It was a misguided reward for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, a barbershop during a holdup in his own Bronx neighborhood when two assholes with .38s had come in while he was buried in aprons, towels, and shaving cream. The shop was a known numbers drop, easy pickings, and after they kneecapped one of the barbers, Milton kicked his chair around on its swivel and started shooting from beneath his polyester body bib, which promptly caught fire. By the time his barber whipped off the flaming sheet he had second-degree burns on his left arm and thigh.

Both perps, one shot in the throat, the other in the face, survived but went directly from Misericordia to the Tombs. The mayor and the police commissioner came to see Milton in the burn unit of that same hospital, the PC presenting him with his detective’s shield in front of cameras.

The question put to him was “Where do you want to go.”

Where. He wanted to go wherever he could hide.

Patrol had always been his thing, the street his wheelhouse—frontier justice, an eye for an eye, and the culling of information through extracurricular beatdowns. He would be a terrible detective, and he knew it: not too bright with paper trails, not particularly subtle or patient in an interview room, and possessed of a freakishly violent yet icy temper when provoked.

Since the shootout at the barbershop he’d been transferred to seven different precincts in five years. Truculent and inept, he was a burden to each squad, until he landed at the 4-6 in the Bronx. Even before Milton arrived, the lieutenant there got the message that he was doing a great job with Detective Ramos, we all appreciate it, no more hot potato. Milton’s new boss made the savvy decision to stash him in the burglary squad, which averaged thirty-five cases a month, all difficult to solve. But even in that Eeyore world of low expectation he managed to go three years without a single arrest, at which point he became the supervisor of night complaints, his job to come in at eight a.m. and farm out the complaints that had accumulated since the previous midnight to the other incoming day-tour detectives—a housecat gig that reeked of dunce cap.

But after a long stretch in that purgatory, a new boss finally put him back in the regular squad, and six months after that there wasn’t a known actor in the 4-6 who didn’t come to dread hearing the phrase, usually spoken in a low-key, near-distracted monotone, “Get out of the car, please?”

*   *   *

MILTON TOOK THE DIRTY TOWEL and carefully folded it into a thick band. He then straddled the drunk and laid the towel across his throat. Snapping the telescoping baton out to its full length, he perched it lengthwise along the center of the towel. Carefully stepping on the narrow end with his right foot, he pressed the steel rod into one side of the guy’s throat. Then, holding on to a branch in order to keep his balance and modulate the pressure, he placed his other foot on the handle end so that now his full weight was coming down on the Adam’s apple, that weight fluctuating between 180 and 190 pounds, depending on the time of the year and what holidays had just passed.

The drunk’s suddenly bulging eyes turned a damp, golden red, and the only sound he was capable of making was a faint peeping like a newborn chick heard from one farm over.

After thirty seconds or so, Milton stepped off the baton one foot at a time, then squatted and lifted the thick towel beneath; the throat was unblemished. He replaced the towel on the guy’s throat and once again balanced the baton across its center.

“One more time?”

The drunk shook his head, even the weak peeping sound gone.

“Come on…” Milton rose to his height, found his balance again at both ends of the rod, and started seesawing. “In case I never get to see you again.”

 

CHAPTER
2

As they crossed the Triborough Bridge in Pavlicek’s cream-colored elephant of a Lexus, Billy felt like he could stand up in the shotgun seat without grazing the ceiling. For its owner, though, the oversized SUV was a necessity. Pavlicek was nearly big enough to have his own zip code, six foot four, with a head as big around as a diving bell, the upper body of a power lifter, and hands that once, on a bet, had crushed a raw potato. Even with his face and frame somewhat softened by retirement and wealth, his presence still tended to make everyone around him, including Billy, behave. Big man, big car, big life.

In Billy’s opinion, of all their original crew, Pavlicek had played the exit game most righteously. Any cop working a precinct could tell you where the money went, but Pavlicek’s genius back in the ’90s was to see where it wasn’t: in the roofless brownstone shells that had become crack squats, the decimated walk-ups, the derelict working-class ghost palaces that had peaked in the 1940s, if they had ever peaked at all. He had bought them one at a time for a renegotiated accumulation of back taxes and liens, either from the city or the desperate owners themselves, paying an average of $7,500 in the beginning, never more than $50,000 later on, once other speculators started to get in the game. And after completing the purchase, Pavlicek was good at vacating buildings, offering first cash, then violence to the squatters and junkies still cooping after the sale.

In the early days, Pavlicek did all the dirty work himself, rarely needing to do more than show up unannounced at dawn and display his holstered service revolver or a baseball bat. As his holdings grew, he began contracting out these spontaneous evictions, as he called them, to others: mainly defrocked cops, guys who had gotten jammed up for taking money or beating a prisoner or worse, losing both their badges and their pensions in the aftermath and now desperate for even the shadiest of paydays.

Once the troublemakers and deadbeats were gone, he quickly rehabbed the properties and got decent people to move in—there were always decent people—Pavlicek specifically courting the elderly on Social Security or other kinds of fixed income, as well as those who could arrange for the city or their bank to make direct rent payments to his corporation, the bottom line being that five years after retirement Pavlicek owned twenty-eight mostly beat-up but relatively violation-free properties in Washington Heights and the Bronx, had a house in Pelham Manor the length of a tanker and a personal worth of $30 million if a dime.

But if he had been blessed with wealth, he had been cursed with loss: after three years of reasonably happy marriage, his wife, Angela, had attempted to drown their then six-month-old son in the backyard wading pool. Four months later, on her first leave from the Payne-Whitney Psychiatric Clinic, she tried it again. Nineteen years later she was still institutionalized, most recently at a residential treatment facility in Michigan, not far from her parents’ home in Wisconsin. Pavlicek still grieved for her and still hated himself for being so oblivious to her pain and madness back then. As far as Billy knew, they were still married.

“You ever been out of the country?” Pavlicek asked as they cruised past the Forensic Psychiatric Center, a.k.a. the Hat Factory, on Wards Island.

“Nope,” Billy said, trying to peer through the barred windows to the Thorazine-infused prisoners within.