Speak of the Devil

by Richard Hawke

  But I wasn’t looking at Nightmare. James King wasn’t holding Philip Byron. He wasn’t playing puppet master to Angel Ramos. When I’d checked in with the Parks Department administrative office at the Arsenal, I’d been told at first that James King was out of town, on vacation in Florida. A second look at the records had shown that-no-his vacation had ended just the day before. Monday. He’d remained in Florida an extra day to avoid traveling on the Sunday after Thanksgiving. Today was King’s first day back at work. King confirmed that for me. So did his sunburned face.

  But even more than all that was the simple fact that he made no effort whatsoever to disguise a character that seemed all too capable of going to a very dark place and considering very dark deeds. Charlie Burke says to doubt everything. Fine. But James King gave me nothing to doubt. He pleaded guilty to ongoing rage and to an impotent act of revenge on his cousin’s suicide note. More than the fact that he had been more than a thousand miles away during the past week of carnage, those were his alibis.

  I thanked him for his time. He placed his hands behind him on the wall and leaned back. For a moment I thought he was going to swing his legs over his head and follow his cousin to the grave. He looked miserable.

  He looked off to his left. “Funny,” he said.

  “What’s funny?”

  “Nothing, really. I was just thinking about Maggie. She was a drunk, you know.”

  “I know about that.”

  “Yeah. A drunk and a nun and now dead. Some life. Back when she was a teenager, after my aunt and uncle were killed and everything? Before she got attacked and accused my father of being the one who did it, we kind of got to be friends again. For a little while. She really needed someone to talk to. For a while, it was me.” He stroked his mustache as his thoughts turned a little more gently to the past. “She had a huge crush on the guy who prosecuted her parents’ killer. Huge crush. She was all of sixteen and seventeen, and she kept telling me how she was in love and she bet he was in love with her, too, and how one day they’d get married and everything would be great. She’d be the queen in her castle. You know how girls can get.”

  “Sure,” I said. From just outside the park, I heard several sirens. Police. Ambulance. I couldn’t say which. From the corner of my eye, I saw two men in suits take off running in the direction of York Avenue.

  King picked up the chain saw and cradled it in his lap. A second set of sirens kicked up. These seemed to be coming from the direction of Gracie Mansion. King hoisted the chain saw up onto his shoulder as if he were Paul Bunyan. A smirk of sorts-it was hard to tell-appeared beneath the mustache.

  “If Maggie’s dreams had come true, none of that other stuff would’ve happened. Maybe my father’d still be alive.” This time he let out a small laugh. “And Maggie’d have been a big deal. Queen of the whole city.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Something was definitely going on. A cop on a bicycle was pedaling our way as fast as he could.

  “The prosecutor,” King said. “Maggie’s dreamboat. That was Martin Leavitt. He was a big hotshot in Brooklyn at the time. Mr. Law and Order. If she really could’ve landed him, she’d be fat and happy now. It would’ve all been different, just like she said. Up at that mansion. Might not be a castle, but I’ll bet Maggie’d have been all right with that.”

  “Leavitt?”

  The bicycle cop flew by, his legs pumping like twin pistons. His face was a mask of grimness.

  King slid off the wall. “Hey, man, where’s the fire?”

  Still more sirens sounded. I wheeled around. The feeling came over me again, the one like I was in a tunnel. I was standing stock-still, but it felt like everything around me was rushing past at breakneck speed. It was enough of a feeling that I must have staggered. King grabbed hold of my arm.

  “Hey, man, are you okay?”

  38

  PIER 17 JUTS OUT INTO THE EAST RIVER JUST A FEW BLOCKS NORTH OF Wall Street. Until the early eighties, it was just one more on the growing list of Manhattan’s abandoned piers, home to seagulls, drunks, junkies and a few gay men looking for another few gay men. The only feature of note was the nearby Fulton Fish Market, which operated out of mainly open-air stalls located along the water running north from the pier, primarily in the shadow of the elevated FDR Drive.

