by Tom Straw
On their separate pads, Macie and Gunnar jotted the first name of the crew chief as he questioned his caller in even tones. “Amador, breathe. Tell me what’s got you so rattled.”
Spatone barked out the call he’d just received from Gunnar, ending with, “This guy’s bad news, Jeff. Says you killed Rú and he’s going to hang it on me for conspiracy.” They listened to his breath scratching erratically on his mouthpiece. Up on the monitor, Jeff appeared for the first time. In sweatpants and a long-sleeved tee, he crossed by the bedroom window then disappeared, only to reappear in the living room. Wild fixed her eyes on that screen as he approached the window to look down at the street. His bald head gleamed, reflecting the city lights. She concentrated her thoughts, willing him to admit that he was the killer. Like it would happen in a movie or cop show.
But this wasn’t, and he didn’t.
“Amador. Listen to me. You need to control your emotions. This opera of yours is why you didn’t make the cut.”
“Fuck that shit, man,” he hollered, making Jeff’s point. “I don’t need this kind of trouble. Are you even hearing this?”
They watched the crew chief draw the phone away from his ear and stare at it, as if considering a hang up. Instead he resumed the conversation, still sounding unfazed. “Amador, trouble is only going to come if you don’t hold it together.”
“Bull shiiiit. I know how these things work. Dude’s squeezing my balls cause he wants yours. And now that lawyer has me down for tossing the bitch’s crib the other night.”
“Then you should be glad I didn’t let you come along.” Gunnar nudged Macie and traced a check mark in the air. Her flyer of a question to Spatone had smoked out the crew chief as the wrecking ball at Cilla Dougherty’s place. “My advice to you is pop a Xanax.”
“You’ve got lots of advice, homes. Like now you’re telling me to chill. You need to get some pulse goin’, man.”
“I’m chill because everything is chill.” The crew chief turned from the window and walked a slow circle, barefoot, around his living room.
“Easy when you’re protected, and I’m not.” Spatone’s words lit up both faces in the van. Macie jotted the word: Protected. Then drew a circle around it. Gunnar simply logged the time.
“You want protection? Shut your pie hole.” The slang, delivered so dispassionately, made it sound all the more menacing. “If you’re getting hassled, go take a long drive for a couple weeks.”
There was a pause from the other end. Then Spatone said, “That’s it, huh. Don’t I even get a thanks for the heads-up?”
“Thank you for the heads-up. And good night.” The crew chief ended the call and tossed his cell phone on the sofa. Macie and Gunnar watched him pass through the bedroom again and waited until they heard the sink run and the chugging of a Waterpik before they spoke.
“Protected,” she said. “So what’s it mean? I mean, I know what it means. I just don’t know how exactly.”
“Could mean lots of things. Protected could be armed. Could be connected to a mob or gang—highly likely, given the crazy access he gets to secure buildings. Plus, this guy’s not going to Flamingo’s to pawn a Sargent or a Chagall. Safe bet he’s got some hardwired connections for that.” She studied the angular cut where Gunnar’s jaw met his neck, watching the almost imperceptible flex of muscles as he worked something out. “Then there’s the other kind of protection.”
“Police?”
“Police, pols . . . I’ve seen it all. Shit rolling upstream to some pretty eye-popping places over the years. Usually they cross-pollinate with the gangs and mobs. Hard to say what we have here. Haven’t heard enough.”
They sat in silence the better part of another hour, watching and listening. Occasionally Gunnar used his controllers to pan and zoom the windows to study the layout. Unfortunately the apartment was as spare as the tenant. No stacked boxes of stolen items on the dining table or multimillion-dollar canvases leaning against the foot of the king-sized bed. Jeff the crew chief occupied himself on the living room couch flipping between an old episode of Dog The Bounty Hunter and a sharpshooter competition on the History Channel. His cell rang. He picked it up but set it back down without answering. CyberG’s worm was programmed to have Spatone’s call infect the burner so Gunnar had a readout of the ID, but it said, “Private Caller.” It rang again. The crew chief hesitated, muted the TV, and answered.
“Don’t dodge my call again,” said the man on the other end. Jeff didn’t reply. Just waited. The caller continued. “I need a status update.”
