by Ben Sanders
Ludo said, ‘Five seconds, Tol.’ Leaning out past his door pillar, an arm draped on the wheel. ‘Four. Three.’
Tol didn’t answer. His bluff had been called, and everyone knew it.
‘Two.’
But the gun was already coming down. Tol swore under his breath, threw the rifle back in the Subaru, slammed the trunk lid two-handed. Ludo laughed. He sat revving as Tol walked around to the passenger door. The car listed and righted as he got in.
Ludo closed his door, reached across and clapped Tol on the shoulder. He massaged the joint, showing some tongue as he dug his fingers in. He said, ‘You do that to me again, you better make sure you pull the trigger.’
He put the car in gear and propped his elbow on the seatback, smiled as they pulled away up the road.
EIGHT
Marshall
He couldn’t sleep. The meeting with Perry was on steady repeat. He kept wondering if he’d made a wrong move. Maybe he should’ve committed to his backseat interview, and just waited for the cops to leave the parking lot. Maybe they weren’t even cops. He might have bailed for the sake of IRS people, checking up on receipts or whatever they did. He had Perry’s address, though; nothing to stop him picking up where they left off. The problem being Perry would expect that, nervous as he was. Not a great idea to go visiting an edgy gun owner in the dead of night.
He got out of bed and stood at the desk. It was 2 A.M.
How long are you going to live like this?
If you can call it living, hiding and staying traceless. It was a limbo existence, but the fact that it was habit fooled him it was normal. He’d done it in New Mexico as well, moved from cheap place to cheap place, fake names and cash payments. Everything austere and expendable, so he could run when he had to.
He stood with his hands on his hips, looking out at the dark. The dew on the window lit yellow by the streetlights, a rough catenary draped pane to pane. He could hear Chloe Asaro in his head, her voice through a dead hit man’s phone, telling him she’d tried to have him killed. She’d sent a cleaner for him in Santa Fe last year, and now this was round two: Perry Rhodes and the men who kidnapped Cohen.
He’d given Henry that line about being happy to hide until she tried to kill him, and that was probably the truth. If he’d been left alone, he would’ve responded in kind. They were a high-risk item, he and Chloe. They’d dated while Marshall was undercover, romance with the daughter as he built a case against the father. It was a razor edge he couldn’t walk for long: he blew his cover in a meeting with Tony’s son at the Asaro apartment on Central Park West. He hadn’t known Chloe was there, and he could still see the moment she entered, panic and desperation as she went for a gun.
He shot her.
He knew at the time it wasn’t fatal, but it still robbed his sleep. He agonised over alternatives that would have left her unscathed. Five years insomnia, for a woman who’d tried to have him murdered. If he got the chance, he’d ask what made her do it—what came first in the hierarchy of betrayals: lying to Chloe, or lying to her father?
She still cost him sleep, but now the problem was reversed.
Now he just wanted her dead.
He dressed and went downstairs and made a left when he reached the street. It was a different demographic at this hour: mostly young people, a few drunk or drugged kids on the tail end of a big night, tottering solo or walking arm in arm in zombie gangs. He walked down Lafayette and into the Astor Place subway station. The entry was always a good challenge. He liked to time the approach so he could run his MetroCardthrough the reader and then push through the turnstile without pausing. Rhythm was key, and tonight he nailed it.
He caught a 6 train downtown and shared a carriage with a cop and a homeless guy stretched out on a bench seat against the wall. Marshall stood by the door, arms folded, looking at the floor as they burrowed and clattered through the dark. He had a no-hands approach to riding trains. Not that he was a germophobe, but from the standpoint of hygiene, it seemed prudent to avoid handholds, given the frequency of usage. He’d bought a little bottle of hand sanitiser from a drugstore in L.A., but it had only lasted him four days. For now, he had to make do with care and vigilance.
Rats and grime aside, though, he’d missed the subway. At his core he was a man of logic and precision, and he figured trains demanded a synthesis of both. The huge network of track, all the corresponding schedules. Straightforward at face value, but the tightrope was backstage.
