by Adam Dunn
“You ever watch Lethal Weapon?” Santiago asked, his right hand white on the safety strap.
“Wazzat lahk oan de teevee?” replied More in a spuddy, soyish cornpone drawl.
Santiago felt like shooting More again. Or maybe throwing up. “Just—just—” he stammered in exasperation, flailing his huge left paw, the one gripping the radio handset.
More was really pushing the old Crown Vic now, the speedo touching seventy as they slalomed between vans and trucks. The tail had to work hard at it, but it was keeping up. Their pursuers, Santiago noticed, drove more like cops than More did. He thought he caught a whiff of a burnt odor, maybe leaking exhaust fumes or smoldering transmission fluid, and silently prayed that More wouldn’t blow up or crash the old cab before he, Santiago, had a fighting chance to get clear of it.
Santiago’s stomach was doing strange maneuvers as More slammed the cab between vehicles, all the while gaining speed on the downward incline toward the off-ramp. The Roosevelt Island tram, which ran parallel to the bridge’s north side, would be passing overhead any minute. Santiago imagined the looks on the faces of tourists and commuters as they watched a runaway taxicab plow head-on into the side of a slow-moving bus. He looked down the off-ramp in horror and saw that the two uniformed Traffic cops, visible from afar in their fluorescent yellow vests, had apparently not been notified of the situation and were nonchalantly waving on southbound traffic along Second Avenue, with no clue that More was guiding a two-ton missile down on them at seventy-five miles per hour.
“More,” Santiago began.
Who showed no response. The speedo cleared seventy-five and kept moving. Santiago could see a woman with a stroller crossing Sixtieth, yakking away on her phone, the kid, too old and fat to be wheeled around, contentedly lazing with one arm draped over his head, both oblivious to the danger.
“More, slow down,” Santiago attempted.
One of the uniformed cops finally noticed the Crown Vic hurtling toward him, and frantically threw up his arms, trying to stop oncoming traffic and clear the ramp, and yelling at the woman with the stroller on the phone, who paid him no mind, lost in her conversation.
“MORE, YOU CRAZY FUCK!” Santiago conceded.
The Crown Vic hit the intersection at eighty miles an hour, More drifting the cab slightly to the right of the tramway terminus to shoot across Sixtieth Street. Santiago briefly heard the woman’s scream as they smashed her stroller all the way down the street to the stairs of the old Serendipity, now long buried in a sea of trash; on the right-hand periphery of his vision Santiago glimpsed the stroller kid setting a new land speed record sprinting up Second Avenue. More kept accelerating; the burning smell in the cabin intensified. The elastic central articulation of an uptown-bound M101 loomed up directly in front of them. Santiago screamed and time truncated for him again; they missed the rear of the bus by inches and Santiago, looking south past the Fish Face, saw sixteen NYPD cruisers heading broadside at them for a second, before being blocked out by the ruin of the old Bloomingdale’s, now little more than a public latrine. The surge patrol crossed the T of their rear bumper and Santiago heard the screech of their pursuers’ brakes, trapped on the east side of the avenue with cops all over them.
More finally reduced their speed. He turned and offered the soft, childlike smile often associated with the hopelessly insane and asked, “Was it good for you, too?”
“Watch the fucking road!” Santiago yelled as they bounced over cavernous potholes, left unrepaired for years, bleeding off speed. More put the car in a controlled skid at the corner of Madison and fishtailed them northbound as Santiago’s phone went off. McKeutchen.
“Congratulations, assholes,” he growled into Santiago’s ear. “You two just turned the whole fucking city upside down. Meet me at the CPP. Now.”
Santiago cut the connection and relayed the orders to More. “If I lose my shield over this, I’m going to kill you.”
“Take a number,” More replied wetly.
The Central Park Precinct was a relic from the days when horsepower was measured in feed and dung. A row of stables converted to mixed garage/office/storage/junk space lay nestled on the south side of the Eighty-sixth Street traverse, across from the reservoir. Here cops on cushy patrol beats parked their three-wheeled ATVs along footpaths designed nearly two centuries earlier, the great green gift of Olmstead and Vaux, now peopled with joggers, dog-walkers, bird-watchers, tourists lost in their maps, homeless lost in their minds, and the occasional contraband entrepreneurs doing business under cover of the Ramble.
