Rivers of Gold Read online

  Victor’s move on his youngest son’s behalf was unprecedented, and there were some angry words around the family dinner table when the news was broken, but the old man had stood firm, and by this time neither of Santiago’s asshole brothers would even think of getting in his face over this. His sister, for her part, had bought him a George Foreman grill (the big one with the griddle on the side) as a housewarming present, and Santiago began to consider that life might just actually be sweet.

  Santiago’s mother had thoughtfully prepared some highway snacks for them, since he and Victor agreed that all the road food along I-95 would gag a subway rat. For fifty miles, they munched intermittently and blissfully on grilled poblano peppers stuffed with fresh crabmeat, and Santiago reminded himself for the umpteenth time what a lucky SOB he was, even as a part-time security guard and a full-time street cop with the Citywide Anticrime Bureau, easily one of the most dangerous jobs in town.

  Victor brought him back to earth abruptly when, on the outskirts of New Haven, he asked, “How’s it going with your new partner?”

  Santiago sighed. “Could be better,” he said wearily.

  Thirty-six hours earlier, Santiago had nearly checked out forever when two morons bent on killing each other over a fucking parking spot had trashed a weeklong investigation of the drug trade flowing through the city’s bars.

  It was nothing new. The market lay just beneath the surface, the demand was always there. It was just a matter of asking around until you connected. No surprise, really; since William Bratton and then Ray Kelly had kicked the dealers off the streets so they wouldn’t scare off well-moneyed tourists, the trade had simply moved indoors. Tourists liked having good illegal drugs to accompany the legal ones they paid top dollar for just as much as native New Yorkers did, and with cops working multiple jobs to raise enough weakened dollars just to keep their heads above water, well, the usual graft was getting unusually thick.

  It was compounded by the fact that the city’s drug merchants had set up a triple-tiered trade for cocaine. First came top-of-the-line powder ($250 a gram), then heavily cut rock ($10 a vial), then the dreaded paco. This new South American import was a waste product of the refining process that had become a profitable way to dispose of even the last dregs of a shipment, and it was blamed for a quarter of all the overdoses in the city as well as a third of violent drug-related crimes. Combine that with ten percent inflation and twelve percent unemployment, a hiring freeze in a police force already cut back twenty percent from its 2008 size, soaring food prices, and annual tax hikes, and you had a recipe for apocalypse.

  The one thing that could be counted upon to prop up the city was tourism. Not that New York was Disney World, far from it. But with the government’s unprecedented spending binge, the dollar had dropped through the floor, and just about anyone from anywhere else could afford to live it up in New York—hey, it’s a safe big city, the FBI says crime is at its lowest point in half a century! So, word had come down from City Hall via NYPD high command: Keep the Knuckleheads Down. Young Arab swingers flush with petrodollars, jetting in on private planes to the Big Apple to do all the drinking and fucking they can’t do at home, well, they tend to get turned off when a paco-crazed junkie drives a stolen SUV into the lounge bar where they’re making time with those loose American girls. Well-scrubbed German families converting stronger euros to weaker dollars tended to “turn around and advance on back” to the nice safe EU with a quickness when an overheard comment—or, God forbid, eye contact—between locals led to whole magazines being unloaded in classrooms, movie theaters, and subway stations.

  And then there were the speaks, which the NYPD couldn’t even begin to get a handle on. As per their namesake, the speaks were illegal bars; unlike those of old, however, these floated with no fixed address through scores of buildings left vacant by the real estate crash. A bar would vanish from one address only to pop up at another. The mechanism was a phantom network that broadcast the next location of each speak with little advance notice. No one knew how the information was transmitted, which made it all but impossible for the cops to crack. Not that any of this would’ve even come up on the cops’ radar if it hadn’t been for the fact that the speaks provided excellent cover for all sorts of criminal activity, from drugs to prostitution, and even that would’ve gone unnoticed in the carnage that was New York City in 2013 if not for the body count such nightlife racked up. Vice, Narcotics, and even Homicide were undermanned, overwhelmed, and outmaneuvered.

  The cheerleaders of chaos and entropy were thriving and diversifying, while the home team of law and order was in the ICU.

