The night had come down on the South Bronx like a slow fall of black snow, bringing with it a strange, almost luminous fog. A lung-deep chill from Long Island Sound had glided in across the city blocks, spilling down from the rooftops and filling up the streets like an invisible flood. The tenements and abandoned wrecks that lined Tenbroeck Avenue seemed to float in a field of white mist, and there was a slimy yellow light around the few streetlamps still working. The street was deserted, everyone indoors or riding the downtown trains tonight, looking for entertainment or victims on the Deuce or in the Village or along Lenox and 125th Street in Harlem. There was a low rushing murmur riding on the wind, the sound of cars and trucks on the Bronx and Pelham Parkway a few blocks to the east. A thin frost was making snowflake patterns in the mist on the inside windshield of his car.
Luke puffed at his cigarette again and exhaled, watching the smoke slide and curl around the dashboard and the window, listening idly to the radio calls on the cross-town NYPD frequency. He was sitting at the wheel of the tan Caprice they’d drawn from auto pool after Fiertag’s briefing. The two other guys in their four-man takedown unit, Rico Groza and Walt Rich, were in another unmarked car, a tan Ford, a few blocks away, waiting for Luke and Grizzly to pick up their fink, check him out, and get the evening’s festivities under way.
Right now Grizzly was inside the snitch’s flat on the third floor of a crumbling half-burned-out brownstone. Their target, Elijah Olney, was supposed to be hiding in a ratbag South Bronx hotel somewhere around Crotona Park, between Third and the Boston Road. Oddly, that was only a few blocks away from their office in the Bronx Borough Hall.
Tonight’s fink-du-jour was a crack addict named Bubblegum who suffered from a number of diseases, including AIDS. He was not the type of snitch Luke liked to count on, but you took them as they came, and this was the only lead they had on Elijah Olney, fugitive gangbanger.
Luke puffed one last time on his cigarette, trying to finish it before Grizzly came back. Grizzly had a mild case of asthma, and although he would never complain, Luke knew his smoking gave Grizzly a bad time when they were cooped up in a stakeout car. Grizzly’s own rancid cigars never seemed to bother him, but then, like Clinton, he didn’t inhale. Luke had the windows open to air out the interior, and a cold Bronx wind was slicing through the car, burning Luke’s left cheek. He had the heater on, but the wind had shifted a while ago and was now slicing in off the ocean, carrying a slow and penetrating damp chill that went right to the marrow.
Shifting in his seat, he pushed at his chest, trying to get comfortable in his Kevlar Second Chance vest. The trauma plate was in tonight, a ceramic shield that fit into a pocket in the vest, right over his heart and lungs. It gave very good protection against high-velocity Talon rounds, but it felt like a Christmas platter shoved up against his chest. It was stiff and awkward and hot. Tonight he had on the regulation black jeans and black combat boots, black raid jacket with us MARSHALS in gold on the back, and a black baseball cap with a gold star on the front.
With the vest and the trauma plate, the shoulder harness with his Taurus nine-mill—which, when loaded, weighed around four pounds—and two sets of matte black cuffs in the small of his back, two extra fifteen-round magazines hanging from the shoulder rig on his right side, a can of Mace, and a Mini-Maglite on his belt, a large Mag-Lite with four D cells on another belt hook, the portable radio on his left side, attached to the mike mounted on his shoulder, and his gold Marshals star on a leather clip next to his belt buckle, Luke was carrying around thirty-five extra pounds of combat gear.
For some of the younger guys—those yuppie-cops he’d watched today, for instance—maybe this all-black SWAT-style outfit, all the weapons and the gear, made them feel like hard-core guys. And it also saved some lives—certainly it let other cops on the call know who was a good guy and who wasn’t—but in the end all this stuff just made Luke feel like a junkman’s pushcart or an extra in a Stallone movie. It made him feel like a Saturday morning cartoon hero, as if he were tricked out to look like a cop, as if his gear weren’t a uniform but wardrobe.
Luke had worked with city and state bulls and corrections officers who went in after some very dangerous criminals wearing a Harvey Woods sports coat, Sansabelt slacks, and black wingtip cordovans. True, the city Emergency Services guys wore the same kind of black raid gear, but most of the 150,000 felony arrests the NYPD filed every year were made by a couple of plainclothes precinct detectives and maybe a few harness guys for backup. Busting a bad guy used to be a fundamental element of law enforcement, something you did every day. Now it was a job for black operations, for specialists.
