“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.
• • •
IN 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.
Everyone held his place for what seemed like hours but measured no more than ten seconds. Skeeter was the first to speak.
“Hope you got money on you,” he said in a high-pitched voice that bordered on feminine. “’Cause I’m takin’ it after you’re dead. Pay for the fuckin’ door you just busted up.”
“Take my watch,” Boomer said. “I’d want you to have it anyway.”
“You here for the cash?” Skeeter pointed to the money spread across his table. “If you ain’t, then you gonna be dead for the dumbest of fuckin’ reasons.”
“You really seem serious about us dyin’,” Boomer said.
“All I gots to do is nod my head.”
“Your head’ll be off before you finish the shake,” Boomer said. “Which makes it easy for me to die happy. And you see my partner behind me?”
“Spook with a badge.” Skeeter’s voice quivered with contempt. “What tree you shake him off of?”
“He takes two of yours before he buys the plot,” Boomer said. “That means only three walk out. We can save ourselves all that shit and make it easy for you and me.”
“I got ears,” Skeeter said.
“You let us lead you out of the building,” Boomer said. “The manpower walks. It’s only you we want.”
“Don’t think so, white,” Skeeter said. “I was born in this fuckin’ building. Just as soon die in it.”
“Well, you can’t shoot a guy for trying,” Boomer said.
Boomer heard the click of the semi before he saw the flash. He jumped to his right, landed on one knee, and fired four quick rounds toward the men by the kitchen door. Behind him, Dead-Eye laid out the two on the couch, fast-pumped them from head to heart without so much as a twitch. It all happened so quickly, Skeeter had no choice but to remain frozen in place, still holding the handful of bills.
Dead-Eye flipped over a coffee table, landed on his feet, and fired three shots into one of the men near the kitchen. He aimed his other gun at a crouched man coming out of the bathroom, had him in his sights, when Skeeter threw the money in the air and came up shooting. His first shot split the wall. His second got Dead-Eye in the shoulder.
“I’m hit, Boom,” he said, falling to the ground, shooting his gun at anyone without a badge that could still move.
“Stay down,
” Boomer shouted through the smoke, gunfire, and moans. “Reload and stay down.”
Skeeter jumped over the table and made a run for the door, slipping over the thousands of dollars that were now raining on the faces of dead men.
Boomer followed him out.
“I’m on him,” he shouted back to Dead-Eye. “There’s two more in the kitchen.”
“They’re either gonna stay in there or die out here,” Dead-Eye said. “Either way, they’re mine.”
• • •
BOOMER CAUGHT SKEETER in the middle of the third-floor landing. He threw him against the wall and swung a hard left that found the thin man’s stomach. Skeeter gave out a grunt loud enough to echo through the halls. He came back with a right hand of his own, grazing the side of Boomer’s temple. Then he went for the throat, both hands wrapped tight around Boomer, pushing him hard against a shaky railing. Boomer’s hands went up against Skeeter’s jaw, pushing the dope dealer’s head back, causing his eyes to flutter toward the ceiling.
“You gonna die, you fucker,” Skeeter said, tightening his grip. “Gonna die right here. In front of me.”
Boomer pulled one hand away from Skeeter’s chin, moving it down his chest, trying to reach the .22 he kept in a crotch holster. As his hand found his pants, he heard the wood of the railing behind him start to give way. Skeeter’s eyes were bulging now, spittle coming down the sides of his mouth, the strength of his hands cutting the air from Boomer’s throat, forcing him to take short breaths through his nose.
Boomer had his hand around the gun when the railing gave way.
The two of them fell together down through the next railing, linked like dancers, wood and rusty iron flying through the air, one shard slashing the right side of Boomer’s face. The muzzle of Boomer’s gun was flush against Skeeter’s stomach.
Boomer felt a sharp pain in his right side the instant his gun went off. He looked at Skeeter’s face and knew the man was dead. If it wasn’t the bullet that did him, it had to be the iron rail lodged through his throat. Boomer turned his head and saw half a rail hanging through the right side of his own chest, blood flowing out of the hole in his jacket.
He and Skeeter had fallen down three stories, taking every railing with them. There had been a fifteen-minute firefight only minutes earlier. He could still hear Dead-Eye and the kitchen help exchanging shots. Sirens wailed in the distance. Yet despite that, not one apartment door had opened.
Boomer sat there, unmoving, blood oozing from his wound, Skeeter’s dead body stretched across his chest. He closed his eyes, willing himself to another place.
The growl of a dog shook him from his dream.
Boomer turned his head to his left and saw a dark gray pit bull. Boomer hated dogs, big or small. But he especially hated pit bulls.
“Let me take a wild guess,” he said, pointing to the body on top of him. “This guy belongs to you.”
The dog stared and continued to growl and sniff for a minute or two, then turned and walked out of the building.
“Doesn’t say much about you, does it, Skeeter?” Boomer said to the dead man. “When your own dog doesn’t give a shit whether you live or die.”
• • •
BOOMER STARED AT the retirement papers in his hands, thick triplicate forms filled with numbers and statistics. They were all one big blur, none of the information making any sense. All that was clear to him was the reality of a fall down a set of tenement banisters and half a lung now missing from his chest. That one rusty iron rail had landed him what the beat cops liked to call “the policeman’s lotto.” A nifty three-quarter, tax-free disability pension doled out for the rest of his life.
Based on his 1980 earnings, complete with overtime and vacation days due him, Boomer’s yearly take averaged out to a clean $38,500 a year. Plus full health coverage. Boomer Frontieri was only thirty-eight years old, and there should have been a smile as wide as a canyon on his face. Instead, on that drab early December morning in 1980, all Boomer wanted to do was find someplace quiet and cry.
