Burn (Michael Bennett 7) (7 page)

Managed correctly, the squad could be an effective tool, I realized. It would just be a matter of prioritizing cases and laser-focusing on a few cases at a time like any other squad. Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad after all. I was actually a little excited.

Until I got to the assigned officer personnel files.

“OK, now I get it,” I mumbled to myself as I skimmed through the records.

It wasn’t just the most frustrating cases that were being shunted here, I realized. It seemed that some of the department’s most frustrating
cops
had been sent here, too. Instead of confusing myself further, I decided to put names to faces and meet my new charges one by one.

“Arturo Lopez!” I called out to the cops lined up outside the door.

A friendly-seeming young Puerto Rican officer came in. I recognized him as the big-boned cop who’d been sleeping at his desk. Arturo was about five-ten and about five hundred pounds. Well, maybe not five hundred, but easily thirty pounds overweight.

“Lopez, are you interested in being a good cop?” I said after I introduced myself.

“Yes, I definitely am, sir. It means everything to me.”

“Good deal. Let me ask you a question. How fast are you?”

“How fat am I?” he said, hurt. “C’mon, that’s pretty cold, sir.”

“Not fat, Lopez,” I said. “Fast.
F-A-S-T
.”

“I don’t know. Sort of fast, I guess. Who’s to say?”

I raised an eyebrow at him.

“If I said, ‘Hey, Arturo, let’s you and me have a race to the elevator,’ would you have a chance of winning?”

“Maybe?” he said, wincing.

He finally lowered his head. “No, not a chance.”

“See, it’s not really the weight, Arturo. It’s the ability to get around. Things go down fast on the street, and we have to watch each other’s backs out there. No one is going to want to partner up with you if you can’t catch up. If you really want to be a detective, you need to lose some weight, dude. You need to start running and working out or you’re going to be working somewhere else.”

“I get you, Detective. I will. I promise,” he said as he left.

“Noah Robertson!” I called out.

A good-looking blond guy walked in. He was impeccably dressed in a modish soft-gray bespoke suit with a white silk shirt and silk navy tie, with a matching pocket square. His gelled hair was sharply parted à la Cary Grant, and on his feet, I saw, were fancy euro shoes that looked a lot like black velvet slippers. He was tall and tan and slim and looked more like an actor or a Hollister model than a cop.

I’d already read that there had been some kind of sex harassment deal at his last assignment, which explained his presence here. I didn’t ask about it. He was just another of the problem children I’d inherited, as far as I was concerned. All I cared about was here and now. It was
A Brand-New Day
, after all.

“Robertson, why are you here?” I said, squinting at him.

The elegant young man stared at me for a beat.

“I want to be a detective, obviously,” he said.

“Yes, but why?” I said. “Let me guess. Because you’re a clotheshorse and the uniform doesn’t live up to your high sartorial standards?”

“Well, I am a clotheshorse,” he said with a canny little smile. “But I only want what you want, Detective. To help people who need helping. Get bad guys off the street. Maybe get a chance to use my brain in the process.”

I nodded. I liked his answer. But I wasn’t finished.

“If that’s the case, Robertson, then why were you hiding in the corner with everybody else when I came in?”

He looked out my window for a moment, thinking, then gave me his little smile again. “I was waiting for an inspirational leader to arrive,” he said, holding up a finger.

Elegant and able to bullshit on his feet. That might come in handy, I thought.

“Be careful what you wish for, Robertson. Now go back out in the hallway.”

“Naomi Chast!” I called out after he left.

Chast was a pretty, medium-height young woman with tightly tied-back strawberry-blond hair and an almost too lean, wiry triathlete’s build. She was wearing a crisp NYPD polo over her department-issue navy tactical pants.

She seemed professional and kind of normal, I thought as I thumbed through her paperwork. But that was impossible. If she were normal, why would she have been sent here?

When I looked up from her file, she was suddenly glaring at me.

“Oh, I see. You’re cleaning house, huh?” she said with her hands on her hips. “Well, let me save you the trouble. Transfer away. You think I want to be in this chickenshit outfit, you’re crazy. You don’t think I know how all this political crap works? Let me tell
you
a few things.”

