Outside, the sun was setting in the west and some shore birds were cutting streaks through the darkening sky. Bettie and I rocked in unison in the big wicker-backed chairs and my mind was a million miles away from the cacophony of sounds that made New York City the Big Apple. It was a great nickname until you remembered that people took bites out of big apples and if one of those bites nipped your rear end, it shouldn’t be a total surprise.
Darris Kinder’s Batman car turned the corner, pulled up in front of Bettie’s house and he cut the engine. He came out of the vehicle, took a casual look around the area and walked up to the porch.
I stood up and said, “Captain, it’s good to see you. What’s happening?”
“Got to make sure all our new guests are comfortable.”
“Can’t you tell?”
Kinder looked at the two of us and grinned. “Oh, yeah. I can see that.”
I pulled over another rocker and said, “Have a seat. This is the first time we’ve had any real company.”
His face had a bland expression, but I had seen bland expressions before and the look I gave him said I got the implication of what he was thinking.
“It’s a quiet night,” I offered.
He nodded in agreement. “We’ve always had quiet nights,” he said, but there seemed to be some almost- silent emphasis on the word “quiet.”
He went on: “The guys at the Station House had a meeting earlier. They want to get you ‘initiated.’ “
“I already signed up.”
“That’s not being initiated.”
“Darris, it’s great to be here, but I’m not the ‘joiner’ type. You know?”
“Sure, but tell your old buddies that, not me.... Say, you remember Pudgy Gillespie, don’t you?”
“From the thirty-second? Yeah.”
“Well, he’s thinking of moving down here.” Darris passed me a sheet of small notepaper. “Here’s his number. Give him a call.”
His voice was friendly and bland, but there was a funny tone in it and I nodded and said, “Sure thing, I’ll get him later.”
When he left, Kinder looked back at me for a quick second and his eyes were telling me something that Bettie couldn’t see.
But Bettie had been blind for a long time. Sight wasn’t a total necessity for her vision any longer. There were other ways she could see, and when Kinder drove off Bettie very quietly asked, “What was that all about, Jack?”
Her inquiry was so loaded with suggestion that I couldn’t lie to her. “Something’s happening,” I told her.
“What?” she demanded.
“It’s a cop thing, doll.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Because you’re not a cop.”
“Are you?”
“I was.”
“... Can you tell me?”
“I can.”
“Will you?”
So you love the girl. She’s old enough to be a woman but she was born twenty years ago, even if she’s forty- something, so she’s a girl, who’s been through her own hell. She’s still in it, but beginning to see the light shining through the murk. You’ve kissed her and tasted her and you’re in total love with her and now she wants to be more a part of you than ever before.
I said, “I will.”
“Then tell me.”
“Something happened at Credentials where you worked. It was a computer business, so it had to do with the machinery you operated there. Computers, can you remember that? Ray Burnwald was your boss.”
“Poor Mr. Burnwald. You said he was... injured?”
“Yes. He’s recovering.”
“Mr. Burnwald was nice.”
“Do you remember your job there?”
For thirty seconds I got a blank stare, then she squinted her sightless eyes, seeing into a past a long time ago. She waited a little longer and said, “Fission.”
“What?”
“Fission,” she repeated. “Does that... mean anything to you, Jack?”
Silently, I mouthed a string of words that had nothing to do with my thoughts because things suddenly started to make a little bit of sense if you consider all the possible potential of that single word.
And only a retired cop and a blind beauty to stop it.
Don’t mess with a bunch of pros.
They may have been low-paid cops, but they had been trained and were experienced and had gone through the muck and mire of the defects of society and been shot at and sometimes hit and sometimes killed and when they had something to contribute to the general welfare of the society they had protected for so long, you had damn well better listen to them.
Pudgy Gillespie, newly retired sergeant, who had gotten hit twice when he stopped a bank robbery, said, “Jack, I got hold of some information I think you’ve been looking for.”
“Oh?” I said to the voice on the phone.
“Bennie Orbach was released from prison four months ago,” Pudgy said. “He served out all those years for that attempted hijacking of that army truck that was transporting atomic materials to a new location. You remember that?”
That word
I nodded, then said, “That truck was a dummy, wasn’t it? The real one got through.”
“The hell it was a dummy. That story came out only when it was found empty.”
“A cover-up,” I said.
“Like you can’t believe. All personnel connected to that affair were assigned to scattered outposts, kept from making contact until everything quieted down or they died, and until now certain Washington agencies have sat on this thing like it was Fort Knox’s gold hoard.”
I waited.
When he had his breath back, Pudgy added, “Benny Orbach went into deep cover as soon as he hit the street. He totally disappeared, never even attempting to contact his parole officer, but a couple of our hot shot trackers from downtown picked up a thread of information and followed it up.”
“They located Benny?”
“No, they found what was left of his body. Somebody had really worked him over and whatever he was holding out, he spilled. Nobody could have kept quiet with the kind of sticking he was given. It was almost like a living autopsy.”
“Damn,” I spit out.
“But they missed something,” Pudgy said. “They never found his personal stash.”
I squinted silently at that.
Pudgy told me, “You know how the cons hide their most necessary items, like narcotics?”
With the way prison shakedowns are held, I couldn’t imagine any way any con could hold out anything. After a few seconds I suggested, “You referring to rectal implants?”
“Exactly.”
