On the Ropes: A Duffy Dombrowski Mystery

by Tom Schreck

  “What do you mean you got federal guys threatening you?” Kelley said.

  “I’ve had a Crown Vic following me home for the last two weeks. The other night, two federal types cornered me, jumped out of the car, put a gun to my head, and told me to leave things alone.”

  “Who were they?”

  “I have no idea, they didn’t identify themselves.”

  “They show you ID?” Kelley said.

  “They didn’t show me shit, they didn’t say shit—except to threaten me.”

  “What did they look like?”

  “Blue blazers, gray pants, one guy looked Middle Eastern, the other was young and blond.”

  “Middle Eastern?”

  “Yeah, but no accent.”

  “Duff, the car, the outfits—they sound like FBI. I’d do what they say.”

  “Can you find out anything about who they are, Kel?”

  “No—the FBI doesn’t answer to us.”

  “Then what the hell do I do? I’m not sitting back while something happens to this kid. And what if these guys are planning something? Then, what do I do?”

  “Call the FBI anonymously and tell them about the explosives,” Kelley said.

  “What will that do?”

  “In this day and age, a lot. They will follow up.”

  That made some sense. I didn’t know where the Crown Vic was from or what they were up to. Maybe they were on to the Gabbibbs and I was in the way. If the Crown Vic boys were from the FBI, then the FBI should know what I knew. And if those guys weren’t from the FBI, who the hell were they?

  I wasn’t letting go of going after Shony, though. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do next, but I was going to do something. This had gotten way too personal, and it wasn’t time for me to let it go—not a chance.

  I asked Kelley for the number for the appropriate FBI contact. He fished a small piece of paper out of his wallet and pointed to it. I borrowed Rocco’s cell phone and went outside. I called and spoke quickly to some clerical type and then I hung up.

  There, I had done something a responsible levelheaded citizen would do.

  I came back inside AJ’s and got a fresh Schlitz.

  “Did you call?” Kelley said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you tell them everything?”

  “Yeah, then I hung up without giving my name.”

  “See, being a responsible citizen isn’t so hard.”

  “Shut up and drink.” I bought Kelley a round and asked AJ for a sidecar of bourbon. I wanted desperately to chill out before the vein in my temple exploded all over the bar.

  With the Yankees game over, it was time for the eleven o’clock news. The bar got quiet as the talking head anchor told us about the nation’s alert level going to orange. This was the type of fuel that the Fearsome Foursome thrived on.

  “They’re goin’ to botulize the reservoirs,” Rocco said. “Bushel full of bad mushrooms in the water system and we’ll be shittin’ our pants for months.”

  “Thanks for the visual,” Jerry Number One said.

  “I did some bad mushrooms once,” Jerry Number Two said. “I didn’t shit my pants, but I did hallucinate.”

  “What did you see?” TC asked.

  “Spiro Agnew and Golda Meir having sex,” Jerry said.

  I ordered another Schlitz and watched the rest of the local news. The Foursome just wouldn’t let go.

  “They could hit the bridges with explosives,” Rocco continued. “I heard something on the news about how they could infect all the hookers with a small ox.”

  “Geezus, Rocco,” TC said. “You got to get the Miracle-Ear serviced. That’s small pox, jackass.”

  “Or they could blow up a dirt bomb in Times Square.” Rocco was on a roll. “We might not get hurt, but all that dirt would be a pain in the ass and fuck up the economy.”

  “Unless you were a dry cleaner,” Jerry Number Two said, sipping his Cosmo.

  “Actually, that dirty bomb shit is pretty scary,” TC said.

  “You’re right,” Jerry Number Two said. “A pretty simple way to cause not only a shitload of damage, but also mass panic.”

  “With dirt and gravel?” said Rocco.

  “No, Rock. A dirty bomb is regular explosives with radioactive material put in it,” Jerry said. “When the explosives go ‘bang,’ the radioactive material gets spread all around.”

  The conversation suddenly drew my attention.

