Damaged Goods (20 page)

“What happened with the vans?” Gadd was looking over at him, the map lying across her thighs.

“Yeah, the vans.” Moodrow glanced down at the speedometer, eased off the gas slightly. “All I could think about, when we finally got back to the parking lot, was the air conditioner in the car. I’d parked it under a tree so I figured it wouldn’t be too heated up. Then I noticed these vans, there must have been six or seven of them, unloading kids at the entrance to the Stations. Some of these kids had no hair, like it’d fallen out from chemotherapy. And all of them had that kind of gray complexion people get when they’re terminally ill.

“It was something you definitely couldn’t ignore. Pitiful, right? Like they were making their own march to the cross. But what caught my attention was that the parents were missing. There were maybe twenty or thirty kids and only six adults, three of them nuns, to herd everybody up onto the trail. Hot as it was, I walked over to one of the vans, spoke to the driver, asked him what was going on. He told me they take the kids to the different Stations and pray for a group miracle. Like the miracle could hit one kid or be shared by all of them. I don’t know why, but it got to me. ‘Shotgun salvation,’ that’s what Betty called it.”

“I see what you mean.” Gadd rolled down the window, took a breath of fresh air. “I guess Theresa Kalkadonis could use a little piece of a miracle right now. Like maybe there won’t be anybody home when we get to Jilly’s house. Better yet, she’ll be there by herself.”

Moodrow, with nothing to add, kept his eyes glued to the road. The darkness seemed to be sucking the car forward, the headlights merely illuminating a path into the whirlwind. Jilly Sappone’s house stood at the calm center of that storm. It was as if there was nothing between the two of them but time.

“I don’t know what Exit 64 is called,” Gadd said. “I can’t tell from the map. Could be Route 112, Medford Avenue, Patchogue Road—it seems like the name of the streets change from town to town. What you have to do is go north, then take the right-hand fork when you get past Horse Block Road. That’ll be Middle Island Road.”

The first sign, EXIT 64/2 MILES, flashed by and Moodrow dutifully moved to the right lane and eased off the gas pedal. Out of the corner of his eye, he watched Gadd take an S&W Airweight from her purse, open the cylinder, slide a bullet into an open chamber. Like many cops, she kept the hammer of her .38 on an empty chamber, accepting the loss of firepower in the name of safety. This despite the manufacturer insisting that the weapon cannot discharge with the hammer down.

“When was the last time you fired that piece?” he asked.

Gadd answered without looking at him. “Three days ago,” she said. Then, after a pause, “I used to shoot in department competitions. Best I ever got was a third place, but I met a lot of ranking officers. For all the good it did me.” She hesitated again. “Don’t worry, Moodrow. I’ll hit what I’m aiming at. Assuming I’m not paralyzed with terror.”

“All right, all right.” Moodrow braked sharply as he slid onto the off-ramp. “I’m sorry I brought it up. You can’t blame me for wanting to know.”

Gadd said nothing for a moment, waiting until the car came to a full stop at the end of the ramp. “Take a right. The fork should be at the next intersection.”

They drove the block in silence, pulling up as the light turned red.

“How ’bout you, Moodrow? You fire the gun on the job?”

Gadd was turned to him now, her .38 lying in her lap. As he watched, she emptied her bag onto the floor, then put the revolver inside the bag. She did it, he noted, with her hands, not her eyes, snuggling the weapon into a place where she could get to it fast.

“When I came on the job,” Moodrow said, “if some jerk ran away, all you had to do was fire a single warning shot. After that, assuming he didn’t take the hint, you could kill him and the job would back you up. Didn’t matter if he was unarmed.”

Gadd was about to say, “That’s not what I asked you,” when the light changed and Moodrow accelerated onto Middle Island Road. Two narrow lanes wide and devoid of any on-street lighting, the road curved through the woods with only an occasional house on either side. The first house they came to, set back forty feet, bore the number 238 under a porch light. The second was completely dark, as was the third. The fourth and fifth were set close to the sidewalk. Gadd called out the numbers 446 and 490 as they passed, added, “We’re closing in.”

They drove the next several hundred yards in total darkness, until Middle Island Road took a sharp bend to the right and they passed a dark house, then a house numbered 636. A hundred yards farther on, Gadd announced the number 772.

