Black Water Transit

by Carsten Stroud

“When he was working at the dealership. He was skimming off the shop receipts, doing his own work after hours, used the place as a chop shop, ripping down stolen cars. Carmine tumbled, was gonna use the air hammer on his knees. That’s why I had to let him go.”

  “You told me he was a slacker. You never said he was a thief.”

  “Anybody else, I’d a made a point with him. You can’t let that kinda thing get done to you. People get ideas.”

  “I thank you for it. I really do. But what’s this got to do with Black Water Transit and the pension fund?”

  Frank closed his eyes, reached out a bony arm, and wrapped his fingers around Jack’s forearm.

  “Whatever you do, don’t do nothing just for that kid. You know the line ‘no good deed ever goes unpunished’? You put yourself onna line for Danny, you’ll be sorry. One way or another.”

  “Frank, what are you hearing?”

  “I hear? I hear my life pouring out of the bottle. Making that glug-glug sound, hah? You making moves for Danny, that’s what I hear. Talking to people downtown. Those people, the feds, they’re worse than the zips. Harvard, Yale, Brown. The tennis players. The single-malt people. Cigar-suckers. Those people got no mercy in them. Us, we stab you inna front. Them, they fuck you up the ass, they kill your cat, they take everything you ever had, and then they go for a facial and later they have a decaf latte widda twist and maybe a cinnamon biscotti. You know a guy, Earl Pike?”

  “Yeah. I do.”

  “He say he know me?”

  “He said he knew the same people. Is that true?”

  “Pike’s people did some things for me when we was trying to set up that hotel in Costa Rica. He knew the locals, steered me to a good lawyer down there. Me, I never met the guy personally, but Carmine did. You in some kinda business with him?”

  “He’s using your name.”

  “That’s why you’re in business with him?”

  “It was part of the picture.”

  “Jack, my honor, I never told Pike he could use my name. He was talking to Carmine about his collection, and Carmine told him about my guns. I don’t run Carmine anymore. Carmine said he was a stand-up guy and asked me if he could hand the guy on to you. I figured you’d do what you wanted, say yes or no.”

  “I know that. Frank, I need to ask you—”

  Frank raised a shaking hand, palm out.

  “Don’t ask me nothing. I ain’t a priest. What I don’t know, nobody can get outta me with a hacksaw. I unnerstand we gotta do what we gotta do for our kids. My boy, Tony, he’s a fucking loser, he don’t know that I know he’s a coke-head. The guy he buys from, he’s a guy I know. I set it up, I let it happen, because I don’t want him going to strangers. I let him run the dealership, now I’m sick. He’s skimming the till too, the mook. Sooner or later I’m gonna wish I let him crash and burn. But you and me, we’re fathers, and we got no power anymore to make the way smooth for our two boys. Family. You don’t throw away family. That’s an infamita. All we can do is say the rosary and wait for the bad news onna telephone.”

  Jack listened to this, his face set and hard, his chest hurting. Frank was right. There was nothing Jack could do to change Danny’s destiny, but he had to ride with his son all the way to the end of the line. Creek didn’t understand that, never would, because although Creek had been many things in his life, he had never been a father.

  Enough of this.

  “You want to talk about Pike. I’m listening.”

  “No. I got no stake in it either way. Guy’s a business associate, not my brother. But if you’re inna thing with him, my advice? Carmine’s too? Do not fuck up. Be sure of your troops. And if you gonna fuck with the guy in some way, make it permanent. Leave nothing behind. Not even a chalk mark, okay?”

  “Carmine know about this thing?”

  A flickering sheet of white-hot agony arced right across Frank’s face, bleaching it the color of exposed bone. He fumbled for some pills, dumped four into his shaking palm, and downed them with a shot of whiskey. Jack watched this with his heart stopped. In a minute Frank’s face softened and the pain ebbed out of it.

  “Christ … sorry, Jack. Comes and goes. Carmine … he’s gotta be thinking of himself now. I ain’t gonna be around, I got nobody else to hand things off to, so he knows what I’m doing. He knows about this thing with Pike. He’s the one told me about it. He thinks you’re crazy to fuck with Pike, but Pike’s not family and you are. Can’t keep nothing from Carmine anyway. Maybe not even Claire.”

