Where It Hurts (8 page)

Now he gave me that fist bump.

“Thanks, Zee.”

“Let me know if you decide to keep on going. I’ll help you any way I can until I’m outta here.”

I left the darkness of Harrigan’s behind me, thinking I might just take Zee’s advice. But when I answered my phone, I realized that walking away wasn’t an option.

(FRIDAY, EARLY AFTERNOON)

N
umber 11 Pinetree Court in Commack had once been the happy center of my universe. The place where Annie had made a home for us. The place where Annie and I raised our kids. The place where we were going to grow old together. The place where we would watch our grandkids for John Jr. and Krissy when they wanted to get away for long weekends. We weren’t the type of people who cared about fancy cars or expensive things. Our house was the one possession we took the most pride in. We had scrimped and saved for the down payment. We’d jumped through all kinds of hoops to get the mortgage. I’d even swallowed my pride and asked my dad to cosign. Something he lorded over me until the day he died. We’d worked on it until it was just how we wanted it. Then, in a single heartbeat, it turned into sawdust.

Nothing brought John’s death back to me quite in the same way as seeing the old place. I could not separate my memories of him from the house. There wasn’t a spot in the yard or inside the house itself that I could not see John. Even now, pulling up alongside the mailbox, I pictured John shooting free throw after free throw at the hoop in the driveway. The hoop was gone. I’d destroyed it in a drunken rage the night we’d buried John. But that didn’t matter. I didn’t believe in ghosts,
though I did believe in hauntings. As much as we had loved the place, we couldn’t bear to live there and we couldn’t bear to sell it. The day would soon come when we would have to sell. The rent we were charging was a few hundred dollars short of the mortgage payment and we had lived in limbo for long enough.

Sue Sherman was standing in the driveway, waiting for me, her face twisted up into an expression that was one part panic, one part worry, and one part anger. I’d seen that look before, a hundred times. No one ever thinks they’ll be a victim of a crime, so they are woefully unprepared for the aftermath. The sudden sense of insecurity. The intense, empty feeling of violation. The gnawing fear. The outrage. When she saw me getting out of my car, it all boiled over. Tears poured down her cheeks and she yelled something out at me that was utterly unintelligible, but completely understandable. I hugged her until she calmed down.

“I was out shopping and when I came home . . .” She was out of breath. “The cats were sitting on the front porch. I knew I didn’t leave the door open. I figured they must have found a new way out of the house, but when I went to open the front door—”

“It was already open.” I finished the sentence for her. “Did you go inside?”

“No. I called my husband, who told me to call you.”

“Did you call 9-1-1?”

“I guess I should have but I didn’t know what to do because I haven’t been in the house.”

“It’s okay, Sue,” I said, patting her shoulder. “You did the right thing. Are the cats okay? Where are they?”

She pointed at her car in the driveway. Two little brown Siamese faces stared out at us.

“Get in your car and drive down the block. Then call 9-1-1. I’m going to take a quick look around. Whoever was inside is gone now,” I said, although I had no way of being certain if that was true or not. Sue seemed uncertain, but I told her to go on, that I would be all right.

When she backed out of the driveway, I reached down toward my ankle. I was halfway bent over before I remembered that the Crime Scene Unit had my little Glock and that I hadn’t taken my old service weapon with me. I didn’t go directly into the house. For one thing, I couldn’t be sure Sue had been accurate about not having left the door open or a window open a crack so that the cats might’ve gotten out. People forget all sorts of things. Second, if it really was a crime scene, I didn’t want to taint it. But the real reason was that I didn’t want to go in. I don’t think I ever wanted to go into that house again. So I found a fallen twig and used it to unlatch the gate to the white vinyl fence I’d put up a few years ago.

