Where It Hurts Read online

  ALSO BY REED FARREL COLEMAN

  DYLAN KLEIN SERIES

  Life Goes Sleeping

  Little Easter

  They Don’t Play Stickball in Milwaukee

  MOE PRAGER SERIES

  Walking the Perfect Square

  Redemption Street

  The James Deans

  Soul Patch

  Empty Ever After

  Innocent Monster

  Hurt Machine

  Onion Street

  The Hollow Girl

  JOE SERPE SERIES

  Hose Monkey

  The Fourth Victim

  GULLIVER DOWD SERIES

  Dirty Work

  Valentino Pier

  The Boardwalk

  ROBERT B. PARKER’S JESSE STONE

  Blind Spot

  The Devil Wins

  STAND-ALONE NOVELS

  Tower (with Ken Bruen)

  Bronx Requiem (with John Roe)

  Gun Church

  G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

  Publishers Since 1838

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2016 by Reed F. Coleman, Inc.

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-698-18409-1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Coleman, Reed Farrel, date.

  Where it hurts : a Gus Murphy novel / Reed Farrel Coleman.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-399-17303-5

  I. Title.

  PS3553.O47445W48 2016 2015017115

  813'.54—dc23

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  For Paul E. Pepe Jr., Evan Lieberman, and Jeff Fisher

  —

  There is always a cause, but not always a because. And even when there is, the dead are beyond its reach or caring.

  CONTENTS

  Also by Reed Farrel Coleman

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  1

  (MONDAY NIGHT)

  Some people swallow their grief. Some let it swallow them. I guess there’re about a thousand degrees in between those extremes. Maybe a million. Maybe a million million. Who the fuck knows? Not me. I don’t. I’m just about able to put one foot before the other, to breathe again. But not always, not even most of the time. Annie, my wife, I mean, my ex-wife, she let it swallow her whole and when it spit her back up, she was someone else, something else: a hornet from a butterfly. If I was on the outside looking in and not the central target of her fury and sting, I might understand it. I might forgive it. I tell myself I would. But I’d have to forgive myself first. I might as well wish for Jesus to reveal himself in my sideview mirror or for John Jr. to come back to us. At the moment, my wishes were less ambitious ones. I wished for the 11:38 to Ronkonkoma to be on time. I should have wished for it to be early.

  I checked the dashboard clock as I pulled into the hotel courtesy van parking spot out in front of the Dunkin’ Donuts shop at the station. 11:30, eight minutes to spare. But spare time was empty time and I had come to dread it because empty was pretty much all I was anymore. Two years steeped in emptiness and I still didn’t know how to fill it up. My shrink, Dr. Rosen, says not to try, that I should let myself fully experience the void. That if I don’t give myself permission to feel the depth of the abyss, the slipperiness of its walls, I’ll never climb out. The thing is, you have to want to climb out, don’t you? Even a spare minute was chance enough to relive the last two years. Took forever to live it. Takes only seconds to live it again. I had tried filling in the fissures, cracks, and cavities with wondering, wondering about the trick of time. That got me about as far as wishing. Nowhere.

  I stepped out of the van into the chill night. My breath turned to heaving clouds of smoke as cold as God’s love. Hail Mary, full of shit, the Lord is with thee, not me. I didn’t really want coffee. No man who lives for sleep as I do wants coffee. But I had to sustain my waking trance until six a.m. Then I could turn the van keys over to Fredo and fall into my cool sheet-and-quilt-covered solace. When I was on the job, it was different. Everything was different. I liked the world then and the people in it. Liked the buzz of caffeine. Yeah, that was me once, the cop in a doughnut shop, reinforcing stereotypes. Now I was just occupying my mind, doing something, anything not to sit in the van marking time.

  Aziza, the mocha-skinned Pakistani girl behind the counter, nodded at me. Smiled a gap-toothed smile. She no longer asked what I wanted. Small coffee. Half-and-half. Two Sweet’N Lows. She made it up for me. Put it on the counter. She no longer gave me the change when I paid. She dropped the change in the paper tip cup with the other careless pennies, quarters, dimes, and nickels. I liked Aziza because she expected nothing of me beyond our routine. We danced our nightly dance and then went back to being strangers. She didn’t expect me to put the pai
n behind me or to bravely get on with my life.

  Khalid, the night manager, a fleshy man with shark eyes and a suspicious face, stared at me as he always did. It was as if he could smell the taint on me. He didn’t like me in the shop. Thought I might sully the place with my taint, or maybe that wasn’t it at all.

