Gatekeeper

Chapter 18

Sammie kept trying to concentrate. She knew she'd heard something important while talking with Ralph Meiner, but she couldn't get hold of it. Instead, she was distracted by everything she saw passing by the windows of her car-lights, trees, endless rows of buildings. Although slightly blurred and a little stuttery, as in an old silent movie, it all took on an intensity, a beauty, and a mysterious serenity that she'd never before noticed. She found herself unexpectedly walking across a broad stretch of park, out of the car, not remembering having left it, totally attuned to the smells and sensations around her. She felt happy, even euphoric, tingling with sensuality. She dropped to her knees and and placed her hands on the ground, curling her fingers through the grass as if it were a lover's hair, grinding her teeth with the passion, before finally stretching out to feel the resonance of the earth against her body. In an unexpected shift, however, that same sensation led her back in time to when, as a child, she'd press her ear against a wall to distinguish the muted murmurings on the other side. Now, as back then, she was confronted with messages she couldn't decipher-except that this time it was a dilemma she found pleasantly seductive, even sexually stimulating.

By the time the effects of the Ecstasy wore off, she was tired, dirty, disoriented, and let down. It was late and dark, and it took her half an hour to locate her car at the park's edge. As for the overall experience, she was caught between worrying about any long-range consequences and the strong, lingering memory of having tasted something unimaginably appealing. She realized with a shock that had she been on the drug the night before, when standing so close to Manuel in the basement, she wouldn't have hesitated entering his embrace-a thought that troubled her beyond anything else.

* * *

"I was stupid."

Joe reached out and took Gail's hand in his own. "You were trying to make amends for something you shouldn't have felt guilty about in the first place. It still doesn't mean it wasn't worth the attempt."

"She took me for a patsy, and she was right. I played right into it."

"I'm glad you didn't shoot her boyfriend," he said, half as an aside.

Gail thought about that for a couple of beats. "I didn't even see him. All I saw was the other guy's face."

The other guy-to Joe's knowledge, she hadn't spoken her rapist's actual name in years.

"But you stayed in control. You did what you thought was right, realized you were being had, and you corrected the situation. Take that for what it is, Gail. You were not stupid."

She smiled thinly. They were in her living room, her more pawnable possessions still gathered near the double doors where either Debbie and Nelson had piled them up or the cops had placed them after cataloging and removing them from Nelson's rust bucket of a van.

"You say the nicest things," she said with irony. "I just wish it made me feel better."

"How's Laurie doing?" he asked.

"The same. I called Rachel a while ago." She'd been staring at the floor but now fixed him with a direct look. "Joe, I'm sorry I shut you out."

"You had a lot on your mind."

She shook her head. "I'm not sure I did. I think I had only one thing on my mind-to turn back the clock somehow. You know, the funny thing is that I never much liked Laurie. The little time I spent with her, all she did was complain about her life, which for my money was pampered and privileged and overindulged. And yet she whined about how bored she was and how terrible her parents were. I didn't know what she was doing in Brattleboro because I took no interest. I had a Post-it note on my computer-'call Laurie.' I saw it every day until I finally threw it out. Never called her once."

"You think anything would've changed if you had?" he asked gently.

He gave her credit. Someone else might have flared at that. Gail merely nodded acceptingly. "Probably not. I still wouldn't have liked her. And she never saw me as anything other than her mother's sister, anyhow."

"That may not be true," he countered. "She ever say that?"

"No," she admitted. "We never had that long a conversation."

Joe sensed they were past the worst of Gail's self-recrimination, certainly far enough for him to ask, "So why did you go after Debbie so hard, if Laurie meant that little?"

He'd overplayed his hand a bit. She looked at him sharply. "We didn't have much in common-but I still loved her. Love her."

But he didn't back down. The question floated between them.

"All right," she conceded. "I've been feeling out of sorts lately. Not sure that what I'm doing is what I really want out of life. It's thrown me off and made me doubt a lot of things-my job, my goals, even the two of us sometimes."

"Oh?"

