Malone approached the kneeling man at the ready. He cocked his right leg and kicked the man in the face, toppling Achmed Hamed into eternal darkness.
Malone was only dimly conscious of what happened after that. He vaguely recalled leaning on the divider and firing his revolver at disappearing taillights. He could recall the warm, thick liquid seeping over his trousers and chilling his thighs as he sat cross-legged on the expressway cradling the body of Nicholas Zambrano. The smells of hot metal and blood made him vomit. He did not hear the excited CBers shouting into their sets. A parhelion of rotating lights came toward him. The taste of tears mixed with blood in his mouth. Most of all he could feel an awful sense of irreplaceable loss.
19
SATURDAY, July 4 … Morning
Malone opened his eyes and almost cried out, conscious for the first time of pain, first in his neck and shoulder, then in his rib cage. There was an awful throbbing ache inside his head. He moved his hand out from under the sheet and let his fingertips gingerly probe the gauze. He had landed on his head, causing a long gash in the hairline.
“It took sixty-eight stitches to close you up,” Gus Heinemann said in a small voice.
Malone’s eyes drifted to the two men looking down at him. Heinemann and Bo Davis. He could see the concern in their faces.
“Where am I?” A dry mutter.
“Nassau Hospital,” Davis said. “You’re going to be all right.”
“Zambrano?” Malone asked, without any hope in his voice.
Bleak expressions gave him an answer. He was seized with a consuming rage to kill, to deal out tough street justice. The detectives pretended not to notice when he brushed his arm across his face to rub his eyes dry. He forced himself up into a sitting position and cleared his throat. “Whattaya got?”
Heinemann slapped open his memo pad and began to read in laconic police prose. “Tractor-trailer found abandoned at Guinea Woods Road. Nassau County PD dusted for prints. Negative results. Vehicle reported stolen yesterday from Hunts Point Market, alarm 14061-52. There were tire tracks next to the vehicle which indicate that an escape car was waiting. Nassau County PD made plaster casts of the tracks. A canvass was conducted of the motorists caught in the spill-back. The police came up with twenty-eight names and twenty-eight different descriptions. The hump you iced was I.D.’d as Achmed Hamed. He entered the country on a tourist visa from Libya on May twelfth, 1976 and pulled a Mandrake. The duty captain from the One-oh-five responded to the scene. Captain McCormick. He prepared the ‘Unusual’ and the ‘Line of Duty Injury Report.’ The ‘Assault/Firearm Discharge Report’ was made out. McCormick found your use of deadly physical force to be within department guidelines. The PC and the Chief of Op were on the scene.” Heinemann looked up from his pad. “That’s it.”
Malone recalled the five that he had read from one of Harrigan’s detectives. Stanislaus had visited a grocery store on Atlantic Avenue. Achmed Hamed’s store. “How long have I been out?”
Davis said, “About twelve hours.”
Malone groaned as he swung his legs out and over the side of the bed. He sat up, doubling over and hugging himself in a futile effort to relieve the pain. “How’s Pat?” he grunted.
Davis flinched at the sight of his pain. “They think he’ll make it. But the job is finished. He’s gonna be surveyed out.”
Malone took in a large breath and slowly and painfully hissed it out. “What else?”
Heinemann said, “You have been page one. We gave the press the usual arrests-are-imminent bullshit. You’re stashed here under a phony name.” He waved his hand in front of him. “No sense giving them another shot at you.”
Bo Davis said, “Jake and Starling managed to get inside Stanislaus’s garage and plant a beeper under his car. The Braxtons, Kelly, Bramson, and Stanislaus have been very cautious since you got hurt. They seemed to have arranged a signaling schedule at various telephone booths around the city. One of them must have gone around copying down locations and numbers.”
Malone said, “What about the telephone outside Braxton’s apartment?”
Heinemann said, “None of them have gone near it.”
Malone stared at his feet.
Heinemann said, “Sergeant Harrigan has taken over in your absence. He detailed us to guard you. He has the rest of the team out following suspects. I checked with him a few minutes ago. He told me that some sort of meet is going down. Aldridge Braxton, Kelly, Stanislaus, and Bramson have all hit the bricks. They’re scurrying around town, keeping both eyes over their shoulders.”