Luke believed, but didn’t say out loud, that there was getting to be too much military influence in what used to be a simple law enforcement detail. Now every takedown was a combat scenario, complete with masked avengers and caped crusaders. The trouble with running takedowns as if they were military operations was that your training was all directed toward one moment—shooting to kill. Maybe that was something the Special Operations Group guys had to think about—although it hadn’t saved Bill Degan’s life at Ruby Ridge, Idaho—but for a street Marshal like Luke, it felt wrong, as if it were turning him into something he wasn’t. Less of a chaser and more of a hired killer. The fact that he was good at it, probably one of the service’s best, didn’t make him feel any better. He worried that the younger guys coming up, guys who hadn’t seen anyone die by gunfire other than in a movie, were basing their view of real death on a Hollywood illusion, and all this army gear just seemed to support the unreality of it.
Not that the guy they were looking for tonight didn’t stand in desperate need of a couple of serious rounds placed right where they would do the most good. Elijah Olney was the kind of guy you wanted out of the gene pool yesterday. But once you get into a combat mindset instead of a law enforcement mindset, you set yourself up for some serious overreactions.
Like the Weaver takedown. It wasn’t entirely clear to Luke that Randy Weaver’s wife and Randy Weaver’s fourteen-year-old kid quite added up to the threat factor of a heavyweight thug like Elijah Olney. And it was a fact that the Ruby Ridge takedown stuck in every U.S. Marshal’s throat, no matter how they tried to hide it. The charges were actually pretty minor, and a lot of agents knew damn well that the ATF was trying to set Weaver up for snitch recruitment, a classic federal ploy. Weaver said no thanks and failed to show up for his trial. Once Weaver had defied a federal warrant, it was up to the U.S. Marshals Service to go in and get him.
Now, nobody was kidding themselves that these survivalists were nice guys who loved their fellow man, but the sticky fact remained that Randy Weaver’s opinions were not actions. Other than showing an unhealthy interest in lethal—but legal—weaponry, possibly a subject for psychiatric inquiry but not, currently, illegal, his only actual crime had been to deliver two sawed-off shotguns to a federal fink. No one had been threatened with them, and there was never any suggestion that Weaver intended to use them in a crime of any kind.
And not a lot of people outside federal law enforcement knew that Randy Weaver had been set up by the ATF to force him, under threat of prosecution, to spy on white supremacist groups, in this case the Aryan Nations, for the ATF, the FBI, and the Justice Department. The ATF added the usual juice to their allegations, claiming that Weaver was growing grass on the property—a standard federal pretext—and made up a basically bullshit list of crimes he was supposed to have committed in Oregon and Washington State—bank jobs, weapons smuggling, conspiracy. The U.S. Attorney, a man named Maurice Ellsworth, took the hook and pushed the shotgun charges against Weaver. Weaver’s perhaps predictable response to Ellsworth and the fink recruitment issue was to ignore the court summons and hole up in his mountaintop retreat in northern Idaho and pretend the rest of the United States wasn’t there, a position in absolute concordance with everything he had ever said, promised, or written, so there was no point in the feds saying, Hey, golly, we didn’t think he’d do That!
But the Justice Department, God bless it, is like a half-starved one-eyed gutshot pit bull with a snoutful of porcupine quills; it clamps down even when it hurts. Weaver was a target, by billy-be-damned, and he was jolly well coming in from the cold whenever his mother said so.
They laid an eighteen-month surveillance operation on his place that quickly degenerated into an unintentional parody of Marat/Sade, with Weaver as Marat, the ATF as de Sade, and the national media playing the inmates, while camouflage-covered radicals scuttled about in the undergrowth muttering quotations from Thomas Jefferson and David Duke and waving AK-47s and crossbows, and ATF agents hiding out in the tops of trees with their rag-man sniper suits and twigs in their Tilley hats got interviewed about their potty problems by video news twinkies and blow-dried network animatrons in Banana Republic flak jackets and boots from Abercrombie & Fitch.
Luke and his takedown unit partners had watched the whole thing on a TV in the Bronx Borough office and groaned aloud every time another poor son of a bitch federal agent got tagged by a breathless newshound or spotted by a videocamera on his way into the brush with a roll of toilet paper. It was just plain embarrassing.
