Sunrise Highway

by Peter Blauner

  “I don’t know where you’re going with this, chief.” She turned her back on Mitchell, who was beckoning for her to put the phone down. “Or where you’re getting it, but—”

  “And Papi be down on the floor with the cop’s foot on his neck and he be all mad and shit, talking Spanish and English. And then he be like, ‘We gotta do this in front of mi familia, hombre? Why you gotta humiliate me in front of my daughters?’”

  Every word, exactly as it was. An invasion so vivid and visceral that it felt like he was on the couch beside her, with a sweaty hand down her shirt.

  “And Izzy, she be losing it, yo.” He’d started to giggle. “Because she, like, really believed in your daddy. She idolized him. She thought he was some kind of hero to the people in the neighborhood who looked up to him. She didn’t know he was just a scumbag drug dealer, who kept selling even after your brother died from an overdose. His own son, in an urn on the mantle. But now here he be, down on the rug, begging the po-po not to shame him in front of his wife and kids. And you know what I think?”

  “I don’t give a fuck what you think.” Her voice broke.

  “I think Izzy started to lose her fucking mind that night, from seeing her daddy like the dog he was. Your mami too…”

  “Fuck you, Tolliver. I’ma kill you.”

  This was mental terrorism. Somehow he’d bypassed her defensive fortifications and gotten in her head.

  “But you, L. Ro., you was being all strong and shit. Not falling apart like your moms and sister. ’Cause you had the heart to go against your own blood. You weren’t going to be like them. You weren’t going to fall apart and cry like a fuckin’ bitch. You was ready to crawl right into that big white policeman’s lap, do whatever you had to do to survive, because he was the one with the big fucking gun and his foot on your daddy’s neck. You would’ve licked that whole fucking barrel in front of Papi if that officer told you to, because that’s the kind of girl you were. And still are.”

  “You don’t know shit about me.” She was on her feet and shouting, not caring that Mitchell looked terrified. “Next time I see you, I’ma fuck you up…”

  “And that’s when the officer asked you, ‘What do you want to be when you grow up, little girl?’ And like a good compliant little bitch, you said, ‘I want to be a police officer.’” He wasn’t laughing anymore. “Now you know that was so long ago that the officer who said that is probably dead and gone. And so Izzy’s the only other person who could have heard what you said that night. And if I know it, she must have told me. Willingly. So why don’t you just think about that a little before you go back to your squad all fired up about kicking anyone’s ass? Maybe you want to take a step back and put that shit in perspective. Sleep on it, muchacha. I’ll see you in my dreams.”

  The line went dead. She looked down and saw that the recording app had paused three seconds into the conversation, losing the rest. She’d either accidentally hit the pause button or he’d found a way to turn it off remotely. She threw the phone down at the sofa cushions. Then just this once, she let Mitchell sit down beside her and stretch out his skinny pale arms, so she could collapse against him.

  53

  Joey rolled up his Escalade window, not liking how the two Arab women in ghostlike headscarves were staring as they walked past him on the sidewalk.

  It was almost midnight in Lourdes Robles’s Brooklyn neighborhood. The light in her fifth-floor window was still on. Probably crying to her boyfriend about what she’d just heard. Maybe fixing herself a drink. It’d taken a while, but he’d gotten to her with the phone call. Maybe rattling her enough to get sloppy and make a mistake.

  An NYPD blue-and-white sector car cruised past him, and he lowered the binoculars he’d been looking through. Then a couple of dog-walkers looked through his window. He hadn’t expected there to be this many people on the street. In the districts where his own officers normally patrolled, it was mainly prostitutes and pushers out at this hour. But here came the pub-crawlers, bike riders, families doing their wash at all-night Laundromats, and pain-in-the-ass bystanders of some hard-to-determine ethnicity hanging out on their stoops, talking idly. Any idea he’d had about grabbing Robles up as she was coming out of her building was on hold now. Too many eyes on.

