Dead Street

“You opened an envelope and read it there.”

She frowned and nodded.

I added, “Where is the envelope, Bettie?”

She didn’t answer immediately. She was like a computer whose electronics were on a search pattern, making thousands of contacts a second to find the answer to a query the operator typed in. A minute passed, then another. They seemed like hours. Then she simply shook her head and let her unseeing eyes stare at me. “I don’t know.”

“You hid it,” I said bluntly.

Her answer was a quiet, “Yes.”

“Good!”

“But... I don’t remember where.”

When you interrogate a crime suspect you don’t have to do it all at once. Fear and aggravating circumstance can block his memory, so you give the suspect a chance to recover the information you want. He may try to disguise it, but the interrogator is an expert and can spot the opening when it appears, and then he’s up to bat and the right pitch will come along and the ball will go over the fence. Bettie wasn’t a crime suspect, but the situation was damn near identical.

Out of the blue she said, “Jack... tell me about us.”

“Us?”

“Before you came here. It didn’t just ‘happen,’ did it?”

When I said no she noticed the quietness in my voice and didn’t say a word. She was waiting for me to explain another part of her life that had been taken from her. She was rational, she could think, she could reason, but would she be able to comprehend the details of the past without losing any of the progress she had made?

Now the ball was in my court.

I said, “Twenty years ago you and I were in love. We were going to get married.”

Damn... she was smiling!

I felt a little bit nervous. She was waiting so I continued. “At work you uncovered something in the files that was so important to the public welfare that you pulled it out and carried it home with you. You knew I was a cop and planned to show it to me. Unfortunately, I figure the guy who had left that information at Credentials returned, discovered what had happened and the finger led right to you. He employed some hired killers to wipe you out... after snatching you and retrieving those files. It had to be a quick move, simple torture would have made you talk, then your body would have been disposed of.”

Bettie’s face didn’t show any deep concern at all. She was digesting the details and studying them; then she asked me, “What happened?”

“Good neighbors. They suspected what was happening. Deliveries of rugs don’t happen at that time of night. Somebody notified 911, the police responded and a squad car came immediately. The chase went on until the truck crashed, went over the bridge and into the river. Somehow you survived by grabbing hold of an inflated inner tube that was in the truck.”

“And?”

“You know the rest. The good veterinarian in Staten Island rescued you. He prepared for your future. His son, your adopted brother, carried the doc’s wishes out into the present. And here you are.”

“We are,” she told me very quietly. Tacos’ tail thumped the floor again and just as softly as her first remark, she asked me, “Jack, are you in love with me?”

“Incredibly so,” I said. “Now, may I ask you something?”

I didn’t have to repeat her question at all.

She simply said, “Incredibly so.”

We both had our eyes closed when I kissed her. We were blind but all-seeing and now we had the world in our hands.

At least for the moment. It was like surviving the monstrous blast of an A-bomb.

And that thought put me right back on the track again. Somewhere, secreted away, was a hoard of nuclear material that could blast a major city wide apart.

It was time to start calling in favors. When I got back to my house the first one went to NYPD police tech Paul Burke.

He told me that enriched uranium the size of a football could be designed to wipe out a vast area. With the right secondary devices incorporated into the main device, subsequent devastation could cause intense radiation injury that could wipe out an entire country. In some arenas of scientific speculation, it was considered possible to eliminate nearly all of the world’s population.

“Except for the small group who planned to do the repopulating,” I suggested.

“That would be the general idea.”

“Feasible?” I asked.

“If you want to speculate,” he said. “There are always wise guys like cops who seem to bust things up.”

“Quit being so damned cheerful, Paul.”

“Sure,” he said. “Now, what do you really need?”

“That nuclear material was probably enriched uranium. It has to be stored someplace. It had to have been transported in a secure manner with no radiation leakage and that would be in a mobile compartment inside the truck. Now, the truck was found empty. The cargo, being mechanically mobile, was taken in another vehicle and brought to a secure location. What would that be like?”

“Interesting question,” Paul responded. “The uranium itself isn’t very large, but the container that held it would be of good size. How it was structured so as not to leak radiation is probably a scientific secret, but since it has not been found or used, it may still be secure. Where it is being held is the important thing. Commercial storage areas are out of the question. Too many inspections. Sometimes they burn down. Sometimes they are selected for destruction when a new project is planned and they are in the way.”

“So?” I put in.

“So it would wind up at a privately owned location not selected for any development and as secure as it is possible to be.”

“That really tips the scales in the bad guy’s favor, doesn’t it?”

“Bad guys like it that way. That’s why they’re called bad guys.”

“What do we do about them, Paul?”

“Hell, buddy, you know the answer to that. You shoot them.”

“Great,” I said before I hung up.

This may be the information era, but getting the information you want isn’t all that easy. You have to give something in order to get something back.

I slouched in my big chair. I took out my t... .45’s, the Combat Commander and the standard 1911 model. I cleaned and oiled them again, checked the action in each and shoved in full clips. I was a New Yorker even though I didn’t like the place, and being in the quietude of Florida’s playground didn’t exercise my mental facilities at all. I wondered how the hell the other guys could stand it. Maybe I was just too damn mean for retirement.

Telling Bettie that I had to go back to the Big Apple again so soon wasn’t easy, but she smiled like she knew this was coming and didn’t argue. The way she squeezed my hand told me that she knew this had to be and that she was going to be right here waiting for me to come back wearing a CASE CLOSED smile.

The next morning when I kissed her so long, all I could think of was that she sure would make a great wife for a cop. Even a retired one. And would we be the first retirees in Sunset Lodge to consider starting a family?

The dog gave a puzzled look and whined, but when I petted his head he banged the floor with his tail again.

Chapter Seven

Davy Ross met me at the airport in an unmarked squad car. When I sat back against the seat and buckled up the safety belt, I had that “old times” feeling again.

Davy said, “I know you’re not carrying, so I brought you a Glock to wear. They’re getting to be standard weapons these days.”