Which was none too peaceable at the moment. With the cab safely out of sight behind a row of NYPD vans, Santiago stood in a huddle with McKeutchen, two deputy commissioners (Operations and CT), the Chief of Detectives, and, just for laughs, the Chief of Organized Crime Control, in whose bailiwick lay the OCID command that Santiago coveted. At this particular moment, however, his prospects for a detail to OCID looked tenuous at best.
“What the fuck are you talking about?” barked the OCC chief, an ursine brute named Randazzo, who looked as though he wanted to pull one of Santiago’s arms off and gnaw on it like a buffalo wing. “A drug ring that uses cabs? The TLC has every hack in the fleet wired. There’s cameras inside half of them now, there’s the GPS meters, there’s cameras on every major intersection traffic signal and TLC enforcement in unmarked cars. The cabbies can’t take a piss without somebody knowing.”
“And you say they’re connected to these, what, speakeasies? We haven’t had those in almost a hundred years,” pointed out the DC Ops, a sullen, barrel-chested pug named Devaney, who looked like he wanted to break Santiago’s kneecaps. “Back then, the cabs were for getting johns to hookers. A cabbie serving drug customers today would be rolling in cash. So where’s the money?”
“Why’d you call in air and a surge patrol?” asked the Counterterrorism chief, a quiet umber slab of a man named Derricks, who never took his eyes off More.
“And why the fuck were you guys playing cat-and-mouse with a fuckin’ Treasury car?” moaned the Chief of Detectives, a tiny saffron-colored dweeb named Saffran, who squirmed and fidgeted as he spoke. The day had turned sultry and humid, the kind where New Yorkers blasted the AC and threatened the power grid and prayed for rain, and the chief was clearly uncomfortable with his clothes and with the situation.
The Automatic License Plate Recognition cars Santiago had called in had transmitted the tail car’s plates to the Real Time Crime Center, a hive of supercomputers on the eighth floor of One Police Plaza. It had taken longer than usual to get a hit, because of all the cutouts, but the wonks had finally turned up Feds. The big surprise was that the tail car was from Treasury, not the FBI as everyone had suspected at first. Nobody knew why the Treasury Department would want to spy on a CAB team. Between that and More’s joyride, the hornet’s nest at One PP had been sufficiently stirred up. Hence the unusual and unofficial powwow of pissed-off police chiefs in the park. McKeutchen was doing his best to run interference for his men, but he was outranked and outflanked. That pissed him off.
And, of course, Santiago was the focal point for the whole group’s enmity.
McKeutchen stood just behind Santiago’s right shoulder, stolid in the armor of his fat. More, for his part, was ignoring everybody, poring over the taxi looking for damage.
Santiago had the bizarre feeling of being summoned to the principal’s office to explain a troublesome sibling’s urinating in a school water fountain. He saw his gold shield and OCID assignment shimmering like a desert mirage, his Plan swaying on feet of clay, yet in the midst of it all, he noticed something different in himself; he did not blame More. His partner, gurgling psychopath though he was, had called it and played it through, and Santiago no longer felt like shooting him. This revelation notwithstanding, however, Santiago knew he was going to have to find out once and for all just who he was rolling with. He resolved to do just that, and just how he’d go about it, if he ever got out of this mess.
&nbs
p; He was working up an eloquent line of bullshit when a second taxicab squealed into the CPP’s lot, blaring speed metal through its gaping windows (from the radio, a low screeching voice full of ball bearings screamed, “Sto-o-o-p the SQUIRTS!”). Subtle, Santiago thought disgustedly. If their pursuers hadn’t been able to find them before, they’d have no trouble now. His mood darkened further when the cab’s doors opened and Liesl and Turse, the Narc Sharks, clambered out, grinning all over themselves.
“Mierda,” Santiago said under his breath. Tilting his head toward McKeutchen, he asked, “What’re they doing here?”
“I told them to come,” McKeutchen replied in his best Shadowy and Inscrutable. “If you guys are gonna crack this thing, you’re gonna have to learn to work together. No,” he said quickly, cutting off Santiago’s broiling response, “More’s in this too. You guys pull this off and you’re a team. We all pull this off we’re a unit. Sabby?”
