The Graving Dock (31 page)

Sperry seemed to be singing to himself. Slowly, Jack raised his gun. He was about to shout at the man to get down on the floor when another door at the back of the room swung open and all hell broke loose. Gary Daskivitch began to come through. The pigeons flapped up toward the ceiling’s water-stained acoustic tiles, squawking loudly, distracting the big detective. And Sperry didn’t waste a second in surprise. He charged toward the door and slammed into a big metal shelving unit next to it, which crashed down, pinning Daskivitch on the floor. Sperry picked himself up and reached for something on a side table. Something that looked very much like a Glock-19 service weapon.

Jack lunged forward. “Freeze, goddamnit! NYPD!”

Sperry whirled around, wide-eyed, but again he didn’t waste a second in acknowledgment. Abandoning the gun, he dodged around his flaming trash can and hurled himself against the bank of windows, which gave way with a crash. And then he was gone.

Cursing, Jack sprinted across the room. He paused to glance at his former partner, who lay groaning on the floor, but Daskivitch waved him on. “Go! Get the bastard!”

Jack ran over to the windows. Shark fins of broken glass still clung to the edges of the hole Sperry had made. Jack tucked his gun in its holster, picked up a chair, and smashed the opening wider. He ducked through and then he was outside, squinting in the early sun. A parking area, weeds pushing up through the broken concrete. He looked left:
nothing
. He looked right and saw Sperry limping around the far edge of the shed, clutching his damaged arm. Jack sprinted after, shouting for Ray Hillhouse and the S.W.A.T.

He ran around the end of the shed, veered around an old gray Dumpster, and saw the basin to his left, sparkling now in the light. His footsteps slapped on the concrete and echoed against the wall of the shed. His breath sounded very loud in his own ears, and ragged. He turned right again, which brought him back to the graving dock. The scene was oddly beautiful, everything tinged with morning light, all orange and rose.

Sperry was staggering along the edge of the dock, the long way, grunting in pain. Jack followed. “Stop!” he called out, between gulps of air, but the man hobbled on.

A distant shout. Jack made out the figure of the S.W.A.T. at the far end of the dock. Raising his rifle.

“Don’t shoot!” Jack cried.

With his customary decisiveness, Sperry skidded to a halt and started to lower himself down the stone tiers at the side of the graving dock. By the time Jack reached the spot where he had clambered down, the man was already skidding out across the ice. The dock was perhaps two hundred feet wide. Cursing, Jack lowered himself down, tier by freezing tier. Down at the end of the dock, the S.W.A.T. was running around to the far side.

The ice was treacherous. Sperry slipped, fell on his side, and slid a few yards, but he picked himself up and scrambled on. Jack almost felt sorry for the man; he was unarmed, and injured, and nearly cornered. Then he thought of all the people Sperry had killed or wounded, and his sympathy dried up. He set out, almost skating across the ice.

“Sperry!” he called, but the fugitive ignored him. He tried another tack. “Bobby!”

This time, hearing his childhood nickname, the man paused in his flight and looked over his shoulder. And that was when the ice groaned. With a sharp, gunlike report, deep cracks appeared. Sperry looked down, finally overwhelmed by surprise and confusion, and then the broken ice dipped sideways beneath him and he dropped into the frigid water. And disappeared.

After a shockingly still moment, he bobbed back up, spluttering, arms flailing, until they found the edge of the hole.

“Hold on!” Jack shouted. He thought of something he had heard when he was a kid, about how you were supposed to lie down to spread out your weight across fragile ice, and that’s what he did. Unfortunately, he was at least ten yards away.

Sperry went under again. Then he bobbed back up, spit out a mouthful of water, and cried out like a panicked child.

Jack looked up across the ice: The S.W.A.T. was directly across from him now, and he had been joined by a couple of squad cars, lights flashing. “Don’t move,” the S.W.A.T. shouted. “Help is on the way.”

Jack wriggled out of his wool coat, held on to one arm, and tried to throw the garment out across the ice. Not even close.

Sperry’s grip on the ice weakened and he plunged out of sight again. Jack winced. When the man’s head popped up again, Jack called out to him.

“Bobby! Tell me: Who was the boy in the coffin? Please, Bobby, tell me…”

There was a terrible pleading in Sperry’s eyes. And then the ice cracked some more and he was gone.