In short order the whole operation was blown, bungled, buggered, and bamboozled. The Ruby Ridge siege of Randy Weaver’s hideout became about as redundant as a free lobotomy for Al D’Amato, and if there had been anyone in the Justice Department with the brain of a newt, there’d have been an immediate standdown and an orderly withdrawal.
Instead, Ruby Ridge became a real siege, a test of wills between an ex-Green Beret with some bizarre political views and a federal government that just couldn’t say no. In Luke’s view a regular city cop would have said, hey, lay some watchers on him and pop him when he goes for some KFC. Until then, let’s all go back to our day jobs. Would that they had. Bill Degan would have still been alive.
Degan, a member of the USMS Special Operations Group, the service SWAT team, had been doing perimeter surveillance—actually, at the time of the killing, they were being chased by one of Weaver’s dogs, which they shot—when rifle fire from the bushes had caught Degan in the head. Fire was immediately returned, which killed Weaver’s fourteen-year-old son Samuel. The resulting standoff took eleven days and cost the life of Weaver’s wife, Vicki, killed by FBI sniper Lon Horiuchi as she stood in a cabin window. Horiuchi—West Point Class of 1976—attached to the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team, composed largely of ex-Marine Corps and U.S. Army personnel, maintained that he was following orders laid out in his rules of engagement.
True, except that in this case, they were operating on a nonstandard rule of engagement that advised HRT members that they “can and should” shoot an armed adult, whether or not their lives or the lives of others were in imminent danger, an alteration of the standard operational language that amounted, in Luke’s experienced view, to an assassination order.
And Luke also knew damn well what the view was like through a sniper scope—he’d used one hundreds of times. So when he heard that FBI sniper Horiuchi, one of nine surrounding the cabin, had wounded Randy Weaver while Weaver was walking toward an outbuilding and, seconds later, blown off most of Vicki Weaver’s face as she stood behind the partially curtained window, watching Kevin Harris try to make it back inside the cabin, it seemed to him that Horiuchi should have known exactly who he was targeting and precisely where the round would strike her—in the neck on her left side.
It was hard, perhaps, but he really didn’t give too much of a damn about Weaver’s family—you run with wolves, you get hunted with wolves—but the operation at Ruby Ridge also got Bill Degan killed, for, basically, nada. Bill Degan was ten times the man Randy Weaver would ever be, and his death was a loss to the nation that would never be balanced by any number of prosecutions against “hate” groups or firearms fanatics.
In Boise in 1993, in the final chapter of the farce, Weaver was acquitted on all charges but the failure to appear, essentially a misdemeanor, the gap between ordinary citizens and professional law enforcement got a little wider, and that was that, except for Weaver’s lawsuit, which was going to cost the taxpayers of the country millions and millions of dollars.
So in the long run the ATF had tried to turn a perhaps unstable—but up until that point harmless—survivalist into a federal fink, then wildly misjudged their man and bungled it up thoroughly; the U.S. Attorneys got their shorts in a knot, bounced into each other and panicked, sent in the Special Operations Group and the FBI’s maniacally gung-ho Hostage Rescue Team, who promptly turned a misdemeanor firearms beef into a war, because that’s what you get when you send in the troops to make arrests.
Arrests like the October 2, 1992, DEA raid on the Malibu ranch of one Donald Scott, a millionaire weirdo who was supposed to be growing marijuana on his property. It was an early evening raid, no-knock bang-bang style, and Scott came running out of his bedroom with a .357 Magnum in his hand when he heard shouting and screaming in the living room. He found a bunch of armed men in black suits and black face masks pushing his wife around, shouting threats, waving guns, and generally laying waste to the environment. They gave Scott about a half-second to figure out these weren’t thugs, they were cops, but as he hesitated, one of the L.A. cops blew his brains out the back of his head.
As for Scott’s alleged marijuana farm … ah, well, ahem ahh, unfortunately, nobody actually found any ahem … cough cough … actual, real … ah … as it were grass, so to speak ah, anywhere on the property, the, like, locale, you know, and so and it was later rumored that the whole operation was quite likely a deliberate ruse to seize his property under federal drug-related forfeiture laws. Scott had apparently refused to sell his ranch to L.A. County for some development project the city was determined to have and was therefore branded a misanthropic obstructionist dingbat and a pain in the ass, and somebody made him a target.
