Christopher Buckley - Wet Work

Diatri couldn't remember his NADDIS access code. It disturbed him. It was like forgetting your Social Security number. "Sylvia, give me Gubanovich's access code, would you?" Sylvia looked good. What was that she was wearing, seamed stockings? Who'd have thought those would come back. There was nothing in NADDIS on Ramon Antonio Luis. A million and a half files in the database, and nothing on him. Two ounces was just nothing to get excited over these days; certainly Diatri wasn't excited. His Sig Sauer 9mm felt a little tight against his stomach.

The Puerto Rican kid at the AMANECER CAR SERVICE ABIERTO 24 HORAS on East Eighth Street reacted the way people usually reacted when they saw Frank Diatri flash his badge. Diatri could inspire nervousness even without showing ID. He was strongly built, just under six feet, genetically pre-tanned, with liquid brown eyes that glommed on to yours and didn't let go until you'd accounted for yourself. Despite the permanently disappointed look, he smiled easily and people were usually grateful for that; the Puerto Rican kid was. Diatri spoke Spanish with him. The kid said he was sure the jackets said D-E-A. Diatri had him step out onto the sidewalk. He pointed to an ad in a bus shelter on Avenue C and asked him to read what it said.

"A-t l-a-s-t S-t-r-e-e-p t-a-l-k-s."

" Veintelveinte ," Diatri grinned.

He stood on the sidewalk by the Church of Santa Brigida where Ramon Antonio Luis had died. The blood had congealed into a three-foot-wide brown patch. Diatri thought of lying in his own pool of blood and the elevator door closing and the elevator going up and the door opening and the woman seeing him and screaming and running back to her apartment-Thank you, ma'am-and the elevator door going down to another floor and a little girl seeing him and screaming and running away. He was going to die in the elevator going up and down, up and down, with the doors opening and people screaming.

Detective Korn showed him the photographs from the scene. "A real fucking tragedy," he said.

Diatri looked at the close-up of the back of Luis' head. "Powder burns?"

"Not a speck," said Korn admiringly. "And a twenty-two pistol. Look at that shot. Right in the ten ring."

"Marksman, huh?"

"This," said Korn, "was a Samaritan."

"I'm getting a sense here," said Diatri, "that you didn't like Ramon."

"He sold crack."

"I know, but look at him here. And in front of a church. Someone could slip."

"You know what you do with that? Throw a little sand on it. Look," said Korn, "just between you and I, if you guys had something going on and something happened-it's not a problem for me."

Diatri laughed. "Aw no, you don't mean that."

Korn looked at him. "No," he said. "'Course not. I got a seventy-nine-year-old woman in Peter Cooper this morning someone beat to death with a steam iron after they raped her. Also I got a three-year-old kid whose father squashed his head in between the radiator bars because he was crying." He sighed. "They get such terrible deaths, these kids. Luis here, on my scale of one to ten, he doesn't even show up."

"How many?" asked Miss Farrell.

"Two," said Charley, scanning the clipboard she always met him with at the elevator.

Two ducks over five days? Miss Farrell was not herself an aficionada of blood sports, but still it seemed an inglorious bag. It surprised her that Mr. Becker would be hunting at all, the season being closed. He looked tired, she thought, though certainly better than he looked at the funeral. Usually he came from the island with more color in his cheeks.

She was just bringing coffee a few minutes later when she heard him shout, " Goddamnit! " He had The New York Times spread in front of him. He often swore when reading it, especially Mr. Safire's columns, but as she set the coffee down she noticed the paper was open to pages 2 and 3 of the Metropolitan section, not the editorial pages.

"Get me Felix," he said, not lifting his eyes from the paper. She studied her own copy of the Times while waiting for the call to go through. She found no clue to the old man's explosion. Felix came on. It was not a good connection. He said he was on the New Jersey Turnpike. She put him through. She couldn't resist listening to the conversation.

"You read the paper this morning?" said Charley.

"The paper? No."

"They with you?"

"No. Is there a problem?"

"You bet there's a problem. There's a very significant problem. Where are they?"

"At the dock."

"I'm coming back to the island. I'll see you there tonight. Out."

She used the excuse of bringing in an updated list of people who'd sent condolence letters. He'd tossed the paper to the side, but he'd torn a piece from the bottom of page 63. Back at her own desk, she compared the missing piece with her copy. All she found was a small story, a filler item:

MAN SHOT TO DEATH IN EAST VILLAGE

A man with a history of narcotics violations was found shot to death early yesterday morning on East 8 thStreet shortly before dawn.

Police say Ramon Antonio Luis, 34, of no known address, was killed by a single gunshot to the back of the head. A spokesman for the Ninth Precinct Detective Squad described the killing as "clearly drug-related," but added, "We're pursuing this as we would any murder, vigorously."

It couldn't have been that. Then she noticed next to the story was the runover from the story on page 81, about the opening of Felix Rohatyn's new restaurant. Must have been that. Perhaps Mr. Becker was upset at not being invited.

There was a fog on Chesapeake Bay and it was just as well since it matched his mood. Charley walked up and down the wood-plank pier, grinding an unlit Upmann into a chewy wet stub. Spook, having given up on being thrown something to retrieve, had jumped in anyway and swam alongside, keeping pace with his master. Charley reached the end of the pier and turned around, Spook following. Back and forth, back and forth, boots clumping on wood, Labrador grunts in icy water.

Charley was trying to decide which one of them had done it. Rostow, he'd bet. Rostow had been "allowed to retire" from DEA after shooting the bodyguard of a Peruvian narco . Self-defense, yes, but they're so touchy down there about our people killing their people. It's not legal, strictly speaking. Only a sudden infusion of U.S. aid, which the State Department wrangled out of DEA's appropriations, got him out. They found him doing security for a manufacturer of high-speed dental drilling equipment in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.

McNamara and Bundy he found through his friend the colonel, who ran the Army's SERE school at Fort Bragg. Survival Evasion Resistance Escape. Charley had given four hundred POWs a week at the Greenbriar Hotel after they got back from Vietnam, and he and the colonel had stayed in touch over the years. Charley had come down to visit the school, and was impressed. The colonel could take men scared to death of snakes and after they spent thirty days in that school of his, every water moccasin in his swamp would have four, five, sometimes six hungry troopers following after it trying to get to it first. The instructors were impressive, most of them having served with the Special Forces in Vietnam-as the colonel had before his five and a half years at the Hanoi Hilton-a number of them recruited by CIA into the Special Operations Groups. "Some of my executives are getting a little flabby," Charley explained. "I have in mind a program that would combine exercise, diet and survival. We have offices overseas, and you saw what Ross Perot had to go through to get his boys out of Teheran after that maniac took over. I'm thinking of calling it 'Upward Bound.' I mean, show me a man who'd chase down a water moc for his dinner and I'll show you one hell of a motivated manager." The colonel was only too happy to oblige him with the names of some of his former instructors. Charley interviewed dozens of them. Word spread through the company that the old man was setting up some kind of horrible fitness program. Miss Farrell got a call from the VP for sales asking if it was true all the divisional heads were being sent to some swamp in Louisiana to eat snakes. She hadn't heard anything about that, she said, but the gentlemen Mr. Becker was interviewing certainly appeared to be the kind for whom a diet of reptiles would pose no problem. "Jesus," muttered the VP.