3 Quarters (29 page)

Through binoculars, Trevor Sawyer watched his wife, Constance, kiss Bobby Emmet good-bye. He had watched them both since her arrival at the boat basin almost two hours earlier. He had watched the Japanese man pull away in the other boat, the one he'd hired to follow them. He dialed a cell phone, and after a brief pause he said, “Hello, is Mr. Gleason there please?” He paused a moment, watching Connie walk down from
The Fifth Amendment.
Then he spoke back into the phone: “Hello, Izzy? It's Trevor. We need to talk. . . .”

A
s the rain fell hard, Bobby parked the Jeep in the gravel parking lot and stepped into The Central Booking Saloon through an aluminum-clad side door. The bar was loud, smoky, dark, and crowded. A Yankees game blared from the TV, and Waylon Jennings howled from the juke, and the rain drummed on the tile roof. The neon of the jukebox, computer games, and the beer signs blinked on and off.

Bobby saw at least six three-quarters cops at the bar and one behind it: Kuzak, Zeke, Lebeche, Daniels, Flynn, and Levin. O'Brien was behind the stick, pulling foamy Bud into frosted mugs. Funny, Bobby thought, how O'Brien's bad back never seemed to bother him when he stooped to the back-bar refrigerator for freshly frosted mugs.

Lou Barnicle was seated at a cocktail table near the front door, with two drinks on the table in front of him. Bobby walked directly to Barnicle, who looked up at him, his arms folded across a black-and-red shirtfront that was silk-screened with a map of all the Hawaiian Islands. Neither said a word. The rain pounded. Now the other cops noticed Bobby, and they moved slowly from the bar toward the table.

“Jesus, Lou, look at all these invalids,” Bobby said as he looked from the three-quarters cops to Barnicle. “Real walking wounded. Here for the physical therapy, boys?” Bobby smiled. “But, Lou, how come they move like the Giants backfield all the way to the bank with the three-quarters checks the first of every month?”

Flynn started taking off his jacket with a saloon brawler's flourish, as if looking for the chance he never got in the Gibraltar Security office the day he and Bobby first met.

“Easy, guppy, I'm here to see the kingfish,” Bobby said to him.

“Come on,” said Flynn. “One on one. Just you and me.”

“I really don't feel like hurting my hands,” Bobby said. “And now that I'm out of the job, I can't even get three-quarters.”

Flynn bull-charged Bobby, who very calmly stepped to the side, like a matador. Flynn stumbled past, and as he did Bobby blasted a right hand into his lower spine, certain he heard a couple of discs crunch. The big kid dropped to all fours.

“Eyyyaaaaaghhhhh!
” Flynn screamed and tried to straighten but couldn't.

“S'matter?” Bobby said, circling to the front of him. “Having trouble? Back problem?”

Flynn writhed on the wooden plank floor, screaming in pain.

“Geez, I think he might really qualify for three-quarters now,” Bobby said. “That's if he was on duty for NYPD. But since he was on duty for a bag of shit named Barnicle, I'm not so sure they'd be so sympathetic.”

Kuzak and Zeke now lurched toward Bobby. Lebeche and Daniels pulled out their Glock 9 mm pistols. Barnicle stood, raising his right hand, freezing them. Bobby cleared his throat and said, “I know your game, Lou. I know how low it starts and how far up it goes. It's a great racket. But I'm telling you, Lou, these morons you have working for you are going to be your downfall. Like those two Nobel Prize candidates.”

He pointed at Lebeche and Daniels, who still held their pistols on Bobby. “They couldn't find a hot dog in Coney Island, and yet they find, what, fifty large apiece, give it to Kuzak and Zeke here to buy a three-quarters pension?” He turned to them. “What did you do, boys? Rob a drug dealer?”

Lou Barnicle appeared concerned for the first time since Bobby started his spiel. But Bobby was careful not to tell him how much he actually knew.

“Lou,” Kuzak said. “Just give me the word, and he disappears.”