F
OUR DAYS LATER, JACK
finally discovered the identity of the floating boy.

It was no great feat of deductive reasoning, no brainstorm or exceptional piecing together of clues. It was just basic detective work, just slogging on and refusing to give up. It took many hours, but Jack had them. He didn’t have to be home now at any special time, and he took vacation days so he could work without a budget-conscious Sergeant Tanney telling him that the case was already finished. He did it with a computer, a fax machine, a phone, and a little luck.

In the late afternoon, he got a call from a doctor in Michigan, a response to a photo he had faxed out hundreds of times, to hospitals across the country. Young Steven Eastlund had not stayed around for treatment, but the doctor clearly remembered diagnosing the ten-year-old’s illness, and meeting his parents, and the white-haired, hawk-faced man they all called Grandpa.

After a little more legwork, Jack learned that the parents, residents of Mancellus, Michigan, had been killed soon thereafter, on September 3, 2001, by a drunk driver, on a county highway in broad daylight.

A week later, the towers came down. First the diagnosis of his grandchild’s illness, then the death of his daughter and son-in-law, then September 11. Who knew if the latter event had fully unhinged Robert Sperry? It certainly could not have helped.

THREE DAYS LATER, JACK
and Gary Daskivitch and Linda Vargas and some other detectives from the task force and the Seventy-sixth precinct took a trip out to Long Island, where somebody had a cousin who worked for a cemetery, and they gave the boy a proper burial, with a modest little headstone that everybody had kicked in to buy.

Jack had ordered the inscription, highly unoriginal:

Rest in peace.

T
HE NEXT MORNING, JACK
slept late. When he finally got out of bed, he discovered that he was out of coffee, so he threw on some clothes and walked down to the corner deli. When he got back, the answering machine in the front hall caught his eye. The red message light, blinking.

He ran a hand over his mouth. He wasn’t due in to work until four. He was sick of reporters and lawyers and Department brass. He just wanted to sit in his kitchen and drink his coffee, maybe go up and shoot the shit for a while with Mr. Gardner, but it was hard to ignore the machine. What if it was his son, with some emergency? Or some work thing that needed his immediate attention?

He tilted his head back, groaned, and pressed Play. And froze.

Michelle’s voice, tentative. “Jack? It’s me. I, uh…can you call me?” And then she hung up. He replayed the message immediately, then a third time, trying to tease out any hidden meanings. Did she sound sad, or upset? He thought so, but couldn’t be sure. He leaned against the wall and wrapped his arms around himself. What did she want? Was she having regrets? Did she want to come back? Or did she just want to find a safe time when she could come and take back her stuff?

He returned to his bedroom and sat on the edge of his bed for five minutes, thinking. Then he stood up. He didn’t reach for his cell phone. He went over to the bureau and dug into a drawer for his newest, thickest pair of athletic socks. He changed into his sweatpants, and pulled on his sneakers. Then he went out to the hall closet and pulled out his sweatshirt. He picked up his car keys, and his house keys, and he locked up, and went out and got into his car.

HE FOUND A LIGHT
pole on the edge of the park and pushed against it with both hands while he stretched his Achilles tendons, and then he grabbed one foot at a time and stretched his hamstrings. Then he entered the park, got on the loop road, and started running. This was what he needed right now, this steady slapping of his feet on the asphalt, the sound of his breath huffing into the winter air.

It was a weekday, so the park was sparsely populated. He glanced over at the edge of the lake, where some fat geese were waddling along. He looked up into the trees sliding past overhead, into their bare, bristly branches. He passed a couple of heavyset women helping each other work off some extra weight, and then he was passed by a Park Slope dad pushing a toddler in an expensive jogging stroller. He thought of his son, Ben, and how that was what you did, really—you pushed your kid along in front of you, huffing and sweating, until he was able to run on his own, pick up speed, and leave you panting far behind.

He was breathing harder now, and his muscles were sore, but he pressed on. He replayed Michelle’s phone message in his mind a few times, but it was opaque as ever, and he resolved not to think about it for the next three quarters of an hour.

