Reed Coleman - Hurt machine

“I am exhausted.”

“Look, I’m here. You wanna come, come. You don’t wanna come, don’t.”

I was done with my slice by the time Nick Roussis came to my table. Although the pizza lived down to its usual standard, I enjoyed it more than I had ever enjoyed any pizza. I was struck by the revelation that the menu for a condemned man’s last meal is almost beside the point. What matters in the scheme of things is that it is a last meal.

Nicky looked tired, but there was something else too. He seemed out of sorts, distracted.

“What’s up, Nick?”

“What? Oh, what’s up? You tell me,” he said. “I hear you were at the old offices today.”

“News travels fast.”

“Steve Schwartz called as a professional courtesy. Told me you was poking around.”

“Not poking around. Actually, I was coming to say thanks for the assist with the case. That’s all.”

Drumming his fingers on the table, he asked, “How’d that pan out?”

“Not like I hoped,” I said.

“That’s too bad. Listen, Moe, can you excuse me for a minute? I’ve gotta delivery comin’ in and-”

“Don’t worry about it. Go ahead. I’m gonna get a gelato.”

“Good. I’ll tell the kid to take care of you. It’s on the house.”

“Thanks.”

“No problem, Moe. Just don’t go nowhere.”

“I’ll be here.”

The pistachio gelato was just how I remembered it: rich, buttery, but not too sweet. I hated things that were so sweet that the sweetness obscured the complexity of the flavor and texture. Savoring the gelato, my mind drifted off to the other food experiences that defined old Brooklyn to me: the pineapple ices at Adesso’s Bakery on Avenue X, the pastrami at Max’s Deli on Sheepshead Bay Road, the ruglach from Leon’s Bakery, the roast beef from Brennan amp; Carr on Nostrand, the french fries at Nathan’s.

“Earth to Moe. Earth to Moe.” Nicky had returned, snapping his fingers in front of my face.

I looked at my watch. Twenty minutes had passed as if in a second. Who says time travel is impossible?

“Sorry. Just lost in the past.”

Nick sat down across from me. We chatted for a few more minutes, neither of us really saying anything. I was feeling tired at last and Nick was even more distracted than he had been earlier. We shook hands and agreed to have dinner again soon, but this time it was a hollow promise. My prognosis notwithstanding, it was Nick who seemed uncomfortable at the suggestion. It was a familiar story. Rekindling long-dormant friendships doesn’t usually work unless both parties are equally committed. Otherwise, it’s like a one-armed man trying to start a fire by rubbing two sticks together. I remembered thinking the very same thing twenty years before. I guess I’d been hemorrhaging friends for a very long time.

When I looked around, I noticed that most of the tables were empty and that the red and green neon Gelato Grotto sign had been shut off. Closing time. I walked back around the corner, tired but sated, my head much less foggy than it had been since I’d taken the pill. When I got back to my rented SUV, I realized that I was parked in exactly the same spot Alta Conseco had parked in the night she was killed. A lot of things were suddenly clearer to me and I stopped stone still in my tracks. It got quiet-no, not quiet, silent. Silent so the only thing I could hear were my own thoughts in between the suddenly quickening beats of my heart.

I looked at the rear of the Grotto and, sure enough, a van was backed up to the loading dock. But the van didn’t have commercial license plates and the doors were unmarked. There was no company name on the doors, no DOT number, no company logo, nothing. Anyway, who gets a food delivery after midnight? And why did the owner have to be here to take in a simple food delivery? It made no sense. Then, in a single breath, I went from clear-headed to lightheaded, as a thousand images and questions rushed to mind all at once.

I walked twenty feet back toward the corner, the spot where Alta’s blood trail began. I tried to remember details from the coroner’s report Fuqua had shown me. Alta was stabbed once in the back; the remainder of the wounds were to her right side and the front of her torso. She had many defensive wounds on her arms and hands. I returned to where I was parked, tried to time how long it might take someone running from the loading dock to catch up to someone walking around the corner. I flashed back to the night Nicky had invited me back to his office, the night we left through the prep kitchen onto the loading dock. I pictured the wall of the prep kitchen-rows of knives neatly lined up on magnetic strips.

Fuqua’s training officer had been right all along: only fools ignore the obvious. And I was the biggest fool of them all. I saw Nicky’s eagerness to reconnect, to go to dinner, to help with the case in a new light. Who had so conveniently supplied me with a witness against Delgado? Who kept calling me to see how things were progressing? What was one of the first questions out of Nicky’s mouth tonight? I thought back to Nick’s silly lie about going into the office a few days a week. I thought about what both the security guard and Steve Schwartz had said about the family business nearly going under and that sudden infusion of cash.

I laughed. It was a laugh disconnected from joy. I reached for my cell phone to call Fuqua. He would be relieved, I thought, to know that Esme might have been a blackmailing sociopath, but not a murderer, not yet anyway. I stopped laughing when I felt the cold steel press against the nape of my neck.

My first thought was that I was going to avoid surgery after all. I smiled. My second thought was about missing Sarah’s wedding. I wasn’t smiling anymore.

“I’ll take that, asshole.”

I didn’t recognize the voice, yet there was something vaguely familiar about it. Powerful fingers grabbed the cell phone out of my hand, but I wasn’t sure the guy pressing the gun to my neck was the same guy who took the phone. I sensed there were two, maybe three of them. If I was wrong and there was only one, I still didn’t like the odds. A gun to the neck counts for a lot.

“He’s probably carrying.” This voice I knew. It belonged to Nick Roussis. Hands were patting me down; one reached under my jacket and yanked my old off-duty piece out of its holster. “Come on, let’s get him off the freakin’ street and into the van.” The headlights of a car turning the corner cast our own shadows ahead of us. “Come on, come on.”

I counted the shadows. There were three of them: Nicky and two other guys. The muzzle of the gun was pushed hard into my neck, urging me forward so that I almost tumbled head first. The car flashed past. I wasn’t hopeful that the driver would see or understand what was going on. Even if the driver had been looking right at us, it was too dark for him or her to see much. Now we were at the side door of the van. The muzzle eased off my neck. My arms were pulled backwards, my wrists pressed close, and taped behind me. I was shoved face first onto the van floor and rolled over on my back. Nick crawled in beside me and sat across from me with his back against the van wall. He was pointing my own. 38 at me. His two friends got into the front seats and we were moving.

“You just couldn’t leave it alone, could ya?” Nicky said. “When did you know?”

I didn’t answer immediately. Instead I stared at the man sitting in the passenger seat and at the driver. The guy in the passenger seat was squat, thick-necked. His hair was more salt than pepper and I couldn’t make out much of his profile except that his left cheek was scarred and pitted. I had a better angle to see the driver. He was a twitchy bastard, but he looked like a skinnier, younger version of Nick Roussis.