Rivers of Gold (11 page)

“You don't talk much, I'm guessing.”

Nothing.

“If you
can
talk, say something,” Santiago attempted in a somewhat less grumpy tone. For him, this was reaching out.

“This car sucks,” More gargled. Santiago could barely make out the words behind the phlegm. More's voice—what there was of it—sounded like it came from beneath a storm drain caked with alluvial mud. More sounded like he hadn't spoken a word in years, or maybe had an errant sliver of bone growing sideways through his larynx. But he
had
spoken, that was something at least.

“You just noticed?” Santiago turned back to face front, grabbed the leaden steering wheel with his left hand, cranked the key with his right, and, miraculously, the tired old V-8 coughed to life.

They had passed that first patrol together in silence. Seven hours and four drag hauls and not one word. The hauls were, in sequence: a UPS driver in the Flatiron District getting a blow job in his truck from a transvestite prostitute; a purse snatcher outside a church in Murray Hill too stoned to run a straight line; a pair of college football players outside a Third Avenue tavern, too sodden with beer to actually make their punches connect; and a derelict hopped up on
paco
who was terrorizing patrons of a sidewalk café on Madison Avenue with a broken bottle, stalking up and down beside the tables, screaming about how much he didn't give a fuck.

Santiago had let More take the lead on the last one, just to see how he'd handle it. It was quite a sight, though a short-lived one. Showing no ill effects from being cooped up in the front seat for hours at a time, More became pure liquid as he slid soundlessly from the cab. The junkie never saw him coming, never heard More identify himself as a police officer, never heard himself being told to drop his weapon and put his hands on his head, because More did none of these things, as he was required to by law. More simply appeared in a blind spot off the derelict's right shoulder and, well, did
something
that was too fast for Santiago to see. The junkie made a loud, croaking noise, dropping the bottle harmlessly in the gutter and clawing for his throat, his legs collapsing beneath him. More cuffed him, dragged him by the scruff of the neck, and threw him in the back of the cab in less than ten seconds, oblivious to the café patrons, who were too terrified even to film the event with their phones. Santiago double-checked to make sure More had secured the drag's manacles to one of the heavy-duty steel rings bolted to the armored partition between the taxicab's front and back seats. By the time he had, More was back in the front seat reading his printout. Santiago noticed he'd swung the overhead visor to the side and diagonally across his window, effectively blocking out the amateur videographers who were now falling over one another trying to get footage with their phones.
Cops
, live, New York City!

It was an extremely slow patrol, given the state of things in the city. A good night for a rookie to break in. Except that More was no rookie, Santiago knew this in his heart. When they went end-of-watch Santiago turned to ask More what unit he'd transferred from, but More had already slammed the door behind him. He hadn't said a word during the entire patrol. He'd had nothing to eat or drink, and hadn't asked for a bathroom break. Stranger still, he hadn't asked about how many credits their hauls would bring in.
Anybody
who transferred to Anticrime asked that, right up front.

It was also just as well, Santiago reflected later, that if there were any off-duty lawyers in the crowd watching More's Anticrime debut, they'd chosen to sit that one out. More had ignored maybe half a dozen procedural regulations while breaking his Anticrime cherry. That in itself was nothing new; Anticrime was rough, dirty work, hence the credit sweetener given to entice recruits who would otherwise pull nice cushy shifts in uniform patrol or Traffic. But More stood out. He'd acted with ruthless efficiency and a blatant disregard for individual rights. Santiago turned this over in his mind during the silent patrol and decided that, until such time as More's MO proved dangerous to his own career path, he was okay with it. Whatever happened, Santiago felt reasonably confident that McKeutchen had his back covered. After all, McKeutchen himself had assigned him this whack-job partner; something would most definitely come to light should there be an Internal Affairs Bureau inquiry.

In fact, Santiago thought, More might be a blessing in disguise, albeit a mixed one, to be sure.

All business, yet somehow completely aloof. Wrapped up in his own little world, though not so much so that he couldn't take care of business when necessary.

