Mark Jacobs

Wild Turkey

Climbing the outside steps to Glynda’s apartment, Mick Garrity felt the gravity of experience slowing his step. The sky was spitting wet snow at him, paying him back for some screw up he could not put his finger on, just now. Glynda’s deadbeat boyfriend Murphy had beaten her up again. Dispatch said she was hysterical. She wanted the police to save her. Again. Across the universe a thousand cops were climbing the same steps hearing the same old story they had heard and told a thousand times.
On the landing, Mick raised his hand to knock but Glynda was already opening the door to him. “I kept my word,” she snuffled. “I swear to God, Mick, I kept my word.”

She looked terrible. The sleeve of her burgundy quilted robe was torn. Her hair was wild. She had always had a cute face, a sexy come-get-me face, but now it was bruised and lumpy, swollen out of shape courtesy of Marvin Murphy.

“Hello, Glynda. Want me to come in?”

Her girls were there, hushed and head down, behaving the way kids did in homes where beating went on. They sat at the table in the kitchen pretending to concentrate on their homework, untouched glasses of chocolate milk on the table in front of them.
“I’m going to talk to Officer Garrity,” Glynda told them, honey sliding in her mommy’s voice. “You come get me if you need something.”
Mick had seen this, too, more times than he wanted, tender taking care in the wake of an assault, as though now the nastiness was out of the way people could focus on being human. The girls looked at him with bunched suspicion. A tall man in a uniform who wasn’t saying much. Was this how his own kids saw him?
There was a faint smell of something sinister in the living room, the blackened residue of anger and fear. Glynda tried to manoeuvre him into a seat next to her on the couch, but he took a chair.

“What I told you? Last time? How I wasn’t letting the son of a bitch in the apartment any more? I kept my promise.”
“So how did he get to you?”
“I’m on the phone coming down the stairs, right? Not paying attention. There he stands at the bottom, smoking, and he’s got this God’s gift smile on his face. Drug me out in the back yard and worked his Murphy magic on me.”
“You ready to have him arrested?”
She nodded. She looked at her hands folded in her lap.
“I need to hear you say it, Glynda. Say it and mean it.”
“All right, arrest the bastard. I’ll testify. I swear to God I will testify and hope his dick rots off in prison. I used to be pretty, you know.”
He nodded. He attended to his paperwork. The thought of arresting Murphy gave him more satisfaction than it needed to.
On the way out he said goodbye to the girls. They had not yet made up their mind whether he was a good guy or one more bad guy in the endless line of them turning up at their mother’s.

Back in the car, he was relieved to be away from Glynda. In his experience, which admittedly was limited to upstate New York, there were women like her who couldn’t stop trying even if they didn’t really want it. Some of them liked cops or the idea of a cop. One of the reasons he was happy with Becky was her indifference to police life. She thought they could be a regular couple. Mick had his days but had not given up hoping the same thing.

Murphy’s last known turned out to be three blocks over from Glynda’s. She lived on the upper floor of a duplex. Murphy lived on the lower floor of an almost identical place. Both were blue, and their porches sagged at a similar angle. Mick parked a few doors down but decided he couldn’t give the time it needed to sit on the place. He went up the steps and knocked. No answer. When he knocked again a woman’s crabby voice asked him who he was and what he wanted.

