I really thought I had him again, but then he was on me like some kind of wild animal, shrieking as he thumbed at my eyes and grabbed my face. His hands were like steel. He got his fingers deep into the muscles of my cheeks. It felt like he was tearing my jawbone off as he pushed me back.
A second later, as I was about to try another swing, Apt slammed into me, and I felt something punch quickly into my right side.
I looked down. There was a knife in me. I stared down at the steel blade, embedded through the waistband of my shorts just above my right hip, as blood began to pour out.
Chapter 104
I fell to my knees in the sand again. My whole body began to tingle painfully. I felt a stinging like pins-and-needles, only sharper, like a low-level electric current was running through me.
I had trouble thinking, trouble seeing. The surf was crashing behind me. I knelt there, afraid to touch the knife, beginning to shake as I bled.
Before I could form even the semblance of a thought, Apt kicked me in the side of the head. He was wearing steel-toed combat boots, and I immediately went down, my skull ringing.
"That's all!" he screamed as he reared back and kicked me full in my unprotected balls.
I threw up then. I was leaking from every orifice. Pain was arriving from all points at once.
I don't know how I got to my feet, but I did. I started running down the beach. I was the one he wanted, and I wanted him to follow me. I needed to get this fucking maniac as far away from my son as possible.
I didn't make it twenty feet before I was tackled from behind. I screamed. The knife had opened me up even deeper as I landed. It was in deep, the blade now scraping on bone.
"This all you got?" Apt said, turning me over and pinning my shoulders with his knees.
"You know what I'm going to do now?" he said. He went into his pocket and brought out something orange-tinged and gleaming.
No. Please, no, I thought. It was a pair of brass knuckles.
I went out when he hit me in the side of my face. When I came out of it, the bone near my eye didn't feel right. The eye itself felt like it was hanging wrong.
"This is what Lawrence wanted. Not for me to shoot you. Not for me to knife you, but for me to beat you to death. He wanted you to feel it, he said. What he wanted was for a hero, a truly good person, to feel what it felt like to be him, to be on the bottom, to be nothing. So don't blame me, Bennett. Remember, I'm just the errand boy."
When he swung again, he broke my jaw. My face, my entire self, felt cracked, like a jigsaw puzzle being taken apart.
Bleeding badly, almost unconscious, and barely able to breathe, I was going down heavily, like a foundering ship, when I heard it.
"Freeze!"
I didn't know whose voice it was. At first I thought it might have been God's. Then I recognized its familiar tone, its pitch, its power.
It was the voice of authority that they'd taught us at the Police Academy. It was a cop's voice, I realized. A sole cop's voice crying in my wilderness, and it was the sweetest sound I'd ever heard.
"Relax, relax. We're just messing," Apt said, raising his hands as he got off me.
Then I heard it again.
"Freeze!"
But the voice was different now. Same tone of authority, but from someone else. Incredible. It was another cop! The cavalry.
"Freeze, fucker!" called a woman a moment later.
"You heard her. Put your hands up!" called another voice.
"Down, down!"
Now I heard a litany of voices, a choir. I realized they were my neighbors. Breezy Point's Finest, a regiment of vacationing cops to the rescue.
"On your knees, shit-ass!"
What happened next was a blur. Apt screamed, and then there was a cracking sound. Actually several of them. Cracking and popping like firecrackers going off all around me, and I turned my face down into the sand like a fed-up ostrich and passed out.
"Okay, okay. C'mon, c'mon. Let's pick it up."
I woke up with a start, still lying facedown but staring at the blurring ground. I felt about twenty hands on me, running me across the sand. The face next to mine was Billy Ginty's, my neighbor, an anticrime cop from Brooklyn. I saw another guy from my block, Edgar Perez, a horse cop sergeant with a disabled kid. There was a big burly son of a bitch in a Mets jersey, and I realized it was Flaherty. He was holding me as gently as a baby, his face red as he ran.
My friends and neighbors, all of them heroes, were trying to save my life.
We suddenly stopped somewhere. I wanted to thank Flaherty, to apologize, but he shushed me.
"Don't you dare go out now," he said. "They're getting you a chopper. You're going for a ride on the whirly bird, you lucky dog."
"Mike, Mike," Mary Catherine said from far away.
From somewhere close by, I could hear Ricky crying. Oh, thank you, God. He was all right.
"Tell him it's okay. I'm okay," I said or attempted to. I gagged as I swallowed blood, salty and thick like metallic glue.
"Stop, Mike. Don't try to talk," Mary Catherine said, next to me now.
My cell phone started to ring.
"I got it. I got it. It's for me," I gurgled as I reached for it.
Then Mary Catherine took it out of my pocket and tossed it. My eyes fastened on it in the sand where it glowed on and off, ghostly and blue as it rang and rang and rang.
Then I looked up at Mary Catherine. I remembered how magical she had looked that night diving into the water. I wished we could both do that now. Walk down to the beach, hand in hand, go under the waves where it was quiet and dark, quiet and peaceful down in the tumbling warmth.
Epilogue
Chapter 105
I'm at the window in the bedroom of my apartment.
A strange nickel-colored light fills the streets. The streets are empty. No cars, no people. The lustrous light winks off endless rows of empty windows. Off to my right beyond the buildings is the Hudson River, but I can't see any current. Everything is as still as a painting. The curtains blow in on my face for a moment and then fall back, still, and I know time has stopped.
I'm sitting back against the headboard of my bed, which is funny because my bed isn't anywhere near the window, only now it is. Then I realize it's not my current apartment on West End Avenue. It's actually my old place, the tiny studio Maeve and I rented on a sketchy run of Riverside Drive after we got married.
Just as I realize this, arms suddenly embrace me from behind. I want to turn, but I can't. I'm paralyzed. Hair stands up on the back of my neck as a chin rests on my shoulder.
Michael, a soft Irish-accented voice whispers in my ear.
It's my dead wife, Maeve. She's alive. I can feel the warmth of her hands, her breath in my ear, on my cheek. I check myself, feel my side where Apt stabbed me, feel my face for the dent in my fractured face, but everything is impossibly smooth. An incredible sadness rises in me like an overflowing spring.
No, she admonishes me when I start to cry.
But it's over, I cry.
No, she says again as a finger wipes away a tear and presses against my lips.
It's not the end. There is no end. That's the good part. How are all my babies?
I have trouble breathing, I'm crying so hard.
Baby, you should see Juliana. She's so brave and capable, just like you. And Brian, he's this huge, wonderful, polite young man.
Just like you, Maeve says.
And the rest of them. Eddie's so funny, and Trent. The younger girls have left me in the dust, honey. Pink is cool one second, then it's so babyish. I can't keep up. Oh, God, you'd be so proud of them.