And then I thought of Nick, going through the world making his own justice, too. I remembered how we had both waited outside Lucky’s for Bravelli, so much alike. Blood brothers. Now, it was almost as if it were Nick, not me, standing here, ready to put a bullet in Bravelli’s head. I was getting everything mixed up.
Shake it off, I told myself. Just kill Bravelli. Just kill him.
But I saw the crowd again, all around us on Locust Street. Only now I was part of it, thirsting for blood, for a feast of raw death. I tried to break away, but I couldn’t, I couldn’t get back into myself, back to the alley where I was standing. If I pulled the trigger I was going to kill Donna, I was going to kill Steve, I was going to kill everybody.
I lowered the gun, and as I did I gradually came back into the alley, into myself. Bravelli was there crying, tears coming from his eyes. There was a big wet spot on his pants, he had fucking pissed himself.
“Please don’t shoot me, please don’t shoot me,” he kept crying, over and over again, like a little boy.
With my free hand, I got out my handcuffs. “Lie down on the ground, face first,” I ordered. He did it real quick.
“Put your hands behind your back.”
Still pointing my gun at his head, I snapped the cuffs on his left wrist, then his right.
“Get up,” I said.
He got on his feet. And as he straightened, I switched the gun to my left hand, and with my right made a fist and drilled it into the side of his head. My chest hurt, like I had been hit myself, a real sharp pain, and I dropped to one knee. Bravelli staggered backward, then tripped. With no way to catch himself, he fell, face first. I stood up and walked over to him and grabbed the handcuff chain behind his back.
“Get the fuck up.”
Again, the moment he straightened, I hit his face with all my might, and he went down again, onto his ass. It felt good, it felt real good, I didn’t mind my own pain that time.
“Get the fuck up,” I said.
He just sat there.
“You got two choices, pal,” I said. “My fist or my gun. Which do you want?”
He slowly got back on his feet. He was still bending over, on his way up, when my fist pounded into his right eye. He staggered back and somehow stayed on his feet, so I hit him again, in the mouth. He staggered back again, and looked like he was thinking of bolting. I raised my gun at his head, and he froze. His face was covered with blood, from above his eye, from his nose, from his mouth. His pretty face didn’t look so fucking pretty now.
I finally put my gun back in my holster. Bravelli seemed to relax a little, but I drew my arm back and put all my weight, everything I had, into the next punch, right into his jaw. I heard a crack, it was one of the greatest sounds I ever heard, his fucking jaw cracking. A searing pain ripped through my chest, but it was worth it, and I fell to the ground at the same time Bravelli fell. I thought I had knocked him out, and I lay there watching him, but after a few seconds, he opened his eyes.
I tried to get to my feet, but I couldn’t, and we both lay there, faces on the pavement, looking at each other. I felt like I had been shot again, and for a moment I wondered whether the bullet had somehow pushed its way into me. But I knew that wasn’t possible.
It took me a long time to get up. Bravelli was still on the ground, watching me. He didn’t know what was going to happen next.
I heard sirens in the distance. Help was finally coming.
I looked at Bravelli. “Get the fuck up,” I said. I was afraid that if I hit him again, I’d pass out. But I couldn’t not hit him. I had to keep going.
He wasn’t about to get up again. Well, that was too fucking bad. I reached down to grab the handcuff chain to boost him up, and then I heard a familiar voice say, “That’s enough, Sergeant.”
I wheeled around and there was the Commissioner in his uniform and his Commissioner’s hat. His gun was leveled at my chest. Behind him, at the end of the alley by Sagiliano’s back door, was his Blazer.
I looked at him in disbelief. “You were here all along? You were here, and you didn’t call for help?”
The Commissioner just gazed at me impassively. He didn’t fucking care.
Bravelli was getting to his feet. He tried to smile with his broken jaw, yeah, was he glad to see the Commissioner. He walked over and stood right next to him.
