Hurt Machine

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  By his third drink on me, Flannery had told me a few hundred war stories—at least it seemed that way—and had begun grousing about how the world and the job had changed and, in his opinion, not for the better. I subtly egged him on, though he didn’t really need any encouragement. Just when I was about to introduce the subject of Alta and Maya’s alleged dereliction of duty, Flannery made a trip to the bathroom. The business at the bar slowed down momentarily and I waved the barman over. I had him bring another round.

  “So what’s my drinking mate’s story?” I asked the bartender—a guy about my age—when he brought the drinks.

  “Flannery? He’s a pain in the balls, but make no mistake, the man’s a hero.”

  “Him? Get the fuck outta here.”

  “I shit you not. Remember how bad things were in the ghettos in the early ’70s?” he asked. “I was on the job then too, a ladder company in Brownsville. We used to get pelted with bricks and bottles on nearly every night run we made in them days. Trust me, it didn’t fill me heart with love for those people. We were targets for their anger. Flannery, after getting hit in the head by a brick, made the best rescue anyone ever saw. It’s fucking legendary. Singlehandedly saved five kids, their parents, and a cat from a kerosene heater blaze that lit up the building like tissue paper. Kept running in and out of a building he had no business going into in the first place. I know he can be a ornery bastard, but that bastard won the James Gordon Bennett Medal. That’s the highest honor the department bestows and it ain’t given out like Halloween candy. Just don’t mention it or tell him I told you. He hates talking about it. Okay, here he comes.”

  Flannery sat back down beside me and made quick work of the Jameson. He nodded at the barman. “Big-mouthed son of a bitch bartender told you, didn’t he? About the medal, I mean. Don’t deny it. I seen that look on your face. I seen it plenty. How can a broken-down drunk slob like Flannery be a hero?”

  “Don’t get mad at him. I asked about you.”

  “Yeah, well, we’ll get on fine, you and me, as long as we don’t talk about that.”

  That was my opening.

  “Fine. Then let’s talk about something else.”

  “Like what?”

  Finally, a song I knew came on. “Paradise By The Dashboard Light” played and most of the crowd in Finbarr’s was singing along. I had to shout at Flannery to be heard.

  “Like about the two EMTs that let that guy die in the city.”

  I guess I was a little too successful at being heard. Before Flannery could say a word, a heavy hand slammed down on my shoulder and it stayed there. The guy attached to the other end of it walked around in front of me. He was twenty-five with dark red hair, a healthy mustache, and light blue eyes shot with blood. He had the look of a man who’d been drinking for a few hours and was spoiling to flex his beer muscles.

  “What are you, another fucking reporter here to stir up the shit?”

  “No, I’m a man having a private conversation,” I said, calm but serious. “Now if you don’t mind, please get your hand off my shoulder.”

  “But I do mind, motherfucker!” He turned his attention on Flannery. “Don’t talk to this asshole. He’s looking to bury us.”

  Flannery didn’t answer right away, but I was losing patience.

  “Listen, I asked you politely to move your hand off my shoulder and got called a motherfucker for my trouble. Now I’m not asking, I’m telling you. Get your fucking hand off my shoulder.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  By now, the rest of the bar had stopped singing and focused their eyes on us. Not good. With an audience, there was no way for this guy to back down and save face. His friends started egging him on. Kick the old guy’s ass, Hickey. Come on, Hickey, fuck him up. And so it went.

  I may have been an old man in his eyes, but I stopped taking shit from morons like Hickey when I was eight years old. And there was this other thing: I was carrying. My old .38 was holstered in the small of my back and I could have it sticking under Hickey’s chin in a second or two. I waited a beat to give him a chance to back off. He didn’t avail himself of the opportunity. No surprise there. So I reached around under my jacket, but my hand never made halfway to my holster. Flannery had a hold of my wrist and when he had hold of something, it stayed held. I looked his way and he shook his head no. I nodded that I understood and he let go. Before I could exhale, Flannery was out of his seat and had his left hand around Hickey’s throat.

