In one eight-month period, between fourth and fifth grades, Jimmy was moved three separate times, each new set of parents welcoming him to his new home and then just as eagerly seeing him off only a few weeks later.
Jimmy’s way of life didn’t leave much room for hobbies. There were no baseball card collections to hoard or comic books hidden on dusty shelves to be read in the dead of night. There weren’t any kittens to hold or fish tanks to tend. Though Jimmy loved to read, he owned few books of his own. Anything to make packing easier.
Jimmy did have one passion, and he fell back on it to help get him through those early dark years. With a magical talent for anything electrical, he welcomed the secondhand toys his array of foster parents would send his way. Plug-in remote-control robots that had smashed into too many walls, chewed-up tape recorders, acid-stained transistor radios: They all found their way into Jimmy Ryan’s hands.
Slowly and with great care, Jimmy would take a gadget apart, reconfigure the wiring, and emerge with something virtually new. If he had the time and the tools, he would even add a few fresh dimensions to his re-creation.
In his empty hours, Jimmy pored through the electronics magazines he found in local libraries and carted out as many books on the subject as he had time to read. He absorbed all the knowledge available, stored it, and shared it with no one. Then, when that knowledge would do him the most good, Jimmy Ryan would figure a way to put it to use.
Ryan planted his first bug when he was twelve.
He was living with a plumber, George Richards, who had a short-fuse temper and a wife with a flirtatious eye. They both drank heavily and often took the frustrations of a night’s drunk out on the boy. The wife, Elaine, began her assaults with an angry voice and ended them with an even louder flurry of slaps, leaving Jimmy with a series of welts and bruises hidden under his shirts and sweaters. Afterward, she scolded him into silence and backed the warnings with hard hits across already reddened flesh.
Jimmy Ryan never uttered a word.
Instead, he laid a wire inside the main bedroom of the Richardses’ two-story stucco house in Peekskill, New York. The wire was wrapped around a wooden board under the queen-size mattress. It connected to a remote mini-recorder taped under a bureau next to the bed. On those tapes, Jimmy listened and learned about the couple he was told to call Mom and Dad.
He heard about their mounting debts and backed-up loans. He laughed as George boasted about customers he double-billed and how Elaine had her doctor file false medical claims in return for half the insurance check. But the best tapes of all, and the ones that would extract the sweetest justice, involved Elaine and her lover, Carl, a real estate attorney who also happened to be her brother-in-law. They shared two passionate afternoons a week, finishing their lovemaking just before Jimmy got home from school. All of it, from moans of pleasure to rants against George, was picked up by Jimmy’s spool of tape.
On the night he was sent away, packed valise in his left hand, Jimmy stood before George and Elaine.
“We’re sorry it didn’t work out,” Elaine told him, already on her third gin and tonic.
Jimmy nodded, checking the inside pocket of his tattered hunting jacket, making sure the dozen tapes were safely tucked away.
“Gonna miss having you here,” George said, holding a longneck bottle of beer.
“I have a gift for you,” Jimmy told George. “To thank you for what you did for me.”
“You kiddin’?” George rested a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “You got me a gift?” He turned to Elaine, hitting her with a scornful gaze, then looked back at Jimmy with a smile.
Jimmy reached into his pocket and took out the set of tapes, neatly wrapped in flowered tissue paper and held together with a ribbon.
“Want me to open it now?” George asked, taking the package and holding it in both hands.
“Maybe you should wait,” Jimmy said, looking over at Elaine. “Until you’re by yourself.”
“Thank you,” George said, nodding his head. “I’ll never forget you doin’ this.”
Jimmy buttoned his coat and picked up his valise. “I know,” he said.
He walked past George and Elaine for the last time, toward the front door, a waiting car, and another set of parents.
• • •
THE WOMAN IN the red pumps knocked on the door to Room 1211, silver bracelet jangling against her wrist.
“It’s like she’s knockin’ on the front hood of the car,” Calise said. “It’s so damn clear.”