“Jack is a good man,” Malone said, easing himself off the bed.
Davis and Heinemann each took an arm and helped him.
“Where are my clothes?” Malone said.
“You ought’na leave,” Davis said. “The doctor said …”
Malone cut him off. “My clothes.”
Davis shrugged, as if to say You’re the boss, and went over to the clothes cabinet. “I went to your place and got some things. The clothes that you were wearing were ruined.” Davis took out a pair of brown corduroy trousers, a white pullover, and an Irish poplin sport jacket. He bent down and picked up a pair of penny loafers and underwear.
Untying the loose-fitting hospital gown, Malone said, “My gun and shield?”
“Vouchered at the One-oh-five,” Heinemann said.
Stepping into his briefs was painful. He pulled them up slowly. “Who made the notification to Zambrano’s wife?”
Davis said, “The PC and the Catholic chaplain.”
“How’d she take it?” Malone asked.
“I hear real bad,” Heinemann said.
Davis got on one knee and helped him on with his socks.
He looked up at Malone’s grimacing face. “Erica Sommers has been calling the Squad every hour on the hour. She is really concerned about you. Naturally, we didn’t tell her where you were.”
Heinemann said, “Want me to dial her number for you?”
Malone looked at the telephone on top of the white hospital stand. “I’ve got more important things to do right now.” There was a soft, menacing lilt to his voice.
A lash of warm air slapped Aldridge Braxton’s face as he stood in the middle of York Avenue waiting for a break in the traffic. He was sure that he was not being followed. When the opening presented itself, he made his way to the other side and stood on the curb checking. Even confident men do not take chances.
A stocky middle-aged man came around the corner on the other side of York Avenue. He had on pilot-type sunglasses and was carrying a yellow sun hat in his left hand. He walked in a slow, unhurried gait, like a shopper searching the window displays.
The man with the yellow sun hat came upon a florist who had taken up half the sidewalk with his wares. He bent to examine them more closely. He picked up a gloxinia and held it up in front of him admiring its luscious purple buds. He shifted his gaze to the impeccably dressed man a block away. He held the clay pot with one hand and with the other depressed the transmit button on the walkie-talkie that was concealed inside the sun hat. “He is walking north on York. Just past Sixty-ninth Street.”
A blue Sting Ray pulled up to the corner of Seventy-first Street facing York. The driver was in his middle thirties and had eyebrows that ran a straight line. The passenger was older and completely bald. His taut skin gave him a plastic look. The driver scowled with displeasure. “Here he comes,” he said into the walkie-talkie.
Jake Stern was driving the gray van while Johnson, in the rear of the van, studied the signal motes as they bounced across the direction grid.
“How far ahead is he?” Harrigan said, as they emerged from the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel.
“About a quarter of a mile,” Johnson answered.
Joseph Stanislaus came out of the tunnel on the Brooklyn side and wormed his way out of the exact-change line into a toll collector’s lane.
The toll plaza was crowded. Stanislaus kept examining the faces of motorists. He had the uncomf
ortable sensation of being followed. He wished he had been out there on the LIE that night. Why did it have to be Zambrano and not Malone?
When he reached the toll booth he rolled down his window to show the collector his shield. “I’m on the Job. I got into the wrong lane in Manhattan and ended up here. Any chance of turning me around? My wife is waiting for me at the Vista.”
The collector leaned out to look at the shield. “No problem.” He walked from the booth over to the traffic cones that separated the lanes. He kicked away four cones and then halted the queue entering the tunnel from the Brooklyn side. He turned to Stanislaus and waved him to make a U-turn through the space.
“He’s doubling back on us,” Starling Johnson shouted, a note of alarm in his voice.
“Stop the van,” Harrigan ordered. “If we come out of the tunnel now he is bound to see us. He might recognize the van. We should wait until he is back inside the tunnel.”
A sudden cacophony of horns reverberated throughout the white-tiled tunnel as bumpers rear-ended bumpers.