  “Listen, pup, what me and my friend choose to discuss is none of your fucking business. You ever interrupt me or lay a hand on a friend again and I’ll make sure you get your medical pension in a hurry. Do you take my meaning, son?” He squeezed a little tighter as he asked. Hickey nodded that he understood. “Smart lad. Now my friend and I are leaving. I turn around and even sniff you behind us, I’ll snap your arm off.” He let go of Hickey.

  I thanked the barman and left the change as a tip. Outside, I asked Flannery why he stopped me from teaching Hickey a lesson.

  “Because we police our own,” he said. “Now let’s find a place to do some proper drinking.”

  And so we did.

  TEN

  Flannery knew a real neighborhood bar not two blocks from Finbarr McPhee’s. The kind of place where they played Sinatra on the jukebox and the jukebox still played vinyl records. It was the kind of place that had a name, but you didn’t need to know it because you knew where it was and what it was about. And what it was about was beers and shots of whiskey, a pool table, a dart board, and one old TV that hadn’t worked in years. Nobody came here to hit on babes or to impress anyone at all. It was a bar for men to drink in and to be comfortable doing so.

  The bartender knew Flannery, which didn’t exactly shock me. I supposed most of the bartenders in Bay Ridge knew him. I gestured to a booth. Flannery wasn’t having any. He preferred sitting at the bar and that was fine with me. I took out another fifty and ordered a Jameson and a Guinness. I think I’d managed two sips of my first Guinness at McPhee’s and never got to the second. I meant to actually drink this pint. My drinking buddy had no trouble finishing his and made quick work of his whiskey. I figured that since he’d just saved my ass or saved me from making an ass of myself, I’d let him bring up the subject that had started all the trouble in the first place.

  “You know why that pup got so agitated when you brought up the EMTs?” Flannery asked, his unfocused eyes aimed vaguely at the mirror behind the bar.

  “I have some idea. They reflected badly on the department and all of that.”

  “That’s part of it, but not nearly all. It’s politics.”

  “What isn’t?” I said, nodding for the barman to bring Flannery another.

  “True enough, but this is ugly politics, internal politics. See, EMTs wear uniforms, but are civilian employees of the department. They’re not firefighters like in other cities and they don’t usually work out of the same houses that the men on the real job do. If an EMT wants to become a fireman, they gotta take a special test.”

  “I see. So even though these two women weren’t on the job, the real firefighters get tainted by what they did. The public isn’t big on making subtle distinctions.”

  “The media neither, but it’s even more complicated than that, Moe.” He looked around to make sure no one was in earshot. “Here’s the deal. The department has never been the most welcoming place for certain kinds of people, if you catch my drift.”

  “I do.”

  “Going back to my days in the department, the blacks always sued over the test to get on the job, saying it discriminates against them. Even though I think that’s all a crock of shit myself, when you look at the numbers…. And these days, the FDNY gets federal money too. So someone inside the union got the bright idea to get EMTs counted with the FDNY’s numbers because a lot of the EMTs are women and minorities.”

  “Holy shit!”

  “That’s right, Moe. They wanna use the big minority numbers from the ranks of the
EMTs to make the department’s racial profile look better and more balanced for the feds and the courts, but they want them to remain civilian employees. Of course, the EMTs ain’t exactly thrilled by this plan.”

  “There’s a perverse kind of symmetry to that way of thinking. It unskews the curve, but without really changing anything.”

  “Bingo! When those two EMTs fucked up, they pissed everybody off. They really rocked the boat. It’s a big-stakes game and everyone on all sides got a dog in the fight, so emotions are running high. People are edgy and like you found out back at McPhee’s, just asking questions about it is risky business.”

  “Risky enough to get someone killed?”

  Flannery didn’t answer right away. I checked his eyes in the mirror. They were focused now, but seemed to be locked in on something in the distance, beyond my field of vision.

