Reversible Error Read online

  Dugman snorted. “Huh! You persistent, I give you that. No, matter of fact, there wasn’t no teapot.” He thought for a moment. “No tea bag neither.”

  “Then why did you say one of them had tea?” “Because of the lemon. There was a squeezed lemon on the saucer of one of the cups. Nobody drinks their coffee with lemon, do they?” Karp felt a flood of excitement and satisfaction wash through him, a feeling a lightness and release. He reflected that it was exactly like that feeling he used to get when he launched a three-point shot from twenty-five feet out and knew deep in his body, in a way that defied the telling, that it was going to float into the basket without touching the rim.

  He said, “No, not many people do,” in such a strange tone of voice that Dugman stopped and stared at him. Then he said, “Art, did you ever just know something? Like about a crime. When you all of a sudden knew who did it, or how he did it?”

  Dugman said, “You mean like a hunch?”

  “Yeah,” said Karp, “but more than that. Like a certainty. I know where they have Fulton.”

  “This is a fucking fort,” said Maus. “How the hell are we gonna get in?” The King Cole Trio were standing outside their van in the trash-strewn shadows of the West Side Highway looking across Eleventh Avenue at the immense front of Pier 87, the old American Line property. The main entrance, through which trucks and cars had once unloaded and provisioned transatlantic liners, was sealed with corrugated steel. There were several smaller doors on either side of the main entrance, and these were barred with heavy steel grids.

  “Well?” Maus spoke again irritably. “How are we?”

  Art Dugman looked up from the building plans he was studying. He had reading glasses on, which made him look disconcertingly professorial. “When I figure it, you be the first to know,” he said. He resumed his study. The plans showed that the building had three working floors. The ground floor was essentially a huge open bay, largely devoted to vehicular traffic and the reception and handling of baggage and cargo. The rear of this area had been assigned to customs. The second floor was a reception area for passengers; first class, second class, third class all had their separate entranceways, lounges, bars. The top floor was offices.

  That was the plan. What the interior of the building looked like now, fifteen years after the last liner had docked, was anyone’s guess. If this had been a normal police operation, Dugman would have covered all the doors and sent a squad down through the roof, clearing the building from above, by the book. Going into a monster like this was an impossible task for three men, especially on no better information than Karp’s hunch. Dugman folded the plans neatly and climbed back into the van. He looked into the ice chest and found a soda and half a roast-beef sandwich that Maus had bought the previous day.

  He drank some soda against the oppressive heat and took a bite of the sandwich. It was dry and gristly. He thought of searching for one of the plastic sacks of catsup or mayo that were usually to be found scattered on the floor of the van, but decided not to bother. He put the rest of the sandwich into his coat pocket and closed his burning eyes.

  Jeffers was stretched out full length on the carpet covering the rear, a Post draped over his face. Gentle snores came from beneath the paper, fluttering it. Dugman turned around and looked at him with irritation. He said in an unnecessarily loud voice, “Hey, Jeffers! You on the job? You protecting the public?”

  Jeffers grunted and said sleepily, “I’m thinkin about it. I’m getting my courage up to face them miserable mean streets once again. Anything goin on?”

  “Yeah, we sittin with our knittin out on the street. I can’t think of a way to get into that damn pier without a fuckin strike team.”

  “We could just go up to the door and say, ‘Open up! This the po-lice.’ It work for me.”

  “Yeah, and they’ll cut the Loo’s throat between the po and the -lice.”

  “So what’re we doing here?”

  “We waiting, son,” said Dugman. “Either for a inspiration from the Lord or for that radio to light up and tell us that they found the Loo. Or for something. We might as well wait here as anywhere.”

  “Fine with me,” answered Jeffers, readjusting the paper over his face. “Wake me up if something happen.”

  The sun moved across Manhattan and began its slow descent toward its home in New Jersey. The front of the pier was thrown into ocher shadow. Dugman sat in the passenger seat of the van listening to the irrelevant crackle of the police radio, dozing fitfully. Maus lurked behind a highway pillar watching the pier building, whistling “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.” In the back of the van Jeffers snored more deeply.

