by Mike Bogin
EE spun the mike away and stormed out from his studio, unaware that Crazy Thumbs had followed orders and recorded Elliot’s speech on ten-minute delay. The lawyers had long since stopped believing that Emerson Elliot would stay within the lines.
At curbside, Elliot was whisked into a town car headed to Westchester County Airport. The driver asked twice that he use
his seatbelt. Not folding into a fetal position was the best that Elliot could manage. A dozen screeching thoughts raced through his brain until they had melded into one mind-numbing, piercing wail.
“I am outta here,” he told Crazy Thumbs with a sweet and sour confusion in his tone.
“Fifteen day hiatus,” Thumbs replied. “While you get your mojo back, I’m going to be sipping mai tais and calling in reruns from the comfort of my couch.”
A NetJet flight waited outside the hanger to fly Elliot to St. Vincent and two weeks of sailing through the Grenadines.
“Am I just weak or am I totally full of shit?” Elliot asked himself while he gazed out the airplane window.
You really want to stir the pot, you need to be ready to lose everything. He wasn’t ready. But he thought he believed it. He really did.
* * * * *
“Why is he coming along on a stakeout?” Tremaine said, arguing with Owen. “We work, O. I have your back, you have mine. I don’t want that old man at my back or in front of me, either.”
“He has a name, Tee. At least give him that.”
“I know that he’s got a name. Man, he’s got a name and a place and that place is behind the scenes, way behind. Saving him could have gotten you killed, or are you forgetting already?”
“Al is FBI. Gonzalez is FBI. Every one of Gonzalez’s men is FBI. Tee, if people are out of place in the equation, it’s us, not them.”
“So what are we doing in this?” Tremaine questioned. “I don’t want to be a hero. I got a chill thing going, brother. So what if we’re chasing around gun stores in Jersey? Why rock the boat? You saw how that went last time.”
“We’re on the job, Tee.”
Tremaine glared right back. “No, we’re not on the job. We’re over the line is what we are. You and me work for the Division and the Division serves the Department.”
“And the Department serves the citizens and it’s the citizens who are getting killed!” Owen finished. “I’m seeing this through, Tee. I have to! Are you with me or not?”
“Shit. You ought never be asking me that.”
Repeat repeat repeat repeat. Owen tapped his heels on the ground whenever he sat down and paced whenever he was standing up. Bigfoot enters, cameras on him. FBI guys in place on the roof, in the stands, and the six rovers. He and Tremaine in the security office watching the cameras. Spencer enters the stadium; they mark his position for Gonzalez. Gonzalez verifies ID. Sharpshooters take out Spencer. He ruminated on every piece of the operational planning. What was he missing? How could something go wrong?
Central Park West. The FBI screwing NYPD. The forensics team bleaching Mamaroneck. The NSA inside the construction site across from Barrow & Taylor. The Chinese woman stuck under the garage door, dead, lying there in her own blood.
He ran through the plan two hundred times in his own head and another twenty times with Al. Dansk had access to three thousand cameras in the city—the most advanced facial recognition software in existence. But she refused to even input Spencer’s Facebook or high school yearbook photographs.
She had her own agenda, that was crystal clear. They, he and Al and Tremaine and Gonzalez, represented the one best chance for stopping Spencer.
“I’m submitting the website on Thursday,” Al told them. The turtle cameras would be put in place on Monday, Labor Day, ahead of the website going live the following day. “Now we need Spencer to see the website and show up.”
“And if he doesn’t show up beforehand, what then?” Tremaine asked. “I’m not OK with putting Midtown North into those luxury suites. When this is all over, you’re done. Me and O, we have to live with those guys. How you going to feel if one of your own people sets you up for bait? Bulletproof glass or not, somebody puts me there and doesn’t tell me first, I don’t know what I might do to him.”
“We control the killing zone this time, not him,” Gonzalez bragged. “If Spencer shows up, he’s going down.”
* * * * *
Owen was feeling too amped to go home. They were going to the stadium Tuesday at 11 a.m. Plan ahead. Look to details, he told himself, even just making sure there was coffee for each rotation. Two thermoses of strong coffee to start with. If Tremaine wanted French Vanilla Mango Papaya, he was on his own.
They had practiced. They had numbers. Like Gonzalez said, they owned the killing zone.
Callie could see the stress Owen was carrying. She knew it wasn’t only at work. If it was stress from work, he’d have been climbing on top of her morning and night.
The attorney, the bankruptcy; it was all weighing on him. The night before he had sat down to dinner and got up again before she put down the plate. He didn’t realize he hadn’t eaten! But this was her time. She paid her dues. Besides, it was hard on her, too. Owen wasn’t sorting through the piles. It wasn’t him who was going to be packing up a whole household. It wasn’t Owen who was registering Liam into the new school district.
