by Ed McBain
Again, Loomis ignored it.
“Yes, I’m sure that’s enough time,” he said.
“At three-thirty sharp, then, I want you and the cop and the case to go down to the limo,” the caller said. “And I want you to drive the limo out of the garage and onto the River Highway heading toward the Hamilton Bridge. Have you got that, too?”
“Yes.”
“Repeat it.”
“River Highway to the Hamilton Bridge.”
“Who’s with you in the car?”
“A detective.”
“And the case. Don’t forget the case with the money.”
“Second tower’s on him.”
“Cingular wireless this time. Getting the number now.”
“Come on, come on,” Endicott said.
“You drive, Mr. Loomis. The cop rides shotgun. Tell him to wear a holstered weapon. Have you got all that?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Three-thirty sharp. I’ll call you again in the car at a quarter to four. Any questions so far?”
“Yes. When will we get Tam…?”
“All in good time. But listen to this, Mr. Loomis, and whoever else is listening.”
Endicott nodded sourly.
“There are three of us. Two of us will be picking up the cash, while our friend stays with the girl. If there is any sign of police activity at the site, the girl gets killed. If anyone tries to follow us from the site, the girl gets killed. If you try to arrest us after we pick up the cash, the girl gets killed. The girl is our hole card, do you understand? We’re showing you the hole card now, so you won’t try to bet her life on a losing hand. Tell me you understand everything. Especially about the girl getting killed if there are any tricks.”
“Yes, I understand everything,” Loomis said.
“Keep him on.”
“Especially about the girl getting killed.”
“Especially about Tamar getting killed.”
“Keep him on!”
“Good,” the caller said, and hung up abruptly.
“Damn it, we were almost there.”
“Why do you suppose he wants a cop tagging along?” Forbes asked.
“Peculiar, isn’t it?” Endicott said.
“Last thing he should want is a cop.”
“An armed cop, no less.”
“You want this number?” one of the agents asked. “It’s a lady in Riverhead.”
“Move on it,” Corcoran told Feingold. “But it’ll be another stolen phone, wait and see.”
“He’s so damn sure of himself,” Endicott said.
“Well, he’s got the girl,” Corcoran said, “you heard him. She’s his hole card.” He hesitated only a moment, and then said, “I’ll go with you, Mr. Loomis,” and was actually putting on his jacket when Loomis said, “No.”
They all turned to look at him.
“I want Detective Carella,” he said.
9
THE CELL PHONE in the car rang at precisely three-forty-five, just as Barney Loomis was driving past the Buford Park exit on the River Harb Highway.
Carella picked up the phone, hit the SEND button.
“Hello?” he said.
“Who’s this?” Avery asked.
“Detective Carella,” he said.
“What’s your first name, Detective?”
“Steve.”
“Would you mind if I called you ‘Steve’?”
“Not at all.”
“I have trouble with Italian names, you see.”
And fuck you, too, Carella thought.
“Steve, is Mr. Loomis driving?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Is there anyone else in the car with you?”
“No, sir.”
“Is this the only phone in the car?”
“Yes, sir.”
This was a lie. Carella had another cell phone in the side pocket on the right side of his windbreaker.
“Is it portable?”
“Sir?”
“Can it be taken out of the car?”
“Oh. Yes, sir, it can.”
“Let me talk to Mr. Loomis.”
Carella handed the phone to him.
“Hello?” Loomis said.
“Mr. Loomis, I want you to drive to Exit 17. That should take you ten, maybe fifteen minutes. Make a right turn at the top of the ramp. You’ll see a parking area for people who are sharing rides. Park there and wait. I’ll call again at four o’clock.”
There was a click on the line.
Loomis put down the phone.
“What’d he say?” Carella asked.
“Exit 17, park there and wait for his next call.”
The cell phone in Carella’s pocket rang. He yanked it out, hit the TALK button.
“Hello?” he said.
“Carella? This is Lieutenant Corcoran.”
“Yes, sir,” Carella said.
