Morrigan knew he was fighting a losing battle. Men like Klein had deep pockets and a deep bench of players to dispose of him easily if they wanted. It wasn’t just his own self-preservation that was at stake, it was Tommy’s and everyone else he felt any bit of attachment for as well. Morrigan didn’t want to dance to Klein’s tune—but deep down he knew he would have to.
“What is their game anyway?” Morrigan asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean what is the big fucking picture, what is their play, what do those motherfuckers Klein and Senator Connolly get from all this?”
“I don’t know to be honest. Connolly is up for re-election soon and Klein is his right-hand man. It kinda looks like they might be trying to cover something up by paying to have people killed off.”
“What are they trying to cover up?”
“I don’t fucking know. That’s not your concern. Just do what they ask you to do and don’t ask them any questions.”
“They said,” John began with a depleted tone, “that they’ll contact me soon with whatever it is they want me to do. Right?”
Tommy nodded. “Right… and I’m praying that you’ll do whatever it is they ask you to do.”
Morrigan perched forward, looked at the plane taking off from the runway on the television during the Casablanca finale, and nodded. “Fine,” he said, somewhat reluctant. “Fuck it.”
Tommy breathed a sigh of relief and stood up. “That’s good, John. Really good. Fuck, I’m glad you said that.”
Morrigan waved him off. “Just go, man. Okay? I’m cashed out for the night.”
Tommy held up his hands in submission. “Yeah, of course. Absolutely.”
“Call me later.”
“I will. I promise.”
Tommy moved toward the door, opened it, and stopped in his tracks. “John?” he said.
Morrigan looked up.
“You’re doing the right thing. I know it may not feel like it, but you are.”
Morrigan stared at his brother for the longest moment, just as enraged as he was concerned for his sibling. “I’ll talk to you later,” was all he said before Tommy bowed out and Morrigan locked the door behind him.
As the movie closed out on the television, Morrigan lingered near the window and focused on the predicament he had found himself in. How far have I fallen? he thought. How long until this all comes to a grinding halt?
He hated where he was at. He despised every element of it. He knew that he was going to do Klein’s bidding, but part of him, the defiant law-chaser, knew deep down that he wouldn’t be able to let it go. I’ll do Klein’s bidding, he thought. But that doesn’t mean I can’t make my own plays…
He picked up his cell phone and scrolled down his contact list and called Bukowski. After a few rings he heard her voice.
“Hey, John,” she answered.
“Hi, look, I’ll cut to the chase—”
“You were never one for small talk,” Bukowski interrupted.
“This shit has just got more complicated, Klein seems to be taking orders from a senator called Robert Connolly.”
“What the… are you serious?”
“Yes I’m serious, now just shut up for once in your life and listen,” Morrigan said as he continued to explain to his colleague what he had discovered over the last few hours.
27
In the Cold Morning Light
Friday, January 25th
Midtown Precinct North,
8:30am
Morrigan couldn’t shake the feeling that he was being tailed as he made his way into the precinct. Being a man in his position, he had felt eyes on him more than once before when he was walking around the city—but now it was so potent, so overwhelming and certain that it felt like someone was walking only a few feet behind him.
Someone tailing me? he thought. Jesus, has it been like this this whole time?
He opted out of thinking about it once he had arrived in the hallway of the precinct, the community of his fellow NY officers offering him brief solace as he cleared his throat, snagged a cup of shit coffee from the break room, and leaned against the edge of the kitchen counter.
“Morrigan,” a uniformed officer said as he poked his head in the conference room. “Bukowski’s looking for ya.”
Morrigan swigged, the remnants of last night’s liquor knocking on the front door of his skull to say hello. “Swell. Where is she?”
“Rooftop.”
Morrigan leveled his gaze at the patrolman—only smokers and people with secrets went to the rooftop, and most of the smokers preferred taking the sixty second exit to the curb to hack a butt than the five-minute trek it took to get to the roof. Nonetheless, Bukowski was halfway through a smoke and pulling up the collar to her jacket as Morrigan emerged on the roof and took a suspicious glance around.
“You thinkin’ I flipped to IAD or something?” Bukowski said.
“No,” Morrigan replied. “Never.”
“Then what’s with the glare in your eye?”
Morrigan shrugged. “You never come to the roof.” He saw the five crushed cigarette butts scattered around Bukowski’s feet. “Jesus,” he said as he pulled out his own pack. “Rough night?”
Bukowski tossed down her cigarette and crushed it with her heel as Morrigan lit one of his own, the wave of nicotine that came with the first cigarette of the day washing over him and giving him that same tingling sensation that he got when his old man gave him his first smoke at thirteen.
“You’re right,” she said.
“Right about what?” he said.
“About me having a long night. I’ve been sifting through files in that fucking office until my eyes were bloodshot.”
“Anything intriguing?”
Bukowski nodded and crossed her arms. Morrigan couldn’t help noting the timid and apprehensive quality in the way that she was standing.
“You gonna keep me in suspense?” Morrigan said.
“This is fucked, John. This whole thing is seriously fucked.”
“Sure is?”
“This stuff with Klein and Connolly.” She shook her head and looked away. “These bastards are into something deep.”