  I got back to the van as the 11:38 pulled into Ronkonkoma. In the eight minutes that had passed, the usual crowd had descended upon the station. Parents in double-parked SUVs, waiting to pick up their kids. Bored-looking husbands unhappy at being dragged off their sofas into the cold night because their wives felt like doing Broadway with the girls. Cabbies outside their cars, their flannel-shirted bellies flopping over their belt lines, smoking cigarettes, talking shit to each other. I placed the coffee inside the van and took out my Paragon Hotel placard on which the words WESTEX TECHNICAL were written in black marker.

  I was scheduled to pick up a party of three from Westex and bring them back to the Paragon. The Paragon Hotel of Bohemia, New York, was paragon of nothing so much as proximity, proximity to Long Island MacArthur Airport. And MacArthur Airport, an airport of three airlines, was nothing so much as an unfulfilled promise, the little airport that couldn’t. The Paragon was a way station, a place to pass through on the way to or from the airport. There was the occasional foreign tourist who’d fixated on the room rate instead of the distance to New York City or had neglected to convert kilometers into miles.

  The three Westex guys were what I expected, what most of my passengers were: tired, hungry, distracted. When I got back into the van after loading their bags into the rear, all of them were busy with their phones or tablets. They kind of grunted to themselves and one another. I was glad of that, happy to be ignored. I had trouble with the chatty ones, the ones who wanted to be your pal. When I was on the job, I understood nervous chatter because the uniform made people nervous. I also had empathy for the compulsively polite. Not anymore. Who in their heart of hearts really wanted to be the van driver’s buddy? It was all so much bullshit, a way to pass time from point to point. I was in on the lie of passing time, so I never spoke first. Never asked where anyone was from. Never asked if they had enjoyed the city. Never asked what they did for a living, or about their families. Never asked where they were headed. I knew where they were headed. We were all headed there, eventually.

  I put the van in drive, looked in my sideview for oncoming cars or the Second Coming. And not seeing either, I pulled the wheel hard left and made a sweeping U-turn west onto Railroad Avenue. As we went, I sipped at my unwanted coffee, thinking of my dead son.

  2

  (TUESDAY MORNING)

  The phone bleating on the nightstand woke me from a dreamless sleep, but John Jr. was my first waking thought, just as he had been my last conscious thought before I closed my eyes. It was as reflexive to me as blinking. After two years grieving him, missing him, tearing my guts out over his death, he never really left me. At least he was no longer every thought in between my first and last. There had been periods during that first year when I felt I would choke on his constant presence. When I would have given almost anything for a few minutes of simple forgetfulness. It got so oppressive that I began hating the son I had loved more than myself and then hated myself for hating him.

  The TV was still on but tuned to SportsCenter, so it could have been any time of the day or night. I looked out the southeast-facing window of my room and saw the sun was relatively low in the sky. I felt the weariness still deep in my bones and knew I hadn’t been asleep very long.

  I reached for the phone.

  “Yeah, what?”

  Nothing.

  I dozed off with the phone still in my hand. This time when it rang, I managed to press the talk button.

  “Yeah.”

  “Gus, there’s a gentleman down here asking to see you.” It was Felix at the front desk, his Filipino lilt less prominent when he was speaking in front of a guest.

  “What time is it?” I asked even as I stretched to see the clock radio.

  “Nine seventeen.”

  I yawned. “This gentleman have a name?”

  “He won’t give me his name, but he says you have dealt with him in the past.”

  “That really narrows it down. What’s he look like?”

  Felix cleared his throat and, without a hint of guile, whispered, “Trouble.”

  I laughed, felt the smile on my face. It didn’t used to feel so foreign. “Tell him I’m sleeping.”

  “Don’t you think I have attempted that, Gus? He said he will wait down here all day if that is what it will take.” Then Felix was whispering again. “He’s a rough-looking man with tattoos and he makes me nervous.”

  “All right. Tell him to go wait for me in the coffee shop and I’ll be along.”

  “When?”

  “When I get there.”

  “Thank you, Gus.”

  For my part, I was in no rush to get downstairs, but I liked Felix. He didn’t have much of a heart for confrontation. Then again, I had spent most of my adult life collecting scar tissue from it. It’s what cops did.

  I brushed my teeth, finger-combed my grief-gray hair—that’s what my sister called it—and pulled on my Costco wardrobe: Kirkland jeans, black Tommy Hilfiger sweater, Kirkland athletic socks, and running shoes. My Glock and ammo were the only pieces of my outfit that I hadn’t bought at Costco. Even the black leather jacket I wore had come from there.

