First Thrills - Lee Child [37]
Eddy is right about that. He thinks so, but I know for sure. I step back and the TV disappears in darkness, the glass opaque now, with my reflection on its surface. I like to dress a bit better, clean shaven, cuff links now and then, how my wife likes me. She’s Puerto Rican, likes a little shine, some cologne. But Eddy told me how to dress like a detective, so I’m dressed like a detective.
“Ho shit!” Barks Eddy, attention back on the TV on the other side of the glass. I go up beside him and look through: a replay of a White Sox player who I never heard of knocking an unhittable pitch, up by his eyes, clean out of the ballpark. The big unit, with his giant, gangly frame and trailer- park dismay, stands on top of the wheat shade mound of dirt in utter incredulity.
“Four!” says Eddy. “Four goddamn dingers in one inning? That pitch wasn’t even a strike. It wasn’t even close, damn near over his head! How’d he hit that? Fucking impossible. Four homers.”
I shake my head.
“I can see the headlines. Four! four-get it!”
“Four-gone conclusion,” says Eddy. “Just four-fit already.”
I see the kid as Eddy goes on about how the Unit keeps throwing his flat, useless slider. The kid has bleached blonde hair and light eyes, with a don’t-give-a-fuck apathy way beyond typical adolescence. His attitude puts him going on thirty, a couple of jail bids already behind him. In reality, the kid is maybe fifteen, though not even he knows for sure. Got more miles on him than a ’89 VW.
“Yeah, he was unhittable in the National League, but so fuckin’ what? My friend, you and I could have fifteen wins and an ERA under three with those pansy-ass hitters.”
My father and Eddy were cast from the same boilerplate, even though Eddy is a European mutt and Pop was one-hundred-percent Sicilian. It must be the Brooklyn in them, the streets that taught them both how to hustle and talk, doing funny things with the letter H, adding it to the end of some words and striking it from the beginning of others. Fuck outta ’ere. Even their stooped countenance is the same: short necks, slumped shoulders, heavy faces pulled to the sidewalk as if losing money at dice.
Eddy’s cast-iron eyes look just past me as he speaks, just how a real cop might. Though a real cop would notice the kid already. Even when Eddy is pissed, he can’t manage to make those dark, drooping bags of his look anything but sad.
I nudge him.
“That the kid?”
The kid makes eye contact with me. I hope he doesn’t give it up. I hope I don’t give it up. He smirks at me, teasing—a demon with the face of a cherub.
“Yeah. Hey, kid.”
“Hey.”
“What you got for me?” asks Eddy. The kid holds out a tan Ferragamo wallet. Eddy takes it, and opens it up.
Edward Schalaci.
“Mr. Edward Schalaci,” says Eddy. For a moment, I think he’s talking to me. “Would you look at that,” he says, “guy’s name is Eddie, like me. One-hundred fifty Columbia Heights. Yeah. Would you look at that, Brooklyn Heights, that’s real money. Guy’s probably married. Wife’s got no clue. Right? Let’s get a move.”
As Eddy starts to walk down to the subway, the kid turns and smirks at me. Kid’s got a crazy sense of his own power. He’s an orphan from Poughkeepsie who came to The City to live off wealthy pedophiles. Got thrown out of a few downtown lofts and been selling his ass ever since. There’s something supernatural about the way he seems to get younger every time I see him, as though he started at sixteen and now looks fourteen. Pretty soon he’ll be reduced to shaking down sickos from a stroller.
The thought makes me queasy. My wife is ready, I mean ready for a baby. I’m hesitant, and days like this I know why.
We have done this a couple of times: we go into the bathroom and pretend to be from the Youth Squad, I take The Kid outside while Eddy talks the guy into giving him money, to avoid being arrested. Eddy has been making money like that all over the west side of Lower Manhattan for years. His biggest moneymaker is this kid.
Eddy hooked up with The Kid on one of his fugazi raids, took him under his wing and taught him how to hustle,