Reckless Endangerment (43 page)

Roland was chuckling. “I love it! I see Omar Sharif as the Arab, and Cheech and Chong as the Obregons. Liz could do a cameo as the girl—”

“Come on, Roland, think! You know it works.”

“I don’t, and you know why? Among a hundred other reasons, because when we picked up the Mexican brothers at the airport, they were carrying a couple of million bucks. They were never ripped off or they got their cash back somehow. So why would your supposed Mexican hit man go to that garage to meet your supposed Khalid?”

Karp had to admit not having an answer for that one. “But it doesn’t matter, Roland—he was there. Check the prints, you’ll see I’m right.”

“Anything to put your little mind at rest,” said Roland, still laughing. “Now, take some hot cocoa and go to bed.”

To his shame and annoyance, it took Karp the better part of an hour for the answer to flutter into his mind. But when he called Roland back, the man had already left for home.

For Roland, this was the first two floors of a brownstone on East Seventy-fifth Street off Madison. It was quite dark when he arrived there some time after eight, and he was annoyed to see that the light over the doorway had gone out. He bid good night to Bert Hillyer, his police driver, and walked to the door. Hillyer did not drive away immediately, but wasted some time with a radio call he did not need to make, because he had been told by acting Captain Clay Fulton to make sure that his passenger was tucked in for the night, or at least arrived safely in the marble lobby of his building.

Roland occasionally discovered women waiting for him at his door; he tried to discourage the practice. He often came home with a woman, and he did not care for scenes played out on the street between two of them. This one was standing at the top of the short flight of steps, leaning against his door. She wore tight jeans and high-heeled boots and a dark sweater, with a dark raincoat over it. A large leather bag depended from her shoulder. Her raincoat hung open, and he could see the points of her breasts in the dim light from the street lamp. A blonde, or was that a wig? Roland did not care for wigs either. He came closer, his keys in his hand, and looked at her face. Nice cheekbones, dark skin, big eyes. She was heavily made up. Roland tried to place her and drew a blank—no, there
was
something familiar about her face.

“Can I help you?” he said stiffly, placing his key into the lock of the heavy wrought-iron and glass door.

“Yes,” she said. “You can take me to where the Obregons are.”

Roland looked at her, startled. His recent conversation with Karp came back to him at the same time as he recalled where he had seen that face, a pretty good sketch of which was in every precinct house and police car in the city. A thrill of fear started in his belly and he shouted, “Hillyer!”

Something shiny came out of the bag. Roland spun and started to run down the steps. He saw the door of Hillyer’s car open, and then there was a flash from behind bright enough to cast his own shadow before him, and he felt a blow strike his back and heard a sharp, loud pop, not that much louder than the sound of a pulled champagne cork. He was no longer running, he found, but stretched out facedown on the pavement. There were several more pops and flashes, and the sound of rapid footsteps receding. He heard distant sirens before he fainted.

SEVENTEEN

D
ressed in gray coveralls, his Arabic finery neatly folded into a plastic bag, Chouza Khalid watched the bomb come up out of its fiberglass casing. Big Mahmoud was pulling on the chain hoist, what the Americans delightfully called a come-along. The squat, rounded cylinder contained two hundred and fifty kilograms, over five hundred fifty pounds, of RDX high explosive. Although in its present unarmed state this was about as dangerous as so much sawdust, he was being extremely careful.

The thing cleared its former coffin and came down on a wheeled dolly. The transport plug was still in its nose. The detonator was still in its cardboard tube, which had been shipped in a separate crate. Mahmoud got busy with wrenches, removing the fins from the carcass of the bomb. Khalid was no stranger to explosives, and had set a bomb or two in his time, but he did not care for them, abhorring in his marrow the idea that a lump of what looked like clay could instantly convert itself into an inferno and make a person (perhaps even oneself!) utterly vanish from the earth.

He walked out into the main bay of the warehouse, passing the elevator shaft into which he had encrypted Bashar, and the place where he had dumped used oil and sawdust over the bloodstains, checking to see if anything showed (nothing did) and experiencing real satisfaction about how that business had all worked out.

