Jack felt a sudden burning sense of shame. It was true. He had sold out a man against whom he had no grievance, sent him into a federal trap, and he had done it for what? He knew it was lunacy, but it was impossible not to say something.
“Earl … I have a son. He’s in—”
“The kid in Lompoc? I figured that out for myself. Well, Jack, I have to run. No pun intended there. You did what you thought best. Tried to be a good father. Now you get the consequences.”
“Pike—”
“See you around, Jack.”
The line went dead. Jack hit the call display button.
SLIPSTREAM JETWAYS
718-551-5871
He wrote the number down on a pad by the phone, sat and held it in his hands for a minute, trying to get his breathing under control. Then he stood up and began to dress. Seven minutes later a black Caprice pulled into his driveway. Jack was outside on the front stairs, waiting for it. The two men inside it stepped out as he came down the walkway. Both of them were brick-shaped and buzz-cut and looked like combat accountants in dress blue suits and white shirts. One of them showed Jack an ATF ID folder and said his name was Conroy. The other man watched Jack carefully, said nothing, and held open the back door. Jack got in and the man slammed it hard enough to rattle the empty coffee cup in a holder between the front seats. Jack saw a blue police light in the footwell and a police radio under the dashboard. Conroy got in behind the wheel, and the other man came around and sat in the back next to Jack. As they pulled away, Conroy pressed a button and the door locks snapped down.
“What’s that for?” asked Jack.
“Just routine,” said Conroy over his shoulder. The man sitting beside Jack leaned into the seat and unbuttoned his suit jacket so Jack could see the dull gray sheen of the Glock in his shoulder holster.
They were airborne in a black Bell Ranger thirty-four minutes later. The chopper had no markings of any kind. Conroy sat in the front with the pilot. They seemed to know each other. The man who wasn’t Conroy and who had the Glock in a shoulder holster never left Jack’s side all the way down to Red Hook.
They followed the Taconic southward at a thousand feet. Jack saw pinpoint lights and the blue squares of farmyards bathed in arc lamps and now and then a single car cruising on the black ribbon of the parkway. The dulled thunder of the rotors made thinking impossible. He wondered who was in that car a thousand feet below, what his life was like, where he was going. Was it maybe Flannery Coleman down there, foot to the floor, heating up his cell phone, snapping and snarling at some hapless mutt on the far end of the line?
Away in the east, the sky turned the color of skim milk, slowly changed to pale pink, and then the haze from the city stained the whole of the eastern horizon like a spill of brown water. Yonkers went by underneath them, a scattering of suburban blocks and freight yards half-hidden in third-growth forest, then the Bronx, at first wooded and rolling, and then the trees died away, replaced by block after block of redbrick and stained concrete buildings, and then a sudden greenbelt and a dropping bluff, and now there was a flat lead-gray plain of water below as they crossed over Rikers Island and Jack could see the landing strips of LaGuardia and, away to the left, the long straightaway of Astoria Boulevard, the streetlights blazing like runway markers. He found his old block in the neighborhood, by the schoolyard, and stared at it with a sense of terrible distance and loss and loneliness until it was obscured in the brown haze behind him.
Up ahead he saw the East River and Roosevelt Island and they followed the turning of the river for another mile, with the office towers of Manhattan catching fire from the first rays of the rising sun as it blazed on all the glass and steel and marble. Cars were already pouring down the East River Drive and the FDR, traffic on the Triborough was a ribbon of headlights and taillights.
Down on the river, ferries and cruisers carved thin white lines into the pebbled gray surface of the water, trailing widening vees that looked like lace torn from a veil. Away to the southeast Jack could just make out the ocean. It looked as flat and as hard as a slab of polished marble. In another minute Red Hook Terminal was under them and he could see the Agawa Canyon at the dock, a low-riding blue hull with a destroyer bow, her name in tall white lettering, surrounded by derricks and trucks.
