First Thrills - Lee Child [41]
“This boy, Mr. Schalaci, has identified you, and his parents are making a formal complaint against you, that you had sex with him, and that you abused him.”
“Are you . . .” mutters Schalaci, losing his voice.
“I am very serious, Mr. Schalaci.” Eddy reaches into his pocket and takes out the phony arrest warrant he has written up, and shows it to Schalaci. Schalaci takes it. He seems impressed.
“Do you understand the severity of these charges?”
“I . . . I’m sorry . . .”
“Take The Kid back out,” Eddy tells me.
I walk The Kid back out of the room, and let Eddy do his thing. We go out in the hallway, and as I turn to go back inside, The Kid gives me the finger. I don’t control myself this time. My open hand flies and cuffs the back of his head; a wisp of blonde hair springs up. His face gets red and he bites his lip with his sharp teeth, sizing me. He smirks, like he got what he wanted. I don’t care. It felt good.
In the study, Eddy is into his routine.
“. . . bail on the warrant there is set at forty thousand. Now, I’m a reasonable man, Mr. Schalaci. I want this taken care of, but I don’t see the need to disrupt your life, or haul you in or anything like that. I can go back, I’ll change a few numbers on the warrant and it’ll just get lost in the paperwork. If you want, I’ll even send you the warrant and you can rip it up, frame it, or wash you widows with it, point is you won’t hear from us.”
Eddy begins to sound like a salesman. Schalaci thinks hard about this, leaning back against his desk.
“They’ll never call you again.”
Schalaci nods slowly and a sense of relief washes over him.
“They won’t call me?”
“No, sir. It’ll be taken care of. I can promise you that.”
Schalaci has not looked at me once this whole time. He gets up off his desk and walks past me, putting the cuff link into his other sleeve.
“Honey, I’m stepping outside with these gentlemen for a moment.”
Eddy whispers to me.
“Guy’s loaded. Shame about her.”
Schalaci puts on his blazer and we follow him out the door. We leave The Kid in the stairwell playing with his gum, shooting knives at me from his eyes. We go back down the stairs and outside. We follow Schalaci past a silver Corvette, a couple of blocks over, around the corner and into a Citibank. Eddy hops in a corner store quickly and buys a pack of cigarettes. He pounds it into his palm, drops the cellophane on the sidewalk, and flips his lucky. He pops one in his mouth and offers me another. I take it.
“Why you smoking all of a sudden?”
“Don’t know. Big job, you know. Got me nervous.”
I don’t know, I really don’t. Eddy is smoking, so I want to smoke, too.
“Figure in a month or two, call the guy up, tell him it’s taken care of. He’ll be happy, you know, thank God nothing happened to him. Rest of his life he’ll think some policeman took money, fixed the case and that’s that.”
I look at Eddy’s unassuming face and think of Pop, the transformation after the police and Waterfront Commission raided his docks; outraged beyond baseball, beyond a Puerto Rican wife. A few bosses and many of his friends did some serious time behind that raid. Pop came to The City to look in my face with his hound eyes. “You know how that made me look?” he demanded of me. “I didn’t know,” I told him. I didn’t, I swore I didn’t.
I think of The Kid and wonder, if Pop had smacked me just once, let me know who was in charge, let me know how he felt. Enough of the hound dog eyes, the lovable loser. Softest crook I ever knew. If he’d laid it down, shown some huevos, maybe it wouldn’t be as hard as it was. Maybe I wouldn’t have even tried to be a cop.
Eddy inhales a menthol with vacant confidence, a man who isn’t wrong even when he’s wrong.
“Eddy,” I tell him, “something’s not right about this guy. You know?”
“Hey, Ronny, I been at this a long time, I know when something’s off. This guy’s perfect. He assumes he can throw money at anything, make it go away, so he can act any way he wants. Didn’t even hesitate, like, forty? That’s it?”
“I don’t know. The guy never looked at me, never once. Wasn’t right.”
“Trust me. This