The Sleepless (16 page)

God, he wanted Jambo alive. He
needed
Jambo alive. He roared at John Minatello,
‘Don’t!’
but the morning suddenly boomed with two heavyweight shots, and then
boom!
another heavyweight shot, and then
snap! snap! snap!
which was John Minatello’s .38. 

Ralph saw the Beetle’s rear window explode, and a burst of blood spray out of it – almost as if the driver had tossed a cup of coffee into the street.
Shit,
he thought,
he’s killed her.
Then he saw the windshield of Newt’s Plymouth starred and shattered; and a quick, consistent cracking as Newt returned fire. The street was suddenly filled with smoke, and theatrical shafts of light, and Jambo was gone, like a conjuring trick. 

Ralph, panting heavily, leaned to one side of the parked car, then to the other. The fucker had gone, the fucker had gone. He stayed where he was, utterly tense, his knees slightly bent, his gun held upward in both hands, his blue T-shirt darkly circled with sweat. 

‘Where’s he gone?’ he shouted to John Minatello. 

John Minatello’s face was as pale and long as a calf’s-brain sausage. ‘I can’t see him. I thought I hit him.’ 

‘Newt!’ yelled Ralph, in a harsh, high voice. 

‘It’s okay, Ralph!’ Newt shouted back. 

‘Where the fuck is he?’ Ralph demanded. 

‘I don’t know. I didn’t see where he went.’ 

‘What the fuck do you mean, you didn’t see where he went?’ 

‘I mean, I didn’t see where he went.’ 

There was a lengthy silence. Seaver Street was oddly hushed, apart from the ambient murmuring of traffic, and the sound of an L10-11 taking off from Logan, and making its way south-westward. 

Ralph reluctantly edged his way around the back of the car. He held his .44 two-handed, way out in front of him, and he knew that the barrel was trembling, but he put that down to adrenaline. 

‘Mr DuFreyne!’ he called, glancing over at John Minatello. ‘Mr DuFreyne, we’re police officers here, and we have a warrant to arrest you. Now – either you make it easy, or else you make it hard.’ 

The smoke began to drift away; and as the smoke cleared, the silence began to fill up, too. Suddenly there were crowds talking and music playing and dogs barking and trees rustling. 

Ralph leaned down and looked under the car which he was using for protection. He looked all the way across the street. There were plenty of gum wrappers and bottles and squashed drink cans, and a black thing that looked like somebody’s discarded bondage suit, but that was all. 

‘Mr DuFreyne, you’re under arrest but if you co-operate this whole thing could go very easy on you!’ Ralph shouted. ‘Do you hear me? We’re after your buyers, not you! We’re not even interested in Luther! You just tell us who’s been bankrolling this little bit of business, and you can have the deal of a lifetime. Come on, it’s election year! The DA’s pretty sweet on people who act in the public interest. You know that. Look what happened to Mack Rivera.’ 

Again, there was silence. Ralph taxi-whistled to John Minatello to catch his attention, and then indicated with an urgent wave of his gun so that John should leave the comparative safety of a car door, and make his way slowly up the sidewalk until he could see where Jambo DuFreyne had concealed himself. 

The only real worry he had was whether Jambo had done a Harry Lime on him – opened a manhole cover and gone to ground down the sewers. 

He edged along the sidewalk, ducking down now and again to see if he could catch a glimpse of Jambo’s legs. ‘Newt!’ he shouted. ‘Your radio still working?’ 

‘It’s working, Ralph,’ Newt called back. ‘I called for an ambulance already.’ 

‘Shit,’ said Ralph, under his breath. He had a sick sensation in his stomach. He should have let Jambo go, he should have let him get away. The death of a single innocent bystander was too high a price to pay for any bust – even the most spectacular drugs bust in the history of Massachusetts. Even if that girl with the cornrow hair and the hoop earrings wasn’t dead, she was seriously hurt, and her family and her friends and her lawyer and every TV station and newspaper in New England was going to want to know why Detective Ralph Brossard had initiated an ambush when she was still puttering along Seaver Street in the line of fire. 

‘Shit,’ he repeated, ‘shit, shit, shit.’ He was angry and shaken and bitterly regretful; and frightened, too; and all he could taste was shit. 

‘I don’t see him!’ called John Minatello. 

‘Then where the fuck?’ Ralph demanded. 

