ON SATURDAY afternoon under a lowering sky, Rocco pulled into the prosecutor’s office lot and parked next to a mud-splattered three-year-old black Corvette, all hood and looking like a long-barreled handgun. For a moment he wondered if the car belonged to the actor, but it was too dirty. County Narcotics, he decided with a small twist of disappointment.
Rocco felt enervated and down, in need of some kind of pick-me-up. The previous night’s marathon was bad enough, but then earlier this morning, before he had finally crashed, he had driven Erin and her babysitter to the kid’s play group, and no matter how much he begged and wheedled and pouted, he had been unable to get his daughter even to wave goodbye to him. She had just stepped out of the car as if he was a chauffeur, taken the babysitter’s hand and disappeared inside the lobby. Later, Rocco had drifted into a fractured sleep, feeling anxious and emotionally hungry, and his mood hadn’t improved since waking.
When he entered the office. Vy was talking low on the phone and sucking a lipstick-stained Merit.
“Is he here?”
Vy put a hand over the mouthpiece and made a squinty face.
“You know, what’s his name.” Rocco couldn’t bring himself to say Sean Touhey.
“Talk, Rocco.”
“The actor.”
“Nope.”
“Where’s Mazilli?”
“Out in the field.”
Rocco knew that could mean anything from working an old homicide to playing rummy in a Mafia-run social club. He might not be back for hours.
Rocco walked toward the squad room and saw that the chair the actor had used while eavesdropping on the interrogation the day before had never been removed from the hallway. The empty chair prompted an eerie feeling that Touhey was still somewhere in the building, but Rocco shook that off and took a seat at his desk.
He turned on the TV over the filing cabinets, caught a few minutes of a “Hawaii Five-O” rerun, then turned it off. Pulling the actor’s business card out of his sport jacket, Rocco reached for the phone.
“Pressure Point Productions,” said a young male voice.
“Yeah. Is Sean in? This is Rocco Klein.”
“One minute.”
Rocco cradled the phone along his jawline, held the business card in both hands, flipping it over, reading once again the scrawled promissory note on the back.
“Hi.” The new voice was female—husky and intimate.
“Hi. Who’s this?” Rocco leaned forward, his elbows propped on the desk blotter.
“This is Jackie. Can I help you?”
“Jackie, hi, this is Rocco Klein. Is Sean in?”
“Sorry, he’s not in right now. Can I help you with something?”
“Do you know who I am?”
“Sure do.”
“Great. I wasn’t sure, is ah . . . is Sean coming over to my office tonight? We left it kind of up in the air.”
“I, I don’t think so. I think he might have gone upstate.”
“Upstate?” Rocco was momentarily confused: upstate was a local euphemism for jail. “What, he’s on vacation?”
“No, he just . . . he should be back tomorrow.”
“Back where?”
“Hard to say. Do you want me to tell him anything?”
Rocco was tongue-tied for a moment. “Tell him I called, and to call me, OK?”
“What’s your number, Rocky?”
“Rocco, not Rocky.”
“Did I say Rocky?” She laughed, Rocco thinking, Real funny.
Just as he hung up, Vy’s voice came crackling over the desk intercom, telling him he had a visitor. Rocco hopped to it, a rush of blood making his temples pulse. It had to be him—Vy had that teasing note in her voice.
Rocco strode down the hallway making up tonight’s real-life research menu, so pumped about seeing the actor standing there that he looked right at the tiny, hollow-faced, pale woman slouched on the couch and shrugged to Vy.
“Where’d he go?”
“Where’d who go?” Vy squawked, giving Rocco a bug-eyed look.
It took a few moments before he understood that the woman was his visitor. “How are you?” he said tightly, stepping in front of her. The woman’s reddish-brown, broom-textured hair was gathered into a foot-long ponytail that sprouted out over her ear. She wore a tight pair of dungarees, neon pink socks and laceless tennis shoes. Underneath her denim jacket she wore a white T-shirt that bragged “Here’s the Beef,” but she couldn’t have weighed more than ninety pounds.
“I know who shot that guy.” Her voice was raw and gravelly, her eyes sullen and steady.
“Good,” Rocco said mildly and extended his arm toward the interrogation room, bowing slightly.
She walked down the hallway swaybacked, leading with her pelvis like someone who was suffering from borderline starvation. Junkie, Rocco decided, or maybe an ex-junkie, since she seemed to be clean and her clothes were more or less color-coordinated.
In the interrogation room she sat with her elbows touching the insides of her thighs, already on her second cigarette before Rocco could even get her name spelled right.
Rocco sat at right angles to her, his legal pad on his crossed knee. He glanced at her name: Susan Phelan. “So Susan—”
“Suky, Suky.”
