by James Hayman
‘It’s not noise. It’s Propaganda.’
‘What?’
‘Propaganda. That’s who’s singing. They’re very hot.’
‘I can tell. The iPod. Please.’
Wordlessly she rolled off the end of the bed, walked to her desk, got the iPod, inserted the earbuds, and resumed her position on the bed. McCabe retreated to the living room.
He tossed the bills on top of the small desk in the corner, where they joined an unopened stack. He sat in the big chair, feet on the glass coffee table. More bills than money. Always. How much longer could he afford being a cop? In a few years there’d be college to pay for on top of everything else he couldn’t afford. He could sell the condo. Move to a smaller place away from the water. Move backward. Move down. Maybe Sandy was right dumping him for a rich guy. Maybe the rich guy would pay for college. The idea depressed him.
Maybe he should quit the department once the Dubois case was resolved. Shockley might fire him anyway for his big mouth once there was no longer a political price to pay. A guy he knew at NYU who was now CEO of a hot biotech in Boston once talked to him about a corporate security job. The dollars mentioned were a lot more than he was making now. Even so, he wasn’t sure it was worth it. Maybe he could become a PI. Spade amp; Archer? Savage amp; McCabe? He could do a passable Bogey imitation, but there were damned few Maltese Falcon cases out there. Mostly he’d spend nights sneaking around hot-sheets motels, getting the goods on philandering husbands and wives. Nope. Not a PI.
Fuck it. Snap out of it. Suck it up and deal. He was still a cop. It was a calling McCabe believed in. Go out on the streets and get the bad guys, as many as you could. Then put them away for as long as you could. Simple and honorable. He liked it that way. It was why he dropped out of film school, why he gave up his dream of someday being a director for the simpler dream of being a cop.
He pressed the icy bottle against his forehead, hoping to pre-empt the headache that was forming. He closed his eyes. Images of New York came tumbling back. Images of his brother Tommy. The big brother. The surrogate father. The hero figure with the feet of clay. Tommy the Narc. Tommy the cop on the take. Images of the drug dealer named TwoTimes. ‘Some may fuck with me once, but there’s none what fucks with me two times.’
TwoTimes who shot Tommy dead. They caught the little fucker, but he walked. Wouldn’t even cop a plea. Walked right out of court on that bullshit alibi and right back to pushing his shit. ‘I got an alibi, Your Honor. I was fuckin’ my fiancee when the cop got popped,’ said TwoTimes. ‘Yeah, she can tell you. Her mama was right there, and she can tell you, too.’
‘Yeah, Your Honor,’ said the fiancee, ‘that’s the truth. He was fuckin’ me the whole time, so he couldna shot the man. I swear it.’
‘Yeah, Your Honor,’ agreed the mama. ‘TwoTimes was fuckin’ my little girl. He was humpin’ her ass like hell wouldn’t have it. So he couldna shot that cop. No way. No, sir. No way at all.’
All of it bullshit, but the cop-killer walked anyway. Never would’ve happened in the old days. That’s what McCabe’s father, a retired and highly decorated captain, would’ve said had he been alive at the time. Never would’ve gone to trial. A perp shot to death resisting arrest. No questions asked. No answers needed. Simple solution for a simple problem: simple — and honorable. Now Dad was dead and so was Tommy, and the simple solutions weren’t so simple anymore.
McCabe snapped out of his reverie. Casey was walking through the living room on her way to the kitchen. ‘You’re not supposed to wear your gun in the house,’ she said, barely looking at him. ‘It’s a bad influence on an impressionable child.’
‘You’re right,’ he said. He got up, went to his bedroom, and put the. 45 in the locked box in his closet where he kept the shotgun. He felt naked without it.
He heard the fridge door open and close. Then Casey’s face appeared in the doorway of his room, a can of Coke in her hand. ‘I’m not going to see her. I told her that, but she said she was coming anyway.’
‘Did she call again?’
‘Yes. Right after I got home from soccer.’
‘Casey, you may have to see her. We may not have any choice about that. Have you thought about why you don’t want to see her?’
‘I don’t know. I just don’t want to. She’s a real bitch, you know.’ Casey went back to her own room.
