Black Water Transit Read Free Page A

snatched, nine, he knew her, said her name was Shawana Coryell.
    He had watched her from his third-floor window as she walked along Paladino by the Wagner Houses, greendress, red Keds sneakers, and a baggy black silk windbreaker with a Yankees logo, lugging a huge sack of groceries, apparently on her way back from the corner market near Guvillier Park. It was a load no nine-year-old would have been asked to carry in a decent neighborhood, but her mother was doing a court-ordered tour in detox and her aunt was in a wheelchair, dying of HIV picked up off a grubby spike; her little brother Antowain had the flu and needed some baby aspirin, and the fridge was empty, and there was nobody else, so there you go.
    Anyway, she’s on the street and this is when two—maybe three—men in a rusted blue van, partial plates from Jersey, Whisky X ray Nevada something, ducked out of the traffic and pulled up alongside the little girl, and then—for some insane reason—Harlem kids are as street sharp as cats—little Shawana Coryell steps right up to the passenger side window. Ba-bing. She’s gone.
    Six seconds for the hook, maybe less. The blue van then bolts northbound before the witness can get out of his chair. But the witness, a security guard at Gondorff Jewels on 125th Street, got a good look at the whole thing, including the partial, and called it in to 911, where it was patched through to the Two Five, who handed it straight off to Casey Spandau.
    Casey and Levon moved on the 10-10 fast. While all the Two Five RMPs—radio motor patrol cars—hit the streets looking for the rolling blue van, she and Levon scooped the witness up at the Wagner project and took him straight into the station, where he described the takers as white males, the driver hard to see, a blur inside the tinted windshield, but the guy who snagged her, he had to lean out of the window, and the witness pegged him in the shaft of sunlight, a guy maybe in his early thirties, pale skin, almost an albino, buggy eyes, with shiny black hair hanging down past his shoulders.
    Casey and Levon got right back on the street and went north, looking hard for that partial marker, and Casey said later she knew it in her belly that they’d see it just around the next curve. She wanted that marker so hard it was hurting her throat. But they missed it. Somehow the Jersey marker flanks the cordon.
    It happens. They go to ground, or make it to one of the bridges. New York’s a big town. So now Casey and Levon go totally postal, they spend the next two hours ripping up the streets and shaking down the sex-trade crowd—what they liked to call a WHAM tour—winning hearts and minds—and by one o’clock they managed to connect with a baby-faced hustler named Two-Pack, looked to be maybe eleven but wasn’t, worked the short-eyes beat—the pedophile market—doing stuff that would make a hyena gag all along West 125th Street. Casey put the witness sketch of the guy with the long black hair down in front of Two-Pack and—bingo—they got a name out of him. Tony. Last name sounds like “gash.”
    Two-Pack paints a picture of a wiry little guy, late twenties, has an Italian accent, and it matches the witness ID right down to the waist-length black hair. Word is that Tony no-name was in and out of Rikers like a swinging gate and last year got sent upstate for a sex beef. Tony the Gash was known to be hanging with a pair of brothers whose names Two-Pack cannot remember, they’re heavy into the kiddie-sex circuit, always cruising for prospects on the Net or trading deeply twisted videos.
    “But never the real thing?” asked Levon.
    Two-Pack seems to think it over while Casey and the linebacker do silent inner work on their personal anger management issues in the front seat of the DT car.
    Finally, he says that the last time he was with Tony … guy was sort of a regular customer … maybe he heardTony say something about nailing the real thing, about having “a fresh