“So why not provide photographs. Pictures. It’s not a cadaver but it sure would improve our case.”
“How do you photograph what you never see? If there’s light enough for a picture there’s too much light. These things won’t get close to us in light Although we could use infrared equipment. Special Services could probably give us the loan of a scope. But it’s bulky stuff—hard to handle.”
“I’ve got a better idea. Narcotics has been experimenting with computerized image intensification equipment, stuff developed during the Vietnam war. We can get a really super picture even in total darkness with it. Dick’s unit’s been using it experimentally.”
“What’s involved, a support truck or something?”
“Not at all. The whole thing looks like an oversize pair of binoculars. Camera’s built in. You just look through the thing and what you can see you can photograph.”
“What you can see? There’s the hole in the idea. We have to be close enough to see them.”
“Not so close. You’ve got a five-hundred-millimeter lens.”
“My God, that’s the damnedest thing I ever heard of. We could be a quarter of a mile away.”
“Like staked out on the roof of my building watching the alley, watching for them to come back.”
“Yeah, we could do that. We could get our pictures and pull out before they even started climbing the terraces.”
“There’s only one small hitch. Dick’s got to be convinced to help us. He’s got to give us the equipment, and it’s classified.”
Wilson frowned. It meant a departmental infraction, something he didn’t need. He had too many enemies to be able to afford getting things like that in his file. “Goddamn, the PD’d classify mechanical pencils if they had time. I don’t like to get into that kind of stuff, it’s not going to help me.”
“Dick owes you a favor, George.”
“Why?”
“You know perfectly well why.” She said it lightly but felt the anger nevertheless. Her staying in Detectives had depended on finding a place in a block of four men, and to do that you had to get one of those men as a partner. Wilson had taken her on and she had not been shunted off into administration like many lady cops. And Wilson had taken her on because Dick Neff had asked him to.
“He may think it was a favor, but it wasn’t.”
“Jesus. You’re going to seed, Wilson. You actually complimented my police work just then.”
He laughed, his face breaking for a few moments into a mass of merry wrinkles, then as abruptly returning to its usual glower. “You got some good points,” he said, “but I guess you’re right. Taking you on was a favor to Dick when I did it. Maybe he’ll let me collect.”
Becky excused herself and called ahead to the apartment. She wanted to be sure Dick was there; she didn’t want to end up alone with Wilson in the apartment. It wouldn’t look good, especially if Dick came home.
He was there, his voice sounding thick. She wanted to ask him what was wrong but she held back. When she told him she was bringing Wilson over his only comment was a noncommittal grunt.
They ate their food in silence, Wilson digging into his with glazed indifference. If you fed him silage, he’d probably eat it exactly the same way.
Becky was excited about the idea of getting photographs of the animals; excited and worried. The whole situation contained menace, every part of it. There was something about the way these creatures; killed—the extreme violence of it—that made it impossible to put the problem out of your mind even for a short time. You just kept turning it over and over… and Becky had a recurring picture of what they must look like with their long toes that ended in delicate pads and were tipped by claws, with their razor-sharp teeth, and their heavy bodies. But what were their faces like? Human beings had such complex faces, not at all like the more-or-less frozen expressions of animals; would these creatures also have such faces, full of emotion and understanding? And if so, what would those faces tell their victims?
“Look we just come right out and ask Dick— right? Just ask him without fooling around?”
“You mean no diplomatic subtleties?”
“Not my strong point.”
“So we just ask. Everybody’s heard rumors about the optical gear Special Services is using. Just logical that a Narcotics wire man could get his hands on it, isn’t it? We don’t have to tell him we know the stuff is classified. Maybe he’ll never even bring the matter up, just give us the damn thing and not think any more about it. That’s what I’m hoping anyway.”
But that wasn’t what happened. As soon as she opened the door to their apartment, Becky felt something was wrong. She left Wilson in the hall while she went to Dick in the living room. “Why’d you pick tonight to bring that old fart up here?” were his first words.
“I had to, honey. It can’t wait.”
“I got burned.”
There it was, as simple as that. To undercover cops like Dick getting burned meant being recognized as police officers by their suspects. “Bad?”
“Real bad. Some sonofabitch really put it on me. I might as well graduate to the Goddamn movies.”
“Dick, that’s terrible! How—”
“Never mind how, honey. Just say it was two years of work blown to hell. And I think I’ve got a shoofly on my ass, too.”
She leaned down and kissed his hair. He was slumped into the couch, staring at the TV. “You’re clean, aren’t you?” But her heart was sinking, she knew something was wrong. And the inspectors from the Internal Affairs Division knew it too or they wouldn’t have put a man on him—shoofly was what cops called other cops who investigated them.
“You know damn well I’m not clean.” He said it with such infinite tiredness that she was surprised. And he looked older, more hollow, than she had ever seen him before. “Look, let’s get drunk or something later, celebrate my early retirement, but bring Wilson in now, let him do his thing.”
“It’s not much, won’t take a second.” She called Wilson, who moved forward from the foyer where he had been standing.
They shook hands. Dick offered him a beer. They settled into the living room, the TV cut down but not off. Becky closed the curtains.
“What’s up?” Dick said.
“We need your help,” Wilson replied. “I gotta get some pictures, I need your night-vision camera.”
“What night-vision camera?”
“The one you can get from Special. The five-hundred-mil lens, the image-intensification circuit. You know what camera.”
“Why not order it up yourself?” He looked at Becky, a question in his eyes.
“We haven’t got authorization, honey,” she said. “We need it for the creatures.”
“Oh, Christ almighty, that bullshit again! Can’t you get off that? What are you two, nuts or something? I can’t get that Goddamn camera, not while I’ve got shooflies hanging from my Goddamn ears. Come on, lay off it. Why don’t you two earn your damn salaries instead of monkeyin’ around with that shit.”
“We need your help, Neff.” Wilson sat hunched in his chair, his eyes glistening like dots beneath the heavy folds of his brows. “I helped you.”
“Oh, Christ.” He smiled, turned his head away. “Oh, Christ, the favor. The great big favor. Let me tell you, Wilson, I don’t give a rat’s ass about your big favor. That’s not a factor.”
“That camera could solve this case for us, honey, get the damn thing out of our hair. We only need it for a night or so.”
“You need more than the camera, you need me to work the damn thing. It’s balky as hell, you gotta know how to use it.”
“You can teach us.”
He shook his head. “Took me weeks to learn. You don’t get it just right you don’t get any picture.”
She stared at him. “Dick, please. Just one night is all we ask.”