Afterburn (13 page)

"You should have gone down with her, Rick."

He'd spent a long time thinking about that, but he didn't wish to say so.

"Just want to make sure you know that somebody
else
knows," said Peck.

"Lot of people should have done a lot of things," answered Rick.

"Right, right." The detective nodded dismissively. "Of course, she never told us her system, which made it more serious for her."

Rick listened to the wind saw against the boat's rusted edges. A fish flopped a tail.

"I said she never told us her system."

Rick looked back at the detective. "It was too complicated for you to understand."

The detective shrugged this away. "I heard all those steroids make your balls shrink up."

Here we go, Rick thought.

"You got your balls back now, Rick?" The detective smiled, waiting for a response. "I hope you do, because you're gonna need them. See, all your old pals in Brooklyn didn't forget Christina. How could they? She's a sexy girl, sort of the mysterious type, not with the big hair and all. Tony Verducci remembers her. And he got Mickey Simms to call up the Manhattan D.A. and tell them that he was lying, that everything he said about her on the record was a lie." The detective lifted his eyebrows in disgust. "Now, they don't have to believe that, of course, but Tony Verducci says, I can give you somebody else—who exactly, I don't know, but it could be a lot of people. This is just maybe a week ago. Mickey Simms recants his whole testimony. They make a deal. They actually sit in a room and drink coffee and say, This is a deal. You do this, we do that." The detective retrieved a small box of raisins from his pocket. "I worked like a motherfucker to pull that testimony out of him, and then they go and tear it up and say it was a mistake and Christina Welles and her boyfriend Rick Bocca and the rest of those assholes had nothing to do with a tractor trailer full of air conditioners. 'Course, the fact that I
saw
the truck,
counted
the boxes, that doesn't matter. You with me so far?"

"Yeah," Rick said. "I get it." Which he didn't. None of it made any sense to him, in fact. All he had so far was a story. Anybody could make up a story. He sat against the hood of the police car.

"See, I know that Tony Verducci is behind all of this," the detective went on, chewing a wad of raisins. "He's still running his crew. All over the city. I know you don't talk to these people anymore, Rick, but you remember them. You know all these people, Rick, I know you do. You guys practically had your dicks in each other's butts. So I hear about this thing and start wondering, What the fuck's it about? Why does Tony Verducci want Christina Welles out of prison? That's a good question. But it's not for a good reason, Rick. It's not for her
health
." Peck stopped to chew; his mouth appeared to be full of bugs. "He wants something off that poor girl and he's gone to a lot of trouble to get it. He's put Mickey Simms on a stick and stuck him in everybody's face like a marshmallow, and that makes him somebody who I now
personally
want a piece of, for fucking up all my work, and he's also delivered some other poor asswipe to the D.A. I told them, Don't do it, don't make the deal, you're hanging that poor girl out to dry, because she doesn't know who is doing what anymore. I called the prison, she's putting in her time, okay? No big fights, not much time in the hole, you know? That strikes me as basically unfair. See, this is actually a pretty decent college girl who never should have gotten mixed up with a scumbag mope named Ricky Bocca. She helped him out because she loved him or whatever . . ." The detective paused, eyes full of hate. "This is a girl who never got a break from fucking nobody,
never
, and probably all she wants to do is just put her life back together, and now they're setting her up."

Rick put his hands down on the hood of the car, as if about to be arrested. He felt heavy, heavier than in years. His anxieties from the old days had receded, but, like black ants moving regularly up and down the dark trunk of a tree, remained just perceptible; always he'd known they were there, somewhere—the old connections, the unfinished animosities, the gravity of mutual hatreds.

"See," continued Peck, "I'm thinking Tony Verducci is getting frustrated with the cell phones. He hates them. He drives around with like fifty phones in his backseat, always driving and talking. Uses one, throws it back, uses another. Very hard for us to keep track of his conversations, but it can be done. If we put enough meat into it, we can do it. He knows that, everyone knows that. Plus, lot of people aren't as careful as Verducci. He studies the Colombians, admires them. Shit, I admire them, too. But he knows what he got isn't safe. A lot of these cellular encryption technologies can be beat. He's worried, he's getting pretty old to think about doing time. Man's got grandchildren, one of them with some kind of heart condition. He's paying for the doctors, we know everything. It's time to settle up, consolidate. It's time to put on the slippers. So I think he's got some kind of one last monster deal coming up and he needs the best system he ever had. He needs Christina. It didn't go bad because of
her
, you remember."

