Jessica shook her head slowly, but didn’t speak.
“You gotta talk to her, Jess. Talk some sense into her. She’s just a kid, a sweet, naive kid. She thinks she’s gonna stop the madness, save the citizens. It isn’t like that, Jess. Maybe it never was, but it sure as hell isn’t now.”
“I know, Daddy. But Carol is determined. What right do I have? If she told me what to do with my life, I wouldn’t like it very much.”
“Forget rights,” Rizzo said sharply. “She’s your sister. You want her out bumpin’ heads with skells and psychos while every latte-sucking liberal is standing behind her with a camera phone protecting the dirtbags from the oppressive fascist cops? You think that’s gonna work out for her?”
Jessica saw the passion in her father’s eyes, and it unsettled her. She blinked nervously.
“Take it easy, Dad,” she said. “Don’t have a heart attack.”
Rizzo leaned even closer to Jessica.
“Talk to her, Jess,” he said, regaining a softer tone. “For her own good. Talk to her. She may listen to you.”
Rizzo sat back in his seat and began fumbling in his pocket for the Nicorette.
“I don’t think your mother and I can do it alone,” he said softly. “I think this might have us beat.”
Jessica frowned. She saw something in her father’s eyes. Something she had never seen there before: fear.
Detective Second Grade Mike McQueen strolled into Pete’s Downtown Restaurant and took a seat at the bar. He turned to the young female bartender and ordered a straight-up Manhattan. It was twelve forty-five: Joe Rizzo would soon meet him for lunch at the popular Brooklyn restaurant.
At six feet even, with sharp blue eyes twinkling in a well-featured face, McQueen cut an impressive figure in his new charcoal suit. The suit had been specially tailored, showing no hint of the semiautomatic pistol belted to his right hip. He sipped his drink and waited, occasionally returning the admiring smile of the pretty young bartender.
McQueen was twenty-nine years old with nearly eight years in the NYPD. He had spent the preceding year as a rookie detective third grade, partnered with Joe Rizzo at the Sixty-second Precinct.
As he drank, waiting for Rizzo, a smile touched his lips. His recent transfer to headquarters at One Police Plaza had been the result of their brief partnership. With that transfer, he was now poised to advance his career in ways that, six months earlier, he wouldn’t even have dared to imagine. And he owed it all to Joe Rizzo.
As McQueen pondered his good fortune, Joe Rizzo’s Camry, westbound on Old Fulton Street, turned right onto Water Street. He nosed it into the curb and shut it down. Climbing from the car, he glanced at his Timex: twelve-fifty.
The neighborhood, situated between the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges, was now known as DUMBO, an acronym for Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass. The area was at the height of transformation from a forsaken nineteenth-century industrial area to a thriving, urban hub with hulking old factories, ware houses, and liveries being converted into high-priced condominium complexes with ground-floor eateries, specialty shops, and small, artsy businesses.
As Rizzo dug out a cigarette, a last smoke before lunch, and leaned against the Camry, a brutal memory came to him about this very location. As a young patrolman, he and his partner had once discovered the decaying body of a homeless woman, her throat violently slashed, in the shadow of the historic Fireboat Station House which, back then, stood abandoned and dilapidated at the foot of Old Fulton, the flat, calm waters of the East River stretched before it.
Rizzo gazed across the fifty yards separating him from the old building, now gaily festooned in white and red and housing an old-fashioned ice cream parlor, young professionals on their lunch hour entering and exiting, the bright October sunshine washing over the scene. To the right of the Fireboat House, with its cluttered parking lot, stood the River Cafe. Directly across from Pete’s where Mike was waiting, the stone mass of the Brooklyn Eagle building where Walt Whitman had once been a reporter stood in majestic restoration-now the condominium home to scores of young, successful Brooklynites.
Rizzo shook his head in wonder.
“Things sure have changed,” he muttered aloud, making a mental note to introduce his Manhattanite partner, Priscilla, to this corner of Brooklyn, so different from her old Bed-Sty neighborhood and her new working confines of Bensonhurst’s Sixty-second Precinct.
He glanced again at his watch, tossing the cigarette away, and walking toward Pete’s Restaurant.
Once seated with Mike McQueen in the rear of the main dining area, Rizzo smiled across the table.
“So, Mike,” he said. “You look great. How are things across the river? You playin’ nice with all the other Plaza boys and girls?”
“Yeah, so far, so good. Piece a cake. When I told my lieutenant I was heading over the bridge to meet you, he told me not to hurry back. It’s pretty relaxed where they have me working.”
Rizzo shook his head and sipped at the double-rocks Dewar’s now before him. “I’d eat the gun if they ever tied me to a friggin’ computer all day. Christ.” His lips turned down. “You sure you’re okay with it?”
“Better than okay,” McQueen answered. “I run complete profiles on everything going on anywhere in the department. I cross-reference crime stats and major cases, looking for patterns or emerging problems. Sometimes I troll for predators, pedophiles, stuff like that, but mostly I’m nosing in on everything the department’s up to. It’s the place to be, Joe. At least for now. They already bumped me up to second grade. That would never have happened so fast if I was still at the Six-Two, no matter how many cases we cleared.”
Rizzo nodded and reached for his menu, flipping it open. “That’s true enough,” he said.
“In my spare time, I scan through stuff, you know, looking for something I can capitalize on. Maybe something to help me catch somebody’s eye, make myself look good. And who knows, someday maybe I can move over to Policy and Planning, where I kinda always wanted to be.”
“What is it, three weeks, a month you’re over there, and already you’re jockeyin’ for position? You learn fast, kid.”
McQueen drained his drink. “Well,” he said, “that’s how it’s done. And it might not be too hard, either. Some of the guys I’ve met over there aren’t the brightest lights, if you know what I mean.”
With a grin, Rizzo replied. “Yeah, well, don’t sell them short, and watch your back. Remember, they were all smart enough to hook their way into the Plaza.”
“Like me, eh, Joe?” McQueen asked.
As he watched Rizzo’s eyes, McQueen ran the details through his mind: how he and Rizzo had tracked down the runaway daughter of a local Brooklyn political power house, City Councilman William Daily. When closeted skeletons had turned up during the investigation, Rizzo had deftly utilized them to both his and McQueen’s advantage.
But the skeletons had never been buried. Instead, they were still lurking, lurking as evidence in the form of a purloined Panasonic microcassette. Lurking in the basement of Joe Rizzo’s Bay Ridge home.
The tape, McQueen thought. The damn tape that could alter the lives of everyone connected to it.
“Yeah,” Rizzo replied, pulling McQueen from his thoughts. “Like you. But you belong over there, Mike. You’re a sharp guy, and a good cop. Maybe they aren’t.”
“Thanks.”
Rizzo shrugged. “Don’t thank me, I didn’t give you your brains. If they give you half a chance over there, you’ll be runnin’ your own squad in a few years.”
“We’ll see,” McQueen said. “But hopefully I’m done with the streets. Almost eight years, that’s enough, and I still may try for the Academy. Teaching. I think I might like that.”
“I can see you there, Mike. You look the part.”
McQueen smiled. “Well, looks are important. Very political at the Plaza. They’re more a bunch of frustrated yuppies than they are cops.”