by John Donohue
“Which is?”
My brother sighed in annoyance. “Real Time Crime Center.”
I put my hands on my hips and stood there in the middle of the hallway. “Which is?”
He pulled me aside, his voice low. “Connor, stop being such an asshole. Just shut up and come with me. The RTCC’s a networked data center for the PD. Lets you access all kinds of stuff. For our purposes, it’s the next best thing to the bureau’s center. And I go back a long way with the inspector in charge. So he’s doing me a favor and letting us use one of his analysts.”
“But why?”
He poked me in the chest with a finger. “Look, technically, your little incident is not of immediate interest to the bureau. They got a mile of things that take priority over that. I have a personal interest in the case, but they’re not gonna let me tie up their resources. So I made some calls.”
“Why?”
Micky squinted at me and sighed. “Because you’re my brother. And because you, you moron, have kicked over a full bucket of shit.”
The RTCC looked like Mission Control. It had maybe a dozen computer operators with headsets sitting behind paired flat screens. The air was filled with the staccato plastic clicks of people working computer keyboards. The operators’ passive faces flickered with light as images expanded, shrunk, or were arranged in tiles in rapid succession. There was a constant, muted hum of conversation as requests came in and data was fed out to the laptops of detectives in the field. One entire wall of the room was taken up by a screen that contained photos, data, what looked like flowcharts, as well as streaming video.
“Wow,” I said.
Micky nudged me toward the giant wall screen. A small, muscular looking cop with a shaved head was standing there, arms crossed, and eyes focused on the huge display.
“What you got going, McHale?” my brother asked.
The man turned and smiled in recognition. “Burke. How’s life on the outside? I knew you said you needed some help, but I didn’t think you were so desperate you’d be by today.”
Micky shrugged, “I’m between things…” Then gestured at me. “My brother.”
McHale extended a hand. “The other Burke,” he said mockingly. “I’ve read about you.”
“Hello Inspector,” I said as we shook hands. His grip could crush stone. I tried not to let my voice waver as McHale tried to see how much pressure I could take before my knees buckled and my bones popped.
Micky came to my rescue. “What gives on the screen, McHale?”
The Inspector, distracted, released his grip. He looked back at the wall and squinted at the mug shot in the center of the screen. “Liquor store robbery. Perp shot the clerk in the face, but he’ll survive. Local surveillance camera caught him fleeing in an ‘87 Civic. They streamed the video here, we enhanced it for the plates and cross-reffed it to DMV. Registered to a kid by the name of Kwame McPatrick. Ran him for priors, wants, and warrants. Hence the mug shot. He’s gone to ground and we’re running cross-checks for family and known associates…”
“In the old days, we’d have to pound the streets for this kind of thing,” Micky told me.
“Now, we’re moving a bit smarter and a lot faster,” McHale said. “We ran checks on income tax returns, credit reports, parking tickets. Plus whatever we’ve got in our own database: known associates, MO, identifying marks. He’s got a mother living in Ithaca and a sister in Brooklyn. At least three old girlfriends. We got addresses out to the field on all of them, and prepped the responding units on the locale details.”
“On all the addresses?” I asked. “You did that from here?”
“Sure,” he said simply. “We use Google Earth.”
The three of us were clustered around one of the analyst’s stations. Her name was Park: high cheekbones with sleek dark hair pulled into a tight ponytail. She asked the occasional question, but her eyes rarely left the dual screens in front of her. Her fingers flew across the computer keyboard as we talked McHale through the problem.
“You got a incident file number on this case?” Park asked. Micky fished a rumpled slip of paper from his pocket, handed it to her and the report appeared on screen. Park dragged it to a corner with her mouse, then popped up mug shots of the three men who had tried to kill me.
“Los Gemenos,” McHale whistled in recognition. “Bad news comes in twos.”
Park moved one of the pictures to her left-hand screen. “Xavier Soledad. Dead on the scene.”
McHale looked at Micky. “What happened?”
My brother jerked his chin at me. “Him.”
