Special Operations

SEVEN

Peter Wohl glanced at the fuel gauge of the Ford LTD as he turned the ignition key off in the parking lot on Walnut Street near the DaVinci Restaurant. The needle was below E; he was running on the fumes. Since he had driven only from his apartment here, that meant that it had been below E when he had arrived home; andthat meant he had come damned close to running out of gas on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, or on the Schuylkill Expressway, which would have been a disaster. It would have given him the option of radioing for a police wrecker to bring him gas, which would have been embarrassing, or getting drowned in the torrential rain trying to walk to a gas station. Drowned and/or run over.

Periodically in his life, Wohl believed, he seemed to find himself walking along the edge of a steep cliff, acrumbling cliff, with disaster a half-step away. He was obviously in that condition now. The gas gauge seemed to prove that; and so did Naomi of the traveling husband and groping fingers. And, he decided, he probably wasn't going to like at all what Mike Sabara had on his mind.

He got out of the car, and locked it, aware that when he got back in it, the inside temperature would be sizzling; that he would sweat, and his now natty and freshly pressed suit would be mussed when he went to see Chief Coughlin. And he had a gut feeling that was going to be some sort of a disaster, too. It wasn't very likely that Coughlin was going to call him in on a day off to tell him what a splendid job he had been doing and why didn't he take some time off as a reward.

A quick glance around the parking lot told him that Sabara wasn't here yet. He would have spotted a marked Highway Patrol car immediately, and even if Sabara was in an unmarked car, he would have spotted the radio antenna and black-walled tires.

And, he thought, as he walked into the DaVinci, if what Coughlin was after was to hear how his current investigation was going, the reason he had been in Harrisburg, he wasn't going to come across as Sherlock Holmes, either. The only thing two days of rooting around in the Pennsylvania Department of Records had produced was a couple of leads that were weak at best and very probably would turn out to be worthless.

The DaVinci restaurant, named after the artist/inventor, not the proprietor, served very good food despite what Peter thought of as restaurant theatrics. As a general rule of thumb, he had found that restaurants that went out of their way to convert their space into something exotic generally served mediocre to terrible food. The DaVinci had gone a little overboard, he thought, trying to turn their space into rustic Italian. There were red checkered tablecloths; a lot of phony trellises; plastic grapes; and empty Chianti bottles with candles stuck in their necks. But the food was good, and the people who ran the place were very nice.

He asked for and got a table on the lower level, which gave him a view of both the upper level and the bar just inside the door. The waitress was a tall, pretty young brunette who looked as though she should be on a college campus. Then he remembered hearing that the waitresses in DaVinci's were aspiring actresses, hoping to meet theatrical people who came to Philly, and were supposed to patronize DaVinci's.

Her smile vanished when he ordered just coffee.

Or can she tell I'm not a movie producer?

When she delivered his coffee, he handed her a dollar and told her to keep the change. That didn't seem to change her attitude at all.

Mike Sabara came into the room a few minutes later, immediately after Peter had scalded his mouth on the lip of the coffee cup, which had apparently been delivered to his table fresh from the fires of hell.

Mike was in uniform, the crushed-crown cap and motorcyclist's breeches and puttees peculiar to Highway Patrol, worn with a Sam Browne belt festooned with a long line of cartridges and black leather accoutrements for the tools of a policeman's trade, flashlight, handcuffs, and so on. Mike was wearing an open-collared white shirt, with a captain's insignia, two parallel silver bars, on each collar point.

The Highway Patrol and its special uniform went back a long time, way before the Second World War. It had been organized as a traffic law enforcement force, as the name implied, and in the old days, it had been mounted almost entirely on motorcycles, hence the breeches and puttees and soft-crowned cap.

There were still a few motorcycles in Highway-from somewhere Wohl picked out the number twenty-four-but they were rarely used for anything but ceremonial purposes, or maybe crowd control at Mummers Parades. The Highway Patrol still patrolled the highways-the Schuylkill Expressway and Interstate 95-but the Patrol had evolved over the years, especially during the reign of Captain Jerry Carlucci, and even more during the reign of Mayor Carlucci, into sort of a special force that was dispatched to clean up high-crime areas.

