Sunrise Highway

by Peter Blauner

  Just as she turned off the Sunken Meadow Parkway, she decided to call Sullivan again from the car, having rejected his earlier offer to meet up ahead of time. But the Camry he’d given her was so old that it didn’t even have a Bluetooth system in the dashboard and she had to dial the number by hand and put it on speakerphone, all the while aware that she was back on Tolliver’s turf and his officers could use any excuse to pull her over again.

  “Yeah, I’m on my way,” Sullivan said before she could even ask if he wanted to join the posse. “Did you really think you could leave me out of it?”

  * * *

  Naturally she was driving out to see for herself. Ms. Bossy Bitch couldn’t trust the men to do the job right without her. But that was exactly what he wanted when he had the sister call her. To get her knocked off her pins and emotional enough to start making bad decisions. He’d hoped she might even be worked up enough to jump in her car and look around for herself. But no, she had to go and call the cavalry. So she wasn’t that brave or foolhardy.

  It was all right, though. He was prepared for this possibility as well. He picked up the radio from the compartment between the seats and keyed into the Nassau police band.

  “Guys, this is Sergeant Kovalevski. There’s been a change in the tac plan.”

  * * *

  It was almost eleven o’clock in the morning by the time Lourdes reached the south end parking lot. Most of the clouds had cleared, leaving a brilliant blue sky overhead. Though Thanksgiving was just a few weeks away, the temperature was in the fifties and there were still people biking through the state park. The grounds were still green and when she turned off the engine, she could hear birds singing through the car windows. Everything was so idyllic that for a few seconds she could almost imagine taking a weekend stroll here with Mitchell and a baby carriage. Until she looked across the lawn and saw the giant, graffiti-covered, redbrick edifice of the abandoned psych hospital, surrounded by a chain-link fence, and remembered with a falling heart that she was here to look for her lost sister.

  There was one other car in the lot, a white Jeep with New York plates, but no sign of the other cops. She adjusted her mirrors, to see behind her, trying to figure out what was going on. Tierney and Gallagher had said they were already waiting in the lot when she got off the parkway exit. B.B. and Danny had texted that they were close. And Sullivan was coming from nearby, at the Commack Motor Inn. But something jagged quivered inside her, like a broken tuning fork. She pulled in behind the Jeep and took out her phone, cursing the fact that she wasn’t on the radio system out here with the Nassau cops and had to make a call instead. She tapped Tierney’s number and checked both side mirrors, making sure no one was coming up behind her.

  “Yo, what the fuck?” she said. “Where you guys at?”

  “We’re in the lot, waiting for you, detective,” Tierney replied, a little phlegmatically. “We’ve been here twenty minutes. Where are you?”

  “I’m in the lot, by the hospital. I don’t see you.”

  She turned the mirror again and a poultry-legged hiker in shorts with matted hair and an overloaded backpack waved to her before disappearing into a thicket.

  “Kovalevski changed the meetup,” Tierney said. “We’re just down the road at Nissequouge Park lot. Didn’t you get that message? It went out on the radio.”

  “I’m not on the radio, dawg.” She began looking around more nervously and turned her engine back on. “I’m talking to you on the phone.”

  She heard a blast of static and anxious male voices on Tierney’s end of the line.

  “What’s going on?” she said. “Talk to me.”

  “Uh, bad news,” said Tierney after a second. “We just checked. Kovalevski says he didn’t put anything out on the radio.”

  She abruptly threw the phone down to put the car in reverse and when she looked up, Tolliver was pointing a gun at her.

  “Put your window down and move over,” he said. “Or else you’re dead and so is your sister.”

  * * *

  After 9/11, he’d spent a week of vacation time taking an anti-terrorism seminar taught by a former Navy SEAL in Quantico. So he was pleased with his own speed and efficiency in getting the door open, Tasering her liberally, rear cuffing her, and wedging her faceup between the front and back seats of her car. Then he relieved her of her gun and tossed her cell phone on the pavement, just to be sure no one could track them.

