Lou Manfredo - Rizzo's Fire

“Talking to yourself, Daddy?” he heard.

Turning, he saw his middle daughter, Jessica, enter the kitchen, a small book bag in her hand. Like her mother, Jessica stood five feet eight inches tall, lean with dark brown eyes, and long, thick brown hair.

“Hey, honey,” he said. “Home already?”

She shrugged and dropped the bag beside the table, bending to kiss Rizzo’s forehead and sighing.

“They canceled my ten-fifteen. The professor was out soul searching, no doubt, and he couldn’t make it. I only have the two classes on Tuesdays, so here I am.” Twenty-one-year-old Jessica was in her senior year, commuting to and from her parents’ Brooklyn home to Manhattan’s Hunter College.

Rizzo used his foot to push a chair back from the table.

“My good luck,” he said. “I get to see you a little.” He thrust his jaw toward the chair. “Sit,” he said. “You want coffee? I just made it.”

Jessica dropped into the seat and smiled at her father. “Are you serious? It’s almost eleven o’clock, Daddy, I’m already swimming in Starbucks.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Starbucks-aka Maxwell House, only four bucks a cup.”

“I know, Daddy,” she said, rolling her eyes.

“Actually,” Rizzo said, growing serious, “it’s good you’re here. I really need to talk to you.”

“Oh?” she asked. “ ’Bout what?”

“About your sister,” he said.

Jessica wrinkled her brow. “Okay. Which sister?”

“Your kid sister, Carol. I need you to talk to her.”

“You want me to give her the birds and the bees talk, Daddy?” she asked. “ ’Cause I hate to break it to you…”

Rizzo shook his head. “No-birds and bees I can handle myself,” he said.

“Oh, really,” she answered, laughing. “Since when?”

Rizzo looked puzzled as he replied. “Whaddya talkin’ about? I raised three daughters, didn’t I?”

“Yes, but none of us ever heard any s-e-x talk from you.”

“Well, maybe. But I still handled it. I had your mother tell you.”

Jessica’s laughter returned. “And that’s ‘handling’ it?” she asked.

“Sure,” he said. “It worked, didn’t it? You all know where the parts go, don’t you?”

“Yes, Daddy,” Jessica said, nodding solemnly. “Thank you.”

“Okay,” he said with a grin.

“So, what’s up with Carol?” Jessica asked, leaning forward in her seat. “Is it still this police thing?”

Rizzo nodded. “Exactly. The test is comin’ up very soon, and personnel just sent out a fax saying that expedited hiring will get under way in record time. That means by this time next year, Carol could have graduated from the academy already.”

“Oh,” Jessica said, frowning. “Does Mom know about this? The last she and I spoke about it, Mom figured we were a year away from Carol even getting canvassed to be hired.”

Rizzo answered, shaking his head. “I haven’t told your mother yet, but it’s bound to start showin’ up in the papers and on the news. The department wants the word to get out, that’s how desperate they’re gettin’. That’s why Carol’s able to take the test in Suffolk County, at Stony Brook. When I came on, you wanted to be a cop, you took the test at a high school in one of the five boroughs. On a Saturday morning. Now, they’re even givin’ the damn test in Philadelphia. Imagine? They’re wavin’ the Big Apple at kids a hundred miles from here. That’s how hard up they are for recruits.”

Jessica shook her head slowly, but didn’t speak.

“You gotta talk to her, Jess. Talk some sense into her. She’s just a kid, a sweet, naïve kid. She thinks she’s gonna stop the madness, save the citizens. It isn’t like that, Jess. Maybe it never was, but it sure as hell isn’t now.”

“I know, Daddy. But Carol is determined. What right do I have? If she told me what to do with my life, I wouldn’t like it very much.”

“Forget rights,” Rizzo said sharply. “She’s your sister. You want her out bumpin’ heads with skells and psychos while every latte-sucking liberal is standing behind her with a camera phone protecting the dirtbags from the oppressive fascist cops? You think that’s gonna work out for her?”

Jessica saw the passion in her father’s eyes, and it unsettled her. She blinked nervously.

“Take it easy, Dad,” she said. “Don’t have a heart attack.”

Rizzo leaned even closer to Jessica.

“Talk to her, Jess,” he said, regaining a softer tone. “For her own good. Talk to her. She may listen to you.”

Rizzo sat back in his seat and began fumbling in his pocket for the Nicorette.

“I don’t think your mother and I can do it alone,” he said softly. “I think this might have us beat.”

Jessica frowned. She saw something in her father’s eyes. Something she had never seen there before: fear.

DETECTIVE SECOND Grade Mike McQueen strolled into Pete’s Downtown Restaurant and took a seat at the bar. He turned to the young female bartender and ordered a straight-up Manhattan. It was twelve forty-five: Joe Rizzo would soon meet him for lunch at the popular Brooklyn restaurant.

At six feet even, with sharp blue eyes twinkling in a well-featured face, McQueen cut an impressive figure in his new charcoal suit. The suit had been specially tailored, showing no hint of the semiautomatic pistol belted to his right hip. He sipped his drink and waited, occasionally returning the admiring smile of the pretty young bartender.

McQueen was twenty-nine years old with nearly eight years in the NYPD. He had spent the preceding year as a rookie detective third grade, partnered with Joe Rizzo at the Sixty-second Precinct.

As he drank, waiting for Rizzo, a smile touched his lips. His recent transfer to headquarters at One Police Plaza had been the result of their brief partnership. With that transfer, he was now poised to advance his career in ways that, six months earlier, he wouldn’t even have dared to imagine. And he owed it all to Joe Rizzo.

As McQueen pondered his good fortune, Joe Rizzo’s Camry, westbound on Old Fulton Street, turned right onto Water Street. He nosed it into the curb and shut it down. Climbing from the car, he glanced at his Timex: twelve-fifty.

The neighborhood, situated between the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges, was now known as DUMBO, an acronym for Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass. The area was at the height of transformation from a forsaken nineteenth-century industrial area to a thriving, urban hub with hulking old factories, ware houses, and liveries being converted into high-priced condominium complexes with ground-floor eateries, specialty shops, and small, artsy businesses.

As Rizzo dug out a cigarette, a last smoke before lunch, and leaned against the Camry, a brutal memory came to him about this very location. As a young patrolman, he and his partner had once discovered the decaying body of a homeless woman, her throat violently slashed, in the shadow of the historic Fireboat Station House which, back then, stood abandoned and dilapidated at the foot of Old Fulton, the flat, calm waters of the East River stretched before it.

Rizzo gazed across the fifty yards separating him from the old building, now gaily festooned in white and red and housing an old-fashioned ice cream parlor, young professionals on their lunch hour entering and exiting, the bright October sunshine washing over the scene. To the right of the Fireboat House, with its cluttered parking lot, stood the River Café. Directly across from Pete’s where Mike was waiting, the stone mass of the Brooklyn Eagle building where Walt Whitman had once been a reporter stood in majestic restoration-now the condominium home to scores of young, successful Brooklynites.

Rizzo shook his head in wonder.