by Andy Straka
“But what if the devil’s in the details?”
“What if the bigger question is: can we trust you?”
“You want to arrest me? Is that it?”
“No. I don’t want to arrest you. That might tip our hand to the Stonewallers. I just want you to be a team player.”
There was a knock at the back of the van. Grooms wheeled his chair over and pushed one of the rear doors open.
A woman in a dark jacket with the large letters ATF stenciled on the front stood there holding a printout in her hand.
“What’s up?” Grooms asked.
“We’ve got something we thought you’d want to see, boss.”
“What is it?”
The woman made a point of glancing over the top of her paper at me.
“It’s all right, Sally. Just give me what you got.”
She coughed. “The two remaining car bombs, you know, are C-four. And we’re pretty sure the one that boomed was of the same type. But in spraying the area with detection agents we’ve come up with a trace of Group One Inorganic Nitrate along the road.”
Grooms’s brow furrowed for a moment. “Ammonium nitrate? How much?”
“Like I said, just a trace. Minute amount. Could’ve even come in on any of these vehicles’ tires.”
“Probably just some spilled fertilizer.”
“That’s what we were thinking too.”
“Do a broader analysis though, as much as feasible. Check up and down the road for any more of the stuff.”
“You got it.”
“I’ll be right with you guys,” he said.
“Something unexpected?” I asked.
“You’re what’s unexpected, Pavlicek. But I’ve got to go.” He pushed himself out of the chair and I followed.
Halfway through the door of the van he turned to me. “So is this the end of it for you then? Or do I still have to wait for your call?”
“I’ll let you know,” I said.
He tapped his watch. “The clock is ticking. Remember what I said earlier. …”
Be careful who you trust.
“What about my truck?” I asked.
“We’re done with it for now,” he said.
“And Farraday’s hawk?”
“Farraday wasn’t injured, was he?”
“No, just a little shell-shocked, I think.”
“I’ll get somebody to drive the bird down to him at the hospital in just a little bit,” he said.
The inside of my truck was still warming up as I threaded my way among the various law enforcement vehicles parked along the dirt road and rolled down the hill toward the highway, following a state police van that was also leaving. At the intersection with the main road a police barricade blocked the exit. Two sheriff’s deputies nodded at me gravely as they let me pass.
There was another large assembly of klieg lights and vehicles parked along the shoulder here. A half dozen media vans, huge video cameras, and a satellite truck. I heard the guttural chop of air and saw the blinking red lights from a helicopter circling in the dark sky over-head. The county sheriff, Hiram Jackson, and another man stood before a group of fifteen or twenty reporters. Squinting into the bright lights, the sheriff was speaking into a bank of microphones.
Toward the back of the gathering, I noticed Kara Grayson. She was hard to miss, what with her bright blond hair and long dark coat, the same one she had worn at the house the day before; but she appeared content to remain in the background while the other reporters fired their questions at the officials. She turned from watching the sheriff to look at my truck as I passed.
We locked eyes for a moment before I’d driven completely by.
16
I wouldn’t see Jake Toronto again for almost twenty-four hours. He didn’t answer his cell phone, and when I called Betty Carew she said she hadn’t seen him or heard from him either. I picked up a sub and a couple of sodas in Dunbar and drove into downtown Charleston again, circling along the river and up around the surrounding hills through various neighborhoods, thinking about all that had happened.
At night, the city was a bright beacon of civilization built up around a cold river running out of dark mountains. Not a huge metropolis, but big enough to spawn the likes of Roseberry Circle and pique the business interest of the gangs from up North, where a five-dollar vial of crack up there might go for as much as twenty dollars down here. Simple economics. Supply and demand. But what were the economics of hatred that spawned the likes of Bo Higgins and the Stonewall Rangers?
All I had were more questions. Had Chester Carew, being sucked into the Rangers’ orbit, gotten too close to something volatile and been sacrificed simply to silence him as Grooms seemed to suggest? Or was something else going on? Why come after me and Farraday and Conservation Agent Hallston all at once?
Where was Toronto and what was he up to? I’d never known him to leave the scene of a crime like that before. Was Grooms right? Was it really time for me to stand down? I had no direct counterterrorism experience, domestic or otherwise. And that’s what we were talking about, weren’t we? That’s what Grooms and Nolestar, and now even potentially Toronto, were embroiled in: some act or potential act of terrorism. No matter what kind of spin the sheriff and the media put on it for public consumption. And it might just well have been my own boneheaded inexperience that contributed to Gwen Hallston’s being blown to bits instead of her being back home with her friends or family tonight, wherever and whoever they might be. It suddenly occurred to me I hadn’t even thought to ask her about a husband or kids.
I didn’t call Grooms. I shut off my cell phone and returned to the house in Nitro, where Betty and Jason Carew had gone to bed early once again. I let myself in through the back door into the dimly lit kitchen. There was a note from Betty and two pieces of pie left in the refrigerator, only one of which would be consumed that night, I now felt certain.
Later that night, I fell into a dream. It was one of the most vivid I can ever recall having and brought me back in time to a place and realm of experience I thought I’d long since left behind.
