The Ninth Step

by Gabriel Cohen

  That got under Jack’s skin. Stay on track, he told himself. “Something changed, though. … Did he do something that pissed somebody off?”

  Farro hacked up some nasty phlegm and spit it on the sidewalk. “What I heard, he decided he was too good for us. Didn’t want to get his precious hands dirty no more.”

  “What do you mean, ‘you heard’? Weren’t you there?”

  Farro took out a handkerchief and dabbed at his mouth.

  “I was away at that pernt. I went up to Ossining for a few years back in ’sixty-four.” Ossining, an hour north of the city, was home to Sing Prison. The mobster turned to Jack. “So now what? You sorry you asked about all this shit? It doesn’t exactly make you feel proud of your old poppy now, does it?”

  Jack sat thinking for a minute, watching a little toddler chase after an anxious-looking dachshund, reaching out to try to pull the dog’s tail. It seemed logical that the thug who had hired his father would be the man who’d want to teach him a lesson, if he stopped playing ball.

  “This crew you had traveling down to Philly,” he said carefully. “Was it a Joe Gallo thing?”

  The old man scoffed. “Nah. Our little operation would’a just been peanuts for him.”

  “Who then? Who ran the operation?”

  Orlando Farro didn’t answer. He just made a pained face.

  “It’s ancient history,” Jack said. “Just tell me who it was.”

  The old man moaned and pressed a hand to his stomach. Jack realized that his bowels were acting up.

  “Listen,” Farro said, squirming. “I think I already repaid my favor to Cosenza.” He turned and looked over his shoulder for his nurse.

  “Please,” Jack said. “Whoever it was, he probably died a long time ago …”

  The old mobster grimaced; he looked like he was about to weep from frustration and shame. “It was Frank Raucci, goddamnit! And last I heard, he was plenty alive and kickin’.” He cried out, “Shirley! I need you! Take me home!”

  The nurse rushed over and began to wheel the man away. Farro looked over his shoulder and offered one bitter parting comment. “For chrissakes, Leightner, don’t get old!”

  Raucci. Jack frowned; he couldn’t remember the thug from his childhood. Well, at least he had a name to work with.

  He stood up and headed down the path toward his car. Right now, he needed to keep moving forward on the Nadim Hasni case. He was off duty, but that didn’t matter: the possible consequences of not catching this suspect were more drastic than he liked to contemplate.

  The first stop was the Homicide Task Force, to see if any of his contacts had come up with more information about Hasni. He found a new fax in his in-box. Sitting at his desk in the crowded detectives’ squad room, he read it with mounting excitement. He made a couple of calls, and then he dialed Richie Powker. “You still at the Seven-oh? Something very interesting just came in. Hold tight—I’ll be right over.”

  “I’M GLAD YOU’RE STILL here,” he told his partner as he hurried into the squad room, bearing a manila folder.

  “Whaddaya got? Richie asked. The Seven-oh detective was sitting amidst a mess of case files, message slips, and half-eaten food.

  “When we were running Nadim Hasni’s name through the computer the other day, I called someone I know over at the Department of Finance.” Jack sat down next to his partner’s desk, opened his folder, and took out several sheets of paper. “She faxed me these this afternoon. For the past couple years, Hasni has paid regular taxes for his car-service driving, but his income went way down in 2001 and 2002. Here’s the weird thing: there’s a period where he seems to go completely off the record: no taxes taken out, no paychecks at all.”

  Richie ran a hand through his thatch of red hair. “From when to when?”

  “Mid-October 2001 to April of 2002.”

  The Seven-oh detective squinted. “I wonder when his daughter died? Maybe he just didn’t feel up to going to work.”

  Jack shook his head. “I looked it up. She did die during that time, but not until March of 2002.”

  Richie thought for a moment. “Who knows? Maybe the guy was just driving for somebody who let him work off the books.”

  “Maybe—but notice that he went off the radar just after Nine-eleven.”

  Richie frowned. “Do you think he might have gone out of the country? Maybe to some training camp in Afghanistan or something? Isn’t that what these guys do?”

