Burn Read online

  This was apparently now my completely maddening New York bureaucratic disaster.

  CHAPTER 10

  THE BETTER PART OF an hour later, I finally got to the head of the line.

  “Here you go,” said the clerk as she shoved a sheet of paper at me in greeting.

  Her shirt was unbuttoned low enough to show a lot of cleavage, and there was an earring in the lower of her DayGlo-pink lips. Or a lip ring, I guess you’d call it. Whatever it was, it was absolutely not up to the NYPD’s professional-appearance standards.

  Who was running this asylum? Oh, yeah. Me.

  “Hi, I need to talk to someone,” I said, ignoring the paper. “I just moved to Harlem four months ago, and I was robbed three times by the same street-corner kid. Nothing’s been done about this. The kid is still out there. He put a gun to my head, for God’s sake.”

  The lip-ringed clerk nodded sympathetically a couple of times. Then she shoved the paper at me again.

  “That does sound like a problem, sir,” she said. “But instead of telling me, you need to tell it to this Departmental 313-152 Form.”

  “Then what?” I said. “Aren’t those police officers back there behind you? Can’t one of them come with me? The kid’s on the corner right now. Or he was two hours ago when I got on line. I’ll point him out.”

  “They’re currently working on other cases, sir,” the clerk said, blinking at me.

  “Please, I need help,” I said. “I don’t mean to be pushy, but I’m afraid for my kids.”

  “Put it all down on the form, sir. We can’t do anything without the proper paperwork,” she said, glancing down at her lap, where I’d bet my paycheck she had a cell phone. Without looking at me, she gestured with a hand off to the right.

  “There’s pens on the table over there,” she said.

  The clerk checked her Facebook page or Buzzfeed or whatever for a second before looking up and then through me.

  “Next!” she bellowed.

  They say you can catch more flies with honey.

  But unfortunately, I wasn’t trying to catch flies.

  I was trying to restore order in a land in which chaos was currently in full ugly reign. Fortunately, having ten kids, I had been to this place before and knew what to do. Desperate times called for desperate measures.

  It was break-glass-in-case-of-emergency time, also known as completely freak out.

  As it turned out, I didn’t go to the table with the paper. Instead, I stood rooted to the linoleum and glared at the clerk until she once again acknowledged my existence. Then I turned around to the old Asian grandmother with two little boys coming up behind me.

  “I’m sorry, ma’am,” I told her. “But as it turns out, you’re actually not next.”

  “Hey! What are you, crazy?” said the clerk when I faced her again.

  I lifted the Departmental 313-152 Form off the counter and slowly tore it in two. Then tore it in two again.

  “Why, yes,” I said. “Apparently I am. Who wouldn’t be crazy trying to deal with this lousy excuse you call a police squad?”

  She pursed her DayGlo lips.

  “You best stop poppin’ off,” she said, wagging a finger at me ghetto-style. “This is a police facility. You want to get locked up? Now, you can either go over there and fill out your form or I can reserve you a room at the Rikers Island Hilton, comprende? Your choice. Last chance.”

  “No,” I said, glaring at her. “I don’t comprende. I have no idea what’s going on here. And it seems like neither do you.”

  CHAPTER 11

  “HEY, WISE GUY. YEAH, you. You looking for trouble?” said a burly young white cop as he got up from one of the desks in the corner.

  He was a six-foot-tall, broad-shouldered guy in dark slacks and a white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up over his thick forearms. He was smiling and chewing on a piece of gum as he quickly came out from behind the counter straight at me. His pepper spray was already out, I noticed, and he had a twitchy finger on its trigger, ready to go.

  “You doing a little drinking this morning, buddy? Lookin’ for some trouble?” he said almost hopefully.

  “No, cowboy, but you and everybody else in this unit just found a whole bunch,” I said as I took out my shield.

  The cop and the clerk stared at each other, then at me.

  “Allow me to introduce myself. I’m Detective Mike Bennett, the unlucky SOB who just got assigned to CO this wreck.”

  First I pointed at the clerk.

