Apaches - Lorenzo Carcaterra [51]
Carlo didn’t flinch. He almost looked thankful. “I want you to find out which it is,” he said quietly. “I don’t want to find out from some fuckin’ stranger.”
“I’m a retired cop with half a lung and a limp,” Boomer said, releasing his grip. “And I’ve been off the job closing in on two years. There’s not much I can do except put out a few calls, make sure there’s the right kind of follow-up.”
“She’s just another name to them,” Carlo said, his sadness bolstered by defiance. “But she’s a face to you. I’ve known you all my life, Boomer. I don’t think you’ll be happy just making a few phone calls.”
Carlo stood, reached for his hat and coat, and looked down at Boomer. “I’ll be home with Annie,” he said. “She’s counting on you too.”
“You’re betting on an old horse, Carlo.” Boomer sighed. “That’s not a smart thing to do.”
“I’m betting on a friend,” Carlo said. Then he turned and left Nunzio’s, tables now filled with cold and hungry customers.
Boomer looked away, staring out at the windy streets of a frigid winter night. He rubbed at his leg again, the pain always sharper when the temperature dipped below thirty. He thought back to that day in the hospital bed, his small room at Metropolitan shrouded in darkness. The chief of detectives standing above him, smile on his face, a gold shield and a small medal clutched in his hands. “It’s over, Boomer,” the chief whispered. “You can rest now.”
Resting was all he’d been doing these last two years. There were no more doors for him to kick in, no more junkies to roust, no more dealers to take down. And he missed all of it. The stakeouts, the dives into dark rooms, the split-second walk between life and death. They were now only memories.
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