Chapter 17
Tonight’s hell mouth seemed to be situated in Union Square, three runs to that area in less than five hours. The first, at one a.m., on Irving Place, involved the discovery of a middle-aged lawyer who had been found nude, bound, and asphyxiated facedown in his own bed, the word ABUSE with either an R or a D at the end—a mystery for the day tour—carved into his back with a scissor blade. The second run, coming in at three, was in response to the theft of a two-hundred-pound bluefin tuna worth seven thousand dollars from the kitchen of a sushi restaurant on Park Avenue South. And the third and hopefully last run of the night, coming in at four-thirty, was a nonfatal double knifing in the park proper, directly beneath the statue of Gandhi, the actor on that one a seventy-five-year-old panhandler, the victims two drunken tourists from Munich who thought it would be a real howl to hand the old piss-bum a pre-euro ten-mark German note instead of a few American dollars.
“You should have seen them, laughing at me like they was giving a cell phone to a monkey,” Terence Burns said over a five a.m. Coke in the Sixth Squad interview room a few blocks from the scene. Bug-eyed and sporting a steel-colored goatee, he was nearly doubled over with arthritis but somehow still agile as a cat. “Like I wasn’t gonna know what a motherfuckin’ deutsche mark looks like. Hell, I seen plenty, I had plenty, and I spent plenty when I was over there with the Fortieth Tank back in sixty-one.”
“You were there?” Billy both liking the guy and needing the distraction.
“Didn’t I just say that? Had a good time too for most of it,” Burns said. “The whores used to call us hamburgers, the white boys, cheeseburgers. They’d see a bunch of us coming to the club, they’d start throwing out all the shitkickers, ‘No cheeseburger! Hamburger only!’”
“For real?”
“Oh I’m always for real.”
“Another Coke?”
“Fanta if you got it,” Burns said. “Grape or orange.”
Billy went out of the room to hit the vending machine and returned with a Mountain Dew.
“So what else was going on back then?” he asked.
“What else? You don’t know your history? You don’t know about Checkpoint Charlie?”
“I heard of it.”
“You don’t know nothing about the tank standoff with the Russians? I was a machine gunner, they had me set up outside the hatch of a M-48 staring right into the cannon of a T-55 for sixteen motherfuckin’ hours, couldn’t have been more than seventy-five yards away. I swear, as scared as I was? If I hadn’t been so drunk, we’d of had World War Three right then and there.”
Returning to the park to pick up a copy of the Crime Scene Unit report, Billy noticed that the small trucks from upstate and New Jersey had begun to arrive for the Union Square Greenmarket, the vaguely hippieish farmers dragging out their folding tables and canopies in the predawn dark. He also saw one of his supplementals, Milton Ramos from Dennis Doyle’s squad in the 4-6, standing on the edge of the scene watching the techs stow their gear.
Billy had been trying to keep his distance from the guy all tour; like a number of one-offs, there was something not quite right about him. He seemed to be both on edge and spacey, plus Billy was pretty sure that he’d been slipping off fairly steadily to drink. Not that Ramos would have been the first detective on Night Watch to sweeten the long hours and boredom that way; Feeley’s eyes often looked like two cherries floating in buttermilk, but that was Feeley.
The CSUs, both female, were hunched over the hood of their van now, sorting through their report forms.
“So how was the great tuna robbery,” Billy asked Ramos. “Anything fishy about it?”
“I think it was an inside job,” Ramos said flatly.
He was short and thick but too powerfully built to be called fat, his slitted features hidden beneath thick brows and a permanently impassive expression. Billy had him pegged as a complete loner, on the job and off, the type of uncommunicative humorless near blank that made everyone in his home squad uncomfortable.
“You know,” Ramos said, looking around the park, “I used to work midnights my first two years, but now? I don’t know if I could handle it anymore. How does your wife put up with it?”
“She’s a nurse,” Billy said, “she can put up with anything short of me having a second family.”
“Oh yeah? What kind of nurse?”
“ER, but over the years she’s done it all.”
“Done it all, seen it all . . . Easygoing?”
Billy gave him a look. “Philosophical about things,” he lied.
“Philosophical.” Ramos nodded, still looking away. “Shit happens.”
