Don't Ever Look Back: A Mystery (Buck Schatz Series) (12 page)

“Ain’t a cop car. Cop cars have the word ‘Police’ written on them in big letters. That car has got no lights. Got no sirens.”

“Is so a cop car. Did you see the cage in the backseat? Did you see the radio antenna on the back of it? That is a cop car, and so those dudes are cops. Do you want to be killing cops?”

“I want to be doing what I’m told to do.” The big one pulled a plastic-looking handgun out of the low-slung waistband of his baggy jeans and tried to push it into the smaller one’s hands.

The little one didn’t want to take it. “I say we just leave. We got the guy we came here for. Didn’t agree to killing cops.”

“He said you have to do it.”

“And if I do it, the next time you get picked up for possession with intent or some dumb shit, you’ll rat me out to get yourself a plea deal, and then I’ll get a lethal injection for killing cops. I ain’t never killed nobody. You want it done, you can do it. If Carlo wants it done, he can do it. I was promised two hundred dollars to back y’all up today. I ain’t killing no cops for two hundred dollars.”

“Fuck you,” said the big one. “I ain’t no snitch.”

“I ain’t saying you’re a snitch. I just don’t want to find out if you’re a snitch.”

I found the snap on Andre’s belt holster, and got his police-issue .38 loose. It was cool metal, painted matte black. Lightweight, with functional squared-off edges. It was a gun with very little personality, but it would do the job. I flicked the safety catch and checked to make sure there was a round in the chamber. I lifted the door latch, but the door was a little sticky, probably because the car’s frame had warped in the crash. I pushed my shoulder against it.

“I can’t believe I got to do this,” the big panty-head was saying. “He told you to do it. You a pussy-ass motherfucker, you know that?” He tried again to force his friend to take the gun.

With my weight behind it, the door sprung open, but when it did, I pitched sideways and off balance. Even though I didn’t have much of an aim, I managed to shoot the little guy. Firing the .357 felt like wielding Zeus’s thunderbolt. By comparison, shooting the little .38 felt like changing the channel on the television, but it made a big noise, and the bullet blew the kid’s kneecap apart. He fell down and started screaming. The cheap plastic gun clattered to the ground, and while the big guy chased after it, I managed to slide out of the car and climb to my feet, supporting my weight by clinging to the open door.

By the time the big kid came up with his weapon, I had steadied myself, and I had the .38 trained on him.

“Why don’t you drop that?” I said.

He did not immediately comply. He wasn’t quite pointing the gun at me, but he had his finger inside the trigger guard.

“Just be cool, old man,” he said. His hands were shaking a little bit.

“I am cool,” I said, and I shot him three times.

The first bullet hit him right above his left eyebrow, and pulped the part of him that dreamed and the part of him that knew how to speak. The second bullet went in just below his bottom lip, shattered all the teeth in his jaw, shredded his tongue, and lodged itself in his brain stem. The third one hit him in the shoulder while he was falling to the ground. I think he was probably already dead by then.

“You killed Clarence!” the little guy screamed. “Oh, God!”

“I warned him,” I said. “I don’t warn anyone twice.”

The plastic handgun was on the ground, a couple of feet from where the little guy was writhing on the pavement and clutching at his leg. I needed to get hold of it, before he started thinking straight and tried to grab it, but my walker was still in the trunk, where I couldn’t get it. I took a few wobbly steps forward, but that turned out to be as far as I could get. I let my legs give out in the most controlled way I could. It was a little more like kneeling than falling, but not much. At least I didn’t hurt myself much worse than I was already hurt. I crawled the rest of the way to the loose gun on my hands and knees, like a baby. Once I had it, I felt safer, and I managed to pull myself into a sitting position on the pavement before the paramedics arrived.

16

2009

The woman in the EMT uniform took a tentative step toward me. She looked afraid.

“I’ll need you to put those down so I can help you,” she said. She was a young, light-skinned black girl with her hair pulled back from her face. She wasn’t wearing much makeup, but she didn’t seem to need it.

I looked up at her. “What? I’m okay. Somebody needs to help Andre.” I started to point, and was surprised to find that my hands were full of guns. I tried to remember how I’d lit the cigarette I was smoking with my hands full of guns, and could not. I handed the guns to the girl.

