The Graving Dock (30 page)

“What the hell do you want?”

He listened impatiently as the man took a drag from a cigarette. “You know,” Carpsio replied, “my mother taught me that a little politeness goes a long way.”

Jack growled.

“Relax,” Carpsio said. “You did me a good turn, talking some sense into that stupid girl. Now I’m gonna do you one. That nutjob who’s been giving you so much trouble? I know where he is.”

Jack snapped awake. “Let me make sure I’ve got this straight: You’re talking about Robert Sperry?”

“The one and only.”

Jack grimaced. “Did you, uh, did you already ‘take care’ of him?”

Carpsio snorted. “
Please.
I’m a professional contractor and developer. You want
The Sopranos
, watch HBO.” The man laughed at his own joke. “Besides,” he added, “I know how much you cops love the glory. He’s all yours.”

“How do you know where he is?”

“I heard it from a friend. Very reliable.”

Jack swung his legs over the edge of his cot. “You know where he is right now? At this moment?”

“That’s what I said.”

Jack thought for a few seconds. The last time he had answered a late-night tip like this, he had taken a bullet in the chest. “How do I know this isn’t a trap?”

Carpsio scoffed. “Trap, schmap. Bring the Marines and the Air Force, see if I care.”

“Just tell me two things,” Jack said. “Where can I find him, and is he awake?”

I
T WAS BEFORE SUNRISE
on a chill winter’s night, but in The City That Never Sleeps, cars were already making their way across the Brooklyn Bridge toward Manhattan’s sparsely lit office spires. As the Harbor Unit launch plowed north below it, Jack glanced back: The harbor was dark and misty. He saw the Staten Island Ferry making a lonely trip out to the southwest, its decks probably populated only by a few late-night drunks and night-shift workers slogging home.

Ahead, strings of lights above the Manhattan and Williamsburg bridges stood sentinel like rows of ghostly flares. They reflected on the dark surface of the river in shimmering neon, rippling above the muscular water currents. Currents Jack knew only too well; he shivered in the little cabin, crowded in with Mike Pacelli at the wheel, Ray Hillhouse, one of the S.W.A.T. team members, and Gary Daskivitch.

In the middle of his call with John Carpsio, he had realized his mistake: He had done an excellent job of bringing a team onto Governors Island, twenty-five of the area’s finest law enforcement officers, but what he had not foreseen was a need to suddenly get them
off
. (During the day, it would have been easy: They could have commandeered the ferry over to the Brooklyn side. But that vessel was docked across the harbor now, its crew sleeping comfortably wherever the hell they lived, and the only transport was Pacelli’s small Charlie Unit boat.)

He peered up at the rapidly looming span of the Manhattan Bridge and shrugged. Maybe things would work out for the best. If Sperry had been sleeping, they might have had time to draw a big net around him, with boats and helicopters, armored units, the whole shebang, but the man was reportedly awake, and he would have been easily spooked. Jack was not familiar with the place, but he knew that the Navy Yard covered many acres. Like Red Hook, during World War II it had bustled with tens of thousands of maritime workers, but then suffered a major decline. The City had turned it into an industrial park, and was doing its best to revive it, but the Yard was still a sprawling complex of largely abandoned buildings, rusting machinery, derelict cranes, watery cul de sacs. So many hiding places, so many ways for one lone man to slip away. No—it was better to approach like this, by stealth, no thropping of helicopters or blare of sirens. On land, unmarked cars were already speeding toward the Yard to seal off the street side, and other harbor units were running north to close off the mouth of the basin.

“Can’t you turn up the heat?” asked the S.W.A.T., speaking loudly over the throbbing of the engine.

Mike Pacelli frowned. “You think this is bad? I’ve been in here all night freezing my balls off ’cause I couldn’t risk any noise.”

Jack stepped out of the little boathouse and gripped the bow rail. The wind cut through the armholes of his Kevlar vest, and his face was occasionally slapped by icy spray as the launch bounced over a wave, but he wanted a clearer view (and a more settled stomach). Various images rose up—Michelle’s stricken look in the restaurant on New Year’s Eve, John Carpsio’s smug face in the social club—but they whipped away like streamers in the wind. There was something to be said for rushing into a situation in which you might get killed: It freed the mind from other concerns.

