Tuesday, August 21
2300 hours
The South Bronx
The Bolsa Chica Gun Store was sealed up and black, a low bulk of concrete in the yellow downlight from a street lamp. Somebody had nailed plywood up over the shattered front window. A yellow police ribbon had been stretched across the front of the store in a crazy zigzag pattern, like a bolt of lightning. It was close to midnight when Keogh pulled up across the street from it. He shut down his lights and sat in the darkened car, staring across Third Avenue at the buildings along the row. There were a couple of blue NYPD barricades set along the sidewalk. The Pretty Kitty was closed, and most of the shops were shuttered against the unpredictable Bronx night. No one was on the street. There were seven cars parked here and there along both sides of the block. The huge ruin of the Bronx Courthouse cut into a dark sky. The clouds had all rolled away into Long Island Sound. The air was clear and still.
Art Pike’s family station wagon was parked fifty yards up on the east side of Third.
Keogh couldn’t see anyone in the wagon. He sat in the car for about five minutes, thinking it out.
He could do the smart thing, ask for some backup from the 40th. Have a couple of squad cars do a sweep. Maybe get Central to call Butler on his pager.
Down the street the neon sign above the Blue Flame Bar was sending a frantic blue light over the street. The front of the Bolsa Chica changed from black to indigo-blue to green to red as the sign worked its way through a sequence.
The problem with calling Central was that if Pike was in the area with an unauthorized shotgun, then there’d be no way of keeping the thing small. There’d be a full report to the Chief of Detectives and the Chief of Patrol. Pickett, the Zone Commander for the Bronx, would see to it that Pike got the whole nine yards. He’d be Section Eight, retired, out.
Or worse. There might be criminal charges. The press was always on the scanner. There’d be a truckload of media jackals all over the block. A circus. PSYCHO COP LOOSE WITH WEAPON! POLICE TAKE DOWN ONE OF THEIR OWN.
Or … or Keogh could just get out of the car and stroll over to the gun store. Say: Art? Art?
You in there, Art?
Keogh was tempted to drive away slowly and let Art Pike work out his own problems. Just go on up, catch the Cross Bronx to the Bruckner. City Island was no more than fifteen minutes away. Tricia would be asleep in that big brass bed. She’d smell of shampoo and Shalimar perfume. The house would be dark and safe, but she’d have left the fluorescent light on over the sink, and a couple of sandwiches in aluminum foil on the counter. When he got into bed she’d be wearing that pink cotton thing that always rode up around her hips. Under it she’d be naked and warm.
Keogh tugged out his Browning and flipped the magazine into his lap. By the yellow light of the street lamp he saw the glint of brass cases. The gun was heavy and warm from the heat of his body, black and solid as stone.
Maybe Custer had come back. Custer would be waiting on the lawn, at the foot of the steps, that dumb-happy look on his face, waiting for old Frank to come home.
Keogh shoved the magazine up until it locked. Then he pulled the slide back and ran it forward quietly. He could feel the slide pick up the top cartridge and run it into the chamber. It set solid and final. The hammer was back. He flicked the safety off with his right thumb and put his left hand on the door handle.
The glass of the side window was swelling inward, breaking up, the plastic safety sheet stretching, ballooning inward like the fat belly of a crystal Buddha.
There was a huge yellow-red flare of light from the darkened doorway of the Bolsa Chica. Keogh’s left cheek stung with cold fire. Bits of glass were spinning, flaring, blowing past his eyes.
Keogh went flat to his right, belly-down on the front seat, the frozen burning spreading from his left cheek down into his neck. He fumbled at the door handle on the passenger side with his left hand, his right arm with the Browning pinned under his body, his knees jammed into the wheel. He got the door open.
There was another flare, and now he could hear the blast, the deep resonant boom of a 12-gauge shotgun. Spread, spread, Keogh was thinking, trying to remember. Pike was a hunter; he’d have double-ought buck—what was the choke on that Beretta …?
The front of the car was full of wind and metal shot. Keogh felt shot lift his hair, felt another cold blow in his left calf.
Scrambling and sliding over glass and metal, Keogh tumbled out onto the sidewalk. Damn, Keogh was thinking, he’d helped Pike clean that goddam weapon; he’d stood around in Pike’s basement admiring the thing.
Keogh was outraged at the basic unfairness of the situation, lying in God-knew-what while a close family friend turned Keogh’s favorite squad car into a colander.
“Pike! Pike, for chrissakes! Will ya stop? Will ya fuckin’ quit shooting at me! It’s Frank!”