  “That doesn’t seem like a very good time for a Pakistani terrorist to go traveling overseas by plane. I checked with Customs anyhow: there’s no record of him flying anywhere. Unless he had a fake passport … But take a look at this.” Jack flipped through the papers and held one up. “Just for the hell of it, I asked my friend to look up our victim’s tax records. Robert Brasciak took in regular pay from his job at R. J. Stanley for the last couple of years. ‘Go back a little,’ I told her. It turns out that there’s also a complete hole in Brasciak’s records, from early October 2001 to April of 2002. Coincidence?”

  Richie scrutinized the paper.

  Jack’s gaze drifted around the squad room. Now that his excitement about the new information had leveled off, he had time to think—and to remember. He looked at his partner.

  Richie glanced up. “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You’ve got this weird look on your face.”

  Jack sighed. “I got a phone call from our pal Charlson a couple hours ago. He wanted to check in, see how we were doing.”

  Richie shrugged. “Okay … So?”

  Jack frowned. “Listen, I have no idea what this means, but he, ah, he said I should ask you about your wife.”

  Richie stared in disbelief, and then he shook his head and looked away. After a few seconds, he turned back and spoke in a low voice. “Her name is Amina. She was born in Pakistan.”

  Jack scratched his cheek. “And you didn’t mention this?” He had heard his partner briefly refer to his wife a couple of times but had imagined some red-haired, doughy white woman.

  “Mention it? Why should I?” Richie’s voice started to rise—he glanced around the squad room, then lowered his voice again. “She’s American. She’s a goddamn citizen. Why should I have to mention her? I’m married to a Pakistani-American and that means I support terrorists or something?”

  “Easy. No one is saying that.”

  “Charlson is, apparently.”

  Jack shrugged. “It’s just … interesting that you didn’t bring it up.”

  Richie gripped the arms of his chair. “What am I supposed to do, apologize? I lived through Nine-eleven in New York City. I heard what people were saying. What my fellow cops were saying. Towelheads. Sand niggers. We should go over there and bomb those fuckers and turn their countries into parking lots. My wife had to live through that, people giving her dirty looks on the subway, making nasty comments. There were ignorant bastards around here beating up Sikhs, just because they wore turbans. What do you think all that did to my kids?”

  “All right,” Jack said. “I’m certainly not accusing you of anything. Or your wife. It’s just … Charlson seems to be saying that you might be a little less than gung-ho about this case.”

  His partner stared in disbelief again and gestured at the paperwork in front of him. “What do you think I’m doing right now, on my own time?! I’m a cop, Jack. True blue. And a native New Yorker. I love this goddamn city. You think I’m not gonna work to track down some asshole who wants to blow it up?”

  Jack held up his hands in apology. “I don’t think that at all. Look, I’m sorry. Let’s just forget about it, okay?” He stood up. “Listen: I’ve got a court appearance tomorrow morning, but after lunch I’ll come by here and we’ll work on this together, okay?”

  Richie scowled. “That fed can kiss my ass.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  NEAR SUNSET, NADIM HASNI paused after he rounded the corner onto his home block.

  He looked carefully up and down the street.
His gaze darted from sight to sight: a couple of little Pakistani children bouncing a ball outside the big twenty-four-hour Laundromat in the middle of the block; a cat poised halfway up the mottled trunk of an old sycamore tree. Nervous, Nadim lit a cigarette. He heard a skittering noise right behind him and his heart almost leapt out of his chest. He whirled around, only to see a squirrel dart behind a couple of trash cans.

  Nadim pressed a hand to his chest and waited for his heart rate to slow. Anyone else might have attributed such jitters to the shock of having recently killed a man, but Nadim knew that he couldn’t rely on such an obvious explanation. The truth was that he’d been having problems with his nerves for a long time now. He wondered if he was going mad.

  Two lanky Pakistani teenagers walked toward him, both raptly listening to little earphones. Nadim wondered if they would startle when they saw him, if they would shout Murderer! and run, but they moved blithely past, slouching like true American teens. He looked away and spotted an old black man sitting on his front porch, staring idly into the distance. Again, Nadim wondered if this neighbor would jump up at the sight of him, but the man gazed right through him. It seemed that word of the murder had not gotten out—or at least that he himself was still anonymous and invisible, as usual. Just another Pak car-service driver, like a thousand others.

