by R.J. Ellory
It was that simple. It was always that simple with Sandià.
At the lower entrance to the tenement Madigan was waved through into the foyer. Here he went through the customary pat-down—collar, shoulders, underarms, waist, thighs, calves, ankles. His hip holster was empty, as was the one at his ankle. He was escorted to the elevator, and one of the apes rode up with him. Nine floors, all of it in silence, the aged elevator clunking and creaking every foot of the way. The ape didn’t smell so good. He needed a good hosedown. Maybe six three, two ten, two twenty perhaps, his face like a wet sack of sneakers. He had a buzz cut all over, but at the sides there were lightning streaks cut down to the scalp. He had a vicious scar dissecting his left ear, and right down to the edge of his jaw. The ear had been severed, but had knitted.
“Machete,” the ape said, aware that Madigan was staring.
“That so?”
“Sure is.”
“Gotta smart, huh?”
“Just a little.”
“Wouldn’t want to see the guy that did that to you,” Madigan ventured.
“You ain’t gonna,” the ape replied.
The elevator shuddered to a halt.
Madigan waited for the door to slide back. The lithium had slowed his heart, but he could feel the pressure of his own blood in his veins, in his brain, in the arteries in his neck. His hands were moist with sweat. His scalp itched something fierce. He needed to be the way he always was with Sandià—respectful, yet nonchalant and unhurried. They had history together, all of fifteen years, all the way back to the Gangs Division. Back then Madigan had been twenty-seven, Sandià something around forty. He owned a piece of a half dozen things. Nothing was big by itself, but everything together made him matter. He had some cars, some girls, a couple of chop shops, a few runs in and out of the cargo bays at JFK for cigarettes, liquor, videos and electronic gear. He had a crew of three or four dozen. They weren’t a gang. They didn’t wear colors or fly flags. Sandià was too smart for that. No, Sandià knew where to invest his time and resources. Start with the cops already on the take. Get them on your side. Those that weren’t, well, there was always a way. Put a couple of girls in a hotel room, make a call, have a cop arrive for a possession bust, maybe a solicitation or something. The girls take care of the cop so as not to get the ticket, and everything is on film. The cop gets a couple of stills in the mail, he faces a costly divorce, a screwed career, or he gives word to Sandià every time there’s a planned raid on a traffic route.
Madigan’s own introduction to Sandià’s little world had been a mutual thing, a river that ran both ways. Back then, the mid-90s, there were things going on that made today’s business pale in comparison. Madigan was still married to Angela, his first wife. He went up to Manhattan Gangs in July of ’94. Cassie had been two years old and a handful. Neither he nor Angela were sleeping so good. They were fighting, but still at the stage where they didn’t fight around Cassie. There was some vague semblance of their former relationship, perhaps even the belief that they could work through their problems and survive. A year later it would be a different story. A year later they were sleeping in different rooms, Cassie in with Angela, Madigan in the den with a bottle of Jack. It was a bad time, and would stay bad until the final split in early ’97. Madigan already had something going with Ivonne Moreda, a girl he met in July of ’94, the same month he came out of the 12th Patrol and went into Gangs. He’d been twenty-seven, she was all of nineteen, and he had her up for possession with intent to distribute, resisting arrest, unlawful possession of an unlicensed firearm. He hadn’t gotten laid for a year. She was a drop-dead perfect ten. It didn’t take long for her to convince him that there was a better way to iron out the situation than throwing her in the jail with a crew of crack whores and gangbangers. They stayed together until September of ’99, and Adam—their son—had been born in November of ’96. He was a beautiful kid. He was quiet and calm and he looked like all the best of Madigan, all the best of Ivonne. He was the kind of kid who’d solicit admiration from people no matter where he went. Now Adam Moreda was thirteen, Ivonne was thirty-four, and Madigan hadn’t seen either of them for as long as he could recall. But Ivonne had been Madigan’s introduction to Sandià, if not directly, then certainly indirectly. The Hispanic gangs were a world apart from the blacks and the Orientals. The Hispanic gangs—Los Carniceros, El Equipo Séptimo, and Los Fantasmas among others—were vying for bit-and-piece territories all around Louis Cuvillier Park, west to the FDR, north to the junction of MLK Jr. and First by the Triborough. There were incidents. People got stabbed and shot and gutted and burned. Then it all went quiet. Nothing for days. Madigan spoke to Ivonne, and she just smiled. She said, “It’s him. The Watermelon Man. Mr. Sandià. He has it all worked out. He gets them all working together instead of fighting between themselves. He is the mayor of East Harlem now. He has some people killed and now he is the big boss.”
