One option was to go for the weekly B12 shots and, at the same time, go to work as usual and hope for the best. That meant no all-night stakeouts, firefights, or hand-to-hand combat with insane gunmen. In other words, I could not safely do what I called my job.
Or I could get the weekly shots and take a medical leave, as directed by my doctor. During that time Conklin would get a new partner, and I would lose my place in Homicide. I just hated that thought. It was roughly equivalent to closing my eyes and jumping into a sinkhole.
I said, “Brady, my condition is … how can I say this? It’s serious. I have something called pernicious anemia.”
“You’re saying you’re anemic?”
“It’s a form of anemia. The causes are various and so are the symptoms, but it has to do with my blood being unable to absorb vitamin B12. If I don’t deal with this situation pronto, it could damage organs and nerves, or could become something worse. Years back I had aplastic anemia, and that really could have killed me.”
Brady kept his eyes fixed on me. He was reading me.
“This pernicious kind. You’re heading it off right now, right? And so you say it’s treatable? Reversible?”
“I’ve got a good doctor. I need shots every week for a while. And Doc wants me to take time off.”
“Please, Boxer. Do what you’re supposed to do. Take whatever time you need.”
“He says a couple of months. He said I have to do a whole mind and body reset. Sleep, you know, whatever that is. Meditation would be good. See him on schedule. Get better.”
Brady smiled. “You. Lying around the house.”
I tried to smile back, then I shook my head. Brady put his hand on my arm.
“Be a good girl, will you, Boxer?”
“Yes. I will. I have no choice.”
Brady said, “I might as well tell you something you’re going to hear soon anyway.”
“Shoot,” I said.
Brady checked his phone, sent someone a reply, then came back to me. He told me that Jacobi was being retired out, as a result of a case Conklin and I had worked about a year and a half ago involving a crew of dirty cops. After the fallout, the body count had been, all told, about nineteen guilty and innocent souls.
I said to Brady, “IAD is hanging it on Jacobi?”
“Accountability goes with the job,” he said.
I felt tears welling up. Not only was I at a personal low, I was taking this blame-Jacobi news personally.
“Who is replacing him?” I asked.
Brady shrugged. “To be decided.”
Then he said, “Go home, Lindsay. Fight this pernicious anemia. It’s something you have control over. Other than that, don’t worry about a thing. It’ll all work out somehow. You get better, and when you get a green light from your doctor, come back. Not a second before.”
He leaned over, kissed my cheek, said, “Love you, Linds. Be good to yourself. I’ll talk to you soon.”
Then he got out of my car. I sat there and watched him cross Harriet Street and disappear behind a line of parked cars on his way up to the squad room.
“Don’t worry about a thing,” he’d said.
What, me worry?
But he was right. I counseled myself to get a grip on the one thing I might be able to use to save myself. I had to stay home. Spend more time with Julie and Joe and Martha. It would be quite interesting to find out who I was when not working a homicide case.
I couldn’t put it off any longer. I had to go home and give Joe the news.
CHAPTER 101
I HADN’T SEEN Jacobi since the hammer came down, but I’d called him the day after he walked out of the Hall for the last time to ask how he was doing.
“You know how it is, Boxer. Sometimes you’re the dog. Sometimes you’re the tree.”
I commiserated. For different reasons, we were both feeling like trees.
We had a breakfast date this morning. Not in the break room with passed-over donuts, but at an actual eatery in Jacobi’s section of town.
He lives in Hayes Valley. Gentrified not long ago, it has shaken off the rough edges and is now littered with cute little restaurants and bars and boutiques; a nice place to visit. Jacobi’s house holds down the end of a block on Ivy Street and is one of many single-family and multifamily wood-frame houses, built closely together, facing sidewalks lined with young red-flowering gum trees.
I parked my Explorer behind my old friend’s Hyundai SUV and called him on my phone.
“Lindsay?”
“Who else?”
“You’re not the only woman I know,” he said, laughing.
“I’ll be right down.”
A couple of minutes later he came down the zigzag of wooden steps from his living quarters over his wide-body garage. He looked the same as always: gray haired, with hooded eyes, walking with a limp, and wearing a leather flight jacket handed down to him from an uncle who’d fought in the Korean War.
But he looked different to me now. He hadn’t aged. It was nothing as obvious as that. He didn’t even look depressed.
He looked lighter. Like a man who had been retired before he was ready to go, but was glad that the load was off his back. He was grinning when he crossed the street and I crossed the street toward him.
We opened our arms and hugged in the middle of Ivy, and man, it felt good.
Jacobi had stood in for my awful father before, and he was doing it now, even as I had come to comfort him.
He might have heard my strangled sob.
“Do not go wobbly on me, Boxer. I may be fat, I may be pushing sixty, but here I am.”
“Let’s get out of the road,” I said, “so that those aren’t your last words.”
Playa del Oro was a little Mexican joint sandwiched between a shoe repair shop and an art gallery. We ordered huevos rancheros and tea and talked about how we’d come to this unexpected place in our lives.
He said, “Boxer, I’m not an innocent party. I didn’t know Ted Swanson had assembled a robbery crew, but I should have known. I have to be accountable. If I were the mayor, jeez, Louise—someone had to pay. Obviously the buck stopped at my door. And hey, it came with full retirement pay.”
“That part is awesome,” I said.
“And pretty soon, Medicare.” Jacobi grinned broadly, looking lighter and younger by the minute. He said, “But enough about me. Tell me how you’re doing. Don’t leave anything out.”
I told him, “I feel pretty good but like I’m playing hooky. I’m supposed to be on the job. I mean, shit happens and then you die, right? But this is a case of shit happens and you get to stay home, watch movies, and collect a pay-check.”
“Go figure,” said Jacobi. “We’ve got the same deal. But there’s upside for both of us. Your job is to rest up and heal. Mine is to get back to my fighting weight. My doctor told me to lose the bowling ball or else, and when he described ‘or else,’ I definitely didn’t want it.”
I pointed to the dish of chocolate chili cake with a side of churros our waitress had put down in front of us, and he laughed. “I know, I know, but this is a special occasion, old friend. I’m going to cut down on the carbs and start walking. I might get a dog.”
“How about this, Chief? Why don’t we get together to walk my dog every week or so. Or our dogs. We could go to a museum once in a while, take in a ball game. Fight back against enforced home confinement.”
“I like the sound of that, Boxer.”
We grinned at each other, reached across the small round table laden with sweets, and shook on it.
I said, “We’re both fighters.”
Jacobi said, “And fighters win.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Our thanks to those who shared their time and expertise with us in the creation of this book: Judge Kevin Rathburn of Saumico, Wisconsin, Northeast Wisconsin Technical College; Attorney Steven Rabinowitz, Pryor Cashman, New York City, for his wise counsel: and Captain Richard Conklin, BCI commander, Stamford, Connecticut, Police Department. And gratitude to the home team, Mary Jordan, John A. Duffy, and our amazing researcher, Ingrid Taylar, West Coast, USA.
THE ONE WHO KNOWS THE SECRETS IS THE ONE WHO HOLDS THE POWER. CAN NYPD RED FIND THE TRUTH BEFORE A CITY EXPLODES?
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THERE WERE ONLY four words beneath the tattoo of the Grim Reaper on Aubrey Davenport’s inner left thigh. But they spoke volumes.