Ray's other weakness was more serious. It was that he assumed that he was lucky. He had done so since he was a boy. Lucky how? Not that good things always happened to him but that bad things wouldn't. He'd been buried alive and lived. You were that lucky only once in a life. And maybe that used up all the rest of your good luck.
As for what Ray did while he was away, the old detective didn't quite understand all that. Foreign countries, he didn't know about. He knew about Brooklyn, Queens, and parts of Manhattan. The trouble with the Chinese girl was real enough. It was New York City kind of trouble. He sensed it. Somebody wanted something badly. Probably had to do with money, maybe the half-dead Mafia in some way, given the neighborhood. Mob carting services, truck companies, garages. He'd never dealt with Chinese gangsters but knew they could be tough, ruthless. Ray was mixed up in it now… he'd find that sewage company tomorrow and somebody there would know a few facts. Or Ray would sense a lie. He had that gift. As a detective you told yourself that people were telling the truth unless you had reason to think they were lying. Otherwise you would drive yourself mad with suspicion. But nonetheless you could tell. The brain knew. Something in the voice, the eyes, the facial muscles. Scientists had studied this, proved it. But as a detective you just got very good at sensing the lie. You listened to hundreds of people lie, you learned how human beings do it. He'd forgotten-oh, yes. This Chinese girl had gotten to Ray somehow. Ray was in this thing now, whether he wanted to be or not. It was going to get worse for someone, he was sure. Two girls had died, and if he knew anything about how these things went, they wouldn't be the last. He knew Ray had moved his guns to the shed and put on a new lock. He knew that Ray had hidden the key in the birdhouse. And he knew that Ray had checked on the guns yesterday. This was unlike him. It meant Ray was preparing himself, worried. And the nurse had told him about what Ray had done to the men in the hallway, the savagery he'd displayed.
Does all this scare me? thought the old detective. Maybe. Well, yes. But I have to believe in Ray, because otherwise I am dying for nothing. I have to try to help him. Be victorious.
And that was when he thought of something, something important that Ray needed to-?
The Dilaudid pump clicked and sent him a bolus. The warmth of it was so beautiful… I'm addicted… But wait! What was the thing he had just thought of, the thing Ray had to know? The morphine was taking it away from him… something important, having to do with Ray's problem, the kind of information that he used to… the exact sort of thing a detective always wrote down in his… just so he couldn't possibly… And here he… he had forgotten, the morphine warming his eyes, slowing his heart, pulling his breath deeper toward painless sleep… oh, he had thought of… it was
… the thing that his son needed to know… what was it?
11
'Yo, I'm Richie's cousin.'
Too fast.
'Hey, guy, I'm Richie's cousin.'
Better. Get that Brooklyn thing into the voice.
He was sitting in his truck down at the corner of Fourteenth Avenue and Eighty-sixth Street, pulled over by Dyker Beach Park, where he could see old Italian guys playing bocci, rolling the weighted balls along the packed-dirt alley. Lot of good times playing baseball in that park. Across the street was a deli that once been a joint called the 19th Hole, a notorious Mafia hangout. Dozens of murders had been ordered, planned, requested, or approved there by the Lucchese crime family. His father had once said to him that Ray was never to set foot in the 19th Hole under any circumstances, no matter how old and tough he thought he was, and if he knew anyone who frequented the place, Ray was to drop the acquaintance immediately. But now the Mafia was mostly broken up, scattered, on the run. So they said, anyway.
The city kept removing pay phones, but there was one outside the deli, he'd remembered. He didn't want to use the house phone, plus the sounds of the street would add authenticity. The phone was free. He jumped out of the truck, crossed Fourteenth Avenue, slipped in the quarters, dialed.
'Victorious,' came a woman's voice.
'I'm trying to get in touch with Richie.'
'He's not around.'
'I kinda need to talk to him.'
'Call him on the cell,' she said.
'Don't got the number.'
'Who is this?'
'Richie's cousin.' There, the leap into the lie.
'Well, he's out on a job.'
'Just tell me where he is, I'll go talk to him there.'
'Can't do that.'
'Listen, I'm trying to help the guy out with something, see what I mean, like?'
A long pause followed. 'Hang on.'
Then he heard the woman talking into some kind of radio or squawk box. 'Richie, where you at?'
A garble of static came back that Ray couldn't understand.
'I got a guy says he's your cousin.'
More static.
'Hello? He says what's this about?'
Ray looked down Eighty-sixth Street, drew in a lungful of the place. 'He knows what it's about. I ain't talking about it on the phone.'
She repeated this, and the squawk box answered.
'All right,' she told Ray. 'He's out on a job down in the Rockaways, 123rd Street right before the boardwalk.'
'Thanks.' He was about to hang up when he heard a man ask, 'Who just called for Richie, who was that?'
The line went dead.
Ray listened to the far buzz in the earpiece, then hung up. He lifted the receiver again and inserted a bunch of quarters from his pocket, not even counting them. She didn't answer, but her cell phone message came on, then the beep. 'Jin Li,' he said, 'this is Ray, the guy who used to be your boyfriend. I'm not calling to talk about what happened between us. I'm just worried about you, okay? Your brother is in New York and found me. He's got a bunch of guys with him and he's looking for you…' What else to say? Don't mention the police, he told himself, that will just freak her out. 'He explained to me about what happened to you with the two Mexican girls. So I'm looking for you, too. You can call me, but not on my cell. It's gone. Call me at home. You have the number. If a woman answers, remember it's my father's nurse. I know you are scared. All right, I hope you are-' The phone chimed, time was up. He replaced the receiver. If she wasn't answering her cell phone, well-it could mean several things, all of which gave him a bad feeling.
The Rockaways was a big sandbar that hung below Brooklyn, with a village clustered at either end and miles of fabulous beach in between. Technically it was part of Queens, though it felt like Brooklyn, because you could get there from Flatbush Avenue, the zigzag thoroughfare that people had been using for more than three hundred years, starting with Dutch farmers driving their pigs and cattle to market until the present, when you were just as likely to find a Pakistani hauling a load of fake BMW carburetors made in Vietnam to be installed by a Jamaican mechanic in a car owned by a Nigerian. The future of New York City was often found in the cultural mixology of Brooklyn and Queens long before arriving in Manhattan. The Rockaways, however, had always been hard-core Irish, a place apart, dominated by policemen and firefighters, more or less segregated. Once known as the 'Irish Riviera,' the Rockaways was a place where working-class New Yorkers once rented bungalows for fifty dollars a summer. Jigs and reels were danced in the bars, beer five cents a glass. That was all gone. Now it was high-rises and million-dollar homes. He'd once spent a lost weekend there when he was eighteen, drinking, running around, driving on the beach. How naive he'd been at that age, obsessed with a girl whose name he could no longer remember and, even more important at the time, preoccupied with his summer league baseball team. He'd been a pretty good catcher, could take the beating of the position. But, like most American teenagers, he'd been utterly oblivious to
