The Sleepless Read online

  The only real worry he had was whether Jambo had done a Harry Lime on him – opened a manhole cover and gone to ground down the sewers.

  He edged along the sidewalk, ducking down now and again to see if he could catch a glimpse of Jambo’s legs. ‘Newt!’ he shouted. ‘Your radio still working?’

  ‘It’s working, Ralph,’ Newt called back. ‘I called for an ambulance already.’

  ‘Shit,’ said Ralph, under his breath. He had a sick sensation in his stomach. He should have let Jambo go, he should have let him get away. The death of a single innocent bystander was too high a price to pay for any bust – even the most spectacular drugs bust in the history of Massachusetts. Even if that girl with the cornrow hair and the hoop earrings wasn’t dead, she was seriously hurt, and her family and her friends and her lawyer and every TV station and newspaper in New England was going to want to know why Detective Ralph Brossard had initiated an ambush when she was still puttering along Seaver Street in the line of fire.

  ‘Shit,’ he repeated, ‘shit, shit, shit.’ He was angry and shaken and bitterly regretful; and frightened, too; and all he could taste was shit.

  ‘I don’t see him!’ called John Minatello.

  ‘Then where the fuck?’ Ralph demanded.

  Newt said, ‘Look under the cars, for Christ’s sake. Look under the cars.’

  ‘I did,’ John Minatello protested.

  Crouching as low as he could, Ralph made his way up the left-hand side of the street. Every now and then, he leaned over sideways, his hand flat on the hot, gritty sidewalk, so that he could check beneath the parked cars for any sign of Jambo’s ankles. An elderly black woman watched him dispassionately from an open window, her eyes magnified by her spectacles, so that they looked like two freshly-opened oysters.

  ‘Get the hell inside!’ he snapped at her.

  ‘What for?’ she wanted to know. ‘I seen men die before now.’

  ‘Police!’ said Ralph. ‘Now get the hell inside!’

  At that moment, when he was distracted, Newt shouted out, ‘There he goes!’ and Ralph was conscious of a dark shadow flickering between the cars, all arms and legs, and the showy glitter of a nickel-plated gun.

  ‘Freeze!’ he screamed, lifting his .44 and aiming it two-handed along the sidewalk, right to the point where Jambo’s next leap would take him. He saw Jambo’s woolly torn bobbing up and down behind the peeling vinyl roof of a brown Sedan de Ville. He saw Jambo suddenly appear, diving down onto the sidewalk, twisting around, dark glasses and flashing teeth and flashing gun.

  He also saw the young woman push the baby-buggy out of the apartment entrance right behind Jambo, as clear and as plain as anything that he had ever seen, as clear as watching Thelma on a summer’s morning, when he first began to realize that he didn’t love her. Thelma had been smiling, contented, while all the time her days of happiness were already over, and there was nothing left for her but loneliness and tears.

  And this girl smiled, too, as she leaned forward to wipe her baby’s dribbly chin. As Jambo fired, a heavy, swelling, booming shot. As Ralph fired back, a .44-calibre bullet that left the barrel of his gun at 770 feet per second – and blew apart the baby-carriage like a bomb, mattress, blankets, plastic pony-rattles and bloody flesh.

  Jambo scrambled to his feet, turned, stunned. Newt came stalking across the street with his gun held out stiffly in front of him. He practically pushed the muzzle up Jambo’s nose, and screamed at him, ‘Drop it! Freeze! Face down, you fuck!’

  Ralph stood with his gun still lifted high, and the girl with the baby turned and looked at him, and nobody had ever looked at him like that, never, not even wives whose husbands he had been compelled to kill; nor men whose sons had hanged themselves in jail.

  John Minatello came over. ‘Ralph,’ he said. ‘Give me the gun.’

  ‘What?’ said Ralph.

  ‘Give me the gun. I saw what happened. It wasn’t your fault.’

  Ralph stared at him. He had never realized before how pale John Minatello was. His skin was white like wax, with large and obvious pores. He had big sad brown eyes and a mole on his right cheek. And that stupid silky brown moustache, the kind that kids grow to show that they’re men. And that ridiculous pink-and-silver Hawaiian shirt, with palm trees and hula girls.

  Newt had forced Jambo flat on his face on the sidewalk, and was handcuffing him, jerkily, silently, like a man trussing a turkey. The girl with the baby-carriage was staring at all of them in disbelief.

