The Odds (16 page)

Colleen laughed inadvertently.

Farber gave her a dirty look. “Well, I have clearance,” he said into the phone. “Because this is going to be big and juicy, and it’ll put us all in good graces.”

And you’ll be famous, Colleen said to herself. Franklin Farber, defender of the city.

On the way out, she gave a polite wave to Hrznak and Nellins, who were on the way in.

   HRZNAK AND NELLINS WEREN’T fast moving. They had reached retirement age without eating any farms; for reasons, possibly financial, they were content to bumble around for a while longer. Together, they and the patrol cops cordoned off the house and yard and waited for the lab to come over and get pictures, footprints, the usual. “This sure didn’t just happen,” said Hrznak, the more talkative of the two. “Advanced stink.”

“He doesn’t look like much,” Nellins said, inclining his head toward the body.

“Somebody was eating up here.”

“Him, probably.” Nellins, getting whimsical in old age, imagined a loaded submarine sandwich from Peppi’s.

“Him or whoever killed him. The crumbs don’t seem all that dry.”

Whimsy was about all they could do to make the case appealing. Murders that happened in dirty, out-of-the-way places with victims that looked hapless—this one was hairy and ugly—didn’t interest Nellins and Hrznak.

There was no ID in the man’s pockets, but they did find some cash, about sixty-five dollars. They put that in a plastic ziplock.

They jotted a few notes out of sheer duty while the lab took samples of this and that. They murmured jokes about their commander getting a hospital vacation in clean white sheets while they stepped through muck.

They went outside for air and, after a few minutes, ordered food from Lindo’s and sent a patrol cop to get it. Hrznak took sixty of the dollars out of the bag and counted out thirty for Nellins, pocketed thirty for himself. “Buy lunch today and tomorrow.” There had to be some luck in this job. Some.

   LATE THAT SUNDAY MORNING, when Peter MacKensie finally woke up, he tried to remember again if he and Zero had left anything up at their hideout that could get them in trouble. Fingerprints, maybe. But the police could never find them just like that, right? He needed to talk to Sean Zero again. That meant either a phone call to Zero with his father hanging over him or else getting dressed and going over to Sean’s place. He got dressed.

If the man with the gun remembered him, would he come after him? Maybe the guy was dead by now. One way or another, the house was off-limits. He’d liked that old place because he’d found it, because it was his. It made him angry that he had to give it up.

He shuffled into the kitchen where he poured a bowl of cereal and sat down to eat it. While he ate, he watched his father in the living room doing what he did best: watching TV and smoking. When his father went to the cabinet where he kept his cartons of cigarettes, Mac knew the explosion was coming. He started running some water in the sink.

“Get over here, you little fuck.”

“I’m doing dishes.”

“How many packs you steal? Two, three? Three. What the hell good are you, huh? Get in here.”

“I’m doing dishes.”

So his father came into the kitchen and hit him on the side of the head with the half-filled carton. It didn’t hurt. He didn’t mind it. He summoned his good spirits, his cutting-up spirits. He said, “My head is hard as yours. But my dick is harder.” He scrambled and scampered upstairs, locked his bedroom door, listening for footsteps. He was good at the sounds of the house. Wait long enough and he could run. He shoved his portable CD player onto the floor. He wanted modern things, not this old shit he was using.

When he heard his father go to the can, he opened his door and flew down the stairs and out of the house to Sean Zero’s place.

Zero was up. He had a guilty look on his face, Mac saw that right away.

“Let’s go out,” Mac said.

Zero said, “Um. All right. Where we going?”

Mac said, “See if we can find Carl.”

They walked for a while, up toward Federal, and Zero said haltingly, “Don’t get mad, but I called, um, you know, 911.”

Anger flashed in Mac. “Why the hell would you do that?”

“That guy was hurt up there. He was calling for help. See, I kind of told my mother. Not everything. Just that we used to play up some place, that’s how I put it, and I thought maybe there was a guy hurt, but I didn’t want to get involved. She said the only thing to do was call. She was pretty upset, asking me questions, but I didn’t say anything else, honest. She handed me the phone, but don’t worry, I told her we don’t want the police coming around the house, and she agreed with that. So, I went to a pay phone. Called from there.”

