Deadfall

by Linda Fairstein

He was pointing at the western perimeter of the rail yards.

  “Back door of the Bronx Zoo,” Summers said.

  I reached for Mike’s hand and aimed his flashlight that way.

  “This abuts the park directly?” I asked.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Are there animals right over there?”

  “No,” Summers said. “No animals. It’s a remote corner of the zoo—a few acres that have never been developed. Beyond the monorail, if you know where I mean.”

  “Yeah,” Mike said. “I know exactly.”

  “Whenever they do fix it up,” Summers said, “I hope they put the most ferocious cats they’ve got over here. Or make it like Jurassic Park, with raptors that can smell drug dealers. Something to scare these scumbags to another part of town.”

  We waved good night to the security guard who followed after us to lock up.

  “Did we give you what you need to get started?” Summers asked.

  “You did,” Mike said. “I was hoping we’d run into a transaction.”

  “Come back at midnight. The whole place springs to life.”

  “I may just do that,” Mike said. Then, talking to me, “Take you home and spin back with Jimmy North.”

  I shrugged. It didn’t seem worth the trip.

  “Mind if I keep your flashlight?” Mike asked Summers. “I’ll owe you a few rounds of drinks for dragging you out.”

  “Glad to help,” Summers said. “Going back to your car? We’re parked over that way.”

  “I just want to walk that border along the zoo property. See where it goes.”

  “No problem. Safest place to be. The thought of bumping up against JungleWorld keeps the addicts away from that side of the fence.”

  “Thanks again,” Mike said.

  “In that case, Alex, why don’t you take one of the high beams, too,” Summers said. “It’s helpful for walking in the wild up here.”

  “Good idea,” I said.

  The four men started back toward the train station, while Mike and I followed the fence as far to the west as it went, before it curved off.

  The Bronx River Parkway—elevated at this point—was overhead. Traffic was whizzing by, and it was refreshing to hear the road noise after the silence of the train yard.

  We walked on for fifty yards, and then fifty more.

  It was all park and woodland, to be sure—remnants of what had been described a century ago as the wilderness that made Bronx County such an inviting place to create the city’s wildlife zoo.

  I shined my light through the mesh fencing but could see only trees and dense growth around and below it.

  “Don’t go so fast,” I said to Mike.

  “Catch up, then.”

  I ran to close the distance between us.

  Mike was stopped at a break in the wire, too small for anyone to pass through. He pushed against it with both hands, but it didn’t give.

  “Is that a problem?” I asked.

  “Probably not. Probably just corrosion that caused it.”

  He kept going, farther and farther away from the parkway underpass.

  “Look, Mike, if it’s the zoo you want to see, it opens at ten tomorrow.”

  “Almost done, Coop.”

  Ten feet forward and he found another hole, still too small for a human passage. I followed behind Mike and reached out my hand to touch the sharp edges of the damaged fence. It wasn’t barbed wire, but it might as well have been.

  I knew he wasn’t turning back until he reached the far end of the zoo border.

  I paused, lifted my light, and saw the outline of the monorail away in the distance. It felt good to have a familiar visual anchor on this walk.

  “See this?” Mike said, and I jogged to get to his side.

  “What?”

  “This isn’t an accident, Coop, like some of the other spots,” he said, untwisting a thin metal strip that had been fastened—like a tie—to the top of a section of the wire mesh. “Someone’s created an entrance here.”

  Mike knelt down and untied a similar strip at the bottom of the same piece of fence, and when he stood up and pushed against it, the section swung open like a small gate.

  “Throw some more light on me,” he said, standing just inside the opening.

  We both aimed our beams inside the wooded area. There was about ten feet of low brush directly ahead, and then a mass of old growth and fallen trees.

  “Higher,” he said.

  I directed my beam over the tall pile.

  “Trees, Mike. That’s all I can see up ahead. More trees.”

  “Be careful, Coop,” he said, stepping in. “It’s muddy.”

