Line of Sight Read online

  LINE OF SIGHT

  LINE OF SIGHT

  James Queally

  The following is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used in an entirely fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2020 by James Queally

  Cover and jacket design by 2Faced Design

  ISBN 978-1-947993-89-1

  eISBN: 1-978-1-951709-03-7

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2019953455

  First hardcover edition March 2020 by Polis Books, LLC

  221 River St., 9th Fl., #9070

  Hoboken, NJ 07030

  www.PolisBooks.com

  Prologue

  They always said don’t run. Don’t resist.

  As Kevin Mathis sprinted down South 11th Street, lungs burning from the cold air and too many “I’ll only smoke two each day” cigarettes, he wished they could have seen what he was running from, and why it doesn’t always matter what you did or didn’t do.

  He chugged along, fists balled up, elbows swinging toward his hips in violent motions. Punch the midget, like the track coach said, that whole week he actually went to practice freshman year.

  Back then, 14-years-old with less mileage on his airways and fewer two a.m. drive-thru meals padding his stomach, he might have been able to open a lead on his pursuer. But as the footfalls got closer, echoing through the spaces between the apartments and birdcage homes that you couldn’t tell apart even when the sun lit up Newark’s West Ward, he knew his legs weren’t what would keep him alive.

  Kevin spun left, away from the few working street lights, into the vacant lot of a Family Dollar, hugging the chain link fence that separated parking spaces from row houses, looking for the hole he’d cut in it however many years ago, the shortcut he still used from time to time.

  The shouts came in spurts, profanity tucked in-between authoritative commands. Cop-speak, but he wasn’t sure the guy was a cop. The way he’d walked up to his porch, no uniform, way more confident than anyone roaming the neighborhood at 1 a.m. should have been, made him think the guy might have been hiding a gun or a badge.

  But Kevin had been arrested before, knew the steps to that dance. Besides, with everything that had been going on, the cops that knew where to find him also knew it was best to steer clear. For their own sake.

  Still, the only people who came to Kevin’s door that late at night were fiends or friends. This man was neither, which meant he was trouble, which meant Kevin need to move.

  He let his hands run along the fence until a sharp edge bit one of his fingers. The hole was narrow, ragged. They’d done a shit job with the bolt cutters back in high school, when he and a few friends had made this little escape route in the first place.

  Metal scraped his forearm, leaving the kind of chalk color scratch that won’t draw blood but hurts like hell in the moment. Something stalked off under foot as he crept through the dead grass and litter. A stray disturbed from its slumber, rushing through the November cold in search of somewhere else to hide.

  Maybe they’d both get lucky.

  Kevin stumbled, hands out in front of him like he was just learning to walk. There was a hole in the fence at the other end of the block, cut on the same day for the same reason, which led out toward Woodland Cemetery.

  He heard a high-pitched yelp from behind him. His unwanted friend had found the hole, and the fence wasn’t interested in letting him through. The metal rattled like a set of keys in a drier, and the annoyed howls faded as he found the space slashed into the end of the alley.

  He exploded into the street, adrenaline surging into his legs as he imagined the man and his gun wrestling with his shortcut. Woodland was in sight, the old oak trees with the shaggy branches waving hello in a winter gust.

  Some people liked to think you’d find more bodies in Woodland with a flashlight than a shovel. The cemetery wasn’t the ideal place to run if you wanted to keep breathing, but unless one of the neighbors decided to fling open their doors and offer Kevin a hiding spot with a space heater, it would have to do. The old cemetery, with its ornate mausoleums and half-filled granite crypts, was a little too upscale for the neighborhood residents who usually ended up planning funerals a generation before any mother should have to think like that. Most of the people buried at Woodland had gone to ground in recent years, their lives ending on nearby Springfield Avenue, one of Newark’s main drug corridors.

  Anyone in Woodland at that time of night was at risk of becoming a permanent resident. Likely to get carried out in an ambulance, leaving their grieving family to wonder how the hell they’re gonna afford to bring them back in a hearse.

  Kevin’s mother wouldn’t have to stress that. She’d smoked away any responsibility to him, living or dead, before those freshman track practices. Dad though … he didn’t wanna think about that. Kevin had to at least make it to his 21st birthday, let his father live out the fantasy of buying that first legal beer even though they both knew he’d started sneaking them years ago.

  He ducked behind a stone structure with a tiny angel sitting on top. A naked baby dancing to an unheard song. Kevin never understood why people put those angels anywhere near headstones. They were just dead kids with wings.

  Kevin hunched over, bending his knees, trying to shake the fire out of his chest. His heart rate fell slightly from jackhammer to bass drum as he tried to figure out who was chasing him and why. He thought about the last time he was in court. His last pickup from Levon and the one before. The officer with the zig-zag scar. The video on his cell phone.

  He leaned back against the stone, breath returning to normal, nothing but darkness between him and where he’d run from.

  He was safe until he turned his head the other way, found the shadow peering out from the stone condo full of dead people to the right. An arm came up, a familiar shape where a hand should have been.

  He didn’t run.