“When?”

“This morning.”

“Shit. We’re the first people they’re going to look at. That was really stupid, asshole.”

“Why are they going to look at us?”

“I don’t know. If they find us, I’m going to kill you.”

“What were we supposed to do?”

“Nothing. That’s what. Nothing. Let the people up there work it out for themselves. I want to find Carl, get our subcontract going. Only, what if he did it? He knows we go up there. What if he was the one?”

“Carl?”

“Yeah, Carl.”

Zero kicked a few fences, frowning.

Mac hit Zero on the side of the head. “Think,” he said. “Think. I don’t want to tell you how bad you fucked up.” He lit a cigarette and sucked in smoke. God, it felt good. Smoke in his lungs gave him courage. How could it be bad for you when it felt so damned good?

“Give me one.”

He handed the pack over, saying, “Don’t know why I should.”

After a while, Zero asked, “You have anything good on you?”

“Two bags. If you weren’t a fucking idiot …”

“We got to find someplace to do it.”

“Yeah.”

They’ve heard all the hullabaloo about heroin grabbing you until it didn’t even feel good anymore. But some people manage it, some people use it like cigarettes.

   HEAD QUARTERS IS PRACTICALLY empty. Tomorrow, Memorial Day, basically the whole force is taking the day off. For most divisions, the holiday has already begun. Almost nobody
except
Farber and some of his men have shown.

Farber, gritting his teeth, says, “Potocki, try to get a home address on the guy who used to work the pizza shop. Greer, we can have you call him or call on him at home. Work on building that relationship. Plus keep after any other computer searches Potocki is in the middle of.”

Farber goes back to his office. Greer is about to tell Potocki she might as well go roaming, searching for Carl, searching for Nick, when she is interrupted by Potocki’s radio reporting another 911 call has come in, this one much more specific. “A kid again calling about the disturbance on McCandor,” the dispatcher says. “This time he gives the address. Says it’s 826.
This time
the caller says there’s a dead man on the second floor.”

Colleen calls back the dispatcher. “Same kid?”

“Can’t tell.”

“You have the phone number this one was called in from?”

“Pay phone on Arch Street. That’s all we have.”

“Where did the first call come from?”

“Pay phone over on Cedar near the hospital.”

“I have to hear those tapes, both of them. I’m coming over.” Without a word to Farber, and only a small punch on the shoulder to Potocki, she’s out of the office. Problem. They will need an hour or two to get the tape pulled, and it will take her only fifteen minutes to drive to the call center on Lexington Avenue. But she’s out of the office. She can do what they call the “slow drive.” How to explain to Farber why she’s following up the 911 call is another problem.

Because she wants to.

She could look for Carl and for Nick in the meantime, two of her assignments.

She’s not very obedient. Her car isn’t either. With a mind of its own, it detours and drives right up to McCandor. As she parks, she scans the street for kids who might have made that call, but sees none watching. The scene is casual enough. Hrznak and Nellins are out front eating—not that she can cast stones about eating on the job. She breezes past the two old guys and inside to where the Forensics team is working. Because of the holiday, it’s two of the youngest and least experienced workers, easier to intimidate. “I need lots of scrapings. Everything you see here. And I need to borrow your kit. I want to do a presumptive test for heroin. I’m virtually certain there are drugs on this one.”

“We’re scraping. Planning to. There’s a trace of powder in the corner, there.”

“Well, let me do the presumptive myself.”

“So that Hrznak guy isn’t in charge?”

“It’s okay. I’m working the case, too, from the Narcotics angle.”

“Oh.”

Battery-operated lights have been set up, so the scene is now easier to see.

“The footwear is interesting,” says one of the men, pointing. “Various people were up here and the shoes are not all adult size. Most aren’t.”

“Interesting,” she says, her mind going to the phone calls she intends to trace. All the while she’s gathering residue from the floor, she moves carefully so as not to disturb those child-size shoe prints.

