Tuesday, August 21
Midnight
The South Bronx
Keogh and Weisberg tried to keep it simple, but the complications were out of control. Communications had taken a legitimate gunfire call, so Weisberg’s Four Frank car was in the computer as RMP on the scene. Pike was looking at something a little more serious than a Command Discipline. Unlawful discharge of a firearm was a felony, even if Keogh refused to file an Information. Charges and Specifications had to be backed by an Information from a witness. But then there was the damage to the car, the presence of other officers, the injuries sustained by Keogh. His neck and ankles had been peppered with glass and buckshot fragments. Section 265 paragraph 25 of the Code required a physician to report any gunshot wounds to the police. Keogh had fired his own weapon, and he had been heard firing it. So he had to file a PD 424–151, and that report had to go to the Chief of Patrol.
So Art Pike was alive and that was the best thing you could say about it. Weisberg and Keogh both figured that Pike wasn’t in “a culpable mental state,” so he might be able to get away with a plea. But he was through in the NYPD and it was up to the Sergeants Endowment to save his pension.
It was two in the morning before Weisberg and Keogh walked out of the emergency unit of Lincoln Hospital. The Cicarelli kid had gone off duty at midnight, but the green-eyed PW had stayed around to see what happened. She was sitting at the wheel of the NSU car when the two tired cops came down the driveway. The streets were empty, but there was a distant rumor of cars and trucks from Bruckner Boulevard. A low crackle of cross-talk came out of the radio. Keogh looked around for his Plymouth. Then he remembered.
Weisberg saw the look on Keogh’s face.
“Hey, Frank, don’t worry. I was shocked, Frank, shocked to see what senseless vandalism had been perpetrated on a Department vehicle. Myra here wrote up a vandalism report and had Popeye’s come and get it before the Duty Captain got a look at the buckshot tattoo. Myra’ll take care of it.”
Keogh leaned down to look at the girl behind the wheel. She wasn’t a girl.
Myra Kholer’s summer uniform was under a certain amount of strain keeping Myra under control. Her look was straight-ahead all-Kansas, the classic strawberry blonde with green eyes. No makeup, her hair up in a roll, but wisps of it floated like tinted smoke around her temples. She gave Keogh a maternal look and put out her hand. Keogh took it through the window. It was dry and strong.
“Popeye says he’s got all sorts of Plymouth parts in the back lot. He’ll have it back to you by Thursday.”
Jesus, thought Keogh. How old can she be? He tried not to look up at Weisberg. He could feel his reaction to her in his hip pocket.
Weisberg inhaled the night air.
“Well, it’s beddy-byes for me, Frank. This car’s off Central. Why don’t you let Myra drive you home?”
Keogh had called his house several times. The phone was off the hook. That usually meant he was up shit creek with Tricia. Maybe Robbie had done his usual number on her. Robbie seemed to be in some sort of competition with Keogh for Tricia’s loyalty. Tricia had the idea that Frank was trying to turn his son into a robot. Frank felt that she was trying to turn her son into a daughter.
“You don’t mind?”
She seemed surprised he would ask.
“No. No, sir. I’d be glad to. You’re up on City Island, aren’t you, Detective Keogh?”
Keogh opened the door and climbed in. When his back hit the seat he felt a wave of exhaustion and depression roll over him. “Yeah, City Island. And call me Frank.”
They were going north on Third, heading for the Cross Bronx with a full moon riding the low Queens skyline. She put on the broadcast radio and found some slow music. They rolled up the broad avenue listening to Duke Ellington do “Willow Weep for Me.” Myra wasn’t saying anything, but she was restful and calm, and now and then she would look over at Keogh as if there were something she wanted to say to him. Keogh’s neck was stinging, and his ankles ached, and he was worried about Art Pike and his family. And Tricia. And Robbie. And himself.
He was worried about himself because he was forty-two years old, tired and banged up and not at all sure who the hell the good guys were and damn sure he wasn’t one of them. Because it was all he could do to stop himself from asking this PW here in the car with him to go somewhere and buy him a drink.
