Sons of the City (3 page)

We all knew Bravelli was behind it. He was the one egging the neighbors on, saying it was up to them to keep the scum out of Westmount. Sometimes his guys even provided the muscle. I had no idea what Bravelli got out of it. Maybe he was just trying to be a local hero.

Standing there looking at Bravelli, there was no way I was going to back down. Even if all we got was Goop, that’d be enough.

Nick had his handcuffs out, ready, and I nodded to him to go ahead. Nick tried to grab Goop’s arm, but Goop—more annoyed than anything else—put his palm on Nick’s chest and pushed hard. Nick ended up three feet back, and he almost tripped over one of the carjackers.

My cops were getting a little nervous. Bravelli’s guys were moving closer, they were absolutely unafraid of us. I didn’t want to take my gun out—my cops would have followed my lead, and then there would have been guns all over the place.

For some reason, Bravelli’s eyes settled on the silver nameplate over the badge on Steve’s blue police shirt.

“Ryder,” he said, taking a step forward to get a closer look. “Hmmm. Police Commissioner’s son, right? I heard a lot about you.”

Steve stood his ground, and just stared at Bravelli. I always thought it was amazing how much Steve resembled his father, how with their easy good looks, their blue eyes and thick, dark eyebrows, they seemed like father-and-son actors out of Hollywood.

Bravelli didn’t take his eyes off of Steve, it was weird. I stepped between them and got in Bravelli’s face.

“Leave him alone,” I said.

“It’s OK, Sarge,” said Steve.

Bravelli looked at me and shook his head. “Yeah, Sarge, it’s OK,” he mocked. “Except that you should have left when you had the chance. Now you’re way outnumbered.”

“Really?” I asked, and then clicked the microphone on my shirt lapel. I bent my head to the microphone, still looking at Bravelli, and tried to sound slightly bored. “Radio, this is 20-C Charlie, I need an assist in the Roma Room at Lucky’s.”

I straightened my head back up. “OK, let’s do a count, Bravelli. We got seven thousand guys. How many you got?”

I knew I wouldn’t have long to wait—plenty of cops would still be hanging around outside the restaurant. Two burst in from the kitchen, and then two more, and there was a tremendous banging on the main wooden doors.

“They’re still locked,” said Nick, but a moment later the doors burst open, and blue shirts were flowing into the room. Nick looked at me, like, How come we couldn’t do that?

Bravelli’s men just stood there, afraid to try anything now, but unwilling to retreat. Bravelli looked very pissed, which made me feel good for the first time all night.

Lanier appeared next to me. “Everybody OK here?” he asked, looking around.

“We’re all fine and dandy.”

Two paramedics with orange first-aid boxes picked their way through the crowd and reached the two kids.

“OK,” said Lanier, “now I want everybody out.”

“Sure, Captain. Right after I lock up about a dozen assholes for assaulting my prisoners.”

“No,” he said. “Once Rescue gets these two out of here, we’re leaving.”

“Captain …”

“No,” he said again. “There’s already a media cluster-fuck outside. I’m not going to let it get ten times worse.”

I knew Bravelli was looking at me, waiting for me to glance over, for our eyes to meet. I wasn’t going to do it.

Other paramedics were arriving, and everyone—cops, mob guys—watched as the kids were loaded onto stretchers and carried out of the room. When they were gone, Lanier turned to the largest group of cops and announced, “I’m canceling the assist. We’re all leaving.”

Then he turned and walked out. Bravelli laughed, and I couldn’t help it, I looked at him.

“You really are a fuckin’ failure at everything, aren’t you?” he asked me. Then he snapped his fingers, as if he had just thought of something. “Hey, North, why don’t you go to work for the Parking Authority, I bet you can handle writing tickets. If my dumb brother-in-law can do it, anybody can.”

One of his pals standing near me started laughing, and I practically had to call on God to keep from smashing my first into Bravelli’s face.

It was almost dark when we got outside. As I walked alone toward my patrol car, Lanier intercepted me.

“I just wanted to let you know, Eddie, this wasn’t personal.”

“Sure, Captain. Like getting me transferred wasn’t personal, either.”

“Eddie, we’ve been over this—I had to report those calls to the bosses.”

