Uncle Janice (7 page)

“Do you know what that is right there? Itwaru, it’s like your big Korean in the leather jacket. You see him leaning up against that pole or whatever and you’re thinking, Boom, that’s a dealer. A lot of time you’ll hear people say they felt something in their gut or whatever, but one of the things I very much admire about you is that it’s always facts, proofs. You articulate very well. ‘I think this because of that.’ Ninety-nine out of a hundred people, they don’t see the world closely like we do. We’re paying attention in a way almost no one else is. And we’re also building little stories, right? This happened because of this. One thing leads to another. We’re seeing the world very closely and with the stakes being what they are for us, being this sort of life-and-death kind of thing, we need to assess that world accurately, immediately, and so we tell ourselves these stories. Like because he’s a drug dealer, he’s tired of standing, and so that’s why he’s leaning against the pole in his nice jacket. Because Nene and his boy are wearing white clothes, they’re not going to do anything that might risk them getting bloody.

“But see, your Korean guy
wasn’t
a dealer. He
knew
a dealer, sure. But he himself? He was just a guy on a pole. Maybe he
works
for a dealer, as a steerer or whatever, but we don’t know, right? Saying this guy is probably holding down drugs for this reason or that reason, that’s just a story we tell ourselves. And it does what stories are supposed to do. It makes us feel better. Where we get into trouble is when we forget it’s just a story.

“Barnes opens up her passenger’s-side door. See if Caspars was going to take this much time to decide what to do, then she was going to get out and stand next to him. That way, if Caspars does decide to play chauffeur, she can easily offer Nene her seat up front. ‘Your legs are longer. You can give directions. We’re in a fight and I don’t wanna sit next to him. I barely met your friend yet. You boys can haggle over prices
up there.’ Whatever it takes to avoid the tactical disaster of two possibly armed men sitting behind you in the backseat of a car. I’m sitting in
our
car, smelling Hart’s cough drops, and I’m powerless, but when I see Barnes’s door swing open … my goodness. I’m telling you, she was simply a pro.

“But Nene, the Casanova, he pushes the door closed for her, won’t let her give up her seat. He’s pointing west as he goes around to the back. His buddy gets in next to him, neither one of them asking permission as far as I can tell. Caspars heads to the front. He’s walking stiffly with the cement legs he gets when he comes to work straight from the gym. The door slams and the Pathfinder pulls out into the street.

“Not one of the scenarios provided the backup teams with further instructions if the uncles left the set, but we didn’t need further instructions. If the uncles leave, everybody follows. While Hart’s radioing Landry, the ghost car turns onto Thirty-Sixth Avenue in slow-speed pursuit. The cab goes next. Because me and Hart are faced the wrong way on Twenty-First, we go in the opposite direction and will just have to catch up. Landry gets on the radio and says he wants to run leapfrog, with the ghost car trailing the Pathfinder then heading back to the end of the line and letting the cab pick up the Pathfinder then heading back to the end of the line and letting us pick up the Pathfinder, around and around, for as long as it takes. Almost right away, though, for whatever reason Caspars pulls up in front of this twenty-four-hour Laundromat on the avenue. The ghost and the cab have to coast right on by so they won’t get burned. Me and Hart, we’re not even there yet. By the time the ghost circles the block, the Pathfinder’s gone and there’s all this broken glass in the street, but the ghost team can’t remember if the glass had been there before or not.

“Landry’s on the radio asking who’s got the eyeball, who’s got the eyeball, but no one has an answer for him.

“Hart’s choking the steering wheel by now, lipping the curb, and I’m on my cell dialing Caspars’s number but it keeps going straight to voice mail. ‘You know what to do,’ it says. I’m on the radio now with Landry telling him I can’t get through and he tells me to keep trying. His voice
is like weirdly calm. He tells me he’s calling Barnes but can’t get through, either. Maybe they were in a cellular dead spot, but I’ve since walked all around that neighborhood and never lost reception. Maybe all the other guys were calling Caspars and Barnes at the same time. Maybe that’s why none of our calls got through. At one point, this sanitation truck backs out of an alleyway and Hart has to swerve out of its way and ends up sideswiping a parked car. He’s driving sixty miles per hour down these little streets. I think about telling him to buckle his seat belt, but I don’t because that would be like a defeat somehow, like an acknowledgment that something bad might actually happen. At last Caspars’s phone starts ringing, but nobody answers.