  He smoked the rest of his cigarette, watching the block. After a couple more tense minutes, he had to conclude that the block looked as it always did: a modest series of row houses in Kensington, Brooklyn. Concrete stoops, aluminum-sided houses, cheap cars in the driveways. But there had been a time when he would have marveled to think that he might ever live on such a respectable street. Back when he had first come to America, when he had been forced to sleep on couches in the homes of distant relatives, in dingy old brick apartment buildings whose hallways smelled of stale sweat and cat piss.

  Nadim looked down. His heart rate had slowed, but his hands were trembling. He crushed his cigarette underfoot, took a deep breath, and moved on down the sidewalk. As he neared his apartment, he paused to look again for any sign that he was being followed. Nothing. He exhaled. It seemed impossible, given how the police always found the culprits quickly on the TV crime shows, but maybe he had come out of that deli the other day unobserved.

  He walked around a battered white contractor’s van parked in front of the house and gingerly moved up the concrete driveway, past the sign in the middle of the lawn: DR. TEKCHAND PARKASH, ADOLESCENT GYNECOLOGY. The doctor, a Hindu from a little town outside Delhi, kept to himself, which suited Nadim just fine; he came and went to his basement apartment from a separate door on the side of the house, so he didn’t have to find out why on earth adolescent girls might be in need of such treatment.

  He continued up the driveway, then paused to dig in his pockets. He caught his reflection in the glass outer door: he looked exhausted and disheveled. With difficulty, he managed to locate his keys. After he pulled the key ring out, he accidentally dropped it on the asphalt. As he bent down to pick it up, he heard a sharp thwack overhead. A chunk of brick fell at his feet and some crumbs of it landed on his hair. He looked up, dazed with lack of sleep—had it fallen off the top of the building? He didn’t see anything up there. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a stranger moving up the driveway toward him, a stern fellow with severely short hair, holding up a long, thin wrapped bundle. Farther off, he saw the back door of the contractor’s van hanging open in the street. A flash and a muffled sound came out of the front of the bundle and then Nadim heard another thwack on the wall next to him.

  He glanced wildly around, but there were no neighbors in sight to help him. He scrambled to his feet and bolted, his chest gripped by an icy band of fear.

  He heard shouting behind him, several voices, but he didn’t look back, just sprinted up the driveway and veered around the little freestanding garage at the back of the house. There was a narrow space between the weathered gray wall and a chain-link fence; he hurtled into it, squeezed past some prickly yellow-budding shrubs, and burst out into a neighbor’s backyard. He banged into a pole, part of a child’s swing set, and careened around the side of that house, through another side passage, and out onto the next block.

  To his right, the contractor’s van came screeching around the corner. Nadim turned left and ran. He was soon gasping for breath—he cursed his smoking habit—and realized that he could never outrun the onrushing vehicle. Impulsively he veered again, vaulted a low fence, dodged around another aluminum-sided house, through another yard, around another house.

  He felt a painful stitch in his side. There was no way he could maintain this pace. He paused, desperate, to think. At first he wanted to run toward one of the bigger avenues, where other people would be around. Surely his pursuers wouldn’t dare shoot him in public. On the other hand, strangers might block his way …

  He heard shouting behind the last house and he staggered off again—and that’s when inspiration struck. He recognized this block: he had been walking Enny home from school one day when they heard a cat’s pitiful mewing. He had wanted to go on home, but Enny had tugged at his hand. “Abbu, something is wrong.” They stopped and listened more carefully. And they traced the persistent sound to the side of a nearby house: it was coming from beneath a pair of heavy metal storm doors. Nadim was never thrilled about contacting random American strangers—who knew how they would react to his brown face?—but he had walked back around to the front porch, gone up, and rung the bell. No answer. He returned to the storm doors. Hoping that he wouldn’t get mistaken for a burglar, he bent down and discovered that they were not locked, and his daughter had looked so proud of him as he lifted out the bedraggled cat.

