The Dime Page 3

  I need to hear what’s going on and I don’t want the officer to know he’s being taped and recorded by Dallas Narcotics, equipment provided by the FBI, so I instruct Hoskins to hang tight and motion for Seth to quietly follow me out of the far side of the van. We’re both wearing shorts and T-shirts, our SIG Sauers holstered under our loose clothing, so we pretend we’re typical neighborhood joggers, daring heatstroke to prove our physical prowess. I gently close the van doors, slip onto the sidewalk, and start doing a relaxed, easy jog.

  As we approach the officer, who’s continuing to talk with an increasingly agitated and belligerent Bender, I hear the woman apologizing profusely and repeatedly to both of them.

  We run in place for a bit, at a safe distance, merely concerned citizens.

  “What’s going on?” Seth asks her.

  The woman turns to us, her schnauzer yapping excitedly, and says, “I’ve made a terrible mistake. Just terrible.” Her face is wet with tears and sweat, her bottom lip quivering; she’s wiping her nose with the back of her hand. “I was just worried about the little dog. But this man, he’s from my church.”

  The officer gestures to get my attention and points back the way we’ve come, saying, “Folks, you need not to be here right now. Everything’s okay.”

  So Seth and I turn around and begin slowly jogging back to the van while the white Expedition that passed the house earlier appears on the street, headed our way.

  I stop pretending to run and face the SUV as it passes. The window nearest me rolls down with a robotic buzz and the driver’s face turns toward me briefly, the hatchet nose and almond eyes, reminiscent of a pre-Columbian mask, floating starkly within the dark interior. He has seen me and discounted me as an immediate threat, but I get the creeping sensation that some channel within him has been engaged. The same channel that sent his ancestors scurrying atop vast pyramids to hack the hearts out of their victims with stone adzes.

  A semiautomatic pistol emerges from the driver-side window and a pulse of rapid fire commences. Bender does a jerky dance for an instant before falling, blood spattering like a burst balloon onto the cop standing next to him. The officer, scrabbling for his gun, is hit in the second pulse and falls backward onto the yard.

  Seth and I crash into some border shrubs, yelling for the woman to get down, but she’s standing on the walkway, shrieking and clutching her schnauzer to her chest in a terrified grip. The barrel of the semiautomatic does an elegant, minimal sweep, finds her, and drops her in three shots.

  From the passenger side of the Expedition, automatic-rifle fire sprays Hoskins’s maroon surveillance van, punching holes in the metal and shattering glass. Seth and I return fire, but the SUV is accelerating, burning rubber for a count of four before finding traction and hurtling toward the far intersection.

  Seth sprints for the van, and at the same time, from a house a few doors down, a big man in briefs and a terry-cloth bathrobe flapping crazily around his torso like wings, comes pounding out onto his front driveway and begins firing his own large-caliber pistol at the retreating SUV. The gun roars massively five times, sending plugs of wiry Bermuda grass in his neighbors’ yards flying upward like small demolition works.

  I scream at him—“Stop firing, you asshole!”—while kneeling down next to the woman who has fallen, face-first, over her dog. She has no pulse; her blood oozes down the walk like a slow-moving stream, and the dog has gone the way of its owner.

  The back of the maroon van snaps opens and the undercovers spill out: Hoskins and Craddock are okay; Ryan, the youngest team member, not so lucky, with a piece of ricocheted metal in his shoulder. Seth has called for backup and within a few minutes, the street is an anthill of local police, tactical and heli support, and other members from our Narcotics unit. The local news vans are not far behind. The FBI is the last to make an appearance.

  Overhead tracking eventually picks up the white Expedition, but the house it’s parked in front of turns out to be empty, the elderly owner and his Lincoln Town Car already missing.

  I give my account of the events to my sergeant, Verne Taylor, who arrives on scene sweating and swearing at the activity around him as the local neighborhood shooter—mopping his face and naked chest with the edge of his robe—loudly complains to jostling reporters and fellow neighbors that “if the cops in Dallas would just carry their fuckin’ guns like they’re supposed to, us citizens wouldn’t have to do their jobs for ’em. And now the police have taken my gun into their possession. Where’s my goddamned protection now?”

