The Graving Dock

by Gabriel Cohen

  More recollections followed. He wandered back out into the foyer and flipped through a guestbook. Almost all of the alumni lived out of town; time had scattered them to Haverton, Pennsylvania, and Colorado Springs; Corvallis, Oregon, and South Bend, Indiana. He pulled out his cell phone and checked in with the team upstairs: no sign of Sperry. Behind him, the door to the outside opened and he swung around, instinctively reaching for his service weapon.

  “Don’t shoot,” Ray Hillhouse said calmly. “It’s only me.”

  Jack smiled. “If you’re Robert Sperry, I must say that your disguise is very convincing.”

  “Sorry I couldn’t make it here till now.” The FBI agent had been down in Baltimore, working an anti-terrorism case. “Anything interesting happen yet?”

  Jack sighed. “It’s been slow. If I have to listen to one more story about kids tipping a cannon or throwing snowballs at a general, I’m gonna scream.”

  Hillhouse smiled. “I don’t quite see you as the screaming type.”

  Jack smiled back. “You should see me when I look at my paychecks.”

  The FBI agent perched on a corner of the registration table. “So—you think Sperry’s gonna make an appearance?”

  Jack winced. “Just between you and me, I’m not sure. I’m starting to wonder if I might have sounded the alarm a little prematurely.”

  Hillhouse shrugged. “Everybody’s been searching for this bastard for weeks now. This is the best chance we’ve had. I would’ve done the same thing.”

  Jack scratched his cheek. “I guess. Hey, listen—” He was about to start telling the FBI agent about Tommy Balfa and John Carpsio, but a sudden babble of voices from the lecture hall indicated that the morning’s activities had come to an end.

  “I better make myself scarce,” Hillhouse said. “I’ll see you later.”

  AFTER A QUICK BOX lunch, the alumni set off on a walking tour of the island. Jack had worried that they might want to spread out and explore on their own, creating a nightmare for the team assigned to protect them, but he might have guessed that his anxiety was groundless; they set off en masse, like tour groups everywhere.

  Despite Jack’s colleagues’ jokes about mysterious strangers wearing priest’s collars or other disguises, Gene Hoffer assured him that all present were well known and accounted for. In fact, the only stranger was Jack himself. He stayed on the fringes of the group, walking with Michael Durkin, the security supervisor.

  “How have you been?” Jack asked.

  Durkin shrugged. “Okay, I guess. I miss the old man. And it’s been a bit creepy working here since that happened.” He lowered his voice; he had been sworn to secrecy about the current operation. “I’ll feel a lot better if you catch this guy.”

  The first stop was Nolan Park and its yellow officers’ quarters. The alumni chatted blithely about old times as they strolled past the house where the security guard had been bludgeoned to death. Jack felt something cold on his forehead and looked up. A few snowflakes were drifting down, but they were hard to see against the dull white background of the winter sky. A chill wind picked up, but the weather did nothing to diminish the enthusiasm of the group. They were relentlessly cheery: Their kids were fantastic, their careers profitable, their retirements fun. It was like reunions everywhere, Jack supposed: These were the valedictorians, the club presidents, the joiners, and the family newsletter senders. The grumpier types like himself simply stayed home.

  As the group walked farther south, snow started coming down a little heavier, swirling in the wind, whitening the view. Jack glanced back. A couple members of the team had disguised themselves as part of the island’s grounds crew and were following at a discreet distance. He turned; another member was staying ahead of the alumni, a hundred yards away. The advantage of the island as a setting for this operation was clear: Anyone approaching the group would stand out immediately because there were no random passersby. For the same reason, though, maintaining an inconspicuous presence was difficult. Likewise, the snow made it easier for the team to trail the group, but it could also provide cover for a more sinister follower…

  “What years were you here?”

  Jack turned to discover a plump white-haired woman in a thick down coat walking at his elbow. “I’m not actually part of the group.”

  She looked puzzled.

