Good Day to Die (6 page)

But suppose Becky fell under a second obligation. Suppose she felt the need to protect her little girl. Suppose it became clear, even to Becky, that Daddy was going to hurt (or
kill)
her little girl. Would Becky put her child into the back of the van and smuggle her to safety? Would she drive Lorraine back down the road that wasn’t a road at all? That had tossed Lorraine about like she was a sack of flour?

Lorraine sighed, reached into the covered pot that held the last of the food. She dug out a wrapped sandwich and sniffed at it. Peanut butter and jelly. The perfect choice for a young child.

“I should have paid attention. On that damned road. I should have paid attention.”

This time, Lorraine wasn’t startled by the sound of her own voice. She decided that speaking aloud was helpful, because it let her control the flow of her thoughts by slowing them down.

“I was terrified when we drove up to the cabin,” she began. “I don’t know if we drove through the forest or over some abandoned road. I seem to remember branches whipping the sides of the van. I seem to remember driving through a stream. Can a van go through a stream? Don’t you need some kind of Jeep for that?”

She was thinking, not for the first time, about going down the road. Of following the track made by the van. She knew that it had to lead to another road somewhere. To houses and people and help. She felt she could endure almost anything if it led to escape. But what if the track ran directly to
their
house.

Lorraine imagined herself struggling, naked, along a narrow track, finding her way by following the faint impressions made by the van’s tires. Her arms and legs are scratched and bruised, her face swollen by insect bites, her bare feet slippery with blood. Finally, after hours and hours of suffering, she hears a distant radio and stumbles forward. Only to find Daddy perched on the porch swing; Becky toiling at the kitchen stove.

They would kill her for sure.

A sudden gust of wind slammed a fusillade of raindrops against the cabin window. Lorraine shivered and pulled the blanket over her bare feet.

“What I need to do first,” she said, “is get some little concession from Becky. It doesn’t have to be much, as long as it’s done without Daddy’s permission. Another blanket, maybe. Or a T-shirt or a pair of socks. The trick is to get Becky in the habit of making her own decisions.”

Lorraine, having made
her
decision, sat in the chair. Waiting was what she seemed to do best. She listened to the rain for a moment, then felt a cold hand pass over her flesh as the fear returned.

They can’t let me live, she thought to herself. “They
cant.”
The second single word began to echo in time to the drumbeats of rain.
Can’t,
can’t-can’t,
can’t,
can’t-can’t.

There’s only one real question, she finally decided. And that’s whether I’ll go insane before they kill me.

Sometime later (she had no way to calculate any unit of time smaller than a day), she heard a vehicle drive up to the cabin. A door opened, then slammed shut; running feet slapped across the muddy yard.

As she did each day, Lorraine indulged a brief rescue fantasy. A rescue
daydream.
A tin-starred sheriff burst through the cabin door. Or a burly, foul-mouthed New York detective. Or an FBI agent, dressed to the nines. Or her own laughing-crying parents.

“Well, how are we doing on this rainy day, Miss Lorraine?” Becky called, unlocking the door. She rushed on without pausing for an answer. “I do have the most wonderful news for you, Miss Lorraine. Daddy says we are driving tonight. And
you
are coming with us.”

I
T WAS JUST AFTER
three o’clock in the afternoon when I left the labs at One Police Plaza. Sixteen minutes after three o’clock, to be exact. There are some moments you never forget. (Like December 16, 1971, 10:44 A.M., when that C130 lifted off a Saigon runway with my intact carcass aboard.) I imagine convicts released from their prison cages experience the same sense of escape. Escape mixed with exultation. I made it, you son-of-a-bitch. I survived and you got nothin’ to say to me. Now or ever.

It was not the afternoon of the morning I entered the lab. Even Manhattan’s sooty air smelled different now. It was the difference between the smell of the forest when you step into it on a short hike and the smell of the forest when you step into it with an Ml6 strapped to your chest. I automatically scanned the people on the street, separating the mutts and mopes and skels from the cops and common citizens.

