by Bill Stanton
“I understand all that, but I thought your reputation, at least within the department, meant something to you. First you leave the job under a cloud, and now this. You know, a lot of people have you in their sights right now.”
“Is that coming from you, Chief? Or are you trying to give me a heads-up about what I can expect? ’Cause if it’s a warning, I appreciate the thought, but I’m a big boy and I can handle whatever shit comes my way.”
“It’s nice to be confident, Frank, but when the commissioner gets wind of this he’s gonna have a major hard-on for you.”
“To tell you the truth, I never thought he was all that fond of me to begin with.”
“He thinks you’re completely full of shit. All style and no substance.”
“I didn’t realize he knew me that well,” Bishop said with a smile. “Maybe the makin’-it-up-as-you-go-along thing cuts a little too close to home for him.”
“Funny. But this is no laughing matter. We’ve been friends a long time, Frank, and I want you to listen to me. You fuck with the bull, you’ll get the horns. Help nail this motherfuckin’ terrorist and move on.”
“But what if . . .” Bishop hesitated for a moment and then continued. “What if he’s not a terrorist? What if he’s—”
“See, that’s the kind of subversive shit I’m talking about,” the chief said, clearly angry now. “Nobody wants to hear that. Why would you even say that? Jee-sus, man. What the hell was he doin’ in that apartment, then? Pickin’ fuckin’ wallpaper? Commissioner Brock was almost killed that night and your guy was right in the middle of the action. What more do you need?”
“Look, if this is as clear-cut as you and everybody else seem to think, then there’s no problem. I’ll do my investigation and the scumbag’ll end up gettin’ fried.”
“Okay,” the chief said finally, “let’s get outta here.”
• • •
Bishop paid the check and the two men headed for the parking lot. Walking toward his car, Fitzgerald looked back over his shoulder and asked, “Is Anthony Pennetta on your interview list?”
Bishop, about to open his car door, asked, “The ESU commander?”
“I guess that’s a no. Just as well. Zito’d never talk to you anyway. He barely talks to anyone in the department unless he has to.”
With that, the chief got into his unmarked police sedan with his detective driver. As the car started to pull out of the lot, he put the window down. “Watch your back on this, Frank,” he said. “I’d hate to have to find a new sucker to hustle at the range.”
• • •
The two men spoke by cell this time and it was a shorter conversation. No pleasantries and no effort to make small talk. It was strictly business.
“Have you made any progress on the project we talked about?” one of the men asked to begin the conversation.
“Indeed, I have,” came the response. “I am quite gratified to say that I believe I have come up with the perfect solution. I think you’ll be very pleased with the results. It will eliminate our problem and be untraceable.”
“Security at the hospital won’t be an issue?”
“None whatsoever.”
“Timetable?”
“Resolution will be achieved within the next seventy-two hours. No need to give this any more thought. Consider it done.”
“I knew my faith in you would be rewarded. Thank you, my friend. I’ll talk to you soon.”
7
AS BISHOP BEGAN the drive back to Manhattan he had a soft, relaxed smile on his face. It was a look of satisfaction. Just when he thought that maybe he’d gone too far and the chief was really pissed at him, the old guy tossed him a batting-practice fastball right down the center of the plate. ESU commander Anthony Pennetta. “Shit,” Bishop said out loud in the car, “how the fuck could I have missed that?” He was relieved that the chief was still in his corner, but he was really annoyed with himself. He knew Pennetta should’ve been near the top of his interview list. The guy was in the goddamned hallway when the shooting started, and he was in the apartment only seconds after it stopped. And anyone with even a half-assed connection to the upper level of the police department and its factional, Iraqi-style politics knew Pennetta and Brock couldn’t stand each other.
Nevertheless, Pennetta wasn’t even on Bishop’s list, and Bishop knew he’d fucked up. He’d gotten distracted by all the bullshit surrounding the case. Though Bishop seemed, to people who knew him only casually (which was most people), far more interested in getting drunk and getting laid than he was in getting the job done, he was in fact almost manic about his work.
