Do it now! Now is your only chance!
Torres shifted his gaze to the door. Vega lunged for the pile of metal, clasping his hand around an ice-cold rod about two feet in length. Adrenaline muted the sharp stab of frozen steel on bare skin. Vega willed his fingers to wrap themselves around it. Then he threw his full weight against Torres, hoping to knock him down before he could shoot.
Bam.
Bam.
Vega braced for the impact of metal tearing into flesh, the warm spurt of blood. A fitting ending. Live by the gun. Die by it.
“Dad!” screamed Joy on the other side of the door. Torres’s shots missed.
Vega’s rod didn’t.
He struck Torres hard on the shoulder of his thick down jacket. The sound was like a baseball landing cleanly in a catcher’s mitt. No way could Vega do enough damage through that big puffy coat. But it was enough to jolt the gun from Torres’s hand. The Beretta sank beneath the snow.
Joy rattled the door, her voice breathy with panic. “Dad! Are you okay? Say something!”
Vega couldn’t. He was too out of breath. He raked the metal rod through the snow, hoping to find the gun. The cold sliced into his flesh like a filet knife. His limbs felt like they each weighed a hundred pounds.
He couldn’t find the gun.
Torres landed a hard right to Vega’s backside. The rod dropped from his hand. The two men rolled in a tumble of fists. The soft wet snow melted beneath them, soaking through Vega’s pants and jacket. His hands were like slabs of stone he could swing but not feel. He and Torres hadn’t fought since that day over thirty years ago when Torres took the can of black spray paint from Vega’s backpack. Vega had been outclassed then—in weight, size, and skill. But he was in better shape than Torres now. And he had more to lose. His daughter was on the other side of that door.
Vega landed a hard right to the side of Torres’s face. He was too numbed to feel the flash of pain as his knuckles connected with Torres’s cheek. The blow stunned Torres, who fell back against the snow. It bought Vega enough time to sweep his arms through the drifts, willing his frozen fingers to find the gun. His small motor skills were fading fast. And then he felt the sharp outline of metal. He pulled up the gun and aimed it at his old friend as Torres was pushing himself to his knees.
“Stay down!” yelled Vega. “Hands behind your head!”
“Dad! Talk to me!”
Vega sucked in air and tried to catch his breath. He was soaking wet from the melted snow and shivering from a combination of sweat, fear, and ice water.
“Joy! Take Yovanna and go wait by the front doors. The police are on their way. Tell them I’m on the roof. Tell them Torres pulled a gun on me. I’ll explain later.”
“I don’t want to leave you,” she cried.
“You’ve got to. Now do as I say.”
Vega waited until he was sure Joy had retreated. “Get up,” he ordered Torres. “Take the key out of your pants and unlock the door.”
Torres got to his feet. His sweatpants and puffy jacket were dark and heavy with water. He shivered.
“Keep your hands where I can see them,” Vega ordered.
Torres smiled. “Really, Jimmy? You think being the one holding the gun changes anything?”
“Get the key.”
“You shoot me, you’re going to spend the rest of your career with a cloud hanging over you, man. I’m a pillar in this community. And you? You’re the pigeon crap that people scrape off their windshields around here.” Torres shot a glance over his shoulder. “Don’t count on a swift response from the boys in blue. People ’round here take care of their own—or have you forgotten?” Torres nodded his head to the street below. “Don’t believe me? Take a look down there, carnal.”
Vega wasn’t about to take his gaze off Torres.
“Unlock the door,” Vega hissed at him. Already, his wet pants were freezing up stiff on him. His feet were soaked. His fingers had lost most of their feeling.
Torres reached into his pocket.
“Don’t you hear it, Jimmy?”
And suddenly he did. A rumble of voices over the soft, compacted snow. Angry voices growing louder. Encircling the building forty feet below. Not police. There were no sirens. These people were chanting.
“Kill-er cop! Kill-er cop!”
“What do you think is going to happen,” asked Torres, “if you shoot me up here? You think they’re going to say it was all in the line of duty?”
“Open the door, Freddy!”
