TEN

Flannery knew a real neighborhood bar not two blocks from Finbarr McPhee’s. The kind of place where they played Sinatra on the jukebox and the jukebox still played vinyl records. It was the kind of place that had a name, but you didn’t need to know it because you knew where it was and what it was about. And what it was about was beers and shots of whiskey, a pool table, a dart board, and one old TV that hadn’t worked in years. Nobody came here to hit on babes or to impress anyone at all. It was a bar for men to drink in and to be comfortable doing so.

The bartender knew Flannery, which didn’t exactly shock me. I supposed most of the bartenders in Bay Ridge knew him. I gestured to a booth. Flannery wasn’t having any. He preferred sitting at the bar and that was fine with me. I took out another fifty and ordered a Jameson and a Guinness. I think I’d managed two sips of my first Guinness at McPhee’s and never got to the second. I meant to actually drink this pint. My drinking buddy had no trouble finishing his and made quick work of his whiskey. I figured that since he’d just saved my ass or saved me from making an ass of myself, I’d let him bring up the subject that had started all the trouble in the first place.

“You know why that pup got so agitated when you brought up the EMTs?” Flannery asked, his unfocused eyes aimed vaguely at the mirror behind the bar.

“I have some idea. They reflected badly on the department and all of that.”

“That’s part of it, but not nearly all. It’s politics.”

“What isn’t?” I said, nodding for the barman to bring Flannery another.

“True enough, but this is ugly politics, internal politics. See, EMTs wear uniforms, but are civilian employees of the department. They’re not firefighters like in other cities and they don’t usually work out of the same houses that the men on the real job do. If an EMT wants to become a fireman, they gotta take a special test.”

“I see. So even though these two women weren’t on the job, the real firefighters get tainted by what they did. The public isn’t big on making subtle distinctions.”

“The media neither, but it’s even more complicated than that, Moe.” He looked around to make sure no one was in earshot. “Here’s the deal. The department has never been the most welcoming place for certain kinds of people, if you catch my drift.”

“I do.”

“Going back to my days in the department, the blacks always sued over the test to get on the job, saying it discriminates against them. Even though I think that’s all a crock of shit myself, when you look at the numbers…. And these days, the FDNY gets federal money too. So someone inside the union got the bright idea to get EMTs counted with the FDNY’s numbers because a lot of the EMTs are women and minorities.”

“Holy shit!”

“That’s right, Moe. They wanna use the big minority numbers from the ranks of the EMTs to make the department’s racial profile look better and more balanced for the feds and the courts, but they want them to remain civilian employees. Of course, the EMTs ain’t exactly thrilled by this plan.”

“There’s a perverse kind of symmetry to that way of thinking. It unskews the curve, but without really changing anything.”

“Bingo! When those two EMTs fucked up, they pissed everybody off. They really rocked the boat. It’s a big-stakes game and everyone on all sides got a dog in the fight, so emotions are running high. People are edgy and like you found out back at McPhee’s, just asking questions about it is risky business.”

“Risky enough to get someone killed?”

Flannery didn’t answer right away. I checked his eyes in the mirror. They were focused now, but seemed to be locked in on something in the distance, beyond my field of vision.

“Maybe,” he said. “People don’t think sometimes before they do shit. There’s been a lot of grumbling. I think it’s talk mostly, but let’s face it, no one I know sent flowers or sympathy cards when that EMT got hers. Before you start pointing fingers, remember there are just as many EMTs as firemen pissed off at what those two did. Why do you care, anyhow? What’s it to you?”

I figured I owed him the truth. “Alta Conseco, the EMT who was murdered, I was married to her little sister once. They were estranged for a long time and now I guess she feels sort of overwhelmed by guilt about all the time they lost.”

“Guilt,” he said, “a mighty curse to bear. I’ll drink to that.”

And drink he did, but he stopped talking. I finished my Guinness in silence and slid my card across the bar to Flannery.

“Leaving?”

“Yeah,” I said, shaking his hand. “My stomach’s killing me. Pleasure meeting you and thanks for saving my ass before.”

“Forget it.” When I turned to go, he called after me, waving my card between his fingers. “I hear anything, I’ll call.”

I nodded. As I walked to my car, I heard myself laughing. My stomach was killing me.

I didn’t enjoy myself for very long because I got thumped in the ribs as I turned the corner to where my car was parked. The wind went out of me, my laughter transformed to gasping as I collapsed to the sidewalk. I suppose I might’ve tried to get up if I didn’t get a kick in the back.

“Not so tough without your boyfriend to protect ya, are ya, old man?” It was Hickey.

I was preoccupied with trying to get my lungs restarted, so I didn’t answer or reach for my .38. Breathing is easy to take for granted, but the rest of the machinery won’t work without it. Funny, I thought about the tumor again, how it too was probably rooting for me to catch my breath. Nothing in this world likes getting cheated out of the chance to fulfill its destiny. It’s pretty fucked up what you think about sometimes.

“Consider yourself warned, grandpa.”

Grandpa. I couldn’t help but wonder if I would ever hear that name spoken in love.