REVEREND HUSSEIN “SKIP” MUFTI EXITED the dark limousine and walked quickly up to the entrance of the brownstone on 73rd Street on the Upper East Side. He inserted a key in the door and waved to the driver, who flashed his lights and pulled away.
Sitting in an unmarked police car across the street a little ways down the block, Vince Cippio Sr. scowled. “Pretty ritzy neighborhood for a mistress,” he said to the man sitting next to him in the backseat.
Jack Gilliam laughed. “He makes a hundred and fifty thousand as a city councilman, but that’s not half of it. The guy’s crooked as a meth addict’s teeth. If you’re a businessman and want something done in Harlem—like get a development plan through the so-called land use committee or a liquor license or a gun license—you’re going to be laying out some serious dough for Mufti’s retirement account. He’s worth millions and can afford to keep his girlfriend happy and far enough away from his wife to be safe.”
“So why don’t you just nail him for extortion and malfeasance?” Cippio asked. “Seems like that would be a hell of a lot easier than what you got planned.”
Gilliam shook his head. “The feds have been after him for years. But the guy’s slick. He’s stashed the cash somewhere untraceable, probably offshore . . . It’s all pretty subtle, like holding out with his buddies voting for some project, then suddenly changing his vote. Or asking for favors without any evidence of money changing hands. Point is, if the feds can’t get him, we sure as shit aren’t going to with the City Council watching every dime that goes into the department.”
“Besides,” Joe Satars said from the front passenger seat, “he’d just claim he was being persecuted by racist cops, and the press would come to his rescue. We’re going to send these dumb monkeys a message they can’t possibly miss. Not after the little incident in the Tombs the other day.”
“Dumb monkeys?” Cippio repeated with a scowl.
Gilliam rolled his eyes. “Ignore the racist dumbass,” he said. “Joe, how many times have I got to tell you this isn’t about your prejudices. It’s about the war on cops.”
“It sure as hell ain’t the Little Sisters of the Poor,” Satars retorted. “You got your reasons to hate ’em, I got mine.”
“Your reasons are why Eddie Evans didn’t throw in with us,” Gilliam pointed out. “And we could have used his help.”
“Evans? You mean Tony’s partner?” Cippio asked. “What’s he got to do with this?”
“We were thinking he might join our little club,” Gilliam said. “Seeing as how him and Tony were close.”
“If they were so close, he should have been with his partner, and maybe nothing would have happened,” Johnny Delgado, the driver of the car, remarked.
“Kind of makes you wonder if he was in on it,” Satars added.
“I swear to God, you two, if you were any dumber, you’d be a couple of sticks,” Gilliam said. “Evans is a good officer. It was a bad situation.”
“Just saying that sometimes race is thicker than the blood cops bleed every day to protect people who don’t give a damn,” Satars said.
“And I’m just saying to keep your yap shut.”
The men were quiet for a minute before Cippio spoke again. “So how’s this going to go down?”
“Well, our friend the reverend is learning right about now that his girlfriend is not at home,” Gilliam replied. “He’ll be calling her in five, four, three . . .”
The cell phone next to Gilliam rang.
“You going to answer that?” Cippio asked.
Gilliam shook his head. “No. You see, what that horny little bastard doesn’t know is that Miss Lucinda Barnes, age nineteen—”
“And one fine-looking piece of brown ass,” Delgado interjected.
“As I was saying, Miss Lucinda Barnes, an illegal immigrant from Jamaica, was arrested this afternoon with a kilo of cocaine in her possession. She was quite distraught . . .
“. . . especially since Joe and Johnny planted the coke in her apartment when she was out yesterday. My two associates here work in narcotics, so procuring the necessary contraband was no problem. Nor was convincing Miss Barnes to accept our offer to leave the country and return home rather than spend the flower of her youth in the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women.”
“What if she changes her mind and says something?” Cippio asked.
Satars and Delgado laughed. “Jamaica is the violent crime and murder capital of the Caribbean,” Delgado said. “All sorts of bad things can happen down there to an attractive young woman. We have friends with the Kingston Police Department; Joe and I take little vacations down there all the time. They’ll look in on her for us.”
“You got it all figured out.”
“You okay with this?” Gilliam asked, giving him a look. “You can back out now and no one will think less of you. We’re doing this for Tony.”
Cippio shook his head. “Nah, like I told you the other day. I hold this guy and that asshole Sefu responsible for the murder of my son. They stirred the hatred up; no different than pulling the trigger themselves. I want blood for blood. I didn’t know you guys were taking care of things, but I’m grateful that somebody is. I’ve lost two sons to fucking terrorists, and if I can stop one more father from having to go through what I’ve gone through, then I’m good with this and what you got done with Sefu.”
“That was easy,” Satars boasted. “Tiny Adkins is one of the most dangerous and notorious white supremacists in the system, and he runs the meth trade inside the joint. He was only too happy to do us a favor so long as the guards don’t check his girlfriend too closely when she comes to visit—if you know what I mean. And I got a cousin works in the Tombs, all he had to do was leave a sharpened toothbrush in Adkins’s cell and let them both out in the yard at the same time.”
“I thought we weren’t going to talk about it,” Gilliam growled.
“Ah, what the fuck, Adkins won’t talk. He knows he’s not getting out and he likes being the big man on the inside,” Satars said, “and Vince here, he’s one of us.”
