Last Chance for Glory (36 page)

“I kept goin’ because I could tell the jerk anything,” Emily Caruso declared, “and it was like there was nobody there to remember. I mean if no one’s home, you’re just talkin’ to an empty box, right?”

“I remember every word, Emily. I could recite a list of your transgressions as accurately as Gabriel reading from the book.”

She shook her head, willing the priest away. “So that guy with the white hair, you remember who he is, Bell?”

“Not really.”

“Yeah, you do,” she insisted, tugging at his arm. “The albino-lookin’ geek. The one said everybody’s supposed to get fifteen minutes of fame. That’s who I’m talkin’ about.”

“Andy Warhol,” Father Tim said.

“Right, Bell, Andy Warhol. So what I wanna know is what happened to my fifteen minutes? I mean, look at me. If I gotta wait much longer, the only way I’ll get a turn is if my goddamned hearse runs over a little kid on the way to the cemetery.” She paused, her smile dissolving as she thought it through. “Better make it a
crowd
of little kids, a crowd of little kids waitin’ for a school bus. One kid wouldn’t do it in New York.”

Kosinski shrugged. “Guess Andy was wrong.”

“He would’ve been,” Father Tim declared, “if that was what he actually said.”

“Did anybody ask you?”

“Andy Warhol said that everybody was
entitled
to fifteen minutes of fame. Entitlement is no guarantee.”

Emily Caruso turned on him in a fury. “You don’t know shit about it,” she began. “He never said anything about entitled, not a damned word.”

Kosinski let his mind drift away from what had become a nightly Cryders ritual. Emily Caruso’s voice would continue to rise; Father Tim would respond evenly, refuting every point she made; Ed O’Leary would finally stride the length of the bar and threaten to ban them from Cryders forever. Both would pretend to take the threat seriously, though each knew that Ed would never willingly suffer the economic loss. If they failed to show up two nights in a row, he’d be knocking on their doors, ready to drag them in by the collar.

Kosinski watched them with a bemused expression. Thinking the strangest part of the whole business with Max Steinberg and Marty Blake was how happy he felt right at this moment, like a traveler home from a long and difficult journey, a successful journey. Somehow, it’d all been worth it; he’d not only come through unscathed, but in some real way increased. And that was ridiculous; stupid beyond stupid. How could it be over when he was sitting there with his chest wrapped in a kevlar vest and a Smith & Wesson Model 10 tucked into his waistband?

He looked over at Tony Loest sitting on a stool near the door. Tony had been hired to lay bricks on a two-year commercial project, a high-rise going up in downtown Brooklyn, and was officially out of the cocaine business. He was downing boilermakers like he’d been sentenced to death and this was his last chance to repent.

“You ready, Bell?”

Kosinski looked up at Ed O’Leary. The bartender, having issued the ritual threat to Emily and the good Father, was hovering over him, bottle in hand.

“Always,” he said. “Always ready.”

O’Leary filled the glass, then leaned across the bar. “I’m gettin’ killed here,” he confided. “The Mets are up, eight to one. That fuckin’
yam,
Bonilla, all year he’s been a stiff, tonight he hits for the cycle. Go figure.”

Kosinski watched the bartender walk away. He wanted to return to his reverie, wanted to immerse himself in this odd, unexpected joy, but Emily Caruso was already plucking at his sleeve.

“Ya know what I think, Bell?” Her eyes had lost focus. She was weaving on her stool like a wheelchair athlete running a giant slalom. “I think Andy Warhol was full of shit. How could
everybody
get fifteen minutes? There’s like too many people.” She paused, finally said. “And not enough time.”

Kosinski nodded. “Yeah, you add ’em up and there’s five or six billion candidates. If they all got famous, there wouldn’t be any audience.”

“Maybe,” Father Tim declared, “we could have an all-volunteer audience, a core of selfless individuals who renounce their fifteen minutes in the interests of a greater good. We could hook them up to battery-operated television sets for sixteen hours a day, then parade those desiring fame in front of a camera.” He stopped long enough to drain his glass, then belch softly. “Of course, we’d have to have an entitlement commission to decide who is and who isn’t entitled, who’s worthy and who’s not. Violent felons and successful politicians would be automatically excluded.”

