Shoot the Moon

by Joseph T. Klempner

“My best guess is that we’re looking at a case of atypical pseudotumor cerebri here. That’s when we have an overabundance of spinal fluid, and we see symptoms mimicking those associated with a tumor: headaches, visual spots, and so forth. Though the truth is, we usually find that condition in teenagers, and, more often than not, where obesity plays a contributing part.

  “The diagnosis - or lack of diagnosis, really - could explain why we’re seeing some improvement following the spinal tap. We draw fluid out, and that relieves some of the pressure.”

  “So she’s getting better?” Goodman’s voice sounds far away to him, unlike his own.

  “Well, she’s certainly holding her own,” Gendel says. “And the pictures are negative, even with contrast. We’ve got to be very happy about that.”

  “We are,” Goodman agrees.

  “What next?” It’s Carmen’s voice.

  “Next is continued close monitoring,” Gendel says. “Someone’s got to keep watching that spot. It provides us with a convenient barometer of the pressure inside. The spot grows bigger and darker, the pressure’s building up. That means it’s time to do another tap, draw off some fluid. Should it get real bad, she might need to have a drain inserted. On the other hand, the spot continues to get smaller and lighter - yuckier, I believe the technical term is - the less we have to worry about. The important thing is that somebody’s got to keep an eye on the spot.”

  “Somebody?” Goodman asks. He’s aware that twice now, Dr. Gendel has distanced himself from Kelly’s case.

  Dr. Gendel rises from his chair. “We can talk about that if you like,” he says, looking at Kelly and Carmen as if to tell them that they’re dismissed now, this is man-to-man talk. Something else they must teach in medical school, Goodman decides.

  Carmen takes the cue, and she and Kelly say their goodbyes and head back toward the waiting room. Dr. Gendel closes the door.

  “Is this about money?” Goodman asks.

  “Partly,” Dr. Gendel admits. “My office manager tells me you have no insurance of any sort.”

  “I’m going to be able to pay your bill,” Goodman says.

  “This is a very expensive proposition,” Dr. Gendel says. “We’ve made accommodations, but you’re already several thousand dollars behind. Your daughter needs to be watched. There may have to be more procedures, possibly many of them.” He shrugs. “You know, there are city hospitals. I don’t want to see your daughter go untreated. But it’s just not fair to the rest of my patients.”

  The phrase “city hospitals” stings Goodman’s ears. He’s not about to turn his daughter’s care over to some medical student or first-year intern. “I’m going to be able to pay your bill,” he repeats dumbly. “Whatever it comes to.”

  “Don’t get me wrong - I know you have the best of intentions-”

  “You said ‘partly,’ “Goodman reminds him. “Is there some other problem?”

  “Problem? No. Suggestion? Yes.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Your daughter’s cold, Mr. Goodman. She damn near has chronic hypothermia.”

  “She’s nervous about all of this.”

  “She’s freezing!”

  “So?”

  “So,” Dr. Gendel says, “take her on vacation. Take her someplace where it’s warm. Give the kid a chance to thaw out, for God’s sake!”

  Thawing out is very much on Daniel Riley’s mind, too. He shivers in a doorway opposite the entrance to Dr. Gendel’s office, waiting for the reappearance of Michael Goodman, his daughter, and his girlfriend. They’ve been inside for forty minutes now. Outside, where Riley is, it’s thirty-three degrees and windy.

  Riley’s back on duty after a rare night with his family. He watched his son’s fourth-grade basketball team lose to a team of what seemed to Riley to be a bunch of high school kids. At least one of them looked like he was shaving already. They certainly had no trouble reaching the basket. The final score had been twenty-three to nine. Riley’s kid went scoreless, missing two free throws in the last minute from a foul line that couldn’t have been more than five feet from the basket.

  Riley takes his orders from Ray Abbruzzo on this assignment, and Abbruzzo’s convinced the deal is going down Friday night. Still, he’s decided to cover the Mole full-time between now and then, just in case he makes a side trip from one of these family outings to meet with his customers. To Abbruzzo, full-time coverage means sitting by the heater in the plant. To Riley, it means standing out in the cold, getting pneumonia.

  Seniority is a big deal in the NYPD, even among detectives. Especially in winter.

