Rivers of Gold (29 page)

“Holy shit,” Santiago breathed. “We've got him.”

More suggested the Benelli, but Santiago was already through the outer door lock. The inner ones took some doing; the kid must have spent money on new cylinders.

Their initial search did not yield much. The walk-in closet yielded finery the likes of which Santiago had never seen or touched; he didn't recognize any of the labels. There were more pairs of shoes, boots, and silly-looking sneakers than he himself had owned since his feet had stopped growing. The bathroom had two sets of thick, velvety towels the colors of dried herbs. The bed was a standard queen but covered with all manner of opulent pillows and linens; Santiago was reminded of the one and only time his sister had dragged him into ABC Carpet and Home to outfit his apartment (Santiago had taken one look at the prices and left).

There was a wide mahogany desk and an even wider bookcase, ornate in an old-fashioned way, stocked with large-format art books with titles Santiago didn't recognize: Mark, Steichen, Singh, Snowdon. There was a shelf of smaller books, some of which bore yellow stickers on their spines that read
USED
.

And that was it.

For a few moments they both stood silent in front of the four huge photos of the Mall in Central Park, each shot clearly taken in a different season. They were nothing short of stunning.

The desk looked promising. Santiago made for the computer, which took up most of it, along with a money counter and a top-of-the-line digital camera. When he tapped the space bar on the keyboard, the monitor filled with multiple images of a curvaceous
Boricua
chick wearing only a belly chain.

“How do you know she's Puerto Rican?” More asked over his shoulder.

“See that a mile away,” Santiago said dismissively.

More was staring at the books. The bookcase looked like an antique, too, with an intricately carved mantle. More, however, seemed only interested in the books, inspecting the spines of each.

“File says he was an art history major at NYU,” Santiago pointed out. There hadn't been much else to go on; the kid had no record at all, not even a parking ticket. Santiago picked up a book that was lying on the desk next to the computer, a well-thumbed copy of John Lawton's
Life Before Mankind
, third edition. Santiago flipped it open at random to a page showing a scale drawing of a man dwarfed by what appeared to be a gigantic scorpion, but with flippers. He squinted at the caption:
Species of the class
Eurypteridae
arose during the Ordovician and Silurian periods and attained sufficient size to become one of the Permian's top marine predators
… Santiago shut the book and tossed it back on the desk.

More was still inspecting the bookcase. “You thinkin' 'bout selling those on eBay?” Santiago ribbed.

“I would've killed for books like these when I was a kid,” More said tonelessly. Without taking his eyes off the bookcase, he absently reached up into the left sleeve of his field jacket and withdrew a huge, slightly curved blade, with the gleam of Damascus steel. A Stek. Santiago had read about such knives. He seemed to remember they were used by fishermen to cut through whale blubber.

Maybe it was the way More casually mentioned killing, or the familiar way he handled that scary fucking knife, or the fact that he'd probably had it on him all this time they'd been working together and Santiago had never had a clue. Whatever it was, Santiago didn't like any of it. He hoped they could just grab the kid fast and get him down to the station quietly.

“More?”

More had dragged the kid's swivel desk chair over to the bookcase and stood on it (like anyone could balance so easily on a swivel chair, fucking More). After examining the mantle from about two inches away, he worked the tip of the blade into the ornamental grommet.

“More, what the fuck're you
doin
'?”

The center of the grommet came free, revealing a hollowed-out compartment behind it. More reached inside and pulled out what appeared to be an unmarked disk case. He cracked it open for a moment, then shut it and tossed it to Santiago.

Who spake thus: “Holy shit.”

The mother lode, trails of tabs. There was enough in this one disk case alone to put the kid down for decades. Santiago wondered how big the Narc Sharks' haul was. Whoever the kid's boss was, his operation must be huge.

More came down off the swivel chair in one fluid silent motion and stood beside Santiago at the desk. Beside the keyboard was a crumpled printout of an e-mail conversation between the kid and a woman, probably the
Boricua
chick judging from her name, the top line of which read:
THERE'S REALLY NOTHING MORE TO SAY
. Beside this, along the paper's edge, which was wrinkled from having had something colorless spilled on it and later dried, was scrawled a single word:
vivisection
.

More was standing on the bed probing at the ceiling plaster when the kid came through the door, behind which Santiago silently stood. He recoiled in horror from the ragged-looking man on his bed holding a huge knife and turned for the door, only to find two hundred twenty pounds of Dominican blocking it. The badge on a chain around the big man's neck did not seem to register. The kid spun back to face the white guy, maybe to try to reason with him, as Santiago knew he would.

“You're the one who got thrown out of that party behind the library,” said the mangy-looking maniac with the evil-looking knife. His voice sounded wet and rusty.

The kid spun back around toward Santiago.

Someone had definitely worked the kid over, Santiago thought. Greenish bruises, several days old, covered almost one whole side of his face, while the other was misshapen by fresh swelling. Farther down, on the side of his neck, was a livid flesh wound only partially concealed by gauze, the tape coming loose. Over the years, Santiago had seen plenty of burns, both self-inflicted and the other kind.

“You're the one from Barneys,” he stated. He couldn't believe it; he'd seen the kid less than a month ago, flirting with a cute Latina saleswoman on the fourth floor named Janet Nuñez, who'd loudly and bilingually declined Santiago's own advances the previous week. “Guess what we just found.” Santiago waggled the disk case at the kid.

Who looked like his head was going to explode. He opened his mouth to say something, but only a sickly sort of gurgle came out. More stepped silently off the bed and came up behind him. Although he hadn't seen him do it, Santiago was greatly relieved to see that More had sheathed the knife.

“Who's Nightclub Guy?” asked the bum through a throaty rattle.

