by Lee Child
The detective said, “I’ll bet.”
He let go of my hands and said, “Not a mark, Eddie.”
I said, “Momma said she couldn’t trust me. But she could trust me. I never took her Frank Sinatra CD or the shimmery snake shirt or the shoebox in the closet.”
The detective said, “Shoebox? What’s in the shoebox?”
“Momma’s tips.”
“How many tips?”
I held up my hands, like showing how big the fish was I caught. “About that many.”
Eddie walked out. He came back a few minutes later and shook his head.
“There’s no shoebox,” the detective said.
“I guess I took that, too,” I said. “I can’t be trusted.”
“Is that true?” the detective asked. “That you can’t be trusted?”
“I think so. That’s what the voice in my head told me.”
“A voice in your head told you to do this?”
“Yeah. He’s like Jiminy Cricket. He doesn’t exist.”
They looked at each other like when people say, “There you go.”
I said, “But know what’s weird about it?”
The detective was watching me closely now, with wrinkles in his forehead and his mouth a little open like I sometimes keep mine before Momma reminds me to close it. “What?” he said.
“I have a picture of him, even though he’s just in my head.”
The detective said, “You do?”
“Uh-huh.” I stood up and they followed me down the hall. I went into my room and dug beneath my pillow and took out the wallet with the pretty Indian stitching on it and opened it up and there was a little driving card with Bo’s picture on it.
I said, “I stole it from his jacket and I’m sorry.”
The detective smiled and said, “That’s okay. You did just fine.”
I said, “Can I have a sandwich?”
* * *
GREGG HURWITZ is the critically acclaimed, internationally bestselling author of ten thrillers, most recently They’re Watching. His books have been short-listed for best novel of the year by International Thriller Writers, nominated for the British Crime Writers’ Association’s Ian Fleming Steel Dagger, chosen as feature selections for all four major literary book clubs, honored as Book Sense Picks, and translated into seventeen languages.
He has written screenplays for Jerry Bruckheimer Films, Paramount Studios, MGM, and ESPN, developed TV series for Warner Bros. and Lakeshore, acted as consulting producer on ABC’s V, written issues of the Wolverine, Punisher, and Foolkiller series for Marvel, and published numerous academic articles on Shakespeare. He has taught fiction writing in the USC English Department, and guest lectured for UCLA, and for Harvard in the United States and around the world. In the course of researching his thrillers, he has sneaked onto demolition ranges with Navy SEALs, swam with sharks in the Galápagos, and gone undercover into mind-control cults. For more information, visit www.gregghurwitz.net.
Eddy May
THEO GANGI
Eddy tells me we can make money together. Eddy is the best police impersonator there is. He hangs out in police bars. He goes into police stations and talks to cops in perfect jargon. He goes down to court and gets search warrants and arrest forms and types them up. Eddy’s fed himself since the seventies by sending little kids into bathrooms to solicit pedophiles. Then he’d go in like a cop and shake them down.
I’m hanging out on Christopher Street with Eddy. He’s by the phone booth in plainclothes, a sport jacket and black shoes. Eddy told me that’s how you dress like a detective. So now I’m also wearing a sport jacket and plain black shoes.
I’m going to Brooklyn today and I’m pissed about it. I haven’t crossed that water since I moved to Washington Heights and my father cursed me as a traitor.
It’s early on a Tuesday afternoon. The lower west side teems with productivity; Starbucks supports a line out onto the sidewalk. People steadily file down into the subway. Busses yawn, stretch, and lumber up and down avenues. Eddy whistles an old song, “If I were a Bell,” the way Miles Davis played it. It’s a show tune, pretending to be jazz genius, about a man, pretending to be a bell. Eddy catches a glimpse of something through the dark window of the bar on the corner. He gets up close to it. I am still by the phone booth, being a detective. He curses, and starts pacing, fixated on the bar window. I go over to him. He curses again, rolling his eyes and smacking himself on his pocket keys.
“Problem?”
He wipes the sweat from his old, wrinkled brow.
“The fuckin’ unit. Gave up three fuckin’ homers in a row.”
