“How do I know what model it is?”
“Did you even look at it?”
“It’s a subway car, Mike.”
Apparently, other than the obvious exterior differences between the redbirds and the stainless steel trains that came after them, each iteration had unique features.
Fifteen cars later, tracks appeared on each side of the one we had followed in from the gate. The yard got wider and wider, with more rows of abandoned trains than I could count.
Mike dropped down again and looked under the next train. “This is what I mean.”
“What?”
“This model,” he said, heading for the steps to go inside it. He reached back to give me his hand for a boost up into the car. “This is what I want.”
I looked around but didn’t see anything worth noting.
“In the older trains, Coop, the air-conditioning units were built in under the subway car itself. It was really hard for maintenance reasons, for repairs.”
“Okay.”
I watched as Mike stepped up on one of the long benches along the windows of the car. Standing on his toes, he was able to grab a panel in the middle of the ceiling. He tugged at it several times, but it didn’t want to budge.
Then he reached into his pocket for his Swiss Army knife and flipped open a blade, jimmying the panel open with it. The metal strip that was suspended from the ceiling—two feet long and eighteen inches wide—dropped to the floor. Dust flew out everywhere and I began to cough.
“Step back,” Mike said.
“I’m okay,” I said, covering my mouth with my hand. “Did you find what you’re looking for?”
“In a way,” he said. “This model of train is the perfect place for a dealer to keep a stash. I wasn’t expecting to find a stash of heroin on my first stab. I was just hoping to see that there were train models we could identify that might be a dealer’s perfect hidey-hole. A secure place to keep the drugs.”
“Point taken,” I said. “This kind of car is one of them, right?”
“Right. Other models have knife switches on the underbelly of the carriage, or resistor grids,” Mike said. “But most of the guys I’ve locked up over the years prefer a location inside the train itself. They can either carry the glassines to the street or do business right inside the car—out of sight.”
“That makes good sense,” I said, “but they’ve still got to get past the guard.”
He was wiping his hands on his jeans as he jumped down from the bench. “The yards cover something like thirty-forty acres, including the industrial-size maintenance shop, which has more tracks of its own,” Mike said. “You figure two, maybe three guards at night, dozing in their little shacks. All a dealer needs is a wire cutter and the ability to slither through a hole in the fence.”
We got off the train.
“Let’s see if we can spot some gaps,” he said, crossing the old tracks, stepping carefully between the ties, to get to the edge of the fencing.
Now that I knew what we were looking for, it seemed as though there was a breach in the chicken wire—some places repaired and patched over, others not—every twenty or thirty feet.
There were three kids—not more than eight or nine years old—playing around one of the old train cars not far ahead of us. When one saw us coming, he shouted to his pals and they ran to a place in the fence where the wire had been cut and bent back to create an opening low to the ground. One after the other, they crawled on their bellies till they were out on a deserted street, seemingly in the middle of nowhere, laughing at us as they made their getaway.
“Nobody would be crazy enough to leave thousands of dollars of coke or heroin out here,” I said. “That’s putting a lot of faith in those sleepy security guards.”
“You don’t know how it’s done, Coop,” Mike said, turning to walk back to the gate where we’d entered.
“You’re right about that.”
“First the dealer picks out his car—the older, the more rotted out, the less likely to ever be restored, the better. He finds the most convenient place inside to hide his wares,” Mike said. “Could be in the air-conditioning pocket with the removable cover on the ceiling, could be inside the black box—if he’s got an engine room. Lots of options.”
“Then what?”
“Marks his turf—with some paint on the exterior, so people know who they’re fooling with, or not,” Mike said. “Then he sets up a security system to keep the powder safe.”
“An alarm?”
“This isn’t Fort Knox, Coop. No alarms,” he said. “Why do you think the flamethrower on the bicycle keeps snakes?”
“Henry Dibaba? No clue.”
“Snakes on a train, kid,” Mike said. “Let a couple of vipers loose in your caboose, and there won’t be a lot of people looking to get on board.”
I shuddered at the thought of encountering a poisonous snake or constrictor in an open space, much less one coming after me down the length of a subway car.
“Guys who deal out of their homes raise pit bulls for protection. But dogs would make too much noise in an abandoned train yard.”
I nodded in understanding.
“Let’s get Narcotics in to do a sweep of these cars,” Mike said, pulling his phone from his pocket. “Bet we’ll find a whole lot of dealing goin’ on out of these yards.”
“I’m done for the day,” I said. “No snakes for me.”
“They outgrow their skins all the time. They shed them,” Mike said. “I’d be happy to find some molted snakeskins and the residue of a bag of coke. Then I’d call it a day, too.”
FORTY-FOUR
It was almost four forty-five in the afternoon.
Mike and I had come back to the car an hour ago. He called Peterson and asked the lieutenant to speak directly to Commissioner Scully about getting manpower from Narcotics to sweep the train yard. There had been more than one hundred fifty arrests for drug sales—felony and misdemeanor—in the six-block radius around the East 180th Street train yards within the last year.
