Red on Red

by Edward Conlon

  “Check the bathroom, Ralph. That’s where he was. Don’t touch it, don’t move it, just check for the gun.”

  The man on the floor strained to look around at the body, and Nick put his gun to the man’s head.

  “Don’t look. Don’t move.”

  The man turned back to the wall. Nick walked over to the body and touched his neck for a pulse. The flesh had a little give, a softness without response, like a pork chop in the supermarket. Nothing there; done. It reminded him to attend to the victim, who had fallen silent at the speed and violence of his deliverance. Nick walked over to him, and he looked at Nick, blinking. His head was bloodied all over, red in bright rivulets, brown in crusty smears.

  “It’s okay. You’re safe. We’re the police.”

  The man began to laugh, so weakly at first that Nick thought he was weeping, but when it grew more vigorous, there was an unmistakable bitter glee. He shook his shoulders, to tell Nick to unwrap him. Nick took hold of a piece of the cellophane by his neck and tried to tear it; the layers at the edge frayed, but the thicker midsection held. He would remain mummified until he was cut out. Nick wished he had a camera, wished he had a knife. He stepped back to look for something sharp, and the captive leaned over to spit on the man at his feet, who flinched but didn’t move.

  Perez called out from the bathroom. “Got it! I got the piece!”

  Napolitano hustled through the door, flushed and sweat-soaked, and the lieutenant pushed breathlessly past him; he leaned down, hands on his knees, and coughed up phlegm. He looked at Nick, unable to ask what he needed to know. Nick made the report:

  “We’re good here. One perp down, one under, one on the run. Two guns. None of us hurt. The victim—this one—he’s beat up, burnt, but he’s still got some fight in him. This one here, he’s past helping. He don’t need an ambulance, but we need Crime Scene. The runner’s Kiko. We got him for this even if he walks on the homicide.”

  The lieutenant nodded, and his breath seemed to grow more regular as he took in the information. The worst news was far better than what he’d imagined on the labored run upstairs, and you could almost picture his blood vessels relaxing, easing back into the ordinary flow.

  “I already called the ambulance. There should be about a hundred cops here in a minute,” the lieutenant said. “You guys are both okay? This is … all good?”

  Perez stepped out from the bathroom, a new man, nearly swaggering. “The gun’s right there, next to the body.”

  “All right, good. What do we got here?”

  Nick spoke up before Perez got a chance; he didn’t like how Perez improvised.

  “Espo took the door, three guys sitting in chairs, the victim between two perps. Kiko ups and jets. The guy on the floor doesn’t get to. Junior is in the bathroom, he’s got headphones on. The music must be blasting, ’cause he walks out like he’s stepping onto the dance floor. Clueless, not a clue. He goes for his waist—that’s that.”

  Lieutenant Ortiz nodded, then fumbled in his pockets for a cigarette. When he lit the match, his hand shook, and he had to steady it with the other before taking a drag. When he exhaled, all of the detectives did, and Nick could feel his pulse drop. He had seen what had happened, but he hadn’t begun to take it in until he’d said it aloud. It had been a good shoot, as they said, meaning that it was justified, that it would pass the test. Nick looked around the room, at the sweat, the fear, the dishevelment. They looked like an accounting firm who had been dropped into boot camp, their attaché cases lost somewhere on the obstacle course. Napolitano could have come from jogging through a car wash. Perez glistened with perspiration, but he was otherwise kempt. He began to pace back and forth.

  “Muthafucka! That was close!”

  While the lieutenant and Napolitano watched Perez move, walking in an odd circle—it looked something like a victory lap, something like a failed sobriety test—Esposito fixed his eyes on Nick. He was grateful for the simplicity of the recap, and was mindful that he hadn’t been asked himself. He turned to Lieutenant Ortiz, and the wryness faded from his expression. When Esposito placed a hand on the lieutenant’s shoulder, Nick wasn’t sure if it was to ask for support or to offer it.

