“Do I know you?” Phisto said.
“I don’t know.”
Phisto took hold of the man’s face, digging his fingers through his scraggly beard into his jaws. “Do you know me?”
“Yeah, I know you.”
Phisto laughed. “Why didn’t you run away like the rest?”
The man hesitated. “Why?”
Phisto’s eyes screwed up and he lifted the man’s dark glasses from his face. “What’d you say, muthafucker?”
“Why? I didn’t think the game was over.”
Phisto laughed. “You think you’re funny.”
“I mean, he was so amazing, the way he defied gravity. I thought he was Superman. I thought he would get up and fly above that rim again.”
“He was amazing, wasn’t he?” Phisto said.
“Yeah. Amazing.”
Phisto said, “Did you see anything else here?”
The guy took his sunglasses from Phisto’s hand and put them back over his eyes. “What do you mean?”
“Exactly. That’s what I mean,” Phisto replied, turning away. “You better bounce. Cops gonna show any minute.”
“I am a cop,” the man said.
Phisto turned slowly, his face scarred with a dark smile. “For real?”
The man adjusted his dark glasses and smiled. “Just fucking with you.”
Phisto relaxed. “I should kill you for fucking with me.”
“Actually, I wasn’t. I’m really a cop.”
The man opened his jacket. An NYPD detective badge hung from a chain around his neck. Phisto also noticed the 9mm stuck loosely in his waistband.
Phisto gauged the distance between him and the man. “You gonna arrest me?”
“No.”
“If you ain’t gonna arrest me, what you gonna do?”
“Shoot you between the eyes.”
Phisto laughed.
The man wriggled his fingers. “What’s so funny?”
“You’re gonna shoot me between the eyes?”
“Yeah.”
Pointing at the dead baller, Phisto said, “For him?”
“No.”
“Is this personal?”
“Remember the cop you ambushed in that crack house?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“He had a son. That son became a cop.”
“And that son...”
“Would be me.”
Phisto turned to the member of his crew holding the.45. “Shoot this muthafucker.”
Nobody moved.
Phisto made a quick grab at the.45. His hand closed on the grip and that’s when he felt a jolt to his chest as if he’d been kicked by a mule. He bounced against the white wall of one of the racquetball courts and slid to the ground on his back.
Phisto had often thought of what this moment would be like for a person. The moment that separated life from death. Was there some brilliant light to illuminate your path into the next world, as some people claimed who’d had so-called near-death experiences? Was there such a thing as coming close to death? He knew what death looked like. His father had made sure of that.
He looked up and saw streams and streams of white clouds. And then he felt a strange relief swell in his chest, a sort of bonding with an energy entering him. A sadness overcame him and he wanted to cry. He saw the faces of his crew and knew that he’d been betrayed. By one or all of them. He also knew it didn’t matter anymore. The light was approaching fast.
Lights out for Frankie
by Liz MartÍnez
Woodside
Frankie tapped his foot and wished the clerk would hurry up. How long could it take to scan a couple of items and punch the keys on the cash register? He lifted his baseball cap and wiped the sweat off his forehead, then slipped it back on, pulling the bill lower. The heatwave was taking its toll on everyone. The air-conditioning inside the store helped a little, but the customers still looked like they were wilting.
Finally, the cashier got her act together. She handed him the transaction slip and her pen. He scribbled Gerry Adams in the signature space. In the past, Frankie had passed himself off as Billy Clinton, Charles Prince, and Johnny Depp. The cashier counted out crisp currency and gave it to him along with a command to have a nice day. Her name tag read Rochelle.
“Thanks, Rochelle,” he said, and asked her for the receipt. She stared vacantly at the piece of paper. “Oh. Sure,” she said, then handed it to him and wandered off.
Frankie glanced around the customer service desk. What a misnomer. The three clerks behind the counter were doing anything but servicing customers. One was chatting on her cell phone with her back to the store. Another was deep in thought, staring intently into the middle distance. The third mindlessly folded and refolded the same article of clothing. He spied a roll of thermal cash register tape sitting out on the counter. Somebody had probably started changing the tape and then forgot about it midstream. Nobody was paying any attention to him, so he swiped the tape and tucked it into the white plastic bag. He was sure he could find some use for it.
He hopped into his black SUV and merged into traffic on Northern Boulevard. He headed toward his next stop near the Queens Center Mall. Most of his NYPD colleagues worked extra jobs on their RDOS. Having regular days off gave them an opportunity to land good gigs like guarding one of the Commerce Bank branches. Stand there for eight hours in uniform, flirting with the tellers. Nice.
Frankie sighed and looked at the list his wife had made for him. This was how he spent his RDOS — running from store to store. He thought about his wife and their two kids and sighed again. For the millionth time, he questioned the way his life was unfolding. Shouldn’t he try to land a private-pay job with a bank for his days off? Or maybe with a store? He grimaced. It was only July, but the kids would need new school supplies soon, and then Christmas... Always something.
He pulled into the left lane on Queens Boulevard and waited for the light to change. One of the guys in the livery cab that sailed through the light on his right looked familiar, but he couldn’t be sure. He tried to think who it might be. The memory came to him just as he pulled into the Marshall’s parking lot.
On his first day in the Police Academy, Frankie had buddied up with three other recruits: Thompson, Edwards, and... the third guy’s name escaped him. The group had coffee before classes, studied together, and ate lunch in a diner two blocks from the Academy. The man in the black car reminded Frankie of the last member of the Fearsome Foursome. (How young they’d been! That name had sounded so cool at the time.) He was a lanky, raw-boned shit-kicker from the hills of West Virginia. The guy had heard an ad for the NYPD on his short-wave radio and had spent a day driving northeast to take the test. Everybody thought he was stupid because of his hillbilly accent, but Frankie copied his homework every chance he got.
Williams — that was his name. Frankie must have been the first Mexican-American Williams had ever seen. Right off the bat, the guy made a remark about Frankie’s nose. Frankie, who thought his nose was regal, like the profile on the statue of an Aztec warrior, was slightly insulted. “What do you know?” he’d asked Williams. “Your last girlfriend was probably a sheep.”
The other guys chuckled, but Williams took it seriously. “We never had no sheep in our family,” he said. “I had an uncle once, kept goats. He was pretty tight with one of them — called her Priscilla.” He looked puzzled when the other three recruits doubled over with laughter. He must have figured he’d made a slight miscalculation because he tried to backtrack. “I don’t think he was improper with Priscilla or nothin’,” he protested. “They was just real good companions.”