“So Suky, what can I do for You?”
“I told you.” She took a drag on a Newport, her fingertips reddish and nibbled. “I know who did that—who shot that guy.”
“What guy is that?”
“The Ahab’s.” She had smallish blue-gray teeth, and when she coughed into her fist Rocco quickly turned his head, pretending he heard someone knocking at a door.
“Ahab’s? Give me a name.”
“Almighty.” Her eyes shifted to the floor as she said it.
“Almighty . . .” Rocco cocked his head. “You mean the Almighty?”
“No, that’s his name.” Her eyes found Rocco’s face. “His real name is Gary White.”
Rocco wrote down the name, listening to her wet cough, gritting his teeth. “Almighty, Gary. You know where he lives?”
“Yeah. With me.”
Rocco was instantly skeptical. “And where’s that?”
“The Buckingham on Warton?”
“Uh-huh.” Rocco nodded mildly. The Buckingham was a ten-story flophouse across from the Dempsy Greyhound station.
“And how old would you say Almighty is, roughly?”
“Shit, I’ll tell you exactly. He’s twenty-eight.”
Rocco regarded her through narrowed eyes. “I’ll be back in a minute. You sure I can’t get you anything?”
She shrugged and Rocco returned to his desk. He called the Bureau of Criminal Identification and got Bobby Bones on the line.
“What can I do you for, Roc?”
“I need a look-up on a Gary White.”
There was silence on the line for a few seconds. “We got three—a twenty-eight, a fifty-one and a deceased.”
Rocco hesitated, bracing himself as if preparing to race. It was a point of pride for Bobby Bones to cut off an inquiry as soon as he got a name, then begin to spit back entire criminal histories before you could reach for a pad of paper. Bobby Bones had a photographic memory and was obsessed with the rap sheets of every criminal in Dempsy. He was able to retain thousands of numbers: addresses, social security, FBI, SBI, dockets, dates, dispositions, warrants—everything down to age, height and weight for roughly five thousand bad guys going back twenty-five years. The year before, when the computers had gone down, all the calls to BCI were rerouted to Bobby Bones’s mother’s house for thirty-six hours, to keep the wheels of justice rolling.
“I’ll take the twenty-eight. He got a moniker?”
“Almighty. Mostly small-time junkie shit these days—he likes to boost aspirin and steak, mainly. Got about a dozen trespass and petty-theft charges going back five years, some heavier shit before that. A real gnat.”
“Where’s he live?”
“Forty-four Monticello, Four F.”
“Yeah? I got the Buckingham.”
“Oh yeah?” Bones sounded insulted. “I think someone’s jerking your bird over there.”
“Maybe. Can you cut me a picture, send it over?”
“You got it.”
“Bones, what’s this guy, white or black?”
“Yomo. But he’s got a white girlfriend, Susan Phelan, Suky. Another fucking gnat. You want her sheet too?”
“Not now, maybe later.”
“Hey Roc, you know whose daughter she is? You remember Frog Phelan?”
“You’re shitting me.” Rocco felt depressed. “Jesus Christ. Poor Frog—another cop with a fucked-up kid. If they’re not shooting smack, they’re marrying Martians. She’s a junkie too, right? Ex-junkie? Why do they do that, these kids—Frog Phelan, hah? He was a good guy, a real nice guy.”
“He was a prick.” Bobby Bones put a shrug in his voice.
“Listen, this Susan, Suky, she got any outstanding warrants?”
“Petty shit. A two-year-old possession, like that.”
“Frog Phelan, hah? OK Bobby, be well.”
Rocco settled back down into his wooden chair in the interrogation room. There were four Newport butts in the tin dish in front of Suky now, and the room was adrift in smoke.
“Suky, how do you know Almighty did it?”
She looked away. “He told me.”
“When did he tell you?”
“You know, before. He showed me the gun and he said he was gonna kill that guy. Next thing somebody did it, right?”
She looked at the ashtray as she spoke, avoiding his eyes, Rocco thinking, This really stinks.
“Why’d he do it for?”
“Why?” she said, chewing on the word for a while. “He was in there buying a fish sandwich and he was paying in small change—you know, nickels and pennies’? And the manager was getting pissed because he was slowing down the line, giving him shit like, Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go. Then Almighty came up three cents short and the manager made some crack, so like everybody was laughing at him and then the manager wouldn’t let him slide for the three cents and you know he just made him feel bad, made him feel like two cents.”
Rocco couldn’t tell if the story was true. It seemed heartfelt despite her monotone delivery.
“And when was this?”
“The day before he showed me the gun. Like Wednesday? Yeah.” She nodded. “Wednesday.”
“Were you there when this happened?”
