“About what? I didn’t call the precinct,” the guy said, annoyed to be taken away from the sports pages of his Daily News.
“I know that,” Mike said. “We have an old case we’re working on. The DA here needs some photographs of one of the train cars—sort of from a while back. Just some interior shots to use for display.”
“How long you gonna be?”
“Fifteen, twenty minutes. How’s that?”
“It don’t bother me. Just give a shout on your way out.” The man came toward us, unlocked one of the gates to let us in, then returned to the small wooden shed from which he’d emerged.
“Will do,” Mike said, calling after him.
The yard was still. Afternoon sunlight bounced off the silver surfaces of the sleeping trains as I trailed after Mike.
At one point, six or seven cars along the way, Mike dropped to the ground and spread out, full length. He stuck his head under the powerful machine, looked around, then got to his feet again and brushed off his hands.
“If you tell me what you’re looking for, maybe I can help,” I said.
“Nobody has to tell a real detective what to look for, Coop. You either know or you don’t.”
“Usually, I do.”
He had picked up his pace, and I was jogging to keep up with him.
“See that car I looked under?” he asked.
I glanced back over my shoulder. “Yeah.”
“Skip that model. We don’t need to bother with them.”
“How do I know what model it is?”
“Did you even look at it?”
“It’s a subway car, Mike.”
Apparently, other than the obvious exterior differences between the redbirds and the stainless steel trains that came after them, each iteration had unique features.
Fifteen cars later, tracks appeared on each side of the one we had followed in from the gate. The yard got wider and wider, with more rows of abandoned trains than I could count.
Mike dropped down again and looked under the next train. “This is what I mean.”
“What?”
“This model,” he said, heading for the steps to go inside it. He reached back to give me his hand for a boost up into the car. “This is what I want.”
I looked around but didn’t see anything worth noting.
“In the older trains, Coop, the air-conditioning units were built in under the subway car itself. It was really hard for maintenance reasons, for repairs.”
“Okay.”
I watched as Mike stepped up on one of the long benches along the windows of the car. Standing on his toes, he was able to grab a panel in the middle of the ceiling. He tugged at it several times, but it didn’t want to budge.
Then he reached into his pocket for his Swiss Army knife and flipped open a blade, jimmying the panel open with it. The metal strip that was suspended from the ceiling—two feet long and eighteen inches wide—dropped to the floor. Dust flew out everywhere and I began to cough.
“Step back,” Mike said.
“I’m okay,” I said, covering my mouth with my hand. “Did you find what you’re looking for?”
“In a way,” he said. “This model of train is the perfect place for a dealer to keep a stash. I wasn’t expecting to find a stash of heroin on my first stab. I was just hoping to see that there were train models we could identify that might be a dealer’s perfect hidey-hole. A secure place to keep the drugs.”
“Point taken,” I said. “This kind of car is one of them, right?”
“Right. Other models have knife switches on the underbelly of the carriage, or resistor grids,” Mike said. “But most of the guys I’ve locked up over the years prefer a location inside the train itself. They can either carry the glassines to the street or do business right inside the car—out of sight.”
“That makes good sense,” I said, “but they’ve still got to get past the guard.”
He was wiping his hands on his jeans as he jumped down from the bench. “The yards cover something like thirty-forty acres, including the industrial-size maintenance shop, which has more tracks of its own,” Mike said. “You figure two, maybe three guards at night, dozing in their little shacks. All a dealer needs is a wire cutter and the ability to slither through a hole in the fence.”
We got off the train.
“Let’s see if we can spot some gaps,” he said, crossing the old tracks, stepping carefully between the ties, to get to the edge of the fencing.
Now that I knew what we were looking for, it seemed as though there was a breach in the chicken wire—some places repaired and patched over, others not—every twenty or thirty feet.
There were three kids—not more than eight or nine years old—playing around one of the old train cars not far ahead of us. When one saw us coming, he shouted to his pals and they ran to a place in the fence where the wire had been cut and bent back to create an opening low to the ground. One after the other, they crawled on their bellies till they were out on a deserted street, seemingly in the middle of nowhere, laughing at us as they made their getaway.
“Nobody would be crazy enough to leave thousands of dollars of coke or heroin out here,” I said. “That’s putting a lot of faith in those sleepy security guards.”
“You don’t know how it’s done, Coop,” Mike said, turning to walk back to the gate where we’d entered.
“You’re right about that.”
“First the dealer picks out his car—the older, the more rotted out, the less likely to ever be restored, the better. He finds the most convenient place inside to hide his wares,” Mike said. “Could be in the air-conditioning pocket with the removable cover on the ceiling, could be inside the black box—if he’s got an engine room. Lots of options.”
“Then what?”
“Marks his turf—with some paint on the exterior, so people know who they’re fooling with, or not,” Mike said. “Then he sets up a security system to keep the powder safe.”
“An alarm?”
“This isn’t Fort Knox, Coop. No alarms,” he said. “Why do you think the flamethrower on the bicycle keeps snakes?”
“Henry Dibaba? No clue.”
“Snakes on a train, kid,” Mike said. “Let a couple of vipers loose in your caboose, and there won’t be a lot of people looking to get on board.”
I shuddered at the thought of encountering a poisonous snake or constrictor in an open space, much less one coming after me down the length of a subway car.
“Guys who deal out of their homes raise pit bulls for protection. But dogs would make too much noise in an abandoned train yard.”
I nodded in understanding.
“Let’s get Narcotics in to do a sweep of these cars,” Mike said, pulling his phone from his pocket. “Bet we’ll find a whole lot of dealing goin’ on out of these yards.”
“I’m done for the day,” I said. “No snakes for me.”
“They outgrow their skins all the time. They shed them,” Mike said. “I’d be happy to find some molted snakeskins and the residue of a bag of coke. Then I’d call it a day, too.”
FORTY-FOUR