Quiet, quick, and out the door.

Like he didn't really care, almost.

Definitely a weird one.

“
Flaco
?”

“
Gordito
?”

“Is he married?”

“Is he gay?”

The interrogation had begun without warning about a month after he'd started working with More, when he'd opened his mouth about his new partner to his John Jay coffee-klatch companions, Lina and Yersinia.

The girls were Mexican-American, born to immigrant families from Mexico's rural south, a bit younger than Santiago, and widely different from each other in temperament. Lina was soft-spoken and demure. She had neat penmanship and took excellent notes, which she sometimes shared with Santiago when he missed a class or arrived late after a long night of drag-hauling. She dressed in old-fashioned argyle and corduroy, which almost completely masked her comely figure, and wore huge glasses that distorted her fine Indian features. Lina had ripped through Introduction to Criminal Justice, finishing at the top of her class, and decided on the spot that she was bound for the DA's office, via Fordham Law School. Sometimes Santiago thought he could picture her, twenty years on, heavy and matronly, dwarfed by towering piles of case folders in a hideous green office on Centre Street somewhere, still wearing those ludicrous glasses. Too bad.

But where Lina was a slow, methodical, sweep-and-clear type of student, Yersinia was all search-and-destroy. She embodied every cliché about hot-blooded Latinas in a way that at times seemed self-parodying. Yersinia smoked Menthol 100s and swore like a truck driver (in English and Spanish, sometimes simultaneously), and seemed to be on a lifelong kick of bitchiness. Every male in the building under the age of eighty turned to watch her sashay by, all black and red and mesh and leather, her ebony hair shining under the fluorescents, her ripe curves ever on display, to Lina's embarrassment (and, Santiago suspected, envy). Yersinia went through men the way Lina went through legal pads, and she seemed to enjoy gloating over each lovelorn nitwit she canceled.

Santiago privately speculated that while Lina would be a delicious neophyte to initiate to sexual maturity, Yersinia would be a no-holds-barred fight for survival. Lina was an inoffensive diversion; Yersinia was a pest, a twenty-four-hour bad-news channel to which his mind somehow always returned.

Despite the inevitable underlying flirtatiousness among the three, nothing had ever progressed beyond their meetings in the cafeteria, where they gathered to caffeinate and vent and trade stories. They were young hungry people who wanted access to what the school's degrees offered them, and despite the playfulness their ages produced, all three were quite serious in their academic pursuits.

They had met in a class called Drugs, Crime, and Latin American Society. It made for some good bull sessions for the three, which naturally segued into Santiago's (primary) job. The girls would grill him about police requirements and procedures, and he in turn would pick their brains about the finer administrative points of law enforcement. Meetings after his court dates were always grist for the mill, as were headline-grabbing crimes; the girls always wanted to know if he'd shot anyone. And of course they loved hearing about the CAB characters he found himself working with.

Like the Narc Sharks. They were the stuff of which legends—or maybe nightmares—were made. They had transferred to Anticrime together from Narcotics, having worked their way north along Manhattan island through precincts thirty to thirty-four. No one knew when or how they had found each other, but they were inseparable. Beginning with street-level buy-and-bust operations, they had developed a fearsome reputation as case crackers and head breakers. Endlessly inventive and openly contemptuous of what they referred to as “the hand that squeezes the nuts” (i.e., the law), they had a simple credo when it came to closing cases: By Any Means Necessary. They had smelled blood when word of the credit package went through the ranks and immediately signed on. If there was drug activity in any sector, they would find it first. They quickly established themselves as top credit scorers, and even McKeutchen didn't want to know the specifics of how they operated. For his part, Santiago was happy to be far away from them. He had no fear of the sneaky little fucks, but sometimes, when the three of them snarled and squabbled in the station, he found himself thinking of one lion facing two hyena, struggling to keep both in view. The Narc Sharks, he speculated, should have gone to Iraq or Afghanistan, but were born street cops, and would probably wind up indicted for war crimes had they enlisted. There had been a drug dealer in East Harlem who had supposedly put a contract out on the Narc Sharks, then gone to ground pending word of their demise. The dealer had been found dead in a third-floor walk-up around the corner from Rao's, shot nearly thirty times. The hit was ultimately pinned on some local gangbangers who could barely read or write, yet, somehow, had managed to intercept cell phone calls from the dealer, which led them to his hideout. The Narc Sharks (AKA detectives Turse and Liesl) had donned collared shirts and ties and slicked back their scraggly manes and sworn under oath they'd had no contact with the defendants, who howled and screamed from their seats and had to be forcibly removed from the courtroom. A pending IAB investigation withered and died on the vine as two members of the gang suddenly overdosed on hot shots. That they did so while in Central Holding in the Courthouse District turned a few heads, but the story was quickly replaced by a spate of fresher, more attention-getting crimes, of which there was never any shortage.

