Chasers Page 13

  “For the moment, nothing,” Talbot said. “There’s been no indication that a fresh unit has been formed or that new members are actively being recruited. They may well decide to sit this one out, nurse their wounds, and cash their pensions. But if they do choose to come at you hard and fresh, that’s where having Valentine in our back pocket comes in handy. He will, presumably, give us ample warning as to any potential red flags.”

  “Which ex-badge calls the shots?” Angel asked.

  “John Frontieri,” Talbot said. “Answers to the name Boomer. He was something in his day, but time and numerous bullet wounds have more than done their part to slow his engine down a few notches.”

  “Slow engine or no, he still had enough left in his tank to take out Carney and her mad bunch,” Angel said with a tinge of respect. “Badges like these are rare as virgin brides. They don’t live for the check, and give a rat’s tit about the pension comes with it. They get into the game for the action, feed off it the way a junkie feeds off the pipe. They come into it heavy and are never eager to leave. Just based on the few bits you gave me, if this guy saddles up and puts together a new crew it could be a problem.”

  “They have no jurisdiction in any area—local, state, or federal,” Talbot said, as aware as Angel of the potential risks a rogue team of skilled and desperate cops would pose for their overall operation. “They would get little, if any, backup support from within their own department. And, above all else, even fully armed and financed to the hilt they would be no match for your team. It’s not among my habits to patronize, so take what I have to say to you in the spirit it is meant. Lucia Carney, were she still around today, would have risen no higher than midlevel in your organization.”

  “His niece is dead and he’ll come looking for me, team or no,” Angel said, not able to hide the hint of glee in his voice. “He’s out for revenge, with nothing to live for but watching me. Count on it, Talbot, he is one cop we are destined to meet. Let’s make sure we’re ready when we do.”

  “We could have him handled before he makes any move your way,” Talbot said. “If he is indeed the kind of man you say, then we can simply settle the matter before he gets to fire off a round. Why allow the shadow to be cast when we can just make it vanish with a phone call?”

  “Because I want to meet him,” Angel said, pushing his chair back. “And I want to be the one that stands across from him and puts him down. If this Apache is looking to target me, then it should be by my hand that he goes down.”

  18

  Andy Victorino leaned against a cold green wall, clutching his stomach with both hands. The sharp pain caused his knees to buckle and his eyes to water; his back, chest, and forehead were all drenched through with cold sweat. He was standing in a dark corridor, empty gurneys lining both sides. Old and scarred medical clipboards hung from the wall he was using to support his weakened body. He looked down at his lab jacket and dark slacks and saw that both were streaked with blood. He took a deep, painful breath and slowly moved his feet deeper into the corridor, standing now less than twenty feet from the office he shared with two other detectives who worked out of the science lab. He felt as if he were drowning in a sea of his own blood, the betrayal of his body so fierce and so sudden that it was all he could manage not to shout out and curse the strange and deadly disease coursing through him like a snake down a canyon road.

  Andy Victorino, a young man who had devoted his life to the study of the dead and the information they could pass on to the living, was now staring down at a cold slab, and his eyes could see only his own face gazing back. He didn’t need myriad expert medical opinions or a battery of blood results to tell him what his body had been actively devoting the past three months to telling.

  He was dying.

  It started as a red blotch on the upper end of his right arm. Andy was working a multiple murder during that cold week in mid-January when the rash first appeared, and he wrote it off as nothing more than a stress-related side effect. He was putting in double-overtime hours, and his social activity had been relegated to late-night phone sessions with a new lover he had met at a Christmas party in a friend’s downtown loft. This newest and latest in a series of quick-burning flames matched both his temperament and his devotion to work, racking up seventy-hour weeks as a new associate in a white-shoe East Side law firm. For both of them, then, those middle-of-the-night chat sessions were a welcome antidote to a grind whose grip never eased. It was their time to sit back, sip a glass of wine, and share a conversation that lacked a rush to deadline or needed to be charted in any particular course. And it was only then, under the guise of night, that they could toss aside the masks and bask in being their true selves.

