lodge into the sudden shock of the cold air, I felt like I had been plugged into something powerful and been recharged. My heart didn’t hurt any less, but at least I had some life in me now. I felt like I was ready to face anything. Or anybody.
“You look good,” Vinnie said to me. “You look much better.”
“Thank you. How did you know I needed that?”
“You’re my blood brother, remember?”
“I might need your help,” I said. “I have some things to do now.”
He looked at me. In the dim light from the house I could see the bruises on his face, the raccoon-like shiners around his eyes. “I won’t help you destroy yourself. This thing will devour you if you let it. You know that.”
“Vinnie, do you remember when we went up to find your brother? Everything that happened by that lake?”
“Yes, of course.”
I grabbed his right hand. “You took these two fingers right here,” I said. “You took these two fingers and you dipped them in your own blood, and you painted two stripes on each side of my face. Do you remember that?”
“Yes, Alex.”
“You painted my face and you said it was time to go to war.”
“Yes. I did that.”
“Natalie was my family,” I said, letting go of his hand. “You know what she meant to me.”
“Yes.”
“So it’s my blood now,” I said. “And it’s my war.”
Chapter Seventeen
I woke up in a strange bed again, everything coming back to me at once like it probably would every morning for the rest of my life. I couldn’t imagine how it could ever feel normal. I didn’t want it to feel normal, because that would mean I had accepted things the way they were, had even gotten over it as well as I was going to and had moved on with the rest of my life.
The thought was an obscenity to me. I promised myself that morning that I’d never let it slip away from me. As much as it hurt, I never wanted to stop feeling like her death had just happened.
Vinnie was in the kitchen, making coffee. He had insisted on staying with me again. He said he’d keep doing it until he felt I was ready to be alone. He said it wasn’t up to me to decide that. I didn’t fight him too hard. Truth was, it was good to have him around.
I got out of bed and sat at the table. Vinnie brought over a cup of coffee and put it down in front of me. He didn’t try to say good morning, or ask me how I slept or, God forbid, ask me how I was doing. He put his own cup down and sat across from me. His face was about halfway back to normal now, both eyes open, the swelling down, the darker bruises beginning to fade. But he still looked like a man who should give up fighting two men by himself.
“Let’s just say,” I began, “that I needed a boat…”
He took a sip of his coffee, didn’t say anything.
“A good boat, say. Fast, with a long range.”
Another sip.
“A depth finder. And GPS, of course.”
He didn’t look at me.
“I’m just thinking out loud here,” I said. “If I were to ask you, do you think you could find one?”
“That would depend.”
“On what?”
“On whether you’d be using it to get yourself killed.”
“That can’t happen.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because I’m already dead.”
He put his cup down. “You’ve been to an Ojibwa funeral,” he said.
“Yeah?”
“How long did it last?”
“What are you talking about?”
“When we buried my brother, how long did the funeral last?”
“I don’t remember exactly. A few days.”
“Four days. And that was short. I’ve seen them go seven or eight.”
“What does that have to do with me?”
“This happened, what, three days ago? You’ve barely begun to deal with it.”
“Vinnie…”
“I’ll do anything you ask,” he said. “You know that. But you have to give yourself some time first. You don’t even know for sure that this man was responsible.”
“Two cops were setting up a sting on this guy. They both end up dead, on the same day.”
“If it’s that obvious to you, then it’ll be that obvious to everyone else. This guy will go down for it eventually.”
“I don’t think I ever told you this story,” I said. “In fact, I’m sure I didn’t. I haven’t thought about it in years. There was this cop in Detroit named Jim Romano. He was a detective. An old-timer. He was just about ready to retire when I was a rookie. I think I only met the man one time. Anyway, he got it in his head that he was going to take down this big shot, Paulie Masalsky, who was the biggest bookmaker on the whole west side. He owned a bar on Michigan Avenue. He used to have runners going all over the place, bringing slips to a room he had upstairs. He had a buzzer behind the bar in case a cop ever came in. Just press the button and they’d burn the slips real quick. If they were on flash paper, it would only take one second and they’d be gone. Or else they’d flush them, whatever. Standard operating procedure for a bookie.”
Vinnie picked up his cup again. He stared into it while I kept telling the story.
“There was a rumor that Romano’s brother had gotten into some trouble with Masalsky,” I said. “You know, he ran up a big debt, and Romano was gonna see if he could get Masalsky to back off. Either that, or he really just wanted to run the guy out of business. Either way, he got it in his head that he was going to spend his last year on the force making Masalsky’s life miserable. He’d go in the bar all the time, and of course whoever was behind the bar, they’d have to hit that button and the guys upstairs would scramble around, burning up the slips or flushing them. Romano would come to the bar and have one drink, ask where Paulie was, tell the guy to give him his best regards, something like that. Three, four times a week. If he thought the bartender was getting lax on the buzzer, he’d actually tell him he was going to go up the stairs to see if Paulie was up there. Whatever it took to make sure those guys were dumping the slips. This goes on about three months. Everybody on the force knows about it. It’s almost a running joke. Then one morning Jimmy Romano’s found dead in the trunk of his car.”
“Let me guess.”
“You don’t have to. Everybody knew who did it. Like I said, I was just a rookie, but I’d hear guys talking about it in the precinct. They had a police funeral for the guy and Masalsky actually sent over some flowers. It was this big arrangement, one of those horseshoe things. It said something like ‘Sincere Condolences’ on it, but it might as well have said ‘Sincerely Fuck Every Last One of You.’ I was out drinking with some of the cops after the funeral, and they were all talking about what they were going to do with the flowers. You know, like take them over to Masalsky’s bar and shove them down his throat one by one.”
“I probably know the answer to this,” Vinnie said, “but did they ever arrest him?”
“Of course not. He was in his bar all night, had about sixteen alibis lined up. The man who actually pulled the trigger, hell, he was found in the Detroit River a couple of months later. They recovered the gun and everything. But there was no way to pin it on Masalsky. Absolutely no way. For years after that, whenever I was out with some other cops after work, inevitably the story about Romano and Masalsky would come up. It would
