Philadelphia Noir - Carlin Romano [29]
I adjusted my aim and fired. The blast stung my ears and Nathaniel Jeffers jumped back onto a dingy yellow couch. The sound of that single gunshot was so loud I thought it would wake the entire neighborhood. A door opened in the hall and out stepped the boy as if the sound of gunfire was a sound he’d become accustomed to. He had waves of curly black hair and sleepy eyes and caramel-colored skin. He ran to his father and dropped into his arms.
I’d fired wide and the bullet had lodged in the wall, a crack in the plaster spreading from floor to ceiling like a fault line. I heard the sirens already, wailing in the distance, coming closer with that sense of urgency like they knew what they’d find when they got there.
“You better take the boy and get out of here. Billy Haggerty is coming for you.”
“This is my territory, my house. He know better than to come down here.”
“No, I don’t think he does.”
I turned and went out the door and down the steps and onto the street, the gun still in my hand. Billy Haggerty and his boys were on the corner. They were drunk and Denis Mc-Nulty had a large rock in his hand. He wound up like a Major League pitcher, took a couple of steps, and hurled it through Nathaniel Jeffers’s second-floor window. The sound of breaking glass on the street accompanied the crescendo of blaring sirens. Three squad cars converged from different angles and the officers jumped out with guns drawn. A crowd was forming on both sides of the block.
I was pointing with my free hand at Billy Haggerty and his thugs, trying to tell the cops what was happening, but they wouldn’t listen. They were screaming at me to drop the gun and then I felt the first bullet crease my shoulder, the initial burn, my collar bone shattering like a broken twig. The next bullet caught me just above my left hip and spun me around and knocked me to the ground.
I lay on my back, staring up at the clear night sky and the flashing red and blue lights from the police cars, and suddenly, there was Johnny Izzard. He’d heard the sirens and was now emerging from the crowd on the corner, ignoring commands from the police to get back. My legs were numb and I tried to lift my head and I felt Johnny take my hand. I heard him call my name and his voice seemed to come from a long way off, as if I was dreaming and couldn’t shake myself awake. And in the dream I saw myself in the early days with the department and even before that, at the vigil over my father’s casket at St. Gabe’s and the baseball games he’d taken me to at the Vet, climbing all those stairs up into the nosebleed seats. “Just us and the pigeons,” he’d say. And then I saw the blood-soaked body of Millie Price and the sleepy eyes of her son and I felt like I was floating and I felt a sudden shudder of cold.
I opened my eyes and Johnny was still there, his bony grip harder on my hand; he was saying my name but I couldn’t hear him. I saw his lips moving and I tried to smile, that awkward, boyish, embarrassed smile I had, and Johnny was shaking his head and saying, “Seamus. Seamus. Seamus.”
PART II
CITY OF OTHERLY LOVE
ABOVE THE IMPERIAL
BY DENNIS TAFOYA
East Falls
Jimmy Kelly started making lists of the things he stole. He came out of the Staples on Germantown Avenue with one of the composition books like the kind he’d used at St. Bridget’s and a box of plastic Bics, so when he got back to his apartment he smoked a joint and tried to remember everything he’d boosted. He sat in the old split-open chair that had been there when he moved in, ropes of batting spilled like blue gut around his feet.
He drew spirals to start the cheap pen, then wrote, 8/22, two books, borders chestnut hill, and, 8/24, crackers, p-nut butter, acme. After he’d filled a page he started over, made columns first and went back to June, when he’d walked away from the Youth Study Center on Henry Avenue. He took his time, clicked the pen against his teeth. Listed headphones he’d taken from a stereo store downtown, six DVDs from a bin at a video store way out Ridge Avenue somewhere.
It became