Mischief

by Ed McBain

  The Deaf Man was counting on it because he knew human nature and he knew it would happen.

  THE GIRLS INTERRUPTEDtheir sound check when Sil came over to introduce Chloe to them. They were wearing the same overalls and high-topped boots the men were wearing, but the bibs on theirs seemed cut a bit more narrow to reveal generous breasts in tight blue T-shirts. Sex and violence, that was what Chloe guessed rap was all about, never mind the protest crap. Protest never sold a nickel’s worth of records. She’d have to tell that to Sil one day. Later. In the future.

  The one named Grass, the prettier of the two, and the youngest—Chloe judged her to be no more than eighteen, nineteen—looked her up and down the way some men at the club did, gauging her, taking her measure, wondering if this was competition here, Sil holding to her hand so tight that way. Chloe figured the same as she had the night they’d had dinner together, when he’d mentioned her name so offhandedly: There was something going on between these two.

  “Nice to meet you,” Grass said.

  Her eyes met Chloe’s directly.

  A challenge in them.

  Little eighteen-year-old pisspants.

  Chloe grabbed Sil’s hand tighter.

  WHILE HE WAITEDfor Brown to come out of the men’s room, Carella looked over the squadroom bulletin board. Aside from the usual Wanted flyers, there were bits and scraps of everything from notices of changes in departmental rules and regulations, to a detailed reminder on how to administer the Miranda warnings; to a For Sale sign from an officer wanting to get rid of a ten-speed bike, to a flyer about aerobics and weight-lifting classes at the Headquarters Gym, to another flyer about the D.A. Easter Dance and another about the Emerald Society’s Celebrity Auction, and a…

  For Release: Immediately

  On Saturday, April 4th inst. at 1: 00pm., narcotics seized in 6, 955 arrests by the Police Department…

  “Let’s go,” Brown said, and zipped up his fly as he came out of the men’s room.

  THEY LETthe crowd in at twelve noon.

  The crowd streamed in between the red, white, and blue pylon markers, an orderly crowd here for a day’s outing in the sun. The promoters of the event had set up concessionaire trucks around the perimeter, so that all sorts of food and soft drinks were available, but many in the crowd had brought along their own sandwiches and some of them had brought bottles of beer and soda pop in ice coolers, and some of them were sipping mixed alcoholic drinks from plastic Gatorade bottles. There was the usual mad rush to grab space near the stage area, but on the whole this was a civilized crowd intent only on enjoying the day and the music. Nobody wanted a hassle here today. Nobody wanted to fight over who got closest to the performers.

  This was going to be a good, sweet, sunshine-filled day.

  THE CHIEFsecurity officer’s name was Fred Bartlett. He was a burly man almost as tall and as wide as Brown, with a ruddy face and a nose that appeared to have been broken more than once. His flinty blue eyes said Don’t mess with me.

  “I’ve seen crowds at any kind of event you’d care to name,” he told the detectives. “I worked security at baseball games and football games and hockey games and ice shows and pop concerts and folk concerts and rock concerts and even a concert Barbra Streisand done in her own backyard in L.A. I know when a crowd’s gonna be trouble and when it ain’t. I can spot a crowd gonna turn mean from the minute it comes in the place, whatever kind of place it may be, an arena, a concert hall, an ice-skating rink, or a park like this one today.”

  “Uh-huh,” Brown said.

  He was thinking the man was a blowhard.

  “And I can tell you,” Bartlett said, “that this crowd here today is as peaceful as any kind of crowd you’d hope for. They’re all here to have a good time today. The sun don’t hurt. It’s about time spring really got here. That’s what you can sense with this crowd. It’s been a long hard winter and now spring is here and we’re all gonna sit back and enjoy it.”

  “You haven’t received any threatening phone calls, have you?” Carella asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “Bomb scares, anything like that?” Brown said.

  “Nothing,” Bartlett said.

  “Anybody threatening to set a fire?”

  “Nothing.”