McCabe followed. Once again he found himself standing by her open door. ‘Well, you don’t know her very well. Maybe once you get to know her a little better, you’ll like her a little more.’
‘I don’t think so, and I don’t know why you’re even saying something like that.’
He didn’t know either. He just wanted to make the inevitable meeting more palatable to her. He also wanted to end the discussion, but Casey kept going. ‘I don’t understand you. You hate her as much as I do, but you’re making out like she’s just some kind of regular mom or something, and you know that’s just crap. So stop trying to sell her to me. I’m not buying.’ She closed the door, leaving McCabe on the outside, staring at wood.
He didn’t know if there was anything else to do or say. He wanted to shout through the door that he wasn’t trying to sell her anything, and sure as hell not Sandy. Although that seemed a stupid thing: to shout through a door at a thirteen-year-old, even a thirteen-year-old who sometimes sounded like she was thirty. So he didn’t. He just went back to the kitchen, got another beer, retrieved the envelope that had been left for him in the mailbox, and sat back down in the big chair.
Inside was a single sheet of lined paper, maybe torn from a school notebook. The message was written in pencil in the same block-letter style as the envelope. He supposed the writer was trying to disguise her handwriting. He assumed it was a her. The woman from Exchange Street and the cathedral. McCabe, it said, meet me Tuesday night at nine. It’s about the murder. Drive your red car. Come alone. The word ‘alone’ was underlined twice. Take the turnpike north to the Gray exit. Follow Gray Road about six miles. Take a right turn on Holder’s Farm Road. Go 1.3 miles and pull over onto the side. Flash your lights on and off twice to signal that you have not been followed. People are watching. When you get there, wait. I’ll come to your car.
The note wasn’t signed. He still didn’t know who the mystery woman was or if the note was even from her. Whoever wrote it obviously knew where he lived and what kind of car he drove. He considered the possibilities. One, it could be a legitimate meet with someone who felt threatened being seen with him. Two, it could be a crank sending him on a wild-goose chase. Or three, it could be someone setting him up for an ambush. The third possibility, the most dangerous, seemed the least likely. He wasn’t close enough to finding his quarry for anyone, including Spencer, to feel threatened enough to take him out.
McCabe went to the kitchen and got a plastic ziplock bag out of a kitchen drawer. He slipped the note inside. He’d have it checked for prints. His own would be on it, but so might someone else’s.
He heard footsteps coming up the stairs to their apartment. He wasn’t expecting anyone. He heard the sound of a key probing the lock. With his systems on high alert, McCabe’s hand went to his hip, where his gun should be and wasn’t. Shit. He slipped behind the door, where he wouldn’t be seen when it opened. He held his breath. The door opened. A familiar scent. He let the breath out.
Kyra stood in the front hall, arms loaded down with half a dozen plastic bags of groceries. She smiled. ‘Hello, handsome.’
‘I didn’t know you were coming. I thought you had to be in the studio, quote, half the night, unquote.’
‘You want me to leave? I can always find someone else to make a delicious dinner for. I don’t suppose either of you has eaten.’
McCabe had forgotten about dinner. ‘Oh yeah, food.’
‘McCabe, you’re a parent. You’re supposed to see that your kid gets decent nourishment.’
‘Hey, she has a whole bag of chocolate chip cookies right there on the floor next to her bed.’
‘I’m starved,’ he murmured.
‘Me, too,’ she said, pulling away, ‘but you’ll have to settle for chicken breasts.’ She picked up the bags and headed for the kitchen. She looked back. ‘You may get a chance at mine later. If you’re lucky.’
McCabe loved watching Kyra cook. A foodie in her natural habitat, she moved around the kitchen with ease and an economy of motion. The simple act of chopping a bunch of scallions became performance art, Kyra’s fingers manipulating both the vegetables and the finely honed blade with astonishing speed. He poured a Macallan single malt for himself and a chilled Pouilly-Fume for her. They clinked glasses and sipped.
‘Tell Casey we’ll be eating in twenty minutes.’ He slid off his stool and went to deliver the message. Then he came back and climbed onto the stool again.
‘Okay?’ Kyra asked.
‘Yeah, fine. She’s in a bit of a sulk right now. Worried about seeing Sandy again.’
‘I don’t blame her. I would be, too, after three years.’
