Black Market

Hallucination.

“Breathe that pure oxygen, Captain Hudson.”

Deception.

23

Riverdale, New York City

Arch Carroll was only barely awake, barely functioning. Familiar home surroundings coalesced:

Books on the mantel-Carroll loved nonfiction and also mysteries: The Brethren, Fatal Vision, The Pope of Greenwich Village, The Fate of the Earth.

An oil painting of his father, done by Mary Katherine, hung on one wall.

And there were children. Lots and lots of small children.

They were eyeing him suspiciously, waiting for him to speak his mind, to say something characteristically flip and amazing.

Carroll slowly sipped fresh-brewed coffee from a cracked Return of the Jedi mug. “Sunrise Semester” flickered on the portable TV with the sound off. The horizontal line lazily flipped out of sync with the rest of the room.

The Carroll clan was together for a rare family conference. The menu comprised coffee, cocoa, and Arch Carroll's world-famous pop-up toaster waffles. It wasn't quite 6:00 A.M. on the morning of December 14. Green Band felt dead and buried in his mind.

“Mmff… mmff… Lizzie mmff… Lizzie was a son of a bitch, Dad. While you were gone away.”

Mickey Kevin reported this important news as he chewed gooey, heavily syruped wads of waffle. His mouth flapped open in a rubbery, half-smiling circle.

“I think I told you about that kind of gutter talk.”

“Mmff, mmff. You use gutter talk.”

“Yeah, maybe my dad didn't kick my rear end enough. I won't make that same mistake, okay?”

“Besides, I wasn't a son of a bitch. He was.” Lizzie suddenly glared up from the soggy remains on her plate.

“Lizard! You're not too big to get an Ivory soap sandwich, either. Big bar, right fresh out of the wrapper.”

The most angelic smile lit up Lizzie's face. “An Ivory soap sandwich, Daddy?… Better than Eggo, still-a-little-frozen waffles!” She leveled her father with a deadpan, brutal evaluation of his not entirely home-cooked breakfast offerings.

They all began to laugh, then. Clancy and Mary started to giggle, nearly falling off their chairs. Mickey Kevin did topple off, like a carnival Kewpie doll. Carroll finally gave up and broke into a sleepy smile. He winked over at Mary K., who was letting him run the familiar four-ring circus this morning.

He had been trying to tell them about his almost tragic trip to Europe. He'd been trying to be a reasonably good dad for the four of them… He fuzzily remembered how his own father had done the same sort of thing; telling sanitized stories about the 91st Precinct, right in that very same breakfast nook on Sunday mornings.

Finally, after putting it off at least thirty minutes, Arch Carroll came to the really difficult part of his story-the punch line, so to speak-the core of his tale of adventure and foreign intrigue in England and Ireland…

He was going to try to make this all sound very casual now… No big deal, right? So begin.

“Over in Europe, I was working with someone… They had these special teams of police and financial people. Our best people. We worked in London, then in Belfast, together. A lady was nearly killed there, in fact. Over in Ireland. Her name's Caitlin. Caitlin Dillon.”

Silence. The big chill comes to the Carroll house.

Keep going. Don't stop now.

“Sometime I'd like you guys to meet her. She's originally, uh, she's from out in Ohio. She's pretty fu

Absolute, stone-cold silence…

Finally, a very tiny muffled reply from Lizzie. “No, thank you.”

Carroll's eyes slowly, ever so slowly, passed from face to small, stony face.

Mickey, who looked all soft and vulnerable in his Yankee pin-striped pj's with slipper socks, was amazingly close to tears. Clancy, in an oversized robe that made him look like ET in the movie's beer-drinking scene, was silent and more stoic. His small body was rigid with control.

They were angry and unbelievably hurt-all at the same time. They knew exactly what was happening here.

“Hey, come on, lighten up, okay?” Carroll tried to make it seem a little fu

“I talked to a woman who I happen to work with. Just talked. Hello, blah, blah, blah, good-bye.”

They wouldn't say a word to him. They stared at him as if he had just said he was going to leave them. They made him feel so horribly bad.

Come on, it's been three goddamn years.

I'm closing up inside. I'm actually dying.

“Come on, kids.” Mary Katherine finally spoke up from her purposely low-key spot at the kitchen table. “Be a little fair, huh. Doesn't your father get to have some friends, too?”

Silence.

No, he doesn't.

Not women friends.

Lizzie finally started to cry. She tried to muffle her sobs, choking back the breathless gasps with both little hands.

Then they were all crying, except Mickey Kevin, who kept staring murderously at his father.

It was Carroll's worst moment with them since the night Nora had died on some high-and-mighty, antiseptic white floor in New York Hospital. His chest was begi

They weren't ready for someone else-maybe he wasn't ready, either.

For the next several minutes, nothing he could say could make it any better. Nothing could make any of the kids laugh. Nothing could make them loosen up at all.

They all hated Caitlin. They weren't going to give her a chance. Period. End of nondiscussion.

They were fiercely determined to hate anyone who tried to take the place of their dead mother.

24

Manhattan

Two hours later, on duty, Carroll's head was throbbing with dull pain. He felt he needed a stiff shot of Murphy's Irish whiskey. He also felt like going back to the role of Crusader Rabbit, ru

Later, at around nine o'clock, he would vaguely remember weaving a mostly aimless path inside number 13 Wall Street. The fluorescent lights were too bright; the glaring overhead lamps were harsh, tearing at his eyes.

It was all wrong, the place felt wrong. There was too much gloom and doom, palpable frustration evident everywhere. The police investigators and Wall Street researchers bent over mountainous documents or hunched in paralysis in front of computer screens were like people who had been trapped indoors too long, men and women who hadn't seen the light of day for weeks. Even his own people, the usually unflappable Caruso included, had the quirky, tense ma

Around nine-thirty Arch Carroll set to work again inside his monastic office.

The broken windowpane hadn't been replaced, and the sheet of brown paper he'd stuck in the space hung limply now, like a beat-up old blind in an abandoned tenement. He kept the ceiling lights purposely bright, glaringly unpleasant. The door was shut tight so the radiator heat would build up.

An illusion of warmth, he thought.

Carroll was dressed appropriately for the overheated room: a Boston Celtics T-shirt that had the look of something left over from a banquet of moths, Levi's jeans, Crusader Rabbit's very own work boots. He was going to be comfortable, at least.

He also had a bottle of Murphy's Irish whiskey on the desk. What would Walter Trentkamp say? Oh, to hell with Walter and his imposing virtues, his old-world cop mores.