“These aren’t mine,” I said.

“Okay.” She didn’t quite know how to respond to that, but the police had arrived, and one of them came over and took the guns away from her.

“I’m going to need to examine you,” she said. “You’re covered in blood.”

“I am?” I looked down at my shirt. It was soaked in dark red down the front. “Shit. Is all of that from me?”

“Looks that way.”

“Well, you should see the other guy.”

Two paramedics were trying to immobilize the kid I’d shot in the leg, but he was flailing around and clawing at himself and screaming. The medical examiner was zipping the dead one into a rubber bag. A grim-looking emergency team was strapping Andre to a gurney.

“Are you shot?” the girl asked me.

“I don’t think so,” I said. I had a couple of seeping abrasions, and I guess my nose had been gushing, though I had been too dazed to even realize it.

I took the cigarette out of my mouth. It was covered in blood. I laughed at it. “Hey, this thing looks like a used tampon.”

The girl was moving her finger back and forth in front of my face.

“Can you follow my finger with your eyes?” she asked. I tried to. “Can you remember what happened to you?”

The chain of events that had brought me to this point was admittedly a little blurred. “The goddamn air bag punched me in the face. My doctor has me on a blood thinner called Plavix. Keeps me from having a stroke, but it makes me bruise up like a rotten peach. Sometimes I rip myself open jostling against the nightstand, or I cut myself shaving, and we have to go into the emergency room.”

“I think you’re in shock,” she was saying.

I’d had a couple of nosebleeds that were bad enough to require trips to the emergency room, just from dry weather. The air bag had hit me really hard.

“Just tell Rose I am all right. No need to worry her over this. If you need anything, ask my son.”

Now I was lying on my back, somehow, and being carried toward an ambulance. I wasn’t sure how that had happened. They ratcheted the gurney partway upright, either because I was in shock, or so the blood from my nose would not run down my throat.

“They got Elijah,” I said. “He told me they were coming for him, and I didn’t believe him, and now Andre is hurt, and they got him.”

“This mask is to make it easier for you to breathe.” She put it over my face, and I felt the cool flow of air against my damaged nose.

“It was that scumbag Lefkowitz. He must have told them where we were. I know we weren’t followed to the cemetery. We have to get Lefkowitz. He’ll know where they took Elijah. There’s still time to get him back alive, I think, if we’re lucky.”

She jabbed a needle into my arm, and then I started to feel sleepy. I was semiconscious at best when they wheeled me out of the ambulance and into the hospital, and while a doctor in surgical scrubs was shouting for units of O neg, I got bored and dozed off.

SOMETHING I DON’T WANT TO FORGET:

A journalist with a lot of blackheads on his nose had a lot of thoughts about cops: “If I had to choose one convention out of our police thrillers and action-adventures that aggravates me, it would be that the heroes never shoot first,” he said. “They’ve got to let the bad guys open fire before they can retaliate.”

The interviewer nodded emphatically. “And when they do retaliate, they kill everybody.”

“See, that’s something we’ve heard for six years in response to 9/11. We didn’t start it, but we’re going to finish it. As long as we don’t strike the first blow, we’re entitled to unlimited and disproportionate retaliation.”

I snorted at the television. When I was growing up, we were taught that you don’t poke a sleeping bear with a stick.

“Of course, if they were going for verisimilitude, there are plenty of situations in which it makes sense for a policeman or a soldier to open fire before an aggressor does,” the journalist added.

“Absolutely,” said the host. “If they let the bad guys shoot first every time, eventually one of the bad guys won’t miss.”

“I think the real-world bad guys have better aim than the bad guys in most of the movies and television shows we see.”

“And, of course, you spent some time with real cops while writing your true-crime thriller
Last Watch,
which is soon to be a major motion picture. How do real cops differ from the cops we see in movies and on television?”

“I think the thing most people don’t understand is that any interaction a police officer has with members of the public is fraught. When these guys leave for work in the morning, they don’t know if they’ll make it home in one piece. Any time you interact with a police officer, you are dealing with an armed man who knows he is not safe. There are three hundred million firearms in civilian hands. When an officer makes a traffic stop, he doesn’t know whether the driver has a handgun in his glove compartment. When a cop responds to a domestic disturbance, he doesn’t know whether the door is going to be answered by a man holding a shotgun. Every year, a hundred law enforcement officers in this country are killed by suspects.”