“Narcotics have their guys in place?” Jimmy asked, head down, fingers adjusting a series of sound dials.
“They got four in the next suite,” Fitz said. “And three more in a stairwell down the hall. She gets jammed up, should take less than a minute to get to her.”
“Unless they’re asleep,” Calise said. “Which is always fuckin’ possible with those dimrods.”
The door handle snapped open and a man’s voice warmly greeted the woman. He spoke in a thick Spanish accent.
“She’s in,” Jimmy said, sitting straight up and flipping a red switch on to full volume.
“How long you givin’ her?” Fitz said.
“All she needs,” Jimmy said. “These guys are top line. They’re gonna play her first. Make sure she’s legit before they close the deal.”
“What about her?” Calise asked. “How good is she?”
“I’ll let you know in about half an hour,” Jimmy said, putting the earphones back over his head.
• • •
AT SEVENTEEN, JIMMY Ryan did a two-year tour of duty with another foster family of sorts, the U.S. Army. While stationed in Germany, the dark-haired, coal-eyed Ryan was allowed to fuel his passion by working as an electronic surveillance trainee. The army brass was impressed with his ability to handle their most sophisticated equipment and asked him to stay on for an additional four years, promising him tours of Mexico and the Middle East. Ryan, bored and unimpressed with the military regimen and tired of spending weeks without being able to cast his electric gaze on a beautiful woman, took a pass and signed out.
He was in New York City, taking a two-week seminar on wiretapping at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, when he spotted a civil service flyer posted on a hall bulletin board. He ripped it down and signed up to take the New York Police Department exam. Six months later, working as a clerk for a small electronics firm on Queens Boulevard, Ryan got the letter that paved his way to becoming a cop.
He spent a dull sixteen months in uniform and then was transferred to the Manhattan Drug Task Force, working undercover, doing what he had prepared all his life to do—lay down wires, plant devices, and listen to the secrets of others. The assignment also freed Ryan from the uneasy potential for gunplay, the area of police work he cared for the least. He was a listener, content to skirt the perimeters of other people’s worlds, but never eager to enter any one of them.
There were more than enough guys on the squad who had become cops looking to play cowboy, feeding off the nerve rush of the split-second shoot-out. Jimmy Ryan, rugged and catalogue handsome, with a head of thick curly hair and a John Garfield smile, liked living on the outside, doing his police work from a safe distance. He carried only the one gun, the .38 Special, and had never fired it in the line of duty. His danger zone rested in the mining of the wire and the spinning of the spool. Not in the spilling of blood.
• • •
WITH THE MONEY he’d saved from the army, plus his heavy overtime earnings as a cop, Ryan bought his first home, a single-family wood frame on Staten Island, six miles from lower Manhattan. It was the first place he could ever call his own, and he stocked it with books, electronic equipment, stereos, radios—all the toys of a childhood he was never allowed to have.
He worked constantly; his expertise was sought out by every undercover operation team leader throughout the five boroughs. Ryan linked his affinity for computers to his electrical magic show and turned the tedious routine of police surveillance into a state-of-the-a
rt experience. He could tap on anyone, from mob bosses to drug rollers to politicians bagging payoffs. He could lay a wire anywhere, from a car bumper to the hull of a yacht, the sound always clear, the reams of information the tapes generated almost always enough to put away the voice. He was the best bug the NYPD ever had.
The respect the other cops showed him was comforting to Jimmy Ryan. It was his first taste of family.
The cops on the job called him Pins.
Ryan loved bowling and was captain of the Manhattan Task Force team. Every Thursday and Sunday night, he could be found pounding lanes at alleys throughout New York, competing against other squads from around the city. He was the police league’s MVP three years running, holding a steady 201 average and walking off with an armful of trophies.
As much as he loved what he was doing, he had his life beyond the police force planned out.
He would open a small electronics store within walking distance of his home and think about doing six-month tours as a professional bowler. Neither job would be done for the money, but for the pleasure.