People were moving across her decks, not sailors or longshoremen. Strangers, men in black uniforms. The battered tin roofs of the container warehouses were coated with fifty years of grime and a century of bird shit. The terminal grounds were full of police vehicles. He could make out the churning red and blue of police lights. Men and women in various kinds of uniform were standing around in clusters. Two television vans were parked at the entrance gates, their satellite dishes raised on extension poles, and he could see men milling around carrying video cameras. Here and there a hot flowering of white light picked out a man or a woman talking into the cameras, holding a microphone at chest level. The Ranger hovered, the tone of the rotors altered, and the chopper began to settle down toward a cleared strip.
Inside, a ragged circle of men in black combat fatigues; he picked out one figure among the huddled mass staring up at the chopper as it settled onto the parking lot, a paler face upturned, a sharp oval of white against the mass of black uniforms.
A woman. Valeriana Greco. Waiting for Jack.
FRIDAY, JUNE 23
KINGS COUNTY HOSPITAL
BROOKLYN
0530 HOURS
The nurse walking toward him was wearing the same kind of expression on her face that Nicky remembered from the night six years ago when another nurse in another hospital wing had come out of the operating room to tell him that his mother was about to die. He noticed that her walnut-dark skin seemed to glow as she passed under the hallway’s overhead lights, and the pale green of her uniform looked blue as the light moved across it and then became green again as she went forward into darkness.
People moved out of her way, the Internal Affairs slicks in their rumpled suits and the ties loose around the neck, the tangle of blue-and-brass hats standing outside the door into the intensive care unit, the senior brass from Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, separated from the city cops and detectives mainly by the cut and quality of their suits, even Pete LeTourneau, a New York State Police lieutenant, his own section boss, looking rumpled and rural in a blue sports coat over a pair of tan slacks, the snitches from One Police and Gracie Mansion, everybody around her gave her room. Nicky watched her come through, looking at her face, seeing the way she was making direct eye contact with him, and he had the thought that she was coming toward him like a priest coming down the aisle in a cathedral, trailing bad news like sandalwood incense. Nicky remembered then that the worst memory he had was triggered by a sandalwood scent, the same scent that he could smell in the dry sweep of his mother’s hair when he leaned down to kiss her cheek as she lay in her coffin six years ago. The nurse reached him, stood in front of him now, looking down at him with as much compassion as she had left in her after twenty years of walking the very same walk.
“Officer Cicero. They’re finished with the body. The detectives said you can go in now if you still want.”
“Yes. Thanks.”
She nodded, stepped back as he stood up. His left leg vibrated like a tuning fork and a muscle in his cheek pulled at his left eye. He followed her back up the hall past the other cops and the officials. As he cleared a connecting hall, he heard a clamor of voices and shouted questions coming from behind a set of steel doors.
Through the acrylic windows with the letters Do Not Enter stenciled on them in reverse, he could see the broad back of the chief of department of the NYPD, in his full dress blues, the white-hot glare of video lights making a blue corona around his body, see his head go from side to side as he said something to a reporter’s question that Nicky could not quite make out above the staccato chatter of still cameras and the barking of the reporters and television people in the crowded passage. Then he cleared the hallway and the nurse was ho
lding a door open for him, with the look still on her face. Nicky stopped for a moment, gathered himself, and then stepped through the doorway.
There were two people in the room, a white-faced harness cop standing at rigid attention beside the hospital bed, staring straight ahead into the infinite distance and breathing slowly, his dress blue uniform pressed to perfection, a plate of colored medals over his silver badge, a black ribbon around the silver badge, his uniform cap straight and square and hiding his eyes inside a black shadow, and on the bed next to him, a long still figure covered with a sheet.
Nicky walked over to the side of the bed. He could smell disinfectant, bleach, and something else, rust or copper or dried blood. He looked over at the uniformed cop, then looked back down at the body, at the pale-blue sheet drawn over it.
