Apaches - Lorenzo Carcaterra [82]
Lucia smiled at the baby and waved a final good-bye.
12
THEY HAD EATEN their grilled salmon dinner in silence. Nunzio was the only one who got up during the meal, scurrying back and forth from the kitchen to the table with a large bowl of salad or a fresh bottle of wine. By the time the fruit and coffee were served, most of the cops had absorbed what Boomer had told them. They sat at the large table in the middle of the empty restaurant, the shades drawn down, only three of the overhead lights turned on, lost in their own internal struggles.
Geronimo fingered the medallion around his neck, the one his mother had placed there years earlier to ward off harm. He wondered if the others in the group felt as empty as he did. His days were blanks, working a steady shift at a job he cared little about. His nights were horrors, cold sweats mixing with wasted prayer and cries in the dark, wishing he had not lived through the grenade blast that had left him a whole man on the outside and half of one on the inside.
He had not gone near a device since that day. His retirement papers were put through for him while he was still in a hospital bed, about to endure the sixth of what eventually would grow to fourteen surgical procedures, all fruitless attempts to piece together abdominal muscles and lower intestinal tracts. The daily physical therapy he endured was as constant as the pain he forced himself to ignore. The pills he was prescribed sat in rows on three shelves of a medicine cabinet in a one-bedroom apartment in Ozone Park. Geronimo was surviving on antacids and willpower.
He worked for Unger Electronics on the Lower East Side, reporting to an overweight man with a bad back named Carl Ungerwood. It was a family-owned operation that survived mainly because of the popularity of its computer repair department, which was where Geronimo toiled. That was as close to a set of wires as he was willing to get since the blast. He still kept a cache of dynamite in a closet off the main hall of his apartment, more for the memory of who he used to be than for use.
Carl Ungerwood had a thirty-second temper that was mostly set off by problems with an ex-wife who was suing him for a piece of the business. He often directed his tirades at Geronimo, hurling insults and venom at a man the city had often decorated as a hero. Geronimo sat in silence during those moments, his eyes dark and distant. He saw the abuse as further punishment for what he had lost to the man with the grenade. That the pay from Unger Electronics was steady didn’t matter as much to Geronimo as the fact that the work was as far removed from the New York Police Department as he could hope to get.
Unlike Boomer, Geronimo didn’t miss being a cop. But he did miss the thrill of taking down a device. He would set time limits for himself when he worked on the computers, doing mental countdowns as he repaired burned-out modems and replaced weak transmission wires. But it just wasn’t the same. There was no sense of mystery to a computer, not like with a device, where someone as good as Geronimo could will it, control it, thrive on its energy, or die in the clutches of its power. Alone with a device, Geronimo’s life and his possible death took on spiritual weight. It was better than the slow death he was living through now, hunched on a stool in the back room of a dusty electronics store.
Geronimo couldn’t speak for the others, but he sensed that their decision about whether or not they would join Boomer in his battle with Lucia was a matter of choice. Not so for him. For a warrior like Geronimo, it was a matter of destiny.
• • •
“IT’S GETTING LATE,” Boomer said, taking a quick glance at his watch, “and it’s been a long night, so I’ll keep the rest of this short. All I ask is for you to think about what I’m going to say. Think on it hard. And then let me know. Either way, I’ll walk away with no problem about your decision.