Black Water Transit (45 page)

Pike knew that Jack would be testifying in some secret room, that his eyewitness account of the murders of those two guards formed a part of his deal with Greco, but Jack’s accusation was that of a confessed killer and would never find a respectful hearing with any jury in the country. Jack Vermillion had the stain now, and unless he broke his promise and used the Barrett, nothing he said about Earl Pike would ever stand up against Pike’s long and honorable service to his nation. As far as the Barrett was concerned, Pike was prepared to take the risk.

Not that Vermillion had given him much choice. He had Vermillion’s word, and for some reason he was inclined to believe him. The man was a soldier, and the soldier in the man wanted to atone, and Pike was satisfied that his regret had been genuine. The proof of that was the fact that the ATF had not come storming through his door hours ago. Jack had kept his part of the bargain, so Pike would keep his. It was over between them.

His collection, so far, was still in the hands of the government. It might be that it was gone forever. He had to accept that possibility, and he would hope for the understanding of his ancestors. But perhaps, if he was determined, he might win it back someday in the future. He was confident that he had frightened the Greco woman enough to ensure that she would keep it intact and protected as long as he was free. He had seen that in her eyes on Sunday morning.

She was afraid of him, and that meant she was not as stupid as she seemed. No one at the ATF would be “extracting” any of it. It would be in a vault until he reclaimed it, or until he was dead. Either way, he had punished them for the injustice of their system. It was enough that some other soldier in another place might not have his own weapons, his hard-won symbols of honorable battle, seized on a flimsy pretext to further the career plans of an ambitious psychopath.

The phone rang then. It was Mercedes Gonsalva.

“Two police officers are on their way up, Mr. Pike.”

“With what agency?”

“The NYPD, Mr. Pike. A man and a woman.”

Pike thanked her, got up, and walked to the window to look out on the city skyline. Not the ATF, anyway. And he had disposed of the NYPD before. He was calm. He had expected this. The chime sounded twice and he padded across the carpet to open the door.

“Officer Spandau. Officer Cicero. How can I help you?”

Casey held up a color photo. It was a picture of Earl Pike standing in front of a service desk. He had his head down, but the shot was clearly him. He was holding a battered brown briefcase in his hands. A logo on the wall read
MAIL BOXES ETC
. There was a time-date marker in the lower right corner.

Pike studied the picture and worked on his breathing.

“Fascinating. What am I to make of this?”

Casey’s voice was even, but anger was making her throat hurt.

“You’ve told the ATF that you were in South Dakota on Friday. That you left around midnight. Just before the death of Detective James Rule and three ATF agents at the Red Hook Container Terminal. And yet here we have a picture of you standing at a Mail Boxes depot in Peekskill, New York, at a quarter after two on the afternoon of Friday last. The briefcase you’re holding there was stolen from an NYPD vehicle about two hours before. This looks like a problem for you, Mr. Pike.”

“In what sense? I don’t accept that this grainy little snapshot is a picture of me. I’ve never seen that case before, and on Friday afternoon I was in South Dakota with two associates.”

“They may be altering that testimony, Mr. Pike. Your friends will only go so far for you. The ATF is talking to them now. They have a copy of this shot too.”

“This is harassment, lady.”

“I hope so. That’s the effect we were going for. Right now you’re coming with us. To the precinct. You can explain in the car how we got it all wrong. We going to have to cuff you?”

Pike smiled.

“I don’t want to get shot for straightening my tie.”

Nicky stepped in with the cuffs.

Pike offered no resistance.

“Am I charged?”

“Not yet.”

“But I’m cuffed?”

“It just makes us feel better, okay?”

They were walking him toward the elevator. Pike smiled at Casey when they reached the doors.

“You’re a tenacious little bitch, aren’t you? By the way, how’s your mother?”

“You have the right to shut the fuck up,” said Casey.

