Burn (Michael Bennett 7) (6 page)

“In fact, I’m raring to get started serving the department in my new capacity, with your permission, of course, sir,” I continued, offering my hand with a happy wink of my own.

After a long, puzzled moment, Starkie stood. He finally took my hand warily.

“OK, then. Um, carry on, Bennett,” he said.

“Will do, Chief. Thanks for meeting with me. Bye now,” I said before turning and walking out the door.

CHAPTER
8

THERE WAS A TICKET
on my cop car when I got back to it.

Of course there was. I’d parked it in the only free spot available in Lower Manhattan during a workday, namely in front of a fire hydrant. If I hadn’t put my police business placard on the dash, it would probably have been towed.

I was kind of sorry it hadn’t been, I thought as I got in and started it. At that point, a day at the tow yard seemed preferable to dealing with the rank garbage Starkie had just gleefully dumped into my lap.

Harlem is toward the north end of Manhattan Island, a pretty direct shot from southern Manhattan, where I currently was. But since this was the
new
NYPD, as Starkie had described it, I decided to take an alternate route over the Manhattan Bridge into Brooklyn.

I drove around on the BQE and then around the maze of Queens side streets, weighing my new situation. My first and most tempting option was retirement. Having over twenty years in, I could easily put in my papers and just wash my hands of the whole thing.

Because I had accomplished what I had set out to do in life: be a pretty damn good cop. Like my father before me, I’d sent some monstrous people away to prison, a few of them even to the graveyard.

Maybe this was it, I thought. Maybe it was time to hang it up.

But after a while, I started thinking about it, about Starkie and his petty bullshit. I couldn’t let him win that easily. I had outmanned him when we were rookies, and I would outman him now. I’d take anything and everything Starkie could dish out and throw it back in his face. Somehow. As with our little head-to-head in that Bronx bar, I definitely wasn’t going down without a fight.

I was actually a little excited, at least about the idea of the new squad. Despite the glitches Starkie had mentioned, and the fact that the mayor was involved, the idea of a squad devoted solely to helping the city’s most vulnerable people sounded somewhat intriguing.

I looked around for a sign back to Manhattan to find out what exactly was an Ombudsman Outreach Squad.

CHAPTER
9

WHEN I ARRIVED A
little before lunch, 125th Street, Harlem’s version of Main Street, was busy with people and activity.

There were sidewalk vendors and bustling clothing stores and lines of people in front of curbside food carts. There was also a lot of scaffolding and cranes from new construction and building renovations. I even saw a Times Square–style double-decker bus go by filled with wide-eyed tourists.

It was nice to see the historically run-down area busy, I thought as I parked. At least Harlem’s future was looking up.

My new work location was the ninth floor of a new stone-and-glass government building on the corner of 125th and Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard. There was a surprise waiting for me when I got through lobby security and walked off the elevator onto the ninth floor. And it wasn’t a happy one by any stretch.

It was even worse than I’d thought. Which was saying something, since I didn’t even really know what to think yet.

There was a long line outside the office. We’re talking waiting-on-line-for-Yankees-playoff-tickets long. But instead of elated fans, this one was filled with quite pissed-off-looking citizens. The crowd ran the demographic gamut of New York’s working-class whites and blacks and Hispanics and Asians. There were a lot of young women, a lot of them single moms, I’d be willing to bet, with squirming preschool kids in tow.

Instead of storming up front and immediately demanding to find out what the insane holdup was, I decided to take another tack. I got on the end of the line. Heck, I was pretty pissed off, too.

When I turned the first office corner twenty glacially slow minutes later, I saw the office’s official name for the first time. A long plastic banner on the wall said
WELCOME TO THE SPECIAL PROJECT OFFICE FOR COMMUNITY RELATIONS WITH THE NYPD
. Underneath it in smaller type was the peppy assurance,
IT’S A BRAND-NEW DAY
.

The SPOFCRWTNYPD
, I thought, shaking my head.
Rolls right off the tongue
. I mean, even a Polish radio announcer couldn’t pronounce that one.

