Freedomland Read online

  “All right.” It came out high and broken. She put one foot in front of the other as the doctor slipped Lorenzo a packet of codeine tablets, then retreated, calling out, “Get her back here for an X ray on that wrist.”

  As Lorenzo shepherded her toward the ambulance-bay doors, the goateed guard walked backwards in front of them in case he was needed. A gurney came flying through from the street, three medics racing it like a bobsled, almost upending the guard. Lorenzo caught the glazed, dying eyes of Miss Bankhead, the next-door neighbor to the murdered Barretts, her red underrims exposed by the downward pull of the oxygen mask.

  Out of habit, he looked toward the nurses’ station, but he didn’t really need Penny Zito tapping her heart from across the room to know what had happened. Lorenzo corkscrewed with frustration, flinging his hands over his head, that Armstrong double homicide now a triple in his book. Then Brenda jerked him back into the world, her words coming out choked and grievous: “I dreamt my son is dead.”

  As Lorenzo guided Brenda out through the ambulance bay, he saw that the summer night had cracked open, the overhang outside the doors crowded with people unhappily eyeing the parking lot a wet fifty yards away. The crime scene was probably a mudhole by now. The red-faced detective, Mallon or Malloy, gave her the once-over—pitiless, acidic—then abruptly flapped out a borrowed examination gown and, holding it over his head, made a run for the lot, the force of the downpour instantly swamping his shoes and battering his makeshift canopy into a sodden shawl.

  “What do you mean you dreamt—” Lorenzo cut off his own murmured question. This wasn’t the place, but eager to hear what she was driving at, he hustled her out into the rain, racewalked her to the lot, and deposited her in the passenger seat of his Crown Victoria. Brenda looked up at him.

  “When I was on the floor in there? I saw him. I saw my son—”

  “Hold on, hold on.” Raindrops were springing off Lorenzo’s shaved dome. “Just…” He whipped around to the driver’s side and slid in, drenched, a residual tremor in his hands from the adrenaline. “What you mean you saw him. You dreamt? Or you saw.”

  The ignition wouldn’t catch in the downpour, Lorenzo thinking, City-owned piece of shit. Turning to her, he repeated, “You dreamt or you saw.”

  “When I was sitting on the floor. He was right there in the hallway. He was like halfway down the hall. But he was upside down.”

  He tried again; it still wouldn’t kick over. Lorenzo worried about flooding the engine, then went off thinking about Miss Bankhead. She had barely been able to get out of her TV chair, yet she had had a cash crop of five foster children last time he counted, none of them over six years old. Those kids would be going back to the recycling plant now.

  “He was upside down, like a playing card, like a jack or a king. It was like he was dead.”

  The ignition finally caught, Lorenzo feeling overvictorious about it, playing back her recounting of the dream or vision or whatever it was.

  “Brenda, what are you trying to tell me?”

  “What I saw.”

  “Brenda.” Lorenzo forced himself to be all there. “Do you know where your son is right now?”

  She looked at him with starred eyes. “If I did,” she said slowly, each word distinct and paced. “I would be with him right now.”

  Lorenzo watched those eyes brim, then spill their dazzle.

  “OK,” he said, nodding, too tense to truly get inside her, to gauge her realness. “OK.” Gingerly he gunned the engine, studying her as she struggled with her bandaged hands to work the seat belt clasp.

  “Why’d you wait so long to tell me your son was in the car?” He leaned over and locked her in, thinking, Seat belt time is way over. “Huh?” he asked again.

  “Because…” She stared straight ahead, her shoulders jerking as if she were freezing. “Because I didn’t, don’t want it to be true.”

  Before Lorenzo could pull out, a car came flying into the lot, slamming itself into a space. The driver popped out while the car was still rocking and slipped a plastic patient’s bracelet on his wrist as he jogged to the emergency room. Lorenzo grimaced—that bring-your-own-bracelet bit was an old reporter’s trick for getting around unchallenged inside a hospital.

  His pager came to life: his boss, Bobby McDonald. Lorenzo reached for the radio, then pulled back, knowing Bobby would have him take her to the Bureau of Criminal Identification to look at mug shots.

