Out of the Past

[maggiethecat]

Out of the Past

Chapter One

The noise was harsh, insistent, not stopping. The phone was ringing. Not his cell but the land line, the sleek black phone-answering machine combo Christie had picked out when they moved into their loft apartment some five years ago. Jim Dunbar rolled over and opened his eyes, experiencing, as he had for the past year and a half, the infinitesimal seismic jolt on realizing that eyes closed and eyes open produced the same irrevocable darkness. Maybe I’ll get used to it one day, he thought philosophically as he reached for the receiver.

“Hello?” he rasped, and cleared his throat.

Silence, broken only by the faint sound of shallow breathing.

“Hello?” he said again, this time impatiently. “Is anyone there?”

Again, silence and the faint rhythmic panting.

“You got the wrong number,” Jim said shortly, and fumbled the receiver back onto the cradle.

“Jimmy?” Christie said sleepily. “Is it a case?”

“Nah, just our midnight phantom.” He reached out again and slapped the top of the digitally-voiced clock on the night stand. Three twenty-three a.m., said the tinny electronic voice. “Go back to sleep,” he said, and reached over to caress her silky dark hair spread out on the pillow. “Go back to sleep.”

“You should tell the squad,” she murmured. “This is getting weird.”

“I will, Christie, I will. Tomorrow.”

Jim hadn’t thought much about the phone calls. Just part of life, really, the phone ringing and no one there, telemarketers when they were trying to eat dinner, hang-ups and wrong numbers. But the dead flowers at their door were somehow different, and he couldn’t shake the feeling up the back of his neck that something was not right. He’d been a Gold Shield NYPD homicide detective too long -- ten years with the Twenty-fifth Precinct, a year off after he’d been injured and fought to reclaim his job and identity, and now six months with the Eighth Precinct -- to not give credence to that icy sensation or the sharp tenseness in his gut. Not that he would tell Christie, not when he knew that she steeled herself every morning when he walked out the door with Hank. But he would, he thought sleepily, take the evidence to work and lay it out for the guys, for Karen. They would understand.


“Give me a break,” said Marty Russo. “Who sends dead flowers?”

“Morticia Addams?” cracked Tom Selway.

“A big bouquet of dead flowers,” said Jim, “on the floor in front of the door. Carnations, Christie said, like you get on the street. No wrapper so no prints. The card was addressed to her. I had her pick it up with her eyebrow tweezers and put it in this.” He opened his briefcase and felt around, then pulled out a small plastic evidence bag with a gilt-edged florist card in it. “From Chelsea Flowers over on 23rd. I called the owner this morning and he says he keeps a big bowl of the cards on the counter. Anyone could have walked in and taken one.” He held it out and Karen Bettancourt took it, then inhaled sharply when she read the brief message written in block caps.

“What’s it say?” Tom asked.

“Enjoy the funeral, Mrs. Dunbar,” Karen said in a low voice.

“It was there yesterday when Christie got home from work,” Jim went on,” so I don’t know long it’d been there. This morning there was a dog bowl with a can of rat poison in it.” He went back into the briefcase and drew out a Baggie containing an inexpensive white plastic dog bowl and a small red can of rat poison marked with the traditional skull and crossbones. “Also bagged,” he said, “but I can’t believe this hairball’s dumb enough to leave prints. And the phone’s been ringing in the middle of the night for about a week now. No one there, of course.” He shook his head. “Whoever’s doing this is smart enough to hack into the phone companies. You guys are the only ones with our number; we switched to an unlisted one last year when the press was all over me.” He leaned back in his chair, folded his arms, and grinned sourly. “Never said my life wasn’t interesting.”

“Anyone been following you?” Marty asked.

“Yeah, Marty. Six gang-bangers and a high school marching band, but they’ve been real quiet.”

“You know, Dunbar,” Marty said mildly, “you could take it as a compliment that I sometimes forget you’re blind.”

Jim grinned. “A compliment?”

“Ooh,” said Tom, “let me go fetch my calendar. I gotta mark this one down.”

“Very funny, guys,” Karen cut in, “but what are we going to do here?”

“Put a man on him, to start with,” said Lieutenant Gary Fisk, who had been listening from the doorway of his office. “And a tap on the phone. Then find out who he might have pissed off on the job. Besides Russo and Chief Tunney, that is.”

“We really need to do all that?” Jim asked.

“You’re being harassed, your wife’s been threatened, and now your dog. You want to wait ‘til someone takes a shot at you?”

There was a brief awkward silence in which Tom shot a frown at Fisk, and Jim paled slightly. “No,” he said evenly. “Not really.”

“Then get on it,” said Fisk. “You’d be all over this if it was one of us.”

Tom went around the desks, sat down in his chair, and picked up his phone. “You only been here what, Jim? Six months?”

“Seems longer,” Marty muttered, but there was no acrimony in his voice and Jim smiled.

“I see where you’re going with this,” Fisk said to Tom. “Good idea.”

“Yeah,” said Tom. “I thought I’d call the Two-Five and have ‘em send over Jim’s old case files, start lookin’ for anyone with a grudge. At least find out who’s inside and who’s, you know, croaked.”

“Karen,” said Fisk, “you pull the DD5s on the stuff you worked with Jim, and Marty, when the files come in from the Two-Five you and Tom start running them through the system. We’ve got a slow day so we can do this until something pops. And let me know if I need to put the pressure on,” he added. “I want those files here stat.”

Jim raised his hand, like a child asking permission to speak in class. “Hello? Over here? What am I supposed to do, play Solitaire?”

“Tap that memory of yours,” Fisk said crisply. “Read the files. What did you think?” He went in his office and shut the door.

“I don’t know,” Jim said doubtfully. “Everything since I’ve been here, we closed clean. Unless it’s someone like Mattus, who’s still got people to do his dirty work last I heard, I can’t think of anyone. If we start going through old stuff?” He ran a hand through his spiky blond hair. “You know how many cases I worked in ten years?” he said to Karen. “This could take forever, especially if I have to feed everything through the scanner. Even if we split it up, you’d still have to run everything by me.”

Karen was silent.

After a few seconds, Jim sighed and said, “C’mon. Out with it.”

Tom had finished his call to the Two-Five, and he and Marty had headed down the hall for coffee. The squad room was empty, but Karen lowered her voice anyway.

