Wet Work: The Definitive Edition (9 page)

“
You were?” Corvino frowned.

“
Yes. I thought it would be better if we used local talent and then disposed of them. It seemed unnecessary to send in four top men for such a simple operation. And in light of what happened, I can’t help thinking I was right. But then, Hershman gives the orders; we just carry them out.”

“
What’ve you heard from Southcom?”

“
The Panama city police claimed the shootings were gang-related. Our friends in Cali don’t believe them. It’s a mess.”

“
Does the Southern bureau have any leads on who hit them before we went in?”

“
No. They’ve come up with nothing of substance. If it was anyone connected with Escobar’s clan, it could take days to confirm anything.”

Corvino stubbed out the half-smoked cigarette in a marble ashtray. “It’s too much of a coincidence.”

“
Perhaps. We knew about the safe house and the meeting. They could’ve found out.”

“
Lang’s disappearance bugs me. And what was Skolomowski doing at the house?”

“
You think they turned, don’t you?” Del Valle shifted in his chair.

“
It’s the only thing that makes sense. But why? And if so, who were they working for?”

“
Hershman asked me the same question,” Del Valle replied. “Your guess is as good as mine until we can gather more information.”

Both men were silent for several seconds.

“
Where did you think the relationship with Mitra would lead?”

“
I don’t know,” Corvino said. “She wanted to be with me. I made the mistake of telling her I was considering retiring.”

Del Valle’s forehead wrinkled in surprise. “You’ve never mentioned that.”

“
I’ve been thinking about it for some time, but I hadn’t made a decision.”

“
You could’ve discussed it with me.”

“
And have you talk me out of it? You wouldn’t want to lose me.” He looked out the window again.

It was true, Del Valle thought. Corvino was too valuable an asset to be allowed to retire.

“
I’m tired, Ryan,” Corvino sighed. “I’ve been doing this too long. I’m burning out. I shouldn’t have let Mitra get close to me. The fact I did proves my point.

Del Valle silently agreed, then said:

“
You realize that unless we get some concrete answers about this mess, Hershman will have you designated a potential security risk. The retirement they’d give you isn’t what you’d want.”

Corvino nodded. A sanitarium instead of a country club retreat. Drugs and confinement instead of tennis and walks in the countryside.

Even if they got to the bottom of the Panamanian debacle, an early retirement now seemed out of the question.

He felt trapped.

WASHINGTON, D.C.

3.27 P.M.

Despite the patrol car’s air-conditioning, Nick was uncomfortable but relieved. His first day on the streets was almost over, his thoughts turning towards home. A long, cool shower, a cold beer, some dinner, then unwind in front of a video. Going out with Tranksen wasn’t a good idea. Brion could drink more than he could and starting his second day on the job with a hangover was an invitation to trouble. He felt like kicking back to an old Clint Eastwood western.
High Plains Drifter
would be a good movie to pass away the hours. The fact he’d seen it a dozen times didn’t matter. It was like having an old friend over, the kind of guy who never lets you down and always guarantees a good time. If the books Sandy read and reread—Danielle Steel potboilers, V.C. Andrews gothics, Stephen King scarefests—were old friends, then his collection of Eastwood westerns and Stallone action flicks were old high-school companions.

The day had passed by quietly, the high humidity draining the street people and tenement dwellers of any desire to commit crimes and cause trouble. Sure, there had been a handful of minor incidents—a stolen Buick; a domestic dispute involving a baseball bat and an electric fan; and a mugging—but nothing really stressful. Besides which, Santos was turning out to be a decent riding partner and a damn good teacher. His reputation held true.

“
Just act like what you’re doing is the most natural thing in the world,” Santos had said as they pulled up outside the apartment building where the 10-50 call—a disorderly group—was in progress, two women in their early fifties squaring off for another round of swearing and moral criticism.