  “It’s so close to the Bronx River,” I said. “Like wetlands. No wonder they can’t keep animals here, on this side of the park.”

  “Watch your step.”

  I got a few feet in, but it was like walking in quicksand. My sneakers sank in an inch or two, and I had to pull up hard to move forward.

  “Forget it,” I said. “You and the guys can come back in here tomorrow.”

  Mike had stopped at the edge of the dense mound and began to circle it. I lost sight of him when he rounded the enormous log to my right.

  “The beam, kid. I need your beam.”

  “It’s disgusting in here,” I said. “I’m covered in mud up to my knees. You really want to do this now?”

  “Five minutes. Just give me five minutes,” he said.

  Mike was shouting to me and it seemed as though he was getting farther away.

  I looked over my shoulder at the opening in the fence and thought about turning back, but Mike called to me again.

  “Eureka, babe,” he said. “I think I’ve found the Holy Grail.”

  I sidestepped the muddiest section of the path and walked around on a bed of twigs and dead leaves, making a loud cracking noise as I plowed forward.

  “Are you serious?” I called out to him.

  “Better than Tut’s tomb, Coop. Hurry up.”

  When Mike came into view, I saw that he was on one knee, dragging a handful of branches out of the way.

  I stood behind him and leaned in, over his shoulder, shining my flashlight into the brush.

  “Oh my God,” I said, struggling to understand what I was actually looking at—all these gleaming white objects, almost glowing from within—a thick mound beneath all the brown branches. “They’re tusks, aren’t they? They’re elephant tusks, hidden under this load of debris.”

  “A tangled mass of dead trees and fallen branches, hiding a stockpile of ivory—a king’s ransom in blood ivory, Coop. Ready to be sold on the black market,” Mike said, getting to his feet. “Ivory is the lure that can kill, kid. It makes for the perfect deadfall.”

  FORTY-FIVE

  “Let’s go back to the car,” I said. I had started to shiver—either from the idea of the magnitude of the enterprise we’d uncovered or from the night chill. “Call Peterson from there.”

  Mike was taking snapshots of the poached-ivory pile with his cell.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Let me get Mercer on it.”

  He speed-dialed the number and Mercer picked up right away.

  “Hey. It’s me,” he said, turning to take my arm and walk me out of this suddenly terrifying Bronx wilderness so I didn’t sink farther into the mud. “Call Peterson. Tell Vickee to get Scully on this as soon as possible. We found the perfect intersection—kind of what that Liebman guy was telling us about.”

  Mercer answered him but I couldn’t hear that part of the conversation. I was being careful not to lose my footing on the wet ground.

  “Say you’re importing heroin in kilos,” Mike said, “and you’re bringing in illegal ivory, too. This place is the geographical center of the universe for those trades, man. Drugs in the ra
il yard, and ivory in the brush at a remote corner of the zoo, directly adjacent to the drug stashes. Even if someone tripped over it here, you’d think it was a hundred years of dead elephants.”

  Mike waited while Mercer spoke.

  “Thanks. Call you from the car in five,” he said, hitting the End Call button and slipping the phone in his pocket. He removed the flashlight from his pocket and we continued our way around the mound.

  “You think this is Kwan?” I said.

  “I do, but more important than that, it’s what we’ve got to prove somehow,” Mike said. “Let Scully claim this discovery for the department, and Prescott won’t even be able to own a place on the podium.”

  Mike was pumped by his find, justifiably pleased by his persistence in following his gut tonight.

  “Good work,” I said. “Sorry I almost pulled you off it.”

  “Lighten up, babe. This is what I do best,” Mike said. “Detect.”

  “I know that.”

  “Sherlock deduced,” he said. “I detect.”

  “You got it from your dad,” I said. “It’s in your DNA.”

