by David Mark
“Come on, old man, we’ve got to get busy.”
Luca is a few feet away, struggling through the snow. Claudio’s world is black-and-white, a photographic negative, a snowstorm of newspaper print. In its center a silhouette, an inky blob that crosses between himself and his companion in purposeful, efficient strides.
Helpless, feeble, he watches as the man who has attacked him moves toward Luca. Quickly, silently, he darts forward and without another word he grabs Luca by the collar of his stupid calfskin jacket and pushes him forward. The branch goes into his chest just below his rib cage and exits between his shoulder blades. There is a sound like somebody has snapped a dozen small branches and then the soft hiss as the air in his lungs gurgles upward through bloodied lips and into the cold night air.
On the ground, Claudio breathes out, slowly. He tries to become a part of the forest floor. He does not want the man to come back and finish him off. He knows that were the roles reversed, it is what he would do. He is a killer. He takes no pleasure in it but it is his life’s work to stop human hearts. He came here, to this lonely place on the road to Crow, to kill two men. He has done what he was paid to do. He wasn’t expecting the third, who took off into the darkness as soon as Luca pulled the trigger and the big dark Irishman fell forward onto the snow-covered earth.
Claudio watches as the man who killed Luca disappears into the trees. After a moment he begins to move. Slowly, soundlessly, he checks himself over. There is a gash to the top of his skull and there is blood in his mouth, but apart from a ringing sensation in his ears, he is unharmed. Damp and cold, he pulls himself upright and leans against a tree. He reaches into his pocket and finds his cigarettes. Lights up, and breathes out a cloud.
“Fuck,” he whispers, to himself. It covers the majority of his feelings.
Pissed off and sore, Claudio consoles himself with the thought that it is not his fault. Luca fucked up, not him. And nobody had told them about the Chechen. He did his job right and then other forces got in the way. Even as he thinks it, he finds himself shaking his head. He has seen men killed for so much less. He has killed men who had perfectly good excuses for their screwups. He closes his eyes and searches for comfort. Finds it in Belle. The little girl is the only light in the blackness inside him, but she is a light that grows brighter every time she holds his hand and looks at him as if he is something other than a monster. For her, he would stop all this. For her, he would try and be a better man. But neither she nor her mother knows how he earns the money that sustains them and he never intends for them to find out. He lives on borrowed time. For forty years he has been waiting for it all to stop.
As he stares at the body of the young man impaled on the tree, Claudio feels a shiver of premonition. He suddenly fears that he is at the start of something that could lead to his end.
ONE
10:15 P.M., SEVENTH PRECINCT, LOWER EAST SIDE
Now . . .
There’s a chunk of plastic cat shit in Detective Ronald Alto’s Zen garden. It’s just sitting there, next to the little rake, forming a gruesome mouth beneath three shiny pebbles.
Alto fights back a smile as he wordlessly picks up the offending addition and deposits it in his top drawer. It clatters down among the other pieces of artwork that the detectives of New York’s Seventh Precinct have seen fit to place in the little bamboo-and-sand construction that sits in the in-tray on top of his age-blackened desk. He presumes that this evening’s contribution was made by Detective Hugh Redding. Reviewed critically, the cat shit lacks subtlety but has a certain potency. The same could be said for the man himself. It certainly doesn’t possess the creative genius displayed by Sergeant Kendricks, who last week re-created a beach homicide out of Lego figures in the ten minutes that Alto was away from his desk.
“B minus,” announces Alto without looking at the trio of detectives at the far end of the long room, who sit shoveling Chinese food into their mouths with plastic knives and forks.
“Objection,” shouts Redding, beginning to rise. There is rice on the front of his off-white shirt and the seams of his gray trousers strain under the pressure of his flesh.
“Overruled,” says Alto, waving Redding back into his chair.
“It’s a litter box,” shouts Redding, picking a shrimp off the rolled-up cuff of his shirtsleeve and popping it in his mouth. “I want the shit back. Belongs to my stepson.”
“Early Christmas present, was it?”
“Little prick left it in my shoe.”
“And you thought of me?”
“I always think of you, Ronnie,” says Redding, puckering up and blowing a kiss. “Can’t sleep unless I’m spooning you in my mind.”
Alto decides to end the conversation with a grin and a raised middle finger. He is a veteran of the Seventh and well versed in the foul-mouthed sexual banter that is as much a part of the squad room as the black linoleum, the beige walls, the battered silver filing cabinets, and an aroma that would make a perfumer’s head cave in. It’s a pungent cocktail of perspiration, ethnic food, and clothes dried out in a too-small room, marbled with coffee and stale cigarettes. Alto associates the smell with home. He missed it when he spent his year on temporary assignment with Homicide South. That was a hard time. He made the right contacts, put away some bad people, but it was a difficult few months for his soul. He had to stand by while deals were made that turned his stomach, and he found himself starting to see the advantages, the opportunity for manipulation, rather than seeing the victims and the villains. His time with Homicide came to an end through a combination of failing to kiss the right asses and becoming too fond of the bottle. He knows himself to be tenacious but in drink he becomes obsessive.
For the last few months of his time in Homicide he was doggedly pursuing a money launderer who had links to Paulie Pugliesca’s crime family. Loose lips alerted him to the crooked lawyer’s existence and he became convinced that if he could put a face to the legend he would have a useful lever to use against Pugliesca. The old man’s soldiers were responsible for a half dozen hits during his time on Homicide and he had fought tooth and claw to keep the murder investigations within his bailiwick instead of being folded up into the larger federal investigation into organized crime. Instead he found endless layers of bureaucracy and legal red tape and became so entangled in who owned what and which company belonged to what offshore account, he found himself drowning. Like any drowning man, he reached for more liquid. He returned to the Seventh as a borderline alcoholic. The file he collected on the lawyer still sits in his desk, the smug, round-faced bastard grinning up through the sheets of arrest reports, requests for information, and legal documentation. He doesn’t know why he keeps it other than a feeling, deep in his core, that it matters.
Adjusting his glasses, Alto sits on his swivel chair and slaps his hand down on the keyboard of the chunky computer. The machine is all but useless and he prefers to use his own slimline laptop for his casework, but when the screen of the desktop computer is dark he can see the reflection of the squad room in all its gray misery, and at this hour, on an evening this grim, he is far too short on self-loathing to put himself through that.
Ronald Alto is forty-two years old. He’s tall and slim, one of the few detectives in the Seventh who worries about how much exercise he is getting, how much he drinks, and whether he has consumed enough portions of fresh fruit and vegetables each day. His colleagues have stopped inviting him to join in their nightly banquets of cultural cuisine, though tonight the smell of chicken chow mein is so strong that he could very well be passively consuming a share of their artery-hardening calories. It took Alto a year of hard work to lose the sixty pounds he packed on after Lisa walked out on him and he is obsessive in his desire not to let a single ounce of fat slip back onto his middleweight boxer’s torso. Lisa would consider this typical of him. If he had been less obsessive about his work, perhaps she would never have left. Alto would disagree. She w
as always going to leave him. Obsession had nothing to do with it. He considers himself neither more nor less devoted to his work than any of his colleagues. He simply struggles with going home to watch shitty TV and eat dinners off a tray when he could be taking steps toward catching killers. He presumes he would be the same in whatever profession he chose. Were he a carpenter, like his father, he would not be able to stop sanding or varnishing simply because his shift had finished. He would need to see the job through to completion. He told Lisa that long before they were married and continued to mutter it, sullenly, in the face of her tears and tantrums through the course of their three-year marriage. She was already gone a week by the time Alto realized she had made good on her threat. It was not the absence of Lisa that plunged him into misery—more the fulfillment of the gloomy prophecies made by friends, family, and colleagues when he announced his intention to wed. Cops’ marriages don’t last, they said. Marry another cop or marry nobody. He ignored their grim predictions, confident that he would be the exception to the rule. Nobody was pleased when he had been proven wrong.
