Ed Dee - The Con Man's Daughter

Eddie's pulse fluttered for a moment when Boland said "tonight." But tonight? No way. The favorite saying of his doomsday Irish mother was "Don't get your hopes up." He wasn't about to. But Babsie was right: The buried mobile home would be a great spot to hide Kate. The tunnels provided easy entrance and escape routes for the kidnappers, but the size and intensity of this operation would contain any quick exit. No matter how many baklany were inside, the punks from Brighton Beach would just throw up their hands when they saw this army. Eddie knew that under ordinary circumstances there was no way a search of this size would ever have been put together. He owed it all to the mother of a birthday girl, who'd died because he hadn't used his head.

"Okay, I understand they don't want it to appear like a fishing expedition," Eddie said, trying to clear up a loose end. "That means the entire focus is on Sergei, the subject of the arrest warrant."

"Correct."

"And you know he's in there?"

"As of an hour ago. We have people sitting on the place as we speak."

"But no one from Homicide is here?"

"Howie Danton is here, along with his partner," Boland said.

"Only two of them, and all these FBI agents, including wire men?"

Boland shrugged. "No sense wasting a golden opportunity."

Boland handed Eddie a handwritten working copy of his affidavit for the court order. He read down to where a registered confidential informant had told them that located in the trailer was a set of black binders containing the papers for dummy corporations used to funnel criminally obtained U.S. currency into offshore banking institutions.

"These are the binders I'm supposed to have stolen," Eddie said.

Boland shrugged. "Our informant claims he saw them in the trailer."

The informant also told them that meetings were held in the trailer to discuss disbursement of monies from illegal enterprises, such as the sale of Russian military equipment, including nuclear weapons. The affidavit pled the usual case that all other means of obtaining evidence had been exhausted. But Eddie knew that once the words "nuclear weapons" appeared in a warrant application, no judge would refuse to sign.

"Everything always works out good for you, Matty," Babsie said.

"So this isn't really about Sergei," Eddie said.

"We want Borodenko to think it is. But as long as we're in there…"

Immediately after the briefing, the squads formed, decided on vehicles, and headed for Queens. Eddie had been on a few of these large raids in his career. He'd always hated them. The mere size of the force gave everyone the feeling they were invincible. The worst was the mass arrests of the Thirteenth Division cops in the seventies. It was a hastily organized mass raid, just like this. The target was a Brooklyn plainclothes division on the take. Dozens of cops had been indicted. When word of the indictments leaked out, the commanding officer, one of those named in the indictment, rented a room in a hotel near the courthouse and blew his brains out. Fearing a rash of suicides, the upper echelon ordered everyone to be picked up immediately. In the middle of a nice afternoon, Eddie was pulled in from a Manhattan squad to arrest a young plainclothesman. He walked into the house of a cop he'd never met, and while his pregnant wife sobbed, he waited while the young cop took his guns from a box in a bedroom closet and handed them to Eddie. After they left, he could hear the wife crying for blocks.

"The thing that surprises me most about Sergei," Boland said, "is that he never came after you."

"I wish he had," Eddie said. "I wish they all had. What they're doing to me now is worse."

Boland took the Town Car. They drove over the cobblestones of the Fulton Fish Market, which was jumping with activity in the middle of the night. Truckers from all over the East Coast unloaded crates of crab, cod, halibut, and lobster while buyers from local restaurants and supermarkets moved from stall to stall, inspecting the catch. At the tip of the island of Manhattan, the almost-full moon lit New York Harbor. In the crisp, clear night, the Statue of Liberty appeared small and distant. Eddie liked the view better in bad weather. There was something about a haze, the way the torch would shine through the fog, that made her loom larger.

"Eddie, you have to stay in the car tonight," Boland said as the silent convoy left the Belt Parkway. "Too much brass on this caper. They see you marching in with us, the shit will hit the fan. I'll come back and get you if we need you to identify Sergei. Or if we have good news. You can count on that."

The Queens County they rode through was not Archie Bunker's neighborhood. The streets around the junkyard loomed as surreal as a moonscape. An eight-foot chain-link fence topped with razor wire encircled the huge lot. Across from the junkyard sat a collection of phantom factories, sandwich shops, and uninhabitable mystery shacks. The roadway, sidewalks, and grass were painted black with oil. No lights, no signs, no civilization. Packs of wild dogs owned the night. Skeletons of cannibalized cars were scattered about the streets like the abandoned caissons of a retreating army.

Boland donned his vest and a blue nylon jacket with NYPD in Day-Glo letters, then grabbed a portable copy machine from the trunk. He left the car running. The police radios had been set to a special frequency so they could hear the play-by-play. The commander of Emergency Services was running the show. They'd be the guys going through the door first.

"They don't need me in there," Babsie said.

"You don't have to baby-sit," Eddie said.

"Like you can afford my baby-sitting fee," she said.

"I'm just pissed at Boland. He should have given us a heads-up, so we knew how to dress. No way I'm getting grease on this new jacket. But I am a little surprised you didn't fight him. I thought for sure you'd want in on the door-kicking party."

"They'd keep me so far in the background, my ass would still be in Brooklyn."

"Yeah," she said, not quite buying his story. "They got enough bodies here to invade the Kremlin."

From where they were parked, Eddie could barely see the front gate. The barking dogs behind the fence, however, could be heard for miles. A heavily protected Emergency Services cop lumbered up to the gate and aimed a tranquilizer gun through the chain-link fence. One pop, then a howl. Yard-long bolt cutters snipped the chain as if it were strung popcorn. Another dog bit the dust. The cops yanked the chain through and tossed it to the ground. They swung the gate open and went in. One more dog barked pitifully, and then there were none.

The NYPD believed in the strategy of overkill. Always bring more cops to the party than you need. Four teams followed the ESU through the front gate. In the pitch-blackness, wavering flashlight beams were the only show as the cops moved around the stacks of front ends and quarter panels, past the mounds of tires, wheels, and hubcaps. Lights popped on here and there, small bulbs behind filthy windows. He wondered if Kate's world was like this: darkness, then pinpoints of light. He hoped her worst enemy was isolation. The Dunnes could handle isolation.

Only fifteen minutes passed before grim-faced Matty Boland returned. Eddie watched him cut across the beams of car headlights, his head down. He opened the driver's door and leaned in. A swath of grease cut across his cheek.

"We didn't find her, Eddie," he said.

Eddie felt the blood drain from his face. This was okay. This was fine. It meant they still had hope. Hope was everything, all they had.

"Tunnel thing was mostly bullshit," Boland said. "Only one tunnel, built for midgets, looks like. We got five live Russkie types, and a body we want you to look at." Then, as an afterthought, he said, "Male DOA."