Keogh scrambled over, to get the engine block and the wheel rims between himself and that shotgun.
There was a thin cry from the interior of the store, a voice barely recognizable.
“I know who I’m shooting at, you bastard!”
Drunk. Drunk and maudlin. Crazy-drunk and wild.
“Pike, what the hell are you shooting at me for?”
Pike was smart. He fired again, lower, at the pavement fifty feet in front of the car. Boom, and another red flare from the doorway. Crazing rounds came skittering over the roadway an inch off the ground. The curb stopped most of it, but Keogh heard his left front tire go. Goddamn it!
“Pike, you fuckhead! You’re gonna bring the whole Department down on us.”
“Fuck the Department! Fuck you—”
Keogh was looking around for another position. It was never a good idea to lie around in one place when people were shooting at you. Light infantry tactics. Fire-teams. Hey, no problem. All he had to do was get the fire-team to lay down suppressing fire, get some smoke down on Third. Throw a little M-79 action into the bunker, use the 60 to chew up the concrete. Two squad will maneuver right. Three squad flank left. Well call Six and get some arty. Couple of Tomcats. Tactical nuke.
“Pike, Pike, you gotta stop this. Two or three rounds, they’re gonna ignore that. You keep on banging away with that thing, somebody in this neighborhood is gonna call the cops. Will you just quit this shit and come out of there?”
Keogh’s portable radio was in his briefcase in the trunk, along with his Remington and Butler’s pistol-grip Ithaca 12-gauge. Keogh had the idea that trying to get the trunk open would have a negative effect on his health.
There was crackle from the police radio under the dashboard. The tinny voice carried in the still night air.
“Four Frank, K?”
“Four Frank, Central?”
Great, thought Keogh. Four Frank covers this sector. Somebody has called the cops.
“Yeah, Four Frank … we’ve got a report possible gunfire in the area of Third and One Hundred Fifty-ninth.”
“You got a callback on that, Central?”
“Pike!” Keogh yelled. “Are you listening to this?”
“Negative, Four Frank, no callback. We’d have to do a Bell trace to get the number.”
No answer from Pike.
Four Frank’s voice was bored and cranky. “Nah. We’ll slide over there, take a look when we’re clear here. This Ten-Eleven is Ninety-Z, K?”
Audible alarm. They’d be here in three minutes.
That pretty well tears it, thought Keogh. The only chance he had of keeping this thing small was to get over there right now and get control of Pike so that by the time Four Frank got here, he’d have some story worked out. Couple of drunk cops, accidental discharge. If he knew the cop in Four Frank, he might be able to get the whole thing—
“How’s it feel, Frank?” Pike’s voice was shaking with self-pity and rage.
“How the fuck do you think it feels?”
“You know me, Frank. Come on, talk to me. Negotiate with me, Frank. Use your charm. Talk to me while those cocksuckers get a sniper onto the roof. Pour your fucking heart into savin’ my ass. Just when you’re getting somewhere, they’ll put one right into my face.”
This was horse shit. Time to do something.
“Pike …”
Boom. Another shot. The car rocked on its springs, and the rear tires exploded. The Plymouth settled into the gutter.
This guy’s killing my car.
Keogh was firing over the hood, sideways across his chest, the Browning in his right hand, the left bracing it. Fuck this.
Keogh put nine rounds into the black rectangle of the doorway. The Browning kicked and bucked. He kept squeezing the trigger; the slide chattered back and forth. His left ear rang with the sound of the explosions. Bits of stone flew off the doorframe.
Give Pike something to think about—take his mind off his career problems. Pike was finished anyway. The idea was to keep him alive.
Keogh came around the front of the car low, on his toes, racing for the side of the gun store.
Well, the idea was to keep Pike alive without being killed himself. That was the idea. If Pike wasn’t dead already. Keogh was almost all the way across when a blue-white flare appeared in the black hole of the door. Buckshot skittered like marbles over the pavement. Keogh felt fire in his ankles. He stumbled, cursing, and put another five rounds into the doorway as he ran, telling himself he was only trying to keep Pike off balance and away from the door.
No, it didn’t look like Pike was dead. This was putting a severe strain on their relationship, this business of shooting at each other. It was hard not to take it personally. Keogh reached the side of the gun store with his chest burning and blood running down the side of his shirt. His uniform, his best dress blue with his gold shield and the breast bars—it was a sorry-looking mess. Fourteen rounds at 60 cents a round. Plus the uniform.
