The Crossroads

by F. P. Lione

  I was still looking at the blood test report. If the driver of the Suburban goes to trial and his lawyer gets a list of this man’s personal property, I’m sure they’ll try to work it into the defense. I could hear the defense attorney telling the jury the man was HIV positive and his client saved him from dying a horrible death.

  Now I had to let the sergeant know and get an exposure number in case down the line something comes up with me. I wasn’t worried. I’m not HIV positive and I had gloves on the whole time, but everything is procedure.

  Fiore was reading the lab report with his head tilted when I asked, “Joe, do you think this guy went to hell?” That’s another new thing for me, wondering what happens to someone when they die.

  “I have no idea.” He looked surprised by my question. “Why would you ask that?”

  “Because he’s gay,” I pointed out.

  “So?”

  “Isn’t being gay a sin?” I asked, maybe a little sarcastically. “A lot of things are sin, Tony. People don’t go to hell for being gay, or killing someone, or anything else that’s a sin. They go to hell for denying Jesus. If you believe in Jesus and repent and ask for His forgiveness, He forgives your sin. It says in the Bible in 1 John 1:9, ‘If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.’ He cleanses us, and that’s what keeps us out of hell.”

  I cut him off. “But I thought homosexuality is a mortal sin.”

  He chuckled. “What’s a mortal sin?”

  “A mortal sin will send you to hell,” I said.

  He looked confused, so I continued, “It’s not like a venial sin.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said.

  “A venial sin is like a white lie,” I explained.

  “A white lie?” He smirked. “I didn’t realize lies had colors.”

  “A white lie isn’t a bad lie. It’s a little lie, like a lie you have to tell,” I said.

  “A lie is a lie, Tony, big or little,” he said seriously.

  “You’re misunderstanding what I’m saying.” I thought a minute. “When Donna had the baby, and she still had a couple of pounds on from the birth and asked you ‘Do I look fat?’ what did you tell her? Didn’t you say no?”

  He rubbed the back of his neck and seemed to be thinking before he said, “I didn’t think she looked fat. I thought she looked beautiful, and I told her that. I don’t think she asked me if she looked fat. Are you saying my wife is fat?” He said it sharply, but I saw a little twitch of a smile.

  I held up my hands, ignoring his question about Donna being fat. She’s great, but a little too chunky for my taste. “What about this, let’s say you’re in court testifying about a perp you observe doing a hand-to-hand transaction on 42nd Street and 8th Avenue. He sees you and bolts, and you follow him a block up and grab him on 7th Avenue. The defense attorney asks you if you ever lost sight of the perpetrator when you chased him, and you say no. Now, you know when he turned the corner of 7th Avenue you were still behind him, so for a split second he’s out of your sight, but the lawyer is gonna try and beat you up and make it look like you were chasing the wrong guy. Even though it’s the same guy in the same clothes with the same crack on him.”

  “If he turned the corner, I’d say he turned the corner,” Fiore said.

  “And then he gets off because you say that?” I said, getting irritated. “You know he’s guilty, and the lawyer is gonna say you had the wrong guy ’cause you lost sight of him!”

  “Whether or not he’s guilty isn’t my problem, making sure I tell the truth is my problem,” he said calmly. “I would say that I still had a positive ID after coming around the corner.”

  “It’s a white lie, Joe. It doesn’t hurt anyone, and if we don’t lie a little, he’s gonna walk away.”

  He came a little closer and looked me in the face and said, “Tony, the Bible is very clear on this. It’s not acceptable. In fact, if you take a look at Proverbs chapter 6, it says there are six things that the Lord hates, and seven are an abomination to him. The first thing he hates is a proud look, but the second is a lying tongue. Don’t kid yourself here.” He was moving his index finger back and forth to punctuate. “There are no lies that are okay with God. There is never a time that you have to lie, and don’t think you can ever justify one, because you can’t. He hates it, and you don’t want to be doing what God hates,” he finished.

  “So you’re telling me you never told a lie?” I said skeptically, although with Fiore it was probably possible.

