“I never used my weapon in anger in twenty years on the job. I guess I was a little careless in how I worded what I was saying before,” Healy explained.
“My father didn’t figure you were a hothead.”
“How’s the hand? Looks painful.”
“I can handle pain.”
“Learn that playing football?”
A prideful smile lit up Pete Jr.’s face. “Four years at Arizona.”
“Go Wildcats. You play linebacker?”
“Standup defensive end, but special teams mostly.”
“Special teams, yeah, that would explain learning to deal with pain.”
That did the trick. The younger Strohmeyer was glad to meet a New Yorker who knew college football. They discussed the bowl games and the unfairness of the BCS ratings. They talked about the draft and how little money professional football players made compared to baseball and basketball players.
“It’s not right,” Bob said.
“No, and none of the money except your signing bonus is guaranteed.”
The kid seemed all right, Healy thought. His head seemed to be screwed on straight and he was not unsympathetic toward nor unaware of the plight of the less fortunate.
“The black guys really get a bad deal,” Pete Jr. complained. “When they’re recruited they get promised a pro career, but they usually just get chewed up and spit out without really getting an education. I think if a college recruits you, they should either fund your education no matter how long it takes or compensate you, even if you get hurt or cut from the squad. Maybe then the recruiters would be more up front.”
It was not an unreasonable point of view. But Healy knew better than to make judgements based on simply liking a guy. Christ, he’d always liked and respected Joe Serpe, but he never let that effect the way he built his case against him or his partner. He remembered that he had once had a fierce argument with his dad about the trustworthiness of a neighborhood kid. His dad warned him off the kid. Bob argued that the kid was really nice and he was always respectful of his elders.
“Yeah,” his dad said, “and the English cocksuckers that tried to tear the guts out of Ireland loved their children. Didn’t make them good neighbors.”
Bob tried to take advantage of the newly established bond between him and the boy.
“So I get that we’re out here trying to protect, preempt and prevent, but there’ve been two murders around here recently.”
“The retarded man was killed in a dark oil yard. What can we do about that? Besides, I don’t think we even patrol down that far. We don’t. I’m sure we don’t. The Reyes guy… Hey, if these wetbacks want to kill each other, they’re going to kill each other. Believe me, Bob, you’ve got no idea what it’s like in southern Arizona. You don’t want to get into the middle of that shit.”
“No, I suppose not. Watch it!” Healy screamed.
Strohmeyer Jr. still had his game reflexes and jerked the wheel just in time to avoid the man stumbling out in front of his car. He slammed on his brakes and was out of the car before Bob had even unlatched his seatbelt. Healy couldn’t believe they’d missed him. If manner of dress was any indicator, the guy lying face down in the slush was a day laborer. He sported the standard uniform of a hooded sweatshirt, denim jacket, dirty jeans and work boots.
Here it was, Healy thought, a test.
“Hey, Bob, help me turn this guy over.”
Healy knelt down opposite Pete Jr.
“Okay, slowly. I’ll stabilize his neck. If he’s badly injured we don’t want to make it worse. On the count of three. One. Two. Three.”
They rolled him gently over onto his back. His face was puffy and bruised. He was bleeding from his nose, his mouth and cuts on his cheek and above the eyes. His breath stank of alcohol.
“Bar fight,” Strohmeyer Jr. said.
Healy agreed.
Then Pete Jr. started asking questions of the injured man in remarkably fluent Spanish. As the man’s eyes were almost swollen shut, it was difficult to see if he was as surprised by this as Healy. The laborer’s answers were slurred and, from the puzzlement on Pete’s face Healy surmised, incoherent.
“He’s Mexican and his name’s Hector. That’s about all I got. Come on, Bob, let’s get him into the back of the car and call the cops.”
When they got him in the car and Strohmeyer had called it in, Healy was curious as to why he had called the cops.
“This is just the kind of stuff we want in the papers, Bob. The media hates us, but my father says that doesn’t mean we can’t use them. You yourself brought up the murders. Before these guys got here, how many murders do you think there were around here in a given year? How much gang activity? How many bar fights on a snowy Tuesday night? Like my father says, it just proves we are right. The people on this island will be overrun. The more coverage, the better. Just one thing, when the cops get here don’t mention that we are out on patrol. That’s the rule. We don’t want the cops thinking we did this.”
So far this kid was failing all the tests. He wasn’t a screed spewing, halfwit, hate monger. He really seemed to think things through. His only blind spot appeared to be his father’s teachings, which he accepted without question. He wouldn’t be the first. He had been gentle and respectful of the guy now bleeding all over his backseat. Healy couldn’t help but root for the kid.
But if he was wrong about Pete Jr., where did that leave him? Where did it leave Serpe? Maybe he and Joe had been too quick to trust the word of some shithead gang leader. The truth was that the only two people with any viable connection to Cain Cohen’s homicide were themselves dead. There wasn’t a lot here to be encouraged about. Or maybe, Healy thought, staring at Peter Strohmeyer Jr., there was.
A cop showed in about five minutes. Officer Martinez, a handsome twenty-something cop with a white smile and neat mustache, seemed almost happy to have something to do.
“Pretty quiet tonight?” Healy asked.
“This weather, shit. It’s dead out here, not even many fender benders. It’s a night for staying home, for getting under the covers with someone to keep you warm. You know what I’m saying?”
One look at Hector and the cop called an ambulance. He didn’t even bother trying to question him. Bob and Pete Jr. gave their stories, the ambulance came, and they said goodnight to the cop. When the cop left and the patrol started up again, something had changed.
“See the blood there on the backseat, Bob? That blood there is the problem. You get all these men, they come to our country. They have one purpose in coming-to make money and send it back to the sewers they came from. They’re not like your ancestors or mine. They don’t want to be Americans. They don’t bring their families. They don’t bring their women. They’re lonely with a lot of time on their hands. It’s not natural. They get shitfaced, get in fights. They take our jobs and some of them, the slick ones, the ones with a little English, they’re. They’re the real dangerous ones.”
Healy couldn’t believe it. It was as if someone had thrown a switch in the kid’s head. Not only had his demeanor and his language changed, but he had gotten louder, angrier. This was more of what Healy had expected. Something the cop had said must have set him off. Maybe not, maybe it was the cop himself. It was both, Healy decided. Officer Martinez had commented about getting under the covers with someone to keep you warm.
A woman! What else? Now it started to make some sense. Healy couldn’t afford to let young Strohmeyer regain his equilibrium.
“Yeah,” Bob agreed. “I’m happy that my daughter’s grown up and moved off the island. I don’t think I could have stomached her bringing Hector over for Thanksgiving dinner. If my Mary wasn’t dead already, that would’ve killed her for sure.”
Pete Jr. didn’t answer immediately. His silence had nothing to do with careful contemplation of his response. No, his fingers got so tight on the steering wheel that all the blood went out of them. It was easy to see where the blood in the kid’s fingers had gone as his face turned an angry shade of red. He started driving a little faster, his steering became more erratic. Still, he said nothing. Healy turned up the heat.
“When Colleen, that’s my daughter, was a freshman at C.W. Post, she had a roommate, nice girl named Ava.