  “I’m taking you back to Armstrong now,” Lorenzo said, as he finally pulled out of the lot. “I just want you to walk me through the scene, all right?”

  “No. I don’t want to do that. He’s not there.” She took a swipe at her bedraggled hair.

  “Most likely not, but…”

  As they pulled onto JFK Boulevard, the accumulated strips of reflector tape worn by the dope crews and others strobed the way for him as far as the eye could see.

  “What do you think of my dream?” she blurted, then abruptly twisted around, as if someone were hiding in the backseat.

  “What do I think?” Lorenzo was balking, associating dreams more with Bible stories than with analysis.

  “Is it true? You think it’s true?” She twisted around again.

  “Brenda, you got to have a positive attitude.”

  He had seen that swivel-hipped body language before—adrenalized helplessness, people chained to a clock with no hands.

  “I want to go look for the car,” she announced.

  “No, I can’t do that right now.” He shook his head emphatically. “Because if we run up on it? I can’t get involved in an apprehension with you sitting next to me. But see that?” He leaned forward over the steering wheel and pointed out a helicopter heading north toward the marshes. “Look up there. Now, unless that guy put your car in his pocket, he ain’t going far.” Lorenzo was just guessing that the whirlybird was looking for the kid.

  “I don’t want that dream to be true,” she said, ignoring the copter. “It was just a dream.”

  She rattled the envelope of codeine tablets against her parted lips. Lorenzo had no memory of handing them over.

  What else. What else. “Do you want me to notify the father?”

  “The father?” she whispered with alarm.

  Father, mother, brother—those who would have to be told. Brenda clutched her stomach.

  “What’s his name?” Lorenzo said.

  “Ulysses.”

  He scribbled it on an empty paycheck envelope propped on the steering wheel. “Ulysses what.”

  Stopped in traffic, he saw one of his snitches detach himself from a street corner and head for the car, most likely looking for a little money hit. Lorenzo casually ran a red light to avoid that conversation. “Ulysses what.”

  “I don’t even… Maldonado.”

  “You know where he is?”

  “Puerto Rico, Florida. I don’t know.”

  They were almost sideswiped by a white van with New York plates cutting into the oncoming traffic to pass them.

  “Don’t waste your time,” she said. “It wasn’t him.”

  The across-the-river tags and the heedless speed gave Lorenzo a bad feeling.

  “I want to see mug shots.” She shook the envelope against her lips again. “I should see mug shots now.”

  “Just walk me through the scene real quick.” Lorenzo looked away. “Then we’ll set up some trays for you, OK?”

  Armstrong jackers—Lorenzo flipped through his head file. Hootie Charles? But Hootie was a little guy with a full crop up top. But victims make the worst witnesses. But Hootie had switched over to stealing lawn furniture in the last year, just strolling across the city line into Gannon, hopping fences and walking off with lawn mowers, deck chairs, barbeques—rolling those Weber grills and Toros down the street in the general direction of home and selling whatever he had for twenty, forty bucks to whoever happened to be out sitting on their porches.

  “You said this guy had a shaved head?”

  “A shaved he
ad.”

  He couldn’t tell if she was repeating the question or answering it.

  It just didn’t sound like an Armstrong-based crime.

  “Are you related to Lorenzo Wilkinson?” she asked, with a dislocated chattiness.

  “Lorenzo who?”

  “I just thought because you had the same…” She closed her eyes.

  “Brenda. That cut on your head. How’d you get that?”

  “I banged it.” Unconsciously she fingered the crust on her scalp.

  “That part of what happened tonight?” He drove four blocks before adding, “Huh?” Then another two.

  “No.” It sounded defeated, minute, and from far away.

  Parked in the gravel bed of the elevated Conrail tracks opposite the Armstrong Houses, Lorenzo looked directly down at Hurley Street, the rubbled cul-de-sac that lay beneath the low end of the great sloping refrigerator-strewn Bowl.

  This potholed stretch of asphalt, which served as the access road to the bottom-end buildings—Three, Four, and Five—was littered with city vehicles: Gannon’s blue-and-white cruisers, Dempsy’s red-and-cream ones, a motley collection of unmarked Crown Victorias and confiscated dope cars. There was even an ambulance, the paramedics sitting on the hood and smoking, watching the play develop, somebody in the dispatcher’s office having gotten their wires crossed. Lorenzo had a feeling that, even if they weren’t needed now, sticking around tonight might not be a bad idea.