  “It’s a federal regulation,” he said. “Any visitors have to be accompanied by island security.”

  She bought this explanation without any trouble. “It must be very quiet, working here without all of the hustle and bustle of the old days. Like a ghost town, I would think.”

  “I’m just hired for the weekend,” Jack said quickly. He didn’t want to get caught up in small talk; he needed to stay focused on the bigger picture. He glanced down at his pager and pretended to read its little screen. “I’m sorry, I have to make a call.”

  She smiled. “It was nice to meet you.”

  He watched her move away in her puffy coat and he suddenly pictured the dead teenager in Prospect Park, the one Linda Vargas had called the Michelin Tire Man. The one with a blood-soaked hole in his down jacket. The image led to disquieting visions of bullets ripping into this friendly woman, and he looked around nervously, imagining Sperry running up one of these empty lanes, or popping up in a window of a long-abandoned barracks, firing wildly at the crowd…

  “WE WERE HERE, MAN,” said the S.W.A.T. to the young FBI agent. “We did our jobs that day. And where were you guys, when that shit was being planned?”

  “Keep it down,” Jack said for the third time, looking across the dark room at the shapes huddled in front of their third-floor observation post. Having run out of jokes and the desire to tell them, the team was squabbling now, a bitter spat about who had failed on September 11. They were like kids grown cranky on a long car trip. It was inevitable—there was only so long you could keep it together with nerves stretched so tight. It certainly didn’t help that conditions on the island were not conducive to overnight stays: heating provided by crappy generators, no running water…

  “I hope one of you is keeping an eye on the harbor,” Jack added. Nobody had expected that they would still be camped here. The reunion group had gone back to Manhattan for the evening, and Jack had arranged for as many security tails as he could, but there was no way to keep track of so many people dispersed all over the larger island, running off to Broadway shows, restaurants, bars. He just had to hope that Sperry’s disturbed mind would seek out revenge on the site of his former humiliation. The group had one more day on Governors Island, and tonight was the last logical time for Sperry to show up.

  Jack glanced at the faint glow of his watch. “Okay, let’s start breaking this down into shifts. I’ll go first; you guys get some shut-eye.”

  Nobody argued; the others made their way out of the dark office.

  Alone, finally, Jack settled down in front of the night vision scope. Looking through its dark eye at ghostly liquid green outlines, it was impossible not to think of TV images of the recent raids on Afghanistan. Everyone was spouting off about the War on Terror, worrying about some massive new attack on New York. In comparison, the past efforts of one deranged individual seemed pretty marginal, but if Sperry succeeded in doing something bad to the whole reunion, even the most shell-shocked, dazed New Yorkers would sit up and take notice.

  He did a complete scan of the dark harbor water, then turned toward the east. In contrast to the sleek glass-and-metal skyscrapers lining the southern tip of Manhattan, the Brooklyn skyline was caught in a time warp, most of its buildings still made of stone, their crenellated roofs providing a much lower, more modest line against the night sky. Jack played the scope over their facades, slipping into a bitter fantasy of catching Michelle and her new lover highlighted in green in some bedroom window, moving in unison in the dark.

  There was no way for his mind to grasp what she had done. It was crazy. She had stuck with him through his long hospital stay, after he had explicitly told her
that he didn’t expect her to, that they hadn’t known each other long enough, that it was okay to go. She had stuck with him through that horrible second Tuesday in September, when it had seemed that the whole world was falling apart. Why remain through those hard times, then bail out when everything was going well? What was she thinking? Her refusal to answer her phone, much less call him back, left him feeling as if he were dropping stones into a bottomless well; he couldn’t even hear a distant splash. Maybe she simply didn’t love him; maybe she was frightened of commitment; maybe she was having better sex with her new lover; maybe, the whole time he had known her, she had hidden a malicious streak; maybe it was his fault—maybe he had let her down…Without any response from her, there was no way for him to know.