  “Let’s get something straight.” He got behind the wheel and started the engine. “If I wanted you dead, you’d already be dead. Understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Second thing.” He put the car in drive and steered the Camry out of the lot. “I’m not exactly sure how this is going to go. You’ve put me under a lot of stress with this investigation and I haven’t been able to take care of myself or think things through the way I should. So I’m not totally in my right mind. Do you understand that’s what you’ve done to me?”

  Binging on coke like it was 1984 and sleeping maybe an hour and a half a night wouldn’t do much to clarify anybody’s thinking. He was proud he’d done as much as he had, getting the sister into custody and Robles herself hog-tied in the back of the vehicle.

  “Yes, I understand,” she said in a dutiful voice undergirded by an insolence that he’d make her pay for later.

  “So there’s a few different ways this can go,” he said, putting on the right-hand turn signal as he left the lot, so as not to attract undue attention. “But here’s the main takeaway. If I don’t get what I want during this ride, it doesn’t end well for you.”

  “Okay.”

  * * *

  They had left the state park and were driving along some winding Long Island back road now. She looked up at the windows and saw sky, treetops, sun, birds, and just the occasional street sign. The same view a baby in a runaway carriage would have. Because that was as much control as she had at the moment.

  She raised her head enough to look at him in the rearview with his baseball cap, wig, and shades. The other guys on the team wouldn’t necessarily recognize him and, except for Sullivan, they probably wouldn’t recognize this car either.

  “You’ve been talking to someone about me for your case,” he said evenly. “And I want to know who it is.”

  “Are you putting me on?” She squirmed, her arms pinned painfully beneath her weight.

  “No, I’m not putting you on,” he said. “Someone’s cooperating and I want to know who it is.”

  “And I would tell you that … why?”

  He pulled up at a stoplight, casually reached back, and zapped her with 50,000 watts again. This time he kept the Taser on her thigh for a good fifteen seconds, so that her bone structure became a system of conduction, her nerve circuitry was in flames, and her whole body shook.

  “Here’s the deal,” he said, putting both hands back on the wheel again. “Your horizons need to change. If you keep lying to me, I will kill you and then I will kill your sister.”

  “Oh fuck,” she groaned, trying to recover. “You’re probably gonna kill us anyway so what’s the difference?”

  “But you can’t be sure,” he said. “Right? There’s just a tiny chance I won’t.”

  “If you say so, chief.”

  “I like that,” he said. “I like it when you call me chief. Makes me not want to hurt you as much. So let’s just make it simple. Is it Kenny or my ex-wife, Beth, talking to you?”

  He was speaking to her in the kind of quiet, reasonable voice that she used when speaking to skells. The voice she learned from Sullivan, which more often than not worked to persuade criminals that walking to the edge of the abyss and looking down unflinchingly at the reflection of their own worst deeds below was the only way to salvation. She wondered why he didn’t mention Brendan O’Mara possibly cooperating.

  “What are you, high, chief?” She struggled and cringed as he hit a bump in the road, pulling her joints from their sockets. “Look, you already know the task force guys are o
ut looking for me.” She tried to turn it around. “Why don’t you make it easy on yourself and pull over now?”

  “Nice try.” He began to press down on the accelerator a little. “Detective Robles, let me remind you that you are in my jurisdiction now. If something were to happen to you—if, say, your body were to be found dumped in the Long Island Pine Barrens? It would be investigators that I promoted personally processing the crime scene and handling your body. Coroners I play golf with would be cutting you open for the autopsy. If I want to make it look like you killed yourself with your own gun, I could do that.”

  “Nobody’s gonna buy that,” she said, trying to talk sense to him. “What about all the burns on my body now?”

  “With your family’s history of mental illness, that’s not a problem.” The engine was starting to grumble as he pushed it. “You just made a crazy call reporting that your sister was wandering around in some state park, where there was no sign of her. So it’ll look like you’ve gone off the rails. My friends at the ME’s office will say your marks are self-inflicted cigarette burns. Your other injuries they may just conveniently overlook. And everybody will just say you killed yourself because you couldn’t stand the humiliation from going after me and failing.”