  “No, I’ve lied plenty of times. But I do my best not to, and if I catch myself telling a lie, I go back to the person I told it to and tell them I lied,” he said. “I also repent to God.”

  I wasn’t gonna argue with that, ’cause it was true. I’ve heard him say something and then back up and clarify something if he didn’t say it right. I never thought about him not stretching the truth a little while testifying—everybody does it. It was probably a good thing that all cops didn’t think like Fiore, no one would ever go to jail.

  “Do you understand that when Jesus went to the cross, he was the sacrifice for all sin? There wasn’t any sin that his blood didn’t cover,” he said.

  “But I thought some sins were worse than others,” I said.

  “In the context that they do more damage, yes, but the price he paid is still the same. It says in Romans 3:23 ‘for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,’ it doesn’t say that some sins are worse than others, but that we’ve all sinned,” he said.

  I digested that. It’s different than what I was taught. I thought that as long as you were a good person, you wouldn’t go to hell. I actually thought as long as my intentions were good, even if I sinned, I wasn’t sinning. It makes more sense the way Joe describes it, because if Jesus’s death on the cross was only for the good people, then we could earn our way into heaven and we wouldn’t need God.

  Joe stayed with the DOA’s property while I went into the back to type up my voucher. The Anti-Crime room was empty, so I went in and used their typewriter.

  The room was about twenty feet long and twelve feet wide. The crime sergeant’s desk is by the gated window, and on either side of the room two desks face each other. One set Anti-Crime uses, and the other set is for Narcotics.

  A gray metal cabinet with double doors holds radios, and there’s a utility table with a microwave and a minifridge. Next to the fridge is a row of gym-sized lockers the plainclothes units use. They keep their different-colored wristbands for the color of the day, the shield holders for around their necks, fanny packs, all the stuff they don’t want to keep downstairs in their regular lockers.

  The room already stunk of smoke, so I lit a cigarette and grabbed a half-full bottle of Coke with butts floating in it as an ashtray. I index-finger typed the voucher, made a copy, and gave the original to the FTU Sergeant.

  We had a 4:00 meal, and Joe went down to the deli on 9th Avenue to get us some sandwiches. By now I was getting hungry and could use a nap. He came back with two oversized egg-roll-looking things sliced on an angle with the wax paper still on them and a couple of bottles of water.

  “What is this?” I said, eyeing the food suspiciously.

  “They’re wraps. Which do you want, the veggie or the grilled chicken?” He saw me staring at him and said, “What?”

  “Veggie wraps?” I shook my head. “What, are we on a diet? What am I supposed to do with this?” I turned it around to look at the other side, and it still looked like a big egg roll. “Since when are we eating girlie food? I can’t eat this stuff.” I shuddered.

  “Gimme the veggie, you eat the chicken, I don’t want your chest hair falling off,” Fiore said as he grabbed the veggie thing and swallowed it in four bites. “Eat it, it’s good for you,” he said.

  I ate the chicken, surprised at how good it tasted. It had a white dressing; I think it was Caesar with strips of grilled chicken and romaine lettuce.
/>   “Not bad, eh?” he asked.

  “Bird food,” I countered.

  We washed it down with the bottles of water. Joe passed out on one of the cushioned plywood benches in the lounge. I sat up for a little while, thinking about Michele. I swung back and forth with a sick feeling in my stomach from missing her and wanting to choke her for blowing me off.

  I finally fell asleep for about five minutes when I heard Fiore’s watch alarm go off at 5:00, and we went back out on patrol.

  7

  When we went back outside, the night sky was still black, and the temperature had dropped. The wind was blowing down from the north, adding to the chill factor. The paper said we were going down into the single digits tonight, and my nose hairs froze as soon as I walked outside. The air was so cold it almost took my breath away, and my eyes started to tear by the time we got to the RMP.

  It took a while for the car to heat up, so I let it idle on the corner while I went into a bagel store on 9th Avenue. The first morning’s bagels were coming out, and I grabbed an everything bagel, nice and fresh with butter. I got Fiore a pumpernickel with walnut raisin cream cheese to go with his coffee. I’d already read the early edition of the Post, so I grabbed the Daily News and I pulled into a small parking lot on 37th Street to eat our breakfast.

