Hurt Machine Read Free Page A

call an adult relationship. One weekend a month I’d visit her. One weekend a month she’d come down to Brooklyn. Twice a year we’d go on week-long trips together. We enjoyed each other’s company and more than satisfied each other’s needs while managing to avoid the minefield of married sex. I hadn’t really thought about it until now, but married sex was sort of a peculiar mix of comfort and resentment. Between Sarah’s wedding and my ticking clock, I imagined I’d be thinking about a lot of things I’d let slide until now.
    Pam, as unconvinced by my lie as I had been by her smile, was already headed back home. She was working an insurance fraud case that she thought would keep her busy for the next couple of weeks. I had a case to work too, probably my last case, my last chance for redemption. As atheists go, I guess I was a dreadful disappointment. I unfolded the paper Carmella had given to me that morning and punched in her phone number.

FOUR
     
    We met on the boardwalk in Coney Island near Nathan’s. The sun was strong. The wind stronger and fragrant too. It smelled of salt from the sea, of sunscreen lotion, and of hot oil. It smelled so intensely of hot dogs and French fries that I imagined I could hear them sizzle and bubble.
    “Why meet here?” I asked, turning to face the beach.
    “I used to work the Six-O too, remember?”
    “Yeah, but it’s also the place where—”
    “—that scumbag took me from my family and raped me when I was a little girl. You know, when I first found out this was where the department was assigning me after making detective, I almost said no, but you know how the job was back then. I wouldn’t get no second chance. They woulda stuck me behind a desk at One PP and made me a fucking showpiece. When the department wanted to prove women and minorities were getting ahead, they’d have wheeled out the hot piece of Puerto Rican ass and her shiny gold shield for the press. And when they were done making their point, they’d have put me back on the shelf until the next time they needed to flash my shield and pussy for the cameras. No, Moe, that man who did those things to me when I was a girl, he took too much from me. I wasn’t gonna let him take my career away from me too.”
    “Still …”
    “I like it here because it reminds me of the best of us. I loved you everywhere, but I loved you here most of all, in this place. Coney Island is your place, Moe. When you die, they should just bury you right here, under the boardwalk.”
    I bit my lip and nodded, my palm pressing against my abdomen.
    “Was that your girlfriend yesterday, the one who was staring at me?”
    “Girlfriend? At my age, it seems like such a silly word, doesn’t it?”
    “You got a better one?”
    “I guess not. Pam’s her name.”
    “She’s very pretty,” Carmella said.
    “She said something similar about you, but that’s not why we’re here, right? I checked into Alta’s murder.”
    “So you know about the other thing.”
    “About her and her partner not treating Tillman? Yeah, I know what you can know from the internet, which isn’t much. Do you think the two things are connected?”
    “You know I do. Any good detective can do simple math,” she said. “Alta became a target the second those stories about Tillman’s death surfaced.”
    “What do the cops think?”
    “I don’t know what they think. Nobody’s talking.”
    “Not even to you?”
    “Not even to me.”
    I was surprised at that. As a rule, cops are a chatty bunch, especially with other cops. Put a few beers and some Jameson in them and the yak factor goes way up. Add Carmella’s obvious charms to that mix and the chat factor grows exponentially. While Carmella hadn’t exactly been Miss Popularity with the brass, she did have a good rep with her peers—some of whom were still on the job in high places. And she’d taken a bullet in the line of duty, which earned her a lot of respect even from the hardass old-timers