“Fine,” he said. “I’ll take a rain check for today. But at some point I’m going to cash in all my checks and you’re going to have lunch with me.”
I offered a noncommittal nod/shake, and Tony walked away. In the meantime, I had one person who might actually skin me alive if I didn’t answer to him soon.
I arrived at Jack’s desk only to find it vacant. It didn’t take me long to figure out where he’d gone.
The shouting coming from Wallace Langston’s office could be heard throughout the entire newsroom, and reporters who tended to make more noise than the average airbus on takeoff sat dead silent listening to the barrage.
Wallace tended to be a fairly mellow guy. In fact, in my few years at the Gazette, I’d rarely heard him chew a reporter out, rarely saw him get pissed at the copy desk
(if he had, Evelyn Waterstone might have impaled him on one of the flagpoles outside). What really burned Wallace was losing a story to the competition. And since Jack was the newsroom’s elder statesman, he surely took the brunt of it. And since I was partnering with Jack, he no doubt wanted me there to take some of the small-arms fire.
I walked past Wallace’s secretary. She was usually kind to me, always with a good word, but today she looked at me like I was marching right into the sights of a firing squad. I could have sworn she gave me one of those “please, don’t go in there” looks usually reserved for the girlfriend in horror movies who pleads with her man not to go into the basement where the killer is waiting with a machete the size of a guitar.
Sadly, I could not heed her advice, and knocked on
Wallace’s door.
“Who is it?” he yelled from inside.
“It’s Henry,” I said.
“Get the hell in here.”
I gripped the doorknob, took a breath, and hoped
Wallace’s machete was dull.
I opened the door to see Jack seated in front of
Wallace’s desk. Wallace was not seated behind it, as per usual. Instead he was pacing around the room while
Jack’s head swiveled trying to keep pace.
Wallace looked like he’d come in to work properly dressed, hair combed, clothes ironed. But now his graying hair was askew, glasses crooked on his nose. And the pads on his elbows looked like they were being worn away.
“Where the hell have you been?” Wallace said.
“Meeting with a cop about the Kaiser investigation,”
I said. “He’s going to find out what he can about the guy who might be responsible.”
“That’s dandy,” Wallace said. “While you were out pussyfooting with your boys in blue, did you happen to see this?”
He walked over to his desk and picked up a copy of that morning’s New York Dispatch. Wallace stomped over to me, holding the paper much as you would a bag of dog poop. I looked at Jack, wanted to see if he had anything to say, but the old man sat there, head down.
Wallace handed me the paper. “Read it,” he said.
I looked at the front page. Immediately my stomach lurched up to my throat, frustration and anger welling up inside me.
I turned to where the front page article continued, and read the whole thing. Slowly. Word by word. Then I closed the paper and threw it across the room, cursing loud enough that Wallace’s secretary would probably have to apologize to whoever she was on the phone with.
“How the hell did she…” I said.
“Don’t you dare ask that question,” Wallace said. “It’s your job to know what goes on in this city. You handle the crime beat. It is your duty to know every nook and cranny of this island, from the mayor’s office to the bums who live beneath the subway. For something like this to get past you…you must have been asleep at the wheel.”
He looked at Jack, waited for a response. “Either that or the two of you have become so narrow-minded with this
Kaiser murder and Gaines follow-up that you can’t sniff what’s under your nose.”
“I didn’t know anything about this,” I said. “Paulina…I don’t know where she got it. And I don’t know which cops she spoke to, but if you look at the article they all spoke on condition of anonymity. I just met with my man in the NYPD, and he’s as clued in as anyone. He didn’t mention a word of this, and he doesn’t keep things from me. Not like this. Something about this piece doesn’t pass the smell test, Wallace.”
Wallace picked the newspaper back up. He held the cover out for us both to see.
On the front page of the Dispatch was an enlarged picture of what looked like a small stone, possibly a piece of gravel, pitch-black in color with a rough texture.
The headline next to the photo read The Darkness.
The subtitle said, The Drug That’s About to Take Man- hattan Back to the Stone Age.
25
Darkness Rising
As a deadly new drug hits the streets, police and citizens silently fear a return of chaos a quarter century old
Most New Yorkers did not know Kenneth Tsang. The son of Chinese immigrants who passed away before he graduated high school, Tsang received his MBA from Wharton and spent most of his twenties raking in the dough while working at two prestigious investment firms. Most New Yorkers did not know that, despite his income, Tsang owed nearly half a million dollars in taxes and mortgage payments, and that he burned through his money nearly as fast as it came in.
Most NewYorkers know thatTsang was found dead this week, his body pulverized and found floating in the East River. What they do not know is that a balloon marker was tied to the buoy that Tsang’s body was tethered to. They do not know that inside that balloon were half a dozen small, black rocks, left by Tsang’s killer. These rocks were no bigger than a piece of gravel, but each contain enough destructive power to clinch a plastic bag around the head of a city already gasping for air.
Now, come with me for a moment. I have a brief history lesson to impart upon you.
For those of us who lived through New York in the
1980s, much of the information within this article will ring horrifyingly familiar. Let’s backtrack for a minute, about twenty-five years ago to 1984. George Orwell would have been proud. Or terrified.
New York as we know it today did not exist. Following the oil shortage of the 1970s, the Son of Sam murders, and an economy on the verge of chaos, the plumbing system that was New York was about to get hit with a cherry bomb that nearly destroyed it totally.
That cherry bomb was a new drug known to scientists as methylbenzoylecgonine. Or as it is more commonly known, crack.
Crack first appeared on our shores in 1984. Before that, the drug of choice was cocaine. But as cocaine became more plentiful, prices dropped and dealers began to lose much of their profit margin.
Poor them.
So to get back the money they were losing on coke, they came up with a new way to profit. In a nutshell, they used baking soda or other bases to cut the cocaine.
This increased the volume of their product while retaining the same toxicity of the drug. It was the equivalent of taking a dollar bill, mixing it with a few pennies, and turning it into two dollars.
By 1986, just two years after crack hit the streets, over fifty-five thousand people were admitted to emergency rooms around the country with crackrelated injuries (most often this was either from overdosing, or violence which was a result of the drug trade).
For those of you who lived in New York during that time, as I did, the effects of the crack epidemic were as visible as a streetlamp. Crime in this city hit highs never before seen. Murder and rape rates rose dramatically. Cases of aggravated assault skyrocketed from just over 60,000 in 1980 to over 91,000 by the end of the decade. Burglaries. Larceny. Vehicle theft.
New York began to resemble less of a modern, cosmopolitan city than an outpost of Beirut.