The crew chief turned off the TV. “I’d call if it turned up.”
“Turned up. Sounds like you’re not looking.”
“I am on this.”
“After what happened with your handpicked crew, confidence is low. You don’t want confidence to be low.” After a short pause, the voice continued, but more clipped, “Lose this phone. It’s contaminated.” And the caller dropped.
Jeff powered off the disposable, removed the SIM card, and sat staring at the dead TV. A low droning sound startled Macie. Their subject left the couch and crossed the room. Gunnar panned the lens with him. He took the receiver off the wall unit. Someone was buzzing from the lobby.
Minutes later the crew chief opened his front door and waited. Not long after, a woman came in and introduced herself as Dora.
“You’re late.”
“They shut the J train. I had to get a cab.”
The man stood there, looking her over; she stood there, letting him. Gunnar zoomed to see her as best he could. She was partially blocked by a pillar at the corner of the kitchen counter. Then, as if telepathically, Jeff stepped back and beckoned her forward. She advanced into plain view. Dora had on an olive-green blazer, carefully torn jeans, and construction boots. Under the blazer, she wore a tight top with her bust spilling over and showing plenty of cleavage. “Prostitutes don’t look like prostitutes anymore,” said Gunnar.
“Maybe you don’t know it when you meet one,” Macie replied. And then added, “. . . Detective Profiler.”
“Know what Dora looks like to me? Not a hooker at all. More like the hot young mom from Albuquerque who didn’t get past the blind auditions on The Voice.”
Wild laughed in spite of herself. “It’s a job, like any other, as long as it’s consensual.”
“Construction boots?” asked the crew chief.
“I can take them off.”
“Maybe . . .” As he continued to appraise her, Dora dropped her oversized purse on the floor and pulled off the scrunchy that was holding her wavy hair back. She shook her head to free the curls, and they fell, brushing her shoulders. She smiled provocatively. He said, “No. Put it back up.”
She didn’t move. “Make me.”
“Is that what you want?”
“Is that what you want?” She unbuttoned the single button of her blazer and, scissoring the scrunchy between two fingers, stuffed the elastic band deep enough into her cleavage to disappear, then traced the fingertips across her lower lip.
Gunnar said, “I think she just put the sensual in consensual.”
Jeff moved a step closer to her. “You really want me to make you?”
The woman retreated a step away, countering in a semicircle, teasing him. “Do you think you can?” He took another step, and she took one of her own to the side. “Cause I’d really like you to try and make m—.” His left hand sprang out and took hold of her hair. Macie gasped. But the woman flashed teeth in a challenging grin as he clutched her. “Yeah, like that. Make me, Jeff, make me.” He kept his grip, smiling only slightly in return, and drew her toward the bedroom. Just before reaching the doorway, she ducked and twisted herself free, then spun behind him pressing herself on his back so he couldn’t reach her. He spun to face her, and they threw themselves into a kiss. Anything but romantic, it was feral; two animals at danger play, signaling hunger and menace. Locked in their clinch, he walked her backward. The camera lost them between rooms but the bedroom cam pi
cked them up, still mouth-to-mouth, but he had peeled off her blazer and she let it fall to the floor as he tumbled with her onto the bed.
“You doing OK?” asked Gunnar.
Wild realized she had been holding her breath. “Ah, what’s the, um protocol here?”
“Usually it’s to tip her if she does a good job.”
On the screen, the crew chief had his sweatpants off and had straddled her with a knee pinning down each arm. “Still want me to make you? Huh?”
“Want to know what I want? Here’s what I want.” She raised her head up between his thighs, her mouth open, struggling to reach him, while he teased her, playing keep-away.
Macie looked off to the side. “By protocol, I mean, do you sit and watch this?”
“Truthfully, it’s all clinical to me, as many of these as I’ve seen.” He gave her a thoughtful look. “You’re uncomfortable.”
“Well, it’s . . . it’s nothing I’m used to.”
“Sure, well, let’s help you out.” He threw two switches and the monitors went black.
Wild waved both hands. “You don’t have to do that. Doesn’t that mess you up?”
He shrugged. “I’ve still got audio, if he happens to blurt out a confession at the money moment.” Reading her, Gunnar also lowered the volume a hair.