“Look, I didn't want to say this in front of the guys but . . . I was just thinking . . . there is a shortcut,” she said hesitantly. “Someone who worked all those cases with you and might remember stuff you forgot.”

“Oh, Jesus, no, Karen,” he said tiredly. “I don’t want to go there, and you know why.”

“Not completely, no,” she said bluntly. “All I know is it makes sense to bring him in. He’s maybe the one person who could help.”

“Right,” Jim said, a bitter edge to his voice. “"Like that's gonna happen."

"I'm calling him," Karen said decisively. "We got nothing to lose. Is he still in Queens?"

"As far as I know." He paused and bit his lip, and Karen smiled in spite of herself; she'd worked with Detective James Dunbar long enough to know that when he bit his lip like that it meant that some sort of decision was being reached.

"555-8914," he said quietly.

"Got it," said Karen, and Jim heard the once-familiar tone pattern as she touched the keypad. "It's ringing."

"Great," Jim said to himself.

"Hello?" said Karen brightly. "Is this Terry? Terry Jansen?”

Chapter Two

“Jimmy.”

Jim stopped typing and took out his earpiece. “Terry,” he said stiffly. “Thanks for coming.”

“Anything to help,” Terry Jansen said uneasily. “Sorry about yesterday, but I had some business to take care of.”

“No problem,” Jim replied. “Gave us a chance to do some groundwork.”

Quickly, Karen got up from her desk and went over to Terry. “Hey, Terry,” she said cheerfully, shaking his hand. “Good to see you. The Two-Five sent over a bunch of your old files and we put them in Interrogation Room Two. We’ll be working in there today.”

“We have a crime wave?” Tom called from his desk. “We’re gonna be grilling suspects in the bathroom.”

Jim pushed his chair back and stood, and Hank lifted his head quizzically. “Hank, stay,” he said briefly, and then strode swiftly down the aisle between the desks. Terry shrank back as he passed, openly staring at Jim as he made a sharp right and went directly to the door of the interrogation room.

“Well?” Jim said, his hand on the doorknob. “We haven’t got all day.”

“How’s he do that?” Terry muttered.

“Radar,” Karen said blandly as she walked by him. “Just like a bat.”

Terry stopped in the doorway, gazing at the myriad blue-and-white file storage boxes that rose in stacks against the far wall. “Jeez,” he breathed. “We worked a lot of cases back in the day, huh, Jimmy?”

“That we did,” Jim said, a little too heartily. “That we did.”

“Have a seat, Terry. You want some coffee?” Karen asked solicitously; he did look a little damp around the edges, and was that a slight tremor in his hands?

“No, I’m good,” Terry said. “Let’s get started.”

“Okay,” Jim said. “Here’s the deal. Someone’s been dogging me, phone calls in the middle of the night, stuff left by the door—“

“That’s what Karen said,” Terry said. “What sort of stuff?”

“Dead flowers,” Jim said, “with a card to Christie saying ‘Enjoy the funeral, Mrs. Dunbar.’ That was Monday. Tuesday there was a dog bowl with rat poison in it. No prints on anything. Yesterday Christie went home at lunch to pick up some papers she forgot and there was a grocery bag with maybe a dozen pair of broken sunglasses, smashed, like with a hammer. She was pretty upset, I don’t mind telling you. But my lieutenant put a patrol car in front of the building and there’s been nothing for two days. Just the phone calls, and we put on a tap on the line.”

“The caller say anything?” Terry asked curiously.

“Just breathing. If I don’t hang up, they do.”

“So they know to get off before you get can get a fix.”

“It’s not rocket science,” Jim said edgily. “You could pick it up from watching Law & Order. Even if we get a trace it could be crap. If it’s a disposable cell?” He shrugged.

“You think it’s an old case come back to life?” Terry asked.

“I don’t know what it is,” Jim said. “I just know it’s one place to look.”

The morning ground on, New York’s finest discussing New York’s worst, Terry either validating or negating Jim’s suggestions and Karen scribbling notes and delving into file boxes, squinting at labels and pulling faded flimsies. “Why isn’t this on the computer?” she said at one point, straightening with a fist to her lower back. “Since when did all the notes in a case file make it into the system?” Jim answered testily. They kept at it until well after noon, Jim and Terry falling into a kind of cop-speak shorthand. Not that they were comfortable with each other -- after the first hour Jim’s face was creased and white with strain, and Terry kept darting covert glances at him, watching his every expression almost hungrily -- but they had for three years been two halves of a whole, with a shared history no panicked actions of the moment could ever completely erase. And they were funny in a way Karen hadn’t expected, winging off into cases gone wrong, like the time Jim followed a fleeing perp off a fire escape by jumping into what he thought was a dumpster filled with cardbopard and scrap paper.

“I missed,” Jim said dryly. “I went into the one next to it, the one from the Chinese restaurant. Remember?”

“Remember?” Terry gasped, his long frame bent double over the table. “What the hell was in that thing?”

“I don’t know,” Jim laughed. “Old shrimp, those little corn things, dead cats.”

“You stank for a week!”

“Did not.”

“Did too.”

By two o’clock Karen had filled half a legal pad with scribbled notations, five boxes had been shifted to the other side of the room, and Terry left for the part-time security job that, he said shamefacedly, at least kept him out of his wife Annie’s hair. He would be back after the weekend, first thing Monday morning; one more session should finish off their old cases. Jim and Karen shut the door with a sense of accomplishment and returned to their desks, Karen to order lunch and Jim to enter notes into his laptop.

A few minutes later Fisk walked out of his office, a pink message slip in hand.

“Got a floater,” he said. “Woman’s body washed up over by the Chelsea piers. Beat cop who found her said it looks like gunshots. Crime unit’s on the way.”

“About time,” said Tom. “I was beginning to think no one in this city wanted to kill anybody any more.”

“Yeah,” Marty said. “Ain’t it sad.”

“You and Tom take this,” said Fisk. “Jim, Karen, you keep working Jim’s stalker thing.”

“I feel like a file clerk,” Jim grumbled.

“It beats stolen cars,” Karen said equably.

He aimed a crooked smile in her direction. “Or bum restaurant checks.”

“Not to mention crowd control,” Fisk said with a sour smile. “Or a transfer to the South Bronx.”

After he heard Fisk’s office door close and the sound of Russo and Selway’s footsteps had died away, Jim said, “We alone here?”

