Night Work

by Steve Hamilton

  “Again?”

  “I think he’s ducking me.”

  “That’s not good.”

  No kidding, I thought. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m on him.”

  Larry nodded. Still not getting me at all, that man. I didn’t think he was a bad guy because of it. Hell, I don’t get myself most of the time. My old boss, Bob, he was a tough act to follow, in my book at least. He knew I was good at this stuff, even if I went a little overboard sometimes. More importantly, he was here when it all happened, the whole thing with Laurel. He was the one who made me take some time off. He was the one who kept in touch every week, until it was time to bring me back in. Then he was the one who didn’t say a word if I came in every single day, even if it screwed up his overtime numbers.

  He’s retired now. I hated to see him leave. They brought Larry in from some county upstate, way up north of Albany. He knows what I’ve been through, of course. On paper, he knows. But he obviously still doesn’t know quite what to do with me. In fact, I probably scare the hell out of him.

  “You feeling all right today, Joe?”

  I looked up at him. “Yeah. I’m good.”

  “Okay, well … I’ll be up in my office if you need me.”

  “Got it.”

  He nodded, raised a hand as if to make some sort of gesture, changed his mind, and turned around. He went back up the stairs. A few seconds later, I could hear his chair rolling around again.

  My cell phone rang in my pocket. As I took it out, I wondered if it could be Marlene. But no, the caller ID read KINGSTON PD.

  “Howie,” I said as I answered it. “What’s going on?”

  “JT, I just wanted to hear about the big date.”

  Howie Borello had been my best friend for as long as I could remember, since when we were growing up right here in Kingston. He was with me that night, in fact, at my bachelor party. He hadn’t paced himself as well as I did. By the time we got to the strip club, he was already passed out in the car. Now, for the past two years he’d been calling down to the Westchester Police Department at least once a week, trying to find out why the investigation hadn’t gone anywhere. He’d been making a real nuisance of himself, this loud, stubborn detective from up the river. Another reason he was my best friend in the world.

  “We had a nice dinner,” I said. “Very nice.”

  “Come on, spill it. Did you have breakfast, too?”

  I laughed. “Howie, come on.”

  “Just tell me. Was there meaningful physical contact?”

  “Was there what?”

  He’s trying too hard, I thought. He’s trying to make me sound like a normal guy going out on a normal date.

  “You know,” he said. “Something beyond shaking hands, a kiss on the cheek …”

  “Yes, okay? There was some amount of meaningful physical contact.”

  “Hot damn. How come I never get good blind dates?”

  “You’re married, Howie.”

  “No, I mean back in the day. When my blind dates opened the door, I usually screamed and ran.”

  “I think you’re remembering it backwards,” I said. “What’s going on at the station?”

  “It’s pretty quiet right now. But you never know.”

  “I’m gonna go take a run at a kid pretty soon. I’ll talk to ya later, okay?”

  “You gonna be at your usual spot tonight?”

  “I might be.” Meaning absolutely yes. Sunday night was the one time all week I’d go to the Shamrock and have a few.

  “Maybe I’ll stop by. You can tell me more.”

  “Elaine will love that.”

  “She’ll be fine if she knows I’m with you.”

  “Okay, so maybe I’ll see you.”

  “When are you gonna go out with Marlene again?”

  “Soon. I hope.”

  “When am I gonna meet her?”

  “Never. I hope.”

  “You’re a funny man, JT.”

  “Good-bye, Howie.”

  I put the cell phone in my pocket. Trying way too hard, I thought. You had to love him.

  I saw Larry coming down the stairs again, just as I was leaving.

  “Heading out?” he said.

  “Think I’ll go pay a visit to Wayne.”

  “On a Sunday?”

  “A surprise visit,” I said. “It’s my specialty.”

  “Okay, then.” A long pause. “I’ll see you later, Joe.”

  With that, I was out the door. No costume, no cape, but I was about to become Probation Officer Man again, ready to kick some ass.

  I didn’t have to drive too far on this call. Some days, I’d put two or three hundred miles on my car, getting from one end of Ulster County to the other. I work mostly at the main office here on Broadway, but we’ve got another up in Saugerties, one down in New Paltz, one way the hell out in Ellenville. It’s over a thousand square miles, one of the biggest counties in the state, spreading from the Hudson River all the way out to the Catskill Mountains.

  Most of it’s still undeveloped. Lots of trees and open fields. It’s no surprise people move up here from the city, when you can catch a train and be in Manhattan in less than two hours, then come up here to your house in the woods. Listen to the coyotes howling at night and the bears taking down your bird feeder.

  Of course, Ulster County has its share of problems, too. Kingston’s the closest thing to a real city, with gangs and drugs and everything else. New Paltz has one of the state universities, with everything that comes with it—the binge drinking, the sexual assaults, more drugs. There’s Woodstock, of course, at the base of the Catskill Mountains, with the thriving hippie culture and yeah, even more drugs. The Woodstock Green is practically an open-air pharmaceutical marketplace.

