No Lights, No Sirens

by Robert Cea

  There were already a number of RMPs in front of the building. PDU was also there, and more cars rolled up. This told us the job was founded, or real, and someone was, in fact, lying dead on the roof. As we moved toward the farthest building west in the atrium, I searched for Cho. He would know who the victim on the roof was and, more important, who’d clipped him. He was nowhere in sight, though a dead body generally does that to business. The drug trade doesn’t stop, it just moves indoors or to secondary spots, away from the police activity.

  There was a crowd on the roof, mostly cops: uniforms, anticrime, and PDU guys from the 7-6. I figured this had to be a good one because already the instamatics were flashing, and I heard guys describing the wounds and laughing. There was a bunch of neighborhood street kids behind a yellow line set up by the first unit on the scene. I saw Borges, Cho’s newest street steerer, looking over the shoulders of one of the locals. He made eye contact with me, then dropped his head quickly. I found that odd, as he had been trying his damnedest to ingratiate himself on my dick for the past year. I wanted to see if I knew who the victim was, so I pushed past the onlookers and that’s when I saw them. The black Converse high-tops. They were unmistakably his: scuffed, worn, grayish on the sides. Holes were developing in the rubber bottoms. I had told him I wanted to get him a new pair; he’d just laughed and said, “Nahh, poppa, these kicks like me; old school, worn, and Chuck Taylor comfortable.” I had bought him those Chuck Taylor Cons. I stopped short. I knew it was him, even though his face had been torn apart by a large-caliber bullet, one shot dead center.

  I backed up slowly, feeling the sticky roof tar under my feet. I had to inhale deeply. The last thing I wanted to do was puke, but I felt it rising from within. It wasn’t the nasty visual, a purple-reddish half-dollar-sized hole where his nose once was, his eyes swollen shut, the bone fragments of his face turned outward, giving him the appearance of gougedout watermelon. It was who he was. My heart was broken, by a twelve-bag-a-day junkie named Theobaldi Rodriguez, aka Cholito.

  I looked to Conroy, who didn’t seem bothered by the scene at all. I wasn’t surprised, hell, if it were anyone else, I wouldn’t have thought twice about it, but John, he seemed a little too cavalier. He was even joking with some of the uniforms on the roof. Some more in-the-dark fans buying more of King Kong’s bullshit, I thought. I knew my days were numbered with super cop. Hell, I knew my days were numbered period.

  Something was nagging at me. I began clocking the crowd again, making eye contact with Borges. Again he dropped his head and slowly started to wiggle backward, away from the scene. This time Conroy had noticed. He had to have been thinking exactly what I was—if anyone knew about the death of my buddy, this scumbag would. We stepped toward him… and he ran. He was discreet enough about it to not raise up any of the other cops, making it to the door and wrenching it open. I was on turbo drive, so he’d just made it to the first landing when I grabbed the back of his hair, twisting hard as he fell into the steps, hitting three or four of them before he stopped rolling. I was on top of him before he could move. John was right behind me and slowly walked down as I jack-lifted Borges into the wall. I pointed in his face and yelled, “Don’t you ever run from us, you little spic, you hear me…Ever!” He grabbed the side of his head that had hit the steps, but I would not allow him that comfort. I grabbed his hand and slapped him hard in the face; again I pointed at him, saying, “Motherfucker, you are a cunt hair from joining your partner up there. A fucking cunt hair, you hear me!” I didn’t wait for the answer, BANG, I slapped him again.

  He was dazed, though I had his attention. Out of breath, he said, “Okay, Tatico, okay, you got my ’tention.”

  Conroy knelt down and asked him calmly, “What’s with the running bullshit?”

  “I’m…I’m a scared a you two, Con, that all, just scared, son. Streets be talkin,’ sayin’ I’m a get fucked up next, you can understand my nerves, yo.”

  Actually, I couldn’t. We had never dealt with him other than to find out where Cho was dealing. It just was not computing. “What in the fuck are you talking about?” I asked.

