Shoot the Moon (35 page)

He’s awakened suddenly by a noise that sounds like a water main has burst somewhere nearby. He grabs for the volume button on the wiretap recorder and turns it down. Nothing happens. He does the same with the room bugs. Number one, nothing. Number two, nothing. Number three, the noise disappears. He turns it back up, and the noise returns.

“Fucking static,” Spike says out loud. Well, he figures, two outa three ain’t bad. He kills the power on bug number three. Then he remembers he’s supposed to make entries in the logbook. He finds the book, studies his last entry.

He checks his watch, is surprised to see it’s almost four in the morning. He decides he must’ve dozed off for a few minutes. He picks up a pen, enters a notation recording the next important development.

“What do we do now?” Goodman asks.

“I don’t know,” she admits. “The problem is, we’ve already committed enough crimes to put us each away for twenty years.”

“How can that be?”

“Take conspiracy,” she says. “All that’s required is an agreement to break some law, and that one of us does some overt act in furtherance of it.”

“What’s an overt act?”

“Anything,” she says. “It doesn’t even have to be an
illegal
act by itself. My handing the sample to T.M. Your returning one of Vincent’s calls. Our having the conversation we just had. I wouldn’t be surprised if
Washington’s
heard about that by now.”

“So we’re kind of in this thing together, huh?”

“Looks that way. Any ideas?”

“Yeah,” he says. “Pass the soap.”

In his dream, Goodman is flying above the earth, peering down through the clouds at the city’s skyline. He’s not alone - it’s as though he’s the leader of a V-shaped flock of geese. Fanning out behind him are Carmen and Kelly and Pop-Tart and Larus. He wants to see if they all have wings, but for some reason, he’s unable to turn his head to the side to look back at them.

All of a sudden, there are noises, the zinging of bullets whizzing by them. He knows they’ll all be shot, all he killed.

“Daddy! Daddy!”

He recognizes the voice of his daughter, but still he can’t see her; still he can’t move his head.

“Daddy! Daddy! It’s for
you!”

His heart almost bursts at the thought of whatever it is she’s doing for him.

“The telephone, Daddy! It’s for you.”

He opens his eyes and finds he’s on the floor of his apartment, his head wedged against the wall. Above him is Kelly, extending a telephone receiver in his direction. He takes it from her, puts it to his ear.

“Hey, Mikey boy. Sleeping late this morning?”

It’s Vinnie, of course.

“Take a look outside your door, Mikey,” Vinnie says. And then the phone goes dead. After a moment, there’s a dial tone.

“What time is it?” Goodman asks.

“Eight-thirty,” Kelly tells him.

He rubs his eyes and looks around. For a moment, he wonders if
all
of last night was a dream. Then he notices his pajama bottoms are on backward. At least they got back onto him somehow. He spots Carmen on the bed, totally dead to the world. He goes to get up, but finds he has to do it in stages - his balance is slightly off, and his knees are decidedly wobbly.

“Are you
sick,
Daddy?”

“No,” he assures her, “just tired.”

“Maybe you should sleep on the bed tonight,” she suggests. “I can take a turn on the floor.”

“We can talk about it later,” he says. He stands there, trying to remember what it was he was about to do. Then he recalls the phone conversation. What was it Vinnie wanted him to do? Look outside the door - that was it.

He walks to the door, unlocks it, and cracks it open, half-expecting to find Vinnie standing there. But there’s no one in sight. He’s about to close the door when his eyes are drawn downward. There’s something there, right on top of his doormat. He pulls the door open farther, sees it’s a suitcase, a large one - the awkward, heavy type people used to lug on trips before soft, lightweight luggage became popular. It’s particularly ugly, too - a yellow-and-green floral print. There’s a big tag on it that reads innovation luggage.

He grasps the handle and braces himself for its weight - he has no interest in throwing his back out again. But when he lifts it, he finds it’s only moderately heavy, a sure sign that it’s empty. He carries it into the apartment and closes the door.

Kelly has exhibited the good sense to make her own breakfast, and the even better sense to make something that doesn’t require the application of heat. She resumes her seat at the card table, over a bowl of cereal of some sort. He remembers the bug, wonders if right now there are ten guys at CIA headquarters listening to his daughter chewing.

“Are we going somewhere?” she asks between mouthfuls.

He looks at her. She looks at the suitcase. He looks at the suitcase.

“Oh, that.”

“We can talk about it later,” she says.