“Thanks. I appreciate . . . Thanks.”
The two of them sat side by side at the console facing blank monitors, eavesdropping on a sexual encounter. Amid the moans and bed squeaks and unintelligible mumbles dampened by a window between the couple and a microphone across the street, Macie thought back to her first time on surveillance just two nights before when she’d gotten on her soapbox to Gunnar about nothing being sacred anymore. Now she was a participant in her own cautionary tale. And as much as she tried to stave it off, she found her attention not only pulled to the audio, but attracted to it; not picturing the burglar and call girl she had seen on the spy camera but her own idealized, imaginary sex partner. When the hoarse moans fell into a rhythm, she let her gaze drift beside her. Macie was busy trying to mask the flush she felt. Gunnar sat as she always had seen him at that console, stoic and detached. But was he? she wondered. What was really going on behind that aloof coolness? He felt her gaze and turned to her and she snapped her head away, pretending to make a note. If he registered her little moment, he didn’t let on. Ever stoic, ever cool.
But then, as the man’s groans grew to shouts, Gunnar turned the volume all the way down.
“You don’t have to do that for me.”
“Not a problem. A block away, and I bet we could hear him without the mics.” He got out his phone to check e-mails and texts. “We’ll join the happy couple for the postcoital glow. Meanwhile, smoke ’em if you got ’em.”
Ten minutes later he slid the audio back up slightly. “Still?” said Wild. The crew chief was still groaning, albeit sounding subdued, perhaps because of the low volume.
Gunner snickered. “Que macho hombre.”
He backed off the level so it was deep in the background. Then suddenly Jeff’s moans became urgent, then a cry. “No, no, no, I don’t know, I don’t know . . .” Followed by other voices. Dora’s, plus another man’s. Gunnar jerked upright in his seat and powered up the monitors.
The pictures came on immediately to reveal Dora standing in the living room, fully dressed, looking into the bedroom where the crew chief lay naked in a bloodbath on the sheets with two powerfully built men standing over him.
C H A P T E R • 22
* * *
“Holy shit.” Gunnar zoomed in closer on the bedroom. The goon with his back to the window shifted to lean over the crew chief and, when he moved, revealed to their camera that Jeff was not only naked, but bound at his wrists by handcuffs. Gunnar panned with the joystick to his ankles and saw he was cuffed there too.
“You going to be smart or keep bullshitting me?” said the goon.
“Not again, please.” Jeff pleaded, broken, crying. “I don’t know, I don’t know, I d—!” The goon had a large plumber’s wrench in his hand and he brought it down on the crew chief’s knee. Jeff’s scream split the air inside the van. An empty Poland Spring bottle on the console vibrated.
Macie’s mouth had filled with gauze. She had to try twice before she could get any words out. “Don’t argue. I’m calling 911.”
But Gunnar was ahead of her. Keeping his eyes locked on the screen, he opened a drawer and pawed out a cell phone from a half dozen in there, burners, no doubt. “Hi, police? I heard a man screaming for help and I looked out my window and there’s these two big dudes beating the crap out of a guy in the apartment across from me on Beaver Street.” He paused and Wild could hear the operator’s measured voice spill from the earpiece before he continued. “Hurry. Guy’s bleeding pretty bad, I think they’re trying to kill him.” He gave the crew chief’s address, floor number, and orientation, then hung up.
Up on the screen, Jeff had gone fetal, rocking on his side, whining, and holding his knee in his cuffed hands. The second goon muscled him onto his back again with a jerk of his leg irons, prepping him for another dose of pipe wrench. Dora, the hooker, drifted in from the living room. “I found his cell phone. Look, the SIM card’s out.”
“Why’s that?” asked the man with the pipe wrench. He turned to his victim. “Why’s the card out?”
“Infected!” Jeff blurted eagerly, glad to have one question he could answer. “. . . Phone’s bugged.” His three invaders traded looks, then started making paranoid room scans, craning their necks high and low for hidden mics or cameras. The goon with the wrench went to the window and scoped the view.
As his gaze methodically tracked the length of the street and then along the facing buildings, Wild said, “Is he . . . ?”
“Yep. He is.”
“Do you think he could . . . ?”