“Troy police, ma’am.”
“God damn it.”
But she opened the door. She was Glynda’s sister, or might as well be. No bruises on the face, though. Murphy had been indulging his inner child elsewhere.
“Officer Mickey Garrity,” he said. “I’m looking for Marvin Murphy. And you are?”
“Collateral damage. What’s he done now, and who to?”
“I just want to have a conversation with Marvin.”
She nodded. “Right. Well, you won’t find him here. I threw him out a month ago.”
She was telling the truth; cop instinct.
“Know where I can find him?”
“You might stop by Glynda Brozick’s. He always had a thing for her.”
“Where does he work?”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“If he doesn’t work, what does he do with his time?”
The teeth in her crooked grin were surprisingly perfect. “Marvin gets by.”
“That pay pretty well?”
“You’d be surprised. Why don’t you just come out and ask me do I know where you can find him.”
“Do you?”
“What’s in it for me?”
“The satisfaction of knowing you’re a solid citizen.”
She had been holding an apple, and now she took a bite. “That’s something, I guess.”
She had information he wanted and was trying to decide whether she would give it up.
“You want me to come in while you’re thinking? You don’t have to heat the whole neighbourhood.”
She bit hard into her apple again. “What I heard, Marvin’s back into freelancing.”
“Weed? Meth? Give me a hint.”
“Some pretty wonderful Mexican marijuana, a girlfriend of mine says. But I can’t tell you where he hangs. Marvin burns his bridges every damn where. Hard to keep track of the man.”
“I appreciate the help.”
“You find him, do me a favor, remind him he owes Dolores a grand.”
“I’ll do that, Dolores.”

He wanted to arrest Murphy today, now, while the pain and indignity still smarted in Glynda. She had been known to backslide when it came to pressing charges. If Mick could nail him for weed transactions so much the better. Was there any way to be a cop and not get crazed by this stuff?

He drove to a tavern on Fern and parked around the corner on Wisteria. The snow had stopped, and the sun was a dim wafer in the gray sky; a prize you wanted to reach for but would never get your hands on. He rolled down the window and waited. He could not give it long. He was meeting Becky at school for some kind of conference with Kyle’s teacher. No big deal, Becky had told him, but he’d better be there. Come dressed like a dad.

Pitufo was half Mexican, half Albanian, and a man of regular habits. He could no more pass by the tavern on a weekday afternoon when it was cold out than he could recite the Gettysburg Address. Some combination in his cultural heritage made him fatalistic. When he saw Mick’s cruiser he shook his head and came toward him like a robot, head down and shoulders sagging. Caught, and no idea what for.
“What’s up, Bigfoot?”
That was Mick’s name on the street. Size 14’s, and his feet looked bigger in cop shoes.
Pitufo was scrawny and had a hard time keeping the wings of his mustache even. He was wearing a denim jacket not up to the demands of upstate winter.
Mick asked him, “How come you don’t get yourself a decent coat?”
Pitufo shrugged. “Expenses, man. I got ‘em up the wazoo.”
“What do you hear about some quality Mexican weed?”
“I hear it will get you righteously high.”

Patience. You had to have it for the song and dance of people like Pitufo who fell back on the truth as a last resort only after exhausting every other option. Eventually he gave Mick a name and an address and a reason to check them out.
It was a cold storage warehouse, or had been. Cadogan Brothers sat on the edge of Troy. It was just inside the city limits so Mick did not have to bother calling the Rensselaer County sheriff. It fell to a city cop to investigate the report of a criminal enterprise on these particular premises. Mick was a city cop.

Untenanted Cadogan Brothers might be, but there were signs of recent foot traffic, and along the west wall of the long low building Mick found a door that had been wrenched open and left ajar. The perfect way for this to play out would be to arrest Marvin Murphy inside the warehouse for the assault on Glynda, coming upon the man with his hands wrapped around a significant brick of Mexican. It could happen. Not likely, but it could happen.

He radioed dispatch his location and sat to wait. It was that time of the afternoon on a short winter day when thoughts of the city’s potheads turned to blunts.

Sitting there, he thought too much about arresting Murphy and not enough about the meeting with Kyle’s teacher. Shit. By the time he realized he was going to be late he also realized he would have to show up in his uniform. Come dressed like a dad.
He drove fast.

Kyle was in the third grade. His teacher was a man, which was unusual and, Mick thought, probably a good thing. Mr Curry wore a green sweater and had lively eyes. Three or four times he told Becky and Mick how excited he was to have the opportunity to teach their child.