And, while Randy Weaver was on trial in Boise in 1993, the ATF was off stirring up another pot of nitro stew in Waco, Texas. Another buggered-up firearms beef, more unproven accusations of marijuana cultivation and child abuse, another set of faulty warrants, another unnecessary military-style assault that went belly-up—bingo, Bob’s your uncle—and you have seventy-two brand new crispy critters, seventeen of them children. Once again, a civilian ATF assault with a military attitude.
Luke was painfully aware that the ATF had actually trained for the Waco takedown on an Army Ranger MOUT (Military Operations on Urban Terrain) facility at Fort Hood, under the auspices of Joint Task Force 6, a Defense Department program developed after a 1989 decision by Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney that designated drugs as a national security threat.
Joint Task Force 6, which has branches in U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps bases around the nation, in Central and South America, and overseas, exists to provide military training and assistance to any civilian law enforcement group—JTF manuals refer to them as DLEAs, or Drug Law Enforcement Agencies—fighting the drug wars. Hence the frequent, almost routine allegations of marijuana use or crystal meth labs in these targeted groups, allegations that often turned out to be false information supplied by overzealous hired finks.
Troubling to Luke as well was the Justice Department rumor that there had been U.S. Army sergeants present at the Waco takedown as observers. If so, what they observed qualified as a balls-to-the-wall career-blasting Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition police disaster, and Luke was sure these observers had taken the first chopper back to Benning and spent the next six days with their heads down, drinking quietly and steadily in the back of the sergeant’s mess.
Well, hell, this was all getting too deep for him, anyway. And Grizzly was shuffling along the sidewalk, looking like Smokey the Bear as a Blade Runner extra. Grizzly reached the car and got in, huffing from the cold and the run. The hell with the big picture, thought Luke. Just do your job and keep your head down.
“Was he there?” asked Luke.
“Yeah. He’s gonna come down, we’ll get him in the back here.”
“How is he? He straight?”
“As straight as Bubblegum ever gets. He’s real cool right now, so I figure he’s on something like grass or Quaaludes.”
“He’s scared.” The comment wasn’t a question.
Grizzly nodded and rolled up his side window. Luke crushed the cigarette out and pitched it into the street, where it joined a pile of five other butts and a Styrofoam coffee cup from a White Castle.
“You think it’s okay to leave him alone?”
“He’s not gonna call anyone, Luke. We’re the only friends he’s got now, and anyway, there’s no phone in his crib. I’m letting him cap up. He’ll never get through tonight without pharmaceuticals.”
Grizzly was looking down at the clipboard in his hands. There was a mug shot, full face in color, of Elijah Olney, and a copy of the federal warrant issued in November 1994. Olney’s face was grim and hostile in the shot, and the L.A. County booking number in his hand was tilted to one side, held loosely, as if Elijah resented even the act of being ID’d. Luke looked over the shot.
“Ugly son of a bitch, isn’t he?”
“Oh yeah. Face like a yak’s elbow. They say you get the face you deserve when you’re forty. He got his early. Do I have the face I deserve, Luke?”
Luke leaned over and looked closely at Grizzly’s face.
“I’d say so, yeah.”
“Shit. I was hoping it didn’t show. I used to be a handsome guy.”
“You got over it.”
“Thank you, my son.”
“What’d you make out of Fiertag today?”
Grizzly looked at Luke, raising his eyebrows.
“I can’t make anything out of Fiertag. He won’t even let me cut off enough for a wallet. Why are you asking?”
“That thing with Mojica. That’s nothing of ours. Mojica belongs to the DOI and the city DA. Why the hell show us a film of some guy, nobody knows who he is, even if he’s dirty—”
“Trust me, my son. He’s dirty. He’s got Jo-Jo Mojica scared, he’s real dirty.”
“Yeah, so anyway, where’s the federal connection?”
“Fiertag said he was being cooperative. Help out the DOI.”
“Fiertag wouldn’t help Jesus down off the cross unless he could rent him the stepladder, sell him the bandages, and get exclusive Piece-of-the-True-Cross concession rights for Italy and Spain. I know why we saw the Newark bank job—Pigeye Quail’s a Marshals target—but this dog-and-pony number out on the Big Fishkill? I don’t get it. Fiertag saw something in it for himself. There’s some angle there, Grizz, something we’re not getting told.”
