Rivers of Gold (4 page)

And once again, Victor Santiago had displayed shamanic foresight and timing. When asked, he had advised his son to buy his apartment outright, counseled him on the finer points of first-time mortgage application (“
Cabrón
, you tell them you want a thirty-year fixed at this rate, that's all, they try to sell you some horseshit deal you tell 'em to go fuck themselves in the ass”), and co-signed the loan with some tender words of advice for his youngest (“You miss one fucking payment, just one, you're out in the street, I don't give a shit, you come crying to me I'll piss in your face,
claro
?”). Now Santiago had the monthly sword of Damocles hanging over his head, but—the apartment was
his
.

Suddenly his mind was brimming with possibilities. He did two things immediately: He applied for a second job at Barneys on the referral of a brother from his unit who also worked there; and he celebrated his first night as a homeowner with a girl he knew from Inwood named Anilda, who fucked him so hard he had bruises and friction burns on his groin and thighs for three days afterward.

Victor's move on his youngest son's behalf was unprecedented, and there were some angry words around the family dinner table when the news was broken, but the old man had stood firm, and by this time neither of Santiago's asshole brothers would even think of getting in his face over this. His sister, for her part, had bought him a George Foreman grill (the big one with the griddle on the side) as a housewarming present, and Santiago began to consider that life might just actually be sweet.

Santiago's mother had thoughtfully prepared some highway snacks for them, since he and Victor agreed that all the road food along I-95 would gag a subway rat. For fifty miles, they munched intermittently and blissfully on grilled poblano peppers stuffed with fresh crabmeat, and Santiago reminded himself for the umpteenth time what a lucky SOB he was, even as a part-time security guard and a full-time street cop with the Citywide Anticrime Bureau, easily one of the most dangerous jobs in town.

Victor brought him back to earth abruptly when, on the outskirts of New Haven, he asked, “How's it going with your new partner?”

Santiago sighed. “Could be better,” he said wearily.

Thirty-six hours earlier, Santiago had nearly checked out forever when two morons bent on killing each other over a fucking parking spot had trashed a weeklong investigation of the drug trade flowing through the city's bars.

It was nothing new. The market lay just beneath the surface, the demand was always there. It was just a matter of asking around until you connected. No surprise, really; since William Bratton and then Ray Kelly had kicked the dealers off the streets so they wouldn't scare off well-moneyed tourists, the trade had simply moved indoors. Tourists liked having good illegal drugs to accompany the legal ones they paid top dollar for just as much as native New Yorkers did, and with cops working multiple jobs to raise enough weakened dollars just to keep their heads above water, well, the usual graft was getting unusually thick.

It was compounded by the fact that the city's drug merchants had set up a triple-tiered trade for cocaine. First came top-of-the-line powder ($250 a gram), then heavily cut rock ($10 a vial), then the dreaded
paco
. This new South American import was a waste product of the refining process that had become a profitable way to dispose of even the last dregs of a shipment, and it was blamed for a quarter of all the overdoses in the city as well as a third of violent drug-related crimes. Combine that with ten percent inflation and twelve percent unemployment, a hiring freeze in a police force already cut back twenty percent from its 2008 size, soaring food prices, and annual tax hikes, and you had a recipe for apocalypse.

The one thing that could be counted upon to prop up the city was tourism. Not that New York was Disney World, far from it. But with the government's unprecedented spending binge, the dollar had dropped through the floor, and just about anyone from anywhere else could afford to live it up in New York—hey, it's a
safe
big city, the FBI says crime is at its lowest point in half a century! So, word had come down from City Hall via NYPD high command: Keep the Knuckleheads Down. Young Arab swingers flush with petrodollars, jetting in on private planes to the Big Apple to do all the drinking and fucking they can't do at home, well, they tend to get turned off when a
paco
-crazed junkie drives a stolen SUV into the lounge bar where they're making time with those loose American girls. Well-scrubbed German families converting stronger euros to weaker dollars tended to “turn around and advance on back” to the nice safe EU with a quickness when an overheard comment—or, God forbid, eye contact—between locals led to whole magazines being unloaded in classrooms, movie theaters, and subway stations.

