Black Water Transit

by Carsten Stroud

  Nicky’s eyes widened.

  “A fifty? Jesus Christ. What was the weapon?”

  “A Barrett Fifty. The army calls it an M-eighty-two-A-one.”

  LeTourneau lifted up a CD-ROM, held it out to Nicky.

  “This is a combat weapons CD. Put it on when you get a chance, learn about this piece. There’s a video. Watch it carefully. If this is what Pike’s using, we got big trouble right here in River City.”

  Nicky took the CD, pocketed it, shrugged.

  “So what the hell was going on at Red Hook?” he asked.

  “I’m trying to get that out of them. This Pike, he’s military?”

  “Retired a full colonel, Pete. Nobody will tell me anything about his background. But Pike’s the best suspect anybody has.”

  “So ATF, they want him too?”

  “Badly.”

  “And if they get him first, we have zip on Blue Stores.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And if the ATF gets Pike on the sniper thing, it’ll be years before he answers for the NYPD guy. So we both got reasons to be interested, am I right, Officer Spandau?”

  Casey shook her head and broke a long silence.

  “Sir, if Pike’s connected to the death of an NYPD cop, then I got to be honest with you. We’ll have a conflict when we get him.”

  “Let the DAs work that out. We’re just cops. You suspended, Officer Spandau?”

  “Not yet. There’ll be a shooting board, because one of our guys, Carlo Suarez, fired his weapon at an ATF agent. We have an officer killed. There’ll be hell to pay. But no, Vince says I’m not suspended.”

  “So your JTF team is still on this?”

  “I … think so. If Vince wanted me off, he’d have said so.”

  “What about the other two guys on your unit? Dexter Zarnas and Carlo Suarez? Will they help?”

  “Vince busted Suarez back to patrol. But Dexter, he’s ready.”

  “Are you? Ready? Personally?”

  Casey lifted her face, hardened visibly.

  “Yes. I am. I’m ready.”

  Pete raised his hands, shrugged, flipped the plastic bag in the air and caught it.

  “Okay. Get some sleep, both of you. Then go out and find this Earl Pike asshole, bring him back wrapped in heavy chains, hah?”

  “Over the saddle or in it?” asked Nicky.

  “What counts here is proof, not vital signs.”

  “What about the ATF? Do we cooperate?”

  “With the feds? Absolutely. You will cooperate with the federal agencies involved in this case as fully and as completely as they will cooperate with you. Understood?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Nicky. “Understood.”

  FRIDAY, JUNE 23

  RED HOOK CONTAINER TERMINAL

  BROOKLYN

  0710 HOURS

  Flannery Coleman arrived at the Red Hook Terminal a little after seven in the morning. There was heat building out in the long dockyard section, and the ATF agents guarding the long hull of the Agawa Canyon looked hot and bored, their black HK rifles held at port arms across their chests, their faces blank. Jack, watching from the window of the terminal manager’s office on the second floor of the main building, saw Flannery’s green Volvo pull up to a checkpoint manned by a couple of Port Authority police officers.

  “He’s here,” he said, not looking back at Valeriana Greco. She stepped away from the small group of ATF agents gathered at the far end of the room, crossed over to the window.

  “Fine. Now we can get started.”

  “Started at what?”

  Greco gave him the same flat stare that he’d been getting from everyone else in the Red Hook buildings.

  “We have men down, we have questions. We’re hoping you can help us with the answers.”

  Jack considered pushing harder, held his temper, said nothing. Four minutes later Flannery Coleman came through the office door, wearing a dark-blue single-breasted suit over a crisp white shirt, a Yale tie. He was shaved and fresh and looked as if he had just come off a week’s ski vacation in Vermont, his ruddy skin glowing and his pale-green eyes bright with battle. He ignored everyone in the room but Jack, strode briskly over to his side, gave him a wink, and then turned to face Valeriana Greco.

  “Before my client says or does anything, I’d like to know what the blazing hell is going on out there.”