As she continued to rant, I flipped another page of her file and found a note handwritten by the squad’s previous leader.

Impulse control?
it said.
ADD? Anger management issues?

Yes. Yes. Yes
, I scratched next to it, and underlined it twice.

CHAPTER
13

AFTER I GOT CHAST
to calm down and go back out into the hallway, I decided to make my first command decision.

I stood and stuck my head out of my office door.

“Listen up, people. I’m hitting the Reset button,” I said. “So whatever nuttiness has been going on around here is over now, OK? I have one rule. I only work with driven, dedicated cops. If you came here to hide out and push pencils and wait for Thursday’s check to clear, I’m sorry, but those days are over.

“Now I want you to go home and get some sleep and decide if you want to keep working here. Because tomorrow, we’re starting from scratch.”

They were leaving when a well-dressed thirty-something black woman came running into my office.

“Hi, Detective Bennett, is it?” she said. “I’m Ariel. Ariel Tyson.”

I looked up at the woman, at the serious brown eyes behind her red-framed eyeglasses. I had already learned from the files that she was the other clerk.

“I was just at lunch,” she said, “and I heard you sent everybody home, and I just want you to know I’m good at my job. I love my job. End of story. I live six blocks from here, and I have three kids. I’m bringing them up the best I can.”

“You show up every day for work, Ariel?” I said.

“Every day. On time. Don’t even put in for overtime.”

“Then I have just one question,” I said, rubbing my eyes. “How did you wind up here?”

“Bureaucratic screwup. What else?” she said with one of the widest, most likable smiles I’d ever seen.

That was when it happened. I finally had a laugh. The first one of the day.

“How are you doing, Detective?” she said, starting to laugh with me. “You look like you’re having yourself a real long day.”

“I’ve just been assigned to coach the Bad News Bears on the Island of Misfit Toys, Ariel. Isn’t it obvious that I’m having the time of my life?”

As Ariel was leaving my office, I heard someone coming down the hallway. It was the aggressive young cop, Dr. Pepper Spray. His file indicated that his name was Jimmy Doyle. He was a young “gunslinger” cop who already had two kills on the job, which was probably why he’d been assigned here. So his old CO wouldn’t have to fill out the paperwork when he shot numero three.

Doyle held up his hands as he came past my door.

“I know, I know. Calm down, boss,” the spunky cop said. “I’ll only be a minute. I left my wallet in my locker, and I can’t walk home to the Bronx.”

I smiled at his back as he went past. The young cop reminded me of someone. Oh, yeah. Me. About half a lifetime ago.

CHAPTER
14

I WAS POURING MYSELF
a coffee refill when the police-band radio in the corner of my office crackled.

“Twenty-seven,” a dispatcher said. “Come in. We have shots fired. I repeat, shots fired. Corner of a Hundred Twenty-Seventh and Eighth Ave.”

“A Hundred Twenty-Seventh and Eighth? That’s two blocks away. It’s where we buy coffee,” Doyle suddenly said from where he was now standing in the doorway of my office.

I hopped up immediately and grabbed some vests and radios out of the locker in the corner.

“What gives?” Doyle said when I handed him his vest. “The other squad leader said we shouldn’t respond to local calls.”

I pushed the young cop out of my doorway and toward the office exit.

“Yeah, well, he’s not here right now, is he?” I said. “C’mon, Doyle. What are you waiting for? Those who dare, win. Lead the way.”

Down on the street, we bolted diagonally across Adam Clayton, ran two quick blocks, and hooked a left up 127th. There was a project complex on the right-hand side of the street, a row of old brownstone houses on the left. Some howling teenage girls came out of one of the brownstones as we were running past.

“Get back inside!” I yelled as Doyle and I sprinted for the corner.

Doyle and I both had our service weapons drawn when we arrived on the corner of Eighth. Two people were down. Two young black men, neither of them older than twenty. One was facedown in the gutter between two parked cars, not moving. The other one was sitting, leaning up against the doorjamb of the corner bodega, bleeding heavily from his chest and mouth.

A large, older black man with short dreads and Carhartt coveralls was down on his knees beside the victim, holding a dirty towel to the kid’s chest with his left hand while holding the kid’s hand with his right. The gasping youth had on a Dodgers hoodie and had a pale-blue bandanna tied Tupac-style around his head.

