MOODROW LED JIM TILLEY to their double-parked (and unmolested) Plymouth without making a comment on Pinky Mitchell’s condition. He opened the trunk, took out a roll of paper towels and a bottle of Windex and began to clean up the backseat. He was perfectly content to allow his junior partner to stand around doing nothing. Moodrow had one more appointment to keep before he began his final run on Levander Greenwood and the more on edge his partner became, the better for his own purposes.
Moodrow knew he could have gotten Pinky Mitchell to open up. There’s a drug called Narcan used by doctors and paramedics to bring addicts out of an overdose. It reverses the effects of opiates and the small vial Moodrow carried in his inside jacket pocket would have thrust Pinky Mitchell into instant withdrawal. And, thus, presumably, into instant cooperation. But there was one more detail to be taken care of.
“Let’s go up and see Rose,” Moodrow suggested. “I got a feeling Pinky’ll be a little looser by the time we get back.”
“It’s getting pretty late. You think they’ll let her have visitors?”
Moodrow laughed. “Just drive, Jimmy. We’re not gonna ask permission.”
St. Vincent’s Hospital, one of the city’s older institutions, had been expanding over the last decade and now sprawls across both sides of Seventh Avenue. Moodrow had Tilley drive up to the main entrance on 12th Street, where they dropped the car in a spot marked M.D. PLATES ONLY and walked straight up the steps to the security desk. The sergeant behind the desk made them for cops before they passed through the front door.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “what can I do for you?”
Moodrow flipped his badge, but the sergeant didn’t bother to look. “Like I said,” he repeated, “what can I do for you?”
“We’re supervising the Carillo security. You know about that?”
“Sure.”
“What room?”
“Take the elevator to the third floor and turn left to the end of the corridor. They got four cops watchin’ the door, so you shouldn’t have no problems findin’ it.”
The two cops turned to go, but the guard called them back. “Better take these,” he said, offering plastic identity cards. “It’s after hours and you don’t wanna get stopped every two minutes. Drop ’em back here when you come out. And tell them asshole cops to clean up their crap. They’re throwin’ fuckin’ coffee cups all over the hall and maintenance is havin’ a fit.”
“I’ll see to it,” Moodrow agreed. “A lotta cops figure this kind of detail is like having a day off.”
They made their way to the elevator, Moodrow chattering as if they were about to take in a movie. The hospital was fairly quiet and the few nurses hustling along the corridors glanced at the cops’ identity badges and passed without comment. At the end of the corridor on the third floor, as advertised, four cops sat in blue, plastic hospital chairs and tried to pass the time with small talk.
“Everything quiet, boys?” Moodrow asked. He showed his badge and identified himself as a member of the Greenwood task force.
“Nothing happening here.”
“You got somebody in the room, right?”
“Two cops in the room. Four in the corridor. It’d take an army to get past us.”
“Do me a favor. Call the boys outside. We want to talk to Carillo alone.”
Moodrow watched Tilley closely as the cops complied with his orders. This was the clincher. He wanted his partner to take a good look at the results of ordinary human beings trying to protect the people they loved. His reward was Jim Tilley’s sudden, indrawn breath and the tears that followed. Rose Carillo lay asleep on a hospital bed. A narrow tube ran up into her nose, another to a vein in her arm where it was securely taped. The right side of her face was so grotesquely swollen that one eye had disappeared altogether and the skin had split in several places. The doctors had been very careful when they drew the edges of flesh together, but the scars would never disappear and the two cops, having intervened in hundreds of beatings, knew it.
They watched her in silence for a few minutes. She was lying on her right side, trying to keep her weight off her damaged ribs. Then, suddenly, she jerked in her sleep, and her arm went to the blanket covering her side.
“Rose.” Tilley’s cry was automatic, a reflex, as was his movement to the side of her bed. He took her hand as Moodrow backed out the door.
“Jimmy?” Rose groaned as she tried to turn her head far enough to see him with her good eye. She turned very slowly, as if any sudden movement would set off the pain. Though Tilley didn’t know it, small amounts of morphine dripped continually through the intravenous tube. It was enough to control the pain. If she moved slowly.
“I’m so sorry, Rose.” He wanted to say something more, to make some kind of a speech, to take her in his arms, to take responsibility for Greenwood’s continued freedom. But suddenly he knew there was nothing to be said, that it never happens in a vacuum. There are thousands of Levander Greenwoods in New York. And thousands of Rose Carillos. Only the politicians invent cures. For the fighters, it’s one punch, one opponent, at a time. He knelt beside the bed and took her hand, afraid to touch any other part of her body.