Torres pulled the copper-colored key out of his pocket. It was attached to a white plastic key fob. He dangled it in his hand for a second and then flung it over the side of the building.
“What did you do that for?” Vega demanded. “Now we’re both locked up here.”
“That’s right, Jimmy. There’s no escape. Either you shoot me and the Bronx mourns a fallen hero or I shoot you and they lament the tragedy of a cop who went off the deep end. Those are your only two choices.”
Chapter 40
Adele left Fordham quickly, zigzagging through one-way streets, maneuvering around parked cars. Her GPS had told her the location of the Bronx Academy of Achievement. But she had no idea if she could get within a block of the building.
She wondered if she was already too late.
She parked her Prius on a cross street and raced back to the building. It was surrounded in front by several dozen people, all of them chanting, with fists raised in the air. The police had arrived, their flashing lights lending a circus atmosphere to the crowd. A woman watched the spectacle from the doorway of an adjacent laundromat.
“What’s going on?” Adele asked her.
“This police officer went crazy. He dragged a young girl out of here and into the school. And now I think he’s holding poor Dr. Torres at gunpoint.”
Adele’s head was spinning. None of it sounded like Vega. Then again, when he called her Friday night and told her he’d shot a man, that didn’t sound like him either. Nor did that fistfight with a bunch of college students last night.
Nothing sounded like the man she knew and loved anymore.
She cupped a hand across her eyes to blot out the glare of the streetlights and stared up at the roof. The edge of the four-story building was too high to see over. She had no idea what was going on up there. Her feet had gone numb and soggy from the pavement slush. Snow fell down the back of her coat. She felt chilled so deep inside of her that she didn’t think she could ever get warm. She fantasized for a moment that she could speak to these people and calm them down. But she was not Ruben Tate-Rivera. They might listen to him. They would not listen to her.
Conveniently Tate was nowhere to be found.
Four police officers began suiting up in flak vests and body armor. Adele felt the old fear returning, that sense of powerlessness in the face of authority. She tried to tell herself that this was different. Vega was a police officer—just like these men. But then she saw them checking their weaponry and she understood: These officers weren’t here to rescue Vega. They were here to subdue him.
By any means necessary.
* * *
Vega heard the sirens split the night air. They had an odd compacted quality in the snow. He was near the edge of the roof now, with only a thin lip between him and a forty-foot drop to the basketball court below. He saw flashes of red and blue bouncing off the brick front of the tenements across the street from the school.
Torres stepped closer.
“Down on the ground,” shouted Vega. “Hands above your head!”
Torres ignored him. “Shoot me, Jimmy. Go ahead. You know you want to. It’s you or me. What’s it going to be? You killed Ponce’s brother. You know what it’s like to take a life. You’ve tasted blood. Pull the trigger.”
“Get down. Now!” Vega heard the hard, battle-ready voices of cops on the stairs. Not just uniformed officers, either. This sounded like a tactical squad. They were here to take down the shooter. And since he was the one with a gun in his hand, he qualified
.
His feet had gone numb. His arm ached from holding up the gun. His fingers could barely feel the trigger. The snow had gotten a hard crystalline glaze on its surface, the pebbly slickness of moss-covered river stones. It had piled up along the edges of the roof so that the entire surface felt less defined. Plus, it was dark. The ever-present streetlights offered a hazy peach glow to the snowfall, but their pools of light petered off into shadows up here. One wrong move and forty feet of vertical drop guaranteed a quick and messy death.
“Get down!” Vega said to Torres again.
Torres remained standing. “What’s the matter, man? Gun-shy now? Shoot me! I don’t want to be locked up in some ten-foot cell. Shoot me!”
Every ligament in Vega’s body stiffened. He felt paralyzed by his predicament. He could feel his blood rushing through his veins. He didn’t want to pull the trigger. Not again.
Dear God, not again.