And then there were the speaks, which the NYPD couldn't even
begin
to get a handle on. As per their namesake, the speaks were illegal bars; unlike those of old, however, these floated with no fixed address through scores of buildings left vacant by the real estate crash. A bar would vanish from one address only to pop up at another. The mechanism was a phantom network that broadcast the next location of each speak with little advance notice. No one knew how the information was transmitted, which made it all but impossible for the cops to crack. Not that any of this would've even come up on the cops' radar if it hadn't been for the fact that the speaks provided excellent cover for all sorts of criminal activity, from drugs to prostitution, and even
that
would've gone unnoticed in the carnage that was New York City in 2013 if not for the body count such nightlife racked up. Vice, Narcotics, and even Homicide were undermanned, overwhelmed, and outmaneuvered.

The cheerleaders of chaos and entropy were thriving and diversifying, while the home team of law and order was in the ICU.

But then some genius had dreamed up the Citywide Anticrime Bureau (CAB). Basically a revamping and expansion of the anticrime units already in place at most precincts, CAB was a task force aimed at holding back the rising tide utilizing street-level undercover work. Officers from any division in the NYPD could volunteer. Units were organized under local area commanders, all veterans, with each unit spearheaded by field teams in undercover taxicabs backed up by what remained of the uniformed department, organized into flying squads. CAB units, as per their namesake, had city-wide jurisdiction, and they were authorized to use deadly force when necessary. Then came the incentive: CAB cops racked up points based on collars made and cases cleared, a merit system designed to retain seasoned veterans (who were otherwise leaving the force in droves) as well as to attract fresh young talent. To sweeten the pot, the panjandrums of One Police Plaza dangled the golden bough: detectives who reached a predetermined point level earned a transfer to OCID, the Organized Crime Intelligence Division, long held by most cops to be the Valhalla of the NYPD.

The scheme worked, at least at first. Young cops of Santiago's age, with new families and mortgages to feed, eagerly signed up for CAB detail. New transfers from all departments began swelling the CAB ranks, pooling their experience and competing with each other in a cavalier fashion that irked some of the more established police classes, such as the Homicide dicks. With their shiny shoes and metallic suits, the murder cops considered themselves to be the landed gentry of the Department, and they did not care for the young guns driving all over their turf in their dirty fucking taxicabs. But they had no choice, being up to their trouser pleats in bodies. Crime was spiking, the force was shrinking, and the city needed to be thrown a lifeline. CAB was a child of the age, dubbed by one
Times
reporter as “the biggest little shakeup in the history of the NYPD.”

Then Aubrey Bright happened, and the new CAB unit nearly died at birth.

It was only natural that as the CAB field teams jostled with each other to turn crime into job credits, different minorities would take the lead in different locales. Which member would go undercover depended on the “set,” or situation. Latino cops worked Latino sets, black cops worked black sets, and so forth. Aubrey Bright, an up-and-coming twenty-two-year-old fresh out of uniform, had taken point to work a black club in the Flatiron District, home to a number of boisterous nightspots which often hosted assaults, stabbings, and shootings, as well as a river of drug traffic. Aubrey Bright had gotten decked out in his best Sean John, sidled on the set with his best hustle-and-flow, and been made in about five seconds by a notorious gangsta rap star known as MC Cancer and by an equally notorious drug dealer, both stoned to the eyeballs, who were in the club's best booth near the back, each enjoying his own personal bottle of Cristal and a below-table blow job from some of the female staff members employed by the club for that very purpose.

