by Bill Stanton
“Okay,” Lucy said, “I’ll start as soon as we’re done. So whaddaya think?”
“It sounds promising. I think—”
“Promising? You’re kidding, right?” Lucy blurted. “I mean, I know you always like to keep it low-key and all, but c’mon, A. J. This is fucking amazing!”
“Okay, okay. Yes, it’s got amazing possibilities but we’re not there yet. Right now all we have is him. We need more. And by the way, I’m not at all sure he’s being completely straight.”
“What? How much straighter could he be?”
“Well,” A. J. said, “for starters, he knows who Kevin’s partner was in the department. Or at least he has a very good idea. He may have a good reason for holding back, but I’m telling you he knows. Maybe he sees it as his ace in the hole, the one card he’s got left to play. Or maybe he’s not ready to completely trust us yet. But believe me, he knows.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“I’ve done this a few times. And he sounds way too smart not to know who he was in bed with. The stakes were way too high. You did a really nice job here, Lucy. So let’s do this: since I’m just getting started on the Brock thing, you can run with Supreme. Start talking to some other people about him, people from the old days and from the music business. Try to get some sense of what kind of guy he is, how other people see him.”
“Oooooh, yeeesssss,” Lucy squealed. “A. J., you’re the best.”
“Hey, no biggie, girl, you’ve earned it. Did you set up anything else with him?”
“He invited me to some, I don’t know, I guess it’s like a promo party for one of his new rappers. It’s at a club in Brooklyn. I think it’s actually like under the Brooklyn Bridge. It’s later in the week.”
“Of course he did. You don’t have to go if you’re not comfortable, or if—”
“A. J.,” she cut him off. “I know that’s coming from the right place but it’s still patronizing. I’m a big girl. I’ll be fine.”
“Okay,” he said with a heavy sigh. “Call me tomorrow and let me know how you’re doing.”
6
ON SUNDAY MORNING, Frank Bishop was his usual high-energy, hyperactive self. He’d had a really quiet Saturday night—no women, no booze, no carrying on—partly because he was tired but mostly because he simply couldn’t deal. He’d once heard somebody say, “I hate everything and everybody and I hate everything about everybody,” and that pretty much summed up how he was feeling by Saturday afternoon. It didn’t happen often, but every once in a while, he just needed to totally retreat, to be by himself.
After he’d interviewed Andrea Jafaari at Bellevue, he’d gone to the press conference with her and Victoria Cannel. Essentially, he just stood there for almost forty-five minutes while Victoria strutted, preened, and served up witty, sometimes biting responses to the reporters’ questions. Victoria was in fine form. She did righteous indignation with about as much over-the-top, almost campy, passion as Pacino in Scarface. She looked great too, Bishop thought, with her thick, lustrous hair swept back away from her face and her blue suit outlining the contours of her soft, fleshy curves. Though she was in her midforties and, as Bishop liked to say, way past warranty, she was clearly garage-kept. He passed the time imagining himself slowly undoing her skirt and watching it slide down to her ankles. Then he’d peel back her panties and bend her over one of the cheap brown folding chairs right there in that room with its toxic fluorescent lighting. He got so into it that at one point he started to close his eyes and breathe a little heavily, forgetting he was in front of a phalanx of reporters and cameras. By the time the press conference was over, he was drained instead of horny and he decided to simply head home.
Bishop lived in a stunning town house on East Seventy-Ninth Street off Madison, just a few blocks uptown from Supreme. Like much of the rest of his life, it was a cleverly negotiated arrangement. The house was owned by J.D. and Kiki Hiller of Power XXL, the largest independent oil company in America. Bishop had been their go-to guy for years, the “fixer” who, in return, got a two-bedroom apartment on the ground floor, accessible by the old servants’ entrance, rent-free. The “real” front door opened into a black and white marble foyer with a small elevator and a grand winding staircase. The Hillers spent most of their time at their 55,000-acre Texas ranch, which meant that Bishop had the run of the place just about all the time.
