Rivers of Gold (24 page)

Santiago nodded distractedly. He was watching DC Derricks, who had ambled over to More, who had popped the taxicab's hood. The two huddled together over the engine bay, out of sight and earshot, their conversation just out of reach of the group. Santiago strained to hear what they were saying, but he got the Narc Sharks in his face. Liesl wore a faded, torn Sex Pistols T-shirt; Turse wore a yellow one with
I
TO FART
emblazoned in brown across the front.

“Burnout's name is Arun Ladhani. Cabbie for the Sunshine Taxi Corp. Two priors for possession back in ninety-eight and ninety-nine, misdemeanors, both suspended. Clean TLC test records for years. He's fuckin' dirty,” reported Liesl through a mouthful of cashews. For once, the chiefs were silent.

“GPS printouts of his trip sheets going back the last three months show him coming back repeatedly to a handful of locations, several times each in the same night. The last one was at the old Toy Building, where the second victim, whatshisname, Jangahir Khan, was working just before he disappeared. He's fuckin' filthy,” Turse informed them, spraying chewed-up pieces of cashew onto Santiago, who was hovering dangerously close to a personal event horizon.

McKeutchen sensed this and added: “Those reports your sister was feeding us about all the ODs? I had these two run them down. I had a hunch they were connected to the speaks somehow and they were. But we had no eyes on buys, anywhere. And since we didn't know where the next speak was gonna be—”

“—we started looking for the ones that already happened,” Liesl finished.

“We figured we'd start with the night the first victim was discovered, when you two were playing mumbletypeg with those drags on Broome Street,” Turse put in. “With the cabbies' GPS trip sheets, we could see who was driving where on any given shift. We did digital overlays of driver routes shift by shift, and found the patterns.”

“It's the cabs,” McKeutchen explained. “If you get a couple cabbies on your payroll, disable the onboard cameras, have them drive around the block, do the handoff inside, maybe through the partition or in some hidden compartment, whatever. The switch is in the cabs.”

“How'd you know to look at the cabs in the first place?” Santiago asked, perplexed.

“We didn't. He did,” Liesl said, nodding toward More, who was still huddled with DC Derricks.

“Your partner's a fuckin' genius,” said Turse. “We find this Arun guy, we find the dope.” This stung Santiago, who had backchanneled the information they'd gotten from the Talwinders and Baijanti Divya to McKeutchen himself.

“We find Arun, we can roll up a whole fuckin'
network
,” Liesl said excitedly. “Who knows how many cabs they've got working?”

“Who knows how long they've been running this scam?” Turse said, all jazzed up. Santiago was starting to get it, felt himself catching the narcs' buzz. Busting a single crooked cabbie was one thing, but this was their first real crack in the speak wall, and it meant a mountain of credits for the cops who broke it wide open.

Santiago realized that McKeutchen had staged this for their benefit. The Chief of Detectives was bitching
sotto voce
and scratching himself all over. “I fuckin' hate this,” he griped. Santiago couldn't tell if it was the course of the case or the weather he found more irritating.

“Put some talc in your taint,” offered McKeutchen, deadpan. The chief stopped scratching and looked at him with an expression that could kindly be described as incredulous.

Eager to avert further contributions of this sort by his CO, Santiago jumped into the conversation with both feet. “Okay, I'll bite. The drugs in the speaks come from cabs that circle the party zone. They pick up and drop off customers and make the switch onboard. We got a line on one of the cabbies, maybe we flip him. Then what? What if he doesn't know where the next one is until it happens? If we bug his cab we don't get anything that we don't have already. If we pose as cabbies ourselves, it's just buy-and-bust, no big deal. Where's the dope?”

“Where's the money?” glagged More, silently materializing between the Narc Sharks, who jumped at the rattle of his voice. “We find that, we get the key to their communications, locations, everything.”

“Who the fuck're you?” DC Saffran asked, glaring at More.

“He's ESU,” McKeutchen answered, and Santiago picked up a subtle tone of urgency in his voice. “CAB volunteer, partnered with Detective Santiago here,” McKeutchen said quickly, flicking his eyes over to Santiago.

The Narc Sharks were frothing by now. “Let's roust the good Mr. Ladhani and hook his nuts up to a car battery,” Liesl suggested. The chiefs looked like they'd bitten into lemons.

“You know where this Sunshine place is?” Santiago asked, playing along for McKeutchen's sake.

“I've got a better idea,” More coughed.

“Oh shit,” Santiago sighed.

“Hear him out,” McKeutchen ordered.

“Who the fuck
is
this guy?” Chief Saffran whined, tugging his trousers out of the valley of his ass.

While More rode with the Narc Sharks to see Baijanti Divya about his absurd plan, Santiago took some time for himself. He had a friend at the Real Time Crime Center, and on a hunch, he gave her More's name and asked her to see what she could dig up. Then he drove down to the Public Library main branch, dumping the cab in its loading bay behind the abandoned Bryant Park Grill.

Between CUNY and John Jay, Santiago had spent plenty of time at the main branch, and had become friends with David Smith, a librarian who went out of his way to help writers and researchers. Smith looked a bit like a balding, bespectacled beaver, but he knew every inch of the library, and he procured the materials Santiago requested in almost no time flat.

