Where It Hurts (29 page)

(TUESDAY, LATE NIGHT)

B
ill and I lifted Katy out of the blood, but she had lost it. Her coat, face, hair, and hands were covered in blood and she was screaming her head off.

“Shut her the fuck up or I’ll kill her now and add her body to the pile,” Pete said, his voice as cold and steady as the concrete walls.

Bill wrapped his arms around her, stroked her blood-wet hair and whispered to her, “Shhh. Shhh. It’s horrible but you’ve got to quiet down, darling. Shhh. Shhh.” She quieted down some almost immediately. Bill was magic that way. Then he lifted his head and asked Pete, “Can I walk her away from this? It will help.”

We all understood what
this
was.

“Sure, but don’t go too far and don’t try anything stupid, Father Bill.”

Bill bowed his head to Pete and walked Katy away from the bodies.

“What the fuck is a priest doing here?” Pete was red-faced with anger, his cold voice heating up.

If Pete didn’t know that Bill had left the church, I wasn’t going to tell him, and I knew Bill was wise enough not to tell him, either. He was probably going to kill the three of us soon enough regardless, but anything that made him hesitate was something to hang on to. Even
calculating bastards like Pete McCann had to swallow pretty hard to kill a priest and a twenty-year-old girl.

“He came for Regan,” I said. “They go back. Old friends. Nobody was planning on you showing up, Pete.”

“Too bad for you.”

“I guess.” I asked, “So how much did you and the girl see?”

“Enough to freak her out. Throw down your weapon, Gus.”

I laughed.

“I say something funny? I must’ve missed it.”

“No. It’s just that Regan already made me toss it away.” I nodded to my left. “It’s over there. You can see for yourself.”

He looked, saw the baby Glock on the floor, and it was his turn to laugh. Only he meant it.

“Everybody’s being so helpful. First, you want a meeting with Regan that gets the both of you in the same place and he brings Shivers with him and kills the bastard. Then Regan disarms you. Too bad about the chief killing himself with his own weapon.”

“How’s that?”

Pete reached his left arm behind him and beneath his jacket. When I next saw his left hand, it was holding another 9mm.

“Look familiar, Gus?”

“It’s mine, right? The asshole took it off me Friday night when I got pulled over on the Sag. I never thought I’d see it again.”

He gave me the half-smile. “Very good. See, if the chief didn’t already do himself, you were going to kill him and then I was going to have to kill you before you killed me, too.”

“You might’ve been able to sell that if it was only you, me, and the chief. Now things are a lot more complicated. You’re going to have to kill the girl and a priest. Too many loose ends to tie up. Too many bodies to explain away while you walk away unhurt.”

“Let me worry about that, Gus.”

“No, no, no, Pete. Too many people for you to kill.”

He shook his head, that smug look on his face. “Uh-uh, old pal.
You’re confused. Not me. You’re going to kill them and I still get to kill you. Then at your funeral, I’ll hook up with Annie again. A sympathy fuck is good for the soul. You shoulda tried it sometime. Too bad that favor she did for you turned out to be a favor for me. The way I see it, I owe her for that.”

I bit the inside of my cheek so hard, I tasted the metal of my own blood. I couldn’t let him fuck with me, so I changed subjects.

“That charade on the Sagtikos the other night, that was your doing, not Paxson’s?”

“Milt Paxson’s an ass. He couldn’t find his own dick with a roadmap. Milt! What a ridiculous name. Who names a kid Milton? Of course it was me.”

“The dead cop in Smudge’s house and Lazy Eye, that was you also?”

He nodded, said, “I pulled the trigger, but it was your gun.” Then he looked over to where Bill was walking Katy Smalls. Katy had calmed or gone completely into shock and was nearly silent, her supple body rigid under Bill’s arm.

“You’ve got another minute, Father, to say your prayers or to do whatever it is you gotta do,” he said, his voice fractured and nervous. Pete may have planned for me to kill Bill and the girl, but he’d gone through too much Catholic schooling and still believed enough to feel the weight of what he was about to set in motion.

I took a peek at where Bill and the girl were walking and decided to piss Pete off in the hope that Bill would take the opportunity presenting itself.

“You’re gonna kill a priest and a girl, Pete? Really? Are you that much of a coldhearted prick?”

“Grief make you deaf or something, Gus? Not me. You.”

He was too far away from me or I would have spit in his face. Instead I did what I could, shuffling a foot or two to my right to make his eyes follow me, and then I spit at his shoes.

He laughed. “You missed, pal. Maybe your throat’s a little dry from fear, huh?”

“Fuck you, Pete! You cowardly piece of shit. You wanna kill us, do it yourself. The same way you killed Tommy Delcamino.”

