Cops in cars can’t follow suspects worth a shit. Even if they were to possess the requisite skills, the damned unmarked cars would give them away. Unmarked cars are about as inconspicuous as the Good-year blimp. So it didn’t take more than a glance in my rearview mirror to spot the unadorned blue Chevy as it pulled away from the curb. The whole way to Sarah’s school, the car trailed half a block behind, the driver trying to keep other traffic between us.
I kissed Sarah, watched her walk into the schoolyard and up the front steps. When she had disappeared behind the heavy metal doors, I rolled slowly into traffic, making certain to get caught at the first red light. My tail was four cars back in the right hand lane, the same lane as me. I scanned the cross street for oncoming cars and, seeing it was clear, put my foot to the floor. With tires smoking, I swerved across the left lane, through the red light, and onto the cross street.
With my foot still hard on the pedal, I drove a further three blocks before making a sharp left down a dead end street that ran perpendicular to the Belt Parkway. About a hundred feet from the dead end, I backed up an empty driveway until the houses on either side obscured my car from view. I waited. Either they would give up before cruising this street or, as I hoped, they would roll down the street, distracted, annoyed, simply going through the motions rather than searching for me under every stone.
Neither hearing it nor seeing it, I sort of sensed their car coming. Then I caught a glimpse of its nose as it rolled down the block. Went right past me. As it passed, I pulled out of the driveway, slammed on the brakes and put it in park. In a moot display, the cop at the wheel of the Chevy threw it in reverse. Too little too late. My car was widthwise
When the window disappeared halfway into the door, I recognized the driver. I had seen her face on the backs of my eyelids and suspended in the dark air above my bed only a few hours ago. But before I could react, Detective Melendez threw her door open, smacking it hard into my bad knee. Reflexively, I backed up and bent down to rub it. Big mistake. Melendez and her partner were out of the car and on me like wolves on a crippled lamb.
“All right, dickweed, you know the drill,” said Bronx Irish as he threw me into the side of their car.
Still favoring my bad leg, I hit the car awkwardly, the right side of my rib cage taking the full force of impact. Hurt like a son of a bitch and it didn’t do much for my respiration.
“Assume the position,” she barked.
Still trying to catch my breath, I was slow to follow her instructions. Big mistake number two. My arms were being yanked up and thrust forward, palms slapped down on the hood of the Chevy. Bronx Irish kicked my legs apart and back. He frisked me, removing my wallet and.38.
“So, Mr. Prager,” Detective Melendez said, “you always speed like that in a school zone?” It was a question for which she wanted no answer. “That was quite a display of stupidity you put on back there.”
“I noticed I was being followed. How was I supposed to know you were cops?”
“Don’t be such an asshole, Prager,” said Bronx Irish. “What should I do with him, Carmella?”
“Cuff him and throw him in the back.”
“Hey, I-”
“Shut the fuck up!” she cut me off. “Keys in the car?”
“What?”
“Are your fucking keys in the car, Prager?”
“Yes, Detective.”
“John, you take care of him. I’ll park his car right.”
Bronx Irish cuffed me and slid me into the rear of the unmarked Chevy. He got into the passenger seat. As we waited for Melendez to reposition my car, I tried striking up a conversation.
“What part of the Bronx you from, Detective?”
“Pelham.”
“Am I allowed to ask your last name?”
“Murphy.”
“John Murphy, now there’s a rare name on the NYPD.”
I could see him smile.
“What were you guys tailing me for?” I wondered.
“You’ll see,” he said. “We didn’t wanna discuss it in front a your little girl. We were waiting for you to come out, and then you come out with your kid. So we figured-”
Just then, Detective Melendez opened the driver’s side door. She put the Chevy in reverse and tore down the street, tossing my car keys out the window as she went. I hoped I got back to my car before dark. Finding those keys wasn’t going to be easy. She hit the siren, pulled into traffic, and up onto the Belt Parkway heading east. When she shut the siren off, I tried to get back to my chat with her partner.
“So, Murphy, when you saw me come out of my house with Sarah, you-”
“Didn’t I tell you to shut up?” Melendez stared at me in the rearview. “We ask the questions.”
I ignored that. “You’re a real hothead, huh?”
“Shut up and enjoy the drive.”
“You’re kinda young to be a detective, aren’t you?” I pressed on. “Christ, when I was on the job-”
“Don’t gimme any of that old timers’ bullshit. It’s all you old guys do, talk about how it was back in the day. What you got to worry about is that I
Murphy’s head was turned sideways, away from her. I could see he was rolling his eyes. Wanted to ask him how he’d ended up with the young hotshot, but I didn’t figure she’d much enjoy that line of questioning.
“Back in the day or today, people don’t usually make detective at your age.”
She bit the bait hard. “If I was a man, you wouldn’t even be asking me this shit about my age. It’s not about my age! I got to put up with
Murphy, making sure his head blocked her view, pointed his right hand at me and motioned like a quacking duck. He’d heard this speech before. I egged her on.
“So it’s not about your being Hispanic either, then? Not even a little bit?”
Taking her eyes off the road, she turned to give me the cold stare. Murphy crossed himself. I’d done it now.
“Listen,
“Did I say that?”
“You didn’t have to. I was always a big reader, but I read best between the lines, grandpa. Besides, you ever make detective?”
“Nope.”
“So, you’re just a resentful old fuck, huh?”
“I had my shot,” I said.
“What happened?”
“In ’72, I rescued this missing little girl from the roof of an old factory building. Everyone had given her up for dead. It was a big story. These days, they’d throw me a ticker tape parade. Back then-”
“This is it!” Murphy barked.
Melendez hit the siren and lights and yanked the wheel hard right, cutting the Chevy across two lanes of traffic. Several cars smoked their tires as they braked and swerved trying to avoid smacking into the flank of the unmarked cruiser. We pulled up around the Pennsylvania Avenue exit of the Belt Parkway.
The Fountain Avenue dump had been a working landfill for about the first twenty years of my life. I don’t know how long before that. When we were kids, Aaron and I used to call it Stinky Mountain. You didn’t have to see it to know it was coming up. Depending on wind direction, you could tell you were in the vicinity from several miles away. And even when the wind blew the stench of rotting garbage and methane in the other direction, you could always spot the swirling clouds of thousands of gulls and other birds that feasted at the banquet of our moldering debris. Freaked me out more than a little, those
Then, a decade or so back, the city just shut it down. I think someone got the brilliant idea that maybe it wasn’t such a good thing to have a huge dump in the wetlands around Jamaica Bay. Across the way from the dump, some developers had built a maze of apartment buildings, called Starrett City. Like everything else in Brooklyn and the city itself, Starrett City blended in with the surrounding landscape like a pile of pus in a vanilla milk shake. Even
