The Graving Dock (16 page)

You were supposed to fight the bad guys, and never jam a comrade up—sometimes the two rules smacked up against each other, and then what did you do?

For Jack, his first moment of disillusionment had come with his very first assignment, out in the Sixty-eighth precinct. They had put him on nights, in a radio car with an older, cynical cop—a hairbag, as the cop slang put it—a drinker named John Flannery Jack had been eager to work the streets, to make some collars, and he kept trying get his partner to show him the ropes, but the old vet was an expert
coop
er: He knew every spot in the precinct where you could pull into a hidden driveway, an alley, a back parking lot…He’d say, “Wake me if anything comes over the radio, sport,” and then he’d slouch back with his hat over his face. Jack felt like a kid in the presence of the old cop, and didn’t feel like he could argue. He tried cajoling, but Flannery just told him to get out and walk around if he was so goddamn fired up. He couldn’t do that, couldn’t leave the car and the radio, so he just sat there squirming in the passenger seat, cursing his luck. What was he gonna do? Turn the old guy in? Lose the trust of every cop in the precinct? Make it so nobody would wanna work with him? He had kept his mouth shut for three months, until he finally got a chance to switch to a younger and more arrest-hungry partner.

This situation was worse because it wasn’t just about him and his partner. It also involved the man’s whole damn family.

Jack stood up. “I’ll do the dishes.”

“Really?” Michelle asked.

“Sure. You cooked.” With his ex-wife, she had done all of the household chores, but he figured that it was a new era. Michelle had her own day job, and he ought to pull his weight on the home front. It seemed only fair.

In the kitchen, he stacked the dishes in the sink and waited until the water grew hot. He held his hand under the faucet, and the feel of the water on his hands was soothing. It helped him think. He ran the sponge over the plates as he tumbled the options. If he turned a blind eye, his whole career could go down the tubes. On the other hand, if he simply turned Balfa in to Internal Affairs—and if Balfa was telling the truth about the kid—then he’d be completely ruining the guy’s family.

He turned off the water and sighed. Maybe there was a third way. He knew a good detective, an old partner, who had been called in to work for the IAB. Maybe the man could use Balfa undercover in whatever mess he was involved with, break a big case. Maybe he could help the guy turn the whole thing around…And maybe they could throw some kind of Department fund-raiser to help the girl…

First thing in the
A.M.,
he decided, he would make a call…

“DO YOU WANT SOME
water?” Michelle said later. She swung her legs over the edge of the bed and pushed her feet into a pair of fleecy slippers she had bought Jack as a little present when he got out of the hospital.

“What?” He lay staring at the ceiling, frowning.

“I’ll get you some,” she said, shaking her head.

In the kitchen, when she turned on the light, a little cockroach scurried beneath the counter, tiny legs pumping wildly. She filled a couple of glasses, but then perched on the edge of a chair for a moment. She thought of her stepfather, of a certain edgy tone in his voice, which had always seemed to be there—he didn’t need much of a reason. A familiar sourness crept into her chest.

She stood and headed for the bedroom, but detoured into the bathroom on the way. She set the water glass down on the sink and stared at her reflection in the mirror. Usually, she thought of herself as she had been in her twenties. Sometimes, though, she still felt like a little girl. She had been so young, but she had had to mother her own mother, who slowly collapsed as the love of her life, Michelle’s father, wasted away. Then he died, and her mother had disappeared into herself for a couple of years, and then came the stepfather. A man in the prime of his life, vigorous, but selfish and demanding. Michelle had finally escaped, gone off to college, gotten her degree, and then what was the first thing she had done? Found herself an older man. In shaky health. By the time he had proposed to her, they both knew he was on the way out. Emphysema. And she had married him anyhow. Something in her needed to protect men, to try to save them.

Jack coughed in the bedroom and she turned, startled. She had mothered him, too, in the hospital and after. What was she setting herself up for? She had read an article about it in a magazine.
Repetition compulsion.
You kept revisiting the situation, trying to make it right…She turned back to the mirror, which certainly did not reflect a little girl. Her skin was rough, weathered looking. Little crow’s-feet in the corners of her eyes.

Nobody was getting any younger.

She shivered and returned to the bedroom.

