Black Water Transit (6 page)

Creek’s relations with women were complex.

The sun was two fingers above the horizon by the time Jack let himself in and came out through the French doors onto the terrace. He found Creek by the rooftop pool, poking at the flaring coals inside the bowl of a huge Weber barbecue. He was still in his golf clothes and was wearing an apron that read
KISS ME, I’M DELUSIONAL
.

He saw Jack coming, pulled a chilled Grolsch beer from a silver vase, and tossed it over to him. The evening was soft and warm under a pink-and-lime sky, and cozy yellow lights were blinking on all over the university grounds.

Jack popped the cap on the Grolsch and went over to the telescope Creek had mounted on a tripod by the
terrace fence. He checked the view. The telescope was sighted on the window of an apartment block about a half mile away. Through the lens he could see a shimmering image of a group of young women in shorts and tank tops, sitting around on beanbag chairs. They were laughing and drinking from paper cups. A pizza box was open on the floor in front of them, next to a large bottle of white wine. As he watched, a girl emerged from a rear bedroom wearing pale-blue panties and a pink bra and rubbing her hair with a large white towel.

“Jesus, Creek. You’re gonna get badly busted one day.”

Creek looked up from the coals and grinned.

“They’re my science project. Other people have ant farms and nobody objects. My interest in those fabulous young babes is purely anthropological. I may write a paper. How about the wine? Did you bring me something decent, you cheap dago bastard?”

Jack handed him a brown bag. Creek pulled the bottle of wine out and inspected the label.

“Mount Rat Shit. Excellent. Well done, Jackson. Pull up a pew and observe. I am performing a sacrament for carnivores here.”

He had two thick sirloins on the grill. The scent was sharp and peppery. Onions and mushrooms were simmering on a side griddle. His face was bright and his eyes were watery from the charcoal smoke. Jack felt a sudden pang of real hunger.

Creek worked in silence for a while and they both watched a television on the edge of the swimming pool, the sound muted. A female news droid was talking rapidly, eyes bright, her lips working around a soundless crisis. A school picture flashed on, this little black girl, and the cut line
Kidnap in Harlem
. Then the screen jumped and another media zombie, a male this time,
was pointing to a street map of Jerusalem and utilizing his Flexo-Feelings Model XD331 Frowny Face to communicate Serious Concern blended with Heartfelt Compassion.

Jack picked up the remote and clicked the set off. The visual silence was oddly soothing. He watched Creek work for a while and sipped at his Grolsch. Creek had good moves, a way of going about his business with calm and grace. Creek flipped the steaks carefully and then sat down on a deck chair beside Jack. He leaned back, raised a glass of the Montrachet, and sipped it with real enjoyment. There was a short silence while the two of them relaxed in the evening wind and watched the high clouds shining. After a minute Creek pushed Jack’s knee with his sandal.

“Okay, Jackson. Tell Uncle Raleigh.”

Jack sighed, looked at Creek for a while, and then laid out the entire conversation with Earl V. Pike, including the reference to the “administrative fee” and the call he made to Dave Fontenot to check Pike out.

“And Dave said he was a straight guy?”

“Yeah. Said he was in corporate security. I think Pike did some work for Chase, but Dave wouldn’t admit to it.”

“And neither did this Pike character?”

“He said he could neither confirm nor deny.”

Creek looked at the business card.

“Crisis Control Systems. This Pike seem like a hard guy?”

“Machined in Dusseldorf and delivered in a crate.”

“Legit military?”

“Oh yeah.”

“Ours or somebody else’s?”

“He said he worked Thunder Road.”

“Out of Ahn Khe?”

“Didn’t say. But it sounds like air cav to me.”

“Those mutts. I’d watch him on that basis alone. You figure he knows who you know? Maybe that’s where he got the idea. Some of your old Astoria street stickball buddies are into this kind of thing.”

“Pike said he talked to Carmine DaJulia.”

Creek was stunned into silence.

“Did Frank call you personally, tell you about this guy?”

“No. Neither did Carmine. Maybe I should call him.”

Creek shook his head.

“Jackson. You’re at this very moment trying to commission a Wall Street investment bank to pump up the pension plan and totally restructure your employee benefits package. If you have any contact with Frank or Carmine or any of his guys and it comes out in an SEC background check—which it will—there goes your deal with Galitzine Sheng and Munro and maybe worse. You follow?”

