Bad to the Bone (2 page)

“When we did the shows?”

“That’s right. Do you remember the makeup we used? What was it called?”

“Theatrical makeup.” Terry’s voice was just a touch contemptuous. How could Auntie Flo think she wouldn’t remember something so important? “Are you gonna paint me like a clown? Is that the surprise?”

“I’m going to paint a special design on your forehead. An old Indian sign. It means ‘I love you’ in Indian sign language. Maybe when Billy sees it, he’ll change his mind and let you visit us.”

Flo worked quickly. She didn’t want Terry to be so late that her father felt obliged to call the police. Billy would know what had happened to his daughter as soon as he spoke to the teacher. It had happened often enough in the past. Children didn’t leave Hanover House because children were, after all, the ultimate insurance policies.

Flo drew a large white circle on Terry’s forehead and quickly filled it in. A smaller yellow circle followed, at the center of the white circle. Then four lines, two vertical and two horizontal, from the outer edge of the white circle to the outer edge of the yellow. The project took only five minutes to complete and was instantly recognizable for what it was—the crosshairs of a telescopic sight locked onto a bull’s eye.

Billy Williams, Terry’s father, knew the symbol immediately. His knees buckled when he opened the door to find his daughter standing next to Flo Alamare. “Oh,” he whispered, a thin, hopeless cry. “Oh.”

“See, Auntie Flo,” Terry cried. “I knew he wouldn’t like it. He doesn’t like anything I do. Please take me back home with you.”

Terry began to cry softly, and her father’s spirits dropped even further. His shoulders slumped and he lowered his eyes. Flo, who’d been trained to observe the spaces where humans express their real feelings (even when they were
trying
to hide their intentions) had no trouble interpreting Billy’s message.

“Why don’t you go to your room and let me talk to Billy for a while?” Flo put her arm around the child and pulled her close for a moment. “Don’t worry,” she said, kissing Terry’s forehead. “I think we’ll be able to work it out. Okay?”

Flo watched Terry walk into her room, waiting until the door shut before turning back to Billy. “Close the front door and come into the living room.”

She knew he’d obey—he was too far down to rebel. Her sharp command was designed to show him that she was aware of his emotional state. He followed dutifully, sitting upright on a straight-backed chair while she settled into a cushioned rocker. The living room was almost barren, a clear indication to Flo of Billy’s struggle to establish a new life after a decade at Hanover House.

“I don’t believe you’d hurt Terry,” Billy protested. He did not raise his eyes to meet Flo’s. “You were Terry’s bonding mother.”

For the first time, Flo felt a slight twinge of anxiety. A gentle reminder of an appointment that would have to be kept. Of what might lie on the other side of ecstasy. “What
I
would or wouldn’t do is quite irrelevant here. Davis makes his own decisions. He’s made one already. He wants Terry back at Hanover House.”

“She’s my daughter.”

“You hardly knew her.”

“That wasn’t my fault, Flo, I…”

“That’s the fact, no matter whose fault it was. You hardly knew her then. You hardly know her now. You want to construct a life for yourself, but you have no experience at independence. You stayed with your mommy and daddy until you were thirty, then went directly to Hanover House. Now you’re forty years old and you don’t have the faintest fucking idea how to begin living on your own. That’s why you dragged Terry along when you abandoned us. That’s why you spoke to a lawyer and that’s why you’re speaking to a writer about doing a book.”

“You know about that?” Billy’s voice was filled with wonder. “That means John Burke told you. John is my best friend.”

“Have you picked a title for the book yet?” Flo ignored his comment. “Maybe
Cult of the Hanoverians
? Or
Davis Craddock Stole My Daughter
? Yes, by all means put the name of Davis Craddock on the cover. Betray everything and everybody. You’ll probably make a fortune. You’ll probably get rich.” She was standing, seeming to tower over Billy Williams, who held onto the seat of his chair as if he was about to fly away.

“Flo, I never…”

She let her voice go street hard, not bothering with finesse, like a whaler firing a harpoon into the head of an injured whale. “Don’t bullshit me, Billy. When you left Hanover House, you swore you’d never betray our way of life to the outside world. You’re going to keep your word, whether you like it or not. First, Terry comes back to us, where she belongs. You personally deliver her. You knock on the door and hand her over. Then you go back to your piece-of-shit job, instead of trying to get rich by betraying Davis Craddock.”

“For God’s sake, Flo. She’s my child. You can’t take a child away from her father. I’ll forget the book, but please let me keep my daughter.”