  He didn’t resist.

  It didn’t matter.

  CHAPTER 1

  “And you’re sure this will work?”

  No.

  “Of course it will,” I said, peering through the dirt specks on the windshield of my never quite clean Chevy Impala, scanning the sidewalk outside the Newark Police Department’s 3rd Precinct for the guy Officer Anthony Scannell was so worried about.

  “This just seems a little … out there,” Scannell said, rapping his fingers incessantly against my dashboard. “What happens if he says no?”

  Well then, Officer Scannell, you’d be fucked.

  “He won’t say no,” I replied, watching someone round the corner leading up to the precinct’s limestone steps, pretty sure it wasn’t the guy we were looking for. But I couldn’t be entirely certain, because Scannell’s nerve-addled stammer was distracting me and making me wish I’d never quit smoking.

  “How the hell can you be sure?” he asked.

  I couldn’t.

  “I am,” I said, tongue far out ahead of my brain as usual.

  “Goddamnit man, this is my career on the line. My ass,” Scannell said, like I didn’t already know that. “I could use a little explanation.”

  The whining was driving me nuts. Scannell was a big enough guy, probably went 230, six-foot-plus. I’d heard him speak before, years earlier, when we’d both been in the same room but he had no reason to notice. He was a natural baritone, the kind of guy who used profanity in place of cleverness to make it seem like he had something to say. Scannell’s voice was bred tough until a boot got anywhere near his throat, then it turned into a mix of helium and worry. A little kid with a bad report card.

  I g
ritted my teeth, thought about a smoke, and gritted more. Forty-seven days without a cancer stick. In forty-seven days, I’d run at least twenty miles, saved nearly five-hundred bucks and managed to look slightly less than spastic in a pick-up basketball game.

  Scannell wasn’t sending me back to zero. But I needed something in place of a nicotine buzz.

  Berating my client seemed like the next best thing.

  “You’re not exactly in a position to ask questions,” I said.

  “I hired you, didn’t I?” he asked.

  “Yeah, to keep your ass out of the jackpot, not to pat your head and tell you everything’s gonna be fine.”

  Scannell sat up straight, crowded me a little.

  “You know what happens when someone talks to me like that on the job?” he asked.

  “If I had to guess, I’d say you’d beat their ass in the middle of a drug bust, tuck about six grand in your vest, then turn in a weak-ass case that doesn’t even get you past a grand jury, freak out when said suspect goes to pick up his personal property and finds it light, then run to someone who sent you to me for help.”

  His face froze, jaw slack and stupid, and he shrunk back to his side of the car.

  “Allegedly,” he said.

  Allegedly. The useless word I used to type in sentences like “allegedly shot six people” or “allegedly sexually assaulted his stepdaughter.” A legal term I had to write to protect monsters because libel lawsuits are like lower back tattoos.

  With Scannell cowed, I went back to staring at the sidewalk, hoping to catch sight of Antonio Rice before he got anywhere near the precinct’s front door. The Third was on Market Street, north of Ferry, close to the city’s Ironbound section. The neighborhood was all Hispanic and Portuguese, but we’d been here for close to an hour and I hadn’t seen a black man anywhere. Unless I’d missed Rice while debating the facts of life with Scannell, he should have been here by now.

  I turned to the officer, who was staring out the window and plotting his revenge against me.

  “A thought,” I said. “How are you so damn sure Rice will come down here to file a complaint? You can do that over the phone.”

  “That skel doesn’t know that,” he replied.

  “And you’re certain that Rice isn’t smarter than the average skel?”

  “No, I’m certain that I’ve done a solid for the desk sergeant in the Third, and when someone called trying to feed me to the rat squad, he told him they didn’t take complaints over the phone. Then he did me the courtesy of giving me enough time to find you.”

  God bless the Blue Wall.

  On cue, a tall, skinny black man wearing a camouflage jacket rounded the corner at the back of the precinct, hop-stepping with a determined gait and a slight limp. His hair was done up in twists, just like the mug shot I’d seen on the state corrections website.

  “That’s him,” Scannell muttered, sitting straight up.

  I waited a few seconds and let Rice get closer to the precinct, watched Scannell freak out a little. A small part of me wanted to stay in the car, let the universe take out its trash. But I needed the money more than the department needed to be rid of an oaf like Scannell, who sure as shit would cost me business when he inevitably bitched about losing his job in every cop bar between here and Montclair.

  November greeted me with an icy blast as I got out, forcing me to tuck my jacket close as I marched across the street and into Rice’s path.

  “Excuse me,” I said, nearly breaking into a jog to catch up to him. He ignored me.

  “Yo man,” I tried again, earning a half turn of his head but nothing else.

  “Yo, Tonio,” I shouted. “Slow the fuck down.”

  He stopped. Turned.

  Abrasive was Newark’s native tongue.

  Antonio gave me the once-over, trying to figure out if he knew me. If I was cop or criminal. Friend or foe. Fifty feet from a police precinct and even then he didn’t feel safe. It was the kind of practiced skepticism that kept predators from turning into prey in Newark’s West and South Wards.

