Robert Tanenbaum - Reversible Error

Manning gave him an address in an industrial area near Kennedy Airport. When Amalfi pulled up in his car thirty minutes later, Manning stepped out of the doorway to a welding shop and got into the passenger side.

"Jesus, I'm glad to see you!" Manning said.

Amalfi yawned hugely. "I'm falling out here. Wanna go get coffee? I can't keep my eyes open."

"No, we don't have time," said Manning. He looked down the street and checked the rear mirror.

"You gonna tell me what this is all about?" Amalfi asked. He yawned again. The sleeping pills were still dragging him down and he fought against their pull.

"Yeah," said Manning. "It's Fulton. He's working undercover."

Amalfi feigned vast surprise. "Jesus! That cocksucker! What're we gonna do?"

"He doesn't know that I know. I got him to come here. He should be here in half an hour. Look, when he gets here, you got to take him out."

"1 got to take him out? Why me?"

"Because I found out where he's got that rucking tape stashed. The one Tecumseh made."

"How the fuck did you find that out?" asked Amalfi suspiciously.

Manning grinned. "I got friends in high places, man. Anyway, I got to pick it up before anybody finds he's dead. That's why you got to do the job and I got to travel fast. Are you cool?"

Amalfi yawned again and nodded. This was moving a shade too quickly, but he thought he was still ahead. It might even work out better. When Fulton arrived, he'd tell him about Manning and they could pick him up with the tape in hand. Good.

Manning nudged him. Amalfi looked over and saw that he was holding out to him a.38 revolver wrapped in a handkerchief. "It's clean," Manning said. "One in the ear and it's all over. After I have the tape, with him gone they got horseshit on us."

Amalfi took the gun and put it in his jacket pocket.

"OK, give me your gun," said Manning.

Amalfi stifled a yawn and looked at Manning in surprise.

"Why the hell do you want my gun?"

"Because I don't have one. Shit, Sid, I'm so fucked up behind all this, I slipped the clean one into my holster and I was halfway here before I remembered. What's the difference? You got the clean one and I'll have yours. You can dump it on your way home. But I'm damned if I'm gonna do what I have to do bone-naked."

Amalfi shrugged and handed him his own.38 Chief's Special.

"When did you say Fulton was gonna get here?"

Manning looked at his watch. "Around twenty minutes. I'll be going now, OK?"

"Sure, Dick," said Amalfi. He settled himself into his seat and leaned back against the headrest. He felt a yawn coming on again, and this time he didn't stifle it.

Manning waited until Amalfi's mouth was all the way open and his eyes were squeezed tightly shut. Then he reached over and stuck the muzzle of Amalfi's gun into its owner's mouth and pulled the trigger.

Manning waited until the corpse of his former partner had stopped twitching, a surprisingly long time. Then he carefully searched the body and the car for recording devices. Finding none, he removed the clean.38 he had given Amalfi, pressed it into the corpse's right hand, and fired a shot out the open window into the blackness of a large junkyard across the street. Having ensured that Amalfi's hand would bear the microscopic chemical evidence produced by firing a revolver, he removed the clean gun, put it in his pocket, thoroughly wiped Amalfi's own.38, and placed it in the body's limp hand.

Manning left the car and stood in the darkened doorway of the welding shop. Ten minutes passed, then a car Manning recognized came slowly down the street. It parked behind Amalfi's car and Clay Fulton got out. Manning stepped out of the doorway and waved to him.

Clay Fulton saw Manning wave and pulled over to the curb. Fulton was tense and excited, but confident that this meeting was going to break the case open. During the call from Manning that had brought him here, Manning had cast broad hints about introducing him to his main man. He had also complained about Amalfi, that he was acting funny-nervous and distracted.

As well he should be, with a wire on him and hanging around with a cold-blooded shit-head like Dick Manning. Fulton reflected that this would probably be his last night under cover. Whatever happened, he was going to go to Denton in the morning, pull in the IAD team, and see where they stood. Now that IAD was involved, his own role was less necessary, but he felt that the possibility of uncovering Manning's backer was worth hanging on a little longer.

He stepped out of his car and looked around. A good neighborhood for something bad to happen. For the first time he felt a twinge of regret at having come alone. But, of course, that had been the whole point from the start. It was the most plausible thing about him undercover: he really was on his own.

And there was no way Manning could know he was undercover, at least not with enough certainty to act. The only people who could betray him were Denton and Karp. No problem there. And Amalfi. But Amalfi was hooked by IAD. And IAD guys didn't even talk to priests about what they did. So while there could be some additional risk from out of left field, it was a calculated risk that Fulton felt that he had to take.

"What's up?" said Fulton as Manning came toward him.

"What's up is, Sid ate his gun," said Manning, pointing to Amalfi's car. Fulton walked over to the driver's side and bent over to look in the window. It was obvious what had happened, but Fulton instinctively reached out to assure himself that there was no pulse in the man's neck. As he did so, Manning came up silently behind him and hit him as hard as he could on the back of the head with the clean pistol. Karp put the phone down hard, a mixture of annoyance and vague fear roiling his early-morning stomach. He drank some lukewarm coffee and chewed off a chunk of cold toasted bagel, which helped not a whit. Fulton was not to be found: not at the precinct, not at home, not at the various bars and restaurants that Karp knew about. OK, he was undercover, he had dropped from sight before this, but Karp knew that this time he was dangerously exposed.

Karp raised the phone again and dialed Bill Denton's private number, but put it down after the second ring. He was loath to call the chief of detectives, to tell him that the whole elaborate scheme to protect the police was blowing apart, until he had everything nailed down, and he could not do that without Fulton. On the other hand, Fulton might be in there with Denton right now, working on damage control, excluding Karp himself. Karp tried to turn those thoughts aside. Everybody was OK, nobody was screwing anybody, they'd get the bad guys in the end. Period. He decided to give it another day.

But he had to move; he was strangling at this desk, engulfed by the paper shadows of old crimes. He got up and stalked out of his office. Three people, including his secretary, tried to get his attention in the outer office, but he rushed past them, mumbling evasions.

His steps brought him, almost without thought, to the office of V.T. Newbury. This was a small boxlike affair, with a dusty window, tucked away in an obscure corridor of the sixth floor. Newbury was in, as he usually was. A specialist in fraud, and money laundering, and the sequestering of ill-gotten gains, he normally had little contact with the grungy realities of the Criminal Courts Bureau.

When Karp walked in, Newbury was at his desk, half-glasses perched on his chiseled nose, running lengths of the green-and-white-striped computer printout known as elephant toilet paper through his hands, and muttering to himself.

He looked up when he saw Karp, and flashed his perfect smile, then returned to making marks on the printout. Karp sank down in the rocking chair V.T. had provided for his visitors. Newbury had largely furnished his own office: battered wood-and-leather furniture, a worn Turkish rug on the floor, good small framed prints and watercolors on the walls, so that it looked more like the den of a not-very-successful country lawyer than the official seat of a New York assistant D.A. Karp often came here. V.T. was the only person in the building who neither wanted anything from him nor wanted to do anything to him.