What You Break

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  I stopped, not wanting to overplay my hand. If this didn’t convince him, nothing would.

  “And you, Gus Murphy, would you still offer your services to me if I should need them?” he asked after a moment of quiet consideration. “I might ask for something that would displease you.”

  “I won’t kill anyone for you, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  He snorted at that. “You would be surprised at what you would do. Still, I have others for that. There are distasteful things short of killing.”

  “I won’t take back my offer now.”

  He smiled, stood, and offered me his hand. His shake was firm and he stared me in the eye much as Spears had done weeks ago. Only when this little man stared into my eyes it was as if a cold wind blew through the cabin.

  “I will call on you one day, Gus. Of that you can be sure. And when I do, do not disappoint me. No one will be able to talk me out of sparing you and Slava if you disappoint me. But we will not talk of that today. Today you should celebrate with your friend whose life you have saved.” The little man wagged his finger at me. “Keep an eye on the splinter for me. As you say, I may need him.”

  “How will you convince you friends that Slava has been—”

  He laughed, that cold wind blowing through the cabin again. “Do not concern yourself with such things. That is what I have Lagunov for. Now, Gus, please have a safe ride back to the diner parking lot. I don’t suspect there will be a need for you to be blindfolded, as we have made our pact.”

  I suppose I should have been thrilled. Relieved, at the very least. Instead I felt as if I had just signed a stranger’s death warrant and made a deal I would someday fiercely regret.

  Epilogue

  (MID-MAY, WEDNESDAY MORNING)

  Bill Kilkenny, Asher Wilkes, Lara’s sister Niki, and I sat around the mirror-polished tiger-maple table in the conference room at Barson, Mckee, Grimm & Mitchell PC. We were there to watch Micah Spears sign the papers establishing the trust for Lara’s daughter, Bella. Spears had been out of the hospital less than a week and still looked considerably worse for wear. He had lost more than two fingers and a few teeth that Saturday afternoon at Gyron. He had lost the myth of his own immortality.

  We all do, somewhere along the line, lose our sense that we will somehow escape what is waiting for us at the other end of the tunnel. I lost mine long before John died. You can’t be a street cop, not even one in a relatively quiet sector like mine had been, and escape the sound of the ticking clock. I had seen so much death in its varied forms, innocent and otherwise, from car accidents, heart attacks, drownings, train wrecks, and plane crashes, to stabbings, suicides, shootings, bombings . . . It was a long list. We all come into the world in pretty much the same way, yet there are many, many ways to leave it. And leave it we will, inevitably and alone. I guess that some people can keep the myth going no matter what. But all walls crumble, no matter how mighty or thick, even the ones monsters build around their bloody transgressions. I no longer believed in judgment day. I’m not sure I ever really did. The former Arnold Mason probably hadn’t believed in it either. Yet from the look of him across the table, he did now.

  After the papers were signed, Lara’s sister left, gently kissing Spears on the cheek and hugging me. She didn’t ask a lot of questions about who and why and how. Those questions aren’t as important to some people as to others. All she knew was that Spears and I had helped find the men who had brutalized and murdered her big sister and left her the guardian of a twenty-one-year-old autistic niece. All she knew was that there was a man with money who was going to make her burden much easier and that she was thankful for it.

  After she left the room, Asher asked Erin Mitchell, Spears’s attorney, if she could give us a few moments alone together. She left without a word and when he was sure she was gone, Asher spoke.

  “You are both in the clear,” he said, staring directly at Spears and me. “The Suffolk DA assures me he has no intention of pressing charges of any kind against either one of you. But from where I stand I have to say that was an awfully stupid and risky thing you gentlemen did.”

  I smiled and muttered, “That seems to be the consensus.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing, Asher. Sorry.”

  Of the assembled, only I knew the whole story. Spears’s recollections of that day were lost to him in a swirling haze of pain, blood loss, and concussion.

  “You do realize,” Asher continued, “that you might have tainted important evidence or completely ruined a long-term investigation with your cockamamie stunt. If I was the DA, I’m not so sure I would be as forgiving.”

  I said, “Maybe it helps that there was no long-term investigation and two homicides were cleared up in the process. Not to mention that we shut down the biggest ghost-gun operation in the history of the country. And I handed the ATF and FBI leads to the distribution of the guns by giving them all the tag numbers of the cars and vans that had been at Gyron that day.”

