“Evening, Pinky,” he said, reaching into Mitchell’s pocket for the small bags of dope. “You’re a bad boy, Pinky, but I’m your guardian angel. I’ve come to save you from a life of sin. See, you shouldn’t use this shit. It’s bad for ya.” He flipped the bags over his shoulder, back toward the contingent of junkies.
The room remained frozen for a moment, stunned by the unexpected violence. Then the boys began to dive, like kids after coins in the Bay of Naples, for the junk on the floor. Pinky struggled feebly, too stoned and too small to do anything, but protest: “What’re you doin’? Tell me what are you doin’?”
“I’m taking my dog for a walk,” Tilley replied, dragging Mitchell across the room. Nobody tried to interfere, though the dope vanished long before they got to the door. Pinky made one last attempt to pull away just as they reached the fire exit. He managed to twist his body so he was facing his former pals. Tilley shook him like a terrier shakes a rat. “Say g’night to the people, Pinky.”
Moodrow was waiting on the other side of the door. He pulled it tight as soon as the two men came through it, then grabbed Mitchell’s free arm. Together, they picked him off the ground and hustled him over to the parked Plymouth.
“Any trouble?” Moodrow asked, ducking down to get into the backseat alongside Mitchell.
“Piece of cake, Stanley. Piece of cake.”
26
THE FIRST THING PINKY Mitchell did, upon finding himself imprisoned in the backseat of an NYPD Plymouth, was vomit all over Stanley Moodrow’s shoes. Heroin junkies are prone to vomit anyway, the drug basically being a poison and the amount used as close to a lethal dose as the junkie dares get. Many junkies, when they first begin to use heroin, vomit regularly, fifteen or twenty times whenever they shoot up. Rumor has it they find this experience pleasurable. It certainly doesn’t discourage up-and-coming heroin addicts and the nausea gradually subsides as the addiction grows; subsides, but never disappears.
Moodrow knew all about this tendency, of course, so he should have made allowances. That’s probably why he didn’t kill Pinky Mitchell on the spot. True, his small, black eyes grew into saucers and his mouth twitched, but he held himself in check. Tilley, behind the wheel, pressed the Max-Air button and tried not to laugh.
“Sorry, man,” Pinky Mitchell said, watching Moodrow clean his own shoes with a handkerchief. “Like I couldn’t help it, man. I just hada do it.” He leaned back against the seat, unconcerned, and allowed his left wrist to be cuffed to Moodrow’s right. Heroin, as a drug, seems to wipe out even the possibility of anxiety and Pinky Mitchell was very, very stoned.
“You know who I am?” Moodrow demanded. He was obviously pissed, but Mitchell didn’t pick it up.
“Cop,” Pinky said flatly.
“Right. Cop. Then what?”
Mitchell shrugged. He looked like he was about to nod out. “You bustin’ me?” he managed to ask.
“Nah,” Moodrow said as Tilley turned off Third Avenue onto 10th Street, half a block from Moodrow’s basement apartment. “You wouldn’t wanna get busted. If you got busted, you’d have to kick in your cell or go in the hospital. You don’t wanna kick, do you?”
“Fuck no, man, I really don’t. I wanna go back in the shelter. I gotta sleep, man.” He shut up then, twisting away from Moodrow to stare out the window. Both cops thought he was out of it, but Pinky turned back a few seconds later. “How come that guy threw all the dope away?” He jerked his chin forward to indicate Tilley.
“He do that?” Moodrow asked.
“Yeah, he threw it all away, man. All the evidence. So what I can’t figure, man, is what you guys are arrestin’ me for. Ya know what I mean, man? Like what for?”
“But I already told you, Pinky. We’re not arresting you.”
He thought about that, letting his head drop to his chest for a moment before he continued. “So where are you taking me, man? What the fuck do you want?”
When he said that last bit about “what the fuck,” Tilley expected Moodrow to smack him, but Moodrow was as calm as could be, despite the acrid stench of vomit permeating the car’s interior. “We’re going someplace we can talk private,” he explained.