Her hand remained in his but lay there unmoving. "Well, not that much, but still. . Somehow, seeing Laurie in the hospital kind of pulled the rug out from under me. It wasn't just that I felt guilty. It was also the waste of it all-the stupidity. I mean, what the hell is going on? It's crazy. Laurie from the lap of luxury; Debbie from a home not fit for a dog. And they end up in the same jam. Nobody's doing enough, Joe. This war on drugs is a total crock."

He kept silent. They didn't discuss politics much. Too many potential land mines. But he had his own reasons for agreeing with what she'd said. Virtually every drug cop he knew only worked the assignment for the juice or the promotion potential connected to it-not because any of them believed it would actually make a difference. Being a drug cop was a feather in one's professional cap, a chance to get out of the spit and polish, and allowed for an occasional stretching of the rules unavailable elsewhere on the job.

He was considering how to respond when she continued on her own. "Of all the therapists and counselors I know who deal with this, there are some things they all seem to agree about. One is that this whole thing about kids getting into trouble because they're bored is baloney. Kids have more available to them than ever before. So, I have some serious doubts about skateboard parks and more rec centers being the solution. And another thing is that with a huge percentage of young substance abusers, there's always a parental figure who sets the course-teenage drinkers and druggers are the children of drinkers and druggers. The numbers are like a neon sign. Getting more cops on the road and building more prison cells is not going to do one damn thing about that."

Gunther nodded sympathetically. Again, he didn't disagree with her. He'd seen the stats himself. But he was as shy about cutting back on law enforcement as he was about turning the country into a military state. Joe tended to the middle ground on topics like this, which generally meant he kept his mouth shut-a habit he'd learned after being hammered from both sides in the past, and something he shared with a great many police officers.

"We need to go deeper," she was saying as if he were no longer in the room. "We need for our leaders to stop going for the headline and the next vote and take responsibility for the future-to start acting not for themselves, but for future generations. Right now they all talk that line, but they do jack shit to back it up-all this 'three strikes and you're out' crap isn't doing fuck-all."

He laughed gently at that. "It was a perfect election speech till that last line. Is that where you're headed?"

She blinked and focused on him. "It's crossed my mind," she admitted slowly.

"For what office?"

She got up and walked to the double doors to gaze out upon the moonlit lawn, its canvas of lush green grass and verdant trees rendered a deep blue-gray in the lunar glow. Without actually seeing them, she watched the feeble flickerings of a few lightning bugs pirouetting in the near-darkness.

"I haven't decided yet, but I think it's time."

He rolled that over in his mind. She was an ambitious woman, and one used to success. He had no doubt she'd follow through on this. What he was less sure about was how it might affect them. But he took a more roundabout way to broach the subject.

"Gail, this thing with Debbie. I mean, I understand what you just said. To be honest, it's kind of surprised me you haven't run for office before-except for the selectboard, of course-so you know I wish you the best. But I just want to make sure that what happened here"-he waved his hand toward the pile of possessions by the door-"isn't left behind in the process. This was serious. You were hit pretty hard. And it had nothing to do with the fate of your youth or the merits of 'three strikes and you're out.'"

She turned back from the night and faced him, her expression cast in shadow from the lamplight directly beside her. "I'm not so sure," she answered quietly, thoughtfully. "After I was raped, I didn't know what might happen to me. Intellectually, I knew what to expect, and I had you and my friends and my family backing me up. I had things to occupy my brain-going back to law school, becoming a prosecutor for a while, then the lobbying job. On the outside, I knew I was doing okay-even better than okay. The paranoia lessened, my uneasiness being around men."

She moved to a straight-back chair by the wall and sat on its edge, her hands in her lap. "But on the inside-deep inside-I still had that fear, you know? Not just that some man might try again, but a larger fear about what I had left to deal with. You know what they say about the foundation of the Brooklyn Bridge?"

"No," he answered.

"That while the original plan was to dig deep enough to put the footings on granite bedrock, deep underwater, they could never reach it, so they finally gave up. The whole bridge sits on sand-all these years later."

"And you're feeling the same way?"

She leaned forward, her elbows on her knees. "I don't know anymore. I did when I was dealing with Debbie and fighting with my sister-I wondered if I was losing it all over again. But in the end-when that little twerp started waving that knife around in front of me-I suddenly found a chance to test myself. And when I shoved that gun up his nose and knocked him on his ass, all I felt was determination. It was like a rebirth in a flash of light. I know you try to stick to the realities you can hold in your hand, Joe, but this was almost that real to me. There was an element to it of being given a second chance."