The right side of the house looked fine. Nothing was disturbed, but as soon as I got around back and saw that the sliding doors had been smashed through, I knew Sue hadn’t forgotten about leaving the front door or a window open. Our old backyard was bordered by a Polish cemetery run by a Catholic parish in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. There was a small woods between the cemetery and our back fence, but that was easy enough to navigate and the fence easy enough to climb. As long as someone kept his head down, the side fencing would prevent him from being spotted by a neighbor.

I climbed the short flight of wooden steps up to the sliding doors and looked inside. The hallway leading into the kitchen and living room was a total mess. The closets had been emptied, their contents dumped onto the white linoleum floor. I stepped back down onto the winter-dormant grass and peeked through every window. All the rooms had been trashed. John Jr.’s bedroom, too—a room the Shermans agreed never to use or to enter. It was the same as it had been the night before in Tommy’s trailer. This made it very personal now, even more so than getting shot.

It was too big a coincidence to believe that my old house getting tossed had nothing to do with what had gone on the previous evening. I wasn’t a big fan of coincidence. I believed in it about as much as the Virgin Birth. Someone was looking for something, something they
thought Tommy Delcamino once had. Something they thought he might have given me. Unless I was blind or just plain stupid, the green backpack wasn’t it. There wasn’t anything in the backpack worth risking prison for. Certainly not a bunch of old photos or a roll of twenty-dollar bills.

When I heard the sirens, I went back around to the front of the house and waited. But I was through waiting to make up my mind. I was in now, with both feet.

(FRIDAY NIGHT)

I
t had already been a long tough shift by the time I took my first break. The Full Flaps Lounge was jam-packed and rocking the ’80s. The crowd was younger than usual. Much younger. I guess that was due to the fact that it was Christmas office party season. For whatever reason, people seemed to be coming through the door already half-lit. Some were so shitfaced we’d been forced to escort them out before they’d even properly warmed their barstools. A few of them were belligerent about it, but none enough to rate an ass-kicking.

Younger crowds were trouble because it screwed with the club’s usual vibe. Having younger, unmarried women around meant the older men paid less attention to the women who’d come to get their attention. It meant that the younger men hit on the older women to see if what they’d heard about cougars was true. Everyone got a little more sensitive. Tempers got shorter. Competition got fiercer. Insults got nastier. And nights like these were worse because the bar was three deep, the dance floor so densely packed that there was no hope of keeping potential warring parties at arm’s length. On more than a few occasions, we’d had to separate guys who were getting chesty with each other and just a shove away from a first punch. It was all very
schoolyard, but I’d seen schoolyard bullshit turn into murder and that wasn’t going to happen on my watch.

It was on nights like these that I wished I was out driving the van. But when I stopped to think about it, I realized I was in a pretty bad frame of mind to begin with. This afternoon, on my way back to the Paragon, I stopped at a walk-in clinic on Portion Road in Ronkonkoma. I’d had them check the dressing on my leg and write me a script for antibiotics. I’d made up a story for the doctor about how I’d taken out that chunk of my calf with a piece of hot metal in my garage. You mention a gunshot wound to a doctor and, by law, he or she must contact the cops. I wasn’t up for explaining myself, thank you very much.

Between Tommy Delcamino’s murder and the break-in at 11 Pinetree, I’d spent way too much time over the last twenty-four hours with my old colleagues at the SCPD. The detectives from the Fourth Precinct who responded to the break-in didn’t connect that crime to Tommy D.’s murder. Why would they? Two different crimes. Two different precincts. Two different detective squads. But I knew better. Although I lived at the Paragon, my official address was 11 Pinetree Court, and anyone who didn’t know about the fallout from my son’s death would assume my family still lived there. I guess I was also more than a little annoyed at the fact that I’d moved myself into a different room at the hotel. It was a matter of precaution. I figured that it wouldn’t take too long for the guys who had killed Tommy and tossed my old house to track me down to my room at the Paragon. For now, only Felix and I knew I’d moved.