  Greco smiled at him. Flannery gave her an up-and-down look and waited. She was wearing some sort of black jumpsuit with a gold star on the left breast. Her hair was pulled back in a tight ponytail and her face was red and shiny. There was a look in her eyes, a kind of mutant sexual energy, that Jack had not noticed before.

  “Mr. Coleman, the situation outside is something we can address later. Right now we’d like your client to accompany us on board the Agawa Canyon. We have something we’d like him to see.”

  “Ms. Greco. I see police cars, I see federal cars, I see a crime scene van from the NYPD, I came through a cordon of press people, there’s a New York One satellite truck out there, and I passed a CNN mobile unit on the way up Van Brunt. Clearly there has been an event, and I’d like to know what it was exactly, and what bearing it may have on my client’s interests.”

  Greco shook her head.

  “We’re not at liberty to discuss the … event … as it’s an internal matter. Part of an ongoing investigation. I admit we have sustained some injuries as a result of the unexpected intervention of a unit of the NYPD. This is a jurisdictional matter that does not immediately affect Mr. Vermillion’s situation. Now, will you allow us to take your client over to the Agawa Canyon?”

  “Is he charged with something, Ms. Greco?”

  Greco licked her lips and Jack half expected her to snag a passing fly with her tongue while she was at it.

  “Not at this time. And until he is, to be frank, you’re not really a part of this and have no standing here. You’re here as a courtesy and as a way of ensuring that this investigation in no way violates Mr. Vermillion’s rights.”

  “And what is the status of Mr. Earl V. Pike at this time?”

  Greco’s face shifted through some expressions and settled on bland and blank.

  “Mr. Pike is not currently in custody.”

  “What about his shipment? The weapons shipment?”

  “It is currently under our control.”

  “Were there prohibited weapons in the shipment?”

  “Yes. Technically. Yes, there were.”

  “So there will be an arrest in the matter?”

  “There will be some charges, yes. When we locate him.”

  “So he’s missing?”

  “Mr. Pike is not in his hotel room at the UN Plaza Hotel. He is not in his residence in Maryland. Messages have been left and there has been no response as of this hour.”

  “Does he know you’re looking for him?”

  “We’re assuming that he does. We identified ourselves.”

  “What you’re assuming is that if he had a hand in whatever the hell went on here last night—and I’m inferring from your statements that you have no proof—then he’s gone into hiding. It would also be reasonable to assume that if he was innocent, he’d have no reason to be reporting his whereabouts to you and may simply be neglecting his message service. The facts seem to support both interpretations.”

  “We are currently actively trying to locate Mr. Pike in order to question him about the circumstances that arose last night.”

  “But not specifically about his shipment?”

  “His shipment did contain some prohibited weapons.”

  “But there’s no warrant out for him?”

  “No. Not at the moment.”

  “But the deal stands? For Jack’s son?”

  “That situation is in … flux.”

  Jack had been watching this exchange with a rapidly depleting reserve of calm detachment. The word flux drained the tank.

  “Flux! What the hell does that mean? Dammit, Flannery. Let’s just
get this done,” said Jack, who was losing patience with the woman, the talk, the whole damn thing.

  “All right,” said Flannery, “let’s go.”

  Greco made a gesture and the ATF agents in the room seemed to come on point. Jack was aware of their air of controlled aggression and the careful attention they were paying to his movements as they all trooped down the staircase and out onto the quay where the Agawa Canyon was tied up. She was huge up close, as long as a city block, and her hull rose fifty feet above the quayside. It towered over them all and smelled of algae and diesel and mud. They had her cabled fore and aft and her spring lines groaned as she heaved in a low swell off the river. The gangway was guarded top and bottom and a crime scene tape with the words Federal Agents Do Not Cross blocked the entrance.

  Greco ripped the tape away and led the way up the staircase, her boots clanging on the metal risers. It was a long walk up to the deck and a big blond kid in an ATF raid jacket was waiting at the top of the gangway with a black machine pistol slung over his shoulder. He was glaring at Jack as he boarded, but backed away and let him pass. A wind was blowing in off the river, full of the scent of dead fish and sea salt. They could see the trees on Governor’s Island bending in the wind, and a ferry was butting through the big swells on her way to Staten Island. They were standing on the main freight deck, and a thirty-six-foot wall of containers rose up next to them.

