One of the things Detective First Grade Robert Gentry liked about running the Accident Investigations Squad at Midtown South was that when he left the station house he left the work there as well.
Fender benders and buckets kicked over by window washers and pedestrians tripping over gas or water hoses didn’t depress him the way being a narc had for more than ten years, five of those spent deep undercover. Minor accidents didn’t have the same kind of despair and deterioration and rippling consequences as drug addiction. And major automobile or structural accidents were handled jointly by the NYPD and the Fire Department, with the ranking Fire Department official in command. All Gentry had to do was show up. When he came home at night he also didn’t have to wonder whose footsteps or shadows were behind him. And thanks to those long years he’d spent pretending to be Nick Argento, buyer and seller of hard drugs, he no longer had a wife to worry about. For Gentry, worrying that he’d been found out by a pusher or smuggler who’d gotten to the house and to Priscilla had always been his greatest fear.
Police Commissioner Joe Veltre had personally selected Gentry to run the small, relatively cushy AIS nearly six months before. It was the equivalent of a papal dispensation, since Veltre’s appointment as top cop had been given a big boost by Gentry’s successful antidrug efforts.
Gentry usually quit the station house around six P.M., leaving the report writing to Detectives Second Grade Jason Anthony and Jen Malcolm. Anthony in particular enjoyed the detail work. He’d come over from the Multi-Agency Salvage Yard Task Force and said it was gratifying to make order out of chaos.
Maybe. All it did for Gentry was make him want to look out the dirty office window and think. Think about the past. About that one here-then-gone instant that had taken him from narcotics to where he was. Think about Bernie Michaelson and what it had been like to have a partner, to be closer to someone than he’d ever managed to be with his wife. Think about how he missed that-and Bernie. They had been so attuned to each other that even when they hadn’t been able to speak, the movement of an eyebrow, the slope of a shoulder, the shape of a smile told the other one everything he needed to know.
As he usually did, even in the most inclement weather, the thirty-three-year-old NYPD veteran walked downtown from the station house on West Thirty-fifth Street. It was nearly two miles to the West Village, and he enjoyed every block of it. He loved the half sentences of lives he heard as people passed. He loved the smells of restaurants and delis and roasted peanuts hawked by street-corner vendors. He loved the loud tabloid headlines and magazine covers he caught as he passed racks or shop windows. There was always something small to enjoy, and when small got boring there was always something big to savor: the Empire State Building over his left shoulder, the World Trade Center straight ahead. They were different every day, sunshine glinting off both like sequins or clouds hanging low over the tops. There were also old facades, a low-flying dirigible now and then, and the parade of automobiles and trucks and buses. Gentry especially enjoyed the Fashion Institute of Technology on Twenty-seventh Street, and he always slowed on the wide sidewalk to watch the young people coming and going with portfolios. There was life and energy among the young, not just the emaciation and death that he’d become accustomed to during those ten long years.
He walked, too, because he had nowhere to rush to.
There had been women for the first three or four months after he’d quit narcking. Women he met on the job, in coffee shops, on blind dates, at dances. Women who helped him forget, for a few hours, the loss of his wife and then the loss of his undercover partner. But sometimes, in the small hours of the night, he’d look at the woman sleeping next to him. He knew how to turn her on but notwhat turned her on. He’d try to remember her name. And he’d feel dirty inside.They were using each other the way they’d use a back scratcher. He’d spent enough time as a narc watching people destroy their spirits while they thought they were doing happy things to their bodies. So he put a stop to that. He hated being alone, but being with those ladies was worse. They were like mirrors that showed you your own scars. They were alone too.
Walking also gave him time to finish the serial thinking he’d started in his small office. To come to terms with the event that had ended his career as Nick Argento. It was tough, still.
Gentry was married to the Seventh Avenue route. It took him a little out of his way to the east, but Ninth Avenue was too sedate and Eighth Avenue was too damn crowded with people waiting to get into the trendy bar, jazz club, or café of the week. However, he did vary a key part of his routine each night. Sometimes he stopped for Thai takeout, sometimes he grabbed a salad, and sometimes he ate in at a sushi place on Hudson Street because he loved the monster-sized dragon rolls and there was a waitress who was simply the most elegant woman he had ever seen. Old Mrs. Bundonis who lived next door to Gentry warned him that he was going to die of malnutrition or worms. Also of not dressing warmly enough. He was actually glad she did that; he’d always wondered what it would be like to have a mother.
Tonight was Thai night, and Gentry stopped at his favorite hole-in-the-wall on Seventh Avenue. He got caught up on the saga of the counter guy and his four old aunts who had come to visit from Bangkok and showed very little interest in leaving. When Gentry got to his one-bedroom apartment on Washington Street-with a double-order of mei grob, since the portions were appetizer-small-he slipped off his navy blue blazer, white shirt, and cobalt blue tie, pulled on his gray NYPD sweats, and crashed in front of the tube.