One fall morning, near the end of a shift twenty-five years before, my first partner and I had a floater down by an old set of docks that were later demolished, just below Battery Park.
“Friggin’ A. Just what we friggin’ need,” Zak Dolinski said.
“Right,” I said.
The Manhattan skyline had begun to brighten only a half hour before. The call had come over the radio as we were finishing a roust on a couple of copulating junkies who’d temporarily taken over the heated doorway of an otherwise deserted Laundromat only a block or two from Wall Street. Wouldn’t do for any early arriving investment banker types in their pressed woolen suits to be exposed to such an apparently dark underside of humanity.
“Ever see a floatie before?” He switched on the beacons and burped the siren, gunning the engine around a corner, turning south toward the river.
“Nope.” I was just emerging from the Cro-Magnon phase of my early twenties and didn’t have any more to say about it.
“Oh, they’re loads of fun. Depends how long he-she-whatever’s been in the brine.”
“Peachy,” I said.
I was still fresh meat, a little too cocky. Less than ten months out of the academy. Assigned to work the dog shift between Canal Street and the Battery with Zak, who was a twenty-year veteran and had a wife and three teenage children, though for reasons known only to the brass and bureaucracy of NYPD, two months later I’d be transferred north to the war zone of the Bronx. Dolinski, although he couldn’t have known it at the time, was less than twelve months from the five-car pileup on the BQE, on his way to work one evening, that would mangle the cab of his brand-new Chevy, crushing his pelvis so severely he would bleed to death internally before the paramedics could get him stabilized and into the ER at Forest Hills.
But all either of us knew then, on our way down to the Battery at six thirty in the morning, was that the hungry chill of the
Hudson awaited.
We found the spot a couple of minutes later. The vie in the water turned out to be a Puerto Rican male, naked to the waist, with four medium-size gunshot wounds, three to the torso and one larger one to the back of the head. The witness who had called it in looked to be one of those Wall Street types, obviously a local, who still held his dog, a Great Dane named Harriet, on a short leash.
I took down the man’s statement before letting him go, then turned back toward the water’s edge where Dolinski knelt on the pavement above the body.
He shook his head. “Jesus … these spies just keep doing each other in.”
For the most part, it was what he had tried to prepare me for. Bloated arms and fingers, bits of brain salad still leeching into the slick surface eddies of the Hudson. The body had somehow gotten tangled in an old fishing net, making the portion that remained below the water, even at low tide, a good target for crabs. My gaze swept involuntarily past the body toward New Jersey.
“You know,” he said, “we ain’t supposed to touch anything before the dicks and the divers get here.”
I nodded.
“Thing I’m worried about is this current.” He pointed at the oily sluice of water rushing against the dilapidated pilings. And indeed the body, temporarily snagged against the giant-sized broken-toothpick remains of the dock, seemed in peril of breaking free at any moment.
“Must be the tide starting to pull.”
He got on the radio asking how much longer until the divers got there, and was told five, maybe ten minutes.
“Yeah? Well, we may not have five more minutes,” he told the dispatcher. “ ‘Less those frogmen want to go searching for this corpse downriver.”
There was a delay then the crackled, dispassionate response from dispatch. “Don’t let it go.”
Dolinksi shook his head. “Don’t let it go. Christ …” He looked at me. “You believe this shit? Roger,” he said into the radio, then keyed off the mike. “You up for this, Pavlicek? Maybe we should just let José here float on down to Davy Jones.”
“And let the crabs have the rest of him?” I said. We locked eyes for a moment.
He grunted. “Goddamn crabs. …”
But as he was speaking the top half of the body in the water suddenly began to rotate out from the pilings. Without thinking, I leapt down into the river, which came up to my waist. The cold slammed into me like a shock wave and the current almost forced me to lose my balance.
“Grab the netting!” Dolinski was yelling behind me. I reached out toward the slimy lattice already thinking the same thing. A moment later, he was splashing into the water beside me.
The netting was slick with the accumulated muck of the river, not to mention whatever unspeakable fluids had oozed from the corpse. The body was much heavier than I’d expected—it took all of my strength, leaning against the current to hold it in place. Dolinski grabbed hold as well, and between the two of us we managed to shoulder the net and the attached weight of the dead man back toward the pilings where we might gain some relief from the relentless pull of the tide.
“Whoa!” he said. “We gotcha, chico. We gotcha.”
My hands and lower body had already gone completely numb. The chuck-chuck of another siren could be heard in the distance.
“What a bunch of crap!” Dolinski was laughing maniacally now, shaking his head. “Both of us gonna have to burn these sets of blues.”
I almost gagged. Mist rose like cannon smoke from the flat dark green of the river.
“Don’t worry, kiddo. You done good … you done good. …”
I must have turned to look away from him then, away from the pockmarked body and the stinking crap of the water, my gaze somehow instinctively drawn toward the sky. High above the rising clouds of fog, the early-morning sun struck the tops of the twin towers of the Trade Center, turning them a fiery red.
If you worked in lower Manhattan then, you knew those steel monoliths, finished just a couple of years earlier, were always there, but you didn’t stop and gawk at them. As cops, most of our action was down at street level anyway. Concrete and stone. Bankers floated up there in those towers. Bankers and traders and their lawyers. People mostly immune from the types of things we had to deal with.