The building was one of the oldest on the block and did not wear its age well. Neither did the women, Nick thought. He and Santos pulled up opposite just in time to see the smaller of the two women run inside her apartment and reappear with the bat. She waved it like Pete Rose on a good day, ready to knock one out over the bleachers as her neighbor turned the air blue with a constant stream of abuse.

“
Follow me,” Santos said, “but not too close. Don’t want these ladies to think we’re gonna get heavy.”

With that, he was out of the driver’s seat, strolling across the street like he didn’t have a care in the world. Nick wished he felt the same; the little woman with the big bat looked ready to cleave the other woman’s head from her shoulders.

“
An’ that ol’ bastard you call your husband, I give him some, too. Don’t you go startin’ on me now, ya hear, Clarissa?”

“
Least I got me a husband, you ol’ ‘ho.”

“
Don’t you call me no whore, you slut. I seen you. We all seen you an’ Reggie doing it like teenagers in the back of that car of yours. You got no decency.”

The other woman stamped her foot with indignation and Nick wanted to laugh. Despite the baseball bat, which the smaller woman waved ineffectually at the ground, they reminded him of two kids squabbling over who got to pitch first.

“
Now ladies, what is the problem here?” Santos smiled as he spoke, his tone that of a passing neighbor.

“
You stay out of it. Ain’t nothin’ to do with you,” the bat-waver said.

“
Come on, put it down, and let’s talk.”

And within minutes it was over, Santos’ calm manner and soft-spoken charm defusing the hostility, persuading the ladies to go drink cold lemonade together and share the cool air blown by the fan the bat-waver had borrowed from her neighbor, refusing to return it when the woman’s other one had broken down.

As they pulled away, the women were laughing together as if nothing had happened.

“
Weather like this, people just don’t think straight,” Santos muttered as they got back in the car. “All you have to do is get them to think of something else, especially the older ones, and they soon forget their differences.”

“
What if she’d had a knife?”

“
You take it as it comes. A bat’s one thing, knife’s another. Two women arguing…” he shrugged. “It’s not the same as a couple of men, particularly young homeboys. If that had been the case, it would have been over by the time we got there. We would have been calling a meat wagon.

“
Anyway, I know those two. Those sisters are always bitching. No big deal.”

“
Sisters?”

“
Right. Can you believe it?”

And so Nick got to know the neighborhood. The Reggie referred to was the block’s main drunk, and Clarissa’s boyfriend for the past ten years. Maybelle, her sister, had never gotten along with Reggie, but she was usually the one who went to spring him out of the drunk tank. Theirs was a story typical of life on Harmon Street: familial tensions, frequent arguments, occasional violence—broken plates, smashed windows, personal items thrown out the window in the heat of the moment—but behind it all there was a sense of community bound together by old values that poverty and welfare couldn’t pull apart. Most of them still attended the Baptist church on the corner of Harmon and Vine, the Word of God a guiding light however drunk and disorderly their lives. But two blocks over on Croton and Greenberg Street, it was a different story.

The projects there had gone up during the sixties, badly built by a construction company on the take, and allowed to fall immediately into disrepair. The people who lived there were trouble. Crammed primarily with young unmarried couples with kids, Randall House and the Will Arthur Apartments had degenerated under the weight of drug abuse and emotional deprivation to become Crack Central in the 19th Precinct. With nothing tangible to offer, the Word of the Lord and the good Christian values shared by the older residents meant nothing to the men and women whose only escape from the hell of the projects was a pipeful of cheap dreams. If anything was likely to happen, it happened there, Santos informed Nick.

“
We can’t stop it but at least we can contain it,” he’d mumbled between mouthfuls of meatloaf sandwich in the middle of lunch at The White Knight Diner on Croton. “Operation Clean Sweep’s been making some real progress over the last couple of years, but our overall effort to disrupt street drug traffic in this area hasn’t been easy.”