Afterwards, outside, Mick asked his wife, “So what was that all about?”
Becky shooed the kids into the car. Kyle was on best behavior and did what he was told, no lip, but Vanessa was a born scorch. Eighteen months younger than Kyle, she ostentatiously refused to buckle her seat belt.
“Do you really not know, Mick?”
“All I know for sure is, Mr Curry is excited.”
“Kyle ignores directions. Half the time he does the opposite of what he’s told.”
Good for him, Mick did not say. What he said instead was, “I’m sorry.”
“For being late, you mean.”
“That, and the uniform.”
She wasn’t looking at him, which did not necessarily mean she was pissed. Becky was blonde in the way and the style a lot of women wished they could be. Her senior year, she turned them down when they voted her homecoming queen. She thought the whole thing was demeaning. Mick loved that about her. She was independent. She was also quirky and ran at her own rhythm. Her goal was to become a potter. That was expensive, though, plus they were super busy with the kids. For now she contented herself drawing painstaking pictures of pieces she might some day throw on a wheel.
“Let’s take the kids out to eat,” Mick said.
“If you let them pick, they’ll say Arby’s.”
Arby’s it was, and Mick really did wish he’d had time to change into jeans. He liked sitting with his good looking unpredictable wife and their two kids. He liked being off duty. He looked around the restaurant.
“What’s wrong with these people, Becky?”
Everybody in the place was hypnotized by a phone. Parents, kids, teenagers in solidarity clusters. All they saw was little screens.
“It makes me sad,” Becky said, which was another way of saying she forgave him for being late to meet with Mr Curry, and she likes Mick sort of admired their son’s unwillingness to follow directions. And – he was pretty sure and it turned out he was right – she was in the mood to make love.
That night, lying wrapped in his arms in the afterglow of intimacy, the way people ought to fall asleep every night of their life, she ambushed him.
“You need to find something to do that isn’t chasing bad guys.”
“A hobby, you’re talking about.”
“I’m talking about whatever it takes.”
“We’ve had this conversation before.”
“Then I guess it didn’t sink in.”
“Becky.”

She pulled away, turned away, and he knew better than to reach for her. They had made a pact, years ago, not to fight about his being a police officer. This was as close as they got to disrespecting it. He ought to worry, but he was tired and fell asleep in a hurry.
☊
Mick was on days. At the station in the morning, Chief Hurley beckoned him into the office with a crooked finger. The chief was fifty and taking night courses at community college. He had grown up in Troy and never worked anywhere except the department but thought he had it in him to be an architect when he retired. He had a wide, sad Irish face and ears that could have been a size smaller with no damage to his overall appearance.
“I understand Marvin Murphy beat up one of his girlfriends.”
“Glynda Brozick. This time she’s pressing charges. I also heard he’s peddling some Mexican weed.”
Hurley nodded slowly. “Sins of the father.”
Mick must have looked at him oddly.
“Murphy’s old man,” Hurley explained. “Crook, con man, deadbeat. Bled out in his nephew’s front yard. Some kind of argument over nothing. How do you expect the son of a man like that to turn out?”
They were standing up, which meant a short meeting. Hurley picked up a stack of papers from his desk and handed them to Mick.
“Run these out to Whelan. Tell him I can’t keep putting off the insurance guy forever.”
Six months away from retirement, Will Whelan had been shot responding to a home invasion call. The bullet was a through and through, but it seemed to take the fight out of him. He was diabetic. He was bitter. He nursed every grievance an old-time cop could be expected to have or invent. He was not cooperating with the insurance company or the department to get the settlement he was owed.

Mick didn’t care much for Whelan. The guy knew a whole lot about police work, but every useful thing he had to say came curdled with hate, much of it racist. He drove out to Whelan’s place in the country only because he had to. It was a piece of property anybody would love to own. Halfway up a hill, the gray house was gone to seed. But the back yard was a meadow, and behind the meadow rose a planting of pines that looked like the woods where the Seven Dwarves had their big luck, stumbling across Sleeping Beauty who would change their life.