McHale seemed incredulous. “He took out one of the Twins?”
Micky nodded. “Stuck a knife in his eye.” For a split second, Park looked up at me.
McHale shook his head. “Burke, is everyone in your family a complete maniac?” But it was a rhetorical question, and he returned to scanning the data on the screen before him. “Seems we got another dead guy, but Martín got away?” We nodded. “Whoa boy,” McHale continued, “I would not want Martín on the loose and after me.”
“You begin to see the dimension of our problem here,” Micky said. The remaining Twin’s mug shot stared out at us from the center of the screen. He had a thick neck and pitted skin. People rarely look their best in arraignment photos, but Martín’s picture did him justice. He looked like a homicidal toad.
Micky continued. “I need whatever you can pull on Soledad and Martín: known associates, places where Martín might go to ground.”
“Sure. Who’s the other stiff?” McHale asked.
“That one took a while,” Micky said. “He’s not local. The bureau ran a search, and the guy’s name is Ruiz, a gangbanger. In and out of trouble. Bad rep on the street. Moved from LA to Phoenix two years ago. On the surface, nothing really out of the ordinary.”
Except he almost killed me. I remembered this man, the smell of him as we fought that day, the odd horn-like designs inked on his head, the cruel look of satisfaction on his face as he watched me start to bleed out.
“So why do you need us?” McHale asked.
“I was describing Ruiz to an operative I know,” Micky said. “I mentioned his tats and he said that we might want to do a bit more research on that angle.”
McHale nodded. “Tattoos can tell us all kinds of things: where someone did time, gang membership. We’ve been amassing quite a series of data sets on these things.”
Park spoke again. Her ancestry was probably Korean, but her accent was pure Queens. “We’ll need more detailed descriptions of his tattoos. Did the coroner get some shots?”
Micky gave her another file reference number and a series of digital photos stacked up on the screen. Park’s fingers flew and windows began flashing open and closed. “I’m running an image recognition program against a series of files we’ve developed on tattoos,” she explained.
“It may take a few minutes,” McHale commented. “In the meantime, we’ll dump a file for you on what we’ve got on Los Gemenos.”
He looked at Micky and then at me. “Basically, the info on Ruiz is not the problem here.”
“No shit,” Micky said. “The real mystery is why he showed up in Brooklyn with the Twins to off my brother.”
McHale nodded. “It does seem like overkill. The Twins were usually more than enough to get a job done.” He looked shrewdly at Micky. “More than one reason for the visit?”
“That’s what I’m thinking,” my brother said. “The Twins were experienced local talent. Ruiz didn’t need to be there. Unless something else needed to be done…”
“Like what?” I said.
“From what I picked up from that operative, I’m starting to get a pretty good sense,” Micky said. “But I need it corroborated.”
Park’s program was spitting out information. She was watching as line after line of information began flowing across the screen. She sat back in satisfaction. “Ah,” she said.
“Ah?” I couldn’t help myself.
“Ruiz had a lot of tatto
os,” Park said. “Any stick out?”
“He had horn tattoos,” I said. “Devil’s horns.”
Park nodded at the screen and highlighted a line for McHale. McHale seemed suddenly tired. “Nice job, Sue,” he told Park. “Dump this stuff in a folder and keep trolling on known associates of Ruiz.”
“Whatta we got?” Micky prompted.
“Your visitor from Phoenix wasn’t just involved with any gang,” McHale said. “He was a member of TM-7, Todos Muertos.”
Micky looked at me. “Oh. Shit. I was hoping I was wrong.”
“About what?” I asked.
“TM-7 is one of the fastest growing and most violent gangs out there,” McHale said.
“Worse than that,” Micky said. “There are plenty of TM-7 members in the New York area. The fact that the gang sent one of their own all the way from Phoenix to visit you does not bode well, Connor.”
“If it was just a hit, they could have handled it locally,” McHale chimed in. “It’s bad enough to have pissed these guys off, but this…”
“What?” I said. “I don’t get it.”