  It was a five-step stroll to the elevator from my room. The room was part of my deal with the Bonackers, the family that owned and managed the Paragon. I drove the van from six to six, three or four nights a week, and occasionally acted as house detective. Although the hotel was half-empty most of the time, the Full Flaps Lounge did big happy-hour business because of its proximity to a large industrial park and office buildings. And when it was turned into a ’70s and ’80s throwback disco on Friday and Saturday evenings, things sometimes got a little hairy. Middle-aged men flexing their weekend beer muscles for drunk divorcées could get ugly, and often did. The Bonackers liked knowing that when I called the cops, they came, and fast.

  The lobby of the Paragon was actually a pretty grand sight if you didn’t look too closely, and if your taste ran to despair. Completed in the mid-’80s, the hotel had gone through several incarnations. The last time any serious work had been done on the place was prior to the 2008 financial collapse. It took more body blows after JetBlue declined to set up shop at MacArthur, and Southwest began shifting flights to LaGuardia. The Paragon had already changed hands four or five times when the Bonackers bought it. The rooms were cheap, clean, and available. If that wasn’t enough for you, you were shit out of luck.

  I nodded at Felix as I came off the elevator. He pointed his short little arm at the hotel coffee shop, poking the air with his finger. “Big man, Gus. Very big.”

  “I hope you take this the right way, Felix, but—”

  “Don’t you talk about my height again. I am the same size as Manny Pacquiao.”

  I took a boxer’s stance and threw a shadow jab. “Too bad you don’t punch like him.”

  “There is going to be trouble, do you think?”

  “I guess we’re gonna find out.”

  I walked into the Runway coffee shop, the walls of which were covered in murals of great moments in aviation history connected to Long Island. Lindbergh taking off from Roosevelt Field for his flight to Le Bourget. The Grumman-built moon lander touching down in the Sea of Tranquility. The first A-10 rolling off the Fairchild Republic production line. A swept-wing Grumman F-14 swooping low over an air-show crowd at Jones Beach. For the second time in twenty minutes, I laughed. I laughed because there would be no more such great moments. Roosevelt Field was now an enormous shopping mall. Fairchild Republic was gone and Grumman, once the largest employer on Long Island, had been dismembered and swallowed up, existing now only as a feeble outpo
st in a sea of abandonment. I knew a little something about that.

  The coffee shop was nearly empty but for the ghostly scent of fried bacon and dark grace notes of burnt black coffee. Along with the smells of breakfast, the big man was the only other thing in the place. He sat at a booth, a cup of coffee before him on the wingtip-shaped table. I didn’t approach him. He looked like somebody I knew, but I couldn’t quite place him. When I was on the job, I’d had a steel-trap memory, but the last two years had taken their toll. Not much was crisp or clear to me any longer. Vague familiarity was my default setting. Even the pain of John Jr.’s loss had transformed itself from the excruciating burn of a puncture wound to the dull ache of a dying tooth. There was also something in the big man’s expression that reminded me of my own reflection. A distance in his moist brown eyes, a disconnection from the moment. It’s hard to explain, but it was there as sure as the cup in front of him.

  I was frozen in place, pinned by the resonance in the big man’s expression. That was when somebody in the kitchen dumped a load of silverware onto the sorting tray. The crash and jangle of the metal utensils broke the silence. The big man’s eyes refocused. He turned to look up at me, a mournful smile on his crooked mouth. Yeah, I knew him: Thomas Delcamino, Tommy D. Everybody who had worked in the Second Precinct knew Tommy D. Most of us had arrested him. Many of us, more than once.

  3

  (TUESDAY MORNING)

  He stood to greet me, the sadness in his bent smile seeming to vanish. As he rose, I patted my jacket pocket to feel for my weapon. He noticed. I guess I’d wanted him to notice. On the job you hear lots of revenge tales about humps you busted coming around to pay you back, but it turns out that only a very few of those stories had any truth in them. They were meant to keep you alert and to remind you not to be too much of an asshole to the handcuffed people riding in the back of the car. A lot of guys I worked with over the years needed to hear those stories more than I did. Funny how the ones who needed to hear them never listened. When Tommy D. saw me pat my hip, the wind went out of him, the sadness returning to his expression as he shook his head at me in disappointment. Disappointing people, I did a lot of that these days.