  He ground his teeth and sniffed through his nose, wishing he’d brought something to take the edge off. Maybe a couple of Lorazepam, just to calm himself. He’d tried going back on the tranquilizers a few years back but had started to worry they had been making him fuzzy. Maybe he needed to go back on them to balance off the excessive amount of coke he’d been doing the last few days. The newer blow heightened his awareness, which was a definite plus, but had its downside in terms of sleep deprivation and making judgment calls, so those were factors to consider.

  Once the sector car passed, he raised the binoculars again. She was at the window, looking down at the street. “I’ma kill you,” she’d said. After she knew he had her sister. This woman was an existential threat to his world he realized. An asteroid about to crash into his planet. She was the one driving this. She’d grabbed hold of the Rockaway case and steered it out to Long Island. She’d connected all the bodies along Sunrise Highway. She’d tracked down these lying whores and then wouldn’t take the hint when his officers pulled her over on the highway. And she’d had the gall, the fucking cojones, to confront him publicly and make this a personal issue.

  He had half a mind to pull his Glock and fire a round up at her right now. But from the distance, all he’d probably do was bounce a bullet off her building and get himself on a street camera driving away in a panic. He had to get a grip, slow it down, think more strategically. Scientists talked about asteroid belts. Systems in space. They had to be disrupted to change the gravitational field and isolate the problem.

  Bright white light began to fill the interior of his vehicle. For a second, he thought the combination of drugs and adrenaline was giving him a coronary event. Jesus, don’t let me die in this city. Suburban police chief found alone and dead in his car. Parked in Brooklyn for no explicable reason.

  No.

  He would not allow that. He was still in charge of his own fate. It was his story, not hers. He’d eliminate the existential threat, but he’d do it intelligently. The way he always did. Not by trying to shoot an asteroid with a handgun. But by understanding the system around it, first.

  He realized the light flooding his vehicle was from the police car coming around the corner again, to see why he was still parked here. He lowered the binoculars just as he saw Robles move away from her window. Then he gave the officers in the sector car a friendly wave, started his engine, and began the long drive back out toward his home base, going precisely two miles under the speed limit.

  * * *

  Before Plunger even came downstairs the next morning, he could sense there was something different in the house. A presence that wasn’t supposed to be there. He walked in to the kitchen and found Joey sitting in what would usually be the head of the family’s chair at the table, talking to his wife and children.

  “Good morning, sleepyhead.” J raised the coffee mug that Brendan Jr. had made in ceramics class. “How were your dreams?”

  The kids were dressed for school. Cathy was in her purple workout clothes. The clock on the microwave said quarter to eight. Everything appeared regular. Except J was here. Which meant dreamtime was over now.

  The illusion that he could be someone else. That he could live a normal life, and put the rest of it in separate compartments. The night behind the football field, the mistakes he’d made with those women when he thought he could get away with the same things Joey had gotten away with all these years, and the disaster during the hurricane. Those were the stark realities of his life. All these other episodes—the marriage, the kids, the house—they were illusions. Dreams that were bound to fade. Now Joey was sitting before him and staring at him, like no time at all had passed between the moment when he’d realized Kim was no longer moving and
this very second some forty years later.

  “I know one of your cars is in the shop and you’re shorthanded,” Joey said with a smile that dropped Plunger’s organs into an acid bath. “I figured I’d stop by, see if there was anything I could do to help out.”

  “We’re good.” Plunger tried to match the grin. “We’re covered.”

  “Joey was saying he could give the kids a ride on his way to work,” Cathy said, cheerful and oblivious. “And then you can give me a ride to that early spin class I wanted to get to.”

  She was so checked out sometimes that Plunger wondered if both kids were on the spectrum because of her genes. Other times, though, he admitted to himself that something must have always been off on his end. Otherwise, how would he have let Joey take over so much of his life?

  “Or the other way around.” Joey put the mug down. “I can give Brendan a ride to his office, and Cathy can drop the kids before the class. That way you don’t have to do everything at once.”

  It was over now. Joey was going to take him somewhere and kill him. And if Plunger refused to go for the ride, Joey would come back to the house later and kill all of them. And make it look like Plunger had gone crazy and murdered the wife and kids before taking his own life. Either way, it was done.