  Dugman was just thinking about walking down 47th Street to hustle a takeout dinner when he heard the sound of quick footsteps.

  “Hey!” said Maus when he reached the van. “There’s somebody coming out of the pier.”

  Dugman slipped out of the van and went to look. One of the small doors on the side of the pier had opened and a slender black man had emerged from its shadows. He locked the door from the outside, walked toward a black late-model Chevrolet parked in front of the pier, opened its door, and started the engine.

  He stood outside for a minute, allowing the air conditioning to blow the day’s heat out of the interior, then entered the car and drove off.

  “Let’s go get him,” Dugman snapped, dashing around to the passenger side.

  Maus jumped into the driver’s seat, gunned the van’s engine, and took off south on Twelfth Avenue. He kept the van half a block behind the Chevy for several streets. There were no other cars moving on the avenue, which was lined on both sides with idle semi-trailers.

  Maus moved the van up to within two car lengths of the Chevy, then trod heavily on the gas. The van leapt forward, ran up alongside the car, and swerved in front of it. Dugman had a glimpse of the driver’s panicked face before the van drove the Chevy into the side of a parked semi with a screech of metal and brakes.

  It was a perfect pinch. The rear of the van pinned the driver’s door shut and the other door was crushed against the side of the trailer. The driver was trapped. Dugman got out and stood in front of the Chevy with his arms crossed, wreathed by escaping steam from the car’s broken radiator. Jeffers grabbed his shotgun and went around to the rear of the trapped car. When he was in position, he whistled, and Maus rolled the van ahead enough to free the driver’s door.

  Jeffers popped it open and yanked the shaken man out. He spun him around, placed the muzzle of the twelve-gauge against the base of his skull, braced him against his own car, hands on the hood, and patted him down one-handed, coming up with a 9mm automatic pistol and a four-inch butterfly knife. He pulled the man’s hands behind him and snapped on handcuffs.

  Dugman approached and looked the man in the face. He was a young man, not more than twenty, and Dugman did not recognize him—one more of the street’s unlimited supply of apprentices to the drug trade.

  “You got a license for this gun, son?” Dugman asked politely, holding up the weapon.

  “Fuck you, asshole!” the kid yelled. “I din do shit, an you fucked up my car. Who gonna pay for it, nigger?”

  Jeffers said, “He must not be local, talkin’ like that.”

  Dugman shoved the pistol into his belt and nodded. “I don’t guess. Where you from, son? Brooklyn?”

  “What the fuck you care? You gonna bust me, go ahead!”

  “Take him around behind the trailer,” said Dugman.

  Jeffers grabbed the kid’s arm and started to lead him away. The kid did not expect this. He looked around wildly, took a deep breath, and started to shout, “Hey! Help! Police brutality! Hey!” It was the kind of thing that often worked to advantage on the crowded streets of Bed-Stuy.

  Not pausing in his stride, Jeffers tossed up his shotgun, grabbed it five inches from the end of the barrel, and jammed its front end neatly into the kid’s open mouth. He jammed it upward until most of the kid’s weight was hanging from his soft palate. A high whis
tle of agony came from the kid’s throat.

  Behind the trailer, Jeffers kicked the kid’s feet out from under him and threw him facedown on the pavement. Then he sat down heavily on the kid’s back.

  Dugman squatted on his haunches near the kid’s face. He said in a conversational tone, “Now, you ain’t from around here, so we got to make some allowances. Up in Harlem we let a lot of shit go by, but one thing we don’t let go by is snatching no New York City Police Department detective lieutenants. You think you been in trouble before. You been to Youth Hall. You maybe been to Rikers a time or two. But now you’re in Harlem trouble, son. It’s another world. What we got here is way, way beyond police brutality. Am I getting through to you?”

  “Breathe …” the kid gasped.

  Dugman motioned to Jeffers, who leaned forward and took some of his weight onto his feet. Air sucked into the kid’s lungs in a rush. A trickle of blood leaked from his mouth and spotted the pavement.