  That all changed when an urban development group called the Rouse Company struck a deal with the city to develop the pier, along with a portion of the real estate adjacent to it, for commercial purposes. They called it the South Street Seaport. The original vision of the Rouse Company was an urban mall stretching all the way north along the river to the Brooklyn Bridge, a quarter mile away from the pier. This plan, however, would have required more cooperation from the people who controlled the Fulton Fish Market (a loose consortium of Chinese and Italian mafia, along with, of course, the fishmongers themselves) than those people were willing to provide. So the plans got scaled back somewhat. The Rouse Company recobbled the foot of Fulton Street and renovated the existing buildings, most of which dated back to the seventeen hundreds and the area’s heyday as the city’s thriving boatbuilding district, but which, like the piers, had become increasingly ghostlike over the years as New York’s maritime identity diminished. Vintage streetlamps were installed, and a general “Ye Olde” flavor was mandated for the signage of the merchants who were subsequently lured to the area.

  Meanwhile, out on Pier 17 itself, a three-story glass and metal structure was erected. A pavilion. A faux-weathered brass roof was bolted into place, and there it was: a large, light-filled shopping mall on Manhattan’s East River. The Gap, Sharper Image, Banana Republic… only a shut-in or an isolated Montanan doesn’t know the general run of stores that populate these kinds of places.

  There’s general agreement that the success of the South Street Seaport mall has been somewhat less than what either the Rouse Company or the merchants who pay their exorbitant rents to do business there had hoped it would be. I can recall stopping at the place with Margo one Christmas Eve and our being two of seven shoppers in the entire mall; a hired chorus of around twenty had stood at the garland-wrapped railing overlooking the main floor and serenaded us with holiday tunes.

  Probably the most consistently thriving businesses in the pier’s mall are the ones on the top floor, the one with the most glass and the best views: the Brooklyn Bridge to the north, the Brooklyn waterfront and promenade directly across the river, and to the south, Governors Island and the top half of the torch arm of the Statue of Liberty.

  This is the Pier 17 food court. And this is where Angel Ramos screwed up while attempting to plant a homemade bomb behind one of the large potted plants that dot the terra-cotta floor.

  THE CROWD OF ONLOOKERS WAS SOMEWHAT LARGER THAN WHAT YOU generally get for these sorts of things. This was because, in addition to the naturally curious, several hundred shoppers and salesclerks had safely fled the pavilion as word spread of a madman somewhere in the building with a bomb. Even as I arrived, scattered pockets of people were fleeing across the wooden deck between the pier and the street with their arms over their heads. The police had already set up sawhorses and barrier tape. Several officers dashed forward to escort the panicked people the final few feet. One of the people fleeing the pavilion was old St. Nick himself. The big guy was dragging along a stumbling elf by the arm.

  Behind the barrier was the row of police. Dozens of them and more coming. The patrol cars parked at every imaginable angle. And behind the police cars, funneled into the narrow Ye Olde cobbled area of Fulton Street, stood the crowd of onlookers.

  I’d gotten a fragmented piece of the story from one of the cops mobilizing just outside Carl Schurz Park. “Some nut is holding a group of people hostage at Pier 17,” he’d said. “They say he’s got a bomb.”

  I parked my car at the base of the Brooklyn Bridge and jogged along South Street, in front of the fish market stalls. The gawkers were sparse here, and I was able to get right up to the barrier. I heard mutterin
gs from some of the cops that the mayor was allegedly on his way. Not too many seemed thrilled by the prospect.

  “We got our fucking hands full here.”

  “He thinks we got time for a fucking photo op?”

  As Remy Sanchez moved from behind one of the stanchions holding up the FDR Drive, I called out to him: “Sanchez!”

  He looked around, then spotted me. A policeman near me was trying to keep me from the barricade, but Sanchez called to him, “Let him in!” and I ducked under the tape. Sanchez was barking into his walkie-talkie. “No! Do you understand the word ‘no’? Just wait, is what I said.” He lowered the walkie-talkie. “Cox is in there.”

  “Cox? Where?”

  He waved his walkie-talkie toward the pier. “In there somewhere. Son of a bitch. Rule number one in these situations is you stand down. Any cop knows that. Rule number one is not running like a madman across an open space and going inside. That doesn’t make heroes, that makes dead men.”