So Madigan asked questions, got word back, met this Mr. Sandià in January of 1995. Madigan could remember the day as if it were yesterday. Bright, cold, the air fresh and clean. The meeting had been in a small house on East 124th. Lunchtime. Madigan went on up there. The door was opened even as he approached it. A narrow-shouldered man in a good suit waved him in, smiling. One gold tooth on the right side, the rest artificially white. When he turned and led the way down to the kitchen in back Madigan saw the bulge of a handgun in the small of the man’s back. A second man rose as Madigan entered the kitchen. The smell of fried meat and cheese filled his nostrils. It was a good smell.
Sandià got up from the table. He was smiling too. He was no more than five eight or nine, but solidly built. His hair was thick and crimp-curled. His complexion was fair, almost Caucasian, but the warm depth of his eyes and the pitch black of his hair made him nothing but Hispanic.
“You are Madigan,” he said, and there was but the faintest hint of accent.
“And you are Mr. Sandià.”
Sandià smiled again and extended his hand. “We are eating,” he said. “Simple, but good.”
And they ate, and they spoke little—merely of the cold weather, the upcoming political changes, the deterioration of educational standards for children in the area—and all the while Madigan knew that here was a man who possessed no small aspirations. And when lunch was finished and they sat smoking, drinking coffee, Madigan merely said, “There is work for both of us here, Mr. Sandià,” and Sandià, nodding slowly, said, “And what line of work would be of the greatest interest to you?”
It started small. Madigan gave Sandià heads-up on traffic lines for the black gangs. Consignments coming in were detoured, redistributed. In exchange Sandià gave Madigan the inside line on the Orientals, even supply lines for the dealers who provided for the white college kids and student nurses who drove up from Yorkville and the East Side. Sandià got rich. Madigan got a bust sheet the length of the Mississippi, and all was well. August of 1995 Madigan was promoted to investigation detective in the Gangs Division, and there he stayed until October of ’98. From there it was 3rd Class at Vice until January of 2001, and then six years in Robbery-Homicide. But the roots had been planted here, all those many years before, and he and Sandià, differences aside, had worked hand in glove for the better part of fifteen years.
It was this history that was always there, always present. Though tacit, unspoken, there was still a contract between them. A promise. One hand washes the other. One good deed deserves its recompense.
What Madigan had done that morning was a violation of everything that had ever taken place between them—every word and every action through every year of that decade and a half.
And it was this—this painful awareness—that he was doing his utmost to hide as he stepped out of the elevator and walked down the hallway to Sandià’s room.
14
GHOST ON THE HIGHWAY
Walsh should not have been called out, but he was one-time Homicide and was the only detective in the precinct when the call came in. Callow, Harris, the oth
ers—they were all out on other jobs. There was a dead twelve-year-old in a Dumpster near St. Paul’s Place; a domestic on 125th near the subway station that had gone so terribly, terribly wrong; something that looked like an erotic-asphyxia case in a shitty apartment overlooking Thomas Jefferson Park that looked more like a setup with every question asked of the deceased’s boyfriend. A regular evening’s work. So Walsh it was. Duncan Walsh, thirty-nine years old, New Jersey born and bred but sounded like someplace else. Unmarried, living with a woman three years his senior, no kids. Walsh went into the PD in New Jersey. Took his exam late, already twenty-six years old, but he sailed it. Out of the academy into patrol, he did three years feet-and-seat, half the time in a black-and-white, the rest on the sidewalk. Eighteen months in Homicide, and then an about-face that took him into the SWAT Program. SWAT didn’t suit him or vice versa, because four months into that he cut and ran, transferred to NYPD in the early part of 2003 and spent the next four years jockeying a desk in PD Veteran Admin. The mayor’s office PD public relations department came looking in the fall of 2007, and he went; spent a year smoothing out the creases and tucking in the corners, and then he decided it was time for a gold shield. That’s why he wound up in Internal Affairs, the guaranteed fast-track to detective without doing the real grunt work.