Grizzly was still laughing.
“I like that bit about the True Cross, Luke. You got a fresh way with blasphemy. I admire that in a guy. About being lied to, what else is new? We get kept in the dark so much, they oughta call us deputy mushrooms. Why worry about it? Life’s too short, Luke. Anyway, here comes our guy. Leave the windows open, Luke. He’s a little ripe tonight.”
A slight slope-shouldered figure wrapped in an old army fatigue jacket and baggy jeans popped out of the doorway of the crumbling brownstone. The man looked up and down the empty street, saw a car parked up the block and studied it for a while, then turned and jogged a little erratically down toward their unmarked tan Chevy. Grizzly reached into the back and popped the rear door lock. The man, a black male in his late twenties with a close-cropped razor cut and a couple of missing teeth in his upper jaw, flopped inside and lay down on the rear seat. A blast of cold damp air followed him in. The smell of sweat and crack smoke and Thunderbird began to ooze over into the front seat.
Luke found himself wondering once again how it was that his life’s work so often required careful mouth-breathing and gag-reflex suppression in enclosed spaces like patrol cars and interrogation cells. Did priests run into this kind of thing in the confessional?
Probably.
“Hey, Bubblegum. You know Luke, hah?”
Bubblegum’s face was slack and bleary, his skin mottled and stained with dirt and bad living, but fear was still a hectic glitter in his eyes.
“You hadda bring this unit, man. Everybody knows a car like this.”
“The Bentley was in the shop,” said Luke. “You up for this?”
Bubblegum nodded, slapping his arms on his chest, puffing.
“Yo, man. Just roll, okay? I got people on this block looking for me.”
The car pulled away fast, and Bubblegum didn’t sit up until they were across Allerton and heading south toward Williamsbridge Road.
Grizzly flipped the clipboard back onto Bubblegum’s lap. He stared down at it, his face knotted with concentration.
“Yeah. That’s definitely him. Definitely.”
“When’s the last time you saw him?”
“Yesterday. He’s holed up bigtime, man. Only reason he’s opening his door, he needs his shit.”
“What’d you deal him?” said Luke.
Bubblegum was one of Grizzly’s snitches, and Luke usually let Grizzly do the talking, but there was a lot riding on this takedown. Elijah Olney was a very bad man, a Blood enforcer from Los Angeles wanted for every brand of gangbanger bullshit brutality. Like most Marshals Service targets, Elijah Olney’s route from gunrunner in South-Central L.A. to federal fugitive in the South Bronx was a long one, filled with coincidences, lies, foul-ups, and consequences.
It had all started last November, on a smoky fall afternoon, with music coming from the open screen doors and kids in the schoolyard playing stickball. Along comes Elijah Olney and a sack of homies in a stolen rag-top five-liter Mustang, a boomer car fitted with bass-boosters so deep that the rap music coming from it sounded like distant thunder. The gangbanger driver kept the music going while Olney popped up in the back seat like a homicidal Howdy Doody and added his own special nine-millimeter counterpoint to the afternoon’s musical selections.
Given Olney’s unsteady grasp of the concept of fire control, it was hard at the outset to determine precisely who this asshole was shooting at, but while an entire city block went every which way, and the kids were screaming, and teenage boys in the neighborhood were scrambling for their own weapons, and a five-year-old girl in a lime-green party dress swinging on a schoolyard railing took a round in the belly, Olney kept it up, apparently enjoying the mechanical efficiency of the Uzi. At least he looked happy, according to a survivor, especially when he took the time to get out of the Mustang, reload, and empty his Uzi into the pleading, cowering body of a teenage girl named Delores Fryar, whose only connection with Olney was that her older brother, or maybe he was younger, or maybe it was her father well anyway, one of the Fryars had once said something insulting about Elijah Olney’s sister. Or his cousin. Maybe it was his aunt … well, there was no getting around it, somebody had done something unacceptable to Elijah Olney, and in the feral dynamics of South-Central, Olney felt that he’d been “dissed”—one of Luke’s least-favorite words—and had decided to make a point in the only language he felt was up to the enormity of whatever the insult actually was.