But instead of rage, confusion washed over his face. “I didn’t kill that loser. We didn’t kill him. Why would we kill him? When the missing heroin started showing up on the street, we figured we’d keep an eye on him and he’d lead us to it. When he didn’t, Shivers got impatient and sent his crew over there to see if he had it stashed in the trailer. When they showed up, Tommy D. was already dead.”

“You’re full of—”

“Enough!” he screamed. “Enough stalling. Father, get over here and don’t do anything stupid.”

When they were close to us, Pete waved my old service weapon at me. He placed it on the floor at his feet and toed it over to me.

“Go ahead. Pick it up. There’s two in the clip, none in the chamber, so don’t get any dumb ideas, Gus. The three of you would be dead before you could chamber a round and aim it at me. Pick it up. Rack that slide in super slow motion and aim it at the girl while you’re doing it. Understand?”

“Fuck you!”

Pete stepped close, whacked me across the face with his gun, and stepped back. I went down to my knees, a little dazed.

“That was your only chance to be a hero, Gus. You say something like that again or flinch and I’ll put one in your belly. Now get the fuck up and do what I say.”

“Okay, okay!” I raised my hands up. “Too bad I didn’t wear my vest, then you’d have to put one in my leg or head.”

He sneered at me. “Who you think you’re talking to? I’m not a fucking rookie. Now pick up your nine and shoot the girl first. I want the drama over with. Remember, slower than slow.”

I grabbed my old gun. There may not be any atheists in foxholes, but I knew better than to pray. I stood, keeping the Glock down at my side.

“Do it! Do it now,” Pete screamed, pointing his weapon at my head.

I lifted the gun up with my right arm, placed my left hand over the slide and racked a bullet into the chamber while pointing it at Katy’s head. She was weeping a steady stream of silent tears, her body shaking violently, but she didn’t cry out. I wish she had or had dropped to her knees, anything to distract Pete McCann. Now it fell to me.

“No!” I shouted out and wheeled toward Pete. As I squeezed my eyes shut, I thought of John’s face and waited to feel the bullets rip through me.

I heard the shots, but felt no pain. Opening my eyes, I saw shock flash across Pete McCann’s face, then a flash of utter confusion. I answered his confusion with a bullet. The shot tore a path through his neck, opening his arteries and spraying the air with his blood. His eyes rolled back in his head and he toppled backward. Bill was still firing the gun he’d retrieved, as I’d hoped he would.

“Stop, Bill! Stop!” I shouted at the top of my lungs, but it was no good. We were all a little deaf from the gunfire.

Finally, I grabbed for the gun in Bill’s hand, but he would not give it up. Instead he was trying to squeeze the trigger, though the slide was locked out.

“Bill! Bill!”

He relaxed his hand and let me take it from him. He turned to stare up at me, a look of distant horror in his eyes. It was Vietnam all over again for him. Vietnam, where he’d picked up a dead GI’s rifle and shot a girl who had tossed a grenade into the tent of a field hospital where he was serving as a chaplain.

“Christ forgive me, but she couldn’t’ve been more than fifteen. She was about to toss another grenade and I had no choice, Gus,” he had confided in me during my mourning for John. “What merciful God could put that on me?”

I was remembering those words when Bill moved his lips. Nothing came out of his mouth at first or maybe it was that I just couldn’t hear him for the ringing in my ears. I focused on his lips.

“The girl. The girl.” He mouthed over and over.

Oh
,
shit!

The world didn’t exactly slow down or tilt on its edge, but the things that filtered into my eyes came at me as flashes of a strobe light. My adrenaline-fueled tunnel vision only enhanced my weird sense of things as I scanned through the smoke and gore. I found Katy Smalls on her knees, rocking back and forth, holding Kareem Shivers’ dead hand in hers. She was so covered in blood that I couldn’t tell if she was hit or not, but she seemed okay. I turned away from her and back to Bill, who was crossing himself, a rosary in his hand where the gun had been, his lips moving in prayer. I looked at Pete, his eyes open, staring blindly into oblivion. My bullet had finished him, but his legs were bloodied, chewed-up messes. Bill had emptied most of the clip where I’d hinted to him to fire, below Pete’s vest and into his thighs. One of the shots, I thought, had to have hit a femoral artery. Several shots had hit and his pants were soaked with his blood. I stepped over to his lifeless carcass and kicked the gun away from his hand. I don’t know why. I just did. I looked to see if the brown shipping envelope was still there on the floor. It was. I picked it up, cradling it in my arms as I had Krissy and as I had John before her. Then, behind me, in spite of the still overwhelming ringing in my ears, I thought I heard something. When I turned, I saw that Katy had taken up her father’s nightstick and was pounding his body with it. I was frozen and stood there for what felt like an hour, watching her. She tired of it eventually, dropped the stick, and curled herself into a ball next to the bodies of the men who had betrayed her, each in their own way.

