Fidelity Page 4

  “You think this is my first time in a box? I grew up in these rooms,” he said, gesturing at the four walls surrounding him. “And I know how all this works.”

  “If you’ve got such depth of experience,” Torres said, smile slightly less bright, “then you ought to understand what it means that we caught you holding two kilograms of heroin.”

  “I know what it means.”

  “I’ve seen your record, Ricky,” Torres continued over him. “I mean, I’ve browsed it: the whole thing makes for heavy reading, like carrying around a dictionary. And unlike Agent Malloy over there, I’ve never been much on studying. But still, I got enough of it to figure, what with you on parole till, hell, the year 2100 or some such, that whatever judge we pull might not prove so sympathetic to your being slapped with possession with intent to distribute. And what was that one other thing . . .” Torres snapped his fingers loudly, the sound echoing like a shot in the tight confines of the room. “Assaulting a federal officer. Let me ask you a question, Ricky: How you feel about Christmas?”

  “It’s fine.”

  “New Year’s?”

  Ricky shrugged.

  “Halloween? Easter? Cinco de Mayo? Do they celebrate Cinco de Mayo in prison, Ricky?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

  “No? That’s too bad, I’m all sorry to hear that, I truly am—because without your cooperation, it’s going to be a long time before you get to kiss a girl beneath the mistletoe, or eat turkey with your family, or go on an Easter egg hunt. Something like . . .” Torres spent a moment in deliberate consideration. “. . . twenty years?” he asked, turning back as if asking Kay for her input. When she didn’t respond, even to look up from her book, Torres turned back to Ricky. “Maybe a few less, if you get some lefty judge to hoodwink.” Torres had a big, boozy sort of voice, like an carnival pitchman, and it echoed in the small confines of the room for a second or two after he spoke. Then there was silence, just the breathing of the three inmates, barely audible. It went on awhile.

  “Let me tell you how this is going to go,” Ricky said finally. “You gonna dick me around here for a while, because it makes you feel like a big man, and then I’m gonna tell you where to go with it and demand to see whatever shit-for-brains public defender gets assigned my case, and then I’m going to spend the next couple of years in a box. Ain’t no thing. Ain’t no thing to me, not a bit. Going inside, it’s like going back home. Hell, they probably been keeping my cot warm for me.” He leered as wide as a man in handcuffs could leer. “But one thing that’s not gonna happen—one thing I’m not gonna do; one thing I wouldn’t never do—is talk to any damn five-oh.”

  Kay sat mostly forgotten in the corner of the room. Her book was open but she wasn’t looking at it, and the pen in her hands sat uncapped and unused. Kay kept meticulous notes, because it was important when building a case to create a clear paper trail, but for herself she barely needed them. In truth her exceptional memory was a mixed blessing at the very best: memories she would have preferred to forget kept shiny and new by the undiminished force of her own recollection. But professionally it was a valuable asset, one that had already gained her some renown within the Baltimore Field Office.

  “You’re that tight with Rashid Williams?” Kay asked quietly.

  It was the first thing she’d said since entering the room, and that alone seemed to give it a certain weight, even for Ricky, who turned to look at her full on. “First, I ain’t got no idea where Ra is hiding out at. That’s what you’re after, you’re wasting your time. Second, if I did, I wouldn’t tell you anything.”

  “Because you’re so close?”

  “It don’t matter how I feel about Rashid. If I hated Rashid like the devil, you still wouldn’t get nothing out of me.”

  “But the two of you are friendly.”

  “Brothers to blood,” Ricky said, smirking.

  “Interesting,” Kay said. “Interesting.”

  Now it was Ricky’s turn to be interested. “Why you say that?”

  Kay shrugged, as if she weren’t really paying attention. “Family interests me. The connections we build with people, the relationships. The things we owe one another, or the things we decide we owe one another.”

  “Family’s all there is,” Ricky said, nodding his big head in agreement.

  “You’re no kin to Williams, though.”