Newt said, ‘Look under the cars, for Christ’s sake. Look under the cars.’ 

‘I did,’ John Minatello protested. 

Crouching as low as he could, Ralph made his way up the left-hand side of the street. Every now and then, he leaned over sideways, his hand flat on the hot, gritty sidewalk, so that he could check beneath the parked cars for any sign of Jambo’s ankles. An elderly black woman watched him dispassionately from an open window, her eyes magnified by her spectacles, so that they looked like two freshly-opened oysters. 

‘Get the hell inside!’ he snapped at her. 

‘What for?’ she wanted to know. ‘I seen men die before now.’ 

‘Police!’ said Ralph. ‘Now get the hell inside!’ 

At that moment, when he was distracted, Newt shouted out,
‘There he goes!’
and Ralph was conscious of a dark shadow flickering between the cars, all arms and legs, and the showy glitter of a nickel-plated gun. 

‘Freeze!’ he screamed, lifting his .44 and aiming it two-handed along the sidewalk, right to the point where Jambo’s next leap would take him. He saw Jambo’s woolly torn bobbing up and down behind the peeling vinyl roof of a brown Sedan de Ville. He saw Jambo suddenly appear, diving down onto the sidewalk, twisting around, dark glasses and flashing teeth and flashing gun. 

He also saw the young woman push the baby-buggy out of the apartment entrance right behind Jambo, as clear and as plain as anything that he had ever seen, as clear as watching Thelma on a summer’s morning, when he first began to realize that he didn’t love her. Thelma had been smiling, contented, while all the time her days of happiness were already over, and there was nothing left for her but loneliness and tears. 

And this girl smiled, too, as she leaned forward to wipe her baby’s dribbly chin. As Jambo fired, a heavy, swelling, booming shot. As Ralph fired back, a .44-calibre bullet that left the barrel of his gun at 770 feet per second – and blew apart the baby-carriage like a bomb, mattress, blankets, plastic pony-rattles and bloody flesh. 

Jambo scrambled to his feet, turned, stunned. Newt came stalking across the street with his gun held out stiffly in front of him. He practically pushed the muzzle up Jambo’s nose, and screamed at him, ‘Drop it! Freeze! Face down, you fuck!’ 

Ralph stood with his gun still lifted high, and the girl with the baby turned and looked at him, and nobody had ever looked at him like that, never, not even wives whose husbands he had been compelled to kill; nor men whose sons had hanged themselves in jail. 

John Minatello came over. ‘Ralph,’ he said. ‘Give me the gun.’ 

‘What?’ said Ralph. 

‘Give me the gun. I saw what happened. It wasn’t your fault.’ 

Ralph stared at him. He had never realized before how pale John Minatello was. His skin was white like wax, with large and obvious pores. He had big sad brown eyes and a mole on his right cheek. And that stupid silky brown moustache, the kind that kids grow to show that they’re men. And that ridiculous pink-and-silver Hawaiian shirt, with palm trees and hula girls. 

Newt had forced Jambo flat on his face on the sidewalk, and was handcuffing him, jerkily, silently, like a man trussing a turkey. The girl with the baby-carriage was staring at all of them in disbelief. 

‘My baby,’ she said. She sounded almost as if she were singing, rather than talking.
‘My ba – a – a – aby.’
 

Ralph walked up to her, hesitant, wary. He continued to hold his gun up high, to show her that he didn’t mean her any harm. She was a young pale-skinned black, oval-faced, pretty, with stiffly lacquered hair and thinly plucked eyebrows. She wore a red-and-yellow smock and black leggings. Her eyes were glassy, and she was shaking, and it was obvious to Ralph that she was in shock. As he was, too. 

‘My baby,’ she said; and she reached inside the wrecked baby-carriage and lifted out something that looked like a bloodied rolled-up towel. Except that a small chubby arm swung lifelessly from one side of it, and blood dripped from tiny fingers. 

‘I –’ Ralph began. But his larynx constricted, and his mouth locked, and he was totally unable to speak. He wanted to apologize, he wanted to explain. He wanted to beg her forgiveness. But what was the point of apologizing? What was the point of explaining? And how could he expect her to forgive him, after what he had done? 

John Minatello reached up and eased the .44 out of his hand. 

‘Come on, Ralph, it’s all over.’ 