  He would not look me in the eye; I could not tell if this was street skiffle he was trying to sell or if it was the truth. “Why we bullshittin’ each other, C? Word’s out you two on a tear. After you’s did Shah’s spot, we’s all out a work… next thing you know, my man up there with a hot one in the face… you know how the shit roll, down ma’fuckin’ stream.”

  I was trying to put it together. I stared down at this helpless fuckup. Conroy did the same. He then asked, “Who did Cho, Angel?”

  Only now did Borges raise his head slowly and look directly into our eyes. He looked at me and then at John without saying anything. Conroy broke the silence. “All right, take a fuckin’ walk.”

  He slowly stood up and headed down the stairs. He stopped on the landing and looked back up. He wasn’t as helpless, or as frightened. He even smiled as he walked back up toward us, nodding his head as if he was giving us the punch line to a long joke. He stood below us on the steps. “All right, yo, seein’ how I was wrong about the whole nine, you know, I was bullshittin’ y’all. I am still, you know, working…” He pulled a wad of cash out of his pocket, opening it up like a green bouquet loaded entirely with twenties. He extended his hand to us, smiling. It was a blatant and poor bribe attempt.

  That’s when all the lights were suddenly turned on. John and I knew it the second we saw the bills; Angel Borges or whatever his name was, had made the fatal mistake of overplaying his hand. No dealer in the street sells twenty-dollar bags; everything is broken down in dimes, dimes of boy, dimes of girl, even the jumbo crack vials were in denominations of dimes. Dealers do not make change in the street, that is the law. We knew he had to have been at the federal level—no street cop worth his salt, and even the imbeciles from IAB, would ever make that mistake. The flash of red I saw must’ve hit John at the same time because we simultaneously slapped the cash out of his hand. I grabbed him by the neck and John swung wildly, glancing the side of his face. He started to cover up. I threw him to the ground and kicked him in the back. I had a clean shot at his head and was about to stomp when Conroy lifted him off the ground, slamming him into the wall. He squeezed his neck; I thought he was going to strangle the life from him. I didn’t care.

  “You have got to be kidding, you rat motherfucker! You can’t even bribe us correctly, you dumb, smelly spic! Who is it you’re working for?” Borges’s air was cut off, he could not talk, his face was turning blue. John wasn’t looking for an answer; it didn’t matter who he was working for. “You lookin’ to tool up on us, what, riding the pad, or selling, you think you got us selling? Because if that’s what you’re out here to collar us for, the cell at Federal Plaza better be big enough for all of us, you little spic, ’cause you were out here dealing for almost a year. Or that don’t count, you can deal, but we can’t, the feds got the jugo we ain’t got, huh? FBI crime is more important than NYPD crime!”

  Snot was shooting out of Borges’s nose, his eyes were bulging; meanwhile, there was a small army of cops and bosses thirty feet above, maybe some who were part of the whole scam. I grabbed Borges by the hair, ripping him away from Conroy, and he began to cough and choke. I turned him to face me. “You go back and tell those hack wanna-be cops at 26 Federal Plaza that we’re out here doing our jobs. We ain’t selling smack or steering, we’re locking up the animals you steer for and sell to. What’d you do, grab some junk from the property clerk’s office and give it to Cho to get on his dick? Poor junkie didn’t even see it coming, did he? You motherfuckers make me sick. I’d fuckin’ put one right in your head if we weren’t here, spic.” I calmed, though, so many thoughts were running through my head. “The only difference between you and that poor bastard on the roof is, he had heart and he knew who the fuck he was. Can you say the same?” We left him there, struggling for his breath.

  The hypocrisy of it all was so thick I could have choked on it: The FBI were dealing
to try and get two cops who they, mistakenly, thought were dealing. Conroy was right all along. They saw us swinging off of Shah’s dick; in their eyes we were as dirty as he was. My life was full of gaping black holes, I had entered into something there was no way out of; it was all starting to unravel. I hated everything and everyone.

  I was moving ahead of Conroy, toward the car; I needed to get out of the area, needed to think, clear my head.

