The Big Fear (8 page)

It was much worse than he had thought.

CHAPTER TEN

HARBOR PATROL

Detective Ralph Mulino made his way slowly down the switchback wooden staircase toward the Harbor Patrol. The stairway had been built fifty years ago for longshoremen and was showing its age. Never mind his knee; with each creak Mulino worried that the whole thing would collapse. He took a look back up to the street, his car protected, he hoped, by his union decal. This corner of Red Hook, where antique warehouses had been filled with knick-knack shops by eager developers during the boom, had fallen just as fast after. It was already getting so that if you left your car for half an hour you couldn’t be exactly sure it would still have all four rims and the battery when you got back, even with the union decal. Maybe it was almost so bad that the union decal made you a target. The Red Hook Houses, once notorious, then stable, and now growing troubled again, were only a few blocks away. But the guys in Harbor didn’t look up; the kids in the houses were not their concern. Mulino clattered down to the foot of the pier, walked past the tidy NYPD motorboats and toward the squat Quonset stationhouse that housed the Harbor Patrol command.

The typical NYPD command is loud and messy and filled with unhappy neighbors waiting to file petty complaints and sleepy officers eager to take lunch. The floors of most precincts are speckled with dirt or blood or bile, and usually heavy doors seal off the public entryway from the cops’ haven behind. Mulino’s own quarters at OCCB had been a mishmash of pushpin boards advertising months-ago robberies and flurries of daily activity reports and UF-250s and bulletins that sergeants were supposed to read aloud at ten roll calls in a row but never did. When a witness or a victim came to the inner sanctum it would look as though everybody was working. But the Harbor Patrol didn’t have the chance to get muddled by intruders, so the officers could keep it police-neat, staving off the squalor that most precincts had long since tired of fighting.

The station was spare and quiet and wide open—beyond a front podium, there were twelve prim desks topped with up-to-date terminals, staffed by young cops transferring their handwritten reports to some centralized database. Working the eight-to-four tour at Property, arriving at Harbor Patrol at quarter to five, Mulino hadn’t expected to see Sergeant Sparks manning the fiefdom. But there he was, his collar brass orderly and his sharp jaw crisply shaved. Most precincts have a gate at the front, a clear physical barrier beyond which the rabble cannot go unless summoned. Here at Harbor there was only a blue line painted on the floor. Mulino wasn’t the general public, but he hadn’t exactly been invited.

“Sergeant, I thought you worked midnights.”

“They gave me a promotion, how well I handled everything on Monday.”

The NYPD schedule is broken into three eight-hour shifts. The eight-to-four is reserved for guys who have made their numbers or fixed their partners’ paperwork or generally kissed their supervisor’s ass and put in for daytime so they can get back to Nassau in time for the Yankees game to start. The four-to-twelve is when most of the actual crime happens, when people are off work and the sun is down, but they aren’t asleep yet. It’s for guys who want in on the action and are still looking upward at their next promotion. The midnight tours are for the hard-core meatheads who can’t be trusted not to kill someone or let a new arrest walk out of the precinct. The guys they come across on the twelve-to-eights, it wouldn’t matter that much anyway. Sparks had been dumped on midnights just like he’d been dumped on Harbor, and now he was basking in his move up the ranks.

“Good for you.”

“You got some business here at Harbor I can help you with? Property doing on-site inspections now?”

Sparks couldn’t have been more than twenty-eight, his hair gelled and his shoulders square. Mulino imagined him getting off work, going home to Staten Island, and getting free drinks at his local bar while the girls he went to high school with drew lots to get the chance to marry him. Sergeant by twenty-eight probably means captain by thirty-five, which means by the time his pension kicked in there would be a three-bedroom house in New Dorp and other such luxuries. His chest puffed out and his eyes already on the lieutenant’s exam, Sparks wasn’t unfriendly exactly, but he wasn’t really asking Mulino if he could help him.

“As a matter of fact I’m here about the shooting.”

“Not sure I’m supposed to talk to you about an open investigation, Detective.”

Mulino looked past the sergeant to the aisle of quiet, uniformed officers, each pecking away at his terminal. None of them looked up, but both cops knew they were watching. The corners of a dozen pairs of eyes straining to see who was going to win this particular little pissing match, wondering whether their sergeant would give in to the detective or make him back down. Sparks was right, they all knew that the Patrol Guide instructions were to keep your mouth shut when anything was before IAB, DIMAC, the Inspector General. But they all also knew that the Patrol Guide went out the window when it came to protecting a fellow cop. Even the newbies, though, could see that Sparks and Mulino didn’t consider themselves brothers-in-arms.

“You came up on the boat after, Sergeant.”

Sparks looked to the floor. He would play along just enough. “I did hear a gunshot, Detective. I boarded the ship to provide assistance. I didn’t know whether an officer had fired or had been shot. Or both.”

“You knew Rowson.”

“He worked out of this precinct. All these guys knew him. Most of them better than I did.”

The clattering at keyboards slowed for a moment. Cops straining to hear. Mulino felt a cool lonely silence. He had been stripped of his gun when he was sent to Property. He was alone in a precinct with thirteen uniformed officers. He was a fellow cop but to some of them, maybe, he was just the guy who had shot their buddy. And if something happened to him, they would all have each others’ backs.

“When you came on the scene, Sergeant, you saw Rowson’s gun, didn’t you.”

Sparks took a tiny step forward. Still at his little podium now, guarding his blue entrance line, he spoke slowly, his blue eyes hard on Mulino. “You know, Detective, I really can’t say. I got up to the deck and the ESU guys and the EMTs were there, and I saw that you were kneeling, and that someone had been shot. But really, I was pretty much in the back of the crowd. I can’t say that I saw anything one way or the other.”

