The Odds (5 page)

“No.”

“More gaga slobbering over you?”

“Kind of.”

“Get out. I don’t even want to know somebody like you, gets teachers all hot and bothered. Creaming their jeans over your IQ.”

“You’re gross.”

“I am gross and that’s why people love me. Guess what? Your pals, the future criminals of America, have a shitload of cash on them.”

“Do they?”

“They ever give you anything good to try?”

“No.”

“I’ve seen you with them. Is that your new crowd now?” Ryan raises his eyebrows in an almost compliment.

“They want me to write their homework.”

“Well, they can pay, that’s for sure. They’re in the money. Hey. Meet us tomorrow up at the court? If you’re not too busy with the fast crowd.”

“Yeah, sure.”

Ryan made a pantomime of playing basketball. He dribbled, backpedaled, leapt up to touch a spot over one of the classroom doors. Everybody in class looked out into the hall and Ryan shouted, “In!” The boys in the room laughed and the girls giggled; the teacher instructed them to keep their eyes on the blackboard. Joel’s friend called himself Ryan the Crazy Cracker. He even told teachers to call him that. Joel liked Ryan pretty well, even though they had just about nothing in common.

   WHEN THE TWO HOMICIDE detectives arrived at Christie’s room in the hospital, Marina, Christie’s wife, stood in the doorway. She wore black pants and a black sleeveless turtleneck and some kind of dazzling earrings that glinted through her thick hair. It was bad enough that she was beautiful and exotic, but she had to be talented and
nice
, too. Everyone said so, Colleen thought irritably. It was hard not to hate her a little.

“I’ll just be in the hallway,” Marina said.

Franklin Farber was already at Christie’s bedside.

Christie smiled. “Have a seat.” Colleen and Potocki took the chairs on the other side of the bed.

“We have a situation,” Farber said. “As I was saying to your commander, we need to come to an agreement before he’s carted down the hall.”

Carted down the hall
. What did that mean?

“We’re shorthanded,” he continued. “We’re in the middle of something significant. So we’re borrowing the two of you.” He pointed to Colleen and Potocki. “I’ll brief you myself. We’re close to making a large bust, and we need reinforcements.”

“This is something to do with our case?” Colleen asked. Christie shot her a look. “Because he’s just a kid—and it looks like a hot shot. Could be a homicide.” She looked to Christie for support.

Christie bit his lip.

Farber said, “Okay, let’s just say it’s a homicide. If it came from higher up, we need to step carefully. The organization we’re looking at, it’s complex.” He entwined his fingers. “We need information. Relationships. I’m out of undercover guys, but—” He turned to Christie with a challenging look. “We’ve rattled the cages and we’re borrowing you two.”

It was unfair. Christie was too exhausted to say, no, no, no.

Farber continued. “We have a pizza shop that we know is dirty. Chief wants us to move forward with this. It’s priority. Chief wants me to have a couple of extra people undercover, soft cover, every which way. I’m going to need you.”

Colleen’s heart jumped. A Narcotics operation with surveillance and stings could take two years. She looked away from Farber, trying to get her bearings. Outside the hospital windows, the trees were a fresh lime green, blossoms hung off the boughs. Everything was damp, but the day was turning sunny now. Spring in Pittsburgh was gorgeous.

Potocki asked Farber, “Who do we answer to? What are we?”

“One captain on a ship. For the next week or weeks or months, you’ll report to me.” Then Farber said, “Detective Greer would be very good to send into that pizza shop. The new guy who runs it is a good-looking fellow, seems to live alone from what we can tell. He might be susceptible to her.” He turned to Colleen, who thought her face must be very red by now. “I heard how you got the confidence of that guy last year.”

Colleen knew he meant the Washington and McCall cases.

“So you go in, soft cover. You’re a detective on the case with the overdose. Just a very friendly detective. Who breaks a lot of rules and is, you know, single, friendly.”

Just then an intern came into the room. “Mr. Christie? We’re ready for you now.”

“Give me five minutes?”

The intern winced a small disapproval. “Okay.”

“They decided to start the chemo today,” Christie said.

Colleen seized on the chemo issue, partly to avoid Farber. “On a Friday?” she asked. “That’s odd. I mean sequencing. I read a little about it. They usually want to do a series in a row.”

