the night.
“My pleasure,” Ray said to Bobby, leaving the young boy with his dying mother.
Bobby cradled Beatrice in his arms, letting her blood flow over him. He didn’t cry, didn’t speak, just held her close, head against her heart, rocking slowly back and forth. He hadn’t touched her in years and couldn’t remember the last time he told her he loved her. And yet he knew she would forgive him anything, even her own death.
He put his head down against the side of hers, his lips close to her ears and whispered the words to “Partira,” the Italian ballad she had sung him to sleep with when he was a little boy.
They stayed that way until the dawn broke and the police arrived.
• • •
BOBBY SCARPONI BURIED his drug habit alongside his mother. He stayed clear of the streets and worked hard in school. He fought off the nighttime urges when he hungered for a needle bubbling with heroin, for an escape from the life around him.
He lived with his father in a silent house. Albert Scarponi said good-bye to the only woman he ever loved, then turned his back on his only child. They shared a home but never spoke, the older man living quietly with his grief and anger, unable to forgive Bobby for leading his mother into the path of a dealer’s knife. Albert’s hatred was further fueled by his son’s refusal to identify his mother’s killer.
Ray Monte had walked free.
“Don’t get any ideas about doing this on your own, Bobby,” one of the detectives told him. “He’ll kill you just like he did your mom.”
“The dealer didn’t kill my wife,” Albert said, looking up at the detective. “He only held the knife. She was brought there by her son. Her own blood.”
“You get a change of heart,” the other detective told Bobby, placing a card in the napkin holder in the center of the table, “give us a call. Day or night.”
The two detectives left through the back door of the wood-shingled house, leaving Albert and Bobby Scarponi behind, alone in their two separate worlds.
• • •
FROM THEN ON, Bobby Scarponi kept track of Ray Monte.
He would see him occasionally walking the streets of his Queens neighborhood, drinking coffee and pushing drugs, never far from a new car with a running engine. Bobby finished a two-year army tour while Ray sat out the calendar in a Comstock cell, doing three to five on an assault charge. They were discharged two weeks apart.
Ray Monte returned to the streets, ready to move back into the prime arena of the drug trade. He teamed up with an Irish crew working out of Forest Hills and set up shop on 168th Street in Jamaica, handling heroin and cocaine for the posses wresting control of the drug action from the old-time Italians. He took a cut from all the pot and illegal prescription sales generated in the area, and contracted out members of his outfit for hits on anyone who objected.
And he never carried a gun. Only a knife.
• • •
BOBBY SCARPONI SAT across the desk from a detective with a long scar across his face, its edges brushing the lid of his right eye. The detective lit a cigarette and sat back in a creaky wooden swivel chair.
“Why you telling me all this now?” the detective, Sal Albano, asked. “Why didn’t you say anything before?”
“I wanted to see if I could make it through the Academy,” Bobby said. “If I didn’t, nobody needed to know.”
“How long’ve you been off the shit?”
“Eight years this March,” Bobby said. “Shot three speedballs on my sixteenth birthday. Two nights later, my mom got killed.”
“You ain’t the first cop that ever took a hit on the hard stuff,” Albano said. “Shit, these days, I think half the fuckin’ guys in uniform are buzzed out of their skulls.”
“So I don’t get booted?” Bobby asked.
“You’re the best pure cop I ever trained,” Albano said, “and I’ve been doing this long enough to know good when I see it. You stay clean, you’ve got no beef with me.”
“I asked to be put in a precinct in my old neighborhood,” Bobby said, sitting back in his chair, muscular frame relaxed, the once-dead eyes now clear and lucid. “Any chance of that?”
“I’ll make some calls,” Albano said. “Shouldn’t be a problem. But don’t get used to it. Guy like you ain’t gonna be in uniform long. An old friend of mine in Brooklyn needs a good young cop to work decoy. Told him about you. Expect a call in about six months.”
“I won’t need that long to do what I have to do,” Bobby said, standing and reaching over to shake Albano’s hand.
“Which is what?” Albano asked.
“Look up an old friend,” Bobby Scarponi of the New York City Police Department said.
• • •
THE HEAVY APRIL rain pounded the squad car as it circled the empty South Jamaica streets, fog lights on, wipers slapping aside thick streams of water. Bobby Scarponi kicked up the sound on the police radio and turned the window defogger knob down. He was starting his fourth month as a street cop and had already made a dent in cleaning up his old neighborhood. He had nailed four mid-level drug dealers and had taken down an armed felon hiding in a public school science lab. He reintroduced himself to the local merchants, many of whom remembered him as the drug-crazed teen who shoplifted from their stores. Now he was there to protect them.
The street kids, aware of Scarponi’s past, called him Rev. Jim, after the brain-frazzled character portrayed on the hit television series Taxi. The name made its way into the halls of Bobby’s precinct and stuck. Scarponi didn’t mind. It helped give him a street ID, a name they would remember, a key first step toward being a cop they would turn to for help.