He had no illusions. He was aware that people often thought of him as little more than a party boy, someone to hang out with. Even worse, however, he was sometimes seen as a kind of court jester, someone to provide a little diversionary entertainment and nothing more. For these people, laughing at Bishop was reason enough to hang out with him. By his own description, he was “the girl you wanted to fuck, not the one you wanted to take home.” This image of him was mostly the result of his younger, significantly wilder days, and he was still struggling to overcome it.
But Bishop had no regrets. In the small, competitive world of celebrity private eyes, image and self-promotion are everything. “You’ve really got to bang the drum and make some noise to get them in the tent,” Bishop told people. “But once they’re inside, you’ve got to give them a good performance or they won’t come back.” He never forgot that without the wild-man, do-anything, take-your-pants-off-and-get-up-on-the-bar character he’d created early on, no one would’ve noticed him. It was the thing that separated him from everyone else.
That, and the Bishop charm, which for many people was an acquired taste. There was nothing subtle, sophisticated, or cool about Bishop. By contemporary standards, he was pure caveman—an honors graduate of the Frank Sinatra–Arnold Schwarzenegger finishing school. He was disarming and often shockingly blunt. At a chic Manhattan restaurant one night Bishop was chatting up several attractive, obviously successful women he’d just introduced himself to at the bar while everyone was waiting for a table. There was some mildly suggestive, playful teasing and everyone was all smiles. A little while later, when the women had been seated at a table next to Bishop’s, one of them got up to go to the ladies’ room.
She stopped and said something innocuous to Bishop about her after-dinner plans. He smiled; picked up the long, thick pepper mill from the table; and said, “How ’bout I get some batteries for this and we have a party?” Rather than smack him or walk away horrified, she smiled, leaned over, and began stroking his ridiculously ample chest.
• • •
One of Bishop’s plugged-in friends had once told him you know you’re totally wired in New York when you can get anything you need and anybody you want to reach with two phone calls, whether it was playoff tickets, restaurant reservations, or a favor from the mayor. It was all about who you knew, not how much you had. While Bishop hadn’t quite reached the Zen plateau of two phone calls, he was getting close—it took five calls to find Anthony Pennetta.
Bishop’s sources told him that outside of his family and his job, Pennetta’s only real passion was flying. Early in his career, he had been in the Aviation Unit, where he got his pilot’s license. When he was promoted to lieutenant, he went over to the Emergency Service Unit, but he never lost his love of flying. Pennetta had four kids and was completely devoted to his family, so money was always tight, but he’d worked out a deal for flying time in exchange for giving lessons at a flight school at Republic Airport in Farmingdale, Long Island, about a forty-five-minute drive from Manhattan on a relatively quiet, traffic-free Sunday afternoon like this.
Pennetta was making final preparations for the sky time he’d been looking forward to for days when Bishop unexpectedly rolled up. Though Pennetta had no idea who he was, he figured him for someone on the job with his cocky walk and badass attitude. When Bishop introduced himself, Pennetta just stared at him.
He remained silent while the private detective told him he was representing the lone survivor of the terrorist raid.
The ESU commander was an imposing physical presence, a mass of tightly controlled energy. Bishop was rarely intimidated, but with Pennetta looming over him like a stack of boxes about to topple, he felt vaguely threatened. But since Pennetta didn’t make a move toward him or turn his back and walk away, Bishop figured he’d better start talking. He had no idea how much time he might have before Pennetta decided to shut him down. He tried to make small talk about flying. The sense of freedom, the beauty, the adrenaline rush. But Pennetta was clearly not in the mood for charm and bullshit.
Fuck it, Bishop thought, might as well be direct.
“Look,” he said, faltering, “I’m sorry I came out here and bothered you but I need some information. I’m not sure I can get it from anyone else. I’d never do anything to hurt an honest cop. I was on the job. I know cops make mistakes. Even the really good ones. Fuck, it happens. And if a good cop makes a mistake that’s exactly what it is, a mistake.”