  We identify the Good Samaritan by the things in her designer fanny pack, which contains a platinum American Express card and a compact Beretta with a diamond-pavé grip. (A Valentine’s Day present from her husband, as it turns out. He wanted her to stay safe while out walking the dog. Safe from what danger in this upscale neighborhood, he didn’t say, but I know he never imagined that the orgy of violence of the Mexican drug wars would find its way to his peaceful, impeccably landscaped streets.)

  The Good Samaritan appeared, at a distance, to be in her forties, but closer up she looks older. Her driver’s license puts her at sixty-eight. There are gray roots in her blond hair, and the scars from a recent face-lift shine in angry pink ribbons behind her ears. I want very much to pat her hair back into place again—she worked so hard to hide the entropy—but of course, that would be interfering with forensics. As soon as the local cops start making fun of her boob job, her augmented breasts continuing their upward thrust even as the rest of her sags like melting ice cream onto the pavement, I walk away.

  An ambulance transports Ryan to the hospital for treatment, and Seth volunteers to take Bender’s dog into his care, temporarily, after it becomes evident that it will otherwise be put into a shelter.

  I sit on a curb. My teeth are chattering even though the temperature has got to be in the nineties. Christ, how I wish I could call Benny.

  An EMT, a large black woman with a uniform so tight it looks spray-painted on, threatens to carry me into the treatment van if I don’t go there under my own steam. She takes her time checking my vitals.

  She winks at me. “Us females got to stick together in this. Right, baby?”

  She puts a cold pack under my neck and a blanket over my chest—“Some Sunday,” she says mournfully, shaking her head—and spends fifteen minutes filling out five minutes’ worth of paperwork.

  My shakes subside and I try and lie quiet with my eyes closed, but my thoughts continue to circle around the cascading events of the past hour. If Bender hadn’t left his dog in the car, if the woman hadn’t shown up, if Ruiz hadn’t driven by when the policeman was talking to Bender. And on and on. Uncle Benny used to say that there were three kinds of coincidences that could occur during a case. The first was the happy coincidence, which could lead to every piece of evidence folding together like exquisite origami, solid and connected, forming an indisputable picture of a crime.

  The second was the unhappy coincidence, where the unexpected broke the back of an operation: an important witness dying, a crucial piece of evidence disappearing, an inexperienced officer mucking about the scene of the crime, or the good intentions of civilians wreaking havoc. According to Benny, civilians could screw your case quicker than a drunken carny did a fourteen-year-old Polish virgin; witness the lady with the pocketbook schnauzer.

  The third kind of coincidence, the rare, bat-shit-weird sequence of connecting circumstances that oozes into the world seemingly from an alternative universe, was so dangerous you didn’t even want to think about it. The Rhyzyk cops in my family referred to that chain of happenstance as popierdolony, Polish for “cosmically fucked up beyond human control.” Every cop who stays on the force long enough will catch one case that gives him the Cosmic Screw. Like a superstitious sailor who fears a coming storm, I reflexively touch the Saint Michael’s medallion at my neck—Saint Michael is the patron saint of cops—and squeeze the thought from my mind.

  I’ve had two great years with Dallas Narcotic
s, with solid buy-and-busts and good case closures, no deaths other than self-inflicted overdoses. As of today, though, my first case as lead, I’ve got one suspect, one civilian, and one cop all deceased. And one of my own wounded.

  The medic finally clears me and tells me to go home, and I take her advice.

  4

  Jackie has set the table and done most of the dinner cooking by herself. Usually, we do it together, but she knows how badly the day has gone and so she gives me the opportunity to brood alone in the tiny second bedroom in our apartment we call the office. I’ve spoken to my sergeant twice already, and he knows, being an almost-thirty-year veteran of the force, that sometimes even solid things fragment and fall apart, and judging by the events still unfolding, it doesn’t look like it will get better anytime soon.

