The Finder

11

"Yo, I'm Richie's cousin."

Too fast.

"Hey, guy, I'm Richie's cousin."

Better. Get that Brooklyn thing into the voice.

He was sitting in his truck down at the corner of Fourteenth Avenue and Eighty-sixth Street, pulled over by Dyker Beach Park, where he could see old Italian guys playing bocci, rolling the weighted balls along the packed-dirt alley. Lot of good times playing baseball in that park. Across the street was a deli that once been a joint called the 19th Hole, a notorious Mafia hangout. Dozens of murders had been ordered, planned, requested, or approved there by the Lucchese crime family. His father had once said to him that Ray was never to set foot in the 19th Hole under any circumstances, no matter how old and tough he thought he was, and if he knew anyone who frequented the place, Ray was to drop the acquaintance immediately. But now the Mafia was mostly broken up, scattered, on the run. So they said, anyway.

The city kept removing pay phones, but there was one outside the deli, he'd remembered. He didn't want to use the house phone, plus the sounds of the street would add authenticity. The phone was free. He jumped out of the truck, crossed Fourteenth Avenue, slipped in the quarters, dialed.

"Victorious," came a woman's voice.

"I'm trying to get in touch with Richie."

"He's not around."

"I kinda need to talk to him."

"Call him on the cell," she said.

"Don't got the number."

"Who is this?"

"Richie's cousin." There, the leap into the lie.

"Well, he's out on a job."

"Just tell me where he is, I'll go talk to him there."

"Can't do that."

"Listen, I'm trying to help the guy out with something, see what I mean, like?"

A long pause followed. "Hang on."

Then he heard the woman talking into some kind of radio or squawk box. "Richie, where you at?"

A garble of static came back that Ray couldn't understand.

"I got a guy says he's your cousin."

More static.

"Hello? He says what's this about?"

Ray looked down Eighty-sixth Street, drew in a lungful of the place. "He knows what it's about. I ain't talking about it on the phone."

She repeated this, and the squawk box answered.

"All right," she told Ray. "He's out on a job down in the Rockaways, 123rd Street right before the boardwalk."

"Thanks." He was about to hang up when he heard a man ask, "Who just called for Richie, who was that?"

The line went dead.

Ray listened to the far buzz in the earpiece, then hung up. He lifted the receiver again and inserted a bunch of quarters from his pocket, not even counting them. She didn't answer, but her cell phone message came on, then the beep. "Jin Li," he said, "this is Ray, the guy who used to be your boyfriend. I'm not calling to talk about what happened between us. I'm just worried about you, okay? Your brother is in New York and found me. He's got a bunch of guys with him and he's looking for you…" What else to say? Don't mention the police, he told himself, that will just freak her out. "He explained to me about what happened to you with the two Mexican girls. So I'm looking for you, too. You can call me, but not on my cell. It's gone. Call me at home. You have the number. If a woman answers, remember it's my father's nurse. I know you are scared. All right, I hope you are-" The phone chimed, time was up. He replaced the receiver. If she wasn't answering her cell phone, well-it could mean several things, all of which gave him a bad feeling.

