“Okay. Turn around.” From the other officer—blond hair in a spiky cut. He was flipping through the wallet. He clustered it, the gun and the shield in his left hand.
Both officers looked around and directed Pulaski into a doorway, out of sight of the pavement. He understood. They’d been conducting surveillance at Richie’s, probably on Alphonse, waiting for a contact to show up. And they didn’t want to blow the main operation by getting spotted now.
Baldie spoke into his microphone. “Sarge, we got him. The thing is he’s on the force. Major Cases . . . I know . . . I’ll find out.” He cocked his head. “Pulaski? You running an op here? Major Cases always coordinates with us, DSS. So we’re confused.”
“Not an op.”
“What’d you buy?” Baldie seemed to like doing the talking. They were close. His breath smelled of pizza. Garlic and oregano. He glanced at Pulaski’s pocket.
“Nothing.”
“Look, man, we got it on video. Everything.”
Shit. The plumbing van across the street. He had to give ’em credit. There were a dozen plumbing supply stores on the block. A lumberyard truck, a taco truck, an HVAC truck . . . he thought that was weird. But not plumbing.
“It’s not what you think.”
“Yeah, it is what we think, Pulaski. There’s nothing we can do. It’s on tape that’s gotta be logged in,” the blond partner said. He seemed personally upset at the prospect of busting a fellow cop for scoring drugs. But being upset wasn’t going to stop him. Either of them. It just seemed that Blondie would enjoy a collar a bit less than his partner.
“We’re in this far, Pulaski. You gotta give us what you scored. If it’s a misdemeanor amount it won’t go so bad. You can work out something with the DA and Benevolent Association.”
They’d probably be thinking Pulaski might be part of a sting himself—scoring drugs knowing surveillance was there and seeing if Baldie and Blondie let him go, professional courtesy. Then Internal Affairs would sweep in and take them down. So they’d have to treat him like any other buyer.
“I didn’t score any drugs.”
There was silence.
“Search me.”
A glance between them. Blondie did. A good search. They knew what they were about.
Then Baldie was talking into his microphone. “Sarge, nothing on him . . . K.” He disconnected and barked: “So, the fuck’s going on here, Pulaski?”
“That.” He nodded at a wad of papers Blondie had lifted from his pocket. Blondie handed it to him. He opened one small sheet of paper and handed it back.
“What’sis?”
“I had some money trouble last month. Need a couple large. Somebody put me in touch with Alpho. He hooked me up with a money man. I paid him back the last of the vig today. He gave me the marker back.”
The cops looked at the IOU.
Borrowing money at exorbitant rates of interest isn’t illegal unless it’s done to launder cash—though doing so probably tripped over some departmental regs.
Baldie spoke into the microphone. “Wasn’t drugs, Sarge. Juice. Paid his vig and got the note back . . . Yeah . . . I will.”
“You know, that was just fucking stupid, Officer.”
“Yeah? How fucking stupid is it to borrow some green for a friend who’s losing a leg ’cause he’s got cancer and no insurance?” The fear had translated into anger and he decided if you’re going to make something up, pick the most outrageous story you can.
That set them back a bit. But Baldie wasn’t deterred for long. “You could’ve screwed up a major operation here. Your boy back there, Alpo, was supposed to be meeting somebody senior with a DR crew. He comes in, tips to you being blue and who knows what might’ve happened? He could’ve had a shooter with him.”
Pulaski shrugged.
“He say anything about a Dominican?”
“No. We talked sports and how fucked people can get when they borrow at twenty percent interest. My piece and shield. The wallet too.”
Pulaski took them and eased to his knees, re-holstering his weapon. He snapped the strap around the small pistol and rose. “Anything else?” No response. Pulaski gazed at him for a moment then, without a word, he turned and walked away.
If he’d thought his heart was beating fast a few moments ago, it was like a machine gun now.
Man, man, man . . . You lucky son of a bitch, he told himself. But not all luck. He’d planned ahead. Alpho had called him earlier and said he had a lead to Oden, the man who could supply Pulaski with the new breed of Oxy. “Catch or whatever the fuck you call it.” They’d meet at Richie’s and Pulaski would pay him two thousand for the information.
But leaving One PP, where he’d dropped off the computer from the arson scene downtown, Pulaski began to feel paranoid. What if he was seen talking to Alpho by a friend, or fellow cop? He needed an excuse for hanging with the guy. He’d bought drugs once from him but wouldn’t do that again.