Civilians always think you can just shoot a person in an extremity and stop them. But it doesn’t work that way. Moving extremities, even at close range, are hard to hit, and even when you do, the suspect is so charged up on adrenaline, they sometimes don’t feel it and just keep moving anyway. He could miss and hit a cop coming through the doorway. The bullet could ricochet and hit some civilian having dinner in a building across the street. It could pierce an artery and Torres could bleed out anyway. Or Torres could use the seconds it would take Vega to re-aim the gun and push him right off the roof.
“Pull the trigger, carnal. You know you want to. Pull it.”
There was no denying that a part of him did. There would be a mild euphoria in shooting the man who brutally beat his mother to death. Vigilante justice. So what if the people below hated him for killing Torres? They hated him anyway. As soon as he put on the badge, they hated him. He was a homegrown son and they treated him like a traitor. He couldn’t win this one, no matter what he did.
Pull the trigger.
The police were at the door to the roof. “Open up!” yelled a cop with razors in his voice.
“I’m a police officer!” Vega shouted back. “I have a gun trained on the suspect. He threw the key over the building. You’ll have to break down the door.”
Torres stepped closer. “It’s a metal door, Jimmy. Your buddies aren’t going to be able to help you now.”
Vega knew he couldn’t hold out much longer. Torres was about to pounce. Vega had to make the first move. He had to take Torres down and try to restrain him. One good headlock. Hard and fast. Like when he was a kid. Vega sprang forward and grabbed Torres around the neck. But Vega was cold and numb. His muscles weren’t working right. Both men had slippery wet jackets on. Vega managed the headlock but not completely enough to incapacitate Torres. Torres fought back, elbowing Vega in the ribs. Vega grabbed at Torres’s hair. There were grunts and kicks.
And then the door flew open.
Vega heard the clatter of duty holsters and handcuffs behind him. Four cops in flak vests and headgear burst through the door and aimed their weapons.
At Vega.
“Freeze, asshole!” yelled the man with razors in his voice. “Drop the gun!”
Vega complied. “I’m a police officer!” he shouted. His words had no effect. The four cops descended on him with the force of a tsunami, tackling him to the ground, flipping him onto his stomach, kneeing him in the back, and yanking his hands tightly behind to cuff them. Vega felt the slush soak through his clothes like he was swimming in ice water. He tried to speak but razor-man shoved his face hard into an icy embankment while he patted him down.
“Shut your fucking mouth, hombre.”
Vega burned with anger and humiliation. And a certain realization, too. There was only a tin shield separating him from the other side of this divide. At all times. In all situations.
Vega lifted his head just as the officer was about to snap a cuff on his wrists. He saw Freddy Torres back away from the officers. He saw every movement as if it were in slow motion. Torres swung a leg over the low upward curve of the roofline. Then he swung the other.
“No!” Vega forgot about the cops and their weapons. He saw only one thing. A man. Headed over a roof. About to plummet forty feet to his death. A man he hated, sure. But a life.
One.
Two.
Those same two seconds that had taken a life could now save one. Vega leapt for the edge of the roof and grabbed Torres by a sleeve of his puffy jacket. The cop who was about to pounce on Vega for moving saw at once what Vega was trying to do and latched on to the other sleeve.
“Don’t do this, Freddy,” Vega begged.
“Let me go, carnal. My way.”
“No. You don’t get to choose.” Vega grabbed at his jacket. The cold wet nylon was slick in his hands.
“I want to be free.”
“You were free. The door was open. You could have walked away at any time.”
Torres tried to shrug out of their grip. They held tight. It was like playing a high stakes game of tug-of-war. Vega plunged his hands beneath Torres’s armpits. He could feel the warmth thawing his flesh, giving him the circulation and strength to hang on.
Did he want to?
A life for a life. For many lives. His mother’s. Donna’s. Hector Ponce’s. But a deeper part of him didn’t want Torres dead. Death was a quick adrenaline fix. Life—life without freedom or options—that was justice.
And so Vega pulled. There was a thump, followed by four officers pouncing on Torres, cuffing him before he could try again. Torres lost a shoe in the scuffle. Vega heard it drop forty feet below onto the perfect white snow of the basketball court where it made a soft thud. But that was all that dropped.
Jimmy Vega had killed a man who didn’t deserve to die. And now he’d just saved one who probably didn’t deserve to live.
