Apaches - Lorenzo Carcaterra [94]
“Mama said you and Uncle Boomer are both crazy,” Eddie said.
“She’s right about that,” Dead-Eye said, smiling at his son. “We are crazy. But it’s a good crazy, Eddie. The kind you need to have around every once in a while.”
“Are the bad people crazy?”
“Bad people are always crazy,” Dead-Eye said. “That’s why they do what they do. And sometimes it takes crazy guys like me and Uncle Boomer to go out there and stop them.”
“Are you going to be a policeman again?” Eddie asked.
“I never really stopped,” Dead-Eye said, resting his son back against his chest. “But I won’t do this until I know you’re okay with it. Until I know you’re backing me up. All good cops need a backup. So that’s what I’m asking you to be.”
“Do I get a badge?” Eddie asked, lifting his head.
“Even better,” Dead-Eye said, reaching a hand inside the front pocket of his windbreaker and coming out with a replica of a detective’s gold shield closed inside a leather flap. “I made you a copy of my badge. That makes you my partner.”
“Uncle Boomer’s your partner,” Eddie said, taking the badge from his father, his eyes opened wide in amazement.
“Uncle Boomer’s my friend,” Dead-Eye said. “And you don’t have as many bad habits. So what’s it gonna be? Are you with me? You gonna cover my back?”
“Yes, Daddy,” Eddie said, wrapping both arms around his father’s neck, holding him tight, the shield dangling loose from his right hand.
Dead-Eye hugged his son close, his face nestled into the boy’s shoulder.
They sat there still and quiet in the chilly winter morning, their backs against a spray-painted wall, surrounded by barren trees, still swings, sleeping drunks, and congested traffic.
Father and son linked in trust and love.
• • •
THE COURTROOM WAS drab and silent. Court officers stood, arms folded, their backs to the few spectators in attendance. Judge Geraldine Waldstein, a thin woman with thick dark hair and sharp features, glared down at the defendant. Malcolm Juniper sat on a wooden chair wearing his only suit, a gray sharkskin, with a white button-down shirt and a thin black tie. Malcolm’s lawyer, Jerry Spieglman, sat next to him, eyes gazing at an open folder.
Boomer sat in the third row, directly behind Jennifer’s parents, Carlo and Anne. Dead-Eye had decided to wait outside. Like most cops, he felt uncomfortable in a courtroom. It was one of the few traits those inside the law shared with those outside. Boomer kept his eyes on the back of Malcolm’s head, but his mind was in another place. He saw himself in uniform again, a rookie walking a Harlem beat with his mentor, Iron Mike Tragatti. Day after day, Tragatti, using his nightstick as a pointer, would hammer home the one lesson he insisted young Boomer learn.
“You see these people?” Iron Mike would say, pointing out the Harlem merchants opening their stores, preparing to serve their customers. “They are the ones we’re here to protect. They are the good. The bad are the ones who take from them. And they are the ones we put away. The courts call it justice. The people here call it safety. You and me call it our job. It’s as simple as that.”
For two decades, Boomer Frontieri believed every one of those words. Believed them because they used to be true. But they weren’t true anymore. Not on a day when he had to sit in a barren courtroom and stare helplessly at a mother and father, holding hands and crying as they listened to a new set of words, this time spoken by a judge with two children of her own.
Words that would set their daughter’s tormentor free.
Judge Waldstein kept it simple and direct. Her shouts and frustration had been vented behind closed doors.
“You’ve got nothing else?” she had asked Kevin Gilbert, the assistant district attorney assigned to the case.
“Not without the girl, your honor,” Gilbert admitted. “Erase her and I’ve got a room with two retired cops who shouldn’t have been there in the first place, staring at one dead man and one naked