Then there were his personal in/out piles: his private photo stack of local knuckleheads divided into who at present was on the street, who in jail, who just released. Matty looked specifically at two categories of actors: muggers and gun-possession collars. No need to look at shooters per se, since he didn’t think the shooting was intentional, the victim having most likely taken a run at or in some way panicked the perp. Continuing to play sociopath solitaire, he eliminated those who, compared to Cash’s vague descriptions, were too old or looked wrong or whose robbery preference was all wrong: home invaders, commercial specialists, any of those who preferred to do their thieving indoors. When his perp stack was down from fifty to twenty, he put together a flyer with each of their photos, MOs, and a list of known running buddies, then computer-posted the document—the Want Card—to all precincts citywide; if any of these guys were picked up, anywhere in the five boroughs, a red flag would pop up: notify Matty Clark of the Eighth Squad; the potential perp described as a possible witness, not a shooter, to keep all those citywide trigger fingers from itching.
More to do: check for locals with outstanding warrants; guys with swords dangling over their heads who’d talk word on the street to make that sword temporarily go back in its sheath; especially those who were facing three strikes, or even better, their softer partners in crime, the beta males living under that same three-strike shadow who’d been forced to go along on the caper in the first place; they were victims too, or at least that’s how it would be put to them.
More to do: check with parole officers, find out who’s having a hard time toeing the line out here, who’s most likely to miss a curfew, to drop a dirty urine, to not show up at work; good people to squeeze, easy to violate.
More to do: put in the paperwork for the city’s automatic $12,000 reward; for an additional $10,000 from the Mayor’s Fund for mediasensitive homicides.
More to do, more to do, Matty shuffling, posting, keying up, punching in, poring over, looking for someone, something to jump out at him.
At midnight a fresh wave of detectives came in, and the sight of them, relatively clear-eyed and crisp, made him finally head for the door.
As Matty was leaving the squad room, Lugo, standing in the doorway of his own Quality of Life office across the hall, quietly called his name, then signaled for him to head up the stairs.
• • •
Matty sat on a dusty window ledge in the long, gloomy hallway of the uninhabited fourth floor where earlier, God knew how many hours ago, he had caught up with Billy Marcus running away from what remained of his family.
“So, we were doing car stops tonight?” Lugo began, and Matty pretty much knew what was to follow. “And, we wound up pulling over your sons.”
“And?” Matty asked calmly.
“And nothing.” Lugo lit a cigarette. “But just so you know? That car stunk to high heaven with weed.”
Matty nodded, nodded some more, then offered his hand. “I owe you one, Donnie.”
“That’s how we do, my brother.”
“All right, then.” Matty feeling ninety years old.
“Can I just ask . . .” Lugo spit out a fleck of tobacco. “Your kid, the older one, he tinned us, right? What kind of cop is he?”
“About what you’d expect,” Matty said, and headed home to his one-bedroom sublet in the Dubinsky Co-ops on Grand, filled now with sleeping sons, the Big One sprawled on the couch, the Other One in a down-filled bag on the floor.
He poured himself two fingers of whatever his hand came to first, walked over to the pile of clothes draped on the arm of the couch, and lifted the car keys from the Big One’s pants.
Searching the Sentra parked in his space beneath the building, Matty found a half-smoked joint in the glove compartment but nothing else to speak of. Then he opened the trunk and found two Lake George PD gym bags stuffed with grass already broken down into nickel and dime lids for sale back home.
A friend in Washington Heights . . .
Back in the apartment he sat in a chair and watched them sleep.
They were heading back upstate in the morning.
He put the car keys back in the Big One’s jeans pocket, then left the apartment and headed back to the precinct.
An hour later, lying wide-eyed in the airless, fetid bunk room, Matty thought about the shooting death of Isaac Marcus.
Although a few pure athletes of evil did exist out there, most murderers, when he finally caught up to them, pretty much never met his expectations. For the most part, they were a stupid and fantastically self-centered lot; rarely did they come across, at least on first impression, as capable of the biblical enormity of what they had done.
Survivors, on the other hand, even those who were as thick and brutish as the killers who had done away with their spouses or children, almost always appeared to him as larger than life; and being in the service of that kind of suffering often left him feeling both humbled and anointed.
“Don’t be too hard on yourself.” The guy was in shock when he said it, but that only made it more potent, because what he had reverted to in his numbness, his horror trance, was empathy.
Trying not to think of his own sleeping boys back in the apartment, Matty stared into the darkness and continued to mull over the plight of Billy Marcus.
No matter how many times he had witnessed the externals of receiving a blow like that, the greater part of it would always remain, and blessedly so, unimaginable to him. But of all the unknowables, what Matty at this moment found most incomprehensible—and it wasn’t like he couldn’t understand the urge to hide—was why anyone, no matter the trauma, would flee the comfort of a woman like Marcus’s wife.