“If they sent Ruiz, it was because they wanted something from you, Connor,” Micky explained. “Something important. Something they didn’t want to have to reveal to anyone local…”
“But I don’t have anything like that,” I protested.
“You may not know you have it, but you do,” McHale said. “And if I were you, I’d wrack my brains to figure that out. Because these guys are not going away.”
16 Fading Things
“It gets better with time,” I told her. I would have liked to say that the dreams go away, but they never do. At least not entirely. Yamashita’s worked hard with me, but even still the images return, unbidden.
Sarah’s voice sounded shaky over the phone, even as she tried to be upbeat. “That’s good to know,” she said. But she didn’t sound convinced.
“The cops say that Martín is gone.”
“Gone where?” Her voice rose slightly in concern.
“Gone, Sarah,” I said, trying to be soothing. “Away. Out of our lives.” I wasn’t sure that this was entirely true, but she needed some safe space and a sense that normalcy was returning. “The cops say you can come home,” I added.
She took a ragged breath. “Burke… I’m not sure I can.”
“Sarah…”
“I keep seeing you, covered in blood… What I did… The bodies.”
“I know,” I told her. It’s a hard thing to experience. The sensations are bad enough: the sight of blood splashed on walls and pooling in rubbery spots on the floor. The metallic scent of it. The animal grunts, the seeping of air. The fluid rip of a blade or the crash of a gun. And the stunned silence that gets slowly overwhelmed by the growing wail of a siren. But it’s the realization such sensations bring that’s worse: that we’re vulnerable, violent, and mortal despite all our striving.
I wished that I had been with Sarah instead of just a voice over the wire, but her sister had told me how fragile she was and that she didn’t want any visitors. I thought that just holding her might have been enough to help keep the demons at bay.
There was silence on the line for a time. The she spoke. “How do you stand it, Burke?” she asked in something close to desperation.
“Yamashita says… .” I began, but she ripped into me with ferocity.
“I don’t care about Yamashita! How do you stand it? How do you live with it? How do you live with yourself?”
I wasn’t sure I had an answer to that. Or even if I did that it could be explained. I took a breath. “You put it in a box,” I said. “You push it away… The situation is not who you are.” It sounded lame, even as I said it. The truth is that some things don’t bear too much scrutiny. I try not to think about them too much. You fight the fight and, if you come out the other end, you don’t look back. Some wells are too dark and too deep to peer into. If you do, the dense force of the depths will pull you in.
Yamashita had worked with me for years, teaching me to walk across a landscape studded with pits, aware of the danger, yet focused instead on a distant light. It took patience and discipline and the light was often a thin beam, bright enough, but with little warmth to it. It was an odd, cold type of hope and not what Sarah was looking for.
“What if the situation is who you are, Burke?’ she pressed.
“What do you mean?”
“What I mean is… Look at your life. What you do. And the things that keep happening…”
“I don’t create those situations,” I objected. I felt my ears flush.
“No?” she demanded. “What if, deep down, you do? What if you set yourself up for them? What if you need them?”
“Sarah…” We were heading toward the pit. It’s not that her ideas didn’t merit some thought. But you fight one fight at a time.
“Look,” she said, “I’m sorry. I’m upset. But I need some time.”
“Sure,” I answered quickly. I think even then that I could sense what was coming and was trying to head it off. “We could take some time and go somewhere.”
Again the ragged breath over the phone. “Connor,” she said quietly. “I need some time… on my own… to think things through.”
The rest of the conversation was a blur. When we were done, she said goodbye and the link between us clicked apart. I sat in the quiet of approaching night, still and cold and confused.
At dawn, the lights from the Verrazano Bridge still twinkled in the distance. I stared out at the approach of day, wondering where to begin. I had already stretched and worked through the basic sword forms that I had learned years ago, old lessons forever new. I tried to lose myself in the action, but last night’s conversation with Sarah kept running through my head. Eventually, I set the sword aside and let my thoughts cascade through me.
