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from his wound, Skeeter’s dead body stretched across his chest. He closed his eyes, willing himself to another place.
    The growl of a dog shook him from his dream.
    Boomer turned his head to his left and saw a dark gray pit bull. Boomer hated dogs, big or small. But he especially hated pit bulls.
    “Let me take a wild guess,” he said, pointing to the body on top of him. “This guy belongs to you.”
    The dog stared and continued to growl and sniff for a minute or two, then turned and walked out of the building.
    “Doesn’t say much about you, does it, Skeeter?” Boomer said to the dead man. “When your own dog doesn’t give a shit whether you live or die.”
    •    •    •
    B OOMER STARED AT the retirement papers in his hands, thick triplicate forms filled with numbers and statistics. They were all one big blur, none of the information making any sense. All that was clear to him was the reality of a fall down a set of tenement banisters and halfa lung now missing from his chest. That one rusty iron rail had landed him what the beat cops liked to call “the policeman’s lotto.” A nifty three-quarter, tax-free disability pension doled out for the rest of his life.
    Based on his 1980 earnings, complete with overtime and vacation days due him, Boomer’s yearly take averaged out to a clean $38,500 a year. Plus full health coverage. Boomer Frontieri was only thirty-eight years old, and there should have been a smile as wide as a canyon on his face. Instead, on that drab early December morning in 1980, all Boomer wanted to do was find someplace quiet and cry.
    Boomer had survived dozens of other wounds, healed up and returned to wear the shield once again. Not this time. Not with half a lung slowing his breath and a right leg that couldn’t give him more than a quarter of a mile’s run without crumbling in pain. Not even Boomer Frontieri could make it on the streets spotting the shooters those handicaps.
    He could never be a cop again.
    He took three weeks off and traveled to Italy, visiting his father’s hometown of Reggio Calabria, talking to the old men and women who remembered the young John Frontieri. He spent his afternoons walking through the nearby hills as the towns below him slept through the heat. He briefly toyed with the notion of moving there full-time, but let the thought escape, knowing it was not truly the place where he belonged.
    His first six months of retirement were spent fitfully and without much sleep. He went to movies, plays, museums, read books, even caught an opera at the Met, something he hadn’t done since his father was killed. None of it seemed to shake him from his mental slumber. None of what he saw, read, or heard brought him peace. He still jumped with anticipation whenever he heard a police siren off in the distance. His instincts still told him which of the faces he passed on crowdedstreets were dirty, which were looking for the easy score. He still carried a gun, his old police revolver, which he bought from the department, and he carried a replica of his detective’s badge in his back pocket. He even kept his cuffs, tossed in a desk drawer in his apartment. He often looked at them in the sad way a middle-aged man looks upon a photo of an old girlfriend.
    He stayed away from other cops. They would only serve as a reminder of what he so desperately missed. He avoided the bars they drank in and the restaurants he knew they frequented. He limited his nights of eating and drinking to one place, Nunzio’s, a small, out-of-the-way Italian restaurant on West Ninety-sixth Street, near the entrance to the Henry Hudson Parkway. The food was excellent, the drink plentiful, and the company just what he wanted it to be—quiet and distant.
    Most of the regulars at Nunzio’s were made mob guys near the end of their criminal careers. They had taken all the money they could, killed most of their enemies, and done their time. Now they were left alone to watch ball games, argue