  “Close as.”

  “Came up together?”

  “Shit, I known Ra since before anybody be foolish enough to let us hold weight. Playing pickup ball on the mini-baskets and drinking quarter waters,” Ricky said, growing expansive with nostalgia.

  “Just two young boys with dreams of becoming corner kingpins, dropping bodies and selling grams?”

  “Fuck else we gonna do? Become bankers? Where we was from, it was sling crack or work at McDonald’s. And I wasn’t never about wearing one of those hats.”

  Kay had heard it before, and it wasn’t altogether false, but she didn’t think it was entirely true, either. Circumstances limit one’s course of action, but they didn’t define one’s character, one’s identity. Ricky had made the choices that would lead him to a jail cell, and Rashid had made the same. Of course, she allowed no hint of this disapprobation to show on her face. “Yeah, yeah, you and every other two-bit corner boy south of Penn Station want to drop Rashid’s name like you were twin sucklings. I’ve read your sheet: you’re at the bottom of the pole, Ricky, and just cause you once walked past Williams at a party when you were in high school doesn’t make you friends.”

  “You ain’t know what you talking about,” Ricky said, getting heated. “Ra and I go back to when we was seeds. Used to bust into Rite Aid and walk out with all the candy we could carry, sell it the next day at school for a dollar a pop. Shit, only time we ever bothered to show.”

  “Where’d you hide the stash?”

  “His grandmomma’s house. Only place to. Down in the basement. Perfect till the rats got to it.” Ricky smiled at the thought of malfeasance gone by. “Came down one day and found the wrappers torn up, all our work ruined. Must have eaten through four pounds of chocolate in one night.”

  Kay closed her book with a loud snap, turned her attention, or at least her eyes, to Torres. “Why are we wasting our time with this zero?” she said. “Says he won’t tell nothing but that’s just ’cause he’s got nothing to tell. This guy knows Rashid Williams like I know the pope.”

  “You calling me a liar?” Ricky asked, simmering.

  “Nice to see you’re following along.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Let me tell you something, Ricky: I know everything there is to know about Rashid Williams. I eat Williams every morning with my oatmeal. I know Williams better than any friend ever knew him, any lover. Ricky doesn’t have a grandmother; both of his grandmothers are dead. We check that kind of thing.”

  “She was his mom’s cousin or some shit,” Ricky said. “Miss Dee, we used to call her. I practically grew up in that woman’s house; don’t be telling me I don’t know what I’m talking about.”

  “Yeah? You and Williams, the uncrowned kings of West Baltimore.”

  “West Baltimore?” Ricky looked like he was going to spit, then went ahead and decided to actually do so, a thick wad of phlegm going against the wall. “Potomac and Lombard—born there, come up there, gonna die there,” he said.

  “More likely the inside of a cell,” Kay said, standing abruptly. “Let’s go,” she told Torres.

  Torres looked up questioningly, trying to figure out his partner’s ploy, what he was supposed to do to help her out with it.

  But Kay didn’t seem to be playing a game. “We got what we need,” she said.

  “Bullshit,” Thomas said, but there was a damp spot on his forehead. “I didn’t tell you nothing.”

  “You told us everything,” Kay said fl
atly and with no excess of emotion, like she was explaining something simple to someone stupid. “You just didn’t realize it.”

  But outside the interview room Torres seemed as skeptical as Ricky. “If this is a ploy to get him to open up,” he said, shrugging, “I applaud the effort, but it won’t work. We can let him stew awhile but he’s not going to break.”

  “It wasn’t a gambit,” Kay said, showing some sign of excitement for the first time. “Name of Dee, lives near Potomac and Lombard. What do you think, Torres: Worth making another stop?”