  “Cho was ratting on us and he didn’t even know it.” Conroy was summarizing the situation like it was the end of a movie with a twist ending, and he seemed to enjoy breaking it down. I turned and glared at him. “Bro, at least try and hide your contempt. Guy was just murdered…I mean, what the fuck, John.”

  “Rob, he was another junkie snitch. Don’t get all twisted over this, it’s all part of the game.”

  “Fuck the game, John, I liked the guy, I fuckin’ liked him. He didn’t deserve to die.”

  “Shit happens, pal.” He said this coldly as he walked past me; at that point I was scared, not of him, but of what he was capable of and the fact that he probably knew more about this than he was leading me to believe. It was clear that I couldn’t trust him any longer. He continued to talk as we approached the car. “What we should be worried about is not the feds. We should be worried about our job, IAB. We have to assume that they initiated this whole abortion and the feds saw easy targets and jumped on the bandwagon. We have to assume that anything we ever did or said to Cho was reported to them by Borges and then back to the feds. We could really be fucked here.”

  “You know what, John? I don’t give a fuck, I really don’t. Let them come and get us.”

  I got in the car, and the truth was, I didn’t care. The game was over; it was clean-up time for whoever it was who had the case. We were going to get called to the mat and there was nothing we could do about it. We played hard and were going to get hit hard. Conroy seemed different, not as aloof as he’d been earlier. John Conroy, when you got right down to it, was as human as the rest of us, no more, no less, and John Conroy, alleged supercop, Mega Man, King Kong, was scared.

  The sergeant’s locker room was behind the big desk in the precinct. Mahoney would change, sleep, and have the occasional cocktail there before, during, or after each tour. There was a twin bed situated in the corner of the twelve-bytwelve room. There were a few lockers along one of the walls, a small desk, and a TV jerry-rigged for cable. It also was equipped with an ancient VCR that showed all of the illegal porn and “faces of death” tapes procured from search warrants. He poured another three fingers of good mash into my Styrofoam cup.

  “I don’t know what these pricks could want from me, Tommy, I really don’t.”

  “Well, the desk just received a telephone message that IAB and the special prosecutor’s office are working the homicide with PDU.”

  This hit me like a bullet. “They think I did Cholito?”

  “You and Conroy are who they’re looking at.” I was speechless. They were no longer trying to hide the fact that we were suspects; that meant that they had to have pretty compelling evidence. Mahoney asked me evenly, “Do they have you, Rob?”

  “No… Not that way.”

  “Well, how might they have you?”

  “Nothing that counts, I don’t think. Tommy, I never stole, used, or sold junk, never took a dime. Cholito probably got hit behind his dipping habits or for rolling over on the Shah. Why in the fuck would we kill him?”

  “Well, if I was an outsider looking in from Poplar Street* or the SPO’s office, I’d say he was clipped because you two found out he was working with IAB. Dead guys generally make terrible witnesses.”

  “I’m not the one who thought that—” I caught myself from further implicating Conroy, but as far as I was concerned, it was as clear as a bell, and it made perfect sense; but could Conroy have actually pulled the trigger? I suddenly realized how twisted the whole scenario was becoming. Cholito was my friend; I’d tried to protect him, and by doing so that left me vulnerable to my partner and the job because I got so personally involved. I lost an incredible street asset, but more important, I lost a friend. And I was now accused of murdering him. I felt myself falling deeper into a hole I could not climb out of.

  “Well, Rob, this turns out to be another IAB crusade; no one is safe, no one. We could all end up in the fuckin’ can.”

  It was going to add insult to injury if other cops got jammed up behind this investigation. I knew that every cop in the entire zone had to have known about the now-open case on me. I was a leper in the street and on the job. The last thing I wanted was to have other cops hurt behind my jones, but there was nothing I could do to stop it.

  Being out on the streets was no longer fun for me. I now knew what it felt like to be the chased, what it meant to be someone’s jones, and it sucked. Still, I didn’t see myself as a victim. No, I was a player in a high-stakes game, and I was the underdog. It was catch-up time and I needed answers to the many questions that still remained unanswered; topping the list was to find out who’d killed Cholito.