Nick listened intently as he demolished a double bacon cheeseburger and fries. He knew the statistics for the D.C. area, but hearing Santos speak from experience put all the facts and figures into perspective. You could read about homicide being up twenty percent in the Fifth District, of which the 19th Precinct was a part; see figures for rape were down over the last year. Robbery was down ten percent and aggravated assaults were up nine percent—but they were just numbers on paper until you saw how it really was.

“
Ninety percent of every crime committed in this area’s drug-related. Doesn’t seem to matter what we try to do to get the shit off the sidewalks and out of the tenements, there’s always more. And it ain’t gonna get any better whatever the Mayor or the Chief says.”

Santos paused and ordered another Sprite.

“
Parents are fucked up so the kids get fucked up. Night time’s the worst. You drive by and see little kids, kids of four and five, sitting in the gutters playing with broken glass from the vials of Crack their parents smoke. What kind of life’s that?”

His face darkened for an instant and his eyes focused on a distant place, recalling something he’d seen and would never forget: the pulped remains of a six-day-old baby dumped in a trash compactor, thrown out with the rest of the garbage by its mother, a twenty-two-year-old crack whore who couldn’t cope.

He grimaced and downed his Sprite, trying to swallow the image.

“
Kids here grow up seeing other kids making a thousand bucks a week selling shit. What they going to do, go get a job in McDonalds? We got dealers here as young as seven.” He shook his head in despair.

“
Whether he admits it or not, every rookie starts out thinking he’s going to change the world.
You ain’t
. Get that straight.
Here and now.
You can’t win the war, and you won’t win every battle, that’s why you just try to take it one day at a time, try to do the best you can.”

Santos forked up the last of the meatloaf. “Any questions?”

“
Yeah. So why’d you become a cop?”

“
Because I’m an asshole. Just like you. Why’d you do it?”

“
My dad was a cop.” Nick felt uncomfortable admitting it. He’d never told anyone at the Academy, because he was sure they would have asked questions, and those questions would have forced him to examine his own motives. Now he could see the inevitable coming; Santos would want to know all about Will Packard. Nick glanced away using a passing waitress as a convenient diversion so he didn’t have to look Santos in the eye.

But he was wrong.

“
Guess that’s reason enough,” Santos said, shrugging. “Keep a noble family tradition going.”

Nick couldn’t tell if he was being serious but the words “family tradition” made his stomach tense.

“
Guess that makes me a bigger asshole than you,” Santos chuckled.

“
How come?”

“
I’m just in it for the money.”

They both laughed.

“
What pisses me off the most,” Santos said as they cruised down Harmon again, “is the hypocrisy.”

The street was almost still in the afternoon heat, young and old alike trying to find solace in a fan or air conditioner that didn’t break down every five minutes. Aside from the occasional bum sitting in a doorway and some kids congregating around an ice cream truck parked down the block, it was nearly deserted.

“
Nancy said No, but what about the Senators and Congressmen up on the Hill? Don’t tell me there isn’t a bunch of them snorting Bolivia’s finest along with their mistresses and the high class hookers they indulge in. Everyone’s still doin’ it: politicians, reporters, bank managers, lawyers. Only difference is they don’t kill each other. We just have to deal with the consequences in the Projects.”

The radio crackled to life.

“
Car Seven. We have a report of a 10-10 over on Broad. Copy?”

Santos picked up the receiver.

“
Control, this is Car Seven. We’re on Harmon. What’ve we got, a suspicious person?”

“
Shots fired. No details.”

“
We’re on our way.”

The light at the corner of Harmon and Delvile was yellow as they approached and Santos accelerated, hitting the siren as they jumped the red. Nick felt his stomach sink. Now what? It was 3:45. Fifteen minutes and they were due back at the station.

“
What do you think?” he asked.

Santos grinned at the look of worry on Nick’s face.

“
Probably just kids shooting off fireworks. This place gets like Vietnam just before July Fourth.”

They turned right onto Broad, the detective rapidly dropping speed to safely take the corner.