  But then some genius had dreamed up the Citywide Anticrime Bureau (CAB). Basically a revamping and expansion of the anticrime units already in place at most precincts, CAB was a task force aimed at holding back the rising tide utilizing street-level undercover work. Officers from any division in the NYPD could volunteer. Units were organized under local area commanders, all veterans, with each unit spearheaded by field teams in undercover taxicabs backed up by what remained of the uniformed department, organized into flying squads. CAB units, as per their namesake, had city-wide jurisdiction, and they were authorized to use deadly force when necessary. Then came the incentive: CAB cops racked up points based on collars made and cases cleared, a merit system designed to retain seasoned veterans (who were otherwise leaving the force in droves) as well as to attract fresh young talent. To sweeten the pot, the panjandrums of One Police Plaza dangled the golden bough: detectives who reached a predetermined point level earned a transfer to OCID, the Organized Crime Intelligence Division, long held by most cops to be the Valhalla of the NYPD.

  The scheme worked, at least at first. Young cops of Santiago’s age, with new families and mortgages to feed, eagerly signed up for CAB detail. New transfers from all departments began swelling the CAB ranks, pooling their experience and competing with each other in a cavalier fashion that irked some of the more established police classes, such as the Homicide dicks. With their shiny shoes and metallic suits, the murder cops considered themselves to be the landed gentry of the Department, and they did not care for the young guns driving all over their turf in their dirty fucking taxicabs. But they had no choice, being up to their trouser pleats in bodies. Crime was spiking, the force was shrinking, and the city needed to be thrown a lifeline. CAB was a child of the age, dubbed by one Times reporter as “the biggest little shakeup in the history of the NYPD.”

  Then Aubrey Bright happened, and the new CAB unit nearly died at birth.

  It was only natural that as the CAB field teams jostled with each other to turn crime into job credits, different minorities would take the lead in different locales. Which member would go undercover depended on the “set,” or situation. Latino cops worked Latino sets, black cops worked black sets, and so forth. Aubrey Bright, an up-and-coming twenty-two-year-old fresh out of uniform, had taken point to work a black club in the Flatiron District, home to a number of boisterous nightspots which often hosted assaults, stabbings, and shootings, as well as a river of drug traffic. Aubrey Bright had gotten decked out in his best Sean John, sidled on the set with his best hustle-and-flow, and been made in about five seconds by a notorious gangsta rap star known as MC Cancer and by an equally notorious drug dealer, both stoned to the eyeballs, who were in the club’s best booth near the back, each enjoying his own personal bottle of Cristal and a below-table blow job from some of the female staff members employed by the club for that very purpose.

  Aubrey Bright had been dragged out the back door to an adjacent parking lot by the rapper and the dealer, who beat him to a cracked wet pulp before the dealer emptied a full Glock magazine into his body. The murder was recorded by a security camera atop one of the parking lot fence posts; after shooting Aubrey Bright, the dealer pulled down his pants and waggled his genitals at the camera lens. The pair then jumped into a Lincoln Navigator SE and roared out of the lot, with both of the Navigator’s left-side wheels rolling over Aubrey Bright’s
corpse, collapsing his ribcage and skull and splashing viscera across the tarmac. By the time the CAB backup team caught up to them, the rapper had wrapped the SUV around a dumpster half a block down the street. In the ensuing firefight, 112 rounds were fired, a large number of which ended up inside MC Cancer. The drug dealer only survived by running out of ammo, then repeating his earlier genital gesture, at which time one of the field team officers subdued him with a Taser shot to a sensitive area. All of which was of course recorded on the phones of more than a dozen gawking bystanders.

  It was a cascading nightmare, which never seemed to let up. First the CAB unit was taken balls-first over a cheese grater by the media, with much hand-wringing and shit-eating being done for the cameras by the mayor, the police commissioner, and the head of CAB, who was summarily dismissed and promptly made for points unknown. Then the arraignment of the drug dealer, in which the playback from the club’s parking lot security camera was shown as evidence by the (black) prosecutor, causing the (black) stenographer to vomit. The (white) defense attorney tried for a clemency plea before being loudly and profanely fired by his client, who had to be hauled kicking and spitting from the courtroom by burly (black) bailiffs, to be sentenced in absentia. The (black) judge gave the defendant life without parole in record time; the (black) officers involved in the shooting were exonerated and publicly lauded by the commissioner.

