‘So you think I ought to take the job?’
‘Aha! I’m sorry, Michael. No can help. Nobody can take that decision except you.’
Back at home, seated at his drawing-board, Michael sketched a picture of the seashore where the man had been standing, and the squat white lighthouse. With its grassy headland, its ocean-weathered cliffs and its curving sands, it could have been any bay from Pigeon Cove to Horseneck Beach. It might not even have been in Massachusetts, although he was irrationally convinced that it was. It might not even have been a real beach at all.
On a separate sheet of paper, he tried to draw the tall grey man in the long grey coat. It was curiously difficult. Although he could remember very distinctly what impression the man had made on him; and that he was tall; and grey-haired; and narrow-nosed; he found it almost impossible to assemble all of these features in a recognizable face. He pencilled and shaded for nearly two hours, and in the end he managed to produce a vaguely similar figure, but he was very far from satisfied.
He sat back, frowning, and looked out at the clouds crossing New Seabury beach. The sands were deserted. There were no swimmers, no walkers; nobody flying kites. A landscape waiting for something to happen.
All the way back from Hyannis, he had known with complete certainty what he was going to do. He lifted a sheaf of papers under which his telephone had been concealing itself like a burrowing crab, and lifted the handset. He punched out the number which even hypnotherapy could never have erased from his memory, 617–999 9999.
When the girl answered, ‘Plymouth, first and finest, how can I help you?’ he hesitated for only a moment before saying, ‘Joe Garboden please.’
He heard Joe’s extension ringing, and he knew then that there was no turning back.
Five
‘That’s him!’ barked Detective Ralph Brossard, the instant that the lanky black man appeared in the doorway and started to lope across the sidewalk. He flicked his freshly-lit cigarette out of the car window and reached for his r/t.
‘Newt – Newt, Jambo just exited the front door. He’s crossing the street and he’s headed for his vehicle. He’s carrying the sports bag. It’s a go.’
Next to him, Detective John Minatello reached inside his cream cotton windcheater and lifted out his .38. He gave Ralph a quick, pale, sweaty grin and said, with nervous satisfaction, ‘Nailed the son-of-a-bitch. Geronimo!’
Ralph started the Pontiac’s engine, and quickly glanced behind him to make sure that there were no civilian cars coming up the street. With the flat of his hand, he spun the wheel over to left-hand lock, until the power steering whistled. Then he licked his lips and tensely waited.
‘Come on, you mother,’ he breathed.
It was six minutes after eleven a.m. on Seaver Street, in the Combat Zone. The brick tenement buildings were brown and the sidewalks were brown and even the air was brown. The day smelled of cooking fats and automobile fumes and dried-out water traps. Ralph had been sitting by the kerb in his Grand Prix since fifteen minutes before dawn, waiting for Jambo to emerge from 1334. He and John Minatello had breakfasted on Egg MacMuffins and tepid coffee, and the vinyl seat was still cluttered with the debris of their meal, along with crumpled biscuit wrappers and empty cartons of Winston Lights and a dog-eared copy of Islands in the Stream by Ernest Hemingway.
Ralph was a plaid-shirt and twelve-bore Hemingway enthusiast. A man’s man.
All his life (well, ever since his divorce four years ago from Thelma) Ralph had been preparing himself for a Hemingway-like retirement in the Caribbean, fishing for shark and marlin in deep blue waters, listening to the rain rustling on a dried-palm roof, beachcombing, drinking whisky, letting one warm tropical day slide into the next. He had even grown to look a little like Hemingway, although police department regulations forbade a beard. He was broad faced and bluff, with a black-and-white moustache and eyes that crinkled up and focused way beyond Boston, even when he was sitting in cars for days on end waiting for suspects, or typing out reports.
Two years and seven months to go, and Ralph could hang up his gun, hand in his badge, and take the plane south for Miami and then Bimini, leaving behind him the sweating brown summers and the ball-cracking winters, the air pollution and the grimy crime. He could leave behind the supercilious rich on Newbury Street and the snarling poor on Blue Hill Avenue – and everything else he detested about this pretentious, squalid, quaint and dangerous city.
