Danni quickly stepped away from him and turned, hoisting her purse over her shoulder where he’d touched her. “Jason has a birthday party to go to tomorrow at noon.”
“No he doesn’t, I was going to take them to the movies.”
“I already told the kid’s parents you were coming!”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Dad?” Jason called out from the living room, “I really want to go.”
Vic sighed and said, “Okay.”
“And no drinking this weekend while you have them.”
Vic looked at her in disbelief, “Excuse me? Are you suddenly my mother?”
“I just don’t want you drinking around my children. I don’t think it sets a good example.”
“A couple beers isn’t drinking,” Vic said.
“I said no alcohol. Period.”
“And I said who the fuck are you to tell me how to behave?”
“Curse at me again, and I’ll take them home with me right now.”
He looked at her evenly and said, “I doubt that. Whoever you’re dressed up for would be disappointed, I bet.”
“Kids, get your coats on. We’re going home!” Danni announced.
Both children protested as she swooped into the living room and started picking up their jackets. “Daddy doesn’t want you to stay here tonight.”
“That is bullshit!” Vic shouted. “Get your hands off of the kids and get out.”
“If you’d rather drink than watch them, I don’t want them around you,” she said.
“I never said that! I never said I didn’t want them and I never said I’d rather drink.” He pointed at the door and said, “Go. Leave. Now. Go do whatever you planned on doing tonight, and leave us alone. They will be fine. We’re going to rent a movie, eat some pizza and play a board game.” He looked at his daughter and said, “Does that sound fun?”
Penelope smiled and nodded. “I want to stay,” she said.
Danni spun on him and stuck a finger in his face, “Don’t curse around my children. I won’t have it.”
“Okay,” he said. “Now would you please just get out?”
“The only reason I’m not taking them is because I already have plans,” she said.
“Better hurry up then. Don’t want to keep the lucky guy waiting.”
Danni hugged the kids and kissed them while Vic stood by the open door, holding it for her, waiting for her to leave. After she walked out, he shut it quickly and locked it. Both kids were sitting on the couch looking up at him silently. Vic forced a smile and said, “Who wants pizza?”
8
The clerk looked up at the older man standing outside the small window and said, “Can I help you sir?”
He tapped the glass and said, “Is this bulletproof?” He frowned at the wall surrounding the window and said, “The wall around it isn’t. What good is that? Somebody could just start shooting you through the wall. Makes no goddamn sense.”
The clerk put her finger on the red emergency button and said, “What can I do for you, sir?”
“I’m here to see your new detective, Frank O’Ryan.”
“And your name is?”
He smiled at her. “Frank O’Ryan.”
* * *
“Look, let’s just humor him for a few minutes, then make like we got a radio call or something.”
“What are you talking about?” Vic said. He put the car in park and looked around the shopping center. “Where’s he at, inside?”
“I’m serious, Vic. It’s always one thing after another with him. I don’t have time for it anymore.”
“He’s your dad,” Vic said. “Show some respect, you ungrateful goddamn heathen. How many years did he have on the job?”
Frank shrugged, “Thirty something.”
Vic whistled and shut his door. “Back then it was for real. They didn’t take any shit off people. It was strictly hats and bats, you know what I mean?”
“No, not really,” Frank said. “Listen, my dad spent his whole career pushing a black and white around. He never made sergeant, never went anywhere. He worked every holiday, every family gathering, every graduation. It’s nothing to brag about.”
“He put food on the table for you though,” Vic said.
“It was more like beer in the fridge,” Frank said.
Vic stared at him as they crossed the parking lot. “Did you play lacrosse in school?”
“What the hell kind of question is that?”
“It’s an inquiry about your former recreational sports activities. So did you? I bet you did. Out there frolicking with all your preppy friends running around with your baskets, playing catch.”
“Lacrosse is an incredibly rough sport, Vic. It takes more strength than baseball and is more dangerous than football.”
Vic nodded and said, “That must be why they let chicks play it.”
