Force of Nature

by Stephen Solomita

  “The kid’s a terminal junkie. Whatever he makes from dealing or boosting from the stores, he shoots up. Little items, like food and shelter that you and me gotta work for, he gets courtesy of the city. The dirtball’s been living in the fucking shelter so long, it’s like his office. Other junkies know to look for him there. And that makes all kinds of problems for us.”

  “How so?”

  “In the first place, it’s not in our fucking precinct. It’s in the One Three. Second, shelters are guarded by private security. The shelter Pinky’s dealing from has metal detectors where you come in the main entrance. Maybe five or six security guards.”

  “I still don’t see why we can’t put fifty uniforms inside and just take him. He’s not expecting us. He wouldn’t even know what we’re after.”

  “Fine. But what are we gonna take him for? What cause do we have to stop and frisk him? Much less arrest him.” He paused for effect, then went on like he was training a hamster. “Besides which, if Mitchell gets arrested, the suits at the One Three are gonna take the collar. Plus, if you bust a junkie, you gotta take him to the hospital if he asks for it. After which comes a Legal Aid lawyer and you lose two weeks before you get to the bastard. Fuck that. There’s a dirty cop here and he’s stinking up the whole fucking precinct. I don’t know where that cop is or when he’ll find out that we took Mitchell. Don’t forget, the cop has gotta be running Greenwood and Pinky Mitchell. Greenwood rips it off, passes it to the cop who passes it to Mitchell.”

  “I hear what you’re saying. You know how many junkies I saw walking a beat in Brooklyn? The life expectancy of a car radio in Fort Greene is about twenty minutes. The neighborhood’s infested.”

  “Fine. Then you know fucking Pinky Mitchell cannot be running with Levander Greenwood. It’d be like the rabbit running with the wolf.”

  There was nothing more to say on that point. Of course, they’d expected a buffer all along, a middleman between the rip-off and the resale and this only confirmed their suspicions. “So, tell me what you wanna do,” Tilley said, and felt the roller coaster take a sudden twist before dropping almost straight down.

  “There’s no fucking trick to it,” he explained. “It ain’t subtle.

  We take Mitchell out of the shelter and bring him back here. Junkies will sell their mothers’ assholes for a fix. We let Pinky Mitchell get sick, he’s gonna tell us who’s running him.”

  Tilley couldn’t help smiling. He said, “You know what, Moodrow? All those things you just said are right? We sneak in the shelter without anyone knowing. We smuggle one junkie out of the building. We get this junkie down in this basement. The junkie gives us what we want. A very tight chain of logic. Real detectivelike. The only problem is that we have to commit a number of crimes in the process. Not the least of which is kidnapping.”

  “Does that bother you?” Moodrow looked surprised, then anxious, then innocent.

  “Fuck, no. But later on it leads to more problems. Like when we take the cop, who’s gonna testify against him? Are we supposed to admit that we kidnapped and tortured a witness? If we can’t make an arrest on the cop, how do we get him to give up Greenwood?”

  Moodrow stopped him with a wave of his hand. “I don’t give a shit. And I’m not buying that crap says you can’t let a guilty man go free. The first thing is to get Levander Greenwood off the street, before he kills anyone else. Lemme get that done before I worry about the lawyers.” He stopped again and fixed Tilley with his hardest stare. It was almost as hard as that of a Latvian middleweight who’d knocked Tilley out one summer night when he was still an amateur.

  “Look, Jimmy, I’m gonna make you a promise. You give me the junkie and I’ll get the cop. You give me the cop, I’ll get you Levander Greenwood. I guarantee it.”

  Whooooooooooooooooooooooosh. Like stepping off a cliff. Judge, jury and…What would Tilley say later on? “Moodrow made me do it, your Honor. I’m just a kid and I didn’t know any better.” Moodrow had thirty-five years in. Thirty-five years of playing on the edge. Now it was Jim Tilley’s turn and his career was the last thing on his mind. He thought of Rose, limp and moaning, being hoisted into a van. It was all personal. Every bit of it. To play it according to the Patrol Guide would mean long delays and delays were no longer even thinkable to James Patrick Tilley.