He got off at Canal and walked east, and went into the NYPD’s Fifth Precinct on Elizabeth Street. It was an old four-storey edifice in white brick that bore greater resemblance to an apartment building than to a police facility. He hadn’t set foot in it for six years, but it was still a close match to memory. They had all the same happy police propaganda: letter-size posters of cops helping kids, cops helping elderly, cops helping people of all shades and superstitions. There was a female sergeant behind the desk, protected from the public by a thick sheet of scuffed glass. Marshall waited in line behind two women with separate robbery complaints, and the same officer came down to meet each woman in turn and take her upstairs. The desk sergeant was still typing when Marshall reached the counter, and she glanced up seeming skeptical, the way she looked at him from under her brow.
Marshall said, ‘Is Detective Lana Greer available?’
She shook her head. ‘Sorry.’
‘What about Detective Dom Page?’
‘Uh-uh. Sorry.’
He was running out of names. ‘What about Ed Ripley?’
She checked something on her screen and then picked up a phone. She held the mouthpiece against her shoulder. ‘Name?’
‘Tell him it’s Marshall.’
She pushed a speed-dial number and listened and then said, ‘There’s a Marshall here to see you.’ Then: ‘Tall and fortyish.’ She waited and then said, ‘Cool.’
She hung up. ‘He’s coming for you.’
It sounded kind of ominous, the way she said it in a flat tone, not looking at him. ‘He’s coming for you.’ He stood off to one side to let the next person have his turn, and Ripley came down a minute later. He was a short, uniformed sergeant of about fifty with a bald head buffed like the tip of a ballistic missile. He stopped on the bottom stair when he saw Marshall, and when he reached him he said, ‘Shit, been a while, hasn’t it?’
Marshall said, ‘I was out of town.’
‘Yeah, what’s it been? Five years or something?’
‘Six. Let’s go upstairs.’
Ripley had a glass-walled office in the corner of an open-plan area on the third floor. He sat down behind his desk and Marshall leaned in the doorframe.
Ripley said, ‘So what happened? Thought I heard you were UC.’
‘Yeah. I was undercover.’
‘What, and it turned to shit?’
Marshall nodded. ‘Something like that.’
He didn’t want to go into it, and his reticence seemed to send the message. Ripley glanced away and licked his lips, realising this wasn’t going to be a nice little catch-up chat. He said, ‘When she told me Marshall, I thought she meant like the federal kind.’ A neutral observation to steer them out of questioning.
Marshall shook his head. ‘She meant like the me kind.’
Ripley just looked at him and swung back and forth slightly in his chair, like trying to take him in from different angles. Marshall surveyed the rest of the squad room. There were desks corralled by partitions, sheets of paper tacked to them, looking sad with their top corners hanging forward. There were only three other people up here, uniformed cops typing reports, listening to phones while they waited to come off hold.
Ripley read his mind and said, ‘Vice has got a thing going tonight, why it’s so quiet. They got backup up the wazoo.’
Marshall nodded. ‘I’m looking for Lana. Called her last week, and she called back and said try again. Thought I might find her here.’
Ripley linked his hands behind his shiny dome. He s
aid, ‘Lana quit.’
‘When was this?’
He shrugged. ‘Six months ago? Bit like you, just realised I hadn’t seen her in a while.’ He smiled. ‘Thought the feds might’ve put her in witness protection, too.’
Looking him in the eye, letting him know he’d heard the rumours, but Marshall didn’t answer.
Ripley nodded at the squad room and said, ‘You can use a phone if you want. Tell her I said hi.’
He used a vacant desk on the other side of the room. He’d never been assigned to the Fifth but he’d spent time in the precinct, making queries on drugs and dealers. This was the first time he’d come here looking for someone he’d actually want to spend time with. He dialled Lana and stood looking out the window toward Elizabeth Street.
When she picked up he said, ‘It’s Marshall.’
She said, ‘I wondered if I’d hear from you again.’ Dry and uninflected, but he thought he heard a slight lift on the ‘you again’.
