Werewolf Cop (14 page)

Fatboy Mooch was fat all right, but he was big and carried his lard spread collar-to-jockstrap so he was shaped more like a bomb than a beachball. He favored T-shirts with slogans on them like
KILLER
, or a picture of a .38 with the caption
WELCOME TO NEW YORK
. Which was more or less truth in advertising because, despite his imitation-civilized raconteur veneer, there were all sorts of stories about what he'd done to guys with his bare hands. Most of the stories ended up with the Mooch's enemies liquefied and hard men losing their lunches left and right at the sight of what remained.

“You know this corner? You see this corner?” he asked Zach after a while.

They'd been strolling west and north together, talking baseball and the weather. Fatboy had been laying down a running commentary on the Yankees' chances in the postseason, with glosses on Houston's crap-ass pitching to try to get under the Texan's skin. But they stopped now, on the northeast corner, looking to the northwest, and Zach took in the panorama with a cop's eyes: the school playground down the block to his left, the rundown brownstones directly across from him, the empty lot, the scaffolding in front of the grocer's shop. He could guess at the location of the dead drop where the drugs would be hidden. He could guess where the corner boys would have been stationed—dealer there, steerer there, runner there—if there had been corner boys, which there were not.

“I see it,” said Zach.

“You know whose corner this is?” Fatboy asked him.

“I'm a
federale
, Mooch. Which dirtbag is poisoning children where—that's local stuff. Not my beat.”

“You see it, though. You see it with that inward eye that is the bliss of solitude.”

Zach nodded. “It's your corner, sure.”

“It is my corner, Agent.”

“But where's your corner boys?”

“Where indeed? Pretty soon, those third graders gonna be let out for recess, where they gonna get their re-up at?”

“Goddamned city. Nothing runs right.”

“You know where I think my corner boys is at?”

Zach drew his gaze slowly off the scenery and turned to show his baby blues to Fatboy. The two men were about the same height—Mooch maybe half an inch taller—so it was a direct hit, stare to stare. Zach wanted the gangster-man to read him: he knew all this—everything the Mooch was about to say—he'd guessed it, anyway—or seen it with that inward eye that is . . . whatever Fatboy said it was—that's why he was here in the first place.

“I think they be at that land from which no traveler returns,” said Fatboy, straight at him.

“You think your corner boys are dead.”

“That's my deduction. You know how I deduces that? I deduces it because one of them—a young brother go by the name STD—he wear a ring on his finger with a gold skull on it, have some diamonds for the eyes, you know. And that very ring was still on his finger when his hand showed up in a paper bag at my park bench where I eat my morning burrito.”

“Does sound like a clue.”

“The bad man uses a sword, I heard.”

“He does.”

“Put me off my damned breakfast.”

“You shouldn't eat that crap anyway. It'll turn your heart to stone—although maybe that warning comes a bit too late.”

“They an invisible war going on out here, Detective. I'm getting that you already know that, don't you?”

“I do.”

“We ain't fighting against flesh and blood no more. We're fighting against principalities. And powers. Against spiritual forces in the heavenly places. This is a battle between good and evil going on, Agent Adams.”

“Which one are you?” Zach couldn't help asking.

“Me? Why, I bring the gift of laughter to a sorrowful world!” Fatboy Mooch protested, as if his feelings had been hurt. “No one
has
to give me money to get they self high. Reality is free. Ask yourself who deals out
that
shit. I'm a better man than God, when you come to think about it. I make you feel better than He does, anyway.”

You cannot survive as a lawman unless corruption amuses you at some level. Otherwise, it'd be a life with no laughs at all. Zach was amused by Fatboy Mooch, and Fatboy Mooch was pleased by that and smiled to himself as he surveyed what had, until very lately, been his domain.

“What if I told you I had a lead on Dominic Abend?” Zach said. “That I could bring him down with the right intel? Get you your corner back so you can go on killing those children with your drugs.”

Without another word, Fatboy Mooch began to walk again—to walk along the school fence, the empty playground at his shoulder. Zach hesitated only a moment, then followed after him until he caught up, until he had a view of Fatboy's profile. He could see the gangster was doing a nervous scan of every face that came toward them on the sidewalk.

