The Dime

by Kathleen Kent

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Copyright © 2017 by Kathleen Kent

  Cover design by Julianna Lee

  Cover art by Stephen Mulcahey / Arcangel

  Cover copyright © 2017 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  Mulholland Books/Little, Brown and Company

  Hachette Book Group

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  First ebook edition: February 2017

  Mulholland Books is an imprint of Little, Brown and Company, a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Mulholland Books name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  978-0-316-31106-9

  E3-20170117_DANF

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Kathleen Kent

  Newsletters

  For Jim

  A patient woman can roast an ox with a lantern.

  —Chinese proverb

  1

  Norman Avenue and Jewel Street

  Greenpoint, Brooklyn

  Monday, October 23, 2000

  From my position in the hallway—on my ass, head pressed against the door frame, legs drawn up with my gun held two-handed against my sternum—I try to recall the layout of the room: three sets of bunk beds, four corpses sprawled across bloodied sheets, my partner, shot three times, lying motionless next to the nearest bunk, and, somewhere in there, one lunatic, a screaming infant in one hand and a semiautomatic pistol in the other. The last time I sneaked a look around the open doorway, he fired at me, the bullet knocking a crater in the wall opposite. He followed up by threatening to shoot the baby and then himself.

  I’ve been a cop for five months, one week, and nine and a half hours.

  It was the crying baby that brought us to the apartment in the first place. Dispatch had gotten a call from the super of a three-story residential building on Norman Avenue of four shots fired inside one of the top-floor apartments. My partner, an older, more experienced Brooklyn cop named Ted O’Hanlon, and I were only minutes away.

  The stairway was narrow up to the second floor, and several neighbors, mostly thick-waisted women and some small kids, were milling around, more curious than frightened. Ted had told everyone to clear the hallway, to stay inside their apartments, and we climbed cautiously to the third floor, hands on our service pistols.

  We could hear the baby crying as soon as we reached the landing. It was a healthy, steady cry that made me think no one was holding it. The super had let us know that the place opposite the possible shooter’s apartment was empty, so no chance of a neighbor stumbling out at the wrong time.

  Approaching the apartment, we saw that the door was open a small crack, and as we drew our weapons, Ted called out, “NYPD. Hello? Everybody okay?”

  Ted had approached the door slowly, on point, and he palmed it open with his left hand.

  “Jesus,” he’d said.

  I was right behind him, and, being taller than him by several inches—at five eleven, I’m taller than a lot of the men in my squad—I got a good look inside. A pristine, almost sterile living room with the three bunk beds set against three separate walls. Written in orange spray paint above each top bunk and again in giant letters on the graying linoleum covering the floor was the word Uplifted. Crude, childlike drawings of winged stick figures were painted onto the struts of the beds. Pale sunlight, spilling in from the rear kitchen window, made everything in the room appear hazy and indistinct. There was no movement, no sound except for the baby wailing.

  There were four people in the first two sets of bunks, two females and two male youths, all dressed alike in dark blue sweat suits, their arms neatly crossed over their chests, all shot in the head. There was a larger figure completely covered with a gory blanket on the lower bed of the third bunk. Next to the bulky shape was the baby, red-faced and squalling.

  My partner motioned to me to stay in the doorway and instructed me to call Dispatch for backup and medical. Then Ted, a man who had once jumped into the icy waters of Newton Creek in a January snowstorm to save a stray dog, turned his attention to the baby.

  And then I remembered the super had said he’d heard four shots, not five. My mouth opened to warn him when the bulky figure under the blanket reared up and fired three rounds at Ted, hitting him squarely in his torso.

  Instinctively, I threw myself to the floor and scrabbled into the safety of the hallway as he fired in my direction. I waited for him to rush me, but instead he started pacing frantically, ranting in the kind of fiery, talking-in-tongues nonsense of manic televangelists—“Bara oona beresh peka, beresh ontaba oona”—interspersed with tuneless, agitated humming.

  A few months of street patrol, giving out parking tickets and chasing kids pilfering oranges from a neighborhood fruit stand, did not prepare me for this. Backup was on its way, but much too slowly.

  Benny, I think now. What do I do?

  My uncle, a decorated homicide cop, mentor, and father figure who’d seen just about everything there was to see on the streets of Brooklyn, had never, to my knowledge, said anything about a gun-wielding, baby-slinging, murdering cult guy.

  But just like that, I hear Benny’s voice in my head telling me, Betty, chaos in crazy people has its own pattern. You’ve got to break the pattern. Jam up the works.

  Some of his wisdom, remembered through the thick fog of fear.

  The guy is chanting again. “Ready for uplift, ready for uplift…” His voice rising to a hysterical pitch. “The angel says be ready for uplift…”

  I try to think about all the clues in the room. The drawings, the word Uplifted scrawled on the walls, what the victims are wearing. They’re in sweat suits, but the shooter’s got on a Mets jersey.

