MOODROW AND TILLEY WERE uptown when they caught the squeal over the Special Ops channel on the radio. They were sharing this channel with two unrelated task forces, but even so, it was far quieter than the endless static, punctuated by dull cop voices, from Central on channel two. Their vehicle was designated as Green 5, the last of the vehicles involved in Operation Greenwood and the message came from task force headquarters in the 7th Precinct building.
“Base to Green 5. Base to Green 5, K.”
At first they ignored the request to respond. In truth, they didn’t even hear it. Then it was repeated twice more, followed by, “You out there, Moodrow? Please. For just once don’t make us have to look for you.” Moodrow’s tendency to be away from (or even to ignore) radio messages was legendary and a constant source of friction between him and the Murphys.
“Green 5, K.” The radio mike literally disappeared in Moodrow’s fist, like a jelly bean in the hand of a child.
“Hey, I got ’em.” Then a scrabble of overlapping voices before Kirkpatrick came on. “Hey, Moodrow.” No dispatcher, he actually waited for an answer, then repeated: “Hey, Moodrow.”
“Yes, dear,” Moodrow said.
“Our boy finally come outta his cave. Twenty-one thirteen Eldridge, fifth floor. Two dead, one survivor.”
Moodrow sat straight up in his seat. With the mike closed, he said, “I think this is it, Jimmy. I think the motherfucker just made his one mistake.” Then he opened the mike and asked, “What’d he get?”
“What’d he get? You mean Greenwood?”
“No, I mean your fucking grandmother.”
“You can’t use them words on the radio, Moodrow. You’re gonna get us in trouble with the FCC.”
“Please,” Moodrow said after a pause.
“Now that’s better. That’s the magic word. Levander got drugs. Like always.”
Moodrow took a deep breath, then he said, very quietly, “If you were any stupider, you’d be dead. I’m trying to find out what kind of drugs.”
“Heroin. We don’t know how much.”
“You said twenty-one thirteen Eldridge?”
“Right. Two one one three.”
“Muchos gracias, subhuman. Ten-four.” He slid the mike back into its holder, then turned to his partner. “Let’s go with the lights. I wanna be down there in ten minutes.”
Ten minutes? They were on West 95th Street and couldn’t have made the Lower East Side in ten minutes with anything slower than a helicopter. The roads in Central Park were closed to traffic, as they are all summer long, and Tilley headed down Columbus, hoping to skirt the worst of the midtown traffic before he tried to cross the Island. Instead, they ran into an ocean of steaming metal which began at 74th Street and extended south as far as they could see. Moodrow, disbelieving, flipped the channel on the radio, contacted Central and was told that a Jersey Transit bus had overturned in the east tube of the Lincoln Tunnel and caught fire. The tunnel was closed in both directions and Jersey-bound traffic had flooded the west side of midtown Manhattan.
So there was no choice but to go east along with everyone else. The flashing red bubble on the top of the car was, of course, impressing no one. Not that there was anywhere for the traffic to go. When streets are curb-to-curb metal, all you can do is wait. Of course, they would have made slightly better progress if they went with the siren. It’s absolutely unnerving to sit, motionless, in front of a screaming siren, but it would be a clear violation of department guidelines to run with the siren in a nonemergency situation. Besides which, Tilley didn’t really see the reason for Moodrow’s haste, and when Moodrow asked him to go up on the sidewalk, Tilley balked.
“Look, Moodrow, I’m not gonna kill somebody just so we can go look at a bloodstained apartment. I seen them before and advise we get there after the M. E. carts the bodies off to the morgue.”
Moodrow laughed. In spite of his haste, he seemed very happy about something. “Think for a minute, Jimmy. I mean you don’t know all the details, but you should be able to see something different this time. Then you’ll know why we gotta hurry.”
They were on 65th Street, heading for the Central Park transverse. Tilley was prepared to go straight across Manhattan to the East River Drive and the trucks and taxis were making room for them. Then a city bus pulled away from the curb, forcing Tilley to brake sharply before it stopped for the red light on Central Park West. Moodrow jumped out of the car, went to the driver’s window and banged on it hard, waving his badge like a flag on the fourth of July.