"Is that why you let Debbie go before you called 911?"

She rose and crossed over to sit next to him on the couch again. "I know. Probably still makes me look like a patsy to you."

"Maybe a little," he answered truthfully.

"But she wasn't the one responsible anymore. She may have even cooked up the idea to rip me off, but he was the ghost I needed to defeat. Involving her felt like missing the point. I'll deal with her later if I feel like it, or maybe he'll rat her out and I'll have to admit what I did, but that's a trade-off I can live with. Does any of that make sense?"

"Sure it does," he said supportively and kissed her. But in the back of his mind, he still wondered where it might lead.

* * *

Sam pulled into the driveway and killed the engine, still feeling the aftereffects of the drug Ralph Meiner had given her. More lucid now, she actually had no idea if it had been Ecstasy or something else, since her experience in that line had been purely academic until now. The real source of interest to her, however, was how enjoyable it had been. All her professional life, she'd viewed dopers as weak-minded losers, hell-bent on escaping reality. She was not disposed to change this view, of course, but she was surprised at herself for not having realized that part of a drug's attraction might be the pleasure it offered. It was a revelation so simple, she felt stupid even thinking of it.

The saving grace was that this discovery carried no yearning for a second exposure. Sam's nature was nothing if not self-denying, at least when it came to pleasant indulgences, and she was already looking back at this epiphany with a stern distaste.

She sat in the car and watched the house for a while, seeing shadows playing across the drawn shades as Manuel conducted business with Peter Bullis's crew of slowly escalating CIs and undercover cops, all posing as word-of-mouth, walk-in customers.

It was an odd moment for her, especially given what she'd just gone through. Sitting in this car, those memories still as fresh as the dried sweat on her skin, and thinking of Manuel doing business under a battery of hidden cameras, she felt a lack of definition-half crook and half cop-and couldn't help but link it to her life as a whole. Because for Sam, almost everything about her felt in limbo. She was no longer a kid, but still couldn't compare to an adult like her mentor, Joe Gunther. She was no longer a municipal cop, but part of an elite unit that still had to negotiate its way into almost every investigation. And she wasn't single, in the sense of being alone, but was involved with a maniac and now felt drawn to a criminal.

The whole package made her feel as if where she'd come from was long gone, and where she was headed was out of reach.

In that way, if in no other, she had to envy Greta Novak.

She left the car after seeing the two buyers slip out of the house and disappear into the bushes lining the driveway. She walked up to the front door, rang the bell in the coded tattoo that she and Manuel had agreed upon, and then used her key in the lock.

As she closed the door behind her, she more sensed than saw Manuel standing just around the corner, watchful and waiting.

"Honey, I'm home," she announced to the empty entry-way.

He appeared silently, tucking a pistol away under his shirt, a smile on his face. "Yes, darling. And supper's almost ready." His eyes narrowed as he took her in more fully. "What happened to you? You okay?"

She was struck by the genuine concern in his voice. "Yeah. Long story with no damage. I just fell down and got messed up. Hooked an ally, though. At least I think so. If I play him a little more, it might mean a big jump in business."

But he didn't seem to be listening. He'd approached her and now cupped her chin in his hand, raising her face to the light to better see it. "You been doing more than falling down."

She gently removed his hand. "I had to do some dope with him to prove I wasn't a cop. It was a bit of the bad old days I could've lived without."

"What'd he give you?"

"Said it was Ecstasy, but who knows? Anyhow, it made him happy and I'm okay. Might've been worse with coke-that's where I had a problem. We have any beer?"

They went to the kitchen together, where, to her surprise, dinner was in fact simmering on the stove, something in a pot that smelled very rich and very good. When on her own, Sam subsisted on any variety of boring food, so long as it came in either a can or a box, but she had to admit she'd always been fond of home-cooked meals.

"Wow. That looks delicious," she said, glancing at the stove while removing a beer from the fridge.

"Garbanzos con chorizos," he said. "Nothing fancy. Beans and sausage, with attitude. Should be ready in another half hour."