  Carella looked at his watch.

  It was twelve-thirty sharp.

  THE GARBAGE TRUCKmade a sharp turn off the street leading to the river, and then paralleled the river for several blocks, Gloria at the wheel, the Deaf Man sitting beside her. Hanging on to either side of the truck were Carter and Florry. Each of the four was wearing the sanitation department uniform: baggy spruce-green trousers, T-shirt, and jacket. Under the jackets, each of the four had tucked into the waistband of the trousers a nine-millimeter semiautomatic Uzi assault pistol. The Israeli-made weapon carried a twenty-round magazine and, because it was designed to absorb recoil, could accurately fire all twenty rounds within seconds.

  They were going in with eighty rounds of ammunition.

  The Deaf Man figured that would be more than enough to do the job.

  FROM WHEREChloe Chadderton sat on a folding chair on the left hand side of the stage, she saw someone she thought she’d known from another time, another life. The white detective who’d investigated her husband’s murder all those years ago. The good looking one with the slanted eyes that made him look like a Chink. Standing there with a brother bigger than a mountain, talking to a man in uniform almost as big. She couldn’t remember the detective’s name. Maybe she didn’t want to.

  She looked at her watch.

  It was twenty minutes to one.

  GLORIA DROVEthe truck in through the open gate in the cyclone fence. In the distance, puffy white clouds rode the piercing blue sky. A man was looking out over the river, where a tugboat pushed heavily against a mild chop; he was wearing the same spruce-green uniform everyone in or on the truck was wearing. He didn’t even glance up as Gloria stopped the truck alongside the incinerator building.

  She cut the ignition and pocketed the key.

  All four of them put on the ski masks.

  SOMETHING KEPTbothering Carella.

  “What do you think?” Brown asked. “We stay awhile, or we go back to the office?”

  “I think we’d better stay awhile,” he said.

  “Maybe he was just pulling our leg all along,” Brown said. Carella looked at him.

  “Well,” Brown said, and shrugged.

  It was close to a shrug of defeat.

  Both of themknew the Deaf Man hadn’t been pulling their leg but neither of them had even the faintest notion of what his plan might be.

  THERE WERE TWOSanitation Department employees inside the incinerator building. One of them was reading a sports magazine. The other one was eating a sausage and pepper sandwich his wife had made him for lunch. When the front door opened, they thought it was the cops from the Property Clerk’s Office, here to burn their dope. It was only a quarter to one, but sometimes they got here a little early. Instead, they saw four guys in ski masks and uniforms same as they were wearing, all four of them holding guns.

  The tallest one said, “Nice and easy.”

  The two garbage men knew better than to move.

  FROM WHERE THEYstood behind the stage waiting for the show to begin, Carella and Brown could hear the voice of the crowd. It was a single voice that vibrated with the pleasure of expectation. At one o’clock sharp…

  On Saturday, April 4th inst. at 1:00 P.M.…

  …according to what Bartlett had told them, the concert would open with a rap group called Spit Shine…

  “Here’s the program right here,” he’d said, “you can keep it, I’ve got dozens of ’em.”

  It was now five minutes to one, and the voice of the crowd…

  On Saturday, April 4th inst. at 1:00 P.M.…

  …hummed now with expectancy. In just five minutes, the concert would begin. Bartlett had estimated that there were 250,000 people in the crowd. 250,000 people waiting
for…

  Explosion?

  Here?

  Carella could not imagine how.

  AT THREE MINUTESpast one, just as Spit Shine began performing the song George Chadderton had written, rapping out his words, a van marked with the police department’s seal and the wordsPROPERTY CLERK ’S OFFICErolled down the ramp into the river front complex and parked alongside a graffiti-riddled garbage truck near the rear of the incinerator building. A radio car came down the ramp after it, and two officers got out of the car just as a sergeant and another officer got out of the van. The men exchanged greetings there at the river’s edge, commented on what a great day it was, and then the sergeant said, “Let’s see if they’re ready for us,” and they all walked into the building and found themselves looking into the barrels of what appeared to be four semiautomatic assault pistols.