“Pike, you know so far you cost me eight-forty for the nine mils and an easy six hundred for the dress blues. They’re tailor-made, you know?”
Silence.
“Pike?”
Silence.
No. There was a car coming up Third. He could hear it, hear the tires on the road.
Oh, shit.
This was the part he hated most. Back in Vice, there was always some fired-up youngster who was aching to go in first, go through the door or down the alley. Even in the ESU, Keogh was usually on sniper post. Moxie and Pepsi usually did this part.
Keogh released the magazine and slipped in his spare. “Pike?”
A cone of white light caught him broadside.
“You there. Drop your weapon!”
Keogh looked across the street. There was a squad car parked next to his battered Plymouth. They had the spotlight on him. He couldn’t see the cops, but he could feel their guns on him. He shifted around to show the badge on his chest. “Turn that fucker off! And stay where you are. You better call your sergeant.”
“Keogh? That you, Keogh?”
“Yeah. Who’re you?”
The voice was vaguely familiar. He could see the cop crouched at the side of the blue-and-white.
“Jack Weisberg. Who you got?”
Weisberg was the veteran sergeant running the Neighborhood Stabilization Unit car. He’d been here last week.
“Weisberg, you’re not in an NSU car?”
“ ’Fraid so, Frank. What you got in there?”
Great. Weisberg was here with a couple of cherries from the Academy. There was now zero chance to cover up this shit between the old boys.
“I got Art Pike in here.”
There was a long moment while Weisberg took this in. “Who’s holding him?”
“Nobody. Pike’s a little upset.”
Another silence.
“Pike do that to your car?”
“Yeah. One of your babies know how to cover?”
Weisberg looked down at the two recruits crouching at the side of the car. The skinny kid from Jersey, Cicarelli, was pale and sweating. But the broad looked okay.
“Yeah, I got a PW here—she’s okay. What you want?”
“I gotta go in. The back door’s sealed shut.”
“Yeah. Wait a minute.”
All through this there had been no sound from the interior of the Bolsa Chica. Keogh had a vision of driving up to Pike’s house in Staten Island in that pale hour before dawn and knocking on the door with the Scottish lion rampant, and one of his sons opens it up, looking sleepy and rumpled and the first signs of panic in his eyes.
Weisberg pulled the girl to her feet. Her name was Kholer. The skin was tight over her cheeks and her green eyes were wide, but she felt steady. “Just keep your weapon on the door. Cicarelli, you cover the alleys.”
Kholer asked about backup.
“Not yet, kid.”
Weisberg came across at a run.
Keogh looked back at the NSU car. “You tell ’em to get backup?”
Weisberg was a career sergeant. He’d spent his whole life in patrol. He smiled at Keogh.
“What, you wanta make the morning papers?”
“We may do that anyway.”
They went in after Pike.
Art Pike was in the back room of the Bolsa Chica Gun Store, up against the farthest corner, down on his rump with his knee drawn up and his hands around the shotgun. It took them about three seconds to pick him out with Weisberg’s flashlight, Weisberg holding it way out from his body, both of them tight as drumheads waiting for that big white flare and the shitstorm of pellets to come out of the dark.
Keogh and Weisberg picked their way through the litter and garbage on the floor. Weisberg kept the flashlight on Pike as they came across to him. Pike’s eyes glinted, wet and glassy, as he watched them approach.
He had one shoe off, and the sock. His right toe was wedged into the trigger-guard of the glossy black shotgun with the intricate wooden stock. The muzzle of the shotgun was shoved up under Pike’s chin. His hatchet face and his white forehead slick with sweat made him look like something trapped in a box.
Pike’s voice was calm, conversational.
“Frank, you call that a tactical entry? You came in like a pizza boy looking for a washroom.”
Keogh squatted down about ten feet from Pike.
“You cocksucker. See what you did to my uniform?”
Pike gave him a weary smile. “Did you know those kids, Frank? Did you listen to me talking to them?”
Keogh sighed. “Art, it was a bad situation. Two cops down.”
“You know why they hit Ton-Ton’s, Frank?”
Weisberg tried moving in a little.
“Weisberg, you come any closer, I’m gonna ruin two grand worth of Jewish dentistry.”
Keogh had to laugh. “Hey, aim lower then. Pike, you have to stop taking life so seriously.”
“You oughta take it a little more seriously, Frank. One of them had just got out of Spofford. You know what happened there? He got buggered in E wing. Raped. Four guys, Frank.”