  Jack had nothing to say to that. Frank looked at him for a while and then closed his eyes. His face looked sunken, eroded. But he was in no pain. Jack patted his forearm and sipped at a drink. They sat in silence for another few minutes, until the broker in the lime-green shirt and the tan Dockers pushed the woman in the black bikini into the pool, and then Claire Torinetti jumped into the pool in her see-through pink silk blouse, and the broker in the lime-green Polo shirt dove in after her, and then it was everybody into the pool, and Frank here totally passed out in his deck chair. Carmine came over.

  “Hey, Jackie. Frank okay?”

  “He’s dying, Carmine.”

  “Yeah. He is.”

  “I feel bad, not seeing him for so long.”

  “You should. He talks about Ditmars, Astoria, the neighborhood. He coulda used you, eased the day, but you was always busy. Protecting your good name, hah? Stay away from the goombahs. Go uptown. Good for you. That’s nice. You can feel bad, but it’s too late for that shit, Jackie. Frank ain’t getting no time back.”

  Maybe Carmine’s smile was intended to lighten the tone, take away some of the sting. Then, probably not.

  It was time for Jack to call a cab and go home.

  MIDTOWN AUTO PARK

  200 EAST FORTY-FIRST STREET

  2115 HOURS

  Pike talked amiably about the various cars he had owned, as the three of them walked down First Avenue from the United Nations Plaza Hotel. The rain was fine and cool and a wind was making the flags outside the UN building flutter and snap. The northbound traffic on First banged and clattered over iron plates covering construction on the UN underpass. Pike had put on an olive-drab Hugo Boss windbreaker and burgundy Bass Weejuns. His stride was long and he covered the ground in an easy rolling walk, making Casey hurry to keep up, speaking mainly to Nicky Cicero. He looked to Casey like a man at perfect ease. They reached Forty-first and, just to make the guy change gears, she asked him what his business had been in Albany. He stopped and looked back at her like she had just snapped into existence from another dimension. He was damn tall from where she was standing, and there was a quality in him that made her think of a python flicking a tongue in a jungle clearing.

  “I’m a consultant. I was consulting.”

  Casey moved by him and kept walking.

  “What do you consult about?”

  “I have a firm called Crisis Control Systems. We’re mostly retired military. I was army. We do corporate crisis management.”

  “Sounds sexy,” said Nicky, who had observed no signs whatsoever that Earl Pike had been in any kind of physical confrontation in the last few days. And he had been checking out every patch of skin he could see. The plaid shirt was long-sleeved, so he couldn’t check the guy’s forearms, where he would have deflected an incoming punch. There were no marks on his face other than what looked like a very old burn scar. Other than the bandaged right hand, the guy was unmarked and he moved like a piece of oiled machinery.

  After a ten-round fight up at the gym in Albany, Nicky felt like he’d spent a week doing the spin cycle in a clothes dryer with a bag of rocks for company. If Pike had been in the kind of fight that left the other guy looking the way he did, Nicky never wanted to try him on. Earl glanced at his face to look for sarcasm and saw none.

  “Sexy? Not at all, Officer. Very dull stuff. Here we are.”

  They walked down the slope of a darkened parking garage halfway up the block toward Second Avenue. There was a kiosk at the b
ottom of the ramp, lit by a hanging yellow bulb. The attendant was asleep behind the greasy glass. Pike smacked the side of the hut and it shook from the blow. Casey tried not to jump. The guy was spooky as hell and she was a little afraid of him by now. Nicky was acting as if they were buddies from PS 115. She intended to talk to him about it later, when they were alone.

  Pike had taken his keys from the startled attendant and was walking over to a freight elevator. They rode up in silence. The cage ground to a halt at the fifth floor. The level was jammed with cars, packed in so tight they had to thread their way around them single file. Pike stopped in front of a spot marked 219.

  “There she is,” he said.

  In the space was a navy-blue Mercedes-Benz 600. The paint gleamed under a double bar of fluorescent bulbs. Pike stepped back and watched as Casey and Nicky went over the vehicle.

  There wasn’t a mark on it. No broken headlights. No scrape on the fender. No new paint. No sign of any recent repairs. The paint was smooth and covered with wax. Other than the fact that it looked as if it had just been washed and waxed, there was nothing about the Benz to suggest it had been anywhere other than this parking spot in the last week.