  ‘My baby,’ she said. She sounded almost as if she were singing, rather than talking. ‘My ba – a – a – aby.’

  Ralph walked up to her, hesitant, wary. He continued to hold his gun up high, to show her that he didn’t mean her any harm. She was a young pale-skinned black, oval-faced, pretty, with stiffly lacquered hair and thinly plucked eyebrows. She wore a red-and-yellow smock and black leggings. Her eyes were glassy, and she was shaking, and it was obvious to Ralph that she was in shock. As he was, too.

  ‘My baby,’ she said; and she reached inside the wrecked baby-carriage and lifted out something that looked like a bloodied rolled-up towel. Except that a small chubby arm swung lifelessly from one side of it, and blood dripped from tiny fingers.

  ‘I –’ Ralph began. But his larynx constricted, and his mouth locked, and he was totally unable to speak. He wanted to apologize, he wanted to explain. He wanted to beg her forgiveness. But what was the point of apologizing? What was the point of explaining? And how could he expect her to forgive him, after what he had done?

  John Minatello reached up and eased the .44 out of his hand.

  ‘Come on, Ralph, it’s all over.’

  ‘I – didn’t mean to –’ he choked.

  ‘It’s okay, Ralph.’

  The hot brown air was warbling with sirens. An ambulance turned into the far end of Seaver Street, followed by another, and then two squad cars. Ralph allowed John Minatello to usher him back to their Grand Prix. He sat in the passenger seat, with his head bowed, staring at the asphalt pavement. He heard people hurrying backwards and forwards. He heard a window break, but he wasn’t aware of its significance. He looked up after a while and said, ‘John? How was the girl? The girl in the Beetle?’

  John was leaning against the open door, looking around him anxiously. He glanced at Ralph and said, ‘Hard to say. The EMTs are checking her out now. There’s a lot of blood. Brains, too. Doesn’t look hopeful.’

  Another window broke. Ralph heard shouting and arguing, and somebody drumming. A brick sailed through the air without warning, and bounced off the back of his car. He raised his head, groggy, shocked. Something was happening but he couldn’t work out what. Another brick flew over, and shattered close to his feet, then another, then a bottle, then a length of piping, which landed on its end and danced on the pavement like Fred Astaire’s cane.

  He stood up. He couldn’t believe what he saw. Seaver Street, which only a few moments before had been sultry and suffocating and deserted, was now crammed with a jostling, screeching, jumping crowd of young blacks. They were tossing bricks and bottles and hubcaps and lengths of timber, and one young blood with a wide-brimmed hat and dreadlocks was whamming out a ferocious reggae rhythm on the hood of a parked car with two metalworking hammers, and yelling, ‘Latomba! Latomba!’

  ‘What the hell?’ Ralph wanted to know. But at that moment Sergeant Riordan came storming toward him, bull-faced, thick-necked and snorting.

  ‘Get your ass out of here, Brossard, you stupid dumb bastard!’

  ‘What the hell’s going on?’ Ralph demanded.

  ‘You’re going on, that’s what,’ Sergeant Riordan retorted. ‘You and your fucking cack-handed ambush! You’ve only gone and blown away the first and only son of their beloved local hero, that’s all. Even if they don’t kill us, they’ll wreck this fucking place, and that means eleven years of racial diplomacy and softly-softly and equal policing for all goes down the toilet, one flush, gone for ever. Now get your ass out of here before y
ou get burned or beaten or blown away.’

  ‘What are you talking about, Riordan?’ Ralph yelled at him. ‘We just pulled off the biggest drugs bust this godforsaken city ever saw! And I’m sorry about the baby, all right? I wish it hadn’t happened, but it happened, and there was nothing at all I could do!’

  John Minatello took hold of his arm. ‘Come on, Ralph, we have to get out of here.’

  Ralph turned and stared at him. ‘Certainly we have to get out of here. But Jambo comes with us.’

  ‘Newt already took Jambo.’

  ‘Newt took Jambo?’

  More bottles and bricks smashed all around them, and suddenly – over by the steps that led up to Luther Johnson’s apartment building, a gout of orange fire rolled up, and the sidewalk started to blaze.

  ‘Come on, Ralph,’ John Minatello urged him. ‘They’re throwing Molotov cocktails. We’re not equipped to deal with anything like this.’

  ‘Give me my gun,’ Ralph insisted.

