Sharky's Machine Read online

  Sharky lowered his aim an inch or so and fired twice more. The automatic jumped in his hands. Two more holes appeared in Mary’s chest, less than half an inch apart. He moaned, turned sideways, and fell on his knees on the bottom step, his hands between his legs and his forehead resting against the door. Sharky stepped over the driver, who was huddled on the floor with his hands over his ears, and pushed the release button. The door opened and Mary pitched out headfirst.

  Sharky opened the front door and jumped out.

  Two uniformed cops were eight feet away, leaning across the hood of a Chevrolet, their service revolvers trained on Sharky.

  “Hold it right there.”

  Sharky held his I.D. high over his head and strode toward the rear of the bus.

  “Sharky, Central Narcotics,” he yelled. “Get an ambulance.”

  “I said, ‘Hold it right there,’” the cop yelled again.

  Sharky threw the wallet at him. It bounced off the hood of the car and spun around, opened at his shield.

  “I said, ‘Call a goddamn ambulance,’” Sharky said and kept walking. He reached Mary’s still form lying face down in the street and stood over him, his gun aimed at the back of the dope dealer’s head. He slid the .25 away from the body with his foot, then slipped it under High Ball, and rolled him slowly over.

  The dealer looked straight up at the dark sky. Blood rattled in his throat. The eyes turned to glass and rolled up in his head. Sharky stuck his gun in his belt and reached down, pressing his fingers into Mary’s throat. Nothing.

  One of the two cops was shouting into his radio mike. The other joined Sharky and handed him his wallet. “What the hell’s going on?” he asked.

  “I just retired a junkman. Better have your partner call the ME too.”

  People pressed in from all sides. Horns blared as the traffic built up. Inside the bus, passengers crowded to the windows, pressing their faces against the cold glass. The elderly woman suddenly opened her mouth and screamed over and over at the top of her lungs. A flashgun went off, blinding Sharky.

  “What the hell was that?” he yelled.

  “Somebody took a picture.”

  “No pictures, goddammit! No pictures!” Sharky barked.

  “Too late,” the cop said.

  More noise. More confusion. A siren was shrieking nearby.

  Sharky leaned against the bus. He felt suddenly tired, disgusted, used up, sick to his stomach. “Ah, shit,” he said, half aloud.

  He leaned over High Ball Mary’s body, his fingers feeling the coat lining. He felt the bags, then a zipper, and pulled it open. Inside, in small pockets sewn into the lining of the coat, were fifteen one-gram bags of cocaine.

  2

  He arrived at the station at 9:45, fifteen minutes before his appointment. Jaspers’s secretary was a hard-faced, sour-tempered policewoman named Helen Hill, a competent officer turned mean after eight years tied to a desk. She was less than affectionately known in the House as the Dragon Lady.

  “Sit over there,” she snapped, pointing to a hard oak chair without arms. She glared at his scruffy exterior for a moment, then ignored him.

  The outer office was spartan. Nothing to read, no pictures on the wall. The Dragon Lady got up once, poured herself a cup of coffee from an urn on a table near the door, and sat down again. She did not offer Sharky coffee, a drink of water, the time of day, or a kind word. Finally he got up and helped himself to a cup.

  “Don’t you ask?” the Dragon Lady growled.

  “May I have a cup of coffee?” Sharky said with a mock smile. He sprinkled half a packet of sugar into the cup, stirred it with his finger, licked it off, and returned to his seat. The Dragon Lady ignored him. He slurped his coffee loudly and stared at her. She continued to ignore him. The minutes crawled by. Fifteen minutes seemed to take an hour, at least. At exactly ten o’clock the phone on her desk buzzed.

  “Yes, sir? Yes, he is. Yes, sir.” She hung up. “All right. You may go in now,” she said, without looking at him.

  He plopped the half-empty cup in the middle of her desk. “Thanks,” he said, “for starting my day so cheerfully.” She glared at him as he knocked on the door. A voice inside said, “Come.”

  Captain Jaspers was a tall, angular, emotionless man in his early fifties. A scar as thin as a fishing line stretched from in front of his left ear down to his jaw-line. His black hair was streaked with gray. Cold, dead eyes hid behind glasses set in gold frames. His attire was as rigid as a uniform, dark blue suits, white shirts, drab ties, black lace-up shoes. His Timex watch had a gray cloth band. He wore no other jewelry.