“Heel,” Bobby said, snapping his fingers twice, without looking at Kuzak. He was aware that every eye in the place was on him and that for every set of eyes, there was a gun. But he had to humiliate these guys in front of each other to make them overreact. To do this he knew he had to stand erect, cool, jitter free, in
control
.

“I have it all planned out how I'm gonna take you apart,” Kuzak said.

“You'd need instructions to eat soup,” Bobby said. He kept looking Barnicle deep in the eye, leaned closer, exploring the iris for flaws. He found a few, like little signs of mounting fury.

“I don't know who gets all the money,” Bobby said. “Yet. But I'll find out . . .”

Bobby didn't mention Moira Farrell.

“Why don't you take a hike, Bobby. There's no priest or John Shine around this time . . . .”

Barnicle was distracted by the tap, tap, tap of high heels on hard wood. Sandy Fraser walked from the ladies' room to the table with a hip-swinging stride as Barnicle ordered her to keep walking out the front door.

“Something I did or said?” Sandy asked.

“Yeah,” Bobby said. “Excuse my language, but you have too many balls for this crew.”

Sandy paused, smiled, assessed the strained situation. One of the Yankees hit a home run, and from the TV Bobby could hear the crowd at the stadium cheering wildly. Sandy picked up an oversized umbrella, then stepped out into the storm.

“No way to treat a lady,” Bobby said to Barnicle. In back of him, Flynn made little yelping sounds as Levin helped him to a chair.

“I think you better leave, too,” Barnicle said.

“Don't you want to hear the end of the story?” Bobby asked. “About how I'm gonna make the bad guys lose in the end?”

Barnicle glared at him.

“Look around you, Lou,” Bobby said, his voice now very cold. “Then look at yourself. You were a real cop once. You had a reputation once for being brave, ballsy, by the book, honorable. Now you wind up with these pathetic scum. Where did you go wrong, Lou?”

Barnicle just stared at him, his lower lip trembling.

“Go, while the getting is good,” Barnicle said.

“When I'm ready,” Bobby said, walking closer to Barnicle, eye to eye now. “But let me ask you something. When it was still good, when ‘The Job' was still
The Job
, the greatest show on earth, the noblest way to earn an honest dollar and still count for something in your lifetime, when you were actually catching bad guys and protecting the citizens, doing God's work, when you were the legendary cop you truly once were, would you have ever let any one of these pukes take your back? Would you have run into an alley or across a rooftop with Kuzak or Zeke, these two mama's boys? With any of these guys who have balls like Raisinets?”

Barnicle remained mute as Bobby pointed to Lebeche and Daniels and shook his head.

“If some skells had broken into your house and were after your sister or your old, gray mother,” Bobby asked, “and they called nine-one-one, would you want these blue mice to be the first line of defense? These guys would show up after the dirty deed was done and steal the goddamned silverware, Lou.” O'Brien shut off the TV and the jukebox went mute. The rain continued to hammer the roof tiles. “These aren't cops. These are
skells.
These are the
bad
guys, the mutts we joined the force to put away. No different than the bastard who killed my own father.” Bobby's voice dropped to a whisper. “Jesus Christ, Lou, what was it that happened to you to make you become one of
them?”

There was a fragile moment of silence as the rain pelted the tile roof when Bobby thought he detected a scribble of shame in Barnicle's eyes.

“Go,” Barnicle said softly.

Flynn continued to moan in agony.

“I'm leaving here,” Bobby said. “But I'm back to stay. And I'm gonna bring you all down.”

Bobby now knew that Barnicle would have to act.

He drove along the coast road of Rockaway, past the wild reeds and the lumpy dunes where you could still see the abandoned, half-buried nuclear-missile silos of the paranoid fifties peeking through the dirty wet sand. To his right, five hundred feet up the beach, was a wooden walkway leading to the main road. The windshield wipers slapped in the pounding rain, and he could not see very far ahead of him in the gray wash that blew in off the Atlantic.