  He realized that all of the stress and tension of the past forty-eight hours had been a blessing, allowing him to escape from these tormenting questions. Now everything was quiet, and here he was again, running them over and over, like a mouse on a treadmill. He thought of the little Buddhist nun, and tried to share in her sense of acceptance and calm.

  When his shift was over, he retired exhausted to a cot in the other room, but it still took him a while to find his way into sleep, made restless not by Robert Sperry, but the mystery of one woman’s distant heart.

  HOURS LATER, THE BUZZ of his cell phone jerked him out of sleep. (He had stuck the thing in his breast pocket so he wouldn’t miss any emergency calls.) He raised his head, disoriented at first in the unfamiliar dark room, and then he pulled out the phone. An unfamiliar number scrolled across its bright blue face. He flipped it open.

  “Leightner? How ya doin’?”

  He frowned. “Who is this?”

  “A friend from the old neighborhood.”

  Jack’s heart rate picked up. In his sleepy state, it had taken him a moment to recognize John Carpsio Jr.’s gritty voice.

  “What the hell do you want?”

  He listened impatiently as the man took a drag from a cigarette. “You know,” Carpsio replied, “my mother taught me that a little politeness goes a long way.”

  Jack growled.

  “Relax,” Carpsio said. “You did me a good turn, talking some sense into that stupid girl. Now I’m gonna do you one. That nutjob who’s been giving you so much trouble? I know where he is.”

  Jack snapped awake. “Let me make sure I’ve got this straight: You’re talking about Robert Sperry?”

  “The one and only.”

  Jack grimaced. “Did you, uh, did you already ‘take care’ of him?”

  Carpsio snorted. “Please. I’m a professional contractor and developer. You want The Sopranos, watch HBO.” The man laughed at his own joke. “Besides,” he added, “I know how much you cops love the glory. He’s all yours.”

  “How do you know where he is?”

  “I heard it from a friend. Very reliable.”

  Jack swung his legs over the edge of his cot. “You know where he is right now? At this moment?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  Jack thought for a few seconds. The last time he had answered a late-night tip like this, he had taken a bullet in the chest. “How do I know this isn’t a trap?”

  Carpsio scoffed. “Trap, schmap. Bring the Marines and the Air Force, see if I care.”

  “Just tell me two things,” Jack said. “Where can I find him, and is he awake?”

  CHAPTER forty-four

  IT WAS BEFORE SUNRISE on a chill winter’s night, but in The City That Never Sleeps, cars were already making their way across the Brooklyn Bridge toward Manhattan’s sparsely lit office spires. As the Harbor Unit launch plowed north below it, Jack glanced back: The harbor was dark and misty. He saw the Staten Island Ferry making a lonely trip out to the southwest, its decks probably populated only by a few late-night drunks and night-shift workers slogging home.

  Ahead, strings of lights above the Manhattan and Williamsburg bridges stood sentinel like rows of ghostly flares. They reflected on the dark surface of the river in shimmering neon, rippling above the muscular water currents. Currents Jack knew only too well; he shivered in the little cabin, crowded in with Mike Pacelli at the wheel, Ray Hillhouse, one of the S.W.A.T. team members, and Gary Daskivitch.

  In the middle of his call with John Carpsio, he had realized his mistake: He had done an excellent job of bringing a team onto Governors Island, twenty-five of the area’s finest law enforcement officers, but what he had not foreseen was a need to suddenly get them off. (During the day, it would have been easy: They could have commandeered the ferry over to the Brooklyn side. But that vessel was docked across the harbor now, its crew sleeping comfortably wherever the hell they lived, and the only transport was Pacelli’s small Charlie Unit boat.)

