'Your sons are with your wife? I'm not psychic. There's a picture of them in your wallet.'
'Oh, that. It's an old picture.'
'They're handsome boys.'
'They're good kids, too.' I added a little Scotch to my glass. 'They live out in Syosset. They'll take the train in now and then and we catch a ball game together, or maybe a fight at the Garden.'
'They must enjoy that.'
'I know I enjoy it.'
'You must have moved out a while ago.'
I nodded. 'Around the time I left the cops.'
'Same reason?'
I shrugged.
'How come you quit the cops? Was it this stuff?'
'What stuff?'
She waved a hand at the bottles. 'You know. The booze.'
'Oh, hell, no,' I said. 'I wasn't even that heavy a hitter at the time.
I just reached a point where I didn't feel like being a cop anymore.'
'What did it? Disillusionment? A lack of faith in the criminal justice system? Disgust with corruption?'
I shook my head. 'I lost my illusions early in the game and I never had much faith in the criminal justice system. It's a terrible system and the cops just do what they can. As far as corruption goes, I was never enough of an idealist to be bothered by it.'
'What then? Mid-life crisis?'
'You could call it that.'
'Well, we won't talk about it if you don't want to.'
We fell silent for a moment. She drank and then I drank, and then I put my glass down and said, 'Well, it's no secret. It's just not something I talk about a lot. I was in a tavern up in Washington Heights one night.
It was a place where cops could drink on the arm. The owner liked having us around so you could run a tab and never be asked for payment.
I had every right to be there. I was off-duty and I wanted to unwind a little before I drove back out to the island.'
Or maybe I wouldn't have gone home that night anyway. I didn't always. Sometimes I caught a few hours' sleep in a hotel room to save driving back and forth. Sometimes I didn't have to get a hotel room.
'Two punks held up the place,' I went on. 'They got what was in the register and shot the bartender on the way out, shot him dead just for the hell of it. I ran out into the street after them. I was in plainclothes but of course I was carrying a gun. You always carry it.
'I emptied the gun at them. I got them both. I killed one of them and crippled the other. Left him paralyzed from the waist down. Two things he'll never do again are walk and fuck.'
I'd told this story before but this time I could feel it all happening again. Washington Heights is hilly and they'd taken off up an incline. I remembered bracing myself, holding the gun with both hands, firing uphill at them. Maybe it was the Scotch that was making the recollection so vivid. Maybe it was something I responded to in her big unwavering gray eyes.
'And because you killed one and crippled another-'
I shook my head. 'That wouldn't have bothered me. I'm only sorry I didn't kill them both. They murdered that bartender for no good reason on God's earth. I wouldn't lose a dime's worth of sleep over those two.'
She waited.
'One of the shots went wide,' I said. 'Shooting uphill at a pair of moving targets, hell, it's remarkable I scored as well as I did. I always shot Expert on the police range, but it's different when it's real.' I tried to draw my eyes away from hers but couldn't manage it. 'One shot missed, though, and it ricocheted off the pavement or something. Took a bad hop. And there was a little girl walking around or standing around, whatever the hell she was doing. She was only six years old. I don't know what the hell she was doing out at that hour.'
This time I looked away. 'The bullet went into her eye,' I said.
'The ricochet took off some of its steam so if it had been an inch to the side one way or the other it probably would have glanced off bone, but life's a game of inches, isn't it? There was no bone to get in the way and the bullet wound up in her brain and she died. Instantly.'
'God.'
'I didn't do anything wrong. There was a departmental investigation because that's standard procedure, and it was agreed unanimously that I hadn't done anything wrong. As a matter of fact I received a commendation. The child was Hispanic, Puerto Rican, Estrellita Rivera her name was, and sometimes the press gets on you when there's a minority group casualty like that, or you get static from community groups, but there was none of that in this case. If I was anything I was a fast-acting hero cop who had a piece of bad luck.'
'And you quit the police force.'
The Scotch bottle was empty. There was maybe half a pint of vodka in the other bottle and I poured a few ounces of it into my glass.