“Get these cuffs off me.”
Now what? Was the Commissioner going to shoot me, or get Bravelli to do it? The sirens were getting louder. It doesn’t matter, I thought. I’ll be dead before they get here.
The Commissioner started to laugh. “How come you didn’t just shoot him?” he asked me.
What could I say?
“It’s real easy,” he said. “Like this.”
He put the gun to the side of Bravelli’s head.
“Hey!” Bravelli yelled, trying to step away.
But the Commissioner took a step to match Bravelli’s step, and said, “This is for killing my son, you fucking asshole.”
Bravelli looked at the Commissioner and opened his mouth, and there was an explosion and the back of Bravelli’s head blew off. As he fell, you could see a big hole in his forehead.
The Commissioner turned back to me. “See? That’s how easy it is.”
I just stood there, looking at the Commissioner. Now he was going to kill me, blow the back of my head off. I felt the pain in my chest again, pain all over. I was tired, I wanted to lie down and go to sleep. I didn’t even think about what was going to happen, that I was going to die, I just wanted to lie down.
“I didn’t mean for it to be this way,” the Commissioner said evenly. “I would have given my life for my son.”
The air was filled with sirens now, I knew they were less than a block away, but it was too late. I tried to think of something to say, some smart-ass last words like they always say in the movies, but I was too tired even for that.
And I thought: This is how it ends.
The Commissioner’s eyes met mine. “When you see Michelle,” he said, “tell her I love her.”
And then he put the gun to the side of his head and I watched as he quickly pulled the trigger. His head jerked in the explosion and his Commissioner’s hat popped off, and then like a puppet after someone has let go of the strings, he just sort of crumpled onto the ground.
Police cars, lights flashing, were pulling into the alley on both sides, cops were jumping out, guns in hand. The Commissioner and Bravelli lay at my feet, bright red blood pooling around their heads. I turned and walked back down the alley, past all my shell casings, almost to the Dumpster that Nick lay behind. Cops were rushing toward me now.
I hesitated before taking the final step that would bring Nick into view. I was hoping that when I saw him, somehow his eyes would be open and he’d be smiling, and he’d say, “We made it, Eddie, didn’t we?”
I didn’t want to take that final step, I wanted to stand there forever, to keep Nicky alive forever. But I did step forward, I had to, and there he was, lying where I had left him, his arms at his sides, like he was already in a coffin.
“I’m sorry, Nick,” I said softly. “I’m sorry I couldn’t save you.”
EPILOGUE
sometimes it doesn’t matter how true something is, people still won’t accept it.
No one in the Police Department believed my story about Commissioner Ben Ryder, how he had tried to kill me and then had later stood by as Bravelli and Canaletto gunned down Nick.
Even after Lenny Lanier came forward with the videotape, no one could quite accept my account of how it all fit together. I was the only person who had walked out of that alley—I had to be covering up something, but they couldn’t figure out what it was. One inspector came right out and said, “We don’t know exactly what you did yet, but you’re going to jail.”
I was counting on Michelle to back me up. But she was so shaken by her father’s death, and by the realization that she had contributed to it, that she went to her mother’s house and
shut herself away. And since she was the Commissioner’s daughter, no one was going to push her.
So I was on my own. I spent the next twenty-four hours going over my story with captains, inspectors, deputy commissioners, people from Internal Affairs—just about everybody but the Bomb Squad.
It was Michelle who had wanted me to tell the truth about her father in the first place. When she heard he was shot, she rushed to the alley. They were trying to get me into an ambulance when she got there. I didn’t want to go to the hospital, I wanted to get over to Aunt Janet’s. But the paramedics were insisting—the blunt impact could have caused heart damage, lung damage, they said. You have to go.
I spotted Michelle coming out of the alley, and I left the paramedics to talk to her. She hadn’t been able to get to her father. Two commanders blocked her path, they didn’t want her to see.