  That’s the side of things I see most of the time now. Every single day, I’m dealing with somebody using drugs or selling drugs or doing something else illegal because of the drugs. Sometimes it seems like it’s all I do anymore, because low-level drug crimes usually mean probation for first-time offenders. And probation means me in your life. I’m part cop, part social worker, part guidance counselor, part rehab coordinator, part bounty hunter. Every hour of every day, I’m your official court-designated guardian angel. I can come to your house on a school-day morning and drag your ass out of bed, because going to school is an absolutely nonnegotiable part of your probation. Or I can come calling on a Sunday, like I’m doing today, when everybody’s home and I can see what’s really going on with your whole family.

  I headed back down Broadway, toward the water. Passing the gym, then the two hills on either side of the street, City Hall on one side, Kingston High School on the other, where Howie and I both spent four colorful years. Now one of us was a cop, the other a PO. Hard to believe. When the fall comes around, I’ll go back to keeping once-a-week office hours there, in the same school I couldn’t wait to get out of. Every once in a while I’ll run into an adult who’ll seem shocked by this idea, that a kid would get out of class early to go keep his probation appointment. I had one parent ask me with a straight face if I wasn’t worried about stigmatizing my clients this way. I told her that getting excused from biology class to go meet with your probation officer was worth about a hundred points in street cred. If you were one of the few kids who ended up wearing an ankle bracelet, it was a hundred points more. I’ve seen kids wearing shorts in the wintertime just to show them off.

  I kept driving down Broadway, all the way down to the Rondout District. This was the low end of the city, the place where things were once made and shipped out onto the Hudson River. Bricks, for many years. Then steel.

  There’s a strange sort of renewal going on down there now. You go all the way down to the water and you pass all the new condominiums on one side of the street, the new restaurants and little shops on the other. You see all the boats tied up at the docks, the people walking around enjoying the day. A hundred yards later the whole place is overrun with weeds as high as your head. Then there
’s the old meatpacking plant, a spectacular ruin of crumbling brick and broken glass, and farther down an abandoned cement factory. That’s where I drove now, past Block Park and the kids out playing basketball. The houses were smaller on this side of town. People lived closer to the bone.

  The one I was looking for was a duplex. I parked in the driveway, went to the front door, and knocked. I stood there listening for a while. I heard a man yelling, but I couldn’t tell if it was from this side of the duplex or the other side. I knocked again. Finally, the kid’s mother opened the door. She was dressed, but there was no mistaking the fact that I had just woken her up.

  “Claire,” I said. “Good morning. Is Wayne here?”

  “No,” she said, yawning.

  “He missed his appointment on Friday,” I said. “He was supposed to come see me at the gym.”

  Wayne had been assigned to me for about three months now. He and some friends had broken into a couple of houses, stolen some cash, a couple of laptops, some prescription medicine. The kid who seemed to be the leader was from Newburgh. That’s in a different county, so I’d never even heard of him before. What he was doing up here running around with Wayne is something I never quite understood, but apparently that kid had a pretty long history. So he ended up drawing nine months at Coxsackie. Wayne was a first-timer, so he got a year’s probation. One year of Joe Trumbull, for better or worse.

  “He’s not here now.” Her hair was wet, pressed down flat on one side of her head. I was guessing she’d taken her shower and then given up on the day already, going right back to bed.

  “Can I come in?”

  “Sure,” she said. You couldn’t have ironed her voice any flatter.

  She stepped aside and I came in past her. I took a quick look around the living room without being too obvious about it. The last time I was here I had seen a roach clip sitting in one of the ashtrays. If it’s in the living room, that usually means it belongs to Mom or Dad. If the kid’s on probation, in a real way the whole family is, too.

  Of course, here there was only one parent to deal with, at least for the time being. “Have you heard from your husband?”

  “He called yesterday.”

  He was an Army Reserve, currently driving a truck somewhere in Afghanistan.

  “Is everything okay? You seem kind of down.”

  She shrugged. “He’s been gone a long time. It’s hard.”

  “I imagine.”

  She gave me a look as if she might argue with me. Like there was no way I could imagine. Of course, I had my own story, but I’d never use it that way.

  “Do you know where Wayne is? Is he going to be back anytime soon?”

  “He went out with one of his friends,” she said. “To the diner, I think.”

  “He didn’t say anything about the appointment?”

  “I think he said something about his hand hurting.”

  “Meaning what?” I said. “He can’t come see me?”

  “I mean he couldn’t box Friday, on account of his hand.”

  “He never has to. We can just talk. He knows that.”

  “He said he’d try to catch you this weekend. He promised me.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’m sure he did.”

  This was the kid’s MO. Seventeen years old and already an expert at it. He seemed to know exactly how far he could go without me having to ring him up. There was always an excuse for everything. His mother didn’t wake him up in time. He didn’t have a ride. He tried to call me but something was wrong with his phone. I knew that when I finally caught up to him, and I would catch up to him, he’d have another story for me. He and the friend were looking for work, trying to get an interview, they stopped at the diner to get some food for his mother. The whole melodrama I’d get, with that little smile on his face the whole time, daring me to bust him on it.

