The Steel Kiss

“Nobody like him. Just a couple kids. Looked like drug trans going down. I headed for ’em but they took off.”

They might’ve been what she’d seen. Dust. Seagull. Gangbangers swapping bills for C.

“Where were you? Tried the office and your mobile.” She noted he’d changed clothes, swapping his uniform for street.

He was looking around too. “After you left I got a call. I had to talk to a CI, Harlem. The Gutiérrez case.”

Took her a moment. Enrico Gutiérrez. Wanted in a homicide—possibly murder, more likely low-grade manslaughter—that had been one of the first cases Pulaski had run, with another detective in Major Cases. One drug dealer had killed another, so there was little energy to close the case. She guessed the confidential informant had stumbled on some leads and called Pulaski. She said, “That old thing? Thought the DA’d given up. Hardly worth the time.”

“Got the word to clean the docket. Didn’t you see the memo?”

Sachs didn’t pay attention to a lot of memos that circulated through One Police Plaza. Public relations, useless information, new procedures that would be rescinded next month. Reinvigorating cases like Gutiérrez’s didn’t make a lot of sense but, on the other hand, it wasn’t for line detectives or patrol officers to question. And if Pulaski wanted to move up in the world of policing, word from on high had to be heeded. And memos taken seriously.

“Okay, Ron. But lean toward Unsub Forty. If our boy’s got fertilizer bombs and poisons he’s playing with, in addition to hammers, this’s our priority. And answer your damn phone.”

“Got it. Sure. I’ll fit in Gutiérrez best I can.”

She explained what Charlotte and the manager at White Castle had said. Then added, “I’ve canvassed most of the stores around here and gotten to half of the streets he’d take to subways, buses or apartment complexes.” She gave him the locations she’d been to and told him to keep going another few blocks. She told him too about the gypsy cab service where the unsub had possibly been spotted. “I want you to follow up with them. We need that driver. Keep up pressure.”

“I’ll handle it.”

“I’ve got to get my mother to an appointment.”

“How’s she doing?”

“Hanging in there. Operation’s in a few days.”

“Give her my best.”

A nod, then she returned to her Torino and fired up the big engine. In twenty minutes she was cruising along the streets of her neighborhood. She felt a comfort as she headed into the pleasant residential ’hood of Carroll Gardens. The place had been much scruffier when she’d grown up here. Now it was the bastion of PWSM. People With Some Money. Not enough to afford this kind of square footage in Manhattan and not willing to flee the city limits. Gentrification didn’t bother Amelia Sachs. She spent plenty of time in the bad parts of town and was glad to return home to a well-tended enclave with gardenias in unmolested flowerpots on the street, families bicycling through the parks and a high saturation of aromatic coffee shops (though she wouldn’t mind banishing hipsters to SoHo and TriBeCa).

Well, look at this: a legitimate parking space. And only a block from her house. She could park practically anywhere if she left her NYPD placard on the dash. But she’d found this wasn’t a wise practice. One morning she’d returned to her car to find Pig spray-painted on the windshield. She didn’t think the word was much in use anymore and pictured the perpetrator as an unfortunate, aging anti-Vietnam-War protestor. Still, the cleaning had cost her four hundred bucks.

Sachs parked and walked along the tree-lined street to her town house, which was classic Brooklyn: brown brick, window frames painted dark green, fronted by a small verdant strip of grass. She let herself in, locked the door behind her and went into the front hallway, stripping off her jacket and unweaving the Glock holster embracing the weapon from her belt. She was a gun person, in her job and as a hobby, a champion in handgun competitions on police and private ranges, but at home, around family, she was discreet about displaying weapons.

She set the Glock in the closet, on a shelf near her jacket, then stepped into the living room. “Hi.” She nodded a smile to her mother, who said goodbye to whomever she was speaking to on the phone and set the handset down.

“Honey.”

Slim, unsmiling Rose Sachs was a contradiction.

This, the woman who would not speak to her daughter for months when she quit her fashion modeling job to go to the police academy.

This, the woman who would not speak to her husband for even longer for believing he’d encouraged that career change (he had not).

This, the woman whose moods would drive father and daughter out into the garage on Saturday mornings and afternoons to work on one of the muscle cars they both loved to soup up and drive.