“We passed it,” she said, “two houses back.”

Moodrow nodded, allowed himself a moment to visualize Jilly Sappone’s home. He pulled up the image of a small, single-story house served by a long, straight driveway. There were no lights of any kind, not even over the tiny porch, the building just a darker shadow against the trees behind it.

“There was nothing close by, right?” he finally asked. “No neighbors?”

“None.” Gadd was smiling, her eyes sparkling despite the car’s dark interior. “Christ,” she said, “it’s a gift.”

“Yeah,” Moodrow agreed, “but we still have to find a place to park and we still have to hike back to the house. You see a way to circle around, come past again?”

“Take a right at the next intersection. Granny Road.”

“
Granny?
You gotta be kidding.”

Gadd turned to Moodrow, started to respond, thought better of it. She put her handbag on her lap, finding the revolver’s weight somehow reassuring. Her heart was pounding in her chest, but as she’d bought her own ticket, she couldn’t bring herself to start complaining now that the roller coaster was cresting the hill.

Even with no traffic, it took Moodrow almost ten minutes to get back to the intersection of Route 112 and the Long Island Expressway. Roads that seemed relatively short on the map stretched out into the darkness for what seemed like miles. By the time he pulled up to the red light, he was cursing himself for not using someone’s driveway to make a simple U-turn.

There were three cars driving north on Route 112 and Moodrow scanned them impatiently, anxious to make a right turn against the light. The first two carried no passengers and took an immediate left onto the Expressway service road, but the third caught his attention. He could see two men in the vehicle, one in front and one in back. The setup would have been unusual, even in a large sedan, a Cadillac or a town car, but the men were riding in a Ford Taurus. Maybe they were running with the front seat pushed all the way up, but, even so, the man riding behind had to be squeezed in.

As the car slid past Moodrow’s Caprice, the man in back turned to glance out the window. Despite the fourteen years and the tight gray beard, Moodrow recognized Jilly Sappone without hesitation. It might have been the large, sharp nose, Sappone’s most prominent feature, or the way his narrow, probing eyes swept over the Caprice to lock onto Moodrow’s. Either way, the shock charged Moodrow down to his toes. He barely had time to register the Ford’s sudden acceleration when he was seized by a single idea: If I lose Sappone now, I’ll never get him back.

He made the turn, jammed the gas pedal against the floorboard, was almost on Sappone’s trunk before he even considered the near certainty that Theresa Kalkadonis was in the car. By then it was much too late. Even as Moodrow began to fall behind, the sunroof on the Taurus slid back and the flapping edges of a white blanket appeared in the opening. Slowly, inch by inch, the blanket, and the object it so obviously concealed, rose above the retreating automobile. Then, all at once, Jilly Sappone tossed the package into the night air and the blanket flew open, framing the small, frightened child like the wings of an angel.

D
ESPITE BETTY HALUKA’S PREVAILING
mood, a mix of anxiety and self-righteous anger such as a parent might feel for a wandering child lost at the beach, the view got to her. The American 757 out of Los Angeles, after a nearly interminable cross-country voyage, was on its final approach to La Guardia Airport, running straight up the East River with Manhattan spread out beside and beneath. The aircraft was moving very slowly, seeming almost at stall speed, a mere thousand feet above the taller buildings, offering a perspective that reduced the city to a scale model (like the one in a Flushing Meadow Park museum) while at the same time forcing Betty to acknowledge its overwhelming mass. Below her, on First Avenue, a pair of EMS ambulances tore north, their revolving lights drawing her face to the window as she automatically strained to hear the sirens.

“Beautiful, isn’t it? I fly at least once a month and I always hope the plane will take this approach on the return.”

Betty turned to the middle-aged woman (who’d been mercifully silent up to this point) sitting next to her. “Awesome is more like it.” She paused, reconsidered. “Or
aweful.
I can’t decide. Maybe both.”

She looked down at the lights strung along the cables of the Triboro Bridge, then north across Harlem to the George Washington Bridge on the far side of the Island. Street lamps lined every block, throwing patches of orangey light, their softly defined perimeters contrasting with the sharp, harsh rectangles offered by thousands upon thousands of lit windows.