I told her what had happened, what her father had said. At first she was very calm. But when I told her his last words, that he loved her, she lost it, she just started sobbing.
I asked Michelle whether she wanted me to keep quiet about her father and Bravelli. Maybe we can destroy the videotape, I said.
“No,” she said, taking a deep breath to hold back more tears. “No, it has to come out. Everyone has to know that Steve was a good cop. Even if my father wasn’t.”
“You sure?”
She nodded. “Tell them everything.”
So I did. But for more than a day, Michelle kept her silence, and the Department treated me like a criminal.
She finally did come through, though, the next afternoon. I was sitting in Homicide, drinking coffee and waiting for my next round of questioners, when Michelle walked in.
“I’m sorry I left you hanging, Eddie,” she said.
A captain spotted her and waved her over, and they went into a room, and pretty soon two or three other commanders showed up, and they all went in, too. They had totally forgotten about me. After a while, I just got up and went home.
I had wanted to be the one to tell Aunt Janet about Nick. I didn’t want some stranger from the Department going over there and knocking on the door.
But they wouldn’t let me out of the hospital—they kept me there for two hours, taking X rays, running tests. I had pleaded with the commanders to hold off the notification. Let me be the one to go over there, I said. It’s better coming from a family member.
No, they said. The family has to be notified as soon as possible. And the media’s hounding us for information.
Fuck the media, I said.
By the time I finally got over to Aunt Janet’s, she had already heard. Matt and Chris were over there for Sunday dinner, they were all at the table when an inspector came by to give them the news.
The inspector was gone when I walked in the door. Aunt Janet was sitting on the living room couch, her eyes red, looking at nothing, her hands on her lap with a wad of tissue.
I knew I had to tell her about Nick and Steve. There was no way it wasn’t going to come out now—detectives would be squeezing everybody even remotely connected to the mob. Someone would eventually mention Nick’s name.
I wanted it to come from me, someone they knew. So I sat Chris and Matt down on the sofa too with Aunt Janet, and then I got a chair from the kitchen table and brought it in and sat facing them.
I told them they were going to hear some terrible things about Nick. You remember about Steve Ryder getting killed, I said. Well, you’re going to hear that Nick was the one who killed him.
Aunt Janet just sat there numb, but Matt and Chris went crazy, and started yelling what was I talking about. I said it was true, Nick had told me in the crackhouse, and I went over the story with them. Or at least half of it. I left out the part about what had really happened on the roof when Uncle Jimmy died. I doubted whether the two guys up there with Nick that day would ever say anything, they didn’t have any reason to. There were some things the family didn’t need to know.
And then I told Aunt Janet and Chris and Matt how Nicky had gone with me into the alley behind Sagiliano’s. When I got to the part about him saving my life, they all sat there, crying. And I was crying, too.
The funerals for Nick. Donna, and Mickey Bravelli were all on Thursday. Bravelli’s was at St. Mary’s in Westmount, and of course all the mob guys came to pay their respects. Or at least that’s what they said they were doing. Actually, they were there to scope out the new job vacancy. These guys were going up to Bravelli’s coffin at the altar and crossing themselves, and all the time they were thinking, Nice of you to get whacked, pal, thanks.
We just had a small service for Nick at the cemetery, in the morning. I was right about how the truth couldn’t remain hidden—with Bravelli dead, some of his former pals had no hesitation about ratting him out. Of course, it got into the papers, and now the whole city knew that Nick was the one who had killed Steve Ryder.
The priests we talked to didn’t want him in their church. We did find one, though, who would at least come out to the cemetery, and we picked a burial site in a quiet spot near where the woods started. Just a few people were there—Aunt Janet, Matt and Chris, my mother, and me. I wore my uniform, for Nick.
I did everything I could to keep the location of the cemetery a secret, but the media found out, and a whole pack of them showed up. They tried to get up close to the grave site with their cameras and tape recorders, and I had to go over two or three times and yell at them to stay back and respect our privacy.
