Tower

I got training all right, but it had little to do with picking up stray papers with a pointy stick. During my time in Philadelphia, don’t think I once set foot on the university campus. Ask me the school’s colors and I couldn’t tell you. My waking hours were consumed by two things: learning to be a cop and convincing Leeza Velez I was worth loving. Even now I’m not sure how successful I was at either.

Every day, bag lunch in hand, I left our third-floor walkup at 6:15 AM. Dressed in my green coveralls and steel-toed work boots, I’d start walking to the campus and turn down an alley. There I’d climb into the back of a work van that had been booty from a drug seizure and off I went. It was an odd life, one layer of façade atop another layer of bullshit, covering a charade. But hey, if the vacuum of my parents’ lives had prepared me for anything, it was this: It’s hard to lose yourself when you don’t know who the fuck you are to begin with.

What was different for me was that I was on the accelerated plan. My training began the minute I got into the van and didn’t stop until the van dropped me off at 6:00 PM. Took some classes at the Philadelphia Police Academy and had private classes with cops from Philly and NYPD instructors. Sometimes I felt like a guy with a funnel down his throat. These guys were shoving food down as fast as they could and it was all I could do not to choke. Think I absorbed it more than learned it.

Only part I enjoyed was my weapons training. It wasn’t like I hadn’t carried for years, but I never really knew what the hell I was doing. You buy a Glock on the street, guy doesn’t offer to teach you how to use it. Man, think of it like one of them idiot-proof cameras, aim and shoot. Lens cap’s like the safety. Don’t forget to take it off. You hear what I’m sayin’? Was encouraged to spend hours on the range. Got proficient with a 9mm. I was fucking magic with a.38, felt like an extension of myself.

No one ever told me to imagine the paper target as someone I hated. Did that all on my own. One day it was Boyle, the next day Griffin. My favorite target was O’Connor. I’d imagine him calling me lad or son and I’d start pumping slugs into where his fat neck rolls would have been.

About a month into my cram course, started doing ride-alongs in patrol cars, one or two nights a week. I was strictly forbidden to participate. Was there to watch and learn. It was during this time I met a skell who’d raped his sister and killed her friend. What a twisted piece of shit. Told me his folks had both died of cancer. As if I gave a rat’s ass. Was the cancer, he claimed, that had wrecked his head.

“How’s that, scumbag?”

“It’s coming for me, the cancer, man. At night, I can’t sleep cause I hear the clock ticking, the cancer clock.”

Like that explained it all. Like that explained anything.

Meanwhile, Leeza Velez and I settled into this parallel universe existence. We lived separate lives together. Made it really clear that she wasn’t interested in discussing her life with me and was less interested in discussing mine, that as long as the world bought our act and I kept drawing breath, it met her expectations. I was less satisfied with the arrangement, though there was little I could do about it.

The one reprieve I got from life behind the invisible partition came on Friday and Saturday nights. Maintenance work wasn’t rocket science and no one would buy that I had to stay in on weekends cramming for my exams on leaf raking. And since our cover was that we were in love, we had to go out and act the parts. Bar scene in Philly was fun and several-fold less pretentious than Manhattan’s. Although Velez steadfastly refused to share any details of her life beyond the limits of her current assignment, she was more willing to let me talk about growing up in Brooklyn, about my folks, about Nicky and the old block. She even laughed sometimes when I’d tell her about the shit Nicky and me used to pull.

As the weeks passed, stuff happened, small signs of thawing that went barely noticed. She’d catch me staring at her and she would take an extra beat to turn away. We’d reach for the same section of the paper and our fingers would brush, linger. Pure fucking electricity for me. Indifferent expression from her. All quickly forgotten. Took her once folding my laundry as a declaration of love. A man looking for signs can find ’em anywhere.

Then there was the kissing. It’s strange, kissing her had become everything to me. Can’t explain it, but her lips touching mine had become more meaningful for me than any full blown sex I’d ever had and I’d had plenty. During the week when my instructors would begin to drone on, often found myself daydreaming about holding her in my arms, the feel of her cheeks against my palms, the taste of beer on her tongue. Eventually, it stopped mattering to me that none of it mattered to her.

One Friday night her cell phone rang just as we were headed out the door. She picked up. She barely spoke, nodded her head a few times, hung up. Knew better than to ask. Asked anyway. Got no answer. No shock there, yet something had changed. Her body language was different. The awkwardness to the kissing had returned. She was very distracted and apologized several times for asking me to repeat myself.

