Reckless Endangerment (30 page)

Lucy jerked awake and stiffened. Tran placed his hand over her mouth and whispered in Cantonese, “Do not make a sound. Someone is attacking the shelter, and we must be very silent. You must hide under this blanket at the back of the closet, and do not move! Understand?”

Lucy made a faint noise and curled into a ball, with the blanket over her. She wondered if she were dreaming or if this were real life.

Tran cracked the closet door a half inch. Three men dressed in dark track suits and ski masks entered the room. The first two were armed with machine pistols. The third carried nothing but a large sack of some thick cloth. He had strips of duct tape stuck to his chest. This last man leaped upon Fatyma as she slept, mashed a strip of tape over her mouth, spun her around, secured her hands behind her with tape strips, got her thrashing legs under control and taped them too, and finally pulled the sack over her head and shoulders, securing it with additional taped strips. The man spoke to the others briefly in a language Tran did not know. He hoisted the girl up on his shoulders like a rolled carpet, and the three men left.

Tran, who knew a good deal about the subject, thought it a fairly competent snatch, a little noisy perhaps, a hair slow, but certainly sufficient against a site that was prepared to deal only with the random violence expected from estranged boyfriends. He put his pistol away and got Lucy to her feet.

“What happened?” she asked, now sure that it was not a dream.

“Your friend Fatyma has been kidnapped by several men.”

“
What!
” The girl rushed into the room, saw that it was true, and turned angrily on Tran. “Why didn’t you stop them?”

“Because they were many and heavily armed and I am one, and besides it is my duty to protect you and not others. Put your clothes on. We must leave instantly.”

Lucy was about to object, but something in Tran’s look dissuaded her from doing so. “Don’t look!” she said. Tran turned his back while she yanked off the T-shirt she’d slept in and pulled on her clothes. As she did, she heard heavy footsteps from above, a shout, the report of a large-caliber handgun, more shouts, screams, the peculiar ripping roar of an automatic weapon, a slamming door, a woman crying for help. These sounds accelerated her dressing. Then she was being pulled and pushed through hallways full of frightened women and children out into the chilly street. Tran hailed a cab on Avenue B. Sirens sounded in the distance as they drove off. Shortly they were back at the loft, confronting a white-faced Marlene, who, surprisingly, was not in bed but up and in the process of getting dressed as they entered.

“Where are you going?” Lucy demanded, after she had blurted out her version of the recent events, and Tran had delivered a less emotional précis.

“I have to see a client,” said Marlene. “It’s an emergency.”

“But what about Fatyma?” cried Lucy.

“Who’s Fatyma?” asked Karp, staggering into the kitchen in his robe and pajamas. “What’s going on, Marlene? It’s three in the morning.”

“I’ll explain later,” said the wife. “Could you please put Lucy to bed?”

“Yeah, sure,” said Karp sleepily. Then he noticed that Marlene was dressed. “Wait a second … you’re going out? What’s happening?”

“Joan Savitch just shot and killed her husband,” said Marlene. “A client. I got to go walk her through the system, and I have to leave now. Please, just get Lucy to bed and I’ll call you later today.” She kissed him and left, followed by the Vietnamese. Karp sighed and led his daughter to her bedroom, where he watched her undress with perfect modesty under her nightie, and then tucked her in, and comforted her while she cried about Fatyma, in the process learning a little about who Fatyma was, and, putting the night’s events together with what he knew about an Arab girl wanted for a killing and connected somehow with a terrorist operation, he experienced (and suppressed) a wave of white-hot rage against his wife.

“What will happen to Fatyma, Daddy?”

“Don’t worry about it now, baby. Just try to get some sleep.”

“No, tell me! I can’t sleep because I’m
worried
about her.”

“Okay, look: the cops will come, and maybe the FBI too, because it’s a kidnapping. They’ll check all the people she knew to find out who would want to kidnap her. Maybe the kidnappers left some clues. They’ll find her. The main thing is, it’s not your worry. You’re ten years old, Luce. You’re a little girl. Just ’cause your mom’s decided to be Batwoman, it doesn’t mean you have to get sucked up in all this stuff. All right?”

“They were Arabs,” Lucy said sleepily.

“Who were, honey?”

