The Sleepless (17 page)

‘Newt got the sports bag?’ asked Ralph. 

‘That’s the point,’ said John Minatello. 

‘What’s the point? What do you mean, “that’s the point”? What’s the fucking point?’ 

‘The point is that we lost the sports bag.’ 

Ralph stared at him. On every side of them, bottles and cans and bricks and rocks were hurtling and bouncing down, but Ralph stayed completely still, his shoulders slightly hunched in disbelief, not shielding himself, his gun hanging down by his side. 

‘You lost it?’ 

John Minatello shrugged, embarrassed – and then ducked, as a bottle flew past his face. 

‘Jambo must’ve thrown it someplace. There’s not a sign of it.’ 

‘What the hell do you mean he must have thrown it someplace? Where? How far could he throw? Ten feet? Twenty feet?’ 

‘I’m sorry, Ralph. There’s not a sign of it. We’ve searched way back to the buildings; and underneath all of the cars.’ 

Ralph bit his lip. He was too chagrined even to swear. They had lost the sports bag, and all of the marked money – which meant that more than a year of painstaking surveillance and wire-tapping and intelligence-gathering had all gone completely to waste. More than a year of his life had been futile. All those stultifying hours of sitting in cars, eating congealing hamburgers and drinking coffee out of polystyrene cups; all those numbing hours of waiting at courthouses for wire-tap warrants; all those seasons; all that ingenuity; all those hunches; all that seat-of-the-pants detective work; everything. 

Another Molotov cocktail exploded in the middle of the street, and the front tyres of a Mazda pick-up truck began to blaze. The crowd were screaming now – a weird, high-pitched ululation, and Sergeant Riordan said, ‘Come on, Ralph. It’s time to get out of here. They’ll be tearing us limb from limb before you know it.’ 

A young uniformed officer came running across the street, crouching low. ‘Orders are to pull out, sir. They’re sending in back-up.’ 

‘Okay, O’Hara,’ said Sergeant Riordan. He barked some instructions to the rest of his men, although his voice was almost drowned out by the wailing and whooping of the ambulance sirens. 

‘Death to the pigs! Death to the pigs!’
screamed the crowd. Further down the street, they were bouncing a Chevy pickup on its suspension, and then turning it over. It exploded with a splintering roar, and a huge cloud of oily smoke rolled into the air. The crowd screamed even louder. 

Sergeant Riordan grasped Ralph’s arm, too fiercely to be comfortable. ‘You’d best be coming with us, Brossard. It’s your ass they’re after, and you’ll never get your vee-hickle out now.’ 

They ducked back across the street through a blizzard of rocks, bricks, planks, bottles, and even coins. Newt had managed to get his car started, and was backing up the street with a howl of tortured tyres. Three young men ran after him, shouting and hopping and beating at his windows with baseball bats and steel bars. They smashed his side windows and starred his windscreen. But somehow he managed a screeching handbrake turn, and sped off northward, the tail of his car snaking wildly from side to side. 

Sergeant Riordan wrenched open the back door of his squad car and pushed Ralph roughly inside. ‘Put your foot down, O’Hara,’ he ordered. ‘We’ve got the albatross on board.’ 

He was opening his own door when Ralph felt him stagger heavily against the side of the car. Blood gushed down Ralph’s window as if it had been emptied from a slaughterhouse bucket.
‘Sergeant!’
screeched O’Hara, like a frightened woman. 

‘Back up!’ Ralph yelled at him. 

‘What?’ asked O’Hara, white-faced. A half-brick bounced off the squad car’s roof. 

‘Back up, for Christ’s sake!’ 

O’Hara revved the engine until it screamed, and then reversed the squad car up the street. ‘Now, stop!’ Ralph ordered him. 

O’Hara jammed on the brakes. Ralph kicked open his door, and ran back through the blizzard of debris to Sergeant Riordan, who was lying on his back with his hands drawn up like a begging puppy and his legs twitching. His face was varnished dark scarlet with blood, and when Ralph knelt down beside him, he could see at once that the top of his head had been blown off. 

