The Big Fear

by Andrew Case

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2016 Andrew Case

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503952225

  ISBN-10: 1503952223

  Cover design by Mark Ecob

  This book is dedicated to the memory of Jeremiah Minh Grünblatt, the finest storyteller I’ve ever known.

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CHAPTER ONE

  DURABLE GOODS

  Ralph Mulino hated the sea. He was comfortable in the stairwells of housing projects and the stubble of vacant lots, but on the water he felt exposed. Knuckling the lip of the Harbor Patrol whaler, the Verrazano Bridge to his left and a blink of the Statue of Liberty deep in the dark to his right, he took in the kid steering. Sergeant Sparks, proud to have come up through the Seven-Seven in just three years. Proud to have stomped his patrol tour in Crown Heights, as though that meant anything anymore. Every precinct was soft now; even the once-rough ones were like summer camp. Mulino leaned over the edge of the boat, ready to heave, then caught himself and lurched back. A brush with humiliation spared. He stared hard at the sergeant. The kid stood smug; he had aced the exams and got his chevrons early, but he hit each wave heavy, the weight echoing through Mulino’s joints, hips, and spine.

  Mulino sucked in the hot night air and braced himself through the uneasy ride. His knee hurt; arthritis already. He had quit smoking and started with the chiropractor, the grapefruit, and the yogurt. You get old quick on the job, and at fifty-three, Ralph Mulino was an elderly cop. He had loved the thrill of the legwork once, but by the time he had made detective, he felt spent. There are only so many doors you want to be the first guy to kick down. After he had slowed down, shrill boredom set in: long hours, slick food, and surveilled apartments that no one ever seemed to come in or out of.

  And on top of that had been what happened in the Ebbets Field Apartments. Nearly six months had been taken up with the investigation, the hearing, the trial. And afterward, though nobody on the force would ever come out and say it, he was stained. A tiny bit of the complete trust that officers must have in each other had been shaved away. Everyone on the force knew about it. The kid driving the boat probably knew about it, and he had only been in high school back then. Mulino had been wary after that: another reason he couldn’t be the first one through the door. He couldn’t be sure enough of the guys behind him.

  Not to mention the busted lungs from eight months carting rubble and dust from Ground Zero to the Staten Island landfill. That had taken him on the water too. Nearly every cop who had made his twenty took the pension after that—three-quarters pay based on a year pregnant with overtime. But Mulino had only had eighteen years on then, so he kept slogging it out, year after year. Kept trying to prove that he was trustworthy to colleagues who would always look sideways at him. So that a decade afterward, he was still willing to jump out of bed at two in the morning on his regular day off. Ready to get his gun and his flashlight, slide the chain with his badge around his neck, and put on a jacket and tie too. That way the uniforms know you’re a detective, and not the kind that runs around in a sweatshirt all day long either. All to ride shotgun to a sergeant whose crisp summer blouse couldn’t hide his disdain. The feeling’s mutual, pal.

  A ship at anchor, waiting out the night to unload, had sent out an alarm. No news of what was wrong. Come on out to Harbor Patrol, there’s a sergeant waiting for you. Usually when the captain calls you in the middle of the night someone is dead. This had sounded like a false alarm to Mulino. But the captain had pleaded: they couldn’t reach the ship, there was no detective on the midnight tour at the Harbor Patrol, they needed someone who can be ready for the unexpected. The captain knew Mulino would go. He would always go. A couple of times a spot had opened up to run his own squad, and he’d put in his papers, and a couple of times word had come down that he was too good to promote. They needed him on the ground, maybe just so they could keep an eye on him, but even so. A legwork guy through and through, with legs that were already giving out on him.

  The boat bumped along through the gunship-gray waves, its motor the only noise on the water. The Harbor Patrol’s usual prey—drunks falling off the Circle Line or brawlers on gambling ships—had already come ashore. Sergeant Sparks pressed on without looking up from his GPS, hitting the waves hard. Mulino looked at the kid’s knees buckling as the boat hit the surf. That’s going to catch up with you.

  “You think we could pick it up a bit? The call came in thirty minutes ago now.”

  The sergeant looked down at his bearings. “Twenty-two knots is regulation.”

  Mulino stared back out at the water. He knew Sparks’s type—guys who had joined the police department because they liked to follow orders, and weren’t about to kick the habit just to collar a criminal or save someone’s life. Sparks was the kind of cop that had been thriving at the NYPD ever since the new administration decided that zealous cops were a bigger threat to public safety than zealous criminals.

  Mulino had got his own badge the old way, by arresting people who had actually committed crimes. Once there were plenty of them too; you couldn’t stumble through Highbridge without observing a hand-to-hand, you couldn’t spend the day in East New York without someone brandishing a gun. And the more you locked them up, the more they kept coming.

