Buzz Killer

by Tom Straw

  “I know, sad, isn’t it? My father said we were cursed with the Kennedy gene of public service.”

  “Is that why you became a public defender?”

  “More like why I stayed one. I did NYU Law and got into a prestige firm right when the recession hit. Instead of cutting me, they offered to farm my services out on a pro bono fellowship for a year. Next thing I know, I’m at the Manhattan Center for Public Defense. Talk about getting thrown into the deep end. But I really, really loved it. It’s like feeding a meal to someone who’s hungry. Providing assistance to indigent clients, who are so grateful, and need it the most, is very rewarding. So here I am, still there six years later.”

  “Maybe you do have that Kennedy gene.”

  “I’m good with that. As long as it’s Caroline’s.” Macie studied him, feeling a bit of contact rush from being part of his experience, noticing how work intensity made his face more handsome. “So what happened? At TARU. The cops. You left?”

  “Not by choice.” He dropped his gaze, forming the answer he didn’t owe her. “I did a wrong thing for the right reason. Can we leave it there?”

  “Sure.”

  Except Cody couldn’t leave it there. “You know why the statue of Lady Justice is blind? So she doesn’t have to see all the crap I pulled on her behalf.” In a way that seemed important that she know, he added, “Same circumstances, I would do it all again.”

  The silence between them got broken by the ring of Mir’s cell phone. Fabio answered, “Lazy Eight Whorehouse, when can I fit you in?” and then chortled. So did the caller, who, by his accent, sounded like the same man who couldn’t speak earlier.

  “Hey, dog dick, how’s it going?”

  “You know, the usual.”

  “I owe you for that heads-up call. What the fuck was that about?”

  “Beats me. Thought I’d warn you off coming to the pier, just in case, ya know?”

  “Cool, brother. Hey, you up for a pie? Thinking maybe I’d bring one over.”

  Macie got a jolt of adrenaline. This was what it felt like, she thought. Not exactly the same as bagging bin Laden, but close enough. She gave Cody a thumbs-up, but he had his eyes closed, listening, concentrating, not his first training day.

  “I’m in Three-oh-six. Oh, and I got you some of those Dominicans you like. Handmade.”

  “See you in about a half hour. Open the window, air out the farts.”

  When the call ended, Cody calmly logged the time and the room number, then swiveled to her. “I’ve got to get a bug in there before he shows up.”

  Cody knelt on the rug—thick pile, he had told her earlier, to absorb sound; dark brown to absorb light. As he opened and closed drawers of a tool cabinet containing neatly organized wires and electronic parts, he explained that, even though they had Fabio’s phone tapped, it wouldn’t give them ears in the room to pick up conversation when his guest got there. “And as long as I’m going in to plant audio, I might as well give us video too.” He plucked a tiny piece from a drawer and held it up. “Ever see a cam this small? I modified it from a dental probe. Not the highest rez, but it’ll do for this.”

  While he assembled his rig, connecting plugs and snapping in a fresh Ni-Cad, Macie asked, “Why don’t we just wait for the guy to show up, and talk to him?”

  “I would urge you to look at all the precautions these two took to avoid us and ask yourself if this is a guy who’s going to open up just because you have a friendly face.” He reached for a black plastic box the size and shape of a jumbo pack of chewing gum and seated his A/V bug inside it, carefully inserting the dental lens and the mini microphone in the holes that had been drilled in one end. “Besides, don’t you think he’s going to be especially tweaked when he wonders how the hell you found him?” Cody toggled a switch within the black box and suddenly the interior of the cargo hold appeared on the second monitor. Holding the device to his face, he appeared full screen, and said, “Houston: We are go.”

  Still grappling, Macie said, “All true. But bugging a room . . .” She regarded his spy cam with trepidation. “We could always just set fire to the Constitution, and smoke him out.”

  “You went along with bugging his phone.”

  “Sure. After you already did it. This is proactive. It flies in the face of all I believe about privacy and . . . well, you heard me earlier. You get it.”

  “I do. Tell you what. We just unplug now.” He clicked the toggle on his bug and the screen went dark. “You can have Jonny Midnight take it from here. But remember this moment ten years from now when you’re on your monthly guilt trip to see Jackson Hall on visitors’ day up in Dannemora. Assuming he lives.”