  The sergeant wondered why this hadn’t happened long before now, this city.

  “…WHY SHE DO THIS WAY?

  “On her back, on her knees, for the white man pay?

  “She a slave, sister woman, she a slave this way,

  “On her knees, on her back, for the white man pay…”

  Sitting on the side of the stage, listening to the lyrics her husband had written so long ago, Chloe realized that the group was doing something marvelous with them, Sil and Jeeb in the background rapping a steady insistent urgent beat, the two girls rapping the words in a keening high-pitched wail that almost brought Chloe to tears.

  The sound was picked up by forty or fifty microphones collecting audio information on the stage and feeding it into a cable that measured some two inches in diameter and lay on the ground like a snake. This cable, which was in factcalled the snake, ran from the stage through the center of the audience in a lane flanked by sawhorses and covered with a rubber mat, going back some hundred and fifty feet to the control tower, where two sound engineers sat behind the console doing a house mix by ear.

  From the console, four separate feeds ran out to the delay towers and the left and right main speakers stacked on either side of the stage. There were sixteen speakers stacked in each of the delay towers, together with a dozen thousand-watt amplifiers. The system had been equalized during the days before the concert, the delays calibrated so that the sound coming from the delay towers was synchronized with the sound coming from the towers on either side of the stage, where eighty speakers in each tower were moving a hell of a lot of air.

  “…won’t she hear my song?

  “What she doin this way surely got to be wrong.

  “Lift her head, raise her eyes, sing the words out strong…”

  THE ONLY ONEthey had to shoot was the garbage man taking the air at the river’s edge. It was Gloria who shot him because she was the one standing closest to him when he turned and yelled, “Hey! What’s goin on here?”

  This may have been because he’d just seen four men in ski masks moving toward the police van. Gloria was thinking about the payoff on this thing, and she wasn’t about to have any shitty little garbage man screw it up. She fired three shots in rapid succession, the sound dissipating instantly over the water. The shots took him full in the face and knocked him back against the cyclone fence. He slid to the ground like an oil rag.

  “Nice,” the Deaf Man said.

  Then they all climbed into the police van, and he handed Gloria the keys he’d taken from the sergeant’s belt.

  THE SONG WAS CALLED“Hate.”

  It started at twelve minutes past one, just as Gloria turned the van’s ignition key.

  Jeeb was the lead rapper on this one.

  Sil did backup.

  The girls sneered and snarled in the background.

  The Deaf Man had no prior knowledge of the program that would be performed at today’s concert. He was only concerned with timing and diversion, the magician’s concern. He was stealing thirty million dollars’ worth of narcotics under the very noses of the police, and the only way to get away clean was to divert them.

  The timer was set for one-twenty sharp.

  At that time, he hoped to be transferring the contents of the police van into the rented Chevrolet already waiting in the boat basin parking lot farther downtown.

  It was pure coincidence that the song’s content would aid and abet his plan. His plan was foolproof even without the song, but the song couldn’t hurt; give him a little chicken soup, as the lady in the balcony once remarked. Had he been here, the Deaf Man would have been pleased by the song and the spirited performance of the group named Spit Shine.

  Sitting in the audience, Carella recognized dangerous and inflammatory lyrics when he heard them, all right, but his mind kept clicking back over something he’d seen or read, something in one of the newspapers or magazines, something about…

  Saturday, April 4th…

  Something about…

  April 4th inst. at 1:00 P.M.…

  Too damn many newspapers, too damn many magazines.

  “…kick the ofay, kill the ofay, snuff the ofay, off the ofay, box the ofay,hate the ofay, cause the ofay hateyou !

  “Hate the ofay….”

  His mind circled back again.

