“When was the last time you fired that piece?” he asked.
Gadd answered without looking at him. “Three days ago,” she said. Then, after a pause, “I used to shoot in department competitions. Best I ever got was a third place, but I met a lot of ranking officers. For all the good it did me.” She hesitated again. “Don’t worry, Moodrow. I’ll hit what I’m aiming at. Assuming I’m not paralyzed with terror.”
“All right, all right.” Moodrow braked sharply as he slid onto the off-ramp. “I’m sorry I brought it up. You can’t blame me for wanting to know.”
Gadd said nothing for a moment, waiting until the car came to a full stop at the end of the ramp. “Take a right. The fork should be at the next intersection.”
They drove the block in silence, pulling up as the light turned red.
“How ’bout you, Moodrow? You fire the gun on the job?”
Gadd was turned to him now, her .38 lying in her lap. As he watched, she emptied her bag onto the floor, then put the revolver inside the bag. She did it, he noted, with her hands, not her eyes, snuggling the weapon into a place where she could get to it fast.
“When I came on the job,” Moodrow said, “if some jerk ran away, all you had to do was fire a single warning shot. After that, assuming he didn’t take the hint, you could kill him and the job would back you up. Didn’t matter if he was unarmed.”
Gadd was about to say, “That’s not what I asked you,” when the light changed and Moodrow accelerated onto Middle Island Road. Two narrow lanes wide and devoid of any on-street lighting, the road curved through the woods with only an occasional house on either side. The first house they came to, set back forty feet, bore the number 238 under a porch light. The second was completely dark, as was the third. The fourth and fifth were set close to the sidewalk. Gadd called out the numbers 446 and 490 as they passed, added, “We’re closing in.”
They drove the next several hundred yards in total darkness, until Middle Island Road took a sharp bend to the right and they passed a dark house, then a house numbered 636. A hundred yards farther on, Gadd announced the number 772.
“We passed it,” she said, “two houses back.”
Moodrow nodded, allowed himself a moment to visualize Jilly Sappone’s home. He pulled up the image of a small, single-story house served by a long, straight driveway. There were no lights of any kind, not even over the tiny porch, the building just a darker shadow against the trees behind it.
“There was nothing close by, right?” he finally asked. “No neighbors?”
“None.” Gadd was smiling, her eyes sparkling despite the car’s dark interior. “Christ,” she said, “it’s a gift.”
“Yeah,” Moodrow agreed, “but we still have to find a place to park and we still have to hike back to the house. You see a way to circle around, come past again?”
“Take a right at the next intersection. Granny Road.”
“Granny? You gotta be kidding.”
Gadd turned to Moodrow, started to respond, thought better of it. She put her handbag on her lap, finding the revolver’s weight somehow reassuring. Her heart was pounding in her chest, but as she’d bought her own ticket, she couldn’t bring herself to start complaining now that the roller coaster was cresting the hill.
Even with no traffic, it took Moodrow almost ten minutes to get back to the intersection of Route 112 and the Long Island Expressway. Roads that seemed relatively short on the map stretched out into the darkness for what seemed like miles. By the time he pulled up to the red light, he was cursing himself for not using someone’s driveway to make a simple U-turn.
There were three cars driving north on Route 112 and Moodrow scanned them impatiently, anxious to make a right turn against the light. The first two carried no passengers and took an immediate left onto the Expressway service road, but the third caught his attention. He could see two men in the vehicle, one in front and one in back. The setup would have been unusual, even in a large sedan, a Cadillac or a town car, but the men were riding in a Ford Taurus. Maybe they were running with the front seat pushed all the way up, but, even so, the man riding behind had to be squeezed in.
As the car slid past Moodrow’s Caprice, the man in back turned to glance out the window. Despite the fourteen years and the tight gray beard, Moodrow recognized Jilly Sappone without hesitation. It might have been the large, sharp nose, Sappone’s most prominent feature, or the way his narrow, probing eyes swept over the Caprice to lock onto Moodrow’s. Either way, the shock charged Moodrow down to his toes. He barely had time to register the Ford’s sudden acceleration when he was seized by a single idea: If I lose Sappone now, I’ll never get him back.