  Macie’s mouth went dry. This was not the first time since lunch that he had brought her to a moral crossroads. Slipping through the apartment vestibule, entering the crime scene, boosting those papers. Every moment presented a threshold, and she had crossed them all. The result was that, in just hours with Gunnar Cody, she had made more headway on this case than in days with Jonathan Monheit. But this step felt different, defining. Because it was. Planting this bug involved premeditation and ethical, if not legal, trespass. Teetering at a door that would slam shut in minutes if she didn’t act, Wild pondered her responsibility to a client who had put his life in her hands. By playing the Dannemora prison card, Cody had unwittingly done something bigger. He sparked in Macie an epiphany. A revelation that all those thresholds she crossed were not mere thrill seeking or, worse, some latent girlie infatuation with a danger boy. Seeing it all now from the brink, each of those moves had been incremental acts of rebellion—toes in the water—testing out her latent anger at a justice system that had cratered in the wake of her brother’s murder. Macie always knew that DA politics had failed her family. But tonight, confronting a moral Rubicon made Wild recognize her own obedience to that broken system and how her acquiescence had made her complicit. Today’s baby steps of defiance had delivered her to this tipping point—either to retreat or to sing that take-back-her-life song. Decision made, Macie said, “How are we getting it in there? Pull the fire alarm and plant the bug when he comes out?”

  “Amateurs.” Cody’s mock derision was his winkless wink, an unspoken acknowledgment of the courageous leap she was making. He pulled a yellow d-CON box out of a bin on the wall. “I’m going in. I’ll be Ron from maintenance setting a rat trap.” He wagged an imaginary Groucho cigar, and added, “Which, I guess, I kind of will be.” He took the rodent trap out of the package and substituted his own look-alike black box.

  “That’s brilliant. And unsettling.” Then she added, “But wait, Fabio knows you from the pier.”

  Cody smiled a sly grin, then opened a footlocker and routed through a tangle of hats, shirts, and wigs. After quick selections and rejections, he presented himself to her in a stained sweatshirt, mustache, dork glasses, and a greasy baseball cap with collar-length hair attached to it. Macie was struck by how much he had transformed. Not just cosmetically. He had taken on a full persona, adopting the attitude and physicality of a different person. She bet herself that Saint John’s University had a drama club. “You’ve done this before, haven’t you.”

  He nodded. “You’re not lying if you’re acting.”

  Minutes later, alone in the van, she thought of the Native American proverb, “When you come to a great chasm, jump. It’s not as far as you think.” Maybe consequences would rain down on her, but Wild had made the leap, and, for now, empowerment had set her free. Macie listened to Cody’s mic’d footfalls on the stairs of the seedy hotel then picked up the sounds of blaring music, an argument, and an epic orgasm as he passed doorways en route to Room 306.

  His knock was followed by a muffled, “That better be pizza.” The door opened, and Fabio Mir’s “Help you?” carried a stink of annoyance.

  “Hotel maintenance. Sorry, dude. Rat trouble. Gotta lay out some traps.”

  “Now?”

  “I hear ya. Can I just get done and be done? Alls I got to do is put them
down. They’re already baited and set.” Next she heard rustling, and then the monitor filled with light as the spy cam came out of the d-CON box, revealing the little room in all its squalor. The video jostled as Cody hunted for the best location, and it came to rest with the widest angle of the place while Mir looked on passively.

  “I put it right on top of the AC,” he said when he got back in the van. Cody studied the shot, declared it short of broadcast quality, but fine for the job.

  A knock brought both of their eyes to the monitor and the spy cam in Fabio’s room. Mir went to the door. “That better be pizza.”

  “And it’s getting cold, dipshit,” came a man’s voice. It was the Russian’s.

  “Must have gotten by us while I was hustling back here.” Cody’s words were laced with self-reproach, and Wild started to tell him to let it go. But when Fabio opened his door she found herself unable to speak. Because stepping in from the hallway, holding a pizza box, was a white guy who was no blur at all.