When he walked into his apartment, his king shepherds, Gus and Woody, came running to greet him. Gus was named for Augustus McCrae and Woody for Woodrow F. Call, the two stalwart, irresistible cowboys at the heart of Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove. It was the best book Bishop had ever listened to. Bishop played with the dogs for a bit, went through the mail, checked his messages, and took a long, hot shower.
Then it was time to decompress. He ordered some pizza (sausage, extra cheese, as always), including enough for Teresa, the live-in housekeeper, turned off his cell phone and the house phone, and popped The Good, the Bad,- and the Ugly into the DVD player. The old spaghetti western remained one of his favorite movies. He’d seen it dozens of times, but he still found it totally absorbing. It never failed to take his mind off whatever was bothering him.
Bishop loved Clint Eastwood’s unflappable quiet cool. No matter how shitty his luck, no matter how bad things got, there wasn’t even a hint of emotion in his facial expressions or his body language. He gave nothing away unless he wanted to.
In addition to the performances, the action, and the terrific scorched desert scenes, Bishop loved the movie because of its raw, cynical take on human nature. The most obvious piece of this, the fact that people will do anything for money, was a critical part of the story as the characters spent the movie desperately searching for a pile of stolen gold. But it went deeper than this. Bishop had once seen an interview with Sergio Leone, the legendary director, who said, when talking about the movie’s story, that in the pursuit of profit there is no such thing as good and evil. Everything depends on chance—the circumstances you face, the choices you’re forced to make. And in the end, he said, it’s not the best man who wins but the luckiest. Bishop never forgot either of these things.
When he woke up, he was surprised to see that the TV and the DVD player were still on. He didn’t remember nodding off. Unfortunately, he’d fallen asleep before the three-way shoot-out between Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, and Eli Wallach at the end of the movie. Bishop had gotten nearly ten hours of sleep, and physically, he was totally juiced, completely recharged.
Emotionally, however, it was another story. He’d had the Jafaari case for a little more than twenty-four hours and it was making him nuts. He’d gotten even more conflicted about it since interviewing the kid’s mother. Bishop thought of himself as an extraordinary judge of character. He believed it was his strongest asset as an investigator. And his judgment told him that Andrea Jafaari was a decent, hardworking woman who did everything she could as a single parent to take care of her kids. When he talked to her in the conference room at Bellevue Hospital, she was distraught over her son, but she wasn’t the least bit jittery. She maintained eye contact, she answered his questions directly, and she was, he was convinced, completely honest.
All of which just made things more complicated. Bishop was already plenty unhappy about working for a suspected terrorist. Now there was a possibility that he wasn’t a terrorist, that maybe the cops had shot an innocent kid. Bishop felt like he was fucked either way. He couldn’t decide which was worse: working for Jafaari if her son was a terrorist or working for Jafaari if he wasn’t.
Bishop checked the time. It was nearly nine thirty. Shit, he thought, I gotta get going. As luck would have it, he was about to find out just how pissed some of his cop friends were that he had taken the Jafaari case. Once every eight weeks or so, Bishop and Chief Walter Fitzgerald would meet at the NYPD’s outdoor firing range in the Bronx for a little shooting, a little training, and a little gossip. It was always on a Sunday morning, when the range was officially closed.
Known as Rodman’s Neck, the range was tucked away on fifty-four acres in a corner of Pelham Bay Park, the largest park in the city. Used by the army and navy during World Wars I and II, the range had a dozen buildings, including a gun shop, classrooms, and full-scale mock-ups of various kinds of real buildings that ESU and other divisions of the NYPD used for training.
Thanks to some fairly uninhibited driving, Bishop managed to get to the range only ten minutes late. When he walked up to Fitzgerald and the two cops he’d brought along from his detail, he got exactly the kind of greeting he expected. “Holy shit,” one of the cops, a detective named O’Brien, said, “get a load a this. It’s Benedict fuckin’ Bishop. What’s up, man, ISIS take Sundays off? I thought Friday was their holy day of worship. Get yourself a fuckin’ prayer mat yet, traitor? I actually bet everyone at Donohue’s last night you didn’t have the stones to show up this morning. Thanks a lot. You’re still a shitbag traitor, and now I have to buy everyone drinks tonight.”