He made the turn, jammed the gas pedal against the floorboard, was almost on Sappone’s trunk before he even considered the near certainty that Theresa Kalkadonis was in the car. By then it was much too late. Even as Moodrow began to fall behind, the sunroof on the Taurus slid back and the flapping edges of a white blanket appeared in the opening. Slowly, inch by inch, the blanket, and the object it so obviously concealed, rose above the retreating automobile. Then, all at once, Jilly Sappone tossed the package into the night air and the blanket flew open, framing the small, frightened child like the wings of an angel.
EIGHTEEN
DESPITE BETTY HALUKA’S PREVAILING mood, a mix of anxiety and self-righteous anger such as a parent might feel for a wandering child lost at the beach, the view got to her. The American 757 out of Los Angeles, after a nearly interminable cross-country voyage, was on its final approach to La Guardia Airport, running straight up the East River with Manhattan spread out beside and beneath. The aircraft was moving very slowly, seeming almost at stall speed, a mere thousand feet above the taller buildings, offering a perspective that reduced the city to a scale model (like the one in a Flushing Meadow Park museum) while at the same time forcing Betty to acknowledge its overwhelming mass. Below her, on First Avenue, a pair of EMS ambulances tore north, their revolving lights drawing her face to the window as she automatically strained to hear the sirens.
“Beautiful, isn’t it? I fly at least once a month and I always hope the plane will take this approach on the return.”
Betty turned to the middle-aged woman (who’d been mercifully silent up to this point) sitting next to her. “Awesome is more like it.” She paused, reconsidered. “Or aweful. I can’t decide. Maybe both.”
She looked down at the lights strung along the cables of the Triboro Bridge, then north across Harlem to the George Washington Bridge on the far side of the Island. Street lamps lined every block, throwing patches of orangey light, their softly defined perimeters contrasting with the sharp, harsh rectangles offered by thousands upon thousands of lit windows.
The plane took a leisurely turn to the east, descending rapidly, and Betty tightened her seat belt. She’d never been afraid of flying, never had to fortify herself with a few quick belts in an airport bar. That was Stanley’s act, one of several, or so it seemed. Like his failing to call her, like Jim Tilley having to call her instead.
“He’s taking it real hard,” Tilley had said after a long, detailed preamble. “The job’s sending me out to Chicago, to pick up a mutt we’ve been after for a long time. I’ll probably be gone a couple of days.”
The message had been clear enough and Betty, with her cousin now in what the doctors called “an irreversible coma,” had abandoned Arthur and jumped on the next plane out. Not before calling, however. She’d called several times from the house, several times again from an LAX passenger terminal, her mood flipping from worry to anger with every unanswered ring.
She was angry because she was convinced that he should have called her. They’d been lovers and best friends for almost six years. If he couldn’t (or wouldn’t, or didn’t) reach out to her … well, the consequences were obvious enough. The whole relationship would have to be redefined. Hell, the relationship would redefine itself.
But the worry was just as real, a nagging fear she didn’t want to ac
knowledge. Moodrow’s failure to call was beyond any response she could have predicted. Thinking about it, she finally understood why he’d always insisted that he absolutely hated mysteries.
“Stanley blames himself for the kid,” Tilley had said. “And the funeral’s two days from now.”
“He told you that?”
“About the funeral?”
“About blaming himself.”
“He didn’t have to, because I’ve been there myself a few times.” Tilley had hesitated, as if determining exactly how much he wanted to say. “My first year, on foot patrol, I ended up on a roof with a jumper, a woman holding a baby. I didn’t know what to do, what to say, had no training whatever. Meanwhile, I was the only one there, so I had to make a choice: try to talk her down or wait for the sergeant to show up with a department expert. Being young, stupid, and pitifully ambitious, I decided to be a hero. I took a step toward her and over she went. It’s ten years later and I still dream about it.”