Kosinski glanced at Emily Caruso, noted that she was past responding to Father Tim’s jibes. “There’s lots of ways to become famous,” he observed, “and not all of them are good.” Like, he thought, being a white ex-cop whacked in a white neighborhood. Between the event, the investigation, and the funeral, he might even be worth half an hour.

“Fame ain’t what you get.” Emily shook her head, then fought to control the motion before it dragged her off the stool. “Ya know what ya get, Bell?”

“Tell me, Emily.”

“What ya get is one sad story. Dead kids, a husband who kicks your ass, foster homes, an uncle with an eye for twelve-year-olds … whatever it is that cuts you down. You get that so you can see your way through to the end. I mean everyone knows you’re not supposed to actually
tell
it, but at least nobody gets denied. Every single human being on the face of this planet gets one sad story.”

“Even Father Tim?”

Emily Caruso responded by sliding off the stool, Father Tim by catching her with practiced ease.

“I better take her home,” he said. “Better get myself home, too.”

Home, for Emily Caruso, was a room in her daughter’s house three blocks away.

“You think she can make it?”

“She did last night.” He put his hand around her waist, pushed his hat down over his head. “And the night before. God be with you, Bell.”

Kosinski stayed in the bar until there were no more customers, until Ed O’Leary had washed the last glass, wiped the bar, rinsed the empties and dumped them in the redemption bin. He wasn’t afraid; he didn’t dread the empty streets. As far as he could tell, he was looking forward to the confrontation. He’d never fired his .38 in the line of duty, never been shot at though he’d busted many a vicious mutt in his day.

It’s the novelty, he finally concluded. When I left the job, I gave up the idea of change. Everything was supposed to stay the same, a lake of booze with the days floating on top like paper sailboats in a puddle.

He looked down at the wet surface of the bar, counted the black cigarette scars in the wood. “You know what the problem is?” he said to nobody in particular.

“No, Bell, what’s the problem.”

Kosinski stared at Ed O’Leary for a moment. The bartender was standing in the doorway to the back room. “The problem is that you’re not in charge, but you can’t help acting like you are. The problem is that you never get to throw the first punch, but you keep trying.”

He stood up, found his body solid and centered, his hands steady as he tugged the revolver out of his waistband. He cradled the weapon in his palm for a moment, held it with his thumb over the hammer and the front site, his index and middle fingers along the two-inch barrel, his ring finger curled outside the trigger guard. Then he let his hand drop to his side.

From a distance, in the dark, the gun would be invisible. That was Plan A, Plan B, and Plan C; the strategy, he had to admit, of a drunken ex-cop utterly committed to throwing the first punch.

“That bad, is it, Bell?” Ed O’Leary was back behind the bar. He was standing in front of the open cash register with a sawed-off .12 gauge in his left hand. “You want, I’ll walk you over to your place.”

“I don’t think so, Ed.” Kosinski started for the door, then caught himself and turned back to O’Leary. “These bad guys are cops. It’s not a battle you could really win.” Again he started to turn away, again he caught himself. “They know I won’t stop on my own. If they thought I’d stop, they might let me off the hook, but they know I won’t because that’s what I told them. I got only myself to blame.”

It was just after two o’clock when Kosinski finally left Cryders. The air was cool and wet, the sidewalk already slick with dew. He took a deep breath, felt the moisture begin to build on his hair and eyebrows. The streets were empty. Off in the distance, he heard a truck work through its gears, the roar of the engine, the sudden silence as the driver shifted, the deep, guttural blast when the transmission re-engaged. The sound struck him as slow and plodding, which was the way he imagined himself right at that moment.

He crossed the avenue, his eyes moving from doorway to doorway. New York was never dark, not with four streetlights on every block. It was a place of shadows, shadows that gradually brightened, revealing their secrets as you closed in on them.

A car turned onto the avenue and swept past. Kosinski imagined Tommy Brannigan wearing a reversed Raiders baseball cap and a red bandanna, imagined him leaning out of a rear window, Uzi in hand. Grogan would be in front, pulling the trigger of a semiautomatic .12 gauge, while a steely eyed Samuel Harrah kept the car straight and steady.