Just before midnight, I walked out the entrance of the Full Flaps Lounge. I needed some fresh air, cold as it might be. As soon as I stepped into the brisk night air, I got a face full of cigarette smoke. Off to my right was a group of ten men and women huddled together, smoking, keeping warm, and chatting. The word was that many of the hookups happened out here and not inside the club. I didn’t doubt it. It was often so loud inside the club that it was impossible to hear your own internal voice, let alone ask for someone’s number. A few of the regulars
said hello to me, patting me on the shoulder as I passed. Thankfully, none of them whacked on the arm where I’d gotten the tetanus shot. Damned thing hurt almost as much as the leg wound. I nodded and kept moving.

I stopped at the corner of the building, leaning back against the rough concrete wall. I hoped the quiet would ease the ringing in my ears and help stop “Rock Lobster” from going round and round in my brain. I let the cool night air wash over me. It was warm inside the Full Flaps when it was half-empty. On nights like this, it was downright tropical.

A woman’s voice came out of the darkness. “Are you all right?”

“I don’t even know what all right means anymore.” The words came out of me like yesterday’s weather, nasty and raw.

“This was a mistake. I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ll leave you alone.”

The sound of her heels clicking against the pavement echoed in the quiet of midnight. I called after her. Limped after her. Clutched her gently by her right biceps when I finally caught up to her.

“No, no, please. I didn’t mean to be so rude. There’s no excuse for that. I’m the one who’s sorry.”

I took my hand away from her arm. Her face was familiar to me. She wasn’t a regular at the club, but she was there often enough so that we’d nod hello to each other when I’d stamped her hand for reentry. She was in her midthirties, on the short side, and maybe a little heavier than she wanted to be. Maybe not. I think I assumed as much because she always seemed self-conscious in the club. She wasn’t the type who initiated conversations, but would sit at the bar nursing her drinks or stand at the edges of the dance floor waiting. I’d seen her leave with men on occasion, but she’d be back alone the next time. I seemed to know a lot about her, a lot more than I would have believed. Not her name, though.

“What are you smiling at?” she asked, the look on her face unsure.

It was a pretty face, but it was her eyes that I took most notice of. They were light blue and had that cracked-ice-crystal quality to them.
They also had a paradoxical warmth about them so that they almost seemed to glow.

“I was smiling at you, I guess. You have beautiful—”

“Eyes,” she finished my sentence. “Thank you.”

“I take it I’m not the first person to tell you that.”

She shook her head, smiling shyly, hinting at the straight white teeth behind her pink lips. “Not even the first tonight. But I’m glad you think so.”

I thought she might’ve been blushing a little, but it was hard to tell in the harsh parking lot light.

“I’m okay, by the way,” I said. “Just hurt my leg a little, is all.”

“What?”

“That’s how this started, remember? You asked me—”

She laughed a kind of goofy laugh. “Right. Right. I saw you were limping in the club earlier and then when I saw you leaning against the wall, I was just wondering.”

“That’s a helluva a laugh you’ve got there.”

“I know. My ex says it’s one of the reasons he asked for a divorce. He couldn’t take it anymore.”

“I like it. I might even like your name if I knew it.”

Now she definitely was blushing. “Casey. People call me Casey.”

“But that’s not your name?”

“Not nearly,” she said, ducking her head and wrapping her arms around the shoulders of her red leather jacket. “God, it’s cold out here.”

“It is, but you’re not changing subjects that easy.”

We both laughed at that. But she scrunched her lips closed and shook her head no at me like a little girl.

“So, you’re not gonna tell me your name, huh?”

“Not tonight,” she said.

I offered her my right hand. “Well, I’m Gus Murphy.”

Her hand fit comfortably in mine. It was warm and soft, but not too soft. It was a hand that worked for a living.

Casey looked me directly in the eyes. “I know who you are.”

“Do you?”

“People talk.”

She was lovely. Her hair was coal black and parted on the left. It was long, too, and fell over her shoulders as it pleased. She had an angular jawline and a willful chin. And when she wasn’t being shy, her smile was bright and alive. Her lips weren’t overly pouty or thick, but they had great curves to them.