“It’s nice to know that no matter how fucked up the world gets,” Bishop responded, “there’ll always be a few things I can count on. Like you, O’Brien, being an idiot and a cheap prick.”
“All right, guys,” Fitzgerald said. “Dial it down a couple of notches, okay? You’re about to have loaded weapons in your hands.”
It was a command, not a request. The chief, in his midfifties, with nearly thirty years on the job, was old-school. He had a surprisingly smooth, unlined face for someone who’d led the kind of life he had, but it seemed capable of only one expression—a cross between a scowl and a sneer. He didn’t talk a whole lot either, but when he did, people listened. He was a talented street cop and, as it turned out, a talented politician as well.
In the NYPD you can rise to the rank of captain simply by putting your time in and passing all the exams. It’s very straightforward. Anything higher, however, only happens through an appointment by the police commissioner. It’s personal and political. Fitzgerald had managed to thrive and advance from deputy inspector to inspector, then deputy chief to assistant chief, and finally chief, under three different commissioners. No small achievement, when you consider that the department’s politics were so quirky and egocentric they’d have put a sorority house full of prom queens to shame.
The fifth member of the morning’s shooting party was John Lee Russell, the range master, a small, wiry man in ninja pants and wraparound Oakleys. Russell was an internationally known combat instructor who looked—white hair, military demeanor, and all—like Senator John McCain’s slightly demented younger brother. He was a former U.S. Marine who had trained the elite units that guarded Jordan’s King Hussein and Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak. But on this morning, standing before a lifeless collection of targets and sand hills just across the water from City Island, he was about to put a few cops, and one private investigator, through their paces.
“Morning, ladies,” Russell said, offering his standard greeting. “I trust you’re all ready to go, right? Okay then, let’s get to it. In a perfect world, when somebody’s coming at you”—Bishop immediately thought, Shit, in a perfect world nobody’d be coming at me—“one shot between the nipples should cause the assailant a significant loss of morale. We know it never does. As often as not, after absorbing the impact of the first shot, the enemy will simply disregard any further ballistic insults. So let’s work on the Mozambique.”
With that, Russell turned around to face the targets, which were fifteen feet away. Without warning, he drew his weapon, shells flew, and the air reverberated with the sound of three quick shots. Bishop could taste the gunpowder. “That’s the drill,” Russell said with evident satisfaction. “Two to the chest and one to the center of the forehead. That’ll drop anybody, even some crazy, drugged-up motherfucker.”
The average cop with the standard amount of weapons training and practice should have been able to put two to the body and one to the head in about three seconds. A good shot could do it in two seconds, and an exceptional one in about a second and a half. On any given day, Bishop and the chief could be either good or exceptional.
“Feeling sharp today?” the chief asked Bishop. “Lunch says you’re goin’ down.”
“You’re on,” Bishop said with a big smile.
As the other cops whooped it up taunting Bishop and making a couple of side bets, the two men prepared for their competition. Fitzgerald was carrying a Gold Cup Commander, a .45-caliber stainless-steel handgun with a seven-inch barrel. It was a beautiful weapon given to him by his men when he was promoted to chief. He carried it in a Fletch high-ride holster, which had a very narrow profile and sat at a slight angle on the hip.
Bishop had his Kimber Ultra Elite CQB, a lightweight .45-caliber aluminum pistol with a black finish, rosewood grip, and a satin slide. He wore it cocked and locked in a custom-made, non-thumb-break, high-ride leather holster designed for speed. He liked to say the Kimber was the Ferrari of handguns, and it seemed to shine even in the flat light of the dreary, sunless morning.
“Ready, ladies?” Russell asked.
Bishop and Fitzgerald looked at each other and then nodded to Russell.
“Okay, then. Make ready your weapons.”
Both men felt for their holsters without taking their eyes off the targets. The tension was growing. “Don’t think. React,” Russell said. “When you think, you get in trouble. Keep it simple. See the motherfucker, shoot the motherfucker.”