The idea of an all-cop drive by amused Kosinski and he continued to spin it out as he made his way down the street. Maybe the car would be one of those low-rider Chevies, the kind that go up and down when the driver pushes a button. But, no, that was too west coast. In New York it would have to be a black Mercedes Benz, its radio spitting out Ice T’s “Cop Killer.” The rap would grow louder and louder as the car slowed for its final approach; he would spin, raise his .38, get off a few defiant shots before the report of his small revolver was overwhelmed by the deep boom of the shotgun, the repetitive crash of the Uzi.

The really important question, he said to himself, is should I jerk and dance like Bonnie and Clyde at the end of that movie, or should I be lifted by an onrushing wall of lead and slammed through a plate-glass window?

He kept moving while he weighed the merits, kept his right side close to the parked cars lining the block. He’d never been hunted before, but he’d played the part of the hunter often enough. What you learned to do, propelled as you were by absolute terror, was keep your eyes moving. You learned to search the interiors of parked cars, the blank, rectangular doorways, the deep shadows at the end of the alley. To scan the rooftops, the windows, even the trees, your eyes jerking from object to object while your heart jumped furiously in your chest.

What I’ll do is take the broken glass, he finally decided. The furious fusillade will pick me up off the ground, slam me backward through a window. Slivers of glass will flash like a shower of diamonds as the light dies in my eyes.

Dies in my eyes? No, too much. Let it be as the light
fades
in my eyes. Fades is better.

Without warning, Kosinski was overwhelmed by an onrushing wave of nausea. He staggered over to the curb, began to retch, felt his mind begin to slow even as his body was wracked by a series of deep, relentless spasms.

He was a block away from home when his brain snapped back into place. His knees were wet, his scalp cut and dripping blood. He started to reach up, to explore the wound, then saw the gun in his hand and remembered why it was there.

I wonder, he speculated, if I would’ve used it. I wonder if whatever brought me here would’ve known what to do. Something made me stand up, something got my legs moving, something knew where home was. But did something know about combat? About fear?

He willed his eyes back into the shadows, dropped his hand to his side. The unlit sign above the Cheery Day Laundromat beckoned to him, whispered a story about home and safety, a story he refused to acknowledge. Instead of rushing toward the locks and bolts of his apartment door, he stood motionless, drew in breath after breath, allowed the cool evening air to embrace him.

Two blocks away, a maroon Buick turned onto Fourteenth Avenue, made its way up the block, stopped in the intersection. Kosinski saw the driver’s head swivel briefly, then the car accelerated, crossed into the wrong lane, and came to a stop less than ten feet away.

“Say, buddy, I’m trying to get up on the Whitestone Bridge. I must’ve taken a wrong turn, because every way I go brings me right back here.” The driver’s long blond hair glowed in the light from the street lamp. It swept back along the side of his head to reveal a gold earring that, as Kosinski saw it anyway, neatly matched the shine of his glistening white teeth.

“Make a u-turn, go back to 162nd Street, then take a right onto the Cross Island Parkway.” He let his palm drop down onto the butt of the revolver, slid his finger inside the trigger guard, instinctively hid the Smith & Wesson behind his leg.

“Gimme that street again.” The smile widened.

“It’s called the street of your dead dreams.”

The driver’s smile disappeared as the gun he carried, a large-caliber automatic, jumped into the open window. Kosinski stepped to the left, watched the pistol slide toward him, raised his .38, and fired three times. The sound, unimaginably loud in the cool night air, covered the approaching footsteps so that Kosinski’s first knowledge of a second assassin came from a bullet slamming into the back of his vest.

Center of mass, he thought, a perfect shot.

He was hit twice more as he spun to face his attacker. The first shot slammed into the vest hard enough to crack a rib, the second tore through his left arm, shredding flesh, shattering bone. He felt no pain, no urge to turn and flee; instead, he watched his mind shrink down into a hard, black ball, a point of darkness that held reserves of outright hatred he hadn’t known he possessed.

“Last chance,” he told the fat man in the Yankees baseball jacket. “Last chance for glory,” he told himself.

A
FTER MARTY BLAKE DROPPED
his partner off at Cryders Bar, he made a deliberate decision to lose himself in what he termed “operational details,” a decision that proceeded directly from his own feelings of helplessness. He’d begged Kosinski to remain in hiding, dredging up every argument he could think of, but the ex-cop had remained adamant, determined, it seemed, to put his head on the block.