by Mark Dawson
He stepped into the darkness.
89
Polanski returned from the printer with a sheet of paper that recorded all of the calls that were made and received on Shepard’s cellphone. The sheet contained a version of the official billing records maintained by Sprint about call activity. It included the date and time of each call; the telephone number dialled or the number from which the subscriber was called; whether the call was completed; and the length of the call. Each entry also identified the local cellular base stations that serviced the call. The records didn’t record the content of the call, but they had put in a request for that data, too, and they had been told that it would start to be delivered tomorrow.
He sat down at his desk and took out a pen.
Landon Shepard had received fifteen calls on his cellphone today. Most would be mundane—girlfriend, wife, family, whatever—and he would be able to disregard them quickly once the team started to investigate them properly. One line of the record stood out. All of the other incoming calls were identifiable as originating from other cellphones. Only one of them looked as if it had originated from a landline.
718-566-25412.
Polanski tapped on the keyboard and woke up the PC that he had been assigned. He opened a browser window and navigated to Google. He entered the number and hit return. The search result was almost instantaneous: the number was registered to Happy Wok restaurant on Pitkin Avenue.
That was squarely within the boundary of the Seven Five. Polanski would be able to get the sector map from IAB and find out from the precinct house which officers were assigned to that sector tonight.
He was confident that he could guess.
Bobby Carter.
He circled the number and scribbled a reminder on a Post-it note to check the content of the call when it came in.
He stood, stretching his aching arms and shoulders, and was about to go to the kitchen to refill his coffee when his phone vibrated on the desk. He picked it up and put it to his ear.
“Polanski.”
“It’s Walsh.”
“Go on.”
“I’m outside the target’s place.”
They had decided to be careful with their communications until they knew that there was no interference. They had agreed not to refer to Shephard by name.
“And?”
“There’s no one home. All the lights are off, and his car’s gone. There are fresh tracks coming down from his drive. Looks like we just missed him.”
Polanski looked down at the sheet of calls again, dragging his finger down the list until he reached the entry that he had circled in red.
“I’ve got his phone records,” he said. “He had an inbound call at a quarter past eight.”
“We know who from?”
“A restaurant on Pitkin Avenue.”
“Bit far away for takeout,” Walsh joked.
Polanski looked at his watch. “It’s five after nine now. What time did you get there?”
“Twenty minutes ago.”
“So he gets this call at eight fifteen and goes out before you got there at eight forty-five?”
“Looks like it,” she said.
Polanski felt like he was on the verge of a breakthrough.
“We’ll set up here,” Walsh said. “He’ll be back and then we’ll stay on him.”
“Keep me posted,” Polanski said.
He ended the call.
90
Carter made his way across the darkened garage, aiming for the line of light that was leaking around the edge of the door. The music was clearer now: Eminem’s new track playing loud.
Carter could feel Shepard and Rhodes behind him. He reached the door and pushed it open.
He paused, his mouth falling open in confusion.
The room was empty.
“What the fuck?”
Shepard pushed by him and went inside. There was nothing inside: no chairs, no table, no people. There was no one here and there was certainly no card game. The only thing in the room was a boom box plugged into a wall socket.
Dark blue plastic sheets had been spread out across the floor and tacked to the walls.
“Inside.”
Carter turned around and looked into the barrel of a pistol. Rhodes held it out in an easy, comfortable, two-handed grip.
“What the fuck?”
“Inside, Bobby. Next to Shepard. Now.”
“What the fuck is this?” Shepard said.
“Inside, Bobby. Last time I’ll ask.”
Carter backed away from the pistol, taking three steps until he was next to Shepard. It looked like a Taurus, not the Glock that the kid had chosen for his service weapon.
“Put that fucking thing down,” Shepard said, his voice frayed with anger.
“Come on, rookie,” Carter said, trying to maintain a measure of calm. “What are you doing? What is this?”
“He’s lost his mind is what this is,” Shepard said.
Rhodes levelled the Taurus at them both. “I have a message from Carlos Acosta for you both. He’s sorry, but there’s nothing else that can be done. The net is closing in and he can’t risk you being prosecuted. He doesn’t think you’d be able to resist talking if IAB offers you a deal.”
“What?”
“The bureau’s all over you.”
“No,” Shepard protested. “We fixed that. You mean González? We took care of it.”
“No, you didn’t. You just made them more determined. The special prosecutor’s involved now. Guy named Polanski has a hard-on for you. Word is, he's not gonna stop.”
“Bullshit.”
“And you wanna know the worst thing? How unprofessional you two are. There was a kid outside the restroom after you killed González. A kid. And he saw you, Shepard. Says he can ID you. They’re going to round you both up. Acosta says it’ll be soon. A few days. And he can’t have that. He can’t trust you to keep your mouths shut.”
“We wouldn’t rat him out,” Shepard protested. “You tell him that. We’d never rat on him.”