It was the perfect moment to pull into the curb, for Moodrow to open the door, for Pinky Mitchell to be dragged down the steps into Moodrow’s lair. Unfortunately, there were no parking spaces, not even illegal parking spaces. It was after ten and all restrictions had been lifted. Only the fire hydrants were open, but the hydrants are a no-no, even for a cop.
So they circled the block. Slowly. Mitchell’s chin remained on his chest. He appeared to be asleep, but he was actually in that stoned out, zombie state which is at the core of the drug’s appeal. Moodrow looked almost as sleepy and as unconcerned with the future as his captive, but when they came around in front of the building again, he curtly ordered his partner to double-park.
“How long we gonna be here?” Tilley asked.
“I don’t know. Depends on how talkative he is.” He looked puzzled.
“What about the guy’s we’re blocking in?”
“Fuck ’em,” Moodrow said, then reconsidered. “If one of them needs his car, I guess we’re gonna end up with four flat tires. There’s nothing we can do about it. We could circle the fucking block for the next six hours and still not get a space.”
That last had the ring of truth to it. Tilley stopped right by the front door and Moodrow dragged an unresisting Pinky Mitchell out of the car. “Do me a favor,” he tossed back over his shoulder, “leave one of the windows open. The car stinks.”
Inside, Moodrow wasted no time on preliminaries. He uncuffed his own wrist, then recuffed Mitchell’s wrists and his ankles around a vertical water pipe in the bathroom. The pipe was made of thick cast iron, it came up through the floor and ran to the apartment above them.
“Why’re ya doin’ this, man?” Pinky asked. There was just a touch of fear in his voice, as if the reality of his situation was finally cutting through the dope.
Moodrow looked at Tilley questioningly, then closed the bathroom door on Pinky Mitchell and walked his partner across the room. “What’s this about you threw away the evidence?” Moodrow grinned. “Now we can’t even threaten him with arrest.”
“I had to create a diversion.”
“Did it work?”
“They went nuts, Stanley. All these junkies beating on each other in slow motion. Very ugly, but nobody lifted a finger to help Pinky.”
He shrugged. “Big surprise, right? But I never expected to use arrest as a threat. I got something better, even if it’s a little slower. Let’s go talk to him.”
Tilley stopped him with a hand. “You’re gonna leave him ’till he gets sick, right?”
“It’s a guaranteed strategy. You know that.”
“You gonna gag him? Because if you gag him, he’s gonna vomit right into the gag. And if he does that, there’s an excellent chance he’ll suck some of that shit back in his lungs and die. Before he tells us what we need to know. Unless you wanna stay here all night and make sure he doesn’t scream for help.”
“Nobody’s gonna hear him and it ain’t gonna take all fucking night.” Moodrow gestured to the small basement windows and
Tilley saw, for the first time, that they were boarded up and covered with blankets. The place was a tomb. “The old man upstairs can’t hear and he wouldn’t give a shit if he could.”
They marched back across the room and Tilley opened the bathroom door. Moodrow said, “Pinky, could we speak to you for a few minutes?”
Mitchell was sitting on the closed toilet, his arms and legs extended out to the pipe. He was leaning forward with his cheek resting against the wall; he seemed very comfortable. “Okay,” he said.
“What we need to know is how you happened to get that dope. That’s what we can’t figure out.”
Pinky raised his head, sniffing trouble in the wind. “Whatta ya mean, man? There’s dope everywhere, man. The whole fuckin’ Lower East Side is dope.”
“I mean Blue Thunder,” Moodrow explained patiently. “How’d you happen to get Blue Thunder?”
For the first time, Pinky Mitchell’s eyes opened fully. “Eldridge Street, man. That’s where that shit comes from. Blue Thunder, man. Like from Eldridge Street.”
“It don’t wash, Pinky. There’s no smack on Eldridge Street this week.” Moodrow waited until the message sank down through the heroin swamp and rooted itself in Mitchell’s brain. “I spoke to a friend of mine. An Italian man. He promised me there wouldn’t be no fucking dope on Eldridge Street. In fact, he told me the only dope would be the asshole who turned up dealing what Levander Greenwood stole from him. This Italian guy is really mad, Pinky. He made me promise I’d tell him who it was if I found out.”
