Necropolis

by Michael Dempsey

  Bart paled. “Are you nuts?”

  “We’re going to have a heart to heart, Bart.”

  Bart dropped the card, held onto the beer. He drew up his chest and tightened his mouth.

  “Fuck you,” he said. “I don’t talk to people who point gats at me.”

  I came across the room. Wood split, pictures crashed off the scarred bureau, glass tinkled. Then the gun was under Bart’s chin, my hand around his throat. Beer spurted across our ankles.

  “You’re screwing up here, Donner—”

  I cracked him across the face. He sagged, but I didn’t let him collapse to the floor. I hoisted him back up to eye level, waited while he blinked away the pain.

  “J-jesus, you’re crazy…”

  “I finally studied my dickenjane, Bart. Extreme emotion can give me unexpected surges in strength. I might’ve already fractured your cheekbone. I really don’t want to accidentally snap your neck.”

  Bart looked into my eyes for a bluff. When he didn’t find it, a deeper kind of fear suffused his expression. Words tumbled out in a panic. “I had nothing to do with it, you gotta believe me! When they brought that sorry fuck in, they had to hold me back!”

  “Bullshit!” I roared, shaking him. Bart’s head cracked against the bureau again, and he moaned, spittle coating his lips. Our feet danced like prize fighters’, grinding glass into the wet carpet.

  “I wanted my pound of flesh,” he croaked. “We all did! But then the suspect was gone. The booking file was closed like it never existed.”

  “And you just accepted that?”

  “Of course not! I went straight to the Captain. He said you’d been working undercover for the Feds!”

  “What?” I blinked in shock. “Jansen said that?”

  Bart nodded desperately. “He said that booking this shitbird would jeopardize an international drug sting—something that had been in the works for years. The operation was supposed to bring down an entire cartel, get millions of pounds of shit off the streets. He said we couldn’t wreck all that now—we’d pick your doer up again later. He said that’s what you would have wanted us to do.”

  “You didn’t buy that.”

  “No.” Bart sagged again, starting to cry. “I didn’t.”

  I threw him into a chair and waited. When he spoke again, all he could look at was his own hands. “I was about to go higher up, to the Commish, to the Feds if I had to,” he said. “The next thing I know, somebody’s calling my wife.”

  “Sarah?”

  “Asking her if she would be one of those cop’s widows who liked getting reamed by a hunt-pack in the middle of the night. She almost lost her mind. And then some ‘uncle’ we never heard of picked Lizzie up from school—”

  “Christ!”

  “He got her some ice cream and drove her home. But the message was clear enough.” Bart looked at me, tears rolling freely. “You and Elise were dead. I couldn’t bring you back. And my family, Jesus, my family.”

  I didn’t know what I’d expected to hear, but it hadn’t been this. If they’d threatened Elise, I might’ve done the same thing.

  He smiled wanly at the soaked floor. “Gonna smell like a brewery in here.”

  I pressed the cool chrome of the pistol against my forehead. Think, I told myself. Where does this leave you? “I take it there never was a drug bust,” I said.

  Bart shook his head. “And they never re-arrested the perp. Jansen acted like the whole thing never happened. After that, the asshole couldn’t even meet my eyes. He transferred out to Staten Island a month later, the coward.” He stared hard at me. “Donner, what were you into?”

  “Into? Nothing!”

  “Something like this doesn’t happen over nothing! Whoever put the screws to the precinct— You don’t make something like this go away without serious weight.”

  “If they didn’t want this guy caught, why arrest him in the first place?”

  “I think it was a mistake. You know what it’s like when a cop gets killed. Things move fast. Every badge in the city was out for blood. And this guy was no John Dillinger. They had him in a couple hours.”

  “Where?”

  “Red Hook.”

  Another shock. “Here in Brooklyn?”

  “The Seven-six nailed him right in his crib. That’s all I know. I never got a name, never got a look at him. Stew Mahadavia said he was Latino, but I never saw for myself.”

  “Why does a two-bitter go all the way to the Upper West Side to pull a job, when he lives in Brooklyn?”

