Rivers of Gold Read online

  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.

  And McKeutchen started bellowing strange things like Not my men and Not cops, not cops, at More.

  Santiago had never backed down from a fight in his life, and he had learned firsthand how time and events can seem distorted through the carnival mirror of combat. McKeutchen’s ravings only added to the confusion.

  It was only much, much later, after everyone’s evening plans had been ruined, after they all were finally allowed to reclaim their weapons after mandatory disarmament, after McKeutchen had screamed himself hoarse about how they were supposed to be fighting fucking crime, not each other, after he’d given the entire CAB unit a dressing-down that reminded Santiago of the drill sergeant in Full Metal Jacket (except Liesl, who only came to after the speech was over and McKeutchen had released everyone—and except More, whom he’d sequestered in his office with the door locked and the blinds down), only after he’d faced down a glowering Turse, who was helping his groggy partner to their cab, only after all that did McKeutchen’s odd exclamations come back to him.

  What the hell was he talking about? Not cops?

  McKeutchen’s door banged open and More slouched out. If he’d suffered any ill effects from his extra time in McKeutchen’s personal toolshed, they did not register. Santiago found his head suddenly filling up with too many questions too quickly. He started after More, then stopped, then tried to phrase some of his jumbled thoughts, but instead what came out was:

  “Hey … thanks …”

  But More was already gone.

  Their first patrol together passed into memory quickly enough. There’d been other, nastier drag hauls: the elementary-schoolers who’d pushed a wheelchair-bound paraplegic in front of a bus; the teens who’d tied their middle-aged teacher to her chair and set her on fire; and the pack of marauding gay twenty-somethings, fried on meth, that they’d discovered gang-raping a male Fashion Institute of Technology student between dumpsters on West Twenty-seventh Street, in the now-defunct Nightclub Alley.

  And now some fruitless poking around into a fast-cooling case the homicide dicks didn’t want, some Arab cabbie named Eyad who’d apparently picked up the wrong fare, one with psychopathic tendencies and a toolbox. It was a half-hearted effort that yielded little more than the crime scene itself, which had happened to be in close physical and temporal proximity to their fiasco on Broome Street. Beyond that, they had nothing.

  Santiago, grudgingly, came to admit that while More wasn’t exactly the best company, he was more than up to the job. More never hesitated to throw down with drags (who always gave him ample opportunity to do so), but he never seemed to get carried away, either. The Narc Sharks, Santiago knew, were up for at least one brutality complaint (one of their drags, who’d ended up in St. Vincent’s ICU, turned out to be the son of a senior market analyst at Urbank) and were having a hard time keeping their interview date with IAB, for which McKeutchen discreetly provided cover.

  His frontline CAB investigators (McKeutchen had declared to a snarling crowd of reporters during a press conference) were now “actively engaged” in what he referred to as Operation Coploscopy, targeting the drug trade in the city’s bars. Santiago knew McKeutchen was just using this as a cover to get up on the speaks, but since he had an e-mail from the mayor’s office demanding immediate action to curtail the surge in drug-related violence around the city (having hitherto kept a straight face, McKeutchen turned positively gleeful as he flashed the hard copy for the pod of obese, hungover cameramen), he was putting on a show to keep City Hall and the Council from his door (and using the operation’s name on camera as a dig at the assholes who’d come up with the gas caps that had nearly caused his unit to self-destruct).

  The insertions had actually been going on long before McKeutchen’s press conference. On Santiago’s team, More had silently agreed to take point, looking as unremarkable as he did. Santiago had been working with More long enough to see the human features behind the Fish Face: A fine web of creases ringed his eye sockets, and fine straight lines made nearly indiscernible axes across and down the tight fleshless planes of More’s hard-edged cheekbones and jaw, as though he’d spent a lot of time in someplace very hot, or else very cold and bright. Under the station-house fluorescents these lines instantly aged More nearly a decade, but in the gloom of a bar they effectively disappeared, making More seem like just another raggedy-ass student, a look he sometimes enhanced with an unlit cigarette in the corner of his mouth, or by turning his newsboy cap around backward. He’d even borrowed one of Santiago’s hoodies, which fit him like a circus tent, and which stuck out of the top of his field jacket like a poncho. It was perfect; More looked like a bum.

  Santiago knew that he himself would stand out where More could blend in. With his height, wide shoulders, narrow waist, and noticeable hands and eyes, Santiago commanded a certain amount of attention whenever he walked onto a set, and his deep voice and direct manner would be remembered. More, on the other hand, faded into the nighttime crowd of revelers like a plank in a parquet floor.

  Santiago was amazed by how quickly More could adjust to his environment. More would pick up on words and phrases he heard and immediately rearrange and repeat them in new sequences, at varying speeds, and (to Santiago’s frustration) without a trace of the raspy gurgle that he otherwise used for talking to his CAB colleagues, including his partner (which he almost never did). To look at him he was a nobody; to listen to him even less so. Santiago became convinced that More had done undercover work for another unit, maybe Robbery or Narcotics. But that didn’t explain More’s physical prowess, nor did it account for his odd detachment on duty; More behaved as though he were on autopilot much of the time. Santiago had considered, then dismissed the idea th
at More was on drugs (too well controlled). If More was an IAB plant, he kept no written records, and he expressed no interest whatsoever in the other members of the unit or its CO. Granted, he could’ve been wearing a wire during their patrols, Santiago would never notice. After six months together, Santiago still couldn’t figure out where on his person More kept that strange little gun of his. When More had been publicly introduced by McKeutchen to the rest of the CAB team (who’d barely noticed), More had slowly and visibly taken a very ordinary-looking Glock in a very ordinary-looking waist-clip holster and put it in a drawer in his desk, which he had locked. Not once had Santiago ever seen More retrieve his weapon from its resting place. Maybe he was trying to duck an old brutality charge, or maybe he had a bad shooting on his record and was on probation. Santiago wondered if More had once been in Homicide, maybe even been in the DA’s vaunted Homicide Investigations Unit, going toe-to-toe with gangbangers in all five boroughs. There were too many questions, and Santiago figured McKeutchen had at least some of the answers.

  But these could wait. Operation Coploscopy was Santiago’s ticket to the big-time, real investigative work. The press, the Council, and even the mayor’s office were up in arms about CAB cops doing the work of seasoned city detectives, but this was ignoring a very basic fact: The city homicide rate had now breached its 1990 peak and was rising every quarter. Stressed by budget cuts and forced retirements, the Homicide Bureau, the Medical Examiner’s office, the courts, the holding facilities, even the Corrections transports were backlogged and overworked. Somebody had to pick up the slack. CAB wasn’t alone. Other bureaus were picking up more man-hours on drug-related murders and collateral killings. Pundits theorized that blending the roles of otherwise distinct departments would have a detrimental effect on the police, the judiciary, and individual rights. From Santiago’s point of view, on the yellow-and-black tip of the CAB spear, it was at least holding back the tide, and creating new and potentially helpful surprises as novice officers improvised new techniques and procedures for infiltrating the network of the city’s three thousand–plus bars.