  “We won’t go in tonight,” Moodrow explained. “I can get a floor plan of the shelter and some more exact information on Mitchell’s operation. I know a security guard there who owes me a favor. Probably take the rest of the night.”

  “What about me?”

  “You get to go back uptown. Try to do something for the kids. We’ll meet tomorrow afternoon and take Mitchell sometime tomorrow night.”

  “I’m not coming with you now?”

  “I want you should be the one to go inside. So nobody should see you with me.” He laughed. “Tomorrow night, around six o’clock, you’re gonna become homeless.”

  “You want me to go inside the men’s shelter by myself?”

  “Yeah. You go in the front door like any other dirtball. But you go out one of the back doors. I don’t know exactly how, but I’ll have it worked out by tomorrow.”

  “I suppose I have to go in clean? No gun? No badge?”

  “Of course. I told you already. They got metal detectors in the front entrance.”

  “And if someone recognizes me?”

  “Run like hell.”

  Jim Tilley stopped at St. Vincent’s before he headed back uptown. Stubbornly refusing to take the nurse’s evaluation of Rose’s condition as “serious,” he ran down the resident, Doctor Samuel Morris, who’d admitted her. The man was asleep in a private room. He’d been on call for thirty-six hours, but he showed no annoyance when Tilley woke him, not even surprise.

  “She’ll be all right,” he announced firmly. Tilley could not read any doubt in his tone.

  “How much damage is there?”

  “The stab wound went deep enough, but except for nicking her liver, managed to avoid anything really damaging. Her biggest problem right now is potential infection from the blade. We’re anticipating that by feeding her intravenous antibiotics. And, of course, she has a hairline fracture of the skull. Just above the right ear. I think he must have hit her with a brick. There was red dust in the wound. Head injuries sometimes go bad, no doubt about it. There’s also two broken ribs on the right side, but no damage to the lung.”

  Tilley hesitated for a second, before asking the question, but, he knew, if he didn’t ask it this way, he couldn’t be sure of her condition. “Is there any chance that she’ll die?”

  The doctor looked surprised, then fed it to the cop without flinching. “The most dangerous time for her was when she was on the table. Under anesthesia. She came through that without complications. Right now, in a woman her age, I’d say the chances of her going so bad we can’t save her are one in five hundred. That doesn’t mean, by the way, that she won’t be in pain for a long time.” He waited for the cop to take it in, then continued. “Look, I’m not so stupid or so tired that I can’t see she means a lot to you. I’ll watch out for her. If you want some real information, call the hospital, ask for the paging operator and have her find me. I’ll give you whatever time I can, but, for now, it’s ‘goodnight and please call me in the morning.’ I’ve been up for a long time.”

  Susanna was holding a sleeping Jeanette on her lap when Tilley walked into the apartment. She smiled and got up to carry the child into her bedroom. Lee, on the other hand, was wide awake. He was watching an HBO special, a boxing match between the cruiserweight champion, Richard Hartfield, and a pretty good light-heavy, Matthew Johnson. Tilley’d made a mental note to watch the fight a few weeks before, then had forgotten all about it.

  “Tilley, come here,” Lee ordered, indicating the seat next to him. It was the first time he’d asked Tilley for anything and Tilley didn’t waste the opportunity by resenting Lee’s tone of voice. He walked over and sat next to him.

  �
��Who’s winning?” Tilley asked.

  Lee pointed to the tall man with the sharp features, and Tilley said, “That’s Richard Hartfield. He’s the champion. The other guy is Matthew Johnson.”

  Without looking at him, Lee said, “The champion is kicking the shit out of Matthew Johnson.” He was seven years old. “Could you kick the shit out of him?” He pointed to Hartfield again.

  Tilley didn’t say anything for a moment. Just sat there watching the champion as he twisted his body away from the looping punches of a smaller, slower opponent. Hartfield had a way of bending backward at the waist, allowing left hooks to pass harmlessly in front of his face. Then he’d come back over the top with devastating rights. It was a very unusual move and Tilley drifted back to his days in training. At first glance, Richard Hartfield was the perfect opponent for him. He stood ramrod straight, his chin in the air. It looked like an easy target, that chin, but it was almost never there when other fighters tried to hit it.