“Yeah,” Karen said. “What’s up?”

“What did Terry look like?”

“Six-two, dark hair. What d’ you mean, what did he look like? You know what Terry looks like.”

“Karen,” he said in a low voice, “did you smell the guy?”

“Not the cologne thing again,” she groaned.

“He’s been drinking, hard. No one uses that much mouthwash.”

“Maybe he tied one on last night,” she countered. “Maybe he was nervous about coming in.”

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “This has been going on for a while. It’s starting to come through his pores.”

“He did look sort of, I don’t know, messy. His clothes were kind of rumpled, and his shirt wasn’t ironed.”

“Huh. Terry was always sharp, suits pressed, good ties, shine on his shoes. You know, sharp.”

“Like you?”

“Oh, not that sharp,” he said, grinning. “Not possible.”


Christie was putting the last of the dinner dishes in the dishwasher when Jim walked out of the bedroom and, running the back of a hand briefly along the edge of the island, headed for the refrigerator. “I just turned the ringer off on the phone,” he announced. “It’s that knob on the side, right? You’d better check. I don’t care if that freak calls every hour on the hour -- we both need a good night’s sleep.” He opened the refrigerator door and took out a beer, then rolled it across his forehead, the smooth icy glass easing the first twinges of a headache. “I’m beat,” he said. “Let’s hit the sofa and do a movie.”

“Let me guess,” Christie teased. “Godfather I or Godfather II? You know, the new DVDs have really good audio descriptions. I was thinking about getting you the set for your birthday.”

“Thanks, but I’ve seen them so many times I can run ‘em in my head,” he said. “Besides, do I really want to listen to some guy say, Michael drops the gun on the floor, he walks quickly out of the restaurant—”

He began to laugh, genuine unforced laughter that made Christie smile indulgently and ask, “What is it? What’s so funny?”

“Working with Terry today? It’s like Godfather III. 'Every time I think I’m out, they pu-u-ull me back in.' Yeah, let’s do some Godfather. Put on the first one. Budda-bing, budda-bang.”

“Which you’ll be saying for the next two days now,” she said as she walked across the room. She found the DVD in the cabinet under the TV and slid it into the player, and then picked up the remotes and went to the sofa where Jim was already in position, head back, sock feet propped on the coffee table, longneck in hand. Hank was asleep on the rug between the sofa and the coffee table, ears and paws twitching faintly as he chased rabbits and perps through Central Park. She sat down beside Jim and leaned her head against his shoulder, taking his free hand in hers. “Was it bad,” she said tentatively, “seeing Terry again? I mean, you ducked his calls for a year, and then that mess with the shooting.”

And it was back, the cold streak up the back of his neck and the tension under his ribs. “Christie, how often did Terry call? How many times?”

“I don’t know.” She frowned, thinking back to what she had named “Jimmy’s Black Days,” the days when she’d come home to find him asleep, or worse, stretched out on the sofa staring blankly into the abyss, breakfast dishes in the sink, dead coffee burning in the pot, a flotilla of empty beer bottles on the floor beside him and the answering machine blinking away, sometimes as many as two dozen unanswered calls she would then have to go through and deal with. “A lot, at first,” she said. “Then maybe once a month.”

“Even after we changed our number?”

“Of course, don’t you remember? Annie called me at work, upset that she couldn’t get through, so I—” She twisted around and looked up at him. “I shouldn’t have done that, should I?”

“Nah, it’s fine,” he answered, shrugging his shoulders to shake off the moment. “No problem. Let’s just run the movie.”


He was in the back seat of a car, a big black sedan with running boards and wide padded seats, driving through the flat empty reaches of the Jersey meadows. There was a man sitting next to him, a fat man with a puffy childlike face who held a white bakery box on his lap. As they drove the scenery began to change, grassy flatlands giving way to houses and small factories, until the car entered a city block lined with office buildings. The street was choked with patrol cars parked at haphazard angles and he could hear noises: gunshots popping, the harsh chatter of an automatic weapon, hoarse shouts of “Officer down, officer down.” The car stopped and the door beside him opened. He drew his gun and made a move to get out, but the fat man stopped him with a hand on his arm. “Leave the gun,” he said, and held the bakery box out by the red string loop. “Take the cannoli.” He knocked the box out of the man’s hand, got out of the car, and looked down at his right hand. It was empty. His gun was in the car. He tugged on the handle but the door wouldn’t open, so he crept around to the front of the car and looked across the street. Terry was there -- what was Terry doing there? -- crouched against the side of an electrical box, a slick sheen on his flaccid face, as still as stone. And then he turned his head and saw it, a massive silhouette blocking out the sun, looming and ominous, a tall man in bulky body armor, armed, his face hidden by a black balaclava. He turned again, slowly -- he couldn’t move, his limbs were leaden, he couldn’t run, it was all molasses -- and went across the street to Terry and pulled the gun out of his hands, feeling with a sense of relief the cool metallic weight of the Browning, so reassuring, this he could do, and he lifted his arm and aimed, reflexively pulling the trigger once, just once. But the black-clad arm had also risen, and there was a flash of light and in a single sickening instant he knew . . . and then a searing pain snapped his head back and he was falling, he was falling . . . .

Jim Dunbar jerked his eyes open, his heart pounding, his breath harsh in his ears. Shit, he thought bleakly. Not again. Not now.

[maggiethecat]

Chapter Three

It was a long trip uptown — almost an hour — and one he hadn’t made in months, but Jim Dunbar made it at the end of that Monday with a peculiar sense of familiarity and relief. He was good on the subway now, better than those first uneasy days back on the job when he’d been rawly aware of the stares, real or imagined, as he made his way through the crowd to the edge of the platform. Sometimes people approached him — women, mostly — the questions ostensibly about Hank but really about him, and he deflected them with humor and blunt answers. The glasses and the dog were a bizarre kind of passport, he had decided, to a realm where politeness went out the window and it was open season on the obviously different. The only security, then as now, had been the solidly stitched leather of Hank’s harness in his hand, the steady rhythm of his breathing and the onward pull of his softly padding gait, the thick sweet smell of his fur. “Gotta go,” he’d say with a quick unfelt smile. “Dog’s gettin’ itchy.”

