Rivers of Gold Page 15

  Nestor had scarred his sister’s face on the plane of her right temple, just beyond the zygomatic arch. Which was where Santiago began, proceeding downward across the jaw hinge and the outer edge of the mandible, across the right clavicle and scapular acromion, down the humerus to the lateral epicondyle at the outer elbow, the ulna and carpals, the ribs, sternum and xiphoid process, then crossing to the right iliac crest of the pelvis, hammering the femur until he felt it crack, then pounding on the patella until Nestor’s right knee was concave. Santiago did not bother to conceal his face, but even then he doubted Nestor would have recognized him. The pipe was easily disposed of in a nearby storm drain; Santiago had not been away from his scheduled detention long enough to be missed. Not that he would have been. After all, what was one absent sixth-grader more or less?

  Santiago had seen Nestor once, years later. He’d been on his way from CUNY to his parents’ house for dinner, was checking his messages to see if he’d have a date lined up later that night, when he caught sight of a misshapen form beneath the subway stairs on Nagle Avenue by West 213th. Gingerly peering through the slats, he made out Nestor’s misaligned face, his body slanted at an impossible angle over a cardboard pallet, a plastic bottle of Fleischmann’s in his one good hand. One eye was closed; the other was white and dead and permanently half-open, seeing nothing.

  Santiago went to dinner.

  Esperanza got the drag stabilized and into the rotating OR queue. Since the formation of the Nurse Triage Unit during the riots, all incoming patients were sorted by severity of condition and assigned a numbered bracelet, which could be monitored anywhere in the hospital. Mount Sinai’s image had been tarnished somewhat over the years, as the number of suicides, assaults, and overdoses mounted following the crash and the riots. Since the hospital’s foundation had largely been wiped out by the massive Jagoff fraud at the end of 2010, and with city and state funding nonexistent by 2011, the staff (caught between the demands of the City Council for free treatment and the screams of the unions for full compensation for those sidelined by budget cuts) was left to cope as best it could. Things had peaked when a woman admitted for the removal of two precancerous moles on her back wound up having both legs amputated instead. The ensuing public outcry and investigation made for a fierce crackdown throughout the hospital hierarchy. Which meant greater-than-usual reliance on the midlevel managers who ran the daily routines of the hospital, making sure the little things checked out (little things like screening the ever-dwindling blood supply for HIV, double-checking the time clocks on the donor organs, and making sure the residents weren’t raiding the pharmacy for recreation or commercial gain). On senior NTU nurses, for instance. Like Esperanza Santiago.

  “Coño, you think this is your own private clinic?” she growled at her younger brother, her words punctuated by the snapping of latex as she peeled off her gloves and slammed them into a wall-mounted container marked BIOHAZARD.

  Santiago recounted their Waterloo outside of Cardinal Cook. Esperanza shut her eyes, shook her head, and exhaled loudly through her mouth. “That kid should be strung up.”

  “Or become a patient there. I can arrange it.” Santiago smiled in spite of himself. His sister had always been his best friend, and being around her made even the most ridiculous drag haul a little more bearable.

  Esperanza, however, did not share his levity. She grabbed him by the elbow and steered him inside behind the NTU desk, away from More, who slouched in a chair in the waiting area looking blank. He fit in well among the patients on the queue, many of whom looked like they’d just been brought in from sleeping on the streets or dragged bleeding and vomiting from barroom floors. Those conscious enough to take notice of his presence, however, seemed to slink away from him. The seats immediately behind and on either side of More stood empty, even though the room was two-thirds full. “Is that the new guy?” she asked quietly.

  “Yeah. Don’t tell me you think he’s cute.”

  “Carajo, give me some credit. He looks like a bum, or one of those students they bring in on an OD.” Over the past year, the number of overdoses had tripled. The paco cases were usually goners, since the drug pushed cardiac rates far beyond human endurance (not to mention the psychosis it usually triggered). But the tox screens on a good portion of the others revealed high amounts of extremely potent, lab-grade pharmaceuticals such as Ketamine, GHB, and MDMA—party drugs, nightclub drugs. This had not been lost on Esperanza, who had relayed the information to her brother, who’d brought it up to McKeutchen, who’d assigned them to dig up the speaks any way they could. (Which, naturally, made the dicks at the Detective Bureau laugh their asses off. Anticrime? Cabbie cops? Running investigations?! It was too funny to be true.)

