Apaches - Lorenzo Carcaterra [41]
“Think I need it?” Pins wanted to know, looking down at the blood flowing out of his bowling arm.
“Who’s the shooter?” Gennaro asked.
“Just a kid,” Pins said.
Pins looked away from Gennaro. He turned to the photo lamp in the corner. He tried to take a deep breath and smiled.
The small bugging device he planted in the neck of the lamp had picked up everything he said and did during his final moments as a cop.
It was the last bug Jimmy Ryan would plant as a member of the New York City Police Department.
6
Rev. Jim
BOBBY SCARPONI WAS a drug addict and an alcoholic.
He was twelve when he had his first taste of scotch; two weeks later he lit his first joint. Besides his ability to consume large quantities of any illegal substance, Scarponi was known for his chronic truancy and violent streak. He stole bikes and toys from his South Jamaica neighbors to help feed his expensive habits. His parents couldn’t exert any control over the boy, finding it easier to ignore, as much as they could, the whispers that followed their troubled son.
Bobby never dealt drugs, but was a steady customer for a number of local dealers. If he got in too deep financially and couldn’t make the payoff from what he could steal, he could bank on a discreet parental bailout. As a result, he was stripping the Scarponis of their security, slapping away at their pride, and digging into their future, which for them embodied nothing more ambitious than a two-bedroom Laguna Beach condo built around Albert Scarponi’s construction foreman’s pension.
Despite his problems and frequent run-ins with the police, Bobby Scarponi was a well-liked kid. In the pattern of the users and abusers he associated with, Scarponi learned early in his addiction to be a performer, to adjust his demeanor, hide the tracks, clear the eyes, and pretend to be normal. He had an easy way, blending natural charm with rugged features that managed to withstand the ravages of the drugs he ingested.
By the time he reached sixteen, Bobby had been in and out of four rehab clinics and undergone three years of ineffective counseling. He had worked his way up the pharmaceutical ladder from pot to glue to crystal meth to acid to cocaine. Then, on a cloudy April afternoon in 1966, Bobby put a thin needle to a fat vein and felt the hot rush of heroin for the first time.
He was now traveling on a narrow strip of road that often led its passengers to a head-on with death.
Bobby Scarponi was no exception.
• • •
BOBBY SAT NEXT to his mother, Beatrice, on a park bench across from the empty playground. It was cold and late, deep into a Monday night. His mother turned up the collar of her brown parka against the chill wind, shoved her hands deep inside the front pockets, and stared down at the withered grass by her feet. She was a short woman, slender, with a thick head of prematurely graying hair and sorrowful dark eyes. She spoke with a slight trace of an accent, remnants of her years growing up in the Italian seaside village of Panza.
“I never lied to your father, Roberto,” she said. “Tonight was the first time.”
“Relax, Mom,” Bobby said. “It’s gonna be over soon. We pay them the money and then we go home.”
“It’s never over, figlio,” Beatrice said. “As long as you buy what they sell.”
“Mom, please,” Bobby said, zipping up his green army jacket. “No lectures, okay? It’s bad enough we gotta sit in the cold and pay these dirtbags off.”
“You took your father’s heart,” Beatrice said, looking at her son, a hand on his right leg, which was jiggling nervously from the cold and the need for a fix. “You kill him a little bit each day. Every time you put that stuff inside your arms.”
“It’s my life, Mom,” Bobby said, throwing a glance up and down the street, concern etched on his face.
“It’s our life,” Beatrice said. “And it’s a wrong life right now.”
“I’m gonna quit,” Bobby said, turning to look at his mother, seeing the tears welling in her eyes. “I promise you. I don’t like this any more than you do.”
“You know, I was sixteen when I first met your father,” she said. “I looked