Santiago nodded distractedly. He was watching DC Derricks, who had ambled over to More, who had popped the taxicab’s hood. The two huddled together over the engine bay, out of sight and earshot, their conversation just out of reach of the group. Santiago strained to hear what they were saying, but he got the Narc Sharks in his face. Liesl wore a faded, torn Sex Pistols T-shirt; Turse wore a yellow one with I TO FART emblazoned in brown across the front.
“Burnout’s name is Arun Ladhani. Cabbie for the Sunshine Taxi Corp. Two priors for possession back in ninety-eight and ninety-nine, misdemeanors, both suspended. Clean TLC test records for years. He’s fuckin’ dirty,” reported Liesl through a mouthful of cashews. For once, the chiefs were silent.
“GPS printouts of his trip sheets going back the last three months show him coming back repeatedly to a handful of locations, several times each in the same night. The last one was at the old Toy Building, where the second victim, whatshisname, Jangahir Khan, was working just before he disappeared. He’s fuckin’ filthy,” Turse informed them, spraying chewed-up pieces of cashew onto Santiago, who was hovering dangerously close to a personal event horizon.
McKeutchen sensed this and added: “Those reports your sister was feeding us about all the ODs? I had these two run them down. I had a hunch they were connected to the speaks somehow and they were. But we had no eyes on buys, anywhere. And since we didn’t know where the next speak was gonna be—”
“—we started looking for the ones that already happened,” Liesl finished.
“We figured we’d start with the night the first victim was discovered, when you two were playing mumbletypeg with those drags on Broome Street,” Turse put in. “With the cabbies’ GPS trip sheets, we could see who was driving where on any given shift. We did digital overlays of driver routes shift by shift, and found the patterns.”
“It’s the cabs,” McKeutchen explained. “If you get a couple cabbies on your payroll, disable the onboard cameras, have them drive around the block, do the handoff inside, maybe through the partition or in some hidden compartment, whatever. The switch is in the cabs.”
“How’d you know to look at the cabs in the first place?” Santiago asked, perplexed.
“We didn’t. He did,” Liesl said, nodding toward More, who was still huddled with DC Derricks.
“Your partner’s a fuckin’ genius,” said Turse. “We find this Arun guy, we find the dope.” This stung Santiago, who had backchanneled the information they’d gotten from the Talwinders and Baijanti Divya to McKeutchen himself.
“We find Arun, we can roll up a whole fuckin’ network,” Liesl said excitedly. “Who knows how many cabs they’ve got working?”
“Who knows how long they’ve been running this scam?” Turse said, all jazzed up. Santiago was starting to get it, felt himself catching the narcs’ buzz. Busting a single crooked cabbie was one thing, but this was their first real crack in the speak wall, and it meant a mountain of credits for the cops who broke it wide open.
Santiago realized that McKeutchen had staged this for their benefit. The Chief of Detectives was bitching sotto voce and scratching himself all over. “I fuckin’ hate this,” he griped. Santiago couldn’t tell if it was the course of the case or the weather he found more irritating.
“Put some talc in your taint,” offered McKeutchen, deadpan. The chief stopped scratching and looked at him with an expression that could kindly be described as incredulous.
Eager to avert further contributions of this sort by his CO, Santiago jumped into the conversation with both feet. “Okay, I’ll bite. The drugs in the speaks come from cabs that circle the party zone. They pick up and drop off customers and make the switch onboard. We got a line on one of the cabbies, maybe we flip him. Then what? What if he doesn’t know where the next one is until it happens? If we bug his cab we don’t get anything that we don’t have already. If we pose as cabbies ourselves, it’s just buy-and-bust, no big deal. Where’s the dope?”
“Where’s the money?” glagged More, silently materializing between the Narc Sharks, who jumped at the rattle of his voice. “We find that, we get the key to their communications, locations, everything.”
“Who the fuck’re you?” DC Saffran asked, glaring at More.
“He’s ESU,” McKeutchen answered, and Santiago picked up a subtle tone of urgency in his voice. “CAB volunteer, partnered with Detective Santiago here,” McKeutchen said quickly, flicking his eyes over to Santiago.