Back at the Academy, it used to be “Steve” and “Corky.” Now it was “Carella” and “Lieutenant Corcoran.”
“Have you heard anything yet?” Corcoran asked.
“Yes, sir, he just called.”
“What’d he say?”
“He wants us to…”
“What are you doing?” Loomis asked at once.
Carella turned to look at him, puzzled.
“What the hell are you doing?” Loomis shouted.
“Hold it a second,” Carella said into the phone, and turned to Loomis again. “Corcoran wants to know…”
“Give me that phone!” Loomis snapped and held out his right hand.
“Wants to talk to you, Lieutenant,” Carella said, and passed the phone to him.
“Lieutenant Corcoran?” Loomis said. “You listen to me, Lieutenant Corcoran. Are you fucking crazy? These people told us they’re going to kill Tamar if we try any tricks. I consider telling you where we’re going—and Christ knows what else you’ve got planned for the next few minutes—is exactly what they warned us about, it’s playing tricks. I don’t want you trying to find our location, I don’t want you sending in the fucking Marines, I just want to drop off the money and await further instructions, have you got that, Lieutenant Corcoran?” Loomis listened. “Yes, Lieutenant,” he said, “I am perfectly willing to take responsibility for whatever may happen to Tamar. So don’t call this number again, and don’t call the number in the car, and I hope to God you haven’t got anyone following us right this minute,” he said, glancing in the rear view mirror. “Because if anything happens to that girl, I will personally cut off your balls. Is that clear, Lieutenant Corcoran?” Loomis listened again. “Good. No more goddamn tricks!” he said, and nodded curtly, and handed the phone back to Carella.
“Hello?” Carella said. “Yes, I heard.” He listened. “Okay,” he said, “we play it his way. See you later,” he said, and hit the END button, and tossed the phone over his shoulder onto the back seat.
“I don’t like that man,” Loomis said. “I don’t like any of them up there, you want the truth, Corcoran least of all. He’s too full of his own perfume.”
Carella said nothing.
“None of them on that task force has any concept that we’re dealing with a human life here,” Loomis said.
“Well, I think they know that, Mr. Loomis.”
“This is all one big game to them. The good guys and the bad guys. Never mind that the kidnappers spelled it all out, exposed their hole card, told us exactly what was at stake. It’s still all cops and robbers to them, isn’t it?”
“I don’t think so, Mr. Loomis. But we’ll play it your way,” Carella said. “And hope for the best.”
They were approaching Exit 15 now. Loomis kept looking on and off into the rear view mirror, checking to see if anyone was following. Carella was wondering if maybe it wasn’t really all cops and robbers, after all.
That day long ago, it had been cops and robbers, all right, three real cops and three real robbers. The robbers were coming out of a bank on Twelfth and Culver, which was on Carella’s beat, and not
too far from the station house. At the same time, a patrolman named Oscar Jackson was taking a five-minute break to run into the bank to cash his paycheck from last Friday while his partner, Patrolman Jimmy Ryan, sat at the wheel of their idling cruiser, which he’d just pulled into the curb outside the bank.
Police officers were still called patrolmen back then because there weren’t too many female uniforms on the force and there weren’t any real problems with gender identity. There weren’t many black patrolmen back then, either, but Oscar Jackson was indeed black, and he was just taking his wallet out of his pocket to remove the paycheck from it when these three guys wearing ski masks and carrying sawed-off shotguns came running down the bank steps. Nowadays, they’d be carrying Uzis or AK-47s, but this was back then, when you and I were young, Maggie.
Carella had just turned the corner when he saw Jackson—whom he’d noticed around the station house but whose name he didn’t yet know—look up and into the masked faces of the three armed men barreling down the wide front steps of the bank. Jackson didn’t need a program to tell him this was a robbery in progress. Neither did Carella. And neither did Patrolman Jimmy Ryan at the wheel of Charlie Two.
All three men unholstered their weapons, Jackson stepping to one side and immediately assuming a shooter’s crouch, Ryan coming out of the car and hunkering down behind the hood with his elbows on it and his gun in firing position, Carella fearlessly (but he was young) rushing toward the bank with his .38 in his right hand. All three fired in almost the same instant.