As she’s stooping, scraping up the little bit of powder—could be, could be heroin—she watches the workers. With their inexperience and the boredom projected by Nellins and Hrznak, something could easily fall through the cracks. “This
is
a Narcotics case,” she tells old Farber in her mind.

She thinks. The dead man got it right in the heart. Would have been quick. So what are all the other blood smears, the one close to the wall? The bits on the stairs?

“I suppose Hrznak told you to be careful to keep the blood from different areas distinct, right? It’s going to be interesting to see how many people bled in this place. I’d say more than one person was hurt up here.”

One of the young guys grunts, says, “I thought so. I’ve been keeping it separate.”

“Good going.”

The other has handed over his kit for the presumptive test.

Colleen sends up a small prayer, uses the dropper to add solution to the powder she’s gathered, closes her eyes, opens them again.

Good. Good. Almost certainly heroin. Let the lab people go at it. She can tell Farber … What will she say about why she was back here? Someone on the street said it was a drug house, so she’s following up. That’s it. Some kid, she’ll say. Some kid who said it to her and ran. Too bad, but she has no name for him.

Downstairs she tells the two old fellows, while she looks enviously at their egg-and-bacon wraps, “I’m working Narcotics now, and this one is related. I’ll be checking with you on everything. We need to coordinate. I’ll be very eager to hear what you get on the evidence. Shoe prints, fingerprints. Dead man’s got ten good fingers, so we ought to know who he is soon.”

They look up, dazed.

“Unless he’s homeless,” Nellins says.

“What was in his pocket?”

Hrznak swallows a bite of his breakfast. “A key. Five bucks. A snot rag.”

“Why did whoever killed him not take his money?”

Hrznak shrugs. “In a hurry?”

She leaves the two old detectives and drives over to Lexington, where she listens five times to the tapes. The second is definitely a different kid. Smarter than the first. More responsible and more specific.

There is no way Christie will want to leave the case to the tired old grandpops who just want to take it slow.

   MEG AND JOEL LIFT HIM UP, not an easy task since they are smaller than he; he has to bend his left knee and keep his right leg extended; Laurie fits the crutches in under his arms; slowly he adjusts to an upright position.

“How did you find … where did you get these?”

“Salvation Army shelter. They’re used—I mean left behind by someone. I said my sister needed them for a school project, and some woman went and got them from a back room,” Joel explains. “Okay. Does your leg feel any worse upright?”

“It hurts either way.”

“But not worse?”

“No.”

He moves a little, a few steps, but then he stops, wavering. When he wobbles, he curses.

“We might be moving too fast,” Joel says. “You could just wait a day to use these.”

He doesn’t have a fever this morning, but he is weak, panting after only a few steps. They all look at each other, wondering how to calm him.

“I want to go upstairs,” he says.

“You can’t,” says Joel testily. “I don’t think anybody could the first couple of days—well, maybe an athlete.”

“Here,” says Meg. “Sit down. Use the couch. Keep your leg straight.” She and Laurie support him as he lowers himself to the couch. “There.”

He lets the crutches drop next to him, propped against the sofa. His face is a mask of defeat. “What am I going to do? I can’t move.”

“Not yet. Little by little.” Meg motions to Laurie to take Susannah into the kitchen. The two of them are reluctant to go; they look at him the whole way out. He’s drinking them in, too.

“If you want us to make a bedpan, we will.” He snaps to attention. “I’m not a squeamish type,” Meg says.

Joel sounds firm, but not particularly friendly when he says, “If you decide you want to go upstairs, we need to get you on your butt and you need to use your hands, and one of us has to be around to support your leg. There is no other way.”

He closes his eyes, opens them again. “You think I can get up the steps on my butt?”

“Yes,” Joel says simply. “With help.”

They get him standing again and to the stairway where he lowers himself to sit, landing on the third step. Joel has two hands under the splinted leg. “It’s going to take hand and arm strength. If you don’t feel up to it, say so. You’re probably going to knock yourself out in one trip, because—”

But Nick has begun to hoist himself up, crawling backwards like a crab, Joel crawling forward attached to the crab. Meg follows with the crutches. She senses behind her the other two have drifted back to the bottom of the steps to watch.