  “No, I don’t think so. I’m not in training anymore.” His explanation left out the conviction that on his best day, he wouldn’t have made a decent sparring partner for the likes of Mr. Hartfield.

  “I could,” Lee said quietly.

  “Could what?”

  “I could kick his ass.”

  “And how would you do that?”

  Lee reached into the crevice between the armrest and his cushion, withdrawing a black-handled carving knife. It was thick, sharp and almost as long as his forearm. His face was earnest and very serious as he met Tilley’s eyes. “I could kick the shit out of him.”

  Tilley didn’t argue the point, or try to take the knife away. They sat in silence as Hartfield slowly beat his man into submission. The process took another four rounds and by the time it was completed, Susanna had returned from the kitchen and was talking with Lee about computers.

  Exhausted, Tilley excused himself and went to bed. It was still early, but he drifted off almost as soon as his head hit the pillow. He saw one last image before he passed into oblivion. He saw Moodrow and Greenwood as enormous sumo wrestlers charging from opposite ends of a wrestling mat.

  Then he dreamed of the odor of his lover’s throat. It filled each breath. They were wrapped in each other’s arms and she was already maneuvering her body to receive him. Afterward, they both began to cry. The intensity was beyond pleasure. It was devouring, and when Rose said, “I love you, Jim Tilley,” he was so frightened, he almost screamed.

  24

  TILLEY WOKE UP EARLY the next morning and went for what he now thought of as a “cleansing” run. It was hot and rainy, a perfect combination for a jogger—the steady drizzle cooled without chilling and he ran his usual three miles in twenty-two minutes. He didn’t think very much about what he would have to do that night. His mind kept returning to Rose in her hospital bed, to Levander beating her, stabbing her. There’s a reality to being a cop that parallels the feelings of any hunter after his prey. That the prey consists entirely of criminals, which obliges them to undertake the hunt, only serves to heighten the pleasures of the stalk, especially as the end approaches. That end was as far as Jim Tilley’s imagination could stretch and when he arrived home, he was mentally prepared for whatever the night would bring.

  Moodrow wanted Tilley to go into the men’s shelter on Lexington Avenue, an enormous armory that takes up an entire square block between 24th and 25th Streets. Once inside, he would locate and remove a small-time pusher without showing a badge or a gun.

  To say that New York’s shelters are places of violence is to oversimplify the case by plenty. But it is a fact that on freezing cold nights many of the city’s homeless have to be dragged into the shelters against their will, because the Mayor decided, some time ago, that force is preferable to grainy photos of frozen bodies in the tabloids. The homeless, for their part, usually explain their reluctance to accept a warm bed by insisting the dangers inside the shelter are more real than the weather outside; even when the temperature outside is ten degrees; even when the wind is blowing.

  Tilley should have been afraid, like any fighter (or soldier, for that matter) going into combat. New York City’s system of projects, welfare hotels and shelters is predicated on the belief that everyone is entitled to a bed. Literally. Every single person who does not have a place to sleep, must be given a bed.

  An apartment is the desired end, of course, and the low income housing projects stand at the top of the ladder, but the housing shortage precludes the possibility of quick placement in a project. Next come the city-owned tenements, abandoned by their owners and seized by the city for back taxes. They are usually in far worse condition than project apartments, but they are, at least, homes: permanent, located in residential neighborhoods and close to schools and shopping. The hotels are the next step down. Although some Single Room Occupancy (SRO) hotels still exist to serve homeless adults, most of the welfare hotels are reserved for families with dependent children. By political definition, they are temporary. But only if you define “temporary” as including stays of eighteen months and longer.

  Still, the hotels, with their allocation of one family to one room, are far better than the shelters which, at best, have dormitory-style living conditions. The system was originally designed so that families wouldn’t have to spend more than a few nights in shelters, but just as there’s a shortage of apartments, there are not enough hotel rooms to go around either, and many families are put up at special “family” shelters for weeks at a time.

