He called Gina when he got back. Woke her up. At least she was there. He felt giddy and a little breathless from his walk.
“You had no idea who I was, did you?”
“Who else would call me at this hour?”
“I mean when I first asked you out.”
“I don’t remember.”
“You’d met me twice. Through your cousin Maria. And you still didn’t know who I was when I asked you out.”
“That was a long time ago.”
“Four and a half years is not a long time ago.” He found himself gulping for air. He hadn’t walked that hard. Maybe it was panic. He had the same sensation when he crawled down a smoke-charged hallway. He was heading into something he couldn’t see that would only do him harm. “You know when you remembered me? When I told you I was Mike the firefighter.”
“So?”
“Like I said, it was about the coat. It was always about the coat.”
“Mike?” Her voice was hoarse and tentative. “I’ve met someone.”
He hung up. He’d bailed out of enough windows to know something about outrunning flames. No point in standing there, letting yourself get burned. Maybe she would call back and tell him it was all a mistake. Maybe she would be tearful and apologetic. For the first time in nearly seven weeks he longed for noise, and that damn phone never made a sound. He was shadow-boxing with himself.
“Hey, Mikey,” Chuck growled the next morning, “you want to be target practice for the natives, go ahead. But Rufus doesn’t need any shell-casings as souvenirs.”
“I thought a walk would help me sleep.”
“They put a bullet through you, brother, you’ll sleep. Trust me.”
Tig got him alone in the locker room the next day — they were on the same shift — and handed him a gym bag. “If you’re gonna walk around this neighborhood all hours, least you should do is take this.” Inside was Tig’s old NYPD windbreaker and an authentic-looking replica of his badge. All the guys had replicas made so they could keep the real ones at home. That way, if you lost it, you wouldn’t face departmental charges.
“Thanks,” said Mike, stuffing the bag in his locker. He felt guilty he wasn’t more appreciative of Tig’s generosity, then angry that Tig never seemed to notice. The man was awash in admiration, the sun in all its glory. What difference was the light of one more star?
“I figured most people will think twice before messing with a cop,” said Tig. “Just don’t let it get out that I did this, okay? I shouldn’t have a copy of my badge when I don’t have the real one anymore. The PD might get sore at me.”
“I’m good,” said Mike. Whatever that meant. It was all he could manage of conversation these days. Lately, he’d begun to confuse words, calling Bones’s decision to become a Jesus groupie his “salivation,” and Chuck’s worldviews, somewhere to the right of the Michigan Militia, his “egotistical theory.” Not that those interpretations were entirely incorrect. Still, it irked him the way his thoughts seemed to fly around like mosquitoes these days, tormenting and annoying him, without the sweet reprieve of sleep.
Mike continued his walks alone at night. Of course, in Tremont alone was a relative term. Even at 3 a.m., salsa and rap blared from open windows along with the smell of fried porkchops, rice and beans. Beer bottles shattered on concrete. Dirty diapers dropped off the edges of fire escapes. Car alarms whooped. Trains rumbled overhead. Babies wailed. Fights spilled out of doorways like liquid mercury, carried along on whatever current picked them up.
No one bothered Mike. The NYPD jacket and badge probably helped. But he suspected he inhabited the jacket the same way he inhabited his turnout coat. He wasn’t a cop any more than he was a firefighter. Not in his marrow — not like some of the guys. Not like Tig. He knew this when he saw Tig lower himself unflinchingly into a fire-charged room or push forward when his alarm told him he had just minutes of air left in his tank. Never a minute of self-doubt or hesitation. Three fucking years in the FDNY and the guy was more of a firefighter than Mike, with his ten, would ever be. And the goddamn prick slept well too.
Was there a connection here? Mike wondered. Lose the fear of death and you lose the fear of sleep? For what was death, really, but a longer, richer cousin?
He needed a place to test his hypothesis. He didn’t have to look far: Jerome Avenue, a test of nerves if ever there was one. One wide lane of traffic in each direction. Double-parked cars that made pedestrians nearly impossible to notice. Badly timed lights. Third World gypsy cab drivers who thought stopping on red was merely a suggestion. Four people had died in the past six months crossing near his firehouse. The guys had taken to tying Rufus up on nice nights so he wouldn’t decide to follow the rigs and end up as roadkill.
Two nights later, at dusk, when traffic was at its peak, Mike crossed against the light. His heart thumped, his bowels turned to jelly, but it did not help him sleep. The next night he was off, he hopped onto the Jerome Avenue elevated tracks, just to see how long he could stand there before he lost his nerve. Again, his limbs quivered when he heard the approaching train and felt the vibrations along the tracks. Again, he shivered and sweated, felt his bowels go weak and a giddiness overtake him as he scrambled up the filthy concrete wall that separated the tracks from the platform. But sleep did not overtake him. Both the engine and truck went out all night for small fires, false alarms, and medical emergencies. Short of being in a coma, there was no way to sleep through an air horn.
Still, Mike felt convinced there was something to his hypothesis. If only he could find the right test of nerves. The third night he was off, he set a fire in a trash can at the back of a five-story tenement under demolition. The lot was rimmed in razor wire, but a set of bolt cutters, borrowed from the firehouse, cut through the chain-link cleanly.
The tenement, still imposing from the street, was a shell at the back. No windows or doors. Just a warren of crumbling plaster rooms held up, it seemed, by iron scaffolding and plank walkways. A brace on a withering limb.
The plan had been to set the fire, see how long he could take the heat, then extinguish the flames. But it didn’t work out that way. The flames burned hotter and higher than Mike had intended. They latched onto one of the overhead planks on the scaffolding, then curled around it like an old woman’s fingers. Gray-black smoke snuffed out the reflected glow of streetlamps, leaving Mike confused and disoriented as he stumbled backwards over mattress springs and old tires. When he regained his bearings, he became aware of a new light. It was pale and flickering at first, but it was growing inside one of the second-story windows.
He had become so used to the sirens, it took him a full minute to understand that the rigs he was used to seeing from the back were now barreling toward him, lights ricocheting like gunfire off the surrounding low-level buildings. Smoke was churning out of the second-story window now. There was nothing Mike could do but run. He tossed the bolt cutters in some weeds and scrambled over to the hole in the fence. His foot caught the remains of a shopping cart and he stumbled, bruising an elbow and knee in the fall. He didn’t even feel the pain as he climbed through the fence, then ran down a narrow gap between a bodega and a liquor store. He felt certain that at any moment he’d feel the thud of a fist on his back — Chuck’s probably. Somebody from the firehouse had to have seen him. What could he say? What had he done?