Cheryl has ceased to pose any threat, but he will not abandon her. He will find alternate means.
Chapter 21
I head north on Orchard, turn east on Stanton, duffel bag strapped to my back. I’m heading for a hotel near the river where I used to work busting johns.
This has been my beat for ten years now. I first saw these streets through a squad car window. Off-brand department stores, storefront churches, old stone churches, specialty boutiques (most have changed hands since I started), dive bars and night clubs and restaurants and cafes. Multiple generations sharing the same space. In short, a neighborhood.
I remember every arrest I’ve ever made. My third day in uniform, a woman pressed charges against her husband for “tickle-torturing” her. A week later, a gang of adolescent girls put on stiletto heels and stomped a budding cheerleader to within an inch of her life. Now I’m murder police. Detective Cheryl Mabern, Nebraska-blonde champion of the Lower East Side dead. Name any block between Houston and Canal and I’ll tell you a story.
I cut over to Rivington, stroll past repurposed synagogues and community gardens. When I turn north again on Pitt, it becomes clear where I’m headed. Probably I knew all along. The vacant lot where I shot Jesse Smits.
It was a call we weren’t slated to take. We’d been up in Washington Heights, telling a seventy-year-old woman who looked ninety that her grandson was shot dead in a drive-by. She lived in one of those sprawling apartments it’s impossible to find now. Sitting there on her couch, which was still wrapped in plastic after a good decade of use, I could feel the landlord willing her into a nursing home so that he could break the place up into three units, all renting at twice the original price.
She took the armchair across from us, spent a long moment clearing phlegm from her throat.
“Was it quick?” she asked.
“I don’t think he felt a thing,” Randy lied.
Randy was always the one with the bedside manner.
The old woman looked at me.
“He was more than just a rap sheet,” she said.
“I know,” I said.
She nodded.
“As long as you know.”
“Is there anyone who can stay with you?” I asked.
She got up, left the room. We saw ourselves out.
We were almost at the station house when a call came over the radio: an undercover was taking fire on Ridge, just south of Houston. We were two minutes out. Randy stuck our siren on the hood. I punched the gas.
We found Detective Jason Juarez hunkered down behind a station wagon with false mahogany side panels, clamping a handkerchief over a bullet wound on his right shoulder. The area was clear; the shooters must have scattered when they heard us coming. There were more sirens approaching—squad cars and an ambulance and what sounded like a fire truck. Lord knows why they always send a fire truck.
Randy and I holstered our guns, knelt on either side of Juarez. I knew Juarez by reputation—a tough son of a bitch with more commendations than I had years on the job. The salt-and-pepper buzz cut put him in his early fifties. He carried a lot of bulk that used to be muscle.
“They were kids,” he said. “My son’s age.”
“We’ll find them,” I said.
He gave me a look like the world was a broken place either way.
“You’re okay,” Randy said. “What you’ve got there is a scratch.”
“I see Percocet in your future,” I said. “Maybe Demerol.”
Randy stood, scanned the street. The sirens were closing in.
“I love that sound,” he said.
A male figure cast in shadow leapt out from behind a row of garbage cans, fired a single shot, and ran. Randy stumbled, tripped over Juarez. There was blood pouring from his thigh. I started to kneel beside him, but he waved me off.
“Go,” he shouted. “Run.”
The shooter was a full block ahead of me. I jumped into the car, floored it. He saw me coming, cut a diagonal across Houston. A delivery truck swerved, the driver leaning on his horn. I hit the siren, turned with the shooter onto Avenue C, was on top of him when he dove through a hole in a chain-link fence and face-planted in a vacant lot. He came up limping, trailing blood. I was through the fence and after him at full speed, maybe six feet away when I raised my gun and screamed for him to stop. He spun, leveled his revolver. I fired.
Lights came on in the surrounding buildings. I started toward the shooter, gun trained on his body. He’d fallen face-first, arms spread. I kicked the gun from his hand, crouched, turned his head. A child, maybe twelve or thirteen. Still breathing.
I called dispatch, then collapsed in the weeds beside him.
And now here I am again, standing at the scene. Just as I did on that night, I take out my phone, start dialing. I stare up at the windows while I navigate an automated menu I know by heart. There are lights on, but no faces. I want someone to see me. I want my trial to happen right here.
I press three for the ICU. A cranky nurse with adenoiditis tells me there’s been no change: Jesse Smits is still on life support.
Chapter 22
I get a top-floor room with no view. The bed is more cot than mattress; the sheets are spotted with cigarette burns. If I stretch my arms as far as they’ll go, I can touch either wall with my fingertips.
I lie down, fully clothed, and sleep soundly for the first time since the clinic. I wake from a dream I can’t remember beyond a vague sense that I’ve been hunted down and condemned. There’s a moment before the room comes into focus and I understand all over again why I’m here.
That dream stuck pretty close to reality.
I sit up, rub my eyes, press a hand to my heart. I think maybe I’d cry if I hadn’t trained myself not to. I’m as tired as if I hadn’t slept. It occurs to me that I haven’t eaten all day.
I think: What will I do if I can’t be a cop?