In the beginning he’d counted every step, obsessively, beyond need or technique, as he navigated the city armed only with his cane and a rough defiance: out the door and away from Christie to the elevator, down and through the foyer onto the street, counted the steps in each block, dimly thanking whoever had made them a uniform length throughout Manhattan. Counted the steps to the subway, counted the steps down the stairs to the platform although he knew by the subterranean dampness and the aroma compounded of concrete and hot metal and stale sweat when he was there, knew before the train pulled in with a rush of noise and air. But Hank had freed him from all that, giving him back his easy loping stride and the simple joy of walking down a street. Now he barely thought about it, traveling by memory and skill to the office building that was his destination, locating the raised buttons in the elevator and wondering, as he occasionally did in a remote corner of his mind, how the blind had navigated easily, alone, or at all before legislation mandated Braille in public.

The elevator opened and he turned left and walked to the door, cleared his throat nervously, and knocked.

“Jim. Come in. Good to see you.”

“Thanks. You been rearranging the furniture?”

Dr. Alan Galloway smiled and said, “No, everything’s the same.”

They walked across the room and settled themselves, Jim in one of the low square-built armchairs with the prickly upholstery, Hank on the carpeted floor beside him. Jim took off his sunglasses and put them down, precisely, on the end table beside the chair, smiling inwardly as he made the practiced movement.

Galloway leaned against his book-piled desk and shoved his hands deep into the pockets of his rumpled khakis. “Been a while,” he said. “How’s it going? Been having any fun?”

“If you mean what you told Christie and me, I don’t know whether to thank you or kick you,” Jim answered dryly. “She signed us up for ballroom dancing.”

“Ballroom dancing?” Galloway said, one corner of his mouth twitching. “How’d that work out?”

“I found out I’m no Fred Astaire, that’s how it worked out. We switched to a sailboat. Much more fun, and Hank loves it.”

“You sail, Jim?”

“Oh sure, yachting was big in Red Hook. Nah, we took lessons. Christie found this little marina up in Cos Cob where you can rent sixteen-footers. There’s a B & B down the street, you can walk on the beach. It’s nice, really nice.”

The silence drew out. Jim fidgeted his feet in his shoes, cleared his throat again.

“This is all very pleasant,” Galloway said mildly, “but I don’t for a minute believe you came here to talk about sailing.”

“Okay. I, uh, I seem to have picked up a stalker. Stuff left by the door, phone calls at all hours. It’s been going on for a couple of weeks.”

“And?”

“And it’s a pain in the neck. We got a patrol car in front of the building, the phone’s tapped. I even have a babysitter,” he said sourly. “Tommy Antonelli, fresh out of the Academy and I hate to think I was ever that green. I ditched him today by telling him Christie was coming with me.”

“You think that’s wise?”

“I have an idea who’s behind this and— my life’s not in danger. That’s not what this is about,” he said flatly. “Anyway, Karen — she’s my partner and she’s terrific — she’s young but she’s got good instincts — she thought maybe it was an old case, somebody I’d put away, so we’ve been going through files from the Two-Five and . . . “ His voice trailed away. He drummed his fingers on the arm of the chair, and then, as if realizing what sort of signal he was sending, stopped abruptly.

“Jim,” said Galloway. “I thought we’d passed this point.”

“What point?”

“The point at which getting you to talk was like trying to open a clam with a plastic picnic fork.”

Jim snorted, then composed his face into what he hoped was a noncommittal expression. “Anyway, Karen gets this bright idea that we’ll save time if we call in my old partner. So she calls him. She calls Terry.”

Galloway peeled himself off his desk and sat in the chair opposite Jim. “Then this is about Terry.”

“It’s always about Terry,” was the acrid reply. “Mister Screw-up. The guy’s a mess.”

“You can’t mean he’s still on the job.”

“No, he retired on a reduced pension. We set it up that way. I thought if he went away with that much, it’d be the end of it.”

“Hunh,” said Galloway. “Interesting. How’s he doing?”

“Oh great, just great. A little security work, a lot of drinking.”

Galloway frowned, his heavy brows drawn together. “He told you this?”

“My old man ran a bar, drank half the profits. I know the signs. I know the smell,” he added grimly. “I’ve spent the better part of two days going down Memory Lane with him, and — I thought I could handle it. I mean, it’s over. We’re done, Terry and me. But he just keeps turning up.”

“Like a bad penny.”

“More like a bad dream,” Jim muttered.

Galloway leaned forward and studied the other man’s face, noticing for the first time since he’d walked in the faintly etched lines of strain at the sides of his mouth and the bluish shadows under his eyes. “You’ve not been sleeping,” he said intuitively.

“No, I— damn it,” he blurted. “I don’t need this crap. I don’t need to go through this again.”

“Which would be?”

“Which would be?” Jim repeated mockingly. “The dream I keep having. More like a nightmare.”

Again the silence drew out. Hank sank his head onto his paws with a resigned sigh, Jim grimaced and shifted his head to one side, cracking his neck.

“Yes, well,” Galloway said crisply after a moment. “All indications to the contrary, I am not a mind-reader.”

Jim sank back in the chair, put his elbows on the armrests, and rested his chin on clasped hands. “Started in the hospital,” he said almost inaudibly. “I had it a lot, at first. It begins all kind of different ways but always ends the same. With the guy from the bank. With getting shot. And then I wake up, sweating.” He smiled crookedly. “It’s a real adrenalin burst.”

“And you’ve been having it again.”

“Every night, for the past three nights. Ever since Terry showed up. So, Doc, you gonna tell me what it means?”

“That’s not what we do here, Jim.”

“Ah, I know what it means,” he said wearily. “It’s the elephant in the room. Terry blew it, that day at the bank. He froze. Never told you that, did I? I shot the guy with his gun. And Terry never came clean about it. Not with me, not with himself. He only shot himself that time so he’d look like a hero. Like a wounded cop hero.”

“Like you,” Galloway said evenly.

“Yeah,” Jim said. “Ain’t that a kick in the head? Why would anyone want to be like me?”

“You tell me.”

“So this is why I pay you the big bucks,” Jim said with wry amusement. “Okay, I’ll play.” He took a beat and said, “I’m still a cop, and I’m good at it. My marriage is better than it’s been in a long time; it’s like we finally know who we are. The blindness . . . it is what it is. Some days are worse than others — I mean, some days it’s just too damned much — but not so much any more. There’s still this moment when you wake up that’s like, oh yeah. Right. But you get up, you get on with it.”