  April 4th inst. at 1:00 P.M.…

  “…fuck the ofay, juke the ofay…”

  Saturday, April 4th inst. at 1:00 P.M.…

  “…shoot the ofay, spike the ofay…”

  Saturday, April 4th inst. at 1:00 P.M., narcotics seized in…

  “Theyburn it!” he shouted.

  “…dothe ofay…”

  “What!” Brown shouted.

  “The narcotics! Theyburn the stuff!”

  “…like the ofay doyou !”

  And in just that instant, Florry’s timer kicked in and the Deaf Man’s digitally stored voice erupted.

  THE WAY FLORRYhad explained it to him, you had to think of it as upstream and downstream. The sound from the stage randownstream to the console where it was mixed, and then it ran out of the console, backupstream to the speakers in the various towers. Downstream, upstream. Into the console, out of the console again.

  “You’ve got your snake runninginto the console and then your matrix outputs runningout of it,” Florry said. “The matrix outputs are carrying the sound that came downstream and got mixed and is now running backupstream again. It’s like a bottleneck right there, where the mixed sound narrows down to just these four signal lines going out to themain speakers left and right, and thedelay speakers left and right. You follow me so far?”

  “Barely,” the Deaf Man said.

  “Stick with me,” Florry said, and grinned. “Suppose we direct the sound going upstream into our little black box, hmm? So that instead of going straight to the speakers, it goes through the box and out of it again. Business as usual, no depredation of sound. Everything coming from the stage is mixed at the console, goes out of the console into the box, passes through the box and out of the box, and then on to the speakers. Everything still going downstream and then upstream again. Until we decide to abort it.”

  “How do we do that?”

  “Simple,” Florry said.

  The way Florry did it—and the way it was working this very instant—was not, in fact, quite as simple as he’d claimed it was.

  To make it easier for the Deaf Man to understand, he explained that the heart of his “little black box” was a 24-volt DC battery pack that drove all the elements necessary to abort the sound coming from the stage and to substitute for it the message the Deaf Man had recorded. In addition to the resistors, capacitors, and opamps that were the essential components of any sound circuitry, the variousother elements in the box were:

  A digital clock, which had been preset to go off at one-twenty sharp…

  Four relays, which in effect created a two-pole switch, and…

  An EPROM, the electronic chip upon which Florry had digitally stored the Deaf Man’s voice.

  “There are two positions in that box,” Florry said. “The A position is your normal output, the mixed signal going f
rom the console, through the box, and to the speakers. Before the timer kicks in, nobody’ll even guess the signal is running through our box. That’s the first position. But the instant that timer kicks in, your relays switch to the B position, which is the message on the EPROM we burned. The timer throws the switch, which kills the sound coming from the stage and sends out your voice instead. From that second on, a twenty-four-volt battery’ll be running sound to every speaker in the joint! Just think of it! All those speakers in each tower, andyour voice booming from every one of them, a goddamn box from hell!”

  The Deaf Man’s voice was booming from them now.

  “NIGGERS EATSHIT !”

  If you were sitting on the stage, as Chloe was, or if you were sitting no more than fifty feet back from the stage, you might have heard the sound generated by the group’s own amps and speakers, but this was almost totally overridden by the voice that thundered from the stacks of speakers the little black box was now controlling.

  “ALLNIGGERS EAT SHIT!”

  The voice was high and strident. The Deaf Man had shouted into the mike when they were burning the EPROM, and now his voice bellowed from the speakers.

  “EVERY FUCKING NIGGER ONEARTH EATS SHIT!”

  At first, the audience thought this was part of the act. Strange things sometimes happened at these concerts, and Spit Shine was still up there performing, wasn’t it? Even the two men behind the console were initially confused. The board was showing input from the stage mikes, so maybe the group was just being totally outrageous. But the engineers couldsee the stage, and all at once Spit Shine stopped dead. And where an instant earlier there’d been their faintly amplified rap competing with the thunderous sound coming from all those high-powered speakers, now there was only the Deaf Man’s voice, as insistent as Hitler’s had been when he was exhorting his masses.