Hoax

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  Garcia looked at him hard and was about to say something when someone began shouting across the street.

  “AND I LOOKED,” said a man with frizzy hair wearing a Grateful Dead T-shirt standing on the sidewalk bathed in the flashing blue and red lights of the police cars. “AND BEHOLD, A PALE HORSE. AND THE NAME OF HIM WHO SAT ON IT WAS DEATH, AND HADES FOLLOWED WITH HIM. AND POWER WAS GIVEN TO THEM OVER A FOURTH OF THE EARTH TO KILL WITH SWORD, WITH HUNGER, WITH DEATH, AND BY THE BEASTS OF THE EARTH.”

  With that Edward Treacher fell silent and shuffled back into the shadows from which he had emerged. Garcia and Karp looked at one another as Dugan crossed himself and whispered a prayer in Latin.

  “Say one for all of us, Father,” Karp said. “I have a feeling we’re going to need all the help we can get.”

  28

  DETECTIVE MICHAEL FLANAGAN TAPPED THE SIDE OF THE black Toyota Land Cruiser with his gun and looked inside to make sure there was nobody hiding in the vehicle. Advancing toward the warehouse, he signaled Leary and the two uniformed officers who’d joined in the pursuit to move in with him.

  He and his partner had been sitting in the alley across from the Hip-Hop Nightclub when the shooting went down. “Let’s go,” he’d shouted as the Land Cruiser roared past them. Leary hit the gas and he placed the red bubble light on the roof and called in: “Ten-Thirteen. Shots fired. Officer down, Thirty-eighth and Tenth Avenue. One other possible vic, the district attorney, maybe more.”

  “Butch Karp?” the incredulous dispatcher asked.

  “Yeah, dammit, Butch Karp, send ambulances. We’re in pursuit of the suspects heading south on…Eleventh Avenue,” he said as they wheeled violently around the corner of Thirty-eighth.

  The patrol car joined the chase at Fourteenth Street and together they’d followed the SUV when it turned into an area of old warehouses off Christopher. The Land Cruiser had continued around behind one of the abandoned buildings until coming to a stop on the Hudson River side.

  As the two police cars pulled up, the suspects jumped out of the SUV and ran inside through a sliding freight door that had been left ajar. The detectives and officers entered the same way.

  Flanagan listened carefully. But there were no sounds except the usual hum of the city, the occasional hooting of boat traffic on the river, and the sirens of other police cars continuing south on West Street past their location.

  Without apparent regard for his safety, Flanagan stepped out into an open area and shouted, “Okay, boys, time to come out.” He waited a moment and was about to yell again, but then there was a stirring in the shadows.

  “Shee-it, dog,” said a young black man, stepping into the light, followed by his two companions. “We didn’ knowed you’d was inviting the entire En-Why-Pee-Dee. Now where’s our cash and a ride out a here?”

  Flanagan inclined his head toward the entrance. “Behind the warehouse next door. Money’s in a bag on the front seat; key’s on top of the right front tire.”

  “Good. So how’d we do? We get the big white muthafucka?”

  Flanagan frowned and shook his head. “Nah, you’re a lousy shot. The radio said you got a cop and a kid. So now I’m going to have to go to Plan B.”

  “Sorry ’bout that, but you said, ‘Spray the fucker down and run,’ ” the gunman pointed out. “So we wasn’t hangin’ ’round to finish the job.”

  “Well, that’s not quite accurate,” Flanagan replied. “For one thing, I never use those sort of words. But hey, that’s neither here nor there. You can go, but first I need you and your friends to do something for me.”

  “Yeah, what’s that?” the gunman said, gripping the Mac-10 submachine gun a little tighter. His two companions were holding what looked like 9mm handguns down at their sides.

  “I need you to fire off a clip in our direction…after we get out of the way, of course,” Flanagan replied.

  “Why?”

  “Our story is that you guys shot it out with us and got away. Officer Calloway here”—he waved his gun toward one of the uniformed officers—“has even volunteered to get grazed by a bullet—that I’m going to shoot—to make it look real.”

