Brett Halliday - Armed… Dangerous…

“In New York,” Power said. “That’s not necessarily a disadvantage. You’re listening, and that’s a start. I’ve been in police work all my life, Mike, a small matter of forty-three years. This is easily the biggest thing I’ve ever come within shouting distance of. Bear that in mind. And I want you to face the fact that if you get out of this room without saying yes, you’ll have to come up with some damned good reasons. Being on vacation is not a good reason.”

“That was mainly my secretary’s idea,” the detective said impatiently. “I suggest we get on with it.”

“Right,” Power said briskly. “Bear with me, Will. There’s going to be some repetition. This is the basic situation.”

He tasted his beer. “It starts in a poppy field in Burma or eastern Turkey, and ends up on West One Hundredth Street in Manhattan. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred we can’t break into the chain any higher than the next to the last link. If not the user, the pusher, the man who supplies him, who’s usually also a user himself. Sometimes the customs people pick up a batch as it comes in, but one of the facts we have to deal with is that most of that information comes anonymously from inside, as a cheap way of getting rid of somebody who’s stepped out of line. Nobody has to tell me none of this does much permanent good. I’m not fooling myself. It’s a war, Mike, and in a war you do what you can. You don’t turn down a shot at an enemy tank because a couple hundred others are over the hill, and what’s one out of a couple of hundred? But I didn’t come down here to sing the ‘Star Spangled Banner.’”

He reached abstractedly for his beer, and shook it to start the bubbles. “There’s a law against using or peddling, and you do your best to enforce that law. You can’t make an arrest without evidence. You see somebody who’s well known to be a junkie. He’s obviously on the nod, with a fresh needle mark on his arm. That’s not enough. You have to catch him with the needle, with the actual drugs. Sometimes you get lucky, and you’re on the spot when he makes his connection. You put your evidence in a manila envelope, and when you come into court you damn well better bring that envelope or they throw you out on your ear. Well, this happens three or four thousand times a year in greater New York, so naturally we’ve worked up a pretty solid routine. We can usually put our hands on those envelopes. Even after we get a conviction, if we get a conviction, we still hang onto them because the case may go up on appeal, or it may be reopened by a higher court ruling on something else. But a time comes when there’s no point in holding onto the evidence any longer, so what do we do? We burn it. This happens once every two or three years. We go through the property vaults, sort out the dead envelopes and truck them up to the Department of Sanitation incinerator on West Fifty-sixth Street. And it all goes up in smoke. Sometimes there’s a story in the papers about it, and even if there’s not, the news gets around. For a few days all the junkies in New York are very depressed.”

He had finally succeeded in catching Shayne’s interest. The redhead sat forward and said thoughtfully, “Two and a half million bucks worth of junk is a lot of junk.”

“About two tons,” Power said. He took a card out of his pocket. “Here are the figures for the last time. Total value $3,548,000. The heroin alone was $2.7 million. The rest was cocaine, marijuana, goof balls, odds and ends. Total number of arrests, eleven thousand over a three-year period. This time we’re cleaning house after two years, but the retail price has gone up. We’ll have an exact total later. Two and a half million is only a guess.”

“Give or take a million, still it’s something to shoot at,” Shayne said. “And negotiable, as good as cash. But I don’t see your problem. How many cops do you have in New York? About twenty thousand. You ought to be able to move two tons of junk across town without being hit.”

“Now wait. Who thought the Japanese would hit Pearl Harbor? Who expected anybody to rob the Brink’s warehouse? That’s the point. They can assume we won’t expect anything, because who in God’s name would have the gall? The stuff is downtown now, and our security is good there. Nobody’s going to walk in with a few handguns and walk out again alive. The incinerator at the other end is built like a fortress. We’ll have a bunch of people there to certify that the right envelopes are burned. That means the attempt has to take place between those two points. We’ll be out in the open for forty-five minutes and you know we won’t use twenty thousand cops. In the ordinary course of events, two would be enough.”

“Nobody would try it without some good information,” Shayne said slowly.

“Apparently they have it. I have an idea where it comes from, but never mind that now. Let him go on dreaming.”

“What I’d do,” Gentry said. “It’s like any narcotics action-something has to happen before you make an arrest. But hell. Use twenty or thirty plainclothesmen in unmarked cars. Land on them the minute they make their move. You’d have a nice pinch.”

“That was our first idea, Will. But listen.”

He heaved up out of the chair and began to pace. “This is no nickel-and-dime operation, two or three crazy amateurs shooting for a big score. A couple of tons of narcotics-you need an organization to market it. Maybe the organization. And if you want to find guys who are willing to take on two armed cops in city traffic, you have to spend some money. You’ll need a minimum of six people. Three or four vehicles. Maybe a hundred thousand dollars. I don’t want to pull in the small fry this time. I want the man or the men who hired them, who can always hire somebody else. And this time, damn it, I have a chance! I used to be in charge of Narcotics. I inherited the usual complement of stoolies, and I developed some of my own. About three weeks ago I began to get indications that something big was in the offing. A gun named Tug Wynanski turned down a job for a certain date, and that was the same day we’d reserved time at the incinerator. I hate to use shoo-flies, but sometimes you have to. I put men on every clerk in the property department, and seventy-two hours later I had the leak. We watched him around the clock. We put men on Wynanski. For a week now I’ve known exactly how many people are in it. I have their names and records. They’re holed up in a rented house on Staten Island, which I have under surveillance. How many times has it happened in your experience, Will, that you know in advance that a crime’s going to be committed, who’s going to commit it, and where you can put your finger on them whenever you like? As far as I’m concerned, it’s never happened!”

“If your surveillance is that good,” Gentry put in, “you should be able to tie in the higher-ups without using Mike. No?”

“Not unless I let them pull off the heist exactly as planned. That gets too risky. If we lost track of them somewhere along the line, I’d have some serious explaining to do to the Super.”

He took a quick pull at his beer. “Wynanski’s been tagged once or twice, always for small things. What he’s supposed to be good at is putting together a package. You bring him an idea and he handles the details. There’s one trouble with him, he has a temper and he likes to drink. He drives over to Manhattan every day, and on the way back to Staten Island he’s likely to stop at a bar. Here’s how I think we can get Mike in. Two days before D-day, we’ll pick up Wynanski for assault. They’ll believe it. He’s the main guy on the execution level. It’ll leave a large hole.”

Shayne snorted. “You’re out of your mind. What do I do, knock on the door and say I’ve heard on the grapevine that they need a man?”