  “You,” I said. “Button that shirt, take that thing out of your neon lip and your butt out from behind that counter, and go on home until you read the NYPD uniform policy and realize this isn’t a circus sideshow.”

  Before she could protest, I pointed at the aggressive cop.

  “You,” I said.

  “Me?” the strapping twenty-something said.

  “Yeah, you. Go back to your desk and turn off the Tetris, and while you’re there, tell the rest of the mopes in this unit that Daddy’s home and he wants everyone standing in line in the hall by my office until further notice. Everyone except for you, that is. You can take off for the rest of the day, too, Dr. Pepper Spray.”

  As he reluctantly walked off, I turned toward the line of exhausted, frustrated people behind me.

  “I’m sorry, everyone, but this office is closed for the day,” I announced.

  If I thought the people were pissed off before, they were twice as steamed now. There was a lot of groaning and cursing. Someone kicked the wall hard enough to shake the banner. I wondered for a scary second if I was going to need to call for some real cops.

  “This is bull!” someone called out loudly.

  Yes, it is, I thought. “This is bull” was today’s theme. It was New York City’s theme pretty much every day, when you came to think of it. If the politicians were honest, they’d put it on billboard-size signs at the city line.

  WELCOME TO NEW YORK. IT’S BULL!

  “Sorry, but it can’t be helped,” I called back. “Hopefully, we’ll be open tomorrow, but I can’t make any promises. The Project for Outreach Relations with the NYPD apologizes for any inconvenience.”

  “Man, you even got the name wrong,” a thin black man in a UPS uniform said, pointing at the wall banner with a loud “Tsssk.”

  “My mistake,” I said, going over and ripping the banner off the wall. I crumpled it loudly in my hands as I stepped behind the counter and methodically stuffed it into a wastepaper basket.

  “Whatever we are, we are now under renovation!” I called out. “Thank you and I’m sorry and good-bye.”

  CHAPTER 12

  I SPENT THE NEXT hour in my new office trying to get my bearings.

  The office itself was a nice surprise. It was a recently redone, roomy corner space that had new furniture and an extensive view of tree-lined Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard to the north. It even had a washroom and a coffeemaker, which I promptly filled and got percolating before I started stacking the massive pile of in-box files on my desk.

  First order of business was to read through the squad’s operational details folder. In some ways, the unit was like a mini-precinct. In addition to a locker and interview rooms, the office space had an on-site armory, cruisers in the underground lot, Kevlar vests and radios. Coordination had been set up with the Twenty-Eighth Precinct house a couple of blocks away for backup and lockup as needed.

  But in other ways, the unit was like a much more agile, roving detective squad consisting of a handful of officers and a couple of clerks. The officers were what was known as white badges, plainclothes cops recently taken from patrol to see if they had the wherewithal to become permanent detectives.

  Managed correctly, the squad could be an effective tool, I realized. It would just be a matter of prioritizing cases and laser-focusing on a few cases at a time like any other squad. Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad after all. I was actually a little excited.

  Until I got to the assigned officer personnel files.r />
  “OK, now I get it,” I mumbled to myself as I skimmed through the records.

  It wasn’t just the most frustrating cases that were being shunted here, I realized. It seemed that some of the department’s most frustrating cops had been sent here, too. Instead of confusing myself further, I decided to put names to faces and meet my new charges one by one.

  “Arturo Lopez!” I called out to the cops lined up outside the door.

  A friendly-seeming young Puerto Rican officer came in. I recognized him as the big-boned cop who’d been sleeping at his desk. Arturo was about five-ten and about five hundred pounds. Well, maybe not five hundred, but easily thirty pounds overweight.

  “Lopez, are you interested in being a good cop?” I said after I introduced myself.

  “Yes, I definitely am, sir. It means everything to me.”

  “Good deal. Let me ask you a question. How fast are you?”

  “How fat am I?” he said, hurt. “C’mon, that’s pretty cold, sir.”

  “Not fat, Lopez,” I said. “Fast. F-A-S-T.”