Aubrey Bright had been dragged out the back door to an adjacent parking lot by the rapper and the dealer, who beat him to a cracked wet pulp before the dealer emptied a full Glock magazine into his body. The murder was recorded by a security camera atop one of the parking lot fence posts; after shooting Aubrey Bright, the dealer pulled down his pants and waggled his genitals at the camera lens. The pair then jumped into a Lincoln Navigator SE and roared out of the lot, with both of the Navigator's left-side wheels rolling over Aubrey Bright's corpse, collapsing his ribcage and skull and splashing viscera across the tarmac. By the time the CAB backup team caught up to them, the rapper had wrapped the SUV around a dumpster half a block down the street. In the ensuing firefight, 112 rounds were fired, a large number of which ended up inside MC Cancer. The drug dealer only survived by running out of ammo, then repeating his earlier genital gesture, at which time one of the field team officers subdued him with a Taser shot to a sensitive area. All of which was of course recorded on the phones of more than a dozen gawking bystanders.

It was a cascading nightmare, which never seemed to let up. First the CAB unit was taken balls-first over a cheese grater by the media, with much hand-wringing and shit-eating being done for the cameras by the mayor, the police commissioner, and the head of CAB, who was summarily dismissed and promptly made for points unknown. Then the arraignment of the drug dealer, in which the playback from the club's parking lot security camera was shown as evidence by the (black) prosecutor, causing the (black) stenographer to vomit. The (white) defense attorney tried for a clemency plea before being loudly and profanely fired by his client, who had to be hauled kicking and spitting from the courtroom by burly (black) bailiffs, to be sentenced in absentia. The (black) judge gave the defendant life without parole in record time; the (black) officers involved in the shooting were exonerated and publicly lauded by the commissioner.

That the officers involved were black evoked little sympathy in the black community; in the public's eyes, said blacks were blue.
WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?
was the title of a mournful editorial over the byline of one of the
Times
's most prominent black columnists, while the cover of a high-profile black scholarly journal featured a cartoon of a whirlpool with one dark arm visible, on which was written
BLACK YOUTH
in dropped-out type. Black community leaders scheduled a coordinated series of civil disobedience gatherings citywide, for which absolutely no one showed up. Aubrey Bright had died on a Monday night; an ominous silence had descended over the city by Wednesday afternoon.

Everyone knew what was coming, which was why CAB wasn't disbanded despite nonstop howling from the City Council and numerous community groups. Captain McKeutchen had called his boys together; he was kind of grandfatherly in his own way, Santiago had thought, if your grandfather kept blown-up color stills from his latest colonoscopy on his office wall. After giving them a short speech about duty, honor, and Riding Out the Storm—“Like an impacted turd, this too shall pass”—he'd sat down heavily in his reinforced chair and, for the first time in unit memory, started cleaning his service weapon, a two-inch Smith and Wesson Airlite 340PD .357 with a five-shot cylinder, grunting, “The odd one's for me.”

Thirty seconds later, Santiago was the first CAB cop to the armory, plowing right over a pair of tense uniformed rookies demanding M-16s, where he managed to talk down a panicky duty sergeant who was fortifying himself with a bottle of Ten High he didn't bother to hide. After a brief shopping trip through the ordnance locker, Santiago took his pickings out to one of the unmarked cabs. He'd floored it up the Henry Hudson Parkway, Victor in his hands-free headset helping him coordinate, racing down the sun as it careened toward the Palisades, as though eager to hide from the coming storm. Once back in his parents' neighborhood, he'd stopped at a gas station on Dyckman Street, topped off the tank, checked the oil and tires, and strong-armed the nervous attendant into giving him two extra five-gallon jerricans of gas and a case of Poland Spring half-liter water bottles.

For the next three days, as rioting spread throughout the city, Santiago had lived in his taxicab, Victor in his headset, a dashboard solar charger for his iPhone and the police radio chattering nonstop, a 12-gauge Benelli M4 Tactical semiauto cradled in his huge hands. Santiago didn't know why his CO was allowing him to do what he was doing, which was against the entire NYPD rule book, but he was supremely grateful. He'd checked in with McKeutchen regularly on his command line, wanting to make sure that if he himself were hung out to dry, he'd do what he could to see that his boss would be spared.