On the Monday, three days ago now, the snows had come down out of the Tampais Mountains, out of a low winter sky of battleship gray as unvarying and absolute as a prison wall. The wet-wool clouds rolled down onto the mountains and the tops of the trees, leaching the color out of every root and branch, turning the forested slopes into a pinto-painted confusion of dead-brown wood, the wet black of leaves coating the forest floor, and the stark white of the heavy snow lying on the barren branches of the forest. Snow drifted silently down through the cold damp air like plump white feathers, snow sifted gently into cracks and gullies and spread across stony ridges, until the stillness and the heavy white silence covered the central part of the state from Middletown to Syracuse.
The train of three federal cars sped northward into the winter night, the men inside them either silent behind the wheel, or half-asleep, dreaming, calmed by the steady murmur of the engine, the rumble and pop as they changed lanes and the tires hit the little rubber knobs of the lane markers, the half-heard chatter of a late-night radio show, the low humming of the heater fan, while outside the great blankness of the northern winter night pressed against the glass. Up ahead the twin cones of their high beams seemed to conjure, out of an infinite well of blackness, the swirling galaxies of luminous snowflakes falling toward the windshield, the silvery-gray tangle of overarching branches, the angled slabs of a bare rock cliff-side, or the shining ribbons of the highway.
Only the little towns shouted at them as they passed through, a pinwheel tumble of bright neon signs—ARCO and DENNY’S and BEST WESTERN—a cluster of huddled roofs coated in melting snow, plumes of chimney-smoke spreading out flat under the clouds, the visual blare of plastic megamalls and outlet stores, the town names metronomic, syncopated, strange—Goshen and Liberty and Chenango Forks, Whitney Point, Killawog and Cortland. The mists of the previous afternoon were now glazed by the chilly mountain night, coating Luke’s side windows in crystalline intricacies of molecular math, starburst radiations of ice, universes of frozen light that caught the rays of the passing town-lights and sent thunderbolts of blue fire racing up lancing web works, scattered it like shards of breaking mirror-glass over snowfields of etched glass, lakes of pale fire, fleeting rainbows of blue and violet—and then the town-lights would be gone, the silence would come rushing in again as if someone had just turned off a game show, and all that remained was the black satin surface of Interstate 81, slick, sinuous, the tires hissing on it with a steam-on-hot-iron sound, the muted distant rumble of the car engine, the sudden flash of vivid green in the road signs, or in the profound dead-eyed blindness of the night, the fleeting yellow glimmer of a farmhouse window seen through the spindly black stick-figure trees, or the pinpoint red spark of a campfire far up the hillside, strobing between the tree trunks as they passed it.
Luke was alone in his tan Caprice, listening to but not hearing a babble of talk-radio at two in the morning, watching the taillights of the two lead cars a mile ahead, his mind reeling off a seamless succession of images.
The dying ruby-red glitter in Elijah Olney’s left eye as the life in him flew away, Olney’s eye fixed on him the way the tiny red-lit eye of a moth had held him once, caught it in the palm of his hand on a summer night in Columbus a thousand years ago.
Fay Koenig’s shopworn face, white with hatred for him, shining in the beam of Walt Rich’s flash like a piece of new bone at the bottom of an open grave; Mark Shealey’s cold disapproval as he watched Luke holding Pigeye by the hair; a video image of Urjo “Teach” Stodt being transferred, in leg-irons and a waist-chain, to a federal keep in Albany; Teach’s sudden sideways glare into the camera, his beard a matted root-tangle, his cheeks scored and pitted, his eyes as flat as Chinese lacquer.
Aurora Powys’s bottomless blue eyes in the hard white light of the New Jersey jail, and the bright-red blood drops spattering the turnkey’s crisp new uniform shirt; Margaret Farrell’s cynical mouth.
The fear in the face of fugitive Kali Figueroa last Sunday as he ran toward Luke’s position in the parking lot behind the Wal-Mart in White Plains, Rico Groza on his heels, Kali’s lithe body working beautifully as he pelted across the blacktop in the rain, running quite literally into their arms.
The slack-faced resignation on the face of thirty-six-year-old Joel Mark O’Keefe, wanted for child molestation and interstate flight, caught in the living room of his mother’s house in Chenango, New York, yesterday, and shipped off to the local state police substation in his underwear and slippers.
The bright purple cheeks and wide white eyes of James Bennett, serial rapist and carjacker, when he was fighting all four of them on the floor of the Denny’s restaurant on the interstate, where he had been working as a cook for weeks, the travelers screaming, the waitresses watching grimly, the manager choleric with outrage, Bennett’s terrible strength as he lifted himself up off the floor, with Grizzly Dalton on top of him and Walt Rich struggling with one arm, the way his breath huffed out of him when Luke’s boot connected with his crotch, the shock and disapproval of the customers watching all of this happen.