“You can trust me,” Cippio agreed. “Like I said, these guys as good as pointed the gun at my boy’s head. Good riddance. But what about the bodyguard in the limo?”
“He comes back promptly at midnight,” Gilliam said. “When the reverend doesn’t show, he’ll go check on him. After that, a friend of ours with the One-Nine Precinct will oversee the investigation.”
“Think we’ll get away with it?”
“Oh, I’m sure his pals will have their suspicions, and there’ll be a hullabaloo,” Gilliam said. “But the investigation’s going to say suicide. You’ll see why in a minute . . . Hold on a moment while I text the reverend.” He picked up the cell phone from the seat and began tapping on the screen, speaking as he typed. “I want one million in my account . . . or . . . photos in nightstand go to Times.”
“What photos?” Cippio said when Gilliam looked up.
“A couple of weeks ago, we put a camera in the bedroom,” Delgado replied. “I tell you, for an old bastard, the guy can go to town.” He laughed, as did Satars.
“I don’t get it. We’re just going to blackmail him after all this?” Cippio said, scowling. “I thought—”
“Don’t worry,” Gilliam said. “You’ll get your revenge. The photos are just part of the cover-up. Let’s go.”
“You going to send that?” Cippio said, nodding at the phone.
“In a minute,” Gilliam said, as he and the other two cops got out of the car. Cippio followed them.
Delgado and Satars walked quickly across the dark street. They hesitated under a streetlight, looking around, then disappeared around the side of the building. Gilliam popped the trunk of the car and pulled out a bag. He motioned to Cippio, and they followed the others to the emergency exit at the back of the building.
Using a skeleton key, Satars opened the door. “No camera,” Gilliam whispered, pointing to where a security camera would have normally been placed. He then pressed Send on Lucinda Barnes’s cell phone.
The men made their way up the stairs to the fourth floor, where a quick scan showed that no one else was present. Satars again slipped the key in the lock, and they swiftly entered the apartment and made their way to the bedroom.
Sitting on the bed, holding a set of photographs and looking dumbfounded, was Reverend Mufti. He looked up. “Who are you?”
Gilliam didn’t speak, just reached into the bag and pulled out a length of rope with a noose on one end. At the same moment, he raised a Taser and shot Mufti, who flopped onto the floor and lay there twitching.
Delgado stepped forward and yanked the reverend to his feet. Satars arrived from the kitchen with a chair while Gilliam threw the rope over an exposed beam in the ceiling.
As he was coming to, Mufti realized what was happening. “No, wait!” he cried out. “I can pay you. Look in my suit pocket. The little notebook. It’s all my accounts at a bank in the Grand Caymans. There’s plenty to go around.”
Instead, Satars stuffed a sock in Mufti’s mouth, and then the two younger cops lifted him onto the chair. Gilliam threw the noose around the desperately pleading man’s neck and pulled it tight, tying the other end around a leg of the bed.
“Want to do the honors?” Gilliam asked Cippio, nodding at the chair.
“Yeah, sure,” Cippio said, but instead of kicking the chair out from under Mufti, he pulled a gun from the holster beneath his jacket. “You’re under arrest.”
“You fucking bastard,” Delgado said as he started for Cippio, but he backed off as the barrel swung to point at his face.
“What is this, Vince?” Gilliam asked. “I thought you wanted to avenge Tony?”
“Not like this,” Cippio said.
“Fucking nigger lover,” Satars spat, but whatever else he was going to say was interrupted by a deep voice behind them.
“You want to repeat that to my face?” Detective Clay Fulton said as he entered the room. Behind him a half dozen detectives from the DA’s Office followed with their guns drawn. “Get on your knees and keep your hands where I can see them!”
Cippio removed the noose from around Mufti’s neck and helped him step down from the chair. The reverend’s eyes were still wide in fear. “They tried to lynch me,” he said, pointing a shaking finger at the three rogue cops as they were being cuffed.
“Yes, sir,” Fulton replied. “It appeared that way. I’d like you to come down to the station to give a statement.”
“What? So you can do me like you did Imani Sefu?”
“No, sir. You’re not under arrest. We’d just like to get your statement, then you’ll be free to go,” Fulton explained.
Mufti was silent and then the realization came over his face. “You knew they were going to do this, and you let them almost do it.”
“We knew they planned something,” Fulton said, “but we didn’t know what. Mr. Cippio here is a former police officer, and he was our guy on the inside. He wasn’t going to let you be harmed, and we were listening the whole time.”
“A wire? I told you not to trust this son of a bitch,” Satars angrily reminded Gilliam.
Gilliam’s broad face was red with anger as he turned to Cippio. “You turned on your fellow officers for a piece of trash like this, a man who advocates killing cops? What would your sons say?”
Cippio leaned over until his face was a few inches from Gilliam’s. “My sons? Don’t talk to me about my sons. My sons wouldn’t have wiped their shoes on scumbags like you. You dishonored everything good they stood for; you don’t deserve to wear the uniform they died in. It’s too bad they won’t be able to tell you that themselves, because where you’re going after they pull you out of prison in a box is straight to hell.”
Fulton placed a hand on Cippio’s shoulder. “It’s okay, Vince. Your sons are proud of you, and so is every cop who wears the uniform for the right reasons.” He turned to his men. “Get this trash out of here.”