by Jan Fedarcyk
“Can I hold your gun?” he asked, joking. Maybe joking: you could never tell entirely with Christopher.
“You’re lucky I let you use my kitchen knife.”
“You think I don’t know how to fire a pistol, little sister?”
Kay did not like to think about everything that her brother knew how to do. Much of it was unsavory and most of it was unwise. “You can’t hold my gun,” Kay affirmed. “You been to see Uncle Luis lately?”
“It’s been a while since I ran into the Don,” he admitted, making a face and using their childhood name for Luis. They’d always had a difficult relationship, Christopher and Uncle Luis, at least since Luis and his wife had taken them both in as children. Mostly Kay chalked this up to the fact that Christopher had a difficult relationship with everyone he knew who wasn’t a stone-cold junkie; that his erratic and often outright foul behavior was enough to isolate anyone who wasn’t a blood relative. Mostly. “I bumped into Aunt Justyna last month. She seemed well.” Then, switching topics abruptly: “How was your day?”
“I let the biggest drug dealer in East Baltimore escape a trap we’d built for him,” Kay said bluntly. “Real scumbag. Killed two kids in a drive-by a few months back. He had a back exit rigged up in his stash house and I let him walk right past me. Even called me ‘ma’am,’ ” she recalled. “In some dive bar near the office, at this very moment, a half dozen of my colleagues are talking trash about the Ivy League princess that’s been foisted on them.”
“So, run-of-the-mill, then?”
Kay chuckled. There was a lot to say against Christopher, but the fact that he could always make her laugh made up for a lot of it.
“Don’t worry yourself too terribly, little sister,” Christopher said. “Remember, I’ve got three whole years on you, and with those years has come wisdom. These little problems—work, men, money, credit scores, having allowed a modern-day Al Capone to escape the clutches of justice—in time, what do they all really amount to?”
“Your devil-may-care attitude was more amusing back when we were children.”
“But I still act like a child in most ways, so I think it counts.”
Kay laughed again.
“They’d be proud of you,” Christopher said, turning serious all of a sudden and resting his hand on top of hers.
“They” were Paul and Anne Malloy, beloved father and mother of two, resting silently amidst a patch of grass in Green-Wood Cemetery, four hours north in Brooklyn.
“Thanks,” Kay said.
“I’m proud of you too,” Christopher said.
Kay smiled but didn’t say anything, enjoying the moment, knowing it wouldn’t last much longer.
“Kay,” he said, tightening his grip, “I need to borrow some money.”
She sighed but did not withdraw her hand. “How much?”
5
THE NEXT week was not one that Kay would remember with much fondness, with evil eyes rolled at her in the break room, hushed voices talking her down. All except Torres’s. Torres did his talking to her face, which was a nice change and one of the things she liked about him.
“See, we’re supposed to catch the bad guys,” he’d explained to her the next morning. “Not let them get away.”
“Thank you.”
“Didn’t they get around to teaching you that at Princeton?”
“I majored in psychology.”
“I’d think they’d have at least mentioned it at Quantico.”
“I may have skipped that day.”
“Well,” he said, laughing, “now you know.”
If Kay had not been the hardest-working Agent in the Baltimore Field Office before the situation with Williams—and she probably had been—she sure as hell was now. That evening with Christopher was the last time she allowed herself to wallow. Williams had slipped the bait; that meant they needed to set another trap. Kay redoubled her efforts, spent early mornings drinking bad coffee alone in the office, early mornings and long afternoons and late evenings, going back through the records, trying to find a way to trace where Williams had holed himself up.
She came home after one of these long days and found the house dark and Christopher gone; spent a few minutes looking around for a note that she knew she wouldn’t find. Then she ordered a pizza from down the block and sat in front of the stack of papers she had brought home with her. Things were how they were. It was cold in February, hot in August, her brother could not be relied upon. Made as much sense getting upset about the third as it did the first two.
