Survival... ZERO! mh-11 Page 12

  "When?"

  "That was, lemme see ... right after I came on this morning. Like I told her, I see them things sometimes. One guy been coming here eight years always wears one. He owns a restaurant downtown. Rich guy. There's another one, but he kind of drifts by once in a while at night. I figured him for a pimp."

  I edged back under the protection of the overhang, the rain draping a curtain around us. "Tall and skinny, about forty-some?"

  Tim bobbed his head quickly. "Yeah, that's him."

  "When did you see him last?"

  "Hell, about suppertime. He was still drifting along when everybody else was hustling to get outa the wet. I remember because the bum picked a paper outa the trash

  can somebody tossed away instead of buying one. A wet paper yet." Tim stopped, watching me intently, then added, "So he started to cross the street heading west too. I wasn't really watching."

  "Good enough, Tim," I said.

  And now the reins were pulling in a little tighter. The possibilities were beginning to show themselves. It was me who had put Woody onto it in the beginning. He had his own sources of information and it wouldn't have taken him long to spot the association between Lippy and me and dig around the same way I did. If I had found anything Lippy's former friend had lifted from Woody, the police would have had it by now and he'd be squatting on an iron bunk in the city jail.

  But no charges had been leveled, so whatever he was after was still up for grabs. I let the rain whip at my face and grinned pointlessly. So he double-checked Lippy's pad with his boys and they damned near knocked me off. They had taken off fast, not knowing how long I had stayed around, and maybe if I looked hard enough I could have uncovered the item. It wouldn't be big. Large enough for a wallet and easy enough to hide.

  It made sense then. They had to take me out to be sure. They ransacked my office first, then waited for me. They had to. After my bit earlier about "doing business" with Woody, he could have assumed I had the stuff and was ready to sell it to him. That would be "business" in his language. Or Velda could have come up with it and phoned in the information on the tape recorder and they couldn't take a chance of me getting it. They'd try to tap me out first, then Velda.

  Damn it all to hell, why didn't she stay in the office where she belonged?

  From a quarter mile down the avenue came a whine of sirens and tiny red dots winked in the night. I waited and watched another convoy of Army trucks rumble by, escorted by two prowl cars clearing the way. All of them were way above the speed limit. The last four were ambulance vehicles and a jeep. When they passed by I crossed to the other side of Seventh Avenue and started working my way west across town.

  At four a.m. I checked out a single lead and came up with a guy in a red vest, a stew bum conked out on wine, sleeping in a doorway on Eighth Avenue. I said something under my breath and walked down to the bar on the corner that was just about to close up for the night. I tried Velda's apartment first, but there was no answer. I tried

  the hotel I wanted her to use, but nobody using our cover names had checked in. My office phone rang twice before it went to the recorder with the fresh spool I had inserted. There were no messages. By now Larry Beers' corpse would be cold and stiff, his blood jellied on the floor. Pat was going to give me hell.

  He did that, all right, standing there over the body and chewing me out royally, his eyes as tired and bloodshot as my own. Outside the windows the sky had turned to a slate gray, the rain had stopped, but poised and waiting until it could be at its most miserable best when it let loose again.

  The body of Larry Beers had been carted off in a rubber bag, the room photographed, the basics taken care of, now two detectives were standing outside the door getting a muffled earful as Pat lit into me.

  All I could say was, "Listen, I told you I had a witness."

  "Fine. It better be a good one."

  "It is."

  "You better have a damn good excuse for the time lapse in reporting this mess too."

  "Once more for the record, Pat, my witness got hurt in the shuffle. I took her to a doctor who will verify it."

  "He had a phone."

  "So I was in a state of shock."

  "Balls. You know the kind of lawyer Ballinger has to protect his men? You think that other guy's going to admit laying for you? Like hell .. . they'll say you set a trap and touched it off youself deliberately in front of a witness. Nice, eh? You were even supposed to get the other one, but he got away. So maybe your bullets aren't in him. The other guy was firing in self-defense."

  "Look at the office."