Highway Patrol cars carried two officers, while all other Philadelphia police cars carried only one. Unless they had specific orders sending them somewhere else, Highway Patrol cars could patrol wherever, within reason, they liked, without regard to District boundaries. They regarded themselves, and were regarded by other policemen, as an elite force, and there was always a long waiting list of officers who had applied for transfer to Highway Patrol.

Anyone with serious ambitions to rise in the police hierarchy knew the path led through Highway Patrol. Wohl himself had been a Highway Patrol Corporal, and had liked the duty, although he had been wise enough to keep to himself his profound relief that his service in Highway had been after the motorcycles had been all but retired and he had rarely been required to get on one. Going through the "wheel training course," which he had considered necessary to avoid being thought of as less then wholly masculine, had convinced him that anybody who rode a motorcycle willingly, much less joyfully, had some screws in urgent need of tightening.

Wohl had several thoughts as he saw Mike Sabara walking across the room to him, wearing what for Sabara was a warm smile. He thought that Mike was not only an ugly sonofabitch but that he was menacing. Sabara's swarthy face was marked with the scars of what could have been small pox, but more probably were the remnants of adolescent acne. He wore an immaculately trimmed pencil-line mustache. If it was designed to take attention from his disfigured skin, Wohl thought, it had exactly the opposite effect.

He was a short, stocky, barrel-chested man, with an aggressive walk. He was also hairy. Thick black hair showed at the open collar of his shirt and covered his exposed arms.

All of these outward things, Wohl knew, were misleading. Mike Sabara was an extraordinarily gentle man, father of a large brood of wellcared-for kids. He was a Lebanese, and active-he actually taught Sunday School-in some kind of Orthodox Church. Wohl had seen him crying at Dutch Moffitt's funeral, the tears running unashamedly down his cheeks as he carried Dutch to his grave.

Sabara put out his large hand as he slipped into the seat across from Wohl. His grip was firm, but not a demonstration of all the strength his hand possessed.

"I appreciate you meeting me like this, Inspector," Sabara said.

"I know why you're calling me 'Inspector,' Mike," Wohl said, smiling, "so I'll have to reply, 'My pleasure,Captain Sabara.' Congratulations, Mike, it's well deserved, and how come I wasn't invited to your promotion party?"

Wohl immediately sensed that what he had intended as humor had fallen flat. Sabara gave him a confused, even wary, look.

"The Commissioner called me at home last night," Sabara said. "He said to come to work today wearing captain's bars."

Which you just happened to have lying around,Wohl thought, and was immediately ashamed of the unkind thought. He himself had bought a set of lieutenant's bars the day the examination scores had come out, even though he had known it would be long months before the promotion actually came through.

"So it's official then?" Wohl said. "Well, congratulations. I can't think of anybody better qualified."

Wohl saw that, too, produced a reaction in Sabara different from what he expected. More confusion, more wariness.

The waitress reappeared.

"Get you something?"

"Iced tea, please," Captain Sabara said. The waitress looked at him strangely. Sabara, Wohl thought, was not the iced tea type.

"Can I get right to it, Inspector?" Sabara asked, when the waitress had left.

"Sure."

"If it's at all possible," Sabara said, "I'd like Highway Patrol."

Sabara had, Wohl sensed, rehearsed that simple statement.

"I'm not sure what you mean, Mike."

"I mean, I'd really like to take over Highway," Sabara said, and there was more uncertainty in his eyes. "I mean, Christ, no one knows it better than I do. And I know I could do a good job."

What the hell is he driving at?

"You want me to put in a good word for you? Is that it, Mike? Sure. You tell me to who, and I'll do it."

There was a pause before Sabara replied. "You don't know, do you?" he said, finally.

"Know what?"

"About Highway and Special Operations."

"No," Wohl said, and searched his memory. "The last I heard about Special Operations was that it was an idea whose time had not yet come."

"It's time has come," Sabara said, "and Highway's going under it."

"And who's getting Special Operations?"

"You are," Sabara said.

Jesus H. Christ!

"Where did you get that?" Wohl asked.

Sabara looked uncomfortable.

"I heard," he said.

"I'd check out that source pretty carefully, Mike," Wohl said. "This is the first I've heard anything like that."