Edwin Bramson drove his car over the George Washington Bridge and onto the Palisades Parkway. Charles Kelly was turned in the passenger seat looking out the rear window for any car that had been with them for too long a period of time.
Bramson said, “Anyone on us?”
“Don’t think so,” Kelly replied, not taking his eyes from the window. “There was a taxi with us for a while but he turned off at Fort Lee.”
Bramson said, “There is a rest area up ahead where we can pull in. We’ll take in the view and at the same time watch the road. Then just to make sure we’ll drive into Nyack before we turn around. It shouldn’t be too hard to spot a tail.”
“Them camel humpers really fucked things up. We shoulda handled it ourselves,” Kelly said.
“What we shoulda done and what we done are two different things,” Bramson said, turning on some music.
A taxi exited the bridge’s quickway in Fort Lee. The driver leaned over and opened the glove compartment, pulling out a radio handset. “Bird Two to Nest, K.”
Inside the surveillance van Jack Harrigan plucked the microphone from the hook. “Nest. Go ahead, K.”
“Subjects drove over the G.W. Bridge into Jersey. They are now proceeding north on the Palisades Parkway. Bird Two continued into Fort Lee. If I had stayed with them much longer they would have made me for sure.”
Harrigan toed the metal floor. “Where are Birds One and Two, K?”
“Both waiting on the New York side of the bridge. We figured that whatever was going to go down would go down in New York. It stands to reason that once they feel safe they are going to double back.”
“I hope you’re right, K.” The frequency went quiet. Then Harrigan transmitted. “Bird Two, head back to our side of the bridge and ten-eighty-five Birds One and Three. When you reestablish contact with them I want you to use the leapfrog, but be sure to change the ‘close contact car’ frequently. I don’t want to take any chances on losing these guys, K.”
“Ten-four.” The detective in the taxi returned the handset and slammed the lid shut.
Harrigan transmitted, “Nest to Birds One and Three. Did you read my last transmission, K?”
From inside the telephone repair truck that was parked on the New York side of the toll plaza came the transmission: “Bird One, ten-four.”
Near the entrance of the FDR Drive a gypsy cab was stopped with its hood up. A black man was leaning under checking the carburetor. He picked up the paper bag that was lying on top of the battery and moved it toward his lips, “Bird Two, ten-four.”
Starling Johnson did not permit his eyes to stray from the monitor. “Do you really think they’ll come back into the City?” he asked Harrigan.
The sergeant’s face was grim. With Malone in the hospital and Zambrano dead the whole weight of the case was on his back. The fact that they were going up against other cops was finally beginning to frighten him.
“They’ll double back.” He tried to sound convinced. Harrigan absent-mindedly depressed the transmit button several times and then snapped the microphone up to his mouth.
“Birds Four and Five, what are your locations, K?”
The detective with the plastic face inside the Sting Ray transmitted. “Bird Four is proceeding north on York. Just passing Seventy-fourth Street. Subject in view.”
“Bird Five on foot, going north on York. Subject now turning into Seven-six Street.”
An elegantly dressed woman looked with mild curiosity at the pot-bellied man jogging York Avenue and yelling at a yellow sun hat.
“Turn south. West. Lay back. We’re too close. The signals are too strong. He is heading over to the East Side.”
Starling Johnson sat before the tracking monitors in the van, the bombardier directing the ship, calling out coordinates.
Harrigan shouted out to Jake Stern, “If you can see him, we are too close.”
“He’s not in view,” Stern piped, suddenly filled with a disquieting sense of insecurity at the sight of a bus gridlocking Tenth Avenue and blocking their path.
Harrigan rushed up front. “Why are you stopping?”
“That bus is blocking us,” Stern said.
“The signals are getting weak,” Johnson warned.
“Go around the cocksucker,” Harrigan said.
The van leaped the curb. Stern blared the horn and pedestrians flattened themselves against the building. The van rounded the rear of the bus and plowed back into the roadway.
“Five Detective C.O. to Nest. What is your location, K?”
