They were both in street clothes with badges and holsters at their belts. The man on the left, the one I’d taken the flashlight from, looked quite angry. His close-cut hairline was receding and his blue-gray eyes were sparks looking for an accelerant.
“McGill?” a voice from above said.
“That’s me.”
A very large dark-skinned man descended halfway down to the first landing of the stairway. Looking up at him, I remembered a time thirty years before when I let Gordo talk me into climbing in the ring with a natural heavyweight.
The guy’s name was Biggie Barnes and he had fists like anvils.
Don’t let him hit ya was the only advice Gordo gave me at the bell announcing round one.
“Come on up,” the big man said.
I followed in the wake of the giant up four flights. It was a dimly lit journey and my fever made it feel like a ride in a rocking boat. These two elements brought a flicker of fear into the center of my chest.
At any other time I would not have gone to some unknown destination just because Kit asked me to. He was my enemy, my opponent, not a friend.
But I was sick, in love, and seeking redemption. I should have been under the care of two doctors and a Zen monk. Instead I was in Brooklyn with no real way out.
On the fifth floor there were three doors. One of these had a thick dark green curtain hanging over it. The big man pushed the fabric aside and went through. I followed... coming into a good-sized room that was lit by bright incandescent fixtures. There were six desks, here and there, with no rhyme or reason; each had a monitor on it and a plainclothes cop to study it.
The windows were sealed with thick black paper. I counted a dozen small digital cameras, supported on poles of various heights, attached to the walls. The video feeds were routed to the monitors.
The images on the screens were of a social club on Pox Street, one over from Poindexter. Black men and women, many bearing dreadlocks, were coming in and out of the storefront establishment.
I had passed the club on my way to the meeting because I decided to walk around the block before approaching Number 26.
The members of the street-level society sounded like Jamaicans. They seemed rather tough.
“Drug dealers,” the big man said, noticing me staring at a screen.
“You Lethford?”
“Come into my office.”
He led me through a real door this time, into a smaller space that had two wooden folding chairs and a peacock blue phone on the pine floor. No carpeting. He shut the door behind us.
“Sit,” he said in a tone that was neither friendly nor hostile.
The big black man wore a short-sleeved black shirt, black cotton pants, and black shoes. I could tell by his right ankle that his socks were white.
“So,” he said, “do you know why I wanted to see you?”
“Who are you, man?” I replied.
He bit the left side of his lower lip and so refrained from slapping me for my insolence.
The cop had a long face and almost no hair except the few sprouts of white that showed on his chin. He was my age, more or less, and the whites of his eyes were no longer that color.
“Captain Clarence Lethford,” he said, “Special Investigations Unit.”
“Huh.”
“Do you know why I wanted to see you?”
“We’re not gonna get anywhere with you treating me like a trainee,” I said. “I’m here because Carson Kitteridge asked me to come. Now, if you have something to say, then say it.”
Big men throw around their weight from an early age. At some point they assume this is a God-given right. Every now and then it’s good for a short guy like me to disrupt that surety.
“I expect some civility out of you, McGill.”
“Is that it? Because you know absence is the ultimate form of bein’ civil. If I’m not there, I can’t insult you.” I stood up.
“Sit down.”
“Fuck you.”
That was the moment we had to get to. He was either going to hit me, let me leave, or get down to the business at hand.
“I was the chief NYPD liaison officer on the Rutgers heist,” he said.
I sat down.
“I was working that case,” he continued, “until Zella Grisham was charged with complicity.”
“Oh.” I crossed my right leg over the left, lacing my blunt fingers around the knee. This made me think of Mirabelle Mycroft and so I released the joint.
“Yeah,” Lethford agreed. “Oh.”
I think he expected me to start shaking and confess or something. It would take more than one confrontation to break him of his big-man complex.
When he saw that I wasn’t made of straw he continued. “They got me to look over the case again when Breland Lewis got her cut loose. First thing I did was go to the shylock’s file. I found a flag there with your name on it.”
“He hired me to help her decompress into civilian life.”
“Kit says that Lewis is your boy.”
“And that means?”
“It means that maybe you had something to do with the heist,” Lethford said, holding up his thick left thumb. “It means that even if the brass says to lay off you, I’m gonna crawl up your ass until I see brain. It means that maybe I was wrong about Grisham, that maybe you got her out because she knows something that can make your retirement plan shine.”
Every time he said the word means he showed another finger — not necessarily in proper order. He put up the pinkie for the retirement plan.
“No, Captain,” I said. “The only thing to glean from my involvement and her freedom is that she did not commit the crime and that the real culprits are still out there.”
“Why would they fake the money wrappers and make her the patsy?” he asked.
“I have no idea,” I said, falsely answering the perfectly sensible question. “My job was to help prove that she didn’t have any connection to the heist. I accomplished that end.”
“You’re dirty, McGill.”
“That’s the general consensus,” I agreed.
“And I’m the one who’ll take you down.”
“That brings us to the reason I’m here,” I said. “Kitteridge said that I might be in some kind of trouble... and not necessarily from arrest and conviction.”
“Bingo,” the big cop replied. It was not the exhortation of victory.
At that moment the door to the little meeting room slammed open.
“Captain!” a young white cop shouted. She seemed both angry and afraid. “They’re shooting out there!”
Lethford surged up so violently that his chair fell over. He rushed past me into the observation nerve center.
I followed.
“Get the hell out there!” he shouted. “Hurry up!”
I glanced at the screens as the men and woman gathered what weapons they had and rushed out of the room. Some of the cops were already wearing their bulletproof vests; others lugged theirs along.
On the monitors I could see that a black van had crashed into the storefront social club and a cadre of men had jumped out, using semi-automatic weapons against the residents.
On my journey around the block I had noticed a slender alley that led from Pox to Poindexter. On a monitor I saw a young boy, maybe eight, run down that artery with a skateboard under his arm. A few seconds later a tall man with a pistol in his left hand went the same way...
I got to the street maybe ninety seconds later. The police had used another route. The guards for the stairway and door were gone. The pretend homeless man/sentry was also absent.
I made it to the alley just in time to see the back of the tall man. He was carrying the boy like a shield in front of him as he backed toward the possible safety of Poindexter.
There was a lot of shouting and gunfire coming from the POX TURF WAR, as the papers called it the next day.