He reached out and lifted up a corner of the sheet and slowly drew it back. It weighed nothing at all and floated away from the body underneath it as if it were a light mist over a pool of water. The corpse’s face was rigid, stunned-looking, a thing made out of wood and stone, the thin lips purple and tight, as if a dreadful pain were still blazing along the nerves. A mass of stained bandage covered the entire left side of the chest, hiding what Nicky knew was terrible damage. The stillness that surrounded the body seemed artificial, frozen, as if the corpse were just an image caught in a still frame, that in another second someone would touch play again and the dead thing would blink and breathe and sit up and look around again at the wide wonder of the living world. Nicky found himself waiting for that moment, holding on to this illusion for as long as he could, but in a little while he drew the sheet back up and very gently covered Jimmy Rock’s face, turned to real stone now, a thing cut out of quartz and gray marble. Then he turned away and walked back out to the hall and the world of light and air and sound.
Pete LeTourneau was waiting for him by the coffee machine halfway down the hallway, holding two cups and talking to Casey Spandau. Nicky hadn’t seen her since early this morning, when a couple of Internal Affairs bulls had hustled her into a black Lincoln and driven her away, followed by a second car with Dexter Zarnas and Carlo Suarez. As a state man, he was isolated, quarantined. Casey’s eyes were still swollen from crying, and she looked as if somebody had tied her to a chair and then thrown the chair down a fire escape.
She was leaning against the wall, holding her ratty brown briefcase against her belly in what Nicky was beginning to think of as a kind of obsessive manner. It was a damn ugly briefcase. It didn’t suit her. She was an absolute pistol, he couldn’t help thinking, and even in her state of shock she glowed like polished ebony. Maybe he should buy her a briefcase that suited her more. Matteblack steel with solid gold hinges and an engraved nameplate.
Pete LeTourneau, Nicky’s boss, could have been her older brother, a craggy-faced black cop with salt-and-pepper hair and slightly hooded eyes with the same Chinese cast to them. He was known around the State Police divisions as a hard man but a stand-up guy. If he was going to hand Nicky his papers, he’d do it right now. All he gave him when Nicky reached them was one of the coffees he was holding, along with a gentle smile.
“Nicky. How you doing?”
“How do I look?”
“Yeah. Stupid question. I’ve been talking to Officer Spandau here, Nicky. She tells me you handled yourself pretty good out there.”
Nicky looked at Casey, at her puffy face and reddened eyes, her body sagging with fatigue and guilt.
“Did she? I didn’t think any of us handled ourselves pretty good out there. But thanks, Casey.”
Casey just nodded, looking over Nicky’s shoulder at the IAD guys down the hallway. They were talking to one of the Seven Six patrolmen who had arrived just as Jimmy got shot. Casey couldn’t hear what was being said, but she figured her career was about a week from being over. Pete LeTourneau let the silence run for a minute.
“Okay, Nicky … I’ve been talking with Vince Zaragosa, the CO of the JTF. You met him yet?”
“Yeah. He was on the scene at Red Hook about ten minutes after Detective Rule was killed. We had a long talk.”
“Way he told it to me, he talked and you listened.”
“Yeah. That’s about right.”
“You want to go home, then?”
Nicky looked at Casey.
She shrugged, looked at her hands.
“You pulling me off the Blue Stores thing?”
Pete LeTourneau studied Nicky’s face for a time. His eyes were hard but not mean, and he seemed to be making up his mind based on whatever he could see in Nicky’s face. The voices in the hall were hushed, muted, like the talk at a funeral home. The hospital smelled of dead flowers and Lysol. Nicky waited for whatever was coming.
“No. I’m not. Nobody could see this shit coming. ATF was supposed to inform Port Authority, and they did, but only after they were in position. Port Authority never told the NYPD, so there was no way any of you could have known what you were walking into. The usual jurisdictional crap. It’s not your fuck-up, Nicky. Don’t race to own it. You were doing well. Casey says you got some DNA off the guy. If we can match it with blood on the male vic, we can go ahead and charge him, see how it plays out. At least we’ll spoil his weekend. You have that with you?”
Nicky patted the pocket of his black leather jacket, pulled out a plastic bag with a razor blade inside. Pete took the bag, held it up to the light. Tiny flecks of blood and tissue were visible on the steel.