Whelan’s wife had left him years ago – big surprise – and he did not answer Mick’s knock. Mick went around behind the house and found him bundled on the back porch, sitting in a chair cupping a glass in his hands. Next to him, a shotgun leaned against the siding. On the floor by his feet, a bottle of bourbon.
“You bring doughnuts?”
“You’ve got diabetes, Will.”
“I’m a cop. Cops eat doughnuts, any idiot knows that.”
He was a squat man with leathery skin. His eyebrows were a forest, the black eyes beneath them hiding in pouches. He looked like a potato left out to dry.
“Little early for the Wild Turkey?”
“What’s it to you?”
Mick shrugged. “The chief sent out some papers for you to sign.”
“I already signed ‘em.”
“Hurley says you didn’t.”
“Hurley’s an asshole.”
“No he’s not.”
Whelan relented. “Leave me the papers, I’ll sign.”
“If you sign now I’ll take them back with me.”
“So how’s it going, Garrity? Popped any interesting malefactors lately?”
“I’m looking for a piece a shit named Marvin Murphy. Beat up a woman, and he’s ped-dling dope.”
“He ain’t black, is he?”
“He’s white.”
“There’s black Murphys, you know.”
Mick had no idea what moved him to say what he did. “My wife says I need to find a hobby.”
Whelan nodded. “Don’t get mad at her. She’s right, she just wants you to be somebody. In a good way, I’m talking about. She wants there to be a little piece of you the job don’t own.”
“I’m not mad at Becky, I’m just not into hobbies.”
“Curse of the job. I finally got mine. Late, but I got it.”
“Oh yeah?”
Whelan squinted his black potato eyes. He lifted his glass and sniffed the bourbon, set it down again. “Got a goal now, you see.”
“What’s your goal, Will?”
“One of these mornings I’m going to be sitting here with a shot of Wild Turkey rolling around in my mouth. Under the tongue, right? Savoring it. At that very moment a wild turkey will come into the yard, and I’ll shoot the fucker.”
“That’s it?”
“Pay attention to your wife, Garrity.”
Mick handed him a pen. “Sign. I need to go arrest Marvin Murphy.”
Whelan waved away the pen. “You don’t think it can happen, do you? My big moment. Wild Turkey on the tongue, wild turkey in the yard. You’re thinking, this old fart couldn’t hit the bird if they painted it pink and put it on stilts.”
He was building up a head of steam. Mick did not want to be there for the blast, so he left the unsigned paperwork and made his escape. In the driveway he ran into Whelan’s daughter. Meg was a redhead who dressed like a hippy, pretty much what you would expect from the child of a hard-ass like Whelan.
“Is he drunk?” she wanted to know.
“Not yet. I left some papers. He needs to sign them to get his money. If you can make that happen we’ll send a car to pick them up.”
She shrugged. “You know my father.”
“Yeah, I know your father.”
His day got busy. He responded to a fender-bender down town, keeping two belligerent drivers from going at each other. Somebody broke into a bar and stole the kitchen sink. The sink? Then dispatch sent him to Elgin Pawn where a coked-out woman in teal heels was beating old Ben Elkin with her empty purse, also teal. She claimed he had stolen her diamond ring. What he was doing, in fact, was holding an item she had pawned and did not have the cash to redeem. Anyway the stone was a zircon. Elgin had done her a favor, taking the damn thing in the first place.
This was the circus, and Mick loved all three rings. Wouldn’t trade jobs with Bill Gates; not that he was the digital type. What was different, today, was his obsession. He could not get Marvin Murphy out of his mind. He shouldn’t care who picked up the mutt, but he did. The war-rant was out. Sooner or later he would cross a patrolman’s field of vision. Mick could not say why he wanted so badly to be the one who took him in, he just did.
By itself, that was no big deal. He had seen it happen. Some lowlife offender stuck in a cop’s craw, and for a while all that mattered was getting him off the street and into a cell. But Mick did not leave his obsession at work. It bled into his home life. Two days went by; three. No sign of Murphy. No problem, or it shouldn’t be. He was not likely to bolt. Guys like Murphy were rooted to the scene of their constant crimes. They did not have enough imagination to picture life in a jurisdiction where they could get a fresh start. So how come Mick was worrying it day in and day out like a dog with a meatless bone?