“We make a hard left onto this little narrow one-way, squeezed in by row houses on one side and an elementary school on the other. As soon as we’re on it, Hart has to hit the brakes hard to keep from running them over. I don’t remember bouncing off the dash, but I must’ve. I’m out of the car now and there’s no Pathfinder anywhere, but a couple yards away from each other Caspars and Barnes are lying in the street. The air had this really thick burnt smell, from the gunshots or Hart’s braking, I don’t know.

“Caspars was the one closer to me, but I leapt right over him to get to Barnes. That’s another thing I don’t know. Why I did that. I think maybe because he was so, like, irretrievably dead. He lay on his side with his legs bent at the knees and his face was gone, but Barnes was on her back, like maybe just asleep. Except not really, of course. She already had some slight burning across her forehead, all the way up to her hairline. The real damage, though, went down the right side of her face. It looked all dark and sort of charred. Her eye on that side was filled with blood and she had blood all over her chin. Her eyebrow, too, was like super long there, with the inflammation maybe. Like Caspars, she’d been shot through the back of the head, but the bullet had come out at a weird angle, through her cheek. The exit wound looked like this little perfect Valentine’s heart, tipped over on its side. When I was breathing into her mouth, the air came puffing out of that hole.

“Hart was working on Caspars. He can’t find a pulse, he tells me, and
there was no mouth for him to breath into, so I tell him to come help me with Barnes. He puts his hand on the hole in her cheek and the entire time he’s chewing the heck out of a pen, a cheap little Bic, I don’t know where he got it. Her lungs won’t inflate, so I start chest compressions. Hart is still holding on to her cheek for the compressions, even though he doesn’t have to. I start with the breaths again and it’s like screaming down a well. I’m back on chest compressions when Landry pulls me off her. ‘It’s over,’ he tells me. They’re all here, all the guys, paramedics on the way. I see now that the ring on her hand is not a real ring, but one of those lollipop candy rings.

“By the time the paramedics arrive, I’m sitting on a stoop outside one of the houses. I’m sitting there and I’m watching them go through the same CPR rigmarole. But it’s hopeless, right? After they gave up, when they were loading Caspars and Barnes onto the bus, one of the paramedics puts the sheets on their faces, but the other medic pulls them off. He won’t pronounce them dead in front of all of us. The bus takes them away with the sirens going all crazy, and after they’re gone I hear Hart saying that was very respectful, the way the guy took the sheets off their faces, and I can’t tell if he’s being sarcastic or not because to me it’s such a pointless gesture. And maybe even a little cowardly to let the hospital doctor declare them DOA. But that’s probably unfair of me to say. I take that back. Those medics work hard, I know. And what a spot they were in. What a difficult spot with all of us staring at them.

“A little later Landry finds me on my stoop to tell me they found the Pathfinder eight blocks away. Abandoned. It’d take another two days before we found Nene hiding in the woods in Pennsylvania and his buddy at a relative’s in Towson, Maryland. At the time, though, out on that stoop, Landry is telling me IA will be here soon to investigate the shooting. He reminds me that I can delay the interview for up to seventy-two hours. Then he says he’s gotta ask me something. Do I remember if the kel-mics were working when we left the rumpus?

“ ‘No,’ I tell him.

“ ‘No you don’t remember, or no they weren’t working?’

“When I say, ‘No they weren’t working,’ he tells me to take a second to
think about it. What you have to understand, guys, is that this is a good man. A decent, moral human being who’s lost two decent, moral human beings, and he wants to protect as many people as possible now, people above and below him. And that’s natural, in my opinion. That’s why we go into this job, to protect as many people as possible. And really, when it comes right down to it, if I can keep a brother away from the wolves in Internal Affairs, then that’s what I’m going to do, ten times out of ten.

“I ask Landry what does he want me to tell them, and he says, ‘If you don’t remember, I want you to say you don’t remember. There’s nothing wrong with that.’

“He didn’t have to say, ‘No one will trust the testimony of a cop who was blotto drunk on the job.’ But he didn’t say, either, that by protecting our butts today we might be jeopardizing the lives of future uncles, who at the very least should expect to have working kel-mics. But that’s all theoretical, you know? And this is a real person standing over me on the stoop, saying, ‘If you don’t remember, you don’t remember,’ and I dropped my head between my knees, which I guess he interpreted as a nod of acceptance, which I guess it sort of was.

