Speak of the Devil (38 page)

Probably the most consistently thriving businesses in the pier’s mall are the ones on the top floor, the one with the most glass and the best views: the Brooklyn Bridge to the north, the Brooklyn waterfront and promenade directly across the river, and to the south, Governors Island and the top half of the torch arm of the Statue of Liberty.

This is the Pier 17 food court. And this is where Angel Ramos screwed up while attempting to plant a homemade bomb behind one of the large potted plants that dot the terra-cotta floor.

THE CROWD OF ONLOOKERS WAS SOMEWHAT LARGER THAN WHAT YOU generally get for these sorts of things. This was because, in addition to the naturally curious, several hundred shoppers and salesclerks had safely fled the pavilion as word spread of a madman somewhere in the building with a bomb. Even as I arrived, scattered pockets of people were fleeing across the wooden deck between the pier and the street with their arms over their heads. The police had already set up sawhorses and barrier tape. Several officers dashed forward to escort the panicked people the final few feet. One of the people fleeing the pavilion was old St. Nick himself. The big guy was dragging along a stumbling elf by the arm.

Behind the barrier was the row of police. Dozens of them and more coming. The patrol cars parked at every imaginable angle. And behind the police cars, funneled into the narrow Ye Olde cobbled area of Fulton Street, stood the crowd of onlookers.

I’d gotten a fragmented piece of the story from one of the cops mobilizing just outside Carl Schurz Park. “Some nut is holding a group of people hostage at Pier 17,” he’d said. “They say he’s got a bomb.”

I parked my car at the base of the Brooklyn Bridge and jogged along South Street, in front of the fish market stalls. The gawkers were sparse here, and I was able to get right up to the barrier. I heard mutterings from some of the cops that the mayor was allegedly on his way. Not too many seemed thrilled by the prospect.

“We got our fucking hands full here.”

“He thinks we got time for a fucking photo op?”

As Remy Sanchez moved from behind one of the stanchions holding up the FDR Drive, I called out to him: “Sanchez!”

He looked around, then spotted me. A policeman near me was trying to keep me from the barricade, but Sanchez called to him, “Let him in!” and I ducked under the tape. Sanchez was barking into his walkie-talkie. “No! Do you understand the word ‘no’? Just wait, is what I said.” He lowered the walkie-talkie. “Cox is in there.”

“
Cox
? Where?”

He waved his walkie-talkie toward the pier. “In there somewhere. Son of a bitch. Rule number one in these situations is you stand down. Any cop knows that. Rule number one is
not
running like a madman across an open space and going inside. That doesn’t make heroes, that makes dead men.”

I looked over at the pier. The public space was a good hundred yards from the pavilion building. “So what happened?” I asked.

“A man was spotted acting suspiciously by a worker at one of the food joints up there. We think the worker confronted the guy. This is what we’re hearing from some of the people who managed to get away. The worker was shot. He’s still in there. Somehow the shooter managed to corral a bunch of people, and he’s holding them on the top floor. We don’t know exactly how many. He let one person go. A messenger. She says he’s got a bomb. She says the guy’s out of his mind. He wants money. He wants a helicopter. He wants a boat. He wants to talk to the mayor. Son of a bitch doesn’t know what he wants. We’re trying to establish communication.”

“What he wants is ten million dollars,” I said.

Sanchez made a long face. “Well, so do I. And how do you know this?”

“Long story.”

“I take it this is our nut job from last week,” Sanchez said.

“That’s the short version.”

“So he’ll kill those people if it comes to it. We can’t count on this being a bluff.”

“I wouldn’t count on it.”

“Holy mother.”

Sanchez’s walkie-talkie crackled, and he barked into it. I caught the word “sharpshooters.” I scanned the phalanx of police officers. I was surprised Tommy Carroll hadn’t arrived on the scene yet. One Police Plaza was under a mile away. A police van was making its way slowly down the cobbled street, parting the sea of onlookers. Sanchez clicked off his walkie-talkie.

“If I get my hands on Cox, I’m going to strangle him. There’s no way he can approach that guy without endangering the hostages. Goddammit, we need control here. A cowboy cop is not what we need.”

“Cox knows the perp,” I said. “He knows the guy holding the hostages.”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“Another long story.”

