Shoot the Moon (32 page)

It’s even colder Thursday, with temperatures down around thirty. The news is filled with stories about record-breaking temperatures for October. Goodman bundles up for the ride to work, tells Carmen and Kelly to promise him they’ll stay indoors.

“No
way,
” Carmen says. “We’ve got to go out to find a costume for Kelly’s party.”

“We’re not
babies
,” Kelly tells him. “And you’re not the boss of us.”

“You’re
my
babies,” he says.

“Excuse me?” Carmen chimes in.

“Just a figure of speech,” Goodman says, blushing.

“What’s a figure of speech?” Kelly wants to know. “Is it like a figure eight?”

“Not exactly,” he smiles. “It’s when you say something that’s not exactly true.”

“So why do you say it?”

“To make a point,” he explains. “You know, like, ‘I’m so hungry, I could eat a horse.’ “

“Yuck.”

Goodman’s been at work a little over an hour when Manny comes into the office, closes the door behind him, and sits down across the desk from him.

“You doing anything wrong, Michael?”

Goodman thinks immediately of the accounts he’s opened and the checks he’s written against them. Did he slip up somewhere? Has the bank notified Manny?

“Like what?” he asks, trying to sound surprised at the question but knowing that if he was hooked up to a lie detector, the needle would be jumping off the page.

“I dunno,” Manny says. “But two minutes after you walked in, two guys in a blue Ford parked across the way. They been sittin’ in their car since, drinkin’ coffee the whole time.”

“Who do you think they are?” Goodman asks.

“Well, one’s black and one’s white. To me, they gotta be cops. So I was just wonderin’ if it’s you they’re interested in.”

“I can’t imagine why they would be,” Goodman says.

“Me neither,” Manny agrees. “Don’t worry about it.” While he’s there, he pulls his usual roll of bills from his back pocket and peels off five twenties for Goodman.

But not worrying about it proves to be more easily said than done, and worry about it is about all Goodman can do for the rest of the afternoon.

At quitting time, he bundles up for the trip home. On an impulse, he purposefully leaves his briefcase in the office. As he steps out onto Jerome Avenue, he sees a blue Ford across the way. It’s easy to spot: The windshield’s fogged up, and there’s visible exhaust coming from the tailpipe.

He walks a block uptown in the cold before stopping in his tracks. He smacks his forehead like the guy used to do in the “I coulda had a V-8” commercial. Then he turns around suddenly and heads back downtown. As he does so, the blue Ford passes right by him, and he gets a good look at the occupants. The driver is a heavyset black man he doesn’t recognize. But the passenger, a white man, looks very much like the guy he saw at the store the other day when he was buying a newspaper.

“Shit!” says Harry Weems as soon as they’ve driven past Goodman. “Shit! Shit! Shit!” It’s become a staple of his vocabulary since he’s been assigned to this investigation.

“Did you see that?” Sheridan can’t get over it. “Motherfucker doubled back on us like a
pro!
I
told
you he was good.”

Knowing they’ve been burned, they continue on to the plant. No use making things worse than they already are. Besides which, they already know the Mole’s pattern: walk to 161st Street, take the subway home. Maybe stop off for a pizza, if he’s feeling really rich.

When Goodman comes back out of the Bronx Tire Exchange again, this time with his briefcase, the blue Ford is nowhere in sight.

As always, it’s dark as he walks to the train station, and he pays attention to his surroundings, something he’s been careful to do since his first encounter with Russell.

He wonders what Russell’s up to. He hasn’t seen him since the ill-fated attempt to sell the first kilo of drugs. He tries to figure out how long ago that was, but has trouble remembering. As good as he is with numbers, that’s how bad he is with time.

He has occasion to think of Russell again just before he gets to 161st Street. There’s a tall, skinny black kid leaning against the building, and for just a moment, Goodman thinks maybe it
is
Russell. But then he sees that the kid isn’t really a kid after all, but a man in his thirties or forties. As Goodman passes him, the man comes away from the wall, hunched over, eyes closed - sleepwalking. But for some reason totally unfathomable to Goodman, he doesn’t fall over, just staggers around in a circle, oblivious to everything around him. “Drunk as a skunk” is the expression Goodman is reminded of.

If Goodman knew a little about pharmacology, he’d understand that the man isn’t drunk at all. Drunks fall down, because alcohol adversely affects the drinker’s sense of balance. Opiates have no such effect: The heroin user can be quite literally “out on his feet” without ever losing command of his internal gyroscope, his unconscious ability to maintain his balance.

Of course, Michael Goodman may find it easier to assume that the man is drunk. It is Thursday after all. Tomorrow is Friday, the day he and Vinnie are to conduct their little business. How appropriate that they should have picked Halloween, the scariest day of the year to begin with.

Which reminds him - he’s promised Kelly he’d pick up a pumpkin on the way home. So, at the corner of Ninety-sixth and Lexington, he stops at a hybrid Spanish-Korean store called the Bodega Palace and picks out what seems to him a reasonably sized pumpkin. He fishes out a few dollars to pay for it, wondering how much they can charge for what is essentially an overgrown orange squash. The Korean woman behind the counter puts it on the scale and rings it up.

“Nine dolla,” she says.

Jesus, he thinks. But comes up with it.

“Whaddaya mean, he
burned
you?” Abbruzzo asks Weems and Sheridan as soon as they rejoin him at the plant. At Abbruzzo’s request, Lieutenant Spangler has assigned five more men to the investigation, meaning they’re back to eight-hour shifts, three men to a shift.

