URIEL E. GRIBETZ has lived in and about New York City for his entire life. In 1988, after law school, he took a staff attorney position with The Legal Aid Society Criminal Defense Division in Bronx County. Since 1991 he has been in private practice where he continues to represent indigent persons accused of crimes, as a member of a public defender panel. Over the past 18 years he has represented thousands of people accused of crimes -- from the most heinous of murders to the most petty of crooks. He continues to remain enthralled with the fascinating dialectic between cops, perps, prosecutors, witnesses and defense attorneys. Needless to say, criminal law is never boring. He has written a number of crime novels and stories. He published a story title "Sean's Penance" in Orchard Press Mysteries. He lives in White Plains, New York, with his wife, kids, dog and lizard. 
Contact Uriel

Long-term buy operation 4913. A bodega on Webster. The front out of which a bunch of Marielito Cubans are selling weight. We are parked on 195^th Street, around the corner from the bodega. A mountain of snow boulders is piled on the corner. Some of the cars parked on the street are buried in snow from the plows. About a month ago, Nooney, my bucked tooth crackhead CI, introduced me to the players as a dealer from Jersey. Since then, I’ve made two buys. First, for an eight ball and the second for a half a kilo. Tonight I’m supposed to hook up for a whole kilo.

"Nooney’s not coming," Ryan tells me.

"He’ll be here." I’m sure of it.

"I say we bag it," McBride says, backing up Ryan.

"Fuck Nooney. I can do this alone." I have $25,000 wrapped in aluminum foil inside my bubble parka. I pull my hood over my head.

"We better clear it with the boss," McBride tells me.

On the point to point, Ryan reaches Lieutenant Martinez. "The CI is a no show, and Wheels wants to do the buy solo."

Martinez and the apprehension team are in a mini van a few blocks south of the bodega. "Okay, be careful kid," Martinez tells me.

I leave the car and the inside of my nose starts to freeze up. The high squeal of a Gypsy cab’s rear tires spinning on the ice as the wide Continental rocks back and forth trying to free himself from the ice in a parking spot on Webster. The bodega is wedged between a row of buildings overlooking Webster, which runs parallel to the Metro North train rail, across from the Bronx Botanical Gardens. Streets are dead.

Footlong icicles extend from the canopy in front of the bodega. The Cuban I know as John Doe Lurch is behind the counter. The display is empty but for a head of lettuce, a tomato, and an open quart of milk.

"What you want, white boy?"

"The key."

John Doe Primo comes from behind the makeshift black curtain. Primo is Lurch’s cousin. At least that’s what Nooney told me. Primo is more husky than Lurch is thin.

"Where’s Nooney?" Primo asks.

"Forget Nooney. I came for the product."

"You got my money?" Lurch asks me.

"If you got my weight," I tell him.

I’m not doin’ this up here," Lurch says. "We ain’t dealin’ with dime bags here, son. This here is some big shit weight. You understan’ what I’m sayin’? We gots to go downstairs."

"I don’t think so." I’m not going to the basement with these two apes.

"Don’t be scared white boy."

"I ain’t scared. Go get it and come back up."

"We do this in the basement or we don’t do it. What you think I’m goin’ to deal this type of weight in front of the whole world?"

I don’t move.

"What the fuck, player? You gots to understan’ this is business. We businessmen. We got no beef with you. We jus’ bein’ safe. If you got a problem or you not comfortable, we do it some other time."

"You got no reason not to trust us," Primo adds.

"Thas’ true. We did right by you las’ time and the time befo’."

I have no weapon and no kell. I try to look at their hands. Shaking hands will always tell you what a perp is up to. Primo’s hands are inside his pockets.

I follow Lurch and Primo behind the counter to the back of the store. The stairway to the basement is circular and the steps are metal. There are folds of skin on the back of Primo’s thick neck.

At the bottom of the steps Primo turns and punches me in the face. His fingers are ringed with brass knuckles. My front teeth are gone. Bleeding gums mushy and soft. Throbbing radiating pain from where he hit me on my left cheek below the eye to the back of my head. My ears are ringing, and I am on the floor in the long hallway using my arms to shield my face and head. Primo and Lurch are pummeling me with their fists and Timberlands. The toe of a boot connects with my ribs, and I twist away to feel the brass knuckles connect with my back, and I move away and cover up. Each blow and kick sending shockwaves of pain from the point of contact through my body.