  8

  IT DIDN’T take long to find the address of Dee Abbot, fifty-­nine, owner of a two-bedroom house near Patterson Park. Had owned it since 1959, and driving down there Kay found herself wondering what the neighborhood had been like then, if it once held some fragment of the middle-class promise, as much of Baltimore had in the years before the cargo ships had stopped coming into the harbor, and Bethlehem Steel closed, and innumerable other blue-collar businesses had similarly disappeared. If so, it had been a long time since those dreams had rotted. The neighborhood looked like much of the rest of Baltimore: crumbling, vacant houses pushed against occupied domiciles in comparable states of disrepair; liquor stores alternating with the occasional small market, youths and children lounging, looking unfriendly in the late afternoon.

  Torres spent most of the ride grumbling about the weather and about never having gotten his promised Reuben, but he was at least as excited as Kay. Most likely this would be another one of the innumerable leads they had been following that would not pan out, time wasted, but it was better than sitting on their hands, the only other option. They parked their car on the street and crossed over a small front yard of weeds and scattered detritus, Torres in the lead.

  Kay was raising her hand to the front door when a hole appeared in the wood, and then another, and then she heard that half-familiar budda-budda-budda, the sound of a bullet leaving the muzzle of an assault rifle. Then she was flying sideways, ­courtesy of Torres, who had grabbed her from behind and launched the both of them off the stoop and into the comparative safety of the bushes.

  They crashed down through them, branches clawing at Kay’s face. It took a while to get free of each other, but finally Kay managed to right herself. Torres was saying something, but between the echo of gunfire and the rush of adrenaline Kay couldn’t make out what it was at first. “I’m hit!” he insisted. “I’m hit!” And indeed, when Kay looked down, she saw they were both covered in blood and had a sudden flash of fear, thinking that she might have caught a round as well. But no, it was just Torres, a hole in his leg leaking scarlet over her.

  Not for long, though. The assault rifle went silent for a moment and Kay was on her feet. A quick glance at Torres suggested he wouldn’t die—not just then, at least, although of course everyone has that debt to pay the reaper, and Kay was thinking if she didn’t do something quick, then their numbers might both be coming up soon. “Call for backup,” she hissed, drawing her weapon, “and tag him if he tries to come out the front!”

  Torres very clearly did not think this was a good idea. “Kay! Kay!”

  But Kay wasn’t listening; Kay was moving swiftly around to the back of the house. She kept her head down and made sure not to show any trace of herself through the windows, and what she was thinking as she did so—to the degree that she was thinking anything and not simply acting on instinct and training—was that there was no way in hell that James Rashid Williams was going to get away from her twice; no, sir, there was not. They would be putting one of them into the ground at the end of this, Kay felt with a grim sense of certainty.

  Kay had not heard the sounds of an assault rifle since she had been at Quantico. It was the sort of ordnance that even your average Baltimore corner boy—not a species broadly renowned for caution or good sense—recognized. Williams had nothing to lose at this point; it was life in a cell or hold court on his stoop, and the deep-bass explosions echoing from the house made it clear which one he had chosen.

  Kay kept her shoulder against the brick, down as low as she could get and still be able to move, maneuvering sideways until she was at the back end of the row house. The assault rifle had gone silent again, although it had left Kay’s ears ringing, like she had strayed too close to the front of a rock concert.

  “You out there, pigs?” a voice yelled, although before there could be any answer the cannon fired off again. “I got enough for all of you!”

  Kay was directly below Williams now; she could almost feel the reverberation of his rifle and tensed her shoulders. Consciously, she could feel nothing but terror—would have told you, if you had asked, that she was too scared to do anything but shiver, certainly too scared to make and execute a tactical maneuver. But that wouldn’t have been right: hundreds of hours at Quantico had done their grim work of turning her body into a machine that operated without assistance, a fighter jet on ­autopilot.

  The rifle cut off in mid-burst, the familiar snick of a weapon jamming, and Kay was upright an instant later, almost unaware of her decision to move on the shooter. She could see Williams through the window—that same furrowed brow, those same dead eyes. He saw her in the same instant, having fixed the jam, and turned the muzzle of his weapon towards her.