  Preoccupied with his futile attempts to keep warm, Riley almost misses Goodman hailing a cab across the street. He flags down one of his own and jumps in. It feels almost as cold inside the cab as outside. Riley’s forced to show the driver his gold shield in order to convince him to make an illegal U-turn. The driver mumbles something in a strange language. Riley takes his eyes off the other cab just long enough to glance at the driver’s name on the ID card: Viktor Gromechki. That probably goes a long way toward explaining why there’s no heat on in the cab.

  Back home, Goodman, Kelly, and Carmen celebrate the good news - or at least the absence of bad news - by toasting marshmallows over the burner of the stove. Kelly, standing on a chair and using a long serving fork, under Carmen’s close supervision, holds her marshmallow high over the flame, rotating it patiently until it gradually turns a golden brown, just the way Carmen says she likes hers.

  Goodman is less careful, allowing his marshmallow to get too close to the burner, until it catches fire. By the time he succeeds in blowing out the flame, he’s left with a charred crust and an oozing interior that burns his fingers when he goes to pull it off the fork.

  As they sit around the card table, eating their snack, Goodman asks Kelly if she’s warm enough.

  “Yup,” she says absently, busy trying to coax Pop-Tart into tasting the inside of a marshmallow.

  But to Goodman, her lips look thin and just slightly purple. He will watch her for the rest of the afternoon and well into the evening, looking for signs of shivering, of cold - of chronic hypothermia.

  It’s even colder Thursday, with temperatures down around thirty. The news is filled with stories about record-breaking temperatures for October. Goodman bundles up for the ride to work, tells Carmen and Kelly to promise him they’ll stay indoors.

  “No way,” Carmen says. “We’ve got to go out to find a costume for Kelly’s party.”

  “We’re not babies,” Kelly tells him. “And you’re not the boss of us.”

  “You’re my babies,” he says.

  “Excuse me?” Carmen chimes in.

  “Just a figure of speech,” Goodman says, blushing.

  “What’s a figure of speech?” Kelly wants to know. “Is it like a figure eight?”

  “Not exactly,” he smiles. “It’s when you say something that’s not exactly true.”

  “So why do you say it?”

  “To make a point,” he explains. “You know, like, ‘I’m so hungry, I could eat a horse.’ “

  “Yuck.”

  Goodman’s been at work a little over an hour when Manny comes into the office, closes the door behind him, and sits down across the desk from him.

  “You doing anything wrong, Michael?”

  Goodman thinks immediately of the accounts he’s opened and the checks he’s written against them. Did he slip up somewhere? Has the bank notified Manny?

  “Like what?” he asks, trying to sound surprised at the question but knowing that if he was hooked up to a lie detector, the needle would be jumping off the page.

  “I dunno,” Manny says. “But two minutes after you walked in, two guys in a blue Ford parked across the way. They been sittin’ in their car since, drinkin’ coffee the whole time.”

  “Who do you think they are?” Goodman asks.

  “Well, one’s black and one’s white. To me, they gotta be cops. So I was just wonderin’ if it’s you the
y’re interested in.”

  “I can’t imagine why they would be,” Goodman says.

  “Me neither,” Manny agrees. “Don’t worry about it.” While he’s there, he pulls his usual roll of bills from his back pocket and peels off five twenties for Goodman.

  But not worrying about it proves to be more easily said than done, and worry about it is about all Goodman can do for the rest of the afternoon.

  At quitting time, he bundles up for the trip home. On an impulse, he purposefully leaves his briefcase in the office. As he steps out onto Jerome Avenue, he sees a blue Ford across the way. It’s easy to spot: The windshield’s fogged up, and there’s visible exhaust coming from the tailpipe.

  He walks a block uptown in the cold before stopping in his tracks. He smacks his forehead like the guy used to do in the “I coulda had a V-8” commercial. Then he turns around suddenly and heads back downtown. As he does so, the blue Ford passes right by him, and he gets a good look at the occupants. The driver is a heavyset black man he doesn’t recognize. But the passenger, a white man, looks very much like the guy he saw at the store the other day when he was buying a newspaper.

  “Shit!” says Harry Weems as soon as they’ve driven past Goodman. “Shit! Shit! Shit!” It’s become a staple of his vocabulary since he’s been assigned to this investigation.