“Unh-uh. He just told me about it.”
“Can we talk to him? I’d really like to talk to him.”
“Hell yeah. You find him, you can talk to him.” She paused. “You better talk to him.”
“You know where he is now?”
“Minute to minute I can’t say, because I haven’t like seen him since when he showed me that gun.”
“What kind of gun was it? Do you remember?”
“What kind?” She shrugged. “I don’t know nothin’ about guns.”
Bullshit, Rocco told himself. Her old man was a cop. “OK, you think he’s home now?”
“Nah. I would try that field behind the methadone clinic. He might be there.”
“Off Cooper?”
“Yeah, he’s probably there.”
“Where’s he work?”
“He ain’t working now. He’s kind of sick.”
“Oh yeah?” Rocco assumed that sick meant the Virus.
“But when he’s well? When he can get hired? He works hard.”
Rocco was taken aback. Here she was trying to put her boyfriend away for thirty years, but she said it like Rocco shouldn’t think Almighty was a bum.
“Suky, how come you waited twenty hours to come in on this? I’m just curious.”
She looked at the ashtray again. “I just heard about it this afternoon.”
Another lie. “Did you know the guy that got shot?”
“Just from eating there sometimes.”
“How long you and Almighty been together?”
“Six, six and a half years.”
“Married or just . . .”
“He’s my husband—and my father.”
“Your father?”
“Of my baby.” Her face got far away and pained-looking. “How many kids you got?”
“One, a girl.”
Rocco drifted off for a moment, thinking about Erin, thinking of her married to an Almighty, shooting smack. Erin’s father was a cop too.
“Is he a good daddy, Almighty?”
She didn’t answer. Rocco drifted again: it wasn’t too late to become a good father. He just needed a little time to get his bearings, a little luck, and then it would be all downhill, he’d start taking Erin on long walks somewhere, pony rides, you name it.
“So he doesn’t do shit with the kid, right?”
She snapped back into focus, looked directly at Rocco, annoyed but calm. “Why are you asking all this?”
Momentarily flustered by her bluntness, Rocco changed his tack. “Suky, let me think out loud here for a second. I’m thinking, you live with the guy six years, he’s the father of your child, you only know the victim from eating, yet you’re coming in here on your own, you’re voluntarily putting this guy in the shit—and I’m talking an automatic thirty in, no parole if we get a conviction—and so I think, is there anything else going on here? Is this a personal beef? You know, like a lovers’ quarrel that’s a little out of hand? I know you got a warrant out on you. I mean, are you trying to work that off here maybe? Do some swapping? What’s up?”
Rocco stared at her, and she met his eyes with an unflinching steadiness. “I ain’t looking for nothin’,” she said, her voice low and flat. “You do to me whatever you want.”
Rocco leaned back. Shit, now he’d have to go hunt down a goddamn scavenge rat junkie. He knew something else was going on here but he just couldn’t crack it, and he hated feeling that he was being used to settle a private score.
Vy stood outside the interrogation room wiggling her long nails, catching Rocco’s eye and then slipping a manila folder under the door.
Rocco scanned Almighty’s rap sheet, sent over from BCI. He could see the Virus come on him: armed robbery six years ago, car theft and burglary three years ago, then down to selling drugs, then to the crimes that didn’t take much energy or carry much risk of jail time—shoplifting and criminal trespass.
“Is this him?” Rocco put the mug shot on the table, next to the ashtray. Suky looked away as if not on speaking terms with the photo. “Yeah, that’s him.”
The field was a full acre of wasteland bordered by a low-slung housing project, an orange-shingled trailer that housed a methadone clinic, the salvage yard owned by Vince Kelso, the cop, and curving around at the farthest end, a soaring, abandoned hospital complex.
Following a local squad car, Rocco drove a Chevy Nova down a paved but cratered cul-de-sac that was littered with mangled shopping carts and fire-blackened oil drums. At least a dozen men were toiling quietly, burning the rubber off stolen phone cables, piling up battered hubcaps or filling shopping carts with soda cans, refrigerator ribbing, liberated plumbing fixtures and other, less identifiable metal salvage. A hundred feet into the field stood the clubhouse, a rickety lean-to under a tree accompanied by two legless couches which faced the hospital. None of the junkies looked up at the cop caravan, everybody focused on the task at hand, preparing scrap for sale to Kelso’s yard across the way, all moving in an unhurried yet purposeful glide like insects programmed for a life task and knowing of nothing else.
Rocco got out of the Chevy and stretched. The air stank of burning insulation. The oily smoke, the charred metal carcasses, the ashy mounds of old rubber-stripping fires and the zombie lope of the scavengers made him feel as if he was visiting a major battle site three days after the troops had buried their dead and moved on.
