“Next time, asshole, take the hint. Come around here again and it’ll be your teeth, not bullets, bouncin’ off the floor. Get it?”
When I didn’t answer immediately, the foot pressed down even harder on my face.
“I get it,” I gurgled.
“What?”
“I get it. I get it.”
The shoe was off my face, but the pain stayed behind. I was in no shape to do anything but listen to two sets of feet retreating unhurriedly back down the alley toward the club. After about five minutes, the pain eased enough for me to sit up and get my bearings. I rubbed my jaw, wiping the grit off both sides of my face. I tried standing to test out my knees. They both burned with pain. The surgical one wasn’t any less stable than usual. Actually, the doctors hadn’t left enough tissue in there to damage. My good knee was of more concern. It responded pretty well, and I went about collecting my bullets and searching the myriad Dumpsters for my.38.
I didn’t need to be a rocket scientist or even an ex-cop to figure out what had just taken place. It was to laugh. Domino, in her way, had introduced me to John Heaton or, rather, had smoothed the way for him to introduce himself to me. All that and it hadn’t cost Thomas Geary a penny. But it had cost me. I’d be back to collect, and when I came back, I’d have my head up instead of up my ass.
Chapter Seven
It had been my experience that pain seldom evoked pleasant memories. This morning did nothing to dissuade me from that view. Sure, my gut ached, my jaw, too, but that pain didn’t come with any baggage, not even a carry-on. My knee, however, was quite another story. It usually ached in damp weather. You can’t have all that I’d had done to it and expect a free ride. Today was different. Today it hurt like a bastard, like it hadn’t hurt since right after the second surgery. I stood there in the bathroom watching my hands shake as much from remembering those days as from the freshness of the pain.
It was August of 1977. Copwise, it had been a good few weeks. Word was out that the department was reconsidering the freeze on promotions. Something that was owed me as far back as Marina Conseco’s rescue. I’d also been making a shitload of overtime since the July blackout. And now that Son of Sam had extended his franchise to Brooklyn, that overtime was only likely to increase. By snuffing out the life of Stacy Moskowitz and putting a bullet into Robert Violante’s eye, Sam had unknowingly set in motion the end to both our careers.
When they captured him and brought him in for arraignment, they bused a bunch of us in from precincts all around the city to work security and crowd control. Today, it’s hard to recall just how huge Sam’s capture was. This pudgy little bar mitzvah boy from the Bronx had held the city in his murderous grasp for months. He had set off the biggest manhunt in New York’s long history, perhaps the biggest manhunt in the history of the United States. Unless you lived through those days, it would be easy to forget the other factors which had so frayed our collective nerves.
The city was teetering on the edge of fiscal collapse. We had just endured one of the coldest, snowiest winters on record, and in mid-July the city was plunged into a blackout. In ‘65, during the first big blackout, there was no looting to speak of, but in ‘77 the town went nuts. The looting and rioting went on for days. In some ways, it almost felt disconnected from the blackout itself. It was as if years of resentment over Vietnam and the failed promises of the sixties boiled up to the surface in one crazy, angry moment. And casting a shadow over it all was the Son of Sam.
So after Sam’s arraignment and the press conferences, after the handshakes and backslapping, they shipped us back to our precincts. In my absence, the maintenance crew had waxed the precinct floors for the first time in months. I never did find out why they had chosen that particular day. Anyway, on my way to the locker room, one of the precinct detectives called out to me, busting my chops about how I had looked on TV, standing there behind Sam and Detective Ed Zigo. When I turned to answer back, I slipped on a piece of carbon paper some careless schmuck had thrown on the newly waxed floor.
They tell me my knee got so twisted up that some of the guys got nauseated just looking at me. Luckily, I guess, I was knocked silly when my head hit the floor. But by the time I got to the ER at Coney Island Hospital, the pain had made itself intimately familiar. I had known that pain to differing degrees every day since. That day in August of ‘77 was the last time I ever wore my police blues.
The phone rang and I was transported back to the present, to the pain my knees felt now. I waited for Katy to pick up, but she must have been in her studio. Phones were strictly verboten down there. Katy thought telephones were the bane of creative thought. I’m not sure I would have gone quite that far, but I was no artist. I hobbled over to the nightstand and picked up.
“Hello.”
“He wants to talk to you.” It was Domino. I didn’t have to ask who he was.
“Put him on. I don’t think they make a baseball bat that stretches this far.”
She ignored that. “He wants me to talk to you first.”
“This is bullshit! If he wants to talk to-”
“He says it’s this way or no way.”
“All right. Where?”
“As far away from Glitters as-”
“You know Coney Island?”
“I’ve heard of it, but I don’t get out much.”
“Think you can find it?”
“Yeah, I’m a big girl. I pick out my own G-strings and everything.”
“Very funny. Meet me on the boardwalk at West Fifth Street in two hours.”
“But-”
I hung up before she could finish her objecting. All I knew was that I’d be there. The rest was up to her. Besides, I had to stop at the bank. Somehow I got the feeling this little talk wasn’t being arranged out of the goodness of anyone’s heart.
My car seemed to know the way, easing down Ocean Parkway, slipping beneath the el at Brighton Beach Avenue, and sliding finally around the smooth neck of Surf Avenue. I was plenty early, giving myself time enough to make sure I wasn’t being set up for John Heaton’s second at bat. First, I drove past my old precinct house across from Luna Park.
Sixty or seventy years ago, Luna Park, like the Steeplechase, had been its own amusement park. There were four or five separate parks back then, each with distinct character and attractions. Luna Park, for instance, was world famous for the thousands upon thousands of incandescent bulbs strung across every inch of the place. Scientists have speculated that it was so bright, it might have been visible from space. Luna Park burned to the ground three or four times. Now a collection of hideous apartment buildings stand disrespectfully on its ashes. You can’t see them from space, and the rest of the neighborhood wishes you couldn’t see them from across the street.
I thought about driving farther into the throat of Coney Island, past the abandoned factory building where the firemen and I had found Marina Conseco. The city had long since removed the water tank from its roof, and I hadn’t been there since I’d showed it to Katy five years ago. No, I decided, it was best to leave my past behind, even if the rest of the world wouldn’t let me. Instead, I parked in the shadow of the ugly apartment houses and walked back to the boardwalk.
It was another scorcher and sun was warm on my face, but in Coney Island there’s always more to the equation than just the sun. The breeze was blowing hard in off the Atlantic so that you could almost be fooled into believing the remainder of the day would be pleasant, even cool. The beach was still more crowded with gulls than people, and the boardwalk was quiet if not quite deserted. This would all change in a week or two, when schools let out for the summer. The handball courts were busy, as they always were.
From where I positioned myself I had a clear view of the boardwalk in either direction, of the steps leading up to it from the street, and of the steps leading from it down to the beach. To sneak up on me, someone would have had to parachute in or materialize out of thin air.