Pennetta’s face seemed like it was carved out of granite. It didn’t move. Not an eyelash, nothing. He didn’t even blink. He just maintained that hard stare.
“I don’t need to make blood money by hanging a good cop for some scumbag wannabe terrorist,” Bishop continued. “I’m just doin’ my job here and trying to get the facts. So maybe you could cut me some slack and I’ll owe you one.”
Finally Pennetta moved. He shifted his weight from one leg to the other and scratched the top of his head a little with his right hand. “I don’t have anything to say about what happened that night. You need somethin’, you know how it works. Contact DCPI,” he said, referring to the NYPD’s deputy commissioner of public information. “And if that don’t do it for you, talk to Commissioner Brock. I’m sure he’d be happy to give you every detail about his performance that night,” he said without a hint of sarcasm.
“I’m done talking,” Pennetta said. “I wish I could say it was nice to meet you. Now, if you get the fuck outta my face, I’ll overlook the fact that you invaded my space on my day off. This time. But if you show up again, I promise I won’t be so hospitable.”
Bishop held his ground. Rather than attempt some kind of smart-ass remark, he was respectful. He told Pennetta he was absolutely right. “I never should’ve come out here without giving you a heads-up first. I’m really sorry about that. And I respect your feelings about that night. But if there’s anything I can do to get you to change your mind, to talk to me, to tell me if anything unusual happened, please tell me,” Bishop said as gently as he could.
Pennetta just stared at him. Bishop handed him his card. “Call me if you change your mind,” he said.
• • •
Pennetta watched Bishop walk out of the hangar. When he was gone, Pennetta took out his cell phone and started dialing. “Chief Fitzgerald? Yeah, it’s me. Bishop just left. No, I completely gave him the cold shoulder. Sure, anytime. Thanks for the heads-up.”
Pennetta put the phone away. At least the little fucker has balls, he thought, and then he returned to his preflight safety check.
8
LAWRENCE BROCK WAS staring at his face in the bathroom mirror with the intensity of a plastic surgery patient who’s just had his bandages taken off. He was so close to the glass his nose was almost touching it. Piece by piece, the commissioner examined his face. Slowly and gently, his right index finger traced the circles under his eyes, which seemed to have gotten noticeably darker since the last time he looked. Fucking stress, he thought. It had been an especially tough couple of weeks leading up to the Brooklyn raid, not to mention the fallout surrounding it. Disgustedly, he pinched a fold of skin under his chin. His neck was starting to get a little jowly and his cheeks were too fleshy. No one liked getting older, but Brock was pathological about it. It struck at the heart of how he thought of himself. This was a guy who believed he was invincible, bulletproof, literally and figuratively. “I get shot at, but I don’t get hit,” he’d often tell the guys in his detail. “I save other cops.”
Just thinking about getting older completely changed Brock’s mood. He’d gotten up feeling refreshed and vigorous following a night of great sex with Lynn Silvers, his girlfriend—helped, no doubt, by her willingness to keep telling him, as instructed, that he was the toughest, strongest, and most fearless son of a bitch in the city. “It’s all you, baby,” she’d panted as she pulled him into her mouth. “Eight million people in this city and every fucking one of ’em wishes they could be like you.”
But now, the air had gone completely out of his balloon. Every time Brock stepped out of the shower in Silvers’ $4 million Upper West Side apartment, he was unnerved by all the mirrored glass. Jesus, what kind of self-absorbed head case puts floor-to-ceiling mirrors in the bathroom? As vain as he was, the kaleidoscopic, funhouse-mirror view of his soggy, forty-seven-year-old body was even too much for him.
Brock backed away from the glass and he could see his whole body now. He flexed a little and smiled at his thick, tumescent biceps and his hard, taut forearms. But the rest of his body was starting to look a little like the before photo in a diet ad. The good life was taking its toll. Too many fancy lunches and dinners had left his once rock-hard chest and abs a little too soft and doughy. He vowed, as he often did in this bathroom, to start being more careful about what he ate and more disciplined about working out.