Carmen’s still asleep. Goodman notices that somehow she managed to get back into her flannel shirt before passing out. He wonders which one of them had the presence of mind to put some clothes on their bodies. A thought suddenly occurs to him, and he looks over at Kelly, but she seems to be thoroughly occupied with her cereal.

He heads for the bathroom.

“Someone called at oh-eight-thirty,” Spike Schwartz briefs Abbruzzo and Riley, who arrive at the plant at nine. “Told the Mole to look outside the door.”

“And?”

“And nothing,” Schwartz shrugs. “Whatever was there, it didn’t make noise.”

“Mighta been a note,” is Abbruzzo’s guess.

“Sonofa
bitch!”
Riley mutters. “Fuckers are communicating in
writing
now - to beat the tap and the bugs. Maybe we need to get a
video camera
in there, Ray.”

Abbruzzo ignores him. It’s too late for that. Though he must admit he likes the idea - can you imagine catching a couple
doing it
on video?”

“Did they do it last night?” Abbruzzo asks Schwartz.

“Do what, sir?”

“It.”

“It?”

“Did they become acquainted in the biblical sense?”

Morning is apparently not Schwartz’s best time of the day. He stares blankly at Abbruzzo, waiting for the next clue.

“
Did they fuck?”

“
Them?”
Schwartz catches right on. “No way. They were down for the count by 2200.”

“It’s the big day,” Riley says. “They wanted to be well rested.”

Looking in the bathroom mirror as he wipes the last traces of shaving cream from his face, Michael Goodman feels anything but well rested. What he does feels is a growing sense of dread, which he recognizes as the prelude to eventual panic. He feels outnumbered, outwitted, and absurdly out of his league. He feels a little bit like he’s just woken up on the morning he’s scheduled to be executed.

But then again, he feels totally, helplessly in love.

There’s a knock on the bathroom door. Goodman pushes it open, and Carmen slips in, flannel shirt and all. Her smile reassures him that not all of last night was a dream.

“Good morning,” she says, running the back of one hand down the side of his face. He’s never been so glad he’s shaved in his life.

“Morning,” he smiles, heading out the bathroom door.

“Your pajamas are on backward,” she tells him.

Jimmy Zelb wakes up around 9:15. Remembers he’s been looking forward to this day for some time. Today, after all, is the day they’re going to take Michael Goodman down.

Zelb has directed Operation Pushover since the beginning, since Big Red told him about the guy living on East Ninety-Second Street who was dealing pure heroin. It was Zelb who convinced Lenny Siegel, his group leader, to let him put Carmen Cruz in with Goodman. It was Zelb who concocted the rape scenario, knowing that Goodman would be sucker enough to take her in. And it was Zelb who created Vinnie and T.M. In fact, the cute initials - T.M. and C.O.P. - were Zelb’s idea, too.

And it’s all worked like a charm.

Goodman went for the bait like a bear goes for honey. Bought the whole line about Cruz’s fight with her pimp boyfriend, her threat to go back to the street, her connected brother. And before you knew it, Zelb - playing the role of T.M. - had a sample. True, it was actually Cruz who handed him the sample. (But when it came time to do the paperwork, they’d taken care of that little detail by writing Cruz out of the transfer altogether. No big deal.)

And what a sample it turned out to be!

Zelb had taken it to the police chemist himself, bypassing the lab messenger they usually called for. He’d watched as Dr. Krishna or something like that - the “Dr.” no doubt being some sort of an honorary degree, seeing as no Ph.D. chemist would ever stoop to work for what the city pays - had opened up the baggie and examined the contents.

“Notice the gray cast to it,” he’d told Zelb. “And the graininess. I hear South Florida is starting to see this kind of stuff.”

“Where’s it come from originally?” Zelb had asked.

“Colombia, most likely. Though we’re seeing more and more high- quality heroin coming out of Peru lately, too.”

For the next fifteen minutes, Zelb had watched as Krishna had weighed the powder, taken small samples from various parts of it, and added drops of different solutions to the samples, comparing the colors that resulted against standard color samples on index cards. Then he’d turned to Zelb.

“We won’t know the exact numbers until we run it through a neutron activation analysis,” he’d said. “But I’ll stake my reputation on this stuff’s being better than 98 percent pure.”

It turned out that his reputation was safe. The analysis showed the sample to be heroin hydrochloride, 99.8 percent pure. Though Zelb doesn’t know it, heroin in its soluble form is anhydrous - it craves water, tending to combine even with the moisture in the atmosphere, meaning it will almost never test out at 100 percent purity under normal conditions.