One of the countless falsehoods imbibed by any consumer of modern media is that investigative work is exciting, that it consists of very handsome people in dim rooms yelling at one another, or even handsomer people in front of futuristic-looking computers saying “Enhance, enhance, enhance,” and then magically they find the secret clue that blows a case wide open. Even after two years in the FBI, Kay still sometimes found herself thinking this way, especially midway through a long afternoon staring at old leads. Of course it was all nonsense: investigating was like building a brick wall—first a row of stone, then a slab of mortar, repeat, repeat, repeat. You pulled the pictures together, you identified the subjects. Then you went after them, and this was, somehow, even less pleasant than finding them. Endless hours in her car, drinking coffee that had been nasty when it was warm and outright vile after an hour sitting in the cup; coughing on Torres’s endless chain of cigarettes, inhaling enough secondhand smoke to choke a camel.
Better than being on the other side of it, especially those last few weeks in February, which would go down as some of the bloodiest in Baltimore history. No small feat in a city that averaged well over three hundred homicides per year, ten times the murder rate of New York for a city a twentieth the size, comparable to Mosul in Iraq, though a few graves safer than South Africa’s Johannesburg. Williams had gone to ground, disappeared amongst the endless blocks of boarded-up row houses, the all-purpose convenience stores selling rat-eaten cereal and loose cigarettes, the basketball courts with their busted rims, the project housing pointing towards a kinder or more naïve age. Disappeared so far as the FBI was concerned, although any number of corpses could attest to his continued existence: former lieutenants found rotting in Dumpsters or just left cold in the passenger seats of their Escalades. It had become a race against time for all of them: Would Williams manage to kill enough of his former organization to make any case against him untenable? Or could they find someone who would roll on him first?
On a bleak and unfriendly winter morning, with little else to do, Kay was once again searching through old files about Williams, everything that had ever been collected on the budding criminal mastermind since he was still a youth. There wasn’t much to go on. Other than a few cases as a juvenile—all sealed—there was almost nothing about Williams in the years before he had come onto the FBI’s radar.
Almost nothing, but not quite. “The last time Williams got picked up he had just turned eighteen, fighting outside a club, some kind of minor beef. Judge let him go in the custody of his grandmother. Might be worth checking on her.”
“Might be, if we had any idea who she was,” Torres remarked. “Come on, Ivy, you’ve been doing this long enough to know that ‘grandma’ doesn’t mean grandma, it means any woman older than forty who’s looking after kids rather than hanging out in clubs. Could have been an aunt, or a second cousin, or who the hell knows what. Both of Williams’s biological grandmothers are dead, and whoever that woman was, we have no idea who she is, much less where she used to live.”
Kay grumbled quietly and went back to her files: on Williams and on his organization and on all the other players within it, his top people and the many bottom-feeders subsisting beneath them. The silence dragged on. Outside, it had begun to rain.
“What about this guy: Ricky Thomas, two tiers down from Williams, not quite a lieutenant but he went to the
same high school? And there’s an outstanding warrant for failure to appear at his arraignment on local charges.”
“Thomas?” Special Agent Chapman looked up from his desk and shrugged. It was obvious to Kay that he had no idea who Ricky Thomas was, equally so that he didn’t want to admit it. “What about him?”
“Why hasn’t anyone gone and knocked on his door since Williams slipped into the wind?” Kay asked.
“Since he slipped?” Chapman said, drawing attention to Kay’s moment of incompetence in hopes of covering up his own. “I guess we’ve been pretty busy since Williams slipped into the wind, Ivy. I guess we haven’t had time to take a shot at every Baltimore corner boy with two vials of crack in his pocket.”
It was not the first insult Kay had ignored, and she very much doubted it would be the last. “I’ve got a few minutes,” she said simply, taking her service weapon out of her desk and slipping it into its holster. “Torres? You coming?”
“What the hell,” he said, standing and pulling on his coat. “But you’re springing for a Reuben at Attman’s on the way back.”