Alto opens his laptop and in the few seconds it takes for the machine to come to life, turns to look out of the dirty windows at a view he knows better than his own reflection. The detectives’ room is on the second floor of the utilitarian Seventh Precinct, which shares its home with the handsome heroes of the fire department. It overlooks a dreary, blustery corridor of the Lower East Side. The constant wind seems to have picked up a vast chunk of Manhattan’s most uninspiring constructions and deposited them at the edge of the East River. The Seventh, housed at the pleasingly exact address of 19½ Pitt Street, looks out on a scene almost Soviet in its bleakness. This is a place of housing projects, bridge ramps, and squat brick buildings, rattled almost insensible by the constant rumble of vehicles crossing the bridge overhead. Nobody would put this view on a Christmas card, despite the hard, frozen snow that is piled up on the sidewalks like garbage bags. Fresh snow hasn’t fallen for three nights but the temperature has yet to get above zero and the flurries that did fall have now turned to jagged white stone. The emergency rooms are overrun with people who slipped and hurt themselves. Alto heard a story yesterday that a Vietnamese shopkeeper had been assaulted by the son of an elderly lady who fell outside his store. The dutiful son had blamed the shopkeeper for not shoveling the snow away from his building. The shopkeeper had suggested that it wasn’t his responsibility. Devoid of further rational argument, the son made his point by kicking the shopkeeper unconscious. It has been years since such anecdotes shocked Alto. He no longer questions what people will do to one another. He just tries to tidy up afterward as best he can.
A buzz from his cell phone reminds him to take one of his vitamin tablets. His hooded military-issue coat hangs on the back of a nearby chair and he searches its pockets for the correct bottle. He takes two green tablets with a swig of electrolyte-rich water and then slides himself back over to his computer.
“Dinnertime, George?” shouts Redding with his mouth full.
“Just an hors d’oeuvre,” replies Alto, grinning. The men and women of the Seventh have two nicknames for him. One is George Jetson, a reference to his diet of spaceman pills. The other is Bono, in tribute to the amber-tinted glasses he wears to combat the migraines he suffers when he spends too much time beneath bright lights. Both nicknames are remarkably affectionate. The Seventh is full of police officers with handles like Boner, Stinkz, and Ball Sack. To Alto, Ball Sack seems particularly unfair. After all, her mother named her Deborah.
Alto’s fingers move over his keyboard and he pulls up the relevant case file. He sends it to the printer and sits back, waiting for the ancient machine to start rattling and spitting like some steam-powered beast. His eyes flick up to the clock above the filing cabinets. It’s 10:18 p.m. He probably has a few minutes.
A moment later, Alto’s posture tenses as he looks at the mug shot filling his screen. The man’s name is Murray Ellison, and if Alto doesn’t find a way to put him in prison, there is a very good chance he will kill him. Last summer, Ellison drugged an NYU philosophy student he met in a bar off East Broadway. She had been out drinking cocktails with friends and the handsome investment banker had taken a shine to the petite nineteen-year-old with her bubblegum-pink hair, her hippie dress, and her little boy’s body. He said hello. Charmed her. Bought her drinks and another round for her friends. Whispered in her ear until she goosepimpled and blushed. High on new experience, lost in drink, she let him near enough to stir Rohypnol into her sangria blanca. As the drug loosened her inhibitions, she told the others she was with that she was going to stay with her new friend. They were thrilled at her daring, excited that she was going to do something so delightfully brazen. He promised them he would ensure she got a taxi home. Instead, he took her to his East Village apartment and raped her near-unconscious body. He went to bed and left her on his living room floor. The combination of alcohol and Rohypnol caused her to choke to death.