  The bagel was still warm, and the melted butter pooled in the wax wrapping paper. I dipped the bagel into the melted butter as I ate it, alternating with sips of coffee. I finished the bagel and opened my window so I could smoke a cigarette. Fiore doesn’t smoke, so I kept my left arm out the window until my fingers started getting numb.

  I’ve been trying to quit for a couple of months now, and every day I make and break my promise to myself that this will be my day to quit. I’ve tried smoking ultralight cigarettes, but there’s not enough nicotine in them and I smoke twice as many. I banged it down to Marlboro lights, and that was a little better. I tried the patch, but I kept grubbing cigarettes and smoking with the patch on. Rooney said that could kill me, so I nixed the patch. I switched brands, but I kept grubbing cigarettes because I couldn’t stand anything but Marlboros.

  Rooney told me he only smokes every two hours. He said he’s down to less than half a pack, and eventually he’ll go to three hours in between, then four, until he quits. I tried to wait two hours, but then I smoked three cigarettes after the first two hours were up. Cigarettes are so expensive in New York, and each time they raise the price, everyone says they’re gonna quit. So far it hasn’t worked for me; I’m still puffing away.

  As I blew on my fingers to warm them up and get the blood circulating again, Fiore said, “I’m amazed at how much a smoker will go through just to have a cigarette. You’re freezing, but you still continue to smoke, not to mention all the other stuff smoking does to you.”

  He was quiet for a couple of minutes, scanning the Daily News. “We’re getting a storm, a nor’easter, on Friday,” he said as he read.

  “Great, right in time for New Year’s.” I could just picture trying to clean up Times Square for the ball drop.

  “So what happened at your grandmother’s?” Fiore asked. “You started to tell me before we got the DOA.”

  I sighed, “Joe, you need to understand how my family is. They’re the old-fashioned Italians, they’re set in their ways,” I explained.

  “Your grandmother’s the only old one, right?”

  “Yeah,” I said cautiously.

  “So what’s the deal with everyone else? From what Michele said, it was a brawl,” he said.

  “Actually it really started cooking when she left.” I laughed at the thought of Michele seeing the real deal.

  “If it’s that bad, why do you still go there?” he asked.

  “They’re my family,” I said, as if that explained everything.

  A call came over the radio, it was now 5:20. Central read off the job code. “South David, we have a 54 at 320 West 30th Street, apartment 3D as in dog. A male,” she hesitated, “is, uh, puking blood.”

  “Puking blood?” Fiore responded.

  She hesitated again and said, “That’s what it says.”

  I shrugged at Joe. “10-4,” Fiore responded.

  We pulled the RMP in front of the building, and Fiore radioed back 84, on the scene. It was a tan brick building, not Park Avenue, but not bad. A camera was anchored to the right corner above the doors. The doors were locked, but the buzzer sounded just as we pulled on them. We stepped into a small entranceway, and there was another set of glass doors in front of us. Just inside the lobby next to the doors was a desk with a security guard seated behind it.

  The guard was a clean-cut male, black, midtwenties. He was friendly enough, dressed in a white shirt with the security logo on his left sleeve, and blue pants.

  “Is everything alright?” he asked.

  “How you doing, guy?” Joe shook his hand.

  He nodded. “What’s up?”

  “We got a call for an aided up in 3D, supposedly some guy is throwing up blood,” Fiore explained.

  He showed us to the elevator, and we took it to the third floor. Apartment D was at the end of the hall. I tapped my nightstick on the gray metal door with a peephole under the stick-on 3D letters. Fiore and I stood on either side of the doorframe and heard someone approach the door. I knew he was looking through the peephole at us, but he still said, “Who is it?”

  “Police,” I said. “We got a call someone is throwing up blood.”

  “Everything’s okay,” a muffled voice said and started coughing. I heard a dimmer voice say, “Open the door.”

  “I said I’m fine,” the first voice said, a little more forcefully before going off into a spasm of coughs.