Christie shrugged. “He said they have some medical staff on weekend shift, so they’re starting. They told me I was going to be pretty punk and not want to be making decisions after today. So … ”

“You’ll want to, Boss. I know you.”

Christie smiled. In the hallway Marina paced.

“Back to you,” Christie said to Farber.

Farber lowered his voice. “Okay. This is top secret.” He produced a legal pad and started making a rough map. “Pizza shop is called Dona Ana. Way over here in Morningside is an auto repair shop with a renta-wreck component on the side. Cell phone shop in Squirrel Hill. These businesses essentially belong to the same two guys, a man and his brother-in-law, names are Stile and Petrucci. We don’t have the identity of the guy who regularly visits the pizza shop and reups the street guys. Goes by the street name, K. Also goes by George White and George Victor. Neither one checks out as legit. We know he’s living pretty high. The shop can’t make that kind of money. We do know he goes to the Morningside shop a couple of times a week, picks up a different car each time, and presumably takes it to Philly. Two days ago, our men found him on the Turnpike on his way back. They were able to tail him to Pittsburgh. He drove to an apartment in Oakland and carried some stuff inside. My guess—I’d put it in the Tide detergent box. Giant size. So we can see the machine working, parts of it. Questions so far?”

“How big is the Pittsburgh part of it?” Potocki asked.

“We think he keeps on four boys, give or take, in each area he supplies. We have four areas so far that we know about. East Liberty. South Side. Wilkinsburg. North Side.”

“That’s a big operation,” Potocki said.

Farber nodded, swallowed hard with excitement. “Our guy lives in a fancy house owned by a Melissa Thomas. She’s some kind of ghostowner. He’s the only person who ever goes into it.”

“He uses mostly black kids?” Potocki asked. “Like this BZ?”

“Black and white. Completely integrated business. Equal opportunity. What else? Cell phones, yeah, he has a few kids on cell phones, not all.”

“I thought cell phones were out these days,” Colleen said. “Because of tracing.”

“This operation is old-fashioned in national terms. A few still use them.”

To their surprise, Christie stepped in. “This scum—K, whoever?— apparently has a talent for finding kids who are loners. He either finds them or imports them. Runaways, nine times out often.”

“That would explain our OD. Nobody so far knows who he is.”

Farber said, “He likes them dispensable.” With that, he reached into his pocket and put an empty stamp bag on Christie’s hospital table.

“Whoa, watch it!” Christie joked.

“This is what we see most often.” He pointed to a stamp bag that looked like the one Colleen had taken from BZ’s shoe. “This one has been stepped on pretty good. It’s down to seven percent or so. It makes the users crazy of course. Whoever steps on it marks the bag with the littlest dot in the corner. Otherwise it tends to look like a lot of others. We see a couple of brands. Power Times Three, Cuban Special, and Kong are the most frequent. The other ones that look like it without the dot on them come in at around twelve to fifteen percent.”

“The bag BZ shot up was different,” Colleen said.

“I’m not surprised. You two are canvassing on the homicide. Here’s what I want. Greer, you’ll include the pizza shop, even though it’s not that close to where the kid was found. Make it believable. Get friendly with the guy if you can. We have our Janowski living at the Y for three days. He’s going to establish himself, go up to the shop with others from the Y, eventually hang there when he can.”

Janowski was a nice guy, good-looking, forthright, clean-cut. A family man. Colleen liked him from the academy days, and she’d noticed how scruffy he was looking lately. Undercover at the Y made sense of that.

The intern came back for Christie, saying, “No excuses this time.”

They had to leave the room with hurried good-byes.
Carted down the hallway
—Farber’s phrase—infuriated Colleen. Marina gave them all a small wave and went back into the room, her face full of worry.

They walked to the elevators with Farber and rode down together.

Farber asked, “Walking out?”

“We’re going to stop at the coffee shop,” Colleen said. “Didn’t get any this morning.” It was a lie, but it got rid of Farber.

Colleen led Potocki to the coffee shop, explaining, “I know the way. I ate here last night.” She poured coffees for both of them while Potocki paid. They met up at the service table with the sugar and Splenda.