  “Jerry—where do you get radioactive material?” I asked.

  “Lots of places. It’s in construction materials, some gauges, and in medical stuff.”

  “What kind of medical stuff?” I asked.

  “Again, gauges, measuring material, and the stuff you treat some cancers with,” Jerry said.

  I froze. My stomach did a flip and I could feel the hair on my neck stand up.

  “Rocco, give me your phone,” I said.

  “What am I tonight—Rocco Ma Bell?”

  “Just give me the fuckin’ phone, huh?”

  I ripped it out of his hand and called Rudy. It was almost midnight and he’d just done a double shift. It couldn’t be helped.

  “What?” a groggy Rudy answered.

  “Meet me at the medical center in ten minutes,” I said.

  “Fuck you, Duffy,” Rudy said. “I just got out of there.”

  “I don’t have time to explain. Be there in ten minutes.”

  I hung up before he could answer.

  32

  Rudy kept me waiting and pacing in the emergency waiting room. When he came I pounced on him.

  “We’ve got to go check on Eli and Mikey,” I said, grabbing Rudy by the arm and hustling him to the elevator.

  “I’m not going anywhere.” He stopped dead in his tracks. “You mind telling me what the hell this is all about?” Rudy said.

  “You remember telling me how well Eli and Mikey were handling the radioactive treatment?”

  “Yeah—Duff, that’s good news.”

  “It’s good and bad news. It’s good news because they probably don’t have cancer in the first place and bad news because they’re being used as pawns. I’ll bet you anything that they’re not getting any of that radioactive stuff at all,” I said.

  Rudy just stared at me. I woke him up and he was exhausted and he wasn’t processing my rapid-fire information yet.

  “But Duffy—why?”

  “Let’s just go check,” I said.

  We walked out of the sixth-floor elevator and down the hall. Rudy had woken up and had some urgency in his step. We didn’t speak all the way down the hall.

  “Wait here,” Rudy said, heading into Mikey’s room. He came out in less than thirty seconds and walked right past me and went into Eli’s room. He wasn’t there as long.

  “All right, Duff you’re right.” Rudy was all business now. “You mind telling what the fuck is going on?”

  “Gabbibb is building a dirty bomb and he’s taking the radioactive shit from here.”

  “What the hell makes you think that?”

  “Look, one of his cousins has a store in Staten Island. Clogger delivers stuff there, and he says the Gabbibbs aren’t even Indian—they’re Pakistani.”

  “So—”

  “Let me finish. The other cousin owns a grocery store in East Dunham. I checked it out and it looked all on the up and up until I saw them loading explosives in the back room.”

  “You saw that?”

  “Well, Al used to be a bomb-sniffing dog and he—”

  “You’re fucking kidding me—right?”

  Rudy rolled his eyes and let out a huge exhalation. He wiped his hand through his sparse hair and spun around, pacing back and forth across the hall.

  “Not only that, Rude.” Now, I was pleading with him. “The guy who beat Eli and Mikey and the other guys in the park is the guy who beat me and Al up in the Blue. He also is tied up with the women in the porn site,” I said.

  “You’re losing me.”

 
“Remember you told me how much Gabbibb was making from the all the surgeries and cancer treatments?”

  “Yeah, so? He’s a doctor.”

  “I bet anything he’s behind the beatings. He’s paying someone to bring him business, and he knows if he does it to the guys in the park, no one is going to make a lot of noise about it,” I said.

  “So why a dirty bomb and why such a high-tech scheme for a bullshit little city like Crawford?”

  “Rudy, what is Crawford known for? What’s our city’s trademark?”

  Rudy rubbed his chin. “You think because of the wind they chose Crawford to set off a dirty bomb?”

  “We’re under an hour from the city,” I said.

  Rudy looked right into my eyes and shook his head.

  “You better be right, Duff. This ain’t no bullshit irritable bowel syndrome disability diagnosis. If we’re wrong, we’re dead.”

  “If we’re right, a lot of people are going to be dead.”