Grizzly laughing as he told a story in the stale-beer-scented dimness of a roadhouse bar last night, Walt Rich over by the exit sign, on the telephone to his wife and kids in Jersey, and Rico … always the face of Rico Groza … hard and shadowed in the half-light, those black eyes buried in bone, the sardonic twist in the mouth, the sense of calculation and judgment he radiated … Wendy Ma’s satin skin, dusty in a shaft of moonlight … the wet gray hairs on Doc Hollenbeck’s chest, Doc’s toothless, brutally forgiving smile … and a yellow man Luke had only seen in dreams, with shiny blue-black hair flying like a crow’s wing, and a little steel hatchet black against the sun—the car was suddenly full of a loud drumming rumble, and Luke’s head snapped upward.
He was nearly off the road, his left wheels pounding over the rumble strips on the median boundary. Christ! Heart blipping, he corrected, slowed, and pressed the button to roll down the window. Cold wet air sliced his cheek, and flakes of fat white snow flew into the car. Luke picked up his handset.
“Grizzly, you awake?”
“I better be. I’m driving. Walt’s having a little nappy. You know the guy snores?”
“Yeah. What you find out about a guy if you sleep with him, hah?”
“Yep. You okay back there, man? I saw your lights take a little dip there. You wandering?”
“I fell asleep. You wanna take a break?”
“I’m okay. I’m a little peaked. Hey, Rico, you there?”
Rico’s voice came on, breaking up a little in the passes. He sounded as tired as Luke felt.
Luke glanced at the green numbers of the dashboard clock. Man, it was after two in the morning. They’d been on the road since Saturday night, making hits and misses all the way from Pelham Bay to Chenango Forks, scooping six people, if you included Urjo Stodt. Now they were pushing it to Tully, where they had a trooper surveilling an apartment above a muffler shop. If the trooper’s ID was right, they were about to take down a very difficult target.
“Ten-four, Grizzly. Tully’s only ten miles up.”
“I think there’s a truck stop there by the off-ramp. Can you make that, Luke?”
“No problem. I’ll keep the window open. Don’t want to disappoint our next contestant.”
“Copy that, Luke. See you guys there.”
Luke put the little radio down on the seat beside him and rubbed his face with his free hand. This was a time of night most cops called the hour of the wolf, that timeless zoned-out stretch of your shift where nothing has happened for long enough that you start to drift, to get sleepy, to get careless. So far on this sweep, they’d been lucky or smart—only the criminals had been careless, and either way they’d caught a bunch of bad people and were looking at a few more up the road, all the way to Buffalo. But the man holed up over the muffler shop in Tully was a special item.
The man in the apartment—the man they hoped was in the apartment—was a member of the Ghost Shadows, a New York City gang. Wu Xsin Gi, twenty-eight, wanted for escape, torture, a couple of murders. He was also a martial arts expert, according to FBI and New York State profiles.
Wendy Ma had seen his name on their top-ten hit list and tapped it with a delicate finger. They were leaning on the hood of Luke’s car, looking at his route maps. It was last Saturday night, and Wendy had driven around to the Four-Five station house to watch them bring in Pigeye Quail and Fay Koenig. The takedown had been broadcast over the Four-Five detective channel. Wendy, expecting some news about Luke, had been monitoring that channel. She’d driven around to say good-bye to him and the others.
She looked at Wu Xsin Gi’s photo, a black-and-white of a sullen-faced, blunt-boned Asian male with a trick haircut. His black eyes were insolent, furious, defiant. His mouth was a parable of brutal arrogance.
“Chaotic,” she had said. “These people—the Ghost Shadows, they think all you white people are devils. Inferior. I mean that literally. They do not think you are human at all. Killing you is like getting a trophy head. Be careful of this one.”
“I will,” said Luke, kissing her good-bye. “You be careful too. If you get into anything, get backup. If you need to talk to me, you have my pager, and you have Grizzly’s cell phone. Don’t do anything weird, okay?”
“I won’t,” she said, smiling at him. “At least, not without you. I’ll call you, okay?”
“Yeah, you’ll call me,” he said, grinning at her. “Well, you all say that, don’t you?”
Luke had thought about her, on and off, all the way upstate. He had called her squad room a couple of times while they were on the road. She was always out, or in a meeting. Jerry Boynton had answered once, the Four-One detective who had answered Brian Crewes’s backup request, the cop who had found Crewes on the warehouse floor of La Luna Negra.
Luke had reached him from a pay-phone booth at an interstate rest stop west of Middletown. Boynton had been cagey with Luke—more interagency tension—but because Wendy Ma had put in a good word about him, Boynton had some news he was willing to share.