  Asher still didn’t like it. He was a great defense lawyer, but he had played for the other team, too. That’s what made him so good. He still thought like a prosecutor, still understood their sides of things. Why these particular half-truths seemed to bother him more than the ones I’d told Narvaez and Dwyer or the ones his other clients rattled off as easily as they breathed, I couldn’t say.

  “How about the part where you could have been killed? If that other gang hadn’t so very conveniently showed up and taken out Ryan and the Asesinos, we wouldn’t be sitting here today. And just for the record, I don’t buy that other gang bullshit for a second.”

  After the lecture, Asher left. He had done me the service of making sure the trust was set up properly and funded fully. I didn’t trust Spears as far as I could throw him and I needed Asher to ensure Spears and his lawyers hadn’t tried to pull a fast one.

  Al Roussis, Charlie Prince, and his asshole partner Palumbo were pleased. Closed cases make for very happy detectives. Once I tipped Al Roussis off that Alejo had been one of the men to murder Lara, he had no trouble finding the other two men who had been part of her execution. They had left a lot of damning evidence behind. And when I told Charlie that Salazar had been the right man all along and why he had done Linh Trang, he seemed pleased and sad all at once. Alvaro Peña, the SCPD’s gang expert, was surprisingly less pleased than I thought he would have been.

  “Yeah, Gus, it’s great you stopped these guys, but they put a lot of weapons on the street already. And the thing is with gangs, whether it’s drugs or guns, protection or putang, when they find a cash machine that works, they keep going back. These factories are going to start showing up all over the place. Something else, too. Gangs are copycats. What works for one, works for all.”

  I didn’t want to think about that.

  Bill had come to visit me in the hospital once he made sure Spears would live. And when he did, he said he felt obliged to explain some things to me. The look on his face hinted that it was best to simply sit back and listen.

  “I did a stint as Padre in a military prison in Saigon before I rotated back to the States. It was there I met Arnold Mason. He was cold as ice even then, a man with his own windchill. During my first visits he told me to fuck off, but one night he sent word for me to come pay him a call. I did as he asked, Gus, and came to sit with him. He told me he wasn’t of the Catholic faith but that he wished to confess his sins to me. What did it matter to me if he wasn’t a Catholic? I had lost my own faith by then. He could have been a pagan for all I cared at that point. I would have heard his confession.

  “When we had dispensed with the formalities, he proceeded to describe in the most horrid, lurid detail the acts for which he and his friends were to be tried. After a few months in country, it was hard to shock me. And after I had been forced to kill, I thought there wasn’t a blessed thing in the universe which could have shaken me. That I was immune.
” Bill laughed at himself. “The lack of humility and stupidity of that thought, the hubris!

  “The things he described to me that night in his cell . . . I have never been able to rid myself of them. It’s as if they were tattooed into my brain. I think I’ll sooner forget my name in my dotage than his words. I can see the images now as I saw them then. I was disgusted, nauseated, furious, especially when he seemed to grow excited in his retelling. Yet there I sat, listening, taking it in as I had been trained and taught to do, as I had done for many others who had come to seek me out. And inexplicably, what I felt for him was sorrow and forgiveness. There was rage, but mostly sorrow and forgiveness. That’s how I knew that although I had lost my faith, it would not escape me forever. I knew that even if Jesus had seemed to abandon me, that He was there somewhere and I would find my way back to Him or He to me. So you see, Gus, it was this monster who kept me from walking away from the church all those years ago. If we had never crossed paths, Arnold Mason and myself, I don’t know that I would have survived long enough to have my faith restored.

  “When he had his twist of good fortune and relocated to the island, I was easy enough to find when he came looking. I believe in some way he takes a strange comfort in my knowing who he is under that well-scrubbed and nattily dressed façade of his. I don’t pretend to understand it. I don’t pretend to understand him, but I owe him a debt of faith. But what concerns me now is our friendship, Gus. Can you forgive me for getting you involved in this?” Bill asked, bowing his head.

  “Forget it, Bill. There’s nothing to forgive.”

  I left it at that. I didn’t ask if Bill had given absolution to Arnold Mason that night in a dark cell in Saigon. I didn’t want to know. There were many things I didn’t want to know about or think about, but I knew how that sentiment went with the universe. But just as Spears found an odd comfort in Bill knowing the full extent of his depravity, I took a similar comfort in the indifference of the universe to my whims and wishes.