Liam was wetting the bed again, but Owen was too distracted to notice. She told Liam that he was going to a new school, but it didn’t help. He was hardly speaking, counting down the days before he was going back to the bullies.
Callie had decided independently to enroll Casey in the Montessori. They would just have to figure the money piece and that was all there was to it.
It was time, past time, to get out of the old house, but Callie found herself stopping to listen when the stairs creaked underfoot. She liked needing to twist hard on the diverter to fill up the green bathtub. The boys had been bathing together since Casey was a year old. Liam alone before that. Pencil lines on the right side of the doorframe marked their growth. Owen’s marks were there, too, on the left.
“You haven’t made burgers since July,” Callie told Owen. “We’re having a barbecue. Sunday afternoon.”
Tremaine brought along an angel food cake and strawberries to slice up and put on top before serving. Shelley had bite-size spanakopita in her oven. Mike was caramelizing Walla Walla sweet onions.
Owen invited Al Hurwitz. Al showed up with two heavy grocery bags bulging with Fritos and orange sodas, a five-pound bag of Red Delicious apples and a whole tray of pre-sliced vegetables and blue cheese dip.
“I’m sorry,” he told Callie. “I didn’t know what to bring.” This was his first barbecue. He seemed so awkward and was trying so hard, Callie felt like he was a lost puppy.
After Callie put down one of Owen’s burgers in front of him, Al took in the dimensions with no idea how to approach a four-inch thick cheeseburger with all the fixings.
Tremaine lifted his own burger and made love to it with his entire face. Al removed his glasses and followed suit, hesitating before covering his lips and chin.
“I never knew that burgers could be this good.
I’m happy!” Al laughed with his face full of dripping burger juices, ketchup and mayonnaise.
A new world was beginning to open up, lighter and brighter than the politics and chess and Beethoven that had always dominated the apartment. Al talked with Mike about how manmade light was changing the reproduction cycles of thousands of mammal species and then Liam joined the conversation, too, which hardly ever happened.
Liam went into a long description all about cicadas and how they emerge to mate from years of semi-hibernation and how they can live to be seventeen years old. “People eat them, too,” he explained, “especially the females, because they’re high in protein. One of these days w
e could all be getting our main proteins from insects.”
Mike and Al exchanged a smile. Mike remarked “He’s an intellectual, this one. Other kids are gaming, Liam is looking things up on Wikipedia.”
“Spent a lot of good times here,” Owen commented, looking around the yard and speaking to no one in particular.
Tremaine nodded and then caught sight of Callie waving at him to follow her inside the back door.
When the screen slammed, she took two beers and walked through to the front steps where she sat down and slapped on the top step for Tee to join her.
She handed him a Brooklyn Pennant ’55 Ale from the stash she had hidden separately in the fridge.
Tremaine eyed it, watched Callie take a gulp, and then tried it himself, sticking out his lower lip and nodding approval.
“Talk to me, Tee.”
“What’s up, baby?”
“This stadium business. What’s up with that?” Callie’s voice had that tone of hers, like “tell the truth because I know everything anyway.” She’d make a great interrogator, Tremaine imagined.
“O told you then.”
“Damned right he did. I’d rather worry over what I know than what I don’t.”
“Probably nothing,” Tremaine explained. “There’s an outside chance to get the shooter.” He took a long swig from the bottle and let the air out from his throat. “Lots of pieces need to fit into place.”
“Tee, he stopped all of you before. He made it look easy.”
Tremaine leaned back on his elbows and took his time before responding. “He had all the advantages, Callie. We won’t be bouncing around on little boats this time. If he shows up, we’ll have the FBI’s best in place and we’re doing the ambushing, not him, not the other way around.”
“Why do you even need to be there? You’re cops, you’re not SWAT.”
“We won’t be anywhere near the action, Callie. Owen and me, we’ll be inside the main security center watching the whole thing.”
“Don’t bullshit me, Tee. You know Owen won’t sit in any camera room.”
“For real, Callie. The FBI guy in charge, the major, he’s a badass. It isn’t even up to us. We’re watching monitors and talking into radios. That’s it.”
Callie wiped her forehead with the cold beer. “Keep him safe, Tee. Swear to me you’re going to watch out for each other.”
Tremaine’s voice dropped lower. “That’s what we do, baby. We look out for each other. I won’t let anything happen to him. O’s gonna be fine.”
Callie worked her arm inside Tremaine’s and nudged her head into Tremaine’s thick shoulder, pressing tightly before withdrawing abruptly. She was past her girlie moment. One more swig on her beer and she was standing up to go back inside.
“Thank you, Tee.”
“Anytime, girl.”
Tremaine tipped back his head and swigged the entire bottle then handed it to Callie. “I’m going to run. Say my goodbyes, OK? Tell O I’ll catch up with him tomorrow.”
Callie hugged him and waited for Tremaine to cross the street in front before going back inside. Owen was on his way through the house to find them.
“Where’s Tee?”