"You're getting Special Operations and David Pekach is getting Highway," Sabara said. "I thought Pekach was your idea, and maybe I could talk you out of it."

"Did your source say what's in mind for you?" Wohl asked.

"Your deputy."

"Where the hell did you get this?"

"I can't tell you," Sabara said. "But I believe it."

And now I'm beginning to. Sabara has heard something he believes. Jesus, is this why Chief Coughlin sent for me?

Why me?

"I'm beginning to," Wohl said. "Chief Coughlin wants to see me at half-past three. Maybe this is why."

"Now I'm on the spot," Sabara said. "I'd appreciate it if you didn' t-"

"Tell him we talked? No, of course not, Mike. And I really hope you' re wrong."

From the look in Sabara's eyes, Wohl could tell he didn't think there was much chance he was wrong. That meant his source was as good as he said it was. And that meant it had come from way up high in the police department hierarchy, a Chief Inspector, or more likely one of the Deputy Commissioners.

Someone important, who didn't like the idea of Special Operations, of Peter Wohl being given command of Special Operations, of David Pekach being given command of Highway over Mike Sabara. Or all of the above.

"Peter," Mike Sabara said. It was the first time he had used Wohl's Christian name. "You understand… there's nothing personal in this? You're a hell of a good cop. I'd be happy to work for you anywhere. But-"

"You think you're the man to run Highway?" Wohl interrupted him. " Hell, Mike, so do I. And I don't think I'm the man to run Special Operations. I don't even know what the hell it's supposed to do."

There was something about Police Recruit Matthew M. Payne that Sergeant Richard B. Stennis, Firearms Instructor and Assistant Range Officer of the Police Academy of the City of Philadelphia, did not like, although he could not precisely pin it down.

He knew when it had begun, virtually the first time he had ever laid eyes on Payne. Dick Stennis, whose philosophyvis-a-vis firearms, police or anyone else's, was"You never need a gun until you need one badly," took his responsibility to teach rookies about firearms very seriously.

Sergeant Stennis-a stocky, but not fat, balding man of forty-was aware that statistically the odds were about twenty to one that his current class of rookies would go through their entire careers without once having drawn and fired their service weapon in the line of duty. He suspected that, the way things were going, the odds might change a little, maybe down to ten to one that these kids would never have to use their service revolvers; but the flip side of even those percentages was that one in ten of themwould have to use a gun in a situation where his life, or the life of another police officer, or a civilian, would depend on how well he could use it.

Some of Dick Stennis's attitude toward firearms came, and he was aware of this, from the United States Marine Corps. Like many police officers, Stennis had come to the department after a tour in the military. He had enlisted in the Corps at eighteen, a week after graduating from Frankford High School in June of 1950. He had arrived in Korea just in time to miss the Inchon Invasion, but in plenty of time to make the Bug Out from the Yalu and the withdrawal from Hamhung on Christmas Eve of the same year.

He was back from Korea in less than a year, wearing corporal's chevrons and a Silver Star and two Purple Hearts, the reason for the second of which had kept him in the Philadelphia Navy Hospital for four months. When he was restored to duty, the Corps sent him back to Parris Island, and made him a firearms instructor, which was something, but not entirely, like being a drill instructor.

When his three-year enlistment was over and he went back to Philadelphia, he joined the Police Department. Two years after that, about the time he was assigned to the Police Academy, he had gotten married and joined the Marine Corps Reserve because he needed the money.

One weekend a month and two weeks each summer Sergeant Stennis of the Police Department became Master Gunnery Sergeant Stennis of the United States Marine Corps Reserve. He had been called up for the Vietnam War, fully expecting to be sent to Southeast Asia, but the Corps, reasoning that a Philadelphia cop called up from the Reserve was just the guy to fill the billet of Noncommissioned Officer in Charge of the Armed Forces Military Police Detachment in Philadelphia, had sent him back to Philly two weeks after he reported in at Camp LeJeune.

Practically, it had been a good deal. He had done his two years of active duty living at home. The Marine Corps had paid him an allowance in lieu of rations, and an allowance, in lieu of housing, that was greater than the mortgage payment on his house on Leonard Street in Mayfair. And he had been building double-time. His seniority with the Police Department had continued to build while he was "off" in the Corps, and he had added two years of active duty time to his Marine Corps longevity. When he turned sixty, there would be a pension check from the Corps to go with his police pension and, when he turned sixty-five, his Social Security.

