By the time Sara reached the truck, the Witchblade had withdrawn into costume bracelet mode. One look at the crumpled husk, and she knew her attacker was dead. She didn’t hesitate. She dashed around the truck, got up on the step and looked in at the driver, who was hunched over the wheel, breathing in high, thin gasps.
“Are you all right? Are you hurt?”
The guy squeaked a little, then moved hesitantly. “I never saw him! Jesus Christ, he came out of nowhere. He leaped out of thin air!”
“Okay, calm down. It’s all right. I’m a police officer.” “Oh, God, am I under arrest?"
“No, sir. I doubt you’ll be charged. That man assaulted me.”
The driver turned his head. Big guy, honest, blank expression of a Canadian lumberjack, still wearing his orderly’s greens and a laminated badge. Elmer Henderson.
“Mr. Henderson, why don’t you get out of the vehicle and sit down with your head between your legs. Make sure nothing’s broken.”
Two more orderlies appeared. The brouhaha had attracted attention. Seeing Chacon’s body, they immediately turned to get a stretcher. Sara held out her badge.
“Hey, you guys. I’m a cop. My name is Sara Pezzini. Let me make the call.”
One of the orderlies, who’d seen her around, waved. Sara went back to the driver, got him out of the truck, made him sit with his back against the wall. Looking in the cab, she snagged an empty McDonald’s bag from the busy floor, had the driver breath into the bag-an old trick to reduce shock.
She checked the crumpled body for identification. The man was no Einstein. His wallet was in his hip pocket, connected to his leather belt by a chain. He had no driver’s license. He had two credit cards in names that couldn’t possibly be his. A little plastic troll figure adorned with colored thread and beads. He had the business card of a bail bondsman, and a membership card for something called the Afta Owaz Club, to which he’d signed his name. Bobby Chacon.
When Lupe heard the crunch, she knew it had something to do with Bobby. Guy could mess up an omelet. She stayed put, scrunched down in the Celica a block away from the medical center, parked in front of a Korean grocer. When the cop cars started showing up, she figured Bobby had blown it and it was time to split. Good thing Bobby taught her how to drive. Good thing the Celica had an automatic.
Driving too fast, sitting too low, Lupe made her way to the switching yard, parking the car in a cinder lot next to a rusting Erie and Lackawana pick-up truck. She was leery of leaving Bobby’s fine ride unattended, but there was nothing to be done for it. The car was not visible from the street, and would hopefully still be there when she came back. Damn all thieves anyway, she thought.
The old woman was asleep when Lupe reached her shack, flat on her back on her makeshift bed, making a noise like a low pressure valve. Lupe knocked loudly on the rickety wood doorframe.
Estrella sputtered, opened her eyes, did a little jolt like she didn’t know where she was, recovered and sat up. “What you want with Estrella, girl?”
“Lupe. My name is Lupe. Don’t you remember? I was here yesterday. I paid you two hundred dollars to help me get rid of the lady cop.”
Estrella reached for her cigarettes. “Dat right. How did it go?”
“Not good. Bobby never came out. I think he blew it.” Estrella lit her cigarette with a pungent Zippo, puffing like a locomotive building up a head of steam. She fumbled around among her cushions and produced a police scanner. She turned it on, adjusting the frequency. Snatches of conversations came and went.
“... responding to automobile fatality in the parking garage of the Neame Medical Center, Prospect Place in Brooklyn. Looks like a gangbanger waiting to assault someone.”
Madame Estrella turned off the scanner and buried it beneath the cushions. “So. You is right. You give him the charm?”
“I gave it to him.”
“Hmm. Dis witch more powerful den I thought. My mistake. I tol’ you I make it right, girl, an’ I will. I see now dis Bobby a weak vessel in which we place our hopes. It be mistake to send just one man. You need five to take her down.”
Lupe reeled. She knew Los Tecolotes, but they were likely to be furious when they found out Bobby was dead. That could work to her advantage.
“Udderwise, you must do da deed yourself.”
Lupe thought about it. She was not afraid of the lady cop. The only thing she feared was getting caught, spending the rest of her life behind bars.
“Tell me how to stop her with my homies.”