“He came on me out of no place, Jimmy.” Her voice, through swollen lips, was nearly inaudible and Tilley bent forward, his ear almost to her mouth. “He didn’t even say my name. He had a brick and he hit me with it in the face. When I fell, he started kicking me.” She stopped for a moment and Tilley thought she’d gone back to sleep. “Is Marlee all right?”
“Marlee’s okay. She’s home.”
“The children?”
Tilley shrugged helplessly. “The phone call helped. But they’re frightened.”
“It goes on and on,” Rose said. As she became more awake, the pain crept back in. “Jimmy, send Moodrow in for a minute. The nurse gave me a sleeping pill and I can’t stay awake very long.”
Tilley stiffened. “Whatever you want him to do for you, I can do it. You don’t need Moodrow anymore. You can come to me. If you want Levander dead, I’ll take care of it.”
At first when she began to cry, Tilley thought it was from relief, but she insisted again that Moodrow be brought into the room. By the time Tilley finally located his partner, talking to a nurse at the central desk, and brought him back into the room, Rose was nearly asleep.
“Rose,” Moodrow said quietly, “it’s Moodrow.” He touched her side. “You want to see me?”
Suddenly she reached up and took hold of his shirt, her dark eye riveted to his. “You bring Jim Tilley back, you cocksucker. Or don’t come back yourself. If it’s gotta be one or the other, you go first.”
Fifteen minutes later, they were standing in the shadows of a basement apartment on 11th Street and Moodrow was turning the key in the door. Inside, he displayed the small vial, packed in its own emergency syringe. “Know what this is, Jimmy?”
Jimmy looked at Moodrow uncomprehendingly. The roller coaster was spinning faster and faster. Rose’s speech to Moodrow both thrilled and stunned Tilley. He hated the idea of himself as Moodrow’s pawn, but if Rose wanted him to come back…“Just tell me, Stanley. I’m not in the mood for guessing games.”
“This here chemical is called Narcan. I got it courtesy of a nurse at St. Vincent’s. What it does…”
“I know what it does,” Tilley said. “I’ve seen it used a thousand times on junkies with an o.d. It takes the dope right out of their bodies.”
Moodrow grinned. “Whatta ya think’s gonna happen if we shoot it up into Pinky Mitchell?”
Pinky Mitchell was sound asleep in the bathroom, but his wrists were bloody from attempts to pull them through the cuffs. Tilley took him by the hair and pulled him erect. “Wake up, Pinky. We got a little surprise for you.” He ripped the shirt off Mitchell’s back, exposing scarred arms, the veins raised and leathery or invisible altogether. Two pus-filled abscesses leaked clear fluid from below his left bicep to the blood on his wrists.
“What you gonna do to me?” Pinky groaned, obviously still stoned.
“We’re gonna bring you down, motherfucker,” Tilley said, taking the vial from Moodrow and pushing it into Mitchell’s face.
Pinky’s eyes flicked from the vial in Tilley’s hand to the white packets lying on the sink. “Why you wanna put that shit up in me?” he asked. “That’s medicine, man. You ain’t no doctor. You can’t put no medicine in me.”
“That means you know what it is?”
“Sure. I overdosed about ten times. I seen it plenty, man.”
“Listen, Pinky,” Moodrow interrupted, his voice gentle. “We don’t want you. We want the man who gave you the Blue Thunder. You tell us and you just walk away.”
“Levander Greenwood, man. He gave it to me. Everybody knows he took that shit, man. On Eldridge Street. He ripped it off and I bought it to sell.”
“You bought it?” Tilley’s voice crackled with rage. “You haven’t had two cents in the last five years and you tell me you bought it? I hate fucking liars. I hate ’em.”
“Say, Pinky,” Moodrow interrupted, his voice still calm, “is the reason you won’t tell us where you got the dope because the man who gave you the dope is a policeman?” Pinky’s eyes opened wide and Moodrow continued. “Because we already know it’s a policeman, but we don’t know which one. That’s our only problem. Which one.”
They waited, the two cops, for Pinky to make a decision, but when the junkie held his silence, Moodrow and Tilley silently went to work. Moodrow held Mitchell’s right arm immobile, while Tilley searched for a vein. Being neither medic nor junkie, it took nearly five minutes before Mitchell’s blood rose into the bottom of the vial and Tilley forced the Narcan into the junkie’s bloodstream.
The effect was virtually instantaneous. Mitchell began to shiver and to scratch his face against the bathroom wall. The sweat was already pouring from his hair down into his face and over his chest. Then he threw up. Again and again and again. Finally, his head swiveled to the dope on the sink. “How do I know you’ll let me shoot up? How do I know you won’t just bust me?”