The plane took a leisurely turn to the east, descending rapidly, and Betty tightened her seat belt. She’d never been afraid of flying, never had to fortify herself with a few quick belts in an airport bar. That was Stanley’s act, one of several, or so it seemed. Like his failing to call her, like Jim Tilley having to call her instead.

“He’s taking it real hard,” Tilley had said after a long, detailed preamble. “The job’s sending me out to Chicago, to pick up a mutt we’ve been after for a long time. I’ll probably be gone a couple of days.”

The message had been clear enough and Betty, with her cousin now in what the doctors called “an irreversible coma,” had abandoned Arthur and jumped on the next plane out. Not before calling, however. She’d called several times from the house, several times again from an LAX passenger terminal, her mood flipping from worry to anger with every unanswered ring.

She was angry because she was convinced that
he
should have called her. They’d been lovers and best friends for almost six years. If he couldn’t (or wouldn’t, or didn’t) reach out to her … well, the consequences were obvious enough. The whole relationship would have to be redefined. Hell, the relationship would redefine itself.

But the worry was just as real, a nagging fear she didn’t want to acknowledge. Moodrow’s failure to call was beyond any response she could have predicted. Thinking about it, she finally understood why he’d always insisted that he absolutely
hated
mysteries.

“Stanley blames himself for the kid,” Tilley had said. “And the funeral’s two days from now.”

“He told you that?”

“About the funeral?”

“About blaming himself.”

“He didn’t have to, because I’ve been there myself a few times.” Tilley had hesitated, as if determining exactly how much he wanted to say. “My first year, on foot patrol, I ended up on a roof with a jumper, a woman holding a baby. I didn’t know what to do, what to say, had no training whatever. Meanwhile, I was the only one there, so I had to make a choice: try to talk her down or wait for the sergeant to show up with a department expert. Being young, stupid, and pitifully ambitious, I decided to be a hero. I took a step toward her and over she went. It’s ten years later and I still dream about it.”

The plane was up against the ramp, the other passengers standing, when Betty finally pulled herself together. There were practical things to be done, a taxi to catch, luggage to retrieve, a mystery to be confronted. Best not to get obsessed, she told herself, until you know what to be obsessed
about.

Forty minutes later, her taxi rolled off a Brooklyn-Queens Expressway ramp and up onto the Williamsburg Bridge. A subway J Train clanked and screeched a few feet to her left, coming out of its hole to pace the cab for a moment, then falling behind as Betty’s driver accelerated away.

“Too loud, too loud.” The driver waved a hand in dismissal. “Make me nervous. One day bridge falls down from that damn train. You see.”

Betty nodded, but didn’t answer. Suddenly, the simple fact that she was going to arrive on Stanley’s doorstep unannounced jumped into the forefront of her consciousness. What would he say? What would
she
say? It would be easy enough to use Marilyn’s condition as an excuse for suddenly coming back, to keep her own counsel until she had a better grip on events. On the other hand, if Stanley was sitting there, nursing a bottle of Wild Turkey and a wounded ego, she might not be able to control her response.

Her dilemma was resolved a few minutes later when she opened Moodrow’s door to find him seated at the kitchen table, a bottle of bourbon and a half-full glass within easy reach. His back was to her and he clearly hadn’t heard her make her entrance. That, most likely, was because he was talking to himself.

“There’s things in your life that just can’t happen. There’s mistakes you just can’t make, because when you do make them, they run you straight into hell. I mean if you decide to swallow the gun, and flinch when you pull the trigger, there’s a certain price to be paid, right?” He reached out for the glass, but instead of drinking, held it against the side of his unshaven face. “I should’ve checked up. When I asked Gadd to find a way to come around again. If I’d just looked at the map for a minute, I would’ve known how long it was gonna take to get back to the Expressway.” He waved the glass like a baton, slopping the drink onto his shirt and trousers. “I tell ya, Betty, I don’t know why I didn’t make that goddamned U-turn. I mean who was gonna see? Some jerk in a house two miles away from Jilly’s? And what was he gonna do, call the fucking cops? By the time the cops arrived, if they even bothered to respond, we would’ve been inside that house, waiting.”

Betty flinched at the sound of her name. Did he know she was there, standing in front of the door? Probably not, she decided. And that was because he was
definitely
drunk.