  “Let’s get going for this. Let’s get everybody out for Crime Scene,” Esposito said, taking it in. “What about this guy, the victim? We gotta get him out, I know, but I’d hate to lose the picture. With a picture of this guy, like this, we don’t have a trial—we have a plea. Their lawyers will beg for one. Anybody?”

  Nick wondered if Esposito wanted the picture to look at later, for when he thought about the dead boy and needed reassurance that he had done what was necessary, for when he needed proof. Then Nick wondered if it would be a kind of trophy, a head to hang on the wall. He stopped wondering after that. No one had a camera.

  When Nick had been on patrol, he’d carried one for a while—a number of cops did—for souvenir purposes as much as evidentiary ones, but the habit had fallen away. Nick should have had a camera and a knife, he thought. For that matter, a radio and a vest. A lot of detectives discarded the old tools of patrol for defense and attack because their new tools worked so well, so often, and all that mattered was your mind, your mouth. You talked them in, when you could, and you never fought them, when it was possible, because you had to talk to them later on. Someone else was always the tough guy, the bad guy. Nick could hear the sirens gathering in the distance. The cops were coming.

  What would have happened if they’d run this drill by the book? Had met dangerous opponents with body armor, paramilitary tactics, superior force? Would they have done better—one down, one gone, one under arrest, successful rescue, no cops hurt? Before they had taken the door, they’d been chasing a rumor.

  Esposito ran a hand through his hair, thinking, then thinking aloud.

  “The two ladies upstairs, in 5A and 5E, they were ready to help. One of them’s probably got a camera.”

  Napolitano was closest to the door. He tucked his shirt in, smoothed his hair back.

  “I got it.”

  The hostage moaned again—“Ven aquí. Ayudame.”—and Nick went over to him, telling him to wait, it would be all right. The man shook his head, pointing his chin over to Esposito—Look!—and then chinned down to his own neck. He called over, hoarsely, and Perez translated his request.

  “He has a necklace. Take it out. He wants to show you.”

  Nick pulled back sheets of bloody plastic, gingerly, and saw a string of beads, black and red, in alternating grouped bands. The man nodded again to Esposito, in his red and black clothing. Perez led them through the new significance.

  “Los colores, negro y rojo.”

  “The colors, black and red.”

  “Son los colores de Elegua.”

  “Elegua?”

  “Elegua.”

  “He says they’re the colors of Ellegua, whoever that is. You’re a priest? Es usted cura, sacerdote, clero?”

  “Sí.”

  “Qué tipo?”

  “Santero.”

  “Shit, he’s a voodoo guy…. Santeria. That shit creeps me out…. Basically he thinks Espo is his voodoo avenger, that he called Esposito here.”

  “Shut up. Don’t even joke like that,” Esposito said.

  Lieutenant Ortiz raised his hand to cut the conversation off. There would be enough paperwork to do without the metaphysics.

  “You think they knew and they still kidnapped him? Isn’t that bad luck?”

  “It looks like it was bad luck.”

  “What do you think, they took him for his pot of gold?”

  “That’s leprechauns, jackass.”

  Napolitano had returned, with a little disposable camera. The sound of sirens neared outside, as Napolitano stepped into the room and began to choose where he’d snap the pictures. The santero grinned, delighted that his service to Ellegua had borne such fruit. Napolitano told him to stop.

  “Tell him not to smile, okay? It’s just too weird. A good lawyer’s gonna loo
k at him all happy and say it’s some kind of S&M thing.”

  Perez instructed him, and his facial expression varied between grim stoicism and silent-movie horror, as if he were a damsel tied to the railroad tracks. Napolitano took the last picture in the roll, and they wondered if the santero was a little loony, playing up for the camera, but when Esposito tried to tear some of the plastic from his arm, he shrieked. The plastic had melted into the skin, where they had burned him with the iron. Had he been tortured for a day or two? More? He was entitled to make all the faces he wanted, to laugh whenever he found it in himself, and to thank God, the New York City Police Department, and whatever imaginary friends who took the trouble to visit. Esposito touched him on the shoulder, kindly, and stepped back.