He was begging now. There was nothing more to be done. Flo turned away, delivering her final lines as she walked through the door and into the street. “No more talk, Billy. Two days is what you’ve got. Go take a look at your daughter. Then look in the mirror. See if you’ve got the Indian love sign on your
own
forehead.”

She was driving alongside the Bruckner Expressway when the need overcame her. It’d been washing back and forth like a toothache about to explode since she’d walked into Billy’s apartment. She’d hoped that she could make it back to the privacy of Hanover House before she attended to her need, but that was clearly impossible. She pulled the van to the curb, locking the front doors, then opened the glove compartment, reaching inside only to burn the backs of her fingers on the small lightbulb.

“Damn.” She sucked at the reddened area absently, then decided that the van must have some kind of an electrical short. Instead of coming on when the glove compartment was opened, the bulb was staying lit all the time. She always kept the van in perfect condition (that was part of overcoming the carelessness that had characterized her life before she’d met Davis Craddock), and she resolved to fix it as soon as she got back to Hanover House. In the meantime, she removed the small bulb, carefully wrapping her fingers in Kleenex tissue before sliding the bulb from its socket. Then she took the syringe, still warm in its black plastic wrapper, and moved to the back of the van.

In some ways, the rush of anticipation was better than the rush of the drug that Davis Craddock called PURE. There was a fear, like a memory, that always managed to push its way into Flo Alamare’s consciousness before she injected herself. It whispered of what might follow in a few hours if…The fear didn’t vanish when she took the full syringe into her hand, but the certainty of relief transformed it into a physical tingling, into what could only be called arousal. Flo felt it in her breasts and her groin as she wrapped her arm with a piece of rubber tubing.

Alternately closing and opening her fingers, pumping the veins up, she examined herself closely. Her arms had remained practically smooth, as Craddock assured her they would. Hanoverian Therapists always used clean syringes and unadulterated drugs, carefully moving the site of their injections
before
veins were damaged. The end result was entirely predictable—whereas street junkies suffered every kind of infection, from a simple abscess to full-blown AIDS, Hanoverians radiated health.

The 25-gauge needle slid easily into the vein running along the outside of Flo Alamare’s wrist. With a small sigh, she pulled back on the syringe, drawing a single drop of blood into Davis Craddock’s PURE, then pushed down on the plunger. She felt the expected rush of pleasure for a second, but then her universe turned upside down. The ecstasy became a sharp pain which began to burn, hotter and hotter, as it ran through her body. She felt it surge up through her spine and instinctively tried to close her brain off, to confine the agony to her body, to keep her mind alive.

J
IM TILLEY WAS LATE
for the celebration, but neither Jim’s wife, Rose, nor their guests, Stanley Moodrow and Betty Haluka, were waiting to begin the party. Jim Tilley was a New York City cop. His time belonged to the NYPD and the two friends sitting comfortably in Rose and Jim’s living room were well aware of it.

“It’s cop macho,” Moodrow explained to Rose and Betty. “Sleeping in the station house. Drinking fifteen cups of coffee a day. Wearing the same clothes. Detectives brag about it in the bars. Even if you
know
it’s a lotta crap, you still have to do it. Backing away from a hot investigation is like backing away from a suspect on the street.”

“Actually, there isn’t any hot investigation,” Rose said. “Jim was only supposed to go in for a few hours to prepare some evidence for trial. They’ve got him doing paperwork.”

They went on this way for a long time (well into their second drink) before Jim Tilley made a weary appearance. He managed to greet his stepchildren, Lee and Jeanette, as he came down the hallway into the living room, but then sank into a chair and began to rub at reddened eyes with both fists. Rose, who would have liked a hug, settled for a quick peck on the cheek before heading into the kitchen to give a bowl of Irish stew the three-minute, microwave special. Moodrow had called for the impromptu party (the friends were close enough to call and enjoy spur of the moment parties), but he knew that Tilley would have to unburden himself before the celebration could proceed. He settled back in his chair and took a healthy pull at a glass of Wild Turkey bourbon. Maybe Tilley’s story would be a good one.

“Rose told us you were only going in for a short time,” Betty said. “If we’d have known you were going to work twelve straight hours, we’d have had our celebration tomorrow night. There’s really not that much to making a firm decision
not
to live together, anyway.”

Tilley looked up and shrugged. “I should have stayed on patrol. I love the gold shield, but I definitely should’ve stayed on patrol.”

“How’d you get so dirty?” Moodrow asked. “Didn’t I teach you to make the uniforms do the dirty work?”