  “The container we’re interested in is up forward. We’d like you to take a look, verify that this shipment is a part of the official Agawa Canyon manifest.”

  Flannery Coleman interrupted immediately.

  “What does that mean? Jack wasn’t present at the loading dock when Pike’s load came in. What purpose does this serve?”

  “He can verify that it is one of his containers and that the bills of lading are Black Water Transit documents.… Mr. Coleman … are you all right, sir?”

  Flannery had gone pale, staggered a bit, and then sat down on a stanchion line. His lips looked blue and beads of water were bright on his forehead. He was breathing in short sharp gasps. They all stood looking down at him. Jack had a rush of anger.

  “Goddamn, you stupid little bitch! What the hell are you pulling here? Flannery, come on, let’s go. Flan—?”

  Flannery was holding his hand up, tapping on his chest. He put a spidery finger into his pocket and drew out an asthma inhaler, puffed on it a couple of times. He started to get up, but Jack pushed him down again and kept his hand on the man’s shoulder as he raked a salvo across Greco’s bow.

  “This man gets sick here, you get sued to hell and back, you officious little poodle! You’re playing some bullshit game, have been from the start. You got something to show me, then goddammit, show me. Otherwise I’m out of here and you can—”

  “We do have something to show you, Mr. Vermillion.”

  She turned and walked away toward a ladder that led up onto the row of container roofs. Flannery started to follow, but Jack pushed him back down once again. She scuttled up the ladder like a lizard, and Jack followed close enough to consider biting her ass on the way up.

  At the top she turned and waited for him, and then stalked down the grid toward a large black container marked Maersk Dubai in faded white stencil.

  Her boots clanged over the metal and then she was clambering back down toward the container gates. They were closed, but two armed agents stood at either side.

  “This is one of your containers, Mr. Vermillion?”

  “Lady, I don’t own containers. I own the ship, I carry the blasted containers, or haven’t you learned dick yet?”

  Jack was through with this bitch, all the way through. In a minute he was simply going to throw her ass into the river.

  “These are your seals, then?”

  She showed him some customs seals, cut off below the lead. Jack nodded, looking at them in the glow of a Maglite held by one of the silent ATF men. She had no time for his answer.

  “And these are your documents?”

  She fluttered a sheaf of pink and green carbons under his face. Jack snatched them out of her hand and stared down at them.

  “This isn’t the Pike shipment. This is a shipment … it says transformers. Electrical stuff. Factory equipment. This stuff’s from …” He tilted the page into the half-light. “Montreal! For Chrissake. What’s this about?”

  “We have the Pike load. It’s over on the right—”

  “Starboard.”

  “The starboard side. Thank you. And we’ve dealt with that issue for the moment. We’re now talking about this container right here, and I’m asking you again if these are Black Water Transit shipping documents.”

  “They look like—yeah, I think they are, but—”

  “And is this an inspection seal from your office?”

  “What the hell are you driving at? What’s in there?”

  Greco’s eyes were little bright sparks and her cheeks were flushed. She waved at one of the ATF men.

  “Show the man, Marty.”

  The agent stepped in, jerked the long locking rods out of their channels, and dragged the heavy steel doors back. Then he turned the Maglite beam onto the dark interior of the container. Two shapes sent back the light, in glittering black and bright chrome and the velvet sheen of expensive bodywork. It took Jack a couple of beats to understand what he was looking at.

  They were cars.

  Two of them.

  A black Shelby Cobra, gleaming under the flash.

  And beyond that, something low and strange.

  “That car back there is called a Duesenberg, Mr. Vermillion. Very rare. Made in 1934. Marty here tells me that models in that condition run around a million dollars a pop.”

  “Okay. This first car here, that’s a Shelby Cobra. I have one just like it. I know what the damn thing is!”

  “Oh? Is this your car, then? Please be careful not to touch it.”

