One

It was the middle of September, and Conway had let McKenna take him out to a firing range in Bay Ridge to show him how to shoot. McKenna had been a cop for six years until he shot someone in the line of duty and they put him out with three-quarters pension.

‘Can’t believe Ray Boy’s out,’ Conway said. ‘Free. Just walking around.’ He held up the gun and fired at the paper target, missing wide.

‘Dude,’ McKenna said, taking out his earplugs, ‘you really should put these on.’ He offered a set of headphones.

‘I’m gonna go what, deaf?’ Conway did feel a light ringing in his ears, but it was like a far-off music.

McKenna said, ‘When you shoot, you gotta have confidence. You got no confidence now. The way you’re letting the gun pull you around, you’re gonna always miss outside.’

‘Ain’t gonna miss I got the gun right in the guy’s gut,’ Conway said.

‘That’s a situation you’re probably not gonna find yourself in.’

The firing range was in a warehouse next to an abandoned textile company and right across from a Russian supper club. From the outside it looked like the kind of place where snuff movies got made. But gun nuts, cops and otherwise, knew about it and came in and fired down brown-lit rows at cardboard cutouts and paper targets. On some targets there were snaps of ballplayers, Mets gone bad, slumping Yanks. Conway had an old newspaper clipping of Ray Boy, and he’d tacked it onto his target. Thing was he hadn’t even hit it yet and it was big, a fold-out page from the Daily News. Ray Boy, all those years ago, freshly collared, on his way into the Sixty-Second Precinct. Wearing sunglasses, the fuck.

McKenna stood next to Conway now and showed him how to grip the gun. ‘You got fish hands, Con. Close up your fingers.’

Conway tightened up his hold and pulled the trigger again. Wide right. ‘Maybe it’s this type of gun.’

‘You don’t know shit about guns. Trust me. Twenty-two’s good for you.’

‘I need a sawed-off shotgun.’

‘That’s for the movies. This is what I got you.’

Conway fired a few more times, hitting the outer rim of the target once but still missing the picture of Ray Boy, and McKenna seemed to be growing frustrated.

‘Maybe I’ll just come with you,’ McKenna said.

‘I’m not taking you away from Marylou,’ Conway said. ‘Things go wrong, I don’t want you near me.’

‘And what about Pop? What happens to him?’

‘Let me worry about that.’

‘Bunker is supposed to call you when?’

‘This afternoon.’

Bunker was a private investigator out of Monticello who McKenna had hooked him up with via some retired cop who’d settled in Forestburgh. McKenna had used another connection, a State Trooper who knew a guy who knew a prison guard at Sing Sing, to find out that Ray Boy had settled somewhere in the general vicinity of Monticello after getting out. Where exactly, they couldn’t pin down, but Bunker claimed to be on it.

McKenna said, ‘You’re going too quick. I understand why. But you’re gonna do this, you should wait. Few days. Few months. A year. Don’t go in underprepared.’

‘Every day he’s out I’ve waited too long,’ Conway said. The truth was that he didn’t want to be prepared. He wanted to be primitive about it.

‘You better keep shooting.’ McKenna turned away. Conway held the gun out and tried to see Ray Boy running away from him. It wouldn’t happen like that, Ray Boy backing down in his crosshairs, but it was what he needed to see if he was going to show McKenna he could place a shot. He fired again. Barely clipped the outer edge of the target. It was a start.

Bunker called at three. Conway was on the bus home to Gravesend, the gun wrapped in towels in a gym bag at his feet.

‘This Ray Boy’s doing well,’ Bunker said. ‘Know you’re not wanting to hear that.’

Conway moved in his seat. Tried to picture Ray Boy living the high life. ‘You mean, what? He’s got money? A girlfriend already?’

‘He’s got this house in Hawk’s Nest. Been in his family for years. Does a shit ton of push-ups. Gets checks from his mother.’

‘Hawk’s Nest?’

‘About twenty minutes from Monticello.’

‘You can take me there?’ Conway said.

Bunker said, ‘Whenever you want. You come up here, I’ll meet you at the racetrack and show you the way.’

‘How long’s the drive from the city?’