But then Dolinski was suddenly screaming in my ear, the way he must have screamed at the rescue workers trying to free him on the BQE that morning later on. Only it wasn’t Dolinski. In my dream it had become Toronto. I couldn’t understand a word he was saying and I began to lose my grip on the net.
The buildings high above were mainly empty at that hour. The last thing I remember was that their orange glow gave me something to look at so I wouldn’t freeze.
The next morning, after waking to a cold clear sunrise, I sat out in the barn with the Harris’s hawk and the big redtail for a while. The birds were in fine shape. Jason and Betty had been doing a good job feeding and looking after them. Still, Torch had a gleam in his eye I could’ve sworn hadn’t been there two days before. These two wanted to be hunting—it was what they’d been created to do and what Chester would have wanted.
Maybe Gwen Hallston had been right. The state could take possession of them and arrange for transfer to another West Virginia falconer, or, in the case of the red-tail, a captive release. But I couldn’t help thinking that for Jason, taking the remaining birds away at this point would be like ripping away an integral part of his father to which the boy could still cling. The decision would have to be made soon, however, one way or another.
Betty Carew was still in her housecoat and slippers, standing at the stove with her back to me, her white hair stringing down above her shoulders, when I appeared in the kitchen an hour later. Several strips of bacon sizzled in the pan.
“Mornin’, Frank. You fellas were out late last night. You use the key under the mat?”
“I let myself in and put it back where I’d found it before I locked up.” I said.
“Where’s Jake? Sleeping in this morning?”
I didn’t say anything. She’d poured two glasses of orange juice and set the table for both of us. I sat down at one of the places and took a sip.
She turned the heat down on the burner and turned to look at me. “Something’s wrong, isn’t it?”
“I’m afraid so. Is Jason up yet?”
“No, he’s still sleeping. Now what’s wrong? Has Jake been hurt?”
“No, although I’m not quite sure where he is at the moment.”
“What happened?”
I explained about the bombing but left out a lot of my conversation with Grooms and some of the more gory details.
“So you don’t know where Jake went afterward?” she asked when I finished.
“Nope. And let’s keep that to ourselves for the moment. My guess is he’s found something he doesn’t want me knowing about just yet. In the meantime, I was thinking maybe I could get your help with something.”
“Of course. Anything.”
“Have you had a chance to look through any of Chester’s papers or files since he died?”
“No, I haven’t. I tried for the first time yesterday after y’all left, but it was hard for me being in there with his desk and all his things. I stopped after just a couple of minutes.”
“I understand. Would you have any objection if I took a look myself? It’s a long shot, but I might find something that will help Jake and lead me toward Chester’s killer. Now that they’ve got a bombing on their hands, I suspect the police or the FBI may want to have a look at those papers pretty soon too. I wouldn’t mind getting there first.”
She nodded. “I suppose it will be all right. But I’d rather not have to go back in there again myself right now.”
“I promise I’ll be careful not to disturb things too much,” I said.
“Thank you, but you’re going to have some eggs and bacon first, no argument.”
No argument from me. She transferred the bacon onto a plate, placing it in the warm oven to keep the pieces
from getting cold, then cooked the eggs. I was struck by how these little acts of domesticity seemed to help create a home for her, one that would insulate her not just from the pain of her husband’s passing, but also from the terrible possibility of his having been coldly murdered by someone or some group with even larger malevolent intentions.
Now that someone was my cold quarry. And Toronto’s. And that of Nolestar and Grooms and the ATF and the FBI and whoever else might be in on this investigation. I’d decided the night before I was going to try to focus on Chester and find out who shot him, Grooms be damned, and not get too distracted by terrorist bombings or whatever else might happen.
Yeah, right. Like trying to ignore the blaring big-screen TV inside a house trailer. It might take all I had in this game just to keep from being shown the inside of a jail cell.
Eating, I wondered idly why I hadn’t heard any more from Grooms. He knew where I was staying. He might even have somebody watching me right now. I looked out the kitchen windows but saw no sign of surveillance or anything else to mar the early-morning light. Which didn’t mean those eyes weren’t there.
Chester’s office was small. It was not much more than a large closet really, just beyond the door off the kitchen Betty had pointed out to us the afternoon before. A half window looked out on the driveway behind a plain, student-style desk. The hard-backed cane chair sported a worn corduroy pad tied to the back to cushion the seat. Above the desk sat an old postal-style credenza with various envelopes and pieces of paper stuffed into several of the slots. The only other object in the room was a single two-drawer filing cabinet wedged between the desk and wall.
I sat down in the chair and could immediately sense why Betty would have had a hard time doing this right now. The entire nook of a work space spoke of Chester, reeked of Chester. From his bills and correspondence, to the leftover smell of his pipe smoke in the draperies, to a King James Bible on the blotter opened to the book of Proverbs, its well-worn cover frayed at the edges and several small pieces of paper stuck in to the pages as bookmarks. These items were among the last things in this house Chester Carew ever touched.