For some reason the IOU idea had jumped into his head. Not bad. He’d scrawled out a fake marker. When Alpho gave him the Oden info he’d slipped it into the same pocket as the note. It wouldn’t pass forensics—no friction ridges other than his own . . . and forget about handwriting analysis. But he guessed that the DSS cops back there weren’t much concerned about him. They just wanted to get back to their pizza and the Dominican banger stakeout.
He now extracted and looked over the note Alpho had given him, memorizing the address and the other information on it. He closed his eyes and recited it a dozen times.
The hour was getting late. Lincoln and Amelia had to be wondering where he was. And he himself was curious if there’d been anything on Williams’s computer that might lead to Unsub 40. But, checking his phone, neither had called. He texted Amelia that he was heading home—the Gutiérrez case had taken up more time than he’d believed it would—but if she needed anything, give him a call.
Was she mad? Probably. But nothing he could do about it.
He was going to flag down a cab but was painfully aware of how much of his own money he’d just handed over to Alpho so it was subway time. He walked back to Broadway Junction to begin the complicated journey to his wife and children. Feeling dirty, tainted. And sure that even seeing their soft, smiling faces would do little to bring him comfort.
Amelia Sachs pulled her Torino up to the curb and shut the engine off. Sat for a moment, reading texts. She slipped the phone away but still didn’t get out of the car.
After leaving Rhyme’s she’d gone on two missions. The first was to meet with a reporter for one of the big local papers and give him a follow-up to the People’s Guardian story. As part of the article he would print the list of products that contained smart controllers—though in the online edition, since the number of such items was so lengthy. She’d also explained what Chaudhary had said, that manufacturers were reluctant or too lazy to install the patches to improve security. The CEO was going to contact them again but she’d decided that a news story about that reticence would create some public relations pressure for them to install the security updates.
The reporter had thanked her for the tip and left to further research and write up the story.
Sachs had then stopped by One PP briefly and was now here on her second mission—in Little Italy, little indeed, having been taken over by hipsters from the north and Chinese restaurants and gift stores from the south. She climbed out of the car, snagged her briefcase and walked south. Slowing her pace to a stop, she noted the man’s silhouette in a window of the coffeehouse before her.
This place had been here for years, a classic espresso-and-pastry shop right out of a 1940s film. The name was Antonios (there had been only one owner by that name; the family, or the sign-painter, had never bothered with an apostrophe). Sachs preferred it to the three or four other surviving bistros here in south-central Greenwich Village, all of them resiliently resisting the chain-store approach to caffeine.
Sachs pushed inside, a bell mounted to the door jingling cheerfully, and she was assaulted by the smells of rich coffee, cinnamon, nutmeg, yeast.
Eyes still on Nick Carelli, who was scrolling through an iPad.
After a brief pause she walked up to him and said, “Hi.”
“Hey.” He stood up, looked into her eyes and kept his gaze there. No embrace.
She sat and set the briefcase on her lap. Defensive, the way suspects being grilled sometimes crossed their arms.
“What would you like?” Nick asked.
He was drinking black coffee, and she had a memory of a cold Sunday morning, both Nick and she off duty, she in a pajama top, he in the matching bottoms, as she made two cups of coffee, pouring boiling water through a cone filter, the sound like crinkling cellophane. She would sip hers immediately while he would set his cup in the fridge for a few minutes; he liked tepid drinks, never hot.
“Nothing. I can’t stay.”
Did he seem disappointed? She believed so.
“Newfangled.” He pointed to the iPad with a smile.
“A lot’s changed.”
“I think I’m at a disadvantage. Don’t you need to be about thirteen to master something like this?”
“That’s the upper limit,” Sachs said. She couldn’t help but note once more that Nick looked good. Even better than when she’d seen him last. Less gaunt than then. More upright, the slouch gone. He’d had a haircut too. His appearance seemed better now than in his younger days when he’d been, she thought, too skinny. The sprinkles of gray among the black strands helped. And the years—and prison—didn’t seem to have dimmed his sparkly-eyed boyishness. A bit of the frat boy was forever inside. Sachs had believed back then that he hadn’t so much ruthlessly planned and executed the hijackings, as fallen in with the wrong crowd and, for the hell of it, thought he’d try something daring, without considering the consequences.
“So. Here you are.” She opened her briefcase and handed over three thick folders containing about eight hundred sheets of paper. The documentation on his case and related investigations. She’d skimmed the file years ago—not wanting to, but unable to resist. She’d learned that back then there’d been several hijacking rings operating in the city. Nick’s arrest was one of seven in a three-month period. Some other perps had been cops as well. If he had been a sole hijacker—especially one going for a plea—the file would have been much skimpier. He flipped through one of the folders fast, smiled and touched her arm.