  But as the rash spread and the flulike symptoms he had been feeling for more than a week persisted, Andy knew there was more at play than the work-related stress he normally embraced rather than shunned. Still, it wasn’t until that moment that seemed to last for hours, standing in the lobby of the ME’s office, gripping the thin sheet of paper with the results of a blood test administered by a friend at a Greenwich Village clinic, that the first cold wave of reality soaked his rapidly thinning frame.

  “Let me help you to your office.” Andy recognized the woman’s voice and felt her warm hands on the small of his back. “I know you wouldn’t want anyone around here to see you like this.”

  Andy glanced over at her, nodded his head, and managed a weak smile. Not even the dead, he thought.

  She guided Andy down the corridor and into his office. She eased him into his brown swivel chair and watched him stretch out his legs and ease the back of his sweat-soaked hair onto the thick foam of the headrest. “Thanks a lot, Jackie,” he said, his eyes closed, his breath returning to normal. “I was about one step away from falling flat on my face. It serves me right for not getting that free flu shot.”

  “It’s none of my business, I know,” Jackie Pavano said. She was tall and shapely, with rich dark hair and eyes to match. She was in her early thirties, coming off a failed marriage to a uniform with wanderlust, and was a first-rate second-grade homicide detective, with the most solved cases in the unit for the past two years. “But I’m going to ask anyway. You seeing anybody for this flu you have? Somebody to help you until you get over it?”

  Andy opened his eyes and lifted his head, staring across his desk at the young detective with the raised antennas. “There really isn’t anyone to see,” he said in a soft, low voice. “Because there really isn’t anything that can be done.”

  “How long have you known?” Jackie asked in a voice as warm as an old quilt.

  “It will be four months come this Tuesday,” Andy said. “I’m still in the very early stages and, except for the occasional horrendous day like this one, can hide it pretty well. Most days, in fact, I don’t feel ill at all, and there are even a few moments here and there where I can put it out of my mind altogether.”

  “Is there a clock on something like this?” Jackie asked.

  “It’s uncharted waters, as much for doctors as it is for patients,” Andy said, dabbing at his forehead with a folded tissue. “Based on what they do know, which isn’t much, they came out with an anywhere between six months and five years scenario, depending on any number of factors out of their control.”

  Jackie Pavano walked over to a counter and reached for a pot of coffee that looked as if it had been sitting there since the Nixon administration. “I’m going to risk a cup of this,” she said, holding up the pot. “You care to join me, or are you just going to sit back and let me take a dive in by myself?”

  “There should be some rancid cream in the mini-fridge,” Andy said, tossing her a smile. “If you add that and three sugars, you found yourself a partner.”

  They were both silent as Jackie fixed the two cups of coffee and Andy sat up in his chair, the pain in his stomach subsiding, the sweat no longer pouring off him like running water. Jackie handed him a Styrofoam cup and sat back down across from him, taking a long sip of he
r coffee. “This isn’t as bad as I thought it would be,” she said with a grimace. “It’s a lot worse.”

  “When I was first on the job, I couldn’t help but notice the foul mood most of the on-the-scene homicide cops always seemed to be in,” Andy said, the strength back in his voice, the coffee cupped in both his hands. “Initially, I wrote it off to them spending the bulk of their time at a murder site, torn over the loss of one more often innocent life. But after I had been here awhile and got to know most of the crew, that theory was tossed for a loss. Then, early one predawn, I happened to look up from a multiple and spotted all the tins hovering around me drinking coffee. And not fresh-roasted South American joe. I’m talking pre-dug, foot-brewed Manhattan mud.”

  “They should warn us about it at the Police Academy,” Jackie said. “Give us a chance to get used to green tea. The lou back in my old precinct told me early in my run there that cop coffee was like a cop paycheck: it came in steady and it came out steady, and you can count on it straight through to that first pension package. It just happens to be a lot worse down in the science lab for some reason.”