Only one of the robbers returned fire, and he directed his shotgun blast at the cop closest to him, who happened to be Oscar Jackson. Jackson fell to the pavement, bleeding from a devastating wound in his chest. The man who’d shot him dropped at the same moment, felled by three rounds from Ryan’s pistol. Carella had to empty his revolver before he dropped both of the other robbers. But the holdup attempt had been foiled and the only casualty was Oscar Jackson, who was dead even before Ryan and Carella knelt over him. His uncashed paycheck lay on the sidewalk beside him, in the widening pool of his own blood.
That day had been cops and robbers, all right, and maybe every day after that had been cops and robbers, too. But that day hadn’t been “one big game,” as Barney Loomis would have it, and neither was today a game, not when a twenty-year-old girl’s life was at stake. They’d been ready to proceed according to procedure, but Barney Loomis had called off the dogs. Carella just hoped nobody got hurt today.
“Exit 17 coming up,” Loomis said.
THEY HAD MOVED the girl into the smaller of the two bedrooms, where they’d fastened to the door a hasp and lock similar to the one on the closet door. There was a single window in that bedroom, but it opened onto the beach, and there was nobody on that beach but us seagulls, boss. Besides, the girl was handcuffed to the radiator and couldn’t get to the window even if she’d tried. Avery had warned her that there was no sense yelling for help because then they would have to kill her on the spot instead of delivering her to her benefactors at Bison this very night.
Avery had patiently explained to the girl everything they hoped to accomplish today, had laid it all out in detail, the way he had done so far with Barney Loomis and would continue to do throughout the day as events unfolded. This way, there’d be no surprises and no mistakes. After they picked up the cash, they’d deliver the girl tonight as promised, and waltz off with a bit more than $83,000 each, though Cal had already begun complaining that their share—Avery’s and Kellie’s, since they were a couple—would come to twice what he was getting for the same amount of work and risk.
Avery had explained to him, as patiently as he’d explained everything to the girl, that they’d have had to pay the same amount to whichever third party they’d engaged for the gig. So what difference did it make if Kellie was that person? Kellie knew how to handle a boat, and Avery had taught her how to use the assault rifle, more or less, though frankly she wasn’t too sure how she felt about maybe having to shoot the girl if she raised any kind of fuss while they were out there picking up the loot.
She was alone in the house with her now.
It was almost four-thirty. Kellie hadn’t heard a peep from the bedroom since the boys had left the house. She hoped the girl was okay, they were supposed to drop her off tonight in the same condition as when they’d snatched her. She went to the bedroom door, knocked on it, and yelled, “You okay, Tamar?” She felt sort of a thrill calling a rock star by her first name.
“I’m thirsty,” Tamar called from behind the locked door.
“Would you like some iced tea? There’s some iced tea in the fridge.”
“Please,” Tamar said.
“No funny stuff when I unlock the door, right?”
“What funny stuff did you have in mind?” Tamar asked.
Kellie smiled.
“I’ll bring you the tea,” she said to the door, and went down the hall and into the master bedroom. Cal had complained about this, too, the fact that the pair of them got to sleep in a big double bed in the big bedroom while he had to sleep on the living room couch. Cal complained about a lot of things. She’d be glad when this gig—listen to me, she thought, it must be contagious.
The three masks were on a shelf in the closet. Avery had ordered them from the Internet at forty-five bucks a pop, for all three of them to wear on the job itself, and in the house whenever they were around the girl. Actually, Kellie thought it was idiotic to be wearing a mask after the girl had already seen her face, something like locking the barn door after the horse had run off.
This still bothered her.
The fact that the girl had taken a good long look at her face—well, just a short glimpse, really. Even so, she’d undoubtedly seen the red hair and the green eyes, Kellie’s best features, actually, and maybe memorable, though she hated to sound conceited. Not to mention the freckles all over her Irish phiz, wouldn’t Tamar remember those? Wouldn’t she be able to describe her once they let her go free?
