"Bowes, Richard - From The Files Of The Time Rangers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bowes Richard)

From the Files of the Time Rangers
by Richard Bowes



PART ONE
THE SWITCHYARD MASSACRE

Autumn dawn broke over a Hudson River. A tugboat maneuvered a string of barges up to a West Side pier. The cabin door of a barge opened. Out stepped a man in overalls and pea coat, a watchcap pulled over his red hair.

He looked around then locked the cabin behind him. His approach to this city had started in 1745 in Galway on a boat full of recruits bound for France and the Wild Geese regiments. At sea he'd hooked onto one of Napoleon's frigates sailing toward the Horn. Off her, he caught a steamer bound for Buenos Aires in 1900, then jumped far into the new century in a turbine freighter putting into Hoboken, where he signed on as a barge captain.

As he crossed the deck and climbed the ladder to the pier, he sang under his breath:


Through the Long Dark into dawning,
Out of Time and into day.
He signed the name Jack Stanley on the list of those going ashore, walked down the wharf and into the city. Above an elevated highway, a Technicolor billboard displayed what looked like a scowling bank clerk. The Commander-in-Chief in full uniform glared defiance at the world.

Not even dictatorship and the threat of war could still the harbor. Longshoremen headed for the shape-up. trucks and freight trains got unloaded and loaded. On the tenement-lined streets of Chelsea, a corner building had a sign: ROOMS BY THE WEEK OR MONTH. The ground-floor shop sold newspapers, tobacco, sandwiches.

A skinny kid in his mid-teens swept the sidewalk. He glanced up as the barge captain crossed the street. For the space of an eye-flash, the man had in his open palm a spiral badge the color and size of a quarter.

The man entered the store. The kid finished sweeping and carried the broom inside. A woman, obviously his mother, was behind the cash register ringing up purchases. "T. R., show him the third-floor back before you go to school," she said.

The boy gestured toward a door which led to a stairwell. When they were alone, he turned to the man and flashed a copper spiral. "I knew you'd come!" he whispered. The man held a finger to his lips. "It's right up here," the kid said loud enough to be overheard. Captain Roger Deveraux nodded and followed him up the stairs.

From "Pride of the Rangers" by Daniel Ignace, Galaxy Magazine, July 1960.


1.
A few years up the Timestream from now, late in the afternoon of a drizzly April Thursday, a white guy in a windbreaker and a black guy in a suit stand at Tenth Avenue and Thirty-Second Street. Inside the gate of the West Side Consolidated Storage Yards, a silver and blue New Jersey Transit train, its lights up, is set to roll east to Pennsylvania Station.

The man in the windbreaker is stocky and white-haired. He glances a couple of blocks downtown at the abandoned elevated railway tracks jutting out onto the Avenue. A kid skateboards around the steel pillars. The man looks familiar, though TV might not be your guess as to where you'd seen Robert Logue.

The black man is big, with a shaved skull. Louis Jackson says, "Most people, Robert, do not get to choose who in city law enforcement they're going to do business with. You, however, decide on an Assistant DA in the Manhattan Sex Crimes Unit," he indicates himself, "and everyone is happy. Grateful, even. I get pulled off my regular assignments to follow you around."

"Cops don't get stripped, killed, and mutilated either," says Logue. "But forty-plus years ago, about where that train is now, that's how officers Dennis Burke and James LaRocca were found. The Switchyard Massacre. Still unsolved. A major blot on the NYPD record. You weren't born when it happened, Jax."

"I feel like I should be hearing your voice dubbed over a long, lingering camera pan at the start of Buried Murder," says Jackson.

"Luckily, Americans love murders. Even old, forgotten ones. Uncover a crime, give it a name like Reverend Bluebeard or The Noonday Witch, and you've got an audience," Logue tells him. "The Switchyard Massacre is a natural."

"Yeah, I noticed the events of February sixth, 1963 are popular reading all of a sudden," says Jax. "This morning I saw the files. Besides the cops, a certain Ted Benez and Sally Dere, described as police informers, were also murdered."

"Kids. Seventeen or so. Hell, LaRocca and Burke were still in their twenties. They'd seem like kids to me now." Logue starts walking to the corner. "That's enough. I just need to get the feel of the scene."

Louis Jackson nods. They cross Tenth Avenue and head East on Thirty-Third Street. Mail trucks line the curbs around the Postal Annex. Workers sit in the cabs and on the tailgates, tabloids in hand, staring at the cop cars and news crews up the block.

Robert points to a New York Post headline: