Richard Price - The Whites

“Feets do yo’ stuff.”

“Butter and Mayo are up at the Three-two watching Annie Oakley and Calamity Jane sleep it off.”

“And the driver? For real.”

“They found him eight blocks away trying to climb a tree. They took him in for an interview, but he only speaks Wolof and French, so they’re waiting on a translator.”

“Anything else?”

“No sir.”

“And who do I got.” Billy dreaded the voluntary sign-ups, the ever-changing collection of overtime-hungry day-tour detectives who nightly padded out his paltry crew, the majority of them no good for anything after two a.m.

“There’s three, supposedly, but one guy’s kid got sick, another was last seen at a retirement racket down in the Ninth, so maybe you should find out if he’s in any shape to come in at all, and you better check out what Central Park sent us.”

“He’s in? I didn’t see anybody.”

“Check under the rug.”

Back in the squad room, the sign-up, Theodore Moretti, was hiding in plain sight, hunched over, elbows on knees, at the desk farthest from the door.

“I’m in the air,” he hissed into his cell, “you’re breathing me in right now, Jesse. I’m all around you…”

Short and squat, Moretti had straight black hair parted precisely down the middle of his skull and raccooned eyes that made Billy’s seem limpid and tight.

“How you doing?” Billy stood over him, his hands in his pockets. But before he could introduce himself as the boss, Moretti just up and walked out of the office, coming back a moment later, still on the phone.

“You really think you can get rid of me that easy?” Moretti said to the lucky-in-love Jesse, Billy right then recognizing him for what he was and writing him off accordingly. Although money was the prime motivation for those signing up for a one-off tour with Night Watch, occasionally a detective volunteered not so much for the overtime but simply because it facilitated his stalking.

One forty-five a.m…. the sound of tires rolling over a side street full of shattered light bulbs was like the sound of Jiffy Pop achieving climax, the aftermath of a set test between the Skrilla Hill Killaz from the Coolidge Houses and the Stack Money Goons from the Madisons, four kids sent to St. Luke’s for stitches, one with a glass shard protruding from his cornea like a miniature sail. Where they got all the light bulbs was anyone’s guess.

By the time Billy and Moretti stepped out of their sedan, the 2–9 Gang Unit, six young men in windbreakers and high tops, were already harvesting collars, plasti-cuffing belly-down bangers like bundling wheat. The battleground itself was lined with two layers of rubberneckers: on the sidewalk, dozens of locals, a few, despite the hour, with kids in tow; overhead, an equal number of people hanging out the windows of the exhausted-looking SROs that ran along both sides of the narrow street.

Sporting a shaved head and calf-length denim shorts like a superannuated playground bully, Eddie Lopez, the unit FIO, stepped to Billy, a dozen as yet unused plasti-cuffs running up his forearms like bangles.

“These two crews been trading smack on Facebook all week. We should have been here before they were.”

Billy turned to Moretti. “The kids in the ER, go over with somebody from the Gang Unit, start taking interviews.”

“Are you serious? They won’t say shit.”

“Nonetheless…” Billy waving him onward, thinking, One asspain down.

From the opposite end of the block, emerging out of the tree-lined darkness like a charging carnivore, came a battered livery cab, hitting its brakes nearly on top of the arrestfest, a fortyish woman in a bathrobe popping out of the rear seat before the car had even come to a full stop.

“They say my son could lose his eye!”

“Seven dollars,” the driver said, extending his hand from the side window.

“Here we go,” Lopez muttered to Billy before leaving his side. “Miss Carter, all due respect, we didn’t tell Jermaine to be out here two in the morning hunting for Skrillas.”

“How do you know what he was doing out here!” The streetlight turned her rimless glasses into disks of pale fire.

“Because I know him,” Lopez said. “I’ve had dealings with him.”

“He’s going on a financial scholarship to Sullivan County Community College next year!”

“That’s great, but it don’t throw a blanket over it.”

“I’m sorry, Charlene,” one of the women said, stepping off the sidewalk, “all due respect, but truth be known you’re just as much to blame as the boy who threw that glass.”

“ Excuse me?” Miss Carter cocking her head like a pistol.

“Seven dollars?” the driver said again.

Billy slipped him five bucks, then told him to reverse out of the block.

“I hear you every community meeting,” the woman said, “you keep saying, My boy’s a good boy, he’s not mobbing for real, it’s the environment, it’s the circumstances, but this here officer is right. Instead of confronting your child you keep making excuses for him, so what do you expect?”

The kid’s mother became big-eyed and motionless; Billy, knowing what was coming, hooked her arm just as she threw a punch at the other woman’s jaw.

The crowd rippled with clucks and murmurs. A spinning cigarette landed on Billy’s shoulder, but in these close quarters no real telling who had been the intended target, so c’est la guerre.

As he stepped back to brush the ash off his sport jacket, his cell rang: Rollie the Wheel.

“Boss, you remember the ’72 Olympics?”

“Not really.”

“The Munich massacre?”

“OK…”

“We had a guy there, helped take the silver in the four-by-four relays, Horace Woody?”

“OK…”

“Lives in Terry Towers in Chelsea.”

“OK…”

“Patrol just called in, somebody stole his medal. You want us to take it? Could wind up being a media thing, plus Mayo’s just sitting at his desk talking to himself again.”

“Then have him head over to the St. Luke’s ER and babysit Moretti, make sure he isn’t boosting scalpels or something.”

“And the case of the purloined medallion?”

Lopez peered at him over the head of a thirteen-year-old manacled Money Stacker. “Hey, Sarge? No sweat, we can take it from here.”

“Send Stupak to meet me,” Billy said into the phone. “I’m heading over now.”

It sounded like a whole lot of nothing, but he had never met an Olympian before.

Terry Towers was a twelve-story Mitchell-Lama semi-dump in the West Twenties, one step up from a housing project, which meant a few less elevators chronically out of commission and hallway odors not quite as feral. Apartment 7G itself was small, stifling, and untidy, dinner dishes still on the dinette table at two forty-five in the morning. In the middle of the cramped living room, Horace Woody, deep into his sixties but DNA-blessed with the physique of a lanky teenager, stood hands on hips in his boxers, the taut skin across his flat chest the color of a good camel hair coat. But his eyes were maraschinos, and his liquored breath was sweet enough to curl Billy’s teeth.

“It’s not like I don’t have my suspicions as to who took the damn thing,” Woody slurred, glaring at his girlfriend, Carla Garrett, who leaned against an old TV console covered with esoterically molded liqueur bottles and dog-eared photos in Lucite frames. She was maybe half his age, on the heavy side, with steady, realistic eyes. The droll, resigned twist of her mouth confirmed Billy’s hunch about this one being a dummy of a run, at worst a slow-motion domestic, but he didn’t really mind, fascinated as he was by the older man’s uncanny youthfulness.