The Big Unit. The Yankees’ biggest disappointment this year. Eddy and I are Yankees fans. We’re both from Brooklyn, home of the former Ebbet’s Field, where Brooklyn’s own Dodgers once played, now a large project. You ask me it’s just as good, replaces bums with more bums. Most native Brooklynites are Mets fans, as if obeying some law of transfer from one non–Yankee New York team to another. The Brooklyn bitterness toward the frequent champions is deep. Eddy chose the Yankees because some aspect of his life deserved to be aligned with a winner. My preference came at greater cost. To my father it was evidence of a great betrayal.
Many of my teenage years were spent explaining why Mickey Mantle was better than Snider, Pee Wee, Robinson, and Campanella combined. “They’re bums, Pop,” I would tell him. “It’s common knowledge.” His hurt was palpable. I told him it’s only baseball, but he didn’t believe me. “Bums? That what you think of me?”
The dark bar at daytime reminds me of my father. Three or four drunks sit at the bar stools, faces tilted to the blue wash of the TV screens above. Could be any time of day; it will always be the same time inside. Pop was like that; no matter the pitch, it was always a strike.
On the three mounted sets, Randy Johnson paces with his hands on his hips, spitting as though the homer was anybody’s fault but his. The Big Unit irritates the hell out of me and Eddy. After he blows a game, I find myself making up my own Post and Daily News headlines. Big Disaster. Flop of Fame.
“Cocksucker ain’t worth half what we gave for ’em,” says Eddy.
“Got that right.”
I’m a New York Times reader. Eddy reads The Daily News and The New York Post. But when the Big Unit loses, I buy The News, too, so I can fully absorb the crass, ruthless abuse my team deserves. Then I talk to Eddy about this year’s two-hundred-million-dollar joke.
“No word though?” I ask.
“He’ll be here.”
Eddy is right about that. He thinks so, but I know for sure. I step back and the TV disappears in darkness, the glass opaque now, with my reflection on its surface. I like to dress a bit better, clean shaven, cuff links now and then, how my wife likes me. She’s Puerto Rican, likes a little shine, some cologne. But Eddy told me how to dress like a detective, so I’m dressed like a detective.
“Ho shit!” barks Eddy, attention back on the TV on the other side of the glass. I go up beside him and look through: a replay of a White Sox player who I never heard of knocking an unhittable pitch, up by his eyes, clean out of the ballpark. The big unit, with his giant, gangly frame and trailer-park dismay, stands on top of the wheat shade mound of dirt in utter incredulity.
“Four!” says Eddy. “Four goddamn dingers in one inning? That pitch wasn’t even a strike. It wasn’t even close, damn near over his head! How’d he hit that? Fucking impossible. Four homers.”
I shake my head.
“I can see the headlines. Four! four-get it!”
“Four-gone conclusion,” says Eddy. “Just four-fit already.”
I see the kid as Eddy goes on about how the Unit keeps throwing his flat, useless slider. The kid has bleached blonde hair and light eyes, with a don’t-give-a-fuck apathy way beyond typical adolescence. His attitude puts him going on thirty, a couple of jail bids already behind him. In reality, the kid is maybe fifteen, though not even he knows for sure. Got more miles on him than a ’89 VW.
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“Yeah, he was unhittable in the National League, but so fuckin’ what? My friend, you and I could have fifteen wins and an ERA under three with those pansy-ass hitters.”
My father and Eddy were cast from the same boilerplate, even though Eddy is a European mutt and Pop was one-hundred-percent Sicilian. It must be the Brooklyn in them, the streets that taught them both how to hustle and talk, doing funny things with the letter H, adding it to the end of some words and striking it from the beginning of others. Fuck outta ’ere. Even their stooped countenance is the same: short necks, slumped shoulders, heavy faces pulled to the sidewalk as if losing money at dice.
Eddy’s cast-iron eyes look just past me as he speaks, just how a real cop might. Though a real cop would notice the kid already. Even when Eddy is pissed, he can’t manage to make those dark, drooping bags of his look anything but sad.
I nudge him.
“That the kid?”
The kid makes eye contact with me. I hope he doesn’t give it up. I hope I don’t give it up. He smirks at me, teasing—a demon with the face of a cherub.
“Yeah. Hey, kid.”
“Hey.”
“What you got for me?” asks Eddy. The kid holds out a tan Ferragamo wallet. Eddy takes it, and opens it up.