  “Now,” Dugman continued, “you could be a big help to us. We need to know exactly where they got the lieutenant, and where Manning is, and how many guys are in there, and where they are. And the layout inside. Can you do that?”

  The kid gasped, “Fuck you, cop!”

  “We don’t have time for this shit,” said Dugman. He leaned forward until his face was only a few inches from the kid’s staring eye. “You ever eat your own flesh, kid?” he asked softly.

  The eye just stared. The kid had no ready answer.

  Dugman said to Jeffers, “Cut off his ear!”

  Jeffers took out the butterfly knife, snapped it open, grabbed the kid’s right ear roughly and began to saw away. Blood rolled down the kid’s face into his eye. The kid howled and heaved, but Jeffers might have been the Chrysler Building for all it mattered.

  Dugman leaned over and pinched the kid’s nostrils shut, and when his mouth popped open he shoved a bloody mass into the kid’s mouth. The kid immediately spit it out, gagging and retching. He was sobbing now, and his nose was running.

  “He doesn’t like ear,” said Dugman. “Too bad.”

  “Want to try some nose?” suggested Jeffers.

  “Nobody like nose,” said Dugman. “Besides, his all running with snot. It’s disgusting. No, whyn’t you roll him over. Everybody like pecker.”

  They left the kid, crying and cursing, manacled to the bumper of his car, and drove back to the pier. After a block or so, Dugman remarked to Jeffers, “You were real sloppy cutting off that ear. I tell you to cut off some mutt’s ear, I expect it to fly off his head.”

  Maus said, “Oh, right! I got to drive, and you guys get all the fun part. How come I never get to torture suspects? This sucks, guys, I mean it. I’m sorry I joined the cops now.”

  Jeffers ignored this and said to Dugman, “Sorry about that, boss, I guess I didn’t get enough sleep.”

  “You was using the wrong side of the blade, fool! You suppose to use the sharp side, cut off a man’s ear.”

  “No kidding?” said Jeffers, opening his eyes wide. “Shit, I better write that down. And while we at it, what did you shove in that kid’s mouth?”

  “Piece of Maus’s roast beef. I slopped it in some of his blood.”

  “You fed him Maus’s roast-beef sandwich!” Jeffers exclaimed. “Hey, Sarge, I got to tell you that’s over the line. I might have to write you up for that. No wonder he puked.”

  Maus said, “When you guys stop fuckin around, you want to tell me what he said?”

  Dugman said, “Yeah, he was real cooperative after we unzipped his fly. There’s five guys in the place besides him. Willis, Manning, and three others. One guy’s at the entrance, sits in a little guard office by the door. The rest of them are on the second floor. Water and power’s cut off. They use electric lanterns. They got the Loo in a storage closet on the second floor.”

  “Is he OK?” asked Maus.

  “He still screaming, the kid said. The kid said he was going to get some tape that the Loo had. That’s why they were beatin on him. He finally broke down and told them where it was. I figure they won’t do him before they got the tape in hand; he could just be buying time. So he’s still alive, but he ain’t gonna stay alive unless we do this right.”

  Maus parked the van under the expressway and Dugman told the other two men what he expected them to do. He racked a round into the chamber of the Spanish 9mm he had taken off the kid and checked his own big .357 revolver. Maus and Jeffers also checked their 9mm automatics, huge weapons that sat uncomfortably heavy in their shoulder holsters, and Maus picked up his shotgun and a roll of gaffer’s tape.

  They walked across the deserted avenue to the pier. It was twilight, but the concrete still held the day’s heat. As they walked, they each glanced up nervously at the windows of the building, now in deep shadow, like the embrasures of a fortress.

  Dugman opened the door with the key he had taken off the kid. They slipped silently into echoing moist darkness, dappled with shafts of light from glassless openings on the river side of the structure. A paler light also came from a small guard post built out of the right inside wall of the building.

  As they approached, a voice called out, “Hey, Sloopy, you back already?”

  Jeffers accelerated like the linebacker he once was, smashed through the flimsy wooden door of the office, and smashed the man to the ground with a blow of his pistol. The man collapsed and was quickly trussed and gagged with gaffer’s tape.