He didn’t know too much about the life out here anymore, but he did know that these people were at the bottom of the junkie chain, too weak to support themselves with violence or fast reflexes and too sick to survive prison. Most had the Virus, although Rocco guessed that not a one had been tested. Nobody wanted to know for a fact, but they all walked around as if they had already died, as if there was nothing left to fear, as if the news in their bones had finally liberated them, allowing them to embrace without excuse or pretense the only thing that had ever given them comfort, even though it was the same thing that had killed them: intravenous drugs.
Rocco leaned against the door of the Nova and watched the two uniforms emerge from their squad car, both of them older guys with ballooning guts, humped necks, cigarettes and shades. They walked back to Rocco with a casual lumbering roll. He knew them pretty well; they had been cruising this section for years, and one, Eddie Dolan, had once spent six months in Homicide. Bored to death, he had begged to be returned to the street.
Rocco wrinkled his nose. “It’s like fuckin’ Bhopal.”
“Dempsy burnin’,” the two cops chimed in chorus.
They all stood together by the Nova and watched a tall, string-muscled black man tie the end of a roll of phone cable around a tree stump, cut an incision down to the copper strands with a bowie knife, drape the cable around his waist and yank back violently, each jerk stripping back the thick rubber and exposing more of the precious metal.
Eddie Dolan stepped up to the guy. “What’s up, my man.”
The junkie stopped wrestling with the cable, straightened and gave Dolan a look of patient annoyance.
“How you be?” Dolan eyeballed the bowie knife.
The guy said nothing, waiting for a real question.
“Where’s Almighty at?”
“For what?”
“For telling me.” Dolan took the cable from the guy’s hands, coiled it around his own hammy fists and gave it a yank. It wouldn’t budge and Dolan offered it to Rocco.
Rocco took off his sport jacket, exchanged it for the cable and dug in his heels, throwing everything he had into a long jerk and wrenching his back. The junkie stared at him, unamused.
Rocco winced and handed him back the cable. “Thank God for guns, right?”
“You just don’t have the need to strip that bad boy,” the other cop, Willy Harris, drawled. “You gots to have the need.”
“So where’s he at?” Dolan gave Rocco back his sport jacket.
“Ask the desk.” The junkie gestured to the lean-to under the tree. “He’s around, I know that.”
Under the tree but hidden from the road by the lean-to sat an old-fashioned teacher’s desk and chair that someone had boosted from a high school basement. The furniture was never meant to be used outdoors but the heavy oak was indestructible, its surface marred only by bird droppings. The desk drawers, once filled with school supplies and attendance records, were now used to store community-shared sets of works, and the chair and desk sat tilted at opposing angles on the rocky ground.
The thin, bare-chested guy at the desk was otherwise engaged, and Rocco and the uniforms stood two polite steps back, Rocco wincing as the guy shot some dope between the knuckles of his left fist and then carefully placed the needle in a water-filled jelly jar on top of the desk. Running a hand over his mouth and staring toward the hospital, he looked passively amazed, as if he had been teaching a class and the school, the classroom, all the students, had suddenly been atomized leaving him shirtless but intact at his desk in the middle of nowhere.
He tilted back in the chair, twisting his head up to the cops standing behind him. “You ever hear of privacy?”
“I can’t help it. I watch that needle going in, it gets my dick hard.” Dolan pulled on his crotch.
“Well, then you a pervert, Dolan,” the junkie said.
“Hey.” Rocco squinted at him. “Hey, I know you.”
The guy sat motionless, heavy-lidded.
“Robert Johnson, right?”
The guy batted his eyes, sniffed.
Rocco smiled. “Didn’t you die?”
“Somebody’s here,” the junkie said, smirking.
“Yeah, Robert Johnson. I arrested you in 1978 coming out of Dinardo Liquors. You had that shotgun down your leg. Don’t you remember me?”
“Nope.”
“Yeah, so how you been?” Rocco asked without sarcasm.
Johnson stared out into the field. “Working on my tan.”
“Yeah, I could’ve sworn you died two, three years ago, no?”
“Where’s Almighty at?” asked Dolan.
Johnson jerked his chin to the gigantic hospital complex across the field, its Gothic arches so expansive in the twilight that the building seemed to be floating.
Rocco and the two uniforms made their way through the field toward the hospital. “You ever see War of the Worlds?” Rocco asked Dolan. “No one can stop the Martians and they’re blasting the shit out of everybody? You remember what finally killed them?”
“The Virus?” Dolan asked.
