Black Water Transit (10 page)

Jack understood her meaning completely. He leaned forward and spoke forcefully, right into her personal space.

“Before I get into why, let me say that I expect to remain completely anonymous in this matter, or I go no farther with you. Can you guarantee that for me? In writing?”

Ms. Greco sent a sidelong glance over at Luther Campbell, who shrugged back at her.

“Possibly. There are disclosure problems, of course, but the nature of the source can be sealed in the indictment and known only to the judge. Our interception could be at the Red Hook Terminus, or even out at sea. Perhaps an ocean interception would be the best way to go. We’ll have to work out the details … if we agree to
this operation. But it’s natural that there will be reactions and … consequences. So my question remains, Why do this at all?”

“Two reasons. One, it might have been a sting. Pike might have been one of your informants already. He was wearing a suit jacket on a hot day. He made his approach outside, by a parking lot, where there was an opportunity for surveillance, for taping.”

“You assert that you intended to turn him down. If it
were
a sting, then, well, you were safe from it. You had behaved legally.”

“But if I failed to report the attempt? If it
had
been a federal sting? Illegal guns? My shipping company operates under a federal license. Under the terms of that license, a failure to report attempts to bribe or otherwise evade state and federal regulations is grounds for a summary cancellation of my permit. That’s the end of my business right there. That’s reason one.”

She nodded, waited, her face showing nothing.

“Two, you bastards wanted something to trade for my son. This is what I have. All I have.”

“As pure as that? A father’s love, then, is it?”

Jack’s look was all he needed to make his point about that.

“No need to become defensive, Mr. Vermillion. We’re aware that Black Water Transit has been the subject of … interest … by various federal and state investigative branches. As I said earlier, you have social connections with elements of the Italian community. You know La Gioconda is a Mafia-associated location. You make no secret of that connection. You have it on your very wonderful Hermès briefcase here. We know that Frankie Bulls is—”

“His name is Torinetti. Francis Torinetti.”

“He’s a friend of yours. You don’t call him Frankie Bulls?”

“He doesn’t call you Val the Greek.”

“Fine. I stand corrected. Mr. Francis Torinetti is an old school friend, but he has nothing whatsoever to do with Black Water Transit, and all you’re trying to do here is help out your troubled son. As I said in the beginning, a father’s pure and simple love?”

Jack had nothing to say.

One more brief trance for Ms. Greco. Luther put the Ka-Bar down hard. She opened her eyes at the sound, smiled.

“How
admirable
, Mr. Vermillion,” she drawled. “And how
rare
.” She sent Luther a wrap-this-up look and picked up her cell phone without another word to either Jack or Flannery Coleman.

Campbell got out of his chair and hustled them into the hall, offered to get them coffee.

“What’s happening now?” asked Flannery.

“We’ll have to discuss it. Can you give us ten minutes?”

“Five,” said Flannery.

“Okay. Five. Don’t let her get to you, Mr. Vermillion. She has to be a bit of a hard-nose in this line of work.”

“She’s a complete ball-breaker, Officer Campbell.”

“Agent Campbell. Five minutes? For the sake of your kid?”

It turned out to be fifty. Jack was already at the elevator, with Flannery Coleman on his heels, when Campbell caught up with him.

“Jack. I’m sorry. Ms. Greco wanted to discuss this with her superiors. There are several levels of enforcement involved.”

“Run another criminal intelligence check on Jack, you mean,” said Flannery. Campbell smiled.

“Not at all. Main thing, they all said yes. We’re in. It’s a go.”

“Disclosure?” asks Flannery. Campbell nods.

“Jack’s name never comes up. If Jack can make sure the container goes on one of his boats—”

“Ships. I have two. The
Agawa Canyon
and the
Ticonderoga
. The
Agawa Canyon
is the one I have in mind.”

“Okay, great. The
Agawa Canyon
ties up in Red Hook. Maybe the best thing is to take the shipment down there, we make it look like a random cargo check. Personally, I’m not happy about an interception in the open ocean. We’d have to involve the Coast Guard and the FBI, and who needs those mutts. The
attempt
to ship is enough for me. If it’s what we think it is, if even some of the weapons are banned or restricted, Earl Pike’s on the dock with a hook in his gills before sunrise.”

“And what do you think it may be?” asked Flannery.

Luther looked acutely uncomfortable and gave his answer some thought for nearly thirty seconds. Jack felt his heartbeat climbing. What was he getting himself into?

“We have … some reason to believe that Crisis Control Systems … may … be involved in the illegal shipment of weapons.”

Flannery’s reaction was a small controlled explosion.

“I thought you said there was nothing against his firm!”

“Nothing has been proven.”

“So it’s all supposition, then?”

Campbell pulled out his blankest stare.