  Taylor tells me on the second call that the stolen Lincoln has been found with the owner dead in the backseat, shot twice in the head. Another innocent bystander, who was unfortunate enough to be home when El Gitano rang his bell or just walked in through his unlocked door. The Lincoln was located in Oak Cliff, south of downtown Dallas, next to an abandoned auto-repair shop. The local cops were canvassing the area, but so far no one had seen nada. He tells me to try and get some sleep and he’ll see me in the morning, eight o’clock, for a departmental meeting to regroup.

  I disconnect from the call and feel, like a dull toothache, the vibrations from the television in the apartment next door, the volume turned up to stun, the anchor reporting the slaughter in suburban Dallas on the evening news.

  Jackie has dinner on the table when I come out of the office—a totally vegetarian meal, which serves me right for leaving all the work to her.

  “How’re you doing?” she asks. She wraps her arms tightly around me, laying her head in the crook of my neck, her exhalations moist against my skin, a vapor of wine on her breath.

  I try peeling her arms from around my waist. “I’m fine,” I say.

  “And the young detective that was wounded, Kevin Ryan? How’s he doing?”

  I kiss the top of her head and squeeze her tightly.

  “Ryan will recover,” I assure her.

  Sitting down at the table, I stare at the pea pods and Brussels sprouts swimming like tiny brains in olive oil, trying not to let my disappointment show. But I don’t want to hurt her feelings, so I spear some with my fork and wash it down quickly with wine.

  Jackie watches me pretending to like the rabbit food and smiles. She says, “You’ll thank me when your cholesterol registers ‘human.’”

  A pediatric radiologist in a large children’s hospital, Jackie has, over the course of her ten years as a doctor, identified hundreds of instances of child abuse. She’s an after-the-crime child advocate who is never more beautiful than when she’s giving testimony in a courtroom, a witness-box Fury who uses her knowledge of forensics like a dagger. Her department sees about one suspected case per week.

  I remember to ask her about her day.

  “Busy,” she says. “I had more than twenty files across my desk before noon. We are really short-staffed right now, so I might be working more hours. I had to scope a ten-month-old today, hydrocephalic, Gorham’s disease, pericardial effusion. That was not fun…”

  People overhearing our dinner conversations would think we were insensitive, given the way we describe the messy, sometimes gruesome details of our jobs. Where my stories can be heavy-handed and unimaginative—dead guy in the alley behind the Piggly Wiggly, floater in the river under the bridge—hers are elegantly Latinate (and mostly indecipherable to my layperson’s ears). But I’ve seen the way she cradles a damaged infant, fiercely protective, like a medieval Madonna.

  I watch her gleaming dark hair falling in wisps around her neck as she pushes her food artfully around the plate, waving her fork in the air like she’s directing a symphony only she can hear.

  When I first met her, her hair was long and she wore it in two braids hanging in front of her shoulders. She had grown up on a farm in Oregon and was the happiest person I had ever met. On our first real date, I took her to the shooting range because she seemed so confident about everything—her own intellect, her physical buoyancy, her place and purpose in the world. I couldn’t think of anything else that would impress her. I wanted to be able to show her something that I could do well.

  “What?” she asks me now, her head cocked, smiling. “You’re looking at me funny.”

  I had in fact been staring at her tattoo, a red rose, like a miniature heart, edged in black, inked just under her left collarbone. She had gotten the tattoo soon after we’d seen the movie The Rose Tattoo together.

  “I’m looking at you funny?” I ask, redirecting my gaze from the pulsing red of the rose at the tender place below her clavicle to her hazel eyes, and I’m overwhelmed with gratitude at having this lovely, intuitive, graceful creature as my partner. Whatever patience I have, I’ve learned from Jackie.

  “That’s just my face, sweetheart,” I say, squeezing her hand reassuringly.

  “Bad, bad day,” she says, shaking her head. “It’ll get better. It always does.”

  And for the rest of the night I believe her.

  5

  The next morning the undercover team is assembled at the station. Seth, Hoskins, Craddock, and Ryan, sporting a sling for his wounded shoulder, are already gathered in the task-force room. When I walk in, Ryan is being teased by Craddock about not ducking fast enough.

  “Pussy magnet for sure, though,” Hoskins tells him. “Playing the sympathy card works every time. Oh, sorry, Detective Rhyzyk. I didn’t hear you come in. There was no hail of bullets.”