  “Oooh, that’s cold,” the gunman laughed and spoke to his companions. “Five-oh’s gonna shoot one of his own homeboys.” He turned back to Flanagan, “Man, you sumpin’ else.”

  “It’s for a good cause.”

  “Well, thas cool,” the gunman said as he lifted his weapon. “Okay, step out the way, homes, we be blastin’.”

  The police officers and detectives moved off to the side. Flanagan plugged his ears and waited grimly as the air inside the warehouse was suddenly filled with the sound of small arms fire and gunpowder smoke.

  • • •

  Detective Michael Flanagan did not consider himself a bad cop. Quite the opposite, he thought of himself as an exceptionally dedicated officer of the law. One who had risked his life on numerous occasions for the citizens of New York City, including that day in September two years earlier when he ran into the World Trade Center to help evacuate the buildings. He’d only just made it out before the towers came down, killing his partner, who was still inside.

  However, he was sick and tired of the way the world was heading, starting with Manhattan. Everywhere he looked, there was sin and depravity, homosexuals parading around in public, atheists mocking the church, a general decline in moral values. The criminals were in charge of the justice system and victims were not even given a second thought. But almost nobody seemed willing to do anything about it.

  It wasn’t like that when he was a boy. He’d been raised in a devoutly Catholic home, attending Mass at least twice a week, and memorizing his Bible while other boys his age were polluting their minds on comic books and, later, Playboy s. Other decent Catholic boys complained about the rigors of their faith, but not Mikey Flanagan. He actually made up sinful behavior so that he would have something to say to the priest at confession; he always felt cleaner, fresher, even if the sins were not his.

  In the Flanagan household, there was zero tolerance for cursing and using the Lord’s name in vain. A minor offense would be cause for having one’s mouth plugged with a bar of Dial soap; repeated or larger offenses, met with a whipping that made it difficult to sit down for a week.

  The Holy Roman Church was all knowing and all powerful, its representatives—from the parish priest to the pope himself—infallible in both deed and mind. There was only one institution that came close to that kind of respect in the Flanagan household, and it wasn’t the United States government, which his father informed him “everybody knows is run by Jews bent on creating a One World Order.” No, the only other institution worthy of nearly as much devotion was the NYPD.

  He was the son of a good Irish Catholic cop, and learned to be like him the hard way. Liam Flanagan believed in running his household with a firm hand. He didn’t take lip from his wife or his kids, not without them seeing the back of his hand or, if he’d been drinking, that hand balled into a big grapefruit-size fist.

  But all Michael Flanagan ever wanted to be was a cop like his dad and uncles. His favorite memories were of the Saturday evenings when they’d gather in the basement of the family home in the Inwood section of northern Manhattan to drink beer, play poker, and review the past week’s adventures on the job. They’d roar with laughter over tales of busting the niggers’ heads, or chasing some queer in drag across the George Washington Bridge (“And keep your fag ass in Jersey where it belongs!”). All of it under the noble banner of keeping the streets safe for decent folks. Every once in a while, his father would let him have a sip of beer, which made him feel like one of the guys, then remind him, “Loose lips, sink ships, Mikey. What gets said among the men in blue stays with the men in blue.”

  However, he also learned that his father didn’t mean all the men in blue. He learned that the only ones he could really trust were the Irish Catholic cops, a core group that for more than a hundred years had been the real power on the force
. Even with the influx of the “kikes, niggers, wops, chinks, spics, Polacks, faggots, and Protestants” onto the force, the men whose first allegiance was to the pope and the archdiocese of New York still dictated the way things would run and who would be in charge.

  Despite the sometimes harsh upbringing, Flanagan loved his dad. The day the old man with tears in his eyes pinned a badge onto his rookie uniform was the proudest day of his life. The worst day of his life was two years later when he learned that a nigger drug dealer had gut-shot his father and left him to die in an alley off 151st and Broadway. But his pride had swelled at the funeral as he sang “Amazing Grace” along with hundreds of other cops, each with a piece of black tape across his badge, accompanied by Irish bagpipes. That’s how he wanted to go someday with, perhaps, a chorus or two of “Danny Boy” thrown in to get everybody weeping.

