Black Water Transit (26 page)

“What was in that briefcase?”

“Nothing. Case files. Reports. My Rolodex stuff. Contacts.”

“You said it was your whole fucking life.”

Casey’s face was hard and flat and she seemed to freeze up.

“I was upset. You and that prick Zaragosa had just sandbagged me. How the fuck did you think I was going to handle it? You guys made me feel like shit.”

“Did Vince say anything about Morgan?”

“Yeah.”

“Care to share it with me?”

“No. And don’t any of you be stomping around in my head anymore. I’m too tired for any more of this pop psych crap. Okay?”

She put her head up against the window and closed her eyes and had nothing more to say until they reached Casey’s apartment block on Temple Court in Brooklyn. Across the road the sun was slanting sideways through the trees of Prospect Park and the dusty air was glowing yellow and gold. Nicky pulled up outside the entrance and touched Casey’s shoulder.

“Casey. We’re here.”

Casey’s eyes opened. She blinked a couple of times, sat up, shook out a cramp in her shoulder.

“Thanks, Nicky. See you in the morning.”

“Okay. What’s next?”

“Vince says we should start with Pike.”

“Rocket science. Where is he?”

“Vince says the ATF has been in touch with Pike’s
office in Maryland. CCS tells them Pike is on a business trip. Won’t say where. Told the ATF he’d taken a private charter flight out of LaGuardia around midnight last night. Outfit called Slipstream Jetways. Left on one of their Lears.”

“And that gives him no time to be the shooter at Red Hook and then make LaGuardia. Neat. Where’s he supposed to have gone?”

“ATF asked for the flight plan. There wasn’t one. You don’t have to file one if the flight is private. CCS asked the ATF if there was a warrant on Pike.”

“And …?”

“ATF said no. CCS said good-bye. Then some macho ATF muscle-head leaned on this poor female behind the desk, threatened her, made her cry, according to Vince. Called her a stupid … I hate the word. Starts with a
c
and ends with
t
.”

“Cat? Coot? Coronet?”

“Don’t be clever, Nicky. You don’t have the tools. When Vince got involved, the ATF told Vince this was a federal matter. Vince told them that Pike was wanted in connection with the death of an NYPD detective. They said they’d keep him informed, they were the lead agency, and he should keep out of their way.”

“What did Vince say?”

“He told them to … you’re Italian, right?”

“Last time I checked.”

“What does something man-jah va fa-gool something mean?”

“Let’s say it’s an eating disorder. Then what?”

“So then Vince talks to Slipstream himself, asks the clerk very nicely, and the woman is happy to tell him the plane went to Harrisburg.”

“So?”

“So he sent Dexter Zarnas to Harrisburg this morning.
He’s going to talk to the airport people there, see if he can confirm that Pike was on the plane when it landed.”

“The ATF will be all over Harrisburg.”

“Vince doesn’t care. He told Dexter to do whatever he had to.”

“What about us?”

“There’s an internal shooting inquiry at One Police. Ten o’clock sharp. You’re picking me up here tomorrow morning.”

“In what? This piece of shit?”

“No. Motor pool has a Caprice for us. You’re taking this unit in to them. They’ll give you the keys. Where you staying?”

“I have a room at the Thunderbird. In Yonkers. What’s Vince doing in all of this?”

“Planning Jimmy Rock’s funeral. It’ll be a big one. Saint John the Divine. Dress blues all around. We have to be there.”

“When is it?”

“Monday. June twenty-sixth. Two o’clock.”

“Okay. Well, if that’s it, then I’m going to bed.”

“Good idea.”

Casey climbed out of the car, started to walk down the path, and then stopped halfway to the door. She turned and came back to the car, leaned down into the window. Her look was harder in some way. She studied Nicky for a moment.

“Nicky, have you got a minute?”

“Sure.”

“Come up for a bit? There’s somebody I want you to meet.”

“Me? Meet who?”

“You’ll see. Come on.”

“Casey, I’m dead beat.”

“So was I, but that didn’t stop you from dragging me
all the way up to Peekskill and feeding me through a bark chipper.”

“Is this about Jimmy Rock?”

“No. It’s about me.”

“Am I going to enjoy this?”

“Not if I work it right.”