The witch fluttered her fingers, palms up. “I need two hundred more dollar.”
Lupe’s mouth dropped open. “I already gave you two hundred dollars, and your stupid plan didn’t work! All I know, the cops come looking for me next! Madame Estrella. You see that Zippo lighter by your knee?”
Madame Estrella’s claw automatically closed around the lighter.
“That Zippo lighter carries a lifetime guarantee with no conditions. Once you pay for it, it works or the Zippo company replaces it free. And that lighter only cost five bucks! Madame, I’d like to tell the community good things ’bout you. But here you be, charging me twice for the same job ...”
Estrella held up her hand. “I see your point, girl. Hokay. Dis what I do. I help you dis time, no more money, ’cause I should done right by you inna first place. It dis witch-she much more powerful den I first t’ink. Madame Estrella should have charge you five hundred. But what’s done is done. You listen to Madame, an’ if she work for you dis time, you don’ forget come back and see your madame.”
The Celica remained untouched where Lupe had left it. She let herself in, started the engine, and headed for home. Problem: Where could she leave Bobby’s ride that it wouldn’t get ripped off? Bobby had kept the car right in front of his crib on Duke Street, watched over by his homies and his pit bull Samson. But if Lupe showed up, they’d want to know what happened. Once they learned, they’d never let her keep it. Certainly Chango, Bobby’s second-in-command, would demand the car for himself.
Lupe figured she had as much right to the car as anyone. Bobby owed her that much for screwing up the plan. The more she thought about it, the more Lupe figured Bobby owed her. He’d only succeeded in making her life more difficult. She thought about parking the car directly beneath her window, but the cops would notice and come with questions.
After driving around for a while, Lupe headed for the church. St. Patrick’s in Brooklyn wasn’t like St. Patrick’s in Manhattan, but it was a substantial church made of good Vermont granite, with a small parking lot in back surrounded by a chain-link fence. More importantly, the parking lot was invisible to anyone on the street, and Los Tecolotes had nothing to do with the church.
Lupe bumped the Celica up over the high driveway sill, driving carefully between the charcoal granite wall of the church on the left, and the red brick wall of the apartment building on the right-red brick that bore many a scrape attesting to the narrowness of the alley. Lupe barely had six inches clearance on either side. She got the car back there without mishap and parked it next to an old Cadillac sedan.
She shut the engine off and breathed deeply. She hadn’t realized what a strain driving was. She wasn’t used to driving, and had tensed every muscle in her body, fearing a collision. It was a relief just to sit there surrounded by high walls with nobody giving her any crap. After a while, she leaned over and flipped open the glove compartment. May as well check her assets. Bingo. A loaded, 38 revolver. She slipped it into her B.U.M. Original Equipment backpack, which served as her purse.
The door to the church opened with a hideous screech. Father Donagin emerged on the concrete lip and stared down into the parking lot. “Excuse me,” he said.
Lupe got out and smiled. “Hello, Father! It’s me, Lupe Guttierez.”
“Lupe?” The priest’s face cracked in a smile as he came carefully down the iron steps, holding tightly to the rail. He had to be in his late seventies. He’d been there long before Lupe came to New York. Be
fore Lupe was born. “Haven’t seen you at church in a while. What are you doing back here? Is that your car?”
“Father, it’s for my mother. It’s a gift. We all pitched in together-all the kids and cousins and nieces and nephews. It’s for her fortieth birthday.”
“Why, that’s wonderful, Lupe. I wasn’t aware your mother drove.”
“Oh, she always want to drive, but she say, ‘What am I going to drive? I’ll never have a car.’ Don’ worry. We not let her drive around ’til she get her license. But Father, it’s a secret.”
“I won’t tell anyone.”
“Can we keep it here for a few days? Until her birthday?”
“When’s her birthday?”
Lupe did some fast mental calculation. She needed to buy as much time as possible without arousing the priest’s suspicions. “Four days.”
Everything should be settled by then.