Fatboy noticed that he'd noticed and murmured low, “A world full of faces—and every face a face to meet the faces that it meets.”

“Someone stole something from him,” Zach answered, side of the mouth. “Abend. By accident or on purpose, I don't know. But whatever it was, he wants it back. Wants it bad enough to show himself. We think he was there in person when they sliced and diced up Marco Paz.”

The street was noisy. Traffic; sirens; truck panels rumbling as tires hit potholes. Even the sound of footsteps on concrete was loud. Voices could get lost—intimations and innuendoes could get lost. Nonetheless, Zach heard the Mooch's breathing change, or sensed it. He smelled . . .
something
coming off the man. He smelled him thinking the situation through. He smelled him putting the pieces of the puzzle together. Apparently that had a smell. Who knew?

“The Guyland heists,” said Fatboy then.

Smart, thought Zach. Say whatever else you would about him, the gangster was smart.

Fatboy Mooch continued: “Out in Gravesend near Avenue U, near a red brick building across from Moody Square, there's a dumpster in an alley with a black plastic bag inside. And in that plastic bag there is a moldy old mess of shit that looks like papier-mâché before it dries. You ever seen that?”

“Papier-mâché before it dries? In school when I was little, sure.”

“Well, good. Then maybe you will be able to tell the difference between what that looks like and the remains of Billy Grimhouse, which is what's in that bag—all that's left of him after that devil was done.”

“And Billy Grimhouse is? Or was . . . ?”

“The brother of Johnny Grimhouse. Which made them the Brothers Grimhouse. The pair of fools who did the Guyland heists.”

Now it was Zach's turn to make the connections—a whole series of them rattling into place in his mind like dice coming up Yahtzee. These Grimhouse clowns had been doing mansions out on Long Island. They had taken something from Dominic Abend. Dominic Abend had traced some fenced merchandise back to Paz, tortured Paz to get to the Grimhouse brothers, tortured Billy Grimhouse. . . .

“How long ago was this?”

“Don't know,” said Fatboy Mooch. “Two days. Three. A week at most.”

Before the storage unit had been tossed. So Billy didn't have the answers and Abend still hadn't found what he wanted, Zach thought. Which raised a new question: If Billy was the Guyland thief, why
didn't
he know where Abend's merchandise had gotten to?

“If you were up on all this,” Zach asked the Mooch, “why didn't you drop a dime and let me in on it, give me a head start?”

“'Cause that German mo-fo already owns half the cops in town. And though Fatboy Mooch is wiser than the children of light in his generation, even he isn't wise enough to know which half is which.”

This sent another twinge through Zach's anxiety centers re: Goulart. Was Goulart one of the fifty percent of cops Abend already owned?

“But I figure . . .” Fatboy Mooch went on. “I figure if you're asking me, you want to know. And if you want to know, maybe you ain't yet been body-snatched. Maybe you're still clean.”

If
, thought Zach, annoyed to think it, cursing Rebecca Abraham-Hartwell because she had made him think it.
If
you want to know. . . . Did Goulart want to know? Did he really? Or was he just helping Abend stay out in front of Task Force Zero?

Zach and the Mooch were stopped at a corner, at a red light. They didn't have the schoolyard on their flank anymore, so there were pedestrians on every side of them. Yellow cabs and panel trucks and cars whooshed past them from every direction. Fatboy Mooch's head was swiveling, eyes watching everything at once.

And Zach, when he spoke, spoke in a secretive mutter. “There's still Johnny Grimhouse, then.”

“Last I heard.”

“And I'm guessing Johnny Grimhouse is on the run.”

“All men fear death,” said Fatboy Mooch.

“Of course if Abend could find Billy, he can find Johnny too.”

“Johnny the smarter one.”

“All the same.”

Fatboy Mooch's
Killer
T-shirt rose and fell and rose and fell while he considered whether to trust Zach with what he knew. At last he spoke into the middle distance. “You trying to tell me
you
the only hope of saving Western civilization?”

“You trying to tell me you're Western civilization?”