  ‘Ralph ... you know I can’t do that.’

  A huge piece of plaster coving burst on the pavement beside them, and almost choked them with dust. So far, two uniformed officers with pump-guns had been keeping the crowd well back, but when the medics lifted the tattered remains of the baby-carriage into the back of their ambulance, and everybody could see for themselves how bloody and burst-apart it was, a shriek of outrage went up, and bottles and bricks landed all around the squad cars in a thunderous, shattering cascade. It was a monsoon downpour of grief and frustration and fury.

  Sergeant Riordan was hit on the shoulder by a triangular lump of concrete; and a bottle clouted Ralph on the back of the head.

  ‘Give me my goddamned gun, John!’ Ralph yelled at him. ‘And that’s an order!’ John Minatello hesitated, and glanced at Sergeant Riordan, and hesitated some more, and then handed it back. Ralph snatched it impatiently and cocked it. Sergeant Riordan, smacking concrete dust from his shoulders, snapped, ‘Get your ass out of here, Brossard, and if any one of my men suffers so much as a single fucking scratch, then I’ll be looking out for you myself, and don’t you forget it.’

  ‘Newt got the sports bag?’ asked Ralph.

  ‘That’s the point,’ said John Minatello.

  ‘What’s the point? What do you mean, “that’s the point”? What’s the fucking point?’

  ‘The point is that we lost the sports bag.’

  Ralph stared at him. On every side of them, bottles and cans and bricks and rocks were hurtling and bouncing down, but Ralph stayed completely still, his shoulders slightly hunched in disbelief, not shielding himself, his gun hanging down by his side.

  ‘You lost it?’

  John Minatello shrugged, embarrassed – and then ducked, as a bottle flew past his face.

  ‘Jambo must’ve thrown it someplace. There’s not a sign of it.’

  ‘What the hell do you mean he must have thrown it someplace? Where? How far could he throw? Ten feet? Twenty feet?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Ralph. There’s not a sign of it. We’ve searched way back to the buildings; and underneath all of the cars.’

  Ralph bit his lip. He was too chagrined even to swear. They had lost the sports bag, and all of the marked money – which meant that more than a year of painstaking surveillance and wire-tapping and intelligence-gathering had all gone completely to waste. More than a year of his life had been futile. All those stultifying hours of sitting in cars, eating congealing hamburgers and drinking coffee out of polystyrene cups; all those numbing hours of waiting at courthouses for wire-tap warrants; all those seasons; all that ingenuity; all those hunches; all that seat-of-the-pants detective work; everything.

  Another Molotov cocktail exploded in the middle of the street, and the front tyres of a Mazda pick-up truck began to blaze. The crowd were screaming now – a weird, high-pitched ululation, and Sergeant Riordan said, ‘Come on, Ralph. It’s time to get out of here. They’ll be tearing us limb from limb before you know it.’

  A young uniformed officer came running across the street, crouching low. ‘Orders are to pull out, sir. They’re sending in back-up.’

  ‘Okay, O’Hara,’ said Sergeant Riordan. He barked some instructions to the rest of his men, although his voice was almost drowned out by the wailing and whooping of the ambulance sirens.

  ‘Death to the pigs! Death to the pigs!’ screamed the crowd. Further down the street, they were bouncing a Chevy pickup on its suspension, and then turning it over. It exploded with a splintering roar, and a huge cloud of oily smoke rolled into the air. The crowd screamed even louder.

  Sergeant Riordan grasped Ralph’s arm, too fiercely to be comfortable. ‘You’d best be coming with us, Brossard. It’s your ass they’re after, and you’ll never get your vee-hickle out now.’

  They ducked back across the street through a blizzard of rocks, bricks, planks, bottles, and even coins. Newt had managed to get his car started, and was backing up the street with a howl of tortured tyres. Three young men ran after him, shouting and hopping and beating at his windows with baseball bats and steel bars. They smashed his side windows and starred his windscreen. But somehow he managed a screeching handbrake turn, and sped off northward, the tail of his car snaking wildly from side to side.

  Sergeant Riordan wrenched open the back door of his squad car and pushed Ralph roughly inside. ‘Put your foot down, O’Hara,’ he ordered. ‘We’ve got the albatross on board.’

  He was opening his own door when Ralph felt him stagger heavily against the side of the car. Blood gushed down Ralph’s window as if it had been emptied from a slaughterhouse bucket. ‘Sergeant!’ screeched O’Hara, like a frightened woman.