Well, none of this would have come to Bronx Division Deputy U.S. Marshal Luke Zitto’s attention if Elijah Olney’s demonstration of civilian firepower hadn’t ticked off some local brothers, largely because of a dramatically increased level of police interference in their own rackets. They arranged to have Olney ratted out to the LAPD Ramparts District gang squad, who showed up in a foul humor on Olney’s doorstep early one morning to see if they could provoke him into doing something suicidal.
Elijah declined the opportunity, it being far more entertaining to watch rounds heading out than to observe them coming in, and he was arrested and booked on multiple counts of firearms possession, unlawful discharge, various attempted murders, and a charge of murder one.
Sure as the letters NRA mean no responsibility accepted, Olney lost no time in making it known through his Legal Aid lawyer that he was now able to find it in his heart to “assist” the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms in a smuggling interdiction operation based in Atlanta, news of which had lately come to him from somewhere on the cosmic plane.
Bingo.
Elijah Olney—come on down!
Olney’s charges in the drive-by killings were “subsumed” in a U.S. Attorney witness agreement—making him a “client” of the Marshals Service—and he was transferred to a federal lock-up cell that the Marshals rented from the L.A. County Jail. From which Olney promptly escaped with help from a Blood member before he could be arraigned in a federal court. The delay that led to his escape was the result of an attempt by another federal agency, the FBI, to horn in on the opportunities presented by Mr. Olney’s sudden attack of civic-mindedness. (Snitches are like American Express cards—everybody wants one, even if they have to steal yours, and no lawyer will leave home without one.) And so he had been scheduled for a ride across town to discuss Blood recruiting operations in Oregon and Idaho.
The trouble here was that no one thought to make sure that Elijah was under constant guard while these various negotiations played out. In the meantime, as far as L.A. County Jail officials were concerned, Olney was just another juvenile psychopath playing Let’s Make a Deal with the feds. When the jail attendant—not a Marshal—came to get Elijah Olney for one of his interviews, Olney’s gang associate, a kid named Kap Latundi, had stepped forward in his place. The bored jail guard didn’t know Elijah Olney from Marion Barry, and he simply cord-cuffed Kap Latundi and took him out to the federal transport van.
At precisely that moment—almost miraculously—Kap’s Legal Aid lawyer, who later denied any involvement and actually did state that all gangbangers looked alike to her—showed up at county jail with a bail bond, and Elijah Olney—as Kap Latundi—simply strolled out of custody arm-in-arm with his lawyer and down the front steps of the L.A. County Jail, and off they whistling went, as Tom Waits would say, into the great dark heart of the warm, narcotic American night.
Escaping from a federal lockup made his recapture a matter for the Marshals Service. Olney’s name went out on the NCIC (the National Crime Information Computer system), and a special fax was distributed to the FBI, fifty state police agencies, and all ninety-four Marshals offices in the continental United States. One of these faxes found its way onto the desk of Deputy U.S. Marshal Grizzly Dalton, who read it thoroughly and filed it away in his extremely accurate memory.
Grizzly took his job seriously and was always “browsing” through his fink connections—he called it “trolling for pond scum”—and a New York City Corrections probation officer who worked a desk next to him in their Bronx squad room had mentioned to him, in passing, that one of his clients, a crack addict and small-time mugger named William Fleer—street name Bubblegum—was claiming to have sold some drugs to a “heavy hitter” who was supposed to be a Blood from Los Angeles. At the same time, the street was buzzing with rumors.
Bronx Division gang-squad cops had also gotten wind of a possible Crip gangster on the loose in the area of the 43rd Precinct, and they had—very uncharacteristically—thought to contact Grizzly later the same week. Grizzly went back through his fax collection and spotted Olney’s face third down on the sheet. The description the NYPD detectives had culled from various snitches seemed to match Elijah Olney, as did the description given by William “Bubblegum” Fleer. Grizzly saw all this as reason to think Bubblegum might actually have something other than hallucinations to sell, and he had gone out on the streets last week to see what he could work out.