When we got back to the apartment, Leeza Velez, U.S. Marshal headed straight into her room. Didn’t think anything of it. Had grown accustomed to being shut out the second the front door shut behind us. But as I lay half asleep on the futon in the dark, my head digesting some bit of info my instructors had fed me during the past month, I heard her. Velez was sobbing. Tried to ignore it. Sure. Couldn’t. Shuffled down the hallway to the bedroom.

“Hey, Velez, you okay?”

“Come in.”

Leeza was standing naked next to the bed, her body backlit by the dim bulb of a small reading lamp. Her body was everything I had imagined it to be. She was muscular and well defined without distracting rips and cuts. Her muscles, curved and sloped, making smooth transitions from one to the next. Her nipples were hard and larger than I’d envisioned. Her breasts were on the small side, but round and free from the pull of gravity. Her legs were like a sculptor’s idea of perfection: taut, lean, long, curved. It took more than near darkness to hide beauty.

When I moved my lips to ask, she pressed her index finger across my mouth.

“Sssshhhhhh.”

It was more a plea than a command. Leeza knelt down and took me fully into her mouth. From that second on, kisses weren’t ever going to be enough.

When I rolled over the next morning, Leeza’s side of the bed was cold. And when I opened my eyes, O’Connor was staring back at me.

“Morning, lad,” he said as plainly as if this was how he started all his Saturdays. “Don’t bother looking for her. Seems you two have broken up. Pity that.”

“What?” I asked though I’d heard him perfectly well. And when I scanned the room, I could see that any trace of Leeza Velez had been removed.

“You’ve done well, son. Time to move on.”

“Move on where?”

“Southie, South Boston.”

“But—”

“Get packed, probie,” he said. “You’ve got a week back home before you head to Beantown. It’s there you’ll learn to be a man. I’ll get us some coffees while you shower up.”

After O’Connor left, I hesitated. Could still taste Leeza on my lips and smell her scent in the air. Showered, removing more traces of Velez, but not all. Have to scrub my soul for that.

I was a zombie.

Before Philly, I may not have had a firm handle on who Todd Rosen was, exactly. No, I was dead inside. Not dead, exactly. The dead can’t feel the hurt the way I can. No, was like one of those patients on the operating table who wakes up in the middle of their surgery unable to move, but exquisitely aware of the scalpel. Christ, wished the doctor’d just cut my throat and gotten it over with.

It was impossible for me to believe how deeply I’d entwined Leeza Velez into the fabric of myself. Fucking crazy that I could feel so utterly emptied and alone over a woman who’d shared herself with me for a solitary night. For all I knew Leeza Velez wasn’t her name. Maybe that was it. Her distance had let me create a life for us, a life for her not only that didn’t exist, but would never, could never exist. All of it woven out of a dangerous smile, brown skin, and meaningless kisses.

Brooklyn, Nicky, my dad were strangers to me, worse than strangers. Guess that’s what O’Connor wanted: vertigo, discomfort, disorientation. Had never been so off balance in my life. Sidewalks where Nicky and I had scratched our initials in wet cement with a stick, seemed foreign to me now. For fuck’s sake, I was foreign to my own self.

It was Axel’s again. Nicky’s idea, of course. Said it was fine when he asked if that suited me. What did it matter? Once pain hits a certain threshold, you might as well see how much you can take. And man, I was like a flashing neon sign, alternating between deadness and the pain. On. Off. On. Off. On... But it was more than Leeza. It was what I’d become, what I’d let myself be turned into. Looked at myself in the mirror behind the bar. Christ, I thought, a cop, a fucking cop!

Nicky threw his arm over my shoulder, kissed me on the cheek. “C’mon, Todd, drink your beer and cheer up.”

“You ever meet anybody that cheered up on demand?”

“Griffin.”

We both had a laugh at that. Didn’t last long.

“Jesus, pal, I never seen you like this. Wanna talk about it?”

“What’s to talk, Nick? She walked out on me.”

“Did you see it coming?” he asked.

“Maybe. Guess I didn’t really know her.”

“Who knows any woman?”

Wasn’t inclined to argue.

