Black Water Transit (18 page)

There were only two ways to explain it.

Either the cops on this case were just a pack of wild-ass NYPD cowboys looking to … what did they call it? Flake a case. Get evidence and then lie about the source. Just to make a collar.

Or they weren’t really NYPD at all and had something else in mind. Something much more interesting than a dumb dead thug and his gutter-mouthed little whore. It had not been his experience that federal law enforcement cared very deeply about the random deaths of two obscure civilians. Everything he had seen in life was telling him that this contact was important, that a forceful response was vital to his interests. He thought about CCS, about the various contracts he and his associates were processing. Was there something in one of
those sectors that would draw this kind of attention? Yes, he decided, but there had always been a great deal of federal attention directed to any project connected to CCS. None of the attention had ever turned into an illegal search. What was different? What had changed? Who was new on his horizon line?

Pike put the camera back into the case and set it down on the coffee table, next to the phone. He spent a few moments controlling his breathing and trying to ignore the spidery tickles on his cheek and up under his hairline. The Citicorp building glowed with pale white fire and he remembered seeing the same kind of pale glowing fire moving along a network of radio antennae on top of a Russian freighter as his surveillance chopper hammered through a hurricane off the Grand Banks. What was that light called?

Saint Elmo’s fire. It wasn’t really a fire. It was an illusion created by static electricity around the antennae. Not all that different from his hallucinatory infestation of tiny red spiders. There was a rational explanation for both experiences. He found the insight a calming one. The spidery sensation near his temple subsided slightly. He picked up the telephone and carefully dialed a number. He scratched his cheek lightly with the tips of the fingers of his left hand and studied the Tensor bandage covering the knuckles on his right hand as he listened to the phone ring. It rang five times, and then someone answered.

“Vermillion.”

“Jack, how are you?”

“Earl. What can I do for you? Everything okay?”

“Where are you, Jack?”

“In my house. Watching a retard cat eat chicken legs. Why?”

“You alone, Jack?”

Pike listened hard as it took Jack a few seconds to get
his voice under tight control, and when he did speak, it was calm, contained, not overly friendly, just about the way a guy would speak when somebody he doesn’t know real well calls him at his home number at eleven-thirty in the evening with a smart-ass comment.

“Yes, I’m alone. Why?”

“Everything okay up there?”

“Yeah. Where are you?”

“I’m in New York. I’m going over to the terminal later, see the
Agawa Canyon
come in. Unless you got some other advice?”

There was another silence. He heard Jack breathing.

“Pike, don’t play me like this. I’m tired. You go if you want, or you skip the whole thing if you want. I’ll call my captain right now, tell him to leave the container on board, he’ll take it right back up here. Have your guy with the trailer pick it up, and you go find another route. Right now you’re beginning to get on my nerves.”

“Hey … relax. I’m just calling in. I said I would.”

Jack didn’t remember that. Maybe it was true.

“Yeah. Well, it’s late. I’m tired. I got a lot on my mind.”

“Yeah,” said Pike. “Me, too.
Adiós, compadre
.”

Pike put the receiver down softly and considered the skyline. He was certain now that Jack Vermillion had somehow sold him out. If Vermillion was the trigger, it would explain the surveillance, the illegal search. And it meant there would be people covering the movement of his container of weapons. They had to, to establish the chain of evidence.

Which meant that there would be heavy surveillance at Red Hook too, either these cops or maybe the ATF. This was a sting, a federal sting. It had to be. If he was right, and he knew he was, then it was too late to do anything about it. He couldn’t call it off, because he’d already arranged for the container to be delivered to the
Black Water Transit yards upstate. He had confirmed it on a phone call to Vermillion, a call that had to have been taped. The container had been delivered by his driver and placed straight into customs bond under his name. That was a predicate act all by itself. He was already deep into the trap. Thanks to Jack Vermillion and all these cowboy cops, his collection, the trust of his father and his father’s father, was lost to him now. Gone down the federal abyss. To be melted down or sold to cronies inside the system. And it was his own damn fault. What was he going to do about it?

Five minutes later he was walking out of the valet parking garage carrying his large steel rifle case and a small black canvas sports bag. He was wearing black jeans and his olive-drab jacket and running shoes. He caught a cab at the corner of Second and was gone. Thirteen minutes and forty-two seconds later, the patrol unit that Vince Zaragosa had asked for a couple of hours back, the one that took some quality time out for a pee break, finally pulled up in front of the hotel lobby. By that time, Pike was already out of the box and nobody at all was on him in any useful way. Not the ATF, because Valeriana Greco had decided it was too risky to tail him, and not the NYPD, because they’d bungled the Pike surveillance like a squadron of circus clowns. As far as any of the officials involved were concerned, Earl V. Pike was in the wind, totally off the radar.

