Authors: Gabriel Cohen
Red Hook
“[A] sophisticated contemporary noir … What Cohen does so well here is to give us everything we require from a cop story … and then so much more: There’s a documentary panache to his depiction of Brooklyn and its history.” —
Los Angeles Times
on
Red Hook
“Gives you a real feeling for the neighborhood … [An] outstanding first novel.” —
The New York Times Book Review
on
Red Hook
“At a time when some of the older masterful cop writers, like Ed McBain, are dying or just fading away, Cohen’s appearance comes as a relief and pleasure.” —
The Washington Post Book World
on
The Graving Dock
“Intricate, atmospheric, funny, and enthralling. An impressive crime novel from a powerful, promising writer.” —George Pelecanos, author of
The Night Gardener
, on
The Graving Dock
“A murdered friend, a beautiful widow and the borough of Brooklyn loom large in this superb installment from NYPD Detective Jack Leightner… . An impeccable procedural plus a poignant love story, intelligent, understated and refreshing.”
—Kirkus Reviews
, starred review of
Neptune Avenue
“Cohen’s novels belong … at the top of every Brooklyn crime-fiction list.” —
Booklist
, starred review of
Neptune Avenue
“Spellbinding … Deftly plotted and convincingly written. Cohen once more does the genre proud.” —
Kirkus Reviews
, starred review of
The Ninth Step
A Jack Leightner Crime Novel
Gabriel Cohen
For Monroe and Miriam Cohen,
with love and thanks
prologue
T
OMAS BERRIOS PULLED HIS
Yankees cap out of his pocket and set it backward on his head, then ran his hand along his thigh, enjoying the smoothness of the nylon cycling shorts and the tautness of the muscle underneath. Good to be alive, yo. Good to be young.
He pinched the tuft of hair under his bottom lip and surveyed his crew, gathered under the street lamp in front of his apartment: Felix, Ramon, Dionicio. Only Hector the BigHead was missing, late as usual.
Upstairs, his little son’s head peered over the windowsill. “Get back inside,” Tomas said, but he smiled fondly at the boy.
“Okay,” he said, bumping his bicycle down over the curb. “Let’s roll.” He didn’t look back—he knew that everyone would follow. And they did, pursuing the glowing taillights of a taxi as they pedaled off into the hot Brooklyn night.
Just as they reached Fourth Avenue, a shout came from behind.
“Yo! Holdup!”
As Hector came pedaling, the crew waited outside a bodega. Melon-breasted women smiled at them from the malt liquor posters in the window. Across the street, a robed monk on a billboard beamed up at a bottle of Frangelico. “Tomarlo No Es Pecado.” To drink it is not a sin.
“What the fuck is that?” said Ramon, laughing at Hector’s banana-seat bike with its high handlebars.
“What happened to your for-real bike?” Tomas said.
“Somebody stole it,” Hector mumbled, his oversize, pale head shadowed by the hood of a ratty sweatshirt.
“You gonna make all of us look bad, riding that thing,” Tomas said. “How you gonna keep up?”
“I be all right.”
The group swerved onto the avenue, its four lanes divided by a concrete median. The first forty blocks were industrial, a strip of fix-a-flat shops, muffler-repair garages, auto parts warehouses. The breeze smelled of stale oil and fresh gas. Tomas hunched over the handlebars, shoulders straining over his pumping knees. His arm itched: he’d had the tattoo on his right tricep re-inked and the scab was almost ready to peel.
They rode a wave of changing traffic signals, red winking to green as they blew down the avenue. Little bright bodegas whipped past, signs and smells announcing Cuchifritos, Comidas Criollas. They picked up speed, pouring faster and faster into a long V of streaming light, along the dark wall of a cemetery, through silent sleeping Sunset Park, past the somber basilicas and lumbering brick buildings of Bay Ridge.
At the corner of Seventy-third Street, a red Camaro roared past. The passenger window rolled down. “Nice wheels, greaseballs!” shouted the shirtless Italian kid riding shotgun.
Tomas’s heart shifted gears. He called to his crew, “Let’s get those guinea bastids!”
The Italian leaned out of his window, laughing as he checked their progress.
Maybe they’d catch him at a light. Concentrating on the Camaro two blocks ahead, Tomas rode close to the cars parked along the avenue, straight into a suddenly opening driver’s door. He flipped over the metal, flew tumbling twenty feet across the asphalt, thudded onto the hood of a parked Chevy Nova, and landed on his back in front of an Italian restaurant. The diners stared out the window in horror.
His homies screeched to a halt, dropped their bikes, ran to him. “Jesus, guy, I’m sorry,” said the anxious white driver. Tomas raised a hand weakly, all his wind knocked out.
After a minute he sat up, brushed some grit off his riding shorts, staggered to his feet. Little bits of gravel were embedded in his palms. He took a few tentative steps, stomach heaving: everything seemed to work okay. A miracle. He laughed. He was okay. Fucking
invincible
.