He had been following Jambo DuFreyne for over a year now, through five tedious seasons. Leaves had budded, ice had melted, sun had filled the streets. Every two weeks Jambo brought exhibition-quality cocaine in a sports bag from Atlanta, Georgia, to sell it in Boston, and Ralph and John had seen him open that front door and lope across that same street in rain, in snow, in sunshine, in freezing fog – thin and spindly-legged, in the same brown woolly torn and the same knee-length leather coat, and climb into the same dented brown Buick with the squealing bearings.
Up until today, they had let Jambo well alone. Jambo, after all, was nothing more than a carrier. But here, in this apartment building, fifth floor back, lived Luther Johnson, one of the evilest faces in Boston, the Spider of Seaver Street; and from Luther Johnson’s apartment Ralph had patiently followed Jambo’s cocaine to a crack factory in Cambridge; and from the crack factory in Cambridge to most of its major outlets, which included Harvard University and MIT and Harvard Med School, where rich kids were willing to pay well over the odds for good-quality produce.
Ralph already had sufficient evidence to arrest the sons and daughters of some of America’s wealthiest and most influential families on charges of drug trafficking, conspiracy, extortion and tax evasion. He had videos and wiretaps on Belmonts, on Woolleys, on Pembrokes and Cabots. Jambo DuFrayne was the final connection. This morning he was carrying a sports bag of used $100 bills, in payment for his latest delivery – all of which, unknown to Jambo, were marked and all of which could be traced conclusively back to the golden young men and women on five different campuses. Ralph had nicknamed it the Ivy Connection.
Jambo climbed into his car, and for a few moments Ralph was unable to see him, because he was parked about 150 feet further up the road, on the opposite side, behind a large green van.
‘Come on, you mother,’ he repeated, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel.
‘He’s coming, he’s coming,’ said John Minatello. ‘He’s started his engine. I saw the exhaust.’
‘Newt, you there Newt?’ Ralph called, into his r/t.
‘I’m here, Ralph, don’t sweat it.’
‘When I say hit it, Newt, you hit it, and you ram that mother up the rear end so that he doesn’t know whether it’s tomorrow or Christmas.’
‘I got it, Ralph, don’t you worry.’
‘Come on, you mother,’ Ralph repeated.
He glanced in his driver-side mirror. The street was clear. He gently revved the gas, then glanced again. A powder-blue Volkswagen Beetle had appeared from nowhere at all, was slowly approaching. ‘Shit,’ he said. The very last thing he wanted now was any civilian presence. It was inconceivable that Jambo wasn’t armed. He could be carrying anything from a .44 to an Uzi, or both, and he wouldn’t hesitate to use them. Jambo had a history of armed robbery and violent assault that made Saddam Hussein look like St Francis of Assisi.
Ralph could only pray that the Beetle would reach the far end of the street before Jambo decided to pull out of his parking space. He could pull out himself to block the Beetle’s progress, but then he would have to keep on going right past Jambo, or Jambo would immediately twig that he was being ambushed. And if he kept going and passed Jambo by, he would be giving the son of a bitch an open route to make his getaway.
On the other hand, if he didn’t block the Beetle off, Jambo might pull out immediately – when the Beetle was still halfway between Jambo and the end of the street, where Newt was waiting. There were vans and automobiles parked on both sides of the street, and with the Beetle obstructing him, New
t wouldn’t be able to come speeding down from the far end of the street to rear-end Jambo and box him in.
Apart from that, there would be an unacceptably high risk of the Beetle’s driver being injured or even killed.
‘Civilian vehicle approaching,’ Newt remarked, flatly.
‘I’m aware,’ Ralph replied.
‘What do you want to do?’
‘Pray to St Philip that it clears the street.’
‘You could block it?’
‘Jambo’s not moving yet. If he senses that something’s going down, he won’t move. He’ll make a run for it.’
The Beetle chugged closer and closer.
‘We could let him go,’ Newt suggested. ‘We could hit him on Washington Street instead.’
‘Unh-hunh. We have to hit him here. Remember DeSisto.’
