Even the transit cops make no attempt to sweep these people out. What would be the point of it? Their residency harms no one. It can, however, provide cover to a man on the run; to a man who cannot let himself be seen on the streets, who has gone so far down he can accept the grease and the steel dust and company of the desperate.
Thus, Levander Greenwood came to rest, and an explanation for the failure of a hundred cops and their informants. In the first ten days following the massacre on Delancey Street, the task force had received and investigated a dozen tips, sometimes arriving within hours of Greenwood’s departure. The scenario had followed the typical pattern of the fugitive with no place to lay his head and everyone had expected a quick arrest. Then Levander simply disappeared and new tips were either entirely false or led to addresses where he hadn’t been seen in weeks. The baffled detectives had jumped on the hypothesis that he had come to bay in one of the Lower East Side’s abandoned tenements, but surprise sweeps by the black-uniformed SWAT team had turned up only the usual assortment of junkies and squatters. The situation had driven everyone involved with the investigation crazy. Except, of course, Paul Kirkpatrick.
As they drove, Moodrow, Kirkpatrick and Tilley, straight down Second Avenue toward Houston Street, Kirkpatrick recounted his failures at length, searching for an excuse. After the deaths of the two young cops, he’d been afraid to set Greenwood up again. Of course, he had wanted to kill Levander, but he couldn’t find a way to accomplish the deed without involving himself and he was unprepared to explain how he’d come by his knowledge of Levander’s whereabouts. Besides, Greenwood didn’t expect to be taken alive and the continual use of crack had made him as paranoid as a cockroach at a polka festival.
“I admit I did it for money, all right?” He spoke very quickly, his words partially slurred, yet coherent. “But I ain’t the only one. It’s been going on for a long time. Right here, Moodrow, and you fucking know it.” He paused for a response, but Moodrow ignored him. “After Bennie Goldstein was killed, I got sick. Levander was so crazy with the cocaine, he wouldn’t even wait for me to sell the dope he ripped off. He wanted cash up front, as soon as he made delivery. If it wasn’t for the goddamn cash machines in the banks I woulda had to carry a thousand dollars with me all the time. Whenever I tried to walk away, he’d threaten to make a phone call to Internal Affairs. The cocksucker knows more about the job than I do. I kept hoping he’d get blown away trying to take some dealer off, but it went the other way. He came to me twice a week with some kinda dope. Speed, smack, hits—whatever he could grab. He told me he was filling the Lower East Side with ‘fertilizer.’”
Kirkpatrick went on and on. Like any other criminal, once started on his confession, he couldn’t shut it off. That’s why cops say, “Just tell us about it and you’ll feel better.” Every detective has had the experience of listening to a suspect relate details of crimes that have never been reported. And that’s also why Moodrow and Tilley didn’t bother to respond. Just let him make his Act of Contrition. The roller coaster was all downhill from here to the final stop.
After a ten minute ride that seemed to take an hour, they parked on Houston Street by First Avenue. Moodrow carefully locked the door, then opened the trunk of the Plymouth and removed two bulletproof vests. He handed one to his partner and put on the other. Though a third vest lay in clear view at the bottom of the trunk, Moodrow didn’t offer it and Kirkpatrick didn’t ask. He shut his mouth, accepted a black, six-cell flashlight and they went down into the station like three androids in a science fiction movie.
The Second Avenue stop on the F Train is only one block from Houston Street and the Bowery, an intersection with a century-long tradition as headquarters for New York’s alcoholic derelicts. The entrances are located at First and Second Avenues with the station running along Houston Street. A flight of stairs leads to a token booth and a set of turnstiles, then a second flight to the train level. There are two platforms here, with a single track on the outside of each platform and two tracks between them. This is a common arrangement at stations served by express and local trains, but only one train stops at Second Avenue, the F, and the center tracks lead to a dead end in a closed tunnel several hundred yards down the line, a layover track with its length characterized by a widening of the tunnel and a series of storage rooms, each now a private apartment. In the opposite direction, back toward Broadway and Lafayette, the next stop, the layover tracks disappear and the living space shrinks to nothing. It was here that Levander Greenwood had found his cave, in a neighborhood that was completely private, a space that didn’t exist.