Sergeant Riordan stared up at him helplessly. He probably didn’t even realize who he was, or what was happening. Ralph had seen too much of this, too much blood, too much helplessness, and he had no doubt at all that Sergeant Riordan would die. 

The crowd were now swarming all around him, screaming at him and taunting him and yelling, ‘Kill the fucker! Kill the pig!’ 

Ralph gradually stood up, his .44 raised in his right hand, saying nothing. There was a moment when he was stocky but all coiled-up, tense and determined, with all the virile menace of a real Hemingway. 

The crowd shied back a little, but he wouldn’t be able to keep them away for long. He found himself looking from one face to another – mostly young men, but women and children, too – and he felt a rising sense of dread and disbelief at the hate which distorted their faces. How could they hate anybody so much – especially a man they didn’t even know? 

A brick came tumbling through the air and hit him on the shoulder, knocking him off balance. With a whoop, the crowd shifted forward. He levelled his gun two-handed and shouted,
‘Freeze!’
but they kept on coming. 

He shouted,
‘Freeze!’
a second time, but they still kept on coming, and one young man in a red baseball cap came dancing towards him, bare-chested, beads and feathers around his neck, and whipped at his arm with a radio aerial. 

Ralph swung around and shot him. The noise was deafening. The young man danced, slipped, and fell to the pavement, still staring at Ralph in surprise. There was a hole in his chest bigger than a baseball, jetting arterial blood. 

The crowd shrieked – really
shrieked –
with a sound that could have cut plate glass. Ralph backed away, shocked at the shrieking and shocked at what he had done. He might have been Hemingway – he might have been the hottest, hardest, ballsiest detective on the narcotics squad – he might have seen blood and guts and whores sliced up with razors; but at the age of forty-three this was the first time that he had ever killed a man face to face, deliberately shot him, just like that, and he was appalled and astounded and excited, too, adrenaline pumping around him so fast that he felt he could have jumped back twenty feet. 

But then the crowd surged toward him and they were swinging bats and hurling bricks and a rusty elbow-pipe hit him on the forehead and almost concussed him. He fired in the air, twice, but the crowd took no notice, so he fired again, and a young girl toppled, and he fired again, and another young man went down. 

The crowd didn’t stop. His shooting didn’t deter them, it enraged them even more. Every shot gave them another martyr. Every shot added another credential to their cause.
Kill the pigs!
 

He thought that they were going to rip him apart. But then somewhere in his consciousness he heard the deep
booofff!
of a pump-gun loaded with buckshot, and then another
booofff!
 

He had never imagined what it was going to be like, to see people shot. But pieces flew off them, whole muscles flapped in the air, faces were blasted into raspberry fool. 

Then the squad car came slewing in beside him, with its door flapping open, and John Minatello shouted, ‘Ralph! For God’s sake, Ralph!’ 

Ralph fired one more shot, deliberately high, and then tumbled backwards into the squad car. O’Hara slammed his foot on the gas and spun the wheel and the car collided with Jambo’s Electra. He backed up, and they could feel the soft, heavy jolt of hitting people. Then the crowd were beating on their roof with hammers and lumps of concrete, and the side-windows caved in, and John Minatello screamed at O’Hara,’
Get us the hell right out of here?
 

There was an instant he was convinced that they were going to die, and shouted, ‘Mary, Mother of God, forgive me!’ The end of a scaffolding-pole exploded through the right-hand side of the windshield, and dug its way into the seat. If Sergeant Riordan had been sitting there, he would have been impaled. But then the squad car bounced and skidded forward, hitting parked cars and debris and bricks, and suddenly they were swerving right at the end of the street and heading north. 

Ralph sat in the back of the squad car feeling totally shocked and detached. He heard sirens whooping as police and fire-trucks sped past them; he heard helicopters clamouring overhead. But it wasn’t long before they were driving past normal streets where normal people were walking and shopping and kids were skateboarding, and suddenly it was an ordinary summer morning in the suburbs of south Boston. 

