Rizzo’s Fire (6 page)

Rizzo answered, shaking his head. “I haven’t told your mother yet, but it’s bound to start showin’ up in the papers and on the news. The department wants the word to get out, that’s how desperate they’re gettin’. That’s why Carol’s able to take the test in Suffolk County, at Stony Brook. When I came on, you wanted to be a cop, you took the test at a high school in one of the five boroughs. On a Saturday morning. Now, they’re even givin’ the damn test in Philadelphia. Imagine? They’re wavin’ the Big Apple at kids a hundred miles from here. That’s how hard up they are for recruits.”

Jessica shook her head slowly, but didn’t speak.

“You gotta talk to her, Jess. Talk some sense into her. She’s just a kid, a sweet, naïve kid. She thinks she’s gonna stop the madness, save the citizens. It isn’t like that, Jess. Maybe it never was, but it sure as hell isn’t now.”

“I know, Daddy. But Carol is determined. What right do I have? If she told me what to do with my life, I wouldn’t like it very much.”

“Forget rights,” Rizzo said sharply. “She’s your sister. You want her out bumpin’ heads with skells and psychos while every latte-sucking liberal is standing behind her with a camera phone protecting the dirtbags from the oppressive fascist cops? You think that’s gonna work out for her?”

Jessica saw the passion in her father’s eyes, and it unsettled her. She blinked nervously.

“Take it easy, Dad,” she said. “Don’t have a heart attack.”

Rizzo leaned even closer to Jessica.

“Talk to her, Jess,” he said, regaining a softer tone. “For her own good. Talk to her. She may listen to you.”

Rizzo sat back in his seat and began fumbling in his pocket for the Nicorette.

“I don’t think your mother and I can do it alone,” he said softly. “I think this might have us beat.”

Jessica frowned. She saw something in her father’s eyes. Something she had never seen there before: fear.

DETECTIVE SECOND
Grade Mike McQueen strolled into Pete’s Downtown Restaurant and took a seat at the bar. He turned to the young female bartender and ordered a straight-up Manhattan. It was twelve forty-five: Joe Rizzo would soon meet him for lunch at the popular Brooklyn restaurant.

At six feet even, with sharp blue eyes twinkling in a well-featured face, McQueen cut an impressive figure in his new charcoal suit. The suit had been specially tailored, showing no hint of the semiautomatic pistol belted to his right hip. He sipped his drink and waited, occasionally returning the admiring smile of the pretty young bartender.

McQueen was twenty-nine years old with nearly eight years in the NYPD. He had spent the preceding year as a rookie detective third grade, partnered with Joe Rizzo at the Sixty-second Precinct.

As he drank, waiting for Rizzo, a smile touched his lips. His recent transfer to headquarters at One Police Plaza had been the result of their brief partnership. With that transfer, he was now poised to advance his career in ways that, six months earlier, he wouldn’t even have dared to imagine. And he owed it all to Joe Rizzo.

As McQueen pondered his good fortune, Joe Rizzo’s Camry, westbound on Old Fulton Street, turned right onto Water Street. He nosed it into the curb and shut it down. Climbing from the car, he glanced at his Timex: twelve-fifty.

The neighborhood, situated between the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges, was now known as DUMBO, an acronym for Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass. The area was at the height of transformation from a forsaken nineteenth-century industrial area to a thriving, urban hub with hulking old factories, ware houses, and liveries being converted into high-priced condominium complexes with ground-floor eateries, specialty shops, and small, artsy businesses.

As Rizzo dug out a cigarette, a last smoke before lunch, and leaned against the Camry, a brutal memory came to him about this very location. As a young patrolman, he and his partner had once discovered the decaying body of a homeless woman, her throat violently slashed, in the shadow of the historic Fireboat Station House which, back then, stood abandoned and dilapidated at the foot of Old Fulton, the flat, calm waters of the East River stretched before it.

Rizzo gazed across the fifty yards separating him from the old building, now gaily festooned in white and red and housing an old-fashioned ice cream parlor, young professionals on their lunch hour entering and exiting, the bright October sunshine washing over the scene. To the right of the Fireboat House, with its cluttered parking lot, stood the River Café. Directly across from Pete’s where Mike was waiting, the stone mass of the Brooklyn Eagle building where Walt Whitman had once been a reporter stood in majestic restoration—now the condominium home to scores of young, successful Brooklynites.

Rizzo shook his head in wonder.