Near that place, Rifaat was filling five-gallon plastic cans with diesel fuel from a fifty-five-gallon drum fitted with a hand pump. Out on the dock and a safe distance from the fuel, Abdel was busy with a cutting torch and a rusty sheet of one-inch steel plate. Khalid thought that the fuel and the steel plates represented overkill, given the power of the bomb they had, but Ibn-Salemeh was quite precise in the way he wanted things done.

And thinking now of Ibn-Salemeh, Khalid returned again to what the man had said the other night. Crown Heights. No one knew that Khalid had a house in Crown Heights. He had kept that place secret from everyone, especially from his employer. Perhaps it was just a way of speaking, mentioning neighborhoods—he could have said Park Slope or Cobble Hill. Or maybe not. Was he letting Khalid know in his typically elliptical way that he knew about the house? If he knew about that, what else did he know? Khalid felt a warm flush break out on his forehead and on the backs of his hands. If Ibn-Salemeh knew, then perhaps Bashar also knew. He looked down at the oil smear on the floor and recalled what had lain there. If Bashar knew, then the Mexican knew too. He looked at his watch, suddenly close to panic.

“Abdel,” he said, “I must go on an errand. We have three hours until the boy arrives, and I’ll be back before then. Hussein!”

The other man looked up from the white Cadillac, which he had been cleaning.

“I need the car for a while. Give me your cap and jacket.”

“It’s not your fault, Butch, stop it!” said Marlene for about the sixth time.

They were in a crowded waiting room off the surgical ward of Bellevue Hospital. Karp was slumped in a pink plastic chair not nearly big enough for him, emitting at short intervals sighs, groans, and muffled curses. The place was full of cops, in uniform and plain clothes, dropping by to check on Roland and on Hillyer. Roland had taken a nine through the small of his back; the kidney was involved. Hillyer had been shot twice through the chest and was in worse shape. Both were still in surgery. Their assailant had vanished as usual.

Karp glowered at her and stifled a curse. Of course it was his fault. He should have realized instantly that the only reason for the unknown Mexican shooter to show at Khalid’s garage was that the Obregons had told him to. They had their money, and now they were using Khalid to dispose of an embarrassing and now unnecessary shooter. Khalid would be delighted to oblige in getting rid of someone who had caused so much trouble. As for the shooter, once he had escaped from the trap, it would be obvious to him what had gone down, and his first thought would have been to get the Obregons. And who knew where the Obregons were? Not in jail—that would be easy for him to check. No, they were being held as material witnesses, and naturally the prosecutor in charge of the case, whose face and name had been plastered over television for weeks, would know this location.

“I should have seen it,” he muttered to himself.

“What?”

“Nothing,” said Karp and studied the print of a sailboat hanging opposite, a form of art clearly aimed at keeping the mind away from thoughts of loved ones in surgery.

“Hi, Clay,” said Marlene. Karp tore his eyes away from the sprightly sloop. Fulton was leaning against the door of the waiting room, looking gray and grim. They both looked at him expectantly, as if he were the surgeon. He shook his head.

“They’re still in there, is what I heard.” He sat on one of the pink seats, sighing.

“I have to go,” said Marlene, glad that there was someone else to wait with Karp, and to his questioning look, she replied, “Church. It’s Good Friday. I’m going with Lucy.”

“That’s probably a good place to be,” Karp said. “Pray, huh?”

Marlene nodded, hugged both men, and left.

“Hell of a note,” said Fulton after a silence. “Another cop, a prosecutor.”

“Why can’t we seem to nail this guy?” asked Karp.

“Why? It’s a big town. It’s only been a couple of days. We didn’t even figure him for a Mexican until this morning. We’ll get him. He’s got no place to run and no place to hide.”

“Who
is
he? Do we have any idea?”

“Well, the Obregons aren’t talking, and we don’t have any real leverage on them until we have this asshole in custody. By the way, we found the Erbes girl. In Santo Domingo, the D.R. The Feds have a team there trying to get her out, but she’s fighting it. She does not want to see this Mexican or the Obregons ever again. So that could be a blank too on the big questions. Did they import a killer? Who is he? Why should they tell us?”

Why indeed? After a while Karp said, musingly, “You get used to there being rules, you know? I talked with Jack about this the other day. You don’t shoot cops unless you’re totally hyped up or into some wacky politics. You
never
shoot judges or prosecutors.”