DeSisto vs. Commonwealth of Massachusetts was a notorious case in which a drug-runner’s conviction had been overturned because the police had momentarily lost sight of his vehicle in traffic. During those few lost seconds, DeSisto’s defence attorney had argued, anybody could have tossed the package of incriminating evidence into his client’s car. Whether it was likely or not was immaterial. It was possible, and DeSisto had walked. Ralph was determined that Jambo wouldn’t walk, because if Jambo walked, then all of those snotty overbearing Ivy Leaguers and all of those arrogant MIT technocrats would walk, too. Ralph spent most of his time picking up small-time pushers and crackheads and crazies with pissy pants. As far as he was concerned, it was a deep moral principle that the law should be applied with equal vigour to those who wore Calvin Klein and Nino Cerruti and spent their summers in Newport or the Caribbean.
The Beetle crawled slowly past him. He glanced quickly at the driver. A black girl, aged about twenty-three, with cornrow hair and silver hoop earrings. On the Beetle’s door was painted a cartoon crow from Dumbo doffing a straw hat and saying Brush My Feet! Ralph noticed that the licence plate was out of date, and that the rear wheel-arches were severely rusted and patched with fibreglass.
‘Come on, baby,’ Ralph urged her, under his breath. She had almost reached Jambo’s car now. ‘Come on, baby, keep your foot down.’
But the Beetle crawled slower and slower. When it was almost alongside Jambo’s parking place, it stopped completely, and a cloud of brown smoke belched out of its exhausts. For a moment, Ralph thought that the girl might have broken down; but then he realized that she had paused only because she was searching for some particular building. The Beetle stayed where it was for nearly a minute, juddering and pouring out smoke, while Ralph sat drumming and sweating and praying that the girl would move on.
‘What the fuck is she doing?’ Newt asked, over the r/t.
‘Looks like she’s checking the street numbers,’ Ralph replied. ‘She must be lost.’
‘Why the fuck doesn’t she get herself lost someplace else?’
Ralph didn’t reply. He was far too tense. The girl was lost because she was lost; and because every surveillance that Ralph had ever arranged was plagued by innocent glitches: people who wandered bewildered and unknowing into the line of fire, trucks that parked in front of windows they were watching, road menders who would suddenly decide to hammer-drill right next to phone booths that they were tapping.
‘Come on, baby, move,’ he breathed; but still the Beetle stayed where it was, puffing smoke.
He heard Jambo blasting his car horn, and that got the girl moving. She chugged a few feet further down the street, and now Jambo was manoeuvring his black Electra out of his parking space. Through the purplish tint of his windshield, Ralph could see the silhouette of Jambo’s woolly tom and his sunglasses black and expressionless as an insect’s eyes. But the Beetle had stopped again, just behind him, which meant that Newt was faced with a high-speed run along 120 feet of street, culminating in a 50 mph ‘squeeze’ between the dawdling Beetle and the cars parked along the kerb – a ‘squeeze’ which would allow him less than six or seven inches on either side.
‘Newt, you going to try it?’ asked Ralph.
‘Never say never,’ Newt replied.
Jambo’s car had cleared the parking space now, and was driving towards Ralph at quickly increasing speed. Jambo’s Electra was an ‘81 model, unwashed but mechanically well maintained, with stiffened suspension and widened wheels. Ralph knew for certain that if he didn’t stop Jambo now, he would have God’s own job to stop him on Washington Street, or the turnpike, or whichever way he chose to speed to the airport. And he couldn’t let him out of his sight, not for an instant, not for the blink of an eye; or else it was DeSisto all over again. This was one case he couldn’t even think of losing. He couldn’t bear the idea of those Ivy Leaguers laughing at him. He had to nail them and arraign them and lock them up and that was all that mattered. He had to bring them low, because they were low, they were shit.
‘This is it,’ he said, so matter-of-fact that John Minatello was taken by surprise. He slammed his foot on the gas and swerved the Grand Prix out into the middle of the street with an operatic screaming of tyres.
Jambo didn’t even have time to hit the brakes. His 4,ooolb Electra was travelling at nearly 30 mph when it collided head-on with Ralph’s Grand Prix. Ralph heard a devastating smash and his head was slammed backward against the seat and his left leg was jammed against the door. Then he was screaming, ‘Out! Out!’ and he was kicking the door open and rolling into the street. He tugged his non-regulation .44 out of its holster and cocked it and kept on rolling, underneath the back of a parked car, so that when he finally scrambled to his feet he was holding the .44 in both hands and he was shielded by the sagging rear end of an ancient Le Sabre.