It was after midnight, or close, but Jimmy Rock wasn’t anywhere near giving up on waiting for Earl Pike. They were parked in a stand of trees at the western edge of Red Hook Park. The rain had stopped and a wet wind was shaking the tree branches and gusting around the 511 unit. Dexie and Carlo were going the distance with them as well, sitting inside the 509 gypsy cab, about a hundred feet away from the Red Hook Terminal, tucked into the driveway of a warehouse, windows misted over, blank as silver coins.

On the far side of Van Brunt, the hundred-foot-long concrete walls of the Red Hook Container Terminal buildings blocked out the view of the Battery and lower Manhattan, but they could still see the glow from the city; it surrounded the terminal in a yellow haze, silhouetting them. Mist swirled and coiled in a wind off upper New York Bay. The terminal was lit up like an airport runway, as forklifts and front-end loaders cleared a long quay along the river’s edge. A row of trucks was lined up inside the yard, apparently waiting for the arrival of some freighter. A group of dockworkers was standing around at the tip of the key, looking like a crew ready to take a docking line, but there was no ship anywhere around. Above the din of forklift engines and the gravelly mutter of idling diesels, the cops could still hear the channel markers sounding out in the bay, a low bass note like an organ in an empty church.

Time had passed, the way it does on a stakeout, with nobody saying much of anything, especially in the 511
unit, where Casey was having a hard time just staying awake and Jimmy Rock was listening to a jazz channel on the radio and maintaining his policy of total nonfraternization with the black woman sitting beside him.

At around midnight, Nicky Cicero arrived in a gypsy cab. They asked him where the hell he had been. He told them briefly, keeping his good news for last. After he left the hotel, he had stopped into a bar to have a quiet conversation with a bourbon-and-soda, just to calm himself down, and then gone up the block to Second, where he found a patrol car from the One Seven and showed them his badge. After about an hour of dicking him around, they had finally called a sergeant in a supervisor car, who patched him through to Vince Zaragosa at the Jay Rats HQ.

Now, Vince Zaragosa wasn’t interested in talking over Nicky’s activities with a harness bull on the other line, so he told the supervisor to have Nicky taken out to the Red Hook location in a patrol unit. But by now the supervisor was in a snit and giving him grief about not letting him know the Jay Rats were operating in his sector, so he finally told Nicky to ditch the harness bull and grab a cab out to Red Hook, that he’d give him a chit for it later. So he did, which meant he arrived in a cab instead of coming into the area in a marked and highly visible NYPD patrol unit, which turned out to be another tiny but perfect link in the world-class law enforcement cluster-fuck that was now coming together very nicely down in Red Hook.

Anyway, Nicky was feeling pretty good about himself when he got there, and told them all about the razor blade. He held it up in the dim light from the dashboard, the little gray blade inside a plastic evidence Baggie he had borrowed from the patrol guys in the squad car. Jimmy Rock was impressed and said so, which made
Nicky feel slightly better about him. Casey had another view.

“What if he notices the blade is gone? What if we all get beefed for break-and-enter? What if somebody saw Nicky go in?”

Jimmy Rock shrugged and said nothing.

“Nobody did,” said Nicky. “We got his DNA. All we have to do is go get it typed and pick him up when the results come in a week later. For that matter, Jimmy, why the hell even bother hanging around here? We know where he lives. We can scoop him anytime.”

Casey agreed with him.

“He’s right. Once the state guys get a DNA match, they can find Pike wherever he is and lay a charge. Our part in this investigation is over. It ended when we lost the Lincoln.”

“That’s not the point,” said Jimmy Rock. “Vince has a patrol unit out in front of the hotel. What have we heard? We’ve heard dick. Ergo he’s not back there. Where is he, then? He’s coming here. I want to be here when he does. And I’m running this unit. Okay?”

“Why? What’s the point?” asked Nicky.

“What’s the name of this unit, Officer Cicero?”

“Jay Rats. Joint Task Force.”

“Yeah … the word is
joint
, and the job description includes helping out cops from other jurisdictions. Which I’m doing. But right now it also looks like your suspect in a double homicide may be involved in a stunt of some kind on my turf, and I’m the street boss of this joint operation, and I’m not going home until I know what this mook is up to. So let’s zip it for a while and enjoy the night air, hah?”