  “So why’d you ask about him?”

  Esperanza’s voice dropped even lower. “That kid you brought in has a compound fracture of the radius. That’s the inside bone of the forearm. Usually, with a fracture like this, it’s the ulna, the outermost bone that comes through the skin. You follow me?”

  Santiago sensed something was coming that would make this bad night worse. “So?”

  “¡Escúchame! You know how much force it takes to cause a break like that? And how precisely you’d have to apply it? And then there’s the blood loss.”

  Something bad was nudging at Santiago. He’d felt it earlier, when More first broke the drag’s arm, but had been too distracted to think it through. “Yeah, that bugged me, too. I’ve never seen a break cause that kind of bleeding. But so what? It’s just the way the bone came through, right?”

  “No, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. A fractured bone doesn’t just randomly sever the radial artery, not when it’s fractured by somebody else. That kind of damage is deliberate. That break was meant to kill. Don’t tell me anyone in the NYPD, even the ESU, gets taught that kind of lethal hand-to-hand. And if you’re telling me that flaco out there can do this to someone whenever he wants, you need to tell McKeutchen, like now.”

  Santiago heard the timbre of Esperanza’s voice, saw the fear in her eyes, and knew that she was right. He had never in six months looked forward to getting into the battered Crown Vic with More, but now he liked the idea even less. He did not mention this to his sister, who could be cold as ice when dealing with patients but would probably freak out if she knew her baby brother was riding with a sniper instructor who could also break bones and use them as internal saws.

  “Joder,” he breathed. Who the fuck was this guy?

  “We need to check out the cabs,” More said without looking up from a man lying motionless on a gurney.

  Santiago was always somewhat taken aback whenever More spoke, since he so rarely did. “What cabs?”

  “We’ve been trying to figure out how the speaks resupply. In six months we haven’t seen any hand-to-hands, no dead drops, nothing. We haven’t found any evidence the big deals are going down in legal bars. Liesl and Turse haven’t either, and you know they’d run down trace evidence even if it was microscopic.” More was using his unclouded voice, free of phlegm. His ability to switch this on and off at will rattled Santiago no end.

  “How the fuck you turn your gargle mode on and off like that? Why the fuck can’t you talk like a normal person? When the fuck you decide to start talking all of a sudden?” Santiago’s pulse and voice had risen, his hands were opening and closing involuntarily, and his palms were damp. He was acutely aware of the distance between himself and More, of his position directly between More and the NTU stand, where Esperanza stood calling up what little hospital security was available, of the weight of his Glock 25 in its hip-mounted paddle holster.

  But More seemed oblivious to the two hundred twenty pounds of armed, agitated Dominican seething in front of him. In his unsullied voice, More continued: “That dead cabbie we’re looking into. Eyad Fouad. He’s got a friend.” More stood up abruptly with something in his right hand, and Santiago had his Glock pointed half an inch below the brim of More’s plaid newsboy cap in two-and-a-half
seconds.

  “Not bad,” said More, with the left side of his mouth creased in what might eventually turn into a smile in a year or so. “Could use some more work.” He held out his right hand, with the object extended.

  For a few long seconds, Santiago’s eyes went back and forth from the object in More’s outstretched hand to More’s passive, almost sleepy eyes. After doing this for a period of time he would not later remember, he reached out and took the object, but did not lower his weapon until he had read the writing on the object through twice, intermittently, his eyes going back and forth between it and More.

  A TLC hack license for one Jangahir Khan. The guy on the gurney was another cabbie, and for the first time Santiago registered the smell, the cloying, carbonized perfume of charred meat. Before Khan got the bullet through his left eye that had finished him off, someone had taken something very hot, a soldering iron or acetylene torch, to him.

  “You can tell your sister she can free up this gurney,” More said, reverting to his wet-gravel voice. “This guy won’t need it anymore.”