The nights were always like that, those hours after midnight and before the sun came up to show everybody where the boundaries were. Being a cop had meant years of living in that hour-of-the-wolf zone and it was hard not to learn to love it, not to want it to go on forever. He had always felt how easy it would be to slip all his cables, to drift away, to cut himself free of all the attachments that rubbed and limited him. The kid, a home, the place in the Catskills, the constrictions of being a good man and a good father and an honest friend to his wife. He knew he still loved his wife. Whenever he was facing something hard in the job, like having to go into that store after Art Pike, he would have a vision of somewhere safe and Tricia’s soft eyes and her cloud of auburn hair and her familiar body, the history they shared—all those things would come over him in a sentimental tide and he’d feel a sick ache in him for all the possibilities for happiness that he had personally slam-dunked into the trash can over the years. And yet, when he was with her, with Robbie around the house, all he wanted to do was get back into a job, get the adrenaline hit, be on the street and free. It stung him that he couldn’t or wouldn’t be graceful about his own life and the things he had spent years trying to build up and hold on to. There was an absence in him, a distance. He was born a sniper. He was too weak for anything more immediate. The thousand-yard man.
They got to the Cross Bronx. Myra looked at him.
“Well, here’s where we go right.”
There was an obvious question in her voice. He felt the possibility in it.
“Or here’s where we go wrong.…”
“Don’t be so intense, Frank. I just don’t want to go home and count ceiling tiles right now. I could use a drink, and if you’ll forgive my saying so, you look like you could use one too.”
“I’m married, Myra.”
“Jesus. The conceit.”
“Yeah. One drink?”
Myra’s smile was slow and wry. “At a time?”
At a roadhouse in Yonkers they talked, until it closed, about the Department and the job, about Art Pike and the city, about Keogh’s family and Keogh’s wife. Myra had two brothers and she believed that the best way to raise boys was to pay as little attention as possible to what they said and have a little faith that sooner or later their brains would kick in and their hormones would settle down.
It was talk-talk. Keogh could do it, too, and he did it well, but he knew where he was headed. Her face was flushed, her hands busy with her Stoli. Several times she touched his hand or leaned over to make a point. He was acutely aware of her body, the fullness of it and the secrets of it. Her scent was soap and leather and something spicy. They talked for an hour in a red leather booth at the back of the roadhouse, with Yonkers cops and State Police guys off duty and a couple of NYPD guys from Highway, but most of them just came by to say hello and they were left alone when it counted, because those were the rules of the game and every cop in the place had a stake in the game. She got up to go to the bathroom and came back with keys.
When she came into the bedroom, he was already in the big double bed. She had a terry robe on with the hotel crest. She was damp from the shower, and pink. She sat down on the edge of the bed, leaned over to kiss him.
He reached up to pull her across him. Her scent was strong, and her breath warm on his lips. He held her like that, her body across his lap, her arms around him. He felt her tongue, a tentative flicker. She had a delicacy and a graceful way of opening without urgency. Keogh moved a hand down over her shoulder, taking the robe away. In the soft light from the lamp her breast was heavy and marked with a pale tracery of blue veins. He brushed a finger carefully and lightly across the small brown nipple. She stiffened, and he felt her nails in the small of his back.
Keogh heard the percussion of his own heart, felt the blood in his thighs and his throat. He hurt with the pressure of it. She could feel him under her hip, and she laughed softly into his neck. She shifted and the robe came off her shoulders. Her breasts were soft against his chest. He could feel her nipples on his skin.
She was strong and young. When he pulled her down beside him, she untied the cord holding her robe. Her body was marked with white, and where it was tanned she was the color of sherry. When he moved his hand down her belly, she smiled again, and her mouth glided down his cheek to his neck. He felt her tongue on the wounds. She was gently, delicately tasting him. Tasting the blood on his skin.
She tugged at the sheet between them and rolled away onto her knees. The robe came off and she was naked, her strawberry hair down and loose, an umbra; it looked like mist in the lamplight. She pulled the sheet away and looked at him. He took her hand and she came down beside him. Her body was cold and damp from the robe, her scent and his scent and their scent very strong in the silent room.