Colin Harrison - Afterburn

The detective shrugged this away. "I heard all those steroids make your balls shrink up."

Here we go, Rick thought.

"You got your balls back now, Rick?" The detective smiled, waiting for a response. "I hope you do, because you're gonna need them. See, all your old pals in Brooklyn didn't forget Christina. How could they? She's a sexy girl, sort of the mysterious type, not with the big hair and all. Tony Verducci remembers her. And he got Mickey Simms to call up the Manhattan D.A. and tell them that he was lying, that everything he said about her on the record was a lie." The detective lifted his eyebrows in disgust. "Now, they don't have to believe that, of course, but Tony Verducci says, I can give you somebody else-who exactly, I don't know, but it could be a lot of people. This is just maybe a week ago. Mickey Simms recants his whole testimony. They make a deal. They actually sit in a room and drink coffee and say, This is a deal. You do this, we do that." The detective retrieved a small box of raisins from his pocket. "I worked like a motherfucker to pull that testimony out of him, and then they go and tear it up and say it was a mistake and Christina Welles and her boyfriend Rick Bocca and the rest of those assholes had nothing to do with a tractor trailer full of air conditioners. 'Course, the fact that I saw the truck, counted the boxes, that doesn't matter. You with me so far?"

"Yeah," Rick said. "I get it." Which he didn't. None of it made any sense to him, in fact. All he had so far was a story. Anybody could make up a story. He sat against the hood of the police car.

"See, I know that Tony Verducci is behind all of this," the detective went on, chewing a wad of raisins. "He's still running his crew. All over the city. I know you don't talk to these people anymore, Rick, but you remember them. You know all these people, Rick, I know you do. You guys practically had your dicks in each other's butts. So I hear about this thing and start wondering, What the fuck's it about? Why does Tony Verducci want Christina Welles out of prison? That's a good question. But it's not for a good reason, Rick. It's not for her health." Peck stopped to chew; his mouth appeared to be full of bugs. "He wants something off that poor girl and he's gone to a lot of trouble to get it. He's put Mickey Simms on a stick and stuck him in everybody's face like a marshmallow, and that makes him somebody who I now personally want a piece of, for fucking up all my work, and he's also delivered some other poor asswipe to the D.A. I told them, Don't do it, don't make the deal, you're hanging that poor girl out to dry, because she doesn't know who is doing what anymore. I called the prison, she's putting in her time, okay? No big fights, not much time in the hole, you know? That strikes me as basically unfair. See, this is actually a pretty decent college girl who never should have gotten mixed up with a scumbag mope named Ricky Bocca. She helped him out because she loved him or whatever…" The detective paused, eyes full of hate. "This is a girl who never got a break from fucking nobody, never, and probably all she wants to do is just put her life back together, and now they're setting her up."

Rick put his hands down on the hood of the car, as if about to be arrested. He felt heavy, heavier than in years. His anxieties from the old days had receded, but, like black ants moving regularly up and down the dark trunk of a tree, remained just perceptible; always he'd known they were there, somewhere-the old connections, the unfinished animosities, the gravity of mutual hatreds.

"See," continued Peck, "I'm thinking Tony Verducci is getting frustrated with the cell phones. He hates them. He drives around with like fifty phones in his backseat, always driving and talking. Uses one, throws it back, uses another. Very hard for us to keep track of his conversations, but it can be done. If we put enough meat into it, we can do it. He knows that, everyone knows that. Plus, lot of people aren't as careful as Verducci. He studies the Colombians, admires them. Shit, I admire them, too. But he knows what he got isn't safe. A lot of these cellular encryption technologies can be beat. He's worried, he's getting pretty old to think about doing time. Man's got grandchildren, one of them with some kind of heart condition. He's paying for the doctors, we know everything. It's time to settle up, consolidate. It's time to put on the slippers. So I think he's got some kind of one last monster deal coming up and he needs the best system he ever had. He needs Christina. It didn't go bad because of her, you remember."