But there’s a more pressing question: Where do I go now? Back to the employment agency? Or maybe the clinic?
The shrinks told us that when we were alone and in a bad way we had to break the silence, get someone else’s voice in our heads. But by the time you’ve reached a certain age, you have to wonder: if the only people I can reach out to are strangers, then what’s the point?
Randy said he was here for me, but he isn’t. He can’t be. Not physically. Not in any other way.
I splash some murky water on my face, grab up my jacket, and step from the room. The smell in the hallway tells me I could make a week’s worth of busts in one fell swoop.
I take the subway uptown at the tail end of rush hour, hair tucked under a knitted cap, sunglasses pushed far up the bridge of my nose. Not much of a disguise, but it should be enough to make the newshounds doubt it’s really me.
Standing in the train, bodies pressing in on me from all sides, I catch myself wanting so many things at once. More things than I can hope to have. More things than I have a right to.
I want to snap bracelets on the Night Sniper. I want Jesse Smits to wake up and tell the truth. I want never to have shot Jesse Smits. I want to be partnered with Randy again—just the two of us, working cases. I want to live in a world that doesn’t need Homicide cops. I want a nice one-bedroom in Brooklyn Heights and a cabin in the Catskills where I can romp through the woods with an Irish setter at my side. I want Pete to kiss me. I want to bring him home to my nice one-bedroom in Brooklyn Heights.
I exit the train at 103rd Street. I’m following a simple rule that kept me employed for more than a decade: Never score in your own neighborhood.
My dealer of choice tends bar at an easy-to-miss jazz club on 97th off Amsterdam. Andy, a Scottish guy with a thick brogue and a smile that says he passes judgment on no man, least of all himself. It doesn’t hurt that he’s easy on the eyes.
He has his back to the door when I walk in. I take a seat at the zinc, move my wallet from my pants pocket to my coat pocket. I’m the only patron. It’s an in-between time: too late for happy hour, to
o early for live music.
He turns around, sees me, flashes that smile.
“I thought you’d broken up with me,” he says.
“Is that gray in your goatee?” I ask.
“Oh, aye,” he says. “Time has her fun with us all.”
“Tell me about it.”
“The usual, then?”
I nod.
“Wouldn’t do to keep the stuff on the premises,” he says. “I’ll have to go fetch it. Anyone comes in, tell ’em we’re giving self-service a try.”
He leaves me with a pint of black and tan, on the house.
I think to myself: I’m really going to do this.
Chapter 23
He takes the subway to a downtown branch of the public library. Should his time on the computer leave a trace, at least that trace will remain forty blocks from his home.
He spends the six-stop ride rehearsing his next conversation with Cheryl, assuming there is a next conversation. It seems more likely that the bond between them will play out in action, not words. Nevertheless, he finds comfort in directing his thoughts toward her—more comfort still in imagining her quiet, sympathetic response.
“My father fought in Vietnam,” he tells her. “He saw things that changed him. When my mother died, so did any hope of his changing back.”
He imagines her seated next to him, her body jerking against his as the train approaches each station.
“How old were you?” she asks. “When your mother died?”
“Six or seven. It was cancer. I don’t know what kind. My father wouldn’t talk about it. He wouldn’t talk about anything he considered past.”
He feels Cheryl take his hand, then decides this is too much, too soon. Instead, she pats his arm, says:
“I’m so sorry.”
He tells her things he hasn’t shared with anyone else, things he has not allowed himself to dwell on for many years. He tells her about growing up on the compound in Idaho, about the long mountain hikes—marches, really—with his father. Fifty pounds of gear strapped to their backs, rifles at the ready. His father barking insults, striking him on the shoulders with a metal baton if his pace slowed.
“We were preparing for the Apocalypse,” Miles says.
“There were times,” he tells Cheryl, “I didn’t think I’d make it back from those hikes. Times I thought for sure he’d leave my body in the woods.”
He describes the relentless drills. Hours spent on his belly in the snow, well above the tree line, stripped of his coat and boots, waiting for an animal to emerge from a stand of Douglas fir while his father hovered nearby with a cattle prod. The long strings of sleep-deprived nights, his father chomping on pills to keep himself awake, shooting Miles with a water gun if his head started to nod. Dragging his son out at the first hint of dawn, forcing him to sight a target some 800 meters away.
“That’s inhuman,” Cheryl says. “I wish someone had been there to stop him. I wish someone had stood up for you.”
But Miles senses the question she really wants to ask: Did your father live long enough to see you graduate from drills? Did he ever give you a human target?
He considers answering, then decides against it. He’s told her enough. It is her turn to talk.
“I want to hear about you now, Cheryl,” he says.
He realizes, too late, that he has said this out loud. The woman seated next to him—early fifties, plump, wearing three shades of nail polish and an obvious wig—leans back, gives him a quick once-over, then whips her head away to avoid eye contact. Miles knows he should be embarrassed, but he can’t suppress a slight grin. He’s always been a daydreamer. It was dreaming that got him through those long hours on his belly in the snow.
He sits alone at a bank of computers just beyond the children’s section. It occurs to him that he is only three short blocks from task force headquarters.