“Dunno. Lots of ambient light around here.” Macie and Gunnar leaned forward in tandem, studying the face on his monitor. The thug’s eyes explored patiently, expertly. They drifted right past the lens then snapped back. “Shit,” muttered Gunnar. “We’re blown.”
Pipe Wrench turned to his accomplices. “Get him up. Get him the fuck out of here. Now. Now!” Without hesitation the pair descended on the bed. Dora untucked the sheet and rolled Jeff in a swaddle, concealing his nakedness and restraining his protesting body at the same time. The second big man hoisted him over his shoulder like a sack of rice. It only took seconds. They had this drill down.
Gunnar sprung out of his chair and jammed a hand in his messenger bag, coming out with a Sig P220 Elite. He ejected the magazine to check his loads then slid it back in. “They’re going,” said Macie. Gunnar looked up from chambering a .45ACP. On the living room cam, Dora left the apartment followed by the goon hauling the crew chief. Pipe Wrench, however, reappeared in the window. He found the lens again and stared into it, cold, defiant. Macie felt a twitch at her lower back. Then the man made a pistol with his bare hand, aiming his forefinger at them. He mouthed, “Pow,” stared a beat longer, then turned and left too.
Gunnar said, “Wait here,” and opened the cargo door. As soon as he did, blue, white, and red flashes bounced off the storefront they were parked in front of and disco-balled the inside of the darkened van. The unmistakable deep-pitched rumble of a police car engine roared by, followed by another. Revised plan. Gunnar stayed inside, slammed the hatch, and lit up the E-350’s rooftop cams. Another screen came to life; a street view of NYPD blue-and-whites responding to the call, converging up the block. “First Precinct, man,” he said. “They don’t dick around.” Macie tried to read his tone. Was she hearing respect or disappointment?
“Were you hoping to rescue him yourself?”
“Hell, I wanted to get inside that apartment. See what’s-the-what in there.” He flicked on his scanner, programmed to monitor the secret tactical frequencies. The space crackled with cop talk: monosyllables and ten-codes punctuated by beeps and squelches. The uniforms were deploying. Gunna
r placed another anonymous 911 call, adding his eyewitness update about the victim, kidnapped, and on the move, trussed in a bloodstained bed sheet, plus descriptions of the attackers. It all came back over the air in a monotone from the dispatcher in seconds. “And, of course, I would have rescued him,” he said as an aside when he retook his seat.
“No editorial. Just wondering.”
“Right. Here’s a tip, counselor. Don’t try to BS a cop.” He tapped his nose and winked. “Highly developed fecal detector.”
The two of them sat watching the street fill up with more cruisers and listened to the real-time soundtrack of the uniforms making their search. Gunnar translated the radio calls for Macie, annotating the jargon. The responders quickly located the empty apartment—that broadcast came even as they clocked the officers going through the living room and bedroom on their rooftop spy cams. TAC frequencies gave the play-by-play of the building search; clearing the elevators and stairwells. Then came the call for a chopper. “Desperation move,” said Gunnar.
“You know that for a fact?”
“From odds. They’re not toting this dude around downtown like a side of beef. Organized like they were, count on a waiting vehicle, maybe two. Trust me, they’re history.”
“So what’s next? What do we do?”
“We’re doing it.” He extended both arms over his head and stretched, tipping his folding chair on its hind legs, then leaned forward over his console, tweaking the joysticks. Two of the flat screen’s split panels zoomed in closer on the apartment windows. “If you can’t visit the crime scene, counselor, visit the virtual one.”
“Is this legal?”
He chuckled. “Know what I’m gonna do? I’m going to put a jar over here so you can drop a quarter in it every time you ask me that.”
The helicopter arrived, lighting up alleys and the mountain ranges of plastic garbage bags on the sidewalks for the uniforms while they grid searched. Upstairs, the apartment filled with moon suits as the forensic crew checked in, strobing pictures and dipping down out of view to place yellow markers on the floor and mattress. The pair of detectives working the scene hung back, observing the lab unit and debating whether a new female sergeant on their squad was straight or gay, their conjecture broken only by speculation whether the Mets would ever spring for some gloves. Macie said, “This is like WFAN without the commercials. Or expertise.”