The passing years had failed to soften the frost between Bobby and his father. They still shared a roof, but nothing more. Not even the first sight of Bobby in a policeman’s uniform could shake loose his father’s hate.
Bobby Scarponi understood.
He had resigned himself to his culpability in his mother’s death, fighting daily to control the emotions boiling beneath his calm exterior. He knew those emotions would eventually need to be set free to exact their toll. Only then, perhaps, could he work toward building a peace with the man whose house he occupied but whose love he long ago
lost.
Bobby Scarponi also knew that when the day came for him to open that emotional cage, the beast it unleashed would be aimed at Ray Monte.
• • •
BOBBY PULLED THE squad car directly behind the parked Mercedes and shoved the gear stick into park, letting the motor idle. He put on a pair of thin black gloves and grabbed a brown nightstick, twisting the cord around his knuckles.
There were four men around the Mercedes, all dressed in long gray coats and brown fedoras, brims folded down to catch the rain. They separated when they saw Bobby approach, smiles on their faces but menace in their eyes.
Ray Monte stood in the middle, right leg up against a rear hubcap, thin cigar in his mouth.
“You know the world’s a fucked-up place,” Ray said, “when they go and give a junkie a gun and a badge.”
Bobby walked closer, taking small steps, measuring the men, knowing they were all armed and backed up by a small crew drinking in the dimly lit bar behind him.
“Rain like this must cut into business,” Bobby said, his eyes on Ray.
“A junkie ain’t no weatherman,” Ray said. “All he cares about is the fix. Shouldn’t have to be tellin’ you that.”
“I remember,” Bobby said.
Bobby and Ray had not talked in the years since the murder, but they were keenly aware of each other’s activities. Bobby watched as Ray grew his drug business, earning thousands a day as he fed the increasing neighborhood demand for cocaine and heroin. For his part, Ray Monte knew enough about Bobby Scarponi to understand he was not the type to let a blood murder sit. He watched him clean up his life, kick his habit, and then wait for his opportunity, patience his only partner.
The day Bobby Scarponi pinned on a policeman’s badge, Ray Monte knew their moment was close enough to touch.
“You here to pick up the payoffs?” the chubby man to Ray’s left asked, laughing through the question. “They always send the new guys for the pickups. Breaks them in good that way.”
“You got it goin’ pretty good, Ray,” Bobby said. “I figure six blocks in the one-sixties, all kickin’ in to you.”
“I eat,” Ray said, shrugging his shoulders, cigar smoke filtering up past the lid of his fedora.
“What happens if you go down?” Bobby asked. “Who moves in on your take?”
“That’s somethin’ I wouldn’t know or care about. Seein’ as I ain’t goin’ any fuckin’ place.”
“I figure Uncle Angie.” Water dripped down from the peak of Bobby’s policeman’s hat. “He’ll give your corners to one of the Jamaican gangs. Walk away from it with a bigger cut than he’s getting from you.”
“By the time that happens, I’ll have enough money to buy Florida,” Ray said, taking the cigar from his mouth and tossing it over his shoulder into a puddle. “And you’ll still be walkin’ in the rain, bustin’ joint-rollers.”
“You still carry that blade?” Bobby asked, moving in closer to Ray, watching the three men by his side stiffen.
“Always,” Ray said. “You wanna see it?”
“I saw it once,” Bobby said. “It’s enough to hold me.”
“When your mother died, she didn’t make a sound,” Ray said. “She just went. Think you’ll go the same?”
“You did her alone,” Bobby said. “Didn’t need anybody else. Now you got three. Maybe all that money makes you scared.”
Ray Monte smiled and looked over at his men. “Go dry off inside and get a drink,” he told them. “Pour me one too. I won’t be long.”
Bobby and Ray stared at one another, waiting as the three men brushed past, heading for the dark warmth of an old bar.
“You gonna draw down on me, Officer Bob?” Ray asked. “I don’t have a gun.”
“She wasn’t carrying anything,” Bobby said, the rain coming down in heavier doses.
“She had her son to protect her.” Ray’s voice was cold, heavy with hate. “Except he didn’t do nothin’ but watch her bleed.”
“I’ve watched her die every day since then,” Bobby said, the blade of a knife slipping down the side of his police jacket. “And every night.”
Ray Monte pulled the switchblade from his pants pocket and snapped it open, its familiar sound echoing like a drum, as it had so often down through the years. All Bobby heard was his laugh.
The knife went in chest deep, past muscle and bone, through vein and artery. Two hands reached for it, holding it tight, burying it deeper into flesh. The two men stared at each other, the rain around them mixing with the thick flow of blood, one set of eyes welled with sadness and tears, the other losing their grasp on life. The two leaned against the rear door of the Mercedes, wet bodies clinging together, low gurgles coming from the throat of the dying man.
“You didn’t make any noise either,” Bobby Scarponi said to Ray Monte, letting his body go, watching it slide down the side of the Mercedes and crumple to the curb, head against a Firestone all-weather tire.