  “Maybe,” he said. “People don’t think sometimes before they do shit. There’s been a lot of grumbling. I think it’s talk mostly, but let’s face it, no one I know sent flowers or sympathy cards when that EMT got hers. Before you start pointing fingers, remember there are just as many EMTs as firemen pissed off at what those two did. Why do you care, anyhow? What’s it to you?”

  I figured I owed him the truth. “Alta Conseco, the EMT who was murdered, I was married to her little sister once. They were estranged for a long time and now I guess she feels sort of overwhelmed by guilt about all the time they lost.”

  “Guilt,” he said, “a mighty curse to bear. I’ll drink to that.”

  And drink he did, but he stopped talking. I finished my Guinness in silence and slid my card across the bar to Flannery.

  “Leaving?”

  “Yeah,” I said, shaking his hand. “My stomach’s killing me. Pleasure meeting you and thanks for saving my ass before.”

  “Forget it.” When I turned to go, he called after me, waving my card between his fingers. “I hear anything, I’ll call.”

  I nodded. As I walked to my car, I heard myself laughing. My stomach was killing me.

  I didn’t enjoy myself for very long because I got thumped in the ribs as I turned the corner to where my car was parked. The wind went out of me, my laughter transformed to gasping as I collapsed to the sidewalk. I suppose I might’ve tried to get up if I didn’t get a kick in the back.

  “Not so tough without your boyfriend to protect ya, are ya, old man?” It was Hickey.

  I was preoccupied with trying to get my lungs restarted, so I didn’t answer or reach for my .38. Breathing is easy to take for granted, but the rest of the machinery won’t work without it. Funny, I thought about the tumor again, how it too was probably rooting for me to catch my breath. Nothing in this world likes getting cheated out of the chance to fulfill its destiny. It’s pretty fucked up what you think about sometimes.

  “Consider yourself warned, grandpa.”

  Grandpa. I couldn’t help but wonder if I would ever hear that name spoken in love.

  ELEVEN

  I had two nasty bruises and a headache for my troubles. The hurt in my gut had diminished to the level I had grown accustomed to. The pain, which had so frightened me at first, was now just like background noise. Still, I couldn’t sleep. The possible reasons were legion, so I didn’t waste time considering them. What I did instead was read through a box full of hate mail. About halfway through, it occurred to me that people with hearts so full of hate must have no room in their brains for spelling or syntax. The drab sameness of the vulgarity and racism was mind-numbing. It was kind of like my pain; after a while it became noise. None of it made sense, really. Then again, when did reason ever have anything to do with racism or hate? It was a dumb question for a Jew to ask, even to himself. I imagined Mr. Roth showing me the number on his forearm and shaking his head at me in disapproval.

  I pulled a few letters out of the pile. These were the ones that moved beyond simple expressions of hate or vague hopes for terrible fates to befall Alta and Maya and their families. They were the letters in which the writers made specific threats of violence, some alluding to stabbing and throat slitting. I wondered just how hard Detective Fuqua had worked at looking into the origin of these. As he said, many, if not most, New Yorkers felt as though Alta had gotten what she deserved. And no matter how determined Fuqua seemed, I doubted the NYPD was willing to spend the money and manpower it would take to investigate hundreds, maybe thousands of anonymous letters and emails. But things sent electronically weren’t as anonymous as people thought. Sure, there were clever computer geeks and hackers who could bury their cyber-footprints, but I somehow doubted that people who could barely spell fuck or use it in a proper sentence were likely candidates for jobs at Intel, Cisco, or the NSA.

  I called Brian Doyle’s cell. Doyle was an ex-cop. When he was on the job, he had a nasty rep for taking shortcuts and dishing out uppercuts. He was a stubborn, impatient prick who liked using his knuckles more than his noggin, but what made him a bad cop helped make him a good PI. When Carm and I owned our security firm together, we took Brian on and made a damned fine investigator of him. Then in 2002, after Carm and I split and dissolved the partnership, Brian and our tech guy Devo opened up their own shop in lower Manhattan. They had helped me with the Sashi Bluntstone case and I was hoping they could help me again.

  “What? It’s three in the fucking morning,” Brian answered with his usual Old World charm.