When he went on inactive duty again, the Corps gave him a Reserve billet with the Navy Yard, as an investigator on the staff of the Provost Marshal. He generally managed to pick up two or three days of "active duty" a month, sometimes more, in addition to the one weekend, which meant that much more in his Reserve paycheck every three months. It also meant that his Corps pension, when he got to it, would be that much larger.

It was a pretty good deal, he had reminded himself, when he had failed the Police Department's Lieutenant's examination for the second time. If he had passed it, there was no telling where the Department would have assigned him, but it would have meant leaving the Academy, which he liked, and almost certainly would have kept him from picking up an extra two or three days Master Gunnery Sergeant's pay and allowances every month. The Academy had an eight-to-five, Mondaythrough-Friday work schedule. As a new Lieutenant, he could have expected to work nights and weekends.

And he liked what he was doing, and thought it was important. Sometimes, Dick Stennis thought, very privately, that if his supervision of the firearms instruction at the Police Academy kept just one cop,or just one civilian, alive, it was worth being thought of by one class of rookies after another as "that bald-headed prick."

The first time Police Recruit Matthew M. Payne had come to the attention of Sergeant Richard Stennis was during the lecture Sergeant Stennis customarily delivered to the class as the first step in the firearms phase of their training. Sergeant Stennis believed, not unreasonably, that over the years he had been able to hone and polish his introductory lecture to the point where it was both meaningful and interesting.

Police Recruit Matthew M. Payne apparently was not so affected. The first time Stennis saw Payne, who was sitting toward the rear of the classroom, he was yawning. He wasreally yawning, holding a balled fist to his widely gaping mouth.

Sergeant Stennis had stopped in midsentence, and pointed a finger at him.

"You!" he said sharply, to get his attention. "What's your name?"

Payne had looked uncomfortable. "Payne, sir."

"Perhaps it would be easier for you to stay awake if you stood up."

Payne had jumped to his feet and assumed what is known in the military as the position of "parade rest," that is, he stood stiffly, with his feet slightly apart, and his hands folded neatly in the small of his back, staring straight ahead.

That little fucker is making fun of me,Stennis decided, and then modified that slightly. Payne was not alittle fucker. He was probably six feet one, Stennis judged, maybe a little over that. And he was well set up, a muscular, good-looking young man.

Well, fuck you, sonny. I've been dealing with wiseasses like you all my life. You want to stand there at parade rest, fine. You 'II stand there until this class is over.

And Police Recruit Matthew M. Payne had done just that, for the remaining forty, forty-five minutes of the class, which served to give Sergeant Stennis some food for thought. That was the sort of thing a serviceman would do. Perhaps he had jumped the kid a little too hard.

When he checked Payne's records, however, he found no indication that Payne had ever worn any uniform but the one he was wearing now; he was not an ex-serviceman. His records indicated further that Matthew M. Payne had just graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, Bachelor of Arts,cum laude.

That was unusual. Very few college graduates took the Civil Service exam for the Police Department. The starting pay for a rookie policeman was low (in Dick Stennis's opinion, a disgrace) and a college degree was worth more money almost anyplace else.

Making an effort not to make a big deal of it, he asked other instructors what they thought of Payne. The responses had been either a shrug, meaning that they hadn't formed an opinion of him one way or another, or that he was just one more recruit, except for a few instructors who replied that he seemed smart. Not smartass, but smart. Bright. Payne had apparently given no one else any trouble; if he had, Stennis would have heard.

The first day of actual firing on the Police Academy Pistol Range was, Stennis had learned, most often one of shock, even humiliation for rookies. Very few recruits, excepting, of course, ex-servicemen, had much experience with any kind of firearm, and even less with handguns.

What they knew of pistols most often came from what they had seen in the movies and on TV, where Hollywood cops, firing snub-nosed revolvers, routinely shot bad guys between the eyes at fifty yards.