6
IT TOOK them forty minutes to find Ricky Thomas’s last known location, an apartment in the projects set uncomfortably close to the Inner Harbor, owned by Shawnee Terice, girlfriend or baby momma or some such. Torres did the honors, pounding on the thin wood with his ham-hock fists. “Federal Bureau of Investigation,” he boomed. “Please come to the door.”
The commotion inside was loud, and sustained enough to get Torres to give Kay a long, heavy look and for Kay to put her hand around the butt of her service weapon. The door opened to reveal a harpy in stretch pants. “What you want?”
Torres spread his best aw-shucks grin on his face, although Kay wasn’t sure who he thought he was fooling. People in this part of Baltimore were not fond of the police, in the same sense that cats are not fond of dogs. “Good afternoon, ma’am. I was wondering if you had a few minutes to answer some questions for us?”
“Ricky ain’t here,” she said—yelled, really, the noise cutting through the aperture, along with a fair bit of Shawnee’s spit. Shawnee was shaped like a pyramid, a pointed head leading out to a body squat as a radish. The skin of her face was wrinkled and strained from hard living and bad decisions. She looked at the two of them with eyes the color of rusted metal.
Torres smiled a little wider, his eyes flickering over to Kay, then back at the door. “Ricky who?” he asked.
She blinked twice. “I don’t know no Ricky,” Shawnee said, adjusting herself so that her fleshy bulk shielded the interior. “Who said anything about anyone named Ricky?”
“You know, ma’am, and I hope you don’t mind me saying so, but I don’t see much of a future for you as a professional poker player,” Torres said before setting one hand on her shoulder and casually shunting her aside.
“You can’t come in here! You ain’t got no warrant! You can’t come in here!”
“It’s called exigent circumstances,” Torres began to explain, though he didn’t get the chance to finish, because as he pushed open the door there was a quick flash of movement, and Torres tore forward like a hound after a coursing hare. Half Torres’s size and probably a third of his age, still the suspect—who Kay thought was Ricky but couldn’t say for certain—seemed like he was moving in slow motion. Torres got one hand on the back of his hooded sweatshirt and then the sound of tearing fabric was followed, in close succession, by the sound of Ricky being slammed against the linoleum floor. Kay winced in unconscious sympathy.
“Christ, Ricky, you see what happens if you aren’t careful?” Torres continued in his easy lilt, bending down to cuff the suspect. “You could have really hurt yourself. And you went ahead and you ruined your shirt! Now what kind of thinking is that,” Torres continued, standing the still-stunned Ricky up and setting him on the sofa. “Gotta be more careful, man. Whatever would Shawnee here do without you?”
In answer, Shawnee began to enter into a prolonged monologue of intense, even impressive vulgarity. Notwithstanding which, Kay cuffed her and set her down beside her boyfriend.
“Keep an eye on the loving couple,” Torres said. “I’m going to have a quick look around.”
Kay nodded and took up a position midway between the exit and the door Torres headed through, making sure she could offer her partner backup should the situation require it while still keeping an eye on the two suspects. Being put in irons had done nothing to halt Shawnee’s continued slew of high-pitched invective, a torrent at once unceasing and shockingly profane. Ricky kept quiet, although he looked up at Kay with unconcealed hate. It was a look Kay had long since grown used to from working law enforcement in Baltimore, and she no longer felt any particular way about it.
Especially with Shawnee still screaming madly in her ear. One thing that even a casual involvement in law enforcement will teach you—or life generally, for that matter—is that woman, whatever her deficiency in size or strength, is in no way inferior to man in viciousness. And since humanity, in its wisdom, had seen fit to create all sorts of tools by which a weaker person might defeat a stronger one—knives and spears and shining black 9-millimeter Berettas—it behooved a person not to treat a perp casually on account of their sex.
“. . . and your mother was twice as bad,” Shawnee finished.
“Keep talking about my parents,” Kay said flatly, turning to face the shrieking woman. “You’re apt to piss me off.”