They were simple dreams.
Ryan had spent a childhood locked away in silent places where faces and names blended together. It taught him not to stray far from the cold glare of reality and to trust only what he found comfort in, what he knew would never betray him. The cold, sterile world of electronic surveillance was all Jimmy Ryan ever counted on. The shiny brown lanes of smoke-filled bowling alleys were his sanctuary.
And like his home and the police department, the rare places he could call his own.
• • •
THE MAN WITH the heavy Spanish accent sounded agitated.
“You were supposed to bring the cash yourself,” he told the woman in the red pumps.
“It couldn’t be worked out,” the woman answered coolly, traces of a southern accent hidden by a dozen New York winters. “So I had a friend arrange it. He should be here in a few minutes.”
“We didn’t ask your friend to bring the money,” the man said. “We asked you.”
“I’ve known him all my life,” she said, still cool. “I trust him. So can you.”
“I trust no one,” he said. “It is what’s kept me alive.”
“Sad way to live,” the woman said.
“In my business, it’s the only way to live,” the man said. “Trust ends with a bullet.”
• • •
“HE’S ON TO her, Pins,” Calise said. “You can hear it in his voice.”
“It’s too early to move,” Fitz said. “We don’t know if he’s got the shit with him. We bust in and he don’t have the drugs, he walks away clean. And we can’t touch that fucker ever again.”
“You can send Steve in earlier,” Jimmy said. “Once he sees the cash, he’ll be calm.”
“I don’t wanna spook the narcs,” Calise said. “They always look to end these things with guns.”
“Then, I’ll go in,” Jimmy said.
“You?” Fitz scoffed. “Since when do you go in?”
“You guys handle the equipment and I’ll go up.”
“As what!” Calise said, turning to face Jimmy.
“Hotel’s got computerized phone lines,” Jimmy said. “It’ll take me about two minutes to find the basement and short-circuit the phones in the suite. Then I go up, knock on the door, and ask to check the phones.”
“Dressed in a bowling jacket with your name on the chest and jeans,” Fitz said. “What’d you do last night, take a bowling ball to the head?”
“We need the kilos and we need him,” Jimmy said, resting the attaché case on the seat next to him and opening the car’s rear door. “And we need time to get both. This buys it for us.”
“What about the machine?” Calise said. “You’re the only one knows how to run the fuckin’ thing.”
“It’ll run itself,” Jimmy said, looking at the two cops.
“All you gotta do is listen. And be there if I need you.”
“Have I ever let you down?” Calise asked.
“Yes,” Jimmy said.
“When?”
“Every time I’ve needed you,” Jimmy said, stepping out of the car.
“Maybe today I’ll fuck up and you’ll get lucky,” Calise said.
“I’m counting on it,” Jimmy Ryan breathed.
He slammed the car door behind him, zippered the front of his black bowling jacket, and raced across the street toward the entrance of the luxury high rise.
• • •
PINS WAS ON his back, in the basement of the high rise, staring up at a thick cluster of phone lines. He held apart the dozen wires connecting the twelfth floor to the mainframe and followed their flow until he found the one leading to Room 1211. He gave the wire a slight tug and unclipped it from the board, killing the line. He checked his watch and clicked on his radio ban.
“How we doin’?” Pins said, holding down the red transmit button.
“Stevie’s in the room,” Calise said, the machine giving his words a grainy weight. “They cleaned him for weapons. Now they’re scopin’ out the bag of cash.”
“How’s our girl?” Pins asked.
“Like ice in winter,” Calise said. “This broad don’t sweat. Dealer tells her about some guy he smoked in Miami just ’cause he felt like it. Know what she tells him?”
“What?” Pins said, scooting out from under the wires and closing the phone system lid.
“She did the same to a guy in a motel in Ohio,” Calise said. “For keepin’ her waitin’. That jammed his balls back in his shorts.”
“I’ll be up there in less than five,” Pins said, heading down a dark corridor toward the dim light of a basement elevator.