  At least for a little while.

  “I don’t know you,” he said.

  “You do not.”

  “But you know my name.”

  “Sort of. Know why you’re here too,” I said.

  Antonio took a step back, hand traveling toward his waist on instinct.

  “It’s not there, Antonio. We both know you’re not gonna walk into that precinct and lodge a complaint against a police officer while carrying a concealed weapon,” I said. “Besides, I just wanna talk.”

  “Then talk. Start by telling me how the fuck did you know I was gonna be here and why I came? Actually, hold up, first off, who the fuck are you?”

  “My name is Russell Avery,” I replied. “And I think this will go a lot easier for you if you don’t walk into that building.”

  “That a threat?”

  I ran a hand through my hair and craned my neck. The hell was everyone always so defensive for?

  “No man. I don’t do threats. I’m all about mutual benefit. See, you going in there doesn’t get you any closer to your missing money,” I said. “You not going in there, things could go another way.”

  “And what if this ain’t about money, huh?” Antonio asked. “Maybe I just wanna see that fat fuck swing for this, do my civic duty, ya know?”

  “It’s always about money, Antonio. But I’ll play along, if you wanna pretend it’s not,” I said. “So, you walk in there, right? File your complaint. Meet with a detective from the vaunted Internal Affairs bureau. Then the ‘fat fuck,’ as you so eloquently put it, comes down here to fight the charges with a union lawyer. Then there’s an administrative hearing. You know how often that ends with the cop getting in trouble? Carry the one, round down to zero, and it’s right around never. That’s no spin, by the way, that’s math. This department got something like 200 of these kinds of complaints last year. Cop went down for it like five times. You like those odds?”

  “You’re just talking man,” he said.

  “Oh, I’m not done. So, he gets off, because of course he’s getting off, and then you become public enemy numero uno for him and all his bunkmates in Major Crimes. Which means the next time they come looking for you, it’s not gonna be a possession rap. They’ll trump some shit up. They’ll tune you up in the process. Or, since you’ll have really pissed off the good ol’ boys by going to IA , they might just decide they saw you reach for something. Decide their lives were in imminent danger.”

  He kept his hard stare, but my eyes were already following the tapping sound to his foot moving every which way. It was cold, but it wasn’t that cold.

  “In case you were wondering, that was the threat,” I said.

  I highly doubted Scannell or his friends would ever try to kill this kid. Or anyone, for that matter. But it was plausible. To Antonio. Probably to a lot of people in the city. I didn’t know if that said more about them or the department.

  Antonio jutted his chin out a bit, chewed his lip, kept up the “don’t fuck with me” glare like it made a difference.

  “So you gonn’ tell me the other way this could work?” he asked.

  “Yeah. I’m gonna hand you eight grand. You’re gonna pretend you never met me.”

  “Eight?”

  “Interest, for your pain and suffering.”

  “You think you can just buy me off like that?”

  I wanted to lecture him on the insanity of a drug dealer seeking the moral high ground, but then I remembered who I was working for and what I was doing.

  “Money’s in my jacket pocket Antonio. Just saying.”

  His eyes wandered to where my hands were tucked. We stood there like that for a minute, keeping up the pretense that he needed time to think about this.

  But we both knew the way the world worked.

  I waited outside my car after it was over, making sure Antonio didn’t double back and suffer a cr
isis of conscience. In the span of five minutes I’d helped a dirty cop keep his job and likely financed a month of cocaine sales for Antonio.

  At that moment, a little conscience might not have been the worst thing.

  ***

  My conscience had her eyes trained on the newspaper I no longer worked for, using an elbow to keep the page trapped on a table while fishing at a soup bowl with her free hand. She was sitting in the back of a place called Heaven’s Delight, an old brick building that didn’t have a sign out front, so you knew it was good and it was cheap. They made one hell of an Oxtail soup.

  She was muttering to herself, either reading the article in an incoherent whisper or providing a running commentary, when I sat down across the table and banged my knee on the underside.

  A splash of soup leapt for freedom, clearing the rim of the bowl and turning a used car advertisement into a soggy puddle.

  “Asshole,” Key said.

  “Sorry about the paper,” I replied.

  “That’s not why you’re an asshole.”

  “Well there’s a long list of reasons…”

  “Don’t start with the jokes,” Key said, picking her saucer wide eyes up from the paper and training them on me. The woman really needed to switch to tea. Her pupils were stuck halfway between the Lincoln Tunnel and the moon.

  “I checked in with Antonio,” she said. “Sounds like everything’s handled.”

  “Are you surprised?” I asked.

  “Also said you threatened him.”

  “That’s a pretty strict interpretation of the word,” I replied. “I simply advised him of all the possible ramifications of his choices.”

  “Sounds like a fancy way of saying threatened,” she replied.

  “Hey now. As the ordained writer of the two of us...”

  She cocked her head to the side and cut me off before jabbing one of her unpainted, unmanaged fingernails at the newspaper.

  “You a writer? That’s funny,” she said. “I don’t see your name in here anymore.”