'Think he's still there?'
Lonnie shrugged. 'Could be. Looked like he'd been there awhile. I know there was some girls down the way, he was partying with them, they acted like they knew him…' • • • They touched a half-dozen other fences, small- time hustlers. At half-hour intervals, Fell would find a pay phone and make a call.
'Nobody home?'
'Nobody home,' she said, and they went looking for more fences.
Fell was a cowgirl, Lucas thought, watching her drive. She'd been born out of place, out of time, in the Bronx. She'd fit in the Dakotas or Montana: bony, with wide shoulders and high cheekbones, that frizzy red hair held back from her face with bobby pins. With the scar at the end of her mouth…
She'd been jabbed with the broken neck of a beer bottle, she said, back when she was on patrol. 'That's what you get when you try to keep assholes from killing each other.'
Babe Zalacki might have been a babe once, before her teeth fell out. She shook her head and smiled her toothless pink smile at Lucas: 'I don't know from medical shit,' she said. 'The closest I got to it was, I got three hundred cases of Huggies a couple of weeks ago. Now Huggies, you can sell Huggies. You take them up to Harlem and sell them on the street corners like that…' She snapped her fingers. 'But medical shit… who knows?'
Back on the street, Fell said, 'Sun's going down.'
Lucas looked up at the sky, where a dusty sun hung over the west side. 'Still hot.'
'Wait'll August. August is hot. This is nothin'… Better make a call.'
Up the street, a bald man in a jean jacket turned to face a building, braced a hand against it, and began urinating. Lucas watched as he finished, got himself together, and continued down the street. No problem.
Fell came back and said, 'He's home. Phone's busy.'
They took a half hour, cutting crosstown as the light began to fail, through a warehouse section not far from the water. Fell finally slowed, did a U-turn, and bumped the right-side wheels over the curb. She killed the engine, put her radio on the floor in the backseat, fished a sign out from under the seat and tossed it on the dashboard: 'No radio inside.'
'Even a cop car?'
'Especially a cop car-cop cars got all kinds of goodies. At least, that's what they think.'
Lucas climbed out, stretched, yawned, and ran his thumb along his beltline, under his jacket, until it hit the leather of the Bianchi holster. The street was in deep shadow, with doorway niches and shuttered carports in brick walls. A red brick cube, unmarked by any visible sign or number, loomed overhead like a Looney Tune. Rows of dark windows started three stories up; they were tall and narrow, and from the third to the eleventh floor, dark as onyx. Half of the top floor was lit.
'Lights are on,' Fell said.
'Weird place to live,' Lucas said, looking around. Scrap paper sidled lazily down the street, borne on a hot humid river breeze. The breeze smelled like the breath of an old man with bad teeth. They were close to the Hudson, somewhere in the twenties.
'Jackie Smith is a weird guy,' Fell said. Lucas stepped toward the door, but she caught his arm. 'Slow down. Give me a minute.' She dug into her purse and came up with a pack of Luckys.
'You've got it bad,' Lucas said, watching her. 'The habit.'
'Yeah, but at least I don't need an alarm clock.'
'What?' He stepped into it.
'Every morning at seven o'clock sharp, I wake myself up coughing.' When Lucas didn't smile, she peered at him and said, 'That was a joke, Davenport.'
'Yeah. Inside, I'm laughing myself sick,' he said. Then he smiled.
Fell tapped a Lucky on the back of a pack of matches, stuck it in her mouth with a two-finger flipping motion, cupped it with her hands and lit it.
'You're not going to fuck me up, are you?' she asked, her eyes flicking up at him.
'I don't know what that means,' Lucas said. He stuck a finger between his collar and his neck. His neck felt like sandpaper. If ring around the collar were a terminal disease, they'd be burying him.
'I saw the pictures of Bekker, after the arrest,' Fell said. 'He looked like somebody stuck his face in a blender. If you do that in New York, with somebody connected downtown, like Jackie is, your fuckin' career goes in the blender.'
'I don't have a career,' Lucas said.
'I do,' said Fell. 'Four more years and I'm out. I'd like to make it.'
'What're you going to do when you get out?' Lucas asked, making talk while she smoked. He tipped his head back and looked up again. He seemed to do that in New York, even with buildings only twelve stories tall.
'I'm gonna move to Hollywood, Florida, and get a job as a topless waitress,' Fell said.
'What?' She brought him down, startled him.
'Joke, Davenport,' she said.
'Right.' He looked back up, turning in the street. 'Who is this guy?'
She took a drag, coughed, covered her mouth with a rolled fist. 'Jackie? He's fairly big. The others we've talked to, they were middle-sized or small-timers. Jackie's a wholesaler. There are three or four of them here in midtown. When somebody hijacks a truck full of Sonys, one of the wholesalers'll get it and parcel it out to the small-timers. If Jackie feels like it, he could put out the word on Bekker to fifty or sixty or a hundred guys. If he feels like it. And those guys could probably talk to a million junkies and thieves. If they feel like it.'
'If you know all this…?' He looked at her with a cool curiosity. A man turned the corner behind them, saw them standing on the sidewalk, and went back around the corner out of sight.
'He's got his own business, remaindering stuff,' Fell continued. 'If somebody has six zillion nuts and no bolts to go with them, he calls up Jackie. Jackie buys them and finds somebody who needs them. That's all legal. If you tag him, you'll find him going in and out of warehouses all day, ten or twenty a day, different ones every day of the week. Talks to all kinds of people. Hundreds of them. Somewhere in the mess, he's got eight or ten people working for him, running the fencing business out the back door of these legit warehouses… It's tough, man. I know he's doing it, but I can't find his dumps.'
'He knows you?'
'He knows who I am,' she said. 'I once sat outside this place for three days, watching who came and went. Running license numbers. It was colder than shit. You know how it gets when it's too cold to snow?'
'Yeah. I'm from…'
'Minnesota. Like that,' she said, looking down the street, remembering. 'So the third night, this guy comes out of the building, knocks on our window, my partner and me, and hands us a Thermos of hot coffee and a couple of turkey sandwiches, courtesy of Jackie Smith.'
'Hmph.' He looked at her. 'You take it?'
'I poured the coffee on the guy's shoes,' Fell said. She was talking through her teeth. She took a last drag, grinned at him and flicked the cigarette into the street, where it bounced in a shower of sparks. 'The silly shit thought he could buy me with a fuckin' turkey sandwich… C'mon, let's do it.'
The warehouse door was built of inch-thick glass poured around stainless-steel rods, with an identical second door six feet farther in. A video camera was mounted on the wall between the two doors. Fell pushed a doorbell marked 'Top.' A moment later, an electronic voice said, 'Yes?'
Fell leaned close to the speaker plate. 'Detectives Fell and Davenport to see Jackie Smith.'
After a short pause, the voice said, 'Step inside and hold your badges in front of the camera.'
The door lock buzzed and Fell pulled the door open, and they went inside. Now between the two doors, they held their badges in front of the camera. A second later, the lock on the second door buzzed. 'Take the elevator to twelve. It's on the way down,' the voice said.
A sterile lobby of yellow-painted concrete block waited behind the second door. There were no windows, only the elevator doors and a steel fire door at the far end of the lobby. The elevators were to the left, and another video camera, mounted in a wire cage near the ceiling, watched them.
'Interesting,' Lucas said. 'We're in a vault.'
'Yeah. You'd have a hell of a time getting this far if Jackie didn't want you in. You'd probably need plastique to