“Jesus, Malone, you’re just one big fat storybook, aren’t you? Well, I don’t have time to listen to them all right now. You stay put and keep your nose clean. This is police business. If the situation drags on, we’ll light a campfire and let you tell some of your stories.”

“Gracias,” I said.

Sanchez grunted and moved off. I spotted another face I recognized—that of Officer Patrick Noon. He was standing a head above anyone near him, about thirty feet away from me. He was looking in my direction, but if he spotted me, he chose not to show it.

The van that had been inching its way through the crowd reached South Street. The rear doors flew open and a dozen or more helmeted policemen piled out. They were wearing external bulletproof vests and carrying automatic weapons. I spotted an identical van pulling up to the barricades from the south. A small army poured out of this one as well. Sirens sounded overhead, simultaneous with the
thwocka-thwocka-thwocka
of a low-flying helicopter. The elevated FDR Drive runs right past Pier 17, roughly level with the upper floors of the mall. I was sure that traffic had been stopped in both directions. I took a few steps out from under the highway and looked up. I spotted several slender rifle barrels resting on the guardrail. The sharpshooters were already in place. The firepower was building up.

Cox. I pictured him dashing across the hundred-yard open area to make his way to the pier building. This wasn’t heroic, not any more than his shooting Roberto Diaz at point-blank range had been. I knew what it was. It was the same move as the one he’d pulled in the Municipal Building. A preemptive one. Cox had no intention of standing by while police negotiators attempted to set up a link to Angel. He couldn’t risk it. Whatever Leonard Cox’s entanglement was with Angel Ramos, it now appeared that he would do anything in his power to keep Angel from having the opportunity to spell it out.

Cox wasn’t on any rescue mission. He was on the hunt.

Another burping siren sounded, this one from a black sedan making its way down South Street, the same direction I’d come from. A news van was hot on its trail. As the car eased to a stop, I ducked out from behind the tape and slipped unseen to the nearest fish stall and moved quickly behind it. I peeked back around the corner. Martin Leavitt was emerging from the sedan. I thought of James King’s story about his cousin’s crush on the younger Leavitt. The news van screeched to a halt, and Kelly Cole bolted from the passenger side and ran on tippy heels swiftly over to where Leavitt had paused to survey the scene. She was beckoning her cameraman to hurry along. Her hair bounced as if she were in a shampoo commercial. Even from this distance, I could see Leavitt lighting up as she approached. The man couldn’t help himself; he was the ultimate flirt. I thought again about Margaret King, about seventeen-year-old Maggie King. Remy Sanchez was making his way over to the mayor. The news cameraman got his equipment up on his shoulder and flipped on his lamp. Cole reached for Leavitt’s elbow to guide him closer, into the shot. He reached for hers as well. The two shared a little laugh. Even from where I was standing I could read the look on Sanchez’s face. He obviously felt this was no time for a goddamn tea party.

The stalls of the fish market blocked me partially from view, allowing me to scoot unseen along the small seldom-used lip of the pier on the north side of the pavilion. I reached the pavilion and pushed quickly through the first set of double glass doors.

It was beginning to look a lot like Christmas. A forty-foot evergreen rose from the mall floor up to the other levels. It was decorated with large colored disks. They looked like psychedelic hubcaps. At the base of the tree was Santa’s Workshop, now abandoned except for several mechanical reindeer whose heads swiveled left and right as if the animals were trying to figure out where everybody had gone. Thick silver strands of tinsel were draped everywhere, and most of the shopwindows had been frosted around the borders with spray-on snow. The sound system crooned “Silver Bells” to an empty house. I pulled out my .38.

Moving as swiftly as I could, I double-stepped it up the escalator to the second floor level and ducked into the nearest shop. It sold brightly colored wooden animals from South and Central America. A dozen Technicolor parrots were perched on colored loops hanging from the ceiling. I moved behind a blue gorilla the size of a small car and peered out the shopwindow.

There were two ways I could see for reaching the third level. One was to continue up the escalator I’d just been on. The other was to head down the low-ceilinged corridor of shops toward the rear of the pavilion. At the end of the corridor, a set of switchback stairs went up either side to the top level. My memory of the time Margo had dragged me here was that at the top of the escalator were several restaurants. The food court itself ran along an area corresponding to the corridor of shops on my level, then opened up to a large common area with tables and chairs and bolted-down lollipop tables for eating while standing. That was where the steps led to. It would have been nice to know if Ramos was holed up with his hostages on my end of the building or down at the far end. I glanced at the parrots. They weren’t talking.

