Soon he waded out of the water, toes pressing the sandy bottom, eelgrass against his shins, and retrieved his eyeglasses from a slab of stone, making habitual adjustments to get the fit right, yet no longer really noticing that the lenses were scratched and speckled with paint, the broken frame taped at the bridge. He could see well enough with them, and after he climbed the high scaffold of wooden steps up the sea cliff, he could certainly see the blue-and-white police car parked next to his old shingled cottage, the car's windshield opaque with dust, a small maple branch caught under the wiper. He hunched in surprise, as if jabbed. A New York City police car, more than one hundred miles out of its jurisdiction. They never leave you alone, he thought, they never do. Everybody should have forgotten me by now.
He stood in the low bramble, naked and considering. The wind blew, and tiny airborne seeds caught in his beard and the long wet hair on his shoulders. Cornflower and milkweed. A yellow butterfly touched his penis, fluttered away. The cop would be on the other side of the cottage, perhaps peering in a window. Rick hurried along the edge of the cliff toward the deep shade of the woods. When he reached the trees, he looked again across the high grass. The police car, dented from minor collisions in the crowded streets of New York City, was streaked from the muddy ruts of the overgrown lane that led to the cottage and barn well off the main road. The unmarked drive was almost impossible to spot, which was the way Rick preferred it. Now some cop had decided to take a drive out from New York City. They got to fucking leave me alone, he thought, I didn't do anything lately.
He cut through the high grass, the sun warm now on his shoulders, his skin almost dry, and hurried toward the barn, a sagging, windowless structure set fifty yards back from the sea cliff that sheltered a sizable vegetable garden on the lee side. The shingled roof, damaged by ice the previous winter, needed work, and a climbing rose, perhaps once a small shrub planted by a farmer's wife next to the door, reached up over the barn, its main vine as thick as Rick's calf, roots feeding on an ancient manure pile and producing a geyser of pink blooms now attended by the dull hum of bees. He slipped inside, pulled on a pair of frayed cotton boxer shorts, and closed the barn's door, quietly locking it with a heavy iron hook.
Outside, a noise. Grass whisking against long pants. A hand pulled the handle of the door.
"Rick Bocca?"
He adjusted his glasses, waiting.
The hand yanked hard on the door, rattling the frame. "Rick!" the man called fiercely. Then, muttered with disgust: "Fucking bastard."
Rick waited. His hair dripped dark coins onto the bleached planks beneath him. A minute, and then a minute more. He discovered a piece of green kelp in his beard and raked it out with his fingers. If they find you, they'll pull you back. He'd worked too hard to let them do that to him. Maybe something had happened to-well, it could be a lot of people. The dried salt of the ocean was caught in the swirls of black hair on his chest and belly, the creases in his elbows, behind his ears. He told himself to wait longer. Count to one hundred. Finally, the only sound was the wind begging along the shingles outside. Still he waited-nothing. Fuck them all. When he emerged into the bright midday sun, so suddenly hot and dry that the begonias next to the cottage drooped, the police car was gone.
But not for long. Three hours later he was standing in the forward hold of the rust-eaten trawler he worked on, hip boots knee-deep in fish, some still alive, kissing at their death, when the blue-and-white cruiser nosed up, right out onto Greenport's municipal dock, tires drumming over the boards to a stop not two feet from the bow of the trawler. A trim man of about thirty eased out. He wore a jacket and an unknotted necktie thrown over one shoulder, which meant he was a detective.
"Hey," the man called.
"Yeah?"
"Rick Bocca?"
"Yes."
"You got a minute?"
Rick nodded and climbed up out of the fish onto the dock.
"I'm Detective Peck."
"Right."
The detective pulled a photo out of his breast pocket, flashed it at Rick-one of the old bodybuilding shots, local contests maybe six, seven years back. Weight two-sixty, body fat five percent. No beard, crew cut, tanned, buffed, shaved, contact lenses, toenails trimmed.
"Looks like you lost some of that weight."
"It got old, man. I got old."
"You don't remember me, do you?"
"No," Rick answered.
"I was the one put Christina Welles away. Undercover."
"Okay, yeah. You look different. You got the gold shield, I see."
"You should have gone down with her, Rick."
He'd spent a long time thinking about that, but he didn't wish to say so.
"Just want to make sure you know that somebody else knows," said Peck.
"Lot of people should have done a lot of things," answered Rick.
"Right, right." The detective nodded dismissively. "Of course, she never told us her system, which made it more serious for her."
Rick listened to the wind saw against the boat's rusted edges. A fish flopped a tail.
"I said she never told us her system."
Rick looked back at the detective. "It was too complicated for you to understand."
The detective shrugged this away. "I heard all those steroids make your balls shrink up."
Here we go, Rick thought.
"You got your balls back now, Rick?" The detective smiled, waiting for a response. "I hope you do, because you're gonna need them. See, all your old pals in Brooklyn didn't forget Christina. How could they? She's a sexy girl, sort of the mysterious type, not with the big hair and all. Tony Verducci remembers her. And he got Mickey Simms to call up the Manhattan D.A. and tell them that he was lying, that everything he said about her on the record was a lie." The detective lifted his eyebrows in disgust. "Now, they don't have to believe that, of course, but Tony Verducci says, I can give you somebody else-who exactly, I don't know, but it could be a lot of people. This is just maybe a week ago. Mickey Simms recants his whole testimony. They make a deal. They actually sit in a room and drink coffee and say, This is a deal. You do this, we do that." The detective retrieved a small box of raisins from his pocket. "I worked like a motherfucker to pull that testimony out of him, and then they go and tear it up and say it was a mistake and Christina Welles and her boyfriend Rick Bocca and the rest of those assholes had nothing to do with a tractor trailer full of air conditioners. 'Course, the fact that I saw the truck, counted the boxes, that doesn't matter. You with me so far?"
"Yeah," Rick said. "I get it." Which he didn't. None of it made any sense to him, in fact. All he had so far was a story. Anybody could make up a story. He sat against the hood of the police car.
"See, I know that Tony Verducci is behind all of this," the detective went on, chewing a wad of raisins. "He's still running his crew. All over the city. I know you don't talk to these people anymore, Rick, but you remember them. You know all these people, Rick, I know you do. You guys practically had your dicks in each other's butts. So I hear about this thing and start wondering, What the fuck's it about? Why does Tony Verducci want Christina Welles out of prison? That's a good question. But it's not for a good reason, Rick. It's not for her health." Peck stopped to chew; his mouth appeared to be full of bugs. "He wants something off that poor girl and he's gone to a lot of trouble to get it. He's put Mickey Simms on a stick and stuck him in everybody's face like a marshmallow, and that makes him somebody who I now personally want a piece of, for fucking up all my work, and he's also delivered some other poor asswipe to the D.A. I told them, Don't do it, don't make the deal, you're hanging that poor girl out to dry, because she doesn't know who is doing what anymore. I called the prison, she's putting in her time, okay? No big fights, not much time in the hole, you know? That strikes me as basically unfair. See, this is actually a pretty decent college girl who never should have gotten mixed up with a scumbag mope named Ricky Bocca. She helped him out because she loved him or whatever…" The detective paused, eyes full of hate. "This is a girl who never got a break from fucking nobody, never, and probably all she wants to do is just put her life back together, and now they're setting her up."