  “Meanwhile, Mercer claimed there’s an APB for my arrest,” Mike said, bumping his body against mine. He was almost giddy about unearthing this illegal—this hugely valuable—stockpile. “The whole NYPD is looking for some loopy cop who kidnapped a muddy blonde.”

  “Don’t turn yourself in yet,” I said, laughing with him.

  “No chance.”

  We rounded the tall mound of trees and logs, and I heard a rustling sound on the dark path ahead of us. I stood still.

  “What is it?” Mike asked. “Let’s go.”

  “Someone’s in here with us,” I said, lifting my flashlight up higher.

  Mike laughed again. “A loose bison, Coop? A hippo in a hurry? I’m so psyched I could take them with my bare hands.”

  “No moving,” a man’s voice said. Whoever spoke was just a few feet away from us.

  Mike stepped in front of me. In the same moment, he dropped his flashlight to the ground—maybe hoping to be lost in the dark to whoever was confronting us. He reached under his jacket for his gun.

  I lowered my light but didn’t shut it off. I was shaking now, not just shivering, and everything seemed to be happening at once—at warp speed.

  “No moving, I said,” the voice repeated.

  From within the shadows, I could see a figure on the path.

  “Don’t touch that gun, policeman,” he said, with a lilting accent that was part Nigerian and part New York City street talk.

  The black-skinned young man had a rifle pointed at us, and the size of it made Mike’s handgun look like a toy.

  “You, son,” Mike said, stretching out his left arm in front of him, “you put that gun down.”

  “No light,” he said to me. “No light, no moving.”

  He was shifting from one foot to the other. He looked as nervous as I felt.

  I turned the beam off and lowered the flashlight to my side.

  “Drop it,” he said. “Drop the light.”

  I let it fall beside my foot.

  “I know who you are, son,” Mike said, playing a dangerous game of chicken with his adversary. “Your name is Henry Dibaba.”

  The kid seemed startled by Mike’s naming him. The tip of his rifle instantly dipped toward the ground, but he raised it again.

  I was startled by the connection Mike made, too—only now remembering that he had seen Dibaba on police surveillance video hours after the kid had been fleeing from our burning car. Later Mike had been given close-ups of the suspected arsonist’s face in a mug shot.

  “You can’t shoot a cop, son,” Mike said, as calmly as though he was talking to a friend. “Put that rifle down before you make a bad mistake.”

  “You the one making a mistake,” Dibaba said. “You here. Here is the mistake.”

  “You have no idea why we’re here, Henry, so you need to just step aside and let us out. No gunshots, no mistakes,” Mike said. “Everybody goes home happy.”

  Dibaba lifted the rifle to his narrow shoulder. There was a scope attached to it that I could see. I also assumed there was a suppressor, to silence the terrible noise that shots would make.

  “Back up,” Dibaba said. “Two of you back away from here.”

  Then he squeezed his lips together and whistled. He whistled three times, long and loud.

  Mike stepped backward, onto my toes. When he released them, I shuffled my feet to move backward too.

  “You’re already in trouble, Henry,” Mike said. “What are you whistling for? You want help? You think someone’s going to come help you?”

  I didn’t want Mike to keep talking. He was making the kid more jittery each time he spoke.

  “No trouble,” Dibaba said. “Not my trouble.”

  “You set my car on fire on Thursday night,” Mike said. “You tried to kill me. It’s all your trouble.”

  Dibaba held his head up and stared at Mike.

  “Oh, yeah, Henry. My car, on East Sixty-Fourth Street,” Mike said. “We got you on camera.”

  “No way,” Dibaba said, a short, clipped phrase that was totally New York City.

  Mike pointed over his head and Dibaba looked up. “There are cameras on streetlamps all over the city, Henry,” Mike said. “You dumped the bicycle on Sixty-Fifth Street and we could see you running.”

  “Running where?”

  Dibaba was distracted from his own rifle by Mike’s words. He lowered it to his side.

  “Into the zoo, Henry. The Central Park Zoo, right on Fifth Avenue.”

