Red on Red (62 page)

Nick took a breath, took it in. His ribs ached but his head was clear again. Esposito was right. It should be talked about, and it had to wait.

“Make this left, then right on Broadway.”

A car sliding across the opposite lane distracted him; both vehicles moved in slow motion toward each other, gliding toward collision. The detectives tensed up, but when the cars coasted back into their lanes, they relaxed again. Nick’s phone rang, from a blocked number. Nick didn’t know what would happen later, if he and Esposito would still be talking, so he took advantage to ask, “What’s up with the Cole brothers?”

Esposito shook his head, more despondent still as he hunched over the wheel. “I talked to Malcolm today. He got the gun. Forty caliber, same as the one from your friend Jamie Barry. He’s gonna meet me later, but he sounded different. I don’t like it. I don’t know. He said he doesn’t think he can talk to his brother.”

This was no good. Esposito might have been better off with less confidence, but neither of them could afford for him to lose faith altogether. Esposito’s voice almost broke, angry and uncertain. “I told him that wasn’t good enough. I gave him a chance, and he ain’t takin’ it…. The leverage I got, he still don’t understand…. Where are we going?”

“You know the place.”

It was a gift to put it as a riddle, to make Esposito think of something else. Esposito puzzled it over for a while, raised a hand as if giving up, then thought again. Nick pointed, and they made the turn and parked. Fortunes had shifted on this block for them several times before.

“You’re kidding me.”

“No.”

“Shouldn’t we wait? I mean, he can’t be back home yet. Did he see you? Did he recognize you? Does he know that we know—that you know—who he is? Nick, I know this is your case, your call, but this is
basic. This is his hole in the ground, this is where he hides. Do we want to close it off right now, or let him come home?”

Esposito was right, but Nick didn’t care. Tactics and plans, the best they could do with what they had—that had been done already today. They were still cold and wet, angry and tired. They were still empty-handed.

“Let’s go in.”

“All right.”

They stamped their feet in the shabby lobby, leaving clumps of snow. They went upstairs one flight, to apartment 2B. Nick listened in at the crack of the door. The TV was on. Esposito turned the knob, and it opened. When he was in, he took his gun out but stepped aside to let Nick pass, to let him go first: His case, his risk, whatever else might come. Nick ran past, gun drawn, down the hallway.

In the living room, there was a girl of maybe fifteen, sixteen, sitting on the couch, knitting. There was a white wool blanket on her lap, and she was making—Nick didn’t know. It was a square. He didn’t know what it would become. She didn’t move. Nick didn’t. Esposito cleared the apartment, the bedroom, kitchen, and bath. She looked Mexican, looked just like her sister, who rested in an unmarked grave. Nick didn’t point his gun at her, but she dropped her knitting and pushed the blanket from her lap. She raised her hands.

“Tranquilo, tranquilo,”
Nick told her.
“Policía.”

She didn’t move. She didn’t seem comforted to learn they were with the government. Nick looked over at the wall, where Esposito had drawn a mustache on the mother’s picture. It seemed a little blurred from the cleaning.

“Donde es Raul Costa?”

She didn’t move.

“What’s your name?
Cual es su nombre?
”

Nick knew what she’d say, even though she didn’t answer.

“Your sister, where is she? I know. Do you?
Tu soror, donde esta? Maria Fonseca?
”

She was stunned that Nick knew the name. Could they be Immigration? Nick saw her try to think it through. They were said to hit farms, poultry processors. Sometimes they hit restaurants. They hit jobs where they had illegals in numbers; not houses, not little ones, not somebody’s
sister’s boyfriend’s house. Nick didn’t want her to figure it out yet, and yelled the same question. She looked back, more baffled than fearful, and he believed she was honest in what she said. “Factory. Massa-choos. How you say,
Massachusetts
. Maria, she good. She make computer.”

“No.”

“No?”

“No. You are … Mercedes?”

“Sí, Mercedes.”