  ‘Back up!’ Ralph yelled at him.

  ‘What?’ asked O’Hara, white-faced. A half-brick bounced off the squad car’s roof.

  ‘Back up, for Christ’s sake!’

  O’Hara revved the engine until it screamed, and then reversed the squad car up the street. ‘Now, stop!’ Ralph ordered him.

  O’Hara jammed on the brakes. Ralph kicked open his door, and ran back through the blizzard of debris to Sergeant Riordan, who was lying on his back with his hands drawn up like a begging puppy and his legs twitching. His face was varnished dark scarlet with blood, and when Ralph knelt down beside him, he could see at once that the top of his head had been blown off.

  Sergeant Riordan stared up at him helplessly. He probably didn’t even realize who he was, or what was happening. Ralph had seen too much of this, too much blood, too much helplessness, and he had no doubt at all that Sergeant Riordan would die.

  The crowd were now swarming all around him, screaming at him and taunting him and yelling, ‘Kill the fucker! Kill the pig!’

  Ralph gradually stood up, his .44 raised in his right hand, saying nothing. There was a moment when he was stocky but all coiled-up, tense and determined, with all the virile menace of a real Hemingway.

  The crowd shied back a little, but he wouldn’t be able to keep them away for long. He found himself looking from one face to another – mostly young men, but women and children, too – and he felt a rising sense of dread and disbelief at the hate which distorted their faces. How could they hate anybody so much – especially a man they didn’t even know?

  A brick came tumbling through the air and hit him on the shoulder, knocking him off balance. With a whoop, the crowd shifted forward. He levelled his gun two-handed and shouted, ‘Freeze!’ but they kept on coming.

  He shouted, ‘Freeze!’ a second time, but they still kept on coming, and one young man in a red baseball cap came dancing towards him, bare-chested, beads and feathers around his neck, and whipped at his arm with a radio aerial.

  Ralph swung around and shot him. The noise was deafening. The young man danced, slipped, and fell to the pavement, still staring at Ralph in surprise. There was a hole in his chest bigger than a baseball, jetting arterial blood.

  The crowd shrieked – really shrieked – with a sound that could have cut plate glass. Ralph backed away,
shocked at the shrieking and shocked at what he had done. He might have been Hemingway – he might have been the hottest, hardest, ballsiest detective on the narcotics squad – he might have seen blood and guts and whores sliced up with razors; but at the age of forty-three this was the first time that he had ever killed a man face to face, deliberately shot him, just like that, and he was appalled and astounded and excited, too, adrenaline pumping around him so fast that he felt he could have jumped back twenty feet.

  But then the crowd surged toward him and they were swinging bats and hurling bricks and a rusty elbow-pipe hit him on the forehead and almost concussed him. He fired in the air, twice, but the crowd took no notice, so he fired again, and a young girl toppled, and he fired again, and another young man went down.

  The crowd didn’t stop. His shooting didn’t deter them, it enraged them even more. Every shot gave them another martyr. Every shot added another credential to their cause. Kill the pigs!

  He thought that they were going to rip him apart. But then somewhere in his consciousness he heard the deep booofff! of a pump-gun loaded with buckshot, and then another booofff!

  He had never imagined what it was going to be like, to see people shot. But pieces flew off them, whole muscles flapped in the air, faces were blasted into raspberry fool.

  Then the squad car came slewing in beside him, with its door flapping open, and John Minatello shouted, ‘Ralph! For God’s sake, Ralph!’

  Ralph fired one more shot, deliberately high, and then tumbled backwards into the squad car. O’Hara slammed his foot on the gas and spun the wheel and the car collided with Jambo’s Electra. He backed up, and they could feel the soft, heavy jolt of hitting people. Then the crowd were beating on their roof with hammers and lumps of concrete, and the side-windows caved in, and John Minatello screamed at O’Hara,’ Get us the hell right out of here?

  There was an instant he was convinced that they were going to die, and shouted, ‘Mary, Mother of God, forgive me!’ The end of a scaffolding-pole exploded through the right-hand side of the windshield, and dug its way into the seat. If Sergeant Riordan had been sitting there, he would have been impaled. But then the squad car bounced and skidded forward, hitting parked cars and debris and bricks, and suddenly they were swerving right at the end of the street and heading north.