“Check in before you go in,” Calise said. “I need you safe, sound, and alive.”
“Didn’t know you cared so much,” Pins said, walking into the empty elevator and pressing the button for the twelfth floor.
“I don’t,” Calise said. “But I put a hundred on you in Sunday’s bowling tournament.”
Pins turned off the transmitter and slid it into a side pocket of his jacket. “Easy money,” he whispered to himself.
• • •
THE EIGHTEEN LARGE packets of cocaine were piled in two neat rows on top of a glass coffee table. The woman in red sat on a couch, lit cigarette in her right hand, bemused look on her face, watching the man with the accent take the bag from the undercover cop to her right. She watched the man’s manicured fingers slowly unzip the black duffel and saw his brown eyes gleam when he flipped it over, emptying a dozen thick pads of cash over the kilos.
“I’m gonna go take a piss,” the undercover, Steve Rinaldi, said. “While you and your boys busy yourselves countin’ out the cash.”
“We don’t need to count it,” the man said, his eyes on the woman, his voice soft. “We trust you.”
“I still gotta piss,” Rinaldi said. “Trust me on that.”
There were three other men in the room.
Two sat at the bar, elbows stretched out, facing the group around the coffee table. The third man stood with his back to the bedroom door, hands hidden behind the folds of a white silk jacket, heavy lids covering albino blues. The man with the accent turned to him, a smile Krazy-glued to his face, and nodded.
The albino whipped his right arm free, a .44 S&W Special in his hand, silencer screwed tight over the smoke end. He fired off three quick rounds, each finding flesh. The first hit Rinaldi in the neck, spraying blood across the blue fabric of the three-cushion couch. The second hit his right shoulder and shattered bone. The third bullet killed him, entering at the temple and lodging at the base of his skull. The force of the bullets jolted Rinaldi’s body forward, his arms dangling at his sides, his face smearing blood and bone over the cocaine packets.
The woman in the red pumps finally lost her cool demeanor, the color fading from her tanned face, eyelids twitching, her expensive suit splotched with the undercover’s blood. She sat straight up on the couch, cigarette still in
her hand, staring down at the body next to her, the man’s jeans soiled through with urine and excrement, the smell reaching down into her throat.
“He really did have to go to the bathroom,” the man with the accent said. “I thought he was only joking.”
“You kill everybody you do business with?” the woman asked, taking several deep breaths, fighting to regain any semblance of composure.
“Only the ones with badges,” the man said.
“You think my friend was a cop?” she said, trying to sound credible.
“No,” the man said, moving closer to her. “I know he was a cop. What I don’t know is, who are you?”
The woman crushed her cigarette out in an ashtray and stood, ignoring the blood droppings on her hands and clothes, staring straight at the man with the accent.
“I was here to make a deal,” she said, her voice regaining strength. “It looks to me like that’s not going to happen.”
“We made a deal,” the man said, pointing to the coffee table next to his leg. “We have the money. And you have your drugs. I will even have Ramon pack it for you.”
The beefier of the two men at the bar walked over to the table, lifted the undercover by the hair, and tossed his body to the ground. He picked up the black duffel and started to lay in the cocaine packets.
“Before Ramon finishes, there is something I would like you to do for me,” the man said. “A small favor.”
“Do I have a choice?” the woman asked.
“No,” the man said.
“Then just tell me what it is.” She sighed.
“Take off your clothes,” the man with the accent said.
• • •
PINS WAS AT the door, poised to knock.
Calise and Fitz were in the elevator, out of the van, and into the high rise as soon as they heard the undercover take the hit. The narcs in the stairwell held their position, lead man with one hand gripped around the doorknob. The three detectives in the suite next door snapped on their vests and clicked their guns into readiness.
The albino opened the door on the second knock.
“Who the fuck are you?” he said, staring down at the much shorter Pins.
“Telephone repair,” Pins said, catching a glimpse of the undercover’s body behind the albino’s left shoulder. “Your lines are down.”