  “Did you see that?” Sheridan can’t get over it. “Motherfucker doubled back on us like a pro! I told you he was good.”

  Knowing they’ve been burned, they continue on to the plant. No use making things worse than they already are. Besides which, they already know the Mole’s pattern: walk to 161st Street, take the subway home. Maybe stop off for a pizza, if he’s feeling really rich.

  When Goodman comes back out of the Bronx Tire Exchange again, this time with his briefcase, the blue Ford is nowhere in sight.

  As always, it’s dark as he walks to the train station, and he pays attention to his surroundings, something he’s been careful to do since his first encounter with Russell.

  He wonders what Russell’s up to. He hasn’t seen him since the ill-fated attempt to sell the first kilo of drugs. He tries to figure out how long ago that was, but has trouble remembering. As good as he is with numbers, that’s how bad he is with time.

  He has occasion to think of Russell again just before he gets to 161st Street. There’s a tall, skinny black kid leaning against the building, and for just a moment, Goodman thinks maybe it is Russell. But then he sees that the kid isn’t really a kid after all, but a man in his thirties or forties. As Goodman passes him, the man comes away from the wall, hunched over, eyes closed - sleepwalking. But for some reason totally unfathomable to Goodman, he doesn’t fall over, just staggers around in a circle, oblivious to everything around him. “Drunk as a skunk” is the expression Goodman is reminded of.

  If Goodman knew a little about pharmacology, he’d understand that the man isn’t drunk at all. Drunks fall down, because alcohol adversely affects the drinker’s sense of balance. Opiates have no such effect: The heroin user can be quite literally “out on his feet” without ever losing command of his internal gyroscope, his unconscious ability to maintain his balance.

  Of course, Michael Goodman may find it easier to assume that the man is drunk. It is Thursday after all. Tomorrow is Friday, the day he and Vinnie are to conduct their little business. How appropriate that they should have picked Halloween, the scariest day of the year to begin with.

  Which reminds him - he’s promised Kelly he’d pick up a pumpkin on the way home. So, at the corner of Ninety-sixth and Lexington, he stops at a hybrid Spanish-Korean store called the Bodega Palace and picks out what seems to him a reasonably sized pumpkin. He fishes out a few dollars to pay for it, wondering how much they can charge for what is essentially an overgrown orange squash. The Korean woman behind the counter puts it on the scale and rings it up.

  “Nine dolla,” she says.

  Jesus, he thinks. But comes up with it.

  “Whaddaya mean, he burned you?” Abbruzzo asks Weems and Sheridan as soon as they rejoin him at the plant. At Abbruzzo’s request, Lieutenant Spangler has assigned five more men to the investigation, meaning they’re back to eight-hour shifts, three men to a shift.

  “He doubled back on us,” Sheridan explains. “Made us for sure.”

  “Sonofabitch,” Abbruzzo says. “I hope this doesn’t spook him.”

  “How are we ever gonna cover the deal?” Weems wonders. “With this guy so hinky. He’ll make any car we use.”

  Abbruzzo thinks for a moment. “We’ll get the MOUSE,” he says. The MOUSE is the Mobile Operations Unit for Surveillance Enhancement. From the outside, it appears to be a delivery van, one of countless thousands New Yorkers are accustomed to seeing making a variety of deliveries, pickups, installations, or repairs. Inside, it’s equipped with one-way viewing glass, video and still camera ports, and parabolic microphones capable of picking up whispered conversation a block away. For extended periods of surveillance, there’s a small refrigerator, a microwave oven, and even a chemical toilet.

  “Good thinking,” Weems says.

  “This is shaping up as some battle,” Sheridan decides. “The Mole versus the MOUSE. It’s like Wild fucking Kingdom. You gotta wonder who’s gonna survive.”

  “Do yourself a favor,” says Ray Abbruzzo. “Put your money on the MOUSE.”

  Goodman, Carmen, and Kelly are in the middle of dinner when the phone rings. Goodman’s in the process of swallowing a mouthful of tuna casserole as he reaches for it.

  “Hello?” he says.

  “Hello. Who’s this?”

  Goodman recognizes Vinnie’s voice. “Michael,” he says.