She opened the bottle and took a deep swallow, enjoying the cold beer washing straight down into her stomach. She wiped her lips with her wrist and sighed. "That and a hot shower and I'll be ready to eat like a horse."

"Take your time," he said, picking up a long spoon with which to stir the pot.

She went upstairs, taking the beer with her, pondering the domesticity of it all. Narcotics and home cooking-American capitalism, alive and well. Was this what advocates of legalized drug dealing saw as the future? And who on which side of the debate was under the biggest delusion? The futility of it all made her happy she was just a line soldier, following orders-and all the more eager for that soul-cleansing shower.

* * *

After dinner, already late in the evening, Sam and Manuel prepared for the high-volume part of the day, a standard in a business that tended toward the nocturnal. While he got ready to sell his assortment, she, refreshed and fed, set out to duplicate her earlier visit to Ralph by tracking down Stuey Nichols, from George Backer's list, someone Ralph clearly considered a competitor.

Nichols lived in a section of Rutland nicknamed the Gut. In the industrial days of seventy-five years earlier, the Gut was an ethnic, working-class neighborhood, initially made up of Italians, Irish, and others, but finally consisting of Italians overall, after the Irish contingent had pulled up stakes and moved elsewhere in town. The handle is actually a misnomer, since it conjures up images of Upton Sinclair's steaming, fetid slaughterhouses of old Chicago. In fact, although the Gut is located on the far side of the railroad tracks, it is a bland residential area of neat, straight avenues, old, expansive trees, and weathered, modest homes so small and so lacking in traditional New England detail that the neighborhood is also known, if less generally, as Nebraska.

It is a poor section-and host to a large affordable housing complex-but again not as crime-infested as the name implies. For that matter, when the hunt was on to find a suitable location for Sam and Manuel, the logic was to go where some of the city's bigger flare-ups with bikers and gangs had already occurred. That turned out to be north of the Gut's upper boundary of West Street, around Baxter and Maple.

That having been said, however, when Sam found out where Stuey lived, it didn't come as a surprise. Hard times had visited Rutland for long enough that only a few neighborhoods remained immune from Stuey's form of self-employment, and the Gut was certainly not among them. In fact, one of the latest of Rutland's heroin overdoses had occurred right here.

She found the house with relative ease off of South Street, surrounded by darkness and quiet. At this time of night, the rest of Rutland, with its traffic and bright lights, seemed very far away.

Stu Nichols was clearly not into home maintenance. By the feeble glow of a distant streetlamp, Sam picked her way carefully through an odd and inexplicable assortment of holes, cinder blocks, and heaved-up chunks of stony earth, along with a scattering of seriously used children's toys.

The house itself looked perfectly suited to its battlefield yard.

Sam made it to the weather-beaten front porch, illuminated by a harsh yellow bulb hanging overhead from a wire, a corona of interested night bugs circling its orbit in tight, continuous flight. The front door was wide open, and she could see through the screen door a living room rigged like a stage set for a war movie. Seeing no buzzer and hearing children crying and adults shouting somewhere in the back, she pounded on the door frame hard enough to break it.

"Who the fuck's that?" an angry male voice demanded.

"Greta Novak," she shouted, figuring the female voice alone would draw him out.

She wasn't wrong. A skinny, balding man in his forties stumbled into the room, squinting to see through the screening. "Who're you?" he asked, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand, no doubt to make himself doubly attractive.

"Are you Stuey Nichols?"

"That any of your business?"

"I'm a friend of Jimmy Hollowell's, picking up where he left off," she said. "I thought we should maybe talk, since Ralph Meiner called you a pissant when I told him that you and I combined could put him out of business."

Nichols straightened. "He called me a pissant? That little prick?"

There was an outburst of renewed crying from inside the house. Nichols swore, turned on his heel, and vanished from view Moments later, Sam heard him screaming obscenities at the top of his lungs, the slamming of a door, and then silence.

Stuey reappeared, showing his yellow teeth in a welcoming smile. "Come on in, lady," he said, swinging open the door on squealing hinges. "What'd you say your name was?"

"Greta Novak."

