Urge to Kill

The three detectives climbed out of the Lincoln and stood in the heat, looking up at the three-story brick and stone structure. The windows on the top two floors were boarded up. The first-floor windows had aluminum frames and looked new.

“Renz said the place used to be a meth lab,” Quinn said. “There was an explosion on the second floor that damaged a lot of the building, including the third floor and the roof. First floor’s okay, Renz says. That’s us.”

Pearl shook her head. “You gotta admire the way Renz keeps finding us cheaper and cheaper space in a city like New York.”

“The city actually owns this building,” Quinn said. “It was confiscated from the perps running the meth lab.”

They went up half a dozen worn concrete steps and entered the vestibule. Lots of cracked gray tile there, and a bank of tarnished brass mailboxes. Also some black spray graffiti that was illegible but might have been some kind of gang code none of them knew. It was hard to keep up with the city’s gangs. For some of them, graffiti was their lives.

Pearl wrinkled her nose. “Jesus! You smell that?”

Fedderman and Quinn sniffed. There was a slight but acrid scent in the still, warm air.

“I told you,” Quinn said, “it used to be a meth lab. There was what Renz called a minor explosion.”

“Smells like it might explode again,” Pearl said.

They went up another short flight of stairs to the first-floor apartments, one on each side. Quinn tried the door on 1B and found it unlocked. He opened it to see a spacious apartment stripped down to lathing and wooden studs. The bare wood floor was littered with trash, and raw lumber was stacked high in the middle of what must once have been a living room. Several wooden sawhorses and a stack of metal folding chairs stood along the far wall.

“Tell me this isn’t for us,” Pearl said.

Quinn was thinking the same thing. He crossed the hall, tried the door to 1A, and found it unlocked.

It opened to an apartment whose interior walls had been removed except for the kitchen and bathroom. It was one large space, in need of paint to cover the grimy raw wallboard. There were unpainted vertical strips of rough concrete where interior walls had been detached. From inside the spacious room, the new windows appeared dirty and streaked. Some of them still had triangular blue stickers in their upper right corners with the name of the manufacturer. The acrid burnt wood and meth odor had permeated here, too.

“This is more like it,” Quinn said dryly.

Along one wall were three gray steel desks with identical swivel chairs sitting on top of them. Two dented three-drawer black file cabinets sat nearby. Also on each desk was a computer. Lettering on cardboard boxes alongside the desks indicated they were from a used electronics shop in Times Square. Renz doing it on the cheap.

They pushed all the way inside.

“Busy, busy,” Pearl said.

She was talking about the four people in work clothes, three men and a woman, scurrying about with tools and ladders. They ignored the three detectives, concentrating on running wires across the scarred wood floor and taping them tightly so no one would trip over them. The woman, young and wearing a Red Sox cap with her blond ponytail flouncing out the back above the plastic size-adjustment band, was up on an aluminum stepladder with both arms above her head, fiddling with a light fixture.

One of the workers, a handsome guy with lots of curly black hair and a serious cast to his eyes, stood up from where he’d been applying duct tape to run wiring and looked inquisitively at the three detectives.

“Help you?” he asked.

“That’s what you were doing when we came in,” Quinn said. He explained who they were.

“I’m Rusty,” said the man with coal black hair. “We got another four hours’ work here, then the place is all yours. Gotta finish running wiring to where the desks are gonna sit, then put in some ceiling fixtures. It’ll all be crude, but it’ll work and keep working.”

“Like us,” Fedderman said.

“We were told it’s all temporary.”

“Like us,” Fedderman said again.

“You gonna set up the computers?” Pearl asked, thinking she might use her laptop.

Rusty shook his head no. “Somebody from the NYPD’s gonna do all that, fix you up with Internet access, printer, fax machine, whatever. We’re supposed to let him know when we’re done here.”

“It always smell like this?” Pearl asked.

Rusty looked confused. “Like what?”

“Never mind,” Pearl said.

Rusty grinned. “Hope it isn’t me.”

“Not unless you’re flammable.”

His grin widened. “You never know, but there are ways to find out.”

“You don’t flirt with a cop,” Pearl said. “You’ll get run over so flat you’ll never get back up.”

Rusty looked surprised, then thoughtful. Then he nodded.

“We’ll check back this afternoon,” Quinn told him.

“But she won’t have changed her mind,” Fedderman told Rusty, as they were leaving.

Rusty, a fast learner, said nothing.