The closest she came to telling Maxie that she'd seen him on the tape, and suspected he was one of the men who' d killed the rat everyone was talking about, was at breakfast a week or so later when she casually remarked, "By the way, how did you enjoy your pizza that morning?"
"What the fuck you talkin about?" Maxie said.
Four days later he moved in with an eighteen-year-old bitch whose sole claim to fame, according to Maxie, was that she knew how to do The Moroccan Sip. Whatever that was. As if Betty cared what it was.
All she wanted was for the cops to arrest him and send him to the electric chair. Was that a lot to ask for a lousy fifty thousand bucks?
She told them all this on Wednesday morning, the first day of December.
At a quarter past one the next morning, five detectives from the Eight-Seven drove all the way downtown to kick in Maxwell Corey Blaine's front door.
Only one of them got shot.
Chapter Six
They went in with a No-Knock arrest warrant and Kevlar vests because from what Betty Young had told them, the dude in here was no cookie-cutter.
The trouble with most tenement buildings in many parts of this city was that they hadn't been designed for close police work. Maxwell Corey Blaine did not live on a ranch in Beaucoup Acres, Louisiana, where the sheriffs folk could drive up a tree-lined, moss-covered driveway and then storm the front door with a battering ram, five cops on either side of it—my how all dee catties was afeard. Maxwell—or Maxie, as he was familiarly called by his once and former rat fink girlfriend—lived in a six-story walkup on a narrow street in Calm's Point, part of a section that had once been beautiful and civilized, had since become ugly and barbarous, and was currently targeted for gentrification in the next ten years, a cycle that was doomed to repeat itself though no one on the city council had a clue.
The building was constructed of red brick dimmed by the soot of centuries. The stairways were steep and the hallways narrow. There were four apartments on each floor, and at this hour of the morning—they had assembled outside at a quarter to two—the sounds of deep slumber rumbled from behind double-locked doors. They felt
EdMcBain
clumsy in the heavy-duty vests. They were dressed for winter as well, wearing layered clothing under the vests, gloveless now that they were inside the building, all of them carrying AR- assault rifles. No room for a battering ram in these turn-of-the-century hallways, stairs winding back on themselves until the men reached the fifth-floor landing and regrouped.
These men were colleagues and friends. There were no petty quarrels to settle here, no one was trying to trick anyone else into "taking the door," which defined the ten most dangerous seconds in any policeman's life. Kling simply told the others he would take the door. It was him and Brown, he said, who'd initially caught the pizzeria squeal, so this was their case and officially their bust, z/they made a bust here tonight, so he' d take the door, with Brown and Carella as flankers, and Willis and Meyer as backups. It was very cold on that fifth-floor landing. His breath feathered from his mouth as he whispered all this to the others.
He was holding the heavy Colt carbine in both hands. Inside the apartment here, there was a man who'd maybe committed murder, a man the judge had felt was sufficiently dangerous to merit a No-Knock. The team was a good one. These men had worked together before, and they knew exactly what was coming down here tonight, exactly what they were supposed to do. Carella and Brown would flank the door. Kling would kick it in. The moment the lock was history, all three would rush the room, with Willis and Meyer fanning in behind them. If they were lucky, it would all be over in two, three minutes.
Kling put his ear to the wood, listening.
He heard nothing.
He kept listening a moment longer, backed off the door, and ascertained with little head nods that the others were ready. He took a deep breath, brought up his right knee, the left arm extended for balance, his right hand grasping
the pistol grip of the rifle. The force of his kick, combined with his forward momentum and the weight of his body, smashed the wood gripping the lock's bolt to the striker plate and jamb. He followed the splintered door inward, Carella and Brown peeling off from either side of the doorway and rushing after him into the apartment, Meyer and Willis not a heartbeat behind.
"Police!" Kling shouted and behind him the voices of the others echoed the word, "Police! Police!" as the men fanned into the apartment, eyes darting. Willis hit a wall switch and a ceiling light snapped on. They were in a small, shabby living room crowded with overstaffed furniture. To their left was a tiny walk-in kitchen. On the right wall, there were three closed doors. They guessed the one nearest the entrance opened on a closet. The bathroom was probably behind the middle door, the bedroom behind the last door on the wall, where it would have windows facing the street. No one commented aloud on any of this. They had been in many similar apartments and they knew tenement layouts. They simply moved behind Kling toward the last door on the wall, no hinges showing on this side of the door, it would open inward. He grabbed the knob, twisted it, again shouted "Police!," and hurled the door open, the assault rifle leading him into the room.
Kicking in the door, rushing the room, zeroing in on what they expected was the bedroom had maybe taken all of thirty seconds. In that same amount of time, the man who'd presumably been in bed when they arrived had already crossed the room to the dresser, opened the top drawer in it, yanked out what looked like a nine-millimeter pistol, and now turned to point it at Kling.
"Gun!" Kling shouted and hurled himself flat on the floor, rolling away from the shooter as Brown and Carella started into the room. The bedroom was dark. In the faint spill of light from the living room, they didn't see the girl in bed until she screamed, and she didn't scream until the
giant standing at the dresser in white Jockey shorts and a white tank-top shirt fired two shots in rapid succession, not at Kling, but at the doorway, now filled with Brown's considerable bulk. Brown hurled himself to the left just as the shots exploded. The first slug missed him, missed Carella as well, who was coming through the door behind him. The second slug buried itself in the door jamb.
"There's a gun!" Meyer shouted back to Willis, and ran through the doorway, firing in the direction of the muzzle flashes. The girl was screaming hysterically now. The guy in his underwear was blasting away at anything that came through that door, hitting nothing but the door and the doorjamb until Willis, the smallest of the targets, came in like a dancer and took a hit in his thigh where there was no vest to protect it. The slug spun him around. His leg slid out from under him.
The guy at the dresser suddenly realized there were five guys with heavy assault weapons here, and only one of them was down. He could keep firing away for the rest of the night, with that crazy bitch on the bed screaming and screaming, or he could call some kind of truce here before somebody riddled him like a polka dot pie.
"Cool it, boys," he said, and threw down the gun.
Brown swatted him with an open hand that felt like a ten-pound hammer.
On the floor, Willis was trying to stanch the flow of blood from his thigh.
The one thing that could take all the joy out of police work was the sudden realization that it wasn't all fun and games. The graveyard shift had relieved at a quarter to midnight. The assault team had arrived a half hour later, to begin gearing up in the locker room. Now, at a little past four a.m., almost every detective on the squad came to the building on Grover Avenue, wanting to know what the
hell had happened. Men not due to relieve until eight that morning came in because they'd "heard" something. Men who were supposed to be on vacation or out sick came drifting back to the squadroom, wanting to know all the details.