“What an assignment. I’m supposed to make a pass at some guy. I think I’m out of practice.”

Potocki stirred cream into his coffee. “When an attractive woman hangs around and acts friendly and a man has a normal ego, he thinks it’s a pass.”

She knew he was right.

He sipped the coffee. “Not very good.”

They started down the hallway, moving slowly so as not to spill the bad coffee.

“So you get to do some acting, huh?”

“Such as it is. You know I had a conversation with Christie’s wife about acting. You know she’s a professional actress?”

“I know.”

“She told me she would have liked to become a detective. Funny, huh?”

“It means she understands the work. Better than most wives, that is.”

“I guess,” Colleen said, feeling a small tug of disappointment that Marina continued to get high grades. “She told me if she ever did join the force, she’d want to be undercover.”

“Very interesting. Could work.”

“All I know is musicals in high school. But I keep getting acting detail.”

“You sang and danced?”

“I didn’t do any of it well.”

“It’s fun to think about.”

“What is?”

“You being bad at singing and dancing.”

Colleen swatted him, lightly enough not to spill his bad coffee.

It had turned cloudy outside again, just like that.

Her phone rang. “Aha, the lab,” she said to Potocki.

“How do you do it?”

She listened as the guy at the lab told her the cutting agent was baking powder, that the full bag was cut with it down to about 7 percent heroin and that the residue in the other bag was as pure as he’d ever seen, something like 90 percent.

“Fantastic. Thank you so much. And … you haven’t seen this ninety percent around?”

“I sure haven’t.”

“Ninety percent,” she murmured to the tech. “Can you do any further tests on it, try to see where it came from?”

“I’ll try.”

She ended the call as Potocki shook his head, saying, “You flirt.”

“Did you hear me flirting?”

“That’s what’s so tricky about it. It’s in your voice. I’m not condemning. I’m admiring. So. Let’s get you to the pizza shop.”

   THE CLATTER OF GURNEYS and the intermittent interruptions of the PA system over the voices of the nearby doctors and nurses seemed a comfort. Christie tried to breathe steadily.

An aide came in, creeping up toward the bed in a kind of deference. Christie sensed her first in his peripheral vision, then turned to her. She was large, sweet-faced. “I heard you was here. I seen you on TV a lot of times. How you doing?”

“Doing okay.”

“That’s the way. We’re going to get you started. They give you some reading about it?”

“Oh, yes.” Diarrhea, chills, nausea, weakness, vagueness, the whole ball of wax.

They had a TV playing in the treatment room. The voices bothered him. The next time somebody came in, he said, “I don’t want news.”

Instead of turning the thing off, the new aide just changed stations. “There,” she said.

He watched a wounded cowboy crawling into a barn. A lovely woman came in, touched his forehead, brought him water and food, wrapped him, and watched over him.

Marina entered. “They’re going to let me sit with you.” She took his hand and sat waiting with him for the hard part to start, the needle in the arm, the poison.

   CARL HAD MOST OF WHAT HE needed in an abandoned grocery cart: soap, towels, can, jars of tap water, two blankets, sheets, pillow, extra clothes, bread, peanut butter, three books, radio, broom, pills—Tylenol, valerian. He made himself move slowly, as the homeless always did.

He passed Mac’s and Zero’s place, kept going. Seven more houses. When he got to
his
place, he quickly rolled the cart around back of it. The key balked again, and it took forever to work it. But then he was in. Complete darkness.

He needed to buy flashlights. And extra batteries. And more food.

For a while, he worked at chipping an end off a thin piece of wood on a kitchen window. He did the same in what had once been the dining room. The openings let in only the smallest bit of light, but the light would eventually save batteries.

He was shivering and sometimes crying again. Somebody had killed BZ. He concentrated on how Wole Soyinka, in solitary confinement with absolutely nothing, found a way to make things. When he had no ink, he made ink out of dirt. When he had no paper, he used toilet paper. Soyinka counted everything to keep himself from going crazy, and that led to doing math problems. He didn’t
learn
math, he
created
math, invented it. Carl piled up the textbook and workbook from the course he’d never finished. He had to work at tasks. Every day. Like a regular person with a job.