  The tension in the car between Conroy and myself had gotten to the point where we spoke to each other only in response to job-related issues. Cholito was not brought up at all, nor the investigation, for that matter. I needed to separate myself from John, needed to sever our ties and go out on my own and look at the whole picture with a fresh set of eyes. This was the first time in my career that I did not want to be at work. The problem was that I did not want to be at home either; many a night during that dark period I found myself driving aimlessly in the farthest ends of the boroughs. I’d even slept in my car when the paranoia got really bad.

  Some mind-numbing days and nights had passed. As I was cruising the streets, I saw a thin man of medium height with nappy dreads and some gold make me. The second he made our ride, he took off. He ran across Hamilton Avenue, dodging the cars that were speeding toward the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel. I was right behind him, so I had to do the same, and the closer I got to getting hit by one of these cars, the worse it was going to be for him when I caught him. Both of his hands were out, pumping with each stride, so I wasn’t as inclined to think he had a pistol on him, though strangely enough, this was the first time I had chased a man when my gun was not out. I honestly didn’t care that he could have pulled out and taken me down without me returning fire. I heard Conroy hit the siren, trying to get across the six lanes of avenue, but the traffic was heavy on both sides and the cars were moving too fast to stop on the median. Conroy’s presence, or lack thereof, didn’t matter because at this point, he was a liability to me. I also knew that if we were being followed, there was no way in America that they would be able to maneuver through the traffic and down the one-way streets without being seen. That was good for us and bad for this poor schmuck. He turned south on West Ninth Street, which traversed straight from the Badlands and into a high-end neighborhood called Park Slope. An arm of the Gowanus Canal was on my left when I caught him. He actually tried to jump into the canal, which I took as a positive, because he was scared to death. Maybe he was wanted on a body or two, maybe he knew something about Cholito, maybe we could strike a deal and barter.

  I had him facedown in the embankment, which was kneehigh deep in muck and garbage. I tossed him quickly for a pistol; there was none. I was out of breath and covered in the same shit he was; I was hot, dirty, and paranoid; I wanted this part of my life to be over with, I wanted to find the answers I was searching for; I hated these streets, hated Conroy, and hated myself.

  He did not resist and was quiet, too quiet. I dragged him up to the street and started to walk him back toward Hamilton Avenue. Conroy had made it across the avenue and was now flying down Smith Street to find me. I waited for him on Ninth Street, where it was desolate; I wanted complete privacy to question the man. After Conroy pulled up, I opened the rear door, threw him in the backseat without cuffs. He wasn’t armed, so I was not in fear of my life. I jumped in the front and pointed to an abandoned dr
y dock that ran parallel to the canal. It was far enough down the embankment to be hidden from the street. As we rolled, we didn’t say anything to each other. I can only imagine what this guy was thinking, though he did not try to run or talk his way out of this. He had to have known who we were; maybe he’d seen us in the Badlands. I turned to him when Conroy switched off the engine. “You know who we are, yes?” The man was shaking, and he wasn’t faking it—his teeth were chattering and his lips were caked in dried saliva. He nodded quickly in the affirmative. “So what’d you take off for?” I asked this calmly, but I felt a surge of anger building, I was hoping this would end quickly and that he’d have something more than lies and nonsense to tell me. I was a raw nerve and didn’t have time to fuck around.

  “I had a little bag a coke on me—”

  Before he’d finished the lie, I swung hard with an open fist, catching him squarely on the cheek. This was going to be an ugly display of every bad emotion that I had tamped down for the last six months—Cho’s murder, my duplicitous partner, the streets, all of it was ready to erupt out of me. I grabbed his ear and pulled him to me, so close our eyelids were touching. “Now before this goes any further, let’s stop the bullshit, okay? You know exactly what we’re about and you know you aren’t getting collared behind a bag of coke, so let’s start over or on Jesus Christ himself, I’m gonna throw you into that canal, you hear?”