“Sort of, yeah, some microbe they couldn’t handle. And that’s what this is like. Robert Johnson? You remember him, Willie? All the badass motherfuckers from like ten years ago? They’re all dead, dying. They killed themselves. You think of all the old names—Robert Joy, Johnson there, Chuckie Grover, the Carter brothers, all of them.” Rocco shot an imaginary needle.
“I hear Erroll Barnes got it.” Willie Harris pulled up the waist of his pants.
“Good. Fuck him.” Rocco said.
“So what are you saying there, Rocco?” Dolan skipped over an unidentifiable object covered with flies.
“Hey, I’m not saying the Virus is a good thing, but . . .” Rocco faltered, suddenly feeling defensive. “Don’t put fuckin’ words in my mouth.”
The hospital loomed before them. Built in the 1930s, the Anne Donovan Pediatric Center, known to everybody in Dempsy as the baby hospital, was a spectacular ruin, a thirteen-story Depression-era monolith abandoned in the 1970s for a variety of reasons—too expensive to heat, structural fissures, not enough babies. From a distance the gray granite building appeared to be functional; it was only by standing in the necklace of knee-high weeds and debris that ringed the grounds that you could see the blackened and shattered windows and the graffiti-tattooed plywood boarding up the entrances.
The cops picked their way through the booby-trapped vegetation and came to a boarded-up side door. Dolan threw his shoulder into a loosened corner, allowing them to squeeze inside, into the clammy darkness of a stairwell. Following flashlights, they entered the circular main lobby, the heart-stopping base of a thirteen-story atrium that was ringed with interior balconies connected by skeletal staircases, all spiraling up to the skylight like the icing on a multitiered wedding cake.
Surrounded by a herd of shopping carts, they stood on marble tiles that had been scattered and smashed over the years by scavenged booty tossed from above. Once their eyes adjusted to the anemic light filtering through the opaque ceiling, they could pick out three or four junkies at various heights on the stairs, shadow-men mining the carcass, the sounds of their hammering and dragging ricocheting up and down the hollow heart of the hospital.
Rocco was seized by a combination of nostalgia and anxiety. He had come to this place many times as a kid—for vaccinations, stitches, a broken arm, a tonsillectomy—and the visits were always accompanied by pain and panic. Even now, amid the choking must and filth, he could swear he still smelled the fear-inducing pungency of antiseptic alcohol.
Wary of getting winged by flying brass, they all backed up under an overhang.
“I was born here,” Dolan grunted, as if the thought made him angry.
“You and every other fucking cop.” Harris caught a junkie three flights up in the watery beam of his flashlight.
“About six years ago?” Rocco stooped to pick up a loose tile, put it in his pocket as a keepsake. “Me and Frank Delgado, we’d hit a dry spell? You know, it’s cold, no one’s killing anybody, we’d park out back here and wait for them to throw shit out the windows. You know, you smash up a toilet on the twelfth floor, who the fuck wants to lug the pipes down all those stairs, right? Shit would come down, ka-boom, we’d run out there, grab up the brass, the copper, the whatever, throw it in the trunk and take it over to the yard ourself. Sometimes there’d be six other cops out there waiting for the same thing. We’d race for the shit, bend down at the same time, bang heads.” He shrugged. “Paid for a few beers . . . Guys still doing that?”
Neither of them answered, although Rocco caught Dolan throwing Harris an amused look.
Seeing no sign of Almighty, Rocco motioned for Dolan to lead the way to the stairs. As they climbed, Rocco thought about stealing the salvage from the junkies, imagining telling that story to Patty, the look she’d give him, telling her his half-serious theory of the Virus as a weapon against crime, the look that would get, and suddenly Rocco was overwhelmed with a ferocious sense of pride at being born in this ruin just like Dolan, pride at being a local boy, a son of Dempsy, a street kid, a regular guy. He thought of Erin: she had never been in Dempsy in her life. That had to be rectified; she had to know.
As they reached the fourth floor all three of them began breathing through their mouths, and at the fifth, Dolan called for a cigarette break. At every landing Rocco noticed that the fire hoses, racked like compressed intestines on the wall alongside the exit doors, had had their brass nozzles neatly razored off. Compact, heavy, valuable, they must have been the first things to go.
On the sixth floor they ran into a guy sitting on the stairs drinking an Olde English and smoking cocaine.
“Randy, my man.” Dolan put a hand on his own sweating chest. “Where’s Almighty at?”
“He up there.” On the wall alongside Randy’s head was a star-burst of rust-brown dots where someone had booted the blood from their hypo.
“How many floors?” Dolan sounded as if he was begging.
“Just one.” Randy pinched his nose, turned his glass pipe around and took a hit from the other end. “You can make it if you try.”