“What’s eating you?” Becky asked him the evening of the third day he failed to pick up Murphy.
“Nothing.”
“You didn’t even hear what Vanessa asked you, did you?”
“What’s she want?”
He was fated not to know. Becky rose from her chair, her back excessively straight, and scooped up the girl. She marched her upstairs to bed cooing a poisonous lullaby aimed at him. When Mick asked Kyle what his sister wanted, the boy put his head down and shrugged.
It got worse. Day four, day five. At work, Mick drank too much coffee and spent too much time chasing Murphy-leads that went nowhere. Once, over at the tavern on Fern, he got into Pitufo’s face in a way that sobered both of them. At home, the least little thing set him off. But he did not yell. He did not curse or fume. He swallowed his anger, which stewed in the juice of his frustration. Becky quit talking to him beyond the basics. Kyle has swimming practice. We need to write the mortgage check.
On day six he drove to Glynda’s. He wouldn’t put it past her to be in touch with Murphy. Hell, she might have apologized to him, warned him to lay low, promised she’d make it up to him. He caught her fresh from the shower. Her girls were at school, and their mother looked like a person in need of social stimulation. Her makeup was way too heavy for ten in the morning. She was like a cat expecting to be fed now.
“You thought I was wimping out, didn’t you? Well I’m not. Murphy called twice and I never answered. Three times.”
“Good for you, Glynda. Is he still around town?”
“He’ll always be around.”
“Lend me your phone.”
“Sure.”
He scrolled until he found Murphy’s number and hit the call button, handing the phone back to Glynda when it began ringing. She knew exactly what she was supposed to do.
“Hey, sugar. It’s me. What’s going on?”
She listened for a long minute, grinning at Mick.
“I know you’re sorry, baby. It was my fault, I admit that… All right, yes, I did call the cops. It was Mick Garrity that came, remember him from high school? But I told him it was a misunderstanding. It’s over… The girls are in school. Why don’t you come keep me company? I’m looking good this morning, I’m looking like your sexy mama. Bring something to smoke, we’ll lay down and relax.”
Mick knew that Murphy hung up by the expression of disappointment on her face, or was it distaste? She had been looking forward to nailing him, watching him led away cuffed, and it wasn’t going to happen.
“He knows,” she said. “Don’t ask me how, but he knew the minute he answered. I’m sor-ry, Mick.”
“Don’t be sorry. You tried. Hey, if I was the criminal I’d have believed you.”
She was let down and as consolation wanted Mick to entertain her, to entertain him in the time-honored manner. He got out fast making her promise she would call 911 if Murphy tried to get in touch. He went back to looking for the man any time he was not on a call.
One afternoon, after school hours, he stopped Kyle’s teacher for sliding past a stop sign. Mr. Curry was wearing the same bright green sweater he wore the day of the conference. Being pulled over by a cop for a moving violation really threw him. Sweat gems appeared on his upper lip, and his voice cracked like a teenager’s. His apology was over the top. A couple of points on his license? You’d think he was being hauled in for assault and battery. Mick had lived long enough to know that his anger at Mr. Curry was an arrow aimed at the wrong target. He let him go with a warning.
As he got back into the car, dispatch was reporting something going on out at Will Whelan’s. Rensselaer County had notified the department as a courtesy. Mick told the dispatcher he was close enough to take the call. Not true, but he was curious.
He went 33, lights and siren, arriving to find Whelan’s hippyesque daughter sitting on the porch steps cradling her old man’s shotgun. She did not look like a person who had just blown away a close relative, but you never knew. Mick approached with care.
