Apaches Read Online Free PDF Page B

over old scores and cold feuds. They knew who Boomer was, and there was a time when they would have shunned him. Yet now, in a strange way, the cop was one of them, cast adrift, not a threat to anyone. On occasion they would even send a drink to his table.
    The restaurant was owned and managed by an old family friend, Nunzio Goldman. Boomer’s father first worked in the meat market for Nunzio’s Jewish father, Al, the Fourteenth Street boss who split his proceeds with the uptown Italian mob. On the streets, Al was known as the Rabbi, a man who would kill if he caught a dirty look. At home he was Anna Pasqualini’s husband, a quiet, reserved businessman who doted on his family. When the kids were older and Anna got restless, he opened Nunzio’s and put her in charge. After she died, their oldest son took over.
    “How come you’re the only one in the family who’sgot an Italian name?” Boomer once asked Nunzio, whose two brothers were named Daniel and Jacob.
    “Spite,” Nunzio said. “My father took one look down at me and said I had too much Italian blood to be Jewish. It was bad enough he fell in love with an Italian woman. Now this. So he let my mother name me. My other brothers, they got lucky. They were given names that fit. But I came out ahead of the game. They don’t have a restaurant. They gotta eat the slop their wives cook. You’re better off at Frank E. Campbell’s than at their dinner table.”
    Nunzio could always bring a smile to Boomer’s face. Make him forget the emptiness that gnawed at his insides. The old man made sure Boomer didn’t get too fond of the drink or spend too much time alone. He cared about his friend and didn’t want him to fall into the bars and cars cycle he’d seen other cops pursue. A man doesn’t have to die to end a life. Nunzio knew that.
    •    •    •
    B OOMER F RONTIERI WAS retired for two years before he was able to shake the ghosts that haunted his soul. For most retired cops, the wake-up call never comes. But Boomer Frontieri wasn’t just any cop. He was one of the best detectives the city of New York had ever seen. In his eighteen years on the job, he had made a lot of enemies. Many of them were in jail. Many others were dead. Many more walked the streets. Boomer was well aware of who they were and, more important, where they were.
    But, in the course of those eighteen years, Boomer Frontieri had also made a lot of friends. The helpless victims of those he dragged away in cuffs, the anonymous faces of their neighborhoods. Old or young, they all remembered a cop named Boomer Frontieri.
    It was a phone call from one who remembered that changed Boomer’s life. A call from a man he hadn’t talked to in years. About a little girl he had never met.
    Though he didn’t know it then, from the moment Boomer’s hand took the receiver from Nunzio, his course was set.

2
Dead-Eye
    H IS MOTHER CRIED when she heard the news. His father didn’t speak to him for three months. His two older brothers and younger sister avoided any contact. His friends in the Brooklyn neighborhood where he was born and raised couldn’t put together the words to ask him why. His girlfriend turned her back on him and his favorite high school teacher told him he was throwing the promise of a young life into a corner of a room.
    All this because Davis Winthrop decided to become a cop.
    On the streets he called home, a man walking by in a blue uniform or driving past in an unmarked sedan was seen not as friend but as foe. The skin behind that uniform or that wheel was more often than not pasty white. The eyes behind the badges were filled with anger, hate, or, worse, indifference. On the streets of Brownsville, Brooklyn, a policeman was anything but a friend.
    But Davis Winthrop didn’t feel that way. Never. He saw everything the others had seen. He had a number of friends who died mysteriously after being taken into custody for a minor offense. He heard the verbal abuse heaped on