Luke used his GS 11 dashboard permit to park the Ford by the curb on Henry Bacon. The Potomac was a broad ribbon of hammered tin at his back, lined with dark timber on the Virginia shore. The parkway was crowded with a Saturday night parade of Cherokees and Audis and Bimmers going everywhere but home for supper. The air was cooler down here by the river, and a soft wind rustled the new leaves in the cherry trees and oaks along the waterway.
He set the lo-jack system and the fuel cutoff, locked the car, and walked away toward the Lincoln Memorial, a massive white stone box set atop a pyramid of marble steps. He could see Doc’s huge black shape halfway up the stairs. Doc lifted a hand and set it back on his thigh. Luke climbed the steps two at a time and sat down beside Doc, looking out across the Mall toward Foggy Bottom.
“Luke. You look tired.”
“Maybe I am. I’m not sleeping well. I think I actually miss New York. You’ve been there, right? Couple years back?”
“Yeah. I was at John Jay for that interagency course. Security of evidence. I saw you there, with that big blond babe—a real killer. What was her name?”
“Aurora. Aurora Powys.”
“Pow-iss?”
“Yeah. She’s a Marshal too. In Prisoner Transport.”
“You still seeing her?”
“I wasn’t seeing her then. She’s married to a lawyer. Has a kid.”
“Nothing to you, hah?”
“Let’s move on, okay?”
Doc nodded, offered Luke a bite of his pizza wedge. Doc Hollenbeck had that rare blue-black color that some Africans have, like burnished bronze, and his eyes were an odd gray-green. His massive head was shaved bald, and he was running just a bit to fat, like so many middle-aged men in the law. His smile was fleeting but bright. He smelled of Old Spice and cigar smoke. Luke didn’t know him well. They’d just met a few days ago, when Luke had been taken around the Fugitive Ops room at 600 Army Navy.
“How they hanging?”
“Tighter since you said to wear a vest. What have we got?”
Doc made a bit of a production out of finding, stripping, and firing up a Muriel cigar. When he had the tip glowing like a firefly, he leaned back against the step, exhaled, and grinned a wide grin at Luke.
“I meant what I said about finks, you know. I mean, it was tough what happened to your guy. But that’s the business we’re in, right? Shit happens. You can’t take it personal. It’s not like he was on the job.”
Luke closed his eyes for a second and had a very vivid flash of the last time he’d seen Bruno Folinari thoroughly alive, waving at him from across Mott Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, big grin for the ladies on the sidewalk, climbing into a rusted-out Seville with two guys in the front seat, Bruno’s skinny body looking birdlike in a pale yellow bell-bottomed suit, gold chains around his neck, high-top black boots with zippers down the sides.
“No, Doc. You’re right. It’s not like he was on the job.”
“Gotta roll with the punches.”
“Roll with the punches. So …?”
“So, I gotta fink says—”
“He listed?”
“No. I don’t list my finks. I list the useless ones, but not the good ones. No point letting some rear-echelon mope screw up your connections. I always tag some finks for the computer, but they’re mainly drones. You?”
“I tag a few. Depends on how much they’re running. You can’t push too much through cash disbursements. If your fink’s gonna get into real numbers, you have to list him. They get greedier every year. You know that.”
“Tell me about it. I paid out a fink last March—in cash—fifty-six thousand dollars. You know what I make, Luke?”
“You’re on the grid. What, you’re GS 12? Plus overtime?”
“Yeah. I make $42,800 a year. Plus a car allowance. That little shit got ten G’s more than I make, just for ratting out a bunch of Russian gunrunners for the FBI.”
“I know that case. Was he yours?”
“Partly. I found out we were sharing him. My part was to pay him off and get him into WITSEC.”
“I hear Justice averages ninety million a year in fink payouts,” said Luke.
“I heard more. Here in D.C., finks are the main game. I try to make sure a fink of mine isn’t working both sides of the street, me against some FBI or DEA guy. I try to keep them to myself as long as I can. Know what I’ve been hearing—not from our guys but from some sources? Guys who really want to cover a fink? Sometimes they run him as a line item in somebody else’s file. Some other fink, I mean. Say the company wants you to pony up for Fink One. You got your expense sheet, down there on line seven, where it says Incidentals, you deduct the max, keep it in another file, pay Fink Two with it when it gets large enough. That way there’s no paper on him, and you know he’s solid. You know he’s not double-booked, running for someone else too.”
Luke stared at Doc. “That’s a damn dangerous way to run a fink. You tell your sources, they get caught at that, they’ll wish they’d never been hired.”
Doc nodded. “Maybe. But damn, I’m getting real sick of finks who work two, three agencies. Only you don’t know he’s got an agenda, got obligations to the FBI or whoever for some operation you know dick about. So you can’t blame guys who cover theirs as long as they can. Or can you?”
“Sounds like a good way to get popped for falsification. It could look like embezzlement. How would you prove the funds went to Fink Two?”
“He signs for it, just like they all do.”
“But the guy doesn’t log the chit?”
“No. Not until he has to.”
“Man. That’s too hairy for me, Doc. Lose those chits, and your operator is under a federal investigation, and some stringer for the Post is stuffing a hi-fi transmitter up his dog’s butt.”
“You never do that in the Bronx?”
“Not like that. You always been in D.C., in Fugitive Ops?”