Galloway smiled. “It’s called moving on.”

“It’s not like I had a choice,” Jim replied, a tart edge to his voice.

“Nonsense,” Galloway said brusquely. “We always have choices. And what I’m hearing is that, even though you’ve said it here in this office any number of times, you are not done with Terry any more than you’re done with the consequences of his actions.”

“And I need to be.”

“Could not have said it better myself.”


Jim Dunbar slept that night and did not dream of guns or Terry Jansen or the moment that had cut his life in two. He woke early and slipped out of bed without waking Christie, made a pot of coffee, and sat by an open window, drinking in the sounds of the city waking up and sipping the rich bitter brew as he went over in his mind, again, the events of the past week. He knew what he had to do, just as he knew it was going to be brutal, but all he could do, in the end, was follow his instincts. And so that morning he asked Karen and Marty and Tom to join him in the interrogation room, to discuss what they were calling “Jim’s stalker thing.” He took his usual pose, leaning against the wall, with Tom and Marty seated on either side of the long metal table and Karen perched on the edge of it.

“Here’s the thing,” he began. “I been thinking—”

“There’s a news flash,” said Marty.

“Give me a minute here, will you? Going through files is a waste of time. If it was some skell with a grudge they’d get someone to beat me up, or do it themselves. Or shoot me if they were that pissed off. But this is personal. Sick jokes about funerals and Hank, broken sunglasses. This is someone who knows me, which pretty much narrows it down to you guys, my family, and the people I used to work with. And that includes Terry.”

“Whoa,” said Marty. “I know there was some bad blood, but wasn’t he a stand-up guy?”

“I’ll tell them if you won’t,” Karen said.

Jim took off his sunglasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Go ahead. But it doesn’t leave this room.”

“You remember the Oliver case,” Karen said.

“Sure,” Tom said, nodding. “Turned out the gun went off by accident.”

“It didn’t,” Karen said. “Terry picked up Titus’s gun when he dropped it in the stairwell and shot himself in the arm—”

“He what?” exclaimed Tom. “That’s crazy.”

“It gets worse,” Karen said. “Even after the murder charges were dropped on Titus, Terry kept insisting that he’d shot him. So Jim and me, we went back to the roof and poked around until we found the handkerchief Terry’d used to catch powder burns.” She stopped, remembering the determination mingled with a kind of resigned sadness on Jim’s face when he’d unfolded the crumpled linen and found, one by one, the four charred holes. And then later, when she’d driven Jim to the river, the tragic pantomime she’d watched from her car, Terry’s argumentative gestures only quelled when Jim held up the proof of his lies. Jim had been awfully quiet after. There was more to it, she suspected, but since that day the door had remained shut.

“So whose idea was it, the accident thing?” Marty asked.

“Mine,” said Jim. “I told him if he went to Fisk with it, he could probably keep his pension and maybe his reputation. But he was done on the job and he knew it. We both knew it. My end of the deal was, I got rid of the handkerchief.”

“Always thought there was something hinky about that story,” said Tom. “But why would a guy shoot himself like that?”

Marty had been watching Jim’s face throughout. “This goes back to the bank,” he said quietly. “You ever gonna tell us what happened?”

“This is not something we talk about again,” Jim said warily. “No hashing it out over a beer, ever. We clear on that?”

“Got it,” Tom said.

Jim lifted his head, his unfocused gaze somewhere over Marty’s head. “Terry froze. He just, he— he froze. He had a clear shot and the guy was empty and I was empty, and I was yelling at him to take the shot but he didn’t move.” He took a deep breath and blew it out. “So I went over and grabbed his gun,” he said simply. “The rest you know.”

Karen was staring at him, her eyes wide and dark above the hand pressed over her mouth, the only sounds in the dusty little room the pigeons clucking along the windowsill and the faint hum from a vent in the ceiling.

“Jesus, Dunbar,” Marty said in a stunned voice. “You’re blind because of Terry? I’d a killed the guy.”

“Yeah, well, it wasn’t exactly an option at the time,” Jim said sarcastically. “If you want to be technical about it, I’m blind because I got shot in the head. Let’s just say Terry aided and abetted. And it chewed him up bad.”

“Can see that,” Tom said briskly. “Don’t know any man could live with that kind of guilt. You think it’s Terry been leaving that trash by your door, calling you and all?”

“I kept thinking, because of the phone calls, that it had to be someone hacking into databases,” Jim said. “But I didn’t know until the other night, from something Christie said, that the Jansens had our new number. And they sure as hell know where we live.” He was quiet for a moment and then said, “I hate this. I really hate thinking this way.”

Jim Dunbar stood, squared his shoulders, and put on his sunglasses. “I need to run their credit cards, and then we have to get them in here, today. Together. Terry and Annie.”

[maggiethecat]

Chapter Four

Detective Karen Bettancourt had known any number of cops’ wives in her time on the force and had found them to be intelligent, sensible, and characterized by a peculiar brand of toughness. Even Christie Dunbar, the quintessential Uptown Girl, had, Karen sensed, that toughness, the toughness of a woman who knows that on any given day her husband — the sort of man who hears gunfire and runs toward it and not away — could walk out the front door for the last time. And Christie had experienced what all the wives dreaded: the sober-faced officers appearing, suddenly, the patrol car dash with lights flashing and siren keening, the crowded hospital corridor and the hushed voices, the Mayor murmuring soothing platitudes, all of it eclipsed by word that, while her husband was not on his way to the morgue, the news was not good. These were women, Karen knew, who kept the faith and kept smiling and made acrid little jokes to keep the Hounds of Hell at bay. These women were survivors.

Annie Jansen didn’t seem to fit the pattern.

She was almost as tall as Karen but seemed tiny, with a bird-boned physique that bordered on frail. Soft brown hair worn girlishly long, pale translucent skin, and large clear blue eyes in a heart-shaped face combined to give an impression of a clinging vulnerability. Her jeans hung on her hips as though she’d lost weight suddenly and recently, and she kept picking at the frayed cuff of her black turtleneck. This, thought Karen, was a woman who was afraid of something . . . or everything. She had barely looked at Karen or Jim when they arrived, and she barely looked at Terry now as they sat together in Interrogation Room Two, flipping through mug books and not speaking.

“How long we gonna make ‘em do this?” Karen said to Jim as she sat on the edge of her desk, sipping a cup of lukewarm coffee.