It was a nice speech, but Mitchell didn’t respond. As predicted, he could not be moved by threats of violence, especially future violence. The best they could do was wake him up enough so he’d remember what they were after.
“We want you to tell us where you got it, Pinky,” Moodrow persisted.
“Eldridge Street,” he insisted. “That’s where that shit comes from, man. Besides, like I ain’t got nothin’. He threw it all away.”
“Actually,” Moodrow responded quickly, “he didn’t throw away all of it. I got some right here.” He took out eight tiny envelopes and waved them in front of Pinky Mitchell’s face. They bore the inscription Red Dragon instead of Blue Thunder and Mitchell, though his eyes shone with desire, wasn’t blind to the fact.
“That ain’t Blue Thunder, man. That’s Red Dragon.”
Moodrow looked perplexed for a minute, then his face brightened. “You’re too fucking smart for me, Pinky. It isn’t Blue Thunder. But it’s good dope. I mean at least I hear it’s good. I don’t use smack myself.”
Mitchell considered Moodrow’s statement, then nodded his head. “Yeah, man, you’re right. It’s okay dope.”
“Great, Pinky. That’s great. I’m just gonna leave it here on the sink so you can remember how good it is.” He dropped the bags next to a rusty can of shaving cream. From where he was cuffed, Mitchell would have no hope of reaching it. “We gotta go now. My partner needs his beauty rest. But we’ll be back tomorrow and talk this whole thing over. Maybe you’ll be in a better mood by then.”
Mitchell finally figured it out. His head came up sharply. “You ain’t gonna leave me here, man. You gotta be crazy. Like I didn’t do nothin’, man. You even said Levander Greenwood ripped that shit off. Man, this ain’t right.”
“You wanna walk out, you tell me who gave you this dope. You don’t, you kick.”
Moodrow thought they had him, for a second, then he saw the fire go out and Pinky’s eyes began to close. Maybe he thought they wouldn’t go through with it. Maybe he was too stoned to care. Maybe he was more frightened of Levander Greenwood than of Moodrow and Tilley. It didn’t matter and both cops knew it. Time would bring its own motivation.
Just before they left, Moodrow grabbed a limp Pinky Mitchell and jerked him to his feet. “See this?” Moodrow lifted the toilet seat, opened Pinky’s belt and pulled his pants to his ankles. “Use it. You fucked up my car. If you shit in my apartment, I’m gonna break your ankles.”
27
MOODROW LED JIM TILLEY to their double-parked (and unmolested) Plymouth without making a comment on Pinky Mitchell’s condition. He opened the trunk, took out a roll of paper towels and a bottle of Windex and began to clean up the backseat. He was perfectly content to allow his junior partner to stand around doing nothing. Moodrow had one more appointment to keep before he began his final run on Levander Greenwood and the more on edge his partner became, the better for his own purposes.
Moodrow knew he could have gotten Pinky Mitchell to open up. There’s a drug called Narcan used by doctors and paramedics to bring addicts out of an overdose. It reverses the effects of opiates and the small vial Moodrow carried in his inside jacket pocket would have thrust Pinky Mitchell into instant withdrawal. And, thus, presumably, into instant cooperation. But there was one more detail to be taken care of.
“Let’s go up and see Rose,” Moodrow suggested. “I got a feeling Pinky’ll be a little looser by the time we get back.”
“It’s getting pretty late. You think they’ll let her have visitors?”
Moodrow laughed. “Just drive, Jimmy. We’re not gonna ask permission.”
St. Vincent’s Hospital, one of the city’s older institutions, had been expanding over the last decade and now sprawls across both sides of Seventh Avenue. Moodrow had Tilley drive up to the main entrance on 12th Street, where they dropped the car in a spot marked M.D. PLATES ONLY and walked straight up the steps to the security desk. The sergeant behind the desk made them for cops before they passed through the front door.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “what can I do for you?”
Moodrow flipped his badge, but the sergeant didn’t bother to look. “Like I said,” he repeated, “what can I do for you?”
“We’re supervising the Carillo security. You know about that?”
“Sure.”
“What room?”
“Take the elevator to the third floor and turn left to the end of the corridor. They got four cops watchin’ the door, so you shouldn’t have no problems findin’ it.”
