Apaches Read Free Page A

felony arrests and convictions than any other New York City cop. The job consumed him; he lived it and loved it. He never married and had no desire for a family. A bullet had killed his father, had left his mother alone at night, crying herself to sleep. He was a cop and he knew his bullet could arrive at any moment. He didn’t want to leave anyone behind.
    Boomer kept his pleasures to a minimum. He worked out regularly, running as many as twelve miles each morning, long before it became fashionable. He would allow nothing to get in the way of the run. During all-day stakeouts, Boomer would, at some point, jump into the backseat, change into sweats, bolt from the car, and hit the pavement.
    “What do I do if they come out while you’re gone?” a stunned new partner once asked.
    “That’s why they gave you a badge and a gun too,” Boomer told him.
    “They’re gonna know you’re a cop,” his partner whined. “The minute you step outta the car, they’re gonna know.”
    “They already know I’m a cop,” Boomer said. “I’ve been sitting in front of their house all day.”
    “I ain’t takin’ ’em down alone.”
    “I’ll be back if you need me,” Boomer said, starting his run.
    “How you gonna know if I need you?” his partner asked.
    “You’ll be miles away.”
    “I’ll hear you scream,” Boomer said, turning a corner, eager to break a sweat.
    •    •    •
    T HE DARK WEIGHT Boomer Frontieri carried into his work grew heavier through the years. He felt surrounded by the face and smell of death. It had touched many ofthose around him, from partners to family members to street friends, but had merely toyed with him, hanging him from the brink before returning him to the safety net of a dangerous life.
    When his mother died from a stroke in a New York Hospital bed, Boomer was asleep on his stomach in a crosstown hospital as a nervous intern sewed thirty-six stitches down his back, closing up a razor slash, courtesy of a pimp riding a cocaine high. His baby sister Maria, a month shy of her thirtieth birthday, was killed crossing a Jackson Heights street; the hit from a drunk driver’s front end sent her through the window of a shuttered bar. Boomer had to go to her funeral on crutches, his ankles shattered from a two-story fall off a fire escape. His brother, Carmine, suffered a severe heart attack when he was thirty-one years old and sat home in Bellmore, Long Island, living hand-to-mouth on a small disability pension. Boomer would spend time with him, the emptiness of his brother’s life further fueling his own thirst for action.
    Three of Boomer’s seven partners died in the line of duty, each working by his side.
    The majority of cops go through their entire careers never pulling gun from holster. Boomer was not one of those. He viewed his job under a bright, unmistakable moral light. To him, it was all a battle for turf. The dealers were foreign invaders. The more of them who went down, the safer it would be for a man heading to work, looking to keep a family fed and warm.
    The truth be known, he enjoyed his dance with death. And that made him the deadliest type of cop to have on the street, the kind who never thinks he will live long enough to see a pension. In his years on the force, plainclothes and detective, Boomer had been involved in fourteen serious shootouts, half a dozen knifings, and hundreds of street fights. Once, his car was machine-gunned to pieces while he sat in his favorite Italian restaurant, eating a plate of pasta with red clam sauce.
    “You just going to sit there and let them do that to your car?” asked his date, Andrea, a dark-haired detective working out of a Brooklyn fingerprint unit.
    “It
was
my car,” Boomer said, wiping his pasta plate with a chunk of Italian bread. “Sold it to Pete Lucas over in Vice a couple of days ago.”
    “What are you going to tell him?”
    Boomer sipped from a glass of red wine and looked through the window at the shell