  Two bangs that were louder than the other bangs—bangs that Kay somehow did not realize for a long moment had come out of her gun; did not realize it until she saw Williams drop his gun and stumble backward, slapping one hand against his chest, then sliding down the wall, leaving a slick of red.

  Success had robbed her of forward momentum, confused the instinct on which she had been operating. It took her longer than it should have to break the rest of the glass before climbing in through the back window, covering what she at that point was certain was Williams’s corpse with the weapon she’d used to make him into that.

  “All clear!” Kay yelled, as if the SWAT team was waiting for her command. “All clear!”

  9

  KAY’S GOING-AWAY party was a raucous affair, even by the standards of the Baltimore Field Office. Monaghan’s, the dive bar where the FBI did some but not all of its drinking, had not been closed for the event, although anyone who had happened to wander in aimlessly would have left quickly or found himself pulled into the cheering morass, forced to raise a Natty Boh in a toast to Kay’s future in New York.

  Whatever ill feeling Kay had produced amongst some of her squadmates—for letting Williams go the first time, or for being a bit too gung ho about the mission, a bit too willing to stay late and come in early, or just because she had the sort of ­personality that not everyone enjoyed having contact with—had been ­essentially erased with the body of Williams. Even Chapman and some of the others who had never seemed to have a good word to say to her had rallied around Kay after the shooting, as much to show general support as because they were legitimately proud of her.

  Indeed, Kay sometimes felt she was the only one in the office who had any doubts about her actions that grim winter day. It was four months since they had shut down the Williams case, which was a happy euphemism for a closed coffin. There had been an immediate review of the shooting by the Bureau’s Inspection Division, and Kay had given up the weapon she had used and been issued a replacement. But she was quickly cleared of all wrongdoing—indeed, it was hard to imagine a more obvious case in which lethal force had been required. They had offered her counseling with one of the Bureau’s resident headshrinkers, but Kay, despite her academic experience with cognitive psychology, preferred to keep her feelings to herself.

  But sometimes, late at night, she wondered if maybe she wouldn’t have done better to spend a few hours talking it through with someone. Admittedly Williams had been a very bad person, a very bad person indeed, and the world was, so far as Kay was concerned, unequivocally a better place without him in it. Still, she felt that perhaps it was a dangerous thing to feel too good about the facility with which she
had ended a man’s life. It was part of the job, she would remind herself in the early mornings that followed, watching the sun’s rays crawl up her window. Part of the mission, and as always, the mission came first.

  She was rather more excited about her transfer. Rotational protocols dictated that an Agent spend two-plus years in a small- or medium-sized office before being transferred to a larger one, unless they had been assigned to a large field office after graduating New Agent Training at Quantico. She had liked Baltimore, liked the city: low-key and livable, the people friendly when they weren’t shooting at each other. Liked the food and the waterfront, liked the hipster kids up in Hampden, liked getting five-dollar tickets for Orioles games. And she’d liked the office; at least, she liked Torres. More than liked him: respected him, and was glad that she’d had the opportunity to learn from him, and felt confident that she was better for the experience. But New York was home. Christopher was there, and her adopted mother and father, her surrogate family. Not to mention her high school friends, although it seemed a long time since she’d talked to any of them.

  The evening dragged on happily till towards midnight it was just Kay and Torres, neither of whom were what could be called strictly sober. Torres had taken to being shot in the leg with impressive fortitude, using it to coax drinks out of everyone long after he was on the mend. Another month or so and he wouldn’t even need the cane. Was it good luck that the bullet had not found itself six inches upward, in his knee, or was it bad luck that the bullet hadn’t found itself six inches to the right or left and missed him altogether? These were the sorts of questions Kay found herself asking several hours into her farewell party.

  “Moving on from us, Ivy?” Torres asked. Slurred.

  “Only in body and spirit,” Kay said.

  Torres laughed. “And what do we get to hold on to?”

  “A fair portion of my liver.”