  “You okay, Ryan?” I ask, ignoring Hoskins. Ryan grins and gives me a thumbs-up.

  “Oh, he’s fine,” Hoskins says. “More important, Detective, how are you? Over the shakes yet?”

  I give Hoskins a warning look and walk away. Sergeant Taylor and our FBI coordinator, Carter Hayes—appearing, as usual, as though he’s stepped out of an L.L.Bean catalog, wearing khakis and a button-down shirt—are conferring quietly together in a far corner of the room. Compared to the sergeant, who’s broad-shouldered and densely muscled, Hayes looks like a man who’s spent a lifetime behind a desk, which is most likely the case. Until a few years ago, the sergeant was still competing in amateur rodeo events, one of the few black competitors in his division.

  Hoskins has shadowed me and is pointedly studying my feet. “I like your Five-Elevens, Detective.” He says it sarcastically, referring to my nine-inch leather tactical boots. They’re worn by SWAT team members, and I don’t belong to that rarefied paramilitary group. But on the days I’m not undercover I like to wear them just for a little bit of beak-twisting for the boys on the team. My version of army boots.

  I sigh, because if I don’t respond now, he’ll never shut up. “Why, thank you, Bob. I’d let you borrow them, but your feet are a little too dainty.”

  Everyone but Hoskins laughs, and karmic balance is restored.

  I find a seat next to Seth. “How’s Bender’s pup?” I whisper to him, and he gives me a stricken look that tells me he’s already in love. I shake my head. “You are so freakin’ gone, Seth.”

  Taylor starts the meeting by saying, “The bad news is that, for the time being, we’ve lost track of Ruiz. The good news is that his boss, Alberto Carrillo Fuentes, has just been arrested by the Mexican authorities.”

  There are surprised exclamations around the room, and Taylor watches us take it in. Fuentes is the head of the Nuevo Juárez cartel, which is second only to the Sinaloa cartel and a huge player in the trafficking of narcotics across the border from Mexico into the United States. His curious nickname—all of the dealers and their enforcers have their own—is Betty la Fea. Ugly Betty.

  Which, of course, Hoskins has to repeat several times for my benefit.

  With millions in bribes, thousands of enforcers—some of them ex-military, known as La Línea, some of them gang members, like the Barrio Azteca—and hundreds of cor
pses lining the streets of Juárez and border towns, Fuentes operated for years with total impunity. His arrest will lead to a vacuum of power that his men and the soldiers of the Sinaloa federation will be fighting over with increased violence. I’m guessing that the Sinaloa cartel paid more money to the Mexicans than the Juáreznitos did. That Fuentes was arrested and not assassinated offers opportunities for exorbitant bribes to be paid to the Federales by both cartels.

  What this means for El Gitano, left out in the cold, is yet to be seen.

  Taylor turns the floor over to Hayes. “Because the Lincoln was found in Oak Cliff, I think it’s safe to say that Ruiz may be headed south toward the border. He has most likely heard about his boss by now, but we don’t know yet where this will blow him. Then again, he could be uncertain about his position in Juárez and may still be in the Dallas area. We do know that even under the best of circumstances, and by best I mean business as usual, Ruiz is completely capable and willing to commit murder, as we witnessed firsthand yesterday. He’s canny. We now know”—and here he looks at us—“he made at least one of our surveillance vans. As bad as it was, we’re lucky the fallout wasn’t much, much worse.”

  “What’s this ‘we’ stuff, kemosabe,” Seth mutters to me.

  Hayes continues. “There are several leads in the metroplex that you will be following. Sergeant Taylor will go over these with you now. However, until we sort out the mess from yesterday, your intel resources as a team will be limited. No more wires or surveillance materials until further notice. Just eyeballs and balls here. Detective Rhyzyk not to be excluded.”

  There is a brief eruption of laughter and the sergeant holds up his left hand to speak. What makes Hayes’s statement funnier in that moment is that in Taylor’s right hand is a red rubber ball, one of several that he keeps in his desk, which he’s been squeezing tightly during Hayes’s talk. A running joke in the department is “What’s big and red and takes no prisoners? The sergeant’s balls.”