Jim Tilley, much to Betty’s surprise, took the question seriously. “The precinct’s supposed to be cleaned every night,” he responded, “but whatever dirt there is, I was under it all afternoon.”

Moodrow looked for a sign that his friend was able to joke about his day, but Jim Tilley was obviously weary. His ordinarily handsome Irish face was pinched and anxious. He looked, to Moodrow, like an aging parish priest. “You wanna take a hit on this before you tell the story?” Moodrow continued. He offered his bourbon, but Tilley drew back in disgust, reaching instead for his wife’s bloody mary which he drained at a gulp. Betty, who’d been sipping at her own bloody mary, tried to stop him, but she was on her second drink and just a little too slow. At first Tilley had no reaction, but then a tear began to blossom in the corner of his right eye. It grew until his eye couldn’t hold it anymore, then rolled down his cheek, only to be followed by another and another and another.

“Holy shit,” he cried, desperately pressing a cocktail napkin against the stream of mucus issuing from both nostrils. “Who made this drink?”

Betty grinned. “I did. Stanley calls them ‘Bloody Bettys.’ ”

“It’s very hot. Do you always make it this hot?”

“I use cayenne and horseradish. The horseradish makes it chewy.”

“You look like Dracula,” Moodrow observed, sipping at his rejected bourbon. “In that movie with Frank Langella. Remember? His eyes got bright red before he bit people.”

Tilley had nothing to say in return, but his anxiety was slowly disappearing as the Stolichnaya (almost two ounces) made the jump from his belly to his blood stream. His eyes continued to tear, of course, but he no longer cared.

“I feel like a dumb animal beaten into submission,” he declared. “The goddamn job is like being in the army. It’s a military organization. The assholes at the top say ‘jump,’ and if you don’t get your feet off the ground, they put you in front of a firing squad.”

“This is a shock?” Moodrow asked pleasantly. “Being a cop
is
like being a soldier. So take a lesson. A sergeant in the army knows he can’t confront the system head-on, no matter how much he hates it. So he learns to manipulate it. He squeezes it for whatever juice it’s got to give.”

“Well, today the system squeezed me,” Tilley said. “This was supposed to be a nothing day for me and, instead, I got turned into orange juice.”

Rose came back into the room, bearing a plate of Irish stew, a fork, a napkin and an unspiced red drink that looked just like a bloody mary. “How did it get so screwed up?”

Having found a sympathetic audience (and a second drink), Tilley began to unburden himself. He and his team were near the end of a year-long attempted-murder investigation involving a crack dealer with a long string of priors. The case was straightforward: the dealer, Ernesto ‘Babu’ Fariello, identified by a witness, had been arrested an hour after the shooting with a 9mm in his belt. Ballistics, upon comparing the patterns of lands and grooves in slugs found at the scene with slugs fired through Babu’s weapon, had sealed Fariello’s fate. There was no need for eyewitnesses—they might get a conviction even if the
victim
failed to show up. Nor would witnesses be needed for a second group of felonies that fell into their laps: Tilley and another Detective had tossed Babu’s apartment after the arrest and discovered three and a half ounces of cocaine, along with the paraphernalia needed to turn it into crack.

“We’re gonna go before the judge tomorrow,” Tilley complained, “and the Lieutenant asked me to make sure the chain was intact, which is a sign of favor in the job…”

“What chain?” Rose asked.

“The chain of evidence. That’s what I’m leading up to. See, the only evidence that matters here is the gun.”

“What about the cocaine?”

“No gun, then no probable cause to enter the mutt’s apartment,
capisch
?” Tilley noted Betty Haluka’s confirming nod. Betty was a Legal Aid lawyer and knew everything there was to know about ‘probable cause.’ “Mostly it’s just a routine job. You trace the route of the evidence, from first contact into the courtroom. First contact was the witness giving us the perp’s name. This we have on a sworn statement, which I locate in the file. It’s also in the grand jury transcripts. Then me and Joe Baker took the gun off the perp and brought it into the house, so I go back in the file and find the original complaint form and the follow-ups. Both me and my partner, on the day we made the bust, recorded the circumstances in writing, like we’re supposed to. The 9mm is in the report, along with a serial number and a note that Joe is gonna take the piece down to the property clerk’s room and make a request for a laboratory examination. I go back in the file and find copies of the property clerk’s invoice and the lab request form. The ballistic report is also in the file, along with a letter of transmittal from ballistics to the property clerk at the courthouse which means it’s up to the district attorney to get the physical gun into the courtroom. Sounds perfect, right?”