  “It would take a load off my mind,” Cathy said, as the kids nodded.

  “You sure?” Plunger looked at J.

  “Hey.” Joey shrugged. “It’s what I do.”

  54

  This time the phone started vibrating much later in the night, disrupting Lourdes’s REM cycle, like someone had patched the call straight into her unconscious state. She’d been standing on Rockaway Beach with Sullivan, helplessly watching a baby float by in the water, when she heard the buzzing. Then she forced her eyes open in the dark and felt around for the phone on the night table, croaking, “Hello?” in a voice that sounded like a coffin lid opening in some old vampire movie.

  “Lourdes?”

  She looked around in the pitch black of the bedroom, trying to get oriented. The red numbers 3:33 hung suspended, like the digital clock was in outer space instead of just on Mitchell’s side of the bed. Outside the window, the lights of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge glowed softly and a few lonely drivers headed off toward Staten Island.

  “Ysabel? Eres tu?”

  Lourdes sat up on the edge of the bed, putting her bare feet on the cold floor, still trying to figure out if this was real. She’d been about to cry out in the dream as she saw the baby drift away and her heart crumbled as she realized she wasn’t enough of a swimmer to go after it.

  “Sí, soy yo.”

  Lourdes fumbled to put on the night-light, still not entirely convinced she was awake. She and Izzy rarely spoke Spanish to each other, even when they were kids, because Papi always wanted them to talk like regular Americans. It was Mami, more high-strung and prone to outbursts, who sometimes let fly in the mother tongue.

  “Dónde estás, Izzy?” she demanded. “Where the fuck are you?”

  “Uh, I don’t know, Lourdy,” her sister said in her more familiar, spacey way. “They got me checking into this place, Kings Park Psychiatric. But it seems kinda sketchy.”

  “Wait—what?”

  Mitchell was stirring, little muscles moving in his pale freckled back. This was really happening. It was 3:34 in the morning, her feet were on the floor, there was traffic on the bridge, and her sister, who’d been missing for nine months now, was on the phone, calling from a blocked number.

  “Izzy, who are you with?” Lourdes asked.

  There was no answer—just what sounded like a long intake of breath on the other end, too long for a normal human being to sustain.

  “Are you still there, mi hermana? I’ma come get you.”

  Lourdes was on her feet, looking for her pants on the floor, her shirt on the chair, and her gun in the closet.

  “Izzy, qué pasa? Are you okay?”

  But the silence just continued, as if it would never stop. As if it had never really stopped and she had just imagined this fiercely desired reunion with her sibling.

  “Don’t be that girl.” Mitchell was awake and blinking at her.

  “What girl?”

  “The girl who gets in trouble trying to save the day on her own.”

  * * *

  The little sister was actually bigger and slower-moving than Robles, Joey had noticed. Walking with a beleaguered waddle with her hands clasped to her big belly. Dimmed and confused either by medication, street drugs, or some combination that made her seem like she was trying to walk around underwater with the oxygen tank strapped to her front. No wonder she hadn’t tried to run when Ramirez and the little off-duty team he’d put together found her the other night, sleeping with other homeless people beneath an underpass near Huntington Station. She could barely put one foot in front of the other.

  Under the sodium vapor lights of Kings Park, he watched Charlie Maslow Jr. take the throwaway phone from her and then put a hand on top of her head as he pushed her into the back of the squad car. A side of him still thought maybe he should just take full custody and get rid of her, making sure no one would ever find her again. But her current condition reminded him directly of Renee and he knew he wouldn’t be able to abide killing a woman in this state.

  “She still looks pretty wack.” He turned to Ramirez.

  “Yeah, she’s been living rough for a while,” Ramirez said, looking at the abandoned psych hospital shrouded in mist at the edge of the state park. “She could use three hots and a cot for a few more days.”

  “Put her in the system under the street alias she was using,” Joey said. “Then let’s get her into the special housing unit. Have them put her in the bing.”

