Apaches - Lorenzo Carcaterra [83]
“How soon do you need our answers?” Mrs. Columbo asked.
“It doesn’t have to be an overnight deal,” Boomer said. “Come to it when you’re ready. But come to it soon.”
Mrs. Columbo nodded and smiled. She had known Boomer since he was in uniform and had worked with him on several cases. She knew him well enough to realize that alone or with the group, he was going after Lucia. She saw it on his face, from the way he moved and chose his words. He’d always been an obsessed cop, the one guy with a badge criminals hated to have on their trail. He never gave up, never backed down. He thirsted for the rush of the bust.
The same as Mrs. Columbo.
She missed working homicide. Missed it desperately. At best, she was indifferent to her new job—selling insurance from a bland cubicle in a downtown office building. When she was a cop, she always used to pick up a phone after the first ring, waiting for the voice on the other end to tell her that a body had been found and a killer needed to be caught. Now she often let it ring four or five times, knowing it would only be someone asking about the new rates on their car insurance or looking for a two-week extension on a payment. She had stopped reading mysteries and watching them on television. She no longer followed the crime stories in the papers and on the news. Mrs. Columbo was afraid to do anything that would remind her of how much she loved the puzzle of a case.
She knew she should have been a happy woman. There was a husband at home who loved her and cared about her and a son to watch grow. There were PTA meetings to attend and Little League games to monitor. School plays needed to be put on and cake sale funds had to be raised. And while Mrs. Columbo packaged all these activities into parts of her day, she did it without any emotion. It was the same way she approached her physical therapy sessions, handling the difficult exercises with a cold efficiency, hoping that the feeling would soon return to her lower back and ease the sharp pains running down her legs.
Every Sunday, on a rotating basis, Mrs. Columbo and her family had dinner with relatives. The packed dining rooms all looked and sounded the same to her, whether at her sister-in-law’s Mineola ranch in Nassau County or her brother-in-law’s Bergen County Tudor. The talk always revolved around family, bills, old squabbles, sports, and retirement. The language of middle-class life. She listened and participated, but her words were empty. Maybe it was because none of the talk was ever about an unidentified male found floating by the edge of the river late into the night. No one at any of the tables cared about what to look for at a crime scene, or how to read a suspect’s walk and tell who was the one with the killer’s heart.
Mrs. Columbo hated not being a cop. Every pained breath she took reminded her of that. Now Boomer was sitting across from her and offering a chance to be one again. She sipped her coffee and wondered if maybe the wounds she suffered had done more than just scar her body. She worried that they had also stripped away her skill.
• • •
“YOU STILL HAVEN’T told us what you want us to do,” Pins said, washing down his fifth beer of the long night.
“I want us to go after Lucia,” Boomer said. “The people at this table up against whatever she’s got.”
“Six disabled cops and a waiter making a move against an army of drug smackers who like killing cops a lot more than they like selling junk.” Rev. Jim leaned across the table, a hand on Boomer’s forearm. “I’m not one to give advice, but maybe you should give your idea a little more thought.”
Rev. Jim sat back and kept his gaze on Boomer. He still couldn’t understand why he was chosen to be at this meeting. Sure, he had once been a great decoy cop and loved working with different disguises and accents, but that was long before the fire burned the skin from his body. He wanted so much to be a part of what Boomer was putting together, but Rev. Jim knew he had nothing left but a smart mouth and an old gun, and that wasn’t going to get anybody at the table very far.