  That the officers involved were black evoked little sympathy in the black community; in the public’s eyes, said blacks were blue. WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? was the title of a mournful editorial over the byline of one of the Times’s most prominent black columnists, while the cover of a high-profile black scholarly journal featured a cartoon of a whirlpool with one dark arm visible, on which was written BLACK YOUTH in dropped-out type. Black community leaders scheduled a coordinated series of civil disobedience gatherings citywide, for which absolutely no one showed up. Aubrey Bright had died on a Monday night; an ominous silence had descended over the city by Wednesday afternoon.

  Everyone knew what was coming, which was why CAB wasn’t disbanded despite nonstop howling from the City Council and numerous community groups. Captain McKeutchen had called his boys together; he was kind of grandfatherly in his own way, Santiago had thought, if your grandfather kept blown-up color stills from his latest colonoscopy on his office wall. After giving them a short speech about duty, honor, and Riding Out the Storm—“Like an impacted turd, this too shall pass”—he’d sat down heavily in his reinforced chair and, for the first time in unit memory, started cleaning his service weapon, a two-inch Smith and Wesson Airlite 340PD .357 with a five-shot cylinder, grunting, “The odd one’s for me.”

  Thirty seconds later, Santiago was the first CAB cop to the armory, plowing right over a pair of tense uniformed rookies demanding M-16s, where he managed to talk down a panicky duty sergeant who was fortifying himself with a bottle of Ten High he didn’t bother to hide. After a brief shopping trip through the ordnance locker, Santiago took his pickings out to one of the unmarked cabs. He’d floored it up the Henry Hudson Parkway, Victor in his hands-free headset helping him coordinate, racing down the sun as it careened toward the Palisades, as though eager to hide from the coming storm. Once back in his parents’ neighborhood, he’d stopped at a gas station on Dyckman Street, topped off the tank, checked the oil and tires, and strong-armed the nervous attendant into giving him two extra five-gallon jerricans of gas and a case of Poland Spring half-liter water bottles.

  For the next three days, as rioting spread throughout the city, Santiago had lived in his taxicab, Victor in his headset, a dashboard solar charger for his iPhone and the police radio chattering nonstop, a 12-gauge Benelli M4 Tactical semiauto cradled in his huge hands. Santiago didn’t know why his CO was allowing him to do what he was doing, which was against the entire NYPD rule book, but he was supremely grateful. He’d checked in with McKeutchen regularly on his command line, wanting to make sure that if he himself were hung out to dry, he’d do what he could to see that his boss would be spared.

  Those had been a bad three days. The department essentially set up security islands north of the fortified Ninety-sixth Street barricade, dubbed “The White Zone” by the media in Manhattan, one around 181st Street to guard the George Washington Bridge; one at 168th Street to guard Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, which by then was starting to overflow with Harlem’s wounded; and one at 116th Street to guard Columbia University, where the more radical protesters were teargassed and clubbed and dragged around the corner to St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital on Amsterdam Avenue, while their vocal support—those with lots of pins on their backpacks—disappeared in a hurry.

  Up in Inwood, Santiago was more or less on his own, but the neighborhood was having none of it. Surly Latinos wielding an impressive array of weaponry both legal and illegal stood watch in front of their homes and businesses. Santiago himself made food runs between his parents’ house and his father’s shop, delivering large amounts of fried plantains and pollo guisado from his mother’s kitchen to Victor and some of his staff, who had effectively barricaded themselves in the shop; Victor himself sat on the roof of the building with binoculars, his iPhone, and Santiago’s service Glock. Santiago didn’t blame his asshole brothers for not helping him with his vigil, as they both had families of their own to watch over while he himself was single. His sister was doing triage work at Mount Sinai, coping with the overflow of wounded, though well protected by a squad detailed from the nearby Twenty-fourth Precinct—another favor from McKeutchen, who claimed it dovetailed with department policy to protect all hospitals during the riots.