CHAPTER
NINE
JLJetter Bodies, the health club where Sara worked out, was located in the Shienbaum Building on MacDougall Street, downstairs from All Japan Martial Arts. Sara tried to work out at least three times a week. Better Bodies was not one of the newer health clubs, with row after row of gleaming stainless steel machines—John Heinz, the proprietor, didn’t believe in gizmos. He barely believed in weights. If he had his way, everybody would train using jump ropes and the climbing wall.
Better Bodies stank of stale sweat and liniment. It had a creaky hardwood floor, numerous heavy bags, made of leather and patched with duct tape, and a raised boxing ring in one comer where Eric Morel and Roy Jones Jr. had trained, among others. Sara was one of a handful of women who worked out at Better Bodies. A lot of cops worked out there. The grizzled veterans hardly gave Sara a second glance. Working out was serous business. If they’d wanted to ogle young women, they would have joined one of the numerous upscale health clubs with whirlpools, daycare, and Tae Bo.
Late Tuesday morning found Sara in baggy sweat pants and shirt, wearing bag gloves and wailing on an eighty-pound bag. She’d earned her black belt in Tae Kwon Do while an undergraduate at Cornell, and had continued to work out with the Police Athletic League and at Better Bodies since joining the force.
A boom box in the comer broadcast Huey Lewis’ “The Heart of Rock and Roll” as Sara alternated punches and kicks. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Heinz approaching. He was a well-developed, thirty-five-year-old who’d studied with Royce Gracie and taught Brazilian jujitsu.
“Hey, Sara,” he said. “James Bratten and Derek Sharpe are about to go at it upstairs with kendo sticks.”
Sara paused, panting. “Since when does Sharpe work out here?”
“Since he showed up last week,” Heinz replied, heading for the stairs.
Sara grabbed a towel and followed. Up a long, narrow flight of stairs, the All Japan Martial Arts Academy occupied a four-thousand-square-foot studio with hardwood floors and a glass wall protected by a room-length barre overlooking MacDougal Street. When Sara arrived, the smallish visitor area was jammed with cops and honchos. Sara worked her way to the front, resting her arms on the four-foot banister separating the holding pen from the vast hardwood floor.
On the floor, four kendo students sat cross-legged in front of the floor-to-ceiling mirrors. In the center of the large room, facing each other, identically dressed in heavy black cotton uniforms, stood the combatants. Their faces were covered with bamboo masks, heads covered with heavy black cotton. They wore padded cotton gloves and each held a shinai, a multi-sectioned wooden sword. It was easy to tell them apart. At six-four, Sharpe was the short man.
Sara had arrived just in time for the formal salute preceding combat. Baltazar, whom she’d spotted earlier doing sets, appeared at her elbow.
“This is gonna be good. Bratten was channeling Ali, bragging on how he was the baddest cat who ever played the game, and he could take any two guys in the joint. Sharpe made some crack that when the Apples did an exhibition game in Tokyo, two of ’em were picked up for shoplifting. Bratten called Sharpe a punk and here we are.”
“Does Bratten know Sharpe is a cop?”
“I don’t think so. I don’t think they even know each other. It’s a case of hate at first sight.”
The instructor, a wiry little Japanese by the name of Ojima, held his hand up to signal the start of the contest. His hand fell. The combatants clashed in a blinding series of strikes, like two trees fighting each other. It was difficult to tell which was an attack and which was a defense, so quickly did the blows fall. Sara knew that in kendo, there were only seven blows and one thrust. The blows flowed one into another, from attack to defense and back again, as the combatants moved swiftly around the room, their feet tracing semi-circular patterns. Both men were big, but Bratten was extra-big. He towered over the tall cop by four inches. Even so, it was the shorter Sharpe who soon proved dominant, driving his larger opponent around the room like a reluctant bull.
Bratten was good. Sara could see the moves that had earned him NBA All-Star status five years in a row. But despite his superb athleticism, and his size advantage,
Bratten could do nothing with his smaller opponent. Sharpe seemed almost psychic in his ability to sense where Bratten’s blows would fall. He effortlessly deflected Bratten’s attacks, turning each defense into an offense until it became evident to everyone that the cop was playing with the basketball star. Just when it seemed Bratten was beginning to tire, Sharpe ended it with a spectacular rising blow that caught Bratten’s grip, causing him to lose the shinai which soared through the air and thumped against the wall.