“Jesus, Casey …”

She held his eyes and it was clear she wasn’t going away. Nicky let out a sigh, nodded once, got out of the cab, made a move to lock it, and remembered the shattered side window. He put the keys in his pocket and followed her into the building. There was an elevator at the far end of a long wood-paneled hallway that smelled of Lysol and bleach and stale cigarette smoke. Casey dragged the mesh gates open and stepped inside. Nicky followed inside and the cab sagged on its cables. Casey said nothing, punched the number-five button.

They rode up in silence. The cab creaked and groaned and rattled. Nicky looked for the safety permit and saw a blank frame with a gang tag scratched in the old glass. At the fifth floor he followed Casey down a long narrow hallway lit by bare bulbs toward a door at the end. Casey stopped, waited for him to catch up.

She unlocked the door and opened it. Nicky’s first sensation was the powerful smell of marijuana being smoked. When Casey looked at his face, waiting for a comment, he said nothing at all.

The apartment was large, done in a forties style, with plaster arches between the rooms, trimmed in gumwood and oak. The furniture was rounded and massive, a huge dark-green leather couch, two armchairs also in green leather, polished hardwood floors, a boarded-up fireplace with a painted art deco screen, an inlaid sideboard with a stereo, low table lamps in some sort of white stone with stained-glass shades in tones of amber, rose, and emerald-green. Music was playing, a big-band sound.
Nicky recognized Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood.” The light from the setting sun filled the room with a hazy yellow glow. Someone was lying on the couch, a woman. She stirred as Casey came into the room, sat upright on the couch, wrapping a pink satin robe around her body. Cigarette smoke rose up into the yellow light, snaking and twisting in the dead air. She covered her eyes against the shaft of sideways sunlight and peered at them both.

“Casey, is that you?”

“It’s me. I’ve got someone from the office.”

The woman stood up, swayed a little. She was white, so white she looked to be made of candle wax, very thin and gray-haired, her skin dry and her face deeply fissured, as if marked by continuous pain. She looked at Nicky and then back to Casey. When she spoke, her voice was soft, husky, and accusing.

“Casey. I’ve been calling. I’ve been sick. The television said there were shootings. Policemen were killed. I called your boss. He said you were okay, but he wouldn’t put me through to you.”

“I know. I’m okay. I’m sorry. They wouldn’t let me call you until the scene had been released. This is Nicky Cicero.”

The older woman rose to her feet and walked toward Nicky. She was working on a tentative smile, but there was something very wrong with her. She put out her hand and came in close. Her pupils were huge in dark-brown eyes, her cheeks thick with uneven powder, her mascara blurred and indistinct. That she had once been beautiful was there in her bones and in her carriage, which was still erect and poised, but it was layered and hidden by the slackness and dullness in her eyes. When she spoke, her low husky voice was slurred, as if she’d had a stroke, which was what Nicky first thought—she had reached him by now, after a difficult navigation over ten feet of hardwood flooring—she put out her hand like
a countess waiting for a kiss on the ring and gave him a smile that was borderline grotesque.

“Hello,” she said, “I’m happy to meet you.”

Nicky was hit by a cloud of scent—something spicy, and an overlay of stale marijuana smoke. He put out a hand to take hers.

She stumbled into him and he caught her. She reeked of beer and brandy. Her gray hair was like straw and it scratched at his cheek as she fell against him. He caught her shoulders and pushed her upright—her bones were like wires—and she gave him an awful leer, heavy with ruined sexual promise.

“Sorry, Nicky … my God, he’s
gorgeous
 … Nicky … you’re gorgeous … isn’t he, Casey …”

Nicky smiled at her and glanced over at Casey. Casey’s eyes were shining. She looked scalded. Nicky waited for an introduction that didn’t seem to be coming.

“Casey …?”

When she finally spoke, her voice was dry and low.

“Nicky. I’d like you to meet Elena Spandau.”

Nicky looked back down at the older woman, and then he saw the bones, the slightly Oriental eyes.

“Miss Spandau, pleased to meet you.”

“And I you,” she said, wavering like a flame in a breeze. She tried for a curtsey and wobbled. “But it’s Mrs. Spandau.…”

Casey cut in.

“Nicky, this is my mother.”