“Those men. The kidnappers. They were talking Arabic.” She yawned. “He said, ‘Abdel, you go first, Rifaat behind. Let’s go!’ ”

Detective Ray Netski had this Saturday as his regular day off, but he was working anyway, and he was not going to put in for overtime either. For the last few days Hrcany had been on his butt about Morilla, which seemed in the process of becoming seriously untied. Then there was this business about the threats. Netski could not imagine who would be so stupid as to threaten a prosecutor; in his experience such threats were entirely the province of wackos. Professional criminals like the Obregons simply did not do such things, although twenty years on the job had taught him that there was an exception to nearly any rule.

Which was why he was now standing alone in front of the door to an apartment in Washington Heights, on his own time, preparing to brace the woman, Concepción Erbes, and find out whether she was the source of the threatening notes or knew who was. Netski knew from looking over the jail’s phone records that Jesus Obregon had made numerous calls to this apartment. He had interviewed Connie Erbes several times way back when the case was fresh, and had found her in possession of only limited gun-moll knowledge of the criminal doings of her pals (although she had confirmed their phony story in every particular, sad to say), but he had to start someplace, and there
were
all those calls.

He knocked on the door. Some seconds later it was flung wide, not by Connie but by a thin young man who was snarling, “Where the
fuck
you been …” as he opened the door and stopped, scowling, when he saw that the person at the door was not the one he had anticipated.

Netski flashed his shield. “I want to talk to Connie Erbes,” he said, looking this character over. He was dressed in white jeans and socks, and had a wide bandage wrapped low around his bare abdomen. There was a spot of brownish red about the size of a nickel soaking through just over the hipbone.

“She ain’t here,” said the young man, starting to close the door.

“Know where I could find her?” asked Netski, moving his foot and his body forward.

“No,” said the young man, and Netski said, “Mind if I come in and wait?” clearly a rhetorical question, since he had already pushed his wide shoulders and solid hips through the door. Netski was a big guy, well over two hundred pounds. He had a meat-slab face, graying blond hair, and pale eyes. These took in the immediate scene in the apartment’s living room. Some smashed furniture. Stacks of take-out containers on the coffee table. Wads of bloody dressings strewn around. An assemblage of first-aid supplies—antiseptic, bandages, gauze pads, tape, scissors.

“Looks like you got hurt, fella,” said Netski. “How’d it happen?”

“At work. Is construction job. I fell on a nail.”

“Oh, yeah? Where was that? I mean, what job?”

“Some job. Downtown.”

“Uh-huh. What’s your name, fella?”

“Fernando Zedillo.”

“And what’re you doing here, Paco? I mean, excuse me, but you don’t look like you work much construction. You keeping the old bed warm for Obregon? A little snuggle with Connie while the big man’s in the
calaboza
? I tell you what, Paco, let’s you and me take a tour of this crib, see what we can find, all right?”

Netski gestured to the hallway that led from the living room. The young man hesitated a moment and then walked off docilely enough. The first door led to the kitchen—dirty but otherwise innocent. The next door led to a bedroom.

Netski had no sense of danger. He was there to interview a woman; the real bad guys were in jail; there was this pretty boy who looked like maybe somebody stuck him, which in Netski’s experience was an occupational hazard of pretty boys.

So he didn’t have his gun out, he didn’t have his hands on the kid, he didn’t kick the doors open, holding the kid in front of him like a shield, which is what he would have done had he had any sense of danger.

The kid walked into the bedroom and over to the bed, which was unmade, and picked up a pillow. Netski just had time to take in what else was in the room, in the corners, stacked, the machine guns, the rocket launchers, the magazines, the little egg pile of hand grenades, and time to feel the first thrill of fear and reach for his pistol, but not enough time to do anything useful before El Chivato shot him three times in the chest through the pillow.

Marlene came back to the loft shortly before eleven on Saturday morning, having shepherded Joan Savitch through criminal justice system hell, and then visited Mattie Duran in the hospital. Of the two women, Marlene thought that Mattie would recover sooner, despite having taken 9mm rounds through thigh and collarbone.