He checked his watch. It was getting close to ten. On O’Connor’s orders I’d ask to meet with Boyle. Nick had made the arrangements. Shrugged his head that we better get moving. Stood with my beer glass in hand, prepared to chug the rest, when some drunk asshole stumbled into me. The rim of the glass smacked me in my teeth and the beer poured onto my jacket.

Next thing I knew, Nicky had me in a bear hug. The drunk was laid out, donating a generous amount of blood to Axel’s barroom floor. He made a feeble attempt to rise up on his elbows and knees. Kicked him full in the ribs as Nick tried forcing me to the door.

“Holy shit!” he said, struggling to get me into his car. “Are you like seriously deranged?”

Couldn’t answer, the adrenaline burning inside.

“That guy was six six and you dropped him with one punch.”

For the first time in my miserable life I was raging.

“Fuck on a bike, bro. Even I would be afraid to take your ass on. That bitch made a man of you. You’re one dangerous motherfucker all of a sudden.”

Dangerous, yeah, that was me. He only knew the half of it.

“Let’s go,” was all I said.

Riggio’s Clam House was a hole in the wall, but a legendary one. Situated at the corner of Emmons Avenue and Ocean Avenue, directly across from the footbridge that spanned the ass-end of Sheepshead Bay, Riggio’s had been the setting for countless shady deals and more than one mob hit. In the summer sometimes, Nicky and me used to take the bus down here and fish off the bridge. Seemed like a million fucking years ago. But so did every good thing in my life. Exercised the good sense not to try and recall what those were.

Although I had asked for the meet, it was Boyle picked the location. The prick had nothing if not a sense of drama. With him it was hard to know the reasoning behind his decisions. Him and his donkey-fucking logic. Did he just want to stick it to the guineas by talking shop on their turf? Did he already know I was a cop? Would Griffin be waiting to put one in my ear? The setting was convenient enough. Could dump my dead ass directly in Sheepshead Bay or haul it to the marshlands of nearby Gerritsen Beach. Maybe he had a boat waiting and would drop my weighted body in the Atlantic off Manhattan or Plumb Beach. There was no shortage of places to dump a body in this part of Brooklyn. Or maybe Boyle just liked raw clams.

When we got there, Nicky parked around back. The stink of the discarded seafood rotting in the dumpsters overwhelmed the smell of the sea itself. Thought, no, that rotting smell was me. If Griffin was waiting around the turn, who gave a fuck?

“What are you smiling at?” Nick wanted to know as we turned the corner.

“Nothing, Nicky. Nothing.”

Boyle and Griffin were seated at a table in the rear of the dimly lit clam house. It was what you’d expect, red and white checked tablecloths, flickering candles, and Chianti bottles covered in wicker and dripped wax. Boyle got up to greet me as if I was a brother gone for five years instead of a flunky gone a month or two. Hugged me, slapped my back, tousled my hair. Griffin curled up the corner of his mouth. Said nothing. That was like effusive for him.

“Sit!” Boyle ordered. We did. “I heard of your troubles, boyo. Nothing will gut a man like a woman. You learn your lesson and move on. In the future, you won’t let it happen to you again. If the opportunity should ever arise for me to teach you boys how it’s done, how to deal with a woman proper, I will. That’s me word. Do you think she was stepping out on you?”

“No.”

“Were you on her?” he asked.

Could feel the rage again. Tasted it. Fuck, rage had flavor and it was nothing like bacon or pussy. How could this prick even ask me that?

“Never,” I heard myself say, the rage subsiding, slightly.

Boyle must’ve seen it in my eyes. Seemed well pleased. “Let’s order.”

Boyle ordered about two dozen clams of various sorts, so I guess that cleared up any questions I had about why we were here.

During dinner, Nick described what I’d done to the big man at Axel’s. Now it was Griffin who seemed impressed. Actually stopped chewing for a second.

“Listen, Todd,” Boyle said between bites of cheese cake, “I’ve a partner in South Boston could use an extra hand for a coupl’a weeks, someone from outside his patch, if you catch my drift. Would you be interested in doing me the favor? Seems to me you could use the distraction and I would be inclined to show my appreciation.”

“Would I get to use my hands?”

“Idle hands are the devil’s playground, so it’s said. Well, the devil don’t do much playing in South Boston.”

Later learned, and at quite a cost, his assessment was as wrong as wrong could be.

“When do I leave?”

“Not before dessert, at least. Eat up.”