The Manhattan Bridge slipped by far overhead and then, on the right-hand shore, four huge smokestacks from the power plant loomed up out of the mist, red aircraft beacons blinking at their peaks. The launch sped past, moving faster than Jack would have imagined possible, and then they were careening toward the Navy Yard. Pacelli slowed the engines to reduce the noise, and they slid into the shipping basin. Behind them, the skyline of Manhattan was growing faintly brighter, its glass and steel towers reflecting the first rose of the approaching dawn, but the launch might have been veering into a time warp. A number of long piers jutted out from the land, separated by narrow inlets; it was like sailing toward a big outstretched hand. The bright sodium vapor lights around the base of the power plant gave way to spotty single lights along the piers, and stark shapes loomed up along their edges: latticed gantries of loading cranes, topped by little high-perched cabins; hulking old warehouses; an ancient barge lying on the water like a huge beveled slab of rust. The era might have been World War II, or the Civil War, or some more primordial time. Way overhead, in the vaguely brightening sky, a jet struggled through the clouds, searchlights sweeping, like a lost bird.

A pyramid of gravel rose up on the far left pier; a row of squat white fuel tanks sat along the right. Dead ahead, on the end of one of the middle piers, two lights blinked on and off. Car headlights. As they came close, Jack saw a jeep with security markings. Mike Pacelli swung the launch around sideways and eased it against a row of old tires. One by one, the team clambered up over the edge of the pier, passing weapons—a shotgun and a semiautomatic rifle—up to their colleagues on shore, where a nervous Navy Yard security officer stood waiting. He had the soft look of an ex-cop with a cushy job.

Mike Pacelli started to clamber up, but Jack shook his head. “I think you should stay here.”

Pacelli tried to argue, but Jack shook his head. “You’ll see him if he runs for the water, and you can tell the other units where to go when they get here.” He turned to the security guard. “How close are we to Building One-forty-two?”

The man pointed. “It’s that way, a few buildings over. Maybe a quarter mile. You want to tell me what’s going on?”

“We’ve got a report that a suspect might be holed up there. We need to get there fast.” Jack frowned at the little vehicle.

“I can take a couple guys over and then come back,” the security man said.

Jack shook his head. “We should stick together. We’ll hoof it.”

They set off along the edge of the pier, which ran beside a narrow inlet, their breath puffing out into the chill air. The day was breaking now, forms appearing more clearly in the swelling light: a round blue fuel tank, a jumbled pile of discarded machinery, a couple of old truck trailers up on blocks next to a warehouse loading dock. The next warehouse looked to be abandoned; its side was a checkerboard of dusty windows that gaped open in places, like missing teeth.

The men rounded a corner and came out onto a wider artery, a cobbled road lined with train or trolley tracks, which led past rows of factory buildings. Everything was eerily still in the dawn light; the place was like some radioactive ghost town. Breathing harder now, they came around the edge of a warehouse and skirted an odd feature, like a great stone bathtub set below the ground. Jack recognized it from his childhood days in Red Hook: a graving dock. Its walls were tiered stone, and they stepped down to the long rectangular pool, which was frozen over. As they jogged along the edge, he noted immobile waterfalls cascading down the sides, bundled ropes of milky ice. A row of wooden stumps rose out of the center of the pool, where—when the water was drained out—ship hulls had once come to rest.

The little team veered left, away from the dock, into an alley between two warehouses. The security man held up a hand and they paused, panting. Jack’s T-shirt was damp with sweat beneath his winter layers and heavy Kevlar, but catching a cold was by far the least of his present worries.

“Okay,” the security man whispered. “It’s right around that corner.”

“Do you know what’s inside?”

The man shrugged. “It’s an old abandoned shed. There’s a bunch of heavy machinery in there, but I don’t know the layout. No reason to go in, you know?”

Jack considered the man. “Why don’t you stay here? You can keep an eye out in case he bolts, and radio for assistance if we need it.”

The security man nodded, embarrassed but clearly relieved.

Jack peered around the corner. He was hoping for a small contained space, but the “shed” was a football field long, sided with more of those checkerboard windows, so dirty that they offered no view inside, at least not at this distance. Hopefully, they didn’t offer much of a view out. It was hard to be sure in the thin dawn light, but it looked like there was some kind of loading dock about halfway down.

“What do you think?” Jack whispered to the S.W.A.T., who had more experience with this kind of sudden assault.

“I think Daskivitch should wait at this end. You and FBI there”—he nodded at Ray Hillhouse—“go see if there’s an entrance in the middle. I’ll hit the far end. When we’re in position, I’ll give you guys a high sign and we’ll all go in at once.”