  I looked over at the pier. The public space was a good hundred yards from the pavilion building. “So what happened?” I asked.

  “A man was spotted acting suspiciously by a worker at one of the food joints up there. We think the worker confronted the guy. This is what we’re hearing from some of the people who managed to get away. The worker was shot. He’s still in there. Somehow the shooter managed to corral a bunch of people, and he’s holding them on the top floor. We don’t know exactly how many. He let one person go. A messenger. She says he’s got a bomb. She says the guy’s out of his mind. He wants money. He wants a helicopter. He wants a boat. He wants to talk to the mayor. Son of a bitch doesn’t know what he wants. We’re trying to establish communication.”

  “What he wants is ten million dollars,” I said.

  Sanchez made a long face. “Well, so do I. And how do you know this?”

  “Long story.”

  “I take it this is our nut job from last week,” Sanchez said.

  “That’s the short version.”

  “So he’ll kill those people if it comes to it. We can’t count on this being a bluff.”

  “I wouldn’t count on it.”

  “Holy mother.”

  Sanchez’s walkie-talkie crackled, and he barked into it. I caught the word “sharpshooters.” I scanned the phalanx of police officers. I was surprised Tommy Carroll hadn’t arrived on the scene yet. One Police Plaza was under a mile away. A police van was making its way slowly down the cobbled street, parting the sea of onlookers. Sanchez clicked off his walkie-talkie.

  “If I get my hands on Cox, I’m going to strangle him. There’s no way he can approach that guy without endangering the hostages. Goddammit, we need control here. A cowboy cop is not what we need.”

  “Cox knows the perp,” I said. “He knows the guy holding the hostages.”

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  “Another long story.”

  “Jesus, Malone, you’re just one big fat storybook, aren’t you? Well, I don’t have time to listen to them all right now. You stay put and keep your nose clean. This is police business. If the situation drags on, we’ll light a campfire and let you tell some of your stories.”

  “Gracias,” I said.

  Sanchez grunted and moved off. I spotted another face I recognized-that of Officer Patrick Noon. He was standing a head above anyone near him, about thirty feet away from me. He was looking in my direction, but if he spotted me, he chose not to show it.

  The van that had been inching its way through the crowd reached South Street. The rear doors flew open and a dozen or more helmeted policemen piled out. They were wearing external bulletproof vests and carrying automatic weapons. I spotted an identical van pulling up to the barricades from the south. A small army poured out of this one as well. Sirens sounded overhead, simultaneous with the thwocka-thwocka-thwocka of a low-flying helicopter. The elevated FDR Drive runs right past Pier 17, roughly level with the upper floors of the mall. I was sure that traffic had been stopped in both directions. I took a few steps out from under the highway and looked up. I spotted several slender rifle barrels resting on the guardrail. The sharpshooters were already in place. The firepower was building up.

  Cox. I pictured him dashing across the hundred-yard open area to make his way to the pier building. This wasn’t heroic, not any more than his shooting Roberto Diaz at point-blank range had been. I knew what it was. It was the same move as the one he’d pulled in the Municipal Building. A preemptive one. Cox had no intention of standing by while police negotiators attempted to set up a link to Angel. He couldn’t risk it. Whatever Leonard Cox’s entanglement was with Angel Ramos, it now appeared that he would do anything in his power to keep Angel from having the opportunity to spell it out.

  Cox wasn’t on any rescue mission. He was on the hunt.

  Another burping siren sounded, this one from a black sedan making its way down South Street, the same direction I’d come from. A news van was hot on its trail. As the car eased to a stop, I ducked out from behind the tape and slipped unseen to the nearest fish stall and moved quickly behind it. I peeked back around the corner. Martin Leavitt was emerging from the sedan. I thought of James King’s story about his cousin’s crush on the younger Leavitt. The news van screeched to a halt, and Kelly Cole bolted from the passenger side and ran on tippy heels swiftly over to where Leavitt had paused to survey the scene. She was beckoning her cameraman to hurry along. Her hair bounced as if she were in a shampoo commercial. Even from this distance, I could see Leavitt lighting up as she approached. The man couldn’t help himself; he was the ultimate flirt. I thought again about Margaret King, about seventeen-year-old Maggie King. Remy Sanchez was making his way over to the mayor. The news cameraman got his equipment up on his shoulder and flipped on his lamp. Cole reached for Leavitt’s elbow to guide him closer, into the shot. He reached for hers as well. The two shared a little laugh. Even from where I was standing I could read the look on Sanchez’s face. He obviously felt this was no time for a goddamn tea party.