  Casey bent down to look at the New York license plate on the rear. The screws were dull and coated with rust. No one had touched them in years. There were no new scratches around the mounting plate. She stepped back and saw that Pike was watching her carefully. When she made eye contact, he grinned at her.

  “My goodness, Officer Spandau, you look disappointed.”

  “Can you open the hood for us?”

  Pike walked around to the driver’s door, unlocked it, leaned in, and tugged on the hood latch, popping the engine cover. He moved around to the front, levered the hood up. Nicky pulled a small Maglite out of his leather jacket and leaned in over the engine block. The vehicle identification number was embossed on a plate on the side of the block. It was slightly coated with oil and road dust. He rubbed at the plate with his thumb, checked the number. It matched the VIN on the DMV records for this vehicle.

  Nicky read it out to Casey, who checked it with the number on the plate showing in the left side of the dashboard. Also the same. And no signs that either plate had been tampered with in any way. This was not the car. Could not be the car.

  Damn.

  She moved back from the car as Pike, saying nothing, still perfectly unmoved and relaxed, closed the car up and rubbed at the fingerprints on the side of the door. He looked at the cops, standing under the light from the fluorescent bars. His eyes were deep in shadow and his face looked battered and blunt, making his soft voice and his teasing tone all the more strange.

  “You two look tired. How long you been on this?”

  “Thanks for your time, Mr. Pike,” said Casey. “Nicky, let’s go. Sorry to have bothered you.”

  “No problem,” he said. “Happy to have been a help. You sure you can’t tell me what the case was all about?”

  “Just a vehicle accident, sir. That’s all,” said Casey.

  “Must have been serious. You both seem pretty intense.”

  “It was a nasty one,” said Nicky.

  Casey sent him a look. Pike grinned again.

  “Well, if I can ever do anything, you’ll let me know?”

  “We will,” said Casey.

  “I’ll look forward to it, then.”

  “Yeah. Me too.”

  511 UNIT

  UNITED NATIONS PLAZA HOTEL

  2130 HOURS

  Casey and Nicky walked back to the cover car, Jimmy Rock’s brand-new Crown Victoria, and found Jimmy Rock reading a printout of some kind. He looked up from the sheets of paper as they got back into the unit, Casey in the backseat this time and Nicky in the passenger side.

  “How’d it go?” said Jimmy Rock, addressing the question to no one in particular, which Nicky took as an improvement over his previous policy of ignoring the hell out of Casey Spandau.

  “His car’s totally clean,” she said, her voice packed with resentment, aimed equally at Pike and at Jimmy Rock.

  “What’d he have downstairs here?” asked Nicky.

  “Big white Lincoln Continental. Valet said he brought it in this morning.”

  “Anything about the Benz?”

  Jimmy Rock shook his head.

  “Nothing we can use. I talked to the valet parking guys. Pike did have a blue Mercedes Six Hundred in here yesterday morning. They say he took it out early in the day and never brought it back here. He’s got it in a garage down on Forty-first.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why have two cars anyway?”

  Casey opened her mouth, but Nicky spoke first.

  “I had a car like that Benz, I wouldn’t be driving it around New York City either. I’d use a rental.”

  Jimmy Rock shook his head, not convinced.

  “Still hinky. Why not leave his rental in the public garage and keep his precious antique Mercedes-Benz safe in valet parking?”

  Casey and Nicky watched Jimmy Rock’s face.

  “What are you thinking?” she asked, finally.

  Jimmy Rock looked at her over his shoulder as if she had just snapped into being in the backseat.

  “I’m thinking, Officer Spandau, that the guy interests me. You sure about the credit card thing, the guy in Castleton?”

  “Not a hundred percent. Sometimes the posting date is different from the transaction date. The guy could have been confused.”

  “But he definitely saw a big man, white hair, with a blue Benz, has a busted left headlight?”

  Casey nodded, keeping her doubts to herself. Jimmy Rock was heating up the car with a kind of ferocious energy. She watched him as he came up the dial and realized why he was a good cop. He was a cold-assed racist son of a bitch, but he had good instincts.