  It was Friday afternoon, which meant I had twenty-four hours, give or take a few hours, to find the location of the webcast. I also had to pray that the FBI or somebody would find Gabbibb even faster. I called Rudy at the hospital. He told me that Gabbibb didn’t come in today, that he didn’t have any scheduled time off and no one knew where he was. That was scary, but I thought it over and I decided that I had to go after Shony and let the government work on Gabbibb.

  I started with dropping the video camera off with Jerry. I asked him to see if he could enlarge or enhance the picture to make the people and the license plate more discernible. Jerry told me that he could enlarge the digital image, but because of some sort of issue with something called “pixels,” the resolution would be poor as the images were enlarged. He also said there was a chance he could work around that, but that it would take a little time.

  I thanked Jerry and as I was heading out, I asked him if he had a cell phone I could borrow. He went into a closet and came out with a small box that had a half dozen or so.

  “Take your pick,” Jerry said.

  “What are you doing with these?” I asked.

  “Somebody I did some work for didn’t have any money, so he paid me with these. It was a nice thought, but I don’t have much use for them.”

  “Thanks, Jer, I appreciate it.”

  Now it was time to get to work.

  The one thing I knew was that Stephanie was connected with the Eagle Heights clinic and Tyrone and Baldy chauffeured her there for her first visit. I had nowhere else to start, so I decided to see what more I could find out. I called Katy and I knew there was a good chance I was about to go to the well one too many times, but I didn’t have any other wells to pursue. I gave her a call at the clinic.

  “Katy speaking.”

  “Katy, it’s Duff.”

  “Whatever it is, the answer is ‘no,’” she said. “I’m hanging up.”

  “Wait. This is important.”

  “Important?” she said. “Does it have to do with your Internet porn obsession? Here I was, giving you all sorts of information and God knows what you were doing with it.”

  “I was looking at porn on the Internet because I think one of my clients was involved in something ugly—that’s what I was doing,” I said.

  “I’m sure. I don’t think it’s going to matter much. From what I hear, you’re getting fired as soon as you get back to work.”

  “Where did you hear that?”

  “Rhonda was on the phone with Claudia. I heard them talking about posting your job within a week.”

  “Great—it doesn’t matter anyway. Look, can you tell me when Stephanie is due back in?”

  “Why should I tell you anything? You sound like you got some issues and I don’t think I trust you.”

  “Katy, listen to me. The last time we spoke, you wound up giving me info that you knew was against the rules. You didn’t want to, but something inside told you it was more right than wrong. You’re a good person, don’t become one of these asshole social workers. Your instincts had you go out on limb for me because you believed something about me was right. Listen to your instincts,” I said.

  The phone went quiet.

  “Stephanie is going with a bunch of the women to look at the new halfway house. Rhonda wants her to be part of the first group of eight that gets admitted there. They’re leaving in half an hour,” Katy said.

  She hung up before I could thank her.

  I didn’t have time to tail them to the halfway house. It would be tough to hang around the halfway house and not be seen, and I just couldn’t pull up in front of the place and say hi to everyone there. I put on my sweats, my knit cap, and decided to do some roadwork.

  I wasted no time getting there. I parked the Eldorado about a mile and a half away in the parking lot of the only Kingsville grocery store. I told Al I’d be back and I started to run. At about an eight-minute-per-mile pace, I came up on the halfway house in a matter of minutes. Thank God, the van with the clinic lettering was still there.

  I put my hooded sweatshirt up and turned up the block before the house. I swung back down the street that led right to the clinic. Rhonda was leading a group of women toward the parking lot back to the van. Stephanie was in the middle of the pack with a group of rough-looking young women, most of whom were dressed in cheap, tight, acid-washed jeans. Most of them had that big eighties hair look that seems to be so popular with uneducated women who spend a lot of time on the street.

  I pulled up my run about a half a block away and pretended to stretch as if I were cooling down. I turned my back to the group and bent over to stretch my back before I turned back around. That’s when I saw the white pickup truck parked on the other side of the van. When I had come down the street, the angle I was looking from made it impossible to see the truck. Wandering across the street, doing my stretching gave me a different point of view.