  Before leaving the law offices and heading to the airport, I told Spears that the only money I wanted from him was a check to cover the bill for Maggie’s security and a few thousand bucks for my time. I told him to donate all the money he had originally offered me to a medical research program of his choosing in Linh Trang’s name. Spears didn’t argue. He didn’t thank me, either. It was as it should have been. When I left that room, I didn’t look back. I never wanted to see the monster, now broken and frail, ever again.

  Bill stopped me in the hallway. “What was that shite about in there, Gus? What about the foundation in your boy’s name?”

  “Doc Rosen is always after me about facing the reality of things and moving on. The reality is that John is dead, Bill. He’s gone and I have to let go of all the ways I can make myself pretend that he’s not. A foundation might keep his name alive, but that wouldn’t bring him back to his mom and me. Let the money work to keep other kids alive.”

  Bill opened his mouth to say something, but about-faced and went back into the room with Spears.

  I had a one o’clock flight to Chicago out of LaGuardia. Maggie’s play had been running there for a week and had gotten pretty good reviews. Two of the reviews had mentioned her performance in particular. We had worked things out as well as two people could work things out over the phone, nine hundred miles apart. I wouldn’t know if we had really healed the wounds until we saw each other, held each other, and kissed. When we kissed, I would know. She would know. We would move on from there. All I knew was that I was so excited I could barely sit still for imagining the feel and taste of her, imagining what it would feel like just to have her smile at me again.

  I was in the airport men’s room when it happened. I found myself staring into the mirror as if staring into the distance and losing myself in my own reflection. Things were almost back to normal. My friend Slava was back at work and safe. I was back at work, driving businessmen and women to and from the airport to the train station to the hotel. Some of them chatted with me or at me. Most were silent in their discontent. In the last few weeks, no one who had gotten on or off my van had piqued my interest or raised my suspicions. And now, if I could make amends with Magdalena, the world would be right again. The mirror called bullshit on that.

  Nothing was the same or would it ever be right, not in the way it had been right or normal as before. I was a different man from who I had been only a month ago. I had always considered myself a good man. I think most other people thought that of me, too. It is easy, I realized, to be good when you go untested or, like when I was on the job, you take the same tests over and over again. Since the night Mikel had gotten on my van and the day I met Micah Spears in Bill’s apartment, the tests were new ones. What the mirror showed me was a menu of my own hypocrisies and lies. Over the past two weeks I had compromised everything I thought I believed in.

  I was in league with monsters—one because I needed his money to help mitigate my own guilt and another to save a man who had, by his own admission, deserved punishment beyond death. I could no longer hide behind Slava’s warnings that his past shame was too great to share with me. I knew who he was, knew what he had done. He had a hand in more deaths than Spears. Yet I felt no less warmth for Slava when we laughed together, thought it no less funny when he mangled his sentences. It seemed my morality, like police work, was not so much a search for the truth as a set of rationalizations that let me sleep at night.

  As I stared into the mirror, I tried to find who I once was. The man who had so strongly believed in capital punishment. The man who would have damned the torpedoes and the potential fallout. The man who would have shouted to the world about the cover up of Arnold Mason’s atrocities. The man who would have, should have let Slava meet the fate he deserved. I couldn’t find that man. Instead I saw my black-clad maternal grandmother looking back at me, smiling cruelly, and saying, “I told you so.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I owe a great debt to Chris Pepe, David Hale Smith, and Ivan Held, and to Katie McKee.

  I’d also like to thank Erin Mitchell, Peter Spiegelman, Ellen W. Schare, Ming Liu Parson, and Mike Cascione.

  But none of this would be worth it or mean a thing without the love and support of Rosanne, Kaitlin, and Dylan.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Reed Farrel Coleman, author of The New York Times–bestselling Robert B. Parker’s The Devil Wins, has been called “a hard-boiled poet” by NPR’s Maureen Corrigan and the “noir poet laureate” in The Huffington Post. He is the author of twenty-six novels and novellas, including the critically acclaimed Moe Prager series and the first novel in this series, Where It Hurts. A three-time recipient of the Shamus Award for best detective novel, a winner of the Barry and Anthony awards, and a three-time Edgar nominee, he lives with his family on Long Island.

  reedcoleman.com

  facebook.com/ReedFColeman

  twitter.com/ReedFColeman

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