‘Three hours, maybe. Little less.’

Conway flipped the phone shut and looked around at the other people on the bus. An old lady with shopping bags. A couple of Our Lady of the Narrows kids clutching bulky knapsacks in their laps and listening to iPods. This guy, Hyun – Conway knew of him but didn’t really know him – who ran numbers for Mr Natale and was sweaty and nervous, holding onto the overhead strap with one hand and gripping a thin stack of papers with the other. And there was the peg-leg homeless lady who rode the B1 and the B64 all day, her wheelchair ornamented with shopping bags. None of them knew he had a gun. None of them knew he was going to get in his car, drive upstate, and kill Ray Boy Calabrese. Probably none of them knew Ray Boy. Or they’d forgotten his face from the papers. The kids weren’t even alive then. A lot got washed away in sixteen years. Conway thought of Duncan’s grave: all those paper poppies from his once-a-week visits. He’d knelt there and made a promise that none of the people on the bus knew about.

Walking back home, Conway watched pigeons on the sidewalk out in front of Johnny Tomasullo’s barber shop. He looked up at a pair of boots hanging from the telephone wires. People didn’t do that much anymore. He remembered throwing his school shoes up there after he was done with junior high. Then he leaned against a parking meter and thought about how he was going to deal with Pop. Kid gloves. Lies.

Pop was at the door to greet him when he came in the front gate. ‘You’ve been where?’ Pop said.

‘Bay Ridge with McKenna. At the gym.’

‘I need you to pick up my prescription.’

‘Not now.’

‘When?’

‘Maybe later. We’ll see. Otherwise I’ll get Stephanie to run it over.’

‘No, no, no. That’s too much trouble. I’ll go get it myself. To put Stephanie out, ridiculous.’

‘Don’t walk up there with your leg, Pop. Stephanie doesn’t mind. She’s my friend. It’s four blocks. She doesn’t mind.’

‘Ridiculous.’

Conway went inside and got his car keys off the hook in the kitchen and a roll of duct tape out of the tool closet. He put the duct tape in the gym bag. Pop followed close behind. ‘I’m busy, Pop,’ Conway said.

‘But you’ll go get it?’ Pop said.

‘Maybe.’

‘I’ll go.’

Conway said, ‘Okay. I’ll go up and get it.’

But he had no intention of going. He left the house and went down the block and found his Civic parked by P.S. 101. He opened his phone and called Stephanie. Asked her to deliver the prescription to his old man. Told her just call first so she didn’t scare him. Ring the bell a few times, he said. Sometimes Pop couldn’t hear it. Stephanie was happy to do it, thrilled to get out from behind the counter. At least that was taken care of. And Pop would have company to distract him, even if only for a few minutes at the door. Stephanie was goofy, she had this frizzy hair like in cartoon strips and an accent nasty with the neighborhood, but she was kind, especially with old timers.

Driving away up Benson Avenue, headed for the Belt, Conway tried not to picture Pop in their sad living room with the dusty cross on the wall and the Sacred Heart Auto League calendars everywhere and the lampshade that was stressed to flimsy. But the picture came anyway: Pop in a ragged recliner, pillows everywhere, reaching out for the channel changer and trying to hear what they were saying on TV. Pop clawing his fingers into a go-to jar of Vicks VapoRub and massaging his neck, the Vicks blobbing up in his neck hair like a wispy chrysalis in a tree. Just waiting for Conway to get home with the scrip.

Now, beginning this very moment, Pop had nothing, had no one. Conway knew he wasn’t coming back. He was at the end of something. Maybe Aunt Nunzia would come around to check on Pop, but she had her own problems. A construction worker son who gambled away her social security. Squirrels in the wall. Her husband’s loans she was still paying off. Pop had squat. The house and his prescriptions. The windows he stared out. The kids around the corner he liked to call the police on. With Conway gone, he might try to stop living. Not off himself. Just give in quietly. Stop breathing with the TV on.

Plumb Beach wasn’t on the way, but Conway backtracked on the Belt. You could only get there by a short lane exit off the eastbound side after Knapp Street.

A parking lot was split in half on either side of the...