Nicky sighed, leaned back in the rear seat.

“Okay. I’ll give you an hour. Then I’m going to take this … evidence … back to my detachment and get it
processed. This may be your unit, Detective, but it’s my case. Anybody mind if I smoke?”

“I don’t give a fuck if you burst into flames,” said Jimmy Rock, who was never very good at compromises. Casey watched Nicky as he pulled out a pack of Marlboros. She groaned when she saw them.

“Man. I should have known.”

Nicky looked hurt.

“What?”

“Marlboros. Jesus, Nicky. You’re a walking cliché.”

“Thank you,” he said. “I try to amuse. Want one?”

Casey worked at killing a yawn and failed. What the hell?

“Yes,” she said. “I will.”

“Goodness,” said Jimmy Rock. “Whitney has a vice.”

Casey tried to ignore him. Nicky held out a Zippo, flicked it on. Casey puffed and the car filled up with smoke. Jimmy Rock sighed and hit the power button on the passenger window; it slid down. The smoke blew out into the soft mist and drifted on the wind off the East River. The damp air smelled of salt and dead fish and motor oil. By the time the smoke reached the razor wire along the perimeter of the Red Hook Terminal, it was hardly anything at all, but the ATF sniper lying on the roof of the truck garage could still smell it.

He keyed his throat mike, spoke in a whisper.

“Able to Six Actual.”

In his observation post on top of the container terminal, Luther Campbell put down his Star Lite night-vision goggles and pulled his helmet mike closer to his mouth.

“
Six Actual.
”

“Marlboros,” said the ATF man, still watching the 511 unit through the scope on his Remington bolt-action. “Now they’re smoking.”

Campbell grinned at the man on the roof beside him, an ATF agent named Bunny Kreuger. Kreuger was one-third
of the three-round burst Jack Vermillion had last seen up at his offices in Troy. Kreuger made a war face and clicked on his headset mike.

“
Able, this is Baker. That a postcoital smoke?
”

The ATF sniper, an ex–Marine Corps gunnery sergeant named Farrell Garber, chuckled softly.

“No, the other guy won’t leave them alone long enough.”

Campbell’s radio set chirped.

“
People, this isn’t a game. Stay on point.
”

Campbell groaned. He covered his mike and spoke to Kreuger.

“Jeez, where the hell is she?”

Kreuger indicated a row of darkened windows above the main loading yard.

“The shipping office. They have a toilet and a coffee machine. She’s sitting behind the desk listening to opera on NPR.”

“With her gear on? The little black fatigue thingy by DKNY?”

Kreuger nodded. Valeriana Greco’s habit of wearing tailor-made combat fatigues on any operation, no matter how minor, was legendary inside the Albany federal offices, as was her affection for personal firearms. She wore a Glock strapped to her right thigh and had a Ka-Bar knife—a Ka-Bar, for God’s sake—in a Velcro scabbard on the left side of her Kevlar vest, under a nameplate that read
Greco U.S. Attorney
.

It fit her style, that was certain. Greco was an all-around treat to watch, if you were a clinical psychologist. Her workout routine, for example, was tae bo, a kick-boxing routine she performed on a foldaway foam mat in her office. She’d call project meetings during her workouts. Six grown guys would be standing around in suits and shoulder holsters, reporting on various ongoing investigations, while this barefoot pocket rocket in
black ninja pajamas sweated and punched the air and did hip spins and bounced around on the mat, shouting “yah” and “hah” at the top of her lungs while she kicked the living lungs out of an invisible enemy. It was a surreal experience, and it worried Luther Campbell that he had gotten reasonably used to it. He sighed again and keyed his mike.

“All right, people, check in.”

“
Delta, post four, oh-oh-thirty-three hours, go.
”

“
Hotel, post six, oh-oh-thirty-three hours, go.
”

“
India, post seven, oh-oh-thirty-four hours, go.
”

The headset crackled as one ATF agent after another logged in with his time and position. There were nine of them in various posts around the Red Hook area, all heavily armed and dressed in full-scale SWAT gear: Farrell Garber in a sniper post on the garage roof, another sniper named Zoot Conyers paired with a spotter named Lee Ford on top of the main container storage shed, three more agents run by a senior ATF man named Derry Flynn inside a trailer near the quay where the
Agawa Canyon
was going to dock, and two more ATF—both female—a rookie by the name of Antonia Washington and her field trainer, a forty-year-old hard case named Maya Bergmann, both agents out in the river, holding a position in a Zodiac.

