Black Water Transit (9 page)

“
It’s six minutes after midnight, Nicky. Take your portable.
”

“I don’t have one. Pete LeTourneau has it in his lockbox.”

“
Then be careful.
”

“Thanks, Gracie. I know you want my body.”

“
That is so not happening, Nicky. I know where it’s been.
”

He puts the handset away and shuts down the engine, leaving the roof lights churning red and blue. He takes his Maglite and, thinking about it, he also grabs his first-aid kit and some latex gloves. He locks the unit and sets out across the field. It’s a starry night, but there’s no moon. Maybe a mile away to the south he sees the yellow lights from a farmhouse. Other than that it’s dark and still.

Nicky’s a New York City kid—born in Far Rockaway—so it’s not a happy walk for him. He’s maybe twenty yards from the stand of trees when he hears something growling. This upsets him, he can tell, because he’s experiencing an involuntary sex change and the air has gotten as thick as motor oil. He puts the Maglite on the trees. He can see a whole section of black tailgate now, and a Jersey plate: IMA DV8. “I’m a deviate”? Cute.

This doesn’t help his mood. He thumbs the restraining flap off the butt of his Glock Ten and keeps his right hand on it. The growling is louder now. It’s not a growling like a guard dog would make; it sounds different. Involved. Happy. Nicky doesn’t want to speculate on what would make an animal like that happy. And there’s something else. A tearing sound like something being ripped or tugged at.

“Police,” says Nicky. It comes out a bit pinched. “Who’s there?”

The growling stops at once. There’s a short wait while Nicky listens to nothing hard enough to give himself a migraine, and then he sees a quick motion off to his right.

He lifts out the Glock and covers the area.

“State Police. Stand up and come out. Hands where I can see them. Now!”

Something large and dark bolts out of the wheat field at his right. Nicky jumps, steps back a yard, gets the light back on it, his Glock up and ready. His finger is on the blade. He can feel the serration on the trigger, and the three pale-green tritium dots—two on the foresight, one on the rear—are lined up in a perfect row. Beyond the foresight he sees a dog, some sort of mixed breed, part hound, part alligator. Its eyes catch the light and shine like bright red jewels. It stares back at him, jaws open, panting. There’s something dark and sticky-looking all over its muzzle and chest. The dog’s fur glistens.

Then it turns and … disappears. Nicky listens to the sound it makes as it huffs away through the wheat, a hissing rattle as it pushes through the wheat stalks. In a second he’s alone with whatever is in the vehicle under the trees.

He comes up to it, a Jimmy SLT, shiny black, brand-new. The windows are heavily tinted. The passenger window is broken, and shattered glass lies all around in the long grass under the trees. He steps up to the passenger side and puts his light inside the Jimmy.

A young blonde girl is sprawled across the front seats. She’s naked. Damaged as well. There’s blood on her smooth young belly. Her eyes are open. Nicky puts the light in her eyes. Fixed and dilated. He moves the light onto her neck and sees bruising.

Her neck is … wrong.

He slips on his latex gloves, reaches in, and touches her throat under the left side of her jaw, where the muscles join. She’s no warmer than the surrounding night. He holds his fingers there long enough to feel the stillness inside her.

This is a crime scene, he decides, and reaches for the
portable that he doesn’t have with him. Dammit, he says to himself, and takes a breath to calm himself down, and this is when he catches a scent that reminds him of rust, and he thinks about what was on the dog’s muzzle. He steps back away from the vehicle, and the rust smell gets stronger and catches in the back of his throat.

He puts the circle of light on the ground and sees a beaten-down section of long grass leading away from the Jimmy. Twenty feet it runs, into a blackness outside the dim circle of his Maglite, where it disappears into a gap between old and twisted trees. He squats down and studies the marks in the grass. Two people, maybe more. They walked away from the Jimmy in that direction.

Nicky thinks hard about his role in all of this. On the one hand, he’s a cop, and this sort of thing is part of the job. On the other hand, he’s seen this whole scenario before, and it was always with some opening credits scrolling down in front of it and scary music playing. He’s the lone cop in this scene. Everybody knows the lone cop never makes it past the opening credits.

He sighs, gets up, and follows the track into the gap between the trees. He’s now in a large clearing, circular, perhaps twenty feet wide. In the glow of the flash he can see a body lying on its back in a section of crushed and flattened grass.