“Y-y-you're the one from the bar, Broome Street,” the kid sputtered.

“Who is he?” More repeated.

The kid turned and raised a finger toward Santiago. “And y-y-you were in the cab, F-F-Ford H-Heifer—”

More drove the stiffened fingers of his right hand into the kid's right kidney, folding him up like a lawn chair. More caught him on the way down, wrapping his left hand around the kid's jaw and cheekbones. He bent him backward over his knee. The kid made a noise that Santiago had heard before.

“More.”

Fingers tightened around the kid's face, driving the insides of his cheeks between his teeth. “Who's Nightclub Guy?”

The sound coming through the kid's nose went up two octaves.

“More, you're hurting him.” Santiago took a step forward.

“No, that's not hurting him.
This
is hurting him.” More slipped a thumb around the kid's jaw, under his tongue, then drove it straight upward toward the soft palate. The kid screamed through his nostrils as tears coursed down his face.

“More, stop it!” Santiago was halfway to them. He saw More pull something out of his pocket with his free hand. Santiago's gun was already out, but he wasn't quite sure who to aim for.

“Get some whiskey,” More rasped, “we'll have ourselves a down-home barbecue.”

And he flicked open a battered old Zippo (Santiago could make out an eagle, a globe, and an anchor on one side) and thumbed up a huge blue-tinged flame two inches from the kid's bulging eyes.

There was a low-pitched wet rumble, accompanied by a noise like cardboard boxes being torn open, and the kid's pants and the carpet around his feet turned wet and dark. The smell stopped Santiago in his tracks. For the first time ever, Santiago saw a true emotional expression on More's face: rank disgust. More let go and stood up and back, and the kid sank into his own product, crying and babbling incoherently.

Santiago looked at More in disbelief. He had never seen someone literally scare the shit out of someone else, and the hollowed-out gnawing sensation he'd felt in the interrogation room came back over him. Time lost meaning for him again, and he wasn't sure how long they stood there, watching the kid in his fetid puddle. But at some point, Santiago waved More off and holstered his weapon. Gingerly, he helped the kid to his feet. “Come on,” he said numbly, “come on.”

The kid eventually did stop crying, although he continued making vague noises somewhere between sobs and gasps to himself. He made odd little clicks as he got to his feet, and strange wet sounds as he made his way to the bathroom.

And he screamed like a dying rabbit when he tried to close the bathroom door behind him and More kicked it down, hinges, hasp, and all.

Now it was Santiago's turn to be mute. Everything he had seen, heard, and found himself robotically participating in since they'd broken into the kid's apartment conspired to rob him of speech. A cold, logical part of himself had looked at the various angles and permutations and deduced that More's plan made sense, especially given the manpower constraints. The self-preserving, rationalizing part of him held that this was a sure way to get his Second Grade. A purely avaricious part of him said, Hey, fuck it, think of all the credits you'll rack up when this is all over. OCID, here we come!

But a larger, amorphous part of him, one that he thought of as the gray area connecting mind and heart, was shocked and cringing. This was not police work as he had been taught it. More's actions were well beyond ordinary regulations, even beyond drag rules. They cast aside even basic empathy. More had gone Afghan on the kid. Never mind that it was totally illegal. More had broken all the rules he said he was operating by, the ones he'd supposedly promised McKeutchen to observe. It was … cold. Santiago shuddered to think what might have happened in that apartment if he hadn't been there to intervene. And now it was only going to get worse.

Once the kid had cleaned himself up and pulled himself together long enough for transport (Santiago insisted that More drive, while he himself sat in back with the kid, who wouldn't even sit behind the driver's seat, and huddled in a corner trying to keep out of More's line of sight in the rearview), and McKeutchen had a chance to talk the kid down, it all came spilling out, or enough for McKeutchen to start mobilizing his troops.

“Nightclub Guy is Reza Varna, our primary target. Bulgarian national, here legally since 1991. He's behind the brothel Liesl and Turse just took down, maybe some others. Our intel is that he's also behind the Century Club.” The Century Club was an incongruity, a plush startup in the midst of wrack and ruin. Varna (the kid wouldn't call him anything other than Reza) had somehow scooped up the space formerly occupied by the big Barnes & Noble on Twenty-first and Sixth. Two floors, over fifteen thousand square feet. And he'd turned it into one of the city's hottest new restaurant-lounges, with one simple rule: a C-note got you in. Booze, live entertainment (they couldn't wait to see what that was), whatever was on the menu, one Ben Franklin covered it all. The place had been going gangbusters, there were write-ups everywhere, it had been hailed as a new business model for the times. “But intel reports Varna's command center is around the corner, behind a copy shop on West Twentieth,” McKeutchen finished.

“Intel” was sitting in one of the interrogation rooms guarded by Santiago, who told More he'd open fire if he tried to come inside. The kid was a complete wreck. He was rocking in place on a chair, his eyes were pinwheeling, and he was whispering to himself. Every so often he'd blurt out the names of cows and some of the cabbie suspects they'd been questioning, and Santiago eventually put it together that the kid identified different taxicabs by different breeds of cattle. He wondered how long the kid had been frying his brains off Varna's pills; there couldn't be any other explanation for how he'd ended up so far gone. The kid's forthcoming re-up under the Manhattan Bridge, that was a joke; Varna had obviously set the kid up to be killed, and probably would've killed the two cabbies they'd picked up if they hadn't been safely in custody. Which was why he was sitting on the kid for God only knew what madness More was cooking up next, while the Narc Sharks and a mixed CAB–uniform team took the Century Club and a nearby copy shop, supposedly Varna's HQ.

“Go!” McKeutchen shooed the troops out. He stashed More in his office, then came back into the interrogation room alone.

“This is beyond fucked up, Cap,” Santiago observed redundantly.