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“Yeah. Him and me too.”
“They have any connection?”
“Other than cops are mixed in with both…I don’t think so.”
“So you’re trying to prove Man is innocent?”
“Yeah. But I can’t expect you to go all the way with me on this. I mean, I appreciate what you’ve done, but I’m a fugitive now.”
“Maybe not,” Mel opined. “There’s nothing on the radio about any shooting in Queens. And I don’t care anyway. I’d love nothing better than to grab a man off the gallows. Shit, that’s a life-defining moment right there. That’s Errol Flynn in Robin Hood.”
From there he asked me about the details of my inquiries. I told him about most of the names and their involvement; about the Blood Brothers of Broadway and Johanna Mudd, Little Exeter and the heroin trade at the old Brooklyn docks. I didn’t give him Willa Portman’s name.
At the bottom of the second pitcher of wine, he said, “Okay, okay, I get it, what you want about Man. Prove he was being stalked and that his friends were killed and framed by the cops that were on him. Okay. But what about the thing with your job?”
“I want the union to take my case and have me reinstated.”
“But do you want the job back?”
“I want to be exonerated.” Saying these words reminded me of another obligation. “You got a phone I could use for a few days?”
The burner he gave me was still in its plastic packaging.
I set up the phone and sent a text to my daughter based on a simple code she’d devised years before. Our cypher was the transposition of numbers, where 1 = 4, 2 = 9, 3 = 1, 4 = 7, 5 = 2, 6 = 0, 7 = 3, 8 = 5, 9 = 8, and 0 = 9. I sent the number of my new phone to her stepfather, and then she would get another disposable phone and we could talk.
“So what do you want to do next, King?” Mel asked when I stopped working with the phone.
“I need to get Natches to admit that he was working with Convert to scuttle my career.”
“You just gonna walk into his office and say that? I mean, you came outta that ex-cop’s building and they tried to murder you.”
“I think I might be able to get a little leverage on the inspector. I might even get him to come and meet me.”
“You need some help?”
“Hell! I need the whole goddamn French Foreign Legion.”
The devil laughed and my phone rang at the same time.
“A.D.?” I said, answering.
“No. It’s Monica.”
“Oh.” I could tell by her tone that I was in for grief. “Hey.”
“What the hell do you mean telling us that we had to leave town because of something you’d done?”
Despite my profession, I don’t like lying to people. I don’t like making them feel bad either. A good cop is a professional who knows how to lie and inflict pain but does not enjoy these things. I was a good cop, but I needed Aja in my life and Monica was at least part of the reason I was in so much trouble. So I had worked out a tale that would protect them while keeping me from blame.
“Not something I did,” I said. “Something you did.”
“Me?”
“When you called Congressman Acres you set a game into play that got me on the radar of some extremely bad men. Government men. Acres figured out who hired me when I didn’t even know myself. He reported this to some very dangerous characters who need their business kept secret. Now they’re after me and I’m neck-deep in shit, just like when you let them cops keep me in that hole.”
After a brief pause she said, “You’re lying.”
“Did you call Acres?”