The plane was up against the ramp, the other passengers standing, when Betty finally pulled herself together. There were practical things to be done, a taxi to catch, luggage to retrieve, a mystery to be confronted. Best not to get obsessed, she told herself, until you know what to be obsessed about.
Forty minutes later, her taxi rolled off a Brooklyn-Queens Expressway ramp and up onto the Williamsburg Bridge. A subway J Train clanked and screeched a few feet to her left, coming out of its hole to pace the cab for a moment, then falling behind as Betty’s driver accelerated away.
“Too loud, too loud.” The driver waved a hand in dismissal. “Make me nervous. One day bridge falls down from that damn train. You see.”
Betty nodded, but didn’t answer. Suddenly, the simple fact that she was going to arrive on Stanley’s doorstep unannounced jumped into the forefront of her consciousness. What would he say? What would she say? It would be easy enough to use Marilyn’s condition as an excuse for suddenly coming back, to keep her own counsel until she had a better grip on events. On the other hand, if Stanley was sitting there, nursing a bottle of Wild Turkey and a wounded ego, she might not be able to control her response.
Her dilemma was resolved a few minutes later when she opened Moodrow’s door to find him seated at the kitchen table, a bottle of bourbon and a half-full glass within easy reach. His back was to her and he clearly hadn’t heard her make her entrance. That, most likely, was because he was talking to himself.
“There’s things in your life that just can’t happen. There’s mistakes you just can’t make, because when you do make them, they run you straight into hell. I mean if you decide to swallow the gun, and flinch when you pull the trigger, there’s a certain price to be paid, right?” He reached out for the glass, but instead of drinking, held it against the side of his unshaven face. “I should’ve checked up. When I asked Gadd to find a way to come around again. If I’d just looked at the map for a minute, I would’ve known how long it was gonna take to get back to the Expressway.” He waved the glass like a baton, slopping the drink onto his shirt and trousers. “I tell ya, Betty, I don’t know why I didn’t make that goddamned U-turn. I mean who was gonna see? Some jerk in a house two miles away from Jilly’s? And what was he gonna do, call the fucking cops? By the time the cops arrived, if they even bothered to respond, we would’ve been inside that house, waiting.”
Betty flinched at the sound of her name. Did he know she was there, standing in front of the door? Probably not, she decided. And that was because he was definitely drunk.
The anger she’d been nursing cut through her initial confusion, providing just enough focus to get her moving. She dropped her bag onto the carpet, strode across the room, wheeled to face him.
“Stanley …” Her first impression, that he was crying, passed almost immediately. His collar and hair were soaked; beads of moisture covered his scalp and forehead. Unless teardrops had somehow learned to defy gravity and run upward, something else was happening.
“I mean what was it?” He was staring directly into her eyes now, as if she’d been there all along. “An ego trip, nothing else. Hotshit Stanley Moodrow riding to the rescue. I should’ve paid a price for that, Betty, and maybe I really have, because I can’t get Theresa’s face out of my mind.”
Betty took a step forward, brought her palm and fingers to rest on her lover’s cheek. Even as she spoke, she felt the tears spring into her own eyes.
“Christ, Stanley,” she whispered, “you’re on fire.”
PART TWO
ONE
STANLEY MOODROW SPENT THE first thirty-six hours after his admission to Beth Israel Medical Center on First Avenue and Sixteenth Street drifting in and out of consciousness. On the bottom end, when the fever burned throughout his body (when rivulets of sweat ran through the white hospital sheets to lie in small insistent puddles on the plastic-covered mattress) his mind was filled with shifting images. He met friends, enemies, rivals, the living and the dead, as if reviewing his memories without first ordering the internal chaos. Sometimes these images stayed in his mind long enough to offer some piece of advice, to remind him of some forgotten obligation, but just as often they were no more than profiles at the outer edges of his vision, disappearing before he could turn his head.