He saw John Minatello crouched behind the passenger door of their wrecked Grand Prix, brandishing his .38 and screaming, ‘Show me your hands! Show me your fucking hands!’
He saw Newt in his sea-green Plymouth, roaring toward them down Seaver Street with his red beacon flashing, blurred by sunlight and smoke. There was a split second when he really thought that Newt would make it through the narrow gap between the Beetle and the cars parked on the side of the street. He actually mouthed the words, Done it, you beautiful s.o.b. – but then he saw pieces of door-mirror flying in the sunlight, and heard that terrible wrenching, bosh-ing noise of cars colliding, and the Beetle was tilted and dropped, and Newt’s Plymouth was wedged in tight against a rusty brown pick-up.
Jambo – half-out of the driver’s door – turned around and looked behind him with extraordinary grace, almost as if he were performing in a ballet. Ralph saw his thin chest lean back, his hips pivot.
‘Show me your hands! ‘John Minatello raged. But Jambo ignored him and it was then that Ralph realized that Jambo was holding a very large handgun.
God, he wanted Jambo alive. He needed Jambo alive. He roared at John Minatello, ‘Don’t!’ but the morning suddenly boomed with two heavyweight shots, and then boom! another heavyweight shot, and then snap! snap! snap! which was John Minatello’s .38.
Ralph saw the Beetle’s rear window explode, and a burst of blood spray out of it – almost as if the driver had tossed a cup of coffee into the street. Shit, he thought, he’s killed her. Then he saw the windshield of Newt’s Plymouth starred and shattered; and a quick, consistent cracking as Newt returned fire. The street was suddenly filled with smoke, and theatrical shafts of light, and Jambo was gone, like a conjuring trick.
Ralph, panting heavily, leaned to one side of the parked car, then to the other. The fucker had gone, the fucker had gone. He stayed where he was, utterly tense, his knees slightly bent, his gun held upward in both hands, his blue T-shirt darkly circled with sweat.
‘Where’s he gone?’ he shouted to John Minatello.
John Minatello’s face was as pale and long as a calf’s-brain sausage. ‘I can’t see him. I thought I hit him.’
‘Newt!’ yelled Ralph, in a harsh, high voice.
‘It’s okay, Ralph!’ Newt shouted back.
‘Where the fuck is he
?’ Ralph demanded.
‘I don’t know. I didn’t see where he went.’
‘What the fuck do you mean, you didn’t see where he went?’
‘I mean, I didn’t see where he went.’
There was a lengthy silence. Seaver Street was oddly hushed, apart from the ambient murmuring of traffic, and the sound of an L10-11 taking off from Logan, and making its way south-westward.
Ralph reluctantly edged his way around the back of the car. He held his .44 two-handed, way out in front of him, and he knew that the barrel was trembling, but he put that down to adrenaline.
‘Mr DuFreyne!’ he called, glancing over at John Minatello. ‘Mr DuFreyne, we’re police officers here, and we have a warrant to arrest you. Now – either you make it easy, or else you make it hard.’
The smoke began to drift away; and as the smoke cleared, the silence began to fill up, too. Suddenly there were crowds talking and music playing and dogs barking and trees rustling.
Ralph leaned down and looked under the car which he was using for protection. He looked all the way across the street. There were plenty of gum wrappers and bottles and squashed drink cans, and a black thing that looked like somebody’s discarded bondage suit, but that was all.
‘Mr DuFreyne, you’re under arrest but if you co-operate this whole thing could go very easy on you!’ Ralph shouted. ‘Do you hear me? We’re after your buyers, not you! We’re not even interested in Luther! You just tell us who’s been bankrolling this little bit of business, and you can have the deal of a lifetime. Come on, it’s election year! The DA’s pretty sweet on people who act in the public interest. You know that. Look what happened to Mack Rivera.’
Again, there was silence. Ralph taxi-whistled to John Minatello to catch his attention, and then indicated with an urgent wave of his gun so that John should leave the comparative safety of a car door, and make his way slowly up the sidewalk until he could see where Jambo DuFreyne had concealed himself.
The Sleepless Page 11