Edward Schalaci.
“Mr. Edward Schalaci,” says Eddy. For a moment, I think he’s talking to me. “Would you look at that,” he says, “guy’s name is Eddie, like me. One-hundred fifty Columbia Heights. Yeah. Would you look at that, Brooklyn Heights, that’s real money. Guy’s probably married. Wife’s got no clue. Right? Let’s get a move.”
As Eddy starts to walk down to the subway, the kid turns and smirks at me. Kid’s got a crazy sense of his own power. He’s an orphan from Poughkeepsie who came to The City to live off wealthy pedophiles. Got thrown out of a few downtown lofts and been selling his ass ever since. There’s something supernatural about the way he seems to get younger every time I see him, as though he started at sixteen and now looks fourteen. Pretty soon he’ll be reduced to shaking down sickos from a stroller.
The thought makes me queasy. My wife is ready, I mean ready for a baby. I’m hesitant, and days like this I know why.
We have done this a couple of times: we go into the bathroom and pretend to be from the Youth Squad, I take The Kid outside while Eddy talks the guy into giving him money, to avoid being arrested. Eddy has been making money like that all over the west side of Lower Manhattan for years. His biggest moneymaker is this kid.
Eddy hooked up with The Kid on one of his fugazi raids, took him under his wing and taught him how to hustle, taught him how to get paid without giving it up. The Kid still did his own thing, and this wallet represented the coup de grace of their partnership. It meant that The Kid had consummated a transaction and then ripped the john off, ’cuz there are just no good deals left in The City.
When I see the wallet I think of this and only this. I try to joke in my head, but I cannot smile. I see the kid reduced to a baby and wrapped in my wife’s tan arms: a bundle of joy, shock, and heartbreak. Is there a parent alive or dead who hasn’t been heartbroken?
The wallet now is the source of the evil, clear evidence that Eddy knows exactly what this kid is doing and is an accessory. Eddy takes this confession in his hand like a ticket at a deli. I cannot decide if Eddy is magnificently in tune to his hustle or just facile as cardboard.
We join the heavy flow of traffic, heading toward the inevitable. There is no point in talking business in front of these strangers, so the three of us keep quiet. Eddy gives me commiserating glances as we squeeze on the crowded train, reminding me of Pop again. Old and red faced, Pop would raise his eyebrow and shrug like that with me, often reduced to the basics of interaction, like we spoke different languages.
The crowd thins before we leave Manhattan. We get off at the Clark Street station, stepping into the open Brooklyn air beneath the old sign for Hotel St. George. Nothing tastes different about the air, but I’m aware of it. I’m breaking an old promise I made my father by coming here. I didn’t want to see him in Brooklyn, with his Bensonhurst lowlifes and me trying to be a cop. I wonder what borders of mine my wife’s unborn bundle will cross. The Kid looks around, stark baby-blue eyes restless and pissed.
“Who’s this guy, anyway?” he asks, gesturing to me.
“That’s Ron.”
“Hi,” I say.
“Detective Ron?” says The Kid, being smart.
“As far as you’re concerned,” says Eddy, “yeah, he’s a fuckin’ detective.” Eddy clears his throat with a thick, nasty hack. Then, as if his throbbing throat reminds him, he lights a cigarette.
“You want one?” he asks me, already putting his pack of Marlboro menthols away. It is a running joke between us. I don’t smoke. He offers anyway, hoping someone will join him in being self-destructive.
“Yeah,” I say.
“You serious?”
“Yeah. Calm my nerves a bit. I got to act like you anyway, right?”
Smiling, his old movie star dimple like a crater in his cheek, Eddy takes his pack back out, and looks inside. He shakes it. Then reaches in, and gives me one, a bit bent. Then he throws out the pack, and motions toward me with his lighter.
“Wait,” I say. “Your lucky?”
When he opens a new pack, Eddy always flips the first cigarette upside down, and saves it for last, his “lucky.”
“It’s no problem,” says Eddy. “It’s lucky. So maybe you won’t get addicted.”
He lights it. The minty smoke burns down my throat, and bites my lungs. I cough.
“Damn,” I say. “What you smoke these for? Things have teeth.”