After a while, he passed the turnoff for the Center Drive. He could see farther into the woods now, could see the outlines of the mulchy earth as it rose and fell. He was just a few hundred yards from where the dead doctor had lain, and Vargas’s Michelin Tire kid. He thought of the crumpled look on the doctor’s wife’s face, and the stricken look on the son-in-law of the Governors Island security guard. He thought of Tommy Balfa, falling to the deck of the boat, and he thought of the cocaine addict who had drowned her children, and he thought of the other dead, the hundreds of bodies he had seen pass before him in years and years on the job.

What had the little Buddhist nun called it?
Impermanence.
Everything changes. Everything that rises falls away.

One of his hamstrings was cramping a little. He thought of Robert Dietrich Sperry, disappearing beneath the ice. And he thought of Steven Eastlund’s memorial voyage from Governors Island to the shores of Red Hook. At least the kid wasn’t floating nameless anymore.

Three minutes later, he came to the Boathouse and the little lagoon where he had tried to propose to Michelle. He saw a Chinese bride sitting like an open white flower at the water’s edge, and then another one up on the little stone bridge, and a third one on the water’s far shore, and he had to smile, despite himself.

He jogged on, sweating even in the new year’s cold, and then he was pounding up a steep hill on the park’s northeast corner. He saw a few scraps of autumn leaves clinging to a bare winter tree, and he thought of something else the nun had said to him: that the trees didn’t try to hold on to the falling leaves, and the leaves didn’t hold on either; when their time came, they just fell.

He made it to the top of the hill, where he passed a runner coming down, an elfin old man jogging with his head tilted to one side, and he felt a rush of warmth—
a fellow runner
—and almost reached out to give the man a high-five.

On the other side of the park, he came upon the concrete band-shell, site of his first date with Michelle. She had actually got him up and dancing; it had been a happy night. They had had some good times together, and those times were still alive, in his heart. Funny how the nun’s words kept echoing in his head:
True love is never the cause of pain.

He thought of Michelle’s phone message. In just a few minutes, he would call her, and find out what she wanted, and maybe he’d be plunged back into despair. Maybe not. Somehow, he was not in a rush to find out.

He ran and he thought, and he ran and he thought, and he stared out at the wintry landscape, and he passed a few other runners on the loop road, and felt that same little flush of human solidarity. Oxygen passed through his lungs, and he listened to the slap of his feet on the asphalt. By the time he started down the big long hill on the southwest side of the park, he wasn’t thinking about much of anything anymore. He had found his stride, and the blue lake came into view, and the morning sun shone on it, highlighting hundreds of floating white seagulls, and as he came closer they suddenly lifted into the sky, and his heart rose with them.

I
WOULD LIKE TO
thank Reed Farrel Coleman for the last-minute backup and longtime support, and a number of other writer friends who have helped me keep my fingers on the keyboard, including Peter Blauner, S. J. Rozan, Blake Nelson, Katy Munger, Lise McClendon, Tim Sultan, Jonathan Green, Lisa Selin Davis, Virginia Vitzthum, Meeghan Truelove, Stefan Forbes, Patrick Jennings, Ulrich Baer, Jim Fusilli, Ivor Hanson, Rob Reuland, Bill Gordon, and Tim Cockey.

For firsthand info about the work of Brooklyn homicide detectives, thanks to NYPD Lieutenant John Cornicello (check out his excellent Web site, The Squad Room at
www.brooklynnorth.blog-spot.com
).
Street Stories: The World of Police Detectives
by Robert Jack-all was also a valuable resource. For forensic info, thanks to D. P. Lyle, M.D. (
www.dplylemd.com
). For matters nautical, thanks to Carolina Salguero (
www.portsidenewyork.org
), Roberta Weisbrod (
www.sustainableports.com
), and the Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance. Any technical errors are my own.

Loving thanks to Sunny Balzano and Tone Johansen.

Thanks to Roxanne Aubrey for her excellent Web site design.

For support of my writing and that of many, many other authors, grateful thanks to Bonnie Claeson and Joe Guglielmelli and the Black Orchid Bookshop; all the kind crew at Partners & Crime; Mary Gannett, Henry Zook, and Zack Zook of BookCourt bookstore; Barbara Peters and The Poisoned Pen; and Otto Penzler and The Mysterious Bookshop.

I thank my editor, Ruth Cavin, for her kind faith in me, and her assistant, Toni Plummer, for exceptional follow-through. Last, but certainly not least, thanks to my agent, Anna Ghosh.