Rizzo’s Fire Read online

  Rizzo nodded, using his T-shirt sleeve to clear sweat from his eyes.

  “Yeah,” he said. Then after a moment, he shook his head in disbelief. “Can you imagine this? With all I’ve seen over the years? The dead babies, the dozens of murders, the burned corpses, the shooting vics, every goddamned thing. All of that, never a nightmare. But that one kid, that one poor kid, still haunting me after all these years.” He shook his head again. “It just doesn’t make sense.”

  Jennifer shifted her body, facing him more directly.

  “Well,” she said, rubbing gently at the knot of muscle in his powerful shoulder. “Like I’ve said before, you were just a kid yourself. Probably the same age she was. And you had just started on the force. An experience like that can stay with you.”

  Rizzo reached to his night table for a Nicorette packet. “Yeah,” he said, tearing at the cellophane. “But still. Twenty-seven years later, almost. Enough already.”

  Jennifer nodded, unsure of what else to say. “Well, it’s over now. Try to relax.”

  Later, as he lay in bed listening to Jennifer’s shower hiss from the master bath, he replayed that long-ago day in his mind for the thousandth time.

  It had been his very first morning tour, in the old Seventy-fifth Precinct, on the Brooklyn-Queens border. It was a Sunday morning, just past seven a.m., less than an hour remaining on the tour. His training officer, a twenty-year veteran who had harbored no ambition beyond a sector car patrol, had parked the Plymouth on a wooded, deserted stretch of ser vice road lying north of the Belt Parkway. The cop, Sonny Carusso, sat asleep behind the wheel. “Cooping,” the old-timers had called it back in those days.

  Rizzo had watched the skies over Jamaica Bay dawn with a new April morning and now sat struggling with the Sunday News crossword. Then suddenly, the old Motorola shortwave, hanging in silence from its bracket on the under dash of the Plymouth, crackled to life.

  Magically, at the sound of the dispatch, Carusso’s eyes opened. With hooded lids, he glanced first at the radio, then to Rizzo.

  “That’s us, kid,” he said, glancing at his wristwatch. “Bad fuckin’ timin’ to be pickin’ up a call.”

  Rizzo reached out and took the hand mike, keying it and sending a terse “ten-four” back to dispatch.

  Carusso sat up in his seat and slipped the car into gear, wiping the sleep from his eyes with his left hand.

  “Write the time on the recorder sheet,” he told Rizzo. “Oh-seven oh-six. And the job location.”

  Carusso accelerated harshly, the valve train in the battered Plymouth V-8 rattling with the sudden strain. He raced eastbound along the ser vice road, the car’s red dome light swirling, then slowed sharply, swinging a harsh U-turn and hurling the car onto the westbound entrance ramp of the Belt Parkway.

  They reached the scene in moments. Rizzo noted the half dozen autos randomly scattered on the highway, blocking two of its three westbound lanes. Carusso wove the radio car deftly through the crowd of citizens who stood in the roadway, touching the horn rim and sporadically sounding short “wup-wup” siren bursts.

  A body lay facedown on the concrete of the highway, straddling the entrance merge and right-hand traffic lanes.

  Rizzo hurried to the body, that of a young woman—blond, naked, her body raked with bloody scrape marks. The back of her skull glistened with gray-red slime, the bone crushed, blood and exposed brain matter pulsating with each of her rapid heartbeats, welling from the skull and flowing in meandering rivulets across the pale skin of her neck and back.

  Rizzo bent to one knee, his throat constricting, his own heart rate rapidly increasing. He tentatively reached out a hand, unable to bring himself to touch the naked flesh.

  “It wasn’t my fault!” he heard someone say, and Rizzo turned to look over his shoulder. A man, about thirty, tall, hair disheveled by the wind blowing across the highway, was imploring Carusso. “She ran out right in front of me, right out of the bushes, right in front of my car. I swerved, I tried to miss her, but … but … I couldn’t.”

  Carusso took the man by the arm, leading him toward the shoulder of the roadway.

  “Joe,” he said as he walked, “get on the horn … see what’s holdin’ the ambulance. Hurry up.”

  Rizzo stood on weakened legs, turning and running back to the radio car. Frantically, he radioed for expedited medical backup. Then he went back to the girl, again kneeling at her side.