Santiago was sick and tired of playing catch-up with More. It was time to get ahead, and part of that meant learning the taxi business. With a notepad and pen he attacked the pile of books and printouts Smith had turned up on the industry, taking up the end of one of the common tables in the main reference room. He sponged through the early hansom-cab days of horse-drawn buggies. He soldiered through the strikes and plowed through the taxi wars of the 1930s, when cabs were torched and brains spilled out of cracked skulls during some of the worst union violence in city history. He absorbed the rise of Checker and the fall of the unions; he even dug up the scandal surrounding the diesel medallion issue More had mentioned earlier. He clambered over the peak in cabdriver murders in the early 1990s, the driver protests and the Plexiglas partitions that followed. He glided through the free rides cabbies gave in the weeks following 9/11, the FBI raids on cabbies' homes in Queens and Brooklyn, the deportations. And he saw Baijanti Divya photographed at the head of the 1998 and 2004 strikes, and the protests for fuel surcharges after Katrina, Iraq, and OPEC sent gas prices through the roof.

He called Smith over from his desk when he was through and thanked him for his help, and complimented him on how quickly he had pulled the material together.

“No big deal,” Smith said nasally. “I just gave you the same stuff I pulled for the other guy.”

Santiago went rock-still. “What other guy?”

“The cop. The one who said he worked in an undercover cab.”

Santiago sat back down in the chair he had just stood up from. “Describe him,” he said quietly.

“Well, he kinda looks like a bum,” Smith said, “or an NYU student. That's what I figured he was until he showed me his badge.”

Santiago felt the room pulling away from him. “What else did he ask for?” he asked in a very low voice.

Smith shrugged. “Said he wanted to check out the roof structure.”

“Check out the roof structure,” Santiago repeated almost inaudibly.

“Yeah. We don't usually allow that but, y'know, he's a cop and all …”

“Yeah,” Santiago whispered, “he's just a cop. Show me where he went,” he added in a barely audible voice, then, very slowly, he leaned over and began softly hitting his head against the varnished tabletop.

Santiago's friend from the Crime Center texted him as he robotically headed down the marble stairs to the library's Fifth Avenue entrance. He thought he would sit on the stairs and watch the pigeons for a while until he could trust himself to go back to the station.

He read the message twice. His friend had accessed possibly every law-enforcement database in the country, and got only one hit on a More, E., nearly one year earlier, a moving violation in Jacksonville, North Carolina.

Santiago pulled up the GPS in his phone. What the hell was in Jacksonville, North Carolina? The Hofmann State Forest. The Paradise Point Golf Course.

And the U.S. Marine Corps base at Camp Lejeune.

“I gotchu,
carajo
,” Santiago snarled loudly, scrambling a squadron of pigeons into the air.

He hit every green light on the way to the station. Once inside, he printed out a hard copy of More's violation, a speeding ticket on State Route 17, and stormed into McKeutchen's office, slamming the door behind him. McKeutchen was so startled he dropped his magnifying glass, with which he had been inspecting a large gob of orange wax he had just painstakingly excavated from his left ear.

“Problem?” McKeutchen asked around the wad of gum in his maw. It was apple-flavored, his favorite, and the smell made Santiago feel sick.

Santiago slammed the printout on McKeutchen's desk hard enough to make the lamp bounce.

McKeutchen stared at the paper for a good thirty seconds, saying nothing. He even stopped chewing.

“What is he?” Santiago asked, trying very hard to keep his voice level. He was angry and hurt and confused, and for the first time in many years almost felt like crying. He would admit this to no man.

McKeutchen looked sullen and pouty. Santiago put his hands on the desk, leaned over into McKeutchen's face, and just barely managed to growl “WHAT IS HE?” before recoiling from the awful reek of apple gum. He sank into one of the visitors' chairs on the far side of the desk.

McKeutchen sighed. “Force Recon.”

Santiago felt the room slowly beginning to rotate. “Explain.”

McKeutchen laced his fat fingers together. “Uncle Sam's worried about our situation. He views it as something of a dark time in our august city's history, what with riots and EARgasms and the wholesale breakdown of society. Little things like that. Since he went broke bailing out every industry in the country, Sammy's now looking for someone to bail
him
out. Now, to do that requires a shitload of money, and since our own isn't worth much anymore, we have to get it from outside the country. When you mix government and money, two things will happen: (a) the government will fuck everything up royally, and (b) wondrous opportunities arise for bad guys all over the planet who have buckets of dirty money that they need to wash clean.

“As far as I've been told, and I damn sure haven't been told everything, somebody thinks there's dirty money mixed in with the clean money flowing in from overseas, mainly from sovereign wealth funds. This somebody knows very well that there's no legal way to do anything about this, since said funds aren't subject to the laws of our great nation, and since they are under no obligation to disclose their investors. How do you audit a foreign country? Never mind that the first account you ask about is a lawyer who tells you to get fucked in every orifice, in triplicate.” McKeutchen paused to let this soak in.

Santiago felt dizzy and nauseous. Speaks, drugs, dead cabbies, and fucking sovereign wealth funds. Spooks in DC and batshit marines in cabs. Maybe he should have stayed in Traffic. No. Fuck that.

Santiago wasn't in a graduate program at John Jay for nothing. “The Posse Comitatus Act keeps the military and law enforcement separate.”

McKeutchen pointed both index fingers at Santiago, his hands still laced together. “Wrong. The PCA was a product of Reconstruction. After the Civil War, the Army had garrisons all over the South, where they had bushwhackers and the Klan and other upstanding citizens exercising their constitutional right to be assholes. It was bad enough that the Army was stretched so thin, but to make matters worse, the civil policing it was forced to carry out meant it was getting sucked into dicey political situations that Congress figured federal troops had no business being in. The states had to police themselves.