  “Maybe he’s smarter than he looks.”

  “Most of these guys are short-term thinkers. They pick the nearest bodega.”

  “We don’t know that he’s a two-bitter. If he was connected, that might explain… what happened.”

  Say it, I thought. The cover-up. I stood in frustration. “And now there’s no way to know.”

  The words turned Bart into a marble statue.

  “What, Bart?”

  “I hard-copied the guy’s prints. After they were scanned. Before they waved me off. I wanted to be the one to nail the son-of-a-bitch.” He nodded to the bureau I had shoved him against. “Top drawer,” he said. “Taped up inside.”

  I went to the bureau, opened the drawer and reached in. Sure enough, something was taped to the bottom of it. What I withdrew appeared to be a mini credit card.

  Bart looked sick with remorse. “I take it out once in a while. To remind myself what a piece of shit I am.”

  “What is it?”

  “Deposit box key. First Union Federal, Alphabet City. Stuff you can use.”

  He’d set up a survival cache, in case he had to run. He must have been truly terrified.

  As I slid the card into my jacket, I knew I couldn’t hate him. My face must have softened the tiniest bit, because Bart looked more than grateful. He looked… released.

  “Donner,” he whispered. “It was forty years ago. Can’t you let this thing go?”

  I walked out the door. Halfway down the hall, I heard the racking sobs begin.

  ***

  At the curb, I sucked in the cold night air, trying to clear my head. The expanse of sky through the Blister looked ersatz, heaven’s stars turned into cheesy accent lights on a designer firmament.

  I was halfway across the street when the face of Bart’s building dissolved. Green energy swelled outward. Metric tons of matter were instantly vaporized. The blast wave picked me up and threw me through the air like a rag doll. I hit a Packard twenty feet away, the hood crumpling and the windshield imploding. Emerald debris fell like hailstones around me. I rolled behind the vehicle. The drop to the cement stole my breath. The air had become charged. Jade electricity danced down my sleeves. I batted at the St. Elmo’s fire until I realized it didn’t burn. The chrome hubcap by my face shimmered.

  My legs buckled when I tried to stand and I went down again. I grabbed the demolished hood and tried again. The air reeked of ozone and melted insulation.

  I looked back at the building. It was like someone had scooped a neat, circular chunk from its center. The outer walls were intact, but the insides were cleanly excised, transformed into vapor and ash. I saw half a television sitting on half a table in half a bedroom.

  The blast had radiated outward with the same precision, the energy confined to sharp lines. The pavement, trees, cars within this pattern were scorched. Beyond this, the neighborhood was pristine, untouched.

  No gas leak. No accident.

  In the distance, sirens began whooping. Other than that, the street had gone silent as a tomb.

  23

  DONNER

  “Donner?”

  “Get out of the apartment. Download yourself somewhere safe.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Go now, Maggie, before something explodes!”

  “Jesus! Where are you going?”

  “I have some banking to do.”

  ***

  They handed me a metal box and ushered me into a priva
te room. Inside the box were file folders bound with rubber bands, and a yellowing piece of paper. A partial booking sheet. No name, but a complete set of fingerprints. I tucked the paper away. The box also contained a credit pebble and two guns.

  I lifted the Browning Hi-Power. It had customized Delrin polymer grips and an adjustable sight mounted low in the slide. I pulled the magazine to make sure it wasn’t another space toy, then smiled mirthlessly—9mm. One hundred ten grains, capable of moving at eleven hundred feet a second. My kind of destruction.

  The second weapon was a Beretta 92F semi-auto, an old favorite of urban PDs. The double-action automatic had almost the same punch as a Magnum .357 and it jammed a lot less than its predecessor, the Colt .45. I had always preferred Sig Sauers as my back-up pieces, but this was fine. Just fine.

  I left the ray gun in the box.

  ***

  Two hours later, in the driver’s seat of the rental car, Maggie worked the Conch like a woman possessed. I had quickly filled her in, and was gratified in a grim way by her revulsion. The species homo digitalus possessed at least as much a horror of violence as did the average human. Probably more. Maybe I was sitting next to a representative of the only hope for the planet. Who knew? Mankind had sure turned out to be a sucker’s bet.