It seemed that the good Doctor Dred, a.k.a. Clayton Garr, had undergone a miraculous change of heart and now found himself cured of his plea-bargain-related amnesia. The young Doctor had given them a very fine description of the guy who had rattled his patrol-car cage so impressively in the lane behind La Luna Negra.
Boynton read it out to Luke.
It was the Yellow Man, no doubt at all.
Concerning the Yellow Man, Wendy Ma had tried to run a search on the Catch and Holmes systems, looking for any ex-con with the first name of Ernesto or Ernest or anything similar. According to Boynton, there were thousands, largely because about a third of the people in American prisons were Central American drug mules, a lot of whom were known as Ernesto. Luke asked him if Wendy’s NCIC search had caused any “ripples.”
Boynton’s voice cooled a little.
“Yeah, now that you mention it. A day later, the lieutenant hears from a suit in D.C., wants to know who, what, why—says it affects a federal operation.”
“Your LT get a name?”
“Endicott. Reed Endicott. Real stiff. The LT told him to insert and twist, and the guy goes all huffy, rings off.
Nothing from him since. Do I get to hear what all this means, Luke?”
“Soon as I do. Anything else you can tell me?”
Boynton paused long enough to let Luke know he was pushing his credit line. Wendy Ma had checked out the Ninth Precinct, but the killing down there had turned out to be unrelated, a domestic thing, and the husband had used a meat cleaver, not a little tomahawk. Sergeant Brian Crewes was okay, a little memory loss, especially regarding the details around the alleged beating of his prisoner—the circumstances of which seemed to have escaped his recall entirely—but basically he was going to be fine. And one more thing. They had found Don Florida, the owner of the storage and delivery company.
“Where?” said Luke, expecting something ugly.
“Jamaica Bay. A fisherman in Big Fishkill Channel saw a couple of people pushing a sealed fifty-gallon oil drum off the Mill Basin Bridge, out by Floyd Bennett Field—”
“Who told you that?”
“The DOI passed it on. Why?”
“Just asking. What was in the drum?”
“The usual,” said Boynton, his city bull’s voice dry and ironic. “Garbage. Fish guts. Bait. A few spare parts. Hands, a right forearm, a couple of legs. Part of the torso. Not enough to make a whole guy, not even with directions. The hands still had rings on, and the forearm had a watch. Big gold Rolex, with an inscription on the back, Para Mi Vida, something like that. Guy’s wife ID’d him from the wedding ring. That was a scene.”
“You sure it was him?”
“Oh yeah. Once we got the rest of him. The city morgue guys kind of pieced it together for us on one of their gurneys. Weapon used fit the mutilations on the kids, Tito La Gaviota and the girl. Little tomahawk. Wild, hah? Guess who the guy has connections to? Manny Obregon. Ring a bell with you guys?”
“I know who he is. He’s a jefe in the Bronx. How’d his name come up?”
“The vic’s sister, broad named Angela, called Obregon from a pay phone at the precinct house. We don’t tape them, but we get a printout of all the calls originating. She called his unlisted number too. Interesting, right? Right now, the only thing we got going is, Florida had a helper, and that guy is still missing. Florida’s sister says he was supposed to be there around that time. So either he’s lying around in bite-sized chunks in some oil drum by the seashore, or he’s part of the thing. Maybe an accomplice.”
“What’s the name?”
“Gardena. Roderigo Gardena.”
“Gardena …?”
“Yeah? Ring a bell?”
Luke hesitated. Yes, or no?
“Not immediately … something.”
Boynton chuckled. “Sounds like you got the usual case of Big Al, man. I got it too.”
“Big Al?”
“Alzheimer’s, man. Hey, there’s this old guy, sitting on a bench, he’s crying, sobbing. Cop comes along, says, what’s the matter, sir? Old man says, I have a sexy young wife, she’s waiting for me in bed right now, I have all kinds of money, I’m popular, I have my health. Cop says, so why’re you crying? Old guy says, I can’t remember where I live.”
Luke had heard it, but what the hell.
“Anyway,” said Boynton, still laughing, “I asked the DOI guys about it, but they got all snakey-eyed and pucker-lipped, the way those mopes do, and I figured, who needs ’em, this is my case.”
“Wheels within wheels. Where was the rest of Don Florida?”
“Well, I’ll tell you, somebody out there has a sense of humor. DOI guys say they found his head stuck on an umbrella stand, down by the seashore. Wanna guess where?”
“No idea.”
Boynton was laughing.
“Oriental Beach? At the pier. I loved it. Only in New York, I tell you. You get it, hah?”
“I get it,” said Luke, seeing the image.
Oriental Beach lay on a flat section of recovered land, a few miles east of Brighton Beach. It projected out into a weedy stretch of ocean and inlets bounded in the south by the long barrier islands of the Rockaways.
The name of that inland sea was Sheepshead Bay.