I didn’t relish the idea of being delivered to Ramos via the escalator, so I decided to try the corridor. Between the shop and the far end of the corridor stood several market carts in the middle of the floor, the kind that sell bad jewelry and refrigerator magnets and various cheap gewgaws. I decided I’d make my way down the hallway cart by cart. They weren’t much cover, but they were all I had.

I rubbed the gorilla’s nose for good luck, then I took off out of the shop, keeping low, and made it to the first cart. “Silver Bells” had given way to “The Little Drummer Boy.”
Pa-rum-pa-pum-pum
.

I dashed to the second cart and crouched behind it. A refrigerator magnet next to my head read: TIME EXISTS SO THAT EVERYTHING DOESN’T HAPPEN ALL AT ONCE. I liked that. I grabbed it and stuffed it in my pocket. I was halfway to the final cart when a shot sounded out and I felt a bullet zip by just inches from my face. I dove to the floor and slid the final few feet to the cart. A second shot rang out. This one took a chip off the cart, just above my head.

I made myself as small as I could and crawled beneath the cart, wedging myself between the wheels and the centering post. I flattened my cheek against the cold floor and eased my head forward, like a reluctant turtle.

Leonard Cox was crouched behind the railing at the top of the right-side stairway. His elbows were locked in front of him, and he was holding his service revolver in both hands. The gun bucked. The bullet hit something metal and ricocheted into the window of a toy store in front of me on the left. The exploding glass looked like water from a burst dam. I kissed the floor as bits of glass rained down all around me.

“Malone!” It was Cox. “Malone, it’s the police! Hold your fire! Throw down your weapon!”

I knew immediately what he was doing. Cops carry transmitters on their shoulders, and my good friend Leonard Cox was setting it down for the record. In that instant, I knew Charlie’s theory was correct. The so-called murder-suicide of Pearson and Cash. However the shootings went down, in the end it was Cox who’d set things up to look the way they had. Twisting and reshaping. Cox seemed to have a talent for it.

I had a lousy shot. I’d have to bring my shooting arm out from under the cart, and he’d have a free shot at me. Besides, I wanted to avoid firing my gun if at all possible. Cox would have a trickier time putting his self-defense story over on his superiors if there was no evidence that I’d fired at him.

“Malone!”

I didn’t respond. I crawled slowly backward from under the cart and squatted on my haunches behind it. The toy store was the last shop in the corridor. Rising to a crouch, I grabbed hold of the cart’s wooden handles, tilted it off its centering post and gave it a shove. It resisted at first, then moved. Keeping the cart between myself and Cox, I started rolling it forward, breaking into a slow run. As I neared the toy store, Cox fired again. I torqued the handles so that the cart began to tip. With a deep grunt, I shoved the cart with all my strength toward the shattered window and followed behind it, leaping at the last second through the window and rolling into a ball. Toys crashed down all around me in a clatter of plastic and metal. A toy drum set’s cymbals gave a tinny crash. I rolled to a stop. There was a five-inch gash in the sleeve of my jacket. I sensed a warmth beneath it. I scooted immediately up against the wall, flat on the floor, and peered out over the pile of toys.

The tipped-over cart partially blocked my view—and kept me partially hidden—but I could see Cox clearly, up at the top of the stairs. He was still crouched behind the railing. I brought my .38 up to my nose, squinting along the barrel. I had a perfect shot.

Pa-rum-pa-pum-pum.

He pitched sideways. Simultaneously, I heard the shots. Cox started to rise to his knees, then spun around violently as a second volley of shots was fired. His gun dropped and his arm flailed for the railing, just missing it. His mouth dropped open and he toppled forward, belly flopping onto the top three steps. He didn’t move. That was it. He looked as if he were glued to the spot.

I raced out of the toy store. From the floor above me, people were screaming. I heard another burst of automatic gunfire as I reached the stairs. I paused. Running up the stairs would be suicide. Blood was dripping down onto the railing next to me. I craned my neck and saw Leonard Cox’s body. The entire building began to roar. It was the sound of helicopters. The sound was drowning out everything except the screaming. I couldn’t remain where I was.