  “But how—?”

  “Where you feed the animals,” Mike said. “There are cameras everywhere. Even here, right outside the fence.”

  Dibaba whistled again, three more times. Then he turned his head to look over his shoulder, as though he expected someone to respond to his calls.

  Mike was getting to the kid. He was beginning to understand that Mike was not just a stranger who had stumbled onto the stash of ivory.

  “So far, Henry, you don’t have a problem with me,” Mike said, “or I would have been on your ass before you had a chance to point your gun.”

  Mike listed his parents’ names and their Nigerian origins and his ex-girlfriend’s name and the charge for which Henry had been arrested, right outside the rail yard.

  The young man was skittish.

  “Just let the two of us walk out that gate, Henry, and then I’ll come back and talk to you—man-to-man. Let you know how you can make this right.”

  Henry’s eyes darted from the large hoard of ivory tusks, aware that we had seen the treasure he must have been sent to guard, to the open gate behind his back.

  “I’m going to pass through, Henry,” Mike said, taking a step forward, “and you’re going to let us walk out. Is that okay?”

  “I heard you talk. I heard you on the phone.”

  I was hoping Mike didn’t tell him the cavalry was coming. I was hoping that Mike didn’t lay on the stuff about cops arriving to reinforce us, because I thought it would have Henry jumping out of his skin, thinking that we had already called for other police backup.

  “Forget it, Henry,” Mike said. “That had nothing to do with you.”

  The young man took a few steps closer to Mike.

  I heard noise outside the gate, twenty feet or so behind where Henry Dibaba was standing. He heard it too.

  A male voice called out to him in an African dialect. I guessed the cavalry was on location after all—just not our troops. The fear was paralyzing.

  Dibaba turned his head again, and Mike turned his to me. “Pick up your light, Coop. Get ready to bolt.”

  “No talk,” Dibaba said to us.

  “Who you got there, Henry?” Mike said.

  “Men. M
y men, to help me.”

  Men—I didn’t know how many, and at least one of them was armed with a rifle—stood between us and a path back to the street.

  Dibaba let one hand off his rifle, rotating his body to wave his backup in through the gate. He was speaking to him—or them—in the same dialect.

  I stooped to grab my flashlight but didn’t turn it on.

  Mike had the three seconds he needed, too. He lunged forward, tackling the skinny kid around the hips and throwing him to the ground.

  The rifle fell free—like a football jogged loose in a fumble.

  Mike picked it up and stood, yelling at me to run away. I stood still, unwilling and unable to move, watching as he stomped on Dibaba’s chest with his left foot, stunning the kid.

  Someone outside the gate fired the first shot. It was aimed in our direction, so I turned away and headed deeper into the woods.

  “Go, Coop,” Mike yelled, and then I heard him discharge the rifle.

  There were shouts in another language, but no screams, so I doubted he had fired at them.

  I paused to look for him. He was standing over Henry, who was rolling on the ground and holding his stomach with both hands.

  “This’ll only hurt for a minute, kid,” Mike said, cracking Henry over the head with the butt of the rifle.

  Dibaba’s arms fell to his sides and a rivulet of blood trickled down the side of his face.

  Mike fired the rifle again—in the direction of the gate through which we had entered—but high enough not to hit anyone.

  Then he ran toward me and pushed me in the small of my back.

  “Make tracks, Coop. I don’t know who’s there with him,” Mike said, “but it’s time for us to make tracks.”

  FORTY-SIX

  “Where are we?” I asked.

  We had run more than the length of a football field, bobbing and weaving around tree stumps and branches, onto higher and firmer ground than the wetlands near the entrance. It was rough going because of the uneven terrain. Twigs scratched my face and hands as I tried to swat them aside to run.

  Mike hadn’t let me turn on the flashlight in case any of the young men followed. He had cut an irregular path through the Bronx forest in hopes that they wouldn’t be able to find us.