  “You sure? You sound funny.”

  “I’m eating.”

  “Go outside,” Vinnie tells him. “Gimme a call at this number-”

  “Wait, wait,” Goodman says, looking around for something to write with. He finds a pen, says, “Go ahead.”

  “Five-five-five-five-nine-six-two.”

  Goodman writes the number on the palm of his hand. “Give me fifteen minutes,” he says.

  “Fuck fifteen minutes!” Vinnie shouts. “I’m at a payphone. You got any idea how cold it is out here?”

  “Don’t tell me,” Goodman says. “I’ll call you in five minutes.” He hangs up the phone.

  “I have to run out,” he tells Carmen and Kelly. “I’ll be back real soon.”

  “Dress warmly,” Kelly tells him.

  He exchanges a look with Carmen. She knows what the call was about.

  Ray Abbruzzo knows what the call was about, too, and he loses no time in calling Telephone Security’s night line.

  “Get me an address on two-one-two-five-five-five-five-nine-six-two as fast as you can. I think it may be a coin box.” Then he hands the phone to Weems. “You guys are hot,” he says. “I’ll take the Mole. See if you can get a unit to respond to wherever Vinnie’s phone is. But no RMPs.”

  Abbruzzo puts on his coat. As soon as he spots Goodman coming out of his building, he’s out the door, following him at a safe distance, from across the street.

  “That’s a coin-operated phone located inside the premises of One thirty Tenth Avenue,” a woman’s voice tells Weems.

  “What the hell’s at One thirty Tenth Avenue?” Weems asks.

  “It’s a restaurant,” she tells him, “called La Luncheonette.”

  “What’s the cross street?”

  “How am I supposed to know?” she asks. “You’re the detective.”

  He hangs up, calls Communications, and requests a PDU - a Precinct Detective Unit operating out of the local station house - to respond to the location. He tells the operator he’ll hold on to give the unit instructions.

  “No units are answering,” the operator tells him. “It’s cold out there.”

  “Bullshit!” he roars. “Make it a ten-thirteen!” A 10-13 is the highest priority job there is - “Officer needs assistance.” If Martians were landing a flying sa
ucer in Central Park and a 10-13 came over the air, every cop would be out of there in seconds.

  “You know I can’t do that,” the operator says.

  “Fuck!”

  “Wait a minute - I’ve got a unit that’ll take it,” the operator says. “Twelve minutes ETA.”

  “Twelve minutes? I don’t have twelve minutes!”

  “Sorry, sir.”

  Goodman is shivering by the time he reaches the corner. The phone he used last time has an “Out of Order” sticker on it, but the one next to it is working. He drops in a quarter and calls the number he’s written on his palm.

  While Weems continues to hold on, waiting for the Communications operator to come back, Sheridan turns the volume all the way up on the receiver Fu Man Feldman added to the growing list of electronic equipment in the plant. The voices come through loud and clear.

  VOICE: Hello?

  GOODMAN: Hello, Vinnie.

  VINNIE: Hey, Mikey boy. You sound better now. Don’t be eating anything my sister cooks for you, man. You could be taking your life in your hands.

  GOODMAN: What’s up?

  VINNIE: We’re set. Tomorrow night, eight o’clock.

  GOODMAN: Eight?

  VINNIE: Yeah. Whassamatta?

  GOODMAN: Well, it’s just that my kid’s got to be at a party tomorrow night.

  VINNIE: Jesus, I don’t know if I can change it.

  GOODMAN: Well, leave it at eight, then. I’ll see what I can do. But you know how kids are. Where’s this supposed to be?

  VINNIE: Someplace quiet.

  Goodman remembers the last time he did a deal at “someplace quiet.” He ended up losing his drugs, his shoes, and his pants. He wants no part of that this time around.

  GOODMAN: You sure it’s got to be at eight?

  VINNIE: Jesus, I awready told ‘em-

  GOODMAN: Okay, okay. Then it’s going to have to be near where the party is.

  VINNIE: Where’s that?

  GOODMAN: Downtown somewhere. I don’t remember.

  VINNIE: Fuck.

  GOODMAN: I can call you back tomorrow with the address.

  VINNIE: No, no, that’s awright, I’ll call you. You be home around noon?