“All we can say is that CCS has connections with certain political elements in Washington that tend to favor unilateral military aid to a number of right-wing governments in Central America and perhaps even in Mexico. Their client list is not … accessible … to our agencies, but according to a conversation we had with the State
Department this morning, CCS is … a matter of interest to the current administration.”

“Which administration is that? And what
part
of which administration? Listen, my friend, don’t hand my client that sort of vague national-interest bullshit. If there’s more to this than you’re telling us now, if there are outcomes that damage Jack’s operation, I’ll make a project out of you and that Greco harpy and every federal agent in this whole damned building!”

Campbell had taken the eruption from Jack’s lawyer with widening eyes. His skin was flushed and dark.

“Look, Mr. Coleman, this is the ATF. We want to get prohibited weapons off the street. Even if this Mexican shipment Jack is describing really is a private collection, if even one of the pieces is banned and he’s trying to dodge that, that makes him a criminal asshole, and my job is to nail his hand to a door for even thinking about it.”

Flannery’s vestigial conscience bleated weakly from some distant corner of the lawyer’s soul and moved him to ask about Pike’s military service to his country. It got him a blunt answer from Campbell.

“With respect, fuck that. That was yesterday.”

Flannery looked at Jack.

“This Pike character, Jack …”

“Yeah?”

“You think he’ll buy the random check?”

“Forget about that,” said Campbell. “What Pike buys or doesn’t buy means sweet dick here. A weapons beef? The destination some military officer in a foreign nation? Hah! Personally, all that crap about Pike’s business, his influential friends, cuts no ice with me. Don’t try to move weapons around on my turf without a genuflection in the center aisle. I’m gonna bust his ass with a yard-wide grin. That’s my job. And don’t worry about what this mutt thinks. Next time we hear from him,
Chelsea Clinton will be mayor of New York. Have some faith, hah?”

“In what?” said Flannery, but Campbell was already walking.

“Forget about it,” said Jack, watching him go.

“I wish you would,” said Flannery, but it was way too late for that, and anyway Jack Vermillion had stopped listening to his lawyer hours ago. He wasn’t even thinking how all of this might look to Frank Torinetti, who seemed to be involved in some way. Frank was a friend. He’d understand. He had a son of his own. Right now, all Jack could hear was Danny on the prison phone from Lompoc, the fear in his voice so loud you could hear it humming in the background like an overloaded circuit.

Please, Dad. Please help me
.

Casey Spandau was alone in the Jay Rats office that same day, holding down the duty desk at the HQ in a second-floor office suite in an out-of-the-way section of the Albee Square Mall, off Fulton Street. The rest of the unit—Detective Jimmy Rule, Sergeant Dexter Zarnas, and a white shield named Carlo Suarez—were all over at the academy on Twenty-first Street doing a surveillance seminar with the training cadre. Casey was happy to see the back of Jimmy Rule, known to the Jay Rats as Jimmy Rock. She’d spent an entire night shift in his 511 unit, and the blue-eyed rocky-faced Irish son of a bitch hadn’t spoken one word to her.

They’d blown the entire six-hour shift covering a
meaningless stakeout location, sitting outside a dry-cleaning shop in Maspeth, doing a payback favor for a drug squad unit. Jimmy Rock had passed the time on his cell phone or listening to a swing station from New Jersey. He never slept and he didn’t move much. He was dressed in a lovely navy-blue silk suit and matching leather loafers, and his hands were smooth and white. In the darkness of the car, when he moved his hands to turn the dial or pick up his cell phone, they looked like luminous white birds. His breath smelled of mints and his cologne was something spicy with a sandalwood undertone. He was extremely handsome, and a total prick.

Every time Casey tried to start a conversation—maybe explain why she had been transferred out of the Two Five—get the guy to see her point of view perhaps—or just to stay awake—he held up his hand, the right one, turned it so the gold detective’s ring on his finger glittered in the light from a street lamp, and then put his index finger on his upper lip. She got the message.

She was new, she was black, she was here under false pretenses, ducking an undisclosed career-crippling beef that ought to have seen her on a fixer in Coney for generations yet unborn. She was therefore invisible to him, a nonperson. It was a demanding position to take, but Jimmy Rock hadn’t softened up a degree all night. Casey had never before understood the power of absolute silence. Jimmy Rock used it like a skinning tool. When the replacement unit arrived, at the first skim-milk lightening of a fogged-up dawn in Maspeth, Jimmy Rock had tossed her the keys to the 511 unit and walked away to a subway station without a backward look. Watching him leave, Casey had found tears coming.