  Flanagan’s mother had died soon after the funeral and was laid to rest beside her husband. In a way, her son was glad she’d passed on and didn’t live to hear the killer testify at his trial that Liam Flanagan had been shaking down dealers in that area for years and meted out gratuitous beatings. “I finally got tired of it and capped his white ass—in self-defense!”

  Michael Flanagan never believed that his father would have done such things. It was one thing to be on the take, accepting a little payola, to swing by a business a little more often than usual so the local thugs knew to stay away, or even to look the other way when it came to some back-of-the restaurant bookie operation. Flanagan had even taken the plain white envelope with the hundred-dollar bills that showed up in his locker, and was grateful for the dough. Especially after his first wife started whining about wanting a boob job, and even working overtime wasn’t getting it done. But gambling was a harmless vice; drug money was dirty and not something Liam Flanagan would have accepted, his son was absolutely, positively sure of it. And anyone he kicked the shit out of damn well deserved it.

  So Michael Falanagan didn’t take kindly to the aspersions on his sainted father, and when the nigger got out of prison—a mere six years later after District Attorney Sanford Bloom, may his soul roast on a spit in hell, signed off on a manslaughter plea agreement—he didn’t last a week back home in Harlem. One night he’d been picked up by a half-dozen men and taken to the Brooklyn Bridge where he “committed suicide” by falling 135 feet into the East River and drowning (the Irish Catholic deputy medical examiner ruled that he’d received the large purple bruise on his temple when he knocked his head on the way over the railing).

  By then, Michael Flanagan had received his detective’s gold shield and had already embarked on a crusade of his own to bring a little balance to an out-of-whack system. The criminals and perverts had been on a roll for too long—aided by the bleeding heart liberals and bullshit Miranda warnings to make the already dangerous job of policing that much more difficult. But Flanagan and a few other of the boys he’d recruited over the years were out to set things right again, like in the days when his dad joined the force.

  He’d started by bending the rules, such as “finding” small packets of dope on the front seats of cars he pulled over—most driven by people of color—which gave him probable cause to search the rest of the vehicle. Could he help it if a lot of his collars tried to resist arrest and had to be taken to the hospital, sometimes for days or weeks, before being transported to the Tombs? But those were the sorts of things his superiors looked the other way on; no cop who’d ever been on the streets wanted to second-guess another.

  Yet it was all penny-ante stuff and unorganized until he met Andrew Kane. It all started a dozen years earlier on that winter day when a liquor store was robbed and the owner was killed up on 153rd and Broadway. Granted, Flanagan probably shouldn’t have been on the job that afternoon. It had only been two weeks since his first whore of a wife had left him and moved with her Jew doctor to Los Angeles, and he’d been hitting the bottle pretty heavy. He might have been a little distracted and missed the dispatcher’s description of the perpetrator—five foot ten and wearing a blue coat, not a red Bulls jacket.

  Still, the kid should have stopped running when Flanagan got out of the car and ordered him to halt. The snow was blowing around pretty good, but he was sure that he saw a gun in the kid’s hand when he turned slightly at the sound of his voice. But then he kept running, and Flanagan was not in the mood for a foot chase. They were only a couple of blocks from the alley where his father had died and that always put him on edge. Still, he’d only intended to fire a warning shot and wasn’t sure why he felt it necessary to shoot the fleeing suspect three times in the back.

  Flanagan had run up and turned him over. Bloody bubbles were forming around the kid’s lips, but he still managed to ask, “Why’d you shoot me?”

  “ ’Cause you ran,” Flanagan answered, though he was never sure the boy heard him as the eyes had already dimmed. He looked around on the ground and felt in the boy’s pockets but couldn’t find the gun he was sure he’d seen. But he could hear the sirens of an approaching patrol car and an ambulance, so he quickly reached for the little .380 he carried in an ankle holster. He wiped it clean and thought about pressing it into the corpse’s hands to get his prints on it, but the damn kid was wearing dark blue mittens that looked like something his mother had knitted for him. So he stuck the gun in a pocket of the Bulls jacket and stood up just as the ambulance arrived.