‘I – didn’t mean to –’ he choked. 

‘It’s okay, Ralph.’ 

The hot brown air was warbling with sirens. An ambulance turned into the far end of Seaver Street, followed by another, and then two squad cars. Ralph allowed John Minatello to usher him back to their Grand Prix. He sat in the passenger seat, with his head bowed, staring at the asphalt pavement. He heard people hurrying backwards and forwards. He heard a window break, but he wasn’t aware of its significance. He looked up after a while and said, ‘John? How was the girl? The girl in the Beetle?’ 

John was leaning against the open door, looking around him anxiously. He glanced at Ralph and said, ‘Hard to say. The EMTs are checking her out now. There’s a lot of blood. Brains, too. Doesn’t look hopeful.’ 

Another window broke. Ralph heard shouting and arguing, and somebody drumming. A brick sailed through the air without warning, and bounced off the back of his car. He raised his head, groggy, shocked. Something was happening but he couldn’t work out what. Another brick flew over, and shattered close to his feet, then another, then a bottle, then a length of piping, which landed on its end and danced on the pavement like Fred Astaire’s cane. 

He stood up. He couldn’t believe what he saw. Seaver Street, which only a few moments before had been sultry and suffocating and deserted, was now crammed with a jostling, screeching, jumping crowd of young blacks. They were tossing bricks and bottles and hubcaps and lengths of timber, and one young blood with a wide-brimmed hat and dreadlocks was whamming out a ferocious reggae rhythm on the hood of a parked car with two metalworking hammers, and yelling, ‘
Latomba! Latomba!’
 

‘What the hell?’ Ralph wanted to know. But at that moment Sergeant Riordan came storming toward him, bull-faced, thick-necked and snorting. 

‘Get your ass out of here, Brossard, you stupid dumb bastard!’ 

‘What the hell’s going on?’ Ralph demanded. 

‘You’re going on, that’s what,’ Sergeant Riordan retorted. ‘You and your fucking cack-handed ambush! You’ve only gone and blown away the first and only son of their beloved local hero, that’s all. Even if they don’t kill us, they’ll wreck this fucking place, and that means eleven years of racial diplomacy and softly-softly and equal policing for all goes down the toilet, one flush, gone for ever. Now get your ass out of here before you get burned or beaten or blown away.’ 

‘What are you talking about, Riordan?’ Ralph yelled at him. ‘We just pulled off the biggest drugs bust this godforsaken city ever saw! And I’m sorry about the baby, all right? I wish it hadn’t happened, but it happened, and there was nothing at all I could do!’ 

John Minatello took hold of his arm. ‘Come on, Ralph, we have to get out of here.’ 

Ralph turned and stared at him. ‘Certainly we have to get out of here. But Jambo comes with us.’ 

‘Newt already took Jambo.’ 

‘Newt took Jambo?’ 

More bottles and bricks smashed all around them, and suddenly – over by the steps that led up to Luther Johnson’s apartment building, a gout of orange fire rolled up, and the sidewalk started to blaze. 

‘Come on, Ralph,’ John Minatello urged him. ‘They’re throwing Molotov cocktails. We’re not equipped to deal with anything like this.’ 

‘Give me my gun,’ Ralph insisted. 

‘Ralph ... you know I can’t do that.’ 

A huge piece of plaster coving burst on the pavement beside them, and almost choked them with dust. So far, two uniformed officers with pump-guns had been keeping the crowd well back, but when the medics lifted the tattered remains of the baby-carriage into the back of their ambulance, and everybody could see for themselves how bloody and burst-apart it was, a shriek of outrage went up, and bottles and bricks landed all around the squad cars in a thunderous, shattering cascade. It was a monsoon downpour of grief and frustration and fury. 

Sergeant Riordan was hit on the shoulder by a triangular lump of concrete; and a bottle clouted Ralph on the back of the head. 

‘Give me my goddamned gun, John!’ Ralph yelled at him. ‘And that’s an order!’ John Minatello hesitated, and glanced at Sergeant Riordan, and hesitated some more, and then handed it back. Ralph snatched it impatiently and cocked it. Sergeant Riordan, smacking concrete dust from his shoulders, snapped, ‘Get your ass out of here, Brossard, and if any one of my men suffers so much as a single fucking scratch, then I’ll be looking out for you myself, and don’t you forget it.’