Down the River unto the Sea

32

Languishing in the darkness of semiconsciousness, creeping danger, and certain death, I felt the splash of a drop of water on my forehead. If I were the Wicked Witch, that would be the sign of my undoing. I would die and the war of flying monkeys would be over.

My gut felt like a flagging dirigible and the pain in my head was a brick wall: solid and everlasting.

Another tiny splash.

That was one of the tears on my neck when Aja hugged me after I’d been let out of Rikers. I cried too because I was so happy to be loved.

“Are you okay, Daddy?” she asked. It felt as if she were in that room with me and we were crying together.

The next drop brought to mind the rainstorm I was caught in, in the third grade walking home from school. It had been gray all day, but no one had told me it might rain. I gave up protecting my homework and my books. The spring rain soaked through my clothes. It was cold and set me to shivering on the cot where I lay.

I remembered slogging through the downpour toward my grandparents’ house. There was no other choice. When I got there my grandmother put my clothes in the dryer so that when I put them on again I’d be warm and toasty.

There must be a leak above the bed; that’s what I thought. I didn’t want to get up in the middle of the night to fix it, so I turned on my side and moved closer to the wall. All I wanted was unconciousness.

The next drop landed in my left ear. I shot up straight voicing a wordless complaint.

When I opened my eyes I saw that the lights had been turned on and that the leak was actually a man with an eyedropper torturing me like some minor demon from Dante’s hell.

“Glad!” I cried. “What the fuck, man?”

He’d pulled a chair up next to me and used one of the blue plastic juice glasses for his store of torture drops.

“At first I thought you were dead, brother,” my oldest cop friend claimed. “Then I smelled the XO.”

“How’d you find me?” I noticed that he was wearing all black.

“I put out the question on my Facebook and got a message from Lauren Bachnell that you had just left Bedford on Ray Ray’s commuter line. All I had to do was set up across the street and wait for you.”

The hangover that I thought would never leave drained out of me in less than sixty seconds. It was a matter of life and death in that room with Gladstone — mostly death. It all came clear to me right then. I understood what happened to me and why. I knew what the verdict was too.

I looked at my brother in black and asked, “Are you here to take me out?”

“That’s what they said. Not for the first time either.”

I considered attacking him but knew better. He could have put a bullet in my skull rather than those drops on my head.

“You were in league with Little Exeter and his crew?”

“Not me. They just called me up and said that you were a dead man.”

“Why call you?” I asked, even though I knew the answer.

“Nowadays I’m kind of a clearinghouse under the new mayor and chief. They wanna clean up the past and start the future with a blank slate. But back then there was a kind of a club that shared all that money swirling around. My nephew was in law school, and I bought my wife a house in Miami. I had told my friends back then what you were up to and they decided to make you die.”

“But you gave them a better choice,” I said.

“I knew you and the ladies, Joe. I knew we could put a frame around you with a cute young white girl. Worked beautiful. But Convert is a pervert. He made it so Jocelyn Bryor got the case and turned Monica against you. I had it so you’d make bail and then I’d talk you into accepting what had happened. But after you got slashed I just put you in a hole and let the powers that be do what they did.”

“So you destroyed my life,” I said. “Just like that.”

“I saved your life, Joe. Don’t you ever believe anything else.”

“But now you’re gonna come in here and kill me.”

“When I saw you come in this building, I knew you had taken Mr. Thurman’s hideaway,” he said. “We’ve known about this place for a while. How’d you know about it, anyway?”

“Are you gonna kill me, Glad?”

“Do I have to?”

“I’m a cop, man. I saw something bad and I took steps. Your people wrecked everything.”

“You’re an ex-cop, Joe. And who knows? Maybe if you stayed on the job you’d’a gotten shot down in a firefight or somethin’. It could be I saved your life twice.”

“It was wrong what you did.”

“Maybe,” Gladstone Palmer admitted. “Maybe. But you have to understand, Joe, the brass now is all new. The people I worked with are off the force.”

“Paul Convert’s still around.”

“He’s not gonna be a problem long. After he messed up in Queens he’s in more hot water than you.”

“You knew about Queens?”

“After the fact.” Glad’s smile was friendly if sad. “The force can’t afford a scandal, Joe. The people dealing on the docks are either retired, dead, or reformed. Not even the mayor would stand in the way of your demise.”

Gladstone had a way of revealing the truth. I could see that I’d never be exonerated, much less reinstated.

“And there’s another thing,” my friend said.

“What’s that?” I asked. A wave of exhaustion passed through me.

“This thing with Free Man, Leonard Compton.”

“How you know about him?”

“I’m lookin’ for you, and in a whole other precinct you’re kickin’ up dust over a cop killer. You know the left hand speaks to the right even on the dark side of the force.”

“Valence and Pratt killed over a dozen people, Glad.”

“I know.”

“You do?”

“Everybody knew about Valence and Pratt. But nobody kills a cop unless it’s the last resort. And you know those boys made a lotta money. They could grease the wheels of machines half the way to Albany.”

“That’s wrong, man.”

“Yes, it is, but that’s not the question.”

“Then what is?”

“Do you need me to kill you right now?”

There was no smile on my old friend’s lips. I couldn’t remember him ever without at least the hint of a grin somewhere on his face. I took the question seriously, and from somewhere in the depths of my mind an answer rose to the surface like the carcass of some long-dead deep-sea creature.

“No,” I said. “No.”

Sleep came with my last negation. I don’t remember whatever else Glad might have said. I don’t remember him leaving my subterranean cell. I just passed out, unable to defend or save myself.

But in that deep repose the answer to my quest remained in light.

I couldn’t repair my career. I couldn’t achieve a reprieve for A Free Man. All I had was the truth and the certainty that I had to do something about that truth. If that meant breaking the law, I was ready. If it meant missing my child’s graduation, that would have to be.