The targets on the Academy Pistol Range were life-sized silhouettes, with concentric "kill rings" numbered (K5, K4, and so on) for scoring. Ideally, all bullets would land in a K5 kill ring. The targets were set up for the recruit's first firing at fifteen yards. The weapon used was the standard service revolver, the Smith amp; Wesson Model 10 " Military amp; Police." It was a six-shot,.38 Special caliber, fixedsight weapon, which could be fired in either single action (the hammer was cocked, using the thumb, before the trigger was pulled) or double action (simply pulling the trigger would cock the hammer and then release it).

For their first live firing exercise, the recruits were instructed in the double-hand hold, and told to fire the weapon single action, that is by cocking the hammer before lining up the sights and pulling the trigger.

It seemed so easy when the recruits first took their positions.Anyone should be able to hit a man-sized target at that short range. You could practically reach out and touch the damned target. The result of this was that many, even most recruits, decided it would be safe to show off a little, and perhaps even earn a smile from Sergeant Stennis, by shooting the target in the head, a K5 kill ring.

The result of this, many times, was that there were no holes at all in the target, much less in the head, after the recruit had fired his first six rounds. Shooting a pistol is infinitely more difficult than it is made to appear in the movies.

Sergeant Stennis didn't mind that the first six rounds were normally a disaster for their firers. It humbled them; and humbled, they were that much easier to teach.

When Recruit Matthew M. Payne stepped to the firing line, Sergeant Stennis waited until he was in position, and then moved so that he was standing behind him. Payne did not look particularly uncomfortable when, on command, he looked at the revolver. He fed six cartridges into the cylinder without dropping any of them, which sometimes happened, and he closed the cylinder slowly and carefully.

Some recruits, even though cautioned not to do so, followed the practice of Hollywood cops by snapping the pistol sharply to the right, so that the cylinder slammed home by inertia. This practice, Stennis knew, soon threw the cylinder out of line with the barrel, and the pistol then required the services of a gunsmith.

Sergeant Stennis would not have been surprised if Recruit Payne had flipped the cylinder shut. Even when he didn't, he sensed that Payne was going to do something wiseass, like fire his six rounds at the silhouette's head, rather than at the torso of the target.

And when the command to fire was given, Payne did just that.

And hit the silhouette in the head, just above where the right eye would be.

Beginner's luck, Stennis decided.

Payne's second shot hit the silhouette in the upper center of the head, where the forehead would be.

I'll be damned!

Payne's third shot hit the target head where the nose would be; and so did the fourth. The fifth went a little wide, hitting the tip of the silhouette head, but still inside the K5 ring, which Payne made up for by hitting the silhouette head where the left eye would be with his sixth shot.

I really will be damned. That wasn't at all bad.

When the recruits went forward to examine their targets, and to put gummed pasters on the bullet holes, Sergeant Stennis followed Payne.

"Not bad at all," he said to Payne, startling him. "Where did you learn to shoot a pistol?"

"At Quantico," Payne replied. "The Marine base."

"I know what it is," Stennis said. "How come your records don't say anything about you being in the Corps?"

"I was never in the Corps," Payne replied. "I was in the Platoon Leader Program. I went there two summers."

"What happened?" Stennis asked. Payne understood, he saw, what he was really asking: If you were in the Platoon Leader Program, how come you 're here, and not a second lieutenant in the Corps?

"I busted the commissioning physical," Payne said.

"You tell them that when you joined the Department?" Stennis demanded, sharply.

"Yes, sir."

They locked eyes for a moment, long enough for Stennis to decide that Payne was telling the truth.

Is that why he came in? Stennis wondered. Because he flunked the Marine Corps physical, and wants to prove he's a man, anyway? Well, what the hell is wrong with that?

"Well, that was pretty good shooting," Stennis said.

"I could do better if the pistol had better sights," Payne said, adding, "and this could use a trigger job, too."

Stennis's anger returned.

"Well, Payne," he replied sarcastically, "I'm afraid you'll just have to learn to cope with what the Department thinks they should give you."

He turned and walked back to the firing line.

