The Midnight Club_ A Novel - James Patterson [76]
Stefanovitch yelled the words inside the loudly echoing gymnasium. All the workouts at the Sports Center suddenly stopped.
Heavy Universal weights were suspended perilously in midair. Other weights dropped with loud, clanging noises. The aerobics people—the heavy-weight freaks—the blue-clad, holier-than-thou instructors—were all staring at him, all attention on the man in the wheelchair.
Then they began to clap. What Stefanovitch had said, what he’d shouted above the noise in the gym, had gotten to the usually schizoid and narcissistic exercise group.
“Fucking-A right you are, Stefanovitch!” Howie Cohen, the muscle-bound manager of the center, hollered from his usual sedentary perch, high up on the running track.
Laughter erupted at Cohen’s words. Even the ax-faced D.I.’s grinned. Then the regular grunts and groans of torture resumed in the gym. It was business as usual.
I not only intend to walk again, Stefanovitch was thinking as he strained and lifted and groaned. I even intend to live through the week.
74
John Stefanovitch and Isiah Parker; Central Park West
AT HALF PAST eight, Stefanovitch sat with Isiah Parker in the front of a light green police-issue sedan. The two of them sipped lukewarm coffee, and ate bialys off waxed paper and the outside of brown paper bags. That morning, the plan conceived at Sarah’s beach house was going into effect. They were trying not to think too much about what the consequences would be.
“It doesn’t get much better than this,” Isiah Parker said, mocking a TV beer ad. He was as cynical as Stefanovitch, almost as bad as Bear Kupchek had been.
Stefanovitch watched the action at a newspaper vending machine across Central Park West. It was being stocked with morning editions of the New York Times. A big, sky blue Times truck was parked like a moving van in the middle of the street.
Some New York crazy had spray-pained “LIES! TRASH! PROPAGANDA!” in red and black on the sides of the newspaper machine. Stefanovitch was thinking that he wasn’t too enthused about graffiti artists. He kept waiting for the graffiti artists to start up on private cars. He imagined some poor New Yorker crossing the Painted Desert, with “Pepe 122” or “Louis 119” scrawled all over the hood.
That morning, though, he was feeling a little closer to whoever had painted “LIES!” and “TRASH!” Some national papers had already reported LIES and TRASH about whatever had really happened at Trump Plaza in Atlantic City. LIES and TRASH were a sign of the times.
As the morning sun rose over Central Park, Stefanovitch and Parker talked. It was real cop-to-cop chitchat. Laid-back and offhanded and easy. They covered their early days in the police department. Then general fear and loathing on the streets of New York. Both of them were still feeling each other out, slowly and carefully searching for soft spots and also points of connection.
“I went through the Police Academy in ‘seventy-six. Everybody had some version of the same story back then,” Stefanovitch said as he slurped coffee.
“Which story was that?” Parker was wearing a rumpled crimson and white T-shirt that said “Viva Mandela,” plus a black leather vest. He managed to look relaxed, very easygoing, at all times.
“They were all planning to put in their twenty. Get the regulation pension. Then buy a money-maker bar or restaurant somewhere in Florida, out on the Island. But everybody kind of wanted to make the city a little better place to live along the way.”
Isiah Parker laughed. It had been pretty much the same bullshit when he had gone through the academy two years earlier. His eyes narrowed. “They always said you were going to be the P.C. someday. You were supposed to be connected. Rabbi at Police Plaza? That true?”
Stefanovitch shook his head. Now it was his turn to laugh.
“You know how it is, cops like to collect their little stories. I can tell you my own version in about a sentence. I like it on the streets. Right here. Like right now. I keep telling them that down at Police Plaza. They can’t completely envision a wheelchair