“Art, life’s hard. We all get porked in E wing one way or another. You think at all how this is gonna look to your own boys?”
Pike seemed to grow smaller, tighter, paler.
“Why should life be any easier for them? What’s the point, anyway? I’m history, thanks to you.”
Keogh nodded once, cocked the hammer on his Browning, and shoved the muzzle deep into the side of his own neck.
Pike stared blankly at him.
Weisberg set the flashlight down on a desk with the beam on Pike and Keogh. He moved carefully to the left.
“Pike, I’m taking myself hostage.”
“Shit, Keogh.”
Keogh raised his free hand.
“No. Fuck it. You’re right. Life’s a hand job. Howdy Doody had wooden balls. Mr. Greenjeans is dead. This year only one swallow came back to Capistrano, and somebody ate it. Sinatra is starting to look like Jabba the Hutt. I dropped three hundred bucks on a metric tool kit and bingo, we don’t go metric. There isn’t a single white rhino left west of the Mississippi.”
“Keogh, just shut the—”
“No way. You go, I’m going with you. You know how much real football was in the last Super Bowl? Actual action? Ten minutes. I think Tammy Faye still loves that son of a bitch. You know that thing cats do—they get all bristled up and stare out into the hall where the lights are off and you’re all alone in the house? I think they do that on purpose, just to fuck us over. The other day I was leaning over the sink while I was shaving and I saw my face in the water—you know, with the flabby cheeks all hanging down and the lips all wobbly and the ears flopped over—and it hit me that that’s what women have to look at when you’re on top of them and that’s why they close their eyes—”
“Frank, put the gun down. Your dad—”
“Hey, fuck my dad. You put the gun down. Put it down or pull the trigger, Art. I’m getting depressed just thinking about all this shit—like why do they have to wear short pants to play hockey? That just looks stupid. Little knobby knees hanging out. I hear they wear garter belts to hold ’em up. You know what Oprah’s name is backwards? Harpo. Makes you think, doesn’t it? Whales have five fingers in their flippers. That means they were here and they said, ‘Hey, fuck this, guys. Back to the beach.’ ”
Pike’s hands were slipping off his knees. His grip on the piece was loosening. There was dead silence from behind the flashlight. Close, thought Keogh.
“Who ate the first oyster, Art? And what happened to him? If they made a movie of Joan of Arc’s life, would the theme song be ‘You Light Up My Life’? Why does Mickey Mouse always wear white gloves? What’s he trying to hide? Do fish fart? If the guys who beat up Dan Rather thought he was some guy named Kenneth who knew what the frequency was, did Kenneth think that was funny? If you and me are both Catholics and we die tonight, does that mean we both go to Purgatory together? If so, can I sit in the front? Why do guys always say ‘oh, God, oh, God’ when they’re going to come? Does God give a shit? If God is eternal, who pays His rent? If the sea gives up her dead, who’s gonna want to have lunch with them?”
Weisberg came in out of the dark so fast it scared the hell out of Keogh and he almost pulled the trigger on the Browning. Weisberg got his hands on the shotgun, tugging the muzzle out. Pike’s knee came down. There was a huge flare of blue-white flame. Weisberg and Pike were silhouetted in the glare, a black shape. The sound of the shotgun was deafening in the tiny room.
Keogh scooped up the flashlight from the desk where Weisberg had left it. Dust was drifting in the cone of light. Weisberg was pulling Pike to his feet, the shotgun in one hand, Pike in the other. Pike’s eyes were closed, his mouth slack, his face bloody.
“Is he hit?”
Weisberg shook his head and raised his right hand. There was a lead-filled sap in it.
“Nah. I just cracked him one. He’ll be okay.”
“What about you?”
Weisberg shook his head again. “Well, I’m deaf, I think. Fucking thing went off right in my ear. That’s okay, I like it like that.”
Keogh scooped Pike up in a fireman’s lift. Weisberg picked up his flashlight and they headed for the door.
“You like being deaf?”
“Yeah. I don’t have to listen to you talking.”
They came out into a glare of spots from two RMPs. The PW named Kholer was waiting on the sidewalk.
Keogh carried Pike to the NSU car and dumped him into the back seat. Weisberg was putting the Beretta into the trunk. He slammed the lid down and stared at Keogh over the roof of the cruiser.
“Well, do they?”
Keogh didn’t get it right away.
“Do they what?”
“Do fish fart?”
Keogh thought about it for a while.
“Depends on what they eat.”
“Yeah,” said Weisberg. “It would.”