Carter looked at Rhodes and realised that this had already gone too far. The youthful inexperience that he had laughed at was all gone. The rookie suddenly looked much older. His face was straight, without fear or trepidation or even the slightest scintilla of doubt. He held the pistol in steady hands, his weight balanced evenly, with the two of them far enough ahead of him that they wouldn’t be able to reach him before he could fire.
“Shepard,” Rhodes said, “get on your knees.”
“Please,” Shepard said. “I’ve got a family. You don’t need to do this. Carlos knows he can trust me. I’d never rat him out.”
“On your knees.”
Shepard knelt. He was close enough that Carter could hear the creak in his knees, and he remembered—for a moment—the jokes that he had made about how he was old and getting arthritis.
Rhodes switched the Taurus to aim at him and pulled the trigger.
Shepard jack-knifed backwards, his arms spread wide. His blood and flesh splattered onto the sheet.
Carter felt his bowels loosening.
The acrid smell of gun smoke quickly filled the room.
Rhodes turned the pistol on him.
“Knees, Bobby.”
“No,” Carter protested. “Please, kid. Think about what you’re doing. It doesn’t have to go down like this. Let me speak to—”
He saw the flash from the muzzle, heard the crack of the discharge and saw the jerk of the recoil.
91
The locker room was busy with men getting changed after their shifts. Rhodes undressed, wrapped a towel around his waist and went through to the row of showers. He put the towel on a hook, cranked the faucet and stood under the hot water, letting it work away the chill that had seemingly seeped into his muscles during his shift. He closed his eyes and allowed himself to think about where he had been and what he had done.
Before he was real police, Rhodes had been a transit officer for five months. He hadn
’t expected much of his job, but it had only taken him a week to decide that it wasn’t for him. His assignment was on the midnight shift. He got on the N Train at Coney Island and rode to Manhattan and back again. Each officer was issued a radio but, since most of the line was below ground, they were pretty much useless. There had been plenty of occasions when Rhodes would have called for backup, but it was a waste of time. He dealt with passengers who were drunk or high, collared muggers who rolled vulnerable passengers for their valuables. He’d confronted dealers pushing coke and crack as they passed through the cars; groups of kids playing music out of their phones as loud as they could and threatening the other passengers who told them to stop; couples who had sex on the benches; men who exposed themselves to women; women so drunk that they were sprawled out and oblivious to the perverts who felt them up. The worst, by far, were the jumpers who ended themselves by leaping out in front of the trains that rushed through the stations. Rhodes had never understood why someone would decide that was a good way to put an end to things, and that was a conclusion that came to be reinforced when he attended to a man who had jumped beneath a train only to survive the impact. His legs, though, had not been so fortunate; they had been severed at the knees and were eventually found in the tunnel twenty feet away. The man died on the gurney as they tried to get him out of the station to the ambulance on street level. Others died more quickly, their bodies torn and mangled, leaving behind blood and guts that had to be cleaned away.
He had started drinking in an attempt to erase the grim certainty that his life was headed along the same dismal line to irrelevance that had tormented his father before he had vanished one night, leaving his mother to raise him and his brother on her own. Booze had led to a resumption of a high school weed habit and then, quickly thereafter, cocaine. It was everywhere. He could try to ignore it, but what was the point? Rather than bust the dealers who pushed their merchandise on the trains, he started to accept payment from them in exchange for letting them get on with their business. It was money at first—twenty bucks here, fifty bucks there—but then he took payment in kind. The contents of small folds of newspaper, little triangles that he opened with reverent hands, were all that he needed to banish the tedium of his working hours and the depression of a lonely existence in his one-bedroom studio apartment in Queens. After coke came K2, synthetic dope that laid him out for hours at a time. It erased hours and, when he didn’t have to report for work, whole weekends. In his increasingly rare moments of clarity, he knew that he was pathetic and that, if left unchecked, he was headed for an early grave. But he didn’t care.
Rhodes worked up a debt that he had no hope of paying, and, after he had been beaten up by his dealer and a couple of his goons, he had started to think that the only thing for him to do was to quit and move away. That was when Acosta came into his life. His dealer had sold his debt to him. It turned out that Acosta had put the word out that he was looking for someone to fill a very particular role, and that Rhodes was just what he had in mind.
Five thousand dollars was all it had taken for him to buy him. Five grand for a badge. Rhodes had still entertained thoughts of running, especially when he realised who it was who now owned the debt he owed, but things had spun off in a direction that he could never have anticipated.
Acosta had arranged for him to be picked up after his shift one night. The car took him to the strip club on Atlantic and Grand where Acosta did most of his business. He had been welcomed with a drink and a gram of cocaine, and Acosta had made him an offer: he wanted a tame cop on his books, someone he could trust entirely, and he wondered whether Rhodes could be that man. The terms were generous: the debt would be extinguished and, on top of that, he would pay him ten grand a month. All he had to do was accept the place at the police academy that Acosta would arrange for him, and, when he graduated, accept the offer of an assignment in the Seven Five, where he would be Acosta’s eyes and ears inside the precinct house. The ten grand was in addition to his salary as a rookie cop, such as it was, but there would be further remuneration related to the information and favours that he was able to relay to Acosta.