I found my cell phone in my hand, though I don’t remember putting it there. It also seemed I had dialed 9-1-1. I couldn’t hear the operator very well and I kept repeating the address. I left the line open, but I put the phone down. I found a quiet corner in the warehouse, far away from Bill and Katy, far away from the three dead men and the blood and the pain, far away from the world. I got as far away as I could and just waited.

(FRIDAY NIGHT/CHRISTMAS EVE)

E
xpediency
Above
All
is the hidden motto of all police departments. Do they want to get to the truth of things? Do they want justice for victims? Of course, but they also want to clear cases. Closed cases make for pretty statistics and good politics. Police work is just as much sausage making as anything else. Deals and compromises are part of the job. So between the detailed confession Jimmy Regan had left behind, my statements, Neil Furlong’s testimony, and the available evidence, you could see it coming down the road. The homicides of TJ Delcamino, Tommy Delcamino, and Ralph O’Connell were going to get hung around the necks of Regan, McCann, and Kareem Shivers.

Even if all of them had denied those killings to me or implied as much, and the missing heroin was never recovered, they were probably going to take the blame. Dead, disgraced cops and murderers make easy fall guys, and I couldn’t foresee anyone standing up to defend them. It made for a nice little Christmas gift, all neatly wrapped and presented with a silken bow. And when the DA chatted with Carey and Paxson, you just knew they would say anything to save their own skins. Their statements would follow whatever narrative suited the department and the politicians.

Me? I was unconvinced, but no one cared about what I believed. For the moment, Bill Kilkenny and I were being portrayed in the media as heroes, though neither of us felt remotely heroic, most especially not Bill. The media were as big a fan of expediency as the police and politicians. Bigger fans, maybe, and with fewer scruples. Because they hid behind the banner of the truth, their sausage making was uglier. Their expediency was in the name of entertainment and the lowest common denominator. And there was nothing like a lot of blood and scandal to get people’s attention. Bill and me, we were the convenient counterweights, and by New Year’s, all of it would have been forgotten. Suffolk County, all of Long Island, the city, and the world would have moved on to new blood and scandal. There was never any shortage of that.

For the moment, I was concentrating only on the woman in the passenger seat. Magdalena looked amazing in a white satin blouse, black slacks, and black heels. The whole car smelled of that perfume she had worn when we first met. Was I bringing her to make Annie jealous? You bet your ass that was part of it, and I’d told Magdalena as much. She didn’t seem to mind, but that wasn’t all of it. I was a different man than I once was. The toll John’s death had taken, the two years since, and the events of the last two weeks had changed me. I was damaged goods and, by her own admission, so too was my date for the evening.

Magdalena and I were testing our friendship, and maybe that wouldn’t last very long. We’d find that out eventually. What I knew was that women like Casey, as attractive and kind as she was, were too safe for who I was now. I couldn’t fit in a nice little house in Nesconset, into the kind of life I had once so happily lived. I didn’t want that because it would be only an empty parody of what I once had. I had no desire to live like a silhouette: the shape of the shadows just right, but without substance or fire. Maybe Magdalena could offer substance and fire, or maybe not.

I think the thing that saved the evening was that my mother-in-law recognized Magdalena from one of her soaps and was too starstruck
to bust my chops for bringing another woman to the party. Even Annie and Krissy were kind to Magdalena and, more surprisingly, they were kind to me. I guess maybe my liking Rob, Annie’s new beau, didn’t hurt. He was a really nice guy and bent over backward to have talks with me. And I suppose it didn’t hurt that I was being run up the flagpole as a hero. Besides his trying so hard to put me at ease, there was something about Rob I couldn’t help but like: the way he looked at Annie. It was clear that he had a deep, abiding love for her, a love so deep he had carried it around with him for over twenty years. A love so deep he had never married because he knew he could never love anyone else the way he loved Annie and wouldn’t hurt someone by giving less than his all. There was a lot to admire in someone like that and a lot to like about him.

The only really awkward moment of the evening came when Annie’s mom took out some old photo albums. Annie and I wound up next to each other on the couch, pointing at pictures, laughing, and saying things like, “Remember how sick you got when . . .” or “Remember how cute John and Krissy looked when . . .” When the room got really quiet except for Annie and me, we looked up, and there were Rob and Magdalena standing together staring at us. I don’t know what Magdalena was thinking, but it was easy to know what was on Rob’s mind.

“Hey, Rob,” I said to him after coffee, “come on, let’s go for a walk. It’s a little crowded in here.”

Once we were outside, I put his fears to rest.

“We’ll always be connected, Annie and me, but you’ve got nothing to fear from me. Annie deserves to be happy again. I can never give that to her now, not after the last two years. Maybe you can. I hope so.” I shook his hand and clapped him on the back. “I mean it.”

He asked me about Magdalena and all I could do was shrug my shoulders. She was easy enough to desire, but I wanted more than to desire someone. I had to relearn how to like the world and the people in it.