  Dugman and Jeffers started up the enclosed concrete main stairway. Maus ran across to the other side of the loading bay to a doorway, went through, and started climbing the outside fire stairs.

  At the second-floor landing Dugman opened the door a crack and peered through.

  “You see anything?” Jeffers asked in a whisper.

  “Yeah,” whispered Dugman. Through the crack he could see most of a large and partially ruined room, a passenger lounge of some kind, with a long bar along one wall with a large cracked mirror behind it. Part of the ceiling had sagged, exposing pipes and beams, and the pastel murals depicting luxury ocean travel were buckled and stained. A few pieces of broken furniture lay scattered around and there was a pile of the padded cloths movers use abandoned against one wall.

  “Two guys sitting at a table,” he said. “A guy lying on a couch. I don’t see Willis or Manning.”

  “What do we do?” said Jeffers.

  “I’ll go right, you go left. Watch the—”

  There was a distant sharp report. And another. Then two louder explosions. Dugman saw the two men at the table spring to their feet and draw pistols from their clothes. The man on the couch sat up, shook his head, reached down to the floor, and came up with a MAC-10 machine pistol. A door slammed some where and someone shouted, “What the fuck … !”

  The men looked away at the source of the shots, and Dugman sprang into the room with his revolver in both hands. Without warning, he began firing into the man with the MAC-10. Hit three times, the man fell back on the couch, and as he fell his hand tightened convulsively on the trigger of the little automatic weapon, spraying fire at his two companions. One of them was struck by the full force of the burst and went down screaming.

  The other one got off a shot at Dugman, which pierced his suit coat. He felt the tug of the cloth and thought briefly that he had been hit. He was swinging his gun around to the new target when he heard the rapid fire of Jeffers’ pistol from somewhere behind him and the third man cried out and disappeared behind the table.

  Dugman rose creakily from the crouch he had assumed and snapped a Speed-loader into his revolver. They heard running footsteps and the slam of a door. Jeffers started to move in the direction of the sounds, but Dugman placed a restraining hand on his arm.

  “No,” he said, “drop on down to the entrance. There ain’t but one way out, unless he’s got a boat. Maus has the top covered.”

  “What about Willis?”

  “He’ll keep. Just go. I got to find the Loo.”

  Jeffers ran
off down the stairs. When he was gone, Dugman glanced briefly at the three men they had shot, enough to make sure all of them were dead. One was still rasping out breath, but Dugman saw that his belly and chest had been blown apart by the automatic fire at close range. He stepped over the man and walked toward the storeroom where the kid had said Fulton was being held. A smell like that of an ill-kept monkey house reached his nose before he had the door open. His stomach turned over as he stepped into blackness.

  EIGHTEEN

  It was dark in the little room and the floors were slippery. Gun in one hand, reaching out with the other, Dugman advanced into the room. After four steps his foot struck something and he heard a groan.

  With his hands he determined what it was he had found. He holstered his gun. Then he dragged Clay Fulton, still bound to his chair, out into the fading light of the lounge.

  Dugman tore off the wires that held him to the chair. In a small alcove under a window he quickly made a pallet of the mover’s pads, heaved Fulton over to it, and covered him with several more.

  He felt Fulton’s pulse and was gratified to find it reasonably strong. Fulton opened his eyes, or rather one eye, as the other was closed by a massive bruise. “That you, Dugman?”

  “Yeah, it is. You look like shit warmed over, Lieutenant.”

  “What the fuck took you so long?”

  “I took some leave, went to the islands. Cheap fares this time of year.”

  From the battered face came something that could have been a chuckle. They were both silent for a minute, and Dugman said, “For a while there, I thought you were in the islands.”

  “Yeah,” said Fulton. “Sorry about that. Somebody explained?”

  “Yeah, Karp gave me the whole story—what I needed, anyway. He figured out you were here, by the way.”

  “He’s a smart motherfucker,” said Fulton. “I don’t even know where I am.” And then he reached out and grasped Dugman’s wrist with remarkable strength. “Manning,” he said. “Did you get him yet?”