Jane Street, my destination and the home of the King Thong Task Force, was on the west side of Manhattan, a couple of miles from where I stood. I might have taken a subway up or grabbed a cab, but I decided to hoof it, ignoring the fact that New York was on the tail end of a cool spell and the overcast skies threatened rain. I had a tan Gore-Tex jacket on my back, a pair of thoroughly broken-in, waterproofed Western boots on my feet, and a Policemen’s Benevolent Association cap pulled low over my face. If worse came to worse, I could always unfurl the hood zipped into the collar of my jacket and make for the nearest subway.

(The boots, by the way, were my pride and joy. Custom made of fine-grained black lizard, the sharply squared toes encased a steel core. Behind the steel, a thick bed of molded foam provided the necessary cushion for my own toes. I’ve never had the time to study one or another of the disciplines lumped together under the generic term “karate,” but I’ve absolutely mastered a snap-kick to the shin or knee. A snap-kick that’s proven to be more effective than Mace or a Taser in bringing a desire for sanity to the consciousness of the terminally belligerent.)

I walked west on Chambers Street, dodging pedestrians as I made my way toward the Hudson River. One Police Plaza, in the heart of Manhattan’s civic center, is surrounded by federal, state, and city courthouses as well as the enormous Municipal Building with its gilded angel on top. City Hall is there, too, its grimy facade plunked down in the middle of a small, even grimier park.

The few square blocks surrounding the civic center hum to the tune of the several hundred thousand low-level bureaucrats who feed and shop in the area. I suppose tourists must find it strange to discover a Blarney Castle cheek by jowl with the Ojavi West Indian Restaurant. Wong’s Chinese Fast Food, two doors down, probably doesn’t help matters. But that’s New York. The day when you could walk into a Jewish or an Italian or a German neighborhood and know exactly what to expect from the local restaurateurs is long gone. Only Little Italy and Chinatown, pure ethnic pockets institutionalized in the name of the tourist dollar, remain.

I turned north onto Hudson Street, leaving the civic center behind. The developers call this neighborhood TriBeCa. It was created out of the old printing district by real estate sharks in the 1980s. The factories were carved up as the printers took their jobs to automated plants in New Jersey, carved up and converted into co-ops and condos. Now, the locals bustle from one trendy bar to the next while the homeless sleep on the unused loading docks of abandoned factories.

It was mostly old news, but it seemed fresh to me. I watched the life of the streets as if I was still a twenty-one-year-old veteran just back from Vietnam. I’d vowed never to return to Paris, New York, on the day I’d walked into the recruiter’s office, but that didn’t mean I’d been prepared for Manhattan. Manhattan was another world altogether, as different from the DMZ as the DMZ had been from Whiteface Mountain. I
breathed
New York back then, sucked it in as a kind of celebration of my ability to survive.

Well, I’d managed to survive again and now the littered streets seemed as exotic as ever. Above Houston Street, the warehouse district gives way to Greenwich Village, with its town-houses and meandering lanes. On impulse, I took a left at Christopher Street and walked down to what was left of the old West Side Highway, six lanes of asphalt punctuated with traffic lights and divided by concrete barriers.

Across the highway, a few rotting piers jutted out into the Hudson River. Between the piers and the roadway, more concrete barriers sectioned off a long promenade. On this particular afternoon, the piers were almost deserted, but after dark, winter or summer, rain or shine, West Street was the center of a homosexual meat market that had almost nothing to do with the large gay community in Greenwich Village.

That was the strangest part about it. The whores were young runaways from all over the country, and the customers were from New Jersey and Connecticut and Long Island. The newspapers claim that eighty percent of the male prostitutes working the piers are HIV positive. (Only slightly higher, by the way, than the percent of female prostitutes working Midtown.) Back when I’d been assigned to Vice, one of my jobs had been to pose as a prostitute and lure the johns into making a proposition. I was still young and pretty in those days and I never had much trouble making arrests. What amazed me (in the beginning, at least) was the simple fact that almost all of the johns were married. And they weren’t anxious to use condoms, either. I know because, mostly out of boredom, I tested them.

“Forty bucks? Okay, but you gotta use a rubber. I don’t wanna get AIDS.”

“Ha, ha, ha. You kids sure learn to hustle early. Make it sixty. But no scumbags, sonny. I wanna
feel
something.”