At three-thirty in the morning, the scene in front of 27 Eldridge was fairly typical: the last of the last-call stagger-zoo, many of them walking as if it were their first time on ice skates; a kid in the back of an opendoored taxi staring at the knot of damp cash in his hands as he tried to make sense of the meter; and up the block a shirtless, bearded man sticking the top half of his body out of a sixth-floor tenement window and screaming at everybody to shut the fuck up and go back to New Jersey, then slamming his window down so hard that it rained glass, the people below whistling and applauding.
“Excuse me,” the gaunt Night Watch detective addressed the disheveled man perched on the top step above the growing shrine. “How you doing?”
“Good.” The guy looked like human soot.
“You live here?”
“Not right here.”
“You from the area?”
“Originally.”
“There was a shooting in front of this building about this time last night, you hear about it?”
“I did.” Vigorously scratching the side of his neck.
“We’re looking for people who might have been around then, maybe seen or heard something.”
“Sorry.”
“All right.” The detective started to walk off, then came back. “Can I ask what you’re doing here right now?”
“Me?” The guy shrugged. “I’m waiting for someone.”
Yolonda, having volunteered for Night Watch to avoid either having to go back home or sleep in that repulsive bunk room, sat in a parked sedan across the street watching her partner walk back from talking to the dead kid’s father, Marcus looking to her as if he’d just sit on the top step of that stoop until time found a way to reverse itself.
“That’s so sad,” she said to the detective sliding back into the car.
“What is?”
“It’s like he’s waiting for his son to come back, right?”
“That’s the father?” He reared back. “Thanks for telling me.”
“Poor guy,” Yolonda said. “I just hope he’s not going to wind up being a giant pain in the ass on this, you know?”
THREE
FIRST BIRD
(A FEW BUTTERFLIES)
The deal was this: opposite sides of the street; if they saw a likely bunch of heads, the one across
the street from them went up a block, then crossed over, then came back down so they got them in a pincer, but because Tristan had the whistle, Little Dap was always supposed to play it like he was getting juxed too, but stand slightly behind the real vics in case they tried to run or fight. That was the plan, and they spent hours walking down opposite sides of every street from the Bowery to Pitt, from Houston to Henry, both of them limping in order not to draw attention to the slow hunter’s pace they had to maintain, then after a while getting bored and forgetting to limp, then remembering, then taking a break for pizza, whatever, for hours.
At first there were too many people, then no people, then that police taxi showed up and keyed in on Little Dap, motor-stalking him for blocks until he went into the Arab twenty-four-hour just to get them off his back.
Then at two, two-thirty, when the bars and clubs all began to empty, at first there were too many people again, then nobody again, until at three-thirty Little Dap had said fuckit, calling it a night; and the two of them started walking together back to the Lemlichs. Tristan, already worried about toe-sliding through the apartment past his ex-stepfather’s door, was imagining what it would feel like to take the whistle home with him, when suddenly they saw the three white guys on Eldridge coming towards them, the one in the middle drunk, halfcarried by the other two, and before they could even get it together, it was happening—Tristan, his heart slamming in his chest, putting the gun on them, the drunk hitting the deck as the two others separated to organize their individual responses to Little Dap’s demand. The guy on the left did it right, passing over the wallet and backing away eyes to the ground; but then the other guy made it all go to shit, almost smiling as he stepped to him, to the gun, like he was in his favorite movie or something, saying, “Not tonight, my man.”
When the white guy said whatever the fuck dumb thing he said, Little Dap saw Tristan go way too stiff and bughouse, Little Dap wishing he had the gun instead right then, in order to pistol-whip this hero into a different attitude. In fact, he was about to reach for the gun, take it from Tristan’s knotty grip, but then—pop—too late, the guy chest-shot, looking up on impact as if someone had called his name from a window, then crumpling without ever looking back down, Tristan quickstooping over him, like to take a bite out of his face, hissing, “Oh!” Little Dap hissing, “Go!” yanking him out of there, and then the two of them just flew straight south on Eldridge, booking so fast to the Lemlichs that Little Dap’s side vision was just a blur of riot gates. They swooped around one drunk couple like white water past a rock, then came up on an old Chinese dude, the guy wide-eyed, automatically going for his wallet. But as soon as they hit the far side of Madison, Dap grabbed the back of Tristan’s hoodie, pulling him to a stop, “Walk,” the word a wheeze, then gasped, “Roof,” before walking away from him a half block down Madison to the corner of Catherine so they’d cross over to the Lemlichs unrelated, the both of them breathing through their mouths, staring straight ahead as if blind to each other’s existence, entering the grounds, then heading to 32 St. James, entering the lobby at the same time, fucked that up, then taking the separate stairwells on either side of the elevator bank, lunge-climbing the thirty half-flights up to the fifteenth floor, then together silently taking the sole stairway to the roof door, pushing through to the gravel and almost walking into the two housing cops who had their backs to them, hunched over the riverside railing, taking five after a vertical patrol, tapping cigarette ash while discussing the view: Wall Street, the bridges, the Brooklyn Promenade, the Heights. “A kick-ass Trump view,” one cop said, then speculating how much it would go for on the open market. “All you got to do is lose the fifteen stories’ worth of shitskins living under it.”