The smoke clears way for more to come. The feeling is old and familiar. Pop smoked cigars, so I smoked cigarettes.
“You got a preference?”
“Used to smoke regular cigarettes,” I say. “Parliaments.”
“Heh. Pansy ass.”
We keep walking, following The Kid’s little sinister swagger.
“When you were a cop, you ever want to be a detective?” he asks me.
“Sure,” I say, thinking. “But I most likely woulda gone upstate, you know? Been a trooper. Easy work, man. Good money.”
“Heh. No angle in a fugazi state trooper, though, I’ll tell you that. Looks like you got to settle for a detective.”
“A detective’s good,” I say. “Just never thought I’d score good on the test.”
“You scored fine on my test, heh.”
I repeat this to myself: I am a laid-off cop. I still have my shield. That is why Eddy wants to work with me. He needs identification. I am bitter about being laid-off. I repeat this to myself.
We reach Pineapple Street. The neighborhood is a residential haven, with grand old architecture in muted red and earth tones. No home is higher than four stories on the tree-lined blocks, with ceremonial staircases, ornate banisters, and columned entrances. The doors and windows are huge, dark chandeliers dangling within, and brick fills in the rest of the expanding block.
“Let’s go check out the promenade,” suggests Eddy.
The Kid rolls his eyes. I agree, I want to get this over with, but Eddy is already on his way. Over his shoulder, I see Manhattan. From a distance, the towering shapes and rectangles look like an immaculate geometric drawing, a conception impossible to build. Then the murky gray water comes into view, the moat separating the boroughs from The City, as it’s simply referred to by those who don’t call it home.
The water reminds me of Pier 4 Bush, the day my father took me to learn his routine. Looking out at the mercury water and stacks of identically shaped, multicolored crates, Pop introduced me to what seemed like half the ILA Union. Augie, the plan clerk who told what crates wouldn’t be missed; Patty, the dock boss who told the checkers where to carry them; Eddie, the checker who took the crates off to a truck; and Ernie, the rounds man who was on the job twenty-three years without making one arrest. Then Pop and Ernie collected on some
gambling debts. Nobody got violent around me, least of all Pop, whose hands had already begun to shake and couldn’t intimidate a child—he approached the dockworkers, as they would say, with two feet in one shoe. That day he told me I had a choice about whether I wanted to follow in his footsteps. As far as he was concerned, I chose wrong.
Now look at me. He’d be real proud.
The Kid leans over the banister, dangling a ball of spit at his lips and letting it fall below. I want to discipline him, smack him around. Not that my father ever laid a hand on me, though I know he wanted to. Couldn’t ever bring himself to do it, no matter what instance of open defiance.
Looking on the water, Eddy takes out a small bottle of Scotch and takes a sip, offering it to me, his blue hands shaking. I glance around.
“What’re ya looking fer? We’re the law,” he says.
“You think we seem like cops if we smell like liquor?”
“Like a crooked cop, yeah. Fuck, they smellin’ yer breath fer anyway?”
I sip it.
“My pop,” I tell Eddy, the swallow stiff in my throat, ahh, “was a Scotch man. He worked on a dock. Longshoreman. Worked by the water every day.”
“Yeah? How’d he do?”
“Did okay. Had to hustle, though.”
I drink again from the gold liquor and it drops to my stomach like a warm dagger.
“Longshoreman makes good money now,” says Eddy.
“Yeah. Now.”
The Statue of Liberty stands at the end of the island like Manhattan’s toy. Tuesday is a bright, lazy day for some people; bachelors walking their dogs, mothers or nannies pushing strollers, and ghetto teens making out in big coats. It’s difficult to look at The City and see Eddy’s city. I can imagine some crimes more than others. I see professionals and I naturally imagine their drug habits, and the violence that brings them what they need. For every person, there is a logical shadow. For every BlackBerry-carrying, Bluetooth wireless talking professional, there is a messenger-bag middleman, bringing him goodies from some well connected, nickel-plate Ruger-carrying mover-shaker. What scares me about Eddy is how he sees the shadow side of sexuality. For every flower-buying, wife-fucking father, there’s a child-buying, prepubescent-molesting deviant. It bothers me. I try not to be naive about things, but it bothers me. Drugs and violence are tolerable, but touching children is just another animal.