  The Armstrong residents, kept out of Hurley by the cops, had retreated to the elevation of the Bowl, the refrigerators now serving as bleacher seats. The slope had taken on the gap-toothed aspect of a ruined and ancient amphitheater.

  It had stopped raining, but the occasional sweep of headlights bucking their way over the potholes to Martyrs Park at the closed end of the street caught the residual droplets that clung to the gritty foliage there and momentarily graced what remained of the crime scene with a gauzy spray of diamonds.

  As they sat above the action, Lorenzo’s right headlight nuzzling the razor-wire-topped fence meant to keep Armstrong off the tracks, the sputter and squawk of radio transmissions, the bellow and bark of stressed-out cops and tenants floated up to them. Brenda absorbed the soundtrack with what he interpreted as honest horror, blindly reaching out with a bandaged hand to slap down the pop lock on her door.

  “He’s not here,” she said, with teary insistence.

  “Just…” Lorenzo raised a staying hand and began to roll, driving along the track bed above and parallel to Hurley, then down an embankment, curving around to the action.

  At the mouth of the cul-de-sac, they found themselves behind the white kamikaze van that had earlier cut them off, now humming in neutral. The van veered left to park, one side up on the curb, revealing a slant-parked Camaro—a confiscated dope car—blocking the Hurley Street entrance. An older Gannon detective, Leo Sullivan, was standing on post, arguing with the driver of a station wagon hitched to an old sky-blue camper that was attempting to exit the houses.

  Gannon was sealing off Armstrong—no one in, no one out. Brenda groaned.

  Lorenzo, knowing Sullivan, muttered, “Wait here.” Struggling to achieve a smile, he left the car.

  “You’re going to South Carolina now?” Leo grinned at the apoplectic driver. “It’s almost midnight.”

  A cameraman with a shoulder-mounted Betacam topped with a sun gun erupted out of the passenger side of the van and disappeared at a run, into the shadows of a train trestle underpass. Lorenzo guessed the guy was going to make an end run around the border patrol by scampering up the embankment to where they had just been parked, overlooking the play. Then he would climb over the train fence, clamber down the sloped, easily scaled retaining wall, and drop into Hurley Street somewhere closer to the crime scene and well away from this checkpoint.

  “Mr. Leo.” Lorenzo came on grinning like a pumpkin, seething with rage. “You guys taking over Dodge?”

  “It’s that funny fuckin’ city line, Council,” Leo said, making a slithering gesture with the side of his hand. “Goes through that park like Snake Hips Tucker, you know?”

  The city line was famously tortured, at one point cutting through a bowling alley—three lanes in Dempsy twelve in Gannon.

  “We think the deed might of been done on our side of the park, you know what I’m saying?”

  “Huh.” Lorenzo felt the chest tightness again.

  Whenever Gannon took a beating along the border, the line always wiggled a little so that they could pursue and punish the D-Town-bred perp themselves.

  “Lorenzo!” The white-haired driver of the camper stuck his head out the window. “Tell this…” he said, clenching his teeth and chucking a thumb at Sullivan, “I got to go!”

  The guy had his wife sitting next to him and two sullen teenage granddaughters in the backseat. It’s starting, Lorenzo was thinking, knowing he’d be pulled to pieces by aggrieved tenants every step of the way once he got out on the playing field.

  “Why don’t you go in the morning?” Leo said, trying to be friendly about it; then, turning to Lorenzo, “Guy’s got a long trip”; then, back to the driver, “Get a good night’s sleep. You drive all night, pull over to sleep in that metal box you got back there with that southern sun coming up? You’ll cook like an egg.”

  “I’ll go any got-damn time I want,” the driver said, getting buggy. Lorenzo knew the guy was heading down there to drop his granddaughters off for the summer, pick up a few hundred dollars’ worth of firecrackers, get back to Armstrong before the Fourth of July. It was coming up in a few days, and he’d make himself a little money.

  “Hey.” Leo’s lips disappeared. “I’m trying to be respectful to you.”