It was eleven o’clock when the trio walked past the Second Avenue token booth and the station was fairly busy, as it usually is on weekends. The clerk, locked in her booth for protection, looked up momentarily as they pulled open an exit door, then back down at her newspaper. She couldn’t give a shit if they paid or not. It wasn’t her job to make them pay.
There were men sleeping on every bench. Men lying or sitting with their backs against the stone walls. Men passed out in the center of the platform. Passengers stood in knots as far away from these men as possible, yet moved for the cops. They marched past tattered posters advertising the joys of wine and cigarettes and a movie, Over The Top, which had bombed several years before. Above it all, the acrid smell of urine, of men too stoned to find or care about a toilet, cut through the humidity, as it does in every slum on the Lower East Side.
At the end of the platform, a set of iron steps led to the track level. They walked, Kirkpatrick in the lead, directly to them, then waited as a train shrieked into the station. Tilley had seen it coming down the tunnel, its single red eye announcing F to the straphangers leaning over the edge of the platform, but when it hit the open space of the station, the metallic screech of the brake pads echoing back and forth between stone walls awakened him to the possibility of crouching in a narrow tunnel with a train bearing down on him and an electrified third rail at his feet. There are depressions in the walls of the tunnel so workers can get out of the way, but the thought of being pressed back against the stone, with the wheels of the subway car passing two feet from the end of his nose, was less than comforting and he began to be aware of himself and his surroundings for the first time since his visit to Rose. It wasn’t a movie. It wasn’t cops and robbers with a plastic gun and red caps. He could easily die here, ambushed by Greenwood or Kirkpatrick or both. He looked over at Moodrow and found a poker-faced cop utterly absorbed in the job at hand. Then, with the train already making its way toward the next stop, they walked down the stairs and into the tunnel.
Kirkpatrick led them due west, keeping to the southern side of the four tracks running into the station. A hundred and fifty yards from the platform, well into the shadows of the tunnel, they found a small, concrete room just before the junction of the eastbound and the layover tracks. The room was empty, though someone had dragged a filthy mattress through the station to make a home out of it. A steel ladder, bolted to the concrete on the north wall, led up to a metal grating and there was just enough light coming from the single bulb to show another level, an unlit level, above it. Moodrow ran his hand across one of the steel rungs and held it up. It was clean and Tilley looked at the ladder a little more closely. The edges of each rung were covered with greasy soot, but the center, where a foot would press, was spotless.
“What’s up there?” Moodrow asked. “Go over it again. And don’t make any mistakes, Paulie. If it goes wrong, I’m gonna take you out first.”
“You don’t think I know it’s over?” Kirkpatrick turned to meet Moodrow’s gaze. “I’m thanking you, Moodrow. For Maryann. Anybody else woulda turned me over to the headhunters and washed his hands of it. The whole squad thinks you’re an asshole, but nobody else woulda given me a chance to make it good.”
Moodrow bristled at the word “asshole.” “Dump the bullshit,” he ordered. “Just go over the rest of it so there’s no mistakes.”
“That’s a continuat
ion of the token level.” Kirkpatrick pointed at the grating. “But it’s been closed off for years. You can get to it through here or through the ventilation grates that go up to Houston Street. Greenwood’s hole is about two hundred yards west and down a small corridor. I’m going first. The signal, in the beginning when I had to bring him money, was to swing the flashlight from side to side, like a windshield wiper. With that light coming at him, he won’t be able to see anything past me. You stay close to the walls and he won’t have no chance at all.”
Tilley wanted to stop the both of them, to ask if either had any intention of accepting a surrender, but it would have been a waste of time, despite Moodrow’s promise that he would make the decision. Circumstances were making decisions for all of them. Tilley fully realized that Moodrow had something in mind. That the first movement had been played out with Higgins in his apartment and the second with an old, frightened rogue cop named Paul Kirkpatrick. Moodrow had promised it would lead to Levander Greenwood. Then Tilley remembered the men in the task force; their computers and maps. Those men were enjoying a free weekend, no closer to Levander Greenwood than on the day they’d put their task force together.