A puff. “Tell me about it.”
“Yeah, but now I know more than you do. Frankly, I’m ready to turn in my shield and get a job working security at a pharmaceutical firm after what I found.”
Morrigan took a step closer. “Talk to me…”
Bukowski took a beat. “I searched Klein and Connolly’s names across every database I could find. I had a rookie go down to 1 Police Plaza to pull some stuff that was locked away in obscurity.”
“Such as?”
Bukowski pulled the notepad out of her pocket that she had written her notes on, the penmanship on the paper was scribbled and hectic like a stand-up comic’s set list. “Klein apparently owns a share in a taxi-cab company that fell by the wayside after Uber and Lyft came along. The kicker is that the SOB bought the company right when the city started acclimating to the smartphone method of securing rides.”
Morrigan squinted. “Why the hell would he do that?”
“Exactly what I thought. So, I looked more into the company itself. The address for the dispatch was registered to an address over in Jersey. I stopped by there night before last. Place is boarded up. No one was there. Not even a trash can.”
Morrigan was intrigued. He waited for the rest.
“I pulled a list,” Bukowski continued, “of everyone who was registered as a driver for the company—most of them are guys who spent more than a couple of days in lockup or the pen.” She huffed a laugh. “Apparently, Klein was even taking advantage of a program that offered tax breaks to companies that hired reformed convicts to work for them.”
“Good for him…”
“Right… Anyway, I tried sorting through the records of the employees listed on file, but nothing stood out or raised a red flag.”
Morrigan puffed his cigarette and pointed. “But something else di
d stand out, didn’t it?”
She nodded. “The taxis themselves. I got a list from another guy over at the 1-7 working fraud and every single one of the taxi-cabs on file was listed as having current tags and registrations. Fucking things had even passed their inspections last year, so I decided to try and locate the cabs, being that they weren’t holed up at this bogus company over in Jersey.”
“Did you find them?”
She nodded again. “Just one. I put out an APB on all the license plates for the cabs that were on record. A unit over in Harlem called me and ended up finding one that was driving around with the fare light off. They tailed him until I could get there, then I took over.”
“And?” Morrigan asked as he leaned closer to his colleague.
Bukowski pulled out her cell and pulled up an image of a lanky white guy with a leather jacket piling inside of the cab—and Morrigan knew the man’s face instantly.
“That’s Ricky Dyer,” he said. “Smack dealer.”
A nod. “I double-checked records to confirm it.”
“Where did the cab take him?”
“Well, after the cab hit the fare lights, I tailed them all the way from Harlem to Jersey. Dyer stopped off for a pack of smokes at a 7-11 halfway through the drive. When they got to Jersey, he sat in the cab for ten minutes with the driver.”
“You get a look at the driver?”
“No. I thought about pulling him over, but the guy was obeying every damn rule of the road. I could’ve stopped him, but I didn’t want to spook him.”
Morrigan huffed. “What the hell was going on?”
“Well,” Bukowski continued, “he got out of the car and went upstairs to an apartment. Stayed there maybe fifteen minutes before he came back down. Then the driver drove him all the way back to where he had picked him up back in the city.”
“Did Dyer or the driver pass anything off to one another?”
Bukowski nodded with a weight that indicated she was about to place the cherry on top of the sundae. “Dyer came down from that apartment with a duffel bag that he didn’t have on him before. The driver drove him back, dropped him off, and I never saw Dyer pay for the ride.”
Morrigan smiled. “So,” he said, “Dyer had something in the bag, obviously.”
“I wanted to take him at the curb when the driver dropped him off. I just thought it might have been a bad play to jump on him before I even knew what was going on.”
“Did you tail the driver?”
A nod. “He killed the fare lights to showcase that the cab was off-duty before he went back to Jersey. Parked the cab in front of a house, walked inside, and called it a night.”
“You get any info on the address?”
“It’s clean. Some old lady lives there. I tried to spot the driver’s face before he ducked inside the house, but it was too dark to make anything out.”
Morrigan sighed. “What about the other cabs? Anyone flagged them down?”
Bukowski shook her head. “I got shoved off by a couple of captains at other precincts telling me to not waste resources having units chasing cabs around the city. I’ve got no eyes on anything.”
“What about the cab you did find?”
She shrugged. “It’s still sitting there in front of that house. I checked it out about an hour ago.”
Morrigan threw down his butt and shook his head. “Interesting for sure,” he said to Bukowski, somewhat sarcastically. “But it’s not exactly incriminating.”
Bukowski held up her hand. “There was one more thing I found.”
Morrigan waited for the rest.
“When I looked back over the records for Klein’s little sham cab company,” Bukowski said, “I found a name that came up about six times on a few different documents, a lawyer by the name of Ross Simmons.” She held out her hands. “And a guy by the name of Senator Connolly has the exact same attorney.”
Morrigan crossed his arms as he felt the New York morning chill lick at his skin. “We have a connection,” he said, “but there’s nothing in the law that says two guys can’t share the same lawyer.”
“There’s something to be said about the fact that the three of them shared dinner together two weeks ago, which Simmons paid for.”
“How’d you find that?”