“Where’s Will?”
Her face was pale with anger. Contempt, really. She shook her head.
“Tell me you didn’t shoot him, Meg.”
“He’s drunk.”
“That happens a lot, doesn’t it?”
“The mood he’s in, I thought he might off himself. I took this.” She held up the shotgun. “That made him mad. He called me a spoiled little bitch. You have any daughters, Garrity?”
“One.”
“My advice? You have a bad day, don’t call her a bitch. It’s the kind of thing stays with a girl.”
The front door was half open. From inside the house came a bellowing sound of immense self-pity.
“I’ll go talk to him,” said Mick. “You take the gun. Keep it a while.”
“One of these days…”
“You’ll quit coming by.”
She nodded. She stood to make way for him on the steps. By the time he reached the door she was at her car.
Whelan was dressed in a brown suit, a crisp white shirt, a red tie. His feet were bare. On his hands he wore a pair of polished burgundy wingtips. His dried potato face was lit with an an-ger the equal of his daughter’s. Balanced imbalance.
“Going out, Will?”
“What the fuck do you want, Garrity?”
“Thought I might sit out back on the porch a little, watch for some turkeys. That okay with you?”
Whelan threw one of the wingtips at him. Then he threw the other. The whiskey and his debility made him weak, and there was no velocity in the flying footwear, which Mick dodged easily.
“That girl still out there?”
“Your daughter, you mean. Her name is Meg. Nice kid.”
“She stole my shotgun.”
“I told her to keep it.”
Mick saw a pair of sneakers under the couch. He inched his way toward them, leaned down and picked them up.
“Put these on. Any minute now you’re going to realize your feet are cold.”
Whelan nodded as though they were having a rational discussion, they were talking about the Giants, how many interceptions Eli was throwing. He put on the sneakers, which looked ri-diculous with the suit. He loosened his tie, which was too wide and likely the only one he owned.
“Got any more guns in the house?” Mick asked him.
“What do you think?”
“Get ‘em for me.”
It was the critical moment, and Mick understood it could go either way. Whelan nodded and disappeared into the bedroom. Was he pissed off enough to shoot a fellow cop? But he came out and obediently handed over his firearms. A Smith & Wesson .38 pistol. A Winchester lever-action rifle, cowboy style. And, strangely, a derringer with mother-of-pearl grips.
Only then did Mick ask him, “How come you’re wearing a suit?”
Whelan studied his windowpane-checked sleeve. He hiked up his pants, which he found uncomfortable. “Beats me.”
“Maybe you want to check your blood sugar.”
“Good idea.”
He sank heavily onto the couch with a drunk man’s oof and went through the familiar pin-prick ritual. “It’s high,” he said. “It’s real high.”
He sounded relieved, as if now he had something specific to worry about.
“You done drinking for a while?”
Whelan nodded. He looked at Mick across a distance so dark and long it scared Mick. It was a tunnel he wanted never to walk.
“Remind me what you said your wife’s name was.”
“Becky.”
“Right. Becky. All that about getting yourself a hobby?”
“What about it?”
“You tell her…” His head dropped, not in exhaustion but in all-encompassing shame.
“Tell her what?”
With manful effort Whelan composed and pronounced his sentence. “Wild Turkey is no kind of hobby.”
“I hear you. You got any eggs in the fridge?”
“There’s eggs in there.”
“I thought I’d make us an omelet and toast. It’ll soak up some of that bourbon.”
Whelan nodded. He was thinking about something else but came back long enough to tell Mick, “There’s bacon if you want it.”
☊
A couple of days later, Pitufo had a new coat. Old-fashioned; what people used to call a cardigan. It gave him an oddly conservative look. Mick caught up to him outside the Fern Ave-nue tavern.
“Looking good, Pitufo.”
“I heard Cane and Brace is hiring. I’m applying. I can handle factory work. Shit, I can handle anything they throw at me and come back for more.”
