him in a little while.”
“So, you’re killing time.”
“Couldn’t think of anyone I’d rather kill it with.”
“Yet another sad commentary on your life.”
“Fuck you, Klaus!”
“Ah,” he said. “There’s the Moe I know and love.”
Ten years my elder, Kenny Burton had the old-cop look, somehow grizzled and clean-shaven all at once. Except for my recent phone call, we hadn’t spoken or seen each other in many years, but I was unlikely to miss him. Everything about him, from his get-the-fuck-outta-my-way strut to the you-don’t-want-a-piece-of-me manner with which he blew cigarette smoke into the faces of oncoming pedestrians, screamed asshole. Or maybe I saw that in him because I knew him a little bit from when I had started on the job in the late ’60s.
Priding himself on things most other cops would hide like a crazy aunt, Kenny Burton was a brutal, thick- skulled prick who was trained in the ways of pre-Knapp Commission, pre-Miranda Rights policing. He never paid for a meal, a cup of coffee, or a blow job until word came down from on high. He never arrested anyone who wasn’t guilty or didn’t deserve to have the crap beat out of them. His motto might well have been:
“Caveman Kenny Burton, is that you?” I said, walking up to him outside the courthouse. He flicked a still- burning cigarette at the open window of a waiting cab. The cigarette barely missed, bouncing harmlessly off the cab’s door.
“Who wants to know?”
“Moe Prager wants to know.”
Burton grunted, one corner of his mouth turning up. From him this was a hug and a kiss on the lips. “What you doing around here?”
“Waiting for you. Can I buy you a drink?”
“Sure. There’s O’Hearn’s on Church.”
O’Hearn’s was your basic New York version of an Irish pub. What did that mean? It meant it was just like any other shithole bar in the city, only with cardboard shamrocks on the walls in mid-March and the occasional barman who understood that hurling had meaning beyond vomit.
Burton’s malicious blue eyes pinned me to my chair as we sipped at our drinks. We were boxers staring across the ring before the bell for round one. He was doing the silent calculations. I could hear the gears churning nonetheless. The mistake people make about judging brutes is to assume they’re fools. Kenny Burton was no fool. We had never been close, even during the few years we served together. Larry Mac, on the other hand, always considered Kenny a pal. Only after I’d come to know Larry well did I figure out that odd coupling. Kenny Burton appealed to Larry’s ambition, not his heart. Ambitious men are like baseball scouts-they can spot everyone’s special talent and how that talent can serve them. Frankly, I didn’t want to know how Caveman had served Larry’s ambition.
“This about that party thing we spoke about on the phone?” Kenny asked, knowing it wasn’t.
“Nope.” I waved to the waitress for a second round. “That was bullshit.”
“I figured. We ain’t exactly blood brothers, you and me. What it’s about then?”
“Larry’s missing.”
He didn’t react, but I didn’t read much into his deadpan. The gears continued churning. Then, “Missing? Missing how?”
I ignored the question. The waitress came, plopped our drinks down. When she tried clearing Kenny’s first glass, he stared at her so coldly I thought she might freeze in place. “Leave it!” She did.
“He was acting weird the last time I saw him,” I said.
“Weird?”
“Nervous. Jumpy. Not like Larry at all. Then. .”
“Then what?”
“I don’t know. We got together back in Coney on the boardwalk and he started talking crazy about the good old days.”
“Good old days, my ass. Fucking job!”
“I know what you mean,” I said, just trying to see if he’d say something on his own. He didn’t disappoint.
“You do, huh? I remember you being a cunt, Prager.”
“Nice.”
“Ah, you was like all them new cops, more worried about the skells and scumbags than the victims.”
“For every corner guys like you cut, you create two more. I was worried about following the law.”
“Fuck the law! The only law is the law of the jungle. You pussies never understood that.”
“Was Larry Mac a cunt?”
Kenny actually laughed, an icy breeze blowing through O’Hearn’s. “Larry was a lot of things.”
“Was?”
“Don’t be such a fucking asshole, Prager. You know what I mean.”
“I do?”
“What, you want me to throw you a beating? With that bum leg a yours, it’d take me like ten seconds to kick your ass twice around the block.”
“Now there’s something to be proud of.”
“Get to the point, asshole.”
“Larry missing is the point.”
“That’s what you say, but even if he is, I don’t know shit about it. I owe Larry Mac,” he said, taking his eyes off me for the second time since we sat down. “He kept me on the job till I made my twenty. It was a fucking miracle that he pulled it off. I was like a poster boy for I.A.B. for the last half of my career. Then after a few years, he got me this gig with the Marshal Service. Job’s a fucking tit.”
I had made the acquaintance of two retired U.S. marshals during the Moira Heaton investigation. One killed himself. The other tried to kill me. Only time in my life I exchanged gunfire with anyone. I think I hit him, but I didn’t stick around to check. Got the hell out of there and didn’t bother looking back.
“Okay. You hear anything, let me know.” I threw my card and a twenty on the table. I made to go.
He grabbed my forearm. “You really think something’s wrong?”
“I don’t know.”
He let go of my arm and studied my card in earnest. “I hear anything, I’ll call.” He slipped the card into his wallet.
I took a few steps and turned back around.
“What?” he growled. “You gonna annoy me some more?”
“You remember D Rex Mayweather?”
If I thought I was going to catch him off guard with that, I was wrong.
“That dead nigger? Yeah, what about him?”
“Nothing.”
I became acutely aware of the few black faces seated around O’Hearn’s. Burton had been purposely loud. It served the dual purpose of embarrassing me and of challenging anyone in hearing distance. Kenny Burton hadn’t changed. He was the same asshole I had known twenty years before. You could set your watch by him.
That night as I stared up at the ceiling, it wasn’t Kenny Burton’s face I was seeing in the dark. It wasn’t Larry’s. Not Katy’s. Not what was left of Malik’s either. What I saw was a pair of almond-shaped brown eyes burning with a cold fire set against dark, creamy skin. I saw an angular jaw, a perfect, straight nose with slightly flaring nostrils above plush, angry lips. All of it framed in hair blacker than the darkness itself.
CHAPTER EIGHT