“That doesn’t seem like a lot.”

“It’s more than enough to keep that danger on every officer’s mind. And that number would be a lot higher if police weren’t trained to shoot first when confronted by a suspect they have reason to believe is armed. These are men with families. You can’t expect them to give pushers and psychopaths a fair chance to kill them before they retaliate with force. Police shoot and kill about five hundred suspects a year in the United States. Subsequent investigations find the vast majority of those shootings are justified.”

“Investigations by the police agencies that employ the shooters.”

“Well, yes.”

17

1965

I was parked on the street in front of the bank building, slouched low in my Dodge and listening to football on the radio. I had a bag of hamburger sandwiches on my passenger seat, and I was sipping on a warm, flat Coke.

Staking out the bank wasn’t a great plan, and I knew it. There was no way I could keep eyes on both the front door and the side door where the armored trucks made their drops, and I couldn’t really sit out in front of the place for long enough to stop whatever Elijah had going on. I just didn’t have any better ideas.

I had bought myself some time to work on this by telling my captain that I was looking into Longfellow Molloy; there were plenty of folks on the police force who would have loved to see that smart-talking Negro locked in a jail cell. But I wasn’t planning to give them anything on him, so my excuse wouldn’t justify days or weeks spent chasing Elijah. I was going to have to do something, soon.

I had several unappealing options: The first was to take a risk, and encourage Greenfield to move the money as soon as possible. I could monitor the loading of the cash onto the armored truck myself, and even escort the package back to Nashville. If I was lucky, and Elijah was putting together a hit on the vault, I might be able to get the money out before he learned of the transfer. But if I was wrong, and he was prepared to hit the truck, I’d be playing right into his hands, and there would probably be a gunfight, and I would probably die.

My second option was to go after the one remaining lead Paul Schulman had given me. He’d told me Ari Plotkin was involved in Elijah’s scheme. Plotkin was a more refined breed of hood than Schulman, and unlikely to snitch as easily as his low-rent colleague, but I was prepared to hurt him worse, if it meant finding out how to stop the robbery. Unfortunately, if I took Plotkin down, Elijah would find out pretty quickly. He’d know I knew which bank he was robbing, and he’d assume I’d know whatever Plotkin might be able to tell me. He could modify his plans to account for this, and I’d be back where I started.

My third option was to inform the department of what I’d learned. My delay in reporting my meeting with Elijah and my information about his target would, at best, be seen as an exercise of poor professional judgment on my part. More likely, it would be seen as evidence of a racial defect of some sort.

This could easily stymie my career advancement for years. Or it might get me fired. Or maybe I’d just start getting put in dangerous situations without proper support, until an unforeseeable tragedy occurred. Any of these outcomes was unacceptable; the less the police department learned about Elijah and his web of Jewish corruption, the better.

Which led to the fourth option, the one my pride didn’t want to let me consider: I could let Elijah get away with it. Since there was no official investigation, I was free to just walk away from my pursuit. I was a policeman; it wasn’t my job to stop crimes before they happened, only to clean up the mess afterward. Charles Greenfield was entirely nonchalant about the possibility of his bank being robbed, and I didn’t see any reason why I should care about it more than he did.

Elijah wasn’t stealing from people who were struggling to pay their bills. He wasn’t stealing from hungry children. He wasn’t stealing from the Negroes marching in front of Kluge Freight. He was stealing the fully insured contents of a bank vault. It wasn’t a victimless crime, exactly, but the victim lacked a face, and lacked a capacity to suffer. There was nothing in that vault I cared about protecting.

But I had to protect myself. If Elijah got caught, my foreknowledge of his activities might be revealed. Even if he didn’t get caught, his accomplices might. No law enforcement had ever gotten close to catching Elijah, but the people he worked with weren’t always as good, and weren’t always as lucky. Their next job might not be quite so well planned, or they might do something stupid with their money. Whatever the story, his people ended up in custody sometimes, and, when they did, they ended up talking. This was the only reason anyone knew Elijah existed at all. If his people talked this time, they might say my name.