  These were the ones who bothered me the most, the kids right on the edge. There was just enough hope for me to think I had an outside chance with them. Not like some of the others, the kids who already seemed on their way into the system no matter what I did.

  Wayne was smart. He was a good athlete. He didn’t do any organized sports at school, but if I ever got him in the gym on a regular schedule …

  I’ve never lost one kid I got hooked into the gym. Not one.

  “Wayne’s trying,” his mother said. “He really is.”

  “Claire, I’ll be honest. I think things could go either way with him.”

  “He hasn’t been hanging around with any of those guys from Newburgh anymore.”

  “That’s good to hear,” I said. Thinking, good to hear if it’s true. “He’ll be out of the house soon. If he gets into serious trouble again, you know he might not get probation next time.”

  “I know that.”

  Whoever had been yelling when I was outside at the door was back at it again. His voice was coming right through the common wall now. Something about who were you with last night and why weren’t you here when I got home. Classic stuff to yell at a woman, but with a tone of voice I knew was serious trouble. I didn’t hear anybody answering him.

  “Your neighbor sounds like a charming gentleman,” I said. “How often do you have to listen to this?”

  “All the time,” she said. “These walls are so thin, it’s like he’s in the room with us. He kept me awake until midnight last night doing that.”

  “That’s great.”

  “My husband wouldn’t have let it go on, believe me. He would have gone over there and taken that guy’s head off.”

  Some more yelling. We both sat there listening to it.

  “That’s his wife he’s yelling at, I take it.”

  “Wife, girlfriend. I don’t know. They don’t talk to us.”

  “You ever hear anything else?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like him hitting her?”

  “I don’t know.” She looked away from me.

  Here’s where my Laurel would have done something. She would have gone right over and pounded on their door. She would have demanded to talk to the man’s wife. If she saw one mark on that woman’s face, then God help the man, no matter who he was or how big. God help him.

  That’s what Laurel would have done, and for some reason on this morning after everything that had happened the night before, I felt closer to her than ever. I could practically feel her behind me, pushing me to go do something.

  “I’m going to go have a little talk with your neighbors,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Stay right here. I’ll be right back.”

  She looked a little stunned, but I left her there and went outside. As I walked over to the other door, I noticed a faded pinwheel stuck in the ground, the only decoration in the whole damned sorry excuse for a yard. I knocked on the door and a few seconds later heard heavy footsteps on the other side.

  “Who is it?”

  “Open up,” I said. “I want to talk to you.”

  The door opened. The man was big, and he looked familiar. I wondered if I had seen him in court.

  “Who are you?”

  “My name’s Joe Trumbull.” I took out my wallet and showed him my badge.

  “Are you a cop?”

  “I’m a probation officer.”

  “Then what do you want?” All of a sudden he was standing about three feet taller. If I wasn’t a cop, how much trouble could I be?

  “I want to talk to your wife for a minute.”

  The man didn’t know my little secret. That badge I showed him wasn’t just a piece of tin. As it turns out, New York State has a little quirk in the law that makes me an official peace officer. Probation officers, parole officers, even corrections officers. All of us. I could carry a weapon if I wanted to, although juvenile POs usually don’t. I can make arrests. In fact, if I witness a felony, the law says I have to make an arrest.

  Of course, without a gun and without handcuffs, I wasn’t sure what I’d be able to do with this guy. One quick pho
ne call, though, and a lot of help would arrive.

  “She’s busy at the moment,” the man said. “Why don’t you come back later.” He started to close the door. “In fact, why don’t you just not come back at all. There’s nobody on probation in this house.”

  I put my hand on the door. “I’ll talk to your wife or I’ll have the police here in two minutes. Your choice.”

  He stood there looking at me. He clenched his right hand into a fist and started working his thumb against it.

  “You know what?” I said. “I train real hard every day just to be ready for moments like this. I think you should know that now before you try something.”

  I watched his eyes. If he was going to bring it, his eyes would give him away.

  “Sandra,” he said, not moving.

  She came to the door and stood next to him. She looked just as tired as Claire, but otherwise there didn’t seem to be anything wrong with her. No marks, no bruises. She had both arms wrapped tight around her body.

  “Can I talk to you outside for a minute?”

  She looked at her husband. “If you want to talk to me, you can do it right here.”

  “My name is Joe Trumbull.” I took out one of my cards and handed it to her. She waited half a beat before accepting it.

  “I’m a probation officer,” I said, “but I can get you help immediately if you ever need it.”

  “Why would I need help?”

  “My cell phone number is on the card. You can call me anytime.”

  She looked down at the card. I wondered how long it would take for her husband to rip it into little pieces.

  “The probation office is on Broadway,” I said. “Almost all the way up, on the left. And I live at Anderson’s Gym. You know where that is?”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “Just remember that,” I said. “If you ever need me.”

  I looked at the man one more time.

  “Maybe I’ll come back and pay another visit sometime,” I told him. “Have a nice day.”

  The man closed the door and we were done.

  I went back to Claire’s side and told her to have her son call me the second he got home. “Tell him he’s not missing another appointment with me,” I said. “No matter what part of his body hurts.”