Bells rang on the glass of the pizza shop door as they opened it. The old man was waiting at a table for them with three drinks on the table. Frank looked at the straws inside the cups and said, “Dad, I told you not to put the straws in the cups for people. It’s not sanitary.” He yanked the straws out and winged them into the trashcan. He grabbed two new ones and tossed one at Vic. “Some people like their straws to not taste like your grubby fingers before they drink out of them.”
Mr. O’Ryan looked down at his cup and Vic leaned forward, “Was he always this big of a pussy?”
Frank held up his hands and said, “Hey! Not cool, man. Not cool.”
The old man chuckled, “Nah, he was always a good kid. Popular with the ladies. Captain of his lacrosse team.”
Vic spun to look at Frank, their faces just an inch away. “I knew it.”
“Shut up. Listen, dad,” Frank said, “We can’t stay. We’ve got to run down to the city to meet up with the FBI about a drug case.”
“Oh,” Mr. O’Ryan said. “That’s too bad. I was looking to hear how you were making out as a dick.”
“Detective,” Frank said.
“Sorry. We called them dicks.” He looked at Vic and said, “And they lived up to the name, too, I’ll tell you.”
Vic said, “Screw the FBI. They can wait.”
“You know what FBI stands for?” Mr. O’Ryan said. “Famous But Ineffective.”
Vic smiled and nodded to Frank, “That’s what I’m talking about. Old School. I love this guy.” He held up his hand and called out to the man behind the counter to make them a large pie. “So tell me about what it was like when you first came on.”
“My very first week on the job, we get a body dumped in the crick down by the old Watson factory. There’s three feet of water and this girl is stuck in the reeds and wrapped up in a tarp. So’s I get there and see my Chief standing there with these two guys in real fancy suits. They had the hats, the trench coats, the whole nine. My Chief says to me, ‘Detective So-and-so needs to go take a look at the body. Carry him acrost.’”
“Wait? On your back?”
Mr. O’Ryan nodded, “That’s right. I bent down and carried the first detective over, then I took him back and had to carry the next one.”
“No way,” Vic said.
“Hand to God.”
“I’d have dumped their asses in the creek halfway across.”
Mr. O’Ryan shrugged and said, “That ain’t how it was back then. We didn’t have none of the union protection you guys get now or nothing like that. The Chief said to do it, and that was it.”
“Unbelievable,” Vic said.
“It wasn’t so bad. I liked it better than driving a milk truck, that’s for sure. I was just a city kid. Getting a cop job in the burbs was a good gig.”
“How come you didn’t work in the city?”
Mr. O’Ryan shrugged and said, “Wrong color. Back then the mayor was making a push to put all the darkies in uniform.”
“Dad!” Frank said, looking around.
“Sorry, sorry,” Mr. O’Ryan said. “I meant the, you know, black
s or colored people, or whatever they call themselves now.”
“I bet you saw some crazy stuff. Back then you guys didn’t have all these cellphone cameras and internet garbage to worry about. It was just good old fashioned police work.”
“Yeah, that’s how it was,” Mr. O’Ryan said. “I was always good at telling when someone was lying to me. Frankie can tell you, I was hard to beat when he was growing up.”
“Nobody beat the Truth Rabbit,” Frank said.
Both Vic and Frank’s father locked eyes without speaking or moving. Finally, Mr. O’Ryan said, “That was just a goofy thing I used to say.”
Frank was busy watching the television mounted to the wall above them. “You sure that’s all?” Vic said to the old man.
A pause. “Yeah, just me being stupid.”
The food arrived. A steaming pizza on a large silver tray that forced the men to lean back from the table as the waiter set it down. “This looks good,” Frank said.
Mr. O’Ryan took a slice and folded it in two on his plate, watching it so carefully that he never once lifted his eyes to meet Vic’s stare. “So tell me what you boys are working on.”
Frank was busily gobbling up his first slice and trying to catch the grease leaking onto his chin with a napkin. He spoke, but it was with a mouthful of food. Vic said nothing.