Kirkpatrick went up the ladder first, easily pushing aside the grating. The opening was small and he struggled for a moment, trying to get through, a perfect target for anyone waiting in the darkness. Moodrow followed, his passage even more difficult. Tilley had no problem, his shoulders being narrower than Moodrow’s and his gut flatter than Kirkpatrick’s. For a few seconds, they peered down the platform, half-frozen. It was as wide as the first level, called the mezzanine level, with its token booth and turnstiles. Perhaps, at some time in the past, it had housed a command post for the engineers or the cops, but it obviously hadn’t been used in years. The walls and the floor were covered with greasy soot. Even Levander Greenwood’s footprints were only darker depressions in the filth.
Slowly, calmly, Kirkpatrick flipped on his flashlight and began to swing it back and forth. In the sudden glare, they could see the side corridor, exactly where Kirkpatrick said it would be, about halfway between the cops and a tiled wall at the end of the level. The flashlight, one of the newer ones, had a halogen bulb and threw an incredibly bright beam. Behind it, as Kirkpatrick had insisted, Moodrow and Tilley were invisible.
Despite Kirkpatrick’s warnings, Moodrow stayed close behind him as he began to move away. He wasn’t about to let Kirkpatrick turn that corner unobserved. Tilley, following the two of them down the corridor, felt a fear as intense as anything he’d ever known. He’d always hated the filth, the closed-in, trapped paranoia of narrow tenement stairways, but they were nothing compared to this. He knew there was an insane crack addict with a sawed-off shotgun waiting somewhere in that darkness. Though all three of them had drawn their weapons as soon as they came through the grating, a .38 is no match for an auto-loading shotgun. Neither was there any realistic hope of surprising a cocaine freak who slept for three or four hours every other day. In one sense, they were at the mercy of a detective who was already responsible for the deaths of three cops.
Tilley thought of Rose living in her apartment on the Lower East Side, of the permanent fear becoming terror each time she heard a footstep on the stairs, of the dread to be inspired by a key turning in a lock. How does it feel to open up on a crowd with a shotgun? To see the flesh peeling back, the explosion of red blood? Tilley had never shot anyone in his life, but the image of Levander Greenwood’s fists on his lover’s flesh clouded all perspective. He asked himself for a reason why such a man should live and found only rage. And fear.
“Levander. It’s me. Kirkpatrick.”
Kirkpatrick began to call as soon as he turned the corner. Moodrow and Tilley were only a few feet behind him, but they stopped at the mouth of the corridor, flattening against opposite walls, peering around the corner while Kirkpatrick plodded along. He kept his weapon pointed at the ceiling, but the beam of the flashlight swept back and forth across a doorless opening thirty feet away, so close they could almost touch it.
“Hey Levander, it’s Kirkpatrick. You in there?” His voice was cop-strong. Tough and confident.
“What you want, pig? Why you come here?”
“I got a place for ya, Levander. Crack dealer in Queens. Outta the Lower East Side where you’re not so hot. Guy does about a thousand vials a day. I can get you in the apartment.”
A long pause as Kirkpatrick stopped ten feet from the doorway and Levander considered the proposition. The bit about Queens held just enough hope to be enticing, like a miniskirt on an old whore. Tilley’s weapon was pointed directly into the doorway, as was Moodrow’s. Within the room, a light flared and the sucking sound of a flame pulled down into the bowl of a pipe filtered through the silence. It only took a few seconds, then Greenwood, his spirits fortified, spoke out.
“How you wanna do this, pig?”
“I got a guy can get you into the apartment as a buyer. Once the door is open, you do your thing. Best part is we know the dude picks up in the morning, so you go in when he’s holding the bundle. It’s a lock.”
