SWEATING UNDER HEAVY Kevlar in a Saint Nicholas Avenue tenement stairwell, I panned my binoculars over a C-Town supermarket and a cell phone store onto Candelerio’s restaurant, Margaritas.
It was cold and windy outside, the sky over the jagged skyline of five-story walk-ups the color of a lead pipe. As in all stakeouts, the minutes were going by in geologic time, as if everything in the world had hit slo-mo.
I checked my phone for the hundredth time. The screen said 10:40. Another hour or so to go until noon. A depressing thought came as I remembered the photos of the armed-to-the-teeth Mexican drug dealers and the shot-to-pieces mini-van:
I certainly didn’t want the arrest to turn into a showdown, but considering the person we were arresting, I was ready if it did. Like the rest of the task force, I was packing heavy firepower-an M4 assault rifle with a holographic sight, along with my Glock. New York cops aren’t necessarily Boy Scouts, but we do like to always be prepared.
The DEA SWAT team, bristling with ballistic shields and MP5 submachine guns, was hidden in a bakery van around the corner, and there were another half dozen backup cops and FBI agents in the building across the street, watching the alley at the restaurant’s rear.
We were settled in our blind with the trap set. Now all we needed was for Perrine to walk into it.
“Hey, what’s that?” Hughie said, suddenly sitting up at the windowsill beside me.
“What? Where?” I said, frantically swiveling my binoculars left and right, down toward the sidewalk.
“Not the street,” McDonough said. “The sound. Listen.”
I dropped the Nikon binocs and cocked an ear out the open stairwell window to catch the heavy driving thump of a dance song coming from somewhere in the wilderness of tenements around us.
“Someone’s having a morning disco party. So what?”
“Don’t you remember?” McDonough said, bopping his head up and down to the beat. “‘Rhythm Is a Dancer.’ That’s the same song they played that summer we worked together in the nineties. I used to vogue to this jammie.”
“Growing up just flat-out isn’t going to happen for you, is it, Hughie?” I said, passing my shirtsleeve over my sweat-soaked face.
We continued to watch and wait. A vein twitched along my eye when Hughie’s cell phone trilled at eleven on the dot.
The thumbs-up he gave me confirmed it was the FBI operations team up in Westchester County that was surveilling Candelerio. Aerial and ground teams had been covering the Dominican for the last week. This morning we’d brought every local PD from Westchester to the Bronx into the loop in case there was some unforeseen detour and we had to do a traffic stop.
“Candelerio is rolling, headed out toward the Saw Mill River Parkway right on schedule,” Hughie said, ending the call. “ETA in thirty. Get this, though. Our spotter said his wife and three girls are with him, and they’re all dressed up.”
I frowned. We were already doing the arrest in a public place. Having Candelerio’s family around would only make things even more complicated.
“Dressed up?” I said. “He’s bringing his
McDonough shrugged.
“Who knows with a family of drug dealers?” he said. “Maybe meeting the Sun King is like meeting real royalty to them. How many opportunities do you get to have an audience with a king?”
I went back to my window perch. I pinned the glasses onto every car that slowed, onto every pedestrian who walked past on the sidewalk. With Candelerio on the way, it meant that Perrine would be coming along any moment now.
My heart fluttered into my throat as a kitted-out black Escalade suddenly pulled up in front of the restaurant. A back door popped open, and out came three men. I tried to spot faces, but all I caught were Yankees baseball caps and aviator sunglasses before the three were inside.
“Did anybody see? Is it Perrine? Can anyone confirm ID?” I frantically called over the radio.
“Negative. No confirmation,” called the DEA SWAT.
“Not sure,” called a cop from the team at the restaurant’s rear. “They went in too fast.”
“Damn it,” I said as Hughie whistled by the window.
“Mike, movement. Six o’clock,” he said.
I panned the glasses back to the restaurant, where a dark-skinned Dominican waitress with big silver hoop earrings and short black hair was stepping out onto the sidewalk.
The attractive Rihanna look-alike was named Valentina Jimenez, and she was a cousin of the informant who was helping us out on the case. She’d come out to give us the signal. If Valentina lit a cigarette, it would mean that she had spotted Perrine.
I watched her intently as she stood in front of the restaurant, looking up and down the street.
“Stand by,” I said into the radio, ready to give the other teams the green light.
That’s when it happened.
Valentina did something, but it wasn’t lighting a cigarette.
She glanced back into the restaurant and then bolted in her high heels at top speed down Saint Nicholas Avenue as though she were running for her life.
“WHAT IN THE name of God?” Hughie yelled, giving voice to my thoughts.
“Have her picked up,” I said into the radio.
“What does it mean? It was Perrine who just went in there? Did she forget the signal?” Hughie said.
“We still don’t know. We have to wait and talk to her,” I said. “She could have just gotten spooked.”
My cell phone rang a second later.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know what to do, okay? I’m so sorry,” Valentina said, sobbing.
“It’s okay, Valentina. I’m having you picked up. You’re safe. Just listen closely. Was it him? Did Manuel Perrine just come into the restaurant?”
“No. Those men were members of Candelerio’s crew. They were just laughing with the manager about how much par-tying they would be doing today since Candelerio is away. Candelerio isn’t coming to lunch. I knew I had to call you, but I was afraid they’d see. You know what they would do to me if they saw me calling a cop? That’s why I left. And I’m not going back. I don’t care what you do to my cousin. These guys are killers. I can’t take working there anymore.”
I stared down at the restaurant in disbelief. Candelerio wasn’t coming? Which meant Perrine wasn’t coming. What did that mean? They were onto us? Were the drug dealers meeting somewhere else?
“Why isn’t he coming? Did you hear anything?” I said as calmly as my racing pulse would allow.
“They said it was a family thing. A graduation? Something like that.”
A graduation? I thought. This early in the year it would have to be Candelerio’s oldest daughter, Daisy, the one at NYU law school. That actually made sense. It explained why Candelerio had brought his family, and why they were all dressed up. Except on the phone for the past month, the drug dealer had said he wanted to meet Perrine at noon today at the restaurant. How did that make sense?
The answer was it didn’t. Exactly nothing was going the way we’d expected. I couldn’t believe this was happening.
“A squad car is pulling over. Can I please, please, please go home?” my informant said.
“Of course, Valentina. You did good. I’ll call you,” I said, hanging up.
The metal clang of a passing garbage truck bouncing over potholes in the street rang off the gouged walls and dirty marble steps as I stood there trying to figure out what was happening.
“So?” Hughie said, holding up his hands.
“We were wrong,” I said. “Candelerio isn’t coming. He’s going to his daughter’s graduation.”