Walsh may have been New Jersey, but he wasn’t real New Jersey. His father was Scots lineage out of Pennsylvania, his mother from the South. Duncan had been an only child, neither spoiled nor ignored, but hovering somewhere in the middle ground. Later, after both of them were dead, Walsh looked back on his parents and wondered if they’d had a child not because they wanted to, but because they were supposed to. That’s what people did. They got married and had kids. His folks tried it once and figured it was someone else’s game.
Work was his thing. That was what Walsh did. He latched on to the police career for lack of some other vocation. He forced himself to identify and relate. It was neither a case of personal reconciliation, nor conditioned response, but the simple fact of having to do something that possessed meaning. Walsh’s problem had always been the expectations afforded tomorrow. It would be better tomorrow. What was up ahead was infinitely better than what had gone, or what was now. A trait he took from his father. Not pessimism, more a belief that everything was a way station en route to something better. It was a double-edged sword. You didn’t rest on your laurels, and yet neither did you acknowledge your immediate successes. Always in limbo, Walsh worked and watched and waited for his chance to prove something. What he was trying to prove he was as unaware of as anyone else, but that didn’t change the fact that this was what he felt. Such an attitude, such a philosophy, gave him a degree of perfectionism and attention to detail that was almost obsessive. He had been that way in PD Veteran Admin, in the mayor’s office, and before that in Homicide. SWAT had been a different ball game. SWAT had tested everything that he was, and he had been found wanting. Walsh knew himself better than most. He recognized a hiding to nowhere, and he got out before he arrived. Acceptance of limitations was not defeatist as far as he was concerned; it was simply realistic and pragmatic.
That Tuesday evening, when the call came through from the desk to say that a triple homicide had been reported in a storage unit off of East 109th, Walsh’s first response was, “Who told you to give it to me?”
“Squad sergeant,” the desk told him.
Walsh called Bryant, and Bryant said, “We have no one else. I’m not asking you to take the case. I’ll pass it on to whoever comes back first. I just need someone with half a brain to go down there and secure the scene. That’s all.”
“This is so not my job—”
“You think I don’t know that? Jesus, Walsh, stop acting like six feet of bullshit. Right now you’re all I have . . . oh, aside from three dead fellers and a crapload of cash all over the floor of some storage unit garage. Gimme half an hour of your precious time, will ya?”
“Crime Scene been called?”
“Yep, but they say another twenty minutes or so.”
“Give me the address,” Walsh said, and he was already reaching for the jacket on the back of his chair.
Uniforms had put a black-and-white on either side of the storage unit. Already there were people haunting the edges of the thing. Walsh pulled over, flipped his badge, and tucked it into his breast pocket. He glanced at his watch. Five fifteen.
Bryant had been good to his word. Inside there were three DBs, a bunch of cash scattered this way and that, a lot of blood. Only vehicle was a Ford Econoline E-250. Looked like the party had all gone to shit. Crime Scene would have a field day.
There were three dead, two of whom still held handguns—a .38 and a .44. The guy holding the .44 had a chest wound, looked like he’d taken a slug right through the heart. The guy with the .38 had been shot in the stomach, and from the wide pool of blood around him Walsh figured it had been a bleed out. The third man had gone down with a head shot, looked like a .38 as well; he was without a weapon, and there didn’t seem to be a weapon anywhere on the floor of the storage unit. Walsh’s first question was who shot who first? The only way it could have worked was for .38 to shoot the one with no weapon. No weapon is down and finished, no argument. We’re good so far. Then .38 and .44 have a face-off. Did they fire simultaneously? One gets it in the head, the other gets it in the stomach, and then .38, he bleeds out? Seemed to work in theory, but Ballistics and Forensics would confirm.
