Black Water Transit (21 page)

Zoot put both hands in the air and held his breath, acutely aware of the guns now trained on his body. He tried to pray but could think of nothing to say. Down by the blue sedan, a cluster of figures was gathering around the far side of the vehicle, looking down at something—someone?—on the ground. He couldn’t make out what. A siren blipped once and he looked up to see an EMS ambulance rolling toward the vehicle, butting through the tangle of plainclothes and uniformed cops. He was dimly aware of a large older man standing beside him now, it was the Delta agent—gray crew-cut hair and small eyes, what the hell was his name—Zoot could not remember his name—it was Derry Flynn.

Derry Flynn was holding up a badge and bellowing down at the cops—
federal agents don’t fire we’re federal agents
—and now there was a sudden rushing wind and the downward buffeting blast of a hovering chopper overhead. Zoot looked up and saw a Blackhawk with the letters
ATF Medevac
on the belly, and when he looked back down at the blue sedan it was surrounded by blue uniforms and the EMS truck was stopped dead beside it, the red and white strobes on its roof circling slowly.

The doors were wide open and some poor bastard on a gurney was being lifted into the back of the EMS truck and paramedics were holding a bag of intravenous fluid over the body and someone else was wrapping the figure in a red blanket and Zoot Conyers, the former hut-hut freak, came to the important realization at that precise moment that real was not always better than training, and when real life showed up in a cranky frame of mind, you were a lucky young man if you were anywhere else.

Jack had fallen asleep in the dining-room chair, in front of the cold chicken plate. When the phone rang, he jerked upright and reached for the cordless handset beside him. Smoke, the six-toed stray tom with the brainpower shortfall, sat on the dining-room table about a foot away, blinked his yellow eyes at Jack, and yawned hugely, showing Jack a pink-ribbed cavern of a mouth and four needlepoint fangs the size of railroad spikes. Jack blinked back at him and did the same. Smoke seemed unimpressed.

“Hello?”

“Mr. Vermillion, this is Valeriana Greco.”

“Yes. Miss Greco. Right … what time is it?”

There was a pause while somebody spoke in the background. When she came back on the line, her voice was guarded, formal.

“It’s three in the morning. We have a car on the way. We’re going to fly you down here in a chopper.”

“How did it go?”

Another whispered conversation.

“I’d rather not discuss it on the phone.”

“Okay. I’ll be here.”

“Fine. One thing?”

“Yes?”

“I think you should have a lawyer with you, okay?”

Jack was definitely not okay. Wide awake now, but not okay.

“A lawyer … why do I need a lawyer?”

Her voice was fading.

“My battery’s low. I’ll have to break off. I just want you to have representation with you. For your own protection.”

“From what?”

“The car will be there in ten minutes.”

The transmission popped and shut off. Jack set the receiver down, stared at it for another full minute, and then dialed the number of Flannery Coleman. The phone rang six times and then he heard Flannery’s growling voice.

“This had better be damned amusing.”

“Flan, it’s Jack.”

“I figured it was you. What fresh hell is this?”

Jack sketched it out.

“I’ll meet you at Red Hook. Say nothing to anyone until I get there. No matter what happens. Nothing. I’m leaving now.”

“You can ride with us.”

“No. I have calls to make. Hear me, Jack. Not a word.”

Jack put the receiver back, moved toward the bathroom with his mind in overdrive and his heart pounding against his rib cage. He was halfway there when the phone rang again.

“Hello?”

“Jack. Hope I didn’t wake you?”

It was Earl Pike. His voice was as soft as sleep. Jack could hear traffic in the background and someone calling out names over a public address system. There was an echoing emptiness in the background that made Jack think of an airport or a train station. Pike was breathing hard, as if he was out of breath.

“Earl, are you okay? You sound bad.”

“I’m fine, Jack. I just wanted to say thank you.”

“Okay. It went well?”

“Went well? Not really. It went badly. Very badly. I just wanted to say thank you for the lesson.”

“Lesson?”

“You get to a certain age, no matter what you know, you tend to get sentimental. They say it happens to men our age. Women get tougher, we get weaker. I got sentimental over my family’s collection. Now it’s gone. I got sentimental over you, over a man I saw as a soldier, just like me. That was stupid. You straightened me out. Showed me the truth. So I’m saying thank you.”

