Authors: Lorenzo Carcaterra
“Secrets of the trade,” Ryan said, smiling. “If I told you, Andy here would have to pump two into the back of your ears.”
Calise refused to smile back. “Least you could do is let me take the wire out.”
“Sorry, Augie,” Ryan said, snapping a cord into a set of earphones and resting them around his neck. “I’m the only one who can touch her. My hands’ve got a priority one clearance.”
“Who the hell gave you that?” Calise asked, checking the traffic in front of the building.
“I was born with it,” Jimmy Ryan said.
• • •
J
IMMY
R
YAN WAS
orphaned at birth, abandoned in an upstate New York hospital by frightened teenage parents. His childhood memories revolved around a series of loveless foster homes inhabited by faceless adults, too anonymous to call parents, too familiar to call strangers. He grew up quiet and alone, confiding in no one, reluctant to form bonds, knowing they could soon be severed by the sudden shrill ring of a telephone.
The calls always came at night.
They would soon be followed by the mad rush to pack secondhand clothes into a worn valise and the false warmth of hurried good-byes. The car rides to each new family were always silent. Jimmy would sit in the back, scrunched down in his seat, eyes peering out at the passing landscape, feeling empty and lost.
He never stayed with any one family for more than a year. His plight was similar to thousands of other unwanted youngsters his age, all pawns in a statewide bureaucracy shuffle that revolved around cash payments. Children locked inside the state’s foster care system were peddled off to applicant families who agreed to take them into their homes for a maximum twelve-month period. In return, they would receive average monthly checks of $78 per child, money meant to cover food and clothing expenses. More often than not, the checks helped cover gambling habits and drink binges. At any time, either the child, foster parent, or a system representative could rescind the deal, trucking the orphan off to still another foreign place to call home.
In one eight-month period, between fourth and fifth grades, Jimmy was moved three separate times, each new set of parents welcoming him to his new home and then just as eagerly seeing him off only a few weeks later.
Jimmy’s way of life didn’t leave much room for hobbies. There were no baseball card collections to hoard or comic books hidden on dusty shelves to be read in the dead of night. There weren’t any kittens to hold or fish tanks to tend. Though Jimmy loved to read, he owned few books of his own. Anything to make packing easier.
Jimmy did have one passion, and he fell back on it to help get him through those early dark years. With a magical talent for anything electrical, he welcomed the secondhand toys his array of foster parents would send his way. Plug-in remote-control robots that had smashed into too many walls, chewed-up tape recorders, acid-stained transistor radios: They all found their way into Jimmy Ryan’s hands.
Slowly and with great care, Jimmy would take a gadget apart, reconfigure the wiring, and emerge with something virtually new. If he had the time and the tools, he would even add a few fresh dimensions to his re-creation.
In his empty hours, Jimmy pored through the electronics magazines he found in local libraries and carted
out as many books on the subject as he had time to read. He absorbed all the knowledge available, stored it, and shared it with no one. Then, when that knowledge would do him the most good, Jimmy Ryan would figure a way to put it to use.
Ryan planted his first bug when he was twelve.
He was living with a plumber, George Richards, who had a short-fuse temper and a wife with a flirtatious eye. They both drank heavily and often took the frustrations of a night’s drunk out on the boy. The wife, Elaine, began her assaults with an angry voice and ended them with an even louder flurry of slaps, leaving Jimmy with a series of welts and bruises hidden under his shirts and sweaters. Afterward, she scolded him into silence and backed the warnings with hard hits across already reddened flesh.
Jimmy Ryan never uttered a word.
Instead, he laid a wire inside the main bedroom of the Richardses’ two-story stucco house in Peekskill, New York. The wire was wrapped around a wooden board under the queen-size mattress. It connected to a remote mini-recorder taped under a bureau next to the bed. On those tapes, Jimmy listened and learned about the couple he was told to call Mom and Dad.