* * *
“Your old man has some great stories, Frank.”
Frank shrugged, trying to dig a piece of pepperoni out of his back molars with his finger. He peeled his lips back in the visor’s mirror and said, “When you hear them a hundred times, they get kind of old.”
Vic checked to see that the highway was clear, eyes shifting repeatedly from the road to Frank’s face as he steered. “Hey, what was he saying about that one thing? The rabbit?”
“I dunno. You mean that rabid possum he shot?”
“No,” Vic said. Frank was now using his car keys to scrape between his molars. Completely oblivious. “The Honesty Rabbit or something?”
“The Truth Rabbit. That didn’t have anything to do with being a cop. It was what he called himself whenever he thought I was lying to him. He always said ‘Nobody lies to the Truth Rabbit and gets away with it. Son of a bitch, I got it,” Frank said, inspecting the string of meat between his fingers. “He was good at it too. That or I can’t lie for shit.”
Vic stayed quiet as he navigated the interstate, the large, towering skyscrapers of Center City looming closer. They drove past a State Trooper conducting a car stop. He was talking to the driver of a vehicle with his head down, the brim of his circular Smokey the Bear campaign hat nearly as wide as his shoulders. “PSP, the finest law enforcement agency in the Commonwealth. Just ask them, they’ll tell you,” Vic muttered.
“Big heads, little hats,” Frank said. The trooper looked up at them as they passed and Frank held up his middle finger through the window.
“Do you know why God invented the NYPD?”
“No, why?”
“So that New Jersey State Troopers could have heroes,” Vic said.
Both men laughed, and then Frank said, “Do you know why God invented our police department, Vic?”
“No,” Vic said.
“You really don’t know?”
“No, I really don’t know. Tell me.”
Frank turned to look back out of the window at the skyscrapers and bridges passing by. “Me either.”
* * *
They parked on the street outside of a shipyard as tractor trailers pulled up to the front gate only to be glared at by stern-faced port authority police officers. The stink of Diesel fuel filled the air. Vic pointed at a dilapidated brick building near the gate and said, “Come on. You got your badge?” Frank showed him his silver Patrolman badge and Vic frowned. “Where’s your gold shield?”
“I don’t have a gold shield. I’m not even a not-even-promoted detective yet.”
“Maybe someday, rookie. Maybe someday.”
Frank followed him toward a steel door with no handle. A tractor trailer rumbled past them, laying on the air brakes as it approached the gate. Vic banged the door with his fist and had his badge ready when the door opened. A large city cop wearing a t-shirt and blue jeans answered the door. He squinted at both badges and said, “How y’all feeling?”
“All right,” Vic said. He looked into the dark warehouse behind the officer and frowned, “Dez around?”
“He in the back with the rest of those clowns. Come on in.”
The warehouse was filled with hundreds of folding tables stacked on top of one another. “I thought this was an FBI operation,” Frank said. “What’s with the Philly cops?”
“It’s a taskforce. They take guys from all over. There’s only a handful of Feebs, but they fund it, so they run it.”
“Feebs?”
“It’s a term of affection,” Vic said. He came to a room in the back and rapped his knuckles on the doorframe. “Is this where the 4-H club is meeting?”
Several voices greeted him, and Vic waved for Frank to come inside. There were a half-dozen cops inside the room, dressed in baseball caps and t-shirts. There was one man in a suit. He immediately looked Frank over and said, “Who’s the new guy?”
“This is Frank O’Ryan,” Vic said. “He’s the hero who shot the mope that killed one of our guys. Frank took a round in the leg and he’s working with me while he recovers. Hopefully longer.”
The rest of the men nodded and murmured their approval. One of the cops in the back said, “Where the white girl at?”
The man in the suit’s head snapped at him. His eyes flared, but he caught himself before he spoke. “Yeah,” he said, turning to Vic. “How is Aprille?”
“Haven’t seen her, Dez. How’s your wife and kids doing?”