Jack felt a sudden burning sense of shame. It was true. He had sold out a man against whom he had no grievance, sent him into a federal trap, and he had done it for what? He knew it was lunacy, but it was impossible not to say something.

“Earl … I have a son. He’s in—”

“The kid in Lompoc? I figured that out for myself. Well, Jack, I have to run. No pun intended there. You did what you thought best. Tried to be a good father. Now you get the consequences.”

“Pike—”

“See you around, Jack.”

The line went dead. Jack hit the call display button.

He wrote the number down on a pad by the phone, sat and held it in his hands for a minute, trying to get his breathing under control. Then he stood up and began to dress. Seven minutes later a black Caprice pulled into his driveway. Jack was outside on the front stairs, waiting for it. The two men inside it stepped out as he came down the walkway. Both of them were brick-shaped and buzz-cut and looked like combat accountants in dress
blue suits and white shirts. One of them showed Jack an ATF ID folder and said his name was Conroy. The other man watched Jack carefully, said nothing, and held open the back door. Jack got in and the man slammed it hard enough to rattle the empty coffee cup in a holder between the front seats. Jack saw a blue police light in the footwell and a police radio under the dashboard. Conroy got in behind the wheel, and the other man came around and sat in the back next to Jack. As they pulled away, Conroy pressed a button and the door locks snapped down.

“What’s that for?” asked Jack.

“Just routine,” said Conroy over his shoulder. The man sitting beside Jack leaned into the seat and unbuttoned his suit jacket so Jack could see the dull gray sheen of the Glock in his shoulder holster.

They were airborne in a black Bell Ranger thirty-four minutes later. The chopper had no markings of any kind. Conroy sat in the front with the pilot. They seemed to know each other. The man who wasn’t Conroy and who had the Glock in a shoulder holster never left Jack’s side all the way down to Red Hook.

They followed the Taconic southward at a thousand feet. Jack saw pinpoint lights and the blue squares of farmyards bathed in arc lamps and now and then a single car cruising on the black ribbon of the parkway. The dulled thunder of the rotors made thinking impossible. He wondered who was in that car a thousand feet below, what his life was like, where he was going. Was it maybe Flannery Coleman down there, foot to the floor, heating up his cell phone, snapping and snarling at some hapless mutt on the far end of the line?

Away in the east, the sky turned the color of skim milk, slowly changed to pale pink, and then the haze from the city stained the whole of the eastern horizon like a spill of brown water. Yonkers went by underneath
them, a scattering of suburban blocks and freight yards half-hidden in third-growth forest, then the Bronx, at first wooded and rolling, and then the trees died away, replaced by block after block of redbrick and stained concrete buildings, and then a sudden greenbelt and a dropping bluff, and now there was a flat lead-gray plain of water below as they crossed over Rikers Island and Jack could see the landing strips of LaGuardia and, away to the left, the long straightaway of Astoria Boulevard, the streetlights blazing like runway markers. He found his old block in the neighborhood, by the schoolyard, and stared at it with a sense of terrible distance and loss and loneliness until it was obscured in the brown haze behind him.

Up ahead he saw the East River and Roosevelt Island and they followed the turning of the river for another mile, with the office towers of Manhattan catching fire from the first rays of the rising sun as it blazed on all the glass and steel and marble. Cars were already pouring down the East River Drive and the FDR, traffic on the Triborough was a ribbon of headlights and taillights.

Down on the river, ferries and cruisers carved thin white lines into the pebbled gray surface of the water, trailing widening vees that looked like lace torn from a veil. Away to the southeast Jack could just make out the ocean. It looked as flat and as hard as a slab of polished marble. In another minute Red Hook Terminal was under them and he could see the
Agawa Canyon
at the dock, a low-riding blue hull with a destroyer bow, her name in tall white lettering, surrounded by derricks and trucks.

People were moving across her decks, not sailors or longshoremen. Strangers, men in black uniforms. The battered tin roofs of the container warehouses were coated with fifty years of grime and a century of bird shit. The terminal grounds were full of police vehicles.
He could make out the churning red and blue of police lights. Men and women in various kinds of uniform were standing around in clusters. Two television vans were parked at the entrance gates, their satellite dishes raised on extension poles, and he could see men milling around carrying video cameras. Here and there a hot flowering of white light picked out a man or a woman talking into the cameras, holding a microphone at chest level. The Ranger hovered, the tone of the rotors altered, and the chopper began to settle down toward a cleared strip.