  Jack kept his hands off, studied the interior, looked around the body, checked the windshield.

  “No. I don’t think so. It better not be. Mine’s in the garage back in Rensselaer, as far as I know.”

  Greco inclined her head, looked sly and smug, a hard thing to do with the same face at the same time, but she managed.

  “Yes. It is. We checked.”

  “You checked? You checked my car? How?”

  “We had some people at your house. They checked.”

  “My garage is locked. What the hell is—”

  “We’ll get to that. You agree this is not your car, then?”

  “I’d like to run the number. But no, it’s not. There aren’t more than twenty of this particular model in the world.”

  “These Cobras are rare, then?”

  “Of course they are. I paid over a quarter million for mine.”

  “So the presence of these two extremely valuable collector cars—a type of car in which I gather you have shown a particular interest—is a total surprise to you? You don’t know anything about them?”

  “Not a damn thing!”

  “Really? You never thought, goodness me, what a chance to run a shipment of cars down the river? They’re going to raid my barge looking for one container. They’ll never check the rest of the boat? Is that what you were thinking, Mr. Vermillion?”

  “Why the hell should I lie about shipping cars? It’s perfectly legal to ship cars in containers. What’s this got to do with you?”

  “We’ve run the VINs. The RCMP inform us that the black Shelby Cobra here—such a lovely car—went missing from in front of the Château Des Jardins in Quebec City two months ago. The Duesenberg belonged to a collector who was holding it for a stockbroker at Morgan Stanley in a storage yard in Montreal. Needless to say, it’s not there, since it seems to be here instead.”

  Jack felt his chest go very tight and his face was burning.

  “You saying they’re hot? That they’re stolen?”

  “Yes,” she said, smiling a vicious satisfied smile. “They’re extremely hot,
very stolen, and they’re sitting on your barge under seals supplied by your firm and carried on your papers as transformers. All very irregular. So, as you can understand, I’m rather curious to hear what you have to say about all of this.”

  Jack stared back at her, felt his rage building.

  “What I have to say? I don’t know a damn thing about this!”

  Greco nodded. “Fine. Maybe this will help jog your memory. Marty, let’s show Mr. Vermillion here what we found in the trunk of the Cobra.”

  The ATF man led them down the inside of the container, sliding along the wall, holding his Maglite on the car. He stopped at the rear end and waited for them to edge along far enough to see what he was doing. Jack was close enough to Greco to smell her perfume and her sweat. She was looking down at the top of the Cobra trunk with a ferocious intensity.

  “Open it, Marty.”

  The agent popped the trunk. It rose up in a hiss of hydraulics. Jack stared down at the interior, at what looked like five bales wrapped in lime-green plastic. Under the glare of the flashlight they seemed luminous, radioactive, unearthly.

  “What the hell is that?” he asked. “Your laundry?”

  Greco had a knife attached to her flak jacket. She peeled it off, skinned it, and used it to cut a ragged slice in the side of the bale. Jack could see compact bundles of something green and black.

  “What is it?” he asked. “Paper?”

  “Paper. Yes, I guess you could say paper. It’s currency, Mr. Vermillion. Canadian currency. Mixed denominations, mostly twenties, fifties, hundreds. At a rough estimate, close to a million dollars’ worth. Anything to say about this?”

  Jack was silent. What in the hell was going on?

  “No?” said Greco, looking solicitous. “No comment? No snippy tone? Don’t feel like calling me some more names? Would it interest you to know that much of this money has field-tested positive for amphetamine and cocaine residue? I mean, in very high numbers? Now, we know that most currency will test positive for drug residue, but not in the degree that these bills register. That means this is very likely drug-related. So we have drug-related Canadian currency in very large amounts stuffed into the trunk of a stolen Shelby Cobra, also last seen in the fabled land of moose heads and mukluks a little to the north of us, and all of this nifty-neat stuff packed into a container sealed with Black Water Transit customs seals and carried on the Agawa Canyon, which is owned and operated by your company. So, as I said before, I’m curious. Would you care to comment? Would you care to … enlighten us?”