  Her conscious mind told her that this was just intimidation, but each bump on the road was registering as a body blow, with her spine and kidneys getting the worst of it.

  “Just remember, everybody has a breaking point,” he said. “And we’re gonna find out what yours is. I’ll take you somewhere, make you feel things no woman’s ever felt. You’ll be begging for the end by the time I’m done.”

  She realized Sullivan would be wondering what happened to her on the phone. Maybe there was a chance he called this in. Or just as important, that the LoJack subscription he’d tried to convince her to renew on this twelve-year-old car hadn’t run out yet, meaning there might be a chance of someone tracking them.

  “You want me to tell you who’s ratting so you can go and kill them?” she asked.

  “Innocent people could get hurt otherwise,” Tolliver said. “And that’ll be on you.”

  “Seriously? On me?”

  Another pothole jolted her spine and threatened to pop both her shoulders out of their sockets. Her arms had almost gone dead from being pinned under her weight.

  It was hard to tell how crazy he was right now. The man had literally been getting away with murder for forty years. This manic edge could be a sign of desperation or just the state he regularly worked himself into when he was about to kill someone.

  “Save yourself the agony,” he said. “Who’s been talking to you?”

  “Leslie Martinez.” She grimaced against the g-force as he kept pushing the speed.

  When she opened her eyes, she was looking up at racing clouds that had now entered the blue sky. Cirrus, cumulus, stratus. The clouds she’d learned about in middle school science. “Take On Me” was on the radio. One of the first songs she remembered. The clouds began to thin from winding sheets to diaphanous shreds. This was it. This was what people meant by life flashing before your eyes. Death was in the vicinity and they were rapidly closing in.

  “Ho-kay, lady,” Tolliver said, mocking her in a cab driver’s Puerto Rican accent, foot all the way down on the gas pedal now.

  They must have gone to a section of the highway without stoplights. The Toyota engine was shrieking and the chassis was shuddering beneath her. He began swerving wildly. She rolled back and forth on the floor mats that she hadn’t gotten around to cleaning for a while. Gum wrappers, empty plastic bottles, and brown paper bags confronted her. The smell of old food and his aftershave turned her stomach. He was giving her a rough ride. Used to torture unbuckled suspects without laying a hand on them. Her joints were tearing and her vertebrae were coming apart. Her eyeballs turning to jelly from all the shaking and her guts in a seasick uproar.

  “Look,” she yelled out. “I know you didn’t do it all alone. Instead of asking who’s talking to me, you should be telling me who else was involved on your end.”

  “Why? You gonna help me mitigate, Robles?”

  “I’m just asking.”

  They suddenly pulled off the road and went into what felt like a parking lot.

  “Where are we?” she said.

  “We’re right outside the DA’s office. It’s not that far from Kings Park.”

  “What?” She strained trying to sit up and see if he was telling the truth. “What are we doing here?”

  “You’re right,” he said coolly, slowly cruising around the lot. “I didn’t do it alone. Brendan, his father Phil, Kenny, Steve Snyder, my ex. They were all in on it in some way. All the upstanding citizens who got better houses, lower taxes, and fewer people like you next to them. Actually, Brendan killed some of those girls, without me. Maybe just to see what it was like. That’s how sick he was. So what I want to know is, which of them turned on me first?”

  “Why?” she asked, realizing that the last bump before they turned into the lot had jarred her so much that her cuffed wrists were just slightly below the curve of her ass.

  “Because I’m going to kill whoever betrayed me and bring the whole shit house crashing down if I have to,” he said, still driving around the lot carefully. “You say the word and I will go into that building, and I will kill Kenny Makris. Because I’m the one who put him where he is. And then I will kill my ex-wife. And then, who knows?”

  “You really want to do all that?”