The Savitch business had, fortunately, been a perfectly straightforward case. Gerald Savitch, ex-husband of Ms. Savitch, having been released from prison the day before, had used a wrecking bar to break into Ms. Savitch’s apartment, thus gaining entry illegally during the hours of the night, upon the discovery of which Ms. Savitch had confronted him and ordered him to leave, whereupon, he refusing and advancing toward her in a menacing fashion with the wrecking bar, and she in fear of her life or grievous bodily harm, she had fired five .38-caliber hollow-points into his chest, killing him instantly. Marlene had managed to get the woman released on her own recognizance even given the charge of homicide, the authorities being fairly sympathetic to householders who shoot guys who break in at night. Savitch would have to appear before a grand jury at some future time and explain the death, but Marlene had little doubt that the jury would find the shooting justifiable homicide and no crime.

Yes, the legal part was dandy. What Marlene was dragging behind her like a sack of dead mackerel as she entered her home was the other stuff that always surrounded death by violence, especially death by violence by loved ones, especially messy death by violence by loved ones, with big hollow-point wounds,
not
as seen on the TV, blowing great gouts of estranged-Dad flesh over the tweed couch and the framed picture of the kids and the nice blue shag rug, and the blood actually gurgling and hissing out of the blown aorta, another thing (besides, of course, the smell) that the media are reluctant to depict, blood mist filling the air and spraying a fine carmine airbrush-like pattern over the table and the chairs and the ceiling, and over Mom with the smoking gun and the two little boys, seven and ten, standing there, watching.

And, inevitably, the various horrified feelings, the real, the ancient gut-ripping feelings, which turn out to be not at all ameliorated by all the hundreds or thousands of dramatized killings we have all seen, but are just as vivid as they were the day Clytemnestra whacked Agamemnon, king of men, those feelings, after taking some twisting caroms around the psyche of the formerly abused lady, popped out at—who else?—the author of the event, the supplier of the deadly weapon, the enabler, Marlene herself. And Marlene had to take it, the blame, the rage, the shame, the horror, the dumping, because what could she say? Congratulations? Ding-dong, the witch is dead?

Baby giggles and a peculiar shuffling sound greeted her as she entered the loft. Her husband had brought out a four-foot-high plastic basket and backboard into the wide, smooth hallway, and he was on his knees playing b-ball of a sort with his twin sons, using a six-inch green Nerf sphere. Much of this game consisted of wild heaves by the boys and scrambling after the loose ball, but occasionally one of them caught a pass or hit close enough to the backboard so that Karp could flick it in and crow, “Swish! Two points!”

Ordinarily, this scene lifted Marlene’s heart, but not today, with the faces of Savitch’s two boys occupying her interior TV. And there was the unfinished business with the shelter and the Arab girl that would have to be thrashed through with Butch and, God knew, she didn’t have the energy just now. She waved at Karp and got a wave in return, a formal one, like a salute, and then she went into the bedroom and stripped. She hooked up the thick, old-fashioned Koss headphones to the cassette deck of the bedroom’s stereo and slapped in Glenn Gould doing
The Well-Tempered Clavier.
Wrapped in her sleazy kimono and trailing the twenty-foot cord that was pumping heavenly order into her ears, she marched to the huge rubber hot tub, dropped the robe, and submerged up to her neck. Hot tears leaked from her eyes and dimpled the black surface of the water.

As for Karp, contrary to appearances, he had not spent the morning entirely in fatherly Saturday a.m. pursuits. Posie had left him with cleaned and fed twins before departing for her regular day off. Lucy was sleeping in. Plopping the boys in front of the most lurid and violent cartoons on offer, he had worked the phones. As the district attorney’s sole deputy, and as a former homicide bureau chief of some luster, Karp still drew a good deal of water in the murky channels of Manhattan’s criminal justice system. Cops from working-stiff detectives to precinct captains took his calls, and fed him more or less the straight line. He managed to grab the Fifth Precinct night-shift detective lieutenant, a man named Eric Schenck, before that tired fellow had gone off duty, and extracted from him the full story of the women’s shelter raid.

“Funny business,” Schenck said, his voice husky with smoke and coffee and the end of a Friday night East Village shift. “They came in through the roof door. Looked like a pro job, but nothing taken—hell, nothing there
to
take. The director there, that Duran woman, blasted away at the perps with that big Colt she keeps, and they returned fire from some kind of nine-milli auto weapon, the proverbial hail of fucking lead. She got hit twice, but lucky. She’s stable at Saint Vs. What’s your interest here?”