  “Sir? The bing? Solitary? Under what charge?”

  “Officer Ramirez, I shouldn’t have to spell this out.” Joey tried to shame him with a look. “That woman is a known prostitute. We’re going to say she assaulted several officers in the course of resisting arrest. She’s obviously off her meds and is a danger to herself as well as others. Is that clear enough for you now?”

  “Yes, sir, but I’m still worried about getting in trouble.”

  “Your chief has given you an order,” Joey said. “Worry about your family and how you’re going to feed that nephew of yours if he’s not getting deported.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Joey stood in the parking lot and watched Ramirez trudge off to the squad car. And then waited for the red taillights to glide away and disappear in the night.

  * * *

  Don’t be that girl. She wanted to smack Mitchell when he said it. Like she was going to act like some bubble-brain chick detective in a TV show or a movie, rushing out to the location on her own and getting grabbed up by the bad guy. Fuck that. Despite the fact that her pulse was triple-timing and she was having trouble catching her breath, she tried to be calm and deliberate about what she needed to do.

  She called the other members of the task force one at a time to tell them about the call, even leaving a message for B.B. She didn’t even blow her top when Danny Kovalevski admonished her for not recording the call, like that was something he would have thought of if he’d been woken up from a dead sleep, under the most stressful conditions imaginable. Instead she took a deep breath and asked him if it was possible for the Nassau County police’s Emergency Service Unit to head out to Kings Park and start the search for her sister without alerting Joseph Tolliver’s subordinates in Suffolk County, where the hospital in the park was located. And she didn’t squawk or fall into name-calling when Danny said it would be tricky but he’d see what he could do.

  Then she made a cup of coffee and called her aunt Soledad to tell her what was going on. By six in the morning, the sun was starting to rise and Mitchell sat with her awhile, quietly holding her hand to try to keep her cool. At 6:26, Danny called her back and explained the situation out on the Island. The Kings Parks Psychiatric Center, where Izzy said she was being checked in, ha
d been closed since 1996, when most of its patients had been transferred to Pilgrim Psychiatric Center in Brentwood. The facility itself was actually a series of buildings, most of which had been demolished. A couple of structures remained standing, including a forbidding, ivy-covered, thirteen-story hospital that was officially the jurisdiction of the Park Police and would be dangerous and time-consuming to search because of structural and lighting issues. In the meantime, a couple of ESU teams from Nassau had quietly encroached on Suffolk’s territory and conducted grid searches across the state park where the hospital once stood. They had found no sign of Ysabel so far.

  “You sure you didn’t just imagine her calling?” Danny asked. “So far, there’s no cell phone pings from the area in the time frame you gave us. And you know you been a little on edge lately…”

  She hung up abruptly and called Sullivan.

  * * *

  Joey sat in his Jeep, just outside Kings Park near the Nissequouge River, monitoring transmissions from the state police and the Nassau County cops. Of course, those sons of bitches were going to try to keep him out of the loop and prevent him from knowing what was going on. But with all the communication systems that had been set up to handle cross-jurisdictional issues and car chases that went across county lines, there was no way they could shut him down completely.

  “I think she made it all up,” a sergeant from Nassau was saying on channel 3 of his radio band. “The woman’s a goddamn pain in the ass, at the best of times. But now I think she’s gone off the deep end.”

  “You hear she’s threatening to come out with a team and conduct her own search?” a lieutenant from the local state police barracks responded.

  “Hey, it’s a free country,” the Nassau sergeant said. “Or at least it was last time I looked. As long as it’s on her budget, not ours, she can go to hell and back as far as I’m concerned.”

  * * *

  Of course, she wasn’t going to be that girl, traipsing around an abandoned state mental hospital by herself. Instead she waited until eight in the morning and had Mitchell walk her to the Camry, which was parked on Fourth Avenue with Sullivan’s “Erin Go Bragh” sticker on the back window. Then she drove out to Kings Park with a plan, arranging to meet Tierney, Bogdan, and whoever else they could muster in the parking lot off St. Johnland Road to do their own search.