Saying almost anything would be saying too much. Mick nodded. You had to keep an open mind on the subject of happy endings. Once in a while, they happened. Pitufo must really be picturing a new and different life for himself. He offered up what he had without pumping.
“You still looking for Marvin Murphy?”
“I am.”
“He’ll be at the Cadogan warehouse this morning. I heard he’s offering a discount. Needs to move his product so he can pay somebody off.”
Mick was skeptical and did not call for back-up. Pitufo had let him down more often than not. But there was an old Ford in the Cadogan Brothers lot, where the slush had frozen into low, freaky shapes. He ran the plate. It came up registered to a Dolores Hathaway of Troy. So much for throwing Murphy out.
The side door was propped open with a brick. A story came back to Mick, some cop blinded going into a dark building out of the sun and getting blasted by the guy he was trying to arrest. The details were murky, but he squinched his eyes and went in warily with his gun drawn.
It was not as dark as he expected. The warehouse was a cavern, but the second story was punctuated with big windows through which bars of sunlight fell the way they fell in church. His eyes adjusted.
Easy. Some perverse instinct in him wished it were harder, but there sat Murphy in a plas-tic lawn chair watching the smoke from his cigarette rise in the dusty light. Next to his foot was a cardboard box containing what appeared to be neatly stacked bags of weed.
“Guess I got lazy,” said Murphy.
“You mean you’d rather pound on women and sell dope than work for a living.”
He shook his head. “Shouldn’t have left the car out front.”
He was a good-looking guy, with chiseled features, brown hair just a little too long, and an air of gigantic self-regard. Women like Glynda and Dolores found him irresistible, and he had gotten a lot of mileage out of his studly looks.
“What’s in the box?” Mick said.
“Recreational use only. I smoke it when my nerves get bad.”
“There’s a warrant out on you for assaulting Glynda.”
“I don’t know any Glyndas. What you gonna do, Garrity, shoot me? You know you want to. You’re dying to put a hole in me.”
Mick had not thought his rage was obvious. Knowing it was should have put him on his guard. It didn’t.
“Stand up slow, hands on your head.”
“I’m comfortable where I am, Officer. The nerves are bad this morning. My situation, the stress I got, it happens.”
He was goading Mick. Maybe that was a tactic. More likely it was all he knew to do. Mick told him again to stand up.
“You don’t shoot me, what, you gonna make yourself feel good, knock me around? Don’t tell me ‘cuz I know how this thing works. No witnesses, and who they gonna believe? You were an asshole in high school, Garrity, and you’re still an asshole. You have no fucking idea what real life is like. Without the gun and the cop suit, you’re zero minus.”
He went on. It was working, and he knew it was working. Mick felt fresh anger rising red in him. Murphy wanted to provoke him. Well, he was provoked. In a dim side room of his mind a man in a funny hat, a man with no face, was writing up a report of how the suspect got up out of his chair and lunged for the officer’s gun.
Nah.
Nah.
“We’ve got history, Garrity. That’s all my lawyer needs.”
They had gotten into it, once, back in high school. Mick could not remember over what.
“There’s no history between you and me,” he said. “There’s no nothing.”
Murphy had no compelling reason to get up. So they added resisting arrest to their love letter. What did he care? His only shot, at the moment, was if Mick did something stupid.
Mick experienced a moment of clean, pure hatred. For Murphy and all his lowlife broth-ers-in-crime on the streets of Troy. It hit him like a bullet. He was lucky. It was a through and through. No organ damage. He would do nothing stupid.
He called dispatch on his cell and gave them his location. “Got a subject resisting arrest.”
Hearing that, Murphy knew it was over. Help was on the way; witnesses. He stood. He placed his hands on his head. He did not bother saying anything.
“Hands out where I can cuff them,” Mick said.
Murphy offered his hands, and Mick went toward him with deliberation. Becky was prob-ably right. He needed a hobby.