The Rockaways was a big sandbar that hung below Brooklyn, with a village clustered at either end and miles of fabulous beach in between. Technically it was part of Queens, though it felt like Brooklyn, because you could get there from Flatbush Avenue, the zigzag thoroughfare that people had been using for more than three hundred years, starting with Dutch farmers driving their pigs and cattle to market until the present, when you were just as likely to find a Pakistani hauling a load of fake BMW carburetors made in Vietnam to be installed by a Jamaican mechanic in a car owned by a Nigerian. The future of New York City was often found in the cultural mixology of Brooklyn and Queens long before arriving in Manhattan. The Rockaways, however, had always been hard-core Irish, a place apart, dominated by policemen and firefighters, more or less segregated. Once known as the "Irish Riviera," the Rockaways was a place where working-class New Yorkers once rented bungalows for fifty dollars a summer. Jigs and reels were danced in the bars, beer five cents a glass. That was all gone. Now it was high-rises and million-dollar homes. He'd once spent a lost weekend there when he was eighteen, drinking, running around, driving on the beach. How naive he'd been at that age, obsessed with a girl whose name he could no longer remember and, even more important at the time, preoccupied with his summer league baseball team. He'd been a pretty good catcher, could take the beating of the position. But, like most American teenagers, he'd been utterly oblivious to almost everything beyond himself. Boys were different in other parts of the world; they became men sooner, were accelerated toward their fates. Example? Sure: Once, in Mogadishu, Somalia, he'd had a fifteen-year-old stick a Chinese-made AK-47 into his face while a crew of younger boys swarmed over his supply truck, stealing water, medicine, foodstuffs, motor oil, water purification tablets, children's clothing, and three dozen crank-powered radios. Ray had spent two days loading the truck, and in a matter of minutes, it was plundered. The boy made Ray lie on the ground, and when his crew was done he had fired a bullet into the desert sand next to Ray's head. Then left. Ray had taken his sweet time getting up and, before doing so, it occurred to him that he could dig up the bullet, which he did, about a foot deep in the sand. It was still warm and he touched it to his lip religiously, why he didn't know. The next day, after he had returned to camp with the empty relief truck, he heard that the boy who'd held him at gunpoint had, that same evening, had both arms macheted off by a rival group stealing the supplies from his crew.

Here and now, Ray told himself, be here and now. Don't be haunted. He made the turn for the Rockaways, the Atlantic to his right. He reminded himself that all he knew about Richie was that he'd probably been the man who'd pumped out the household waste in Queens that had found its way into a parking lot drain in Brooklyn. Not much to go on. But not nothing, either.

The Rockaways-the name suggested a faraway place where you might rock a chair by the ocean. Which was correct. On 123rd Street big houses sat on narrow lots, the kinds of places families could stay in all summer, kids going to the beach every day, dad out back with the barbecue. He spotted the big green sewage truck pulled up on the curb, passed by, found a parking spot, and walked back. A large man in coveralls with a blond crew cut stood next to the truck, letting a fat rubber hose run through his gloved hands as it mechanically spooled itself onto the truck. He was just finishing.

"Hey," called Ray, walking up. "You got a minute? Let me tell you my problem. I live couple streets away. Kinda embarrassing. My wedding ring went down the toilet. Barely flushed, though."

The man nodded warily, inspecting Ray up and down, no doubt wondering if Ray's presence was related to the earlier call about the "cousin."

"Happens all the time," he said. "Earrings, watches, dentures. All kinds of stuff."

Ray felt jumpy, a little strange. "How do I get it back?"

"Could still be there. Turn off all your water. Give us a call, we'll pump you out, see if it's there."

Ray pretended to watch the hose. "You got any kind of screen on that, find things caught in it?"

"Yes. But we only use it if we're looking for something. It'd get jammed every three minutes, shit people put in there. I mean the stuff that ain't shit, if you see what I mean."

Ray nodded. "How fast these trucks fill up?"

"Day or two. Lot of shit in the world."

"Holds what-?"

"On the side of the truck it says eight thousand gallons but we try not to fill it quite that much. Gets too heavy. Hard to go uphill. You can crack a guy's driveway."

Ray pointed at the name on the door: RICHIE.

"They give every guy his own truck?"

"No, only us top guys."

"What if the truck breaks down?"

A pause, the mood shifting. "What if I don't feel like answering any more questions?"

"Hey, just being friendly," Ray said.

Richie grunted. Then he looked at Ray, mouth tight. "I don't know who you are, buddy, but you're fucking with me. I can feel it. So get the fuck away from me and my truck and just take your bullshit elsewhere. Either that or we got a problem, and if we got a problem, then I got a lot of ways to fix it."

The two men held each other's gaze. Indeed, Ray thought, we've got a problem.

But he played it cool. "No sweat," he said, "not a problem." He put up his hands meekly, backed away.

But now that I know what you look like, Richie-boy, he thought, I'll be watching you.