by Archer Mayor
There had been times, out there, lethal and alone, so isolated and removed from his feelings that he could barely feel pain, that he’d actually thought in those terms, of hearts beating in unison like those of lovers in poems.
Which had made stopping them as he had, time and again, a curious experience initially, and eventually a debilitating one. In the long run, he’d lost interest in thinking about such things. Or perhaps, given his own heart’s condition, he’d lost the ability to match its beat to anyone else’s.
He passed under the water tower, groping in the gloom, bent double and feeling the ground before him, when suddenly he heard a soft voice. He froze, waiting, his mouth half open to quiet his breathing, his eyes avoiding any bright pinpoints of light so his pupils could adjust to the darkest corners of the roof.
The voice continued, almost a whisper, close to an atonal chant. Now totally and instinctively back in combat mode, Willy moved forward, retrieved his belongings from under the tar-paper flap without a sound, and homed in on the source of the chanting. He found it after drifting like a shadow pushed by the breeze to the edge of the roof beyond the tower. There, he found a young man with his baseball cap turned backward, sitting atop the low parapet, his legs dangling over the side. Beside him was a plastic bag of powder and an assortment of drug paraphernalia. He was talking to himself in a low, regularly cadenced voice, as if reciting a mantra. Heartbeat-toheartbeat once more, Willy Kunkle stood behind him, six inches away, and clearly heard that the young man was merely mouthing the lines from a rap song, without inflection or enthusiasm.
Willy looked down at the back of the head near his right hand, remembering the things he’d been capable of so long ago, the things both his hands had once done, virtually without thought, and willfully without self-reproach.
Half the rush from those situations, however, had nothing to do with the acts of violence terminating them. In some ways, Willy had seen the killing as a letdown— messy, occasionally smelly—a disappointment, given all the intensity leading up to it. The truly curious joy had come before, in the psychic dominance preceding the final act. It had come from the knowledge that while he could have dispatched his target, he hadn’t quite yet, and had thus extended the man’s life. Most importantly, he’d given himself the power to choose, if for only a moment.
Just like now.
He watched the man manipulate his lethal tools, preparing to give himself an injection, so close that his hands could have been Willy’s own. Willy wondered about how many times Mary had done this same thing, quietly prepared herself as others might make a ham sandwich, her anticipation rising for the lift the drug would soon give her.
As the young addict tied the rubber tourniquet around his arm, his elbow almost struck Willy in the leg, and yet Willy still stood as quietly as the water tower over them, watching, absorbing, remembering, imagining.
Until the source of this scrutiny reached for the plastic baggy. As he moved it from its resting place, the dim light from the surrounding city glimmered off its surface, and revealed the crude stamped image of a smiling devil.
In one smooth move, as fast and silent as a snake’s, Willy reached out with his one hand, pulled the man back from his perch, dropped him onto his back, put a knee into his chest, and shoved his gun up against his nostrils, so that both his crossed eyes could clearly see what was menacing him.
“Be very, very quiet,” Willy said, his mouth three inches from the young man’s face. “If I even feel you twitch the wrong way, I will pull the trigger. Do you have any doubts about that? Nod yes or no.”
The man’s eyes were huge and white. But he gave his head a slight shake.
“What’s your name?”
“Dewey.” His breathing was coming in short, shallow gasps.
“I need to know where you got the Diablo, Dewey. Give me the name of your source.”
“Who are you?”
Willy moved slightly, increasing the pressure both on Dewey’s chest and against his nose with the gun. Dewey’s eyes began to water.
“Wrong answer. I am not someone you can deal with. I will kill you in a heartbeat if you don’t make me happy. Where did you get the Diablo?”
Dewey started hyperventilating, his body shaking and his hands slowly stiffening.
Once more with startling speed, Willy put the gun aside, grabbed the other man by his shirtfront, and hauled him in one clean jerk up to the top of the parapet, so that he balanced there on his back, with one arm and one leg dangling over the deserted street far below.
“I’m getting tired of this. You talk, or I push. That simple enough?”
Dewey was raving by now, thrashing and babbling and crying. It was all Willy could do to keep him from falling off on his own. In fact, he was about to dump him back on the roof and abandon him when Dewey suddenly blurted out, “It’s Marcus, it’s Marcus.”
Willy shoved his face up close again. “What’s Marcus? He sold you this shit?”
“Yeah, yeah. It was Marcus, man.”
“Marcus who? How do I find him?”
Dewey’s fear notched up. “I don’t know his last name. I swear it. I just know ‘Marcus.’ That’s all. That’s what they call him.”
“Where’s he hang?”
“Around 145th.”
Willy made as if he were about to push him over. “Where, Dewey? That’s a long street. Give me an address.”
“There ain’t no address, man. I swear. He’s on the street.”
“Meaning he doesn’t make the stuff. I want to know who makes it, Dewey. You’re being stupid here.”
“Jesus Christ, man, how the fuck d’I know? I don’t give a shit who makes it.”
That much rang true, Willy thought. “Describe Marcus to me.”
“He’s real tall, and skinny.”
Willy waited before asking, “That’s it?” He shoved him slightly, making the young man flail out in terror. “Stop jerking me around.”