They rode down in the green-mirrored elevator, Nicky on one side and Casey on the other. Something lyrical and classical was playing on the speakers. The elevator stopped at the lobby level and the doors opened. An old man in a black suit and a dirty white shirt was standing there, holding a stainless-steel revolver. He had a bloody bandage taped to his left cheek. In a detached way, in the seconds he had left, Pike recognized a Colt Python. The man held the door, leveled the pistol at them all. No one moved. Nicky and Casey stared at the man. He looked at Pike and spoke only to him.

“Julia Maria Gianetto,” he said.

Pike looked into the old man’s eyes and knew the name.

Fabrizio Senza saw the understanding in his face. Pike knew himself at that moment in a way he had never known himself. As a dead man. The muzzle of the Colt flowered white. Pike knew that it would. That was the way of guns. But the heat shocked him. It was the last thought he had as the round punched through his skull and painted the green glass mirror behind him in deltas and rivers of bright shining red. The heat—

Late in August, just around sunset, Claire Torinetti was found dead in the pool at their house in Rensselaer. Only one round in her lungs, but it was enough to keep her on the bottom until the cops arrived. Frank was sitting in a deck chair, drinking a Bombay Sapphire gin straight up, listening to “Midnight Sun,” playing it over and over again. It’s a Johnny Mercer song, which if you take the time to find and listen to real careful, you get a picture of how Frank was doing at the time. He died a couple days later, and they had a real nice funeral for them both, and buried them side by side on a little crest of hill with a view of the river there.

Greco nailed Marty Glazer’s dick to a door and got all the credit for taking down a big Wall Street outfit. She’s in DC now, a rising star, and did a turn on
Burden of Proof
last week. The camera still loves her, which you have to figure is enough for her.

Carmine DaJulia lived to take a plea and is now somewhere in the witness protection program. If there’s a God, Carmine is working as a stock boy in a Wal-Mart in some rat’s-ass trailer town way out in the middle of Nebraska. The mutt.

Fabrizio Senza had a heart attack while Nicky and Casey were taking him down to Central Booking, and died in the Rikers Island infirmary a month later. At the autopsy, they cut him open, his heart was like a brown paper bag. Here’s a kicker. When they looked into it later, Casey found out that this Gianetto kid was no relation to Senza at all. Yes, his niece had died. In a hit-and-run
up in Tarrytown. No connection with Pike at all. Frank Torinetti wanted Pike dead as a kind of insurance, and Fabrizio Senza was just playing with Pike’s head while he shot him. The old guy was dying anyway, and what he said when he shot Pike took the official heat away from Frank. Maybe Fabrizio Senza just wanted to die like an old soldier. And he did.

Casey and Nicky took some heat for letting Pike get killed, but in the long run everyone was just damn glad the man was finally dead. He took a lot of things to the grave with him, which had to be a relief to his friends at CCS. Casey and Nicky are still an item, and they go see Morgan Rule when they can. No change there, but everybody has to have some hope. It’s the thing with feathers.

About Casey’s mother? Baby steps.

Jack’s kid, Danny, was transferred to a medium-security facility outside Fresno as soon as he got out of the clinic at Lompoc, just the way Jack Vermillion had wanted it. He got himself killed two months later in a tractor accident while he was working in a big field of grapevines. It was a fine sunny day in southern California and he’d been out of detox a month and was clean and straight when he died, according to the prison medics who did the autopsy. Anyway, there you go. That’s about it. No. Wait. There was one last thing.

Creek was watching the snow falling down over the campus grounds. It fell like apple blossoms, soft and white and into a perfect silence. The yellow windows glowed in the dark buildings, and the sound of a Christmas choir rose into the black night sky. Creek watched the snow come down out of the night. It was dizzying, like the stars falling. He looked at his pool, at the cover straining under the weight of the snow falling on it. The warm lights from his penthouse shone out into the patio and put a lovely amber tint on the snow that had gathered on his lawn chairs and his patio table, on the rounded dome of the barbecue where he had grilled steaks for his old friend Jack on the first day of the summer that was now long gone. Jack, who was coming home tonight. Creek had taken a call from Jack in the early morning, just as the snow had begun to fall. As he watched the snow falling into the deep dark below him, Creek thought about that call, played it over in his mind again and again.

