Apaches - Lorenzo Carcaterra [49]
Bobby kneeled down on a box, watching.
“Any civilians out with them?” Clifton asked.
“I wouldn’t worry too much,” Bobby said. “Everybody in this neighborhood’s a phone call away from an indictment.”
“Let’s keep it clear,” Clifton said. “Just in case.”
“Money man’s already in the car,” Bobby reported.
“His connect can’t be too far away,” Clifton said. “Dealers hate being out in the cold.”
“Tell me something I don’t know,” Bobby whispered to himself, resting the radio by his leg.
A tan Buick ragtop, lightning bolts painted on its doors, pulled up behind the Cadillac and cut its engine. Five men sat squeezed inside, windows rolled up, breath and smoke clouding the interior.
“Elvis is in the building,” Bobby said into the radio, moving his .38 Special out of its holster and into his right hand.
“Sit tight, Rev.,” Clifton said. “And let it happen. Won’t be long.”
The two men in coats stepped out from the litter of the doorway and walked toward the parked cars. The one on the left, head down against the cold, dug a key from his pocket and opened the trunk of the Cadillac. The one on the right, unbuttoned coat flapping in the wind, stood next to the trunk of the Buick, his hand reaching out to lift it up when the driver popped it from the inside.
Bobby pushed aside one of the box lids, watching as the two men each pulled out identical leather briefcases, walked toward one another, and made the transfer.
“Houston, we have liftoff,” Bobby said into the radio. “Come and get ’em.”
“Hold on to your boxes, Rev.,” Clifton said, slamming a red cherry light on top of his unmarked sedan and jamming the car into gear. “We’re just a phone call away.”
“Try not to hit any innocent bystanders before you get here,” Bobby said, turning the baseball cap brim forward.
“Too late,” Clifton said with a laugh, tossing the radio onto the dashboard.
Bobby Scarponi didn’t see the two teenagers.
Blanketed in the seclusion of his cardboard complex, his only focus was on the two cars, the drug deal, and the bust about to happen. He didn’t see the boys carry the red canisters of gasoline down from the corner Mobil station, lids off, their brains pan-fried with an angel dust and glue omelette, looking to torch the cardboard shanty and the bum who lived inside. They moved quiet as cats, first dousing the edges and then the sides of the tenement wall.
One lit a match and the other leaned over the side of the shaky banister and poured gasoline into the small opening Rev. Jim had cleared for a view.
Then they both laughed.
Bobby knew it the second he tasted the gas and smelled the fumes, his body locked in place, a steady calm engulfing him. He watched the match float down past his shoulder and then felt the sudden rush of heat and saw the blue and yellow of the flames.
He jumped out of his inferno, clothes burning, body torched. He was all smoke and light as he rolled onto the sidewalk, leaving shreds of melted skin and burning fabric in his wake.
He heard the sound of sirens, a steady round of gunshots and shouts coming at him from all directions. He caught a glimpse of Tony Clifton running toward him, gun drawn, his mouth forming words, his weary face burdened with fear.
Then Bobby Scarponi stopped his roll and lay still on the streets of a Brooklyn ghetto, less than a hundred feet from a leather bag filled with a drug he once would have killed someone to snort.
The ex-junkie-turned-cop was sprawled on a sidewalk, charred head hanging over a cracked curb, his partner kneeling beside him, holding a gun on his lap and crying in anger to the heavens.
Rev. Jim heard and saw none of it.
He was once again living inside a dark world.
BOOK TWO
I love war and responsibility and excitement. Peace is going to be hell on me.
—General George S. Patton
7
February 21, 1982
HOLDING