  “I don’t know. Sort of fast, I guess. Who’s to say?”

  I raised an eyebrow at him.

  “If I said, ‘Hey, Arturo, let’s you and me have a race to the elevator,’ would you have a chance of winning?”

  “Maybe?” he said, wincing.

  He finally lowered his head. “No, not a chance.”

  “See, it’s not really the weight, Arturo. It’s the ability to get around. Things go down fast on the street, and we have to watch each other’s backs out there. No one is going to want to partner up with you if you can’t catch up. If you really want to be a detective, you need to lose some weight, dude. You need to start running and working out or you’re going to be working somewhere else.”

  “I get you, Detective. I will. I promise,” he said as he left.

  “Noah Robertson!” I called out.

  A good-looking blond guy walked in. He was impeccably dressed in a modish soft-gray bespoke suit with a white silk shirt and silk navy tie, with a matching pocket square. His gelled hair was sharply parted à la Cary Grant, and on his feet, I saw, were fancy euro shoes that looked a lot like black velvet slippers. He was tall and tan and slim and looked more like an actor or a Hollister model than a cop.

  I’d already read that there had been some kind of sex harassment deal at his last assignment, which explained his presence here. I didn’t ask about it. He was just another of the problem children I’d inherited, as far as I was concerned. All I cared about was here and now. It was A Brand-New Day, after all.

  “Robertson, why are you here?” I said, squinting at him.

  The elegant young man stared at me for a beat.

  “I want to be a detective, obviously,” he said.

  “Yes, but why?” I said. “Let me guess. Because you’re a clotheshorse and the uniform doesn’t live up to your high sartorial standards?”

  “Well, I am a clotheshorse,” he said with a canny little smile. “But I only want what you want, Detective. To help people who need helping. Get bad guys off the street. Maybe get a chance to use my brain in the process.”

  I nodded. I liked his answer. But I wasn’t finished.

  “If that’s the case, Robertson, then why were you hiding in the corner with everybody else when I came in?”

  He looked out my window for a moment, thinking, then gave me his little smile again. “I was waiting for an inspirational leader to arrive,” he said, holding up a finger.

  Elegant and able to bullshit on his feet. That might come in handy, I thought.

  “Be careful what you wish for, Robertson. Now go back out in the hallway.”

  “Naomi Chast!” I called out after he left.

  Chast was a pretty, medium-height young woman with tightly tied-back strawberry-blond hair and an almost too lean, wiry triathlete’s build. She was wearing a crisp NYPD polo over her department-issue navy tactical pants.

  She seemed professional and kind of normal, I thought as I thumbed through her paperwork. But that was impossible. If she were normal, why would she have been sent here?

  When I looked up from her file, she was suddenly glaring at me.

  “Oh, I see. You’re cleaning house, huh?” she said with her hands on her hips. “Well, let me save you the trouble. Transfer away. You think I want to be in this chickenshit outfit, you’re crazy. You don’t think I know how all this political crap works? Let me tell you a few things.”

  As she continued to rant, I flipped another page of her file and found a note handwritten by the squad’s previous leader.

  Impulse control? it said. ADD? Anger management issues?

  Yes. Yes. Yes, I scratched next to it, and underlined it twice.

  CHAPTER 13

  AFTER I GOT CHAST to calm down and go back out into the hallway, I decided to make my first command decision.

  I stood and stuck my head out of my office door.

  “Listen up, people. I’m hitting the Reset button,” I said. “So whatever nuttiness has been going on around here is over now, OK? I have one rule. I only work with driven, dedicated cops. If you came here to hide out and push pencils and wait for Thursday’s check to clear, I’m sorry, but those days are over.

  “Now I want you to go home and get some sleep and decide if you want to keep working here. Because tomorrow, we’re starting from scratch.”

  They were leaving when a well-dressed thirty-something black woman came running into my office.

  “Hi, Detective Bennett, is it?” she said. “I’m Ariel. Ariel Tyson.”