  “You doing surveillance?”

  “What the fuck else would I be doing answering my cell phone at three a.m.?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe you’re just lonely.”

  “Loneliness was never my problem, Boss.” Brian had never gotten out of the habit of calling me that. “So what can I do you for?”

  “Can you meet me tomorrow? I got a job for you and Devo.”

  “Where and when?”

  “Lunch at noon,” I said. “You pick the place.”

  “O’Hearn’s on Church Street. I’m in a corned beef and cabbage kinda mood.”

  “See you tomorrow.”

  Click.

  I realized I hadn’t called Pam or Sarah in a few days. I’d call Sarah in the morning. Although Pam was still a PI, she wasn’t Brian Doyle’s type of PI. She wasn’t big on late-night surveillance, but she did kick the occasional ass. I wasn’t going to risk waking her, not at this hour. So I looked out my front window at Sheepshead Bay and thought back to when I was a kid and crossing the Ocean Avenue footbridge over the bay to Manhattan Beach seemed like a walk into another world. I was thinking about that kind of walk a lot lately, a walk into another world.

  TWELVE

  Whereas Sarah was thrilled to hear from me and excited about the wedding, the edge to Pam’s voice was about as subtle as a chainsaw. I didn’t need to scratch too far below the surface to understand why. The edge was there when she first saw Carmella in my arms. Although Pam had done a good job of sheathing it during the party on Sunday, the edge was there again in our goodbyes that night. Funny how this woman, who never seemed threatened by anything or anyone, was so thrown off her game. It was worse now than on Sunday night because she’d been alone for a few days with time to think. That was the worst thing of all, time to think. Time to think is life’s Petri dish. It’s the medium in which a random twinge of anxiety morphs into debilitating self-doubt, where a passing regret grows into paralytic guilt. Since walking out of my oncologist’s office, I’d become very familiar with the dangers of time to think. That’s why Carmella’s reappearance was saving me from eating myself alive before the cancer could. Problem was, until after the wedding, Pam couldn’t know that the more immediate threat to the two years we’d spent together wasn’t Carmella at all.

  “Hey, how’s the case going?” I asked, ignoring the edginess.

  “Fine.”

  “Fine?”

  “What do you want me to say? It’s a case.”

  “Specificity, that’s what I always loved about you.”

  “Loved?”

  Shit! I’d bee
n trying to walk on eggshells when it was actually a minefield I was walking through.

  “Come on, Pam, cut it out.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, sounding like she meant it. “I’m just feeling off is all. Listen, I should be wrapping this job up by next Monday latest. You have off, right? Why not come up here a few days early and we can spend time drinking in bed? Besides, you’ve looked pretty stressed out lately and you haven’t taken good care of yourself. Let me take care of you.”

  Talk about a minefield. Jesus! “As incredible as that sounds, I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m working a case.”

  “A case? You haven’t worked a case in two years and you’re working one now, a few weeks before your daughter’s wedding.”

  “That’s about it, yeah.”

  “It’s for her, isn’t it? That’s why she was there Sunday.”

  I decided that lying would only make things worse. “For Carmella? Yes, for her. It’s complicated.”

  “No, it’s not, Moe. It’s not complicated at all.”

  “But it is.”

  “Then explain it to me.”

  “You know the EMT who let that guy die in the restaurant and then got stabbed to death in Brooklyn? Her name was Alta Conseco. She was Carmella’s older sister.”

  “Christ! I never thought to put the names together.”

  Pam knew the whole story about Carmella and me, about how Carmella had changed her name from Marina Conseco, even about how Carmella had added the extra l in her new first name as a fuck you to her mother for the way she treated Carmella after being molested.

  “So what are you supposed to do?” Pam asked.

  “Like I said, it’s complicated.”

  “So of all the cases in the world, you choose this one? You’re going to spend the weeks before Sarah’s wedding doing a favor for a woman who basically ran out on you and robbed a child from you? No, Moe, like I said, it’s not complicated. It’s just plain crazy.”