Night Work (43 page)

“Can I drop you anywhere?”

“No. I'm going to walk, and stop for a drink, and walk, and stop for a drink. And so on. Take care, Michael. We will see each other soon.”

*   *   *

The uniformed cop outside Orso's hospital door recognized Cassidy. He nodded toward the room. “He's still out, but the doc's in there. Man, you've been busy, last night and today. I've been on the Force nineteen years. I've drawn my gun three times and never fired it.”

“That's the way it should be.”

“Yeah? I don't know. Seems to me there are a lot of scumbags out there could use a little instant justice.”

The door opened, and the doctor came out followed by a nurse. The doctor was a tall, thin man with a kind face and the long, strong hands of a pianist. “How is he, Doctor?”

“And you are?” A raised eyebrow, and a smile to disarm the question.

“Michael Cassidy. I'm Tony Orso's partner.”

“Ah, family, then. Would you like to take a look in? He's unconscious, but if you want to see…”

Cassidy stepped inside the room. Orso lay on his back. His face was pale and slack. His hair, normally slicked, stood out randomly from his head. Tubes ran from IV stands into his arms. Wires ran from his chest to monitors. His chest rose and fell in slow, shallow breaths. He was a man balanced at the edge of the drop.

The doctor touched Cassidy on the shoulder, and they went back into the corridor.

“I'm Dr. Trager, by the way. Do you mind if we walk while we talk?” They set off down the corridor. “He was hit three times. We had a bit of trouble with the bullet in his shoulder. It lodged against the brachial plexus. This is a network of nerves that comes from the spine. They pass through the armpit, and run down the arm. I'm a little worried that we're going to see some nerve damage. The major concern would be damage to the median nerve, because it branches down into the hand and serves the thumb, index, and middle fingers. He's right-handed, isn't he?”

“Yes.”

“So that might be a problem, but of course the biggest concern we face is that his body has received a massive insult, and there is no real way to predict how it will react. Some people absorb this kind of punishment and two days later they announce they want to go dancing. Some people take a minor hit, and just like that they're gone. Were you in the war, Detective Cassidy?”

“Yes.” They stopped in front of double doors marked AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.

“Then you've seen that. You know what I'm talking about. But Orso seems a vigorous man, so perhaps it rests with how much he wants to live. You know him. Does he want to live?”

Cassidy thought about Orso sitting at the table in his bedroom, his hand on the gun. “I don't know. I hope so. When will you know more?”

“The next twenty-four hours should tell. I'll leave your name with the nurses as family so you can call in. I have to go. I'm due in surgery.” He smiled encouragement. His handshake was firm and brief. The doors flapped behind him.

Cassidy patted his pockets for cigarettes and found he had none. He set out to look for a cigarette machine and was told by a janitor mopping the floor at the open door to a ladies room that there was one in the waiting room at the end of the corridor.

Dylan stood next to it feeding quarters into the machine.

*   *   *

They sat at a table in a corner of the basement cafeteria and drank weak coffee and smoked, and he told her what happened in the basement of the hotel across from Penn Station. When he finished she reached across the table to squeeze his hand. “You saved Castro's life.”

“Did I? I don't think Fuentes would have tried when Castro was surrounded by cops. We could have gotten him to the train without incident and sent him off to Boston. But I wanted Fuentes. I used Castro like bait to bring him in. I wanted him for what he did to you. I wanted him for killing that shit Echevarria who I despised, but I despised how Fuentes killed him even more. I may have gotten my partner killed. I almost got another good cop and Ribera killed. I never stopped to think that Fuentes would not come alone, that he would have Lopato at hand somewhere. I never stopped to think that he would have his own ideas about how things would happen. You know why I didn't think about it? Because I didn't want to look at all the reasons I shouldn't do what I wanted to do.”

Dylan pushed her half-f coffee cup away. “God, that stuff is foul. Why can't they make good coffee in America?” She took a cigarette from the pack on the table and lit it. “You're right. You made some stupid choices.”

“Now I feel better.”