“Okay, okay,” Dewey stammered. “Let’s see. He’s … ah… tall. No, no. I mean, hold it. I said that. His hair. He’s got spiky hair, and he wears a tight chain around his neck—silver, real shiny. And he’s got a real bad scar down his right… no, wait… his left cheek. I think… no…I mean, that’s all I can think of.” He sounded on the verge of hysteria. “Is that okay? Please?”
Willy placed one foot on Dewey’s chest to stabilize him, and leaned over to retrieve the baggy of heroin. He sprinkled its contents into the night air as Dewey softly moaned in consternation. Finally, he dropped the syringe onto the roof and crushed it underfoot.
He stepped back, retrieved his gun, and pocketed it. “A little advice from your fairy godmother. You got a real desire to live, Dewey. Think about that next time you want to shoot up.”
Dewey merely covered his eyes with his hand.
Twenty minutes later, Willy Kunkle stepped into the small convenience store where he’d first met Nathan Lee. The large man he’d seen at the counter was still there, and gave him a blank-eyed stare as he entered. Willy recalled Lee’s calling him Riley.
Willy checked both narrow aisles of the store for patrons. For the time being, they were alone.
“Seen Nate?” Willy asked.
“Nate who?”
Willy sighed. What a routine. New York, Vermont, it didn’t seem to matter. Who? What? Don’t know what you’re talking about. Pain in the ass.
Tired, stressed, longing for some answers, Willy yielded to a fit of impatience, pulling his weapon and circling the counter to shove it into the big man’s gut. As he did so, however, he walked right into the working end of a sawed off, double-barreled shotgun, solidly held in one of Riley Cox’s meaty hands.
“We don’t allow people back here,” he said, almost apologetically.
Willy fell apart. He began laughing so hard, he had to put his gun on the counter to wipe the tears from his eyes. He laughed until his stomach hurt, flooded with images of Mary, of Dewey, and of the jungle flashbacks, of himself wedged
into a corner of the holding cell, of a thousand images he’d spent years bottling up. Even in the middle of this bizarre and spontaneous release, he knew, as if he were standing outside of himself, that he was close to cracking up.
As if fully aware of this, Riley gently reached out and dropped a newspaper over Willy’s exposed gun before stowing his own back under the counter.
He waited until Willy had recovered from the worst of his fit. “You okay?” he asked quietly, his eyes still watchful.
Willy held up a hand. “Yeah, yeah. Been an interesting day. Hell of a few days, for that matter.”
Riley pointed at the limp arm. “You get that in country?”
Willy straightened, took a deep breath, and ran his hand across his face. “Nah. Got it later, back where it was safe. I never got a scratch over there.”
Riley gave him a half smile. “I can see that.”
Willy retrieved his gun and backed out from behind the counter. “Nate tell you about me?”
“Told me you cut him slack when he needed it. I didn’t need telling you been in ’Nam.”
“You, too, huh?”
Riley’s response was a long, drawn-out, “Yeah.”
Willy didn’t bother going on. He sensed Riley was no more prone than he was to indulging in old stories and secret handshakes. Theirs was a shared nightmare that didn’t need resurrecting.
“So, what about Nate? Last I saw him, we were both being busted at some bar.”
Riley’s expression didn’t change. “He told me about that. Why’d they grab you?”
“Resisting.” Willy patted his jacket pocket where he kept his gun. “Had to skip upstairs to hide a few things. They just let me out. He get off?”
Riley nodded. “Didn’t have nuthin’ on him.”
Willy smiled. “Straight and narrow. He’s probably the only good deed I ever did in my life. I need to finish a conversation we were having.”
“That may be,” Riley told him, “but I ain’t seen him since right after that happened. What’d you tell him to do?”
“I didn’t tell him anything. I just asked if he’d check something out for me.”
“Like what?”
Willy didn’t see what he had to lose, certainly with this man. “My ex-wife OD’d on some junk named Diablo, only she was downtown and that shit comes from up around here. Nate was going to look into why.”
Riley looked suddenly very tired. His kind eyes turned old and his gaze dropped to the countertop. “Old Nate musta thought the world of you,” he said, almost in a whisper.
A sick feeling rose up from Willy’s stomach. Piece by piece, he felt he was losing chunks of himself, one day at a time. “What’s happened to him?”
“I don’t know, man. But he shoulda been in touch by now. Most of the time, I could set my watch by Nate. I been worried about him all day.”
Willy stepped over to the window and absentmindedly looked at the street outside, the passing pedestrians barely registering in his conscious mind.
After a long pause, he turned and asked Riley, “Ever hear of a dealer named Marcus? Works on 145th.”
Riley made a face. “Along with a hundred others. You think he makes this Diablo?”
“Not according to my source. But he probably knows who does.”
Riley knew what he was thinking. “So, the Great White Hope tracks the dude down and makes this a movie with a happy ending?”
“Up yours.”
“Hey, I won’t be the one paying the price. What you think you’re going to accomplish finding this guy? What’re you going to do then?”
“What do you care?”
“I don’t, not about you. But Nate’s my friend, and I’d like to find out where he is before you go shootin’ up the neighborhood and maybe gettin’ him killed.”