Jack’s arraignment was held under a press ban, all reporters barred from the hearing, in a broom-closet courtroom down a dead-end hallway on the third-floor annex of the old federal courthouse. It went just the way Flannery said it would. Jack stood upright and steady in his shackles, wearing the same clothes he’d been arrested in that morning, blue jeans and cowboy boots and a white T-shirt under a blue blazer, his face set and hard, listening while Valeriana Greco read a list of RICO charges in a voice ringing with outraged virtue and a sleepy-eyed judge in a mud-brown business suit held his sagging face up with one liver-spotted hand, watching Jack through his half-closed lids, his spindly fingers drumming a little paradiddle on the desktop pad.

Flannery had Jack plead not guilty to each charge as it was read off, and then asked the judge for a release on own recognizance. Greco popped up like a duck in a shooting gallery and quacked on feverishly about Risk of Flight and Security Concerns and Ongoing Investigations—Jack got a master-class lesson in the fine art of speaking in capitals—while Flannery humphed and brooded and the sleepy-eyed judge nodded away at Greco as if his neck had been presnapped especially for the occasion. Which was true. The fix was already in. She reached her aria, peaked on a high note about the Majesty of the Law, and in the pounding silence that followed, Jack found his ears were ringing. The judge blinked twice, sat up straight, reached for the gavel, raised it high, paused as if he were waiting for a suicidal
cockroach to scuttle into position, and brought it down hard, a practiced snapping crack that sounded like a pistol shot.

Bang.

Bail denied.

Bang.

Prisoner to be transported this day.

Bang.

It’s Miller time.

Bang bang.

Greco made meaningful eye contact with Jack and offered him a vicious victory leer that made Jack think of a poxed-up nun in fishnet stockings singing a Weimar drinking song in a basement bar in Munich. Flannery gripped Jack’s shoulder hard as the guards led him away, narrowed his eyes to signify his rock-ribbed resolve to fight them on the beaches and fight them in the streets, and barked fiery promises at his back, until the big steel door slammed shut between them.

Jack was taken back to the same interview room and rebolted to the wooden chair. The steel door slammed shut with a dull boom that shook the floorboards. He heard their boots in the hall, and a muffled joke, and some low rolling laughter. Then he was alone.

Time floated in the still air of the tiny windowless room, stirred by nothing but Jack’s slow and steady breathing. The chair back prodded his ribs and kidneys as if it had a personal grudge. His legs went to sleep after thirty minutes and he followed soon afterward.

The prison transport came for Jack an hour later, at eight-thirty that evening, a steel-plated white van with squared-off angles, two windows in either side made of thick green glass. It emptied itself of two U.S. marshals, who boomed into the holding room, woke Jack up with the slamming of the door, and then he was blinking up at a man and a woman, the male black, in his early thirties,
with a double row of burned-in tribal scars across both cheeks. His eyes were as black as an oil slick and shiny with contempt. The woman was a frowzy trailer-park blonde, a face marked up by bad genes and beer, with wide-spaced brown eyes and a round ruddy face. Both of them were short, beefy, and packed with muscle, both wearing suit pants and white shirts under Kevlar flak jackets, heavy combat boots, thick black equipment belts hung with cuff cases, radios, pepper spray, and matte-gray Glock pistols.

The woman showed Jack her ID, introduced herself as Deputy United States Marshal Sharon Callahan. Her voice was husky, and she smelled of a very recent cigarette. Her air was official and bored, but the first thing she did was take the ankle chains off Jack and undo the chain that held him to the wooden chair. When Jack stood up, he almost collapsed, but Callahan held him up, her fingers on his upper arm as solid as angle iron, with a grip he felt right to his bone.

“Sweet Jesus, cowboy. How long have these assholes had you trussed up like this?”

Jack straightened up, hiding the sharp pain in his lower back.

“I don’t know. What time is it?”

“They took your watch, hah? Was it a nice one, cowboy?”

“My name is Jack Vermillion. It was a Rolex.”

“Too bad. Guards around here are worse than gypsies. You sure you aren’t a cowboy? Got that big white longhorn mustache. Pair of Dan Post boots there. Wear your hair all combed back. Got the look in your eyes. You look just like Heck Thomas. You know who Heck Thomas was?”

“No. I don’t.”

“Famous lawman. A life-taker. I own his Winchester carbine. Paid eleven thousand dollars for it. Bought it at
a gun show in Cheyenne. Damn, look at this. It’s twenty minutes to nine. Buster and I gotta get you on the truck. We got a long run ahead of us.”