A momentary silence fell over the radio frequency. Starling Johnson turned away from the monitor and exchanged a quick smile with Harrigan. The sergeant grabbed the microphone.
“Is that you, Lou?”
“Ten-four. What is your location, K?”
“Eight and Five-two, heading east,” Harrigan transmitted.
“On the way,” Malone radioed without inflection.
“All right!” someone shouted happily over the restricted frequency.
The Pavilion is a luxury apartment complex with massive wood-paneled lobbies and spiring water fountains separated from the East River by the compact John Jay Park. Aldridge Braxton drew parallel with the Volkswagen dealer on Seventy-sixth Street and turned to cross to the other side of the street. A small group of liverymen were standing in front of the Pavilion’s garage. Braxton glanced at them as he passed and continued on to his destination.
Braxton walked into the Seventy-sixth Street entrance of John Jay Park, an area of benches and trees that continued through to Seventy-seventh Street. He walked through and exited the park onto Seventy-seventh Street and Cherokee Place. He looked across the street at a building with an unusual façade of white stone and yellow brick. The apartment house had mullioned windows and buff fire escapes. He was interested in the arched ambulatories that led through the building on the corner of Cherokee Place to Seventy-eighth Street. If needed, they could be his escape hatch. He turned and looked around the park. Au pair girls and their wards, chic ladies with their custom jeans and expensive accessories, paddleball players using the handball courts, and a queue outside the bathhouse of people eager to use the Olympic-size pool represented normal activity. The bow of a freighter, its black riveted hull slicing the view, slid past Seventy-seventh Street.
Aldridge Braxton was not a particularly nervous man. But the force of recent events had changed that. He could almost reach out and touch the presence of danger. It was all supposed to have been so easy. Risk free, Stanislaus had told him. He should have known better. Now this meeting and the sudden precautions, the warnings only to use safe telephones. He felt almost physically ill.
Inside the surveillance van Jake Stern turned and glanced into the rear. “Hey, Sarge, will you take the wheel for a minute? I gotta piss so bad I can taste it.”
Harrigan made his way out front and exchanged places with him.
Stern steered himself into the back and
squeezed himself into the cramped toilet. Urinating into the waterless bowl, he shouted to Johnson. “How you makin’ out with P.O. O’Day?”
“We’re practically mispocah,” Johnson said grinning.
Stern stepped out of the cubicle pulling up his zipper. “I’m glad that the boss is all right.”
“Me too, ma man.”
“Nest and Birds, what are your locations, K?” Malone’s voice came over the wires.
“Five-two and Madison, heading east,” Harrigan transmitted.
“Birds One, Two, and Three on FDR Drive,” the detective in the gypsy cab transmitted.
“Bird Four is parked on the corner of York and Seventy-six. Subject has entered John Jay Park, K.”
“Bird Five in on foot at Cherokee Place and Seventy-sixth Street. About to enter park. I am going off the air now.”
Malone turned to Heinemann. “Looks like the meet is going down in the park.”
Heinemann nodded. Bo Davis was in the rear of the car. He leaned forward and tapped Malone on the shoulder. “Braxton or one of the others might recognize the van.”
Malone picked up the handset and transmitted. “Five C.O. to Nest, K.”
“Go. Nest, K.” Harrigan’s voice.
“Nest. Bury the van nearby. They might spot it.”
“Nest. Ten-four.” Harrigan returned the microphone and reached up to the photographic cabinet above the radio set. He flipped the hasp and reached inside, removing two movie cameras. He placed them carefully on the ledge and then selected the correct telescopic lenses.
The van was buried among the jumble of sanitation trucks on Seventy-third Street and the River. Harrigan and Stern got out and walked over to the cavelike entrance of the sanitation garage to wait for Johnson, who was still inside the van securing the equipment. As they stepped out of the way of a lumbering garbage truck, Harrigan walkie-talkied their location to Malone. When Johnson joined them, the three men trotted to the apartment house on the corner of Seventy-seventh Street and Cherokee Place. They entered through the Seventy-eighth Street ambulatory and rushed up to the roof.
One Police Plaza Page 27