Force of Nature

by Stephen Solomita

  “No, one of ours scared him off,” Handelsman said easily. He had no idea of Tilley’s relationship with Rose. For him it was just another complication. Another pain in the ass that would require a mountain of paperwork and an apartment-by-apartment search of the Vladek Houses. “She’s beat up and she’s been stabbed deep, but she’s breathing all right and her heart’s strong. He stabbed her in the gut, so she’s probably bleeding inside. And there’s some broken bones.”

  Tilley took off at a dead run, leaving Moodrow to explain it to Handelsman. His pulse was racing wildly and he was more frightened than he had ever been in his life. She must have followed them? Why? What did she hope to do for Louise and Marlee? What about the children? He pushed through the outer lobby door into the seeming chaos of a crime scene. The housing cops were controlling this one, but the sergeant in charge, O’Malley, was willing to give way to an NYPD detective, even a kid like Tilley.

  “Where’s the bus?” Tilley asked first. He was referring to an Emergency Services ambulance. “You got an ETA?”

  “They’re backed up about forty minutes. Even that’s a guess.”

  “How bad is she?”

  “She’s unconscious.”

  “Can we take her in a car?”

  “She’s got head injuries. She’s got to be immobilized.”

  “Gimme your portable.”

  Without questioning, O’Malley turned his portable over to the detective. Tilley wanted to scream into it, but he knew it would do no good. “Task Force Green. Green Five to Central. K.”

  “Go ahead Green Five.”

  “We need a bus at the Vladek Houses. Right now.”

  “Hold on, Green Five.” There was a brief pause and the dispatcher came back on. Her calm voice was maddening. “No ETA possible at this time.”

  “This task force has priority, Central. I want the first available bus. K.”

  “I’ll try once more. Standby.”

  Tilley desperately wanted to go to Rose’s side. She was lying on her back, a blanket under her head, about thirty feet away, and he could hear her moaning softly.

  “Green Five, K.”

  “Green Five,” Tilley returned.

  “No earlier ETA possible on that bus. Emergency Services is backed up with elderly aided cases because of the heat. I will advise as soon as we have a definite.”

  Tilley sighed. “10-4.” He looked up to find Moodrow standing behind him. “She followed me here,” Tilley explained. “He must have been waiting. I should have known she’d come. I should have figured it.”

  By way of an answer, Moodrow put his arm around Tilley’s shoulders and led him over to Rose. A young man, an Asian, knelt beside her, a pressure pack in his hand. He looked up at Moodrow, then handed the big cop a business card: HOUSE CALLS, INC. Dr. Muhammad Bhutto.

  “You’re a doctor?” Tilley asked. The man’s presence in the Vladek Houses was as miraculous to him as the appearance of the Virgin at Lourdes.

  “I am a doctor.” His accent was pure British, clipped and upper class.

  “This is personal, Doctor.” Moodrow stepped in, his arm still supporting his partner’s shoulders. “We have to know how she is. The truth. Not what you think I want to hear.”

  “Your name, sir?” the doctor asked calmly.

  Moodrow flipped his shield. “Detective Moodrow. This is my partner, Detective Tilley.”

  Doctor Bhutto nodded. “Please realize that I am only able to view the external aspect of the woman’s wounds. However, as I am Pakistani and have worked in the Afghan refugee camps on the border of our countries, I am quite familiar with trauma. I am certain that she has not sustained a skull fracture in which bone has been displaced and that she has no severe spinal injuries because she is able to move her extremities freely. She is, of course, in shock and losing blood internally from a single stab wound. While the position of the entry wound is in the lower abdomen and her heart is untouched, we cannot rule out damage to any number of organs. It is also possible that a major artery has been cut, but as her color remains quite pink, I must consider that unlikely.”

  “If her back and her head are all right, why can’t we take her to the hospital in a car?”

  “She has severe rib injuries. Cracked or broken. I do not believe she should try to sit upright. I think we can wait for the ambulance. It’s an acceptable risk.”

  “Bullshit,” Moodrow said. He walked away from Rose and searched the faces of the crowd standing outside the police barricades. “Hey Henry,” he said, suddenly striding toward a small, middle-aged man with a thin beard.

