She checked the clock. Nine-thirty. Her school planner called for her to teach math and English before recess. Math was a goner. She still had hopes for salvaging English. She was reading the class “The Most Dangerous Game,” the story where a mad hunter sets men loose on his private jungle island to track down and kill. There were plenty of metaphors in the story that the kids could relate to, especially at the end when “the Man” gets his comeuppance.
“Twenty years,” someone shouted. “Sing Sing.”
“Nah, ten, but no parole.”
“Ten years?” asked Jenny. “For grabbing a watch and giving someone a little cut? Don’t you guys find that kind of harsh?”
“Hell no.” It was Maurice Gates. “How else you think they gonna learn?”
“Excuse me, Maurice, do you have a comment?”
The supersized teenager nodded. “You got to teach those muscleheads a lesson,” he said, eyes boring into Jenny. “You got to be tough. No mercy. Unnerstand? Less’n you want ’em to come for you in the middle of the night. They mad enough, they even cut you in your own bed. Door locked. Don’t matter. They gonna get in. Take care of bidness. You be sleepin’ alone. They gonna get in. Cut you good. Ain’t that right, Miss Dance? You got to put ’em away.”
Jenny held his eyes, wondering if she might have to go to security on this one. Don’t you dare come after me, her look said. I can take care of myself.
“Ten years,” said Hector, banging his feet on the ground.
In no time, the class raised a chant. “Ten years. Ten years.”
“Enough!” said Jenny, patting the air with her hands. She looked from face to face. Hector had robbed a bodega in his neighborhood. Lacretia had gotten into “the life” when she was twelve. For the most part, they were a decent bunch of kids. They weren’t angels, but she hoped she could just drive home what was right and what was wrong.
“Miss Dance?”
“Yes, Frankie.”
Frankie Gonzalez walked up alongside her and put his head on her shoulder. He was short, and skinny, and rubbery, the class runt and self-appointed clown. “Miss Dance,” he said again, and she knew he was making his wiseass smile. “Yo, I kill them muthafuckers they touch you.”
The class cracked up. Jenny patted his head and sent him back to his desk. “Thank you, Frankie, but I think that’s a bit extreme, not to mention against the law.”
She dropped off the desk and walked to the chalkboard. She wanted to make a list of appropriate penalties and take a vote. Crime and punishment passed for reading and writing.
Just then, the door to her classroom opened. A tall, rangy man with close-cropped gray hair and a weathered face peered in. “Miss Dance, may I have a word? Outside, please.”
Jenny put down the chalk. “I’ll be right back,” she said to the class. She smiled as she entered the corridor. A parole officer, she thought, or a cop come to tell her about one of her new charges. “Yes, what can I do for you?”
The man approached her, the smile bleeding from his face. “If you ever want to see Thomas Bolden alive again,” he said, his voice hard as a diamond, “you’ll come with me.”
23
“Look who’s back,” said Detective Second Grade Mike Melendez as John Franciscus walked into the squad room. “Night shift ain’t enough for you, Johnny? Hey, I got a shift you can take.”
“Short Mike. How you doin’? Tell you the truth, heating’s going berserk at the house,” Franciscus lied, stopping at Melendez’s desk, rapping his knuckles twice as if knocking. “Place is like a sweatbox. Got a guy coming at noon to take a look at it. Just what I need. Put another C-note into the house.”
Melendez stood up from his desk, stretching his six-foot-eight-inch frame, and headed toward the hall. “You doing a four-to-one? Didn’t see you on the roster.”
“No. Figured in the meantime I’d take care of some paperwork, maybe catch a few Z’s in the duty room.”
Melendez gave him a look as if he were certifiable. “Make yourself at home.”
Franciscus walked to the back of the squad room, saying his hellos to the guys. A New York City detective’s day was divided into three shifts: “eight-to-four,” “four-to-one” (which actually ended at midnight), and the night shift. Twice a month you did a “back-to-back,” meaning you did a four-to-one and an eight-to-four the following day. Since most of the cops lived upstate, they’d fitted out the duty room with a couple of cots and plenty of fresh sheets.
The detectives’ squad room for Manhattan North was located on the sixth floor of an unmarked brick building on 114th Street and Broadway. They shared the building with SVU-the special victims unit-child protective services, and the local welfare office. It was a real crowd of jollies from morning till night. But the squad room itself was a haven: large, clean, and heated to a pleasant sixty-six degrees. A row of desks ran down each side of the room, separated by a wide aisle. The floor was old freckled linoleum, but spotless. The walls were standard-issue acoustical tile. A bulletin board covered with shoulder patches from visiting cops hung on one wall. Franciscus preferred it to the pictures that hung across the room. There in a row were the ranking policemen in the New York City Police Department. The big muckety-mucks. The commissioner, his deputy, the chief of police, and the chief of detectives. Once he’d dreamed of having his picture up there too, but things happened.
Just then, Melendez sauntered over.
“Pickup already go through?” Franciscus asked. Every morning at eight, a paddy wagon stopped by to haul the night’s take down to 1 Police Plaza, or “One PP,” for formal booking and arraignment.
“Half hour ago. Your boy went along nice and easy.”
“Still not talking?”
“Not a peep. What’s up with that?”
“Don’t know. I’m heading over to see Vicki. See if she can dig something up for me.”
“You got a name?”
“Not his, unfortunately. Something else the complainant was talking about.”
“Who? Mr. Wall Street?”
Franciscus nodded. “Amazing a kid like that can make it. You see his body art. ‘Never Rat on Friends.’ You love it? I had something nifty like that on my shoulder, they would have kicked my butt out of OCS.”
“Doesn’t matter where you come from anymore. It’s what you can do. How you handle yourself. Look at what Billy did with his GED.”
Melendez’s kid brother, Billy, had worked as a trader with a foreign exchange firm doing business out of Tower 2, eighty-fifth floor. No one above eighty-four made it out. “God bless, Mike.”
“Amen,” said Short Mike Melendez. “Oh, the lieutenant said something about seeing you later. He’s in his office, you feel so inclined.”
“You want to take odds on that?” As union trustee, Franciscus was in constant demand to answer questions about health care, retirement, and the like. The lieutenant had his thirty in, and was set to retire in a month’s time. For weeks, he’d been harping on how to take his pension.
Franciscus had hardly sat down and gotten comfortable when he saw Lieutenant Bob McDermott amble from his office. McDermott raised a hand. “Johnny. A word.”
Franciscus labored to his feet. “You still thinking of taking insurance? Don’t.”
McDermott shook his head and frowned, as if he wasn’t interested in talking about himself. “Got a sec? Need to tell you something.”
“Actually, I’m just on the way to IT. Got a lead I want to check on.”
“It’ll just take a minute.” McDermott put a hand on his shoulder and walked with him toward his office. Given the lieutenant’s easygoing nature, it might as well have been a stickup at gunpoint. McDermott shut the door behind him and walked to his desk. “Got a report here from your doctor.”
“Yeah,” Franciscus said lightly. “Saw him last week.” But inside him, his gut tightened.