“Something like that.”
Billy saw Stupak, coming from the Irving Place homicide, enter the park and head toward the tents and tables, waiting for someone to open up.
He raised his cell to call her.
“She always want to be a nurse?” Ramos asked.
“What?”
“Your wife.”
“What is this, an interview?”
“No, I’m sorry, I just . . . My wife? She passed seven years ago.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Billy said, killing the call.
“Yeah. Hit-and-run.”
“I’m sorry.”
“We have a daughter, she’s eight,” he said, then: “If the mother’s dead and you say ‘we,’ is it ‘We have a daughter’ or ‘We had a daughter’?”
The guy was definitely sauced, but he was talking about losing his wife.
“Grammar wasn’t my strong suit,” Billy said.
“You have kids?”
“Two boys.”
“Two boys, double the trouble.”
Billy impatiently checked the time, six-fifteen in the a.m., the crime scene techs still hunched over the hood working up their reports.
“Back when we were kids?” Ramos moved closer to him. “Me and my brother, we were the terror of the neighborhood.”
“Oh yeah?” Billy tried to call Stupak again. “What neighborhood was that?”
Ramos either didn’t hear him or didn’t want to answer.
“What are you doing,” Billy asked Stupak.
“Where are you?”
“By the Gandhi statue waiting on CSU. Bring me a coffee, cream and sugar, and a buttered roll.”
“You know,” Ramos plowed on, “before she died, my wife was an X-ray technician at Beth Abraham for five years, so I know a little about nurses. And, the little I know is that they’re not like cops, you know what I’m saying? You don’t become a nurse because your mother and grandmother were nurses, so forgive me for getting personal and you can just tell me to mind my own business, but I’m curious, why do you think your wife became a nurse?”
“Now I’m supposed to say, ‘Because she likes to help people’?”
“Not at all, I was just wondering if there was any one moment where she, you know, like an event or something . . .”
Billy gave him another long look.
“Like with me,” Ramos said quickly, “I never thought I was going to be a cop, I was a troubled kid, a fighter. But when I was seventeen, I lost my mother and two brothers all like within a month’s time, and I needed a place to hide.”
“What do you mean, hide.”
“Not hide, more like I needed a structure, you know, be part of something that would give me all the dos and don’ts, keep me from going over to the dark side. It took a few years, but here I am.”
“Here you are,” Billy said, not liking this guy at all, him and his copious tragedies.
One of the techs finally came over, peeled off a copy of the report for Billy, then headed off to the greenmarket with her partner.
“Beautiful, right?” Ramos said, as the sun began to paint the tops of the ancient office buildings at the western edge of the square.
Billy loathed sunrises; he knew them as cruel mirages, each one a false promise that a tour had come to its end when, in fact, depending on the time of year, there were anywhere from one to three hours left for that phone to ring with a fresh disaster. Sunrises, like Ramos here, made him tense.
They made him feel fucked with.
“Listen to me,” Billy said abruptly. “You’ve had liquor on your breath all night.”
Frowning, Ramos looked away.
“I’m not going to write you up, but I don’t ever want to see you on my tour again. In fact, you can take off right now, I’ll sign you out when I get back to the office.”
At first, Ramos didn’t respond, his frown deepening into a scowl, but then he began nodding his head as if having come to some kind of decision.
“I apologize,” he said quietly, turning back to Billy and handing over the keys to the squad sedan, “and I appreciate the courtesy.”
Ramos walked off toward the Fourteenth Street subway entrance without another word, Billy watching him all the way, wondering if he had been too hard on the guy.
Then, tired of waiting for Stupak to deliver his breakfast, he wandered over to the market himself, where he discovered that almost all the cops involved in the three wee-hour local felonies were now cruising the food stalls as intensely as if they were at a gun show.
Walking into the house with two biodegradable bags filled with agave-sweetened muffins, crullers, and doughnut holes, it seemed to Billy that the only one up and about was the six-year-old, Carlos sitting in the dining room and eating the breakfast he had made for himself: a teacup of orange juice and an unthawed Eggo.
“Where’s your mother?” Billy asked, dropping the waffle into the toaster. “Is she still sleeping?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where’s your brother?”