This really bothered her a lot.
Avery had chosen the Yasir Arafat mask for himself and the Saddam Hussein mask for Cal, probably because the two men were all over television these days—though not as often as Tamar Valparaiso. Kellie wished he’d ordered her at least a female mask, but certainly any mask other than the one he finally chose for her, which was a George W. Bush mask that bore an uncanny resemblance to Alfred E. Neumann. Which, come to think of it, so did the actual President.
Kellie took the rubber mask down from the shelf now, and pulled it over her head, covering her face and her short red hair. Maybe Tamar had forgotten what she looked like, after all. There’d been only that few seconds of exposure before she slammed the closet door shut again. Shrugging (but it still bothered her), Kellie went into the kitchen, took a bottle of Snapple from the shelf, unscrewed the lid, and poured most of the contents into a glass. She drank the rest of the tea herself, straight from the bottle. Then she picked up the glass she’d poured for Tamar, and lifted the AK-47 from where it was resting on the kitchen table.
With the glass of tea in one hand and the assault rifle in the other, she went down the hall again, and unlocked the door to the bedroom.
She sure hoped Tamar wouldn’t try anything funny.
THEY’D BEEN PARKED in the drop-off area at the top of the ramp no longer than three minutes when the car phone rang again. This time, Loomis himself picked up.
“Hello,” he said.
“Mr. Loomis?”
“Yes?”
“Drive west on Hawkes,” Avery said. “Make a right turn on Norman and proceed to the intersection of Norman and a Hun’ Eighty-fifth. Park there. Repeat, please.”
“I’m driving to Norman and a Hundred Eighty-fifth,” Loomis said.
“More later,” Avery said, and hung up.
“The Wasteland,” Carella said.
THERE WERE SOME sections of this city that were completely forsaken, lost to rehabilitation, utterly resigned to rot and decay. The are
a that ran for some ten blocks west-to-east from 181st to 191st and another ten blocks north-to-south from Norman to Jewel was one such desolate location.
Appropriately nicknamed “The Wasteland” long before its buildings were abandoned by landlords loath to spend another nickel keeping them in repair, the area was later renounced even by the squatters who had taken up residence in its empty dwellings. The city finally condemned everything within the square half-mile The Wasteland encompassed. Windows and doors were boarded over, once stately living quarters left to crumble into dust.
Today, even in the waning daylight hours, the area resembled nothing more than a war zone. Rats had chewed away the wooden barriers on windows and doors; they now scampered freely from building to building, foraging in the garbage residents from neighboring areas came here to dump whenever the Department of Sanitation neglected its scheduled pickups. Like eyeless sockets in forgotten faces, The Wasteland’s empty windows stared out at only rubble-strewn lots.
Occasionally a patrol car from the Nine-Six swept through these potholed streets.
Occasionally, a dead body was discovered here before the rats left nothing but clean, picked-over bones.
When Carella was a college student, he used to call girls he was trying to impress and read to them passages from T. S. Eliot’s collected poems. He read mostly from “Prufrock,” which impressed nineteen-year-old co-eds with how deeply romantic and sensitive and experienced he was, especially when he came to the line “And I have known the eyes already.”
But he also read from The Waste Land—well not much of it, just the very beginning of the first poem, before it got so morbid and preoccupied with burying the dead. He would say into the phone, “I was just reading this poem a few minutes ago, and I thought, ‘Gee, I’ll bet Margie (or Alice or Mary or Jeannie) would love to hear it, so I hope you don’t mind my calling you,’ ” such baloney, such a line, but he was only twenty years old. He would then read the section beginning with the words “April is the cruellest month,” and keep reading through the stuff about being surprised by a sudden summer shower, and drinking coffee and talking in an outdoor German garden, it must have been, or perhaps Austrian because there was a cousin who was an archduke. Carella would pause dramatically before reading the line “I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter,” which was before the poem turned so serious, and which always evoked a sigh from Margie (or Alice or Mary or Jeannie).