“Gimme your goddamn driver’s license,” he yelled. The bus driver seemed about to faint. Moodrow, with his massive head and his rumpled woolly jacket, looked like a carnivorous buffalo and each time he slapped his palm against the window, the bus rocked on its suspension. “Before the fucking light changes, asshole,” he demanded.
From behind the wheel, Tilley could just see the driver’s face and it was hanging damn near to the middle of his chest. He was very, very sorry he’d cut off a cop. Most likely, the heat and the traffic had gotten to him and he just didn’t give a shit until after it was too late. In any event, he handed over his license and Moodrow carried it back to the car.
“Let’s go,” Moodrow said as soon as he was inside. Never one to argue, Tilley pulled around the bus and crossed Central Park West against the light. In the rearview mirror, he could make out the bus driver pounding his steering wheel in frustration. It would take half a day to get a duplicate at the MVB on Worth Street; four hours of dealing with the most hated bureaucracy in New York City.
The move relaxed Moodrow immensely, and once through the park, they began to make better time. “Listen,” Tilley said. “This ‘difference’ you talked about. That’s because it’s heroin, right?” From the little information they had, that’s the only thing that could have been different. Though he’d moved freely from one drug dealer to another (not surprising if a cop, with access to every corner of the marketplace, was running him), Levander had concentrated mainly on cocaine dealers. It was common knowledge that Levander was a terminal crack addict, so the pattern came as no surprise.
“That’s exactly right,” Moodrow responded.
“You know what brand?”
“I think so, but I have to make sure. That’s why I wanna get down there in a hurry. If it’s what I think it is, we’ll catch it coming back out on the street. If we’re fast enough.”
Moodrow was referring to a marketing device commonly used by larger heroin-dealing gangs. Ten dollar bags were now stamped with a trade name so the user could identify the source. The names, Blue Thunder, Red Dragon, Smiley D, were not very imaginative and the scrollwork surrounding the name on the glassine envelopes was equally crude. Yet the names were used week after week and whenever any especially powerful dope hit the streets, the brand name would spread quickly among the junkies. A dime bag is a dime bag, but the purity of the drug inside varies enormously.
“So what’s your guess? What do you think it is?”
“It’s Blue Thunder. Ninety-nine percent sure. Eldridge Street is all Blue Thunder.”
“But isn’t that the problem?”
“What? Spell it out.” They were on the Drive by now and moving quickly downtown. In the lighter traffic, other vehicles were making an effort to get out of the way and Tilley was doing about forty-five miles an hour which is all FDR Drive, with its massive potholes and roller coaster dips, will allow.
“Moodrow, if all of Eldridge Street is selling Blue Thunder, not to mention the other fifteen places scattered around the neighborhood, how is it gonna help that one more dealer is handling it on the street?”
“If it’s Blue Thunder I think I might be able to shut it off. For a while.”
The statement sat with them like the atmosphere after a loud fart. Nobody wanted to be the first to breathe it in.
“You really think you can do this?” Tilley finally asked.
Moodrow looked at his partner strangely for a moment, then said, “I know the wop who runs Blue Thunder on the Lower East Side. I went to high school with him.”
“This guy is your friend?”
Moodrow broke into a nervous giggle. “That’s the one problem. I hated him from the first day I met him. He was a vicious bastard, so mean I took him for an ordinary bully. I thought he’d run if I stamped my foot, but I was wrong. We fought from when we were freshmen until after we graduated, without anyone coming out a clear winner. I see him on the street and I still wanna hit him. He’s a mob scumbag who feeds on human misery. A real threat to everything and everyone in that neighborhood.”
“You mean Don Moodrow’s neighborhood?” As the hours passed, they were becoming more and more committed to, each other. It was a fact, not a decision. Now Tilley could tease Moodrow without worrying about his reaction, and though Moodrow’s testing of his partner never really stopped, he no longer looked like he expected Tilley to fail. On those few occasions when Tilley put his foot down (as he had when Moodrow asked him to pull onto the sidewalk), Moodrow respected it.
“What makes you think they won’t repackage?”
“If they do, they do. But I think Greenwood’s too desperate for that and, naturally, he believes there’s twenty other people out there with the same product. Nobody has any idea that I could do this thing. By the way, if I can do it, it’s gotta stay between the two of us. Understand?”
“Not even Higgins and the captain?”
“The two of us,” he repeated, his eyes glued to the road ahead. “Until we decide what we’re to do with cousin Levander.”