Chapter 41
A photograph graced the front page of the New York Daily News the day after Freddy Torres was arrested. It had been snapped the night before from a rooftop overlooking the Bronx Academy of Achievement. Jimmy Vega had no idea the shot had been taken.
It showed him and an NYPD officer (ironically, the same one who’d smashed his face in the snow). They were both sprawled on the ledge of the building’s roof, halfway over themselves, risking their lives to save a man who would probably spend the rest of his in jail. It was a dramatic shot that made Vega and the other cop look like the good guys for once. Not heroes. Vega would never use that word. But it told the world at the very least that they’d tried to do the right thing when the right thing was damned hard to do.
The police charged Torres with Hector Ponce’s murder. Not Donna’s. Or Vega’s mother’s. Those two cases were older and would take longer to assemble. But even so, announcing to the world that Hector Ponce hadn’t died by a cop’s hand changed the spotlight. It turned Vega from the star of a drama he’d never auditioned for to a bit player. He welcomed the chance to step back and at least begin to reclaim his life.
Two days after Torres’s arrest, Isadora Jenkins showed up at Vega’s house in orthopedic shoes and glittery snowman earrings and gave Vega the news that the medical examiner’s office had failed to find gun powder residue or metal particles in Antonio Fernandez’s wounds—which pretty much put to rest the notion that Vega had executed the man. That, and the fact that Margaret Behring had abruptly recanted her testimony.
“You didn’t pressure her into recanting, I hope,” Vega said to Adele.
“Never,” Adele assured him. “Let’s just say, she uh, saw the light.”
The media storm quickly faded from the Internet. By the third day after Torres’s arrest, it was already back page news. An anonymous donor offered to bury both Hector and Antonio in St. Raymond’s cemetery. The brothers would be together in death even if they never got much of a chance in life.
Vega thought he’d feel a great sense of relief knowing that his mother’s murderer had been caught and that Yovanna was no longer in danger. The district attorney even floated the poss
ibility that the case could be cleared in-house instead of being submitted to a grand jury. But something still gnawed at Vega.
Ricardo Luis.
He was at the center of everything that had happened. And he wasn’t talking. Nor was Humberto Oliva. “I have made my peace with God,” Oliva insisted. “And now, Luis must make his.”
Vega refused to give up. He contacted a colleague in the FBI he’d once worked a joint investigation with to see if the Feds could press the case without Oliva’s cooperation. But that too proved to be a dead end. Word came back that there was no proof Luis’s victims had even died on the U.S. side of the border. The Mexican police had little interest in pinning such a heinous, twenty-year-old crime on a homegrown hero. Luis was free.
Not Vega. Antonio’s death hung like a ghost around him. Even the news, five days after Torres’s arrest, that the DA had declined to convene a grand jury, didn’t offer Vega the relief he’d been hoping for. He was going back to work.
He wondered if he’d still be able to do the job.
“You know what you need?” asked Isadora Jenkins as Vega walked her to her car after their meeting with the DA.
“To shut my big, fat mouth?”
She laughed. “Always. But in this case, you need someone to keep you honest.”
“I am honest.”
“I mean honest about how you’re doing.”
Vega started to protest. Jenkins dismissed him with a wave of her hand. Today, she was wearing a big, flower-shaped ring encrusted with rhinestones. Vega’s daughter had a ring like that back when she used to pretend to be a fairy princess. Isadora Jenkins apparently still thought she was.
“Don’t you dare hand me those words I’m fine,” said Jenkins. “Ninety-five percent of cops who kill someone in the line of duty don’t go to jail or face disciplinary charges. And yet something like a third of them quit their jobs within five years of the incident. Do you know why, Detective? Because they walk around with the same shell-shocked expression you’ve got on your face right now, saying, ‘I’m fine.’ And they’re not.”
Jenkins put a hand on his arm. Her eyes turned soft and maternal. “Keep going to therapy, Vega. And more than that, find somebody who gets what you’re going through. Not your family. Lord knows, they never will. Just—somebody who’s been there.”
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