“At Theo’s house. He slept there on a sleepover.”
Through the kitchen window Billy saw his father sitting on a lawn chair beneath one of the TARU cameras in the backyard, the old guy, as usual, reading the New York Times.
“How’s Grandpa today?”
“I don’t know,” Carlos said, then: “A teacher in my school got quit.”
“What do you mean, got quit?”
“He’s not a teacher anymore.”
“Oh yeah? What teacher.”
“Mr. Lazar.”
“Mr. Lazar quit? Or got fired?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why?” He couldn’t imagine that the school would can him for being gay.
“He hurt some guy,” Carlos said.
“What do you mean, hurt. Hurt what guy?” Billy trying to remember the name of Lazar’s potential blackmailer.
“He got took away,” Carlos said.
“Lazar?”
“Mr. Lazar.”
“Who took him away?”
“The police guys at release time. I’m going to the basement. Dec said there’s a mouse.”
Billy went up to his bedroom, quietly crept past his wife, her flank beneath the sheets swelling and dipping like a chain of dunes, and stowed his weapon and handcuffs in the closet. Then, intending to call the Yonkers PD to find out about Lazar, he went back down to the kitchen.
A few minutes later, while he was still on hold with the Second Precinct Detective Squad, the doorbell began to chime. Assuming the callers were either evangelists or Con Ed, and worried that a second round of chimes would wake Carmen, he stepped briskly into the hallway and swung the door wide to see Milton Ramos standing on his doorstep, stone-faced and thick as a stump, his razored eyes staring past Billy and into the house as if he weren’t even there.
Thinking that he was probably stuporously drunk by now and angry about having been booted from Night Watch three hours earlier, Billy was about to try to talk him down when Ramos reached behind his back—Billy vaguely thinking for some kind of letter of complaint—and came out with a Glock.
“Where is she,” Ramos said.
Billy took a step outside the house, then made a big show of holding up his hands for the TARU cameras, though he had no idea whether anyone was even monitoring them.
“Where is she,” Ramos repeated, muzzle-shoving Billy back inside as far as the living room while efficiently patting him down with his free hand even though they were both still in motion.
So, not stuporously drunk.
“Ramos.” He couldn’t remember his first name. “What are you doing?”
“Where is she.”
This time Billy heard the question. “Where’s who.”
“Your wife.”
“My wife?”
“Your wife, your wife, your wife,” he said, as if fed up with a blockhead.
“Hang on, hang on, I’m the one who gave you grief.”
Done with the basement, Carlos wandered into the room and without looking at either Ramos or his father, took a seat on the couch and picked up the remote.
“Hey, buddy, not now,” Billy said, his voice starting to float. “Go outside.”
“He stays,” Ramos said, letting the kid settle in and find his show.
“Look, just say,” Billy struggling not to plead, “what do you want.”
“I told you already,” Ramos said. Then, tilting his chin to the sound of footsteps coming from above, “She’s up there? Call her down.”
“She still doesn’t recognize me.”
Ramos was addressing Billy but his eyes were on Carmen, sitting across the room from him as stiff as a pharaoh, her own gaze fixed on the floor. “How can that be.”
Carlos, absorbed in his cartoons, was sitting alongside Ramos on the couch now, the automatic hidden beneath a throw pillow between them.
“What do you need the kid for,” Billy said, striving for an offhand tone. “Just let him come to me.”
Ignoring Billy, Ramos leaned forward to get Carmen to look at him. She wouldn’t.
“But you remember Little Man, right?” he said.
“You’re Milton,” Carmen whispered dully.
“Maybe I’m Edgar.”
“Edgar’s dead,” she said in that same downcast hush.
“So you know,” he said.
Billy, barely listening, finally became aware that there was a real conversation going on, neither Ramos nor his wife raising their voices.
“My whole family, in the ground, where you put them,” Ramos said to her, “and all these years I never knew why.”
Carlos half-stood to reach for the remote again, Ramos slowly raising a hand to grab him in case he decided to bolt, but the kid fell back into the cushions on his own.
“Milton, I’m right in front of you, I’m right here,” Carmen’s voice, despite the danger, still jarringly flat. “Please don’t hurt my son.”