  She’d met me under the Varrazano-Narrows Bridge, close to the water. Pulled up next to the rusted chain link in a pink jelly bean with enormous fenders. Which was funny, since there were no wheels. As a barge tooted beyond a scrubby expanse of marsh grass, she’d leaned out and grinned.

  “Hey, sailor. Going my way?”

  My face had lit up in a sad smile. I was happy to see her. Why did she affect me that way?

  Part of her jaunty greeting no doubt had to do with my appearance. I was done with being conspicuous, so I’d made a trip to the pharmacy. Nail polish, blue contacts and a “Just For Reborn Men” hair kit later, I looked like a bad copy of my former self.

  Maggie scanned the prints into her databases as the car tooled along on autodrive. I was relegated to surveying the neighborhood.

  We crossed a cement bridge over the Gowanus Expressway, and just like that, we were in Red Hook.

  It hadn’t changed. The peninsula, once one of the busiest ports in America, had been cut off from South Brooklyn and its own waterfront by some brilliant government moves in the mid-twentieth, notably the Brooklyn Queens Expressway and the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel. Its businesses had wilted under the shadow of the overpass. By my day, the area, with its quaint cobblestones and Civil-war era warehouses, was a ghetto where three-quarters of the population lived in housing projects and drugs and violence were the de facto masters of the streets. Its lots and abandoned properties had turned into open dumps. The shipyards had long ago moved to Jersey, and the gentrification wave that swept through Park Slope in my time apparently ran out of steam before it reached this place.

  The setting sun transformed Manhattan’s aeries into postcard silhouettes. I looked at the skeletons of warehouses, the rolling tide of razor-wire, the rusted steel shutters. The desolation was somehow beautiful. In a world of lies, it at least was honest.

  “I got him,” Maggie said, interrupting my reverie. I leaned over to view the image she was projecting onto the vehicle’s broad dashboard. A young Latino kid looked sullenly back at me.

  Hector Alvarez.

  My murderer.

  24

  DONNER

  The Red Hook Houses extended block after block like urban kudzu.

  The moment Maggie and I stepped from the car in front of the projects, six young men at the corner bristled and headed our way. Shit, I thought. Hope street gangs react the way they used to. Their wardrobe was a pastiche, present and past, old and new, zoot suits and durags. The leader’s head had an aggressive thrust to it. His crew’s hands were all under their jackets. Not the best sign.

  “Hey, hey, it’s the heat,” said the leader. He was of mixed Afro-American-Hispanic heritage. His eyes shone out from beautiful caramel skin with a harsh intelligence.

  I shook my head and kept my demeanor neutral. The leader gave me a “don’t bother to deny it” laugh. “You five-oh all over, man.”

  Maggie smiled. “We’re just here to—”

  “Nobody talk to you, embustero.”

  Maggie recoiled as if slapped. I felt the energy in the air leap a couple levels. I put a restraining hand on her arm. “I’m with Reborn Affairs,” I said mildly. “I’m looking for a man named Hector Alvarez. His grandmother revived.”

  That stopped them. The four in back started whispering. The leader eyed me up and down again. “Why you carrying, if you ain’t the man?”

  “What’s your name?”

  The leader wavered, then stuck out his lower lip. “José.”

  Not a street tag. Gutsy. “I don’t come down here unarmed, José. Do you blame me?”

  José laughed, and his boys did, too, once they knew it was okay. “Fuck no. My crew, we spray the corners. You don’t brandish iron, you end up in the Canal.”

  I nodded, thinking furiously. No choice but to step out. “Yeah, the Canal,” I said. “It’s been a while. They ever clean that mess up? Last time I saw it, it was green slime.”

  It was a risk. If it had been cleaned up, but, like, seventeen years ago, I’d just shown myself for a reeb. And I could guess how these kids would take to that.

  But José bobbed with civic pride. “Yeah, man, Surazal, they did good by us. Bought up some warehouses, hired some locals, and cleaned up the Gowanus. We fish in it, now.”

