Billy Senior headed up the stairs.
“Dad!” Billy yelled, but the old man kept climbing.
With all the phones in the house continuously ringing as if to announce a royal wedding—all the phones except, strangely, Billy’s own—Ramos began to come around, his eyes slowly opening and closing like something in a terrarium. Billy pressed the .45 hard into the nape of his neck, then searched him for his cuffs. Nothing.
He had to get to a phone and give Yonkers the green light to come on in before he lost control of the situation, but he couldn’t risk rising up with Ramos unsecured, couldn’t risk him seeing the barrel-plugged gun full-on and recognizing it for what it was, couldn’t risk him finding his own live piece somewhere in the room.
“There’s like a fucking army out there, OK?” Billy said, trying to keep the tremble out of his voice. “So just take it easy, OK?”
Ramos winced, then slightly, effortlessly, shifted beneath Billy’s weight, Billy knowing right then that he wasn’t physically strong enough to keep him down if it came to that.
“Milton, right? Milton, think of your daughter, OK? Just think of your daughter and everything is going to be OK, OK?”
Ramos was fully alert now, but he made no further effort to move, just lay there with the side of his face half-buried in the high nap of the carpet, staring off as if thinking about something unrelated.
“Your daughter, what’s her name,” Billy chattered. “Tell me her name.”
Clearly the calmer of the two, Ramos continued to stare off, Billy’s bulk and the pressure of the muzzle no more distracting than pecking birds on the back of a rhino.
“Come on, Milton, tell me her name.”
Ramos cleared his throat. “If somebody in your will is down as your kid’s guardian,” he said, his voice half-muffled by the pile, “and you go to jail instead of dying, do they still get the kid?”
“Yeah, sure,” Billy said automatically, ducking then swiveling his head in a low search for the cast-off automatic.
“Or does jail throw the whole guardian arrangement out the window.”
Billy thought he saw what might be the gun lying deep under the couch, but it could just as easily have been one of the kids’ toys.
“She likes it out there with her aunt,” Ramos continued. “I don’t want her going to foster care.”
“Sure,” Billy babbled. “She stays wherever you decide.”
“What do you know,” Ramos said calmly, then threw Billy off his back as easily as doing a push-up.
The Glock, now pointed at Billy, had been under Ramos the whole time Billy had been riding him.
“Over there,” Ramos said. “On the table.”
Billy did as he was told, putting his father’s gun on the low coffee table.
“The fucking thing’s plugged anyhow,” Ramos added.
If he knew that all along, Billy thought dreamily, and his own live piece was right under his gut . . .
“We can get out of this, no problem,” Billy said. “Just let me pick up the phone. Or pick it up yourself.”
“Turn to the wall, please?”
Billy did as he was told, so stupid with fear he felt high.
“Did you know?” Ramos asked him from behind.
“Did I know what.”
“She never told you,” Ramos marveled.
“Tell me what,” Billy said, then: “So tell me now. I want to know.”
“Never said a word . . .”
As fine cracks in the wall paint, inches from his face, imprinted themselves on his brain, as the hell choir of endlessly ringing phones faded to a weak, sickly carousel tune in Billy’s ears, Ramos took two steps back.
“You see?” his voice tearing up blackly. “All these years, and you fucking people, you just sail on, sail on.”
Billy tried to shut himself down and just let it happen, but then he heard Ramos stepping back farther. Then farther. Then heard the front door swing open, the murderously pregnant silence out there rushing into the house like a tornado.
He wasn’t sure what he experienced first, the staggered report of the volley or the sight of Ramos charging the ESU cops with Billy Senior’s dummy gun. Either way the outcome was the same.
Either way the phones finally stopped ringing.
As the house filled with footsteps and radio squawk, Billy, intent on finding his cell phone, tuned out the calming voices, shrugged off the reaching hands that were screwing with his concentration.
“Where did it go.”
“Where’d what go, Billy,” someone said.
“My goddamn phone, I just had it this morning.”
“It’s in your front pocket,” the voice said. “Why don’t you come sit down.”
Pulling out his cell, Billy saw that there was someone on the line.
“Who’s this.”
“Graves, is that you?” a familiar voice said.
“I asked who this is,” Billy said, finally allowing someone to guide him to a chair.
“Evan Lefkowitz, Second Squad.”
“You’re calling me?”
“Actually, you called me, us, about an hour ago, then left the line open,” Lefkowitz said. “We’ve been listening in ever since.”
“Hey, while I have you?” Billy said brightly, waving off the hovering EMTs. “I was talking to my son earlier . . . What’s the deal with Albert Lazar?”
A new call came in while the medics were debating whether to shoot him up with three mikes of sodium nitroprusside or let his blood pressure come down on its own.
“Hey, Billy, Bobby Cardozo from the Eighty Squad. We finally got a match on the prints from the bat.”
“Good,” Billy said, watching the needle go in.
“Are you sitting down? Because you’re not going to believe your ears.”
By the time they finally laid eyes on each other in the trauma room of Saint Joseph’s, Billy was so dizzy from the Nitropress, Carmen so bombed on Ativan, that for a while all they could do was stare.
“Who’s got the kids?”
“Millie,” she said, then: “Billy, I’m so sorry.”
In the ensuing stoned silence, fragments of her conversation with Ramos began to revisit him.
“You knew he’d be coming for you?”
“I knew something would be coming for me,” she said. “I just didn’t know what.”
Billy nodded, then nodded some more. “So,” clearing his throat, “who’s Little Man?”