“He doubled back on us,” Sheridan explains. “Made us for sure.”

“Sonofabitch,” Abbruzzo says. “I hope this doesn’t spook him.”

“How are we ever gonna cover the deal?” Weems wonders. “With this guy so hinky. He’ll make any car we use.”

Abbruzzo thinks for a moment. “We’ll get the MOUSE,” he says. The MOUSE is the Mobile Operations Unit for Surveillance Enhancement. From the outside, it appears to be a delivery van, one of countless thousands New Yorkers are accustomed to seeing making a variety of deliveries, pickups, installations, or repairs. Inside, it’s equipped with one-way viewing glass, video and still camera ports, and parabolic microphones capable of picking up whispered conversation a block away. For extended periods of surveillance, there’s a small refrigerator, a microwave oven, and even a chemical toilet.

“Good thinking,” Weems says.

“This is shaping up as some battle,” Sheridan decides. “The Mole versus the MOUSE. It’s like
Wild
fucking
Kingdom.
You gotta wonder who’s gonna survive.”

“Do yourself a favor,” says Ray Abbruzzo. “Put your money on the MOUSE.”

Goodman, Carmen, and Kelly are in the middle of dinner when the phone rings. Goodman’s in the process of swallowing a mouthful of tuna casserole as he reaches for it.

“Hello?” he says.

“Hello. Who’s this?”

Goodman recognizes Vinnie’s voice. “Michael,” he says.

“You sure? You sound funny.”

“I’m eating.”

“Go outside,” Vinnie tells him. “Gimme a call at this number-”

“Wait, wait,” Goodman says, looking around for something to write with. He finds a pen, says, “Go ahead.”

“Five-five-five-five-nine-six-two.”

Goodman writes the number on the palm of his hand. “Give me fifteen minutes,” he says.

“Fuck fifteen minutes!” Vinnie shouts. “I’m at a payphone. You got any idea how
cold
it is out here?”

“Don’t tell me,” Goodman says. “I’ll call you in five minutes.” He hangs up the phone.

“I have to run out,” he tells Carmen and Kelly. “I’ll be back real soon.”

“Dress warmly,” Kelly tells him.

He exchanges a look with Carmen. She knows what the call was about.

Ray Abbruzzo knows what the call was about, too, and he loses no time in calling Telephone Security’s night line.

“Get me an address on two-one-two-five-five-five-five-nine-six-two as fast as you can. I think it may be a coin box.” Then he hands the phone to Weems. “You guys are hot,” he says. “I’ll take the Mole. See if you can get a unit to respond to wherever Vinnie’s phone is. But no RMPs.”

Abbruzzo puts on his coat. As soon as he spots Goodman coming out of his building, he’s out the door, following him at a safe distance, from across the street.

“That’s a coin-operated phone located inside the premises of One thirty Tenth Avenue,” a woman’s voice tells Weems.

“What the hell’s at One thirty Tenth Avenue?” Weems asks.

“It’s a restaurant,” she tells him, “called La Luncheonette.”

“What’s the cross street?”

“How am I supposed to know?” she asks.
“You’re
the detective.”

He hangs up, calls Communications, and requests a PDU - a Precinct Detective Unit operating out of the local station house - to respond to the location. He tells the operator he’ll hold on to give the unit instructions.

“No units are answering,” the operator tells him. “It’s cold out there.”

“Bullshit!” he roars. “Make it a ten-thirteen!” A 10-13 is the highest priority job there is - “Officer needs assistance.” If Martians were landing a flying saucer in Central Park and a 10-13 came over the air, every cop would be out of there in seconds.

“You know I can’t do that,” the operator says.

“Fuck!”

“Wait a minute - I’ve got a unit that’ll take it,” the operator says. “Twelve minutes ETA.”

“
Twelve minutes?
I don’t
have
twelve minutes!”

“Sorry, sir.”

Goodman is shivering by the time he reaches the corner. The phone he used last time has an “Out of Order” sticker on it, but the one next to it is working. He drops in a quarter and calls the number he’s written on his palm.

While Weems continues to hold on, waiting for the Communications operator to come back, Sheridan turns the volume all the way up on the receiver Fu Man Feldman added to the growing list of electronic equipment in the plant. The voices come through loud and clear.

The phone goes dead.

“Shit!” Harry Weems slams down the phone. He’d hoped the conversation would last for eight or ten minutes. That might have given the responding unit a chance to get to the restaurant in time to see who was on the phone, or at least who was coming out of the place looking as if he’d just used the phone. One time, Weems had been able to find out who had used a pay phone last by yelling out that the quarter had ended up in the coin return slot, then waiting to see who claimed it. Guy who claimed it ended up doing five years, too - either because he was really the one who’d made the call or because he was greedy and tried to steal the twenty-five cents. Whatever.

But Goodman stayed on the phone less than a minute, making it impossible for anyone to get there in time to get a look at this Vinnie guy.

On the other hand, they
have
learned that the exchange is scheduled to go down at eight o’clock tomorrow night. And while they don’t know the location yet - other than “downtown somewhere” - they should have that by noon tomorrow.

The door opens, and Ray Abbruzzo comes in and joins them. “How’d you do?” he asks them, still shivering from the cold.

“No luck on IDing Vinnie,” Weems says.