He hoped that if any of Barnicle's goons pursued him, they'd look for him on the highway, while he took this back road off of the peninsula. If they were going to come after him, he wasn't going to let them turn him into a simple highway accident.

No, if they were going to try to whack him, they'd have to do it up close and personal. It could be nothing but murder.

He thought he had some time. He was fairly certain that Barnicle wouldn't risk going after him so close to Windy Tip. If Bobby was miles away when it happened, Barnicle would have a perfect alibi. Watching a Yankee game. With a priest and fifteen other witnesses. But the goons would come. It might take as long as a day or a week, Bobby thought.

He was wrong.

Suddenly out of the gray blank of the storm, a white van appeared in front of him in a wild wet skid, lashing a spray of sand across Bobby's windshield. His wipers scraped at the clumps of gritty sand as Bobby hit his own brakes and spun the wheel of the Jeep to the right to avoid hitting the van. Adrenaline sizzled in his veins and his chest swelled and his heart began to pound. Bobby floored the gas pedal and mounted a small dune to avoid the white van. But the going was slow in the four-wheel gear, the tires chewing at the softer sand under the wet, hard-packed top layer. He picked up momentum as the Jeep rumbled downhill from a higher dune-covered silo, sending an explosion of seagulls into panicked flight. Because of the rain and the sand and the birds, he could see nothing. But he kept the accelerator floored.

He peered into his rearview mirror and could make out the white monster of a van in pursuit. When the gulls finally dispersed, he looked ahead again, and another white van was ominously there in front of him, like a portable prison wall. Bobby swung the wheel left this time, toward the surf, hoping to get to full speed on the hard-packed sand of the shore. The second van raced toward him, and even in the wet, windy haze Bobby could see that the license plate had been obscured by a black plastic bag.

Racing for the shoreline, Bobby realized he was now sandwiched between the two huge vans and could not swerve left or right. The only place to go was straight into the riotous sea. He slammed the brakes, the car lurching to a halt in the wet sand. The vans also braked. Bobby quickly shifted into reverse and heard the metallic grinding of sand trapped between the gears. The Jeep strained to climb the incline in reverse, and then he found himself hopelessly mired, the wheels spinning like those of a stationary bicycle.

The two white vans had him penned in on either side, making it impossible for him to open the side doors. Bobby saw men with black ski masks and zippered NYPD jackets, who had exited the far doors of the white vans, now circle around to the front of his Jeep. The men were animated with boozy machismo. He leaped over the backseat of his Jeep, into the hatchback area, braced himself against the seat, and kicked out the back window with both boots. He heard the roar of the wind and felt the rain on his face as he dove out the back window, hitting the ground in a roll.

He was on his feet in seconds and instantly con fronted by a hooded, masked man who swung a blackjack at his head. Bobby ducked under the sap and dropped the man with a punch to the solar plexus.

Bobby began running, racing as fast as he could in the wet sand toward the walkway five hundred feet up ahead. He waited for a bullet to end his run. It didn't come. Instead, a hand grabbed him from behind and Bobby spun. He saw a black wool ski mask, and he punched at it with a right hand where the nose protruded. He felt bone and cartilage flatten under his knuckles. The man fell in a legless twirl. Now a second ski-masked goon grabbed him from the left, and Bobby threw a punch at this attacker, and he went down on his back with a soft thud. The third and fourth goons approached him from the sides, one hitting Bobby with a police nightstick across the backs of his knees, buckling him and forcing him to a kneeling position. The second one hit him with a blackjack across the right ear. Bobby looked up as his head spun, and he saw six masked faces looming down at him. Rain fell in his eyes from a funereal sky.

He imagined Maggie standing at his funeral . . . .

He could see the entire huddle of men over him, wearing NYPD jackets, NYPD rings, NYPD T-shirts, whacking him with blackjacks, kicking him, punching him. The pain jolted through him, as he instinctively tried to protect his face, then his balls, his back, as he was attacked from every angle. He tried to get up. He was stomped back down.