Bubblegum hadn’t been hard to find; he was in a lockup at the 48th Precinct, busted by Bronx Vice on a crack charge. For twelve hours he’d been sitting on his butt in the 48th holding cells, shivering and throwing up and generally whining about his influential friends in the federal government. Finally one of the Bronx Vice guys got sick of cleaning up after him and called Walt Rich, a Marshal who worked with Grizzly and Luke. He called Rich because Rich used to be on the force, and the NYPD takes care of its own. (Forget the Skull and Bones or the Masons; the Virgin Mary herself couldn’t get a straight answer from the NYPD, unless she could prove that her dad had walked a beat on Sapphire Street for the 106th and played the snare drum with the Shamrock Society band every March 17.)
Walt Rich was busy with another fugitive trace, and he told Grizzly about the snitch in the Four-Eight lockup. Grizzly showed up at the 48th, scraped Bubblegum down off the ceiling, and listened to his story. Bubblegum wanted leniency on a parole violation and immunity for the crack bust, which was his official third, and he was looking at a possible life hitch in Attica.
Life in Attica for a mope like Bubblegum Fleer, who was also HIV-positive, would probably have worked out to be about eighteen months, after which his good looks would have flown and somebody would have shanked him off to Neverland just to steal his cigarettes. Bubblegum knew this very well. Ratting out a Blood fugitive was probably a move with equally fatal consequences, but it was the last move he had, other than suicide.
Bubblegum had no doubt gone through all that up in his apartment while he smoked the last of his crack and drained a quart jar of Thunderbird. Luke was still waiting for his answer about the drugs Bubblegum had delivered to Elijah Olney. Bubblegum looked up at the roof of the undercover car and pretended to ransack his memory.
“Yeah, I, ah, well, he likes Ecstasy, and he also scored some crystal.”
Luke looked at Bubblegum in his rearview as he rolled the tan Caprice down side streets toward the New York Institute for the Blind.
“Meth? Crystal meth?”
Bubblegum looked uncomfortable.
“Yeah, yeah, I think—”
Grizzly turned around and snarled at Bubblegum.
“Don’t think, man. You know what you sold him. This ain’t a truth in advertising thing. Stop fucking with us.”
“Okay! Jeez, chill, man. It was crank—I think.”
Luke and Grizzly looked at each other. Grizzly sighed. “Oh, great. He’s on PCP. That’s just peachy. Can I go home now?”
“No, Grizzly. You can’t. Bubblegum, you get a look inside this crib?”
“No way, man. He’s too spiky for that. Cracked the lid maybe an inch and took the shit over the chain.”
“You can make the guy from a slice of his face an inch wide?”
“Well, like, it was bigger than that. I mean, like it was …”
Grizzly shook his head and looked at Luke. Snitches.
“So, the main question, where’s he at?” said Grizzly.
Bubblegum studied his reflection in the side window. The Bronx was rolling past his window, tenement blocks giving way to apartment towers and storefronts, Harlem in the horizon, the lights of midtown casting a big rose-colored glow on the underside of the cloud cover away to the south. The crosstown NYPD frequency on their radio was a low crackling whisper in the dark and silent car.
“See the respondent 3852 Broadway—
“Eat no pay, Five Boy—enjoy enjoy—
“Aided case 344 Atlantic Avenue—
“Two Eddy stand by one—
“Citywide Auto has a BOLO—
“Oh, not for long, Five Charlie—
“Anybody got a Slim Jim for Six Adam at Fordham?
“—ginia marker Tom Zebra Boy, one five one one—
“—five foot tall had on a green jacket white fur on the collar—
“We got a ten-51 a roaming gang at Webster and Tremont, Four Eddy—
“—Detective Boynton at 144th and Timpson—
“That was dispute with a firearm, South Frank—
“Ten-four, check and advise—
“Seven hundred White Plains, Four David. That’s a 90Z, K?”
“Bubblegum, you still back there?”
He came out of a kind of stoned reverie. Luke didn’t have to work hard to imagine what he was thinking. Vita brevis, Tempus fugit, Why me, oh Lord? Your basic snitch mantra.
“Harbor … something. But I know it when I see it. It’s next to the recruiting station. They turn me down.”
“Who, the Marines? I can’t see why, man—Luke, I know that place. I think he means the Harbor Light. Right, Bubblegum?”
“Yeah … yeah, that could be it.”
“If he’s shucking us, I say we dump him off the High Bridge.”
“Not the High Bridge again,” said Luke, in a whine. “You always wanna dump them off that bridge. I get to pick the next one.”