“You was expecting maybe Mozart?”

The light turned green, but the two big men stayed right there at the sidewalk's edge while the other pedestrians streamed past them, while Fatboy Mooch made his decision.

“Johnny got a hole I know in Long Island City,” he said then. He murmured an address. “And was I you, I would hie me hence with wings as swift as meditation or the thoughts of love.”

Zach had already pivoted on his heel, was already hurrying away.

12

GRIMHOUSE

Z
ach was about halfway across the 59th Street Bridge, the Crown Vic doing twenty in steady traffic, when a wave of fever hit him. The world turned suddenly distant and unreal. The criss-crossing bridge supports surrounding him became a sort of graph superimposed on the surface of the scenery beyond, making it all seem two-dimensional. The gleaming pinnacles of Manhattan in the rearview—the drear flatlands of Queens in the windshield—the alien reaches of Roosevelt Island at the windows—looked to him all at once like territories on a map of themselves, drawings on one of those old brown maps with sailing ships and whales in the sea-spaces and monsters in the vast unknown beyond the borders.

Zach felt sick and started sweating. The cars ahead of him blurred. Their red bright taillights smeared themselves across his field of vision. His sudden sense of unreality—this image of New York as a map of itself—a hand-crafted picture of a place—a cartoon cityscape through which he was all too mysteriously passing—reminded him so much of his drive through Germany that he was only somewhat surprised, only somewhat nauseated, to see the executioner from his dream standing impossibly on one of the bridge's low stone towers just up ahead. Both the executioner's hands were resting on the hilt of his long sword, and the sword's round end was pressed into the concrete. He watched Zach drive by beneath him with what could only be called a tragic smile.

My love! My love! It is for you I am become an abomination!

With that, the wave of fever—the sense of unreality—receded. The bridge was the bridge and the city was the city again, after what had to have been less than half a minute. Nothing remained of the incident but the high-sea-rolling of Zach's stomach, and that was already subsiding as well.

Still, the moment left him worried—weak and worried. Since returning home from Germany, he had come to believe that his dissociation during that weird drive out of Dresden must have been the first symptom of the septicemia that ultimately brought him low. He was worried that this—this moment on the bridge between Manhattan and Queens—was a sign that he hadn't fully recovered, that he was in danger of having a relapse.

Which, in turn, made him think that he should have brought Goulart along on this excursion. He should have called Goulart, at least, and arranged to meet him in Long Island City. Of course he should have. He
would
have, at any other time, and he had no idea how he was going to explain to him why he hadn't, why he had come out here alone. But if there was any chance of getting to Johnny Grimhouse before Abend did, he had to take it. And if there was even the slightest chance that Goulart might have gone bad, that he might give Abend a warning call, he couldn't risk it. Damn Rebecca Abraham-Hartwell for putting these thoughts into his mind; but now that they were there, he couldn't ignore them. He had to do this on his own.

His head was more or less clear again as he pulled the car up to the curb on a desolate gray block beside the railway yards in Long Island City. He stood out of the Crown Vic into the cool clear autumn weather. He still felt a little hollow and fuzzy in his gut. He breathed deep in an effort to restore himself, but even the air was dead here. He looked around him. There was a dirt construction site with an abandoned tractor sitting idle by a half-dug pit; there was the ruin of an old concrete plant, the aluminum siding half-stripped off its water tower; and there was the building Fatboy Mooch had sent him to find. It was six stories—red brick—blackened red brick—and had held apartments once, but was gutted now. The big windows were dark. The glass in some of them was broken. The brick was smashed around some of the frames. There was a lopsided scaffold rotting around the building's base, and a construction screen draped down one corner, roof to sidewalk. It looked as if a restoration project had been abandoned halfway through.

A train rattled across the yards, one level below the street. Zach was about to start away from his car and cross toward the building—but his breath caught and he stiffened as he spotted a movement at one of the windows. Unconsciously, he raised his hand in the direction of the gun under his arm. He stared hard at the window, a tall intact rectangle of black glass up on the fourth floor. Nothing. No movement now. His hand slid slowly back to his side. Maybe it had been an optical illusion. Or more fever stuff.