Clear Blue Sky

by F. P. Lione

  © 2007 by F. P. Lione

  Published by Revell

  a division of Baker Publishing Group

  P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287

  www.revellbooks.com

  Ebook edition created 2011

  Ebook corrections 9.25.2012

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

  ISBN 978-1-4412-3724-8

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

  Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture is taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com

  The New York City landmarks described in this book exist, as do any recognizable public figures. However, this is a work of fiction. The events and characters are the products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to any actual events or people, dead or living, is entirely coincidental.

  The internet addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers in this book are accurate at the time of publication. They are provided as a resource. Baker Publishing Group does not endorse them or vouch for their content or permanence.

  This book is dedicated to Jesus,

  who calls us friends.

  Greater love has no man than this,

  that he lay down his life for his friends.

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  PROLOGUE

  In New York City, September is a beautiful month. The summer humidity is gone, and the skies are warm and clear. It’s also the time of street festivals throughout the five boroughs of the city. Neighborhoods in Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Staten Island close off their streets, and people bring their picnic tables and grills out from the backyard for block parties. We sit and schmooze with neighbors we’ll argue over parking spots with for the rest of the year and talk about who died, who moved, who got arrested, and how bad the neighborhood’s getting. We also have the San Gennaro feast, with the annual procession of the statue of the patron saint of Naples paraded through the streets of Little Italy, and the smell of sausage and peppers, zeppoli, and cannolli from the street vendors fills the air. Labor Day starts it off with the West Indian Day parade on Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn.

  September 11, 2001, was a beautiful clear day with a soft wind blowing from the north. It was also the electoral primaries in New York City. With new term restrictions, there was a mass exodus of a lot of the incumbent locals, and the new blood wasn’t impressing any of us. The last thing we needed was another mayor who hated cops and handed the streets back to the perps.

  But all of this was forgotten at 8:46 that morning when American Airlines flight 11 slammed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center and began the darkest day New York City has ever seen. This forever changed not only our skyline but also the lives of everyone in our city. And the soft winds that blew that day were of smoke and fire and death.

  1

  My name is Tony Cavalucci, and this is my eleventh year as a New York City cop. I’ve spent most of my career working midnights in a sector car in Times Square. My precinct is in Midtown Manhattan, in a detached, brown brick building off 9th Avenue that enhances the gloominess of the mostly commercial, litter- and graffiti-filled block.

  I came here six months out of the Academy at twenty-two years old, and I’ve worked patrol here ever since. I was hoping to be “out of the bag,” as we call it, and in the plainclothes Anti-Crime Unit before the end of the year. That move would eventually take me from Anti-Crime to Robbery in Progress—or RIP, as we call it—with my silver shield, and then on to the Precinct Detective Unit with my gold shield.

  It was September 2, the Sunday before Labor Day, and even though it was 70 degrees outside, it was hot in the precinct. It would take a couple of weeks for the cooler air to make its way inside, and I was already starting to sweat under my vest. I was standing by the radio room with a cup of coffee, waiting for my partner, Joe Fiore, to come up from the locker room. I had a couple of minutes before roll call to shoot the breeze with Vince Puletti, the old-timer who runs the radio room. He was standing at the open door, with the ancient cassette radio on the battered metal desk tuned to the oldies station. He was listening to either Norm N. Nite or Cousin Brucie; I couldn’t tell with the static. The wire hanger wrapped in foil that he’d stuck in the spot where the antenna snapped off wasn’t helping, and I wondered how he could listen to it that way.

  Vince has at least thirty years on. He’s big and beefy and won’t give the time of day to any cop with less than five years on. He’s bald except for the band of hair around the back of his head and has hands like sledgehammers. He reminds me of the bulldog on the Tom and Jerry cartoons; all he needs is a spike collar around his neck. He smokes two packs of Marlboros a day, has high blood pressure, and is so big in the gut he can’t see his shoes anymore. He’s been having some stomach problems lately, but it obviously isn’t affecting his weight. He puts the max into his deferred comp and spends most of his time watching his investments and hoping he can retire without having to work another job.

  “How’s it goin’, Vince?” I asked, shaking his hand.

  “Ah, can’t complain,” he said, grabbing his belt and hoisting up his pants over his stomach like he always does. They slid right back down, so I don’t know why he bothers.

  John Quinn from the four to twelve handed Vince his radio and said, “I’m outta here.”

  “Have a good one,” Vince called after him and stuck the radio into one of the chargers mounted on the wall behind him. I watched the charger lights go from red to yellow to green and back to red to show the battery was charging.

  We heard the front door open, and we both turned to look as one of the new rookies came in. He stopped in front of the flags stationed just inside the door, saluted, and headed toward the stairwell to go upstairs.

  “Is it that time again already?” I asked.

  “Yeah, we got the rookies coming in tonight,” he said, shaking his head. “Sorriest bunch I’ve seen yet.”

  Vince was talking about the brand-new rookies, the ones that have been writing summonses in their field training units since they got out of the Academy in July. Tonight would be their first roll call with the squad.

