Richard Price - The Whites

While Victor was busy stowing his gear in the Range Rover, Milton, in hopes of sobering up, put all four windows down and the AC on full blast and then rolled out of the lot directly onto the southbound New England Thruway, driving from the Bronx to Queens to Brooklyn. Thirty-five minutes later, freezing but still wasted, he pulled up across the street from Victor’s apartment building on Palmetto Street in Bushwick and settled in, taking one last nip of the ’Treuse to chase the chill.

He didn’t have to wait long, Victor’s Range Rover slow-cruising right past him while he was still feeling around the floor after dropping the thermos cap. At first, it looked almost too easy, Victor parking the Ranger one block ahead, then walking back in his direction. But when Milton stepped from the car he immediately fell back against the driver’s door, weakly waved his bat at the sky, then hinged forward to puke into the roadway as Victor, wide-berthing the mess, made it to his front door unmolested and disappeared into the building.

Just as well, just as well.

When his vomiting came down to a few ropy strands of saliva and his eyes began to lose their strained filminess, he slowly raised himself up and took a few raw breaths.

Just as well…

Then, unbidden: I don’t want your fucking money.

Why did he say that to her? It was his fucking money. She might have scammed him out of it, but he had said your money, as if she had taken his sense of self along with the cash. Had date-raped his brain. And he had just walked out the door, don’t mind the wet spot.

He slammed the bat into his own car door, was about to do it again, do anything to fend off his other memory of tonight — Sofia’s shell-shocked silence, her stunned poke-hole of a face — when the magnified clack of a turned latch abruptly brought him back, Milton looking up to see Victor returning to the street with a small dog.

It was like he was asking for it.

Like he was insisting on it.

The dog, some kind of small pug, immediately squatted and pissed on the pavement, the streetlight too bright right there to risk anything. But when Victor turned the corner, Milton, keeping his distance and sticking tight to the shadowed building fronts, followed. They walked in a two-man stagger nearly the length of the street before Victor, absorbed in his dog’s doings, came to a complete stop with his back to him.

The distance between them was next to nothing, but he was still too wasted to close in fast, and the broadcasted wheeze of his lungs, the sloppy scrape of his bat against the pavement had Victor fully turned around and reaching for something on his belt before Milton could make contact.

And then came the invisible jolt to his torso, a white wallop of phosphorescent pain emanating from somewhere between his left hip and armpit that lifted him like a backhand into the side of a building. But he was too drunk and too determined to let it distract him for long, and after shutting down what needed to be shut down, Milton once again began to close in. The dazzling burn in his side made it difficult for him to really bring the bat around like he wanted, and the lead-pipe impact of the heavy-booted side kick that Victor delivered to his thigh at some point didn’t help, but when he was done, Carmen’s brother lay curled at his feet, blood bubbling from his nostrils each time he took a breath, an ivory shard of bone that had broken through the sleeve of his shirt winking in the moonlight.

By the time Milton managed to circle around and slowly drive past the scene, a small crowd had already formed: dope fiends, joggers, dog walkers, and what have you, everyone on their cells, either calling out or making iPhone videos, the flashers of an approaching ambo lighting up the street like a midway. From the car, he spotted his bloodied bat lying up against the curb, but there was nothing he could do about that now.

It wasn’t until an hour later, while standing outside the cage-gate of his house and woozily patting himself down for the keys, that he finally noticed the dual Taser darts still buried between his ribs, their attached wires dangling down his side like extruded nerves.

There were six people in the visitors’ waiting room outside the OR of the Maimonides Medical Center: Billy, Carmen, Bobby Cardozo, a detective from the 8–0 Squad, and three of Victor and Richard’s friends — gym rats, by the look of them — everyone waiting for Victor to come out from under the knife. The damage — a shattered left humerus, a fractured right collarbone, the left lung pierced by the lowest and smallest of his three broken ribs — was gruesome, the only good news being that the actor had stayed away from his head.

“Bobby, can you get prints off the bat?” Billy asked Cardozo, whose black eyes, goatee, and kettle-drum gut made him look like a villain in a silent movie.

“We’re sending it to the lab this afternoon. So, hopefully.”

Richard Kubin came into the waiting room with a vending-machine coffee, his anger making him look broader and taller than Billy had ever seen him.

“Your friend…” Cardozo began.

“My husband.”

“He carried a Taser?”

“You would too if you saw where he worked.”

“I’m just asking.”

“Look, we know who did this,” a short, red-bearded weight lifter said.

They didn’t, but Billy did, as did Carmen, who, rather than browbeating Cardozo and the entire hospital staff, was sitting silently on a tatty couch, staring at her hands.

“These little mutants from the Knickerbockers,” the bearded guy said. “They sport-hunt us like we’re their personal buffalo herd.”

“What are you talking, gay bashers?” Cardozo reared back. “You sure? I pass your friend Mr. Acosta on the street, I’m not thinking gay.”

“Meaning what,” Richard snapped.

“I’m just saying,” Cardozo retreated.

“Saying what.”

Cardozo threw Billy a quick helpless look, then stepped away to regroup.

At first, Billy didn’t understand why he was refraining from volunteering information about the stalker in order to help refocus the investigation. And then he did: simply put, he felt ashamed.

As far as he knew, they had all been victimized, but somehow over the course of the last few weeks, the innocence of the people living under his roof had gradually come to feel tainted, as if they all in some way deserved what had been happening to them. It was a classic reaction, he knew, the victim falling into self-loathing and self-blame, but now that the family contagion had reached out and claimed Victor, he felt as guilty as if he had swung the bat himself. And Carmen — sitting there so uncharacteristically withdrawn — had to be feeling something of the same.

“These kids…” Cardozo said, taking out his notepad.

“Kids?”

“These individuals. Any names? Street tags?”

“There’s two,” said another friend, wearing a Bucknell T-shirt. “I know them by sight.”

“And the other one,” the weight lifter said. “The moron with the hat.”

“How about this,” Cardozo said, stowing his pad. “Why don’t you all come in, we’ll set you up with some photo trays, then we can do a ride-by around the Knickerbockers, see if you can maybe make some IDs that way.”

“You know what?” Bucknell said. “Forget it. We’ll take care of it ourselves.”

“How about you don’t,” Billy volunteered.

“Do you know how many assault complaints we filed with your precinct this year?” Bucknell wheeling on Billy. “Do you know how many times I’ve been in that building? You people just don’t give a shit.”

“First I’m hearing about it,” Cardozo said.