  But family shelters are still not the bottom. Not even close to it. In family shelters, despite the degradation, there still remains a sense of something to protect, even if it’s only the children. At the absolute bottom of the system are all-male and all-female shelters for adults who have no place to sleep. Typically, they consist of a single, large room, often with a concrete floor, in which hundreds of numbered beds have been arranged in neat rows, like vegetables in a farmer’s field. Into these beds are sent New York’s poorest; its most crazy; its most violent; its most addicted. No one can be turned away. Mumblers, drooling over foul, unwashed clothing, sleep next to ex-convicts with less tolerance for odor than a hawk for a rat. Radios blare. Drugs are smoked, snorted and shot. Humans shower and eat. Sex is given and taken. All under the careful scrutiny of a security staff paid so little as to guarantee corruption as surely as the wages of the Tijuana cop sanctify the giving and taking of bribes.

  This is why many homeless people prefer the comfort of concrete to the clean sheets of the shelters. But, just as there are people in our society who thrive in jail, there are people, men and women, who have come to accept life in the shelters, who live there as if in extended families, separating into factions and competing for the crumbs—dope, food, a particular bed next to a particular lover—like convicts struggling over prison pleasures.

  That’s where Tilley was going to go. In with those people. The cliché is that all prizefighters are scared, at one time or another. But the only thing that ever scared Jim Tilley was losing. At that moment, coming up 88th Street, he couldn’t wait to get started and he went up the steps to his apartment like Rocky on that monument in Philadelphia. Fuck you, Pinky Mitchell. Here I come. Rose loves me, you bastard, and I’m gonna kick your fuckin’ ass.

  Susanna was making breakfast when he entered his apartment. The kids were sitting together on the couch in the living room, watching cartoons.

  “How are they doing?” Tilley asked his mother.

  “They sit together whenever they’re awake. I don’t think they believe us. About Rose being all right.”

  Tilley went to the phone in his bedroom, called St. Vincent’s, asked for the paging operator and identified himself as a NYPD detective. Then he asked for Doctor Samuel Morris. The operator, apparently unimpressed, put him on hold for fifteen minutes before Samuel Morris came on the line, his voice dripping exhaustion.

  “This is Detective Tilley,” Tilley said, “calling about Rose Carillo. You said I should call you
.” He could feel his breath catch in his throat as he waited for the doctor to speak.

  “I saw her not more than ten minutes ago. She’s okay. Running a little fever, but we expected that.”

  “Listen, Doctor, I have a problem with her children. I can’t really convince them she’s all right. I don’t know the kids real well and they don’t trust me. Is there any way they could see her?”

  “I think you should let that go for a few days. Her face is very swollen and she’d probably frighten them. But, if she’s awake, I could have her call them. Give me the number and I’ll go to work on it.”

  “You know something, Morris?” Tilley said. “You’re a goddamn miracle.”

  “Fuck you, too, pal.”

  Ten minutes later the phone rang and a groggy Rose Carillo managed to speak to her children. Though she meant to reassure them, her advice was very practical. “I did a very dumb thing,” she told each in turn. “I was safe with Jim and Susanna and I left anyway. Don’t make the same mistake. Stay where you are no matter what. Now I’m safe again and I won’t leave until I can come back to you. But I’ll call you everyday to let you know that I’m all right.”

  The children listened in silence, only Jeanette asking a simple question: “Did Daddy do this to you?”

  Rose answered, “Yes,” then began to drift away. Finally a nurse came on and explained to the children about sleep helping their mother to get better.

  Susanna took the phone and, very gently, hung it up. The children looked at each other, then went back to the couch and their cartoon, still sitting next to each other, still obedient to the only hope in their lives—Rose Carillo.

  By three o’clock, too excited to stay away, Tilley was walking up to Moodrow’s door. He knocked loudly (the bell didn’t work) and waited a few minutes. Nothing. This didn’t mean, of course, that no one was home. Moodrow, who, when awake, appeared to watch everything, fell into utter oblivion when he slept. That was one of the reasons he’d given Tilley a set of keys. And also the reason why Tilley worked the keys quietly and gently in the lock. He was early and he didn’t see any reason to wake up his partner.