“He’s not going to hurt him,” Billy said lightly, his heart blowing like a bellows. “He’s got a daughter of his own, right?”
The sound of the back door opening had Ramos half-rising, the automatic now down at his side. But at the sight of Billy Senior standing in the doorway, ruffled sections of the weekend paper tucked under his arm, he eased himself back down, slipping the gun once again beneath the pillow.
“What are you coming so early for?” Billy Senior said, stepping into the den. “I’m on nights this week. Didn’t they tell you?”
“I just came by to visit your son,” Ramos said easily. “I’ll be back for you later.”
“Well, see you then, my friend.” Billy’s father gave a short wave and left the room the same way he came in.
At first Billy was baffled, but then he realized that his father had been talking to his replacement driver, and that Ramos was the one who had been torturing them for weeks.
Milton, she had called him.
There was a glass snow globe from Jiminy Peak on the windowsill, a brass candlestick on a side table, the snow globe closer but still too far away.
“Tell me why you did it,” Ramos said.
Carmen tried to raise her eyes to Carlos, couldn’t. “Milton, I’m scared to look at him. Please.”
“Carlos, buddy, come on over to me,” Billy said. “Ramos, be a good guy, just let him come.”
“Tell me why you did it.”
“I never meant to,” she said. “You have to believe that.”
“Ramos, be a good guy . . .”
“Why.”
“Ramos, you do something here, how much time do you think you’ll ever have to be with your daughter? She’s already lost her mother, you told me yourself.”
“Why.”
“Because he broke my heart,” Carmen said, her voice barely carrying across the room.
“He what?” Ramos cocked his head, draped an arm atop Carlos’s shoulders.
“Think it through,” Billy said, eyes back to roaming for weapons.
“Broke my heart.”
“Broke your heart,” Ramos said. “He got you pregnant?”
“No.”
“But he was fucking you.” More a question than a statement.
Carlos started to fidget under the weight of his arm, but Ramos was too absorbed to even notice.
“Be cool, buddy,” Billy said to his son.
“He never even looked at me but once,” Carmen said.
Out the window, Billy saw a fleet of patrol cars and a Yonkers ESU van rolling up to the house, their presence, prayed for earlier, now heightening his sense of danger.
“I was fifteen years old,” Carmen said heavily. “They came up to me on the stoop, he had just hurt my feelings, I was mad, and I said what I said.”
Astonishingly, understandably, Carlos fell asleep against Ramos’s shoulder.
“You were fifteen, he had just hurt your feelings . . . And you just said what you said,” Ramos recited to himself. “Hurt your feelings? That’s it?”
“You want a better story?” Carmen softly crying now. “I don’t have one.”
The house phone rang; hostage negotiators for sure, Billy knew, no one making a move to answer it.
“You know something?” Ramos said to Carmen, his voice filled with wonder. “I believe you. Fifteen years old . . . I don’t know what I was expecting to hear all these years.”
The fax line began to ring in the den, followed by Carmen’s cell phone in the hallway.
“Would it be too little for me to say that I pray for him every day of my life?” she asked listlessly.
“Yeah,” Ramos getting to his feet, the Glock rising in his fist, “it would.”
Before Billy could launch himself, his father reappeared in the doorway, this time with his ancient .45 double-gripped and leveled at the back of Ramos’s head. When Ramos wheeled to the threat, then kept coming, Billy Senior fired, although the fucking thing might as well have had a BANG flag pop out. Billy lunged for the snow globe on the windowsill, then giant-stepped forward and cracked it against Ramos’s near temple, sending him milk-eyed to the floor, the side of his face shining with viscous liquid and glitter.
For a moment, Carmen just stood there as if still lost in whatever they had been talking about; then, snapping out of it, she scooped Carlos from the couch, screamed, “Billy, come!” and when he wouldn’t—his father was in the house too—remained in the doorway, her legs trembling like jackhammers, until he shoved her out of the house, toward the cops.
Having no idea where the Glock had gone, Billy snatched his father’s .45 out of his hands, then dropped down to straddle Ramos’s broad back, the sheer breadth of it stretching the tendons in his groin.