  I looked up at the woman, at the serious brown eyes behind her red-framed eyeglasses. I had already learned from the files that she was the other clerk.

  “I was just at lunch,” she said, “and I heard you sent everybody home, and I just want you to know I’m good at my job. I love my job. End of story. I live six blocks from here, and I have three kids. I’m bringing them up the best I can.”

  “You show up every day for work, Ariel?” I said.

  “Every day. On time. Don’t even put in for overtime.”

  “Then I have just one question,” I said, rubbing my eyes. “How did you wind up here?”

  “Bureaucratic screwup. What else?” she said with one of the widest, most likable smiles I’d ever seen.

  That was when it happened. I finally had a laugh. The first one of the day.

  “How are you doing, Detective?” she said, starting to laugh with me. “You look like you’re having yourself a real long day.”

  “I’ve just been assigned to coach the Bad News Bears on the Island of Misfit Toys, Ariel. Isn’t it obvious that I’m having the time of my life?”

  As Ariel was leaving my office, I heard someone coming down the hallway. It was the aggressive young cop, Dr. Pepper Spray. His file indicated that his name was Jimmy Doyle. He was a young “gunslinger” cop who already had two kills on the job, which was probably why he’d been assigned here. So his old CO wouldn’t have to fill out the paperwork when he shot numero three.

  Doyle held up his hands as he came past my door.

  “I know, I know. Calm down, boss,” the spunky cop said. “I’ll only be a minute. I left my wallet in my locker, and I can’t walk home to the Bronx.”

  I smiled at his back as he went past. The young cop reminded me of someone. Oh, yeah. Me. About half a lifetime ago.

  CHAPTER 14

  I WAS POURING MYSELF a coffee refill when the police-band radio in the corner of my office crackled.

  “Twenty-seven,” a dispatcher said. “Come in. We have shots fired. I repeat, shots fired. Corner of a Hundred Twenty-Seventh and Eighth Ave.”

  “A Hundred Twenty-Seventh and Eighth? That’s two blocks away. It’s where we buy coffee,” Doyle suddenly said from where he was now standing in the doorway of my office.

  I hopped up immediately and grabbed some vests and radios out of the locker in the corner.

  “What gives?” Doyle said when I handed hi
m his vest. “The other squad leader said we shouldn’t respond to local calls.”

  I pushed the young cop out of my doorway and toward the office exit.

  “Yeah, well, he’s not here right now, is he?” I said. “C’mon, Doyle. What are you waiting for? Those who dare, win. Lead the way.”

  Down on the street, we bolted diagonally across Adam Clayton, ran two quick blocks, and hooked a left up 127th. There was a project complex on the right-hand side of the street, a row of old brownstone houses on the left. Some howling teenage girls came out of one of the brownstones as we were running past.

  “Get back inside!” I yelled as Doyle and I sprinted for the corner.

  Doyle and I both had our service weapons drawn when we arrived on the corner of Eighth. Two people were down. Two young black men, neither of them older than twenty. One was facedown in the gutter between two parked cars, not moving. The other one was sitting, leaning up against the doorjamb of the corner bodega, bleeding heavily from his chest and mouth.

  A large, older black man with short dreads and Carhartt coveralls was down on his knees beside the victim, holding a dirty towel to the kid’s chest with his left hand while holding the kid’s hand with his right. The gasping youth had on a Dodgers hoodie and had a pale-blue bandanna tied Tupac-style around his head.

  Gangs, I thought immediately, seeing the rag. Pale blue. Crips.

  “C’mon, c’mon,” the man said to the bleeding youth in a Jamaican accent. “C’mon, son. Stay awake, now. They’re comin’ to help ya.”

  I went and squatted by the kid in the gutter. He was stocky, wearing a pristine white-and-light-blue-striped polo and oversize jeans. But there was no helping him. There was a large-caliber bullet hole the size of a bouncy ball just above his right temple, and blood and brain matter covered the left leg of his pants.

  I saw a gun tucked at the back of his waistband, some type of Taurus semiautomatic. I retrieved it carefully and unloaded it as I stood.