He heard about their mounting debts and backed-up loans. He laughed as George boasted about customers he double-billed and how Elaine had her doctor file false medical claims in return for half the insurance check. But the best tapes of all, and the ones that would extract the sweetest justice, involved Elaine and her lover, Carl, a real estate attorney who also happened to be her brother-in-law. They shared two passionate afternoons a week, finishing their lovemaking just before Jimmy got home from school. All of it, from moans of pleasure to rants against George, was picked up by Jimmy’s spool of tape.
On the night he was sent away, packed valise in his left hand, Jimmy stood before George and Elaine.
“We’re sorry it didn’t work out,” Elaine told him, already on her third gin and tonic.
Jimmy nodded, checking the inside pocket of his tattered hunting jacket, making sure the dozen tapes were safely tucked away.
“Gonna miss having you here,” George said, holding a longneck bottle of beer.
“I have a gift for you,” Jimmy told George. “To thank you for what you did for me.”
“You kiddin’?” George rested a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “You got me a gift?” He turned to Elaine, hitting her with a scornful gaze, then looked back at Jimmy with a smile.
Jimmy reached into his pocket and took out the set of tapes, neatly wrapped in flowered tissue paper and held together with a ribbon.
“Want me to open it now?” George asked, taking the package and holding it in both hands.
“Maybe you should wait,” Jimmy said, looking over at Elaine. “Until you’re by yourself.”
“Thank you,” George said, nodding his head. “I’ll never forget you doin’ this.”
Jimmy buttoned his coat and picked up his valise. “I know,” he said.
He walked past George and Elaine for the last time, toward the front door, a waiting car, and another set of parents.
• • •
T
HE WOMAN IN
the red pumps knocked on the door to Room 1211, silver bracelet jangling against her wrist.
“It’s like she’s knockin’ on the front hood of the car,” Calise said. “It’s so damn clear.”
“Narcotics have their guys in place?” Jimmy asked, head down, fingers adjusting a series of sound dials.
“They got four in the next suite,” Fitz said. “And three more in a stairwell down the hall. She gets jammed up, should take less than a minute to get to her.”
“Unless they’re asleep,” Calise said. “Which is always fuckin’ possible with those dimrods.”
The door handle snapped open and a man’s voice warmly greeted the woman. He spoke in a thick Spanish accent.
“She’s in,” Jimmy said, sitting straight up and flipping a red switch on to full volume.
“How long you givin’ her?” Fitz said.
“All she needs,” Jimmy said. “These guys are top line. They’re gonna play her first. Make sure she’s legit before they close the deal.”
“What about her?” Calise asked. “How good is she?”
“I’ll let you know in about half an hour,” Jimmy said, putting the earphones back over his head.
• • •
A
T SEVENTEEN
, J
IMMY
Ryan did a two-year tour of duty with another foster family of sorts, the U.S. Army. While stationed in Germany, the dark-haired, coal-eyed Ryan was allowed to fuel his passion by working as an electronic surveillance trainee. The army brass was impressed with his ability to handle their most sophisticated equipment and asked him to stay on for an additional four years, promising him tours of Mexico and the Middle East. Ryan, bored and unimpressed with the military regimen and tired of spending weeks without being able to cast his electric gaze on a beautiful woman, took a pass and signed out.
He was in New York City, taking a two-week seminar on wiretapping at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, when he spotted a civil service flyer posted on a hall bulletin board. He ripped it down and signed up to take the New York Police Department exam. Six months later, working as a clerk for a small electronics firm on Queens Boulevard, Ryan got the letter that paved his way to becoming a cop.
He spent a dull sixteen months in uniform and then was transferred to the Manhattan Drug Task Force,
working undercover, doing what he had prepared all his life to do—lay down wires, plant devices, and listen to the secrets of others. The assignment also freed Ryan from the uneasy potential for gunplay, the area of police work he cared for the least. He was a listener, content to skirt the perimeters of other people’s worlds, but never eager to enter any one of them.
There were more than enough guys on the squad who had become cops looking to play cowboy, feeding off the nerve rush of the split-second shoot-out. Jimmy Ryan, rugged and catalogue handsome, with a head of thick curly hair and a John Garfield smile, liked living on the outside, doing his police work from a safe distance. He carried only the one gun, the .38 Special, and had never fired it in the line of duty. His danger zone rested in the mining of the wire and the spinning of the spool. Not in the spilling of blood.