Right under their noses, he thinks. But then they wouldn’t know me if I walked up and confessed.
He types “Detective Cheryl Mabern, NYPD” into a search engine, hits return, is overwhelmed with a slew of recent news articles. He deletes “Detective” and “PD,” tries again.
He is looking for some way to contact her outside of the precinct. It is less than unlikely, he knows, that her number will be listed in the White Pages or her email address listed in some union database. But in the age of social media, no one is completely hidden.
Ultimately, it is easier than Miles could have anticipated: Cheryl Mabern has a LinkedIn account.
She must have opened it shortly after the Smits shooting, and, Miles guesses, just before she was institutionalized. The head shot she chose as avatar shows her hair chopped shorter than Amy’s. Miles is glad she’s let it grow out.
Her page is set up to attract security work. Under Skills, she’s listed Crime Prevention, Surveillance Analysis, Field Training, Personal Protection, and Dignitary Protection. Guilt over the shooting must have led her to seek a less volatile source of income—something, if not behind a desk, then at least off the street. Chances are she’s forgotten by now that she ever opened the account.
Miles continues reading. Under Experience, Cheryl has chronicled a rapid rise through the department—from beat cop to Detective First Grade in just six years. After a short detail in Vice, she jumped straight to Homicide.
Cheryl’s Education: a BA in criminal justice from John Jay, then a year of law at Fordham.
Miles thinks: I wonder what kind of lawyer you would have made. I bet you’re wondering right about now, too.
He scrolls back to the top of the page, clicks on a blue icon marked Contact info. An email address was the most he’d dared to hope for, but there is a phone number, followed by the word “cell” in parentheses.
Chapter 24
There’s nothing lonelier than sitting at a bar even the bartender has deserted.
I take a long drag from my pint, look around the room. Maybe, I think, this is my personal purgatory, the holding cell meant to keep me until Jesse Smits recovers or doesn’t, until the Sniper is caught or stops killing. If so, it could be worse. There’s Louis Armstrong on the jukebox, and the bottles behind the bar look mostly full. I’d be okay here for a while.
So why do I feel so anxious?
And what’s taking Andy so long?
I reach behind the bar, take up a bottle of whisky, top off my black and tan. One long swallow and I’m on the verge of floating away.
Here’s what people don’t know—the secret Randy’s been good enough to keep. I’ve done some of my best cop work while drunk or high. I had a nice bourbon-buzz going the night we cornered child-killer Mike Mazza in a boiler room on Avenue C. I had a half-dozen oxycodone in me when we finally shackled Bryzinski.
The biggest secret of all: I was loaded on benzos when I shot Jesse Smits.
It’s not a question of liquid or pharmaceutical courage. I was born with the kind of fearlessness that could go either way. Contract killers and serial killers have it. So do the most decorated soldiers and cops. Point a gun at me and my heart doesn’t miss a beat. I’m not bragging: it’s a gene you’re either born with or you aren’t. I have that straight from the shrinks.
So why drink? Why take pills?
To shut up the voice my mom and pop drilled into me because they knew that special gene might get me killed. The voice that says: but if I do X, then Y might happen, and behind Y lurks something much worse. It’s the same voice that tells me to wait for backup, let SWAT take the door. If you don’t hear enough of that voice, then your life expectancy plummets. Hear too much of it, and you end up paralyzed.
Right now, I’m in the mood to jump off the roof or kick down the door. I don’t really care if I break my leg or take a bullet.
The band for the night shows up early, occupies the opposite end of the bar. Per Andy’s instructions, I tell them to help themselves. The one with the sax-shaped case hops the zinc, searches out the most expensive bottle of Scotch. The rest of them whisper among the
mselves. Over Armstrong’s scatting I catch the word “cop.” Then I hear one of them say, “Still, she’s not half bad.”
At least I’ve got that going for me.
Andy returns. He’s carrying a brown paper bag with twine handles, the kind you see at upscale department stores.
“Evening, gents,” he says.
“We were hoping you wouldn’t show,” the sax player says.
“I can only give away so much of the boss’s liquor.”
The patter dies down, and Andy turns to me.
“Took you long enough,” I say.
He hands over the bag.
“Go on,” he says. “Have a look inside.”
I realize this little show is for the benefit of the boozy quartet. Andy knows they’ve made me, and he doesn’t want prying eyes speculating as to what that bag might hold.
I reach in, pull out what looks like a long box of gourmet chocolate. It’s a good disguise. The box is even shrink-wrapped for effect. Holding it, my hand starts to quiver. I think: It’s been too long.
“Only the best for my gal,” Andy says.
How long has it been since someone called me his gal? Partly to play along and partly because the alcohol is kicking in, I lean across the bar, kiss him full on the lips.
Now the band is eyeing us hard.
“I’ve always wanted to do that,” I say.
“Yeah,” he says, “me too. How about we—”
“Hold on,” I say.
I’m getting a text. The vibration in my pocket startles me. I stand, dig out my phone. Then I feel myself go white.
“What?” Andy says. “What is it?”
Just three words on the screen: Tonight in Marseille.