  "You could have done that yourself. You told me you didn't see them in the act of wrecking it. Your witness couldn't help there, either."

  "Well, you know better."

  "Sure, I do, only I'm just a cop. I can investigate and arrest. I don't handle the prosecution. Your ass is in deep trouble this time. Don't think the D.A.'s office is going to buy your story on sight. What you think happened won't cut any grass with that bunch. Even the shooting at Lippy's won't help any. That could have been staged too. You try using the witness you got there and all you'll get is a cold laugh and a kiss-off. Even your own lawyer wouldn't touch them."

  "Okay, what do you want from me?" I asked him.

  "Who's your witness, damn it!"

  I grinned and shrugged my shoulders. "You know, you forgot to advise me of my rights, Captain. Under that Supreme Court decision, this case could be kicked right off the docket as of now."

  Pat let those red eyes bore into me for ten seconds, his teeth clamped tight. Then suddenly the taut muscles in his jaw loosened, he grinned back and shook his head in amazement.

  "I don't know why I'm bothering with you, Mike. I'm acting like this is the first homicide I ever stumbled over. After all the nitheaded times you and I ... oh, shit." He swabbed at his eyes with his hands and took a deep breath. "The whole damn country's in line for extermination and I'm letting you bug me." He dropped his hands, his face serious. "Anyway, by tomorrow you wouldn't even make the back page."

  I didn't say anything. His face had a peculiar, blank look.

  Finally, Pat dropped his voice and said, "They found a canister at the bottom of the Ashokan Reservoir. It was a bacteriological device timed to open six days from now."

  I couldn't figure it. I said, "Then why the sweat if you got it nailed down?"

  Pat brushed some torn remnants off the arm of the chair and lowered himself down to it. "The guy found dead in the subway was the same one those honeymooners spotted, all right. They searched the area where they saw him and came up with the cannister." His eyes left the window and wandered over to mine. "It must have been the last one he planted. It was marked #20-ashokan. Someplace scattered around are nineteen others like it, all due to release in six days."

  "And the papers got this?"

  "One of the reservists in the group that handled the stuff was a reporter fresh out of journalism school. He figured he had a scoop and phoned it in. He didn't know about the other nineteen they didn't find."

  "There's still time to squelch the story."

  "Oh, they're on that, don't worry. Everybody connected with that guy's paper is in protective custody, but they're screaming like hell and they're not going to be held long. There's a chance they might have spouted off to their friends or relatives, and if they did, it's panic tune. People aren't going to hold in a secret like that."

  "Who's handling it ... locals?"

  "Washington. That's how big it is." Pat reached for his hat and stood up. "So whatever you do doesn't really matter, Mike. You're only an interesting diversion that keeps me from thinking about other things. Six days from now we can all pick out a nice place to sit and watch each other kick off."

  "Brother, are you full of piss and vinegar tonight."

  "I wish you'd worry a little. It would make me feel better."

  "Crap," I said sullenly. There was no mistaking Pat's attitude. He was deadly serious. I had never seen him like that
before. Maybe it was better to be like the rest of the world, not knowing about things. But what would they be like when they found out?

  "Six days. When it happens you can bet there's going to be some kind of retaliation, or expecting it, the other side fires first. A nuclear holocaust could destroy this country and possibly the bacteria too. If I were on the other side I'd consider the same thing." Pat let a laugh grunt through his teeth. "Now even the Soviet bunch is thinking along those lines. I heard they all tried to get out of the country when we found the thing, but the Feds put the squeeze on them. In a way they're hostages for six days and they'd better run down a lead before then or they've had it too."

  "Sounds crazy," I said.

  "Doesn't it?" Pat waved me to the door. "So let's have a coffee like it all never happened and then we'll check into the ballistics report on those slugs that tore up your buddy Beers."

  I lay stretched out on the bed, not quite awakened from the druglike sleep I had been in. The window was a patch of damp gray letting the steamy smells of the city drift into the room through the open half. The clock said ten after two, and I pulled the phone down beside me and dialed the office number. Nothing. Velda's apartment didn't answer either.