His .44 lay across his lap, no longer warm but smelling strongly of burned powder. John Minatello glanced at it once or twice, but made no attempt to take it away from him. Ralph said nothing, but watched the trees and the buildings and the traffic pass him by, all of it seen through the red gelatinous filter of Sergeant Riordan’s blood. 

Matthew Monyatta was talking to a young single mother about her tenancy rights when the door of his office burst open. 

‘Hold on just a minute, I’m busy here!’ he called out, raising his hand. 

But his unexpected visitor wasn’t deterred. He rapped with his knuckles on the open door, said, ‘Sorry to butt in like this, Matthew ... but –’ and waited with an expectant face for Matthew to ask him what he wanted. 

Matthew said, ‘This must be important, right?’ 

‘It’s important,’ nodded his visitor. ‘In fact, it’s critical.’ 

‘How long’s this going to take?’ asked Matthew. 

His visitor made a face. ‘As long as it takes, I’m afraid.’ 

Matthew turned around to the young woman with the haunting almond-shaped Ethiopian face and the huge gold earrings and the red satin dress and said, ‘Elizabeth ... I’m sorry about this, but I’m going to ask you to excuse me for just a while. Don’t you worry ... you won’t be put out on the street. I won’t let that happen. You have the right to stay where you are; and you have the right not to be harassed. So don’t you worry. The Lord is with you; the law is with you; and so am I.’ 

The young woman took hold of his hand and squeezed it. She looked as if she would have been quite prepared to kneel down on the floor and kiss his feet. Then she rose from her chair, and without even looking at Matthew’s visitor, she left the room with a rustle of silken skirts. 

The visitor came in and closed the door firmly behind him. He was a broad-shouldered white man with a florid face and wiry blond hair and eggshell eyes that stared just a little too widely, as f he were slightly unhinged. He was built like an old-fashioned wardrobe. He wore a loud check sports coat in mustard and blue and a poached-salmon shirt that was almost the same colour as his face. 

‘Haven’t you heard the news?’ he asked Matthew, abruptly. 

‘Of course I’ve heard the news,’ Matthew replied, tilting himself back in his chair, so that the springs squeaked. He was a lion-headed black man of fifty-five – handsome now that he was older, because his eyes had sunken a little and his cheekbones were more pronounced and his jaw had taken on a biblical sharpness. His hair was thick and very white. He was wearing a loose oatmeal-coloured djellaba, a hooded North African robe, which not only gave him the appearance of a prophet or a mystic, but which also concealed his considerable bulk. He wore three heavy gold rings on each hand. 

The visitor sat down. He had been in this room before, so he was no longer intrigued by the prints that hung on the beige-painted walls: sand dunes and pyramids and strange stylized African faces with slanted eyes. Matthew Monyatta was the founder and president and chief guru of Boston’s Olduvai Black Consciousness Group. He had been a protégé of Malcolm X in the days of the Black Muslims, but after the shooting of his wife and children in 1973 in a bloody struggle between black political factions, he had become far less fanatical, far more interested in racial reconciliation, while at the same time trying to show that black civilization was as ancient and as deeply rooted as white. 

Hence the name ‘Olduvai’, from the gorge in Tanzania where some of the earliest fossils of
Homo erectus
were discovered. 

‘There’s a full-scale war going on down there,’ said the visitor. 

‘Are you surprised, Mr Deputy Mayor?’ asked Matthew. ‘A white police officer shot and killed the three-month-old son of one of the ghetto’s greatest heroes. Four other black brothers also died, and one black sister. It was a massacre, right on our doorstep. And this was supposedly part of an exercise to catch a drug-running ring run by wealthy white Ivy Leaguers who never even drove down Seaver Street with the windows closed and the air-conditioning turned to “purify”.’ 

Kenneth Flynn pursed his lips tight and looked away. He had never liked Matthew Monyatta and he knew that he never would. He wasn’t racially prejudiced: one of his closest buddies at college had been black, and was now running for state treasurer. Kenneth just didn’t happen to like ethnicity, period. Irish ethnicity was just as bad as African ethnicity: they both added up to ugly handmade pottery and monotonous songs with a lot of amateurish harmonizing and dopey young people with sandals on their feet and stars in their eyes.