  He was muscular with thinning brown hair and a short goatee. The red scrapes on his cheek came from Macie’s fingernails.

  C H A P T E R • 12

  * * *

  Wild couldn’t take her eyes off the man. Seeing him on the video monitor only made the whole experience more surreal, as if her attacker, who already had wandered from real life into her nightmares, was now appearing as the surprise guest star on some low-budget TV cop show. As he set the pizza carton on the bed and accepted the cigars from his pal, a sense memory shuddered through her: the whiff of stale tobacco she got while he locked her head in a clinch against his body. Macie chanced a quick side glance to Cody. Other than the low curse he’d muttered, his face betrayed nothing, and he remained in fixed concentration on the screen action. But when she picked up her cell phone, he said, “No, don’t.”

  “We need to call the police.”

  “That,” said Cody, “is exactly what we do not want to do.”

  Her screen was night-blinding both of them in the dimness of the van, and she clicked it off. “But he’s right there. They can get him.”

  “While we are performing a not-strictly-legal surveillance.” Cody kept his attention on the screen while the visitor ran one of the hand rolleds under his nose with approval. “Do you want to explain that to the arresting officers? To the district attorney? To the bar association?”

  He was right, she couldn’t expose herself to that scrutiny. Wild quickly fanned through her range of options, every single one less favorable than another. At last she decided to stick with the choice she already had made. In for a penny, and all that. She set her iPhone on her lap, shattered glass down.

  “Besides, why stop now when it just got interesting?”

  They watched the visitor file the three Hondurans in the pocket of his coat before he carefully draped it across the bed pillows. “Smells like a donkey’s asshole in here. What you been doing?”

  Fabio Mir shrugged. “Ass-fucking a donkey, what do you think?”

  Cody turned to Wild. “Welcome to the Bowery chapter meeting of Mensa.”

  Mir sat on the bed, deferring to the Russian, who pulled the only chair up and opened the lid on the pizza. Both dug in joylessly. Fabio shoved half a congealed slice into his mouth and talked around it as he chewed. “Hey, Luchik, want to hear my new hustle?”

  “Got a feeling I’m going to anyway.”

  Wild made a note—“Lou-chick?”—while Mir continued. “OK, see, I hang out near the parking lots at the Broadway theaters waiting for the suburban dumbshits to show up. I go, ‘Pardon me, ma’am or sir. I’m your prepay parking-ticket agent.’”

  “Seriously?” said Luchik, taking another slice.

  “God’s truth. I go, ‘Prepay discount price is eighteen fifty-seven.’ Who has change ready like that? So they always give me twenty. I say, ‘I’ll be right back with the validation and change.’”

  “Adios!”

  “You know it. Hundred-sixty bucks, yesterday alone.” He studied his guest. “Come on, man, be impressed. At least fake it. I know it’s not close to your paydays. How much did your man grease you just this week? Make me jealous. Four Gs, maybe fi—” The visitor stopped chewing and fastened a look on Fabio that petrified Macie even through a bleary lens three floors down. Mir had his back to the camera but she saw him lean back, withering under the stare. “Hey, man, just wondering . . .”

  “Don’t. Ever.” His foreign accent made two simple words deadly.

  Mir held up his palms. “It’s cool, it’s cool.” And just as quickly, the Russian smiled and went back to eating, his menace turning on a dime.

  “Just think,” said Cody. “You were twenty feet from a trunk ride with this character from Grand Theft Auto.”

  She nodded. “Don’t think I haven’t—”

  “Whoa, whoa, hold on. This is us.” Cody goosed the volume.

  Mir was asking, “You hear about Jackson?” And there it was. The link to Jackson Hall, confirmed. But exactly what was it to? Macie leaned into the screen with an amping pulse rate as Fabio continued. “Found him strung up. His ass is in a coma now.”

  “No shit.” The visitor’s reaction gave nothing away, as if he’d just heard a second-string quarterback from the Browns got a DUI. He picked up another slice, then lobbed it back in the box. “Fucking Rikers, man. That’s why you’ll never see my zhopa in there.”

  An uncomfortable quiet passed until Fabio spoke again, this time more tentatively. “Mind if I ask?” His companion grunted the OK, so Mir took a pause and did ask. “What happened with Pinto?”