McCabe got up, stood behind Kyra, and began kneading the muscles along her shoulders and nuzzling the back of her neck.
‘Alright, that feels great, but either I cook or you nuzzle. We can’t do both.’
‘Are you sure — ’
‘Yes, I’ll cut my finger off.’
‘What I was going to say was, are you sure what you said about us not getting married being the right answer?’
She put the knife down and turned to face him. ‘Why are you bringing this up again?’
‘Because I love you?’
‘I love you, too — but it strikes me that your timing, bringing it up right now, just might be more about you and Casey and maybe you and Sandy than it is about you and me. That somewhere in your devious mind you think giving Casey a substitute mother will somehow take the pressure off.’
McCabe didn’t know if Kyra was right. She might be. He backed away and went to refill his Scotch. ‘Let’s wait until this visit with Sandy is over,’ said Kyra. ‘We can talk about it again.’
That night, after they made love, he dreamed of TwoTimes.
He dreamed he was climbing the stairs inside the house on Merced Street. Flight after flight of rotting boards wrapped around a central well. His two hands clutching a Glock 17. Pressed against the wall at the side of the stairs. No lights. No backup. Pitch black. Yet somehow he could see through the dark. A stink of decaying flesh growing stronger as he climbed each floor. His foot hit something soft.
‘Hey, kid, watch where you’re walking.’
He looked down. His brother Tommy splayed out on the stairs looking up. Smiling that patented smile no one could resist. Even though Tommy was dead, even though his smile was marred by two large exit wounds where the bullets that entered the back of his head came out the front, carrying with them a spray of brains and bits of Tommy the Narc’s oh-so-blue right eye.
Looking down he saw that the dead, but not dead, Tommy had a girl on each arm. Ellie Pearlman to his right. The Jewish girl who lived on the next block. His father’s voice rang out. ‘Tommy, are you still messing around with that Jew girl?’ On Tommy’s left was Mag O’Connell, her shirt off, her bra unhooked and hanging by one strap. Then Ellie Pearlman was gone and Tommy was standing behind Mag, his arms wrapped around her, one hand cupped under each of Mag’s large, soft white breasts with the big pink nipples. Tommy holding Mag’s breasts out for the ten-year-old McCabe to admire. ‘Hey, Mikey, bet you never saw anything like these before.’ He shook his head. No. No, he hadn’t. ‘Wanna have a feel?’ He hesitated before putting his hand out and stroking Mag’s soft, pliant flesh.
McCabe looked down. Tommy was dead again, Mag O’Connell gone. He climbed over the body and continued up the stairs. At the top, he saw TwoTimes, a black cigarette, the color of a cigar, dangling from his lips. ‘I’m tellin’ you like I told your brother, you may fuck with me once, but there’s none what fucks with me two times.’
By TwoTimes’s side stood a fat white man with a round pasty face, speaking in a white pasty voice. ‘Your Honor, we find the drug pusher, pimp, and cop-killer TwoTimes not guilty.’
‘Not guilty,’ repeated TwoTimes, still on the stairs. ‘I told you, hot shot, nobody fucks with TwoTimes two times.’
Then TwoTimes reached into his waistband and pulled out a small silver metal pistol, a little. 22, shiny like a kid’s cowboy cap gun. TwoTimes fired from the hip; the slug whizzed by McCabe’s left ear and embedded itself in the plaster wall. McCabe aimed and fired before TwoTimes could fire again. The shot from the Glock, so much louder than the. 22, echoed up and down the endless stairwell. McCabe watched the 9 mm slug, visible like a cartoon bullet, traverse the twenty feet between the end of the barrel and TwoTimes’s head. It entered TwoTimes precisely at the tip of his wide flat nose.
McCabe continued up the stairs. TwoTimes was gone. Now Sandy stood at the top, wearing a sheer silk nightgown, her naked body gleaming under it, white in the moonlight, her hand out, beckoning him. ‘Come on up, McCabe.’ Once again, Sandy as the young Lauren Bacall.
McCabe reached for her, but his hand still held the Glock. The gun brushed against her body. He squeezed the trigger and the image of Sandy shattered into a thousand fragments, images in a broken mirror he could never put together again.