“This is bull,” said a young black woman in a red hoodie in front of me as she shifted the bright-eyed two-or-three-year-old girl she was holding onto her other arm.

“You can say that again,” I said.

“You taking off work?” she said, turning back toward me.

“No, not really.”

“You’re lucky,” the mom said. “I’m wasting a personal day on this.”

“I wouldn’t call it lucky,” I mumbled. “Why are you here?”

“Drug gang just moved into my next-door neighbor’s apartment, an eighty-three-year-old woman. Just took it over. I told the local precinct three times but ain’t nothing been done. They told me to come here. I been standing here has to be an hour now. This city. I should have known.”

I spoke to some other people. It seemed like every aggravating case the local precincts didn’t want to deal with was being sent here to my new world.

And what a not-so-wonderful world it was.

What I saw firsthand over the next hour of waiting was unbelievable, unforgettable. There was one female clerk behind the DMV-like counter. One!

Not that there weren’t more personnel present. On the contrary. Through an open doorway behind the clerk, I saw a wide-assed male cop first sleep, then read the newspaper, then sleep again. The only other cops I could see were sitting at desks as far away from the reception desk as they could get, heads down, idly clicking at computers, shopping sites probably.

Everywhere phones were ringing. Everywhere no one was answering them.
What a completely maddening New York bureaucratic disaster
, I thought.
No, worse
, I remembered.

This was apparently now
my
completely maddening New York bureaucratic disaster.

CHAPTER
10

THE BETTER PART OF
an hour later, I finally got to the head of the line.

“Here you go,” said the clerk as she shoved a sheet of paper at me in greeting.

Her shirt was unbuttoned low enough to show a lot of cleavage, and there was an earring in the lower of her DayGlo-pink lips. Or a lip ring, I guess you’d call it. Whatever it was, it was absolutely not up to the NYPD’s professional-appearance standards.

Who was running this asylum? Oh, yeah. Me.

“Hi, I need to talk to someone,” I said, ignoring the paper. “I just moved to Harlem four months ago, and I was robbed three times by the same street-corner kid. Nothing’s been done about this. The kid is still out there. He put a gun to my head, for God’s sake.”

The lip-ringed clerk nodded sympathetically a couple of times. Then she shoved the paper at me again.

“That does sound like a problem, sir,” she said. “But instead of telling me, you need to tell it to this Departmental 313-152 Form.”

“Then what?” I said. “Aren’t those police officers back there behind you? Can’t one of them come with me? The kid’s on the corner right now. Or he was two hours ago when I got on line. I’ll point him out.”

“They’re currently working on other cases, sir,” the clerk said, blinking at me.

“Please, I need help,” I said. “I don’t mean to be pushy, but I’m afraid for my kids.”

“Put it all down on the form, sir. We can’t do anything without the proper paperwork,” she said, glancing down at her lap, where I’d bet my paycheck she had a cell phone. Without looking at me, she gestured with a hand off to the right.

“There’s pens on the table over there,” she said.

The clerk checked her Facebook page or Buzzfeed or whatever for a second before looking up and then through me.

“Next!” she bellowed.

They say you can catch more flies with honey.

But unfortunately, I wasn’t trying to catch flies.

I was trying to restore order in a land in which chaos was currently in full ugly reign. Fortunately, having ten kids, I had been to this place before and knew what to do. Desperate times called for desperate measures.

It was break-glass-in-case-of-emergency time, also known as completely freak out.

As it turned out, I didn’t go to the table with the paper. Instead, I stood rooted to the linoleum and glared at the clerk until she once again acknowledged my existence. Then I turned around to the old Asian grandmother with two little boys coming up behind me.

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” I told her. “But as it turns out, you’re actually not next.”

“Hey! What are you, crazy?” said the clerk when I faced her again.

I lifted the Departmental 313-152 Form off the counter and slowly tore it in two. Then tore it in two again.

“Why, yes,” I said. “Apparently I am. Who wouldn’t be crazy trying to deal with this lousy excuse you call a police squad?”