  He peered up at the rapidly looming span of the Manhattan Bridge and shrugged. Maybe things would work out for the best. If Sperry had been sleeping, they might have had time to draw a big net around him, with boats and helicopters, armored units, the whole shebang, but the man was reportedly awake, and he would have been easily spooked. Jack was not familiar with the place, but he knew that the Navy Yard covered many acres. Like Red Hook, during World War II it had bustled with tens of thousands of maritime workers, but then suffered a major decline. The City had turned it into an industrial park, and was doing its best to revive it, but the Yard was still a sprawling complex of largely abandoned buildings, rusting machinery, derelict cranes, watery cul de sacs. So many hiding places, so many ways for one lone man to slip away. No—it was better to approach like this, by stealth, no thropping of helicopters or blare of sirens. On land, unmarked cars were already speeding toward the Yard to seal off the street side, and other harbor units were running north to close off the mouth of the basin.

  “Can’t you turn up the heat?” asked the S.W.A.T., speaking loudly over the throbbing of the engine.

  Mike Pacelli frowned. “You think this is bad? I’ve been in here all night freezing my balls off ’cause I couldn’t risk any noise.”

  Jack stepped out of the little boathouse and gripped the bow rail. The wind cut through the armholes of his Kevlar vest, and his face was occasionally slapped by icy spray as the launch bounced over a wave, but he wanted a clearer view (and a more settled stomach). Various images rose up—Michelle’s stricken look in the restaurant on New Year’s Eve, John Carpsio’s smug face in the social club—but they whipped away like streamers in the wind. There was something to be said for rushing into a situation in which you might get killed: It freed the mind from other concerns.

  The Manhattan Bridge slipped by far overhead and then, on the right-hand shore, four huge smokestacks from the power plant loomed up out of the mist, red aircraft beacons blinking at their peaks. The launch sped past, moving faster than Jack would have imagined possible, and then they were careening toward the Navy Yard. Pacelli slowed the engines to reduce the noise, and they slid into the shipping basin. Behind them, the skyline of Manhattan was growing faintly brighter, its glass and steel towers reflecting the first rose of the approaching dawn, but the launch might have been veering into a time warp. A number of long piers jutted out from the land, separated by narrow inlets; it was like sailing toward a big outstretched hand. The bright sodium vapor lights around the base of the power plant gave way to spotty single lights along the piers, and stark shapes loomed up along their edges: latticed gantries of loading cranes, topped by little high-perched cabins; hulking old warehouses; an ancient barge lying on the water like a huge beveled slab of rust. The era might have been World War II, or the Civil War, or some more primordial time. Way overhead, in the vaguely brightening sky, a jet struggled through the clouds, searchlights sweeping, like a lost bird.

  A pyramid of gravel rose up on the far left pier; a row of squat white fuel tanks sat along the right. Dead ahead, on the end of one of the middle piers, two lights blinked on and off. Car headlights. As they came close, Jack saw a jeep with security markings. Mike Pacelli swung the launch around sideways and eased it against a row
of old tires. One by one, the team clambered up over the edge of the pier, passing weapons—a shotgun and a semiautomatic rifle—up to their colleagues on shore, where a nervous Navy Yard security officer stood waiting. He had the soft look of an ex-cop with a cushy job.

  Mike Pacelli started to clamber up, but Jack shook his head. “I think you should stay here.”

  Pacelli tried to argue, but Jack shook his head. “You’ll see him if he runs for the water, and you can tell the other units where to go when they get here.” He turned to the security guard. “How close are we to Building One-forty-two?”

  The man pointed. “It’s that way, a few buildings over. Maybe a quarter mile. You want to tell me what’s going on?”

  “We’ve got a report that a suspect might be holed up there. We need to get there fast.” Jack frowned at the little vehicle.

  “I can take a couple guys over and then come back,” the security man said.

  Jack shook his head. “We should stick together. We’ll hoof it.”

  They set off along the edge of the pier, which ran beside a narrow inlet, their breath puffing out into the chill air. The day was breaking now, forms appearing more clearly in the swelling light: a round blue fuel tank, a jumbled pile of discarded machinery, a couple of old truck trailers up on blocks next to a warehouse loading dock. The next warehouse looked to be abandoned; its side was a checkerboard of dusty windows that gaped open in places, like missing teeth.