Not her hand. That would have seemed inappropriate. Just her forearm. Still, even through layers of wool and cotton, she felt the electricity that she remembered from years ago. Wished she hadn’t. Really wished that.
He must have felt her stiffen. Certainly he saw her look away. Nick lifted his hand off her sleeve.
She said, “You’ve got to be careful, Nick. You can’t associate with anybody’s got a record. Your PO’s told you that.”
“If there’s anybody who can help me and there’s any risk, or it even looks like they’re connected, I’ll use, you know, an intermediary to contact them, a friend. Promise.”
“Make sure.”
She stood.
“You’re positive you don’t have time for a fast dinner?”
“I’ve got to get home to my mother.”
“How is she?”
“Well enough for the surgery.”
“I don’t know how to thank you, Amelia.”
“Prove you’re innocent,” she said. “That’s how.”
CHAPTER 24
Policing, Nick Carelli knew, was mostly paperwork.
You wanted collars but you hated collars because of all the forms, the notes, the triplicate, quadruplicate and whatever the hell five copies of something was.
But the good news now was that the Internal Affairs cops on his case, and the regular gold shields, had really done their homework, and he had paperwork galore to prowl through. Probably there was so much because they’d thought they had a crooked cop and a crooked cop is the best kind of perp. You nail a boy in blue who’s screwed up and the world’s your oyster. Press, promotion, adulation from the public.
In his apartment now. Sitting at a table he’d been meaning to level with a folded piece of paper since he’d moved back in, Nick was looking through what Amelia had brought him, ream upon ream of paperwork. Looking for a key to his salvation.
He sipped coffee, black and lukewarm. Not hot, not iced. Tepid. He didn’t know why, but this was the way he always drank coffee. He remembered being with Amelia and she’d make it the old-fashioned drip way—pre-Keurig days—pouring it through a cone filter. One of his favorite memories, a freezing-cold morning, sharing the ugliest pair of striped beige pajamas on earth. Her toenails blue from polish. His blue from the cold.
He’d gulped several mugs of Folgers since he’d started going through the files Ame—no, Amelia—had brought him. How many hours had it been? He didn’t want to guess.
He suddenly was aware of a scent that took him back years. He cocked his head, inhaled. Yes, definitely. The source? He lifted one of the file folders. Where Amelia had undoubtedly held it. She wasn’t into perfume. But she tended to use the same lotions and shampoos, which had their own distinctive fragrance. This was what he now smelled. Hand cream, Guerlain, he believed. Amazed the name came back to him.
He discarded a few other memories, with difficulty, and returned to the paperwork. Page after page.
An hour crawled past. Another. Numbing. He decided to go for a late-night run. Five more minutes.
But finding what he so desperately wanted took only two.
Jesus. Oh, my sweet Jesus!
He was reading from a report that had been put together as part of the larger investigation into police involvement in hijackings. It was dated nearly a year after he had gone to jail. There was a photocopy of a detective’s handwritten notes, very hard to read—it looked like the officer had used pencil.
2/23. Interv albert constanto olice investigation 44-3452—operation take back subject not involved in jackings but sheet on drug missed court rants, dropped one, kicked down to lesser included, subject reported overheard . . . in flannigan’s bar key man for stolen merch, always behind scenes, layers of protection knows “everything” in BK, white male, fifties, first name starts with j married nanci, “j” is key constanto says.
I’ll say he’s key, Nick Carelli thought. For my mission at least. Flannigan’s was one of the underground meeting places for organized crime operations. This mysterious “J” figure, who’d just arrived in BK—Brooklyn—with connections and a wife, Nanci, would know who was who in the hijacking scene back then. And if he couldn’t directly help Nick, he’d probably know somebody who could. He flipped through the remaining pages, hoping to find a transcript of the notes, which would be easier to read, but no. There wasn’t much else. And no follow-up finding the “J” figure and his wife Nanci.
Then he saw why.
An NYPD memo announced the end of Operation Take Back. The commissioner praised the officers for greatly reducing the incidence of hijackings and the involvement of corrupt police officers in them. Many ’jackers and their police allies were behind bars; others, against whom cases could not be made, had been driven out of the business. The real answer was made clear in several other memos, announcing the formation of several anti-terrorist and -drug task forces. Resources within the NYPD were limited, always true, and stolen TVs fall pretty low on the gotta-stop-it scale, compared with al-Qaeda wannabes in Westchester targeting synagogues and Times Square.