Moodrow reached into his jacket pocket and removed a syringe, still in the wrapper, a candle and a spoon. He laid all three on the sink. “We don’t want to arrest you, Pinky. I swear to God we don’t want you at all. I know you probably don’t believe me. Maybe cops have lied to you before. So why don’t we do this. You give me the name, then we’ll let you inject the heroin while we go over the details.”
Even as he considered the deal, Mitchell’s body was wracked by another cramp. When he’d pulled himself together, he turned back to Moodrow. There was no remorse on his face. The pain was overwhelming. “It’s a big, fat detective from the 7th Precinct. Kirkpatrick’s his name. A fat mick with a red face. That’s as much as I’m gonna say until I get well.”
Moodrow rocked back in his chair, then turned and looked down at the floor as if considering something utterly private. Tilley thought back to their meetings with Kirkpatrick. Neither of them had had a clue and Tilley was sure Moodrow must be seeing it as a personal betrayal.
“Sure, Pinky, you don’t have to say no more.” Moodrow sat up, pulling himself together. His eyes were black marbles set in white granite. “And thanks. Enjoy the dope, but don’t get so stoned you can’t talk, because if you’re lying to me, I’m gonna walk out of here and this time I won’t come back for a week.”
Mitchell didn’t bother to listen. The moment his wrists and ankles were free, he stepped to the sink and knelt before it like a nun taking Holy Communion. Slowly and very carefully (his hands were still shaking), he filled the syringe with water, then squirted the water into the spoon. The dope followed, all of it, and without being asked, Moodrow lit the candle. Mitchell cooked the mixture until it began to bubble, then left the soup to cool while he removed his belt and twisted it into a tourniquet. His veins had long ago retreated to the bone and, even though he was better than Tilley, he had to probe again and again before he finally drew blood into the syringe, until he could push the load home.
The transformation was miraculous. The sickness simply vanished and he began cleaning himself as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened to him. It was a snake oil salesman’s dream; a powder that cures sickness, instantaneously and completely. That the powder causes the illness in the first place is not, of course, the salesman’s problem. Moodrow waited patiently until Mitchell was finished, then all went into the main room for a talk.
The interrogation didn’t take long. Pinky Mitchell had begun his informing career after Kirkpatrick accidentally caught him boosting shirts in Macy’s. That had been six years ago and at first their relationship had followed the normal cop-informant pattern. Then, more than a year ago, Kirkpatrick had occasionally begun to supply him with heroin for sale. The split was seventy-thirty, in Kirkpatrick’s favor. Considerably better than the dollar-a-bag profit Pinky ordinarily made on his merchandise.
Mitchell sat in a chair while he told his story. His chin lay on his chest and he seemed unconcerned, though he made no effort to hold back. When he was done, Moodrow delivered the bad news.
“You gotta go back inside now, Pinky,” he said quietly. “Back in the toilet. You’re gonna stay with us for another day or two.”
The junkie’s eyes darted around the room as he weighed the possibility of escape. As if his doped-up body had any chance of getting to that door before Jim Tilley got to him. Gently, Moodrow took his wrist and tugged him to his feet, leading him back across the room.
“This ain’t fair,” Pinky whined. “I did what you wanted, didn’t I? Please let me go.”
“I can’t take a chance you’re lying or that you might run. Here, I’ll leave this with you so you don’t get sick.” He showed Pinky the small bags he held in his hand, then pushed them into the junkie’s pocket. Inside the bathroom, he cuffed one of Mitchell’s wrists to the pipe. With his legs and the other arm free, Pinky would be able to reach the sink. And the dope.
“Before I go, there’s something I want you to think about,” Moodrow said. “You remember that Italian I mentioned before? I’m gonna have to tell him about you, so if you go back on the street, he’s gonna kill you. What do you think about that?”
Apparently, Pinky Mitchell didn’t think too much of it. He shrugged his shoulders and when he spoke his voice was slurred. He was beginning to nod. “What am I supposed to do? Go back to Ol’ Virginny?”
“Look, if you want, I can get you into a program. There’s a place in Staten Island. Detox for the first two weeks, then talk for a month. I’ll give you a name to ask for and they’ll take you right in. Six weeks from now, you can go wherever you want. No more dope chains. That’s all I could do for you, Pinky. That’s it.”
The junkie stared at Moodrow for a long time. He was as surprised as Tilley was by Moodrow’s offer. Finally, he smiled. “It don’t matter, anyway, man. It don’t matter worth a shit.”
“Why’s that, Pinky?” Moodrow asked.
“I got the virus, man. I’m just killin’ time.”