  The occasional roving posse car excepted—nobody came near the old taxicab with the big scowling Latino at the wheel, with an enormous shotgun poking out through the driver’s-side window—Santiago was left alone. He’d stuck his badge high up on the left side of his jacket, so that any trigger-happy uniforms or Emergency Services Unit teams wouldn’t blow him away by mistake, and listened to the reports of fires and looting coming in from East New York, Brownsville, Bushwick, Bed-Stuy, East Flatbush, Crown Heights, Greenpoint, Borough Park, Hunts Point, Mott Haven, Soundview, Morrisania, Parkchester, Tremont, Fordham, Hollis, Jamaica Estates, and Hillcrest. When the storm subsided as abruptly as it had begun, the death toll would be twice that of the 1993 Los Angeles riots, with untold numbers of wounded; property damage was estimated at half a trillion dollars. The media later reported that the most sought-after items from looted stores were iPhones, liquor, and Playstation 5s.

  Santiago had traced a meandering route along Fort Washington Avenue, around Fort Tryon Park and the Cloisters, across Nagle Avenue to Dyckman Street, up and around Fort George Hill, down the western border of High Bridge Park, and back along St. Nicholas Avenue. He kept a wary eye on all the stairwells descending from the elevated Number 1 subway line, as well as the exits from the A train terminus at 207th Street. There wasn’t much he could do about the Broadway and Henry Hudson bridges, but he knew from his radio that squads from the Thirty-third and Thirty-fourth Precincts, as well as DOT teams, had set up twin checkpoints (later reinforced with some local National Guard units back from Iraq). Officially, Santiago was detailed to the bridge details; off the record, he was off the reservation.

  Santiago hadn’t done much reflecting about the riots or their place in the city’s history. Other than immediate thoughts of his family, he found himself remembering his days coming up in Traffic, long before his transfer to CAB, and his old partner Bertie Goldstein, a wizened old Jewish lady from Sunnyside, looking to see how big a pension she could rack up before the Department cut her loose. Santiago’d been a happy young buck in those days of boomtime, before the credit and real-estate busts. The city had revealed another side of itself to him then, one of infinite possibility and prizes there for the taking. He couldn’t wait to get to work in those days, nailing one stolen car after another, collaring joyriders, car thieves, and chop-shop couriers. He’d learned how to do research then, how to rapi
dly run down histories (criminal, credit, employment, or medical), how to find patterns in seemingly meaningless reams of data, how to spot a mope on the move from a great distance. It was so easy. He’d just drive to the nearest school, wait for the most expensive car to roll up, and pounce. He remembered once being chided by his partner for profiling, a concept he readily employed. “Bertie, honey,” he drawled, feeling oddly paternalistic toward the ancient dwarf sharing his radio car, “you call it like you see it. If you see some knucklehead barely old enough to shave behind the wheel of a brand-new SL95 AMG, you stop him on principle. Ninety-nine percent of the time, you either got credit card fraud or grand theft auto. If you don’t, you just say ‘Have a nice day.’ All it takes is a few minutes of time on your computer, and these badges we wear say we can stop whoever we want, whenever we want. At the end of the day, we get more collars, the city gets fewer people defaulting on their credit cards or using stolen or fake ones, and the department maybe even gets a few bucks selling the cars we seize at auction. Everybody wins except the knucklehead who deserves to lose anyway. See?”

  “Nu, right you could effsher be, but as it is, boychik,” conceded Bertie Goldstein. “Even verse, ven young you are, but since ven the vorld vuz easy? Esk any Jew.”

  Bertie Goldstein was always one for folk homilies like this. She never badmouthed anyone, never raised her voice, never cursed, and Santiago loved her for it. She was an oasis of warm harmlessness in a population bursting with anything but. He liked to give her “Goldbug hugs,” sincere embraces carefully designed for her tiny, delicate frame (he would have crushed her otherwise). But for all her kindness, Bertie Goldstein was beset over the years by a spectacular series of physical ailments—viral pneumonia, rheumatoid arthritis, acid reflux, tendonitis, constipation, heart murmur, and bunions. Still, she never complained.