The shooter looked at Dead-Eye, his hand around the pistol handle. “Hey, nigger,” the shooter said, straining to lift the gun. “Don’t you ever miss?”
Dead-Eye curled the .44 he held in his left hand and squeezed off one round, hitting the shooter in the center of his forehead, dropping him dead.
“No,” Dead-Eye said, leaning his head back against the wall.
“Ask a stupid question …” Rev. Jim said.
The laughter of the wounded Apaches echoed through the shell of the burning house and floated out across the ruins of a fallen drug empire.
The ones they said could never be whole again had achieved victory.
EPILOGUE
Every man has his own destiny. The only imperative is to follow it, to accept it, no matter where it leads.
—Henry Miller,
“The Wisdom of the Heart”
January 1983
BOOMER SAT AT the head of the small table, sipping a cup of tea, watching Dead-Eye and Rev. Jim go deep into a game of chess.
“Is that as boring to play as it is to watch?” Boomer asked.
“Yes,” Rev. Jim said.
“So why play it?” Boomer said.
“We don’t have any checkers,” Dead-Eye said.
The physical healing was almost complete.
Boomer and Dead-Eye had spent a month in an Arizona hospital. Rev. Jim was set loose after two weeks, during which he managed to fall hard for one of the night nurses. They each had to endure painful daily physical therapy sessions, which by now were a given in their lives.
As expected, there had been no legal complications from the attack on Lucia’s compound. The feds were more than eager to grab credit for the takedown of Lucia Carney and her crew. The Apaches watched the press conference on a TV in Boomer’s hospital room.
“If they could only bust as good as they bullshit,” Rev. Jim said, turning off the set, “there’d be no crime.”
They never did get to the private plane that waited for them three miles east of the compound. Instead, they drove out of Arizona in a rented convertible. Along the way they stopped to visit with Geronimo’s Native American adviser. The old man listened with bright eyes as they told him how Geronimo had died—a brave warrior, unafraid and proud.
“We’ll miss him,” Boomer told the old man. “He was a good friend.”
“There’s no need,” the man said in a voice filled with strength. “His spirit lives and travels alongside you. And alongside those who will follow you.”
“The only thing following us these days are flies,” Rev. Jim said.
The old man smiled and nodded. “No one chooses their road,” he said. “Especially the brave.”
When he got back to New York, Boomer headed straight for Mrs. Columbo’s house. He sat at the small kitchen table across from her husband and son. He pulled her shield from his pocket and handed it to young Frank.
“She’d want you to keep this for her,” Boomer said to the boy.
Frank held the badge and stared at it. “It’s all she cared about,” he said, his voice choking. “Being a cop.”
“You’re wrong about that,” Boomer said. “She cared about you. A lot.”
“Did you love her?” Frank asked, looking up from his mother’s shield.
“Yes,” Boomer said, looking right back.
“Did she love you?”
“Yes,” Boomer said. “But not in the way you’re thinking. Not in the way she loved your father.”
“What way, then?” Frank asked.
“She loved me for what I did,” Boomer said. “She loved your dad for who he was. There’s a big difference.”
“I don’t see it,” Frank said.
“You don’t have to see it now,” Boomer said, standing. “But one day you will. And I hope I’m around when you do.”
• • •
THEY HAD RETURNED to the predictable boredom of their everyday lives.
Dead-Eye was back on doorman duty, working a building on East Sixty-fifth Street In his free time he played catch with Eddie and took long drives with his wife.
Rev. Jim went into construction, taking charge of the crew Nunzio had hired to rebuild Pins’s bowling alley. The old man thought he could turn it into an afternoon retreat for the neighborhood kids.
Boomer busied himself with daytime stops at movies, museums, and libraries. His nights, as always, were spent at Nunzio’s.
• • •
DEAD-EYE MOVED A knight against one of Rev. Jim’s rooks, swiping it from the board.
“That’s it?” Boomer said. “Fifteen minutes you stare and wait and that’s what you do?”
“Couldn’t get to his queen,” Dead-Eye explained.
“People in comas have more laughs,” Boomer muttered.
Nunzio walked over, dragging a chair, holding a cup of coffee.
“There’s a call for you,” he told Boomer, sitting down to watch the game. “Before you take it, tell me who’s ahead here. I don’t want to break into their concentration.”
“If you get an answer,” Boomer said, “I’ll buy dinner for the table.”
“I’m winning,” Dead-Eye said.
“I’ll have the steak special,” Rev. Jim added.
Boomer pushed his chair back and headed for the phone by the bar.
“Who is it?” he asked Nunzio.
“Wouldn’t say.”
“Why not?”
Nunzio shrugged. “Maybe he’s shy.”
Boomer came back to the table in less than five minutes. There was a glow to his face and in his eyes. Dead-Eye, Rev. Jim, and Nunzio all stared over at him.
“You gonna tell us?” Dead-Eye asked. “Or do we play another game?”
“How much longer till you finish this one?” Boomer asked.
“We can stop anytime,” Rev. Jim said. “If we’ve got a good reason.”
“Wanna take a ride with me?” Boomer asked.
“Where to?” Dead-Eye said.
“See a guy who’s in a little trouble,” Boomer said. “He thinks maybe we can help.”
Boomer looked at his three friends, and, as the smiles formed on their faces, he nodded.
“I ain’t ever gonna get that doorman’s pension,” Dead-Eye said, pushing the chessboard aside.
“Maybe they’ll let you keep the suit,” Rev. Jim said, reaching for his cap. “It looks good on you.”
Nunzio sat at the table and watched the Apaches walk out of his restaurant into the frigid afternoon of a winter’s day. He watched them leave to be what they had always been.
Cops.
LORENZO CARCATERRA is the author of Chasers, Paradise City, Street Boys, Gangster, A Safe Place, and the New York Times bestseller Sleepers. He has written scripts for movies and television, and has worked as a writer and producer for Law & Order. Learn more about his work at www.LorenzoCarcaterra.com.
Apaches is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
2005 Ballantine Books Mass Market Edition
Copyright © 1997 by Lorenzo Carcaterra
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
BALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., in 1997.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House Inc., and Harold Ober Associates Incorporated for permission to reprint “Fantasy in Purple” from The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. Copyright © 1994 by the estate of Langston Hughes. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf and Harold Ober Associates Incorporated.
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