He stared at her in surprise, studying her face as if she'd sprouted a horn. "No shit," he said after a pause. "You a foreigner?"

"My parents saw too many old movies."

He gave her a blank expression. "Right. You want a drink?"

Sam stood in the middle of the room, wondering if anything might jump out and bite her ankle. "I'm all set. You got a lot of kids?"

He spat on the floor, to little effect. "Little bastards. You can have 'em if you want. I'll even wrap 'em up. So you're next in line to Jimmy, huh? That mean you're gonna get strung up, too?" He laughed uproariously before turning on his heel and beckoning to her to follow him. "Let's go to my office if we're gonna talk business."

She picked her way through the debris, noticing the smell of diapers and rotting food increasing the deeper she entered the building, making her feel she was progressing through the innards of some beast. Stuey Nichols turned left down a short hallway, proceeded through a door at its end, and stopped to usher her through before closing it behind her.

"Have a chair," he offered, pointing to a half-deflated beanbag propped against the wall.

She glanced around for something a little less absorbing. "That's okay."

He looked offended. "What? Not cushy enough? You don't want to catch somethin'? Nice start. You came to me, lady. I'm being polite here. Don't need to put on airs."

Sam shook her head and sat-actually half collapsed-into the low-slung beanbag, feeling like her butt had just been grabbed by mud. "Jesus, Stuey Don't make a federal case out of it, okay?"

Nichols himself perched on the edge of a debris-strewn table nearby, one leg up, the other still planted on the floor, all offense vaporized. "How'd you know Jimmy?"

"An ex-boyfriend and him were friends."

"Long time ago?"

She tilted her head slightly, looking up at him. "This twenty questions time?"

"Yeah. You got a problem with that?"

"No. About four years."

"Where?"

"Where what?" she asked. "Where did I meet Jimmy? Springfield. We were living there then. He came by to sell some stuff to the boyfriend."

"What was the boyfriend's name?"

"You wouldn't know. He was a flatlander-bum-jerk-off named Nicky Meadows. We split up and he went back to New York."

"How'd you meet him?"

"Nicky? What do you care?"

"Humor me," Nichols persisted.

"I work winters at Tucker Peak. You meet a lot of people in a place like that."

Stuey laughed. "And do a lot of dope. That what wet your whistle to get into the business?"

"That's where it started, yeah."

"So how'd you make the leap from meeting Jimmy to taking over after he got whacked? That's a big gap."

"Jimmy worked for Rivera. Now I do."

Stuey shook his head as if confused. "Rivera. . Johnny Rivera? He's a Holyoke nobody."

"He took over Torres's Vermont run."

"You hook up with him through Jimmy?"

Sam had hoped to avoid this part. "No. Bill Dancer from Bratt led me to Torres. That's how we found out about Rivera. Just my luck we walked in right after Jimmy died."

Stuey smiled sympathetically. "No shit. You sound like one lucky girl. A lot luckier than Dancer, from what I heard."

He held her gaze a little longer than was comfortable. Sam became even more aware of being wrapped in Styro-foam beams. "That supposed to mean something?"

He slid off the table and pretended to stretch, exposing his pale, soft, hairy stomach. "Well, you know. . the boyfriend disappears where no one will find him, Jimmy dies right on cue, Dancer gets busted as soon as you meet Rivera. Almost too good to be true."

He lowered his arms, shifted his feet slightly, and stood facing her silently like a boxer, ready to start. Sam knew not only that she was in trouble but that she'd been there from the start. The beanbag was a trap. If she'd had a gun, she couldn't have reached it, and in any case, she was hard-pressed to move without real effort.

Nothing left to lose.

She pitched violently to her left, spilling out of the bag and scrambling to gain her footing. Simultaneously, Stuey Nichols snatched a baseball bat off the table beside him, swung neatly around on his heel in a windup, and came up like a golfer, hitting her in the upswing, right across the abdomen as she was still on all fours. The blow lifted her off the floor and sent her rolling against the wall, doubled over with pain.

She opened her eyes just enough to see him standing over her, the smile gone and the bat held ready. "Who do you think you're shitting, lady? Think I'm a fucking moron? You're a Brattleboro cop. I know you. You busted me five years ago, for Christ's sake. You must take me for a fucking idiot."