Everybody was moving forward now without James Prescott and the task force team.
He had left four messages on Mike’s phone, but even the commissioner didn’t want to split responsibility for this investigation with the US attorney.
I was in the passenger seat of Mike’s car with my feet on the dashboard, watching the people come and go from the train station from time to time.
“I promised Scully I’d take you back to Three Sisters in time for dinner,” Mike said.
“Push it back a bit.”
Mike looked at his watch. “I’m just waiting on the Narcotics guys,” he said. “Scully said all he could put together on a Sunday afternoon were two sets of partners—four guys who are familiar with this neighborhood.”
“No rush.”
“They should be here within the hour,” Mike said. “I’d like to go through the yard with them. Hear what they think.”
“I bet it’s a lot dicier here when it gets dark,” I said. “I wish they’d hurry up.”
The character of the neighborhood was changing with the hours. The number of mothers who had emerged from the stucco train station pushing baby carriages in the early afternoon had slowed to a trickle. Older people—women and men—who came from the elevators out onto the sidewalk all seemed to get on their way more quickly.
At five twenty, two unmarked cars pulled in and parked across the street from us. Mike and I got out, crossed the street, and introduced ourselves to the four men.
“What’s this about?” the senior detective asked. “I’m Skip Summers. You run into trouble today?”
“I was hoping to, to tell you the truth,” Mike said. “Came up short. You guys work around here?”
“You might guess we’re a little too long in the tooth to be doing undercover gigs anymore, but we
run the area for the kids doing buy and busts.”
“Any of you lock up a kid named Henry Dibaba earlier this year?” Mike asked.
The name wasn’t familiar to them.
“What’s your biggest problem in this area?” he said.
A second guy answered, obviously not happy to be pulled out on a Sunday afternoon.
“The area. That’s the problem,” he said. “Look around. The whole freaking area’s the problem.”
“Every politician in New York makes promises to clean up the South Bronx when they run for office,” the senior detective said. “Then they get elected and it’s still the armpit of the city. What do you want to do?”
“I’m assuming, because of the size and isolation of the rail yards—especially at night—that this is a destination point for sellers,” Mike said. “Especially since the drug business was chased out of the Hunts Point Market when they gentrified that part of the Bronx.”
“You could probably die of an overdose if you spent an hour sniffing your way through these tracks,” Summers said. “Did you go inside the gates?”
“Yeah, the guard didn’t seem to mind.”
“See anything?”
The older man opened his car door and reached into the glove compartment, taking out two flashlights. His counterparts did the same, handing one of them to Mike.
“When the sun quits, you’ll think you’ve had shades pulled over your eyes. It’s one of the darkest parts of town.”
“Thanks,” Mike said. “We think we may be onto a big business that imports large quantities of heroin. Heroin-highway kind of operation. Afghanistan to Africa across the Indian Ocean to Asia—and then here.”
“This could be your marketplace, Chapman. A lot of smack ends up right here, coming from everywhere. What was that fancy old train in France?” Summers said, sweeping his hand in front of us. “The Orient Express? Well, it’s parked right here. All fourteen hundred cars of it.”
“These yards are that big?” I asked.
“It goes on forever. You saw the shop, right?” Summers said. “There are twelve tracks just to hold cars that come in here for servicing to be done. For upkeep, even though it doesn’t look that way.”
“But those rusted old trains on the far side,” I said. “They look beyond repair.”
“Those are the ones on what they call storage tracks. They’re not only beyond repair; they’re beyond the interest of every politico in government.”
“Does anyone ever take them out of storage?” I asked.
“Not a chance. The cars are picked over like they were body-part donors at the morgue.”
My stomach jumped at the word “morgue.” It had been less than a week since I’d stared at Paul Battaglia’s corpse.
“Then there’s Unionport Yard, directly adjacent to this,” the detective said, pointing farther off as he talked to me. “Nineteen more tracks that occasionally hold some number 2 and number 5 trains. I mean, live ones, that get moved back out once there’s a need.”
“No use talking to Coop about it,” Mike said. “She’s allergic to subways and she doesn’t do outer boroughs. She wouldn’t know the 2 and 5 from the Q and N.”
“I do need a translator if you’re going on like this about subway numbers and rail yards,” I said. I saw too many of my perps getting off at the Canal Street stop when I traveled to work that way. We were all on our way to the same courtroom, and it always made me feel too exposed.
“C’mon,” Summers said. “We’ll walk you through it.”
He led the way to the gate, and I closed in next to Mike.
“We just came out of here,” I said. “Why go back?”
“’Cause these men know the place. They can tell us where our team should focus their efforts, if I turn out to be right.”
Detective Summers rattled the gate till the guard came out to open it up. We were a pack of six, walking with more purpose now, through the entrance to the vast yards.
Summers took a different route, passing the security shed to the left and cutting through the middle of the yard.