Rocco picked his way down a chalky, rubble-strewn hospital corridor illuminated by the dying sun descending over New York harbor, the slanting rays coming through the windows of a lane of doorless recovery rooms, the Statue of Liberty tracking his progress so closely that he could count the spokes on her crown.
“Dr. Almighty, paging Dr. Almighty,” Rocco droned through cupped palms. “Paging Dr. Good God Almighty.”
Harris and Dolan laughed, high-stepping over chunks of fallen ceiling. The three came to the corner room, the one with the best view, ducked in and saw a man who had to be Almighty, sitting slightly hunched over on the wrecked rusty springs of a hospital bed. The man started and clutched his chest, the arm of the Statue of Liberty sticking straight up out of his head like a prosthetic device.
“Dr. Almighty, you’re wanted in surgery.” Rocco leaned in past the doorframe, pointed his finger like a gun, then pulled the trigger. “Gotcha.” He tried not to laugh; the poor guy looked so seized up that maybe he thought the hospital had come back to life for real.
“Almighty. How you doing?” Rocco walked into the room, hand out like a salesman. Almighty tentatively extended a junkie’s swollen mitt, and Rocco forced himself to keep smiling as he shook his hand. Almighty was wearing a dirty plaid shirt open over a dark blue T-shirt from a place called the Good Girl Lounge, red gym pants and an Orlando Magic cap. Something about his lanky frame, his sleepy yet precise movements, suggested a former athleticism.
“I’m Detective Klein from the prosecutor’s office. How you been?”
“I’m OK,” he said in a frail drawl. “I ain’t bothering nobody.”
Rocco ducked down, took in the Statue of Liberty. “Jesus, nice view.”
Harris and Dolan joined Rocco at the window.
“You could charge money for this.” Rocco straightened up. “You wanna take a ride with me?” A huge but odorless human shit lay in the far corner of the room, most likely the grand finale of a week’s worth of some junkie’s constipation.
“You locking me up?” Almighty had swollen almond-shaped eyes that perpetually quivered with a promise of tears.
“Hell no.” Rocco waved the question away. “If I was locking you up, I’d be putting cuffs on you.” He extended his arm for Almighty to rise. “C’mon.”
Shuffling out of the room, Almighty stopped next to a parked shopping cart in the hallway. He had scored two faucets, a stainless steel tray, a bundle of traverse rods and a metal drawer from a filing cabinet. He looked to Rocco. Rocco looked to Harris and Dolan, the uniforms shrugging in assent.
Almighty led the way, pushing the cart, walking on his toes with a slightly forward lurch. In his unhurried gait, in the slow bob of his head, Rocco saw that the guy probably loved working this place, thirteen floors to stroll with his cart, nice view of the lady of the harbor, run into friends, always something to score, some wiring to rip out of a dropped ceiling, a radiator everybody missed, a shower head. It was like a garden, or a dream, the smashed toilets and gutted ceilings an outside to match Almighty’s inside—shattered, sick, still, peaceful.
Rocco shook himself out of his ruminations, shouted “Ho!” just to hear the echo. On the way down the corridor to the stairs, he stopped at a twenty-foot-long rectangular window that looked in on a barren and lightless room. A glass-walled cubicle stood off to one corner, and a red-on-yellow sign was still taped to the back wall: “Please Do Not Tap on Glass.”
“What the hell was this?” Rocco peered through the filthy window.
“The baby room,” Dolan said. “You know, the observation room, where guys made horses’ asses out of themselves waving to their new sons?”
“No . . .” Rocco took in the chalky desolation through the long window. He couldn’t imagine the room looking any way other than it did right now, and it made him think of unloved, unclaimed infants. “That’s a shame,” he said, clucking his tongue.
“What is?” Harris helped Almighty maneuver the cart over a pothole.
Dolan and Harris stood over the balcony and helped Almighty toss his booty down to the lobby. Elbows on the railing, observing the swoop and glide of the falling objects, Rocco couldn’t shake the image of the ghostly observation room. He began to imagine that the entire atrium was some kind of celestial flue or baby aviary and that the air was filled with the nightgowned spirits of long-gone infants.
“Do you know something?” Rocco squinted into the hollow gloom. “If you shoot a pregnant woman and they deliver the baby before she dies? If that baby is delivered dead, even if it was killed by the bullet, it’s still a single homicide. In order for it to be a homicide, a baby’s lungs have got to be fully aerated before it’s killed. Does that suck or what?”
Almighty seemed to be the only one listening.
Dolan stepped up beside him. “Double or nothing I get it right in a shopping cart.” Dolan dropped a faucet, which hit the handle of a cart and shot out of the lobby like a rocket.
“Kill my ass!” someone yelled from below. “Walk it down, motherfucker! Walk it down! Jesus!”
