We trucked on past the closed-up shop, heading farther into the yards. We were walking west, and I could see the sun starting to drop behind the city skyline. I zipped up my sweater and put my hands in the pockets of my jeans.
“Once you get another hundred yards past the shop,” Summers said, “you start to hit no-man’s-land.”
It was clear these were much older train cars—some missing pieces of their steps, many with broken windows, all graffiti covered and looking as though time and disuse had made them obsolete.
“Tell them about that bastard your UC got here last month,” Summers said to one of the others.
The war stories fed into Mike’s theory. Each of the men talked as we walked, threading the tracks between cars, going toward the fences to examine places where access had been easily gained.
The undercover officers seemed to have encountered everything. Hookers who fronted for dealers, dealers who used adolescents as runners so they wouldn’t do jail time if caught with the drugs, and addicts willing to pay the price to come to this desolate strip of the city to find twenty or thirty dollars’ worth of what they needed to get them through the night.
“I have a kid on my team who looks one hundred percent the part,” the second cop said. “One of the best I’ve seen in a long time. He bought from this nineteen-year-old guy from Uganda who came to work right over there, at midnight three nights a week. Lived on that decommissioned R-142 till we busted him.”
“R-142?” I asked.
“Old version of some current subway cars that run on the number 5 line,” he said. “Made in Japan. There’s apparently no way to convert them to be functional anymore, so they’re just replaced with new machines.”
“This Ugandan knew he had a train that wasn’t going to be touched,” I said. “Is that the idea? He just made himself right at home.”
“Yeah. You could consider half of this rail yard like a housing project for junkies, long as they don’t come out in daylight,” the cop said. “He had a sixteen-year-old girlfriend who carried the heroin in a baggie, inside her vagina.”
“Your guys couldn’t do a cavity search,” I said, “unless they had a female officer with them.”
“So she usually just dumped the shit on the street. The pair of them got away with it for weeks, ’cause our undercover was making the buys on the street, outside the fencing. By the time we closed in for the search and bust, the dope was gone.”
Summers took over. “That’s when we figured we had to identify and get into the right subway car. Once we found it, turns out the perp was keeping half a kilo in the control panel of the R-142, locked up tight with three padlocks. He’d hollowed the panel out and stashed his mother lode in there.”
“But no snakes?” I said with a nervous laugh.
“No snakes. Just a couple of tarantulas, to keep curious folks from dipping in, if they could break the locks.”
Lucky I didn’t crave heroin. Snakes and spiders were two of my least favorite living creatures.
“We get the yard workers to patch up these holes as soon as they can,” the second cop said, standing next to a gap in the fence, “but the bad guys make them as fast as we get them repaired.”
We were about as far away from the entrance to the yard as we could have been. It must have been close to a mile in distance.
The light was gone now, and shadows on the stainless steel train cars played tricks on my eyes. There weren’t many streetlights around, but the few that turned on bounced shapes off the glass windows and silver sides of the sad old trains.
Detective Summers turned on his flashlight. Mike and the other guys followed suit. I didn’t have a light, so I stayed close to Mike.
“You want a list?” Summers asked.
Mike took out his phone and opened his Word app.
“On the northern perimeter, your most likely prospects are the rows of cars on the second, third, and fourth row of tracks,” Summers said. “There are dealers who squat in them, mostly at night, and all of them have weapons.”
“What do you do to get them out?” I asked.
“Bronx Narcotics comes in with a SWAT team every couple of weeks, when they have manpower, but the dealers just pick another roost,” Summers said. “They’re a very transient population, as you know.”
“When you have no residences in the area,” the second cop added, “there aren’t many neighbors to complain about a drug problem. This stuff gets pushed to the fringes of a community, and as long as the mopes stay away from the train station itself, nobody rings up the useless mayor to complain to him.”
Summers was talking to Mike, listing the specifics of the trouble zones on three of the four corners of the train yard. If Scully agreed, he could bring uniformed men in during the day tomorrow to search the abandoned trains. The effort wouldn’t be wasted, whether or not it connected to Paul Battaglia’s death. It was bound to turn up a boatload of heroin and cocaine.
We doubled back toward the entrance, taking a different route. It was darker on this side of the yards, and spookier now that we were navigating entirely by flashlight.
“What’s all that forest-looking stuff on the other side of the fence?” Mike asked.
He was pointing at the western perimeter of the rail yards.
“Back door of the Bronx Zoo,” Summers said.
I reached for Mike’s hand and aimed his flashlight that way.
“This abuts the park directly?” I asked.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Are there animals right over there?”
“No,” Summers said. “No animals. It’s a remote corner of the zoo—a few acres that have never been developed. Beyond the monorail, if you know where I mean.”
“Yeah,” Mike said. “I know exactly.”
“Whenever they do fix it up,” Summers said, “I hope they put the most ferocious cats they’ve got over here. Or make it like Jurassic Park, with raptors that can smell drug dealers. Something to scare these scumbags to another part of town.”
We waved good night to the security guard who followed after us to lock up.
“Did we give you what you need to get started?” Summers asked.
“You did,” Mike said. “I was hoping we’d run into a transaction.”
“Come back at midnight. The whole place springs to life.”
“I may just do that,” Mike said. Then, talking to me, “Take you home and spin back with Jimmy North.”
I shrugged. It didn’t seem worth the trip.
“Mind if I keep your flashlight?” Mike asked Summers. “I’ll owe you a few rounds of drinks for dragging you out.”
“Glad to help,” Summers said. “Going back to your car? We’re parked over that way.”
“I just want to walk that border along the zoo property. See where it goes.”
“No problem. Safest place to be. The thought of bumping up against JungleWorld keeps the addicts away from that side of the fence.”
“Thanks again,” Mike said.
“In that case, Alex, why don’t you take one of the high beams, too,” Summers said. “It’s helpful for walking in the wild up here.”
“Good idea,” I said.