Bolden’s eyes walked the floor where they had lain curled up under his frayed all-purpose comforter, and came to rest on the candle she had made for him out of the Chianti bottle, the kind with straw wrapped around the bottom and wax drippings down the sides.
“Terrible taste. Terrific memory,” Jenny had said.
He missed her.
Thinking of the kiss that had accompanied the candle, he closed his eyes and laid his head on the cushion. He needed to rest. Just for a few minutes. Ten or fifteen…
Bolden dreamed. He stood in the center of a large room, surrounded by a circle of boys, teenagers really. He knew them all. Gritsch, Skudlarek, Feely, Danis, Richens, and the rest of them from the Dungeon. They were stamping their feet on the wooden floor, chanting his name. He looked down and saw the body on the floor in front of him. He bent down and turned it over. It was Coyle. He was dead, his neck grotesquely twisted, his eyes and mouth open. “It was an accident,” a sixteen-year-old Bolden shouted. “An accident!”
The circle of boys closed in on him, chanting his name. All were holding pistols. The same gun that Guilfoyle had pointed at his head. They raised their arms. Bolden felt the barrel pressed to his forehead. They fired.
The gun!
Bolden woke with a start. It was then that the image came to him. A memory from the night just past. He rushed across the living room to his desk, a nineteenth-century secretary. A legal pad sat on top of it. He found a pen and began to sketch the tattoo he had seen on the chest of the man who had wanted him dead. The first drawing was terrible and looked like a misshapen dog bone. He tore off the paper, wadded it up, and chucked it into the wastebasket. He started again, working slower. A sturdy stock led into a long, tapered barrel. Finished with the outline, he colored it in. Still terrible, but he had captured the idea more or less. He held up the drawing for examination.
An old-fashioned rifle, circa 1800. Something Daniel Boone would carry. A frontiersman’s rife. No, not a rifle, he corrected himself.
A musket.
12
Detective First Grade John Franciscus couldn’t believe his eyes. About ten yards away, a tall black guy, maybe forty, nicely dressed, was standing with his johnson in his hand taking a leak on the side of St. Thomas’s Episcopal Church. The sight incensed him. Here it was, barely eight in the morning, and this guy’s letting go on a house of worship like he’s watering the roses.
Slamming on the brakes, Franciscus pulled his unmarked police cruiser to the sidewalk and threw open the door. “You!” he shouted. “Stay!”
“Whatchyou-” The man didn’t have time to finish his sentence before Franciscus ran up and slugged him in the mouth. The man tumbled backward off his feet, his right hand still firmly clamped to his exhaust pipe, the pee flying all over him. “Shit,” he moaned, his eyes fluttering.
Franciscus winced at the smell of the booze wafting up at him. “That, sir, was a lesson in attitude adjustment. This is your neighborhood. Take better care of it.”
Shaking his head, Franciscus headed back to his car before the guy could get a better look at him. The kind of behavior that Franciscus called preemptive action, or an attitude adjustment, was strictly frowned upon these days. Some called it excessive force, or police brutality. Even so, it was too effective a policy tool to be discarded entirely. The way Franciscus saw it, he was just doing his duty as a resident.
Harlem was his neighborhood, too. Coming up on thirty-five years, he’d been policing out of the Three-Four and Manhattan North Homicide. He’d watched Harlem pull itself up by its bootstraps and turn from an urban war zone where no man was safe after dark-white, black, or any shade in between-to a respectable, bustling community with clean sidewalks and proud citizens.
You let the small things slide and people get the idea that no one gives a darn. No sir. You have to bust the homeless guys who spit on your window and want a dollar to clean it off; the winos who demand tips as doormen at ATMs; corner crack dealers; fare breakers; graffiti artists. Anybody and everybody who made the streets an ugly, difficult place. He was not about to stand for some knucklehead peeing in public, and on a church, to boot.
It was policing this kind of low-grade delinquency that had reclaimed Harlem from the thugs and the thieves, and made greater New York the safest big city in the world.
A mile down the road, Franciscus pulled his car over and slipped the “Police Business” card onto the dash. Craning his neck, he stared up at the high-rise. Hamilton Tower, after Alexander Hamilton, who’d built his “country” house, the Grange, just up the road. What someone was thinking building a luxury office tower around here was beyond him. The building looked to be about twenty percent finished. He surveyed the building site. The only vehicle on the premises was a Ford F-150 pickup. He looked around for some hard hats, checked if the crane up top was moving. The site was as quiet as a morgue. Franciscus knew what that meant. No dinero. Just what Harlem needed. Another white elephant, excuse the pun.
Franciscus checked both ways, waiting for a hole in traffic. Strictly speaking, he was off duty, but he had a few things he needed to clear up, or he’d never get to sleep. Home was not a place he cared to be when his mind was jumping through hoops. It was a nice enough place, four thousand square feet, two stories, white picket fence, and a lawn out back up in Orange County. But it was lonely as hell. His wife had passed away three years earlier. His sons were living the life of Riley out in San Diego, both of them sheriffs, God bless ’em. These days it was just him and the radiator, each of them ticking away, waiting to see who was going to give out first.
A car passed and he jogged across the street. Five strides, and he could feel the sweat begin to pour, his heart doing the Riverdance-and this with the mercury barely clawing its way above zero. He slowed to a walk, and wiped his forehead.
At the supervisor’s shack, Franciscus knocked once, then stuck his head in the door. “Anyone here?”
“Enter,” answered a gruff voice.
Franciscus stepped inside and flashed his identification, keeping it there good and long so there wouldn’t be any questions afterward. The badge wasn’t good enough anymore. Every Tom, Dick, and Harry had a fake. “I’d like to take a look around. You mind?”
“Not if you’re interested in building a new precinct station here. We got plenty of floors open. One through eighty. Take your pick.”
The construction manager was an older guy with a beer belly and a beet red face. He had a copy of the Post in his lap, a cigarette burning in the ashtray next to a supersize mug of coffee, and a bag of Krispy Kremes in arm’s reach. Franciscus took a look at him, wondering how this guy’s heart was holding up.
“I need to get up to the foreman’s shack,” he said.
“Go ahead. Gate’s open. Elevator’s running. Not much to see up there. Don’t get too near the edges, ya hear?”
“Don’t worry about me. I don’t feel like taking a dive anytime soon.” Franciscus nodded toward the work site. “Mind me saying, I don’t see many guys around.”
“You and me both. The suits are waiting to see if anyone’s actually gonna move in, before they plunk down any more dough. If you need anything, just holler. Loud!”
Franciscus chuckled. It was weak, but at least the guy was trying. “You said the gate’s unlocked. You keep this place open all night?”
“Tell me you’re kidding and you’ll restore my faith in city government.”