  Cops began to arrive in numbers, and the lieutenant kept them calm, outside the apartment; Nick picked the man up from the floor, struggling in his cuffs, and sent him away with two of the cops. EMS arrived soon after, among them the same pair, their old friends. When they walked into the room, the white guy was visibly amazed, while the Spanish woman knew enough to conceal her amazement and get to work. She went to the santero, while the white guy went to the dead guy, touched his neck. He looked at his watch.

  “Time is 11:32.”

  And then he looked to Nick, wondering. There was no accusation in his face. If anything, he looked admiring, cocking his head toward Esposito.

  “Jeez. This guy—you guys, again? Which one did it?”

  Esposito scowled. Napolitano stepped forward, as if to backhand him, and the EMT stumbled back. Napolitano was the union delegate. He knew that every shooting led to either a medal or an indictment. This one looked good, but he was unwilling to bet. And he certainly was not going to allow a statement to a stranger.

  “What I do?” the EMT asked.

  His partner cringed and went to him, for consolation and cover. Esposito shook his head as Napolitano walked up to them, shaking an angry finger.

  “We have to read people their rights before we ask if they killed anybody. I guess you’re a special kind of detective, get to do whatever you want.”

  “Sorry. I just—”

  “Yeah.”

  “Easy now, everybody.” The woman EMT put a placating hand on Napolitano’s shoulder, then another on her partner’s, and led him over to the priest.

  “Come on. Help me here. Baby, get a razor. Let’s get this guy out of this stuff. There’s second-, third-degree burns here. I don’t think the scalp and face lacerations are too bad….”

  Lieutenant Ortiz joined them around the man in the chair, in part to separate the teams.

  “Easy with the plastic, okay? We’re gonna have to save it, check it for prints, DNA, see if we’re missing any of the players.”

  “You got it. I think there may be twenty, thirty yards of it, maybe more.”

  “Yeah.”

  As they cut through the plastic, a dark-skinned man emerged from beneath, nearly fifty years old, with a bare barrel chest and a substantial belly. His arms were thin, and his legs didn’t quite reach the ground. There were a dozen burns on his arms and half as many on his legs where they had to cut around the plastic because it had been seared in; the doctors would have to remove it later on. His underwear was dingy and white, or once had been. It was now sallow yellow at the front, giving off a foul waft when his legs and lower body were finally cut free. Some covered their faces. Some made sounds, disgusted. Most stepped back. The Spanish EMT caressed his face.

  “Todo está okay, papi. No te sientas avergonzado.”

  The priest began to cry now, maybe for the first time, as if the pain had been somehow bearable but the shame was not. Bound and brutalized, he’d been able to stand whatever his enemies had inflicted on him; sitting in dirty underpants in front of a compassionate woman was beyond his endurance. He began to sob and cough in erratic rhythm, and the EMTs ushered him to his unsteady feet before helping him up onto the gurney. They guided him out of the apartment, into the crowd of cops in the hallway, where a dozen blue arms reached around the stretcher to help carry him down the stairs. Nick wondered what the color blue meant for him, what devil or divinity he had called upon to bear him away, after the red god had shot his way to freedom.

  There was work to be done in the apartment, but it wasn’t theirs; Crime Scene would take photographs, measurements, specimens. All the documentation and cataloguing, the dull science of it, was theirs to slog through. There were interrogations to be conducted in the precinct, regarding the crimes to be proved and disproved. The detectives gave the lieutenant their guns, to establish which had been fired. Nick would have to give a statement, later on, but there was still business for him to do with his partner. They pushed through the crowd outside the apartment—cops and the curious—and forgot again, like the last time, where the car was; was it an hour ago when they’d met, hiding around the corner? Ages ago, that hour. Nick breathed more deeply and easily when they found the car, and again when they left the block, so that it felt like, with each stage of departure, he was finally getting real air. Esposito had wiped his forehead with his arm a few times, but his suit was a poor absorbent for the sweat that flowed from him.

  “How you doin’?”

  “Fine,” said Nick, almost believing it. “You?”

  “Yeah, me, too. I got an idea. Let’s take a break.”