I continued on up to Jane Street, then turned east. The one-story brick structure housing the task force had originally been a garage. The faded sign above the door read “MANGANARO TKG.” There was nothing to announce the presence of a police task force (the NYPD, if it had its choice, would probably make 911 an unlisted number) except the actual address. I tried the door, found it locked, rang the bell.

“Yeah?” The cop who answered was in uniform. He stared at my face for a moment, trying to guess who or what I was, then repeated, “Yeah?”

“Detective Means,” I responded, deadpan.

“There’s no Detective Means here.”

“
I’m
Detective Means, you asshole. I’m looking for Pucinski.”

He didn’t like my answer, but there wasn’t much he could do about it. Eating shit is an important part of the police experience. He let me inside and I spotted Pucinski sitting in front of a computer off to one side of the room.

I knew Pucinski from the ballistics lab. In some ways, he was the ultimate cop, a thirty-five-year man with no intention of retiring. The job was his family, his religion, his life. Five years ago, he’d run into the wrong alley and been rewarded with a shotgun blast that took off most of his right leg. He could have retired on the spot with a three-quarter pension, but, as he explained to me later, he’d never even considered the possibility. Instead, after the surgery, the prosthesis, and the rehab, he’d clomped into the office of Inspector George Dimenico, his rabbi, and begged to be assigned to limited duty.

Dimenico hadn’t had much choice. Pucinski was a genuine hero, even if he had been stupid enough to chase an armed mutt down a dark alley. I suppose ballistics had seemed as good a place as any for a handicapped veteran; Pucinski had been down there for more than four years when I showed up. Somehow, despite being the ultimate burnout hairbag, he’d mastered every aspect of ballistics, including the computer link to NCIC and NYSIIS, the federal and state crime information systems. The computer wouldn’t actually compare ballistic evidence, but it would match a name to a rap sheet.

I watched Pucinski (called Pooch, naturally) peck away at the keyboard for a moment before I went over. He hadn’t changed much. Five-foot-eight (at the most), two hundred and eighty pounds (at the least), he was wrapped in a tan, wash-and-wear, gabardine suit, a frayed white shirt, and a solid brown tie that must have been rumpled when he’d pulled it off the five-dollar rack. Closing in on sixty, his jowls hid his collar while his gut covered his belt. Even his eyelids drooped.

“Hey, Pooch,” I said. “How’s it goin’?”

Pucinski turned slowly (he did everything slowly) and smiled up at me. “Why, if it ain’t Mean Mister Means. How many you kill, today, Means? What’s the body count?”

That was another of the many benefits of the job. Being endlessly ribbed by dinosaurs like Pucinski. You couldn’t hit them and you couldn’t insult them, either. What you had to do was take it.

“Well, I haven’t made my quota today, but it’s still early.” I sat down next to him. “The captain speak to you?”

“Bouton?”

“That’s her.”

“Yeah, she spoke to me.”

“About what she has in mind?”

“The whole deal,” he smirked. “Say, Means, what was the first Israeli settlement?” Jokes, mostly ethnic, mostly nasty, were an important part of the Pucinski repertoire.

“I don’t know, Pooch.”

“The first Israeli settlement was ten cents on a dollar.” He chortled happily for a minute, then sobered up.

“It’s a piece of shit, Means,” he said, grabbing the back of my hand. “You caught a piece of shit.”

I
T WASN’T WHAT I
wanted to hear, but I can’t say I was surprised. I tried to dredge up some kind of a response, but failed. What’s the expression—
a piece of shit is a piece of shit is a piece of shit?
I shrugged to show the required degree of macho indifference, then took a moment to glance around the room.

A row of mismatched six-drawer filing cabinets, at least two dozen, stood against the wall behind Pucinski’s desk, their tops covered with boxes of what I mistakenly took to be supplies. A bank of silent telephones and a row of computer stations linked the far end of the building with the charts and blackboards covering the rest of the wall space. The center of the garage was carpeted with several dozen, mostly empty, chairs and desks.

“See them boxes, Means?” Pucinski asked. “What’s in them boxes is what didn’t fit in the filing cabinets. The hotline number was on the air two hundred and fifty times a day in the beginning. We got a hundred and eighty-five thousand calls in three months. After that, we stopped countin’. Things are winding down, now, but we used to have twenty cops on them phones, and the public still bitched about the busy signals.