It was almost four forty-five in the afternoon.
Mike and I had come back to the car an hour ago. He called Peterson and asked the lieutenant to speak directly to Commissioner Scully about getting manpower from Narcotics to sweep the train yard. There had been more than one hundred fifty arrests for drug sales—felony and misdemeanor—in the six-block radius around the East 180th Street train yards within the last year.
Everybody was moving forward now without James Prescott and the task force team.
He had left four messages on Mike’s phone, but even the commissioner didn’t want to split responsibility for this investigation with the US attorney.
I was in the passenger seat of Mike’s car with my feet on the dashboard, watching the people come and go from the train station from time to time.
“I promised Scully I’d take you back to Three Sisters in time for dinner,” Mike said.
“Push it back a bit.”
Mike looked at his watch. “I’m just waiting on the Narcotics guys,” he said. “Scully said all he could put together on a Sunday afternoon were two sets of partners—four guys who are familiar with this neighborhood.”
“No rush.”
“They should be here within the hour,” Mike said. “I’d like to go through the yard with them. Hear what they think.”
“I bet it’s a lot dicier here when it gets dark,” I said. “I wish they’d hurry up.”
The character of the neighborhood was changing with the hours. The number of mothers who had emerged from the stucco train station pushing baby carriages in the early afternoon had slowed to a trickle. Older people—women and men—who came from the elevators out onto the sidewalk all seemed to get on their way more quickly.
At five twenty, two unmarked cars pulled in and parked across the street from us. Mike and I got out, crossed the street, and introduced ourselves to the four men.
“What’s this about?” the senior detective asked. “I’m Skip Summers. You run into trouble today?”
“I was hoping to, to tell you the truth,” Mike said. “Came up short. You guys work around here?”
“You might guess we’re a little too long in the tooth to be doing undercover gigs anymore, but we run the area for the kids doing buy and busts.”
“Any of you lock up a kid named Henry Dibaba earlier this year?” Mike asked.
The name wasn’t familiar to them.
“What’s your biggest problem in this area?” he said.
A second guy answered, obviously not happy to be pulled out on a Sunday afternoon.
“The area. That’s the problem,” he said. “Look around. The whole freaking area’s the problem.”
“Every politician in New York makes promises to clean up the South Bronx when they run for office,” the senior detective said. “Then they get elected and it’s still the armpit of the city. What do you want to do?”
“I’m assuming, because of the size and isolation of the rail yards—especially at night—that this is a destination point for sellers,” Mike said. “Especially since the drug business was chased out of the Hunts Point Market when they gentrified that part of the Bronx.”
“You could probably die of an overdose if you spent an hour sniffing your way through these tracks,” Summers said. “Did you go inside the gates?”
“Yeah, the guard didn’t seem to mind.”
“See anything?”
The older man opened his car door and reached into the glove compartment, taking out two flashlights. His counterparts did the same, handing one of them to Mike.
“When the sun quits, you’ll think you’ve had shades pulled over your eyes. It’s one of the darkest parts of town.”
“Thanks,” Mike said. “We think we may be onto a big business that imports large quantities of heroin. Heroin-highway kind of operation. Afghanistan to Africa across the Indian Ocean to Asia—and then here.”
“This could be your marketplace, Chapman. A lot of smack ends up right here, coming from everywhere. What was that fancy old train in France?” Summers said, sweeping his hand in front of us. “The Orient Express? Well, it’s parked right here. All fourteen hundred cars of it.”
“These yards are that big?” I asked.
“It goes on forever. You saw the shop, right?” Summers said. “There are twelve tracks just to hold cars that come in here for servicing to be done. For upkeep, even though it doesn’t look that way.”
“But those rusted old trains on the far side,” I said. “They look beyond repair.”
“Those are the ones on what they call storage tracks. They’re not only beyond repair; they’re beyond the interest of every politico in government.”
“Does anyone ever take them out of storage?” I asked.
“Not a chance. The cars are picked over like they were body-part donors at the morgue.”
My stomach jumped at the word “morgue.” It had been less than a week since I’d stared at Paul Battaglia’s corpse.
“Then there’s Unionport Yard, directly adjacent to this,” the detective said, pointing farther off as he talked to me. “Nineteen more tracks that occasionally hold some number 2 and number 5 trains. I mean, live ones, that get moved back out once there’s a need.”
“No use talking to Coop about it,” Mike said. “She’s allergic to subways and she doesn’t do outer boroughs. She wouldn’t know the 2 and 5 from the Q and N.”
“I do need a translator if you’re going on like this about subway numbers and rail yards,” I said. I saw too many of my perps getting off at the Canal Street stop when I traveled to work that way. We were all on our way to the same courtroom, and it always made me feel too exposed.
“C’mon,” Summers said. “We’ll walk you through it.”
He led the way to the gate, and I closed in next to Mike.
“We just came out of here,” I said. “Why go back?”
“’Cause these men know the place. They can tell us where our team should focus their efforts, if I turn out to be right.”
Detective Summers rattled the gate till the guard came out to open it up. We were a pack of six, walking with more purpose now, through the entrance to the vast yards.
Summers took a different route, passing the security shed to the left and cutting through the middle of the yard.
We walked past dozens of cars—tracks on each side of us that seemed to go on forever—until the maintenance shop stood in our path.
“This here is where the work gets done Monday to Friday,” he said. “It’s two city blocks long and half again as wide. Sort of a nine-to-five operation. In my experience, the drug dealers keep their distance from this general area, because there’s too much foot traffic during the week.”
Summers stood in place but made a circle, pointing at the rows of subway cars that were closest to the shop. “We’ve never had much action out of this area,” he said, talking to his three companions. “Am I right, guys?”
They all murmured agreement with him.