And of course Greco herself in the office overlooking the main loading yard, which made nine and a half. Campbell could hear the high-voltage energy in her voice as she logged in with her personal code name.

“
Valkyrie, oh-oh-thirty-five hours. Go.
”

“Valkyrie, this is Six. Have we got a comeback from any other agency on the DMV hit we did on those plates?”

As soon as the blue Crown Vic and the gypsy cab had pulled up and taken positions at the entrance to the Red Hook yards, the sniper on the roof had called in their
plates. That was an hour ago. So far the DMV computer had come up with nothing at all. Neither vehicle showed an RO of any kind, just a series of numbers cross-linked to a corporate name, Boston Bar Investment Management, and an address in Brooklyn. That’s all the DMV records would show for
any
NYPD unmarked car used in a surveillance operation, since even the criminals had access to plate records, but this subtle point had eluded Greco and she was clearly getting cranky about the issue. Her response was short and sharp.

“
Nothing yet. If it changes, I’ll let you know. Valkyrie out.
”

“Thanks a bunch, honey bunny,” said Campbell, but not into the mike. Kreuger laughed and crawled back to the edge of the roof. From their OP he could see the two suspect cars and the sniper nearest to them, prone on the garage roof just beneath his position. Beyond that, it was block after block of storage yards and tenements and the squat towers of Red Hook housing projects. The lights of Brooklyn were blurry inside a pale mist and the low clouds over the city reflected the orange glow of the yard lights.

Kreuger liked the Mad Max postapocalypse look to the sector. He figured, you’re going to have a major weapons takedown, do it in a place like this. Just like in the movies. Bunny Kreuger was a big fan of the movies and it always bothered him that real-life law enforcement work hardly ever lived up to a Bruce Willis film. He trained his night-vision binoculars on the two vehicles down below.

The gypsy cab windows were misted over, but he could just make out two male figures behind the windshield, a tough-looking guy in his mid-thirties with an outlaw biker look to him, and a younger guy, pale-skinned, who, even at a hundred yards, gave off the impression that he was nervous. The older guy was behind
the wheel. His mouth was moving, but Kreuger couldn’t hear what he was saying because the damned department wouldn’t spring for a serious directional microwave or laser mike. Bruce Willis would have had one. Life was not fair.

He shifted his sights. In the blue Crown Victoria he could detect more movement now. Some kind of discussion seemed to be going on. He zoomed in on the driver, a thin-faced young man behind the wheel. He had twisted around in his seat and was talking to the man in the back, the one who had just arrived in a cab. Once again, no sound. Kreuger pulled back to the second-floor exterior wall where Campbell was leaning up against an exhaust fan housing.

“You think those guys down there are really connected to this operation? I’m telling you, they look like surveillance cops to me.”

“There’s nothing on the plates that says so. Usually when you get an undercover car and you run it on DMV or NCIC, the computer will flag your request and whatever agency is running the UC unit will come back with a warning. So far, all we got is the registered owner as Boston Bar Investments. We’ve already notified the Port Authority guys about this operation, and the NYPD doesn’t have jurisdiction over the terminal area. So if those guys aren’t Port Authority—and Port Authority says they’re not—then we have to pay attention.”

Kreuger shrugged.

“Why don’t we just send somebody down there to ask them what the hell they’re doing?”

“And if they are connected to this op, we’re blown.”

Campbell popped the tab on his watch cover.

“It’s twelve-forty. The freighter’s due in at one. Let’s just hang tight and see what happens when the ship docks.”

Kreuger nodded, put his head back against the vent
housing, and closed his eyes. Campbell adjusted his position, shivered a little in the damp, and counted off the minutes in his head, a Zen thing he used to calm himself down when an operation was getting weird.

At one o’clock they all heard a huge brassy wail blaring through the air, echoing off the concrete walls, tearing up the wet night air, and everybody twitched at their positions. Campbell and Kreuger stood up and looked out over the roof of the warehouse and saw a huge ship steaming around the point through Buttermilk Channel. The ship’s engines throbbed in the night, a booming bass rumble you could feel inside your rib cage, and a dirty-white bow wave was cresting along her prow. Yellow running lights and the red and green of her navigation markers looked blurry in the heavy mist. Seen this close, the ship looked impossibly huge, like a
Close Encounters
mother ship gliding in out of the dark. Now they could all hear the turbulence in the water as the captain hit his bow thrusters and the big ship slowed down in the approach canal. Down in the yards, dockworkers were hopping into their tow motors and the huge overhead derrick next to the quayside began to swing in a groan of metal and hydraulics.