For a moment, no one in the room moved or spoke. Dez cracked a thin smile and said, “They’re good, thanks. So now that we’ve made do with the pleasantries, why don’t you tell us how you two wound up with a real life drug dealer out there in the boonies?”
* * *
One of the officers passed around flyers and said, “Here’s your boy. Paris Deimos, black male, twenty-two years old. He’s got two priors for delivery of controlled substances.”
Vic looked down at the color photograph in his hands of a handsome dark-skinned male with braided hair. “Any weapons offenses?”
“He shot two people when he was sixteen. Did six months for Agg Assault.”
“We suspect him in several other homicides,” Dez said.
“Our boy says he’s seen Paris shoot people down here,” Vic said.
“That just confirms he’s a high-priority target. What’s the status of your CI?”
“What’s a CI?” Frank said.
There were a few chuckles and Vic shot a glance back at Frank with his eyes narrowed. Dez held up his hand, “Easy. He’s new to all this. A CI is a Confidential Informant. Is the local asset signed up yet?”
“No,” Vic said. “Not exactly.”
“Why?”
“I’m letting him sweat a little. We’ll get better cooperation out of him that way.”
Dez nodded, “Okay. Just make sure you get him on board soon. We don’t want to miss this chance. Keep me posted.”
The officers got up from their seats and Frank leaned close to Vic to whisper, “I thought Billy wanted to call the FBI.”
“Shut up,” Vic whispered. He looked at Dez and said, “Hey, I need a minute.”
The two men went into the corner, talking in low tones with their backs turned to everyone else. Frank shook hands with the other cops who introduced themselves and offered their hands as they walked past him. Frank saw Vic mouth the words Truth Rabbit and Dez’s eyes fixed on Frank, suddenly interested.
* * *
Everyone filtered out of the building toward their assorted vehicles. Blacked out Chryslers with chrome rims and beat up pickup trucks that wheezed smoke. Dez locked the door behind them and held up his keys to autostart a brand new Aud
i parked near the building. As he walked up to Frank, he pulled out his phone and said, “Give me your number. I want us all to be able to stay in touch.”
Frank rattled off the digits as Dez punched them into his keypad and buzzed him back. “Now you’ve got mine too,” Dez said. “Give me a shout if you need anything. This job is all about connections, Frank. It’s knowing who to call when you don’t know where to turn. Vic used to be like that, but now he’s out there in the wilderness somewhere.”
Vic came up to stand at his side as they both watched Dez get into his car and drive off. “Promise me something,” Vic said. “If he tries to sleep with you, say no.”
“Okay,” Frank said. “It shouldn’t be that hard. He’s not my type.”
Vic stepped into the street, timing the passing of a large truck, “That’s what they all say. Next thing you know, I’m losing another partner.”
Frank hurried behind him, “Does that mean I’m your partner now?”
“Just get in the car.” Vic reached for his keys and felt his pocket buzz. He frowned as he read the name on the screen and held the phone up to his ear. “Go ahead, Chief. We’re in Philly, meeting with the FBI. Yes it pertains to something in our town. I’ll explain later.” He stopped talking and listened for a moment. “Oh,” he said. “Okay. We’ll get right there.”
They pulled back onto the highway and Vic said, “Did you ever meet Joe Hector’s step-dad, Al Charon?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“He’s dead.”
* * *
Officer Iolaus was waiting by the apartment’s front door holding a yellow legal pad. He smiled when he saw Vic and Frank coming up the stairs. “Thank God, now I can get the hell out of here.”
A foul-tinged whiff of air blew from under the closed door and Frank recoiled. Vic put his hands on his hips, “How bad is it?”
Iolaus shrugged and said, “No clue. I got here, saw him swinging, and shut the door. That’s why we have you guys.”
“Who found him?”
“Maintenance. They went in to change the batteries on the smoke detectors and saw him hanging there and called 911. The coroner’s been notified. Should be here in twenty minutes.” Iolaus shook his head sadly and said, “Poor bastard. Him and Heck were always tight. I guess he couldn’t take it.”
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