If you could make an arrest for bad temper, thought Lederer, this whole damn city would be on Rikers Island.
He stepped off the curb into the street. Horns blared behind him. The uniforms had blocked off Riverside from 72nd up to 75th and the diversion onto Broadway was causing an angry tangle. He'd parked on Columbus and walked over. It was easier.
The warm wind gusting off the river tugged at his hat.
The stink was powerful. Sweet. Cloying. He could not say what it reminded him of. But something.
The tanker lay like a huge cracked egg frying in the middle of the street, its spill a great wide slick of dark thick liquid pooling from the center line out along the western curb.
He stepped carefully around it.
A white Buick wagon lay sprawled on its side at the corner of 73rd. There was very little left of its rear compartment. The windshield was shattered on the driver's side and spackled with blood.
He could pretty much guess what happened. The Buick had turned onto Riverside against the light. The trucker was moving fast and hit his brakes to avoid it. Much too late and much too hard.
They were tricky, these tankers. Especially if you ran them full and without baffles, the heavy sheets of steel which lay inside the tank, separating the load into compartments so that they took some of the wave-action when you braked. Without the baffles you could still brake fast if you had to. But you'd better not turn the wheel. Because if you did you had maybe 9,500 gallons behind you and all this weight, this huge wave of liquid back there starts to push forward, jackknifing the cab at the fifth wheel and ramming you with every bit of its weight like a battering ram.
You had to be one hell of a driver to control all that. He guessed this one wasn't.
There wasn't much left of him.
Again it was easy to imagine. The tank had jackknifed the cab all the way around to what was probably no more than a ten degree angle. Then the wave effect started. The first wave went forward, the second back, and the third side-to-side — all of it one great heaving surge of motion. It was the side-to-side that killed the driver — toppling the tank off its sub-frame directly onto his cab, squashing it like a cardboard container. The man inside was nothing but a wide smear of red and grey between the crushed roof and the fake-leather seat. A bug against a windshield.
It had been fast, anyway.
The guy had that much luck.
McCann was standing by the traffic light. He walked over. "What's the cargo?" Lederer asked.
"Damned if I know. Smells sweet. Liquid sweetener or something. Take a look at the logo there."
Painted in red letters along the side of the tank were the words LADIES, INC.
"What the hell's that mean?" said Lederer.
McCann shrugged. "I guess it means that at least we can assume our feet won't glow in the dark."
Lederer lit a cigarette and watched the cleanup crew work the spill and the wrecking crew try to pull fifty-five feet of steel off the guy in the cab.
Uniforms held the perimeter. A good-sized crowd had gathered. Some were standing on park benches. A few kids mostly were perched in trees, looking for a better view. It would take a while but they'd get their view all right, when the boys pulled off that tank.
"What about the wagon?"
"Woman in the driver's seat, no passengers. Mid-twenties I'd say. No seatbelt. My wife does the same thing. I tell her, use the goddamn seatbelt but she knows better. And me out here looking at this shit a dozen times a month. They took her down to Roosevelt half an hour ago. You ask me, she's not going to make it."
The wind was up now, blowing west to southeast off the river, and Lederer thought I ought to get those kids out of the trees. A little gusting, a few more miles-per-hour and they could get into some trouble up there. Riverside Park, with its thin dark soil and macadam walkways, was a hard place to fall.
"I don't get it," he said. "What the hell was a tanker even doing here?" He pointed to the sign on the streetlight behind them. "Look at that. This whole damn street is posted. Not just here, but back at the corner of 72nd and Broadway and again right there at the entrance to Riverside. NO COMMERCIAL TRAFFIC. Every couple of blocks. Plus he had to be really moving to do that much damage to the Buick. So what the hell was he doing in the first place, highballing it through Manhattan?"
"Maybe we got a driver who can't read," said McCann.
"No way. You can't read you don't move freight. He knew where he was going. He knew it was illegal. He did it anyway."
"The route-sheet in the cab," said McCann. "Maybe we'll get it there."
"Maybe."
But he had a feeling that the only thing they'd find in the cab was a messy driver. Without documentation. Beneath the sickly-sweet scent of the cargo he thought he detected another smell — the stink of greed and corruption.
The usual.
Cut corners, cover-ups. The cheap shot at the fast buck. The city was made of that. More and more that was what it was all about these days as the economy and government and the whole damn shooting match seemed to wind down slowly into disaster.
Naturally there were victims. A young woman in a white Buick. One wrong turn and it all came hurtling down at you.
He watched the progress of the wrecking crew. At this rate it would be hours before they could pry the tank away. In the meantime it would probably be a good idea to talk with the boys in the lab. Find out what this stuff was. Check the plates on the tanker. A company registration, maybe, for LADIES, INC. Punch it up on the computer.
"Listen," he said to McCann, "if anything breaks you call me, okay?"
"Sure."
"Especially on that route-sheet."
"Will do."
Lederer crossed the street, headed back to his car. It was 2:30 in the afternoon and the day was hot — hot and humid even with the breeze, ennervating — and he suddenly had the feeling there was going to be a whole lot of work to do before his shift was over.
Halfway down Columbus it hit him.
The smell.
It was weaker here, weak enough so that he could finally get a handle on it — something specific and not just a too-sweet reek. It made no sense. But what it reminded him of filled him with a kind of strange elation.
Cherry, he thought.
Cherry lollipops, to be more exact. That good bright artificial smell he remembered liking so much as a kid, wafting along on a westerly breeze. Cherry-flavored lollipops.
His favorite kind.