Then there’d been the negotiations between Goodman and Vinnie, who was of course none other than Zelb’s partner, Frank Farrelli. Goodman had driven an unexpectedly hard bargain, insisting on $3.5 million for the nineteen kilos he has left. But the truth is, Farrelli had been prepared to offer as much as 5 million if he’d had to. Money is no object when you’re not going to spend it. But Farrelli had nevertheless been compelled to
seem
reluctant to meet Goodman’s price: As any drug dealer knows, if a buyer agrees to pay too much, he’s either intending to rip you off or he’s the Man. But then again, Goodman wasn’t just any drug dealer. An exhaustive search of the files of DEA, FBI, and even Interpol revealed no mention of him, except for a three-year stint in the navy in the seventies. To this day, nobody’s been able to explain how he suddenly appeared on the drug scene. There’s been some speculation that he may even have stolen someone else’s stash. That notion’s recently been fueled by an unconfirmed report from an informer that in the past day or two a handful of Latino heavyweights have flown up from the Miami area to reclaim something they consider to be rightfully theirs.

But that’s all idle speculation and rumor, what the Justice Department classifies as “soft” information. Jimmy Zelb likes to deal in
facts.
And the
fact
is that today’s the day Michael Goodman’s going to bring them nineteen kilos of the purest heroin law enforcement has seen in three decades. And he’s going to put it right in their hands.

“Going somewhere?” Carmen asks, eyeing the suitcase as she comes out of the bathroom, drying her hair with a towel.

“We can talk about it later,” Kelly says, cutting between them to take her turn in the bathroom.

“It seems your ‘brother’ had it dropped off on our doorstep,” Goodman explains.

Carmen examines the tag on the suitcase. “It’s brand new,” she says. “They’ve no doubt bought another one just like it. That means they want to do another switch.”

“Boy, they think of everything.”

“Oh, they’re three moves ahead of you, Michael. First, this forces you to get the drugs out of hiding so you can transfer them to the suitcase. Next, it’s nice and visible, so you’ll be easy for them to spot when you show up. Finally, it’s big and unwieldy, so you can’t disappear with the money that’ll be in the other suitcase.”

“They really
do
think of everything.”

She takes his face in both hands and makes him look her in the eyes. “Promise me you’ll tell Vinnie you can’t go through with it, Michael.”

“Promise me my daughter’s not going to keep needing tests,” he says.

She releases his face but not his eyes. “Your daughter needs
you,
” she says.

By midmorning, the plant is packed with cops. Abbruzzo and Weems, by virtue of their seniority, will run the operation from there. Lieutenant Spangler is the supervisor, and he’ll act as field commander from his car. Riley and Sheridan will cover the buy location, aided by a dozen plainclothes police officers. DeSimone and Kwon will be nearby if technical assistance is required. They’ve even thought to have a female officer assigned, in case they arrest Goodman’s girlfriend. And someone from the Bureau of Child Welfare is on standby, since it’s possible they may end up with a
kid
on their hands. All told, there are twenty-one people assigned to the operation at this point, not counting Maggie Kennedy, who’ll be at her desk in the DA’s office should legal advice be needed.

In addition to cellular telephones, each unit has a handheld radio to keep in touch with all other units. Finally, the deputy commissioner in charge of Public Affairs has been briefed; he, in turn, has notified certain trusted contacts in the media. If all goes according to schedule, the seizure should make both the eleven o’clock news and the morning papers.

At 1145 hours, a call comes in from the Special Equipment Unit telling them the MOUSE is ready for their use. Abbruzzo tells Sheridan and Riley to go pick it up. “And don’t be playing with any of the gadgets, for Chrissakes.”

“You want us to bring it back here?”

“Fuck no,” Abbruzzo says, looking around for his Maalox tablets. “I don’t want the Mole to see it anywhere around here. I want you to call me when you got it, then just hang loose until we find out where this thing is going to go down.” He finds the Maalox, pops one.

“Then we head for the set?”

“You don’t do
anything,”
Abbruzzo says, “until I tell you to.” He downs another Maalox.

Gustavo Fuentes wakes up Friday morning in a suite he’s rented for the weekend at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. It’s a large suite, which the Waldorf categorizes as one of its “premiere” accommodations. It consists of a large sitting room, a bedroom, a dressing room, a full bathroom, and a half bathroom off the sitting room, for guests. It has a service area complete with refrigerator, cooking facilities, dining table, and a full wet bar. It rents for $ 1,850 per night. Yet it somehow fails to please Mister Fuentes.