No Witness But the Moon(100)
“Pull the trigger, carnal. You know you want to. Pull it.”
There was no denying that a part of him did. There would be a mild euphoria in shooting the man who brutally beat his mother to death. Vigilante justice. So what if the people below hated him for killing Torres? They hated him anyway. As soon as he put on the badge, they hated him. He was a homegrown son and they treated him like a traitor. He couldn’t win this one, no matter what he did.
Pull the trigger.
The police were at the door to the roof. “Open up!” yelled a cop with razors in his voice.
“I’m a police officer!” Vega shouted back. “I have a gun trained on the suspect. He threw the key over the building. You’ll have to break down the door.”
Torres stepped closer. “It’s a metal door, Jimmy. Your buddies aren’t going to be able to help you now.”
Vega knew he couldn’t hold out much longer. Torres was about to pounce. Vega had to make the first move. He had to take Torres down and try to restrain him. One good headlock. Hard and fast. Like when he was a kid. Vega sprang forward and grabbed Torres around the neck. But Vega was cold and numb. His muscles weren’t working right. Both men had slippery wet jackets on. Vega managed the headlock but not completely enough to incapacitate Torres. Torres fought back, elbowing Vega in the ribs. Vega grabbed at Torres’s hair. There were grunts and kicks.
And then the door flew open.
Vega heard the clatter of duty holsters and handcuffs behind him. Four cops in flak vests and headgear burst through the door and aimed their weapons.
At Vega.
“Freeze, *!” yelled the man with razors in his voice. “Drop the gun!”
Vega complied. “I’m a police officer!” he shouted. His words had no effect. The four cops descended on him with the force of a tsunami, tackling him to the ground, flipping him onto his stomach, kneeing him in the back, and yanking his hands tightly behind to cuff them. Vega felt the slush soak through his clothes like he was swimming in ice water. He tried to speak but razor-man shoved his face hard into an icy embankment while he patted him down.
“Shut your f*cking mouth, hombre.”
Vega burned with anger and humiliation. And a certain realization, too. There was only a tin shield separating him from the other side of this divide. At all times. In all situations.
Vega lifted his head just as the officer was about to snap a cuff on his wrists. He saw Freddy Torres back away from the officers. He saw every movement as if it were in slow motion. Torres swung a leg over the low upward curve of the roofline. Then he swung the other.
“No!” Vega forgot about the cops and their weapons. He saw only one thing. A man. Headed over a roof. About to plummet forty feet to his death. A man he hated, sure. But a life.
One.
Two.
Those same two seconds that had taken a life could now save one. Vega leapt for the edge of the roof and grabbed Torres by a sleeve of his puffy jacket. The cop who was about to pounce on Vega for moving saw at once what Vega was trying to do and latched on to the other sleeve.
“Don’t do this, Freddy,” Vega begged.
“Let me go, carnal. My way.”
“No. You don’t get to choose.” Vega grabbed at his jacket. The cold wet nylon was slick in his hands.
“I want to be free.”
“You were free. The door was open. You could have walked away at any time.”
Torres tried to shrug out of their grip. They held tight. It was like playing a high stakes game of tug-of-war. Vega plunged his hands beneath Torres’s armpits. He could feel the warmth thawing his flesh, giving him the circulation and strength to hang on.
Did he want to?
A life for a life. For many lives. His mother’s. Donna’s. Hector Ponce’s. But a deeper part of him didn’t want Torres dead. Death was a quick adrenaline fix. Life—life without freedom or options—that was justice.
And so Vega pulled. There was a thump, followed by four officers pouncing on Torres, cuffing him before he could try again. Torres lost a shoe in the scuffle. Vega heard it drop forty feet below onto the perfect white snow of the basketball court where it made a soft thud. But that was all that dropped.
Jimmy Vega had killed a man who didn’t deserve to die. And now he’d just saved one who probably didn’t deserve to live.
Chapter 41
A photograph graced the front page of the New York Daily News the day after Freddy Torres was arrested. It had been snapped the night before from a rooftop overlooking the Bronx Academy of Achievement. Jimmy Vega had no idea the shot had been taken.
It showed him and an NYPD officer (ironically, the same one who’d smashed his face in the snow). They were both sprawled on the ledge of the building’s roof, halfway over themselves, risking their lives to save a man who would probably spend the rest of his in jail. It was a dramatic shot that made Vega and the other cop look like the good guys for once. Not heroes. Vega would never use that word. But it told the world at the very least that they’d tried to do the right thing when the right thing was damned hard to do.
The police charged Torres with Hector Ponce’s murder. Not Donna’s. Or Vega’s mother’s. Those two cases were older and would take longer to assemble. But even so, announcing to the world that Hector Ponce hadn’t died by a cop’s hand changed the spotlight. It turned Vega from the star of a drama he’d never auditioned for to a bit player. He welcomed the chance to step back and at least begin to reclaim his life.