They had reached the Bronx and Pelham Parkway and were running downhill toward the Boston Road ramp. The city lights were blurred and jaundiced in the chilly mist. Cars and cabs and delivery vans were jolting and racing alongside their cruiser, and in the distance they could just make out the towers and pillars of light in Manhattan. Bubblegum was silent in the back seat, the lights of the cars playing over his face. Luke glanced at him in the rearview from time to time, just to make sure he was still alive.
“Better get on to Rico and Walt, Grizz.”
Grizzly nodded, took out his cell phone, and dialed them up. They had learned not to announce a pending takedown over the radio net. Almost everybody had a scanner now. It was true that you could monitor a cell phone call, but it was a lot harder to do. They’d use a low-power two-way system when they got close to the fugitive’s location.
“Walt—Grizz here—yeah, we got him. He’s telling us it’s maybe a flop called Harbor Light on Crotona Park North, just at Marmion there. By the recruiting office—yeah—yeah … No, we haven’t.… I’ll tell him … Yeah, seems weird to me too. Yeah, we’re about ten minutes away.
Let the city know. Kisses to Rico, hah?… Who? He’s the looie at the 48th. If he’s on tonight, talk to him personally.… What’s Rico say? Well, so’s he … Bye.”
“Tell me what?” said Luke.
“Weird. City says to go ahead. If we want a cover car, we’ll have to wait until tomorrow.”
“That’s not like the city guys. What’s up?”
“They got a thing, multiple felonies, over by Hunts Point Market. They got a lot of their units tied up in a canvass.”
“Yeah. That’s the Four-One. They got a cop involved?”
“They wouldn’t say, but if they’re pulling patrol units off the streets on a Friday night in the Bronx, whoever they’re looking for, they want him bad. They don’t usually get that worked up for a citizen.”
“Multiple dead?”
“That’s what they said.”
“Fuck it,” said Luke. “Just another drug hit.”
“Yeah,” said Grizzly. “Fuck it.”
Five minutes later they pulled up beside Rico Groza and Walt Rich’s unmarked Ford in an alleyway that ran behind the tenement blocks along Crotona Park North. The alley was wide and strewn with wrecked cars, overflowing Dumpsters, garbage bags broken open like shattered green eggs, bottles and soda cans clattering and rolling in a sudden cold wind that ran up the lane between the tenement blocks.
Luke stopped the car beside the other unit and rolled down his window. Rico Groza’s wolfish face was lit from beneath by the green glow of the dashboard lights, making his deepset dark eyes and his bony face look even more sinister. Beyond him Walt Rich’s pale Irish face and short red crew cut were just visible. They were in raid gear as well. Rico grinned, and his white teeth glittered with green fire.
“Luke, Grizzly—where’s our star?”
“He’s in here, down on the floor.”
“Troubled, is he?”
“He’s sick at heart and fain wad lee doon. How you wanna do this, Rico?”
Rico Groza was, technically, the senior agent on the scene. Rico had come out of the Puerto Rico station covered in glory after a major drug-lord takedown in Honduras, a combined DEA-FBI-Marshals Service operation that had severed a number of major cocaine- and hashish-distribution pipelines around Central America and the Caribbean. He was only here now to get some street time so he could go back to D.C. and take a major promotion to Fugitive Ops in Arlington.
The fact that this major promotion was, at one time, supposed to belong to Luke wasn’t an issue between them. Rico Groza was a stand-up who had testified on Luke’s behalf at the informal inquiry after the D.C. operation.
“It’s your show, Luke. Walt and me, we’ll take perimeter, if you want. Walt’s got the peeper, if you need it.”
Luke looked at Grizzly, who nodded.
“Okay, we’re entry, you two take perimeter. You’re telling me the city cops are letting us do this alone?”
Rico grinned again, looked at his partner in the car. Walt Rich leaned forward and said, “Yeah. They got their hands full with a cartel thing up in Hunts Point. They got an officer down too. I spoke to the CO at the Four-Eight. He’s got a unit on standby, but they got shit happening all over their precinct. He says do what you gotta do, but don’t kill any of his civilians. And if we step on our dicks, they’ll say they never heard of us.”
“I figured it hadda be something like that,” said Luke. “Okay, let’s get this done. It’s been a long day.”