Gangs
, I thought immediately, seeing the rag.
Pale blue. Crips
.

“C’mon, c’mon,” the man said to the bleeding youth in a Jamaican accent. “C’mon, son. Stay awake, now. They’re comin’ to help ya.”

I went and squatted by the kid in the gutter. He was stocky, wearing a pristine white-and-light-blue-striped polo and oversize jeans. But there was no helping him. There was a large-caliber bullet hole the size of a bouncy ball just above his right temple, and blood and brain matter covered the left leg of his pants.

I saw a gun tucked at the back of his waistband, some type of Taurus semiautomatic. I retrieved it carefully and unloaded it as I stood.

“What happened?” I said to the Jamaican guy.

“These two was comin’ out the store,” the man said, “and it was ‘blam blam blam.’ Some fools shootin’ a long rifle gun from the window of a green car right there on the corner right in the middle of the damn day.”

“What kind of car was it?” I said.

“Like a Honda maybe, or a Nissan. With the loud muffler on it. You know? It was like a teal green.”

I was about to call it in on the radio when I saw that Doyle had beaten me to the punch. He was also moving back the growing crowd of people. The kid took control well, I noticed. He had an easy, convincing authority for such a young cop. I was immediately impressed.

I knelt and clapped my hands by the face of the young man, who was now bleeding out, as his eyes started to flutter. The kneeling Jamaican looked at the kid and shook his head before he pointed his sad and stunned face at me.

“This young, young man,” the Jamaican said, staring at me furiously. “Over what? What?”

A Twenty-Eighth Precinct squad car shrieked up a moment later, an ambulance right behind it.

“What is it? What’s up?” said the thin sergeant who leaped out of the car. He had one of his black-gloved hands on his gun and Ray-Ban sunglasses propped on top of his shaved head.

“Drive-by,” I said, handing him the Taurus, watching the EMTs hurry the teen wearing the Dodgers hoodie into the back of the ambulance. “Two down. One gone, the other likely. Crips gangbangers, looks like.”

“What are you guys? Gang squad?” the sergeant, whose name was Gomez, said, staring at us as he called it in.

“No, we’re the, um, ombudsman squad over on a Hundred and Twenty-Fifth,” I said.

“The what?” Gomez said, utterly confused. “Wait, you mean the mayor’s thing? Are you frickin’ kidding me? You heard the call and just came running, huh? Or did you zip-line out of the building like Batman and Robin?”

“Yeah, we ran,” Doyle said, immediately squaring up on the skinny wise guy. “What did you do, Gomez? Crawl?”

The screaming ambulance pulled away.

“Good job, do-gooder squad, but wait,” the sergeant said as he pretended to answer his cell phone. “That was Commissioner Gordon,” he went on, lowering his phone. “He said your new orders are to go back and deactivate the bat signal.”

“C’mon, Doyle,” I said, getting between him and Gomez. “Let’s leave the paperwork on this one to the Joker.” I turned to leave.

CHAPTER
15

THE BUILDING AT 793
West End Avenue looks a lot like the rest of the prewar buildings on the Upper West Side. Its brick-and-limestone-trimmed facade is worn and probably due for a power wash, but there’s no denying that its lines are still grand, its hunter-green awning and polished brass poles still classy and stately.

The words
sight for sore eyes
could have been added to its description as I scored a rare parking spot across from my apartment house that afternoon after work.

I sat for a moment and just stared up at the dusty windows of my apartment on the eighth floor. There were so many memories there. My mind spun at all the christenings and birthday parties and anniversaries. All the happy faces lit by candlelight around the table.

How my deceased wife, Maeve, had put the calculus of all those dates together in her head and never missed a one, I will never know. She never forgot an occasion to celebrate all of us, the people she loved so dearly, with a card and a cupcake, with a book, with a prayer.

“We’ll be starting on all the graduations soon enough, won’t we?” I said to Maeve as I sat there in the car.
Weddings someday, too
, I thought, and then new christenings and new birthday parties and on and on and on. I smiled as I got out onto the sidewalk. It was good to be home.