“Things sure have changed,” he muttered aloud, making a mental note to introduce his Manhattanite partner, Priscilla, to this corner of Brooklyn, so different from her old Bed-Sty neighborhood and her new working confines of Bensonhurst’s Sixty-second Precinct.

He glanced again at his watch, tossing the cigarette away, and walking toward Pete’s Restaurant.

Once seated with Mike McQueen in the rear of the main dining area, Rizzo smiled across the table.

“So, Mike,” he said. “You look great. How are things across the river? You playin’ nice with all the other Plaza boys and girls?”

“Yeah, so far, so good. Piece a cake. When I told my lieutenant I was heading over the bridge to meet you, he told me not to hurry back. It’s pretty relaxed where they have me working.”

Rizzo shook his head and sipped at the double-rocks Dewar’s now before him. “I’d eat the gun if they ever tied me to a friggin’ computer all day. Christ.” His lips turned down. “You sure you’re okay with it?”

“Better than okay,” McQueen answered. “I run complete profiles on everything going on anywhere in the department. I cross-reference crime stats and major cases, looking for patterns or emerging problems. Sometimes I troll for predators, pedophiles, stuff like that, but mostly I’m nosing in on everything the department’s up to. It’s the place to be, Joe. At least for now. They already bumped me up to second grade. That would never have happened so fast if I was still at the Six-Two, no matter how many cases we cleared.”

Rizzo nodded and reached for his menu, flipping it open. “That’s true enough,” he said.

“In my spare time, I scan through stuff, you know, looking for something I can capitalize on. Maybe something to help me catch somebody’s eye, make myself look good. And who knows, someday maybe I can move over to Policy and Planning, where I kinda always wanted to be.”

“What is it, three weeks, a month you’re over there, and already you’re jockeyin’ for position? You learn fast, kid.”

McQueen drained his drink. “Well,” he said, “that’s how it’s done. And it might not be too hard, either. Some of the guys I’ve met over there aren’t the brightest lights, if you know what I mean.”

With a grin, Rizzo replied. “Yeah, well, don’t sell them short, and watch your back. Remember, they were all smart enough to hook their way into the Plaza.”

“Like me, eh, Joe?” McQueen asked.

As he watched Rizzo’s eyes, McQueen ran the details through his mind: how he and Rizzo had tracked down the runaway daughter of a local Brooklyn political power house, City Councilman William Daily. When closeted skeletons had turned up during the investigation, Rizzo had deftly utilized them to both his and McQueen’s advantage.

But the skeletons had never been buried. Instead, they were still lurking, lurking as evidence in the form of a purloined Panasonic microcassette. Lurking in the basement of Joe Rizzo’s Bay Ridge home.

The tape, McQueen thought. The damn tape that could alter the lives of everyone connected to it.

“Yeah,” Rizzo replied, pulling McQueen from his thoughts. “Like you. But you belong over there, Mike. You’re a sharp guy, and a good cop. Maybe they aren’t.”

“Thanks.”

Rizzo shrugged. “Don’t thank me, I didn’t give you your brains. If they give you half a chance over there, you’ll be runnin’ your own squad in a few years.”

“We’ll see,” McQueen said. “But hopefully I’m done with the streets. Almost eight years, that’s enough, and I still may try for the Academy. Teaching. I think I might like that.”

“I can see you there, Mike. You look the part.”

McQueen smiled. “Well, looks are important. Very political at the Plaza. They’re more a bunch of frustrated yuppies than they are cops.”

“We learned a little somethin’ about politics with that runaway Daily kid, now didn’t we, Mikey?”

McQueen’s face turned more somber. “Yeah, I guess we did.”

They ordered their meals, then caught up on each other’s lives. Rizzo filled him in on Priscilla Jackson’s first few days at the Six-Two squad. McQueen laughed when Rizzo related her first encounter with the precinct Romeo, Nick Rossi.

“That’s my Cil,” Mike said.

Later, with McQueen sipping a cappuccino and Rizzo dark coffee, the older cop shifted in his seat and leaned slightly forward. When he spoke, it was in a soft, low voice.

“We need to talk, kid,” he said.

The change in mood wasn’t lost on McQueen. He placed his cup down on the white linen tablecloth and sat back in his seat.

“Yeah. I figured,” he said, his blue eyes neutral.

Rizzo smiled sadly. “Yeah. I figured you figured.”

McQueen waved for the waiter.

“Another straight-up Manhattan and Dewar’s, rocks,” he said. He turned back to Rizzo. “About the tape. Right?”