“But Castro's alive, and Fuentes is dead, and if he was still alive, he would have gone to Boston, and if he missed there, he would have gone to Canada and tried again. Maybe someone some day will get Fidel, but it won't be that son of a bitch. So thank you. And I'm sorry about Orso, but he's not dead, and maybe he'll be okay. There's no way to go back and undo what you did. Leave it. Move on.”

Dylan was at the hospital, because Slava was on the floor below Orso's recovering from his gunshot wound. “The bullet went in and out. It didn't hit bone. They'll let him go in a couple of days. Carlos will get him on a plane.” She read something in his face. “What?”

“We have some eyewitness descriptions of the man who was with General Garza y Mendoza the afternoon he was killed. Tall, strong, fit, very pale hair. They all remarked on the hair.”

Dylan became still, and tried to show him nothing, but her eyes were worried. “What are you going to do?”

“Get him out of here as fast as you can. Some other cop might put two and two together.”

“Thank you.” She took his hand. “I know you're doing it for me, Michael.”

“Yeah, well, if I'm going to fuck up, I might as well get it all done at once.” He took her cigarette and took a drag and then gave it back to her. “I want to see you again.”

“I don't think that's a good idea.”

“What are you going to do now?”

“I told him I'd bring him some cigarettes before I left the hospital. He must be wondering where I am.”

It was not what he meant by the question. He meant, where would she go, what would she do next, where would he find her if he looked for her? But her answer showed how empty his hopes were.

They stood up from the table together. They knew they had to go, and neither wanted to be the first. Cassidy put out his hand. Dylan took it and used it to pull them together. A good-bye kiss that went on longer than good-bye. Dylan broke it, turned, and walked away quickly.

So that was that.

*   *   *

“She loves you, you know,” Alice said in the darkness of the bedroom.

“I don't think so.”

“Trust me. She does.”

“Is that one of those secrets women know and men don't?”

“Yes.”

“She married someone else.”

“Women marry men for all kinds of reasons. Love isn't always one of them.”

“She'll be in Cuba in a few days, and then who knows where.”

“That's just geography.” She rolled closer and put a leg over him. “We're going to stop talking about your other women now, okay?”

“Okay.”

“'Cause talking to your guy about other women who love him does not make a girl feel all sexy and interested, so I'm going to sleep, and when I wake up, I'm going to have a whole new attitude about that.” She rose on one elbow and kissed him on the corner of his mouth, and then turned over and was asleep in minutes.

The dream woke him at dawn.

Dream mosaic—fragments and bits, but never the whole picture. Orso and gunfire, and a garden somewhere with someone he could not identify asking if he wanted lime with his drink. But he wasn't drinking. A dog, and the boy in a Buckley School hat laughing and pointing at someone. At who? At Cassidy sitting on a kitchen chair, and then the elevator doors started to open, and a woman turned around and pointed a gun at him.
Cassidy lurched up out of sleep with his heart pounding.

Alice slept deeply beside him. He got up and went into the living room. The dream still held him, and his heart would not slow. Who was the woman with the gun? He stood at the windows and looked out through the gray light of dawn over the tops of the piers to the river beyond, but he did not see it, because the dream fragments were fading and he concentrated on trying to hold on to them.

Lime. There was something he knew about lime. What was it? Don't think about it. Maybe it will come.

He went into the kitchen and filled the coffeepot with water, put grounds in the basket, and set it on the stove to perk while he took a shower.

How does the brain work? Hot water to relax it, coffee to stimulate it, and the memory of being on his sister's terrace bubbled up unbidden. The gardener, Fred, saying something about putting lime in one of the planters to correct the balance in the soil.

Jesus Christ, it's been right in front of you all the time, and you couldn't see it. Maybe you're getting too stupid to do this job.

He knew how they had moved Casey Allen on his chair to the park where Jane Hopkins would find him.

 

30

The rain was gone by the time Cassidy left the apartment. The rain had washed the city, leaving crystal air the traffic had not yet dirtied. The sun was still low down in the stone canyons to the east, but it promised the first really hot day of spring.

He spent an hour in the squad room on the phone and then went out into the warming day and walked north to 72nd Street and west to Central Park. He did not see Jane Hopkins and her red setter, and it was too late for Seth Rutherfurd and his dog, Tinker. He would be in school. No sign remained of murdered Casey Allen sitting on his chair.