Bobby walked to his squad car, got in, put it in gear, and drove off, heading back to the station house.
His tour of duty done.
• • •
THREE MONTHS AFTER Ray Monte’s death, Bobby Scarponi was transferred out of uniform and assigned to the Brooklyn Decoy Unit. At twenty-five, he was the youngest member of a team that roamed the borough posing as potential criminal targets. They were a traveling troupe of actors whose successful performance ended with an attempted mugging and an arrest. Bobby, who loved acting, took to the detail as easily as he once took to drugs. More important, he cherished the risk involved, the chance of exposure, of being taken down by desperate hands.
For the cop they called Rev. Jim, it was just another way to get high.
In no time, he mastered the disguises of the job—from the drunken Wall Street executive asleep at a subway stop to the tattered rummy sleeping one off on a heat grate to the unruly drug addict hustling street corners for throwaway change. He was the best performer on the street, pushing his talents to dangerous limits as he lulled his suspects into action.
It was as a member of the Decoy Unit that Bobby Scarponi found himself leaning against a railing in Brooklyn Heights, looking out across the still river at the diamond glimmer of the Manhattan night. His hair was caked, clothes torn and soiled, black plastic garbage bags wrapped around his feet. He took a fast swig from an iced-tea-filled pint of Four Roses and turned to look at the two young girls on the park bench behind him, both drinking from cups of hot chocolate. The elder of the two, running about sixteen, held a cigarette between the fingers of a gloved hand. They giggled as they talked.
He moved a few steps down, dragging his feet, one hand on the rail, eyes catching a glimpse of his target, hidden behind a tree, a quick jump from the girls on the bench.
“We got company,” Bobby Scarponi said into the top button of his torn coat. A wire transmitter was attached to a band clipped to his waist. “About five feet from the marks.”
The two backups were in a black Plymouth hidden behind a Parks Department shack a quarter of a mile away, guns on their laps, empty coffee containers strewn about their feet.
“You sure it’s him?” the one behind the wheel, T. J. Turner, asked. “Might just be a bum takin’ a piss.”
“Bums piss in their pants,” Bobby whispered into his coat. “It’s part of what makes them bums.”
“You would know, Rev. Jim,” Tommy Mackens said from the passenger seat. “Never met a decoy liked to wear pissed-in clothes as much as you.”
“It’s not what you wear,” Rev. Jim said, “but how you wear it.”
“Be careful with this guy,” T.J. told him. “He’s into the pain more than the takeoff.”
“He found two soft ones tonight,” Rev. Jim said. “Not gonna get much of a fight out of these kids.”
“Hates bums too,” Tommy said, laughing. “Might come beat the shit out of you.”
“I’ll be ready,” Bobby Scarponi said.
He moved away from the railing, staggeri
ng his walk, singing “Bye Bye Blackbird” in a soft voice marked by a drunken lilt. He kept his eyes away from the girls, ignoring their chatter, his ears tuned only to the rustle of leaves and the rush of feet.
He was twenty yards from the two girls when the man behind the tree made his move, rushing out to stand in front of the girls, their voices silenced by the sight of a gun. He was tall and solid, a wall of muscle packed under a black set of sweats. He had a ski mask over his face and gloves to hide his fingerprints.
“Don’t hurt us,” one of the girls begged. Her thin face was hidden by thick curls of brown hair.
“Kind of hurt I got, you might like,” the man answered, his voice hard and low. “You both stand up slow and get behind that tree.”
The girls were shaking too hard to move, tears running down their faces, gloved hands gripping the sides of the bench. The man stepped closer and stroked the barrel of the gun against the side of one girl’s temple, nudging the blond hair tucked beneath the flap of her pink wool hat. She didn’t turn her face.
“I can put it inside any kind of trim,” the man said with a small boy’s giggle. “Dead or alive, don’t mean shit. Now, you two gonna walk or be dragged?”
“‘Here I go singing low, Bye bye blackbird.’ Everybody!” Bobby was up behind them now, his voice loud, the pint of Four Roses held high, a big smile on his face. “C’mon, girls, let’s hear it. You, with the mask, I know you can do it.”
The man turned to Bobby, gun in hand, eyes lit with anger.
“Take your shit down the road, bum,” he said. “Before I put you to sleep for good.”
“I look like a bum to you?” Bobby said, dragging his garbage bag-covered feet closer. “You blind? I’m a singer, man. And you’re steppin’ on my stage.”
The man raised the .38 Special, placing it inches from Bobby’s chest, and tightened his grip around the trigger.
“Hear me out, singer,” the man said. “I kill you and there ain’t nobody out there gonna give a fuck.”
“I tell jokes too.” Bobby planted his feet, his right hand clutching the Four Roses pint. “Make the girls smile nice and pretty.”
“Last chance,” the man said, pressing the gun against Bobby’s cheek.