  “There are fewer people around to piss and moan about it,” Andy said. “So I’m afraid we’re stuck with it, at least until the spring floaters lodge a complaint.”

  Jackie laughed and rested her cup on the edge of Andy’s desk. “Who else knows?” she asked.

  “About the coffee? Pretty much everyone,” he said. “About me? You’d be the first.”

  “You can hide it for a while longer, I’m guessing,” Jackie said. “But sooner than later the word will leak, and it’ll run through here faster than you can run out.”

  “I’ve lived with secrets most of my life,” Andy Victorino said in a tone that was free of regret. “I was hoping to treat this as just one more in a long line.”

  “I don’t know what those other secrets are,” Jackie said, “and I don’t have to know. But any of those you could pretty much bury and hide without anyone giving two shits. This one is in a league of its own. This is about a disease they’ll think can be spread from you to them with just a nod of the head. And when it comes to shit like that, nobody—and I swear to you nobody—goes over-the-top paranoid more than a cop. They’ll treat you worse than a basement on-the-nod skell.”

  “And you think I should do what about it?” Andy asked, not liking what he was hearing but knowing that it came to him out of truth and friendship. “Other than live with it the way I have been for as long as I have been.”

  “I don’t have an answer for that, Andy,” Jackie said, reaching out a free hand to rest on one of his folded ones. “I wish I did, swear to God. I just know as bad as it is for you now, keeping it under lock and key, it’s going to come down on you like a fucking hurricane soon as it’s out in the open. And you won’t just feel pain then. You’ll feel shame, too. They’ll do all they can to make damn sure of that.”

  “This has been my world for so long,” he said, “and I’ve known for a while that I’ll need to leave it behind. I’ve just been trying to hold on to it for as long as I could.”

  “And what happens to you then?” Jackie asked. “You have somewhere to go? Or someone to be with?”

  “I haven’t planned it that far ahead,” Andy said in a slightly sheepish manner. “Which is par for the course for me, I guess. After all these years working a job with no reruns, it’s hard enough to map out the next day, let alone a month or two down the road.”

  “It might be time to start giving that some thought, then,” Jackie said. “There are places that can lend a hand with that sort of situation, or maybe just a friend if you want to keep a lid on it.”

  “Does it really matter?” Andy asked. “I’m going to die—that’s the plain and the simple of it. I doubt that whether I’m alone or I’m surrounded by friends will have much effect on the final outcome.”

  “It’s better not to be alone,” Jackie said, finishing the last of her bitter coffee.

  They sat in silence for a few minutes, both absorbed in their own thoughts. Andy tossed a folded tissue into a wastebasket by his right leg and looked up at Jackie, her face marred by sadness. “Go ahead and ask me the question,” he said to her. “You’re too good a cop not to want to, and too good a friend to get a lie tossed back your way.”

  “You want me to know, I won’t stop you from telling me,” she said. “Otherwise, both the question and the answer stay where they belong.”

  “I’m not a drug addict, and I didn’t get it from a blood transfusion,” Andy said. “That leaves us looking at only door number one. But I guess you knew that even before you sat down to drink the coffee from hell.”

  “You’re wrong about that, Quincy,” Jackie said with a sad smile. “If I did, it would have saved me a lot of worry time, leaving here at night wondering what the hell I had to do to get you to notice me.”

  “And that’s where you’re wrong,” Andy said, returning the smile with a wider one of his own. “I noticed you on your first day here. I may not want to sleep with a woman but, like anyone else, I can appreciate her beauty.”