  The stalls of the fish market blocked me partially from view, allowing me to scoot unseen along the small seldom-used lip of the pier on the north side of the pavilion. I reached the pavilion and pushed quickly through the first set of double glass doors.

  It was beginning to look a lot like Christmas. A forty-foot evergreen rose from the mall floor up to the other levels. It was decorated with large colored disks. They looked like psychedelic hubcaps. At the base of the tree was Santa’s Workshop, now abandoned except for several mechanical reindeer whose heads swiveled left and right as if the animals were trying to figure out where everybody had gone. Thick silver strands of tinsel were draped everywhere, and most of the shopwindows had been frosted around the borders with spray-on snow. The sound system crooned “Silver Bells” to an empty house. I pulled out my.38.

  Moving as swiftly as I could, I double-stepped it up the escalator to the second floor level and ducked into the nearest shop. It sold brightly colored wooden animals from South and Central America. A dozen Technicolor parrots were perched on colored loops hanging from the ceiling. I moved behind a blue gorilla the size of a small car and peered out the shopwindow.

  There were two ways I could see for reaching the third level. One was to continue up the escalator I’d just been on. The other was to head down the low-ceilinged corridor of shops toward the rear of the pavilion. At the end of the corridor, a set of switchback stairs went up either side to the top level. My memory of the time Margo had dragged me here was that at the top of the escalator were several restaurants. The food court itself ran along an area corresponding to the corridor of shops on my level, then opened up to a large common area with tables and chairs and bolted-down lollipop tables for eating while standing. That was where the steps led to. It would have been nice to know if Ramos was holed up with his hostages on my end of the building or down at the far end. I glanced at the parrots. They weren’t talking.

  I didn’t relish the idea of being
delivered to Ramos via the escalator, so I decided to try the corridor. Between the shop and the far end of the corridor stood several market carts in the middle of the floor, the kind that sell bad jewelry and refrigerator magnets and various cheap gewgaws. I decided I’d make my way down the hallway cart by cart. They weren’t much cover, but they were all I had.

  I rubbed the gorilla’s nose for good luck, then I took off out of the shop, keeping low, and made it to the first cart. “Silver Bells” had given way to “The Little Drummer Boy.” Pa-rum-pa-pum-pum.

  I dashed to the second cart and crouched behind it. A refrigerator magnet next to my head read: TIME EXISTS SO THAT EVERYTHING DOESN’T HAPPEN ALL AT ONCE. I liked that. I grabbed it and stuffed it in my pocket. I was halfway to the final cart when a shot sounded out and I felt a bullet zip by just inches from my face. I dove to the floor and slid the final few feet to the cart. A second shot rang out. This one took a chip off the cart, just above my head.

  I made myself as small as I could and crawled beneath the cart, wedging myself between the wheels and the centering post. I flattened my cheek against the cold floor and eased my head forward, like a reluctant turtle.

  Leonard Cox was crouched behind the railing at the top of the right-side stairway. His elbows were locked in front of him, and he was holding his service revolver in both hands. The gun bucked. The bullet hit something metal and ricocheted into the window of a toy store in front of me on the left. The exploding glass looked like water from a burst dam. I kissed the floor as bits of glass rained down all around me.

  “Malone!” It was Cox. “Malone, it’s the police! Hold your fire! Throw down your weapon!”

  I knew immediately what he was doing. Cops carry transmitters on their shoulders, and my good friend Leonard Cox was setting it down for the record. In that instant, I knew Charlie’s theory was correct. The so-called murder-suicide of Pearson and Cash. However the shootings went down, in the end it was Cox who’d set things up to look the way they had. Twisting and reshaping. Cox seemed to have a talent for it.