  I looked dubious. “Real fish? Do they glow?”

  “Naw, they sucked that toxic shit right out. Built this iron pier for us to cast from an’ everything. There’s striped bass, bluefish and flounder. Rafael’s mom, she cooks ’em up.”

  Rafael scowled in agreement.

  “Once I caught a blue crab,” came a voice from the rear.

  “Shut up, Julius,” said José. Julius was pummeled by the others.

  José cocked his head at me. “So you want Hector, huh? He old, man.”

  Maggie nodded discretely. He was eighteen when I died.

  “You say his granny-moms come back, huh?” José bobbed his head, thinking. “What’s her name?”

  I tightened. I’d walked right into that. I had no idea if José actually knew the answer. If he did, and I gave him a bullshit answer, things would change instantly. I was outnumbered and outgunned. But I’d be equally dead if I hesitated. So I opened my mouth to make up a name, when—

  “Daphnia,” said Maggie. She smiled. “Pretty name.”

  José stared a moment. But he nodded, satisfied. “Yeah, Daphnia. They say she was a hot patootie.” He eyed the lay of my jacket. “Let’s see it.”

  I felt Maggie stiffen. But these bangers weren’t ready to play. Not yet, at least. I slid back my jacket, showing them the holster. I pulled the Browning with a single, unthreatening gesture and handed it butt-first to him. José ratcheted the action back, and his eyes widened. His crew hissed in appreciation when they saw the jacketed round in the chamber.

  “This a fine antique, white boy. None of that plasma shit. This a real weapon. For a real man.” Rafael reached out, but José slapped his hand away.

  José leered at Maggie. “You got a real man, Miss Anne.”

  “Don’t I know it,” she smiled.

  “What say I tell you where Hector be, and you let me keep this fine piece of American craftsmanship?” José was grinning, but his eyes were dead. The issue wasn’t open for debate. The guy was just letting me save face in front of my “Miss Anne,” my white girl. So I frowned, but then nodded grudgingly.

  “Just one more thing, though.” José leaned in, confidentially. “His grams ain’t coming back here, is she?”

  I shook my head. “They’ll care for her in a foster home until she’s young enough to care for herself.”

  José nodded, and shuddered. “Down here, we hunt ’em like rats.” He pointed his finger right at me
and fired.

  ***

  José led us to the far west side of the Houses. Running into him had been lucky. The projects, when taken in total, were larger than the Pentagon. We could have searched for days without finding the right building, the right floor. But merely five minutes after our conversation, José was rapping his knuckles on the shellacked metal door of Apartment 67D, sixth floor.

  I’d gone icy still. Behind that door could be the man who took my life away. Took Elise’s life. I’d expected to feel, what? Anger? Dread? Anticipation? But there was only numbness. My emotions were in a deep freeze, like when I’d first revived.

  So be it.

  “Who is it?” came an irritated voice from behind the door.

  “José!”

  “What the fuck you want?”

  “I got some of that new Mexican chronic. Thought you might want a taste.”

  “Fuck off.”

  “On the house, you old piece of shit.”

  Silence. “On the—? What the hell… ? Hold on!” Then a racking, phlegmy cough. “Shit piss fuck.”

  José swung a hand toward the apartment like a carnival barker, winked once, and pimprolled down the hall.

  The door cracked opened on the chain. A bleary eye appeared to appraise the situation.

  I kicked into the room, the chain snapping like licorice. Maggie gasped, then slid into the apartment behind me.

  Hector Alvarez had jumped backwards to avoid the crashing door. He’d spilled a Lipton’s Cup-A-Soup all over his chest. Now he stood in the middle of the room, cracked lips working silently, his eyes bulging. He had the look of a man who’d waited all his life for a demon to arrive and make him atone for his sins. And now the horrible thing was here.

  “You recognize me,” I said.

  The man nodded mutely. Noodles hung like maggots on his broth-soaked shirt.

  My emotions may have been out of order, but my mind felt extraordinarily nimble. The vague dullness of thought that had plagued me seemed to dissipate with the sight of this man.