  Where the hell was she? Until now Velda had always called in at regular intervals, or if necessity warranted it, longer ones, but she always called. Now there were only two answers left. Either she was on a prolonged stakeout or Woody Ballinger had found her. I tried another half-dozen calls to key people I had contacted, but none of them had seen Woody or any of his boys. All his office would say was he had left town, but Chipper Hodges had gone into his apartment through a window on a fire

  escape and said his bags were in a closet and nothing seemed to be missing.

  Pat had slept in his office all night and his voice was still a hoarse growl with no expression in it at all. "Sorry, Mike," he said, "still negative. Nobody's seen Ballinger around at all."

  "Damn it, Pat ..."

  "We'd like to see him, though. Ballistics came up with another item besides those slugs in Beers coming from that same gun that shot at you in Lippy's apartment. That same gun was used to kill the cop who stepped into the cross fire when he was raiding that policy place uptown. Supposedly one of Woody's places."

  "And now you got men on it."

  "Uh-huh. As many as we can spare. Don't worry, we'll find Ballinger."

  "He might have Velda. There isn't much time."

  "I know," he told me softly, "not for any of us," then hung up.

  Back to that again, I thought. Six days ... no, five days left. In a way there was almost a comic angle to the situation. The ones who didn't know what was impending couldn't care, and those who knew about it didn't. A real wild world, this. Trouble was coming in from so many sources that another one, no matter how big, was no more than an itch to be scratched. Maybe the world wouldn't give a damn either if it did know. Nobody seems to think that big. Sufficient unto the day are the evils thereof. How long since Hiroshima and Nagasaki? You sit on a time bomb so long you get to ignore it. The object of destruction gets to be a familiar thing and one more wouldn't matter anyway. Defusing the problem was somebody else's job and somehow in some way it would be taken care of. That's what we have a government for, isn't it? So why worry, have another beer and watch the ball game. The Mets are ahead.

  I picked up a paper at the stand on the corner and riffled through the pages. The News had a two-column spread on page four about how the special Army teams in their exercise maneuvers upstate had located a possible contamination source in the Ashokan Reservoir, and although the water supply to New York City and adjacent areas had been temporarily curtailed, there was no actual shortage and the Army experts were expected to clear the matter up shortly.

  Further on was another little squib about a certain Long Island newspaper suspending operations temporarily

  due to a breakdown in their presses. Washington was putting the squeeze on, but good. I wondered how Eddie Dandy was making out, wherever he was. By now he must have a mad on as big as his head. Somebody was going to catch hell when they released him, that was for sure.

  Little Joe was working his trade on Broadway, pushing himself along on a homemade skateboard. For a beggar he was ahead in his field, peddling cheap ball-point pens instead of pencils, gabbing with all the familiar figures who kept him in business with the daily nickels and dimes.

  I drew his attention by fluttering a buck down over his shoulder into his box and he spun around with a surprised grin when he saw me. "Hey, Mike. Thought I just got me a big spender. You want a pen?"

  "Might as well get something for my dollar."

  He held up his box. "Take your pick."

  I pulled out two black ones and dropped them in my pocket. "Velda told me she saw you," I said.

  "Yeah," Joe said, craning his neck up to look at me. "She was looking for that dip I saw with old Lippy."

  A curious tingle ran across my shoulders. "She didn't say what he was. You didn't know, either."

  "That was then. Me, I ain't got much to do except look, and besides, you two always did get me curious. So I look and ask a few people and pretty soon I get a few answers. Since Lindy's closed I moved my beat up here a couple of blocks and you'd be surprised how much can go on just a pair of traffic lights away. Like another world."

  "Don't yak so much, Joe."

  "Mike ... when do I get the chance to? Like you're a captive audience." Then he saw the impatience in my face and nodded. "He came in from Miami about two months ago where he was working Hialeah. That was his thing, working the tracks where the cash money was and the crowds and the excitement. Only the security boys made him and he got the boot."

  "Who fed you that?"

