"See you in the morning," he said.
Teddy was waiting in the living room. Sitting under the Tiffany-style lamp, reading. She put down the book the moment he came in. Her hands signed Tell me.
He told her about following Tommy the night before. Told her he'd seen Tommy getting into a red Honda Accord driven by a woman.
"I don't know what to tell Angela," he said.
Just be sure, Teddy signed.
Their informant told them he'd seen these two dudes from Washington, DC, one of them named Sonny and the other named Dick, in an abandoned building off Ritter. There was a girl with them, but he didn't know the name of the girl at all; she wasn't from Washington, she was from right here in this city. All three of them were crackheads.
This was the information Wade and Bent had.
They had got it at a little after nine o'clock that night from a man who himself was a crackhead and who had volunteered the information because they had him on a week-old pharmacy break-in. He said word was out they was looking for a dude named Sonny and that's who he'd seen earlier tonight, Sonny and this other dude and a girl couldn't be older than sixteen, he was being cooperative, wasn't he? They told him he was being real cooperative, and then they clapped him in a holding cell downstairs to wait for the ten o'clock van pickup.
The building was around the corner from Ritter Avenue, on a street that had once been lined with elegant apartment buildings, most of them occupied by Jews who'd moved up here a generation after their parents made the long journey from Poland and Russia to settle in the side streets of Lower Isola. The Jews had long since left this section of Riverhead. The area became Puerto Rican until they, too, left because landlords found it cheaper to abandon rent-controlled buildings than to maintain them. Ritter Avenue and its surrounding side streets now looked the way London or Tokyo or Berlin had looked after World War II - but America had never suffered any bombing raids. What had once been a thriving commercial and residential community was now as barren as a moonscape. Here there was only an unsteady mix of rubble and buildings about to fall into rubble. Here there was no pretense of rescue, no fancy plastic flowerpot decals promising later reconstruction; the jungle had already reclaimed what had once been a rich and vibrant community.
Sonny and Dick and the sixteen-year-old girl were presumably holed up at 3341 Sloane, the only building still standing in a field of jagged brick and concrete, strewn mattresses and rubbish, roaming dogs and skittering rats. Clouds scudded across a thin-mooned sky as the detectives got out of their car and looked up at the building. Something flickered in one of the gutted windows.
Third floor up.
Wade gestured.
Bent nodded.
They both figured it was a candle flickering up there. Too hot for a fire unless they were cooking food. Probably just sitting around a candle, smoking dope. Sonny and Dick and the sixteen-year-old girl. Sonny who had been carrying a gun on the night Anthony Carella got killed. Sonny who was maybe still carrying that same gun unless he'd sold it to buy more crack.
Neither Wade nor Bent said a word. Both of them drew their guns and entered the building. The shots came as they rounded the second-floor landing. Four shots in a row, cracking on the night air, sundering the silence, sending the cops flying off in either direction, one to the right, one to the left of the staircase, throwing themselves out of the line of fire. Someone was standing at the top of the stairs. A cloud passed, uncovering a remnant moon, revealing a man in silhouette on the roofless floor above, huge against the sky, gun in hand, but only for an instant. The figure ducked away. There was noise up there, some frantic scrambling around, a girl's nervous giggle, a hushed whisper, and then rapid footfalls on the night - but no one coming down this way. Wade stepped out. Bent covered him, firing three shots in rapid succession up the stairwell. Both men pounded up the steps, guns fanning the air ahead of them. The apartment to the right of the stairwell was vacant save for a handful of empty crack vials and a guttering votive candle in a red glass holder. It took the detectives only a moment to realize where everyone had gone; there was a fire escape at the rear of the building.
But there were spent cartridge cases at the top of the staircase, and they now had something they could compare with what they'd found on the floor of the A amp; L Bakery on the night Anthony Carella was killed.