Later that morning, I drove up to St. Stephen’s in the Port Richmond section, where they were having services for Donna. It seemed like every cop in the city was there.
Buster never left the casket, not for a moment. He sat next to it all during the Mass, and rode in the front seat of the hearse to the cemetery. Long after everyone had left the grave site and gone home, even the family, Buster was still there.
Commissioner Ben Ryder was buried the next day. Since it turned out he wasn’t exactly a model cop, they didn’t give him an official police funeral, the kind Steve and Donna got. But the church was almost full, there seemed to be a lot of friends and family members. There were also plenty of police commanders and street cops. Ben Ryder had been known for being loyal to his troops, and now the loyalty was being repaid.
Michelle and her mother sat together in the front row, erect, even proudly, their heads lifted.
I wouldn’t have gone to the service, except to see Michelle. I didn’t have a chance to talk with her at the church, so afterward I joined the procession to the cemetery. It was a short, simple ceremony. There was no American flag covering the coffin, no twenty-one-gun salute. The Commissioner was buried next to his son. It turned out Steve had deserved his hero’s funeral after all.
As I watched the service, I was thinking how Nick and the Commissioner had both decided to cross some sort of line. I don’t know what you’d call what was on the other side of the line. Maybe it was just Nick’s other universe.
But it was a place I couldn’t go. And, it turned out, neither could Michelle.
It occurred to me that both Nick and the Commissioner had tried to come back from that place—Nick by saving me, the Commissioner by committing suicide. And as the priest spread drops of holy water on the casket, and I heard him say something about commending Ben Ryder’s soul to heaven, I wondered, When you betray your soul, can you ever get it back?
Then I remembered Nick lying in the alley, saying how everything was OK. Maybe he had found some sort of peace. I wanted to think so. As for the Commissioner, I had no idea. He could have killed me, and gotten away with it, and he chose not to. I didn’t know the reason he didn’t, and I didn’t really care what it was. I was just grateful.
After the service, I walked up to Michelle, just as I had at Steve’s funeral. We moved away from the crowd so we could talk, and she said she wanted us to get together, over the weekend maybe. I told her I’d like that. Then she asked me whether I thought her father had atoned for his actions, even a little,
by taking his own life.
“I was just wondering that myself,” I said. “I don’t know, Michelle. What do you think?”
“I don’t know, either. I hope he did.”
Her hope for her father was the same hope I had for Nick. I can’t say why I walked out of that alley and he didn’t, any more than I can say why I stopped short of the line that he seemed destined to tumble across.
But I would have pulled him back, if I only could.
ONE
Every cop who’s been on the job for a while can tell you about the call.
That one call over Police Radio, that if he had to do it all over again, there’s no way in the world he’d answer it. Maybe he’d pretend his radio was turned off, or its battery was dead. As a last resort, he might try to leave work early—Hey, Sarge, I don’t feel so good, I’ve been throwing up, I really think I should go home right away.
It might be an innocent-sounding call, part of the daily routine. Or one that hints of danger, the dispatcher’s voice suddenly tense, just slightly higher pitched. A call out of nowhere, out of the air, a voice that breaks the silence as the patrol car cruises through the familiar streets. The cop doesn’t know it yet, has no way of knowing, but it’s the call. And once he answers it, it changes his life forever.
For me, it came late one night, near the end of my shift. I was already making plans, thinking about calling Michelle and having that first cold beer.
20-C-Charlie, we have a request for a supervisor.
No big deal, I thought. It just meant one of my cops needed me, probably for something minor, maybe even idiotic. Uh, Sarge, we just broke up a fight between like eight dogs—do we got to do paperwork on it?
This time, it was Mutt and Roy who wanted me. Mutt had radioed in, asking for a supervisor at 43rd and Market. The dispatcher, knowing I was the only 20th District sergeant on the street that night, relayed the request to me.
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