  I’ve known Vince for almost eleven years, and every year when the new rookies come in he says they’re the worst cops he’s ever seen and how if this is all we got, the department is going down the tubes.

  “Joe Fiore.” Vince smiled past me as my partner came upstairs from the locker room.

  “Hey, Vince. Hey, buddy,” Fiore said, shaking our hands.

  I started working with Fiore last June when my partner John Conte blew out his knee and needed surgery. Sergeant Hanrahan put me with Fiore, saying there was a lot I could learn from him. Fiore only had a couple more years on the job than me, so I didn’t know what the boss was talking about. Looking back, he was right. There was a lot I could learn from Fiore, but it wasn’t about police work. When I met him I was depressed from just breaking up with someone I’d been seeing for a few years, I was in
the bar more than I was home, and I was toying with the idea of eating my gun. Fiore stood by me when I crashed and brought me into his family and his church. He also introduced me to Michele Dugan, the woman I’ll be marrying this November. I’ve changed a lot this year, and when I get up in the morning and look in the mirror I’m not disgusted with what I see there anymore. I’m probably closer to Fiore than I am to my own brother. To be honest, he’s the best friend I’ve ever had.

  “Ready for tomorrow?” Fiore asked me, smiling.

  “If I didn’t need the money, I’d be home eating hot dogs,” I said.

  “You guys working the West Indian Day parade?” Vince asked, shaking his head. “You’re outta your mind. You couldn’t get me to work that on a bet.”

  Before Vince could go off on a tirade about the parade, Joe and I made our way over to the muster room, where roll call is held. The room is about thirty feet long by thirty feet wide with a wall of gated windows on one side. The other walls have crime stats, bios of wanted perps, and precinct club news that nobody reads. I saw a hand truck full of boxes taped shut. There must have been a sting operation on the four to twelve, and the boxes were taped shut to give the property clerk something to do in the morning. There were also two bicycles with evidence voucher sheets stapled around the handlebars leaning against the desk. The windows were open to let in some of the cool air and exhaust fumes, and I could detect the faint smell of urine, since the windows face the alley between the buildings.

  The room was buzzing as we waited for Sergeant Hanrahan to give the attention to the roll call order. Hanrahan is a good boss. He’s been my sergeant for a lot of years now, and except when he put me with Joe, I’ve never had a problem with him. He’s in his late thirties, about six feet tall, with dark hair and deep blue eyes. He has some gray in his hair, but he’s got a baby face, so it doesn’t age him.

  “The color of the day is white,” Hanrahan said, giving the citywide color plainclothes cops use to identify themselves as police and keep them from getting shot if they’re stopped by uniformed officers and reach for their badges.

  Hanrahan went through his usual spiel, going from the color of the day right into the sectors.

  “Garcia.”

  “Here.”

  “Davis.”

  “Here.”

  “Adam-Boy, 1886, five o’clock meal,” which designated their sector, the number of the patrol car they’d be driving, and their meal hour.

  “McGovern.”

  “Here.”

  “O’Brien”

  “Here, boss.”

  “Charlie-Frank, 1883, four o’clock meal.”

  O’Brien was recently back from a stint in the pension section after an off-duty domestic incident involving his wife and the guy she was sleeping with. She claimed he threatened to shoot her and let off a round in the house. He was cleared of discharging his weapon a while ago, and last week he was cleared of the death threat and finally allowed back to work.

  Sergeant Hanrahan went through David-George, which is me and Joe, and Eddie-Henry, which is Rooney and Connelly.

  Midtown is divided up into sectors. The sectors in my command include the Garment District, 34th Street, Port Authority, Penn Station, Grand Central Station, Madison Square Garden, Times Square, the Empire State Building, and 42nd Street between 7th and 8th avenues, which all the old-timers call the Deuce.

  When he finished up the sectors and got to the foot posts, there were a couple of new names, one of them being Nick Romano’s replacement. Nick worked with us until last spring when he went over to FDNY.

  “Snout?” Hanrahan said it like a question, and it came out with a choke.

  “Here,” a female answered, and we all swung our eyes toward her. She was tall and skinny, with curly dark blond hair and the fair skin and smattering of freckles that pegged her as Irish.

  “Look at the Snout on her,” Rooney called out.

  A couple of snorts went up around the room as Hanrahan shook his head and said, “Robbery post 4.” He gave Bruno Galotti robbery post 5 and called out two more new names. One of them was Walsh, a massive, dopey looking blond-haired guy. His upper body was huge, and his biceps were straining against the sleeves of his uniform.

  “Here,” Walsh boomed, his voice deep and thick.

  I looked over at him and thought, He’s exactly what you want with you when it all hits the fan and you need some muscle.

  “We’ve got a new interim order about tasering emotionally disturbed persons,” Hanrahan said, looking at a piece of paper on the podium. “There was an incident up in the Bronx where an EDP had soaked himself with gasoline earlier, and when the taser hit him he lit up like a Roman candle.” He looked around the room. “So if you have an EDP who looks wet or you smell gasoline, let me or one of the sergeants know so we don’t have a repeat of this occurrence.”