It was a practiced speech. One that Mulino knew well. He had given it himself at Ramsay’s trial. Sparks knew that. He was throwing it back in his face.

“The kid’s locker is here?”

Sparks turned from his roost and walked to the row of lockers on the far wall. The officers kept their noses at their terminals. Mulino wasn’t sure if they were really that devoted to their menial tasks or if they were simply terrified of their sergeant. He knew what it was like to be a junior cop, though, to hope that you could just be invisible while the storm passes by.

At the lockers, Sparks turned, his eyes fixed on Mulino’s feet, checking to make sure he was behind the blue line. The detective was a civilian to him now. He fished a small key from his pocket and unlatched the cabinet, then reached into a cubbyhole like a magician proving his hat is truly empty.

“I didn’t see it on the boat, Detective, but he didn’t leave it here. And I’ll be sure to tell the investigators and the evidence guys the same thing.”

Mulino nodded. As Sparks turned back to the front of the precinct, Mulino scanned the row of rookies. There was one, near the back, trying a little too hard to look like he was working. It was cool in the stationhouse, but the kid had sweat on his temples, was breathing heavier than you’d think you’d need to sitting at a computer. A chubby face, short dark hair, sort of spacey eyes. Mulino looked down to the nameplate. Del Rio. He looked at the face again. The eyes. He thought maybe he remembered him from that night.

“Officer Del Rio. You came on board the boat after, too, didn’t you? You were out there.”

The kid gulped and looked up at his sergeant. The glassy eyes clouded over in confusion. Sparks didn’t take his eyes off Mulino while he addressed Del Rio. “Officer, you don’t answer that question or any other questions until you have permission from me to be released from duty.”

Mulino smiled. “You get promoted up to four-to-twelves along with your sergeant, Officer? You do some exceptional work that night?”

Sparks had made it back to his perch at the entrance to the precinct and nudged Mulino toward the door without ever touching him. “I am happy to chat with you a little off the record, Detective. I can handle it. But you don’t need to bring my men into this.”

“I’m sure you can spare Officer Del Rio from his World of Warcraft league or whatever it is you have these guys doing.”

“That’s going to be all, Detective.”

“Officer Del Rio, you saw Rowson’s gun, didn’t you? Or are you the one who tossed it off the boat?”

In retrospect it was a bad idea to walk past Sergeant Sparks, but Mulino wanted an answer from Del Rio before the sergeant could coach him. But before the detective was a foot past the blue line, Sergeant Sparks had grabbed his left arm, twisted it to the side, and flipped and pinned him to the ground. Mulino’s shoulder ached with pain, but he could feel the sergeant easing up on him. Sparks was not going to pour the pressure on. He was a fellow cop, after all. The sergeant loosened his grip and Mulino snapped his arm free, twisted himself out and sprang to his feet. In the moment, he could always summon the energy back, if it came to it.

He stared down the sergeant, ready to have it out. Mulino could see the recognition in Sparks’s face, could see that he knew Mulino was faster and stronger than he looked. That Mulino had probably been on the force long enough to have gotten in a couple of scraps with other cops, and knew how these things went. Mulino knew that Sparks didn’t want to risk losing a fistfight on the floor of his own command.

But Mulino knew something else as well. He was a detective under investigation. He didn’t have his weapon. He wasn’t supposed to be in this precinct at all. If it came down to it, an incident report showing that he’d even been here could be the end of his pension, however the shooting case went down. He backed off behind the blue line. The standoff was over. He nodded to Sparks.

“Thanks for talking to me, Sergeant. I appreciate it. And Officer Del Rio, you think that over. I’m sure someone else will be talking to you soon enough.”

“Goodbye, Detective.”

Officer Joey Del Rio looked down at his computer. Mulino watched a single drop of sweat spill out onto his keyboard. He backed out of the precinct, his eyes locked on the sergeant’s the whole way.

Standing at the lip of the curb overhanging the waterfront, Leonard watched the detective amble up the dock toward the stairs. Mulino had been in and out of the precinct in ten minutes. Still, that was plenty of time to cook up a story with Sparks. No one really got a rip for talking to another cop during a shooting investigation: you weren’t supposed to do it, but with the forty-eight hour rule and the tight bonds of blue, there was no way to stop them. And if you forwarded a case to the DA saying you couldn’t find evidence of a bad shooting but you could show that the guys had spoken to each other, it wasn’t as though they were going to bring charges for witness tampering.

But on another level, it didn’t make that much sense. It wasn’t Mulino’s story that was a problem, and Sparks hadn’t shown up on the deck until after the shooting. Mulino’s problem was the evidence. Mulino’s problem was that he’d said that Brian Rowson had a gun, and as Leonard had learned when the full packet had come in just after lunch, no gun had been recovered. It had been enough to send Leonard into the field, and watching Mulino hail a car service on Gold Street had been enough for him to try an impromptu stakeout.

Mulino stopped at the base of the rickety staircase. Leonard ducked back behind the railing. He could explain himself if he had to, but better just to leave. There was nothing more to see, just a middle-aged man struggling up a couple of flights of stairs. Whatever he had wanted to see had gone on inside the precinct. A search for the missing gun. A hunt for a suitable replacement. The dead cop was already dead. The living cop was still a brother. If the sergeant still had Mulino’s back, then the next day Leonard would get a fax with a statement about seeing the gun, how it slipped into the water. Or better yet the gun would appear itself.