Brock dried himself off, shaved, and brushed his teeth. Then he took a small black leather pouch off the sink and opened the zipper. Carefully he took out a syringe and a tiny bottle of clear liquid. It was human growth hormone, known as HGH, a steroid commonly abused by athletes and weight lifters. He filled the syringe and then injected himself in the fleshy part of his ass. He put the syringe and the empty HGH bottle back into the pouch and finished getting ready.
It was Sunday morning, so he dressed casually in high-ranking-cop chic—black cashmere turtleneck, charcoal-gray pants, and a black Armani leather jacket. He looked at his watch. It was a little before eleven. He’d gotten up much earlier; checked in with his detail of two detectives, who were downstairs sitting in the car in front of the building; and found out nothing was happening. Since his cell phone and BlackBerry were also quiet, he and Lynn had rolled back into bed for one more round of Brock worship. She was a great find. Brock had met her at a black-tie benefit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A fiery redhead with nice legs and full lips, she came on to him as soon as she spotted him in the glass pyramid that housed the Temple of Dendur. She walked over and introduced herself, but Brock already knew who she was from the gossip columns.
Lynn Silvers was one of the best-known people in the media business. She had started her own newsy website, The Silvers Report, before the explosion of blogs and Web spin-offs by established media, and it was an immediate hit. Turning a profit for the site, which was part news aggregator, part original commentary—often from celebrities of one kind or another—took a little longer, but eventually she was able to sell it to a digital media conglomerate for several hundred million dollars.
Lynn was rich, powerful, and, according to what he’d read in the tabloids, crazy. They regularly portrayed her as mean, impossible to work for, even harder to have a relationship with. Brock found her to be none of these things. In truth, he preferred submissive women—especially in bed—because strong, powerful women scared him. But they also turned him on. And Lynn was as strong a woman as he’d ever met. He had to work hard to maintain the upper hand and often he used fear to exercise control.
Brock was completely taken with her—well, not with Lynn so much as what she could do for him. To be fair, Brock did like her and actually enjoyed spending time with her. She was interesting, funny, and hypercritical of just about everyone, which he loved. Unlike most women (and most men, for that matter), she was totally without pretense. She said exactly what she thought and didn’t really give a shit how it sounded. And she was great in bed�
�she’d do whatever he wanted, no matter how outrageous.
But it was her juice, her influence, that Brock was really interested in. Though he had extraordinary access as police commissioner to powerful people—politicians and businessmen in particular—Lynn was plugged into a whole other world. They had dinner with some of the biggest names in the entertainment business—producers, directors, writers, and television personalities.
And then there was the film. They had begun preliminary work on a treatment for a documentary about Brock’s life and career, and she was even more aggressive than he was about “massaging” the facts to intensify the drama and to make Brock a larger, more appealing figure. And since no one knew marketing, promotion, and media better than Lynn Silvers, once they started shopping it to producers, a big payday was almost guaranteed.
The film was one more piece of Brock’s increasingly ambitious master plan. Over time, he’d developed a deeply held belief in his own destiny. In his heart he knew he was meant to do great things, and it was all starting to happen for him. He was also convinced that by carefully crafting his image, he could create his own reality. From his very first days as police commissioner, his strategy was to market himself, not just to the public, but to the cops on the force as well. It wasn’t enough to be police commissioner; he wanted to be a cop’s cop. He wanted the guys on the force to think he was just like them, not some tight-assed, out-of-touch bureaucrat. And in many respects, he was like them. He was a kid from the Bronx whose father was a junkie and a thief killed robbing a cabdriver when Brock was only six. His mother had cleaned houses and suffered from sometimes-debilitating depression. One day when he was ten, he came home from school and found her lying on the kitchen floor, dead. She had closed all the windows and turned on the gas in the oven.