  Now Santiago knew what was bothering him about More.

  He was getting interested.

  Joder in all its forms.

  R I V E R S OF G O L D

  Ah, the Eyrie. Such memories.

  The studio is an empty white loft at the top of a dingy-looking slab on Dyer Avenue right above the Holland Tunnel. Packed full of similar photography shops and their attendant software retouching companies, the Eyrie sits atop them all, ringed with windows on all sides, affording the best natural light a shooter could ask for. Careers have been made here, mine being one of them. I did it the old-fashioned way—I stole a client from the photographer I was assisting. A whole year I slaved away for that moron, putting up with his tantrums, his complicated lighting setups and snow-fueled round-the-clock shoots. He was a hack, but he had good connections. I had school loans, an invalid mother, a lease coming due, and no word from the art schools I’d applied to. You’d have done the same thing.

  The cab hurtles down Ninth Avenue past boarded-up storefronts and vacant restaurants long abandoned by their owners, saltshakers on tables but the chairs all gone. But here in the backseat I’m feeling good about things. I feel like there are possibilities now instead of pairs of bleak choices. And N is in all of them.

  Twelve stories up, the cavernous loft is filled with the kind of New York sunshine you only get at high altitudes, and which Marty has thoughtfully sought to temper by draping the walls in luminescent damask. He’s setting up the kliegs by the eastern wall, and I immediately notice that (a) he’s playing MC Cancer on the PA, which sets my teeth on edge, and (b) he’s in a tank top to show off his tats. Normally I wouldn’t mind, the work really is first-rate, huge twisting fish rendered kingyo-style, the colors in the scales changing shade with each motion of his arms. The problem, of course, is that I don’t want him dominating the attention of the delicious Miyuki. (And where the fuck is she?) I can see the wunderkind Retch, two-time Oscar winner for his artful portrayals of conflicted, tormented young men, piss-drunk already at eleven A.M., being fawned over by Donny and Marie (hair and makeup), while the favoloso Tony Q flits and floats among his lineups, clearly oiled up on some mixture of his own, feeling no pain.

  —Caballero! Tony trills.

  Let the Games Begin.

  Leaving the drudgery of lighting, loading, and everything else to Marty (who stoically drops his eyes behind his round, eighties-style glasses and silently bends to his tasks), I confer with Tony and boy wonder Retch, who reeks of vodka and is sweating eighty proof. I unload eleven Specials on them both as discreetly as I can, the odd one going to the extra, R, at Retch’s slurred request. R has been a stand-in on several of my shoots and is a textbook runway runaway, a tangled mane of thick brown hair, scrawny with brown teddy-bear eyes and incongruously large breasts, says she’s nineteen but probably left home as soon as she grew profitable curves. R has no difficulty rationalizing the exchange of fellatio for spots on the most high-profile shoots, no matter how menial, which ensures that she usually gets them.

  Tony promises the balance due for the Specials consignment at Le Yef later. Tonight it’s in the empty Bryant Park Grill, long since closed. The restaurant’s in the park behind the library on Forty-first, which stays open thanks to the posthumous benevolence of some of its donors (you can almost hear the wails of their deprived, dependent offspring). The BPG went under, well, I don’t really remember now, there’ve been so many. The park was beautiful once, before the association supporting it went broke. Now it’s just another public latrine, its coffee kiosks looted, its gardens razed.

  With Retch drunkenly ogling R’s décolletage, Tony informs me that Miyuki’s flight is late and that her publicist will call the minute they’re on the ground. That’s fine, the more time I have to rent the space, the more I charge Roundup. Johnette will be none too happy about this, but thankfully she’s nowhere in sight. In fact, there’s no one here from the magazine at all. That’s odd—usually the client has a rep on the shoot to make sure they’re getting their money’s worth.

  I decide to use the lull to calm my fears about the soccer-ball light, which is sitting on the floor not ten feet from where Retch weaves on his stool. I make a show of picking it up and taking it to the changing room, where I carefully place it on the floor beneath the makeup counter. There will be no disco light show today.