Above the far end of the shed, a metal crane was already catching the first real rays of morning light. Jack pulled out his service revolver. “We better go in before it gets too bright out here. If we can, let’s take him alive—I wanna know who that kid was in the box.”

“Ready?” the S.W.A.T. said.

The others nodded, and then began to run.

T
HE S.W.A.T. WENT FIRST
, scuttling like a crab, below the banks of windows. Jack followed, trying to keep his head down, wincing at the thought of taking a bullet from his own captured gun. He glanced left as he ran, rewarded by an occasional glimpse through a missing pane: quick impressions of a huge open interior crowded with rusting machines. Ahead, he saw that the loading dock’s big sliding door was down, but a regular door beside it was slightly ajar. A rusty tin sign hung above it:
SAFETY GLASSES MUST BE WORN.

He reached the loading dock and slumped down beneath the edge. He thanked his recent park jogging for preparing him for the sudden sprint; when Hillhouse, the heavier man, dove down beside him, the FBI agent held his stomach and gasped for air. Jack glanced back at Gary Daskivitch, crouched at the corner of the shed, as hard to hide as a grizzly bear. Down at the other end of the shed, the S.W.A.T. had taken up a position behind the base of the old crane.

Hillhouse was wheezing. “You okay?” Jack asked.

The FBI man nodded, and released the safety on his shotgun.

The team exchanged thumbs-ups.

Jack took a deep breath, darted up a little staircase at the edge of the loading dock, ran across it, and paused outside the smaller door. He listened carefully:
silence
. Maintaining a firm grip on his pistol, he reached out with his left hand and pushed very lightly on the door.
Squeak.
Jack gritted his teeth. He transferred the gun to his left hand, gripped the doorknob tightly, and lifted up on the frame, hoping the hinges would swing more freely. And they did, enough to admit him and his colleague without further complaint.

They found themselves in a narrow hallway. The air inside was musty, and probably ten degrees colder. From his glimpses in during his headlong rush outside, Jack had gathered the impression that the shed had one long open interior, but such was clearly not the case. The hallway was murky, but ten yards down light spilled in through open doorways on both sides. Just before they reached them, Ray Hillhouse tugged on Jack’s sleeve. He pointed to himself, then the right doorway, then to Jack and the left.

Jack nodded. Carefully, he peered around through his designated entrance. A relatively small room, softly illuminated by light coming through a dusty skylight. Old green metal lockers knocked over and scattered as if by a giant’s hand. A floor so deteriorated that scraps of linoleum were jumbled in piles that somehow made him think of raw tobacco.

Gingerly, he stepped out across the locker room floor and found another door, half open. He peered through, holding up his pistol. A big hollow skylit space, the machine floor. In one corner, a pile of red metal canisters (for acetylene torches?). In the center of the floor, a monumental piece of heavy machinery, its green paint peeling back to reveal a yellow undercoating, topped by a set of massive gears. (He had no idea what it might be for.) He heard a sudden fluttering. Startled, he pointed his gun up, only to discover a couple of disgruntled pigeons settling on a metal rafter.

Slowly, Jack stepped out across the gritty concrete, moving his gun from side to side. He peered around a pile of giant broken metal ducts.
No one.
He paused to wipe sweat off his forehead with the back of his nongun hand. He figured he must be halfway to Daskivitch now. On the right far side of the room, another open doorway…

Coming closer, he smelled smoke. And then he heard something, a low humming sound.
Human.

Moving as quickly as he dared, he traversed the rest of the floor, feeling hugely vulnerable in the open space. He reached the side of the door frame and paused. The smell of smoke was stronger. He peered around. A big employee lunch room. Several long tables ran across the left side, and a bank of dusty checkerboard windows made up the right wall, brightening in the early sun. Several pigeons highstepped across the grimy green linoleum floor. One of them looked up and contemplated Jack, its little black watermelon pit eyes fixed on his face. He held his breath, praying that it wouldn’t provide a warning to the white-haired man who stood in a far corner, holding out a hand to a trash-can fire. The other arm was bound in a sling—evidently Jerome Konetz had gotten in a pretty good shot with his flashlight before he had passed out in that Atlantic Avenue basement. Maybe this was why Sperry hadn’t shown up at the reunion: Lifting a small craft into the water and navigating the channel’s swift currents would be hugely difficult with just one functioning arm.