  During his four years of ser vice as an Army M.P., Rizzo had seen some ugly things, things he preferred not to think about. But never had he seen anything like this. As he looked down at the woman, the girl, an eerie, dry hollow rattle suddenly sounded from deep within her chest cavity. Simultaneously, the pulsating blood from the head wound went oddly still. It began to pool within the skull, filling the depth of the depression and again spilling slowly onto the already bloodstained pavement.

  Rizzo glanced up over his shoulder at Carusso, now standing above and behind him. “She just died,” he heard the older cop say. “It’s over.” Rizzo stood slowly, his hands trembling, his breath coming in short, shallow gasps.

  Carusso took him by the arm.

  “Hey, kid,” he said softly. “Get hold of yourself. Stiffen up. Go see if there’s anything in the trunk. We gotta cover her up a little, give her some dignity. She don’t need to have her ass out here on display. Go ahead. Go find somethin’.”

  Later, Rizzo examined the abandoned car hidden in the bushes off the side of the highway. It was an old Dodge, the engine still hot, ticking in the April morning air with an eerie cadence.

  The woman had been stripped naked, sexually assaulted, and savagely beaten in her own car. The medical examiner would later determine there had been at least two assailants involved. At some point, the girl had broken free, terrified and panicked, running blindly from the car and into the path of oncoming highway traffic. There she had been struck with violent force and dragged under a car, then ultimately thrown free from its undercarriage. The terrified driver, hearing her body thump and thrash beneath the floorboard, swerved and skidded off the roadway onto the grass shoulder.

  The responding detectives examined the Dodge, but it had yielded no usable clues. The case remained open, no arrest had ever been made.

  Now, nearly twenty-seven years later, Joe Rizzo lay on his bed staring at the ceiling.

  The dream came periodically. Often, at first, then once or twice a year. Lately, he had gone nearly two years without having it, and Rizzo thought he knew what had triggered it this time.

  He swung his legs off the bed and sighed, sitting up and rubbing at his face.

  The dream was always the same. They were alone on the highway. Just Rizzo and the body. No vehicles, no Carusso, no citizens. The cold wind blew over the desolate scene, chilling him.

  The girl, scarred, battered, bloody, and naked against the dirty, cold concrete of the roadway, gave her death rattle. The pulsating blood went still, tranquil, inanimate.

  Rizzo held a soiled blanket. Gently, he covered the girl’s naked body and face. As he stood on the empty highway, the wind rushing in his ears, gazing down at the covered corpse, his eyes began to tear.

  Then, slowly, the blanket began to stir. The young woman pulled the blanket from her face with a bloodied, trembling hand. Rizzo stepped back suddenly, enveloped in a fear that overwhelmed his grief. He stared at the pretty young face, blond hair wisping lightly in the breeze against the skin, the eyes now wide open. Blue, sharp, piercing. The pale lips parted, and in a throaty, wet voice, the young woman pleaded to him. “Help me,” she said.

  Terrified, he backed farther away, his bowels going loose with fear.

  “Help me,” she whispered, desperation and chilling terror in her eyes. “You’re a cop. Help me. Please.”

  Then he would awaken, violently sweating, arms flailing, panic-stricken. Time after time.

  Rizzo sighed. “And that,” he said aloud, “is the reality of it.”

  “The reality of what?
” he heard suddenly. Startled, he turned quickly. Jennifer, rubbing at her hair with a fluffy towel, stood naked in the bathroom doorway.

  “The reality of being a cop,” he said to her. Rizzo shook his head sadly. “That’s what Carol doesn’t get. What she doesn’t understand.”

  Jennifer crossed the room, sitting beside him on the bed.

  “Is this about that damn nightmare of yours?” she asked.

  He nodded. “Yeah. That’s what triggered it this time, this business with Carol going on the cops. She figures she’ll be a big hero, Charlie’s friggin’ Angel, riding to the rescue in her blue-and-white. Then she’ll spend the next twenty years learning the truth. How you wind up kneeling on the road watchin’ some kid die, with some old cop tellin’ you to note the time. For the incident report. Note the time and go get a goddamned blanket.”

  Jennifer laid a hand on his shoulder but remained silent. Rizzo glanced at her face, saw the tension in her jaw.

