But it was too late. I’d gotten to my feet without even realizing it. “You lying piece of shit! I’m gonna — ”
Susan swung the gun around to me. “You’re not going to do anything, Moe, except shut your fucking mouth. Everyone keep your mouths shut. If it’s quiet enough, we should be able to hear the explosion even at this distance. Right, Papa?”
Bergman didn’t answer.
Choirboy started the countdown, “Ten seconds to go.”
Jimmy moved onto his knees.
Nine.
“Don’t be an idiot, Jimmy. I see what you’re doing.” Susan pointed the gun right at him.
Eight.
Bobby moaned.
Seven.
Susan closed her eyes in rapturous anticipation.
Six.
Jimmy knew he was a dead man once the bomb went off. He leapt at Susan.
Five.
Susan opened her eyes, stepped back, fired.
Four.
The gunshot was deafening in that confined space. Jimmy probably didn’t much care. He was beyond caring.
Three.
The hunched old man backhanded his granddaughter across the side of her head. Stunned, she tumbled over, banging her gun hand against the concrete foundation wall.
Two.
Bergman scooped up the gun, turned, shot Choirboy through the heart.
One.
Choirboy went down like a huge sack of flour.
Zero.
Silence.
The only explosion was the one echoing in our ears. There was nothing from the distance. Susan, her lips dripping blood, scrambled on hands and knees over to Choirboy’s body. She grabbed at his wrist, not to check his pulse, but to check his watch.
“Something’s wrong, Papa. There was no explosion.”
He ignored her, turning to me instead. “Take your friend and get the hell out from here.”
I didn’t need to be told twice. When I grabbed Bobby’s arms he shrieked in pain, but the knot around his wrists was so tight and I had nothing to cut the rope with. Once I got him up, I bent down and folded him over my shoulder. We were about halfway up the stairs when I heard a third gunshot. I didn’t go back to look.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Coney Island Hospital was a white brick box at the corner of Ocean Parkway and Shore Parkway. It was known in the neighborhood as the butcher shop. It was a city-run hospital and the kind of place where big doses of apathy were handed out like after-dinner mints. Incompetence too. The emergency room was renowned for casts that were put on too tight, and bones that had to be rebroken and reset because … well, because they just didn’t get it right the first time. I knew guys with broken arms and legs that had driven themselves to other hospitals to avoid the place. But Coney Island Hospital was less than ten minutes away from Hyman Bergman’s house, and with Bobby in such bad shape I didn’t think I could risk being choosy.
About five minutes after they wheeled Bobby into the emergency room, I was herded into a dark room by two uniformed cops. When I asked what was going on, they told me, “Get the fuck in, sit the fuck down, and shut the fuck up.” Charm school graduates, both.
The room was a windowless box with a rolling desk chair that didn’t roll, a metal desk, and metal shelves bending under the weight of cardboard boxes dating back to a time before the Dodgers moved away from Brooklyn. I waited in there for a half hour or so, trying to come to grips with what had happened to me over the last few hours. I had just watched two men shot to death in front of me. And I don’t mean killed at a distance. One of them, Jimmy, had his brain blown out the back of his head. Neither the Choirboy nor Jimmy had been more than ten feet from me when they died. I kept waiting to feel something other than numb, but I just didn’t. I was cold inside, so cold that I shivered.
There was a knock on the door and it pushed open. In walked a man who didn’t exactly bring an end to my shivers. No more than five foot six, he was a nasty-looking little fireplug of a man with a gray and brown brush cut. He wore his face red and angry, and a lit cigarette dangled from his snarly lips. He carried a ridiculous gray fedora in his hand, and he was twenty years too old and thirty pounds too heavy for his John’s Bargain Store suit. That, and his black shoes squeaked when he walked. Hanging out of the hanky pocket of his suit jacket was a gold and blue enamel detective shield.
“I’m Nance, Detective Nance,” he said, leaning his face right up close to mine. His breath smelled of onions, cigarettes, and whiskey. Yummy. He squeezed my cheeks together till they hurt. “We’re gonna be pals, you and me.”
I said nothing. He didn’t like that. Apparently his other pals were more talkative.
He slapped the side of my head and then grabbed my collar. Why did everybody do that to me? My collar had been grabbed more in the last week than in my whole life. “Listen to me, you little shit. You’re gonna tell me what happened in that basement tonight and how you came to be there. You don’t, I’m gonna slap the cuffs on ya, beat the piss outta ya, and then you’re gonna take a ride to the Tombs to spend the night.”
I said nothing. What I was in the middle of an hour ago, that was worth being frightened over. This guy bullying me … not so much.
He slapped me in the side of the head again, this time a lot harder. “You deaf, asshole?”
“What?”
“Very funny, ya hippie draft-dodgin’ piece a crap. Tell me what happened tonight.”
This time I had something to say, but I knew he was going to like it even less than my silence. “I’ll tell someone, but not you. Get Wallace Casey in here and I’ll talk to him, only him.”
He was back to tugging at my collar. “You obnoxious little cocksucker. Who the fuck do you think you are, ordering me around like I’m your boy?”
“Wallace Casey,” I repeated.
He changed tactics. Instead of tightening his grip on my collar, he pushed me and the chair over backwards. “Start talking.”
I obliged him. “Wallace Casey.”
Nance kicked me in the ribs. It hadn’t escaped my attention that Nance never once asked me who the hell Wallace Casey was. I was pretty sure he knew exactly who Wallace Casey was. I assumed Casey was either standing on the other side of the door or was on his way over. Because there was little doubt that the second an incident involving Bobby Friedman had occurred, Casey would be notified. I knew the truth and the truth was this: the deceased Jimmy might have been a lot of things, a belligerent asshole for sure, but he wasn’t the informant. No, Bobby Friedman was. I might have been a little bit in shock, but I wasn’t stupid. A lot of things made sense to me now that didn’t quite fit before. The only two people who could tell me if I was right or wrong were Bobby and Casey, and Bobby was in no shape to tell me anything.
“All right, ya little kike shit,” Nance barked, flicking his lit cigarette into my face. “Stay where ya are and we’ll see what we’ll see.” Then, before leaving, he gave me a goodbye kick for luck.
I really didn’t like that man. I hadn’t had many direct dealings with the cops in my life, but if Nance was representative of the way most cops acted, it was easy to see why not many people my age gave them much respect. I picked myself up and the chair too, stamped out the cigarette, and waited some more.
This time when there was a knock on the door, it was followed by a question. “Can I come in?”
“Sure.”
Wallace Casey stood front and center. He was even more imposing close up than at a distance, but he wore what I guess passed for a smile on his face. He held a hand the size of a baseball mitt out to me. “I’m Detective Wallace Casey. I hear you been asking for me.”
I shook his hand. “We’ve met before,” I said. “The night 1055 Coney Island Avenue burned down. You were wearing a ski mask at the time and whacking me across the belly with a baseball bat. You called me something like a long-haired hippie freak.”