Now she was more afraid. Esposito smashed the picture on the wall, punching through with his fist, all the way through the sheetrock. Nick was glad he still had a glove on that hand. Nick kicked the television over. Esposito threw a chair through the window. Costa would not come back here. They would burn him out, burn the hole. That was a figure of speech. Still, it felt good to do it, to tear down his home. Maybe he would feel it in a corner of his mind. Nick saw Esposito punch another hole in the wall, and he punched one, too, indifferent to whether his hand would break. Mercedes started to cry, which made Nick recover himself. Esposito did as well, and he knelt down by the couch to try to calm her. Nick went into the kitchen to find a plastic bag, and then he went to the bedroom, looking at the stray clothes on the floor. Little red underpants. That would do. Nick picked them up with the bag, then turned the bag inside out. Esposito had been speaking Italian to Mercedes—
L’uomo chi abitare in questa casa, dov’e
—and the near sense of it seemed to calm her down. They told her to put on her coat, pick up her solitary backpack of possessions, and then they escorted her down to the car. Nick wanted to ask her when she’d gotten here, if anything had happened to her with Costa, what she knew about him. He didn’t ask anything, didn’t even try. Nick wondered if Mercedes had ever seen snow before.

When they got back to the school, Nick brought Mercedes onto the grounds. He rang the doorbell at the main building for a few minutes, and when no one answered, he looked around. There was a light in the shed. An old man was inside, trying to start the snowblower, yanking on the cord, adjusting the choke. It coughed and started, then failed. Nick started to explain things to him, faster, then slower, to blinking incomprehension. Nick took his arm and put Mercedes’s hand in his, told him to bring her to Sister Agnes. Nick said the name, Sister Agnes, and the man seemed to know what to do.

When Nick went back to the street, he asked the lieutenant about
Garelick. The cassock had been exchanged for an overcoat, grudgingly, Nick thought, but it made for better access to the holster.

“He’s alive, he’s okay. They have to do tests.”

Even this middling news had a sanguine effect. When the bloodhound finally arrived an hour later, their spirits rose further. The K-9 handler stepped from the driver’s seat and went round the back; he had the appearance of an aide attending to an ambassador. The hound regarded its audience with deep-set weary eyes, and emerged from the car with a heavy step. In the snow, the hound’s tread lightened, and it cast its head back and forth; it was untroubled by the weather, whatever had gone wrong today or might yet still; it was ready to begin what it had been born and bred for. Nick led the entourage down the block, to where the trees began, where they had lost Costa. The dog was in a harness, on a long lead; the handler stood over the hound, fixing it in place with his knees, and took the bag of underwear from Nick. The bag was placed over the snout with a rude suddenness, and the dog shuddered. The handler gave Nick the bag back, and Nick accepted it reluctantly. The dog and handler began to crisscross ahead, finding the trail. Nick looked out through the little wilderness, the darkness in the woods, the bright swirling snow, the sun that was setting somewhere. The dog lunged forward, straining on the leash, and the detectives clambered down the hill after them. A few of them had flashlights, and the beams danced crazily ahead like woodland sprites.

At the bottom of the hill, the highway barred their way, and the dog led them south a few hundred yards before cutting back up the slope. Soft curses broke out from the party as they considered the climb, but they quieted when the dog bayed and put its paws up on the frost-slicked trunk of an oak; they jolted to a halt, peering into the tangled shadows of the branches, and several cops drew their guns. Had he been treed, so soon? No. The handler reached up, and took a black wool cap that hung from a twig. It was handmade; Nick wondered which Fonseca sister had made it. The handler offered it to Nick, and he stuck it into his pocket. They made their way back uphill on a low diagonal, breathing heavily, freezing and sweating. Several blocks later, they were at the top of the ridge again, at a break in the fence. Most of the party were glad to be back on level ground, but when Nick looked over at Esposito, he looked disappointed at the change of venue. Blizzard, bloodhound, the forest primeval, and a quest for a beast; even with the botched operation,
only an hour in the past, this beggared the dreams of boyhood. Nick smiled; he had a partner again.