“Not never … you took a bullet a couple years back, I recall.”

“Right, the exception that proves the rule. The guys who shot me were Cuban gangsters. This guy is a Mexican gangster. And the Arabs, the terrorists—it’s a different culture, where the cops and the judges are just part of a different gang. The idea that there’s a system, a rule that’s somewhere up above street life, the scrabbling and fighting, just isn’t there. It’s just naked power, no limits…”

“Yeah, and you know, Stretch, a lot of the folks uptown think that’s what we got already,” said Fulton lightly, and then regretted it, for Karp rounded on him vehemently.

“And they’re fucking
wrong
! You know they’re wrong, Clay. Your whole life says that. There
is
a difference. Are there bad cops? Sure. Does the system creak and moan? It does. But there’s
still
a difference, and the
guapos
and the hustlers know it; they fucking
depend
on it, which is why a couple of cops can go into a dope market and pull guys out and arrest them and nobody’ll say boo, guys with guns, guys with knives. Anyplace in the city they can do it—there’s no casbah in New York, there’s no place where a cop can’t walk, because the cops don’t shoot kids when storekeepers pay them to like they do in Brazil, and they don’t moonlight as death squads for the government like they do down in Central America. Okay, it’s thin. God, if
anybody
knows how thin it is, it’s me, but it’s still there. But these new guys—it’s not there to them at all. They’re importing Mexican rules, Lebanon rules, into New York. And we’re starting to respond in the same way—like another gang—and all the local shitheels who think that’s just fine are coming out of the closet, they love it.” He paused, suddenly aware that the other people in the waiting room were staring at him, apparently distracted from the soaps playing on the TV that hung from the ceiling.

“I want it to stop,” he finished lamely, feeling ever more a jerk.

Fulton, however, was smiling at him benignly. “That was a pretty good one, Stretch. You need to save that for the closing when we get these bastards. Speaking of which, I think we caught us a little break last night.”

“Ah, good news for a change!”

“It could be,” said Fulton more cautiously. “Say what you want about the FBI, when they tackle something they’re thorough. The phone in Khalid’s office was used to make a dozen or so calls to a number in London. They asked the Brits to check it out. An empty office, no surprise there, but the Feds also asked for a phone record from
that
phone and it came in on Telex late last night. A couple of calls made to Abu Dhabi down there on the Persian Gulf, some big sheik, Rashid something or other. Meanwhile, they’re running all the phone records against visas—did anybody these bastards called enter or leave the U.S. recently? And it turns out this Sheik Rashid’s private jet landed at Kennedy the other day, seven passengers, the big kahuna and six buddies checked through INS.”

“And … ?”

“And the Feds raid the airplane, and what do they find? Seven guys eating sandwiches and watching TV. The INS swears there were only seven people on that plane, and seven people in Arab costumes were seen leaving the airport in a stretch limo. What do you think of that?”

“It sounds like they’re bringing in reinforcements. Do you have the seven guys yet?”

“No,” replied Fulton with some heat, “but if the NYPD can’t find seven guys in head rags and bed sheets, we’d better hang it the fuck up.”

El Chivato had no objection to wearing women’s clothing and had often done so in making an approach for an assassination. In Mexico he had known tough and experienced bodyguards to continue making lewd remarks and sucking noises right up to the moment he killed them. When he was a boy, his older sisters had delighted to dress him in girl’s clothes and do his face and his hair. He did not mind this either, although he had shot several men who had suggested that he looked like a girl. Consistency in these matters was not something that much troubled El Chivato.

In the Midtown parking garage where he had spent Thursday night, he strolled back and forth as if coming from a car, smiling brightly at all he met until, after the morning rush was over, he spotted a slim blond woman locking a gold Nissan Maxima. He smiled at her too, and she smiled back, and when she had just gone past him, he whirled and cracked her over the head with his pistol. She fell and he hit her again.

It took less than three minutes to stuff her in the Nissan’s trunk and get under way, with her purse and ID on the front seat and her big sunglasses on his face. He drove to Brooklyn at a sedate pace, to Park Slope, but when he passed Seventh Avenue and Ninth Street, he saw that the street ahead was filled with police vehicles and a cop was stationed at the corner to divert traffic. He allowed himself to be diverted.