The Narc Sharks were frothing by now. “Let’s roust the good Mr. Ladhani and hook his nuts up to a car battery,” Liesl suggested. The chiefs looked like they’d bitten into lemons.
“You know where this Sunshine place is?” Santiago asked, playing along for McKeutchen’s sake.
“I’ve got a better idea,” More coughed.
“Oh shit,” Santiago sighed.
“Hear him out,” McKeutchen ordered.
“Who the fuck is this guy?” Chief Saffran whined, tugging his trousers out of the valley of his ass.
While More rode with the Narc Sharks to see Baijanti Divya about his absurd plan, Santiago took some time for himself. He had a friend at the Real Time Crime Center, and on a hunch, he gave her More’s name and asked her to see what she could dig up. Then he drove down to the Public Library main branch, dumping the cab in its loading bay behind the abandoned Bryant Park Grill.
Between CUNY and John Jay, Santiago had spent plenty of time at the main branch, and had become friends with David Smith, a librarian who went out of his way to help writers and researchers. Smith looked a bit like a balding, bespectacled beaver, but he knew every inch of the library, and he procured the materials Santiago requested in almost no time flat.
Santiago was sick and tired of playing catch-up with More. It was time to get ahead, and part of that meant learning the taxi business. With a notepad and pen he attacked the pile of books and printouts Smith had turned up on the industry, taking up the end of one of the common tables in the main reference room. He sponged through the early hansom-cab days of horse-drawn buggies. He soldiered through the strikes and plowed through the taxi wars of the 1930s, when cabs were torched and brains spilled out of cracked skulls during some of the worst union violence in city history. He absorbed the rise of Checker and the fall of the unions; he even dug up the scandal surrounding the diesel medallion issue More had mentioned earlier. He clambered over the peak in cabdriver murders in the early 1990s, the driver protests and the Plexiglas partitions that followed. He glided through the free rides cabbies gave in the weeks following 9/11, the FBI raids on cabbies’ homes in Queens and Brooklyn, the deportations. And he saw Baijanti Divya photographed at the head of the 1998 and 2004 strikes, and the protests for fuel surcharges after Katrina, Iraq, and OPEC sent gas prices through the roof.
He called Smith over from his desk when he was through and thanked him for his help, and complimented him on how quickly he had pulled the material together.
“No big deal,” Smith said nasally. “I just gave you the same stuff I pulled for the other guy.”
Santi
ago went rock-still. “What other guy?”
“The cop. The one who said he worked in an undercover cab.”
Santiago sat back down in the chair he had just stood up from. “Describe him,” he said quietly.
“Well, he kinda looks like a bum,” Smith said, “or an NYU student. That’s what I figured he was until he showed me his badge.”
Santiago felt the room pulling away from him. “What else did he ask for?” he asked in a very low voice.
Smith shrugged. “Said he wanted to check out the roof structure.”
“Check out the roof structure,” Santiago repeated almost inaudibly.
“Yeah. We don’t usually allow that but, y’know, he’s a cop and all …”
“Yeah,” Santiago whispered, “he’s just a cop. Show me where he went,” he added in a barely audible voice, then, very slowly, he leaned over and began softly hitting his head against the varnished tabletop.
Santiago’s friend from the Crime Center texted him as he robotically headed down the marble stairs to the library’s Fifth Avenue entrance. He thought he would sit on the stairs and watch the pigeons for a while until he could trust himself to go back to the station.
He read the message twice. His friend had accessed possibly every law-enforcement database in the country, and got only one hit on a More, E., nearly one year earlier, a moving violation in Jacksonville, North Carolina.
Santiago pulled up the GPS in his phone. What the hell was in Jacksonville, North Carolina? The Hofmann State Forest. The Paradise Point Golf Course.
And the U.S. Marine Corps base at Camp Lejeune.
“I gotchu, carajo,” Santiago snarled loudly, scrambling a squadron of pigeons into the air.
He hit every green light on the way to the station. Once inside, he printed out a hard copy of More’s violation, a speeding ticket on State Route 17, and stormed into McKeutchen’s office, slamming the door behind him. McKeutchen was so startled he dropped his magnifying glass, with which he had been inspecting a large gob of orange wax he had just painstakingly excavated from his left ear.