  At the top of my lungs, I scream out, “Fuck the Yankees.”

  There is a pause in the squeaking of his shoes.

  “That’s right,” I yell. “You heard me. Fuck th
e Yankees.”

  Even over the baby’s shrill crying, I can sense him listening, straining to hear what I’ll say next.

  “That guy Clemens,” I say. “Can you believe what he did? Slinging the bat like that at Mike? Did you see that game three months ago when he beaned Mike in the head?”

  I’m soaking every word with as much disdain and outrage as I can summon, hoping to God, or whatever power is watching over the subway series the entire country is watching, that it’s enough to distract this lunatic. I hear sirens approaching Norman Avenue. There’ll be more officers here within four minutes, but that may be three minutes too late.

  “He shouldn’t have done that,” the guy says sadly, like he’s just lost his childhood pet.

  “Right?” I say. “Hey, did you watch the whole game yesterday?”

  It sounds like he’s repositioning the baby, shushing it gently, as though he hasn’t just been threatening to shoot it in the head. “Yeah,” he says. “They oughtta do something about that guy Clemens.”

  “What did you say?” I call out. “I can’t hear you so well over the baby crying.”

  I ease myself to a standing position, sliding up the door frame, taking deep breaths to quiet my shaking hands. The sirens are louder now, and I’m afraid the piercing sounds will only hasten the impending violence.

  He yells, “They oughtta do something about Clemens! He’s dangerous.”

  “He’s a thug!” I yell back. And then, softly, “Too bad the Mets lost that one. The Mets can be such losers.”

  “What?” the guy calls out. “What’d you say?”

  “Hey,” I say, my cheek pressed hard against the door frame. “I really want to talk to you about the game. But, honestly, I can’t hear what you’re saying over the baby crying. You think you could set the baby down, just for a sec, so we can have a conversation?”

  The guy’s humming dangerously again, and it sounds like the responding officers, and probably the medical units, have arrived at the front of the building.

  “Come on,” I plead. “Just for a minute. Christ, all this crying’s giving me a headache. Did you ever meet any of the Mets in person?”

  There’s a long pause and then he says, “I shook Piazza’s hand once.”

  “No shit,” I say, closing my eyes. “You shook Mike’s hand?”

  I can hear voices coming up the stairwell. My palms are sweating so bad that I’m afraid I’ll drop the gun.

  “Okay,” the guy says. The tone of his voice is flat, all enthusiasm for baseball gone. “I’m going to set the baby down. She’s tired. I need to put her to sleep first.”

  I risk a glance into the room. He’s bending over the squirming infant, who he’s placed on the bare floor. The gun is pointed at the baby.

  He’s saying, “And then we can talk about the Me—”

  I fire six times, a tight cluster of body shots. He crashes heavily against one of the bunk beds and falls into a sitting position, legs spread wide. He jerks a few times and then slumps forward.

  I melt onto the floor across from him, my legs too weak to hold me up anymore, and watch the guy’s Mets shirt turn dark with the blood leaking from his chest. I’m afraid to look at Ted, not sure I want to see him not breathing. I can’t even pick up the screaming baby for fear my rubbery arms will drop her.

  The hallway floods with responding officers, guns drawn, who crash into the room swearing, incredulous at the scene in the apartment.

  A young cop with acne on his neck mutters at me, “Holy shit, Rhyzyk, what’d you do?”

  Then the medics are hovering over me, lifting me up and out into the hallway. They put Ted onto a stretcher—miraculously, he’s still alive—and take him down to a waiting ambulance. Someone picks up the baby and she mercifully stops crying.

  I’m questioned by the senior officer on the scene, who passes my Mets-Yankees story down the hallway. It reaches the cops on the street before I even exit the building.

  Examined once again by the medics, this time in the second ambulance waiting at the curb, I’m quizzed by a ring of disbelieving, envious policemen who missed out on all the excitement.

  The EMTs assure me that the doctors will do everything they can for Ted. He regained consciousness while in transit and was asking to see his wife, they tell me.

  Sergeant Stanek shows up and looks me over in an embarrassingly concerned manner.

  “So,” he says, wagging a finger in my face, “I hear you took the Yankees’ name in vain. I ought to suspend you without pay for that one.”

  He offers me a ride to the hospital where Ted’s been taken. And I gratefully accept.

  Someone hands me a phone and I call my uncle Benny at the Ninety-Fourth Precinct.

  “Poor bastard,” he says about the shooter after I finish filling him in on what happened. “He got stuck in the abyss of his own morass.” There’s a pause while he listens to my breathing. “You okay?” he asks.

  “Yeah,” I answer, but I’m not so sure I am.

