James Hayman - The Cutting

McCabe continued up the stairs. TwoTimes was gone. Now Sandy stood at the top, wearing a sheer silk nightgown, her naked body gleaming under it, white in the moonlight, her hand out, beckoning him. ‘Come on up, McCabe.’ Once again, Sandy as the young Lauren Bacall.

McCabe reached for her, but his hand still held the Glock. The gun brushed against her body. He squeezed the trigger and the image of Sandy shattered into a thousand fragments, images in a broken mirror he could never put together again.

He woke with a start, his body soaked with sweat. He looked across the bed at Kyra, still sleeping. He thought about waking her, but whatever this feeling was, he knew it was not about Kyra, and not about making love. So instead he just lay there, staring into the dark shadows, breathing slowly and deeply until his bad dreams went away.

Tuesday. 6:30 A.M.

Kyra and McCabe lay, side by side, holding hands, legs touching, in the queen-sized bed.

‘Tell me about TwoTimes,’ she said.

He glanced over, a frown appearing at the bridge of his nose. ‘I already told you about that.’

‘Not everything, I think.’

‘What do you want to know?’

‘I want to know why you’re having nightmares and muttering his name in your sleep. His name and your brother’s name. And Sandy’s.’

McCabe stared silently up at the plaster ceiling in the old room, his eyes tracing the route of a crack that had been patched over and had now reappeared for about the tenth time. ‘Got to fix that crack,’ he said.

‘Look, McCabe, you say you love me. You say you may even want to marry me. If that’s true and you want me to be your wife and not just a warm body to get cozy with, I have to know it all.’

‘You already know most of it,’ he said. ‘TwoTimes was a small-potatoes crack dealer in the South Bronx. Just a kid, really. Nineteen when I planted the bullet in his skull. He ran a network of street sellers, other kids, all of them underage, some of them as young as ten or twelve. The idea was if the kids got picked up they’d only do juvie time.’

‘And Tommy was a narcotics cop?’

‘Yeah. Tommy the Narc. Real hotshot. I dropped out of NYU and transferred to John Jay to follow in his footsteps. Tommy knew his way around the trade. Made some big busts. What I didn’t know, what I should’ve known, was that by the time TwoTimes came along, Tommy had turned.’

‘Turned?’

‘Turned bad. Gone on the take. He was pocketing money and drugs from half a dozen dealers in the Bronx. Most of them more powerful than TwoTimes.’

‘You never told me that.’

‘It’s not anything I like talking about. Anyway, TwoTimes was getting too big for his baggy britches. He was trying to expand his territory and pushing up against some guys who didn’t take kindly to being pushed. So they called in their fixer to get TwoTimes out of the way.’

‘Tommy?’

‘Yeah, Tommy. You want coffee? I can make us some coffee.’

‘No. Thanks. Not until I’ve heard it all.’

McCabe sighed. ‘Problem was Tommy had gotten greedy. He doesn’t want to take TwoTimes out ’cause he figures he’ll lose a nice source of income. So instead he decides to talk him out of it. Tommy always figured he could talk anybody out of anything. Anyway, he goes over to TwoTimes’s place, a sleazebag apartment on Merced Street, and tells him he’s gotta stop crowding the big guys. TwoTimes says, “What the fuck you talking about? You work for me.” So Tommy tells TwoTimes he also works for a number of other clients, and if TwoTimes doesn’t stop horning in on their business, he’s gonna have to arrest him.’

‘Tommy is?’

‘Yeah, but TwoTimes is too smart for that. He knows no way in hell is Tommy gonna arrest anybody who can testify in court how he’s been paying him off for more than two years. Instead he figures Tommy’s gonna kill him. So while Tommy’s still talking, TwoTimes takes out this bullshit little twenty-two and puts two slugs into his head. Kills him on the spot.’

‘How did you find out about all this?’

‘Some of it at the trial. Some from Tommy’s partner. The rest I got from TwoTimes just before I took him down.’

‘So what happened after he killed Tommy?’

‘Biggest bullshit trial I ever saw in my life. I mean, the DA had TwoTimes dead to rights. They had Tommy’s blood all over the apartment. They had the gun — ’

‘Fingerprints?’

‘Not on the gun. He wiped it clean.’ McCabe paused. ‘Get dressed,’ he said. ‘Let’s take a walk. I need some air.’

‘You’ll tell me the rest of it?’

‘Yeah, I’ll tell you the rest of it.’

It took McCabe less than a minute to throw on a pair of jeans and an oversized sweatshirt loose enough to cover his. 45. While Kyra dressed, he interrupted Casey’s ongoing snooze to let her know it was time to get out of bed and ready for school. Breakfast was Cheerios. They were going out. They’d be back, but not before she left.

Kyra and McCabe walked across the Eastern Prom and down the hill toward the morning light and the water. They crossed the narrow-gauge tracks and then turned north along the joggers’ trail toward Back Bay. A few runners passed. Other than that they were alone. ‘I didn’t want to talk about this stuff in the apartment. Casey can hear through walls. She’s got ears like a hawk. None of this is for her consumption.’

‘It’s eyes like a hawk. To my knowledge hawks aren’t particularly well regarded for their hearing.’

‘Yeah, I know. I just couldn’t come up with an appropriate animal metaphor. How about ears like a rabbit?’ He smiled.

Kyra didn’t return his smile. She wasn’t falling for banter. ‘Let’s stay on subject,’ she said.

‘You’re right. Where was I?’

‘The biggest bullshit trial you ever saw in your life.’

‘Yeah, right. TwoTimes’s lawyer puts him on the stand, and he comes in with this bullshit alibi that he was having sex with his girlfriend while Tommy was getting shot, and both the girlfriend and the girlfriend’s mother swear up and down that it’s true.’

‘He gets off on that?’

‘He gets off on reasonable doubt. Nobody denied Tommy was killed in TwoTimes’s apartment or that he was killed with TwoTimes’s gun, but there were no witnesses. Even though this twelve-year-old girl who lived down the hall told detectives she heard the four shots and then saw TwoTimes exiting the apartment via the fire escape. Unfortunately, she wasn’t willing to repeat the story in court. One of TwoTimes’s crack crew probably got to her.’

‘So he gets off, and you, to your everlasting regret, go to his apartment and kill him, what, out of revenge for your dead brother?’

‘That’s what the Internal Affairs people were trying to prove, but that wasn’t how it happened. By the way, I don’t really regret it.’

‘So how did it happen?’

‘The problem, as IA saw it, was that I was Midtown North homicide and not South Bronx narcotics. I had no business nosing around in the case, especially after TwoTimes walked.’

‘But you did?’

‘But I did.’

‘May I ask why, and what you were hoping to accomplish? Assuming, of course, you’re telling the truth about not going there to kill the guy.’

‘I could have done that. I was certainly tempted, but I didn’t. I knew he couldn’t be tried for the murder again, but I wanted him to admit not only that he killed Tommy but that he was a dealer. That he sold crack to kids for a living. I went wearing a wire. I wanted the truth. I wanted him to do at least a little time.’ McCabe paused. ‘Maybe I wanted to rough him up a little.’

‘So what happened?’