Secondary crime scene, he thinks, and starts to map out all the ways he has moved around the whole sector. He’s going to have to explain it to the GIC people when they get here. He moves in, puts the light on the body from six feet away.

A white male, tanned, head shaved. Young, maybe in his twenties. Very muscular, a weight lifter or a pro football player. Wearing a white—now a partly white—tank top. Nude from the waist down. Oh man, thinks Nicky. This is going to be bad.

Nicky steps in closer. The rust smell has another element
here, a sewage smell, and a bitter stink of stomach acids. Someone has thrown up here and maybe lost control of their bowels as well. He puts the light on the man’s torso.

Below the bloodstained white tank top, the man’s belly has been opened up like a piñata, spilling multicolored fruit everywhere. Below the belly there’s nothing but a tangled mass of pink and blue and shiny red tissue all the way to the man’s lower thighs.

Something—that goddamn gator-dog—has been eating the man from the crotch up. Nicky moves backward, fighting his stomach. There’s no way the GIC guys are going to find anything from inside Nicky Cicero anywhere in this disaster area.

He looks down at the man’s face. It’s a mask of bruises and blood. One eye is open wide, the other pinched shut by swollen tissue. His mouth is open and full of black blood. He looks as if he was beaten to death by someone in a bare-knuckle fight.

Nicky kneels down and looks at one outstretched hand. He lifts it, a slack meaty weight, and curls the fingers. The knuckles are raw and scraped. He fought, anyway, fought back hard, judging from the wear and tear. Whoever did this to him, that person will have some marks on him, on his knuckles and his face, his arms where he blocked incoming blows. This Nicky knows something about.

He gets to his feet again and sees the clearing in a new way. This was a stand-up fight. Bare-knuckle and toe to toe. A challenge fight? Maybe some twisted kind of contest. Through the gaps in the stand of gnarled old trees, crazy red-and-blue lights were fluttering in the blackness. They made Nicky think of tropical fish floating in a black lagoon. He turned away and walked slowly back to the cruiser.

“Echo one four to base.”

“
Nicky, having a pee break?
”

“No, Gracie.”

“
You sound funny, Nicky. Are you okay?
”

“No, Gracie.”

In the morning Jack Vermillion called his lawyer, Flannery Coleman, from his house in Rensselaer and found out in damn short order that Coleman emphatically agreed with Creek Johnson on this one, that trading an ATF bust on Earl Pike for a mercy plea on Danny Vermillion was a totally bat-shit stunt that would certainly end in tears, so of course Jack proceeded to ignore his advice as well.

Two hours later he and a grumpy and dissatisfied Flannery Coleman—a wily old boot-leather lawyer who had spent nine years with the New York DA’s office before he went into private practice up in Albany—met with the special agent in charge of the Albany office of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, a compact black cop with white hair named Luther Campbell.

Luther Campbell was brisk and funny, seemed competent and grateful for the tip-off, but he had company with him. And this is where Jack Vermillion for the first time meets Valeriana Greco herself, the assistant U.S. attorney for that sector.

She was a machine-tooled little number in her mid-thirties, with great legs and a sharp face and shiny black hair cut to her jawline and held back on the left with a sterling silver gecko with two emerald eyes. Jack noticed
that her eyes were the same shade of green as the gecko’s eyes. She wore the usual federal power suit, a navy blue pinstripe number with a short skirt, and came equipped with a Dell Inspiron laptop and a chrome-plated cell phone the size of a hamster’s dick. She was all business and drive and managerial chutzpah and was extremely successful in pissing Jack off right from the get-go.

She sat them both down in her office full of mahogany furniture and wall-to-wall plaques citing her legal accomplishments and her influential Washington friends, and waited while Jack tried twice to get his burgundy leather briefcase to stand upright on a rug deep enough to conceal a leg-hold trap. Finally he let it fall over a third time and lie there. She looked down at it with an expression of pained interest.

“Nice bag, Mr. Vermillion.”

Jack looked down at the bag. It was lying on its left side, showing a sterling silver plate in a frame stitched under the handle.

Jack raised his shoulders, let them fall in a very Italian gesture. “Thanks. Nice office.”