  To Sharky’s knowledge, Jaspers had no friends in the department. His only confidant was the new police commissioner, Ezra Powers. Jaspers was a ruthless officer with little regard for his men, a rigid and stern disciplinarian, quick to demote or suspend the men in Central District, which was his command. Five years earlier when Sharky was assigned to a blue-and-white, his partner had been Orville Slyden, who had been flopped from detective third grade to patrolman and given six-and-six, six weeks suspension and six weeks at reduced pay, for taking a handout. Later Slyden had been proven innocent, but Jaspers refused to restore him to rank. It was the captain’s contention that anyone even suspected of such an infraction did not deserve to be a detective. It was Slyden who had given Jaspers his nickname, The Bat. “He’s a fuckin’ vampire,” Slyden had said and the name had stuck, although nobody ever called Jaspers that to his face.

  Jaspers’s predecessor had been a thoughtful and highly respected man who had risen slowly and painfully through the ranks. He had committed suicide after learning he had terminal cancer. According to a persistent rumor of the House, Jaspers had loaded the gun for him.

  The office was barren. A spotless desk with nothing on it but a telephone and a letterbox. A table behind the desk contained a police squawk box, nothing else. Two uncomfortable chairs. A single photograph on the wall of Dwight Eisenhower shaking hands with Jaspers, who wore the uniform of an army major. Neither of them was smiling. There were no ashtrays; Jaspers did not approve of smoking or drinking.

  He did not look up when Sharky entered the room; he jabbed a finger toward one of the chairs and continued reading a file that lay in front of him. Sharky sat down. Another five minutes died. Finally Jaspers closed the cover of the file and took a newspaper out of his desk drawer. He held it up with a flourish for Sharky to read. Jaspers thrived on these little dramatis momenta. The headline read:

  “UNDERCOVER COP KILLS DOPE

  PUSHER ON CROWDED CITY BUS”

  Beside the story a photograph showed a scruffy, bearded, and weary Sharky, gun in hand, leaning over High Ball Mary.

  “I saw it,” Sharky said.

  “When you blow your cover, you certainly do it extravagantly,” Jaspers said. His voice was a dry, brittle rasp.

  “Well, I had a little bad luck.”

  “You had a lot of bad luck.”

  “The way it happened, I was—”

  “I know the way it happened. Anybody who can read knows the way it happened.”

  “The story in the paper isn’t quite—”

  “I read your report, what there was of it.”

  “Yes, sir, uh, about that … Lieutenant Goldwald thought we should leave out some …”

  “I know what Goldwald thought. I’ve already finished with Goldwald.”

  “Could I just give you my end of it? Sir,” Sharky said.

  “No. I know all I need to know. I know you went into this meet with, uh, what was his name? Uh …”

  “Creech. Percy Creech. A/k/a High Ball Mary.”

  “Yes, Creech. You went in there solo. No back-up. No surveillance team. Six hundred dollars of department money in your pocket. You set up this buy with a very dangerous pusher and kept the details to yourself. A real grandstand play, Sharky. And then to get involved in a chase through the most crowded section of town. At rush hour. A shoot-out on a crowded city bus filled with women and children.
Just what else would you like to add to that?”

  “Everything was rolling smooth until that goddamn Tully …”

  “I’m not interested in Tully,” Jaspers snapped, cutting him off. “Tully was an accident. Accidents happen. You should anticipate, anticipate, problems.”

  Sharky’s face began to redden.

  “He’s a moron …”

  Jaspers cut him off again.

  “Are you deaf?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Deaf. Are you deaf? I said I am not interested in Tully. Tully was a mistake. It’s what happened after Tully that concerns me. You forgot everything. You panicked, forgot every regulation. You ignored the rules. Pro-ced-ure. There is pro-ced-ure to be followed.” Jaspers sat back in his chair and stared across the desk at Sharky, who felt suddenly like a grammar school boy called before the principal. It was humiliating and Sharky could not abide humiliation.

  “Look, do I have any say at all? I mean, do I get to tell my end of this?”

  “Don’t be insolent,” Jaspers snapped.