  “I didn’t have nothing to do with this, Moodrow,” the man said as the big cop walked over to him.

  “I need a favor.” Moodrow didn’t even bother replying to the ritual denial. “I need a van with no backseat. Maybe with a mattress. Like you sometimes use to carry television sets to your fence.”

  Henry, to his credit, neither laughed nor denied the charge. “For Rosey?” he asked.

  “Yeah. The fucking ambulance is gonna be late. We gotta get her to a hospital.”

  “All right. Five minutes, but I have to drive it. It doesn’t go anywhere without me behind the wheel.”

  “No problem.”

  Henry hesitated for a moment, just long enough to ask, “When are you gonna kill this dude, Moodrow? He’s been around too long. You shoulda chilled him a long time ago.”

  Fifteen minutes later, Rose was lying on a thin mattress in the back of a half-ton Dodge van. Doctor Bhutto was beside her and a patrol car was set to escort her to the hospital. It would run the lights and siren. While Tilley stood behind the van, Moodrow instructed the driver of the patrol car.

  “No Bellevue,” he told the driver. “Take her to St. Vincent’s.”

  “Bellevue is the best for trauma,” the cop said automatically. The theory was that emergency room physicians at Bellevue handled so many stabbings and gunshot wounds, they would be the best at treating Rose’s injuries.

  “If Levander decides to go looking for her, Bellevue’s the first place he’ll try. I don’t want her anywhere he can find her.” The cop in the patrol car nodded his agreement and Moodrow walked to the side of the van. “Henry,” he whispered, “you’re going to St. Vincent’s on Seventh Avenue. Just follow the cop in front of you. By the way, if you don’t tell everyone where she is, there’s no way Levander can find her at St. Vincent’s. I owe you one.” Without waiting for a reply, he walked to the back of the van and stood beside an immobile James Tilley. “What do you want to do, Jimmy? You wanna go with Rose?”

  Tilley looked at his partner in surprise. “No way, Moodrow. I can’t do anything for Rose but take Greenwood off the street. And that’s what I’m gonna do. We’re too close for me to spend the night in a hospital corridor.”

  “Take off,” Moodrow yelled to the cop in the first patrol car and the two vehicles, the RMP and the van, moved toward Montgomery Street and FDR Drive. Moodrow and Tilley watched it for a moment, then turned to the housing cops still surrounding the crime scene. “Who caught the squeal?” Moodrow asked loudly.

  A young cop, a black woman in uniform, stepped forward. “Patrolman Gorman,” she said calmly.

  “Can you run it down for us?” Moodrow asked.

  “I was in the house when we got a call from apartment 3C, Building G. A domestic dispute. Woman screaming between G and F Buildings. I came over to eyeball the situation and also heard screaming. I could see a man striking a woman and I drew my service revolver and called for him to stop. He turned to me and fired twice. A pistol. I ducked behind the corner of Building G, but was unable to return fire due to the close proximity of the victim. When I looked out, the perpetrator was gone. I then ascertained that the victim was badly injured and called for backup and a bus.”

  “And you didn’t see him run into a building? Or have any idea where he went except that it was away from you?”

  “That’s correct.”

  For the first time, Tilley seemed t
o come out of his lethargy. “We’re just wasting time, Moodrow. The whole task force is here now. Let them do that shit work. Let’s get out of here.”

  Moodrow looked around in surprise, noting the dozens of detectives and uniforms flooding the scene. As Handelsman had predicted, there would be a search, not only of the projects, but of the entire surrounding neighborhood. If Greenwood was out on the street, he would be snatched up within two hours. Even as Moodrow watched, the task force was setting up a mobile command post and dividing the neighborhood into sectors. Greenwood’s status as a cop killer was attracting off-duty cops from every borough. There was no sense in the two of them getting involved in the scut work. Let the pencil pushers plot the logistics. Without another word, Moodrow led his partner to their waiting Plymouth and they began to drive uptown.