“I know La Gioconda,” she said.

“Do you?”

“It’s in Astoria, isn’t it? In Queens? On the boulevard?”

It was easy to see where this was going.

Jack decided to get there first.

“I grew up in Astoria. I have a lot of friends there. Including Frank Torinetti. If that’s a problem for you, we can stop right here.”

She had a small mouth, full lips like a cherub on a cathedral wall. In spite of this, her smile managed to be reptilian.

“Not at all. I was just making an observation.”

Flannery Coleman broke in with a flat statement.

“What specifically is your role here, Ms. Greco?”

She obliged him with a set speech. It took eleven minutes by the Seth Thomas on the sideboard, next to her graduation picture from the Kennedy School of Government. This was
her
case, she made that clear. Ms. Greco was very interested in Jack’s story. She of course applauded his loyalty to the cause of justice. Ms. Greco could of course make no promises regarding the incarceration of Daniello Vermillion, since Mr. Vermillion was being held by the state of California, but certainly there were
ameliorating
steps that could be taken as a cooperative effort between state and federal agencies, and depending upon the
outcomes
 …

There was much more of that kind of crap, but Jack had extracted the clear impression, later supported by his lawyer, that cooperation with ATF in the matter of Earl Pike would very likely result in parallel, but not
officially
reciprocal, review of the terms of Danny’s imprisonment. This would include an immediate—and this was the important part as far as Jack was concerned—transfer to a medium-security detox facility in Fresno.

“That’s, like, right now, you follow?” said Jack, interrupting her aria. “Because if he goes back into gen pop where he is, he’s as good as dead and our deal is off. It ends here. Right here. That’s not negotiable.”

“I understand. I agree. Immediate. We’ll make the call today. Anything else?”

Jack had some ideas. Perhaps a real attempt to deal with Streak’s addictions and his … He paused to think.

“Dysfunctional lifestyle?” was how Ms. Greco
phrased it, her lips shaping around the phrase like a nun blowing dust off a dildo.

However, Ms. Greco had some questions.

Luther, who had watched this extended warning label from under his white and bushy eyebrows while he toyed with a Ka-Bar letter opener and glanced occasionally at Jack, had then settled his gaze on Jack’s face. Jack had the feeling there was a warning in the look. What questions? Ms. Greco seemed to coil up.

Motivations, really. She had run an NCIC check on Mr. Pike and had discovered nothing at all against him. According to reliable sources, his firm, Crisis Control Systems, had a long and respectable history of corporate consultations. His associates were, as far as her people had been able to determine, retired naval and army personnel with unblemished records. He was a registered firearms collector and was even on the board of directors of the William Cody Museum in Cody, Wyoming.

She had also contacted the Department of the Army and they had given her a glowing report on the military record of the Pike family, which apparently went back to the War for Independence and the liberation of Texas, all the way up to the career of Colonel Earl Pike himself, which began with three tours of combat duty as a G2 officer in the First Air Cavalry in Vietnam and was followed by another twenty-four years of active service in Central America, the Middle East, Colombia, Peru, and lately in Central Africa.

So here we find a successful businessman, an ex-military professional, with many valuable and influential contacts, and yet, amazingly, he is apparently willing to risk all of this to execute a patently illegal shipment of apparently problematic weaponry down the Hudson and from there on to Merida, in Mexico, all of which was entirely contrary to highly publicized ATF shipping
restrictions. And he contracts the shipment to a complete stranger, although, she had to admit, a man who—she hoped Jack would forgive her—a man who did have connections in some fairly colorful parts of the city. It was therefore odd, she said, and did not conform to her eleven years of experience in these matters. And there was the risk to Black Water Transit Systems. Here she paused and her lids closed and then opened again, as if she had just received a cosmic transmission or was having some intestinal problems—the fact that Jack had
initiated
an investigation against Pike, the fact of his status as an
informant
, would that not damage his relationships with legitimate businesspeople in Albany? She felt it must. And therefore what puzzled her, what troubled her in all of this, was the
uniqueness
of the situation. It had not been her experience that ordinary citizens, powerful businessmen such as Jack, were given to
paroxysms
of civic altruism, especially in a matter where they might suffer serious damage to their corporate interests. So, she said, all sweet reason, she was left with questions.