She and Jack lay in bed for a few minutes, silent, separate, curled away from each other. And then, unexpected, she felt his warm hand on the base of her spine. He pressed it against her cool skin, then smoothed it up over her tight back muscles. He massaged them, kneaded her shoulders, brushed her hair out of the way, and firmly stroked the back of her neck. She pressed her face down into the pillow, felt the tension leaving her body with each long breath.

Suddenly she felt closer to him than she had for weeks.

Relationships were such a mysterious things.

S
LEET PEPPERED THE ROOF
of the car like buckshot. Several inches of snow that had fallen overnight were now rimed with ice, and Jack glanced out from his warm submarine cabin to watch passersby totter along the sidewalks, slipping occasionally and throwing their arms up like actors in some old slapstick movie.

Traffic was crawling. He glanced at his watch: He was due to meet with his old friend down at the IAB office in Manhattan in fifteen minutes, yet here he was still plodding toward the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. He groaned; he wanted to get past this situation as soon as possible, to let someone else worry about Tommy Balfa’s screwed-up life. As soon as he got downtown, it would no longer be his problem.

He finally made it up onto the highway, which rose on stilts as it neared the Brooklyn waterfront. Below and to the right slid the dark polluted worm of the Gowanus Canal; to the left stretched the warehouses and loading docks of Red Hook. Beyond them, through the sleet, the winter-dulled harbor faintly shone. The traffic was just starting to pick up when his beeper went off. He pulled out his cell phone.

“Jack? It’s Mike Pacelli.” Harbor Unit. “You said you wanted to hear about any unusual activity along the waterfront. Something just came in. We got a call that someone might have just broken into a boat out in Bay Ridge. I’m in the middle of a rescue in Coney Island right now, but I’m sending one of our patrol launches over. Are you anywhere near there?”

Jack swerved toward an exit ramp. There was no way he could pass up an opportunity to catch the Governors Island killer—IAB would have to wait. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.” He pulled his rotating beacon from beneath the seat and stuck it up on the dash. He cut around an eighteen-wheeler and felt his tires grabbing for traction as he skidded down the ramp. He clutched the wheel with one hand and his cell phone with the other. He needed backup. He had already learned his lesson about going out on a dangerous call alone—he had a bullet-shaped scar on his chest to prove it. Tommy Balfa was still point man on the case, but the thought of working with the detective this morning was hardly appealing. He tried Gary Daskivitch, but got his voice mail. He tried the Seven-six desk, got a sergeant he knew, and learned that Balfa’s boss was out on a call. He thought of Raymond Hillhouse, but the man was in Manhattan. He frowned; time was slipping away.

Cursing under his breath, he punched in Balfa’s cell number. Maybe this could be the detective’s chance to rehabilitate his sorry ass.

Balfa didn’t answer.

Jack called the Seven-six desk again. “Do you know where Detective Balfa is this morning?”

“Yeah,” the sergeant answered. “He’s at home. He called in sick today”

Yeah, right,
Jack thought.
Sick with guilt.
He hoped the detective hadn’t gone a runner. “Do you know where he lives?”

“Gimme a sec.”

The sergeant came back on the line with an address in Sunset Park. Half the way toward the marina.

B
ALFA ANSWERED THE DOOR
fully dressed. He started to say something, but stopped, a look of total surprise on his face. “What are you doing here?”

Jack got the sense that the detective had been expecting someone else. He didn’t bother giving him any grief about his fake sick day. “Let’s go,” he said brusquely. “I’ve got a hot lead on our Governors Island perp.”

“I can’t,” Balfa sputtered. “I have things—”

“No.
This
is what you’re doing. Get your coat and let’s go.”

He pushed the detective in the chest, and then—without asking—he followed the man into his modest two-story aluminum-sided house.

“I’m not really—”

“Come on,”
Jack said. “We nail this guy and you’re gonna be in a lot better shape. Do something right for once.”

Balfa stared at him for a moment, nodded, and then walked down a hallway and pulled his shoulder holster and coat from a hook on the back of the kitchen door.