  “Insolent! Insolent, shit.” He stood up and walked to the edge of the desk. Jaspers’s face was scarlet with rage. “Lemme tell you something, Captain. I spent three months on that goddamn machine. Three months setting it up, kissing that miserable bastard’s ass so I could make that buy.”

  “Sharky!” Jaspers roared.

  “No, I’m gonna finish this. This wasn’t any ordinary coke buy, y’know. Creech was leading me upstairs, to his man. We were talking coke in pounds. Pounds! He couldn’t handle that big a thing; he had to go to the supplier. That’s who I was after, High Ball’s connection. I had to. It couldn’t leak out, see. One leak—”

  “How dare you?” Jaspers was enraged now. “What in God’s name possessed you? A gunfight on a crowded bus.”

  Jesus, is that all that mattered? The bus? Sharky started to explain what happened. That he had taken a chance and looked at High Ball Mary, that everyone behind the pusher had dropped to the floor, that he was using soft-nose bullets. It wasn’t some irresponsible snap decision; he didn’t have any choice. But he said nothing. What the hell, all The Bat cared about was the goddamn bus.

  “This kind of press is disastrous,” The Bat was saying.

  “Press? For Christ’s sake, what was I supposed to do, kiss his ass and wave goodbye?”

  “I ought to break you. For insubordination alone. I ought to give you six-and-six and put you back where you belong, in a blue-and-white on Auburn Avenue. You’ll never learn, will you? You have no respect for anyone.”

  “Captain, look, it happened too fast. All of a sudden there we were on a bus full of Christmas shoppers and he was bonkers, totally around the bend, threatening to kill kids and all. I had a clean shot and I took it. What the hell else is there to say about it?”

  “Three clean shots, apparently.”

  “Okay, I hit him three times. I didn’t want to take a chance that maybe he squeezes one off and wastes some old lady on the way home to dinner. Or some kid. I took him out. Isn’t that the way it’s supposed to work?”

  Jaspers drummed his desk with his fingers. He glared at Sharky. God, how he despised these young hotshots. Headline hunters.

  “I don’t want any more headline hunting,” he said.

  “That’s what it’s going down as, hunh? Headline hunting? Everybody’s scared shitless of the papers.”

  “You’ve tried my patience with your insubordination, Sharky.”

  “Captain, I’m asking to be treated fairly. No more consideration than we give to some bum in the drunk tank, that’s what I’m asking for.”

  “I’ll give you hell and call it whatever you want to call it Right now you’re about as useful to Narcotics as a paraplegic.”

  “I don’t …” Sharky started to say something and stopped. He stared at the cold eyes. The bottom of his foot began to itch. He tried grinding his foot into the carpet. The itch grew worse. He tried to ignore it. Tears began welling up in his eyes. Christ, he thought, the son of a bitch is going to think he’s got me crying. Sharky sat down, unzipped his boot and pulled it off, frantically scratching the bottom of his foot. His big toe stuck through a hole in his sock.

  Jaspers stared at him, appalled.

  “What in God’s name?” he stammered.

  “My foot itches,” Sharky said. “It’s driving me crazy.”

  Jaspers threw the paper in the wastebasket. He stood up and leaned across his desk. “Put that shoe on,” he said. “Put it on and stand at attention.”

  Sharky put his boot back on and stood up.

  “I’ll tell you what’s going to happen, Sharky. As of eight A.M. today you are no longer attached to the narcotics section. As of eight A.M. you are in Vice.”

  Sharky looked at him in disbelief.

  “Vice!”

  “Vice. Report to Lieutenant Friscoe.”

  Sharky stared at him for several moments. He looked around the room, struggling to keep his own anger in check. “Sir, will you please just look at my sheet? I think I deserve that much. Eighteen months on the street, eighteen collars, all hard drugs. I dumped eighteen goddamn pushers, one a month, and fourteen got the basket. The DA knows …”

  “Shut up.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I said, ‘Shut up.’”

  “Sure. Yes, sir. I’ll just, uh, yeah, keep my mouth shut, sit over there in public library watching the freaks jack off.”

  “Somebody has to do it. You think you’re too good for the Vice Squad, that it?”

  “I got eighteen months out there. That’s got to be worth something to Narcs. Even on a desk I can be a lot of help down there.”