  I tapped the door a little louder this time and said, “Come on, let us in. We have to make sure everything’s okay.”

  I heard the clink of bottles, while at the same time the sound of the chain sliding and the dead bolt unlocking. Someone said, “Why did you have to call them?”

  The door was opened by a dopey-looking white male about thirty years old. He was about five foot nine with a medium build, brown hair in need of a cut, brown eyes, and a mustache. He was dressed casually in black jeans and a beige sweater. He let us in, gesturing us into the living room.

  The smell of stale beer, cigarettes, and something sour hit us as we walked in. The apartment was old, with high ceilings and the old pulley windows that looked painted shut. There was no real furniture, just a couple of folding chairs around a big wooden spool, the kind that’s used to hold cable wire.

  The other guy, who I guessed was the puker, was cleaning up beer bottles and red plastic cups off the wire spool, which also held an overflowing ashtray and two boxes of Marlboros. He was a chalky-looking white male in his early thirties, wearing worn, tattered jeans, no shoes, and a faded black T-shirt with a red plaid flannel shirt over it. He had shaggy blond hair, and his eyes were light green with dark circles under them.

  Next to the spool table was a medium-sized black waste-basket half full of liquid.

  “Who called us?” Fiore asked.

  “I did,” Dopey said as the other guy brought the beer bottles into the kitchen. I could hear them clanking as he threw them in the garbage.

  “Who are you?” Fiore said.

  “I’m his friend,” he answered.

  “What’s the problem here?” I interjected.

  “He’s puking blood, and he won’t stop drinking.” He sounded upset as he pointed to the basket. I looked into the basket and realized the liquid in it was blood.

  “That’s nasty,” I said.

  “It’s no big deal,” the puker said as he came back over to us. “I don’t know why he had to call you. I’m not going to the hospital.” He sounded annoyed, and it annoyed me that they were talking to us about each other like they weren’t both in the room. As he got closer, I could see a couple of days’ worth of stubble on his face. It was obvious he hadn’t showered; his hair was greasy and he smelled sour, like sweat,
alcohol, and vomit. There were stains on his T-shirt, some white, others were wet, turning the shirt darker.

  “This isn’t the first time he’s done this,” the friend said. “He knows he can’t drink anymore or this will happen.”

  Fiore walked back toward the front door and told Central we’re gonna need EMS. “They’re three minutes out,” he said quietly to me, and I said, “Joe, if he doesn’t want to go to the hospital, let his friend deal with him.”

  Fiore shook his head. “No, let EMS take a look at him first.” The puker got a little loud now and said, “I’m fine, why do you have to worry all the time—” he started coughing and retching. He walked toward the basket and barfed out a stream of bright red blood.

  His friend yelled, “If you don’t stop, you’re gonna die!”

  I stepped back so I wouldn’t get any on me and said, “Buddy, you got problems.”

  We heard a knock on the door a few minutes later, and Fiore opened it to a couple of EMS workers we’ve met before. These two had been around a while, they had that worn-out look they get after they’ve had more than five years under their belt. One was a female, heavyset with short dark hair. The other was taller and thinner, with balding blond hair and a mustache.

  “What’s going on?” the female asked.

  “He’s puking blood in the bucket,” I said. I had my back to the guys, so I tipped an invisible glass to my mouth to let her know he was a boozer.

  “How long has he been vomiting?” she asked.

  “A couple of hours,” the friend said, hovering nearby and looking worried.

  “This isn’t the first time you’ve done this,” the other EMS guy said. “How long have you had a problem with your stomach?”

  “A couple of years. It’s only when I drink.”

  Was it me?

  “Hey, Einstein,” I said. “Maybe you should stop drinking before you kill yourself.”

  “Ah come on. I just ran out of pills for my stomach. I got ulcers,” he said, dismissing me.

  The female EMS worker was getting the pertinent info from the friend, address, telephone number, date of birth, and information in case we needed to contact someone. Fiore was with her, writing down all the information we needed for the aided card. The male EMS worker was taking his vital signs and said, “We’re going to have to take him to Claires,” meaning St. Claires/Roosevelt Hospital.