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.
• • •
DAVIS “DEAD-EYE” WINTHROP 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.
• • •
BOOMER 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.
• • •
BOOMER AND DEAD-EYE 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.”
“Save it for Mike Wallace,” Dead-Eye said. “All we wanna hear is you spit up some names.”
“Don’t have to give you shit, Super Fly.” The smile was back on Cleve’s face. “You can’t arrest me. Your badges been stamped out.”
“I never shot a pimp on the job,” Boomer said, looking away from Cleve and checking the two hookers in hot pants and fake fur standing by a pink Lincoln, shivering in their six-inch heels. “How about you, Dead-Eye?”
“Fleshed one once in the shoulder,” Dead-Eye said. “Up in Spanish Harlem. He ran off down the avenue, screaming like an old woman.”
“There’s a hundred wacks, easy, out here movin’ kids,” Cleve said. “I ain’t no ftickin’ yellow pages. Can’t know them all.”
Boomer looked away from the hookers and stepped in closer to Cleve, lips inches from the pimp’s left ear. “Be a pal,” Boomer whispered, “and give us your three best names.”
“I only go by their street names,” Cleve said, eyes moving from Boomer to Dead-Eye.
“We’ll take what you can give,” Dead-Eye said.
“I’d peek at a lowball PR calls himself Crow,” Cleve said, toning down his voice. “Works the terminal, lifting boys for the chicken hawks, sometimes takes a chippie home for himself.”
“You’re riding a wave, Cleve,” Boomer said. “Don’t stop it now.”
“There’s this white dude rides around the deuce in out-of-state wheels,” Cleve said, lifting the front flap of his coat and pulling out a filter-tip Kool. “Nasty piece of business. Got more tattoos than skin. Couldn’t miss him if you were blind and tied to a tree.”
“We get the idea,” Dead-Eye said.
“He deals in runaways,” Cleve said, putting a lit match to the cigarette, talking as he puffed. “Hangs on to them for a week or so, chillin’ his bones, then sells ’em off to an outside shipper.”
“Nice set of friends,” Boomer said. “I should shoot you just for knowin’ ’em.”
“We only walk on the same streets, Boom,” Cleve said. “I don’t ever chop wood with shit like that. I aim my end simple and clean. Keeps my pockets filled with cash, my dick covered with pussy, and my soft ass outta jail.”
“You should have your own talk show,” Boomer said. “Now, get back on track, Romeo. Give us up another name.”
“There’s a brother calls himself X,” Cleve said, tossing the butt end of the Kool out toward the curb. “You know, like Malcolm X?”
“Minus the religion,” Dead-Eye said.
“He’s as close to Malcolm as me to the Pope,” Cleve said. “This fucker’s out there, pulls in runaways and sells them over to some uptown crew that takes ’em, fucks ’em till they’re knocked up, then deals them and the baby. Like a two for one.”
“Jesus Christ,” Dead-Eye muttered.
“He work the area steady?” Boomer asked.
“I see him enough to make me nervous,” Cleve said. “He don’t always sell what he picks up.”
“Why’s that?” Dead-Eye asked.
“Sometimes the goods are too damaged,” Cleve said. “Buyers take a pass, if you read what I mean. He ain’t happy just gettin’ his rocks soft. He’s into the pain.”
“He have a regular spot?” Boomer said. “A hang place.”
“I hear he scores his dope off a dealer works the Eighth Avenue end of the Port,” Cleve said. “That’d be where I would gaze. But then, I ain’t no shot-up super cops like you two.”
“Appreciate the info, Cleve,” Boomer said. “You ever end up doin’ a stretch, we promise to visit.”
“Bring you and your prison chick some home cookin’,” Dead-Eye said.
“Like being in the can ain’t bad enough,” Cleve said, silver teeth gleaming under the glow of the overhead streetlight.
“Just one more thing,” Boomer said, nodding over toward Dead-Eye.
“I gave up the three.” Cleve was annoyed. “That’s all I can do for free.”
“This one won’t cost,” Boomer said, smiling. “It’s just a favor, Cleve.”
“What you need?” Cleve started to slow-step it toward the parked car and the waiting hookers. “But make it quick.”
“The name of your dentist,” Boomer said.
• • •
BOOMER PLACED THE sharp end of a pocket knife in the dealer’s ear. He had his left hand wrapped around the man’s throat, force-lifting him inches from the floor. The dealer was thin and bug-eyed with long, greasy black hair covering half his face.
They were inside an empty Port Authority men’s room, Dead-Eye leaning his back against the front door. The dealer’s glassy eyes veered from Boomer to Dead-Eye, trying to place the faces of the men who had yanked him without warning from the street and dragged him into the first open door they found.
“I know you guys ain’t dealers,” he said. “And I don’t think you’re cops.”
“We’re priests,” Dead-Eye said.
“And we’re willing to save your fucking soul,” Boomer said, lifting the dealer higher up against the side of the grimy wall. “So the only thinkin’ for you right now should be about how can I make these guys happy.”
“Take my works,” the dealer said, fear kicking his voice into a higher gear. “Got enough for ten, maybe twelve, easy, on the street.”
“You sell smack to a low-end run chaser calls himself X,” Dead-Eye said, pointing a finger toward the knife inside the dealer’s ear. “Give us his name, unless you want to spend the rest of your life reading lips.”
“You guys lookin’ for chicks, no problem, I can help you out,” the dealer said. “X is the best. He can find a fresh piece of fur in the desert.”
Boomer slid the edge of the knife across the side of the dealer’s ear, bringing a thin row of blood drops flowing down his neck. “You guys ain’t fuckin’ priests,” the dealer muttered.
Boomer squeezed his hand tighter against the man’s throat, muffling the sounds of pain, causing his eyes to bulge. “The name is all I wanna hear from you,” Boomer said. “We understand each other?”
The dealer nodded and Boomer lightened his grip. “Malcolm Juniper,” the dealer said. “We did a spin together up at Attica.”
“Where’s he sleep?” Dead-Eye asked, popping four Maalox tablets into his mouth.
“Here and there,” the dealer said. “No place steady. He’s only been loose a few weeks.”
“Where’s he sleeping tonight?” Boomer asked, wiping the knife blade on the sleeve of the dealer’s torn velvet jacket. Then he took a handkerchief from his pants pocket and handed it to the dealer. “Clean that blood off your ear,” he told him. “After you answer the question.”
“He’s been stayin’ at a park-and-lock on Thirty-ninth Street,” he said, putting the handkerchief next to his ear. “Put down enough for a four-day stay.”
“When?” Dead-Eye asked.
“Yesterday,” the dealer said. “Day before, maybe.”