  “What are you thinking?” asked Nicky, who had decided that although Pike was probably some kind of bad-ass, there was no way they had enough to lay anything on his back over this double homicide near Blue Stores. For Nicky Cicero it was back to zero. Jimmy Rock smiled, shrugged, tapped the side of his nose, reached for the radio.

  “Five-one-one to five-zero-zero, K?”

  “Five-one-one?”

  “Vince, that you?”

  “It is. Where are you?”

  “UN Plaza. Where are Dexie and Carlo?”

  “Having dinner down in the Battery.”

  “Can we get them up here?”

  “Sure. What’s up?”

  “We’re on that thing with the state cop. We may have something here. We can use another car.”

  “You got it. I’ll call them now. How’s the traffic?”

  “Easing up. Can you ask them to come in fast?”

  “Ten-four.”

  Casey had been trying to read the papers on Jimmy Rock’s lap. He saw this, held the sheaf up, fanning the pages.

  “Pike’s phone calls. Every call he’s made since he checked in two weeks back.”

  “How the hell did you get that?” asked Casey, impressed. Jimmy Rock indicated the woman sitting behind the concierge desk inside the tower lobby.

  “Mercedes Gonsalva.”

  “Her name is Mercedes?”

  “Yeah. Coincidence, hah? Anyway, she senses my power.”

  “Your power?”

  “Also, I begged. Anyway, I got the sheet.”

  Nicky had watched this interchange, puzzled. “But his car’s clean. He’s not the guy.”

  “He mojoed the car somehow,” said Casey before Jimmy Rock could speak. “He’s your guy, Nicky. I feel it.”

  “Much as I hate to agree with Whitney Houston here, I think she’s right. I think this Pike guy is your man. You tell me yourself, Nicky. How’d he strike you?”

  Nicky shrugged. He wasn’t about to admit the guy scared him. But Jimmy Rock had Nicky’s frequency pegged.

  “He’s a bug, a psycho, a stone-cold killer. A cockroach. A bug, like I said. That’s what I’m getting from you both.”

&n
bsp; Casey spoke up in spite of herself.

  “He’s not a bug. There’s more to him than that. He’s like a guy who used to believe in something and then got disappointed or something. He hits you as a guy who has a lot of anger, but has it all tamped down real tight. Tonight, when we showed up, it was like he was … enjoying the whole thing. We never rattled his cage at all.”

  Jimmy Rock took in the speech with a nod, said nothing to her, looked into the middle distance while he tapped a finger on the steering column. Finally he spoke to Nicky directly.

  “Nicky, this is your beef. But this is my show. My advice, how about we just hang off his left shoulder for a while, see what happens? We stir up his life a little and see what floats to the top of the pond. That work for you?”

  Nicky nodded, privately convinced it would be a total waste of time. If Pike was the guy, they had dick on him. If he wasn’t, it would become obvious pretty soon. He’d ride it out for a while, give this cocky DT a chance to screw up, and then he’d tell him to go fuck himself.

  Jimmy Rock tossed the pages into the backseat.

  “You read these numbers off, Spandau. Nicky, you watch the doors there. I’ll do the thinking. That’s what I’m good at.”

  Casey had a cheek muscle working but she said nothing and reached over the front seat into the glove compartment, pulled out the NYPD crisscross directory, flicked on her mini Maglite, and went down the list one by one, reading off the results while Nicky watched the hotel doors and Jimmy Rock listened very hard to what Casey was saying.

  “Here’s one … 973-343-6000 … an unlisted Newark number. Called this guy around six. Ben Guardello?”

  “He’s a gunsmith. Benny Boom-Bang, they call him. Handgun specialist. Does porting and polishing for private clubs. Gas vents. Extensions. Sound suppressors. Pachmyr grips. Laser sights. All legit, as far as we can prove. That’s very interesting. What’s next?”

  Casey worked her way down the page, checking each number off and flipping through the pages of the crisscross directory. Jimmy Rock would nod or shake his head, mostly say nothing.

  They both listened to Casey read and Jimmy Rock briefly wondered if Casey had family here. Probably a pack of tight-ass phony Islamic nut bars. All the little boys strapped on those stupid bow ties. Sipped Turkish tea, listened to the Revereeno slag the Jews.