Rick remembered. The whole thing had collapsed because he had not noticed the surveillance, felt so comfortable with the off-loading of the air conditioners that he'd even walked down the block to get a sandwich and some cigarettes, and well, the rest of it was one giant fuck-up, with cops everywhere and the crew melting away into the street crowds and Christina sitting in the truck without the keys, having honked the horn to warn everyone and waiting loyally for Rick to come back, which he couldn't do, since Mickey Simms had pulled Rick into the first doorway he could find and stuck his gun in Rick's ear, saying,
Don't go back, man, they already got her, you can't save her, and I'm fucking not going to let you
.

"Now, the other thing," continued the detective, "is that Tony Verducci has a new guy working for him, named Morris. Got kicked out of medical school or something, used to drive an ambulance. I don't know where they found him. Somebody said Vancouver, somebody said San Diego. I don't know, and I don't care. Morris is their go-to guy, you know? Gets in there and actually takes the football over the line—" The detective popped him in the shoulder. "Hey, you know what I'm saying, Ricky?"

Rick nodded.

"Nobody knows how many he's done. He's been around, that's all I can say. We'll get him one of these days, but right now he's out there, he's the dog on the chain. So you see my problem, Rick. I got the D.A.'s Office cutting Christina Welles loose, and she's got no family I can talk to—mother lives somewhere in Florida but never hears from her daughter—I got Tony Verducci still in business, with his new guy Morris in the picture, and I got you, babe."

Rick gazed past the detective. Across the bay cut a magnificent sixty-foot sailboat, full of people who didn't have Rick's problems. He looked back at Peck. "Why don't you talk to Christina yourself?"

"It's fucking impossible to call anybody up at the prison, have a decent conversation. And I just heard all this at eight this morning anyway. And"—here the detective himself looked toward the bright distance of the ocean—"be honest with you, my wife is going into the shop tomorrow, have a breast taken off. St. Vincent's Hospital. I got to be there, see. I'd drive up to Bedford Hills tomorrow real early, I really would, but it's my wife, I got to be there, see where the cancer is, hold her hand when they tell her. Christina is going to be gone by the time I could get up there."

"So you—"

"So, yeah, I came to you, because you're the only card I got, Rick. She's walking out of that prison tomorrow morning, probably around 9:00 a.m."

"Does Tony know that?"

"No, I already thought of that and got the regular discharge time changed for her. I'm looking out for this girl, okay? Once she disappears into the city, it could take a while to find her." Peck pulled a business card out of his pocket. "I was thinking maybe, since you got your balls back, and since you've spent four years out here remembering that
you
should be doing the time just like Christina, that maybe it would be the fucking morally
appropriate
thing to forget about the fucking fish for a little while"—he flicked the card at Rick—"and go to the prison and be there when she gets out."

HE TOOK HIS DINNER
in the village every night, driving his patched quarter-ton pickup along the lane, bumping over the same roots each time, grinding the gears a bit, crunching along the curving, up-and-down gravel, slowing once to let a deer gambol across the road, tail flashing flag-white, flag-white, then continuing until a church steeple rose in view and the shingled houses of the village lay before him. He pulled up in front of the restaurant—a place of local people, farmers taking their wives out, teenage boys shoving burgers into their mouths, the occasional stray artist renting a house through the winter—and parked next to a rusted-out school bus packed with cut firewood. Inside, he slid into his regular booth. The waitressing staff consisted of the woman who had worked there seventeen years and whatever three or four teenage girls from the village currently needed to make money for community college or abortions or getting the hell out. The waitresses long ago had quit bringing Rick a menu and instead, on his instructions, set the same chicken breast platter before him every night. If he was a curiosity to them—a large, bearded man in worn overalls and taped glasses who said little—they knew not to show it. He was old enough that they expected that he would look at them with a certain frank sexual attention, as did most of the older men, yet he remained young enough, dark and muscular and self-composed, that he elicited something in them they didn't quite understand. They knew he lived alone, worked on a fishing boat out of Greenport. They were plain girls, but healthy from outdoor lives, and yet he seemed uninterested in their young bodies, their teenage breasts and slender ankles and hair smelling of cheap shampoo. Sometimes one of the girls got up her courage and asked him his name, but he just shook his head. Their innocence bored him.