Almost immediately, he felt like a hypocrite. Wiseass or not, the kid was right. You couldn't get a very good sight picture with the standard service revolver. The front sight was simply a piece of rounded metal, part of the barrel. The rear sight was simply an indentation in the frame. Stennis's own revolver was equipped with adjustable sights-a sharply defined front sight, and a rear sight that was adjustable for both height and windage, with a sharply defined aperture. That, coupled with a carefully honed action, a "trigger job," which permitted a smooth "let off," resulted in a pistol capable of significantly greater accuracy than an off-the-shelf revolver.

And Stennis was suddenly very much aware that his personal pistol was not regulation, and that he got away with carrying it solely because no one in the Department was liable to carefully scrutinize the pistol carried by the Police Academy's Firearms Instructor.

When he reached the firing line, he was not especially surprised to see Chief Inspector Heinrich "Heine" Matdorf, Chief of the Training Bureaus, and thus sort of the headmaster of the Police Academy, standing at the end of the line, to the right, where a concrete pathway led to the main Police Academy Building.

Heine Matdorf, a large, portly, red-faced man who was nearly bald, believed in keeping an eye on what was going on. Stennis liked him, even if they could not be called friends. When Matdorf had come to the Training Bureau two years before, he had made everyone nervous by his unannounced visits to classrooms and training sites. He was taciturn, and his blue eyes seemed cold.

But they had quickly learned that he was not hypercritical, as prone to offer a word of approval as a word of criticism. The new broom had swept only those areas in need of it.

As was his custom, Stennis acknowledged the presence of Chief Matdorf with a nod, expecting a nod in return. But Matdorf surprised him by walking over to him.

"Chief," Stennis greeted him.

"That kid you were talking to, Payne?"

"Yes, sir."

"I want a word with him," Matdorf said. "Stick around."

"He put six shots into the head, first time up," Stennis offered.

Matdorf grunted again, but didn't otherwise respond.

Matthew Payne finished pasting his target and walked back to the firing line. Stennis saw in his eyes that he was curious, but not uneasy, to see Chief Matdorf standing there beside him.

"You know who I am?" Matdorf asked as Payne walked up.

"Yes, sir."

"We met at Captain Moffitt's wake," Chief Matdorf said. "Chief Coughlin introduced us."

"Yes, sir, I remember."

What the hell was this kid doing at Dutch Moffitt's wake? And Chief Coughlin introduced him to Matdorf?

"I just had a call from Chief Coughlin about you," Matdorf said.

"Yes, sir?"

"Turn in your gear," Matdorf said. "Clean out your locker. If anybody asks what you're doing, tell them 'just what I'm told.' At eightthirty tomorrow morning, report to Captain Sabara at Highway Patrol. You know where that is? Bustleton and Bowler?"

"I don't understand."

"I'm sure Captain Sabara will explain everything to you tomorrow morning," Matdorf said. "If I didn't make this clear, you won't be coming back here."

"And I'm to… clean out my locker right now?"

"That's right," Matdorf said. "And don't tell anybody where you're going."

"Yes, sir," Payne said. Stennis saw that he didn't like what he had been told, but was smart enough to sense that asking Chief Matdorf would be futile.

"So get on with it," Matdorf said.

"Yes, sir," Payne said. Then he picked up his earmuffs and other shooting equipment from the firing position and walked off the line.

"You don't say anything to anybody about him going to Highway, either, Dick," Matdorf said.

"No, sir," Stennis said.

"Curiosity about to eat you up?" Matdorf asked, flashing a rare, shy smile.

"Yes, sir."

"The reason he was at Dutch Moffitt's funeral was that Dutch was his uncle."

"I didn't know that."

"His father was a cop, too. Sergeant John X. Moffitt," Matdorf went on. "He got himself killed answering a silent burglar alarm in a gas station in West Philadelphia."

"I didn't know that, either. What are they going to do with him in Highway?" Stennis asked, and then, without giving Matdorf a chance to reply, went on, "How come his name is Payne?"

"His mother remarried; the new husband adopted him," Matdorf said. " And I don't know what they're going to do with him in Highway. This was one of those times when I didn't think I should ask too many questions."

"Coughlin set it up?" Stennis asked.

Matdorf nodded. "Chief Coughlin and the boy's father went through the Academy together. They were pretty tight. I know, because I was in the same class."

His face expressionless, Matdorf met Stennis's eyes for a long moment. Then he turned and walked off the firing line.