himself or his wife or the guy next door.'
'The guy with the bow and arrow.'
'Whatever. But who's gonna tell him not to have a gun?' He slapped his abdomen, where his service revolver was tucked under his belt. 'I gotta carry this,' he said. 'It's regulations. But I'll tell you, I wouldn't walk around out there without it. I'd feel naked.'
'I used to think that. You get used to it.'
'You don't carry anything?'
'Nothing.'
'And it doesn't bother you?'
I went to the bar and got fresh drinks, more vodka for him, more ginger ale for me. When I brought them back to the table Durkin drank the whole thing in one long swallow and sighed like a tire going flat.
He cupped his hands and lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply, blew out the smoke as if in a hurry to be rid of it.
'This fucking city,' he said.
It was hopeless, he said, and he went on to tell me just how hopeless it was. He rang changes on the whole criminal justice system, from the cops to the courts to the jails, explaining how none of it worked and all of it was getting worse every day. You couldn't arrest a guy and then you couldn't convict him and finally you couldn't keep the son of a bitch in jail.
'The prisons are overcrowded,' he said, 'so the judges don't want to hand out long sentences and the parole boards release people early.
And the D.A.s let the guys cop to a reduced charge, they plea bargain good cases down to nothing, because the court calendars are so jammed up and the courts are so careful to protect the rights of the accused that you just about need a photo of the guy committing the crime in order to get a conviction, and then you might get a reversal because you were violating his civil rights by taking his photograph without prior permission. And in the meantime there's no cops. The department's got ten thousand men below what it had twelve years ago. Ten thousand fewer cops on the street!'
'I know.'
'Twice as many crooks and a third less cops and you wonder why it's not safe to walk down the street.
You know what it is? The city's broke. There's no money for cops, no money to keep the subways running, no money for anything. The whole country's leaking money, it's all winding up in Saudi fucking Arabia. All those assholes are trading in their camels for Cadillacs while this country goes down the fucking tubes.' He stood up. 'My turn to buy.'
'No, I'll get them. I'm on expenses.'
'Right, you got a client.' He sat down. I came back with another round and he said, 'What are you drinking there?'
'Just ginger ale.'
'Yeah, I thought that's what it looked like. Whyntcha have a real drink?'
'I'm sort of cutting back on it these days.'
'Oh yeah?' The gray eyes focused on me as he registered this information. He picked up his glass and drank about half of it, set it down on the worn wooden table with a thunk. 'You got the right idea,'
he said, and I thought he meant the ginger ale, but he had shifted gears by then. 'Quitting the job. Getting out. You know what I want? All I want is six more years.'
'Then you got your twenty?'
'Then I got my twenty,' he said, 'and then I got my pension, and then I'm fucking well gone. Out of this job and out of this shithole of a city. Florida, Texas, New Mexico, someplace warm and dry and clean.
Forget Florida, I heard things about Florida, all the fucking Cubans, they got crime like you get here. Plus they got all the dope coming in there. Those crazy Colombians. You know about the Colombians?'
I thought of Royal Waldron. 'A fellow I know says they're all right,' I said. 'He said you just don't want to cheat 'em.'
'You bet your ass you don't want to cheat 'em. You read about those two girls over in Long Island City? Must have been six, eight months ago. Sisters, one's twelve and one's fourteen, and they found 'em in the back room of this out-of-business gas station, hands tied behind their backs, each of 'em shot twice in the head with a small- caliber weapon, I think a .22, but who gives a shit?' He drank the rest of his drink. 'Well, it didn't figure. No sex angle, nothing. It's an execution, but who executes a couple of teenage sisters?
'Well, it clears itself up, because a week later somebody breaks into the house where they lived and shoots their mother. We found her in the kitchen with dinner still cooking on the stove. See, the family's Colombian, and the father's in the cocaine business, which is the chief industry down there outside of smuggling emeralds—'
'I thought they grew a lot of coffee.'
'That's probably a front. Where was I? The point is, the father turns up dead a month later in whatever's the capital of Colombia. He crossed somebody and he ran for it, and they wound up getting him in Colombia, but first they killed his kids and his wife. See, the Colombians, they play by a different set of rules. You fuck with them and they don't just kill you. They wipe out your whole family. Kids, any age, it don't matter. You got a dog and a cat and some tropical fish, they're dead too.'
'Jesus.'
'The Mafia was always considerate about family. They'd even make sure to arrange a hit so your family wouldn't be there to see it happen. Now we got criminals that kill the whole family. Nice?'
'Jesus.'