He said, ‘Hoping you would, or hoping you wouldn’t?’
‘I don’t know, I just wondered. But I called you back, didn’t I?’
‘Yeah. You did.’
She said, ‘Where are you now?’
‘New York.’
‘So why’d you tell me a New Mexico number?’
‘It’s a longish story.’ He took a breath, wondering if this was too far. He said, ‘But if you want to meet up, you can hear it.’
‘What are you doing up this late?’
‘I can tell you that as well, if you want.’
Crackle on the phone for a moment, and then she said, ‘Yeah. All right.’
He said, ‘What are you doing right now?’
‘Nothing important. My shift’s almost finished. We could get coffee. There’s a diner down here I like.’
She gave him the name of a place on Delancey Street, down on the Lower East Side, and he knew it would be in the low-rise commercial area where the Williamsburg Bridge came in from Brooklyn. It took him fifteen minutes to walk there from Elizabeth Street. He didn’t say goodbye to Ripley. He could sense a desire to hear the last six years in great detail, and he preferred to just slip away.
The diner was called Cayenne. It was a long, rectangular structure panelled in shiny aluminum, looking like a toaster or an old RV with its chamfered corners. Marshall went in and took an abandoned newspaper off a table and sat at a booth down the back. There were four other customers in the diner, a couple and two singles. None of them looked like they wished him any harm, and none of them looked like they could inflict any if they changed their mind.
A waiter came by, and Marshall ordered coffee with cream. Black was his standard, but given it was 3 A.M. and quiet, he suspected they’d had the same brew stewing all night, in which case he’d need some dairy to take the edge off the taste.
Lana arrived before his order did. He hadn’t seen her in years, but she hadn’t changed. She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt under a knee-length hooded coat, bulky enough she seemed petite rather than just small. He lifted a hand and she saw him and came over, shrugged out of the coat and folded it across her arm as she slid in opposite him.
She said, ‘Been too long.’
Nothing in her tone, as if another six years wouldn’t have bothered her. Her age was more evident up close. He could see lines around her mouth and eyes, probably a consequence of stress and cigarettes. Like him, she’d been undercover in a narc unit, but he was never quite sure how deep she went. He’d known people who were UC who ended up with crack or crystal meth addictions, so he hoped that wasn’t Lana. It seemed unlikely, though. Her teeth were too good.
He smiled and sighed, coming back from his brief pause, and said, ‘Yeah, way too long. How are you?’
She smiled back. ‘I’m OK. No major complaints. That was one of the stranger messages I’ve had, though.’
‘What?’
She linked her fingers and rested her hands on the table. He thought she’d lean forward and talk quietly, but she stayed upright, looking more serene than conspiratorial.
She said, ‘“Please call Marshall.” On an Albuquerque number that’s not even yours.’
‘It was Santa Fe.’
She shrugged. She had a tattoo he hadn’t noticed before: a bar code on the inside of her right forearm.
She said, ‘Might as well be anywhere if you don’t answer.’
‘It was a friend. I don’t have a phone.’
‘How did you call me just now?’
‘From the Fifth Precinct. Your message was pretty strange, too, if we’re on that subject.’
‘Yeah, well. I thought it was safer to be cryptic and have you come looking, rather than tell the U.S. Marshals in New Mexico who I was.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘I don’t know.’ She chewed her lip, looking at him. ‘I trust you more than them.’
He didn’t answer.
Her eyes flicked back and forth, searching him for more of the story, and he tried to sit there without moving. She said, ‘Are you OK?’
He nodded. ‘Yeah. I’m all right.’
‘What happened to you? I haven’t seen you for years.’
He didn’t answer. Then he said, ‘I saw Ripley at the Fifth. He said you’d quit.’
‘Yeah.’
‘How come?’
She looked at her coat and smoothed a hand on it and then looked up again. She said, ‘Why are you reading someone’s else’s newspaper?’
He folded it and slid it aside. ‘Maybe it’s mine.’
