Kevin Corcoran stood at his dresser, one piece of cold metal in each hand. In his left, a Purple Heart he didn't earn. In his right, his detective's badge. The apartment was too quiet. It'd been so since he came back from Afghanistan, and he didn't like it. Coming home from war, of all things, to an empty apartment was the most frightening experience of his life. Worse than war. Worse than murder. It was a strong opinion, but it was his opinion, and a man's opinion was all he had in these times.
He brushed his teeth, ran a comb through his hair and picked a tie. He did this every morning: picked a tie and remembered he was shit at tying ties. Ellen always did that for him, as ridiculous as it sounded. He was a grown-ass man who couldn't tie a tie. He was also terrible at cooking, cleaning, and sleeping alone. He tossed the tie back in the drawer.
New York was loud, and dirty, and crowded, but it had his heart. Kevin hated the city, almost as much as he loved it. He needed the challenge. New York was the kind of place that challenged you all the time. A cab home, a slice of pizza, a moment of peace and quiet: New York would fight you on all these things, one way or another. It could be a lot at times, but Kevin had always been a fighter. On this particular morning, New York was fighting Kevin's sense of punctuality.
He arrived five minutes late, nearly missing the morning debrief. He slunk in and took a seat in the back, trying to keep his head low.
"You're late, boyo," Burns snarled. He was a real jackass, Burns. He didn't like that Kevin was head detective right out of the army, and he made it clear every chance he got. Kevin preferred to believe that he pushed everyone else around because he himself was impotent.
"Traffic," Kevin mumbled. "What'd I miss?"
"ATM stakeout," his partner Frank supplied. "Gonna be a corker."
Kevin and Frank had known one another since their teens. They were both amateur boxers back in the day, both mouthy Irish upstarts whose winning streaks were constantly competing for top billing. Frank's career was cut short by a blow to the eye socket, the pressure of which detached his right retina. He'd had a number of corrective procedures over the years, but that particular eye was never quite the same. Frank claimed it improved his shooting.
"It's all about focus," he'd rambled time and again. "All about being able to zero in on that target. Your eyes play tricks on you, see, and you end up mixing up the true location of the target because each of your eyes is seeing it from a different perspective. Eliminate an eye, eliminate the tricks."
Despite his claims of superhuman target practice, it was his trick eye that prohibited Frank from enlisting when Kevin did.
"I for one am excited for this stakeout," interjected their other partner, Andy O'Brien. "I brought jerky."
Andy was sweet as pie and built like a brick shithouse. Before he was a cop, he was a bouncer at a nightclub, a job he found "almost too easy." He carried a gun, but Kevin couldn't remember him ever firing it. Anything Kevin and Frank might have done with their guns, Andy did with his fists. Or his feet and shoulders if you counted busting down doors, which he often did.
Stakeouts were probably the second most boring assignment on the beat. The first, of course, was paperwork. Paperwork felt endless at the precinct, probably because of the crackdown on police brutality and other general missteps made by cops Kevin had never met, nor did he care to emulate. But, the paperwork made their shortcomings his problem. Just another boiling resentment, working in tandem with the cocktail of bitterness and concern in his belly.
The bank was a small branch, with the ATM being its main feature. Someone had robbed three people at gunpoint in broad daylight at this particular location, an act that seemed almost too brazen to be true.
"It just goes to show ya, some folks have no shame," Andy said through a mouthful of jerky. He'd been trying to quit chewing tobacco over the past couple of weeks, finding that jerky, sunflower seeds, and Big League Chew could all take its place. His cheeks were perpetually loaded, giving him the appearance of an overgrown chipmunk. Chewing was a retro sort of vice, something Andy had done as long as he and Corky had known one another, and something he'd probably still be doing if not for his wife. The lovely Sybil O'Brien was an accidental fixture at the precinct, always in a tizzy about something or another. From her outbursts, guest appearances, and Andy's stories, Kevin could assume she was afraid of inclement weather, germs, cancer, airplanes, boats, and her biological clock. All reasonable fears in and of themselves, but Sybil threw them all in a blender and made a crazy shake, which she then chugged and impressed upon her husband.
"I don't think it's a matter of shame," said Frank without looking up from his Rolling Stone magazine. "I think it's a matter of being poor and doing what you have to do to survive."
"You're poor. You ever knock over an ATM?" Andy retorted.
"No man is poor who has friends," Frank shot back. "Ain't that right, Corky?"
"I'm the richest man in New York," Kevin snarked, just as his phone began to buzz.
"Who is it?" Andy demanded, dying for something, anything to happen.
The caller ID read, Rob Morehouse. "It's the richest man in New York." Kevin unbuckled his seatbelt and tossed Frank the keys to the car. "Excuse me, boys. I've gotta go."