Rick remembered. The whole thing had collapsed because he had not noticed the surveillance, felt so comfortable with the off-loading of the air conditioners that he'd even walked down the block to get a sandwich and some cigarettes, and well, the rest of it was one giant fuck-up, with cops everywhere and the crew melting away into the street crowds and Christina sitting in the truck without the keys, having honked the horn to warn everyone and waiting loyally for Rick to come back, which he couldn't do, since Mickey Simms had pulled Rick into the first doorway he could find and stuck his gun in Rick's ear, saying, Don't go back, man, they already got her, you can't save her, and I'm fucking not going to let you.

"Now, the other thing," continued the detective, "is that Tony Verducci has a new guy working for him, named Morris. Got kicked out of medical school or something, used to drive an ambulance. I don't know where they found him. Somebody said Vancouver, somebody said San Diego. I don't know, and I don't care. Morris is their go-to guy, you know? Gets in there and actually takes the football over the line-" The detective popped him in the shoulder. "Hey, you know what I'm saying, Ricky?"

Rick nodded.

"Nobody knows how many he's done. He's been around, that's all I can say. We'll get him one of these days, but right now he's out there, he's the dog on the chain. So you see my problem, Rick. I got the D.A.'s Office cutting Christina Welles loose, and she's got no family I can talk to-mother lives somewhere in Florida but never hears from her daughter-I got Tony Verducci still in business, with his new guy Morris in the picture, and I got you, babe."

Rick gazed past the detective. Across the bay cut a magnificent sixty-foot sailboat, full of people who didn't have Rick's problems. He looked back at Peck. "Why don't you talk to Christina yourself?"

"It's fucking impossible to call anybody up at the prison, have a decent conversation. And I just heard all this at eight this morning anyway. And"-here the detective himself looked toward the bright distance of the ocean-"be honest with you, my wife is going into the shop tomorrow, have a breast taken off. St. Vincent's Hospital. I got to be there, see. I'd drive up to Bedford Hills tomorrow real early, I really would, but it's my wife, I got to be there, see where the cancer is, hold her hand when they tell her. Christina is going to be gone by the time I could get up there."

"So you-"

"So, yeah, I came to you, because you're the only card I got, Rick. She's walking out of that prison tomorrow morning, probably around 9:00 a.m."

"Does Tony know that?"

"No, I already thought of that and got the regular discharge time changed for her. I'm looking out for this girl, okay? Once she disappears into the city, it could take a while to find her." Peck pulled a business card out of his pocket. "I was thinking maybe, since you got your balls back, and since you've spent four years out here remembering that you should be doing the time just like Christina, that maybe it would be the fucking morally appropriate thing to forget about the fucking fish for a little while"-he flicked the card at Rick-"and go to the prison and be there when she gets out."

He took his dinner in the village every night, driving his patched quarter-ton pickup along the lane, bumping over the same roots each time, grinding the gears a bit, crunching along the curving, up-and-down gravel, slowing once to let a deer gambol across the road, tail flashing flag-white, flag-white, then continuing until a church steeple rose in view and the shingled houses of the village lay before him. He pulled up in front of the restaurant-a place of local people, farmers taking their wives out, teenage boys shoving burgers into their mouths, the occasional stray artist renting a house through the winter-and parked next to a rusted-out school bus packed with cut firewood. Inside, he slid into his regular booth. The waitressing staff consisted of the woman who had worked there seventeen years and whatever three or four teenage girls from the village currently needed to make money for community college or abortions or getting the hell out. The waitresses long ago had quit bringing Rick a menu and instead, on his instructions, set the same chicken breast platter before him every night. If he was a curiosity to them-a large, bearded man in worn overalls and taped glasses who said little-they knew not to show it. He was old enough that they expected that he would look at them with a certain frank sexual attention, as did most of the older men, yet he remained young enough, dark and muscular and self-composed, that he elicited something in them they didn't quite understand. They knew he lived alone, worked on a fishing boat out of Greenport. They were plain girls, but healthy from outdoor lives, and yet he seemed uninterested in their young bodies, their teenage breasts and slender ankles and hair smelling of cheap shampoo. Sometimes one of the girls got up her courage and asked him his name, but he just shook his head. Their innocence bored him.