  “Then respect my got-damn wish to go.”

  Lorenzo quickly turned to check on Brenda, who was still in the car, hands to her face. He had no business bringing her here, he thought, then returned to the conflict before him.

  “C’mon, Leo.” He made himself grin again, eyeing the Convoy brothers over Leo’s shoulder. Through the gap between Four and Five Buildings, he could see them standing on refrigerator crates back up in the Bowl. Lorenzo remembered spotting them from the community center window earlier, knew they had to have seen her, but no way was he sharing that information with Gannon—risk their getting a little slaphappy with the Convoys and shutting down the lines of communication.

  “C’mon, man,” Lorenzo said, exasperated at the pettiness of this shit.

  “Now he’s leaving town?” Leo muttered. “Why now?”

  “He works nights at the hospital. This is when he’s up.”

  Leo shrugged unhappily, then saw Brenda in the car, his eyes registering recognition. Before he could approach her, he was distracted by the driver of the white van, who came up with business card in hand and yet another Betacam, held under his arm like a football.

  “Hey guys, I’m with National—”

  “I know who you are.” Leo went thin-lipped again and turned to the camper. “All right, get out of here,” he said, like the words cost blood; then he turned back to the man with the Betacam. “This is a secured crime scene. If I catch you or the other guy in there, you’re both going to jail and I’ll throw so many fuckin’ Denver boots on that van it’ll sink, you got me?”

  Lorenzo pegged them as freelance scavengers, trolling both sides of the Hudson with a police radio, responding to crimes and fires, phoning the local networks, who shut down their own roving crews at eleven, to try to get a precommitment on the footage as they tore ass to the scene.

  The video hustler retreated to his van and drove away. The antique camper, exuding an odor of burned hair, sputtered past the blockade. Both Leo and Lorenzo, alone now, turned to the Crown Victoria: Brenda was gone.

  Lorenzo wigged for an endless moment before he spied her sitting on the curb, doubled over, her injured hands palms-up, resting on her knees.

  “You OK, Brenda?” Leo asked, down on one knee, his voice gentle but level. Lorenzo h
eard some kind of subtle withholding in his tone, and apparently Brenda did too, curling her chin into her shoulder.

  “We’ll get him back. Right, Big Daddy?”

  “Hell, yeah,” Lorenzo said, a little tightly. He didn’t like the sound of his tag in a white cop’s mouth; he was always braced for an unindictable tinge of mockery in the air.

  Leo got up and headed for the seized dope car, moving it to let them drive through to the scene.

  Once Lorenzo had parked inside the Hurley cul-de-sac, pulling in along the base of the Conrail retaining wall, Brenda had to be coaxed out of her seat. If he was going to go through with the charade of bringing her back to the scene, to jog her memory or whatever, he would have to play it out all the way. But from the moment Lorenzo stepped out of the car, he saw at least three things wrong from the jump.

  He saw Danny Martin, Brenda’s brother, standing in the middle of Hurley talking to Bump Rosen, the both of them trying not to argue in front of the customers. Danny was high-chested and raw, wild-eyed and stubble-chinned, wearing rubber flip-flops and baggy shorts, which meant he had dashed out of his house with his head not right. Bump was himself, plug-squat, bald and bearded, wrestler-thick, but the strain of trying to be diplomatic made him seem even more condensed than usual. Then Lorenzo saw Teddy Moon, a Gannon detective on loan to the Dempsy County sheriff’s office, distributing a sheaf of papers to Gannon and Dempsy detectives both, who fanned out and hit the buildings. Lorenzo guessed the papers were unexecuted arrest warrants on Armstrong residents, mostly bullshit complaints: motor vehicle violations, possession, the odd robbery or assault. And lastly, he saw two cruisers, one Dempsy, one Gannon, blocking the driveway exits at the high end of the projects above the Bowl, the Gompers Street end—Gannon, with the cooperation of their Dempsy brothers, locking down Armstrong like East Berlin.

  Brenda stared at her brother, Danny, all hot-eyed and knotty, and responded by retreating from the middle of the street to the safety of the shadows under the retaining wall. Lorenzo backtracked along with her, taking a moment to get the lay of the land.