While the crew regrouped in the street, the driver took advantage of Tomas’s good humor to retreat into the restaurant. Tomas picked up his bike, which had also survived with just a toe clip torn away. He turned. “Where’s Hector?”
Felix undipped the water bottle from his crossbar, spit. “I think he stopped off at the McDonald’s back by the cemetery.”
“We’ll give him one minute,” Tomas said. “That’s it.”
“Forget his ass,” Ramon said, the sharp angles of his face made starker by the streetlight overhead. “Let’s go.”
The others waited to see what Tomas would do. For years he’d been the leader of the group, but in the past several months, for some unknown reason, Ramon had taken it upon himself to test his authority.
Tomas pretended not to hear. After a minute, he led the crew off again, spreading out in a line for the last lap before they reached the water. The night air was sweet. Now and then a flash of gleaming metal, a silver-blue arch of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, rose over the rooftops like some improbable element of a dream.
At the end of Fourth Avenue, they crossed the Shore Parkway to a grassy strip bordering the harbor. They hit high gear now, gliding single-file on the smooth path along the river, a squadron of Stealth bombers under the moonlight, coursing between the bay on the right and the Shore Parkway’s river of lights on the left.
Tomas braked to stand exhilarated under the bridge, which rocketed across a lake of molten pewter toward the dark mass of Staten Island. Unlike the Brooklyn Bridge, with its spiderwebs of cable and comfortable stone towers, the Verrazano was Space Age, stripped for speed, an expressway hung from two grand but simple strings of light. From under the bridge, a barge glided by like a half-submerged submarine, bucking powerful currents rippling silver around the bend.
Tomas moved away from the others and stood on the path along the water’s edge. Finally, a moment alone. Always, there was his wife, and his mother-in-law, who never left the house. Sunday morning, when a man deserved a few moments of peace and quiet, the kids pounced on him in bed, squealing like puppies. At rush hour in the subway he was packed in with a bunch of other wage slaves in an airless sardine can. The only time he was by himself was when he was on the John or riding up and down in the service elevator at work.
This, now: here was a place of power. Under this eerie manmade object built to such an immense scale, a floodlit arc reaching out into the sky, the night hummed with something great, some invisible electric force. Funny, he thought: that he should be dwarfed by the bridge, yet feel his heart expand.
It bothered him that none of his crew could appreciate the scene right in front of their eyes. Except Hector the BigHead, who finally caught up, swerving next to him. In the background, the others grumbled about getting under way, but Hector stood silent, showing the proper reverence. He felt it too. Maybe that was why Tomas put up with him, touched in the head as the kid was.
Across the harbor, the Statue of Liberty held up her torch like a cigarette lighter in the night.
Give me your tired, your poor…
Fuck that, Tomas murmured to himself. You weren’t really an American until you had money—you were still just a Dominican or a Puerto Rican or a Pole.
Five miles back, just across from the southern tip of Manhattan, lay Red Hook, his lucky neighborhood, where soon he would make the score that would change things forever. Tonight he was on one side of a great wall, a wall built to keep people like him out, but in just twelve hours he would stand on the other side. He was glad for his children, glad for his wife, but most of all, in his deep heart, he was glad for himself. Tomorrow his life would begin.
T
HE GOWANUS CANAL WAS
a bilious green. Long ago, Brooklyn kids had jumped in off its narrow banks to shout and splash around, but more than a century’s worth of raw sewage and pollution from the adjoining factories had rendered the water unfit for every living thing except some algae and a tiny perverse species called killifish. Its opaque depths kept many secrets, but by a stroke of luck this corpse was not one of them.
The body lay in a scrub of sun-dry marsh grass at the top of the bank. As Detective Jack Leightner made his way up, his hamstrings strained, but he told himself he was still in good shape for a fifty-year-old. As a member of the elite Brooklyn South Homicide Task Force, he’d been called in to aid the local precinct with the investigation.
A team had already fanned out around the corpse, stooped over like migrant workers as they searched the ground for evidence: a scrap of clothing, a clump of hair, maybe just a cigarette butt with DNA evidence smooched on the filter…A Crime Scene Unit photographer shifted around, snapping pictures.
One of the locals, a massive man with a bear’s ponderous gait, straightened up and smiled as Jack approached. “Hey, whaddaya know?” he said. “The cavalry’s here!”
At thirty, Gary Daskivitch was the youngest detective in the Seven-six Precinct. He and Jack had worked together the year before on a murder in the nearby Gowanus housing projects.
“You catch the case?” Jack asked.
“Yeah. Looks like we’re partners again.”
At four o’clock the August sun should have been high, but a bank of scudding dirty-cotton clouds dimmed the light. The air bore the heavy, metallic tang of an approaching storm.
“Hey, you see the Mets play last night?” Daskivitch asked.
Jack snorted and looked up at his partner, who stood a full head taller. “I saw it. Almost made me ashamed to be a New Yorker.”
