Yesterday's News

huh?”
    “Especially.”
    “You might just be alright, boy. I can see how you could of knocked Mark off his stride a bit.”
    “The chair. From the disability?”
    “Uh-huh. Damnedest thing. Come through Korea without a scratch, not even frostbite. Re-upped once, then twenty-eight years on the force here, not much more bumps and bruises than a bad sleigh ride. Until four years ago. I’m heading home after a midnight tour when I see smoke pouring out of this four-family, edge of a Porto neighborhood. They’re good people, mostly, but they get stiff as fish from that red piss they drink. I figure I better see what’s going down.
    “Then I see this kid at the third-floor window. He’s big enough to know he’s in the shit, but small enough, he doesn’t know what to do about it ‘cept scream his lungs out. So I kick in the front door, taking the steps two at a time and banging every door I pass. People run outta there like ants from a hill. You couldn’t count ‘em all. One of the women, girl actually but they start young, you know what I mean, one of them had the balls to follow me up the steps, yelling something I couldn’t catch. Funny how you can live among ‘em for so long, never get the hang of their talking.
    “So her and me hit the top floor, there’s serious fire ‘round us now, can’t barely breathe much less see for shit, and I had to damn near knock the door off the hinges anyway to get us in. Smoke’s worse somehow, but she gets hold of a little baby, and I grab the kid at the window, and we start down. She was hell-bent scared, but she knew the stairs and I didn’t. Damned landing, they never nail the runners down right, suppose I shoulda been surprised there was any there at all. I catch my heel in it, going full tilt down, and I tear the shit out of one knee while I’m breaking my fall with the other leg, all the time trying to keep the kid’s head from cracking open on the steps. I got all the way down, but it felt like somebody’d taken a bat to my legs, and the boys in one of our units had to carry me out like a dime-a-dozen halfback.”
    “Hell of a story.”
    “Damned right.”
    “You have surgery on the knee?”
    “Knees. Both of them. Wanna see?”
    You can retire them, but you can’t keep the good ones from sensing where you’re going. “So I can check for recent knife wounds?”
    Schonstein grinned again, but reached down to his cuffs, inching up the pants legs like a demented stripper until I could see the old stitch tracks. The calves looked toned instead of withered, but there were no new marks or scars.
    He said, “Satisfied?”
    “Some.”
    Schonstein dropped his trousers back to normal. “Good. Good to be a bit skeptical, I mean. Lotsa cops forget that these days.”
    “The motorized chair help?”
    “Godsend. I figured I’d only be in this thing for two, three weeks, then braces, cane, and back to normal. But it didn’t work out that way. Barely ever got to use the braces. Docs said it was the arthritis. Always had some twinges going back to my thirties, never paid it much mind till the surgery and all sort of speeded things up. But I get by, I get by.”
    “You’re still able to drive?”
    “The car you mean? Hell, yes. The department— actually the city council technically, I guess. The boys let me bid on it when they were selling the fleet to buy new ones. Damned fine car, big engine, best suspension, which makes a difference when you feel the potholes a little more now. Had a guy alter it for me, makes it easier to drive with just the hands. Probably be my last car, too, but that’s alright. Saved the best for last.”
    “Mind me asking about an earlier car?”
    “Figured that’s why you’re here. Gotta give you credit for patience, though. Patience, that’s the most important thing for an interrogation, you know. Skepticism and patience, they’re in short supply on the force now.”
    “That night with Hagan and the boy who was killed. Can you tell me your version?”
    “No, but I’ll tell you what happened, you don’t get too puffed up with all my compliments there.”
    “I’ll try not to.”
    Schonstein slid the Browning under the blanket, rotating his shoulders on the back of the chair. “Neil and me were in the cruiser, regular patrol. He was on the job maybe eight, ten months. No, eight, eight sticks in my mind. It was summertime, we were doing the four to twelve, nice and easy. Not too hot, not too much humidity, no real