  With the important business (the Specials) out of the way, and the fact that I can’t really proceed with the shoot until Miyuki arrives, I devote myself to the task of checking my messages while Marty finishes setting up the lights and preparing the cameras. A photographer’s job, after all, is but to point and shoot, not the setup and breakdown and rentals and all that other crap. I’ve already paid my dues.

  The first message is from N, saying she can’t make it tonight. That’s three nights in a row. I can feel my frown. I knew she’d get busy going to work for LA, but something’s not right. I need to get on this. I’d rather be on this than on my shoot. Fuck.

  Two more calls from L, who’s sounding impatient about why I haven’t gotten back to her. She’s such a control freak, always wants to be the one calling the shots. Well, she can be the one to wait for a change. I haven’t figured out how to break it off with her yet, but given the nature of our relationship, it shouldn’t take much.

  The last one is Joss. She’s inviting me over, wants to talk about size matters, says she’ll make it worth my while.

  Shit. A week ago I’d have been thrilled by the prospect, but now I wish she hadn’t called. Her reference to size, contrary to what you might think, is code for a bulk order for Specials. I could probably unload a whole case, maybe more. And I find I just don’t want to. But this is Reza business, I can’t say no. This also sounds sketchy. Is Joss planning a franchise of her own? And doing the deal at her place—no fucking way. Renny’s Rule Number Three: No Housecalls. Keep It in the Cab.

  I’m so caught up over what to do about this that it must be five minutes before I notice the change in the studio. The music’s gone off, Tony’s disappeared somewhere, and so have Kid Retch and R. Only Marty’s in the room with me, quietly taping down cables.

  —Where is everybody?

  —Beats me, says Marty, his default answer for everything. Probably smokes as much dope as Arun, though I’d be lost without him. And right now, this shoot is slipping out of my hands. If someone from Roundup walked in right now I’d likely lose the gig. No sir.

  I commence prowling around the Eyrie, starting with the wraparound terrace. It’d be just my luck if Retch took a drunken dive off the building. But the only one outside is Tony, smoking and gabbing away on his phone. I make the complete circuit of the outside and start working through the ancillary rooms. Office, kitchen, bathrooms—all empty. The only place I haven’t checked is the changing room, and there’s noises I can’t place emanating from behind the closed door.

  How best to describe walking in on a ca
tastrophe? As a photographer, my mind records the sequence in frames. In the first I see myself, reflected in the long vanity mirror. In the second frame is Retch, swaying slightly on rubber legs, a drunken gargoyle’s leer on his slack face, his (uncircumcised) cock in both hands, piss flowing freely. Frame three is R, on her knees in front of Retch, not eagerly but dutifully drinking his urine, swaying a bit herself to keep her mouth in line with his wavering stream.

  In the last frame I see myself again, features contorting in horror, as they both turn to face me, and Retch pours rivers of gold all over the twenty-thousand-dollar oscillating icosahedral soccer-ball light I stashed in here for safekeeping, and for which I am wholly responsible.

  The job’s gone, destroyed, poof, and with it went twenty grand and my cover shot. Instead, I’m on the hook for another twenty grand, plus the cost of the rentals, which I’ve sent Marty to return along with whatever story he can cook up.

  The commission I just made won’t even begin to cover the cost of this disaster. I need to collect on the Specials I sold Tony Q on consignment before the shoot went to shit or, more accurate, to piss. Retch lurched unsteadily out of the Eyrie with R in tow, not a care in the world. If I see him at Le Yef tonight I’ll kill him. Actually, I’ll ask Jan or one of Reza’s other goons to do it, maybe even that big fucking lollipop guy.

  Think. Get the money for the Specials from Tony tonight, and move the rest of the first half of the package during the remainder of Le Yef. Wait. Joss. Bulk order. Must keep second half of package on reserve for her tomorrow. Wait. See her tonight. Sell through first half at Le Yef fast, sell second half to Joss, then pay off Reza and the soccer-ball light tomorrow. I’ll still be behind on everything else that I owe, but I can pick up another package from Reza and start moving it tomorrow. Within twenty-four hours I should be back on track. Yes.