  Seven years after AIDS first began to cut its deadly swath, it left in its horrendous wake thousands of dead homosexual men. By the time Jackie and Andy were sitting across a desk from each other, more than 35,000 cases of AIDS had been diagnosed nationwide, with 60 percent of them ending in a long and painful death. In March of 1987, the Food and Drug Administration approved AZT, a drug manufactured by Burroughs Wellcome that would relieve some of the symptoms of the disease and extend the lives of those suffering from it. The total cost of $10,000 a year per patient was covered under most medical plans but was ignored by many patients out of fear that news of their illness would cause them to lose their income and be shunned by those closest to them.

  Andy Victorino took his disease and the suffering that went with it even closer to the edge of an abyss from which there was no return. He was a homosexual man working in a heterosexual world. He was a cop who logged long hours within the confines and the strictures of a paramilitary organization with little room in its ranks for gay men, closeted or not. He had kept his private life a secret in the same manner that many who were bound by a similar situation chose to do, partaking in many of the social activities that went along with being a cop and ducking and dodging matters of dating, marriage, and family. It also helped his cause that a number of cops held off on marriage until they were close to retirement due to the high-voltage dangers of the work, allowing him to apply the same reasoning to his status without red flags being raised.

  The incessant demands of his job, more than any other circumstance of his life, was what curtailed Andy’s potential for meeting anyone with whom he could establish a lasting relationship. As a rule, cops have always had difficulty dating outside the parameters of their blue world. “Think about it, Andy,” Jimmy McReynolds, a twenty-five-year battle-scarred homicide detective had told him a few years back during a long night of marathon beer gulping. “Why would anybody who didn’t have to even think of dating a cop? We got the hours from hell, our take-home sucks, and most of us don’t have any hobbies outside of busting down doors and hunting up leads. Plus—and this is the dark truth about all of us, man, woman, dog—we would rather hang with each other than be with somebody that’s not a part of our fucked-up world.”

  “Maybe so, but we’re not the only ones who are like that and who put in the hours we do,” Andy said. “These investment bankers never seem to go home, either. Might as well put a pullout in their office and grab a few that way. Same as us. So what makes them a better grab for someone on the prowl? And don’t say the money, because it’s never just that alone.”

  “You better start drinking something a lot stronger than beer if you don’t think money comes into play,” Jimmy Mac said. “Sure, they put a pullout in their office—except theirs is a leather number imported from some factory in Northern Italy and costs more than we make in two months. Ours we buy from a brother-in-law who can make a
grab at a Macy’s. And the only reason they won’t make it back home alive at the end of a long shift is because they pulled a suicide squeeze off an eight-digit merger deal gone sour. And not because they took two to the head and chest in a hallway stare-down with a cracked-out predicate felon. We talk and live in two different worlds, young Andy. They live in one and we live in the other, and there’s no point in sneaking across their border even if we could swing it. They could pick us out of any six-pack with their eyes sealed.”

  Jackie pushed her chair back and tossed her empty cup into a wastes-basket to her left. “I need to get back to my case,” she said, standing and looking down at Andy. “And you need to get back to yours.”

  “Thanks for taking the time,” Andy said. “Not just out in the hall there, but in here as well. It felt good to talk about it, even if it was just for a few minutes.”

  “It’s what a friend does, Andy,” Jackie said. “You shouldn’t have to go through this all alone. You might think you can, and you may even be strong enough to get past the dark days by yourself. But it’s not just about that. It’s about having a hand you can reach for when you feel the need. Nothing is going to help make this fight you’re in go down any easier, but it just might make the day-to-day of it not as hard.”

  “You have your own life,” Andy said. “You don’t need this. This is an ugly disease that’s only going to get uglier. Some of the people we work with think you can catch it just by standing close to me. And I don’t know enough about it to tell them they’re wrong. I’ll be shunned, as will any friends I have left. And I care too much to put you in that place.”

  Jackie stared at Andy for several seconds and then walked past the desk and over to his chair. She rested her right hand on his and leaned down and kissed him gently on the cheek. “You’re a good man, Andy,” she whispered. “And a good man should never die alone.”