  Esposito made a sharp turn right, and then another one, so that they weren’t heading south to the hospital anymore, but north, toward the precinct, and wherever else. He pulled over by a bodega and returned with a brown bag before heading west. At the far end of 181st Street, they left the car. There was a short walk over a pedestrian bridge that crossed the highway, the railroad, and then they went into parkland, lawn and trees, green and rolling, near the foot of the colossal steel supports of the George Washington Bridge. Down to the left were massive gray boulders, piled to the river’s edge, where an old man in a black suit reached into his pocket and tossed handfuls of bread crumbs into the water. A few Canada geese paddled in close to him, bumping like tugboats, their snaky necks thrashing down at the crumbs.

  The detectives scrambled down the embankment and sat down on the hillside. There was more air here, again, and Nick breathed it as if it had just been invented. The river flowed past, as dirty as an old nickel, but the breeze felt fresh. Esposito took a quart of beer out of the bag and handed another one to Nick. They raised the bottles and tapped them against each other. Esposito poured a few drops of beer onto the ground, a libation. The movement was quick, surreptitious, as if he did not mean for it to be observed. There was a gap in the air, as if there were something that needed to be said. Esposito spoke first, with a kind of cracked curiosity in his voice. “You know what’s the most fucked up thing about all of this?”

  Nick was startled; he had expected some expression of sorrow or regret over the death, but the tone was jarring, almost angry. He didn’t respond, and after a few seconds, Esposito continued.

  “The EMTs. This is the third time we get these two in, what, four days? Three times in four days, when there’s dead people and almost-dead people that some people might say was our fault. My fault. Come on, Nick! What are the chances? What do you think, it’s one of them or both? The girl or the guy?”

  “What?”

  Nick was relieved that the crisis was not what he had at first feared; beyond that, he was baffled. They had just lived through a moment of mythic intensity—door crashing, lifesaving, death dealing, with good witchcraft and bad music—and the last of Nick’s preoccupations was the fluky cameo in the aftermath. Esposito looked at him, half-smiling, his black hair sticking up in sweaty clumps and weedy blades where he had rubbed his head in his penitential moment, now past. He was reanimated now, awake to a new challenge.

  “Nicky, come on. You’re supposed to be the smart one.”

  “I’m not.”

  “They’re IAB, Nick. Gotta be. Twice is coincidence. Three times is a conspiracy. Can you believe these peop
le? We’re lucky to scrape up a handful of guys to bust up a kidnapping. How many of these fucks are working on us, on overtime, watching to see if we fuck it up?”

  Nick took in the news like a snake swallowing a rat—yes, a rat—slowly, in difficult stages, but with certain result. Esposito mistook the shame in his face for fear, and laid a hand on his shoulder. More than one thought went through Nick’s mind; the last one was that he was not trusted himself, by the people who’d sent him.

  “Interesting,” Nick said.

  Esposito gave him an easy shove. “Don’t worry, pal. I got a knack for these people. I can spot ’em a mile away.”

  Now Nick knew. Love brought the gift of not-seeing. He laughed in turn, and Esposito was reassured that his partner had not lost confidence, either.

  “Was it a good shoot? Tell me, Nick, whaddaya think? Me, I think it had to go that way. It was meant to be.”

  Nick nodded, eager to talk about something else. He hadn’t tried to picture what was behind the apartment door, waiting to see it instead. In retrospect, the result had been predictable, the most likely end if not the inevitable one—three trained men surprised three distracted amateurs, and advantage prevailed. Seconds later, Nick realized that was not the case, not it at all. The result had been a blind bull’s-eye at the end of a crazy chain of wanton whatiffery. A sturdier front door, a different breakfast for the boy in the bathroom—skipping that last cup of coffee, having cereal instead of bacon and eggs—or a lack of headphones might have led to an entirely different outcome. Esposito was beguiled by his own charisma, a kite that thought it ruled the wind. No, that wasn’t quite right, either. Choice and chance, in a game of hide-and-seek. Ellegua was as good an explanation as any, and it would do for now.