Loner though he was, Willy was enough of a pragmatist to recognize the value of what Riley had just implied: He would be a local guide to the neighborhood and its residents, if only so far as determining Nathan Lee’s whereabouts. On his own, Willy knew, a white, out-of-town, one-armed cop probably wasn’t going to get far.
“You’ll help me?” he asked.
“More like I’ll keep an eye on you while I’m doin’ what I need to do,” Riley answered.
Willy looked at the man’s size and steadiness, and remembered the way he’d handled that shotgun.
“Whatever,” he agreed.
Joe Gunther glanced down at his pager. “Damn.” He looked up at Ward Ogden. “Could I use your phone?”
Ogden gave him a questioning glance but pointed to the phone on the desk.
Gunther dialed the number given him by the Legal Aid lawyer that morning. It was now nightfall.
“This is Joe Gunther. Did you try calling my pager today?”
He waited while Sammie Martens watched him, her expression revealing she’d already sensed what had happened.
After listening for a few minutes, he said, “Thanks. Sorry. I didn’t mean to leave you in the lurch,” and hung up.
He tapped the pager clipped to his belt. “Batteries died. I just noticed it. There was a schedule change and Willy’s hearing was moved to today. He’s back on the street. So much for keeping tabs on him.” He gave them both a resigned smile. “I guess Murphy’s lurking as usual.”
They were back in the precinct house, back in the interview room, away from everyone else. Over the intervening hours, the initial bond between the two older men had solidified, and it was clear that Ward Ogden, given his elite status, was going to exploit it by keeping Joe and Sammie inside the loop, even though standard department protocol decreed otherwise. It was a development the two Vermont cops weren’t about to tamper with. Whatever Ogden suggested at this point, they would do if they wanted to stick around.
Not that he’d been in any way domineering. In fact, up to now, while they’d been waiting for confirmations from CSU, Ogden had been putting his house in order, changing the status of this erstwhile “groundball investigation” to a homicide, reorganizing his schedule, clearing up or delegating some of his cases, and otherwise giving himself more room to move. Sammie and Joe had used the opportunity to study Mary’s file more carefully and to take notes on what obvious avenues of investigation to pursue.
Now, however, there was a knock on the door and a uniformed officer stepped in to hand Ogden an envelope. After waiting for the young man to leave, Ogden opened the envelope and consulted its contents.
“Fax from CSU,” he said. “They agree with our scenario. The fire escape was recently oiled, the grate over the basement window tampered with, and the heating control was cranked way up within the last few days, they say here, ‘enough to have caused considerable discomfort within the apartment,’ and then returned to normal. They also confirm the metal shavings you found, Joe, are consistent with what a key cutter produces, but that’s as far as they’ll stick their necks out. Oh,” he added, rereading the document before handing it over. “They also checked the window sash and found a recently killed spider along the groove, complete with torn web, indicating the window had been raised.”
Joe Gunther tapped the case file with his finger. “We were going over the responding officer’s report,” he said, “and noticed that the old lady next door who called 911 mentioned how hot she’d been two nights previous to that. If you’re right about how thin the walls are in that place, it could be Mary’s apartment heat bled through to the neighbor’s. That and the dated birth control pill dispenser give us a pretty good fix on the time of death.”
Ogden glanced at the calendar on the wall. “Which would make it Tuesday night. By the way, I also called the morgue and told them to run a few extra tests on the body—fingernail scrapings, vaginal swabs, whatever they don’t do for routine overdoses. Lucky thing Willy appeared when he did, or I would have released the body.”
The dinosaur stood up and began pacing the tiny room, obviously building up steam. “Okay,” he announced, “we’re behind the eight ball on this, so s
ome things’ll be too cold to pursue. That still leaves us a ton to do. Some you can help with, others you’ll have to stay away from. Most of the latter involves using the computers here, dealing with people like DMV, Social Security, Welfare, and others, or getting subpoenas for things like Mary’s luds.”
“What’re those?” Sammie asked.
His answer came rapid-fire: “Her local phone calls, the ones that don’t appear in the bill. Stands for ‘local usage detail.’ ” He went back to thinking out loud. “Basically, we have three major areas of concentration: the technical, like forensics, those phone records, and the Metro cards; the internal, which means talking to the drug unit and combing through every nook and cranny in our files for any and all past arrests and whether anyone in Mary’s building is on parole or has a record or ever filed a complaint with us; and the external, which covers everything from talking to her neighbors, friends, and co-workers, to dropping by local pawnshops in case something stolen was sold, to checking with the Homeless Outreach project to see what bums, if any, might have seen someone coming or going from the building that night. And that’s just to begin with, unless something falls into our laps.”
He snapped his fingers suddenly. “And we need to check the building’s trash compactor. I noticed a trash chute on her floor. It should still be full—there’s been a garbage strike all week.”
“What can we do?” Joe asked.
Ogden stopped pacing. “Honestly? One of my biggest concerns is Kunkle. You know him, you know his style and habits. You could help me by finding him as fast as possible. I seriously doubt he’s taking Circle Line tours or visiting the museums.”