“
Creek, Jack here.
”

“
Jack! Great to hear from you. Where are you?
”

“
I’m in Harrisburg. The airport. They let me out today.
”

“
I heard. You want me to pick you up at the airport?
”

“
No. I’ll take a cab. I wanted to say something to you.
”

“
Sure. Yeah. Okay.
”

“
You took money from Glazer, right?
”

Creek had been silent for a long time then, before he said yes.

“
Why, Creek?
”

“
How’d you find out?
”

“
Flannery told me yesterday. It came out in Glazer’s plea bargain, during the full-and-frank-statement part. Flannery didn’t want me to know. But now I do. Why did you take it?
”

What the hell was there to say? How about the truth?

“
I was into a lot of people. Carmine. His friends. Gambling. I made some bad calls in the market. I owed people. The cars weren’t enough. I had talked to some Wall Street people about our plans to redo the pension fund, and I guess one of them talked to Galitzine Sheng and Munro. Glazer called me. He knew about my cash flow
 … 
my problems. He asked me to arrange a meet.
”

“
At the Frontenac?
”

“
Yeah
 … 
Jack, listen
—”

“
How much did you take? To set up the meet?
”

“
A quarter million. I paid off Carmine a hundred thousand, but I still have some left. I can
—”

“
Nothing to do now, Creek. All done. Listen, what I wanted to say
 … 
you’re my friend, Creek. My good friend. I understand. I understand how a man can do things
 … 
under the gun, a guy can do things and then be sorry for them later. I did that. It’s
 … 
nobody’s above it, okay? Anybody can do
 … 
anything.
”

“
Christ, Jack
 … 
I’m sorry every goddamn day.
”

“
Yeah
 … 
me too. Look
 … 
they’re calling my plane.
”

“
You want me to come and get you?
”

“
No, Creek
 … 
I’ll give you a call. In the new year.
”

“
In the new year? Promise? I’ll look forward to it. Fly safe.
”

“
Yeah. I promise. You stay safe too, buddy.
”

Then he was gone. That had been many hours ago. A very long time ago. Now Creek was standing at the edge
of his roof, looking out over the low huddled buildings of the college, the yellow glow of the dormitory windows, listening to the sweet voices of the choir, and the snow continued to fall out of the black woolen sky in huge soft flakes that were just like apple blossoms.

Could a man fall like that, if he were to step out into the black woolen night? Would he fall the way the snow falls, into a perfect silence? How sweet it would be to have the courage to know.

My descriptions of the territorial and judicial conflicts encountered every day by the men and women of the NYPD are as accurate as my research and personal observations could make them. The operational details are based on my own experiences with working detectives on the streets of the five boroughs. The real-life consequences of the asset seizure laws, including their corrosive effect on the principles and conduct of certain city, state, and federal attorneys, are a matter of public record for those of you who care to look.

Although this novel is a work of fiction, and any resemblance to the living or dead is purely coincidental, Earl V. Pike is a composite of several men I have met in the course of my long and uneven life, many of whom are now safely tucked away in shallow graves in assorted third-world hellholes, and for whom no one mourns but I.

Carsten Stroud
Thunder Beach

Dedicated to the memory of
BEVERLY LEWIS
my friend and my editor for fifteen years,
and to
CATHERINE AMANDA STROUD
my mother.

Both of these graceful,
intelligent, and compassionate women
died during the year this book
was being written.

And to
KATIE HALL
my editor,
who loved Beverly
as much as I did.

A sigh can break a man in two.

—THE TALMUD

Thanks are also due to, among many other people, Irwyn Applebaum, for being patient with a very complicated book, to Barney Karpfinger, for being patient with a very stressed-out writer, and to John Flicker, for helping me get the Barrett Fifty right. And finally, my thanks to Howard Hardwick and a couple of NYPD detectives, who made the book possible in the first place.