The two cops turned to go, but the guard called them back. “Better take these,” he said, offering plastic identity cards. “It’s after hours and you don’t wanna get stopped every two minutes. Drop ’em back here when you come out. And tell them asshole cops to clean up their crap. They’re throwin’ fuckin’ coffee cups all over the hall and maintenance is havin’ a fit.”
“I’ll see to it,” Moodrow agreed. “A lotta cops figure this kind of detail is like having a day off.”
They made their way to the elevator, Moodrow chattering as if they were about to take in a movie. The hospital was fairly quiet and the few nurses hustling along the corridors glanced at the cops’ identity badges and passed without comment. At the end of the corridor on the third floor, as advertised, four cops sat in blue, plastic hospital chairs and tried to pass the time with small talk.
“Everything quiet, boys?” Moodrow asked. He showed his badge and identified himself as a member of the Greenwood task force.
“Nothing happening here.”
“You got somebody in the room, right?”
“Two cops in the room. Four in the corridor. It’d take an army to get past us.”
“Do me a favor. Call the boys outside. We want to talk to Carillo alone.”
Moodrow watched Tilley closely as the cops complied with his orders. This was the clincher. He wanted his partner to take a good look at the results of ordinary human beings trying to protect the people they loved. His reward was Jim Tilley’s sudden, indrawn breath and the tears that followed. Rose Carillo lay asleep on a hospital bed. A narrow tube ran up into her nose, another to a vein in her arm where it was securely taped. The right side of her face was so grotesquely swollen that one eye had disappeared altogether and the skin had split in several places. The doctors had been very careful when they drew the edges of flesh together, but the scars would never disappear and the two cops, having intervened in hundreds of beatings, knew it.
They watched her in silence for a few minutes. She was lying on her right side, trying to keep her weight off her damaged ribs. Then, suddenly, she jerked in her sleep, and her arm went to the blanket covering her side.
“Rose.” Tilley’s cry was automatic, a reflex, as was his movement to the side of her bed. He took her hand as Moodrow backed out the door.
“Jimmy?” Rose groaned as she tried to turn her head far enough to see him with her good eye. She turned very slowly, as if any sudden movement would set off the pain. Though Tilley didn’t know it, small amounts of morphine dripped continually through the intravenous tube. It was enough to control the pain. If she moved slowly.
“I’m so sorry, Rose.” He wanted to say something more, to make some k
ind of a speech, to take her in his arms, to take responsibility for Greenwood’s continued freedom. But suddenly he knew there was nothing to be said, that it never happens in a vacuum. There are thousands of Levander Greenwoods in New York. And thousands of Rose Carillos. Only the politicians invent cures. For the fighters, it’s one punch, one opponent, at a time. He knelt beside the bed and took her hand, afraid to touch any other part of her body.
“He came on me out of no place, Jimmy.” Her voice, through swollen lips, was nearly inaudible and Tilley bent forward, his ear almost to her mouth. “He didn’t even say my name. He had a brick and he hit me with it in the face. When I fell, he started kicking me.” She stopped for a moment and Tilley thought she’d gone back to sleep. “Is Marlee all right?”
“Marlee’s okay. She’s home.”
“The children?”
Tilley shrugged helplessly. “The phone call helped. But they’re frightened.”
“It goes on and on,” Rose said. As she became more awake, the pain crept back in. “Jimmy, send Moodrow in for a minute. The nurse gave me a sleeping pill and I can’t stay awake very long.”
Tilley stiffened. “Whatever you want him to do for you, I can do it. You don’t need Moodrow anymore. You can come to me. If you want Levander dead, I’ll take care of it.”
At first when she began to cry, Tilley thought it was from relief, but she insisted again that Moodrow be brought into the room. By the time Tilley finally located his partner, talking to a nurse at the central desk, and brought him back into the room, Rose was nearly asleep.
“Rose,” Moodrow said quietly, “it’s Moodrow.” He touched her side. “You want to see me?”
Suddenly she reached up and took hold of his shirt, her dark eye riveted to his. “You bring Jim Tilley back, you cocksucker. Or don’t come back yourself. If it’s gotta be one or the other, you go first.”
Force of Nature Page 25