After a while, she pulled herself together and drove the unit back to the Jay Rats HQ, where she took the elevator up to the second floor. According to the brass
sign on the wood-veneer-over-steel-plate front door of the Jay Rats base, the business operated inside Suite 2200 was known to the world as

Casey figured the investment firm had put a lot of
somebody’s
money into the place, security video cameras in the approaches and inside each of the nine separate offices in the suite, motion detectors everywhere, weight-sensitive floor pads as well, all of this connected to silent alarms running to a nearby Brinks station. Verizon had run secure data lines into the suite through shielded lead-armored piping, and the doors were reinforced with steel plates and frames.

The office of the CEO and president, at the back of the 1,700-square-foot suite, had been taken over by the boss himself, who had formed the unit three years back. It was lined in solid teak, had indigo wall-to-wall carpet, and the big picture window behind the rosewood desk had bulletproof glass, through which you got a narrow westward view of the Brooklyn Law School, the redbrick Borough Hall, the bell tower of Saint Ann’s Church, and in the haze beyond them, the twin towers of the World Trade Center and most of lower Manhattan, looking like the backdrop of a Broadway play.

It was a hell of an office, she figured, and seeing it yesterday evening had convinced her that the Jay Rats unit was higher up the food chain than the CO of the Two Five had led her to believe.

Jimmy Rock, the street boss of the Jay Rats unit, had ordered a special doorplate engraved for the boss when the unit took over the Boston Bar offices. It was on the door right now, under a framed black-and-white photo
of Primo Carnera, the old pug fighter, who Casey had decided really did look a bit like the boss.

There was a note for Casey, from Zaragosa, pinned to the door:

Casey dropped her briefcase beside her desk and found the bunk. It was clean and neat, the sheets crisp and white, folded down in a military style. She sat down on it, inhaled the scent of gun oil and cigarette smoke, and rubbed her face with her hands. She lay down on the cot, shifted her hips twice, let out a long ragged sigh, and was asleep in seven seconds. At noon, the phone rang in the main office. She woke with a jolt of adrenaline, remembered where she was, got to her feet, staggered, and crossed the floor to her desk.

“Joint Task Force.”

“Hello. This is Officer Nick Cicero. I’m with the New York State Police. Badge five-five-seven-eight-one. I need to talk to somebody at the Joint Task Force.”

“This is Officer Spandau. What can I do for you?”

“Okay. I’m working on a double homicide here. We
got two dead, and the story is, we figure there was some kind of road-rage thing involved.”

“How come?”

“I’m in a unit last night, on Highway Eighty-two, off the Taconic there, near Blue Stores? You know it?”

“I was born in Carthage. I’ve been up and down the Taconic all my life.”

“I know Carthage. Up there near Fort Drum, right?”

His voice was deep, even silky. There was Italian in the accent, Casey figured, maybe Queens.

“Yeah. What can I do for you, Officer Cicero?”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t get your name, Miss …?”

Not Queens. Maybe Brooklyn.

“Spandau. Officer Spandau.”

“Hi. I’m Nicky. They call me Nicky.”

“Hi, Nicky.”

“Can I get your first name?” Christ. How old was this kid?

“It’s Casey.”

“Okay, Casey. I can call you Casey?”

“You seem to be.”

“Okay … where was I?”

“You were in a unit, patrolling Highway Eighty-two in the region of Blue Stores.”

“Right. I see this black Jimmy in a stand of trees. Long story short, there’s two dead citizens. You need the details?”

How long had this guy been a cop? Three days?

“No. What can we do for you?”

“After CID arrived, I went back south on Eighty-two, looking for whatever I could see. About three miles from the Taconic exit for Gallatinville, I pick up broken glass in the middle of the road. Headlight glass. I bagged it.”

“Why?”

“At the crime scene, the Jimmy had a brand-new scrape on the right rear tail section. We got some paint off it. Navy-blue paint.”

“So you figure there was contact up the road, then a secondary confrontation where you found the Jimmy?”

“Yeah. We also have a witness, a flatbed driver, says he saw two cars, a big blue one and a black Jimmy, they were parked by the side of the road there. Says the blue car had passed him a while back, doing a flat ninety. Now he’s off the road beside the black truck.”

“And you have two dead at the scene?” Casey’s interest was rising. “Names?” she said, fumbling for a pen and some paper.

“The female is Julia Maria Gianetto, DOB 02-14-1980. A resident of Albany. First year at SUNY there. The registered owner is Donald Albert Condotti, DOB 08-28-1978. Unemployed. Lived in Paramus. He rang some bells on NCIC. Assault, weapons, some minor drug beefs. The ME says he was a major steroid user. His liver was already bleeding, and he was what … twenty-two?”

“How dead were these vics?”

“Bad dead. The girl had her neck broken. She’d been …”

“Been what?”

“Sexually abused. It was postmortem.”

“Any semen?”

“Nothing. Maybe he used a condom.”

“Safe sex even for psychos, hah? And the other body?”

