“One more for the road, boys?”
They all shuffled back inside the Golden Rose and left me alone on the deserted sidewalk.
I walked a few aimless blocks until I found myself in front of the twenty-four-hour laundromat with its fluorescent lights shining through the glass and the dryers whirring inside and a fat old black lady thumbing the pages of a worn newspaper on the bench. The stairwell to the second floor smelled like piss but it didn’t matter. I reached around to the small of my back and pulled out the Glock that had been gathering dust in a drawer since the day I left the Philadelphia Police Department. I took a deep breath and kicked in the door.
I was face-to-face with Nathaniel Jeffers. He didn’t move. He was younger than I thought he’d be but not childlike in his appearance. He had short cropped hair over a broad forehead and a thin mustache and the body of an athlete. I pointed the gun at his chest, holding it with two hands, my arms thrust out in front of me, my grip beginning to tremble. The look in his eyes seemed to say that he knew why I was there, that he knew it wasn’t because of Millie Price or their son or Billy Haggerty or all the bullshit that defined him as black and me as white. It was because of Charlie Melvin, and Nathaniel Jeffers knew it.
“Did you kill Charlie Melvyn?”
“Who?”
“The old man in front of the barber shop.”
His lips were sealed firmly across his face but I had my answer in the way he stood, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, and the way he shrugged his shoulders and ground his teeth. He was a typical Philly liar, I thought. The truth made him squirm.
My fingers curled around the trigger and the hammer slowly lifted from its seat, and in my mind I heard the voice of Johnny Izzard telling me how once I pulled the trigger, everything would change, my legacy with the Philadelphia Police Department, the reasons I became a cop, and the reasons I left. But it was too late to think about regrets. I owed this to Charlie Melvyn.
I adjusted my aim and fired. The blast stung my ears and Nathaniel Jeffers jumped back onto a dingy yellow couch. The sound of that single gunshot was so loud I thought it would wake the entire neighborhood. A door opened in the hall and out stepped the boy as if the sound of gunfire was a sound he’d become accustomed to. He had waves of curly black hair and sleepy eyes and caramel-colored skin. He ran to his father and dropped into his arms.
I’d fired wide and the bullet had lodged in the wall, a crack in the plaster spreading from floor to ceiling like a fault line. I heard the sirens already, wailing in the distance, coming closer with that sense of urgency like they knew what they’d find when they got there.
“You better take the boy and get out of here. Billy Haggerty is coming for you.”
“This is my territory, my house. He know better than to come down here.”
“No, I don’t think he does.”
I turned and went out the door and down the steps and onto the street, the gun still in my hand. Billy Haggerty and his boys were on the corner. They were drunk and Denis Mc-Nulty had a large rock in his hand. He wound up like a Major League pitcher, took a couple of steps, and hurled it through Nathaniel Jeffers’s second-floor window. The sound of breaking glass on the street accompanied the crescendo of blaring sirens. Three squad cars converged from different angles and the officers jumped out with guns drawn. A crowd was forming on both sides of the block.
I was pointing with my free hand at Billy Haggerty and his thugs, trying to tell the cops what was happening, but they wouldn’t listen. They were screaming at me to drop the gun and then I felt the first bullet crease my shoulder, the initial burn, my collar bone shattering like a broken twig. The next bullet caught me just above my left hip and spun me around and knocked me to the ground.
I lay on my back, staring up at the clear night sky and the flashing red and blue lights from the police cars, and suddenly, there was Johnny Izzard. He’d heard the sirens and was now emerging from the crowd on the corner, ignoring commands from the police to get back. My legs were numb and I tried to lift my head and I felt Johnny take my hand. I heard him call my name and his voice seemed to come from a long way off, as if I was dreaming and couldn’t shake myself awake. And in the dream I saw myself in the early days with the department and even before that, at the vigil over my father’s casket at St. Gabe’s and the baseball games he’d taken me to at the Vet, climbing all those stairs up into the nosebleed seats. “Just us and the pigeons,” he’d say. And then I saw the blood-soaked body of Millie Price and the sleepy eyes of her son and I felt like I was floating and I felt a sudden shudder of cold.
I opened my eyes and Johnny was still there, his bony grip harder on my hand; he was saying my name but I couldn’t hear him. I saw his lips moving and I tried to smile, that awkward, boyish, embarrassed smile I had, and Johnny was shaking his head and saying, “Seamus. Seamus. Seamus.”
PART II. CITY OF OTHERLY LOVE
ABOVE THE IMPERIAL BY DENNIS TAFOYA
Jimmy Kelly started making lists of the things he stole. He came out of the Staples on Germantown Avenue with one of the composition books like the kind he’d used at St. Bridget’s and a box of plastic Bics, so when he got back to his apartment he smoked a joint and tried to remember everything he’d boosted. He sat in the old split-open chair that had been there when he moved in, ropes of batting spilled like blue gut around his feet.
He drew spirals to start the cheap pen, then wrote,
It became his project. He’d fill his coat, stuff things into his pants, then scurry back to the apartment over the Imperial Gardens and add to the list. He never got caught. If things looked too dicey, he’d move on because there was always more to steal. He kept it out of the neighborhood, mostly, and took what was easy rather than what he wanted. He took gum and a Mounds bar from a CVS, a yellow sweater with a golf club over the heart from a thrift store in Germantown. Walmarts and Kmarts were too risky, big chains with too many cameras. Once in the Plymouth Meeting Mall he’d dumped everything in the bathroom and walked out with a guy in a red blazer right behind him. But he never got tagged.
One September night he burned a couple of joints and went downstairs, two bottles of blue nail polish that he’d lifted from a bin at the Rite Aid in his pockets. He dropped down the narrow stairs, his feet bouncing, the muscles in his legs quivering. His friend Jesus had a black Epiphone bass that was called a Nikki Sixx Blackbird, and sometimes Jimmy would put his hands on it while Jesus plucked the wound metal strings. When he was high the feeling in the wires and cords in his legs was like that, a resonant buzzing and snapping that made him smile and put pictures in his head of running through alien landscapes populated by shiny, sexed-up female robots.
In front of the Imperial people came and went with their orders or guys would walk out picking their teeth and patting their bellies, like it wasn’t enough to be full, you had to put on a play about it for your friends. He wanted to ask them why they did it, but half of life seemed like that to Jimmy, like people didn’t want things as much as they liked to dance and sing about how much they wanted them. Jimmy’s theory was that was why people liked movies and videos, because everyone was starring in their own movie all the time. When he’d first escaped from the Youth Study Center up on Henry, he’d spent three days hiding at the movie house at the end of Main Street in Manayunk just going from theater to theater and there was always some scene where a guy is about to take on