  It had all changed when crime started to go down. Suddenly the department was only judging you on how many stops you made, no matter if the guy was carrying a nine or a joint or a bag of groceries. Data-driven policing. It had seemed to Mulino that the stats had been in decline even before the push to
do more UF-250s had come out. But no one cares what the foot soldiers think—crime was down and stops were up so everyone just figured there was a connection.

  Mulino had made his numbers, hit detective, and landed at the Organized Crime Control Bureau. He had thought he would be free of the game there, listening to wiretaps and busting capos. But it had been the same routine as the beat: as soon as one mope hands a dime bag to another, that’s a crime ring. The teenagers in One Police Plaza had issued their edicts, and so the word was out to OCCB: round up as many petty dealers as you can, and don’t worry about which ones are in charge. Making detective had been like winning a pie-eating contest where the prize was more pie. And even now his phone would wake him from a deep sleep while guys who had joined the force just two years earlier were collecting his salary’s worth of pension and living all summer at Aqueduct.

  Farther from the shore, the water grew still, and against the dim lights on the horizon, he could see the outline of the massive ship, its bolts knitting shut the huge panes of steel. It was hard for Mulino to believe that anything so heavy could stay afloat at all. The cops’ small boat bobbed in the water, but the waves could not disturb the cargo ship. It was weighed down by thousands of railcar containers, each painted a different dismal shade of orange, green, or yellow, a futile effort to bring cheer to the whole sagging enterprise. In the dim light—no moon, the only glow from the city maybe a mile behind them—the ship was a silent monster, already slain, waiting to be buried.

  The kid cut the motor. Mulino stood, shook off the nausea from his ride, and looked up. He stretched his arms; his back was beginning to feel better. He slipped his finger inside his collar and loosened it a bit. The tie had already proven to the sergeant everything it was going to prove. He wanted to make sure his blood would flow, that he could breathe unrestricted. Because you never know.

  Mulino smiled to himself, craning his neck at the ship above. Tired as he was now, he had always enjoyed the hunt. Police work had its misery and humiliation and discomforts, but hitting the ground and starting a chase brought his vigor back. He took a few breaths and felt young again. Looking up at the ship, the whaler now gently bumping against its massive steel hide, Mulino reminded himself that he would never be happier doing anything else in the world.

  The sergeant was at the bow of their little boat, lassoing the lines onto an oversized cleat on the hull. He worked slowly, according to form, just like he had been doing everything. The boat was lashed on, a tiny fish stuck to the belly of a whale. They had made contact, but there was no one on the deck above for them to hail, only a rail-thin ladder bolted to the side. Mulino looked to the sergeant and spoke.

  “Am I supposed to go up that thing?”

  The ladder bore evidence of a week on the open ocean. It was wet and dark; fronds of seaweed dangled haphazardly. Maybe forty feet to climb to the deck, where there was no sound, no light, no evidence of what may have set the crew on edge.

  “All I got told is I’m driving an OCCB detective out. I don’t know what happens now.” Exactly what he was told and not a lick more. “Maybe we should wait a little. Maybe we should call in, see if anything new has come over since the radio.”

  But Ralph Mulino wasn’t the kind of cop who called up and asked what he was supposed to do every ten minutes. Maybe his fellow officers doubted him. But the captains had always picked him. He had been sent out, and he would do what needed to be done, whether or not the sergeant driving him was willing to help. He pulled his radio and his flashlight from the hull of the skiff and fastened them to his belt beside his gun. He’d resisted upgrading to the nine millimeter, had held onto his thirty-eight—not as many shots in a minute, but better control, better aim. You only need one bullet if you can put it in the right place. They had upgraded the guns, but the radios had never changed; they were still a foot long, brick-wide, and heavy. Maybe the brass wanted to make sure that the rookies still carried eighteen pounds on their gun belt, just like they’d had to.

  Or maybe having quick access to a big heavy object that isn’t technically a weapon still came in handy. On the streets of Highbridge, twenty years ago, Mulino had used the radio that way, bloodying gangbangers with what they all called Motorola Shampoo. Try that now and the kid is going to find a lawyer who knows that the city would rather pay twenty grand in hush money than bother to defend a detective at trial. The new administration would likely throw you under the bus as well, even more so if you’re middle-aged, white, and nearly ready to take your suddenly hefty pension.

  They had done away with the numbers game, at least. All the speeches at roll call about how the neighboring precinct had logged six hundred stops last week and we had only managed five hundred and forty-eight were gone. And at first, Mulino hadn’t been the only one to notice—none of the bad guys came back. There was no epidemic of carjackings. No purses getting snatched from Times Square tourists. It had seemed at first that the whole decade had been a waste; a half a million kids had been tossed for nothing. Crime had gone down for a thousand reasons, and frisking teenagers hadn’t been one of them.