  23

  THEY DROVE DIRECTLY TO the Lip Cafe, a small, trendy restaurant fronting Tompkins Square Park. The owner, Frank Parisi, an uptown entrepreneur, had become friendly with Moodrow when he’d been attempting to establish his business. Continuous vandalism had nearly driven him back uptown, but Moodrow had acted as an arbitrator with the local street gangs and negotiated a peace which, surprisingly, had held up. The destruction had ended as soon as the owner stopped calling the precinct and complaining about menacing characters hanging around his establishment.

  “Frank,” Moodrow said, without even a preliminary hello, “I need your office and your phone for a couple hours. And some dinner.”

  “Hey,” Frankie smiled his most hospitable smile. “You don’t even gotta ask. Take as long as ya like. I’ll send you a waitress.”

  “Send Gretchen.”

  “You like Gretchen?” Frankie asked.

  “I like to bust her balls,” Moodrow replied.

  Each of the cops made a phone call while they waited for the waitress to arrive. Moodrow called Epstein and made arrangements for Rose’s protection. It would be impossible to keep the task force ignorant of her whereabouts, but Moodrow could make sure that cops assigned to watch her were good and he pushed Epstein to call in some favors from another precinct, to get a squad of anti-crime street cops from uptown assigned to protect her. If there was enough firepower around her door, even Levander couldn’t blast his way inside.

  Tilley called his mother, Susanna, and ran down the attack on Rose, assuring her (and himself) that Rose would be all right. In the meantime, she would have to take care of the children, to explain what had happened as best she could. There was no chance he would get home for hours and at least a possibility that he would not get home at all.

  Susanna Tilley took it in without asking a single question. She, too, recalled a scene that had taken place long before; of trying to tell a little boy that his father would not be coming home; of trying to make death real to a small child while she held back her own grief. “Don’t worry about it, Jimmy. We’ll be all right. But, for God’s sake, get this man off the street.”

  After the phone calls were made, they began to discuss drugs in general and Greenwood’s condition in particular. Moodrow wasn’t surprised when Tilley told of his experiments with cocaine: Moodrow was a long time advocate of the legalization of drugs. (“If some asshole wants to shoot dope and become a zombie, what do I give a fuck? As long as he don’t steal my television, let ’im do what he wants.”) He was, however, just as glad to know that Tilley wasn’t presently doing anything heavier than a Schaefer and an occasional joint. And he agreed with him about Levander’s condition.

  “The street’s already canonized the mighty Kubla Khan. They’re making him a cop-killing superhero. Fucking mutt’s probably living in a basement hole in some abandoned tenement. Well, I promise you one thing, Jimmy. He ain’t got another week. I’m so close I can smell him. I can feel myself settling up for Marlee and Rose and all the rest of them.”

  They were interrupted by the waitress, a heavy-set young woman in a frumpy, black dress that looked as if it came down secondhand from a Ukrainian widow. Her hair was also black, jet black—except for three silver spikes, sprinkled with glitter, that stood straight up in the air.

  To say the two cops were out of place in the Lip Cafe is to put it as mildly as possible, but Moodrow was wild about the chimi-changas and they placed their orders without considering the ambiance. Cops are not nearly as callous as the media likes to paint them, but they know they cannot carry that pain with them, so they bury it. And become alcoholics. Or swallow the gun. Or clown it up at inappropriate moments.

  Thus, fifteen minutes later, even as Moodrow analyzed Levander Greenwood and the investigation, two things happened, right on cue. His beeper went off and the waitress arrived with several steaming plates of food. The beeper was the signal to go to the apartment on 11th Street and wait for Cecil, which only made the food seem more appetizing, and Moodrow asked the waitress to wrap it up.

  For a moment, she didn’t react, just stood there with her hands on her hips, staring at them. Finally, she said, “Ya know somethin’, Moodrow? You’re really a pain in the ass.”

  “Is that what you like?” he asked.

  “What the fuck are you talkin’ about?”

  “A pain in the ass. Is that what you like?”

  She wasn’t stupid enough to reply, but as she picked up the plates, Moodrow fired a final shot. “Because if that’s what you like, you should come to my place tonight and we’ll play a little game with my .38.”