  While the paramedics checked on the body, he went back and told his partner, Big Bill McKeowan, what he’d done. He knew he could count on McKeowan to back him up; the older detective had once ridden shotgun with Flanagan’s father back in the good old days. As expected, his partner assured him that he’d stick by him, but he was worried about a woman he’d seen looking out her window. “I’m not sure what she saw,” he said, “but don’t worry, it’ll be her word against ours.”

  And that’s how it had been when Internal Affairs investigated the shooting. The woman said she saw him shoot an unarmed man, and the two detectives swore the boy had a gun and briefly turned as if to shoot. Flanagan should have known there might be trouble when he saw that the IA officer assigned to the case was a chink, Walter Chin, and was sure of it after he repeated his story about the suspect holding a gun.

  “With mittens on?” Chin asked.

  The next thing he knew, his lieutenant told him to go talk to some hotshot lawyer the department hired to review IA cases named Andrew Kane. It was Kane who informed him that the traitors in Internal Affairs wanted to pass his file on to the district attorney with a recommendation that charges be filed in the shooting death of Jumain Little.

  “You may be looking at manslaughter, even homicide,” Kane said.

  “The nig…the perp pointed a gun, I swear to God,” Flanagan told the lawyer. “But then he turned around and ran just as I fired; that’s why he got hit in the back.”

  “Three times?” Kane asked.

  “You ever faced an armed man?” Falanagan replied angrily. “It’s not like in the Lone Ranger where you shoot the gun out of his hand. In real life, when you pull the trigger, you keep pullin’ till the guy goes down.”

  Kane didn’t answer but instead seemed to be appraising him with those unsettling blue eyes. When at last he spoke, his tone was smooth and creamy as milk. “Yes, well, you’re in luck. I’m not inclined to see a good officer take a bad fall because of an unfortunate case of mistaken identification. The victim could have been the robber; you might have been at risk. You are a good cop, aren’t you Detective Flanagan?”

  “Yes, I believe I am, thank you, sir,” he replied proudly.

  “A good Catholic, too,” Kane said studying the file in front of him.

  “A better Catholic even than I am a cop, I hope.”

  “Well, then, perhaps there are ways you can be of service to one of my other clients, the Archdiocese of New York, and together you can help make this a better world,” Kane said, clasping his hands in front of him on his desk.

  “I’d do anything for the chu
rch,” Flanagan said. “And the department.”

  Kane smiled and explained that he was prepared to overrule the IA recommendations and could guarantee that there would be no charges in the case. But there was something Flanagan could do, too. He was not alone in believing that the world was going to hell in a handbasket. In fact, none other than Archbishop Fey, for whom Kane worked as legal counsel, had recently decided that the church needed to take a more, “how should I say this…proactive role,” in halting the moral decay of Manhattan.

  “He’s interested in forming what you might call an Army of Christian Soldiers within the police force—good Irish Catholic officers such as yourself; after all, who else could you trust—to perform occasional acts at the direction of the church…through its representative,” he said with a smile. “Me, or someone the archbishop may appoint.”

  So Flanagan and his boys found themselves with a new purpose, which wasn’t all that much different from their old. But he blessed the day he met Kane and started mixing his service to the Lord with his service to the department. The courts and the politicians had failed to protect—or, hell, like Clinton, were part of the problem—the public from the criminals, communists, faggots, terrorists, and other subversive elements. So as far as he was concerned it was about time for the Catholic Church, and a few of her chosen servants on the New York City Police Department, to step up to the plate.

  Sometimes that meant dealing firmly with people who sought to damage the church itself through their scurrilous lies and exaggerations against her priests. More often, however, the characters he and his lads dealt with were sinners who had been identified by Kane, and later Father O’Callahan, who was introduced as his “intermediary with the archbishop.”

  While he knew that the general population might consider what he and his boys were doing was criminal, Flanagan felt that he was answering to a higher law, God’s law. For him, without question, the ends did truly justify the means.