They threw Almighty’s scrap into the trunk of the Chevy Nova. Dolan rode in back with Almighty to make it two against one, and Harris brought up the rear in the cruiser.
“So, Gary, still living with Suky?” Rocco sought out his eyes in the rearview mirror.
“Yeah, uh-huh . . . kind of.” Almighty slouched down, hand over his mouth, watching the world slip past.
“You ever meet your father-in-law?”
“The cop? Unh-uh.” He laughed as if he knew what would have happened.
“I bet not,” Rocco said. “So what are you doing with yourself? You working?”
“Yeah, I was helping on the trucks? But I’m sick now.”
“How much is that shit in the trunk worth? Kelso still giving good prices?”
“He OK.”
They drove past the precinct house. Almighty was probably used to being booked here, and he sat up straight, frowning. “Where we going?”
“My office,” Rocco said.
“What’s that?”
“Homicide.” Rocco watched the rearview for his reaction.
“Homicide?” Almighty slouched back down, barely interested. “Huh, you think I did somebody?” he asked, sounding almost amused.
“I dunno.” Rocco laughed. “Did you?”
“There are those who would,” Almighty drawled. “I can tell you that.”
Rocco was silent for the rest of the ride. Almighty remained indifferent, dreamy, and only when he first sat down at the desk in the interrogation room did he become momentarily alert, frowning, jerking his chin into his neck as if he could smell his wife’s scent from three hours before. But then he seemed to let it go. He slid down into his chair and popped open a bag of potato chips from the vending machine in the hallway.
Rocco settled in across the desk, absently smoothing out the top page of his legal pad and clearing his throat. “Almighty, can I call you Gary? I just can’t get my mouth around the other.”
“You can call me what you want. We in your house now.” He rubbed a tattoo on the meat below his left thumb; Rocco saw “King of Kings” in blue and a crude three-cornered crown like a child’s drawing.
“Gary, what do you know about Ahab’s? What happened there?”
“What happened there?” He dipped his long fingers into the bag. “You mean the guy that got killed? I don’t know nothin’. Guy got killed.” His eyes were unfocused, drifting. “That’s what I know.”
The room smelled of grease and salt. Rocco rubbed his face. “C’mon, you’re a sharp guy, you’re always in the street, nothing gets past you. What do you hear?”
Almighty hunched his shoulders, staring silently at a spot on the wall behind Rocco’s right ear.
Rocco sighed. “How many warrants you got out on you now?”
Almighty snapped to attention, sitting up and trying to find Rocco’s eyes. “Only but one. But that time I was supposed to be in court? I was in jail on some other thing. I was in jail, so how could I be in court too. That’s not right.”
“So Gary, come on, what do you hear?”
“Yeah, I hear it was something . . . something with drugs.” Almighty leaned forward now, anxious to please.
“Who’s saying that?”
“You know, people.”
“What people?”
“People. You know, people talk. It just words.”
“What, he had drugs, he was selling drugs, buying drugs?”
“It just words, I don’t know.”
“You own a gun?”
“Me? Hell no.”
“You ever find a gun?”
“Me? No, but if I did? I’d sell it.” He nodded. “I’d sell the shit out of that bad boy. A gun cost money.”
Rocco tapped his pencil on the desk. “When was the last time you were in Ahab’s?”
“Ahab’s?” Almighty went blank again. “Week, two weeks. I don’t like that food they got in there. It hurts my stomach.”
“Anything happen that last time?”
“Bought some food, I guess.”
“You have any problems?”
Almighty touched his stomach. “With the food?”
“Anything.”
“Nope.”
“You sure? You have the right change on you?”
“The right change? I guess.”
Rocco stared at the ceiling, took a deep breath. “You weren’t short a couple of cents?”
Almighty jerked upright in confusion.
“You didn’t have any problems with anyone?”
“Unh-uh.”
“And the last time you were there was a week or two ago.”
“Somethin’ like that. I’m mostly day-to-day in my lifestyle right now.”
“Where were you last night?”
Almighty shrugged. “I was where I always am. All over.”
“Who were you with?”
“Shakwan, Dave and them all.”
“They’ll back you up on that?”
“I guess.”
Rocco wasn’t even bothering to take notes anymore. The guy was innocent.
“Well, then let me ask you this. What would you say if I told you I got someone who says you showed them a gun, you told them you were gonna cap that guy and”—Rocco threw this in for the hell of it—“saw you do it.”
“Who say wha?” Almighty’s voice went faint and high, his damp eyes staring. He leaned closer to Rocco. “Who . . .”
Rocco smelled true confusion, almost hurt, coming off him, but he simply stared back for a few seconds, letting Almighty sit on his own question.