Cassidy walked out onto Bethesda Terrace. The trees in the park were now thick with new green leaves. When he turned, he could see the maintenance shed where the gunmen had waited to kill Castro. The only sign of that explosive night was the length of yellow police tape hanging from the door. Time helped nature cover all scars.

He turned away and walked down the wide stairs and along one of the paths to the Conservatory Water, the shallow concrete-rimmed pond where people sailed model boats. The children who used it most were in school, and the few people there were serious enthusiasts who spent their days as they wished. He watched an elderly man in a well-cut coffee-colored linen suit use a bamboo pole to turn his six-foot-long model of an America's Cup defender J-boat to catch the wind. It was an exquisite replica, so beautifully made to scale that you expected to see a tiny crew working the deck. The sails filled and the boat heeled and slipped across the pond as if friction had been abolished. At the other side of the pond, a man who could have been the first man's twin turned the boat with his bamboo pole and sent it back. A puff of wind tightened the sails, and it came across fast. It was the largest boat on the pond, and if it encountered another boat it pushed it aside,
force majeure
. When the J-boat reached the shore, the elderly man beckoned and a man in a chauffeur's uniform stepped forward and lifted it from the water. It was too heavy to hold away from him, and the front of his uniform was quickly wet. The elderly man walked away and the chauffeur followed carrying the boat. When they reached the other side of the pond, the man's twin fell in step and they strolled toward Fifth Avenue talking quietly with the chauffeur trailing.

Barney Rose and Kevin Rotella were planting a tree near the north end of the pond. The tree was nearly six feet tall, and its root ball was bound in burlap. It lay on the floor of the army green Parks Department van parked on the sidewalk six feet from the hole they had dug for the tree. Their pickaxe and shovels leaned against the end of the bench where the two men took a cigarette break.

“Can I get a light?” Cassidy asked.

“Sure,” Rose said and handed him his cigarette. Cassidy lit his off the burning coal and handed it back. “Thanks. How are you guys doing?”

“Yeah. Fine. Hey, wait a minute. I know you.” Rotella was the smarter of the two. “You're that cop, right?”

“Right.”

“What's up? They got you patrolling the park these days?” Rotella offered him a wiseass grin.

“Actually, I was looking for you two.” He caught the worried look that passed between them. “I wanted to ask you a question about fertilizer.” They both relaxed.

“Yeah, sure,” Rotella said. “What do you want to know?”

“Do you use lime to balance soil?”

“Yeah. I mean if you've got too much acid in your soil, you add lime, otherwise you might add gypsum if you've got, like, too much clay or maybe too much salt.”

“How does lime come, in sacks?”

“Yeah. Twenty-five pounds. Fifty pounds.”

“Do you use much?”

“All the time, right, Barney?”

“Yeah. High acidity in the soil all over the park.” They both had settled back in the bench, lulled by the innocence of the questions, happy to show their knowledge.

“Is it tough on the hands? Do you have to wear gloves, or what?”

“Yeah, gloves. Otherwise you can burn your skin.”

“Can I see? I might as well buy what the experts use.”

“Sure.” Rose found his gloves on the bench and tossed them to Cassidy.

Cassidy examined them. “These look pretty worn. Do they last?”

“I've had those, I don't know, three months? That's pretty good.” Whatever had worried them had slipped away.

“What about you,” Cassidy said to Rotella. “Do you use the same kind?”

“No. I like these.” He tossed his to Cassidy.

“Do these last?”

“Yeah. Three or four months.”

“So you guys were wearing these gloves when you carried Casey Allen on the chair out of the van and put him down where she told you to.” A quick “what the fuck” look passed between them. “You probably should have thrown them away, because we're going to find that the fibers and lime from these gloves are going to match the fibers and lime on the bottom of the chair you took out of his workshop.” Rotella started to make a turn toward the pickaxe next to him. Cassidy stepped back and opened his jacket so they could see the holstered pistol. “Don't. Don't do anything stupider than you've already done. Which one of you shot him?”