“No. I was in Asset Seizure, in Kansas City. Got transferred two years ago. It’s not too bad, if you stay away from the top floor, don’t mess with the brass, and don’t play golf with the suits.”
Luke nodded, lit up a cigarette, drew it in deep, and felt his pulse kicking over quietly, a tiny rumble-pop in his neck. He blew out a stream and settled forward, leaning his elbows on his knees.
“So, my guy?”
Doc came back forward, set his hands on his knees, blew out a long breath. “Okay. Rona, Paolo Coimbra. DOB one May 1961. Also known as Quarco, Q, Roderigo Gardena, a string of aliases. Albany warrant, suspicion murder, a payment dispute. Mainly a forger, supplies bogus ID to wiseguys and gangbangers. Man, he’s only thirty-three!”
“Started young, up in Hunts Point.”
“Yeah? Middleman for counterfeit documents—isn’t this a Treasury thing?”
“They want him. So do I, and he’s a federal escapee.”
“Anyway, a forger. But flexible. Also into multiple serial rapes, felony assault, unlawful confinement, sexual assault female corrections officer, escape custody—we know the corrections chick, don’t we?”
“We know her.”
Luke closed his jaw on the sentence and held it shut, waiting for Doc to say something, to bring up her name again. Down on the Mall, a gaggle of black kids had come out of the hollow near the Vietnam Memorial and were heading toward the Lincoln Memorial. One thing sure, they weren’t tourists. Bulls jackets, Hoyas caps on sideways, those stupid clown-baggy pajama pants, oversize sneakers. They looked like a pile of laundry with ten legs. Luke and Doc could hear them talking from a hundred feet away.
Doc watched the kids. “Man, I hate gangbangers. They depress the shit outta me. This why we fought for civil rights? So black teenagers can walk around armed to the nuts and dressed up like Emmett Kelly? This a personal thing, Luke?”
“Against policy, Doc. You know that.”
Doc studied Luke’s face for a while, considered his beak-nosed profile and the seamed skin of his cheek, the hooded eyes as Luke stared down the steps at the gangbangers. It was clear to both men that Luke was evading the issue, and that Doc was going to let him.
“Okay … let’s see … Jeez, sodomy, that still a crime?”
“It’s the way he does it.”
“Ouch—well, it goes on. Man, I love this. In Sing-Sing he took courses in computer graphics and offset printing! Courtesy of New York State. They goddamn trained him, the silly bastards!”
“Cons can take karate lessons, lift weights, get a law degree. I’ve seen them angle for certain prisons—they like the library or the gym better. I quit trying to make sense of all that shit a long time ago. Some writer I once read said he figured the trouble with humans was we were smart enough to think up civilization but not smart enough to run it right. There you go.”
“Yeah, there you go. Anyway, I guess you know his sheet.”
“Right.”
“So we have something, I think. I got a guy, he’s from Haiti, name of Celandre Marcuse—”
“What?”
“See-lan-dray. It’s French. He’s been one of my finks for two years. I got him from a guy in Drug Enforcement, had used him up in a Haitian thing but didn’t want to cut him loose. The guy has dependents now, and his only thing these last three years is professional informant.”
“He a posse guy? Or a Crip, a Blood?”
“No. Those mutts don’t last. They have no self-control. No manners. Say one thing on Tuesday, forget it by Wednesday. Rat you out by Friday lunch. Dead by Sunday midnight. I never take them on. This guy, we set him up in a gypsy cab—”
“A gypsy cab! On whose ticket?”
“Us—we went for it. Fugitive Ops.”
“We paid for this guy’s cab?”
“Paid for it, hell, I picked it out! I like this guy, he’s a stand-up. For a fink. He keeps his word. I figure he wasn’t born here, hasn’t been infected with the American work ethic.”
“I thought finks were like Kleenex.”
Doc’s smile was thin.
“They are. Don’t misunderstand me here. I see to it this guy gets his cab, I see to it he keeps it. Everything he has, I gave him. His girlfriend, his walk-up on K Street. The Mickey Dee’s he scarfs every Friday night. I say ‘Calandre—have a heart attack,’ he says, ‘Which ventricle?’ He belongs to me.”
Down in the Mall the black kids had gathered together in a tight knot, and now and then they’d look up the stairs toward Luke and Doc. Man, no one could be that stupid.
“And?”
Doc took the hint.
“And last Wednesday night, maybe nine o’clock, he picks up a hooker outside the Zanzibar. That’s a flop on K Street Southeast, near the navy yards. This young girl, she’s a wreck. Bleeding so bad, my guy doesn’t want to let her in the cab, right?”
Doc fell silent as the crowd of young black males started to work their way up the steps of the memorial, looking casual, looking like a mugging about to happen. Maybe they were that stupid.
“I see them,” Luke said. “So what happened?”
Doc was silent for another moment, his broad black face hardening as he watched the group come up the steps, talking loud, shoving each other, but always coming up.
“Rough trick. Looked like a kind of Hispanic yuppie, clean cut, dressed okay. But a mean streak. While he’s doing it, this hooker gets a look at his right leg.”
“Front of his thigh? The right thigh?”
“Bingo. Burn scar, inches around, shaped like a Q.”
Now the kids were less than twenty feet down the steps. Three of them took an angle on Luke and Doc, while the other two checked out the other tourists and then came up toward the two men. Luke sighed, and Doc shook his head slowly.
“Man. And on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial too.”