The trail led them on streets more than sidewalks, usually on the side, close in to the parked cars. They were a motley bunch—a few in uniform, some dressed for office work, one or two bundled up sensibly for the weather. Nick still had his groundskeeper coveralls. It might have been better to have a car take them behind the tracker, warm and dry, resting for the next event, but no one was willing to admit they were tired, and no one wanted to separate, in the event they had to leave the road again. In the child wonderland of the storm, now in the early evening, the snow drifting a foot high in parts, the manhunt was less of a spectacle. No one seemed to notice them. Passersby trudged along, determined to get home, or they ran and threw snowballs, hoping it wouldn’t end. The men followed the hound down to Broadway, where the plows and salt trucks had begun to clear the streets. The handler fretted about the dog’s paws with the salt, but he said it wouldn’t damage the trail. Nick’s fears were different, and he felt a wave of nausea when the dog stopped, turning north and south, before leading them back uptown.

Esposito clapped him on the back. He understood what it meant: Costa had not gone back home. Not a mistake, then, not yet, burning that bridge. North again, block after block, past the precinct and beyond. Who did Costa know? No one was left at the precinct to run computer checks; calling anyone else would have brought Special Victims into the game. The lieutenant would not let them share in the prize, when they seemed so close and had suffered such loss. When Nick looked over at the lieutenant, he worried there might be a second cardiac casualty. The lieutenant caught the concerned eye and waved a hand; he was fine. The march went on, getting closer to Nick’s apartment. What could they know about where Costa might run? Not that the computers would offer much. Nick knew Costa had no real criminal record, nor would he have intruded in the vast databases of mortgage applications and tax liens. Friends, family? No, and maybe. He was alone with his mother in that picture Esposito had vandalized. Twice. No. Costa was not a man with connections to people; it was why he had to force them, as he had. These were the footprints to track, the ones they followed now. Terra incognita, the white spaces on the map.

They cut west again, off Broadway, toward the park. Nothing but
apartments, Nick knew—no restaurants, bars, or movie theaters, where a stranger could come in from the cold for an hour. All of them were getting tired, except for the dog.

“Whaddaya think, Nick?”

Esposito had put a hand on his shoulder.

“I don’t know. We don’t know shit about him, and I don’t want him to make sense to me. I don’t know.”

“You wanna know what I think?”

Nick did.

“I think it’s kinda funny that I’m glad we’re not sitting down having dinner. I pictured it for a second—steaks, drinks, pretty broads, dry clothes—and then I thought how much better it was here. Am I out of my mind? This is the night. This is gonna happen. This is on. Tomorrow? That same dinner, only better, because we’re gonna be celebrating.”

The words could have come over the wireless during the worst hour of the Blitz, as the planes droned and the bombs dropped, nearly hilarious in their contempt for any result but victory, inevitable, absolute, and very soon. It cheered Nick; it cheered the hell out of him. Faith or fantasy, it didn’t matter. Not just for the cause, the case, but for the friendship; all the fires had been rekindled, all at once, and they blazed. No warmth but this, and not much more light, but for a while Nick forgot the cold and dark and kept walking. His side ached when he laughed. The only doubt Nick had about Esposito’s vision for tomorrow was that he knew he’d have a hard time moving in the morning. They cut back east, to Broadway.

Nick didn’t know what private jokes, what doubts or desires, were in the others’ minds when the dog rushed forward to the subway entrance and down the stairs, but all his newfound fellowship and focus dissipated with the new direction, down and out. The company jumped over turnstiles as the attendant pretended not to see, and then spread out across the concrete platform. The A train had just left the station, downtown-bound, lights and noise dwindling in the tunnel. The men kicked the snow off their shoes as the dog stopped, circled, stopped again. Nick knew that Costa, with his head start, had probably left four or five trains before. This is where it ended. Nick hadn’t caught the man in the case he’d stolen, the case in which he’d found himself, at least for a few hours. The magic of the night ended at the bottom of subway stairs.
King for a day, and the day was over. Costa had gone to ground, and when he came up, he wouldn’t be Nick’s to capture. Nick looked at the lieutenant, who shook his head, and sat heavily on a bench.

“This kills me. This was our shot. Now I gotta tell that prick we were right. It’s their show now. Sorry, Nick, I really am. I coulda sworn things were breaking right for you on this.”

The other cops offered condolences as they followed the K-9 handler upstairs. Nick felt like he was at his father’s wake, receiving the line of earnest two-handed handshakes, shoulder pats, nods of understanding. Esposito stepped aside for a private phone call, and returned a few minutes later.