A shotgun appeared in the doorway, caught in the glare of Kirkpatrick’s flashlight, then the edge of a face. Levander was checking the scene, his caution a matter of habit though he had met with Kirkpatrick only a few days before. “Whyn’t you put up that light, motherfucker? Yo blindin’ me.”
From behind, Moodrow and Tilley could see Kirkpatrick’s shadow against the circle of light at the end of the corridor. Could see him slowly raise his .38 until the barrel pointed at the ceiling. “I told ya last time,” he said. “Get a fuckin’ lantern down here. What’re you so scared about, anyway? Everybody loves you.”
Without missing a beat, Kirkpatrick fired a round into the ceiling. The crack of his pistol, incredibly loud in the confined space, was instantly obliterated by the roar of the shotgun and his body flew backwards even as it received a second and a third blast.
The silence that followed was louder than the explosions. Kirkpatrick was lying in a pool of blood, his weapon clutched in his hand. The flashlight had rolled against the far wall, but still pointed directly at the now-empty doorway. A miracle for which, right then and there, Tilley thanked whatever gods were above him. Now they could watch that doorway without revealing their position. Or even their existence.
Unfortunately, Moodrow erased that tactical advantage as soon as the echo of Levander Greenwood’s shotgun died away. “Hey, fuckhead,” he screamed. “I heard you’re lookin’ for me.”
“Who’s that? Who’s that?”
Tilley expected a cloud of buckshot, but the doorway remained empty. Moodrow’s face, across the corridor, was a blank shadow, but he could feel Moodrow’s satisfied smile, could hear it in his voice.
“It’s Moodrow,” he said cheerfully.
“I’m gon’ kill you, motherfucker.” He may have meant it as a scream of defiance, but his voice was filled with hopelessness.
“There’s no way out, Levander. You gotta give it up. Even a fucking moron could figure that out. Even a stoned-out freak like you.” He hesitated for a moment, then went on. “Oh, by the way, Rose says to give you her best. Likewise from Jeanette and Lee. Rose says she’s sorry she won’t be hearin’ from you no more, but what with all the cops you killed, you won’t see daylight ’till you’re around ten thousand years old.”
“You cocksucker. I’ll kill you. I swear I’ll kill you.”
“So who’s stopping you?” Moodrow bellowed the words and the question hung in the air. “You don’t think you’re gonna get another chance, do ya? This is Custer’s Last Stand for Levander Greenwood. Last stand. Come on out and say goodbye.”
Nothing. Not a sound. Tilley expected a suicidal plunge. That “all right, you dirty copper” blaze of movieland glory. But Levander Greenwood’s only response was to relight his pipe, to take one more shot at passing ecstasy.
“What if I give myself up?” The question, totally unexpected, rattled in the empty space. �
�You gonna get me a lawyer?”
“Anything you want, Levander. You just come on out with your hands on your head. After we get the cuffs on, we’ll talk about it.”
“You gon’ kill me, pig. Ah know what you gon’ do.”
Then silence again. Dead silence. Moodrow, smiling over at his partner, knelt and took a backup gun from an ankle holster, a 9mm automatic with a fifteen shot magazine.
“Let’s see if we can’t motivate the man,” he said cheerfully. He dropped his .38 back into its holster, transferred the automatic to his right hand, then pumped fifteen shots, as fast as he could pull the trigger, into Levander Greenwood’s small, concrete hole. The rounds pinged back and forth like the beeps of a berserk computer, flashing back down the corridor. Tilley pressed himself against the wall, but Moodrow kept Levander’s doorway in view at all times. Even as he slammed another clip into the 9mm and smiled over at his partner.
“Hey, Levander,” he yelled. “You wanna talk about it some more? You wanna open negotiations again?”
Dead silence. The one thing Moodrow didn’t expect. At the very least, Greenwood should have returned fire. Should have tried to drive them back.
“What’s the matter, Kubla? That’s what they call you, right? Kubla Khan? The Emperor?” He paused briefly, then continued to push, praying for a reaction. “The Emperor of Filth. King of the Sewers.” Still no response.
Force of Nature Page 29