Inside, a ragged circle of men in black combat fatigues; he picked out one figure among the huddled mass staring up at the chopper as it settled onto the parking lot, a paler face upturned, a sharp oval of white against the mass of black uniforms.

A woman. Valeriana Greco. Waiting for Jack.

The nurse walking toward him was wearing the same kind of expression on her face that Nicky remembered from the night six years ago when another nurse in another hospital wing had come out of the operating room to tell him that his mother was about to die. He noticed that her walnut-dark skin seemed to glow as she passed under the hallway’s overhead lights, and the pale green of her uniform looked blue as the light moved across it and then became green again as she went forward into darkness.

People moved out of her way, the Internal Affairs
slicks in their rumpled suits and the ties loose around the neck, the tangle of blue-and-brass hats standing outside the door into the intensive care unit, the senior brass from Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, separated from the city cops and detectives mainly by the cut and quality of their suits, even Pete LeTourneau, a New York State Police lieutenant, his own section boss, looking rumpled and rural in a blue sports coat over a pair of tan slacks, the snitches from One Police and Gracie Mansion, everybody around her gave her room. Nicky watched her come through, looking at her face, seeing the way she was making direct eye contact with him, and he had the thought that she was coming toward him like a priest coming down the aisle in a cathedral, trailing bad news like sandalwood incense. Nicky remembered then that the worst memory he had was triggered by a sandalwood scent, the same scent that he could smell in the dry sweep of his mother’s hair when he leaned down to kiss her cheek as she lay in her coffin six years ago. The nurse reached him, stood in front of him now, looking down at him with as much compassion as she had left in her after twenty years of walking the very same walk.

“Officer Cicero. They’re finished with the body. The detectives said you can go in now if you still want.”

“Yes. Thanks.”

She nodded, stepped back as he stood up. His left leg vibrated like a tuning fork and a muscle in his cheek pulled at his left eye. He followed her back up the hall past the other cops and the officials. As he cleared a connecting hall, he heard a clamor of voices and shouted questions coming from behind a set of steel doors.

Through the acrylic windows with the letters
Do Not Enter
stenciled on them in reverse, he could see the broad back of the chief of department of the NYPD, in his full dress blues, the white-hot glare of video lights
making a blue corona around his body, see his head go from side to side as he said something to a reporter’s question that Nicky could not quite make out above the staccato chatter of still cameras and the barking of the reporters and television people in the crowded passage. Then he cleared the hallway and the nurse was holding a door open for him, with the look still on her face. Nicky stopped for a moment, gathered himself, and then stepped through the doorway.

There were two people in the room, a white-faced harness cop standing at rigid attention beside the hospital bed, staring straight ahead into the infinite distance and breathing slowly, his dress blue uniform pressed to perfection, a plate of colored medals over his silver badge, a black ribbon around the silver badge, his uniform cap straight and square and hiding his eyes inside a black shadow, and on the bed next to him, a long still figure covered with a sheet.

Nicky walked over to the side of the bed. He could smell disinfectant, bleach, and something else, rust or copper or dried blood. He looked over at the uniformed cop, then looked back down at the body, at the pale-blue sheet drawn over it.

He reached out and lifted up a corner of the sheet and slowly drew it back. It weighed nothing at all and floated away from the body underneath it as if it were a light mist over a pool of water. The corpse’s face was rigid, stunned-looking, a thing made out of wood and stone, the thin lips purple and tight, as if a dreadful pain were still blazing along the nerves. A mass of stained bandage covered the entire left side of the chest, hiding what Nicky knew was terrible damage. The stillness that surrounded the body seemed artificial, frozen, as if the corpse were just an image caught in a still frame, that in another second someone would touch play again and the dead thing would blink and breathe and sit up and
look around again at the wide wonder of the living world. Nicky found himself waiting for that moment, holding on to this illusion for as long as he could, but in a little while he drew the sheet back up and very gently covered Jimmy Rock’s face, turned to real stone now, a thing cut out of quartz and gray marble. Then he turned away and walked back out to the hall and the world of light and air and sound.