The girls always asked about the Narc Sharks, and Yersinia even wanted to meet them, but Santiago absolutely forbade it. Knowing what Liesl and Turse did on the job, he had no desire to know how they comported themselves off duty. Not with anyone he knew. And not the way things currently stood between the Narc Sharks, himself, and More.

It had happened several weeks earlier, on Gas Fight Night, the second time the fledgling CAB unit nearly went extinct.

It had started typically, with the Narc Sharks bitching about vouchers for gas. When gas prices first topped seven dollars a gallon, NYPD brass ordered paper trails for each and every fill-up of police vehicles citywide, with a cap of no more than one tank per shift. Cops from Kingsbridge to Brownsville bristled at this new directive, for subsidized gas was taken for granted by most patrol cops and all senior officers, who also suckled at the gas nipple for their personal vehicles as well. Now they were not only being called to account for their consumption, they were looking at having to go into their own pockets just to keep their cars running. They had to learn to turn the motors off, too. Shift supervisors were driving
their
cars around looking for cops burning gas just to idle, as cops were wont to do. Precinct stations with their own pumps became covetous posts. McKeutchen, ever prescient, guarded his pump with the ferocity of a mother bear. He had one rule only: Keep the Paper Trail Clear. This did not go down well with unconventional cops like the Narc Sharks, who preferred to keep their doings as nebulous as possible.

Things had come to a head one fine evening when the city was enduring one of its cold, damp, foggy rains that lasted all day and into the night and drove New Yorkers to drink, order in, and watch adult pay-per-view, which is doubtless what most of the CAB cops finishing their shift were planning on. The Narc Sharks, however, were all fired up about whatever it was they were doing after work and couldn't wait to get out the door. (It might have actually
been
work; Santiago didn't know for sure and didn't
want
to know.) When the duty sergeant, an elderly alcoholic marking time until his thirty-year pension, waved the gas vouchers at them, they treated him to the sort of high-intensity ass-chewing normally reserved for the most troublesome drags. That had brought McKeutchen into the fray and soon everybody was screaming at each other, and suddenly Santiago was in the middle of it with Turse in his face calling him a shit-sucking, drag-fucking spic, and Santiago closing the gap between them, and Turse going for his gun, and Santiago locking up Turse's right hand and arm with a
tenkan
variation of the
sankyo
immobilization technique he'd learned from the aikido instructors at John Jay, and there was Liesl coming in from his nine o'clock going for
his
gun, and suddenly More slid fluidly between them, deftly pinning Liesl's arm to his belly in a maneuver Santiago didn't recognize. More pivoted his body, whipping his right foot upward in a vicious clockwise arc that caught Liesl high on the inside left thigh with a muffled
thwap
. Liesl's eyes rolled back up in their sockets and he sank like a stone. In almost the same motion, More had this sci-fi pistol out, a pinprick of green light visible beneath the huge muzzle bore, which also registered unwaveringly on Turse's right cheekbone. More wasn't even breathing hard.