“He asks if he can get me anything and I tell him a bottle of water. Ten minutes later this pretty blond patrol brings me a warm can of Diet Pepsi that’s probably been sitting in her squad car all day. I popped the tab so she wouldn’t feel offended, but I didn’t drink any of it. I wasn’t even thirsty. The whole reason I wanted the water was to wash off my face. I had this crazy thought that my wife was going to show up and I didn’t want her to see me with Barnes’s blood all over my mouth.

“Later, back at the rumpus, Landry pulls the buy board off the wall. He dismantles it in front of us, gets rid of the Polaroids and everything. Okay, well, that’s a nice gesture, but now what? Because we are properly traumatized, let me tell you. Dudes are bugging out, so a couple days later Commissioner Kelly gives every undercover in the department—Firearms, Narcotics, whatever—he gives every uncle an opportunity to flip over to investigator, no questions asked. Now, I don’t think the Big Bosses really thought that one through. Because what happens is pretty much every uncle abandons ship. Almost all these guys, they had
become undercovers in the first place so they could get to investigator one day. And even if you wanted to stick around, your wife was going to make you switch, or, like me, you got divorced. So now the department’s all out of uncles, and the only people buying drugs are the drug addicts. Unacceptable, right?

“So the department reaches out to you guys. The replacements—and I don’t mean that in a bad way. You’re just the next wave is all. And now here we are, déjà vu all over again. Five years pass and none of you have
heard
these stories, so the Big Bosses figure, ‘Hey, let’s get some buy boards back on the walls, what’s the worst that can happen?’

“I’m just telling you, God forbid, if I get killed from all this crazy numbers-chasing? The one-upmanship? Not a single Big Boss is allowed to come to my funeral. No one above sergeant. Not Prondzinski, not Nielsen, not Captain Morse,
none
of them. I’m serious. If any of those snakes gets within three hundred feet of my casket, I will hold each of you responsible and haunt you all for the rest of your lives. Remember that. It’s gonna be some idiot drug dealer that pulls the trigger, but it’s the department pushing us in front of the gun. Just saying. God forbid.”

Unable to see clearly, unable to breathe deeply, Janice woke up on a white leather couch. Her nose was congested, her eyes inflamed and leaking water. A rancid fuzz coated her tongue. Mister Maplewood—an obese orange tabby cat—sat atop her chest, crushing her, pawing at her blouse as if kneading dough. The good news: he belonged to Fiorella, which meant Janice hadn’t accidentally fucked a stranger last night, and, even more important, her gun would be locked up inside the apartment’s safe. The bad: she was allergic to cats. She sat up on the couch, to try to get some air into her lungs, but the inertia-prone Mister Maplewood clung to her by his claws, disengaging himself only when she let loose a fantastic, head-clearing sneeze.

“God bless you,” said a tiny voice.

With her vision still bleary, she rubbed at her eyes—the very worst thing she could’ve done—until she could see the outline of Fiorella’s nine-year-old son, Hector the Magnificent, magician/superhero. He stood in the living room’s entryway wearing his beloved Superman costume, the cape more orange than red, hand-sewn by Vita as a replacement for the original, which he’d lost on what Fiorella called a disastrous horse-drawn-carriage ride through Central Park. His head turned to watch the cat gallop past him toward the back of the apartment.

“What are you doing up so early?” Janice asked him.

“Couldn’t sleep.” Like so many children of police officers, he had the haywire hair and shiny eye baggage of the apprentice insomniac. “Bad dreams.”

“I get those, too,” she said.

“I tried to tell Mama, but she wouldn’t wake up.”

“Oh, honey, I’m sorry,” she said. She swung her sweaty legs off the sticky couch. Normally someone who slept in the nude with an eye mask and earplugs, she had—thank God—kept her shirt on, matted now with dander, and her underwear, but her wool-felted pencil skirt lay crumpled on the carpet. Her purse strap curled out from under the coffee table. She pulled it toward her to check the time, but apparently her phone battery had gone dead. Of course it had. She squeezed her saddlebags, hating herself. She hated everything, everywhere, except for these eye-rubs, which felt amazingly good and for which she’d suffer all day. “Mama and Aunt Janice had a rough night catching bad guys,” she told him. “But we’ll get her up real soon, okay?”