She nodded at it. ‘Crossword’s only half-done. You wouldn’t start something and leave it incomplete.’
‘Maybe it was in the booth already.’
She shook her head, wiped a finger on the table. ‘It’s just been cleaned. They wouldn’t leave a newspaper here.’
‘Why does it matter?’
She shrugged and smiled. ‘It doesn’t. It just occurred to me. You picked it up somewhere.’
Marshall didn’t answer.
She said, ‘It wasn’t a criticism. Just an observation.’
His coffee arrived, and Lana ordered a cup as well. He thought maybe he should do a test sip to see if cream was actually warranted, but he decided to accept his earlier assessment as valid. He poured in a packet of half-and-half.
She said, ‘You told me the story was long.’
‘Uh-huh. Longish.’
She looked around. ‘So you better start talking.’
He glanced out at the street. It was a proudly neon neighbourhood: McDonald’s in red and yellow, a Chase Bank in electric blue.
He said, ‘You know this is the third diner I’ve been to in seven hours.’
She slid to the edge of the seat. ‘Well, let’s go somewhere else, then.’
‘It wasn’t a criticism. Just an observation.’
‘Take the coffee to go. We can walk on the bridge.’
Marshall said, ‘Might not be a great idea, this time of night.’
Lana said, ‘Don’t worry. I’ve got a gun.’
He didn’t bother with his coffee. He’d bought it to pass the time rather than boost his caffeine. Lana took hers in a cardboard cup. The bill was four dollars, and Marshall decided that was perfect: with the tip it implied a total charge of five dollars, which is a clean and orderly amount. Marshall paid, and they left the diner and walked east toward the mouth of the bridge, streets bejewelled with night traffic, a hard wind coming south down the river.
Marshall said, ‘So what happened?’
She hugged herself in the coat, crossed her arms to keep it closed. ‘When are we going to get to your story?’
‘I’ll talk if you talk.’
She said, ‘I take it you’re no longer with NYPD.’
It sounded rhetorical. He didn’t answer.
She said, ‘I left about six months ago.’
Marshall said, ‘Had enough?’
‘Sort of. I think they’d had enough of me.’
‘What happen
ed?’
She didn’t answer, but he figured she was just taking her time rather than ignoring the question. They walked up the pedestrian gantry on the right-hand side, the Brooklyn-bound lanes below them at deck level. Traffic was sparse enough each car sang its own brief note.
She said, ‘There was talk I tipped someone off about a bust.’
‘In exchange for a kickback?’
The bridge lost some charm after sundown. The projects along the East River looked grim and loveless, groups of young guys loitering by the swing sets, out for fights or graffiti. The steelwork bore messages: GO FUCK YOURSELF in black marker pen.
She said, ‘That was the allegation.’
‘And did you?’
She didn’t answer right away. They walked together out over the water, the East River gliding through, coal-black and sullen. The wind could have been straight out of the Arctic.
She stopped and drank some coffee. Her hair lifted and flattened with the breeze. She said, ‘My father wasn’t well. He needed a lot of help. Only fifty-eight, but he got dementia. Internal Affairs brought me in, told me I’d taken dirty money to help him out, pay for his care. All that kind of shit.’
‘But you didn’t.’
‘No, of course I didn’t. Some shitbag Vice brought in had tried to trade his way out of charges by saying a lady cop had been paid for giving out police intel. That’s all they had: some lady cop. But somehow that equated to me.’
‘Did you fight it?’
She shook her head. ‘Brian and I had separated. I needed a clean start. And I didn’t want to stay around with that hanging over me.’
Marshall left it at that. He said, ‘What do you do now?’
She nodded behind them. ‘I work at a bar. Just back up Delancey, get Sam every other weekend. He’s nine now.’
Marshall nodded.
‘What do you do now?’
He said, ‘Nothing.’
‘Nothing.’
Marshall didn’t answer. The way she was still looking at him, he thought she’d keep pushing him on the work front, but she changed tack and said, ‘You seeing anyone at the moment?’
He shook his head. ‘No. You?’