  This kind of thing happens sometimes. We try to lock up an EDP, and they’re so psycho they wind up getting hurt. A lot of times we can’t get close enough to them to know if they smell like gasoline or if they’re soaking wet before they get tasered. It’s not like we have time to ask them, or like they’re willing to cooperate with us, but we end up looking bad anyway.

  Hanrahan finally wrapped it up with, “You new guys”—he looked around the room at the rookies—“make sure you don’t walk up together to your foot posts. Try to stay separate.” They used to tell us this in the Academy. A group of rookies is an easy target, and someone who hates cops enough would get more bang for his buck with a bunch of rookies if he was looking to hurt us.

  “Cavalucci, Fiore, Connelly, Rooney, and Davis, see me after the roll call,” Hanrahan said as he grabbed his papers off the podium. As we approached him he said, “Make sure you’re back at the house by 7:20 so we can be on the road by 7:30,” which was the time we would leave the precinct to head out to the West Indian Day parade in Brooklyn.

  “You working the detail, boss?” Rooney asked. “You must really need the money.”

  “I got four kids in Catholic school, my oldest is in high school,” Hanrahan said. “Five grand a year just for her tuition.”

  “You should move to Long Island,” Joe said. “You could send your kids to public school and save money on tuition.”

  “Yeah, and pay ten grand a year in taxes. No thanks, I’ll stay in Queens,” Hanrahan said, walking toward the desk to give Lieutenant Coughlin the sectors so he could call them in to Central.

  “Central” stands for central communications, the familiar unknown voices that transmit our jobs from the 911 operators. The Central operators each work one division made up of three commands. When 911 gets a call, they dispatch it to Central, who then transmits to us.

  When we went back over to the radio room, Vince was scowling at a baby-faced rookie standing over by the desk talking to Lieutenant Coughlin from the midnights.

  The rookie he was watching now, a kid named Perez, made the mistake of letting Vince overhear him telling a couple of his buddies to stay away from the old-timers ’cause they’ll get you in trouble. Vince was standing with his arms folded and a scowl on his face, staring the kid down, which is mild compared to what he used to do.

  “What’s the matter, Vince?” I asked as he glared at Perez.

  Vince pointed over at the desk and said, “Look at this meatball.” He was shaking his head in disgust.

  Perez had come out of the back by the cells with a couple of EMS guys and a perp in a wheelchair wearing a Bronx party hat—a bloodstained, gauze-wrapped turban—from having his head busted.

  “What’s the collar for?” the lou was asking Perez.

  “Past assault,” Perez said.

  “Past assault? Past assault? Pass the pepper, you moron!” Vince yelled. “It’s assault in the past!”

  Perez got red in the face when everyone around us started laughing. “He tossed a bottle into a crowd of people outside a bar on 8th Avenue. They caught up with him at the light on 44th Street. Officers Alvarez and Rive
ra locked up the two guys that hit him.”

  I saw the corner of the lou’s mouth twitch a little. We call Alvarez and Rivera Rice and Beans, but Perez wasn’t chummy enough to call them that.

  “Is he going to the hospital?” the lou asked.

  “Yeah,” Perez said with a nod, looking nervously at Vince.

  Vince stared at him until he went out the front doors of the precinct. Terri Marks was working the desk. She’s half in love with Fiore and was looking at him sideways through her black-eyelined silver blue eyes.

  “So when are you gonna leave your wife for me?” she asked.

  “It’s never gonna happen, Terr,” Joe said with a smile.

  I shook my head and laughed. We go through this just about every night. Terri’s divorced, no kids, with the wear and tear of eighteen years on the job. Vince says she was beautiful once, before the years and the booze got the best of her. For all her show about wanting Fiore to fool around with her, I have the feeling she’d be disappointed if he did.

  We grabbed our radios and Bruno Galotti and went out to our RMP. We grabbed the copy of the Daily News that Rice and Beans had left in the car from the four to twelve and threw our hats on the backseat. The car was pretty clean. Before I met Fiore I used to lose it and throw all the trash out onto the street if someone left my car dirty. Now I usually clean it out without saying anything, but a couple of times I got mad enough to dump the garbage outside their locker.

  We drove to the corner of 9th Avenue and threw Bruno out of the car to get us coffee and the Post. I used to throw Nick Romano out of the car to get our coffee, but since he went over to the fire department, Bruno’s all I got to boss around. He’s not as much fun as Nick. He never argues with me.

  Mike Rooney pulled his RMP up behind us. Rooney’s the clown of our squad. He’s a big Irishman who’s built like a linebacker and drinks like a fish. He’s got a mop of brown hair, blue eyes, and a big belly laugh. He’s a good cop and probably would be a lot further up the ranks if he could shut his mouth and watch the drinking. He’s the kind of guy they’re talking about when they say, “God invented alcohol so the Irish wouldn’t rule the earth.”