Mike walked over to the window. A black sedan was parked below with the motor running. “Is it air-conditioned?”
“Headquarters?”
“Your car?”
“Of course. The trip to Metrotech in Brooklyn is likely to take at least an hour and a half in this traffic.”
“And dark?”
“The car? We have tinted windows, if that’s what you mean.”
“And quiet?”
“See for yourself,” suggested one of the marshals.
Mike Boyle followed the men downstairs to the backseat of the car and stepped inside. The vinyl was deliciously cold. A gentle purring of frosty air hummed out of the vents. The department radio had been thoughtfully turned down. One of the marshals stepped in beside him and closed the door. A tiny puff of air escaped, giving Mike the impression that the whole compartment was hermetically sealed. The outside noise — the subway, the car alarms, the sirens — all ceased.
“Do you know any reason why James Francesco would want to set all those fires?” asked the marshal who’d stepped in beside him.
“Tig? Oh, I have my theories,” said Mike, settling into the seat. He tilted his head back so his neck rested on the icy vinyl. His sweat condensed instantly and a chill rolled down his spine. “People who sleep well don’t fear death, you know. They’re always the ones to watch.” Then he closed his eyes and gave into the sensation of falling from a great height and landing onto something so soft, he could stay like this forever.
The cheers like waves
by Kevin Baker
Yankee Stadium
When he got off the train he could already hear the stadium, the noise of the big crowd breaking like the waves out on Jones Beach, from when he was a kid. First there was the low preliminary hiss of anticipation, then letting out with a long, full-throated rush. The wave breaking over him, knocking him off his feet in the water. He put the cheap suitcase down on the platform and stood there with his eyes closed, remembering. Remembering how they had waited for that second rush, down in the basement of Mercedes’s husband — waiting to kill a man.
He opened his eyes and wiped a sleeve across his forehead, the seams of the ancient suit he wore nearly tearing out at the shoulder. The jacket was too small for him now, stretched nearly to the breaking point where his torso bulged from so many years of prison iron and prison food. He worried about the suit. The last thing he wanted was to look ridiculous in front of her, but he couldn’t wait. He had come up as soon as he got off the prison bus, after the endless jolting ride from upstate; making only a quick stop to pick up something he needed, in the back of a bodega that his last cellmate had told him about. Taking the 4 train from there, until it poured up out of the tunnel to the 161st Street stop, past the vast blue-and-white monolith that was the stadium.
Now he was finally here, after so many years of thinking about it, and everything was… off-balance, as if he were a little dizzy. All the same, but different. From the train platform, he could look into the open half-shell of the stadium’s upper deck and see the big crowd there, the people laughing and enjoying themselves, drinking their beers. That was us. That whole loco summer, when everything had seemed unreal then too. Thirty years ago. The two of them sitting night after night up in the last rows of the upper deck, sipping slowly at the stale stadium beer, trying to make it last — trying to make the whole night last. Hoping for one more rally by the Yankees, anybody, so he could stay a little while longer with Mercedes, touching her smooth brown knee beside him, kissing her mouth.
He had heard the games all his life, growing up in one of the pale-brick apartment buildings along Gerard Avenue. He could follow them by the ebb and swell of the crowd noise alone; the collective, disappointed sighs; the cheers, the boos — the vast, hissing intake of breath when something good was in the offing. The wave roaring in after that, a feral, vicious noise, fifty thousand voices sensing the kill. Everyone in the building would lean out their windows on a sweltering summer’s night and listen to it. The old folks smoking and chatting quietly with each other in Spanish; the younger people bored and silent, staring down into the concrete courtyard.
That was where Luis had first seen her, walking her path through the courtyard to the basement. Making her way like a nun across all the trash that he didn’t bother to clean up even for his woman. Head down, arms crossed over her chest, moving quickly through the smashed brown beer bottles, and the cans, and all the other junk in her open shoes. That was where he had seen her, and decided he had to talk to her, even though she kept her head down all the time, never looking up at the men who laughed and called to her from their windows.
Now he was finally back, and about to see her again. He headed on down through the cage of iron bars that encased the 161st Street station. Latecomers scurried down the steps in front of him, kids skipping and prancing about in shirts bearing the names of players he had never heard of. He kept his distance from them, still walking in the careful prison shuffle that was second nature to him now, carrying the cheap suitcase easily in one hand. All it held were his remaining clothes from the old days, a few mottled snapshots, the Bible he had been given on his confirmation, and a deportment medal from grammar school. Everything that his mama had left for him near the end, when she knew that she was dying. They were all that remained of his previous life, the only possessions he had in the world — save for the item he had just acquired in the back of that bodega down on East 124th Street, wrapped carefully in a paper bag and secured in his inside jacket pocket. Any con would see it coming a mile away, he knew, but he didn’t expect that to matter.
He made his way down to the street, and it all came back to him in a rush. He missed his step and staggered off the curb, stunned momentarily by the sheer, overwhelming familiarity of it all. His eyes blinking rapidly, trying to accustom themselves to the dappled, pigeon-streaked world beneath the elevated that he had run through so many times as a boy. There was the same newsstand on the corner; the same seedy row of souvenir booths; a bowling alley. The smell of pretzels and hot dogs cooking over charcoal in the vendors’ carts. All the same, somehow. Back when he was still her Luis, her amado, and his hair was still thick and black, his stomach flat and hard as an ironing board from packing meat on the trucks all day.
She had loved him then. He knew it. Why else would she have been there, up on his floor that day? Why would she be there now?
Despite his vow to meet her, to talk to her, he hadn’t had any idea how to do it. She belonged to Roberto, the super, walking every evening like a novitiate to his fiery kingdom in the basement.
Roberto was not a man to go up against — everybody in the building said that. He was short but built like a bull, with a mat of hair on his chest. Stripped to the waist, summer and winter, always strutting about, flinging open the furnace door and digging vigorously at the grate ash with a fire iron. People in the neighborhood whispered that it was there he burned the bodies of all the men he had killed. He kept a .38 jammed into the front of his jeans, where everyone could see the handle. He wore a pair of wraparound aviator glasses, so that with his pointed beard and his perpetual leer, Luis thought he looked like some kind of demonic insect down in the fiery half-light of the basement.
When Luis came down to pay the rent for Mama, Roberto would bully him. Forcing Luis to wait while he told him his stories about all the things he had done, the women he had taken, the men he had killed. He bullied everyone who came down to plead in vain for him to fix something, or to give them a couple extra days on the rent. Sure that he could keep them all in line.