There was a length of silence. Casey could hear men talking and the sound of a distant elevator. The call display on her desk showed a hospital in Albany. He was probably calling from the morgue. She could see him standing in the hall outside a bright white room, with two bodies laid out under a nasty blue light. She knew
whatever he was looking at had affected the cop, and it made her want to know the guy better. Most cops pretended that nothing got to them. It was tiresome. If this stuff didn’t bother you, you should quit.

“There’d been some kind of stand-up fight in a clearing. The vic was a very big guy. Huge. Like I said, used steroids. A weight lifter. Whoever killed him was either much bigger or much better. I’m going with much better. Basically, the vic was beaten to death.”

“With what?”

“Bare hands. Fists. Not even a boot involved.”

Christ.

“It gets worse. Then he was … gutted.”

“Gutted?”

“We figure a tree branch.”

Holy Christ.

“Postmortem?”

“They think no. There’s a footprint on the guy’s throat. He was held down while it was happening. There was a lot of bleeding, which means he was alive for a while afterward. There had to have been a lot of noise coming from him, but so far no witnesses. It was a long way to the next house, and the people there are retired, spend all day with their TV on and the air-conditioning going.”

Man, thought Casey. The guy’s a bug. If it
was
a guy. Had to be. No woman could do that. At least she hoped not.

“Tell me what we can do for you, Nicky.”

“Our lab guys have run the glass. It’s headlight glass from a Mercedes-Benz. An older model, likely a mid-eighties saloon car known as a Six Hundred. Here’s the thing. We dug glass slivers out of the male vic’s shoes. Similar type of glass. We figure at the primary contact site, back down Eighty-two near the Taconic exit, there’s some sort of traffic dispute, and it could be the vic kicks
out the headlight on the Benz. That’s why the road-rage scenario.”

“It stands up. The paint do anything for you?”

“Yeah. Also from a mid-eighties Benz Six Hundred.”

“Okay. You run this by DMV?”

“Yeah.”

“How many?”

“In that color, DMV shows three hundred sixty-one statewide.”

“And in New York City?”

Nicky paused, and Casey knew that whatever he said, it was going to mean a hell of a lot of legwork. She was right.

“Eighty-three Mercedes-Benz vehicles that fit the paint and the glass.”

“And you want us to help you run the owners down? Why not go to citywide auto?”

“I did. They can’t help us until next week sometime. By then this bug may be somewhere else, or …”

“Or he’s ditched the vehicle, or had it fixed in a crooked shop, or had it shipped to Dubai in a container. Right?”

“You got it.”

“Fax me the list. I’ll run it by my boss.”

“Can I bring it?”

“Bring it? I thought you were in patrol!”

“I’ve been attached to investigations for this case only.”

“Somebody must like you. When can you be here?”

“Three hours. Maybe less.”

“You miss Brooklyn that much?”

“How do you know I’m from Brooklyn?”

“It’s in your voice. You taking a vacation?”

“No. I want this guy. I want him very bad.”

“You figure he’s a New York City guy?”

“I don’t know. HQ has three officers doing the others.
I asked for this. That’s my part in this. Is that okay?”

Casey could see it. Some state cop, shiny as a new cap pistol, tagging along like your kid brother on a trike.

“Knock yourself out, Nicky.”

She gave him the address of the Jay Rats HQ and told him to phone when he was close. She’d see that somebody would be around to work with him. Thinking about it, she hoped it would be her.

It was a little past three and now they were all sitting around in Jack’s offices in Troy, waiting for a call from Earl Pike or one of his people—for an overt or predicate act, Luther Campbell had called it, and the only one doing anything active right now was the pocket-rocket assistant U.S. attorney, Valeriana Greco.

She had her head down so her thick black hair was a screen over her face, and she was clacking away on her matte-black laptop computer. So we would know she wasted no taxpayer moments, Jack supposed, or maybe she was just crazy.

She was wearing a different black suit thingy, tight short skirt and a matching jacket. She had great legs and all the sex appeal of broken glass. Now and then her tiny little cell phone would give a sprightly chirp and she’d flick it open with a practiced move and say something cryptic into the thing.

Whenever this happened, the three androids she had brought along with her from the Albany office of the
ATF would turn their heads and stare at her as if she had just materialized in the room.

He never bothered to get their names. They were just a three-round burst—each man as much like the others as the rounds in a magazine, the federal suits, the crew cuts, the military mustaches to give authority to faces completely unsmacked by reality, the pricey Glocks—what Jack liked to think of as combat Tupperware—in their shoulder rigs, the weight-lifter physiques, and the obvious belief that anyone not an actual member of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms was either a hardened criminal or studying on it for the future. Typical feds. Jack, who had seen some things in this world, wasn’t interested enough in the three of them to attempt to change their views. At twenty minutes after three, the phone rang.