  She squirmed, trying to loosen her shoulders and give herself a little more slack to try to get the cuffs down past the rest of that big old butt she was usually so proud of.

  “Damn right,” he said. “All the fine, responsible folks who got where they are because of me doing their dirty work. Well, it’s time to fucking pay up.”

  This was good that he was talking to her this much, she told herself. He was maybe beginning to see her more as a human being, and less as an object he needed to be rid of. She curled in a little more, the cuffs slipping down over her ass and almost touching her thighs.

  “Sure that’s the play?” she asked, trying to keep him preoccupied.

  “I wouldn’t knock it if I was you,” he said. “If I go in and kill Kenny, maybe you’ll have a chance to be found before I come back. There’s like two dozen police cars parked around here. On the other hand, if you let me go in and kill someone for something he didn’t do, that’ll be your fault.”

  “Now you’re getting too deep on me, chief.” She gasped, trying to fold herself up like a jackknife and get the cuffs down to the backs of her knees. “I think you should just give it up.”

  “Someone’s going to die today, Robles,” he said with a sort of inarguable finality. “The question is do you want to join them or do you want to give yourself a fighting chance? I know what I’d do if I were you. Kenny Makris? My ex? These are bad people. If you tag one of them so that you or your sister gets to survive, what’s the difference? All I’m doing is asking you to tell me who stuck the knife in my back.”

  He was right. None of these people were the salt of the earth. But she didn’t want any of their blood on her hands.

  “So why did you do it?” she said, as she brought up her shoulders and started to raise her legs.

  “Why did I do what?” He adjusted his rearview, trying to see what she was doing as he kept driving.

  “Why did you kill all those girls?” she asked.

  “I didn’t. I just told you.”

  “Oh, come on,” she said, as she rolled back on her shoulders and aimed her toes at the ceiling. “You keep asking me to tell you something. Now I’m asking you.”

  “Oh what, are we in a relationship now, Robles?”

  “Wouldn’t you want to know if you were me?” The cuffs were nearly down to her heels now, less than two inches from clearing the soles of her shoes.

  “Maybe they couldn’t be what somebody wanted them to be. Or what they pretended to be…” He started
to turn around. “Hey, what the fuck are you doing?”

  All at once, her shoes were off and the cuffs were in front of her. He reached back blindly, trying to subdue her with one hand while keeping the other on the steering wheel. She got up on her knees, reached over the seat back, and got him around the neck with the handcuff links. He braced, stretched, and bucked, trying to get his fingers under the links. His foot hit the accelerator and they careened into a guardrail. Lourdes fell back, as she heard the crash of metal on metal and felt her shoulders getting yanked from their sockets.

  The airbag deployed and exploded, filling the air with whitish powder and tiny sharp particles. Tolliver was pinned against his seat, hands limp at his sides as if his head hitting the steering wheel had knocked him unconscious.

  The car horn sounded. Soon cops would be emptying from the DA’s office and the nearby police building. Somehow she still had the cuffs around Tolliver’s neck as he remained slumped behind the airbag. Fifteen to twenty seconds compression to render a man unconscious. More than a minute you start thinking about brain damage.

  “Robles,” Sullivan was approaching from the driver’s side.

  She realized that he must have tracked her from the LoJack in the car. She ignored him and leaned back, cuffs against Tolliver’s windpipe, bracing her feet against the back of his seat for leverage.

  “Robles, stop.” Sully was at the window now. “He’s out.”

  She pulled with all her weight, until her legs were fully extended and her arms were shaking. Choking the life out of him the way he’d choked all the women.

  “Robles, let go.” Sullivan was reaching in, trying to stop her. “He’s not conscious. This isn’t the way.”

  Sirens were wailing, other cops were coming. They’d be here within seconds. But she pulled back and held on as long as she could. The fat girl staying on her horse. Holding the reins like she was riding Lucky Day to the finish line at Aqueduct and bringing all that beautiful dinero home to mami.