  “You’re lucky I don’t send you over. I’ve busted better men than you for a lot less. I had the mayor on the phone half the night. The commissioner calling me at six thirty in the morning. What kind of a nut is he? everybody asks. I’m giving you a break. I want you out of sight for a while. No more headlines. No more grandstanding. Out of my sight. I don’t want to pick up the paper and see your shaggy … my God, look at you. When’s the last time you shaved? Had a haircut?”

  “You, uh, there aren’t a lot of dope deals on the make out there for guys in Brooks Brothers suits and Florsheims. Sir.”

  “Clean yourself up. Get a shave, a haircut, some decent clothes. Buy some decent socks, for God’s sake. Friscoe wants a man for something he’s got working and you’re it. I don’t know what it is, I don’t care. But I want you to understand one thing. Do you understand the term low profile?”

  “Sure. Of course. Yes.”

  “Sir.”

  “Sir.”

  “Fine. Because from now on the first order of business for you is to maintain a very, very, very low profile. L-o-w. Clear?”

  Sharky nodded.

  “Good. Now get out of here.”

  3

  It was noon when Domino headed across the windy plaza toward Mirror Towers. The cathedral clock began tolling the hour and as it did she shuddered unconsciously. It wasn’t the wind. Or the cold. It was something else, the reflection in the building of the street behind her perhaps. Or the chimes solemnly striking twelve.

  She shuddered again. What was it her mother used to say? Someone’s walking on your grave.

  She shrugged off the feeling and entered the building, walking through its wide, stark lobby in the private elevator in the corner. The security guard stood at leisurely attention. He smiled and touched the bill of his cap.

  “Hi, Eddie,” she said brightly.

  “Miss Domino,” he said. “How’s it going today?”

  “Just great,” she said as she stepped into the glass-and-copper bullet attached to the side of the building. Eddie unlocked the up button with a key and pushed it. Then he picked up a wall phone and pressed a button. “Miss Domino’s on her way up,” he said.

  The doors of the elevator swished shut and it shot up the side of the building, stopping at the twentieth floor. Five miles away
, the skyline of the city was a sparkling cluster in the haze.

  The elevator opened on a reception room that was almost as stark as the lobby, except that the two-story ceiling was supported by a dozen Plexiglas pillars. The interior of each pillar was lit by a single spotlight recessed overhead. Within each was a single toy, and each of the toys was unique. Electronic toys, stuffed toys, toys that moved, that sang, that walked and danced and spoke by means of tiny tape loops hidden deep inside them. Each was the prototype for a production model and each performed its eerie function silently within the towering glass rectangles that dwarfed the reception desk at the far end of the uncomfortably quiet room. To Domino, the collection of dolls, animals, trolls, and other creatures was almost too real. She walked past them without looking, her heels echoing on the tile floor.

  At the reception desk a husky Oriental man, his icecube eyes concealed behind heavily tinted glasses, was operating the complex pushbutton switchboard. Music whispered from a tiny transistor radio at his elbow.

  She made a pyramid of her hands and bowed low from the waist.

  “Jo sun,” she said.

  The guard-receptionist stood up and repeated the gesture.

  “Jo sun, dor jeh,” he said.

  He pushed a button under the desk and a door slid soundlessly open nearby. “He awaits you,” he said and she was gone.

  She stepped into a lush botanical garden, a giant two-story terrarium filled with rare plants and shrubs from all over the world: dracaena sanderianas, maidenhair ferns, dwarf azaleas, Chinese fan palms and amazon lilies, saffron pepper trees, butterfly gardenias, and six-foot ferns, all flourishing under an enormous sun dome. In one corner a circular stairway wound up through the foliage to the penthouse above.

  She skirted the dense, moisture-laden foliage and peered past the greenery, through a heavy window into the office beyond. Pieces of Mayan and Chinese sculpture crouched under soft lights on Oriental rugs.

  In the center of the office a man sat behind a broad desk cluttered with curios, a large, heavyset man, bald as a crystal ball, with a full red beard that was turning gray. He wore gold-rimmed bifocals and his large hands lay flat on the desk in front of him. He was wearing one ring, on his left hand, a platinum and jade design that covered one entire joint of his little finger. His silk mandarin shirt had three entwined dragons brocaded in red and gold across the chest. He stared at her for several seconds and then smiled and pushed the button that opened the door between the greenhouse and his office.