Richard Price - The Whites

Pausing the game, he waited for them to subside. He knew he should turn the TV off altogether before the third interception sent them completely over the edge, but he also wanted them to hang in there, so that they could experience the thrill of the fourth-quarter comeback. So they all could.

“You guys want to keep watching or do you want to go play?”

“Watch,” Declan wept.

“Watch,” Carlos said, aping his brother’s tragic delivery.

“You sure?”

“Yes.”

“You have that new game upstairs you could play.”

“Watch,” Dec said in a shuddery hush.

“Watch.”

“OK, watch,” reaching for the remote. Then: “You know what? Let’s see it tomorrow instead.”

No one protested.

“Tomorrow will be better.”

And it would be, Billy intending to fast-forward the DVR’ed version directly to the fourth quarter for them, all joy and no pain.

John MacCormack called an hour later as Billy was coming out of the kids’ bedroom after having told them their favorite story, about the time when, as a rookie, he had chased down and subdued a riderless police horse in Times Square — leaving out, as he always did, the most heroic part of the adventure, the fact that he was off-his-ass drunk at the time, otherwise he’d have never been so idiotic as to bolt from his window seat at the bar and start running like a maniac down Broadway.

“Just thought you might want to know,” MacCormack said, “Eric Cortez went out of the picture.”

“What happened?”

“Pulmonary infection. The fucking guy survives being left outdoors overnight, brain-shot in January weather, then goes and gets pneumonia in a warm hospital three months later.”

“So now it’s a homicide?”

“So now it’s a homicide,” MacCormack said. “Just grabbing at straws here, you sure you don’t have anything for me?”

“Wish I did,” Billy said, surprised by a surge of protectiveness toward Yasmeen.

“All right then.”

“Let me ask you, what day was he found?”

“Cortez? The fifth, why?”

“January fifth?”

“Yeah, why?”

“No reason,” Billy said. “Thanks for the update.”

As soon as he got off the phone with MacCormack he began putting a call through to Yasmeen, then hung up and called her husband instead, Dennis blowing up at him halfway through “Hello.”

“What the hell did you say to her today? She came home half out of her mind.”

“What did she say I said?”

“She didn’t, but what the fuck, Billy, she’s just starting to do good again.”

“It was nothing, just some bullshit I was thinking I wanted to talk to somebody about, but I shouldn’t have picked her. Can you apologize for me?”

“Apologize yourself.”

“No, you’re right, you’re right, I’ll call her. Everything OK otherwise?”

“Same ol’,” Dennis sounding calmer.

“So, the reason I called you, she said you took your family to Florida?”

“Yeah, Boynton Beach, to spend New Year’s with my parents. And people say I don’t know how to party, can you imagine that?”

“I hear you… How long were you down there?”

“From like the thirtieth to the eighth. Why?”

“I was thinking of taking the kids, they’ve never been.”

The thirtieth to the eighth, Billy thinking, Good news for her. Thinking, Fucking Redman. And back to thinking: All Pavlicek, all the time.

He had the option of taking the night off, but he didn’t want to be alone, didn’t want to think about Pavlicek, Victor, the stalker, his father, or even his wife, and so, with Millie sleeping over and the slapdash 24/7 patrols at least going through the motions, he drove into the city at midnight, hoping, for a change, that the general malice out there would keep him busy until the morning.

But in the way of these things, the night, as of three in the morning, was another dud — a home invasion on West Forty-sixth Street in which the home invader got his ass beat by the home owner, and a brawl at Complications, a pole-dance club on the West Side Highway where a few visiting Memphis Grizzlies had been throwing back Dom and stuffing hundreds, although none of them were involved in the fight.

The Wheel called as he was driving back across Twenty-third Street to the office.

“We got a stabbing homicide in the Three-five.”

“Indoors or out.”

“In. Fort Washington and One ninety-first.”

“Fort Washington and One ninety-first?” Billy straightened up. “What address.”

“I just said.”

“The building number, for Christ’s sake.”

By the time he showed up at Esteban Appleyard’s apartment, it was a party: CSU, patrol, Stupak, Butter, and Jimmy Whelan himself, his retired gold shield hanging by a bead chain over a pullover sweatshirt. Jimmy had no business being there, but Billy wasn’t going to say anything, and the others bought his expired tin at first sight even though he was wearing flip-flops.

The small dining table in the living room was a tabloid tableau: two abandoned hands of cards, a knocked-over bottle of Tattoo Spiced Rum, three used glasses, and an ashtray bearing the remains of five Kool filter tips and a hollowed-out cigar wrapper that still held shreds of skunk.

The body, belly-down on the carpet in a pool of not quite dried blood, was crammed into a corner of the room as if Appleyard had tried to escape his killers by crawling through the wall. There were multiple stab wounds to his back and buttocks. Rigor had locked his mouth into a savagely wide grin.

As the two CSU techs turned him over, they all saw that he was still holding his last hand, five cards clutched tight in a frozen grip beneath his chin.

“What’s he got?” Billy asked.

One of the techs carefully prized the arm away from the body. “Aces and eights. Just like Wild Bill.”

“Bullshit,” Whelan said.

“Take a look.”

Whelan stooped over the body and squinted at the hand.

“A pair of threes,” he announced. “You assholes.”

“Dead man’s hand, baby,” the tech laughed.

“Who’s Wild Bill?” Stupak said.

Moments later, as the techs started to inventory the frontal devastation, a small intact balloon of intestine began to peep shyly out of a puncture wound above Appleyard’s navel, then slowly began to expand, those in the know quickly covering their noses and mouths before it could burst.

Wanting to avoid the explosion of stench, Billy retreated into the bedroom, which, like the rest of the small four-room apartment, had been utterly ransacked — plants torn out of their pots, underwear, shirts, and sweaters hanging from open dresser drawers, along with VHS porn tapes and an upended shoe box that had been filled with small serrated-edged snapshots from Appleyard’s childhood in Puerto Rico.

Whelan wandered in and picked up a ripped-out peace lily, the soil that was still clinging to its roots drizzling onto the unmade bed.

“How much money you think he could’ve hid in this pot, thirteen dollars?”

“You sure this was about the lottery?” Billy asked.

“Of course it was. Fuckin’ guy. I told him a thousand times, you heard me yourself.”

Whelan picked up one of the old photos fantailed around the shoe box, a black and white of the victim as a little kid standing with his mother by a seawall.

“I swear, when God said he was passing out brains, Appleyard heard ‘trains,’ didn’t want any, and hid under a table.”

“Any thoughts on the actors?”

“Yeah,” Whelan said, “but not here.”

When they left the apartment, the hallway was filled with tenants.

“He’s dead?” a neighbor asked Whelan.

“You bet.”

“See, I told him,” another one said.