  "Banjie Peters. He hustled tout sheets. He even knew the guy from a few other tracks that kicked him out. So the only place he don't get the boot is Aqueduct and he comes up here for the season. He works it one day and blammo ... security spots him and gives him the heave. He was lucky because he didn't even have time to make his first touch. They find him with anything on him and it's curtains out there."

  "They have a name for him?"

  "Sure, a dozen, and no two alike." He gave me a funny little grin and fished around in his legless lap for something. "I kind of figured you'd be around so I had Banjie con his buddies in security outa a picture they had. They mugged him at Santa Anita and sent copies around."

  He held out a two-by-two black and white photo of a lean, sallow-looking face with a mouth that was too small and eyes that seemed to sneer at the world. His hair had receded on the sides and acne scars marred the jawline. The picture cut him off at chest level, but under his coat he had on an off-shade vest with metal buttons that could have been red. His description on the back put him at age forty-six, five feet eleven tall and one hundred fifty-two pounds. Eight aliases were given, no two remotely alike, and no permanent address.

  Now I knew what he looked like.

  Little Joe said, "He couldn't score at the track, that's why he started hustling around here. You remember Poxie?" While I nodded Joe went on. "When he ain't pimping he keeps his hand in working other people's pockets. This boy sees him working Shubert Alley and beats the crap outa him. Like he laid out a claim and was protecting it. Over there's where he and Lippy used to meet up. You know, Mike, I don't think Lippy knew what the guy was doing."

  "He didn't," I said.

  "Maybe he found out, huh? Then this guy bumped him."

  "Not quite like that, pal. You know where he is now?"

  "Nope, but I seen him last night. He come outa one of them Greek language movies on Eighth Avenue and hopped a cab going uptown. I woulda taken the cab number so you could check out his trip sheet, only I was on the wrong side of the street."

  "Good try, kid."

  "If you want, I'll try harder."

  I looked at him, wondering what he meant.

  Little Joe grinned again and said, "I saw Velda too. She was right beh
ind him and grabbed the cab after his."

  The knot in my stomach held fast, not knowing whether to twist tighter or loosen. "What time, Joe?"

  "Last show was coming out. Just a little after two-thirty."

  And the knot loosened. She was still on her own then and Ballinger hadn't caught up with her. She had located our pickpocket and was running him down.

  Little Joe was still looking at me. "I saved the best until last, Mike," he said. "The name he really goes by is

  Beaver. Like a nickname. He was in Len Parrott's saloon when Len heard two guys ask about him. This guy drops his drink fast and gets out. They were asking about a red vest too and the guy had one on." A frown drew his eyebrows together. "They was Woody Ballinger's boys, Mike."

  I said, "Damn" softly.

  "The bartender didn't tell them nothing, though."

  I let a five-spot fall into Little Joe's box. "I appreciate it, buddy. You get anything else, call Pat Chambers. Remember him?"

  "Captain Pat? Sure, how could I ever forget him? He shot the guy who blew my legs off with that shotgun fifteen years ago."

  If you can't find them, then let them find you. The word was out now in all the right places. It would travel fast and far and someplace a decision would have to be made. I was on a hunt for Sammy and Carl to throw a bullet through their guts and do the explaining afterward. They'd start to sweat because there was plenty of precedent to go by. I had put too many punks they knew under a gun for them to think I wouldn't do it and the only way to stop it would be to get me first. They were the new cool breed, smart, polished and deadly, so full of confidence that they had a tendency to forget that there were others who could play the game even better. Who was it that said, "Don't mess around with the old pros"?

  I finished straightening up the wreckage in the office, pulled a beer out of the cooler and sat down to enjoy it. From the street I could hear the taxis hooting and thought about Velda. She was a pro too and it would take a pretty sharp article to top her. She knew the streets and she knew the people. She wasn't about to expose herself and blow the whole job no matter how far into it she had gotten. If the chips went down, she'd have that little rod in her hand, make herself a lousy target and take somebody down too. At least in New York you heard about shootings.