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“If you crossed the line and the cops are after you I got a plan.”

“Plan for what?”

“For you.”

I thought about standing, realized I couldn’t, then leaned back against the cold brick wall behind the bed. The chill went some way toward rejuvenating me.

“Talk on,” I said.

“Man is dead no matter what way you look at it. And the police department is never gonna admit to cops as bad as Valence and Pratt. Neither will they admit to framing you. You’re a bug to them, and we all know what happens to a bug when he get between a rock and the hard place.”

“Doesn’t sound like much of a plan, Mel.”

“I know a dude down in Panama could make a whole baseball team disappear. All I need is a plane and that’s just some money.”

We talked longer, but I don’t remember what was said. I hadn’t been that drunk in a very long time. And I hope never to go that far again.

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?”