“Yeah, this would do it. How’d you get it?”
Casey’s face was motionless and Nicky thought she might be literally holding her breath. Pete LeTourneau was a fair man, a good cop, and Nicky didn’t want to lie to him. But he wanted Earl Pike. He was now quite certain that Pike was the guy. Why he had done what he did at Red Hook was a mystery. For now. But Pike was the only man who had the background for that kind of work. They had to get him now, any way they could. That meant using the razor blade.
“Detective Rule and Casey had Pike under surveillance. While he was out of the hotel, I went up to his floor. There were maids working the floor. The room was being cleaned. I got the maid to bring me out his garbage. I found the razor in the bag.”
Pete’s eyes widened.
“You tin her?”
“No.”
“Good, because you had no warrant, did you?”
“No, sir.”
“So why’d she bring it out for you?”
“She wanted to be helpful.”
“Yeah? That was sweet. Why’d she want to be helpful?”
“She was from Tegucigalpa. Maybe she thought I was INS.”
“You say you were?”
“No. But I didn’t say I wasn’t.”
Pete was silent for a while, working it through.
“You can swear in court this was taken directly from Earl Pike’s room? No chance of confusion? Chain of evidence?”
“I watched her go in, I watched her come out.”
“Will she verify that?”
“Will she have to?”
“Maybe. Is that a problem?”
“I might have scared her off. What if she blows town?”
“I don’t know. Maybe we don’t need her. I mean, we call her to testify, her job’s toast, and if she’s illegal, she’s out of here. Plus one more witness is one more chance to blow the case in court. DNA collected from a garbage bag has stood up before. Courts say you don’t have an expectation of privacy for hotel garbage. If you … let’s say you simply observed the garbage being removed from the suspect’s room … you follow? That’s a true statement. I mean, it’s literally true. And, being a good investigator, you saw an opportunity to collect DNA-bearing items … that would just be good police work. Right? No. I’d say we don’t need her. If the DNA holds up. What happened with the Benz? Zaragosa says the car was clean.”
Casey came to life at that.
“Sir, Pike’s job puts him in touch with a lot of covert sources. He could have had another Benz located by a contact. Or
he got it repaired by experts. At the time we had no right to put the car through a really close examination. Pike was just a guy on a list, and the DMV numbers matched. If we get some DNA support, then we can seize the Benz and tear it apart. Whatever they did, either way, it had to leave signs under the paint.”
“So you’re saying he found a substitute Benz? And faked the VIN number so well you couldn’t spot it? Or he had his own vehicle put back in mint condition by people so good at it that a couple of trained cops couldn’t spot the repairs? And he does either one of these tricky-dick stunts in just one day?”
“It’s the only explanation I can think of.”
“Yeah? I got one. How about maybe he’s innocent?”
Nicky shook his head.
“I’ve met the guy, Pete. He’s capable of the crime. He was in the vicinity of Blue Stores; a witness puts him in the region. He used his credit card to buy gas. His hand was bandaged. The only thing that says he’s innocent is the Benz, and I think Casey’s right. I think he managed to get the car cleaned up somehow. If we can match his DNA with the crime scene, we don’t even need the damned car.”
Pete looked from one to the other, his mind working.
“Okay. Okay. That works for me. Nicky, I’ll take this back to Albany, get it matched right away. Any idea where Pike is now?”
“No. I haven’t really looked. But we’re not the only people who want to have a chat. The ATF guys figure Pike might have had something to do with the …”
“Total screaming fuck-up?” offered Pete.
“Total screaming fuck-up at Red Hook. The sniper was a pro, that’s a fact. What, three ATF guys down, plus Detective Rule? With a sound suppressor? Christ.”
“Four ATF guys. Three very dead, and a guy named Luther Campbell hanging on to life with half his chest gone. And Detective Rule, the last hit. From a thousand yards, into the haze, into strong lights, without a brace. Everybody says that only a military-trained shooter could do anything like it with a fifty-caliber rifle. And definitely a silenced weapon.”
Black Water Transit Page 18