  Stephanie was talking to Tyrone, who was on the passenger side of the truck, and though I couldn’t say for sure, I would bet that Baldy was behind the wheel. The women were getting in the van and Rhonda came over to the pickup truck to get Stephanie, who was lagging behind. It looked like Rhonda said something quick to Tyrone before Stephanie finally got in.

  The van took a right out of the parking lot and then the pickup took a left, which surprised me. I decided to run after the pickup as long as I could without being too obvious. They continued down Route 44 and didn’t turn for as long as I watched them. That was the opposite direction from the clinic.

  I ran back to the grocery store and started the Eldorado. Al was nervously shifting his weight from one foot to another in what appeared to be the basset equivalent of pacing. He was glad to see me and gave me an enthusiastic lick to let me know. I headed to the clinic, which was about a fifteen-minute drive from the halfway house. Even with the head start it wasn’t going to be hard to catch up with an Econoline van. I pulled up on Ninth Street and waited for the van to show up. I got there just minutes before they did.

  The women slowly got out of the van and headed back into the clinic, presumably to sign out and get their purses. I didn’t have anything else to do, so I hung out to watch them all leave. In a matter of minutes, the women were back out the door. Only two had their own cars; the other five walked down to the next block to catch the fifty-five bus. Stephanie hadn’t come out.

  It seemed unlikely that Tyrone or Baldy would be coming back any time soon because they had left the halfway house heading in the opposite direction. It was heading toward six, so maybe Stephanie and Rhonda had a session, or maybe Stephanie had to go to another group. That seemed like a lot of therapy for one day.

  At ten minutes to seven, Stephanie came out of the front door, followed by Rhonda. Rhonda had her keys and was walking toward the small parking lot across the street. Stephanie walked with her. Rhonda hit the automatic locks and the lights and horn briefly went on in her dark blue BMW.

  Then Rhonda and Stephanie both got in the car.

  33

/>   It wasn’t normal procedure to drive a client anywhere. In fact, it was against the rules because it supposedly meant developing inappropriate boundaries. I had driven clients places and even got written up by the Michelin Woman once for doing it. I found it hard to believe that Rhonda was ignoring the rules; she was an administrator and seemed too much like Claudia to be doing something human.

  I waited at that corner down the street from Bowerman’s town house for an hour. The Yanks were in the middle of a home stand with the Mariners and it was the top of the third and they were already down five to nothing. Announcer Suzyn Waldman was going on about the merits of the aluminum bat used at the collegiate level and somehow that broke into a discussion of steroid use in the major leagues. John Sterling brought up the fact that just because Barry Bonds’s head was the size of a sixteen-pound medicine ball, it didn’t necessarily mean that he was doing anything unnatural.

  Waldman was about to use an eleven-syllable word to keep the conversation going when the national news broke in with a special report.

  “We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming for this special report from NBC. We take you now, live to our New York studios and Brian Williams.”

  Ever since I was a kid, the sound of a special report scared the shit out of me. It wasn’t like they ever interrupted things to bring you good news.

  “Good evening. In Crawford, New York, a city fifty miles north of New York City, four Pakistani nationals were arrested an hour ago. They had in their possession several hundred pounds of explosives and an undisclosed quantity of cesium 147. Cesium 147 is a radioactive isotope used in the treatment of special types of cancers. If combined with explosives, it can disperse large quantities of radioactive material while also rendering damage from the conventional force of the bomb.

  “The four arrested are all employees of the Crawford Medical Center. They are Afu Mohammed, an oncology nurse, Faid Ru Abdul, a nurse’s aid, Said Farook, and Nasseem Abdul, both facilities services workers.

  “Details are still coming in, but Special Agent Carlisle of the FBI was quoted as saying, ‘The suspects are in custody and the radioactive material is accounted for. The situation is under control.’”