“So what do I do?”

Creek sipped at the wine and studied Pike’s card.

“Jackson, my advice?”

“I’m not here for a lesson in covert surveillance.”

“Put this Pike deal down gently and slowly back away. When you’re about a mile out, turn your back and jog briskly into the rising sun. That’s what I’d do. What I do wonder about?”

“What?”

“I wonder why you didn’t just tell him to insert and twist as soon as he brought up the bribery shit. I know you, Jackson. You’re a prideful rascal. If they still had duels, you’d have to wear a bell.”

They heard a distant rumble and watched as a jetliner flew across the evening sky at thirty thousand feet. Sunlight glinted off the fuselage and the vapor trail sparkled and spread out like crystals behind a glass-cutter.
Soft music was floating up from the park, girls laughing, and the rolling racket of kids on skateboards.

Jack set the Grolsch bottle down and reached for another.

“So?” said Creek, lifting an eyebrow.

“You don’t really want to know.”

“Jackson, I had a date tonight. She’s a lit major at McGill. It was a chance to have an orgasm with someone else in the room. I could have a half-naked lit major frolicking in the pool right now. She was a deconstructionist too. You know how nuts they are. But no, I called it off, and now here I am with you. So either you amuse me with your feckless numb-nuts entanglements or you get yourself into the master bedroom and prepare yourself.”

“Danny.”

“Danny? You mean Streak, the Lizard Boy?”

“I mean Danny, my son.”

Creek was silent for another thirty seconds.

“Oh, jeez. Mary and Joseph too. Speak no more, Jackson. Let me guess. No, let me … infer. You figure this Pike guy, he’s up to something … nefarious. Something illegal. And in what passes for a working cortex inside that vast echoing chamber where a normal human would have an actual brain, a tiny lever popped and a little spring went
bing
and there you were with the following thought: Well, by neddie-jingo, I’ll just rat this Pike guy out to the feds—set up a sting of some sort—and then the feds will return the favor and get my reptilian little offspring out of Lompoc, where he just happens to be spending a richly deserved five-to-fifteen for assorted butt-wad offenses under the federal narcotics and armed robbery laws. Do I infer correctly?”

“I would never say ‘by neddie-jingo.’ And it sounded better when I was thinking it.”

“Jackson, do you have a clear mind?”

“Reasonably.”

“Then let’s review. I am going to walk away and turn the steaks and jab away briskly at the onions in a master-chef-like manner, and while I do that you are going to sit quietly and do your best to remember the salient details of your life with Janice. I’ll give you six minutes. You can skip the sex scenes, which ought to leave you with about ten full days to cover in depth. Focus mainly on what a wild-ass totally unredeemable lying sack of Dippity-Do she was, and then do some short-term comparative analysis of the nine hundred different ways in which Streak the Lizard Boy managed to surpass her in almost every area covered by the seven deadly sins. And we won’t even get into the massive and possibly terminal consequences of embarrassing Frank or Carmine by fucking with one of their business associates. Okay? Pencils ready? Begin now. When I come back, I expect you to have achieved a cognitive epiphany.”

“A cognitive epiphany?”

“A Gestalt. A revelation. Seen the light. If you have not done so by the time I return, I will strike you.”

“Strike me?”

“Like a gong.”

Casey and Levon took Tony LoGascio to Central Booking at One Police and got a public defender for him. When Casey and Levon last saw him, he was in an
interview room talking in a hoarse and panicky whisper with his PD, a mook named Eddie Rubinek, a reedy-looking pencil-neck with a felony haircut and a goatee beard that came over like a brown mold on his pinched little face and a clipboard with a Greenpeace sticker on the back. Rubinek was also wearing black socks with floppy brown Birkenstock sandals, one of the secret recognition signals of the Global Brotherhood of Stalinist Nimrods Everywhere. This was a portent.

Then Casey and Levon drove back up to the Two Five and Casey ran the names Rocco and Benno Scarpa on FINEST, the department’s own computer database, and got color prints, full-face and profile, of Rocco and Benito Scarpa, a pair of genetically challenged louts with ragtag brown hair and bad skin, Rocco—Rocky to his friends—sporting a mandarin mustache and a wispy goatee, Benno balding with long stringy hair hanging over his ears and a comb-over that would make Homer Simpson cringe.