Rizzo nodded. “Yeah. About the tape. I know we agreed to sit on it. For six months. Keep Councilman Daily’s dirty little secret for a while longer. In the meantime, we’d get you over to the Plaza, courtesy of Daily and his influence.”

“Yes,” McQueen said, “and get you six months of phantom overtime to pad your pension.”

Rizzo nodded again. “Yeah, but most importantly, to buy us some time. Distance ourselves from it all, so maybe we’d get under the radar.”

The waiter arrived and placed their drinks on the table. McQueen reached for his.

“How’s that overtime thing working out?” he asked.

“Good,” Rizzo replied, with a shrug. “It ain’t exactly phantom, but that’s okay. It’s more legit this way. See, Daily set it up through a flunky of his at the Plaza. They call it Confidential Administrative Overtime. Daily’s man processes the O.T. personally, and it gets billed through the Homeland Security federal funding. City Finance never feels it, and it doesn’t show up on the yearly Six-Two overtime stats, so no red lights start flashin’ over there.”

Sipping his second drink, McQueen spoke around the rim of the glass.

“Do you have to actually do anything for it?” he asked.

Rizzo answered as he reached for his Scotch. “Yeah,” he said. “There’s a large Middle Eastern presence on the northeast side of Bay Ridge. I live on the southwest side of the Ridge, Dyker Heights. So, every so often, I drive by the northeast. Check things out. Talk to some old-timers, the remnants of the Irish and Scandinavians that used to dominate that section of the neighborhood. And I talk to some of the Asian newcomers once in a while. Then I write out a report on the local Muslim activity and fax it over to Anti-terror Intelligence. They file it away, and everybody’s happy.”

“So, okay,” McQueen said.

Rizzo nodded. “Well, by my count, the six months for that tape we’re holdin’ comes up this February. Am I right?”

McQueen shrugged. “Yeah. February.”

Rizzo put down his rock glass and leaned across the table. When he spoke, McQueen could smell the liquor on his breath.

“I need an extension, kid,” he said softly.

Rizzo pretended not to notice the relief that flickered briefly in the young cop’s eyes. He kept his own face neutral.

“Oh,” was all McQueen managed.

“Yeah,” Rizzo said. “An extension. These friggin’ tuition loans won’t go away just because I retire, and it’ll be a couple a years before Marie is a doctor and can assume the loans Jen and me owe, never mind her own. Not to mention my other two girls.”

“How much time, Joe?” McQueen asked casually.

Rizzo spread his hands and cocked his head to the side. “Not sure,” he said. “A year, maybe—say, next October. Then with the administrative O.T., plus my regular O.T., I can get out with enough pension to carry the loans till the girls can take ’em off my hands. And by then, we’ll be far enough away from it that maybe no one will connect us to it when it does go public.”

McQueen smiled. “I understand. To tell you the truth, I could use a little more time myself. I need to make some contacts, some friends at the Plaza. That way, when we put that tape into the right hands, if the shit hits the fan and Daily does realize we screwed him, at least I’ll have some allies. Some cover.”

Rizzo nodded. “Sounds fair, Mike. After all, I’ll probably be out, my pension in hand, outta their reach. You should have some cover, too. Insurance, sorta.”

McQueen drank deeply, draining the glass. “Yeah,” he said. “Insurance.”

Later, leaving the restaurant after they’d eaten their lunch, Rizzo walked McQueen to his shiny black Mazda, which sat parked at an expired meter on Old Fulton Street. They shook hands.

“We’ll get it done,” Rizzo said solemnly. “Just a little later than we figured.”

McQueen, two Manhattans sitting heavily on his eyelids, smiled sadly. “Yeah,” he said, “we’ll get it done.”

PRISCILLA JACKSON
took a seat on the heavy wooden chair beside Joe Rizzo’s squad room desk. She tossed the legal-size papers onto the cluttered desk surface.

“Well, Joe,” she said, “I read all three.”

Rizzo glanced at the sworn statements of Jimmy Cocca, Andy Hermann, and Nunzio Nottadomo, taken earlier by Six-Two personnel.

“Good,” he said. “Now you know as much as I do. Good statements, weren’t they? Bobby Dee might not be the best bull on the squad, but he
is
the best statement taker. He gets all the info, short and sweet.”

Priscilla nodded. “I’ll remember that. Now what? Do we start on that bar canvass?”

Rizzo shook his head. “Not yet.” He looked at the wall clock. “It’s only twenty after four. If we do it, we should start callin’ around to the bars later, about eight or so. More likely to catch the same bartender who worked last night.”