  Forcing a smile to his lips, he leaned over and gently kissed her cheek, laying a soft hand on her thigh.

  “We’ll handle it, Jen,” he said. “Believe me, we’ll handle it.”

  She nodded, still silent, grim-faced.

  He nuzzled her ear. “We need to have a date soon, hon,” he said, lightening his tone, willing his body to relax. “Okay?” he asked.

  “A date?” she said, a small smile forming. “You mean, like when we were in high school?”

  Rizzo allowed his own smile to broaden. “Well,” he said, “considering you’re sitting next to me naked on the bed, I figure more of a college-type date. Remember?”

  Jennifer brushed his hand from her thigh and stood. She removed the towel from her head, shaking her dark hair free.

  “Yes, of course I remember. But relax, sailor, let’s not start ‘dating’ just now. I’ve got to get to work.”

  “Well, then, get that nice-lookin’ ass out of my face or you may be late for homeroom.”

  Jennifer laughed, her tension nearly gone, and spun from his exaggerated efforts to grab her, disappearing back into the bathroom and slamming the door behind her.

  Later, as they sipped coffee at the kitchen table, Rizzo now in his bathrobe, Jennifer dressed and ready for work, he saw the tension return to her face.

  “Can we really do it, Joe?” she asked. “Can we really handle this with Carol?”

  He smiled, trying to convey a confidence he didn’t feel.

  “Sure we can,” he said. “This expedited hiring they announced, that shook me a little, I admit. I figured we had more time. But … I got a plan.”

  Jennifer glanced at the wall clock. “I have a few minutes. Tell me. What’s your plan?”

  He shrugged. “Well, it’s nothing new. What we’ve always done with the girls. All three of ’em. The truth. My plan is the simple, friggin’ truth.”

  She leaned in over the table, closer to him. “Meaning what?” she asked.

  “The Daily thing, for one,” Rizzo said. “That whole mess me and Mike stumbled into. The tape I got stashed in the basement. The whole fuckin’ mess. And that other business, the internal affairs thing that drunk Morelli got me jammed up with. That whole rotten ball of crap. I’m gonna tell Carol about it. All of it. How I.A.D. was squeezin’ me to rat out Morelli; how I played Councilman Daily to use his juice to squash it. I’m gonna tell her how me and Mike are sittin’ on that tape—withholding evidence, riskin’ an accessory charge, all because we couldn’t trust anybody, couldn’t go to the bosses with any confidence. And let’s face it, to grease our own wheels, too. To get Mike to the Plaza, get Cil her gold shield, get me some pensionable overtime. I’m gonna tell her that to fight them, to do what she would consider the ‘right’ thing, we had to become them, no great difference between us. Not in Carol’s world, anyway. I’m gonna lay it all out for her. Make her see that her daddy’s not some knight on a white horse. No, Daddy’s just a street fighter, fighting both sides of every battle. And in the real world, that’s what makes a good cop. The fire to fight the fire and still survive. It’s not right, it’s not wrong. It just is.”

  Now Rizzo paused, allowing himself to calm down. “The fire to fight the fire,” he repeated. “That and the blanket. Always the blanket.”

  He sighed. “To cover up the bodies,” he said softly, nodding. “To cover up the fuckin’ bodies.”

  LATER THAT morning, Rizzo sat sipping coffee and looking into the bright, animated eyes of his youngest daughter, Carol.

  “Nice place,” he said, eyeing their surroundings. “I always liked it here.”

  “Yes,” Carol answered, reaching for her own container of coffee. “It is pretty cool.”

  The Student Activities Center sat squarely in the middle of the Academic Mall on the sprawling Long Island campus of Stony Brook State University.

  Now Carol smiled across the small round table at her father, her light brown eyes twinkling under the fluorescent lighting.

  “So,” she said casually. “To what do I owe the honor of this unexpected visit from my father.”

  Rizzo nodded slightly. “Fair question, I guess,” he said.

  She put her coffee down and twisted her lips as she spoke. “Bet I can guess,” she said.

  Rizzo laughed. “Yeah, I bet you can.” Then, after a small pause, his face grew somber. Leaning inward on the table, he interlocked his fingers, laying his hands atop the table’s cool surface.

  “The test,” he said. “Next week.”