  “Pinto got fucked up’s what happened.” He lasered Mir again and that ended discussion on that subject.

  “There it is,” said Cody.

  “Not quite. Not a confession,” she said. “And even if it was, not admissible. Not under these circumstances.”

  “More than you had ten minutes ago. Like my training instructor at the academy always said, ‘You start with shit and use it to get better shit.’”

  Up in bedbug central, the pair cracked open a couple of Fabio’s Pabsts and turned on the Yankees. “Baseball is bullshit,” complained the Russian. “Is nothing else?”

  “You mean like Larry King on Russia Today? Cable in this dive is crap.”

  Cody threw his wig at the video screen and shouted, “Come on, you Brighton Beach lowlife, back to Pinto, let’s go,” which made her laugh. “Welcome to my world, Macie Wild. A lot of waiting for a lot of nothing.”

  As the two of them sat there watching two guys watch baseball Macie was engaged in what she felt was America’s other pastime, eavesdropping. It only took an inning for their scratching, beer belching, and heckling the plate ump for the size of the strike zone to send her back to digging the hole she had been shoveling since the Russian walked in. “I’m having a really hard time just sitting here watching this and not calling the police.”

  “Once again, welcome to my world.”

  “Fine, but at what point can we do something about this guy?”

  Cody waited to make sure there was still nothing happening onscreen before he answered. “You see, that’s the ballbuster part of surveillance. It takes awhile to sink in—even for experienced cops I knew on TARU—but these assholes don’t just dance for us because they’re on our camera. Gathering intel is a waiting game with no guarantees. Sure, you could call the police. Want to call them? Fine. And maybe—maybe—this guy would take a hit for attacking you.” He rapped a knuckle on the monitor. “But the thing is, that would probably screw you out of gathering hard evidence that he’s the one who killed Pinto. And isn’t that what you really want? To get your client off?”

  She knew he was right but that didn’t make her like it. “So the answer is to just sit here with our thumbs up our asses?”

  “Well,” he said with that half grin, “whatever makes you most comfortable.”

  At the half-inning commercial, Luchik reached for one of his cigars and got out a disposable lighter. Mir sai
d, “Hey, man, you can’t fire up that thing in here.”

  “What, you going all PC now?”

  “Personally, I could give a shit. But they made a BFD at check-in. It’s house rules.”

  “Who’s going to know?” When Fabio answered by pointing up to the smoke detector, his guest smoothed down his short goatee and gave a rascally half smile. “Oh, I can fix that.” He reached back into his coat where it lay across the pillows. This time, instead of a cigar, he came out with the biggest handgun Macie had ever seen. Her eyes sprung to Cody.

  “Forty-four Anaconda,” said Cody in tandem with the man holding the revolver onscreen.

  “The fuck?” said Mir, rising to his feet in alarm.

  The visitor hefted the Colt. “She a beauty or what? Eight-inch barrel. Double action. Mag loads. Put a hole in you the size of a hooker’s pudenda.” He extended his arm toward the ceiling and sighted on the smoke alarm.

  “Ayyy-hey-hey!” called Mir. His buddy chuckled then whipped his arm around, eyes blazing, leveling the massive weapon at Fabio’s gut. Mir held out his palms as if they could stop bullets. It’s what people did.

  The gunman snapped, “You done asking me questions about Pinto?”

  “Yeah, yeah, promise.”

  “Any more stupid fucking questions?”

  “No. No more. . . . Don’t!”

  “My business is my business, got it?”

  “Yeah, got it. Totally.” Mir took a half step back. But then, as quickly as he had lashed out, the other lowered the cannon to his side and gave Fabio a reassuring nod. Macie realized she had stopped breathing and resumed.

  The visitor spread his arms wide and smiled, “Come on, Fabby, bring it in.” Mir hesitated, then moved closer, tentatively, and accepted his friend’s hug. “It’s cool, brother. We all have questions, right?”

  “. . . Yeah.”

  “See, I have questions too.” He snatched Mir by the hair behind his head and jerked it backward, bringing the muzzle of the Anaconda under his chin. “Like, you know my question.”