There was one stipulation: he had to get clean. No more drugs. He had agreed. He had gone cold turkey, getting a friend to lock him in the back of his van for two days until he had sweated out the drugs and the temptation, focussing on the prospect of a way out of his shitty job and a means of obtaining the money that he would only have been able to dream about before.
He turned off the faucet, grabbed his towel and wrapped it around his waist.
He took his watch out of his shoe, where he had left it. Midnight. He had an appointment to keep.
Part VI
Friday
92
Rhodes made his way out of the precinct and got into his Ford Fusion. The car was parked next to Bobby Carter’s big truck. Rhodes entertained the thought that Carter would never drive the truck again, but the thought did not detain him for very long. What had happened to Carter was of his own doing. Acosta was a fair man. If you did well, you were rewarded. If you were negligent, then you had to accept the consequences.
Carter and Shepard had been unforgivably sloppy.
He was about to start the engine when Sergeant Ramirez came out of the doors and raised a hand for him to stop.
Rhodes rolled down the window.
“Hey,” he said.
“I just heard,” the sergeant said. “He left you holding your dick again. What did he say?”
“His wife. She’s in labour.”
“Again?”
“For real. He said he didn’t have time to come back and get the truck”—Rhodes nodded to the big Ford to his left—“so he was going to get a cab to take him straight to the hospital.”
Ramirez shook his head and smiled. “All right. It’ll calm down when the baby’s here. You have a good night—I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Rhodes raised his hand in farewell, started the engine and backed out into the street.
Prospect Park was the largest open space in the borough, and, at half past midnight on a night with the weather as bad as this, it was almost deserted. Rhodes drove south until he reached the zoo and then pulled over to the side of the road and slid up behind the Audi that was waiting there.
He crossed the distance between the two cars, opened the nearside rear door of the Audi and slid inside.
Carlos Acosta was sitting on the other side of the car. He smelled of patchouli oil, a scent that reminded Rhodes of insect repellent. He was wearing a gaudy Rolex Daytona with a cheetah print dial. It was ostentatious, in bad taste and very expensive.
“How’d it go? You all good?”
“All good,” Rhodes said. “No problems.”
“Tell me.”
“They bought it. I said there was a card game and I wanted to hit it. Carter said yes. Said he wanted to be the one to take my cherry.”
Acosta laughed—a braying, ugly sound. “And?”
“He called Shepard for backup. They went in. Didn’t come out.”
“You did good,” he said.
Acosta reached forward and tapped the driver on the shoulder. The man reached into the glovebox and handed back a thick wad of bills.
Rhodes took the money. He had been promised a twenty-thousand-dollar bonus: ten grand for Carter and ten for Shepard. The wad was thick and heavy, and he had no reason to count it. Acosta had never stiffed him before, and to suggest that he thought it was even a possibility would have been a dumb move.
“You tell ’em the reason it was going down like that?”
“I said you were disappointed. Said they’d been sloppy and you couldn’t trust them no more.”
Acosta shrugged. “And that’s the truth. I don’t take no pleasure in it. It’s just business.”
Rhodes knew that was a lie. Carlos Acosta was a killer, and every chance he had to kill was a reminder to himself and to everyone else of what he was capable of doing. It was a reminder of the things that he had done t
o haul himself out of the gutter, and the lengths that he would go to, to keep from going back there.
Rhodes and Acosta had that in common. Rhodes knew that Acosta had seen his own story in him.
Scrappiness. Determination. Ruthlessness when that was needed.
And Rhodes knew, too, that Acosta took pride in a job well done. He had anticipated the consternation and confusion that would infect the Seven Five now that one of their serving officers and another man who had only recently retired had just disappeared off the face of the earth. They would know, of course, that the two had been murdered. Internal Affairs would suspect that Acosta was behind it. But they would never find the bodies. And no one would be able to make Acosta for the crime. He was above it all, omnipotent, able to erase people and problems with the impunity of a god. That would frighten them, and fear was good for business.
“What about the clean-up?” Rhodes asked.
“Don’t worry about it. They’re probably in the furnace now.”
“What happened to the kid?”
Acosta’s mood shifted.
“That’s the other thing I want to talk to you about,” he said grimly. “We got another problem. You know I sent Savio and the others to keep an eye on Polanski?”
“Sure. You said.”
“The English guy, Smith, he went to see him on Wednesday. One of Savio’s guys was in the coffee shop where they spoke. He said the kid could ID one of the guys who took out José. That’s why they had to go. I told them I wanted the kid and the English dude dead. I ain’t taking no risks on this one. They gotta go. So Savio told Alejandro to follow Smith while he took Diego and Matías to go and take care of the kid. They get to the house. Savio goes inside and he has boiling water thrown onto his face. Matías goes in through a back door and gets shot in the shoulder.”