“No one has to report anonymous calls, Captain, and you know it. And now I’m not even in your unit anymore, and you humiliate me in there tonight, in front of all those lowlifes. You know what, Captain? You are the biggest asshole in a department of assholes.”

I didn’t wait around for his reaction, I just turned and headed for my car.

W
hen they kicked me out of OC and busted me back to patrol, they could have sent me to any district in the city. They picked the 20th, probably because it was just about the furthest place from my house up in Northeast Philadelphia, which meant a pain-in-the-ass commute. That’s how the Department usually expressed its sense of humor in dealing with people it didn’t like. If I had lived in the 20th, they would have sent me to Canada or someplace.

I wasn’t about to admit it to anyone, but I actually liked working in the 20th. A lot happened there, which was not a bad thing, at least if you were a cop.

It was a real cross section of the city, and had just about every kind of neighborhood. It started in Westmount, which was the largest Italian section outside of South Philly. Hardly any crime ever happened there, other than the occasional mob hit.

As you headed east, toward the skyscrapers of Center City, you went through black West Philadelphia, a succession of poor and working-class neighborhoods. Crime did happen there, plenty of it, but there were a lot of good people, too. It was a shame to see them when they came home from work and found that some crackhead had broken down their door, torn their house apart looking for money, and then taken the VCR on the way out.

Finally came University City, the area around the University of Pennsylvania and Drexel. Penn liked to call itself a “campus in an urban setting,” which meant that it was a place where rich kids from the suburbs took money out of ATMs in the middle of the night, and then walked away counting the twenties. They were so dumb even I wanted to rob them.

University City was a collection of student apartment buildings, grungy beer-and-pizza joints, Indian restaurants, and computer stores. A little farther from campus were several neighborhoods with large, leafy houses where the professors lived, along with people like newspaper editors and architects. Plenty of big trees your dog could pee on.

At the eastern end of the district was the Schuylkill River, the boundary with Center City. About the only time we ever actually went to the river was when some homeless guy decided he just couldn’t take life anymore, and jumped in from the Walnut or Chestnut Street bridge. Neither bridge was really very high, but in West Philadelphia everyone just did the best they could.

I didn’t calm down from what happened at Lucky’s for hours, and it wasn’t until the next night, as I cruised through the streets of West Philadelphia in my patrol car, that I finally began to relax. Maybe it was because everything was so familiar—the row houses and the stores, even the young black guys on the corners, laughing and drinking their beer from bottles in paper bags. Out here, you knew the rules. You knew whose side everyone was on.

About nine-thirty that night, I decided to stop by district headquarters to see if Nick was around. I was hoping maybe

I could take another shot at cheering him up. As usual, Sammy was in the operations room doing paperwork at his battered gray-metal desk. And, as usual, he had tuned the TV to a cop show.

Sammy was a regular inside guy, one of the cops who sorted through incident reports and dealt with any members of the public who might wander in. He was a towering blond with a thick mustache, and always reminded me of a Minnesota lumberjack who should be eating pancakes. Except that he wore a blue uniform instead of a red flannel shirt, and I never caught him trying to cut down any of the scrawny trees in West Philly.

“Sammy,” I said. “You seen Nick?”

“Unbelievable,” he said, pointing to the TV. “This cop stops a stolen car and says to the guy, ‘Could you get out of the car, please?’ He actually said please. And this show’s supposed to be realistic.”

“Sammy,” I said again. “Nick around?”

He shrugged. “Must be out on the street. Look, now he’s calling the guy sir.” Sammy looked up at me. “My father’s the only one I call sir.”

I
headed over to the Shop-Now supermarket on the edge of University City, I figured some of the guys would be there. The store closed at 9 p.m., so at night the empty parking lot basically became a cop hangout. If you needed to talk to someone in the squad, that’s where you told Radio to have them meet you. A lot of times we’d sit there in our cars when things were quiet, eating our cheesesteaks and catching up on the latest gossip.

As I pulled into the darkened lot, I saw two police cars and a brown unmarked car parked together. Something strange was going on, though at first I couldn’t tell what it was. Nick, Steve, and Buster, another one of my cops, seemed to be doing something to the unmarked car.