"Where are your pig buddies now?"

"Yeah, mother fucker."

They beat me with two by fours. I ball myself up like a fetus. The bubble parka shields me from some of the blows. One of the boards breaks against me. They are winded and there is a pause as they catch their breath, and I lie there bracing for the next. barrage, swallowing and gagging on mouthfuls of my own blood until I throw up on myself.

I’m always more afraid that I will get robbed than be exposed as a cop.

Primo and Lurch take my legs and drag me down the hall. They pull my shoes off. Next my pants, parka and flannel shirt are ripped away.

"Motherfucker." Primo finds the money inside my coat.

They duct tape my hands, wrap the tape around my mouth, and roll me up in an old rug that smells like piss. I can’t breathe through the blood in my nose and my mouth is covered. Charlie and Erica are snug and safe after I tuck them in bed. The image fades. I twist my mouth open, biting around the duct tape, gulping lungfuls of air. The tape digs into my toothless gums. I try to get at it with my back teeth. I am not able to bite through. The course fibers of the rug stab at the bruises, welts and cuts that cover me.

Primo and Lurch drag me through the hall, through a hole punched in the wall to the cellar of the adjacent building and outside into the trunk of a car. I clench. I’m too afraid of what they’ll do if I scream. The top of my head and my toes are numb from the cold. The floor of the trunk is thin and rusty. It gives a little under my weight. I think I will fall through. Some of the exhaust from the muffler seeps in where the wall of the trunk is perforated above the right wheel, and I get nauseous from the fumes. I turn on my side, shake my head from side to side and open and close my mouth so that the tape loosens and I can spit the bile out of the side of my mouth past the duct tape. Its acid bites into the raw exposed flesh inside my mouth. Is this the last of it? I’m going out like a sardine in a can. My head bangs against the spare as the car hits a pothole. They are taking me down by the Hudson River to put a couple of caps in me and then throw my body in the water that way all the forensic evidence will be washed away. It’s my own fault _ so that I could be a fuckin’ hero. For what? So that the lieutenant could say "Good job, Wheels nice collar". For that I’ll never see Charlie and Erica grow up. Are they even going to find body? Maybe in the Spring when the ice melts on the river and my bloated corpse floats to the top? I must still be alive because every inch of my body is wracked with pain.

The car stops, and they open the trunk and toss me onto the frozen ground. I pass out briefly from the pain. They pull back the edges of the rug, and I am freezing but I don’t move. If I am to live, I mustn’t move.

"Muerto." One of them nudges me with the toe of his boot.

They stand over me.

"Que frio cono."

I hear the snow crunch under their boots. One door, then the other closes. The rusty muffler roars. Tires spin on the ice, and the car pulls away.

The moon is high, yellow and full. I realize that I am in Pelham Bay Park. None of the lamps work. I try to stand. I stumble and fall in the snow. I lie there and rip my hands free from the duct tape, and the tape around my mouth muffles my screams. The blood on my face is becoming ice. If I don’t get up and start to move… I get up and push myself through the park, naked, past the snowman with rocks for eyes. In the night light, shadows of the trees extend on either side. I come to a squad car at the edge of the park.

"I’m Kevin Knowles. I’m a cop." I repeat it over and over.

"Oh my God." One of the uniforms says. The other uniform takes a blanket from the trunk and wraps it around me.

"I’m Kevin Knowles. I’m a cop." I continue repeating myself in the back of the car above the din of the sirens. Then I am not able to control my body, and I am watching myself lapse into convulsions.

I lose time. I think I have been in the hospital for weeks. They tell me I have been there just a day.

Doctors come and go, and I hear the words, ‘multiple facial fractures of the right mandible orbital wall’, ‘frontal sinus hematoma of the brain’, and so on. Headaches so bad that closing my eyes hurts, and the room spins so that they give me morphine from an IV. Three surgeries. One to fix the broken bones in my face, the second to repair the nerves in my right eye, and the third to take skin from my thigh and put it on my face. I lose feeling in the right side of my face below my right eye, which a doctor says might come back. They fit me for a bridge where my teeth used to be.

There are no mirrors. Sue visits. When she enters my room and sees me, tears well in her eyes. I don’t want Charlie and Erica to see me.