• • •
W
ITH THE MONEY
he’d saved from the army, plus his heavy overtime earnings as a cop, Ryan bought his first home, a single-family wood frame on Staten Island, six miles from lower Manhattan. It was the first place he could ever call his own, and he stocked it with books, electronic equipment, stereos, radios—all the toys of a childhood he was never allowed to have.
He worked constantly; his expertise was sought out by every undercover operation team leader throughout the five boroughs. Ryan linked his affinity for computers to his electrical magic show and turned the tedious routine of police surveillance into a state-of-the-art experience. He could tap on anyone, from mob bosses to drug rollers to politicians bagging payoffs. He could lay a wire anywhere, from a car bumper to the hull of a yacht, the sound always clear, the reams of information the tapes generated almost always enough to put away the voice. He was the best bug the NYPD ever had.
The respect the other cops showed him was comforting to Jimmy Ryan. It was his first taste of family.
The cops on the job called him Pins.
Ryan loved bowling and was captain of the Manhattan Task Force team. Every Thursday and Sunday night, he could be found pounding lanes at alleys throughout New York, competing against other squads from around the city. He was the police league’s MVP three years running, holding a steady 201 average and walking off with an armful of trophies.
As much as he loved what he was doing, he had his life beyond the police force planned out.
He would open a small electronics store within walking distance of his home and think about doing six-month tours as a professional bowler. Neither job would be done for the money, but for the pleasure.
They were simple dreams.
Ryan had spent a childhood locked away in silent places where faces and names blended together. It taught him not to stray far from the cold glare of reality and to trust only what he found comfort in, what he knew would never betray him. The cold, sterile world of electronic surveillance was all Jimmy Ryan ever counted on. The shiny brown lanes of smoke-filled bowling alleys were his sanctuary.
And like his home and the police department, the rare places he could call his own.
• • •
T
HE MAN WITH
the heavy Spanish accent sounded agitated.
“You were supposed to bring the cash yourself,” he told the woman in the red pumps.
“It couldn’t be worked out,” the woman answered coolly, traces of a southern accent hidden by a dozen New York winters. “So I had a friend arrange it. He should be here in a few minutes.”
“We didn’t ask your friend to bring the money,” the man said. “We asked
you.
”
“I’ve known him all my life,” she said, still cool. “I trust him. So can you.”
“I trust no one,” he said. “It is what’s kept me alive.”
“Sad way to live,” the woman said.
“In my business, it’s the only way to live,” the man said. “Trust ends with a bullet.”
• • •
“H
E’S ON TO
her, Pins,” Calise said. “You can hear it in his voice.”
“It’s too early to move,” Fitz said. “We don’t know if he’s got the shit with him. We bust in and he don’t have the drugs, he walks away clean. And we can’t touch that fucker ever again.”
“You can send Steve in earlier,” Jimmy said. “Once he sees the cash, he’ll be calm.”
“I don’t wanna spook the narcs,” Calise said. “They always look to end these things with guns.”
“Then, I’ll go in,” Jimmy said.
“
You?
” Fitz scoffed. “Since when do
you
go in?”
“You guys handle the equipment and I’ll go up.”
“As
what!
” Calise said, turning to face Jimmy.
“Hotel’s got computerized phone lines,” Jimmy said. “It’ll take me about two minutes to find the basement and short-circuit the phones in the suite. Then I go up, knock on the door, and ask to check the phones.”
“Dressed in a bowling jacket with your name on the chest and jeans,” Fitz said. “What’d you do last night, take a bowling ball to the head?”
“We need the kilos and we need him,” Jimmy said, resting the attaché case on the seat next to him and opening the car’s rear door. “And we need time to get both. This buys it for us.”
“What about the machine?” Calise said. “You’re the only one knows how to run the fuckin’ thing.”
“It’ll run itself,” Jimmy said, looking at the two cops.
“All you gotta do is listen. And be there if I need you.”
“Have I ever let you down?” Calise asked.
“Yes,” Jimmy said.