When I reached them I had to laugh—they had covered every one of the car’s windows with big orange stickers that said “TOW.” The stickers were the kind we slapped on a windshield to let the Parking Authority know we wanted a car towed. You only needed one sticker—they were pretty big—and these guys had used about two hundred. It wasn’t hard to figure out what was going on.

I pulled up next to the other cars and got out. “Who’s inside?” I asked.

Steve put his finger to his mouth to shush me. He had a mischievous smile on his face, and his blue eyes were glittering with excitement, like a kid on Christmas morning.

“It’s Little Napoleon,” he said, keeping his voice low. “Sleeping like a baby.”

“You got a captain in there?” I was impressed. Little Napoleon was what everyone called Casimir Razowski, a short little dickhead who actually did look like Napoleon, or at least the pictures of him in the liquor ads. He was in night command, one of the people who was supposed to keep an eye on things when the regular captains went home. Except that the only thing Little Napoleon ever kept an eye on was his watch.

I walked up to his car, a standard city-issue Plymouth. Buster and Nick were covering up the last little gaps on the back window. If Little Napoleon woke up now, he’d be in complete darkness, he wouldn’t know where the hell he was.

“He’s been coming here every night this week,” said Steve. “He just sleeps for the whole shift. I have the feeling this is going to be his last night.”

“What he means, Sarge,” explained Buster, “is that he wants Little Napoleon gone so
he
can come here to sleep.”

“Wait, I thought both you guys came here to sleep,” I said.

Buster got an indignant look. “You kidding? I always go behind the old Pepsi plant.”

Buster was a big, likable guy, always chomping on his gum and grinning his lopsided grin. He seemed less like a cop than a big-league ballplayer just off the bus from Kansas or someplace.

He also had the loudest mouth in the squad, which he actually put to good use when he was driving 20-17 car. Nothing in that trash heap worked—not the siren, not the horn, not even the red-and-blue emergency lights on top. Other guys driving it couldn’t figure out how to make a car-stop. They’d see someone run a red light, and just let them go. But Buster would stick his head out the window and yell, “YO, PULL OVER!” And they would.

I noticed the silver nameplate on Buster’s chest. Instead of “BROWN,” it said “KIRK.” I looked at Steve’s name-plate, then Nick’s. They were both “KIRK.”

“Where’d you get those?” I laughed. Kirk was the name of our captain, Oliver Kirk. I knew the idea was that if Little Napoleon woke up and read one of the nametags, he’d call up headquarters and yell he wanted the ass of some cop named Kirk.

Steve’s eyes glittered again. “Place up on Castor Avenue, they’re the same ones who supply ‘em to the city. I got a friend who works there.”

He reached in his front pants pocket and pulled out a whole handful of nameplates. They all said “KIRK.”

“Want one?” he asked.

I laughed and shook my head no. I liked Steve, it didn’t really bother me that he was the class clown of the 20th. Here he was the Commissioner’s son, and he was forever coming up with stuff like this. What made it strange was that he had the potential to be a great cop. Steve had wonderful instincts—he could look at three guys standing on a corner, and say, the one in the middle is carrying a gun. And he was always right.

But he never seemed to take the job seriously, he was always screwing around. Maybe that’s what happens when your father’s the Commissioner. It couldn’t have been easy—any success would be attributed to the father, any failure would show that the son just couldn’t measure up. Maybe Steve, in a weird way, was just trying to be his own man.

He looked at me warily. “This OK with you, what we’re doin'?”

“Sure,” I said. “You guys are restoring my faith in the Police Department.”

They laughed and went back to work on the stickers. It was funny—with the four of us standing there talking, you could almost forget that Little Napoleon was in the car. I gazed at the line of row houses across the street, and thought that if anyone looked out their window, they’d just see four cops bullshitting in the middle of an empty supermarket parking lot.

Steve had used up all his stickers, and now was turning his attention to me. “You may be interested to know,” he said, “that Michelle’s on her way over here.”

“Your sister?” I asked, as casually as I could. Nick and Buster were trying not to smile.

“Yeah,” said Steve. “You know she’s in the Twentieth tonight, right?”

“No,” I said. “I didn’t know.”

“Ortiz went home sick. We were short a sergeant, so they called Michelle over from the Twelfth.” That was a neighboring district, and we often used each other’s sergeants.