  At first. But soon it had started again. Mulino had noticed when the dog shit came back to the sidewalks. Prim corners of Brownstone Brooklyn dusted overnight with specks of it, then litter, and pretty soon worse. That spring had seen shootings rise, GTAs tick up, and two separate waves of muggings. The summer welcomed a parade of little disasters, each worse than the next. A water taxi had capsized as it ferried commuters back to Hoboken, drowning twelve. A crane had collapsed, then a chemical plant in Staten Island had sprung a leak, closing a school and sickening an entire block. A thousand rats had been found running wild through a four-star Manhattan restaurant, and a sparkling wine bar in one of the newly genteel corners of Brooklyn had simply exploded. There were ordinary answers for it all—a gas leak here, a faulty seal on the sewers there. But as the heat intensified and each day brought forth another small horror story, people had grown skittish. The latest news was that the sanitation workers weren’t happy with their contract and were thinking of walking out. The last time that happened, trash piled like a snowdrift on the sidewalks. It was as though the 1970s were coming back from vacation. Another reason that a simple distress call from a stalled container ship merited more attention than usual. These days, anything could happen.

  Mulino, always a cop, hauled himself onto the ladder and set out, the Harbor sergeant bobbing below him. It had been hot enough that even the iron was warm to the touch. The rungs dug ridges in his palms as he struggled upward. His back didn’t hurt now, his knees felt fine, and he stared up at the edge of the ship as he huffed his way up, avoiding the slime of the seaweed, keeping his footing careful. The suit jacket cramped his shoulders as he climbed. He thought maybe he should have slipped into a sweatshirt after all; there was no need to impress anyone here. It was probably just a one-off after all. Maybe a seagull had landed on the wrong part of the deck and some panicky Canadian mate had put in a call to 911. But he still had to act as though it was serious. Like he always did. Just in case.

  He heaved himself onto the deck. Everything on the ship was bigger than he would have imagined. The containers, each over twice his height, stacked four high and so deep he couldn’t count. Hundreds of them, each bigger than a two-bedroom apartment. The deck was pristine. Not like the hull, with its slime and its rust and the decay that blossomed on the open sea. No sign of any person. No noise. No anxious crewmember standing on deck wringing his hands. The call had come in maybe an hour before; probably the poor sap was hiding out below, quivering in his bunk.

  Mulino took out his radio and called in a 10-84—arrival on the scene, nothing to report. He leaned over the edge of the deck and waved down to the chipper sergeant. All clear for now. He hefted his regulation flashlight—almost two feet long, four solid pounds of steel—and turned it on. The waxed deck shone; the primly stacked containers left a path through which he could approach the bow. His f
eet fell softly as he sailed forward. He pulled his badge out from inside his shirt, the blue sunburst catching a tiny glint of starlight. The badge itself was one of the great perks of making the grade. Sergeants could crow all they wanted about their golden shields, but a detective’s badge had the same hard royal blue as a captain or above—the same, for that matter, as a district attorney or a city commissioner. He could hear the waves below, but even the motor of the little boat had been cut, and the ship was at anchor, quiet. Just in case, he thought he would call out.

  “Anyone there? This is the NYPD. We got a call. Is anyone on deck?”

  Silence. He started down the corridor between the containers. It was maybe only three feet wide—the shippers encouraged efficiency and there wasn’t much reason to make your way up and down the deck at sea. His thick shoes made no noise, but he wanted to be heard.

  “NYPD. Anybody hear me?”

  Down the aisle, about a hundred yards, his flashlight picked up something splayed across the deck. A couple bags of garbage maybe. Or a pile of clothes. It was too big to be a seagull. Mulino swept his flashlight. No movement. It didn’t take him long to figure out that he was looking at a person. He picked up speed, checking the aisles as he did, always cautious, always keeping his head about him. He strode quick and careful, now glad for his silent shoes. He reached the figure on the deck and lit up the body with his flashlight.

  He could tell the man was dead because of the way he lay perfectly still, even with the light shining at him. He could tell the man was dead because his chest was sunken and silent. But most of all, Mulino could tell the man was dead because of the hole where a third of his face should have been. A gunshot from close range had spread everything above and to the left of the nose like pepper spray across the otherwise spotless deck.

  Mulino swiveled his flashlight up and down the aisle. No light. No sound. He knelt by the body. It was warm, but no warmer than the heat of the heavy summer night. The man wore a uniform, the unfamiliar name of the shipping company neatly stenciled on the left breast, boots polished and laced. Mulino looked up. Calling medical could wait. The alarm had come in about an hour before. If this man had tripped it and gone out on deck, he’d been killed since then. Mulino hadn’t seen another boat on the way out. There was a good chance that whoever had shot him was still on board.