He flipped the cover on his watch and fingered the hands. “It’s been almost an hour. Another couple minutes should do it.”

“You think Terry bought it? I mean, suspicious characters in their neighborhood?”

“I told him I went back to the files and found a guy we put away for Man One, got out last month. Makes sense that he’d go after both of us. Trust me — he bought it. You get the print-outs?”

Karen nodded then mentally chastised herself and said, “Yeah, Jim. Right here. You think we should be the ones to do this? Marty and Tom are up to speed.”

“It wouldn’t have the same effect,” he said grimly. “Where’s her purse?”

“I don’t know, you want me to look?”

“If you don’t mind.”

Karen smiled. “I don’t mind.” She put down her coffee, went swiftly to the alley-like space behind the interrogation room, and was back in seconds. “Big squishy thing,” she announced, “like a bucket bag. It’s on the end of the table.”

“Which end?” Jim asked.

“On your left, when you walk in. They’re facing the back of the room. Annie’s next to the window. Bag’s on the corner of the table.” Karen started to grin. “So what do I look for when you just happen to knock it on the floor?”

“Get the address book—”

“—and see if you’re in it?” she said doubtfully. “That doesn’t prove a thing.”

“You know that and I know that. But she won’t,” he said and stood. “No, Hank, stay. Come on, let’s get this over with.”

“Boss’s still at lunch. He said he wanted to be in on this. Marty and Tom, too.”

“Damn,” Jim groaned. “Look, Karen, let’s keep to the evidence and try to stay off of— well, you know.”

“I know. The Oliver thing. I won’t bring it up, but if it’s what we need to crack those two?” She shook her head. “This isn’t going to be easy.”

“Tell me about it.”


“Hey, how you doin’?” Karen said brightly. She entered the interrogation room and then stopped abruptly so that Jim, on her heels, stumbled and caught himself clumsily on the edge of the table.

“What'd I get?” Jim said blandly.

“Just Annie’s purse. No problem,” Karen said, swiftly picking up the contents strewn over the dusty floor. “I’m down here, Jim, by the table.”

“Thanks,” he said and quickly sidestepped to the right-hand wall.

“Here you go, Annie. I think I got everything,” Karen said, handing her the brown leather bag. She stood, brushed off the knees of her black denim pants, and walked around behind her. Quickly, she leafed through the small green leather address book she had palmed, and shot a discreet “thumbs up” at the two-way mirror for the benefit of Fisk and Selway and Russo.

“Good girl,” Marty said quietly.

Jim found his way to the file boxes from the Two-Five against the back wall and leaned against them, casually folding his arms. “See anyone in the mug books, Terry?” he asked pleasantly.

“Nah, Jimmy. Nothin’ popped out. Honey?”

“No,” said Annie. “Nobody that looked familiar.”

"Yeah," said Jim, nodding. “Didn’t really think you would.”

“Then what are we doin' here?” Terry asked.

“Good question . . . Karen?”

Karen leaned over Annie’s shoulder and slapped a sheaf of papers down on the table in front of her. “Annie, Annie, Annie,” she said sorrowfully, leaning into her face. “We ran your credit cards. Lots of activity on your cards, sweetheart. Grocery stores, utility bills—”

“So?” Annie said defensively. “It’s not a crime, is it?”

“Oh, no. Not a crime. Not at all,” Karen said mildly. She walked around the table so she was facing the Jansens. “We all get behind every once in a while, right? Groceries on the Master Card, light bill on the Visa . . . rat poison at Ace Hardware, sunglasses at the Duane Reade on Astoria Boulevard,” she said fiercely. “Two disposable cell phones at the Radio Shack three blocks from your house. The Dunbars’ phone number in your address book,” she said and tossed it dramatically onto the credit card reports. “Did you think we wouldn’t put it all together? Did you think you were smarter than we were?”

“Oh, Jesus,” Terry whispered. “What is this?”

“This,” Jim said, “is what we've been chasin' all week. My own private stalker. Rat poison, sunglasses. Calls to an unlisted number.”

Terry turned and stared at his wife. “Annie?" he said wonderingly. "What have you— what have you done?”

“Why don’t you ask him?” she said. “Why don’t you ask Jimmy?”

“Aw, sweetie,” Terry said, and tried to put his arm around her shoulders. She shrugged him off angrily and said, “He’s why you’re not a cop.” She pointed a shaking finger at Jim. “Why'd you do it? Why couldn’t you leave him alone? It was an accident. That gun went off by accident. Why’d you have to push him off the job?” Her voice rose shrilly and Dunbar winced. “Why’d you do that, Jimmy? Why? What did he ever do to you?”

“Don't go there, Jim,” Marty muttered. “Don't do it.”

“Terry,” Jim said, shaking his head. “You didn’t tell her.”

“Tell me what? He never talks to me,” Annie cried, tears starting to spill down her cheeks. “We’re gonna lose the house. Did you know that? All he ever does is drink and he never comes home and when he does it’s Jimmy this and Jimmy that and Jimmy done him wrong. Jimmy forced him off the job. Jimmy’s the big hero and Jimmy made him quit.”

“What's up with these people?” Fisk said.

“They’re pathetic,” Marty said in an undertone.

“It's like watchin’ Days of Our Lives," Tom said out of the corner of his mouth. "Maybe she got a brain tumor.”

“This has to end,” Jim said to Terry, a harsh edge to his voice. “Now. Can’t you see what you’ve done?”

“Jimmy, please. I can’t believe you’re doin’ this.”

“No," he said with a flat, dismissive gesture. "You don't put this on me. Not this time.”

“All right. All right,” Terry said, and swallowed. “The shooting . . . it wasn't an accident, honey. I— I picked up the kid’s gun and I shot myself. I wanted to . . . shit, I don’t know why I did it. I guess I wasn't thinkin' too straight. And Jimmy found out and that’s why I quit . . . that’s why I . . . .”

Annie Jansen’s reaction was the last thing anyone expected. “I don’t care,” she cried passionately. “I don’t care. You still get to be a cop,” she said to Jim. “Why doesn't my Terry get to be a cop? It’s all he ever wanted. It’s not fair.”

“You think life is fair?” said Jim Dunbar.

“I just wanted you to suffer,” Annie sobbed. “The way we suffered.”

“Suffered?” Terry blurted. “Annie, look at the guy! Jesus, he can’t see.”