Little Dap and Tristan hid behind the now wide-open roof door breathless, Tristan’s hand like a claw on the outside doorknob. The two of them remained in a frozen crouch until the cigarette butts were airdropped over the edge and the cops turned, walking back, Little Dap praying they wouldn’t notice that the roof door was wide open now, the two of them hunkered behind it; then at the last moment Little Dap had to yank Tristan’s hand off the outside doorknob so the cops could pull the fucking thing shut behind them.
Still in that crouch, they listened to the shuffling echo of footsteps heading down, then finally bolted for the west edge of the roof to look back at where they had come from. They couldn’t see through the snaggle of walk-ups, new green-glass high-rises, and towers of add-ons, nor could they hear sirens or any other sounds of alarm, but the body was out there, it was out there.
Tristan stood rooted in the pea gravel of the roof, his tongue leather-dry in his mouth, pictures and sensations jumping around in him; the small kick in his grip when he squeezed one off, the guy looking up on impact, the whites of his eyes all visible beneath, then again and again, that unexpected jolt in his hand like the snap of a dog as the .22 bucked. Did he mean to shoot? He didn’t know. He was OK, though.
He surprised himself by going off into remembering when he was little and living in those other projects in Brooklyn with his grandmother, the time that him and those kids were messing around inside the elevator shafts, jumping from the top of the one car that was going up, to the top of the other car that was going down, when that boy Neville had slipped, got trapped between the cars going in opposite directions, how the feathers just exploded out of the back of his puffy coat when the edge of the up car slashed it open, slashed him open, then more feathers coming out later as the medics scissored it up the back, trying to get at whatever was left inside.
“Are you deaf?” Little Dap hissed without turning his head from the view. “I said, give me the motherfuckin’ gun!”
Tristan reached into the pocket of his hoodie, panicking a second because there was nothing in there, then discovered that the .22 was still clutched in his right hand, had been in his right hand since he’d squeezed one off.
“OK.” Little Dap took it, still looking straight ahead in the direction of the body. “OK. You say anything?” Shaking his head, wheezing. “You say, to like, anybody?” Taking a breath. “I got this now,” holding up the .22. “Got your prints all over it.”
Tristan had the thought, Got your prints too with you holding it, but figured it had to be more complicated than that. Didn’t it?
Then suddenly Little Dap had him from behind in a bear hug, was thrusting his crotch into the seat of his jeans and hissing in his ear, “You like this? It’s all day, all night in there like this, you hear me? But you ain’t even gonna make it that far.” Tristan wanted to laugh at that, big gladiator-school man, but then Little Dap squatted behind Tristan’s legs, brought his hands in another bear hug around his thighs, and lifted him off the gravel, tilting him almost upside down over the too low railing, Tristan mute with terror, the blood bubbling in his temples as he clawed for purchase on the outside metal grille that separated him from a fifteen-story drop.
“Nobody knows nothing. You don’t say nothing, it’s gonna stay that way,” Little Dap hissed, his grip slipping a little. Tristan jerked a few inches closer to the earth, his mind a screech. “Now. You know they gonna come in here knocking on doors looking, so don’t you give them a reason to knock on your door, look at you, you hear me? Because I am not going back to that place.” Even in his white shock, Tristan could hear the blubbery catch in Little Dap’s throat.
Little Dap hauled him back up, Tristan silently dropping to one knee just to feel the gravel beneath him.
“I’m goin’ downstairs,” Little Dap said, his voice still shaky. “You wait twenty minutes, then you come down.” He started to walk to the roof door, then turned again. “And now on? You don’t even look at me.”
Half an hour later Tristan ninja-walked past his ex-stepfather’s bedroom to the one he shared with the three hamsters, all four mattresses packed so close it was like one wall-to-wall bed. Tristan’s bed was the third or the second in, depending if you were counting from the window side or the closet. The boy, Nelson, to hi
s left was six; the girl, Sonia, to his right, five; the baby, Paloma, three.
There was a note on his pillow: DON’T THINK YOU WON’T PAY FOR THIS, written in the same painstakingly fancy print as the House Rules pushpinned to the bedroom wall.
Tristan went into the bathroom and looked at himself in the mirror. After a long moment, he turned on the hot water, running it as quietly as possible, reached inside the medicine chest for his stepfather’s disposable, and started to shave for the first time since he was old enough to grow the goatee. When he was done, the fat white lightning bolt still ran in a jagged S-curve from his left cheek to the corner of his mouth then out the opposite corner and down to the right side of his jawline. The tight beard had covered enough so that at least it wasn’t the first thing he saw whenever he caught his own reflection in a store window, but the sight of it now completely exposed after all this time was a raw shock, kicking up some more unasked-for memories.
Heading back to the bedroom, he pulled his spiral notebook out from beneath the mattress and tried to put down some lines.
Touch me once ill touch you twice
But nothing else came to mind so he put the notebook back in its hiding place.
A few minutes later, when he finally lay flat on his back, he heard the first bird out there, the first bird in the world, sunrise in a half hour, school business a half hour after that.
Lush Life Page 16