He woke with a start, his body soaked with sweat. He looked across the bed at Kyra, still sleeping. He thought about waking her, but whatever this feeling was, he knew it was not about Kyra, and not about making love. So instead he just lay there, staring into the dark shadows, breathing slowly and deeply until his bad dreams went away.
25
Tuesday. 6:30 A.M.
Kyra and McCabe lay, side by side, holding hands, legs touching, in the queen-sized bed.
‘Tell me about TwoTimes,’ she said.
He glanced over, a frown appearing at the bridge of his nose. ‘I already told you about that.’
‘Not everything, I think.’
‘What do you want to know?’
‘I want to know why you’re having nightmares and muttering his name in your sleep. His name and your brother’s name. And Sandy’s.’
McCabe stared silently up at the plaster ceiling in the old room, his eyes tracing the route of a crack that had been patched over and had now reappeared for about the tenth time. ‘Got to fix that crack,’ he said.
‘Look, McCabe, you say you love me. You say you may even want to marry me. If that’s true and you want me to be your wife and not just a warm body to get cozy with, I have to know it all.’
‘You already know most of it,’ he said. ‘TwoTimes was a small-potatoes crack dealer in the South Bronx. Just a kid, really. Nineteen when I planted the bullet in his skull. He ran a network of street sellers, other kids, all of them underage, some of them as young as ten or twelve. The idea was if the kids got picked up they’d only do juvie time.’
‘And Tommy was a narcotics cop?’
‘Yeah. Tommy the Narc. Real hotshot. I dropped out of NYU and transferred to John Jay to follow in his footsteps. Tommy knew his way around the trade. Made some big busts. What I didn’t know, what I should’ve known, was that by the time TwoTimes came along, Tommy had turned.’
‘Turned?’
‘Turned bad. Gone on the take. He was pocketing money and drugs from half a dozen dealers in the Bronx. Most of them more powerful than TwoTimes.’
‘You never told me that.’
‘It’s not anything I like talking about. Anyway, TwoTimes was getting too big for his baggy britches. He was trying to expand his territory and pushing up against some guys who didn’t take kindly to being pushed. So they called in their fixer to get TwoTimes out of the way.’
<
br /> ‘Tommy?’
‘Yeah, Tommy. You want coffee? I can make us some coffee.’
‘No. Thanks. Not until I’ve heard it all.’
McCabe sighed. ‘Problem was Tommy had gotten greedy. He doesn’t want to take TwoTimes out ’cause he figures he’ll lose a nice source of income. So instead he decides to talk him out of it. Tommy always figured he could talk anybody out of anything. Anyway, he goes over to TwoTimes’s place, a sleazebag apartment on Merced Street, and tells him he’s gotta stop crowding the big guys. TwoTimes says, “What the fuck you talking about? You work for me.” So Tommy tells TwoTimes he also works for a number of other clients, and if TwoTimes doesn’t stop horning in on their business, he’s gonna have to arrest him.’
‘Tommy is?’
‘Yeah, but TwoTimes is too smart for that. He knows no way in hell is Tommy gonna arrest anybody who can testify in court how he’s been paying him off for more than two years. Instead he figures Tommy’s gonna kill him. So while Tommy’s still talking, TwoTimes takes out this bullshit little twenty-two and puts two slugs into his head. Kills him on the spot.’
‘How did you find out about all this?’
‘Some of it at the trial. Some from Tommy’s partner. The rest I got from TwoTimes just before I took him down.’
‘So what happened after he killed Tommy?’
‘Biggest bullshit trial I ever saw in my life. I mean, the DA had TwoTimes dead to rights. They had Tommy’s blood all over the apartment. They had the gun — ’
‘Fingerprints?’
‘Not on the gun. He wiped it clean.’ McCabe paused. ‘Get dressed,’ he said. ‘Let’s take a walk. I need some air.’
‘You’ll tell me the rest of it?’
‘Yeah, I’ll tell you the rest of it.’
It took McCabe less than a minute to throw on a pair of jeans and an oversized sweatshirt loose enough to cover his. 45. While Kyra dressed, he interrupted Casey’s ongoing snooze to let her know it was time to get out of bed and ready for school. Breakfast was Cheerios. They were going out. They’d be back, but not before she left.