Morales, the lieutenant, comes by. I could go out on three quarters pay just like the prior lieutenant, Dobbs, had done. Dobbs had been hit by a UPS truck chasing a pitcher on East Tremont. Splintered femur. Had to repair it with pins. After that, Dobbs was sitting pretty. With his benefits and the settlement from UPS, he bought a bunch of real estate. No, I want to go back to work. I don’t want to be like Dobbs. Not that I don’t respect Dobbs. Dobbs is my buddy. It was Dobbs who got me the gig in narcotics. It is just that I don’t know what to do without the job.

McBride and Ryan also visit.

"How many times have I told him not to lead with his face?" Ryan asks McBride.

When I laugh, my ribs hurt so bad that I lose my breath, and the pain brings tears to my eyes. This makes me start coughing, and it feels like the stitches in my mouth are ripping free, and then the pain in my ribs becomes worse. I lie perfectly still.

"You okay kid?" McBride asks.

"Much better."

They are handling the investigation in-house. I want to know as soon as they locate Lurch and Primo. I ask McBride and Ryan not to collar them.

The doctors let me go home, but the bosses in the police department won’t let me go back to the job until the department shrink clears me.

The police department bosses want to make sure that I don’t have post traumatic stress disorder. The shrink wants me to talk about how the beating makes me feel. Am I angry? Am I sad? How are things with Sue? How are things with the kids? Marion, the shrink, likes for me to talk about the kids. I can tell she doesn’t have kids of her own because I have a hard time explaining to her that your kids see you differently from everyone else. To Charlie and Erica, I am ‘daddy’. It is something someone who doesn’t have kids of their own can’t understand. Yes, I talk about Sue a little, but there really isn’t much to say. The truth is that between me and Sue there is little love. Without the kids, there isn’t much of a marriage. It’s not that Sue and I don’t get along as much as it is that we don’t have anything to say to one another outside of talking about Charlie and Erica.

A year of being home with a routine of putting the kids on the bus in the morning, seeing the physical therapist, then the shrink. Sometimes Dobbs comes over and takes me for breakfast to the Dunkin’ Doughnuts. The old guys gather there in the morning, and we dazzle them with our war stories from the job.

At a meeting in the parking lot of a Diner on Broadway in the Bronx, McBride and Ryan give me the file. There are pictures of my face that they took at the hospital, pictures of Lurch and Primo, and the location where Lurch and Primo are staying in Jamaica, out in Queens.

In my garage, under a tarp, I have a Lorcin .380. I took it from a crackhead who was using it to pistol whip another crackhead in a beef over drugs. I drive out to Queens and sit on the apartment building, watching Lurch and Primo come and go. Perps are so stupid. They think if they go to another borough, it’s like going to another country and they won’t be found. It’s the middle of the day. I follow them into the building. As they enter the elevator, I put two in the back of Lurch’s head. The loud explosion of the muzzle flash, and the smell of gun powder are more pronounced in the confines of the elevator car than they would be out on the street, in the open. Primo turns. He looks puzzled, like he recognizes me but can’t place my face. I put one in his forehead and another one in his cheek. The one in his cheek passes through and goes out the other side of his face. The light in the ceiling of the cab goes out. I use my pocket flashlight. Primo falls on his cousin. The blood puddle grows around my feet. I pick up the shell casings from the elevator floor. On the way back home, I throw the pistol into the Long Island Sound at Whitestone.

For Nooney, I used the .22 eight shot revolver that I took from a fourteen year old who was pitching over on Grand Avenue. Nooney’s death is messy. He is hiding in an abandoned building over by Davidson. Ryan and McBride put heavy pressure on the neighborhood. They closed down the dealers until someone ratted out Nooney. Nooney cries and begs and spills everything because he thinks to come clean will spare his life. I shoot him in both eyes. With those small caliber pistols, sometimes the bullets don’t penetrate bone; but when they get inside, they travel all over. I don’t have to worry about finding shell casings because the revolver shells don’t spit out. I throw the revolver off the 207 Street bridge, the one that connects Manhattan Island to the Bronx.

The whole thing is behind me. Marion, my shrink, notices a big improvement. I am clear to return to narcotics. Morales has only one restriction; I can no longer do undercover work. I am strictly an investigator, and that’s fine. It’s great to be back. All is good, except things are not quite right in my head. Something is slightly off. I can’t figure it.

# # #

Copyright© 2007 Uriel E. Gribetz

Read Uriel's 'Dark Thoughts' on noir fiction