Bukowski hung her head. “In ways that Captain Edmunds would be pissed at me for acquiring…”
Morrigan didn’t realize it, but he was pacing around in a circle with slow, deliberate steps. “What the fuck is going on?” he seethed.
“They’re up to something with those cabs, John.”
“No shit.”
“We just have to figure out what that is.”
Morrigan shook his head. “No,” he said. “No, we’ll be chasing that guy around for weeks before anything happens of interest. If these assholes are using the cabs as cover for something, they’re going to keep all their bases covered to prevent people like us from finding out. Let’s just say that we go the route of putting a revolving tail on the cab—eventually someone will get wise, they’ll cut the cab and the driver loose, and we’re back to square one.”
“So, what then?”
Morrigan had already made up his mind with his next play—he just didn’t know if Bukowski would go along for the ride. “I’m thinking a more direct approach,” he said. “One that might really piss off Edmunds if he found out.”
Bukowski was equal parts intrigued and terrified. “Such as?”
“Think you can pull a couple of shotguns out for us off the record?” Morrigan said before telling Bukowski the rest of his pitch.
28
Headbanger
East Ninety-Sixth Street
6:16pm
Ricky Dyer had his feet up on the coffee table and a bowl of stale Froot Loops seated on his chest. The television was blasting some reality TV show where women with fake tits and lips pawed at each other as they went about telling everyone in the immediate vicinity to stay away from their fucking man. As Dyer laughed and watched in amusement, three solid knocks came at the front door of his shitty one-bedroom apartment.
“Fuck off!” he said to the door.
A few beats passed.
Another knock sounded.
“I said, fuck off!” he yelled.
Another beat.
Another knock.
Dyer placed the bowl of Froot Loops down, hopped off the couch, and moved toward the door as he puffed his chest and tucked in his black shirt. “Motherfucker,” he said as he put his eye to the peep hole. “I swear to Go—”
The door was kicked open and smacked into the right side of Dyer’s face. If the impact hadn’t had knocked the prick silly, Dyer would have noticed the two cops in Kevlar with shotguns in their hands storming through the front door. The big one grabbed him by his collar, picked him up, and threw him into the coffee table. Day-old milk and Fruit Loops soaked Dyer as he tried his best to shake the stars in his vision.
“Sit up, Dyer,” a female voice said. “We need to talk to you.”
Dyer, looking like he was stirring from a nap, reached a hand to the right side of his face and felt the thick and warm sensation of blood flowing from a fresh wound. “W-what…” he stammered. “The… hell…?”
“I said sit up,” the big guy said as he picked Dyer up and plopped him on the couch.
The cops then stood before Dyer and waited for his senses to regroup. Dyer, spotting the white NYPD letters on the flak jackets, laughed and sunk down into the couch. “Oh, fuck you.”
“We need to have a chat,” the big guy said.
“Who the fuck are you?”
“That’s none of your business, punk,” Morrigan said as he pulled the baseball cap down tightly on his forehead and secured his sunglasses. He didn’t want Dyer identifying him and spilling his guts to Klein.
“I didn’t do shit.”
Morrigan handed Bukowski his shotgun and got down on one knee in front of Dyer. “You took a cab night before last,” he said. “You had a
duffel bag with you.”
“So?” Dyer replied. “It’s illegal to carry around fucking luggage now?”
“No, but I’m sure that whatever was inside of it was something you shouldn’t have on you. I’m not playing games with you, Dyer. I’m not dicking around with warrants or due process. You’re going to tell me what was in the bag and who was driving you around in that cab, or I’m going to tune you up so badly that your own mother won’t even be able to recognize you.”
Bukowski grabbed a coffee-stained towel and threw it at Dyer. “Clean yourself up.”
Dyer resentfully looked at both of the cops, and then dabbed at the cut on his head.
Morrigan gave him a moment before starting back in with his line of questioning. “Now,” he said, “tell me what was in the bag and who was in the cab.”
“Okay,” Dyer said, tossing down the towel. “You want to know what was inside of the bag?”
Morrigan and Bukowski waited for the rest.
Dyer then grabbed his crotch, squeezed it, and tugged. “This,” he said. “This was in the fucking bag, you rat prick.”
Morrigan stood up and sighed. “Okay,” he said. “We tried.” He nodded to Bukowski. “Let’s go.”
Dyer stared on incredulously as the cops moved toward the door to leave. “Are you serious?”
Morrigan placed his palm on the door handle and squeezed. “No,” he said. “Of course not.”
In a brute display of strength, Morrigan busted off the door handle, raised it, and threw it like a baseball pitch square into the side of Dyer’s head. He then picked the scrawny guy up, punched him in his gut, and watched him double over with a gasp.
“The bag,” Morrigan said.
Dyer struggled to draw a breath. “I-I… I can’t!”
Morrigan grabbed the guy by the seat of his pants, planted his feet, and then threw Dyer head-first into the plasma television set.
Dyer, his body and face now swelling with bruises, held up his hands in terror. “Please!” he said. “Stop, man!”
Morrigan answered by kicking the man twice in his ribs. “What was in the bag, you fuck?!”
The Dark Path Page 15