  Carol sighed. “What about it, Daddy?” she asked, her voice firm.

  “Would you have been right?” he asked. “If you had guessed, I mean?”

  Carol, without amusement, nodded. She waited for him to continue.

  After another pause, he did. “There’s no reason for you to take it, hon,” he said. “Why sit through a couple a hours of a police entrance exam for a job you’re not gonna take anyway?”

  Carol shook her short brown hair. “Except I am going to take it,” she answered, her tone clipped. “As soon as I clear the medical and physical and psychological.” She paused, holding her father’s cool gaze. “I am going to take it,” she repeated. “It’s what I want.”

  Rizzo shook his head, the carefully rehearsed and chosen words of his argument fading to a slight, panicky anger.

  “It’s a bad idea,” he said.

  “Is it?” Carol said, more forcefully than she had intended. “For who? Me … or you?”

  Rizzo’s anger rose. “For you,” he said, his voice cold.

  Carol shook her head sadly. “Really? Are all cops bad liars, Dad, or just you?”

  Rizzo grunted with bitterness. “The best liars in the world are cops, Carol,” he said. “That’s one of the first things you learn when you go on this job. How to lie.” He shrugged. “If I had a dollar for every time I testified without perjurin’ myself, I couldn’t pay for these two coffees.”

  She gave a humorless laugh. “Okay, Dad, exaggerate. Anything to help you make your point.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t have to exaggerate to make my point. The truth is more than good enough. All I’m saying is being a cop isn’t a good career for a young girl, a young person. It’s not the kinda life you want to lead, Carol, it’s—”

  His daughter cut him off, her own anger now tugging at her facial muscles. “Just what makes you think you know what kind of a life I want to lead?” she said. “Wasn’t it you, you and Mom, who lectured us every damn day about how we could be this, we could be that, anything a boy could do, we could do? Wasn’t that you? Now, all of a sudden—”

  Rizzo interrupted. “This has nothin’ to do with that,” he said, more harshly than he had intended. “Yeah, you could be a cop, just as good a cop as any son of mine coulda been. But you know what? If you were my son, I’d be tellin’ you the same thing. Yeah, you can be a good cop, you can be a good ax murderer, too. But that don’t mean you should be one, just ’cause you can be.”

  “But Daddy …”

 
; Rizzo shook his head so sharply, the movement transferred to the tiny table, shaking their coffee containers. “The job isn’t what you think it is,” he said. “Maybe it never was, but it sure as hell isn’t these days. You wanna be some kinda hero, you wanna change the world, saves lives? Become a schoolteacher, like your mother. You think I ever prevented a crime? You think I ever made a friggin’ difference? Maybe once, twice in twenty-seven years. The resta the time, I was too late—the woman was already raped, the baby already thrown out the window, the pizza delivery guy already shot to death for the twenty bucks he was carryin’. It’s always already done, Carol, you don’t stop it from happening.”

  Now it was Carol who shook her head sharply. “That’s total B.S., and you know it. You’re only saying that to make a point. All those arrests you made over the years, hundreds, maybe a thousand. You have no way of knowing how many crimes, how much grief and suffering you prevented, how many lives you saved by putting all those criminals behind bars. You know it’s true, Daddy, you know—”

  “It sucks the life outta you,” he said, his anger now clashing with a sudden onset of depression welling in his chest. “It eats at you, a little bit at a time, till one day you wake up and you ain’t there anymore. Somebody else is. Somebody you partnered with years ago, when you were a rookie, some old cop long retired, or dead. And now he’s back, wearin’ your clothes, livin’ your life.” Rizzo’s eyes implored her. “Believe me, honey. It sucks the life outta you. It puts out your fire. Like a slow, constant trickle of water, drop by drop, bit by bit, till the fire is all gone.”

  Carol, so self-assured just moments before, now sat studying her father’s face, her resolve wavering with the sight of him so upset.

  “All right, Daddy,” she said, her tone now soft. “I realize it can be a difficult life. But anything worthwhile is difficult.” She smiled. “Another one of the things you taught me.”

  “Don’t make me fight my own words, Carol,” he said. “Please.”

  “You’re not,” she said, leaning closer to him, laying a hand on his arm. “You’re fighting the truth. Those words you spoke years ago. That’s what they were, the truth.”