“I don’t care,” she said raggedly, wiping her nose on her sleeve. “I don’t care. How come he gets to be a cop and you don’t? I just wanted him to worry the way I worry, the way I can’t sleep, the way I—” and she broke down, finally and completely, rocking back and forth and sobbing, screwing her knuckles into her eyes like a child, Terry staring at her helplessly.

“Here’s the deal,” Jim said into the pained silence that followed, Karen gazing compassionately at the weeping woman, Fisk observing with lips compressed to an ominous line. “I’m not going to press charges. Terry, you need to stop blaming other people for your crap, and you need to get sober to do it. If you can't do it by yourself, go to AA. Annie? You really need to talk to somebody. I can give you the name of a good shrink if you want. For the sake of my godson,” he added. “You two go on like this, he's gonna wind up in foster care." He took a deep breath and let it out on a sigh. “Get help,” he said sadly. “And leave me and Christie alone. Just leave us alone.”


Lieutenant Gary Fisk stood in the open door of his office, his face devoid of expression. “Dunbar,” he rapped out. “My office.”

As Jim passed his desk on his way across the squad room Marty said, “Hang tough. We’ll back you.”

“Close the door,” Fisk said curtly, “and sit down. Would you like to tell me what just happened in there?

“We closed the stalker case?”

“Nice try. From what I can tell, it seems that the department is not only paying out a pension to a man who by all rights should have been brought up on charges, but my detectives knew about it.”

“Tom and Marty didn’t, not until yesterday.”

“I see. How’d you know Jansen shot himself?”

“I heard his Browning go off before the .022,” Jim said uneasily.

Fisk picked up his ballpoint and started tapping it on the desk. “And you, what? Confronted him with this little tidbit and he rolled over with his paws in the air?”

“I tried, he wouldn’t budge. But he’d used his handkerchief to catch the powder burns, and stashed it on the roof. So I, uh, I went back there and found it.”

“Right. You just waltzed up there by your lonesome and found it. Where is it?”

“I got rid of it,” Jim said in a low voice. “That was part of the deal. To get him to back off the Oliver kid and say it was an accident.”

Fisk threw the pen down onto his desk. It bounced onto the floor with a clatter and Jim started. “Then you had the goods on him,” the lieutenant said angrily. “Instead you chose to involve Karen in your crooked little scheme — since I think it’s safe to assume she was there on the roof with you — and you destroyed evidence in an ongoing case. Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t turn you over to IA and then bounce you right out the door.”

“I can’t,” Jim said evenly. “If it was me, that’s what I’d do.”

“Damn it, Jim. What’s going on? I have a right to know.”

Jim was silent for a moment, and then said, “Terry only did what he did because of me.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“That day at the bank . . . he didn’t step up like he could have. He couldn’t deal with it.”

“Jim,” Fisk said, frowning. “I’ve read the report, it’s in your jacket. As best I remember, you were empty and Terry gave you his gun. How is that not stepping up?”

“That’s not what happened. I had to leave cover to get his gun.”

“He was pinned down?”

“He wasn’t pinned down,” Jim said caustically. “He froze.”

“Hunh. How come none of this is in the report?”

“IA got to him first, I guess,” he replied with a shrug. “I don’t even remember what I said to the guy. I was pretty doped up for a while.”

“So he sells them a line of bull,” Fisk said to himself.

“Yeah, well, he couldn’t sell it to himself. I didn’t know how screwed up he was until he shot himself.”

“And you just decide to cover for him. After all that.”

“Look, I’d only been here a couple a weeks. Marty was in my face, you didn’t trust me. No one wanted me here. If I’d ratted out my ex-partner, do you think anyone would have let me do my job after that?”

“You thought engaging in a cover-up to protect a fellow officer was the way to gain trust and respect around here.”

“I really didn’t know what else to do.”

Gary Fisk leaned back in his chair and looked at Jim Dunbar, studying him, noting the way he sat, upright and unmoving, his hands relaxed on the arms of the chair. The Dunbar who’d walked into his office six months ago would have leapt to the defensive, argued and interrupted, done anything to protect his tenuous position in the squad — not met a righteous ass-kicking with unflinching honesty.

“I started out walking a beat in the Four-Four,” he said after a moment. “My first partner was old style, a real glad-hander. Couldn’t walk down the block without gettin’ twenties slipped in his pocket. I was young and scared — we were up by Fort Apache — so I kept my mouth shut. About the money, and about a lot of other stuff I don’t like to think about even now. Call it the blue wall of silence, call it hoping things would get better if I kept my head down. I made a vow to myself, though, that I ever attained a position of authority in the department I wouldn’t tolerate any funny business from my men. And I haven’t. But I do know about loyalty, and maybe wanting to give a man better than he gave you. I don’t like what you did, Jim, but I think I understand why you did it.”

“It seemed like the best way out, for everyone. No press, he’d be off the job. Now I’m not so sure."

“Well, we’re not taking this any further, not now. I can’t imagine it’d make any of us look good.” He smiled, briefly. “And I don’t feel like going through the hassle of breaking in a new man. You think Jansen’ll keep his mouth shut?”

“He has before,” Jim said grimly.

“Which leaves Russo and Selway,” Fisk said crisply, sitting up and starting to square up the papers on his desk. “I suggest — strongly — that you all take this to your graves.”

“That sounds good.”

“Then we’re done here. Oh, and get those files back to the Two-Five — I’m sick of tripping over them.”

Jim rose from his chair and was making his way to the door when Fisk looked up from his paperwork. “Jim?”

He turned.

“Sorry you didn’t have a better partner that day,” he said quietly.

“Thanks. That makes two of us.”


Saturday morning dawned cool and crisp, with deep Colorado-blue skies and a breeze. It was the kind of perfect September day that hardened New Yorkers still greeted with a slight uneasiness, eyeing the cloudless sky and remembering another perfect September day and two planes streaking low and fast over the city. But Jim and Christie Dunbar thought no dark thoughts that morning as they headed up to Grand Central Station and the 10:40 to Stamford, comfortably clad in jeans and sweaters, Jim shouldering a duffle with their weekend gear and Hank at his side. They made the train with time to spare, capturing one of the double-wide seats near the doors where Hank could stretch out, and Jim was in such tearing high spirits that he bantered easily with a trio of giggly preteens who diffidently approached him about the dog and the harness, and was he really, you know, like totally blind?