  Panting now, he scanned the surrounding homes. Which had it been? They looked identical, made of pale yellow brick. He struggled to recall. The right side of the street—the house had definitely been on the right. He ran across. The first few houses had driveways, but no storm doors at the side. He ran on. Yes! Halfway down the next driveway, he could see a pair of black metal storm doors outside the basement. He rushed up the asphalt, bent down, and yanked on the right one. It didn’t budge. He tried the other. Locked also. He straightened up, frantic. The house had a little window above the storm doors, and he had a flash of memory: a crystal pendant, a little angel, hanging behind the glass, sparkling in the sun. But there was no pendant here. In the distance, he heard screeching tires.

  He couldn’t run back to the street, so he dashed up the driveway, careened around the rear of the house, and down into the next driveway, where he found another set of storm doors. He skidded to a stop and looked up at the window: there was the angel! He bent down and lifted up with all his strength. The heavy metal squealed and complained, but it rose as he straightened up. Some concrete steps led down into the darkness from which he had freed the cat. He ducked inside, pulled the door down after himself, then caught its full weight at the last minute so it wouldn’t slam.

  He was in pitch blackness now. He sat on one of the steps, not knowing what lay below, struggling to quiet his raspy breath. He listened, every nerve straining outward. He heard a car engine revving, and shouting, and he crouched down, wincing, prepared to be discovered and yanked back up into the fading light. He had nothing to fight back with, nothing but his bare hands.

  And then … the car sounds receded, and the shouting. He sat there in the dark, not daring to believe his luck. It had been brought to him, he realized, by his daughter. By Enny, his own little angel.

  The darkness began to weigh on him, though. He started to tremble. Soon he was overcome by a screamingly powerful desire to lift the door, to emerge back into the air and light, but he knew it wasn’t safe. Not yet.

  The seconds ticked by and he began to sweat profusely, and then to shake as if overcome by fever.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  JACK LEIGHTNER WAS A humble man, but there was one thing that he felt was a bit beneath him: riding the subway. A homicide detective spent a good par
t of his life in cars, crisscrossing the borough, chasing after suspects, arriving at crime scenes like the cavalry coming over a hill. You didn’t worry much about parking, and certainly not about getting tickets. But this morning he had to testify in a Manhattan courtroom, down near City Hall, and he’d hardly be the only one with an official parking permit on his dash, so he decided to just bite the bullet and ride the train.

  As it went over the Manhattan Bridge, he opened his briefcase and reread his case file. Trials took a long time to wend their way through New York City’s overloaded court system, but this case was particularly old. The defendant, a forty-five-year-old male with severe anger-management issues, had killed his wife in a fit of jealous rage. Then, overcome by remorse, he had jumped in his car, sped away, and decided to kill himself by careening into the side of a gasoline truck parked at a service station (no doubt imagining the massive fireball you always saw in such situations on TV). But the truck had not blown up—the car had wedged itself underneath the fuel tank, and the killer broke most of the bones in his body. He had ended up in the infirmary at Rikers Island for almost a year. Jack was thankful for his detailed notes.

  Bright sun poured through the train’s windows and he glanced down at the broad East River, and the pewter harbor, and then the skyscrapers of downtown Manhattan came into view. And then, of course, he was thinking about terrorism and the Hasni investigation. Frowning, he forced his attention back to the papers spread out on his lap; if he couldn’t focus, the trial of this other killer might well go off track. But he looked up: there it was again, the fleeting sense that he was missing some simple but crucial detail in the Hasni investigation, something that had been in front of his face all along.

  At his stop, along with a throng of fellow riders, he pushed out the door past a tide of rude city dwellers pressing into the car, and then he strode toward the exit. The fluorescent lights gleamed against the sides of the white-tiled tunnel, and hundreds of New Yorkers threaded their way past each other on the crowded platform. Jack noticed that half of them carried shopping bags or briefcases or knapsacks, and again he couldn’t help thinking of terrorists, of the coordinated series of explosions that had rocked a number of commuter trains in Madrid the year before, killing almost two hundred. He couldn’t remember if the bombers had blown themselves up, but there certainly seemed to be no lack of fanatics around the world who would. As a detective, Jack had seen hundreds of killers motivated by rage, fear, or greed, but it still seemed hard to believe that human beings might commit mass murder and simultaneous suicide, driven just by politics or religious devotion. It was even more incredible that they could believe that such a horrible act might get them into any reasonable heaven.