"I do," said a male voice behind him.

Nichols swung around. Sam saw Willy Kunkle smack the other man across the head with a heavy metal flashlight, dropping him like a cement bag at Sam's feet.

Willy knelt down next to her. "You okay?"

"Don't know yet," she said weakly. "He dead?"

Willy barely glanced at Nichols. "He's breathing. What the hell were you thinking? That he wouldn't recognize you?"

She rolled her eyes. "I didn't recognize him, for crying out loud. How did you know?"

He smiled slightly. "I been tailing you, just in case. Soon as I saw him through the screen door, I pegged him. I just couldn't figure out what your plan was. Pretty clever, getting yourself almost killed. Good way to gain his confidence."

"Up yours."

Willy sat back on his heels. "You must be feeling better. You want to try moving?"

He held out his hand to help her. Slowly, she straightened her legs, getting her stomach to relax, and palpated her abdomen. Other than feeling tender and nauseous, however, she sensed nothing vital was broken. Slowly, groaning with discomfort, she rolled onto her knees and used the wall to help her stand, Willy's strong right hand on her elbow for support.

She stood there a moment, the room spinning around, her throat constricted and her stomach in turmoil.

"You gonna puke?" Willy asked, the sensitive nursemaid.

She spoke through clenched teeth. "If I do, I'll make sure I hit you."

He didn't laugh as he might have normally, but steered her over to a nearby legitimate chair. "Sit. Looks like you'll live."

He returned to Nichols and checked his pulse. Apparently satisfied, he glanced down the hallway to make sure it was still empty and then sat on a small side table opposite Sam. "So what the hell went wrong?"

She gave him an exasperated glare. "I don't have your encyclopedia brain, Sherlock. Nothing triggered when I saw him."

Willy shook his head. "Well," he conceded, "he used to have a lot of hair and a mustache. Still. . What about our flawless boss? Didn't he tell you the guy had a Brattleboro rap sheet? That might've been vaguely helpful."

Given all that Gunther had done over the years to ensure Willy's employment as a cop, Sam could never believe the latter's constant lack of gratitude. "Give it a rest. It was a screwup. Everyone survived."

"This time," Willy said disgustedly and stood up again. He began looking around the room. "But I knew this would happen. This whole thing's been half-cocked from the start. He never should've okayed it."

"I forced him to. I'd already signed on with Rivera before I told him."

He turned to face her. "That's not how it works, and you know it, Sam. He's the top guy. He calls the shots. He was playing politics and you were helping him. That's not police work. It's. . I don't know. . bullshit."

She watched his face, its intensity showing more concern than anger, and she realized once more how oblique he could be in showing affection. Christ almighty-she could pick them.

"What do we do now?" she asked, to change the subject. "This jerk's punching-bag girlfriend isn't going to stay in her corner forever."

Willy was back in motion, poking around, searching for something. "Yeah, yeah. I'm working on that."

He finally lifted up a pale blue baggie, filled with the familiar dusting of white powder. "Bingo. Okay. You call your pals on the task force, tell 'em you got burned and you need a cover team to pretend to bust this guy for this." He waved the baggie back and forth. "That'll legitimize their crashing in here and tossing the place and making it look good for tomorrow's paper. After that, they can put him under guard in the hospital or shoot him in the head. Anywhere he can't flap his gums."

He handed her his cell phone so she could make the call.

But Sam was looking at the baggie in his hand, the memory of what she'd been trying to recall earlier, just before the Ecstasy took over, coming back to her.

"That's Torres's stuff," she said.

Willy glanced at it. "So?"

"I saw his lieutenant packing it when I was in Holyoke. Same pale blue baggies. It's a signature, like the panther stamp Rivera uses on his. You ever see any like that before?"

"No. Maybe he just got a good deal on them."

"Maybe, but Rivera's supposed to have taken over the run. And, like I said, he uses regular bags and his own stamp."

"Yeah, but he took over just recently, right?" Willy countered. "Couldn't this be a leftover from the Torres days?"

Sam wasn't convinced. Something wasn't right.

Stuey Nichols let out a small groan from the floor.

"Make the call, Sam. We gotta get going."