Walsh backed up to the storage unit’s entranceway, then headed back to his car for his digital camera. He took shots of the Econoline treads, the tread marks on the floor near the wall. He snapped the three DBs, the entry and exit wounds, the handguns, the bodies themselves from each corner of the storage unit, the van, and then the blood-spattered tens, twenties and fifties across the floor.
This was the aftermath of a robbery, a robbery executed successfully, and then someone got greedy. Maybe someone had been greedy all along, and this had been inevitable.
Walsh returned to the door as he heard a vehicle draw to a stop outside. Crime Scene, three of them, booted and suited, businesslike as always.
Unit First acknowledged Walsh, listened to Walsh’s résumé of the prelim.
“We can tell you who shot who, no problem,” Walsh was told. “Don’t know how long it’ll take, however. We’ve had a busy weekend and I got traffic backed up from late Saturday.”
“I’m just on secure detail,” Walsh said. “I’m staying until someone gets here from Robbery-Homicide; then it’s their problem . . .” Then he hesitated and added, “But sure, yes, if it’s no trouble. Send me a copy when you get through with it.” He gave the Unit First his card.
“IA?” he asked. “You’re a little far from home, aren’t you?”
“This is the breaks,” Walsh said, and smiled. “Like I said, I’m just on secure detail until the cavalry arrives.”
Walsh left them to get on with it, headed back to the car, and sat patiently. It was another fifty minutes before someone showed. Ron Callow, some new guy in tow.
Callow and Walsh shook hands, always polite yet never friendly.
“Appreciated,” Callow said.
“No problem.”
“You get a take on this?”
“Nothing much. Looks like a robbery went down, someone got greedy, they had a falling out, and it all went to hell.”
“We’ll go see,” Callow said. He turned back after a moment. “You done?”
“Not until eight,” Walsh replied.
Callow and his partner headed for the storage unit. Walsh got back in his car and started the engine. As he pulled away he glanced back at the strange glow of the arc lamps that emanated from the doorway of the storage unit. Was there something that he missed about this? It had been there, hadn’t it? He’d felt it. Standing over those dead bodies, the blood spatter, the money sent in six different directions . . . the rush that came, that feeling in the base of the gut. Eighteen months in Homicide had taught him a great de
al, but also it had embittered him, given him an edge of cynicism. That was something he’d never wanted to keep, and thus he had moved on, just as he had at SWAT, the same thing that had prompted the transfer from New Jersey to New York. It was the edge that was so visible in people like Callow, in Bryant and Harris and Madigan. And yet Madigan was something beyond even that. Madigan possessed something that was uniquely Madigan. Madigan, Walsh believed, was the best of them. He had a hell of an arrest record, a lot of people put away for a long time. But Madigan was also the hardest to deal with, the toughest to nail down, the quickest to vanish. Madigan was also the man Walsh believed he himself would have become if he had failed to see the signs. They were there, just like the signs on the freeway. Speed limits, stop signs, detours and diversions. There was a reason for those signs, and if you ignored them . . . well, if you ignored them then your career ceased to be a career and became simply a means by which the days and weeks could be made to disappear. Madigan had become such a man; so long a cop there was now no other life he could lead. Two divorces, two different sets of kids, more than likely living in some shitty little apartment, boxes in the hallway containing everything he owned, still there from the day he moved in. That was not a life, certainly not the kind of life Walsh wanted. And yet Madigan inspired a degree of respect, simply because he had not compromised that sense of purpose.
Walsh saw it in most of them—fifteen years in and they were worn out, half-beaten to death, suspicious of all offers of help, cynical not only about the law, but any real possibility of justice, forever angling for any kind of letup that would ease the pressure. And yet they kept on going, kept on doing the job, and they did it as best they could.
Walsh had been in twelve years already, and by the time he reached a decade and a half he wanted the gold shield, the rank, the office, the salary. He had convinced himself that he would not become another Callow, another Harris or Bryant, and certainly not another Madigan. And yet, even in convincing himself of this, he knew that he would never have what they had: a sense of pride in the simple fact that they hadn’t quit.