Boomer had survived dozens of other wounds, healed up and returned to wear the shield once again. Not this time. Not with half a lung slowing his breath and a right leg that couldn’t give him more than a quarter of a mile’s run without crumbling in pain. Not even Boomer Frontieri could make it on the streets spotting the shooters those handicaps.
He could never be a cop again.
He took three weeks off and traveled to Italy, visiting his father’s hometown of Reggio Calabria, talking to the old men and women who remembered the young John Frontieri. He spent his afternoons walking through the nearby hills as the towns below him slept through the heat. He briefly toyed with the notion of moving there full-time, but let the thought escape, knowing it was not truly the place where he belonged.
His first six months of retirement were spent fitfully and without much sleep. He went to movies, plays, museums, read books, even caught an opera at the Met, something he hadn’t done since his father was killed. None of it seemed to shake him from his mental slumber. None of what he saw, read, or heard brought him peace. He still jumped with anticipation whenever he heard a police siren off in the distance. His instincts still told him which of the faces he passed on crowded streets were dirty, which were looking for the easy score. He still carried a gun, his old police revolver, which he bought from the department, and he carried a replica of his detective’s badge in his back pocket. He even kept his cuffs, tossed in a desk drawer in his apartment. He often looked at them in the sad way a middle-aged man looks upon a photo of an old girlfriend.
He stayed away from other cops. They would only serve as a reminder of what he so desperately missed. He avoided the bars they drank in and the restaurants he knew they frequented. He limited his nights of eating and drinking to one place, Nunzio’s, a small, out-of-the-way Italian restaurant on West Ninety-sixth Street, near the entrance to the Henry Hudson Parkway. The food was excellent, the drink plentiful, and the company just what he wanted it to be—quiet and distant.
Most of the regulars at Nunzio’s were made mob guys near the end of their criminal careers. They had taken all the money they could, killed most of their enemies, and done their time. Now they were left alone to watch ball games, argue over old scores and cold feuds. They knew who Boomer was, and there was a time when they would have shunned him. Yet now, in a strange way, the cop was one of them, cast adrift, not a threat to anyone. On occasion they would even send a drink to his table.
The restaurant was owned and managed by an old family friend, Nunzio Goldman. Boomer’s father first worked in the meat market for Nunzio’s Jewish father, Al, the Fourteenth Street boss who split his proceeds with the uptown Italian mob. On the streets, Al was known as the Rabbi, a man who would kill if he caught a dirty look. At home he was Anna Pasqualini’s husband, a quiet, reserved businessman who doted on his family. When the kids were older and Anna got restless, he opened Nunzio’s and put her in charge. After she died, their oldest son took over.
“How come you’re the only one in the family who’s got an Italian name?” Boomer once asked Nunzio, whose two brothers were named Daniel and Jacob.
“Spite,” Nunzio said. “My father took one look down at me and said I had too much Italian blood to be Jewish. It was bad enough he fell in love with an Italian woman. Now this. So he let my mother name me. My other brothers, they got lucky. They were given names that fit. But I came out ahead of the game. They don’t have a restaurant. They gotta eat the slop their wives cook. You’re better off at Frank E. Campbell’s than at their dinner table.”
Nunzio could always bring a smile to Boomer’s face. Make him forget the emptiness that gnawed at his insides. The old man made sure Boomer didn’t get too fond of the drink or spend too much time alone. He cared about his friend and didn’t want him to fall into the bars and cars cycle he’d seen other cops pursue. A man doesn’t have to die to end a life. Nunzio knew that.
• • •
BOOMER FRONT
IERI WAS retired for two years before he was able to shake the ghosts that haunted his soul. For most retired cops, the wake-up call never comes. But Boomer Frontieri wasn’t just any cop. He was one of the best detectives the city of New York had ever seen. In his eighteen years on the job, he had made a lot of enemies. Many of them were in jail. Many others were dead. Many more walked the streets. Boomer was well aware of who they were and, more important, where they were.
But, in the course of those eighteen years, Boomer Frontieri had also made a lot of friends. The helpless victims of those he dragged away in cuffs, the anonymous faces of their neighborhoods. Old or young, they all remembered a cop named Boomer Frontieri.
It was a phone call from one who remembered that changed Boomer’s life. A call from a man he hadn’t talked to in years. About a little girl he had never met.
Though he didn’t know it then, from the moment Boomer’s hand took the receiver from Nunzio, his course was set.
2
Dead-Eye
HIS MOTHER CRIED when she heard the news. His father didn’t speak to him for three months. His two older brothers and younger sister avoided any contact. His friends in the Brooklyn neighborhood where he was born and raised couldn’t put together the words to ask him why. His girlfriend turned her back on him and his favorite high school teacher told him he was throwing the promise of a young life into a corner of a room.
All this because Davis Winthrop decided to become a cop.
On the streets he called home, a man walking by in a blue uniform or driving past in an unmarked sedan was seen not as friend but as foe. The skin behind that uniform or that wheel was more often than not pasty white. The eyes behind the badges were filled with anger, hate, or, worse, indifference. On the streets of Brownsville, Brooklyn, a policeman was anything but a friend.
But Davis Winthrop didn’t feel that way. Never. He saw everything the others had seen. He had a number of friends who died mysteriously after being taken into custody for a minor offense. He heard the verbal abuse heaped on those around him from those protected by the law. He was aware of the looks of scorn, the snide comments mumbled under warm coffee breath, all meant to deride and keep the listener locked in place.