Sunset. His ruined truck bounced back down the long lane, and a few minutes later he spent the last light of the day picking the tomatoes in the garden. He ate the ripest ones, getting juice in his beard, and slipped the green ones into his pockets. It was a seventy-nine-day variety. The pumpkin vines curled all over the place; they'd be ready when he got back. Some corn, too. He'd planted twenty rows of thirty plants—enough for the wind to swirl the tassel pollen from plant to plant. He yanked one ear off a stalk, shucked it halfway, and bit the white-yellow kernels, his beard rasping the rough green husk. The raw corn was unseasonably sweet, and this was no small pleasure to him. Rain tomorrow, he figured, looking at the sky—don't have to water. His sunflowers, a ten-foot variety with huge heads, stooped toward the earth, beginning to die. Above him the bats wheeled and dove as the air cooled. In a month or so he would start to burn a few chunks of scrub oak in the woodstove at night. Behind the cottage he yanked the starter on the pump engine next to the well and let it run five minutes, long enough to fill the water tank in the basement of the cottage. Inside, he brushed his teeth under a bare bulb. He examined the splayed bristles of the toothbrush, then slipped out of his overalls and work shirt.

He wanted to go find Christina. But the prudent thing would be to do nothing. Tony always said, Learn from the Colombians, they know how to do nothing. They would drop a five-million-dollar shipment into a warehouse, lock it up, and then do nothing. For months. A year, even. Just let it sit there, shrink-wrapped, metal-belted to a pallet. They would watch it, of course, to see if anyone else was watching. And if nobody showed up, still they might do nothing. Doing nothing was a course of action, doing nothing was choosing to do what you were
already
planning to do, staying inside the original plan. Rick's original plan was to do nothing for a very long time until everybody forgot about him. The problem with his plan was that it assumed that Christina was in prison. Peck understood this, somehow. Or maybe it was a lucky guess, but detectives were paid to make lucky guesses. Then again, Peck had been working undercover at the time; he might have seen Christina and Rick together; you didn't have to be that smart to see what's going on between a man and a woman. Not if it was craziness, obsession. No, that wasn't necessarily true. Peck didn't know anything. Rick was overthinking it. Peck was an ambitious asshole, working some line of bullshit. Rick had been out of the game so long he didn't have a feel for the nuances of bullshit: What was truth, what was a near-truth, what was a lie, what was interpretation, what was the lie that was meant to draw attention to itself so that the other, crucial lie would go unseen, what was the truth with a lie inside it. All he knew was that Peck was trying to jump him back into something. Why else track him down, why else drive three hours out from the city and then back again? But of course these questions led nowhere. Peck would assume that Rick would think all of these things. That meant that Peck felt very good about his contraption of cleverness, that he believed Rick couldn't pull it apart. Which was true. So, all that was left was the fact that Christina was getting out. She was walking her hot little ass and her cold dark eyes right on out of there, into who knew what. It was an emotional thing, which Peck rightly saw. Once you got your emotions involved, you had a problem.

AN HOUR LATER
, he was alone in a small room by the sea, the window lit by stars. The edge of the sheet brightened in the dark and his eyes were open. For the first year or two the night sky had made him lonely. Certain visions appeared and he would whisper for forgiveness.
I did bad things. I never killed anybody, but I did bad things
. He had tried to read the Bible, but there was nothing in there about eighteen-wheelers full of stolen fax machines. Or unstamped cigarettes, or industrial elevator panels that cost a quarter million a pop, or French wine, or expensive perfume, or big Japanese motorcycles, or any of the stuff landing in Kennedy Airport twenty-four hours a day, items to be consumed in the roaring maw of New York City. Christina had helped them because he had asked her. Of course Tony wanted to use her again. He knew how smart she was, had tried to get her to run one of his operations. He'd probably suffered some fuck-up in his deliveries and remembered how good Christina's system had been. Very effective when the buyers were Russians or Chinese gangsters, distrustful assholes who barely spoke English, who wanted to keep as much distance as possible. The pickups were never directly arranged on the phone. The contact person was just faxed a single digit on a piece of paper. It must have driven the cops wild. She would always fax the number from and to a public copy shop, a different one each time. The cops couldn't wire-tap all the public fax machines in the city. The number did not correspond to the pickup time or place but to a public spot in midtown Manhattan. There the contact person looked at something that was open to view from the street—that was the genius part—and then understood where and when the pickup was. The two parties did not have to talk on the phone, they did not have to meet ahead of time in person, they did not even need to know each other's identity. It had
never
failed. They'd moved three dozen jobs using her system.