We walked past dozens of cars—tracks on each side of us that seemed to go on forever—until the maintenance shop stood in our path.
“This here is where the work gets done Monday to Friday,” he said. “It’s two city blocks long and half again as wide. Sort of a nine-to-five operation. In my experience, the drug dealers keep their distance from this general area, because there’s too much foot traffic during the week.”
Summers stood in place but made a circle, pointing at the rows of subway cars that were closest to the shop. “We’ve never had much action out of this area,” he said, talking to his three companions. “Am I right, guys?”
They all murmured agreement with him.
We trucked on past the closed-up shop, heading farther into the yards. We were walking west, and I could see the sun starting to drop behind the city skyline. I zipped up my sweater and put my hands in the pockets of my jeans.
“Once you get another hundred yards past the shop,” Summers said, “you start to hit no-man’s-land.”
It was clear these were much older train cars—some missing pieces of their steps, many with broken windows, all graffiti covered and looking as though time and disuse had made them obsolete.
“Tell them about that bastard your UC got here last month,” Summers said to one of the others.
The war stories fed into Mike’s theory. Each of the men talked as we walked, threading the tracks between cars, going toward the fences to examine places where access had been easily gained.
The undercover officers seemed to have encountered everything. Hookers who fronted for dealers, dealers who used adolescents as runners so they wouldn’t do jail time if caught with the drugs, and addicts willing to pay the price to come to this desolate strip of the city to find twenty or thirty dollars’ worth of what they needed to get them through the night.
“I have a kid on my team who looks one hundred percent the part,” the second cop said. “One of the best I’ve seen in a long time. He bought from this nineteen-year-old guy from Uganda who came to work right over there, at midnight three nights a week. Lived on that decommissioned R-142 till we busted him.”
“R-142?” I asked.
“Old version of some current subway cars that run on the number 5 line,” he said. “Made in Japan. There’s apparently no way to convert them to be functional anymore, so they’re just replaced with new machines.”
“This Ugandan knew he had a train that wasn’t going to be touched,” I said. “Is that the idea? He just made himself right at home.”
“Yeah. You could consider half of this rail yard like a housing project for junkies, long as they don’t come out in daylight,” the cop said. “He had a sixteen-year-old girlfriend who carried the heroin in a baggie, inside her vagina.”
“Your guys couldn’t do a cavity search,” I said, “unless they had a female officer with them.”
“So she usually just dumped the shit on the street. The pair of them got away with it for weeks, ’cause our undercover was making the buys on the street, outside the fencing. By the time we closed in for the search and bust, the dope was gone.”
Summers took over. “That’s when we figured we had to identify and get into the right subway car. Once we found it, turns out the perp was keeping half a kilo in the control panel of the R-142, locked up tight with three padlocks. He’d hollowed the panel out and stashed his mother lode in there.”
“But no snakes?” I said with a nervous laugh.
“No snakes. Just a couple of tarantulas, to keep curious folks from dipping in, if they could break the locks.”
Lucky I didn’t crave heroin. Snakes and spiders were two of my least favorite living creatures.
“We get the yard workers to patch up these holes as soon as the
y can,” the second cop said, standing next to a gap in the fence, “but the bad guys make them as fast as we get them repaired.”
We were about as far away from the entrance to the yard as we could have been. It must have been close to a mile in distance.
The light was gone now, and shadows on the stainless steel train cars played tricks on my eyes. There weren’t many streetlights around, but the few that turned on bounced shapes off the glass windows and silver sides of the sad old trains.
Detective Summers turned on his flashlight. Mike and the other guys followed suit. I didn’t have a light, so I stayed close to Mike.
“You want a list?” Summers asked.
Mike took out his phone and opened his Word app.
“On the northern perimeter, your most likely prospects are the rows of cars on the second, third, and fourth row of tracks,” Summers said. “There are dealers who squat in them, mostly at night, and all of them have weapons.”
“What do you do to get them out?” I asked.
“Bronx Narcotics comes in with a SWAT team every couple of weeks, when they have manpower, but the dealers just pick another roost,” Summers said. “They’re a very transient population, as you know.”
“When you have no residences in the area,” the second cop added, “there aren’t many neighbors to complain about a drug problem. This stuff gets pushed to the fringes of a community, and as long as the mopes stay away from the train station itself, nobody rings up the useless mayor to complain to him.”
Summers was talking to Mike, listing the specifics of the trouble zones on three of the four corners of the train yard. If Scully agreed, he could bring uniformed men in during the day tomorrow to search the abandoned trains. The effort wouldn’t be wasted, whether or not it connected to Paul Battaglia’s death. It was bound to turn up a boatload of heroin and cocaine.
We doubled back toward the entrance, taking a different route. It was darker on this side of the yards, and spookier now that we were navigating entirely by flashlight.
“What’s all that forest-looking stuff on the other side of the fence?” Mike asked.
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