“Who said that?” The words came out gently, more wounded than outraged.
“Well, let me put it another way. Why would somebody, out of the blue, come to us, seek us out, tell us all this stuff about you, try to get you—”
“Oh my Lord. That motherfuckin’ woman. That . . . Jesus Lord.” He put a hand out to touch Rocco’s arm. “Look at me. Look at me.”
Rocco tilted back slightly.
“I got the Virus, man. I’m a ghost. Who’m I gonna mess with now? That woman, it’s like . . . she says I killed her, you know? But I love her, man, I love her. I didn’t, I wouldn’t touch a hair on her head. I didn’t know, I didn’t . . . ‘You killed me,’ she says, ‘you killed me.’” Almighty was shaking his head, crying now. “Goddamn, how’s I supposed to know.”
Rocco ducked his head in mock astonishment. “How are you supposed to know? Are you not of this planet? You show me one fucking junkie out there who don’t know how you catch the Virus, I’ll buy you a whole deck of heroin, how’s that.”
“Yeah, but see, she had some problems when the baby was born? They tied up her tubes for her so she can’t have no more babies? And she says to me, I can’t get nothing now, you know, no sexual diseases, because my tubes is tied.’ She tells me some doctor told her she was immune now.”
“What fucking doctor.”
“Well, maybe she misheard. Alls I know is, she tells me she’s immune ‘cause her tubes are tied.” His eyes went inward. “She says to me, ‘You made the baby a orphan. You took me from my baby.’ But it’s my baby too, you know? She got my hair. And she’s got this skin, it’s like, it ain’t a black person’s skin like mine and it ain’t a white person’s skin like her mother. It’s like, it’s like, when you stripping cable? It’s like copper, it’s like that soft red gold? And she’s gonna be tall, like me. She’s got them long legs for a kid, like a runner. She’s gonna be like a eight-eighty runner when she gets big. That was my event, the eight-eighty. Yeah, she’s gonna be something else.”
Rocco looked at the tattoo again, thinking, What a fucking goose chase this turned out to be. He mulled over pressing charges against Suky Phelan for hindering the prosecution.
“So you’re a proud daddy, hah?” Rocco asked, the frustration of his day seeping into the question.
“Yeah,” he said, slow, nodding. “You could say that. But, you know this last year I’m sick? Shit, I don’t want to be around her. ‘Cause when I see her, you know like in the park? All I can think on is I ain’t gonna see her for too much longer now. You know, like maybe a year from now she’s gonna be playin’ an’ fall down hurt herself, start cryin’ an’ needin’ help or whatnot? Where am I gonna be? I’m gonna be in the ground, so I don’t wanna see her because it makes me think on that, an’ I can’t take it, man. I just can’t take it.”
Wanting Almighty out of his office, Rocco went for the standard closer. “Would you be willing to take a polygraph?”
“A what?” Almighty squinted. “For what? About the Ahab’s thing? Fuck yeah, I take that and I tell you what else you can do. You can give one to her, man. Ask her what’s up, ‘cause she just tryin’ to get me booked for murder, one way or the other. But I swear I’m murdered every day I got left out here. Alls I got to do is lay down, close my eyes, think on shit? It’s like a execution. A goddamn execution. ‘You killed me,’ she says. Well goddamn, I’m killed too, you know? I’m killed too.” He looked to Rocco for understanding, but Rocco retreated to his notes, avoiding Almighty’s moist gaze.
“Yeah,” Almighty said to his swollen hands. “I never wanted to hurt nobody my whole damn life, but look at this shit now.”
Rocco stared deep into the yellow pad, recalling his half-cocked comments about the Virus being a crime fighter, thinking about the haunted baby hospital, about Erin.
“Look. I got enough reason to lock you up right now, but I’m gonna give you a play.”
“You do that.”
Rocco ignored the sarcasm and put his card on the desk between them. “But do me a favor. You get out there, you let me know what’s up. And you start taking care of yourself.”
“For what?” Almighty said.
Rocco walked him out of the office. It was raining, and the pot-holed strip that ran from the skyway to I-9 was almost purple with gloom. He was supposed to offer Almighty a ride home but all he said was, “You hear anything, you give me a call, OK?”
Almighty pulled down his Orlando Magic cap and loped off into the evening without saying anything. Rocco watched him blend into the wrecked landscape, and suddenly he remembered the guy’s scavenge in the back of the Nova. He opened his mouth to call out Almighty’s name, but then let it go, thinking, The hell with it.
Rocco wandered back into the interrogation room, began to clean it up and noticed that Almighty had left the calling card on the table. Rocco swept a little pile of potato chip crumbs into his cupped palm. The hell with it.