“That was sweet,” Christie murmured when they finally left for their seats at the back of the car, slipping her arm through his. “You were nice.”

“Christie. I’m always nice.”

“Uh huh. Sure you are.”

They got off at Cos Cob and walked through the parking lot, down a hill and back under the Metro North tracks, and then the three short blocks to the Stanton House, a bed and breakfast in a beautifully restored white Victorian surrounded by tall maple trees and lush perennial beds. Mrs. Norsgaard saw them come up the walk and came out to greet them. Of course their room was ready, the airy second floor bedroom with the four-poster and the bathroom with the old-fashioned clawfoot tub Jim claimed you could do the backstroke in, and there was a fresh pitcher of iced tea in the kitchen and would Hank like a nice bowl of water? They parked the duffle and chatted for a few minutes in the large farm-style kitchen at the back of the house, Christie eyeing with envy the pristine vegetable and herb beds through the screen door. The lunch they’d ordered was waiting — sandwiches and beer and a bottle of Chardonnay for milady — packed tidily in a small Styrofoam cooler, and they took it and crossed River Road to the marina.

They stopped at the office, paid for the day’s rental, and walked to the sixteen-foot sailboat tied up at the end of the far dock. They went through their checklist — Christie testing the radio for the Coast Guard and water patrol frequencies, Jim checking the outboard and getting out the seat cushions — and within minutes they were casting off, Jim neatly coiling the lines. "Lines, Mr. Dunbar, lines," he could hear George, their instructor, saying in his head. "They're only ropes on land." They motored down the Mianus River and under the railroad bridge, the 24-foot mast just clearing, and out into Greenwich Harbor. Outboard now off, Jim undid the bungie cords around the mainsail cover on the boom, raised the mainsail, and fed the starboard and port lines through the cleats along the rails, neatly knotting off the one not in use. “I don’t feel like putting up the spinnaker today,” he said. “Too much work.” The mainsail filled with a satisfying ripple, the Sally Ann tilted to a pleasing angle, and they were underway.

“This,” Jim announced as he settled back on a seat cushion and lifted his face to the wind, “is the life.”

“You and Hank look like a couple of dogs with your heads out the car window,” Christie commented, gently moving the tiller to keep them on course. Hank’s ears pricked at the sound of his name, but he stayed where he was on the deck between the two long seats. (George had expressed concern until Jim had explained that, as long as he was in harness, Hank was on duty and would not be, well, acting all that much like a dog.)

“Everything look good?” Jim asked. “Lines not tangled or anything?”

“You’re awfully good at this. You must have the sea in your veins.”

“Ah, me and the Staten Island Ferry go way back.”

It was not only a perfect day, but a perfect day to be out in a boat. The Dunbars sped along at a moderate rate, not really going anywhere, enjoying the rocking-chair motion of the waves, the occasional quick roller coaster when they crossed the wake from a power boat, the only sounds the creaking of the lines, bell buoys pinging like distant church bells, the feline mewing of seagulls, and faint voices from the race out of the Riverside Yacht Club, a flotilla of twenty-footers scattered along the horizon, their sails like starched white handkerchiefs. Christie spread on a coating of 50-SPF sunscreen every hour on the hour (“Why don’t you just use cement?” Jim quipped) and watched the stress trickle out of her husband like water down a drain, remembering his pronouncement after their first long day on the water: “If everyone had a sailboat, no one would need Xanex.”

After a time they changed direction, coming about smartly with an exchange of commands, Jim listening to the sail flapping and adjusting the lines until he heard it belly out into silence, and headed for a secluded spot off Tod’s Point. They dropped anchor. Jim opened a beer, Christie her wine, and she made a ceremony of clinking her plastic cup against his bottle of Heineken.

“You ready to tell me now?” she said presently.

“About what?” he answered drowsily. He was lying down, cushion behind his head, legs crossed and Top Siders kicked off.

“About Terry and Annie.”

“Oh . . . them.” And so he did, relating the dreadful scene in the interrogation room and omitting nothing, not even his forthright conversation with Fisk.

“Then it’s over?” she said tentatively. “Finally over?”

“I think so,” he said, and then, unexpectedly, he began to laugh. “Oh my God,” he said, shaking his head, peals of unfeigned laughter erupting.

“Jimmy!” She reached out and shook his arm. “What?”

“Oh, Jesus,” he gasped. “Oh, this is too much. Do you remember my Aunt Jessie?”

“I don’t know,” she said doubtfully. “Was she at our wedding?”

“No, she was gone by then. Poor old thing. She was a real sweetheart, worked at the main branch of the Brooklyn Public Library for about a hundred years. Always gave me books at Christmas, really terrific stuff. The Black Stallion, Howard Pyle’s Book of Pirates.

“What does she have to do with anything?”

“No, listen. Aunt Jessie had a drinking problem, a bad one. My tenth birthday, she got hammered and fell into the cake, a big Carvel ice cream cake. I shouldn’t laugh, I really shouldn’t,” he said, his shoulders heaving. “I mean, she was so embarrassed. Fudgy the Whale all over her face, everyone yelling. But I was ten and I thought it was the funniest thing I’d ever seen.”

“Jimmy. Where are you going with this?”

He swung his legs down, sat up, and took a long pull on his beer before answering. “Okay, he said. “Here’s the story. Eventually Aunt Jessie hit bottom. She lost her job, she lost her apartment, and so she joined AA. She pretty much had to. And one night — it was right after I graduated from the Academy — she came around to tell me how sorry she was that she’d ruined the party.”

“After all that time? Why?”

“Have you ever known anyone in AA?”

She thought for a minute. “I don’t think so.”

“Now I know you’re not Irish,” he said dryly. “One of the twelve steps — I think it’s nine — is that you have to confront anyone you’ve ever wronged and apologize to them.”

“Oh, no,” Christie moaned as she made the leap.

“You got it,” Jim said, again starting to laugh. “If Terry gets his ass to AA? If he starts workin’ the steps?”

“We’re going to have to change our phone number again,” Christie said, giggling in spite of herself.

“That won’t do it. You have to apologize in person. Shit,” he said and grinned broadly. “We’re gonna have to move. Just when I think I’m out . . . .”

“Stop it, Jimmy, it’s not that funny.”

“Oh, yes it is. It really is.”

* * *