Allegiant started making his way toward the discussion. Now he and Annoyed looked like fraternal twins.
Eager threw up his hand as if to stop the two of them from getting an inch closer, and stop they did. He knelt before me, which made me the taller one.
With a throaty whisper, he said, “Now, this is important. What can you tell me about them?”
“Are they okay?”
“What did they look like?”
“I don’t know. Plain. The girl was pretty, had blond curls, danced on the sidewalk.”
“What did the man look like?”
“Plain,” I said. “Did anything happen to them?”
“I need you to tell me everything you know about them.” He hesitated, then, “I need to make sure they’re safe and sound.”
That bastard. He used my obvious anxiety for the family, for the little girl, against me, manipulated the innocence of a kid to garner a pat on the back. I haven’t felt the same about cops since.
I let out a nervous sigh and started rubbing my temples. “Um, they were from New Jersey.”
He inched closer, his shoes making a scraping sound against the cement. “How do you know this?”
“Their license tags.”
Annoyed took a step in our direction, but Eager still had his hand up. As for Allegiant, he couldn’t have gotten back into Vincent’s faster if someone had loaded him into a shotgun and fired, though by his swagger he made it appear like his purpose was procedural.
Eager swallowed like he’d been salivating. “Do you remember the license plates?”
Fig Newton. Florence Nightingale.
“FN… uh, FN something. Started with FN. Had an eight in it.”
Eager started scribbling on a notepad.
From the corner of my eye I could see a herd of Sicilians running in my direction. At that moment, the vertigo kicked in.
From a distance I heard, “Questioning a minor without his parents’ presence or permission?”
It turns out that means nothing, but it disabled me. A wall of olive skin was coming to rescue me—from causing irreparable damage.
Eager leaned in and asked quickly, like I might take a bullet and he had one last shot to get the goods, “What kind of car was it?”
The Italians were closing in.
The little girl was fading out.
The words dribbled from my voice as though they were my last. “Olds. Silver. Cutlass Sierra.”
What occurred next is much like what a defensive tackle must feel like when he recovers a fumbled ball: bodies coming from every direction, along with a clear understanding that the best you can do is fall on the ball and take the turnover; leave the touchdown for the offense. The only difference here is that Eager did not get leveled, but merely surrounded.
The discussion was over.
The men shepherded me back into Vincent’s, never sent a harsh word my way. They spoke to one another in Italian about how I was the one that was wronged in this ordeal. Their deference and protection of me were pure, things I never doubted—though for the first time I failed to comprehend the justification. My father came to me and put his hand behind my neck, turned his mouth into a consoling half-smile as though I’d failed a test for which I’d spent my life preparing. “Let’s get you something to eat, Johnny,” he said, then kissed me on the head. I curled into his safe hands like a sleepy baby.
The cops took pictures, swabbed drying puddles and stains, did a lot of head-scratching. People gossiped in the streets, in the stores, on the front steps of brownstones.
I didn’t see a thing.
I didn’t hear a thing.
I don’t know nothin’.
At 10:35 a.m. on that same Sunday, Eager performed a query on New Jersey’s Department of Transportation vehicle registration database.
Number of Oldsmobiles registered in the state of NJ:
2,323
Number of Oldsmobiles registered in the state of NJ, model: Cutlass Sierra:
675
Number of Oldsmobiles registered in the state of NJ, model: Cutlass Sierra, color: silver: 177
Number of Oldsmobiles registered in the state of NJ, model: Cutlass Sierra, color: silver, registered tags possessing characters F, N, 8:
1
At 11:08 a.m., Allegiant performed the exact same query.
What followed was little more than a simple race: two sets of men attempting to acquire the same bounty.
At eight minutes past noon, a large black vehicle with tinted windows pulled into the driveway of a modest Cape Cod in Montclair Township, New Jersey. The vehicle was not a police car. Out stepped three large men, firearms safely tucked beneath their clothes, determination in their strides.
The house held the McCartney family: Arthur, a chemist;