He waited another couple of seconds before shouting the command to fire. In a flash, both shooters sent two rounds to the body and one right between the eyebrows. They were dead even in movement, speed, and accuracy. They did two rounds like this and Russell decided to change the conditions. He added a tactical reload after the first two shots to the body. This meant releasing the magazine so it fell to the ground, inserting a new one, and getting off the last shot to the forehead. All, of course, while losing as little time as possible.
After several more rounds, it was still too close to call. “Last round,” Russell announced before their seventh attempt at the Mozambique. “Ready?” When he shouted, “Fire,” the chief was clearly a hair quicker to the draw. “That’s too good,” Bishop said, holding his hands up in mock surrender after both men hit their targets. “No way I can beat that.”
• • •
While the chief talked to the range master, Bishop and the two cops picked up all their spent shells. This took a while since there were hundreds. Bishop was always surprised by how many rounds they fired in a short time. Then they all cleaned their weapons before Bishop and Fitzgerald took off for City Island to grab some lunch. Barely ten minutes from the range, City Island remained a great little hidden piece of New York, a tiny spit of land in Long Island Sound accessible only by a short bridge from the Bronx, with one main avenue that ran the mile-and-a-half length of the island and no street more than a couple of hundred yards from the water. It looked and felt like an old-time New England fishing village, with just over four thousand mostly middle- and working-class residents. It was the kind of place where property often stayed within families, which went a long way toward controlling the character of the place, keeping out both minorities and Manhattan yuppies looking for waterfront property.
Bishop and Fitzgerald, as always, went to Artie’s, a local hangout right near the second of the three traffic lights on the island’s main drag. Unlike most of the island’s other restaurants, which had lots of glass and outdoor deck areas to take advantage of the water views, Artie’s, with its brick interior, was as viewless as a vault. The food was the main attraction. Bishop and Fitzgerald took a table in the back along the wall.
After their time at the range, they were talking about guns and ammo. Specifically, they were engaged in the endless debate over the relative merits of a nine-millimeter versus a .45. Which inflicts more damage, the smaller, faster nine-millimeter round or the much larger, slower forty-five-millimeter bullet? It was the shooter’s version of a couple of sports f
ans arguing over who’s a better quarterback, Tom Brady or Peyton Manning.
They both ordered the lobster special, and when their drinks came, Fitzgerald changed the subject. “So when’re you planning on tellin’ me about your new case?” he asked. “You know, the one where you’re trying to help get a terrorist off. The one where you’re working for someone who wants to kill the same men, women, and children you once took an oath to protect and serve.”
Bishop thought for a moment before responding. Though he had obviously known the subject would come up, he didn’t expect the chief to come on so strong right out of the gate. It caught him off guard. “Oh, you heard about that, did you?” Bishop said, trying to be cute. The effort was pointless. The chief didn’t crack even a hint of a smile, and Bishop suddenly couldn’t think of anything clever to say.
“Shit,” he mumbled finally, “what was I supposed to do, turn down the biggest fuckin’ case I’ve ever been offered? Business is good, Chief, but it’s not that good. I mean, think about the publicity and what this could do for my career. This could—”
“From where I sit, this looks like it could kill your career,” the chief said, interrupting him. “But let’s assume you’re right, and maybe you are. Lawyers get rich and famous representing subhuman cocksuckers all the time. Is that all that matters? The money? The notoriety? You have no allegiances, no belief in right and wrong? You just sell yourself to the highest bidder?”
“Chief, with all due respect, I’m not a cop anymore. I’m a private fuckin’ detective. And in case you hadn’t noticed, it’s usually not the good guys who hire me. This is not a calling, it’s a job. And often it’s a pretty shitty one. I spend half my time hiding in the bushes trying to get pictures of some selfish shithead cheating on his wife. Or I gotta chase some lonely, pissed-off wife who’s tryin’ to get even by sucking some other guy’s dick. So if I’m not doing this for the money, Chief, what the hell’m I doin’ it for? Maybe a little fame, I guess, which never hurts with the ladies. And, shit, I mean the adrenaline rush is great sometimes, but if I didn’t need the money, I’d give this up in a fuckin’ heartbeat.”