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He continued to stare out at the buildings.
“The cables there! Look!” he said, pointing at some cell site tower cables hanging down the back of the building, behind the elevator house.
“That’s impossible,” I said. “He’s dead, then.” I looked down at the shadowed alley far beneath. “The cables are too far off this edge. Spider-Man couldn’t do it!”
“Well, he did it. We need to get someone down there now. What’s that low building there, between us and the train track?”
“Stan’s Sports Bar. Don’t worry. If he’s down there, we got him,” I said as an NYPD Aviation Bell helicopter came in low from the south. “We’re surrounding the block. He’s not—”
I wasn’t able to finish the sentence because the boom boom boom of a gun started below, to the west by the River Avenue side of the sports bar. I couldn’t see what was happening because of the elevated track. The initial shots were followed by two more and then there was the high shriek of tire rubber.
It took us just over two minutes to fly down the stairs and come out onto River Avenue, under the giant rusting jungle gym of the elevated track. This close to the stadium, the whole low block was sports bars and souvenir shops. Everything red, white, and blue, with Budweiser signs and Yankees billboards everywhere.
We came upon Arturo first. He was across from the front entrance of the bar, down on his butt in the gutter, surrounded by half a dozen people. As I ran up, I saw that he was clutching an apron to his blood-soaked leg.
“Forget me. Help Sophie! Over there!” he said, pointing farther north, where three people were kneeling beside someone propped up on one of the elevated track’s steel legs.
Leroux ran over and knelt by his wife. A second later, he had her down on the asphalt and was doing chest compressions on her. When her head lolled to the side, I could see blood, stark and wet, in the white blond of her hair.
I knelt down and helped Arturo shimmy over and sit back against the tire of a parked car. He looked pale. Too pale. A train clattered past overhead.
Job one was keeping him from going into shock. I held down his hand when he tried to lift the apron to look at his leg.
“Talk to me, brother. What happened?”
Arturo took a breath. “Just as we were running up to surround the block like you said, he comes out the front door of Stan’s here.”
“The Brit?”
He nodded.
“He walks out almost right into us with the Glock in his hand. Sophie, who was a little bit ahead of me, got the drop on him before he spotted us. She put her gun to his head, got him on his knees. I’m coming up behind him with the cuffs and then pop pop pop behind us. It was some bitch in a car shooting from the open driver’s window.”
“What kind of car was it?” I said, motioning to one of the cops behind me to call it in.
“A silver Ford. A Focus or something. Maybe a rental. It went south down River,” Arturo said. “It was some kind of submachine gun or something, Mike. After I took one in the leg, I was able to drop down behind the pillar, but Sophie got caught out. She tried to run, but the bitch just lit her up.”
I patted his back as he started crying.
“It was so brutal. So messed up,” he said.
“Hang in there, pal. They’re coming. It’s going to be fine.”
I looked over at Leroux, ten feet away on the street, pressing against his wife in the El’s tattered shadow.
“They’re coming,” I said.
Chapter 74
Eleven o’clock that night, I found a parking spot on the corner in front of my West End Avenue building. After I shut the engine, I sat for a moment and looked out through the windshield at the traffic and buildings and the stoplight down on 96th swaying in the cold wind. Just as I was about to push open the door, I tensed up and smacked at the steering wheel with the palm of my hand half a dozen times as hard as I could.
I guess you could say I was a tad frustrated.
I’d just left the Bronx’s Montefiore Hospital’s intensive care unit, where Sophie Leroux was in a coma. She’d been shot four times in the lower abdomen, and they had to take out half of her pancreas. There had been complications with the surgery, and she’d lost a ton of blood and was now clinging to life by a thread.
The look on Matthew Leroux’s face when I left was terrible to behold. Having lost my own wife, Maeve, to cancer, I actually knew how it felt to helplessly watch a person you deeply love hover between life and death. How the inconsolable pain of it buries you to th
e point where the thought of your own death is actually a hope and a comfort.