  “That’s the thing about cults,” Benny says. “They not only dig the ditch, they lie in it, cover themselves over with dirt, and then cry about how dark the world has gotten.”

  I can hear someone in Benny’s office trying to get his attention.

  “Listen,” he says. “I gotta go. What you need is a good meal, a hot bath, and a few Jamesons, right?”

  I smile and agree with him.

  “Now, tell me, is there any place in the world you’d rather be than Brooklyn? Tell me true.”

  And I assure him that, no, there’s no place in the world I’d rather be. “Especially now that the Yankees are winning,” I say. “Clemens may be a thug, but he’s our thug.”

  He laughs gleefully. “And, Betty,” he says, “you can call me anytime. I’ll be here.”

  2

  Fuel City Car Wash and Taco Stand

  Dallas, Texas

  Wednesday, August 17, 2011

  I think that the Mexican waiter behind the breakfast counter is kidding about Fuel City. I tell him I’ve been in the Lone Star State for only forty-eight hours and he says that if I want to see the real Dallas—la verdadera ciudad, the Dallas of truck drivers, Mexican laborers, lawyers, parolees, and cops mixed elbow to elbow with white privileged gringas driving expensive SUVs—I need to drive farther south, past the city jail, the bail bondsmen, and the highway construction sites, to Riverfront Street. There I’ll find the beating heart of the city.

  It’s eleven o’clock when I walk back to my car, and already the elevated temperature is a monster wrapped around my head, all bristling mirrored scales, sliding tongues of sweat into my ears and down my neck. I go fishing in my pocket for my car keys, thinking how foolish it was to take a to-go cup of scalding coffee.

  Driving the car down the Tollway toward Stemmons Freeway, I think of summers with my folks on the Jersey Shore, Bradley Beach or Ocean Grove, where the water was always a few degrees from stroke-inducing cold, a frigid slap against sunburned skin that made me and my brother scream in outraged delight. Buoyed in the murky waves for hours, we swam, our untamed auburn hair floating out from our heads like scarlet seaweed in the strong ocean currents. At noon we’d eat the sandwiches my mother had made—beach picnics being the only time lunch for us kids wasn’t five dollars and a note—and then run back into the waves, my mother screaming, “You’ll give yourself a heart attack.”

  Jackie and I moved into our place only yesterday, a ground-floor, two-bedroom apartment with an outer breezeway, gated and locked at both ends. The thermostat by afternoon read 112 degrees. One of the movers, an off-duty fireman used to Fahrenheit 451 temps in a Kevlar suit, passed out just outside our door. The air-conditioning unit in our bedroom gave up the Freon ghost by four o’clock, and Jackie and I floated in our own sweat the entire night, despite the electric fans we had placed on each side of our bed.

  Texas, we were cheerfully informed by the apartment manager—himself a transplant from New Orleans—was evidently the only place in
the known universe, including Louisiana, that actually got hotter after the sun went down.

  “Holds the sun’s rays like a giant warming plate,” the manager warned.

  Jackie, ever sunny-side up, responded, “It beats shoveling snow.”

  The manager looked at her, then at me, and smiled knowingly. “She’s cute,” he said, and walked away laughing.

  As I drive toward Fuel City, the glass skyscrapers of downtown are to my left, the sun just above the tallest buildings. Reunion Tower, looking like a giant puffball on steroids, flares the sun like a supernova. Instinctively, I slow down near Dealey Plaza and wonder what it must be like growing up in a place where every visiting outsider, upon seeing the book depository for the first time, asks, “What’s it like living in the city that killed JFK?”

  My thoughts keep returning to my uncle Benny, once robust and capable, spending his last days in hospice care. The man had been burly—there could be no better word to describe him. My father’s younger brother, a cop with the Ninety-Fourth Precinct his whole life, never bothered by so much as a hangnail, now desiccated and diminished by lung cancer. The last surviving member of my immediate family.

  My intention had been to visit him sooner, before the last stretch of his illness rendered him semiconscious. But the move from Brooklyn—selling the old house in Greenpoint, processing all the papers for my new job with the Dallas Police Department—took longer than expected, and by the time I arrived at the hospital in Florida, his place of retirement, he had begun losing the thread of awareness due to all the pain meds.

  He had been sleeping when I entered the room. Someone had covered him with a thin sheet up to his chin; his face glistened with the dew of a morphine sweat. One arm lay on top of the sheet, and the IV, threaded into a prominent vein on his hand, had backed up with blood. The bag hanging overhead was flaccid, empty of fluid. Before ringing for the nurse, though, I traced one finger gently over his knuckles. He stirred and opened his eyes.

  He smiled. “Betty.”

  I leaned over and kissed his cheek. “Benny. How’re you doing?”

  “As you see.” He inhaled raggedly and grimaced.