“He’s heading home. Says he’ll catch you tomorrow.”
“Dang it. I want to go over some things with him.”
Callie pointed with one of the empty beer bottles at the door. “Go. Maybe you’ll catch him.”
Owen got to the porch just in time to see Tee’s huge head and broad shoulders through the back window as the car drove away. He kept watching until Tremaine disappeared, making a left turn at the corner. Owen didn’t think much about that, except that going to Tee’s was a right turn.
* * * * *
Three hundred sections, middle tier. He had clear views straight into all the luxury suites. Barrett. He would need to get the Barrett inside the stadium to get through that glass. First shot could be a throw away. Might not penetrate with accuracy, but it will break out the whole panel wherever it hits. Just one way out of the suites…they’ll all stack up in the doorways. He would have to leave the 50 behind. That bothered him. Leaving the Barrett.
Get out fast and light.
Wall Street Gives Back.
* * * * *
Even Al sensed the unspoken rule; none of them talked shop at the house, but everything was intensified. It didn’t matter that nobody mentioned Shea or Citi-Field or ever used the word “stadium”; they all shared the same buzz. Every flavor was more intense. Every smell. When even a wisp of breeze stirred the air, they felt it.
Tremaine drove south to the corner of Roosevelt, looked right, his direction toward Brooklyn, and then changed his mind and turned left, heading east away from the city toward Flushing instead. North Corona was only a few minutes away from Citi-Field.
He wanted to see the stadium. This was Owen’s gig, Owen and Al and Major Gonzalez. He knew that he was invited along for the ride. But even if he pulled out, nothing would be any different except he’d be breaking the promise he had just made to Callie to have Owen’s back. And unless he called bullshit and ruined things for Owen, Midtown North was still getting played.
Stepping away wouldn’t change a thing.
“You can’t do that,” he told himself.
The Mets were playing in Florida. Save for a father and two kids, a boy and a girl, who were setting up to fire a model rocket near the northwest corner, the vast parking lot was an empty sea of asphalt.
Tremaine drove slowly, making in a wide loop around the lot. He stopped in front of the stadium, put the car into park, and opened up his window, taking in the double archways stacked one atop the other along with the towering steel framing the lighting over right field and left field.
He might have left it at that, except that two security guards came outside the main gate to share a smoke together. Tremaine shifted into drive and let the car drift forward until he was alongside them. He showed his gold shield when they glanced his way.
“You gents mind if I leave the car here and go inside? Won’t be long.”
The younger of the two straightened and spoke up. “You stay as long as you want, Detective. You’ve got the stadium to yourself.”
After Tremaine turned off the engine and extracted himself from the car, the guard added, “I’m entering the academy six weeks out, just got my exam results back on Friday.”
“Put out the cigarette,” Tremaine told him.
The young guard dropped it and crushed it out with the tip of his shoe.
“You’ve got to be a tactical athlete. No more of that stuff.”
Tremaine turned his back on the both of them and wandered inside Citi Field. He didn’t catch the older guard’s comeback. “Like he’s a tactical athlete. How ’bout he should lose a hundred and then talk.”
“Shut up, Marvin. The man’s a detective.”
The mass of the stadium wrapped around a wide oval. Tremaine had never seen it empty, quiet, no rushing families, no cheers or boos coming down the tunnels, no popcorn, hotdogs, beer.
In front of him there were pedestrian ramps right and left and four elevators directly ahead. On one of these, there were lights signaling it was operating. The doors opened immediately when he pressed the up arrow, so Tremaine stepped inside. One of the luxury suites was straight ahead when the elevator doors opened. A cleaning crew inside it had just begun clearing food and drinks from an earlier reception put on by the advertising department.
Tremaine walked inside past two life-size cardboard cutouts of Mets uniforms minus faces. Tremaine poked his head through the face holes and smiled widely when the cleaners looked up..
Through the wall of glass facing the field the whole stadium opened up in front of him, from home plate past the infield and across acres of gre
en out to the giant scoreboard.
“Let’s go Mets,” Tremaine read. He took it all in and smiled wide again, still showing his white teeth until aromas rising from five large silver covered chafing dishes that were still on the catering buffet caught his attention. Tremaine lifted the silver-plated lids one by one to look at the food. Steak Oscar, with asparagus and crab under a Hollandaise. Potato gratin. The third dish held a whole salmon with only a quarter of one side eaten. Pasta primavera. Roasted vegetables. Still enough left over to feed thirty hungry people. He went back and picked off a piece of the salmon, popping it onto his tongue and letting the rich flavor fill his mouth. Then he turned back to look out the glass wall, seeing the entire ballpark staring him in the face. Bam. Right there.
In front of the window there were two rows of wide seats, each set down one foot per row so that nobody would block anyone else’s view. Tremaine took a seat and let his body sink into the soft leather. That was nothing like the hard plastic folding seats in the stands.