Alto cannot prove what happened next but has no doubts about the sequence of events. Alto has traced the calls made from Ellison’s cell phone and knows that he rang an unregistered cell phone forty minutes before a stolen Volvo was dropped off at the curb outside his building by a stocky man in a woolen hat and a ski jacket. He has never been traced. A short while later, a man who looked a lot like Ellison was spotted by a neighbor placing a suitcase in the trunk of the car. He then got into the vehicle and drove away. The vehicle was picked up by surveillance cameras on a residential street in Red Hook. The driver covered his face as he left and did not lock the door. Instead, he left the keys in the ignition. The car was stolen four hours later. Whoever took it abandoned the vehicle a short while afterward. Alto has a feeling they looked in the trunk. Not long after, it was stolen again. By the time the contents were reported to the police, making a case against Ellison seemed damn near impossible. The district attorney said there were too many gaps in the timeline. Once the neighbor began to have doubts about who it was they had seen, and with so many opportunities for other parties to have put the case in the trunk, the whole thing became too difficult a case to proceed with. There were no usable forensics, and Ellison had good lawyers. He stuck to his story. The girl came home with him, they had sex, and she left. The suit his lawyer was wearing cost more than Alto’s car. Ellison smirked his way through his interviews and even had the balls to wink now and again at the officers watching from behind the mirrored glass of the interview room. Alto managed to track down the petty thief who sold Ellison the vehicle but he refused to testify and left the city before Alto could secure a subpoena. The district attorney’s office was impressed with the work Alto had done to demonstrate the victim’s last movements, but did not have sufficient belief in a conviction to prosecute. Ellison was set free. Alto, who had been present at the victim’s autopsy, had to be physically held back as Ellison stepped onto Pitt Street and climbed inside a sleek black limo. He was in the process of pulling his gun.
After the outburst, Alto’s sergeant bought him the Zen garden. Told him to let it go, to be a bit more Buddhist about the whole affair. Karma was a bitch, and Ellison would eventually get what was coming to him. Alto heeded his sergeant’s words. He just wanted to make sure that karma knew exactly what was required.
Alto is staring into Ellison’s green eyes when the phone on his desk begins to ring. His eyes flick to the clock—10:30 p.m. The visitor is dead on time.
After telling the desk sergeant he will be right down, Alto crosses to the printer and collects his sheaf of papers. He pauses for a moment and decides that it will be too cold without his coat. He returns to his desk, pulls on the great gray garment that makes him look like a member of the KGB, and walks briskly down the stairs. He does not need to be told which of the people waiting in the small reception area is here for him. He performed a Google search on his visitor the moment he was told who was coming. And the man standing reading the bulletin board is unmistakably Detec
tive Sergeant Aector McAvoy of the Humberside Police in Merrie Olde England.
“Sergeant McAvoy,” says Alto, swiping his card on the security scanner and pushing through the plastic barrier. “A pleasure.”
The big man turns from the bulletin board like a teenager who has been caught looking at a skin magazine. He looks startled. Embarrassed. His big face is red and his tousled hair is damp at the temples. There is gray beneath his eyes, as if an artist started drawing him in charcoal, then switched to pastels halfway through. He has a ginger goatee, running to gray, and the big brown eyes of a Disney animal. There are scars running from his eyelid to his jawline. They are angry, painful-looking wounds, at odds with the gentleness of the rest of his face. He’s wearing hiking boots and dark trousers that disappear into the hem of a long, dark blue woolen coat. His right hand, when he extends it, is pink and broken and solid as rock.
“Detective Alto?” asks McAvoy. “I’m Sergeant McAvoy. Oh, sorry, you already said . . .”
Alto fights not to do a double take as he spots a blush creeping onto the bigger man’s cheeks. On his computer are the reports he requested detailing this man’s part in the successful detection of two different serial killers on his home turf in Yorkshire. One of those men ended up dead. The other is serving multiple life sentences. In both cases, McAvoy had bled in pursuit of his quarry. In both cases he was praised for his insight and bravery. Alto has been looking forward to meeting him.