Probably it wasn’t a plan, exactly; probably Shawnee was just cracked out and hated cops, and had enough practice being arrested not to be particularly frightened at the concept. But either way, in the instant when Kay’s attention slipped from him, Ricky was up from the couch and hit her turned head with his shoulder hard enough to set her tumbling. Then he was off at a sprint, drugs forgotten, house forgotten, girl forgotten, nothing left but freedom, freedom, freedom.
He was two steps out of the house when Torres caught him with a blow to his temple that sent him flying off the stoop and into the surrounding bushes. One of the upsides to these little shotgun shacks was that they didn’t take long to search and they had back exits. After finishing with the first, Torres had apparently used the second to cycle back around to the front. A fortuitous scenario, otherwise they’d have been left to chase Ricky down Pratt Street with his hands cuffed behind his back, a situation that wouldn’t have done much credit to anyone.
Torres managed to stand Ricky upright, but you could see he was still dazed from the punch, blinking and trying to focus on anything besides the pain in his head and the buzz in his skull.
“Don’t hit my partner,” Torres said. “What the hell kind of gentleman are you? Didn’t your momma teach you any manners?”
Ricky’s girl was still screaming, an ongoing stream of profanity spewing forth like the blood from Kay’s nose.
7
ARRIVING BACK at the office, they put Ricky and his ingenue into separate holding cells and turned to processing the narcotics they had taken from his house. At one point a few drops of blood from Kay’s nose fell on the cellophane wrapping of a cube of heroin. Torres took one look at the eyes above the wounded nostrils, the rage not quite simmering, and decided not to make a joke about it.
Afterward, however, when it was time to have a chat with the man who had broken her nose, Torres decided to make what he knew would be an unsuccessful effort to get his partner to take a few hours off. “You sure you want a piece of this, Ivy? You got tagged pretty good there.”
Kay threw the bit of bloody cotton into a nearby wastebasket. “I’m sure.”
“We won’t even get anything from him anyway. Whatever time he’s looking at on the drugs won’t be enough to convince him to rat on his boss, not with Williams cutting threads like he was a tailor.”
Kay didn’t respond, just turned her cold green eyes towards the room where Thomas sat shackled.
“Your p
roblem, Kay,” Torres said, shrugging and unlocking the door, “is you’re too damn chatty.”
Torres was widely considered to be one of the best interrogators within the Baltimore Field Office. Some combination of his size and good-old-boy manner had the effect of convincing casual criminals and half-hard corner boys to drop their guard, chat a little, get loose and talkative—sometimes, though of course not always, and Kay thought this was going to be one of the not-always days. Looking at Ricky Thomas, a veteran of the gangster culture since he was a youth, well versed in criminality and in the strategies law enforcement used to combat it, Kay did not see a particularly tractable opponent.
Especially when he saw Kay walk in behind her partner, a nasty smile sliding out over his stony facade. After two years working violent gangs in Baltimore, Kay had grown used to that sort of look: searching, sexual, aggressive. It meant nothing to her. It rolled off her like the winter rain off the Bureau car.
“How you doing there, Ricky?” Torres asked, lowering himself into a chair with an audible sigh. “How’s the head? We can get you another ice pack if you want one.”
The aforementioned ice pack sat on the table, lukewarm and untouched. Ricky had not seen fit to use it. “It don’t hurt none,” he said. “How about you, girl? How’s that shiner I gave you? Looks like a beaut.”
Kay did not respond except to take the seat next to Torres—next to and just a bit behind him. She pulled out a small leather journal and a pen, opened the first and held the second between thumb and forefinger.
“Now what kind of a way is that to act?” Torres asked, shaking his big bull head. “I thought we talked about this already, Ricky: you gotta show respect to women. Didn’t your mother teach you anything?”
“You’re wasting your time,” Ricky said.
“You don’t even know what we want yet,” Torres answered through a smile. “Maybe we want to send you on a free visit to Disneyland. Maybe we want to give you tomorrow’s winning lotto numbers. Would you say no to that?”