The landscape shifted as well, from Moodrow’s Lower East Side apartment to a Long Island shrine, to an interrogation room in the old Seventh Precinct on Pitt Street. At one point, he watched himself, at age thirty, questioning a man suspected of rape. (This at a time when confession by way of torture stood up in court.) The young Moodrow had danced around the issue. Bouncing from one foot to another like an enraged gorilla, he smashed the side of his fist into the desk, screamed until his own throat was raw, but never actually touched the man in front of him.
The scene, though it lasted no more than a minute, had nearly perfect clarity, as if the sixty-year-old Moodrow had actually been present, a neutral observer, when it happened. Still, despite this (and despite the histrionics), he continued to maintain a neutrality that bordered on outright indifference. Even when the fever pushed his body temperature above 103 degrees, he watched the unfolding kaleidoscope with equanimity, feeling no emotion greater than mild curiosity.
On the other end, however, when the fever dropped off toward morning and he rose to a vague, exhausted consciousness, Moodrow was overwhelmed by what he saw. A chrome IV pole, framed by a recessed fluorescent light in the ceiling, stood just to his left, its arms extending outward to form an abbreviated cross. In the center of the cross, as if deliberately placed and kept there, a transparent plastic bag filled with a clear fluid slowly emptied into a narrow tube.
Moodrow, lacking both the will and the energy to focus his eyes, saw it all, the light, the bag, the relentless dripping, as a single unit, as the crushed torso of a young child surrounded by an illuminated white blanket. He wasn’t ready for it, not even close, and he jammed his eyes closed, squeezing the lids down as if resisting some misguided physician determined to pry them open.
A few minutes later, he fell into a dreamless sleep, from there back into fever and delirium. Another fourteen hours passed before the antibiotics pouring into his bloodstream overcame the infection. At times he was conscious, or at least awake, but if he recognized Betty as she moved around the bed, soaking towels in cool water, wringing them out, laying them across his forehead, he gave no indication. Instead, he kept his face turned to the right and pressed down into the pillow, tried to pull his tethered hands up to further shield himself.
Inevitably (the only other option being actual death), Moodrow returned to a ragged consciousness, a consciousness predicated on the belief that an IV pole and a bag of saline solution laced with antibiotics and glucose are neither more nor less than they appear to be. He opened his eyes to find Betty standing at the foot of the bed, instinctively tried to reach out to her, only to discover that his hands were tied to the bed rails.
“They were afraid you’d pull out the intravenous line.” Betty’s
round face was striped with tears.
“Why are you crying?” His mouth was so dry he could barely get the words out. Nevertheless, he answered his own question. “They already buried her, right?” He stared at Betty’s puzzled face for a minute, then repeated himself. “Ann,” he said. “Ann already buried her.”
“Stanley, you might have died. Do you know that?”
A short black woman carrying a pen and a clipboard entered the room before he could reply. Her starched, white uniform crackled pleasantly as she strode to his bed and calmly took his temperature.
“Fever’s down,” she announced. “Are we ready to return to the land of the living?” She spoke the words in a pronounced singsong, her voice pitched a full octave above its normal range. As if talking to a child. “My name is Nurse Rashad.”
Moodrow, too weak to react with anything more forceful than out-and-out submission, raised his tethered wrists. To her credit, the nurse took a pair of scissors from a voluminous front pocket and began to saw at the gauze binding his hands.
“If the fever returns, I’ll have to tie you again. That IV up there?” She pointed to the nearly empty bag at the top of the pole. “Look at it like it was your life’s blood coming down that tube.”
For a moment, Moodrow thought she’d said, “Her life’s blood.” He started visibly, wondered if he was still hallucinating.
“Are you thirsty?” Betty was standing on his right. She held a plastic drinking cup in her hand, offering it, along with its bent, plastic straw, for his inspection.
He started to reach for the cup, but Betty was already lowering the straw to his lips. The cold water helped to clean his mouth, but hit his stomach like a rock. He let his head drop back to the pillow.
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