Both mutts had been popped for various misdemeanors, ranging from small-time drugs to theft and attempted armed robbery, as well as a recent charge of forcible confinement and sexual assault—dropped because the thirteen-year-old victim refused to testify—hence the recent photos. They were both, to say the least, ugly as star-nosed moles, and the only way either one of them would have qualified for a real live date with a willing adult female would have been to take up goat-herding in the Basque country.

Casey also got a current address, on Tinton Street in the South Bronx, which turned out to be a slate-rock dive not far from Mary’s Park. The Scarpa brothers were lounging around in their shorts, slugging Thunderbird from a Tupperware container, passing a soggy spliff as big as a mackerel back and forth, and watching old
Mr. Rogers
programs on a hotwired DVD, when the door
slammed open and Casey Spandau, Levon Jamal, and three other bulls from Sex Crimes exploded into the room like some sort of ugly mass hallucination. Rocco giggled out loud and Benno blinked at them for a couple of seconds before he was airborne in the grip of a highly pissed-off Casey Spandau and the rat-skin-gray shag rug on the floor was racing up at his face like an incoming asteroid.

As a part of the arrest procedure, Casey and Levon turned the Scarpa flat upside down and found a pair of bloody underpants stuck between the box spring and the mattress. Covered in little purple dinosaurs, they exactly matched the description of Shawana Coryell’s underwear, part of the clothing list obtained from her aunt at the time of the kidnapping.

A field kit check showed semen stains mixed with the blood, and similar stains on the mattress itself. The Crime Scene Unit came in to do a complete workup on the secondary scene, and, barring a major screw-up, it looked like Casey Spandau and Levon Jamal had nailed three pederast sons-of-bitches to the main gate in Attica. So, at the end of the day, sweet victory? Not exactly.

Enter Euphonia Shabazz.

Jack agreed with Earl Pike about his black Shelby Cobra; it was a hell of a ride. He liked the smell of the black leather interior, the simplicity of the analog tachometer, the honest brutality of the 427 turbo, the sound it made when cruising, a kind of muted growling purr. It was a head-turner, and Jack wasn’t fond of attention,
but the car was such a classic it was worth the distraction. It was one of the few things in his life that gave him unqualified satisfaction, and he was damn well keeping it.

He had on a CD,
Mule Variations
, by Tom Waits. The traffic around him was light and the downtown core of Albany glimmered softly in a heat haze. The interstate was smooth and he was rolling through it in an easy snaking line. When he crossed the Hudson into Rensselaer his tires drummed on the bridge deck, a syncopated booming reverberation that reminded him of his Huey, and thinking about his Huey made him think again about Creek’s bleak view of Jack’s ex-wife and his feckless kid. The trouble was, Creek was probably dead-right about both of them.

Pensacola Naval Air Station, back in 1966. She worked as a clerk in the base dry-cleaning shop. She said her name was Janice Cullitan. Creek used to say she probably wasn’t allowed to tell her real name to potential victims. When she was on the hunt, she was quite a package, and covered the ground like a cat going down a drainpipe. Made love like one, too; upside down and sideways, she always knew where the ground was and how far to the door. She had perky little breasts that she had puppy names for. Jack could never remember which was which, and that bugged her. She talked baby talk during sex, and it still pained him that he used to like it. But the game had no goal line as far as he was concerned. It was just R-and-R in a precombat DMZ. He hadn’t really given the future much thought because, as a jar-head grunt bound for Vietnam, he probably didn’t have one. But Janice had an eye for quality and it had been love at first bite for her. If Jack made it through the war, Janice was sure he’d do something nice and profitable after it, and she wanted to be around for the cast party. She had all four fangs six inches deep in his
carotid by the time he boarded the carrier for Three Corps, Republic of Vietnam.

He had written her a few times during the early months of his war and heard very little back from her, unless the Corps had screwed up his pay deposits. The first year in-country, after he’d been working as a crew chief on an extraction Huey—where he first met Creek—he’d caught a shrapnel fragment in his right knee and they sent him back to Pensacola for a rest and refit.