“What do you know about me, Casey whose name isn’t Casey?”

“You were a cop and . . .”

There it was, that look. She knew about John. I wasn’t in the mood for the usual awkwardness nor was I in the mood to be unkind. Being here with her had changed my frame of mind.

“It’s okay,” I said, touching her cheek. Somehow I knew it would be okay for me to do that. “It’s not good to pretend.”

When she didn’t apologize, I swear I almost kissed her. I found the thought of kissing her suddenly a pleasant idea, but I kept it as just that, a pleasant thought.

“I’ve wanted to talk to you for a long time, Gus, but I could never work up the nerve before tonight. It never seemed like you would want to talk. This isn’t coming out right. It’s not that I thought you wouldn’t want to talk to me. What I’m saying is that you always seemed like you were closed.”

“I
was
closed,” I said, realizing my hand was still pressed to her cheek. I took it away, but not quickly. “What did you want to talk about?”

“The truth?”

“It’s usually a good place to start.”

“Dinner,” she said.

I was confused. “What about dinner?”

She laughed that goofy laugh again and I was even more confused.

“What?”

“I’ve wanted you to ask me that question for months.”

“
What about dinner?
” I repeated it in my head and aloud, trying to understand. Then, “Oh, now I understand.”

“You’re smiling, Gus.”

“Am I? I don’t smile much anymore.”

“You should. It suits you. You’re very handsome when you smile.”

“Thanks.”

She turned her palms up. “Well?”

“Well what?”

Casey smiled. “What about dinner?”

“We better stop this or it’s going to turn into a version of ‘Who’s on first?’”

“What?”

“No, he’s on second.”

“Who is?”

“Never mind.” I laughed, shaking my head at her. “Would you like to go to dinner sometime?”

“Very much.”

“Listen, Casey . . . I’m not sure I’ll be very good company.”

“Nothing is sure.”

I thought of my son and said, “You’re right about that. Nothing is.”

“What’s your number?”

I pointed at the hotel. “Call the hotel and ask for me.” Then I stopped being mysterious and gave her my cell number. “My schedule is kind of screwy, but—”

“You already trying to back out on me?” She wagged a finger.

I shook my head. “Scout’s honor. C’mon, I’ll walk you back to the club.”

“No,” she said, smiling. “I don’t think so. I’ve got what I came for.”

“Your car, then.”

Casey threw a thumb over her shoulder at the old blue Honda Civic behind her. “You already have.” She put her hands on my shoulders, got on her toes, and kissed me softly on my cheek. “I’ll call in a couple of days.”

Stunned, I watched her get into her car and drive off. As her taillights turned into small red specks and then disappeared, I thought of
all the questions I should have asked her, of all the warnings about me I should have given her. But it was too late now. As I turned to limp back to the club, I noticed that neither my leg nor arm hurt quite as much as they had only fifteen minutes before. Then, about four strides short of where I would’ve made the turn around the corner to the Full Flaps, something else came out of the darkness at me. Something cold and hard and far more deadly than Casey’s voice. I stopped in my tracks. The feel of gunmetal against your neck will do that to you—stop you from moving. Stop the world from turning.

Before I could react, two massive, powerful hands clutched my elbows and squeezed my arms together behind me. Another hand, the free hand of the man pressing the gun to my neck, reached under my jacket and removed my old service weapon from the holster on my right hip. Suddenly, I was being moved along toward the space between a parked cargo van and a black Escalade, my feet barely touching the ground beneath them. I was a dead man. I smiled at the absurdity of it, for there had been so many times during the last two years I wouldn’t have cared. That I would have relished an end to all the pain and constant grief. It was different now. Was it as simple as having met a woman other than Annie whose lips I found I wanted to kiss? Was it that Tommy Delcamino’s murder had given me a sense of purpose beyond mourning my loss? I couldn’t say. All I knew was that I desperately wanted to see the sun rise again.