Sharpe instantly stopped, stood upright, and bowed deeply. Bratten had no choice but to respond. “Crap!” he muttered as he headed for the sidelines, stripping off his protective mask. Sharpe walked calmly to the side of the room and sat, cross-legged, before he removed his mask.
The crowd dissipated. Sara followed Baltazar down the stairs to Better Bodies and drifted toward the heavy bag, consumed by one overriding thought: Derek Sharpe was one of the finest swordsmen she’d ever witnessed.
Sara showered in the women's locker room at the station and returned to her desk to finish her report on the assault, for the Brooklyn Seventy-first Precinct. The image of Sharpe, effortlessly disarming Bratten, kept getting in the wray. She tended to give all cops the benefit of the doubt. And she liked Sharpe. But she didn't believe in coincidence, and her curiosity about the new cop had been set free. She needed to obtain as much background information on Sharpe as she could, without alerting Internal Affairs. She wondered about contacting his life partner. All she knew about him was that he worked on Wall Street.
All street cops hated Internal Affairs, and vice versa.
The Eleventh had been saddled with a particularly odious internal affairs officer named Selzer. Another case of hate at first sight. Selzer had it in for Sara for the simple reason that she represented unobtainable beauty. No way was she going to sic Selzer on Sharpe, even if the latter was the samurai killer.
There. She said it.
She found herself staring at the jumble of words on her computer, until Raj rose and left the room. She leaped up and followed, catching up with the Hindu cop in the hall.
“Raj, hang on a minute.” The slight cop paused at a landing next to a window protected by iron bars. Raj was her go-to guy in computers. “Can I trust you with something?”
“Most assuredly.”
“Could you get me Derek Sharpe’s service record, run a background check?”
“Sharpe—the new policeman from the Bay Area? I could do that. Will you tell me what it’s about?”
A public defender banged into the stairwell at street level and headed up, toting an overstaffed briefcase and breathing heavily. They exchanged greetings and waited until he exited on the third floor.
“Sharpe is an expert swordsman. I need to know where he studied.”
Raj’s eyebrows rippled with understanding. “I will use my home computer.”
; “Thanks, Raj. I owe you.”
“Nonsense. It is I who owe you, for the assistance you rendered in the case of the vanishing sardine truck.”
Sara planted a quick kiss on Raj’s cheek and headed back to her desk. Someone had crazy-glued another Spawn figurine to her desk, with the word balloon, “EEK!
DETECTIVE PEZZINI IS AFTER ME!” She broke Spawn loose with a pop and held it up like an Academy Award. “Thanks, guys. These are highly collectible.” She tossed it in the bottom drawer with the others. One of these days she intended to take all her toys over to the Child Bum Unit at Sloan-Kettering.
A check on Bobby Chacon produced a rap sheet like a Chinese takeout menu. Head of the Brooklyn Tecolotes, Chacon had served four years at Ossining for assaulting a police officer. Los Tecolotes were active in the crack market. But the assault on Sara had a personal feel to it. The troll doll had been festooned like some kind of religious fetish. In addition to the colored thread and beads, Sara had discovered some long brown hairs that looked suspiciously like her own. She was familiar with some of the more arcane paths to power favored among New York’s many immigrants: weird religions from the Caribbean and Southeast Asia, ritual sacrifice of hogs and chickens. Sometimes a child.
Sara phoned Nelda Garrulitis at the New York Post. Nelda wrote the Page Six gossip column.
“Garrulitis,” she answered in a voice like crunching snow, the result of a three-pack-a-day habit.
“Nelda, it’s Sara Pezzini.”
“Do you have a zombie sighting for me?”
“Nelda, I need your help. What do you know about an investment banker named Robert Hotchkiss?"
“Consummate bore. Quite the whiz-kid in the nineties, but his career seems to have stalled, and his society wife, Janet, is giving him the heave-ho. Looks like a nasty divorce battle. Hotchkiss has retained Lawton & Cates. The former Miss Dolores Greenbaum has employed the flamboyant women’s rights advocate, Mildred Squires.”
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