She pursed her DayGlo lips.

“You best stop poppin’ off,” she said, wagging a finger at me ghetto-style. “This is a police facility. You want to get locked up? Now, you can either go over there and fill out your form or I can reserve you a room at the Rikers Island Hilton,
comprende?
Your choice. Last chance.”

“No,” I said, glaring at her. “I don’t
comprende
. I have no idea what’s going on here. And it seems like neither do you.”

CHAPTER
11

“HEY, WISE GUY. YEAH,
you. You looking for trouble?” said a burly young white cop as he got up from one of the desks in the corner.

He was a six-foot-tall, broad-shouldered guy in dark slacks and a white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up over his thick forearms. He was smiling and chewing on a piece of gum as he quickly came out from behind the counter straight at me. His pepper spray was already out, I noticed, and he had a twitchy finger on its trigger, ready to go.

“You doing a little drinking this morning, buddy? Lookin’ for some trouble?” he said almost hopefully.

“No, cowboy, but you and everybody else in this unit just found a whole bunch,” I said as I took out my shield.

The cop and the clerk stared at each other, then at me.

“Allow me to introduce myself. I’m Detective Mike Bennett, the unlucky SOB who just got assigned to CO this wreck.”

First I pointed at the clerk.

“You,” I said. “Button that shirt, take that thing out of your neon lip and your butt out from behind that counter, and go on home until you read the NYPD uniform policy and realize this isn’t a circus sideshow.”

Before she could protest, I pointed at the aggressive cop.

“You,” I said.

“Me?” the strapping twenty-something said.

“Yeah, you. Go back to your desk and turn off the Tetris, and while you’re there, tell the rest of the mopes in this unit that Daddy’s home and he wants everyone standing in line in the hall by my office until further notice. Everyone except for you, that is. You can take off for the rest of the day, too, Dr. Pepper Spray.”

As he reluctantly walked off, I turned toward the line of exhausted, frustrated people behind me.

“I’m sorry, everyone, but this office is closed for the day,” I announced.

If I thought the people were pissed off before, they were twice as steamed now. There was a lot of groaning and cursing. Someone kicked the wall hard enough to shake the banner. I wondered for a scary second if I was going to need to call for some real cops.

“This is bull!” someone called out loudly.

Yes, it is
, I thought. “This is bull” was today’s theme. It was New York City’s theme pretty much every day, when you came to think of it. If the politicians were honest, they’d put it on billboard-size signs at the city line.

WELCOME TO NEW YORK. IT’S BULL
!

“Sorry, but it can’t be helped,” I called back. “Hopefully, we’ll be open tomorrow, but I can’t make any promises. The Project for Outreach Relations with the NYPD apologizes for any inconvenience.”

“Man, you even got the name wrong,” a thin black man in a UPS uniform said, pointing at the wall banner with a loud “Tsssk.”

“My mistake,” I said, going over and ripping the banner off the wall. I crumpled it loudly in my hands as I stepped behind the counter and methodically stuffed it into a wastepaper basket.

“Whatever we are, we are now under renovation!” I called out. “Thank you and I’m sorry and good-bye.”

CHAPTER
12

I SPENT THE NEXT
hour in my new office trying to get my bearings.

The office itself was a nice surprise. It was a recently redone, roomy corner space that had new furniture and an extensive view of tree-lined Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard to the north. It even had a washroom and a coffeemaker, which I promptly filled and got percolating before I started stacking the massive pile of in-box files on my desk.

First order of business was to read through the squad’s operational details folder. In some ways, the unit was like a mini-precinct. In addition to a locker and interview rooms, the office space had an on-site armory, cruisers in the underground lot, Kevlar vests and radios. Coordination had been set up with the Twenty-Eighth Precinct house a couple of blocks away for backup and lockup as needed.

But in other ways, the unit was like a much more agile, roving detective squad consisting of a handful of officers and a couple of clerks. The officers were what was known as white badges, plainclothes cops recently taken from patrol to see if they had the wherewithal to become permanent detectives.