I didn’t know whether Sarah’s questions bothered me because of what they said about her or because of what they suggested about me. Either way, I felt oddly defensive. She had come late to the martial arts, but Yamashita saw something in her. Perhaps it was that she had an instinctual knowledge of where to stick the blade.
I sighed and rose from the cold floor. I would need to think about the things Sarah had said. Part of me knew that. But I also knew that I had other things to do as well. Perhaps they weren’t as significant as Sarah’s questions, but they were much more urgent. I set my face, blank and expressionless, as the milky dawn sky brightened over Staten Island, and got dressed.
Martín’s whereabouts were unknown to the NYPD, but the word on the street was that he was gone from New York. Osorio left the same message. I thought that Martín would be back without a doubt. The types of people who hired him react poorly to disappointment. In addition, he had an image to consider as well as a lover to avenge. I figured I had some breathing space, but eventually I was going to see his toad face again. I hoped it would be on my terms.
I knew about Martín—McHale had been nice enough to let Micky spend some time with the file he had generated. So I set him aside for a time. He was just a link in the chain. What I had to figure out was why TM-7 was on my case and what I could do about it.
I teach sporadically as an adjunct instructor at NYU. My schedule is always changing, and after a while the IT people got tired of turning my computer access on and off, so when the head of the history department vouched for me, they left me connected and I could log on to the university system whenever I wanted.
I sat at a cluster of terminals in the university library and did some basic Web searches on the gang known as Todos Muertos, TM-7. It was a grim story. Civil war in Central America sent millions of refugees into the US during the 80’s. The barrios they ended up in were crowded and violent. Crack cocaine and gangs shaped existence there, a nasty Darwinian world where you learned quickly or died. In LA, TM-7 was the mutant product of this hothouse—a nasty, ruthless thing that mirrored the environment.
Over the years, gang members had been deported back acro
ss the border and recruited new members among the destitute and desperate in Mexico and Central America. In time, these new recruits made their way north and the circle continued. The beast was thriving.
And it was no longer just a local issue. Today TM-7 is reported in at least five countries and some thirty states north of the border. Membership is always difficult to determine, but some sources put it as high as one hundred thousand, with instability and desperation adding to the rolls on a regular basis. More good news. I may have inadvertently trimmed the gang population down somewhat, but there was no shortage of replacements.
I read on: highly violent, heavily tattooed. Drugs. Murder. And it got better: as they grew more successful, TM-7 was also becoming a more sophisticated organization. The gang had hired paramilitary experts from Mexico to assist them, rogue members of another border organization known as the Alphas. They were reputed to have come from an elite federal battalion known as the Special Mobile Force Group. They brought increased firepower, sophistication, and ruthlessness to the mix in the dry lands of the Southwest between Mexico and the US.
The members of TM-7’s cells had adapted and expanded their range of activity. They were now heavily involved in working the border, moving dope and guns and anything else that pays. The Feds even worried that they may have ties with Al Qaeda.
And McHale said that they were after me.
And I knew why. Sort of. My explanation was fuzzy, but it provided the only link. How could I have possibly run afoul of TM-7? The only thing I could think of was my trip to Tucson. What had I done? I annoyed some mystery writers, but all their mayhem was confined to paper. I ticked off Lori Westmann, but it had all worked out to her benefit in the end. Little people like me got used and discarded on a regular basis in her world. I doubt she even gave me a second thought.
I did have a fight in the desert with a bunch of guys who seemed to be waiting for something. But thinking back, they didn’t appear to fit the TM-7 mold. They were working men, not gang-bangers. They may have been smugglers, but they were small time.
What had been important enough to send someone after me in Brooklyn? What did I have that could be of any possible interest? I sat back and closed my eyes. I could hear the clicking of other people tapping on keyboards to either side of me, the shuffle of footsteps and distant conversations. My hands rested, palm up, in my lap. I slowed my breathing and waited for the sensation of simultaneously sinking and rising to take hold. Images flickered across my mind: Sarah’s face floating above me as she tried to staunch the bleeding, Yamashita standing in the dojo, a rock worn and pitted by time. My brother’s smirk.