  Without bothering to turn around, she shrugged her shoulders and said, “I’ll take you up on that, fatso. The day you learn to lick your eyebrows.”

  Fifteen minutes later, they were in the apartment on 11th Street. Lucille had taken her seat and was busy doing the panty bit with her legs. This time she added a special treat. She was wearing a plain white cotton t-shirt with two circular targets, one over each breast. The bull’s-eyes were right on her nipples. She excused herself immediately upon entering the room, complaining of the heat, and splashed her face with cold water from the sink in the toilet. In the process, she also soaked the shirt so that her breasts jumped up like two trout from the surface of a pond. All through this performance (and all through her partner’s conversation, which she never interrupted), her features remained frozen. Except for her lower jaw, which slowly worked the wad of gum in her mouth.

  “You were right, Moodrow. About Blue Thunder. It didn’t come back on with Greenwood.” Cecil opened the negotiations with a flat statement, then stopped dead, but Moodrow waved his arm wearily.

  “No play, tonight, Cecil. Just tell me.”

  “This is very important to you. This should be worth something,” Cecil insisted. “We’ve been talking to each other three fucking years already. You gotta do better than ‘just tell me who.’”

  Moodrow’s face turned to stone. His features seemed to shrink back into his skull and Cecil found herself staring at a white rock with two black dots about a third of the way down. “Listen,” the rock said, “If you don’t tell me who’s holding that dope, you ain’t walking out of this apartment. If you think I’m kidding, just keep fucking me around.”

  Cecil stamped her foot in amazement. Even Tilley, who was so excited he could barely remain seated, read in her eyes a clear desire to drive that same foot into Moodrow’s face, perhaps to see if it was as hard as it looked. But Moodrow towered over her like the giants in Jeanette’s nightmares and Cecil had to content herself with complaining. “This is bullshit. You never been like this. I never woulda started up with you, if you were like this. What the fuck is the matter with you?”

  “I’m in a hurry, Cecil.” He hesitated for a moment, then his face opened up, as if he’d made a decision. “Look, I’m passing on all that shit about Chelsea and Elio. I’m trying to take care of that. Correction. I think I will take care of that. But I don’t have time to talk about it tonight. I want you to tell me who it is and then take off. You understand what I’m saying?”

  The carrot and the stick. Threaten, then offer a bone. Tilley recalled a piece o
f advice Moodrow had given him regarding informants. He’d advised his partner to run them the way a pimp runs a stable of whores. Watching Lucille’s tits rise and fall with each breath, Tilley was suddenly completely relaxed, indifferent, really, to the conversation, because he knew his partner would, in fact, break their legs before he would allow them to walk out without giving him what he wanted. To Moodrow, Cecil was not a female. She wasn’t even a criminal or a businesswoman. She was a stepping stone on the path to Levander Greenwood and he was prepared to “step” as hard as necessary.

  “You know a boy named Johnny Mitchell? They call him ‘pinky,’ because he’s white.”

  “I heard of him, but I don’t know what he looks like.”

  “He’s a runt. A dead-end junkie dealing out of the men’s shelter on Lexington Avenue. Dealing Blue Thunder. I know someone who copped last night.”

  “You sure? The person told you this is reliable?”

  “Ninety-nine percent. The story goes that Pinky Mitchell suddenly has more dope than ever before in his life. And his regular spot is inside the armory on Lex.”

  “I know where it is,” Moodrow replied. Tilley could almost hear his partner’s mind racing away with the information.

  Suddenly Cecil broke the tension. She put her hands on her hips and smiled thinly. “Can we leave now? Did we give you enough, Sergeant? Or should I call you sir? Sir Moodrow.”

  By way of an answer, Moodrow took her hand and kissed the backs of her fingers. “Thanks, Cecil.”

  As soon as she’d gone, Moodrow filled his partner in. Pinky Mitchell was a white kid from Alabama who’d gone the whole New York route: from promising kid-exec in midtown; to hip art dealer in SoHo; to cocaine dealer in the West Village; to heroin addict; to small-time, homeless pusher.

  “Why would he live in the shelter if he’s a dealer?” The question was naive, even by Tilley’s standards.