The thought of riding with the other man, armed, didn’t make Jack happy, but if Balfa was prepared to shoot him right out on a city street, he could certainly have done it the day before. “Joe Reppi gave me your address,” he said, letting Balfa know that the desk sergeant at the Seven-six knew he was here, just to be on the safe side. “Charlie Unit’s gonna meet us at the scene.” He glanced impatiently at his watch. “Where’s your Kevlar?”

BALFA STAYED MOSTLY SILENT
during the high-speed ride out to the shore, except that at one point he asked, “Have you thought about what we talked about yesterday?”

Jack shook his head. “Not now. We need to focus on what’s going down here, one hundred and ten percent.” The scar on his chest told him all too well what a moment’s inattention could bring. And he didn’t see any need to warn Balfa about his appointment with his friend at IAB. He was doing the jerk a favor.

Ten minutes later, they reached the shore. Jack peered out his side window at a small marina, where five or six small boats were docked. He couldn’t see anyone, and nothing looked out of place. There was no sign of the Harbor Unit, either.

He gave them a couple of minutes, then decided that he couldn’t wait. “Let’s go,” he said, stepping out into the cold. The sleet had stopped, but the wind was fierce; it sanded his exposed face and hands. He opened his trunk and pulled out his own Kevlar vest.

As the two detectives neared the marina, leaning into the stiff wind, Jack heard a sharp pinging noise. It took him a moment to place it over the dense flutter of the wind and slap of the waves: just a cable clinking against a boat’s hollow metal mast. Nobody was visible. Motioning to Balfa to stay silent, Jack stopped and listened.
Clink, clink.
The wind whistled in from across the harbor. The sky was gray, leaden, sullen. Jack stared out across the churning gray and white water, but couldn’t see any police boats.

He turned his head sharply. Had he imagined it?
Another noise, muffled
…Something moving inside one of the boats. He scanned them slowly. And then he spotted an inflatable Zodiac tethered to the last vessel, a sleek modern sailboat with blue covers wrapped around its furled sails. He gestured to Balfa and they moved forward carefully out onto the pier; the concrete was covered with snow and ice.
There, again
—a muffled knock from inside the last boat.

The ice crunched underfoot and he winced as he moved forward. As he came up to the boat, he reached into his coat and pulled out his gun. He was sweating now, despite the cold, envisioning another bullet slamming into his chest.

He scanned the harbor again: still no sign of backup. Next to him, Balfa reached into his coat and pulled out his own service weapon. Jack prayed for the sound of the Charlie Unit launch; it was too stressful trying to keep one eye on the boat, one eye on his own partner. Balfa, though, seemed focused on the job at hand.

Jack communicated with him through gestures.
I’ll pull the boat closer; you step aboard. I’ll be right behind you.
(At this point, he had no intention of stepping out in front of the man.)

Balfa nodded. Jack bent down and took hold of a mooring rope attached to the rear of the boat, some four feet away. He pulled slowly and it arced in toward the dock and thudded against some old tires strapped to the side of the pier. Balfa grabbed a cable that encircled the deck and stepped over it. Jack dropped the rope and followed suit. The deck was slick, and rocked with the waves. He reached out and grabbed hold of the blue-wrapped boom. It swung a bit, but it was tethered to the deck; it made for an unsteady support as he stepped toward the cabin. He walked on the left side of the boom, Balfa on the right. A textbook pattern—you never wanted to approach together and present a single target.

He heard footsteps down below. A wooden hatch at the rear of the cabin swung open. Jack raised his gun. A man’s head emerged. He looked to be about sixty-five or older—not a vigorous young carpenter and seaman, someone who could sneak aboard an island, build a coffin, and beat a security guard to death.

“Can I help you?” the man said. He had a thick, upswept shock of wirelike gray hair; a craggy face with bright blue eyes, a sharp nose, and a thin, sour mouth. Prominent ears. He sounded low-key and polite, but he had the bristly, rather offended look of a hawk or eagle.

“We’re police officers,” Jack said. “Would you mind stepping up on deck?”

The man looked puzzled. “Of course not. I was just closing up my boat for the winter.”

He came up carrying a big paper shopping bag. It looked to be filled with clothes. “What’s going on?” the man said. As he clambered out, Jack noticed that the clothes he wore seemed wrinkled and dirty. He stared into the man’s stark eyes. Something was wrong.