Cyrus told us where they were headed next while we waited on the north side of Central Park. He has eyes and ears all across this city, a loose network of neighborhood kids who report to him in real time whatever we need to know, whenever we do an operation.
It is three a.m. when we finally make contact with the gang, right after they claim their third victim of the night and are looking for number four. Brax, in full wino mode, slumps down next to a subway entrance on 137th. Mink swings wide around the block to make sure she arrives same time as the gang. If they leave her alone, who knows, maybe she and Brax will let them go home unscathed.
Fat chance of that happening. Cyrus has documented enough of their atrocities over the last two weeks to justify some vigilante vengeance. I might be noncommittal, but Brax and Mink are eager to strike. These kids have dues to pay.
Who gives us the right to be judge and jury and executioner? Nanny Mouse Enterprises—our employer. We look after folks who otherwise don’t get helped. The lower half of the 99%. The marginalized. The unqualified. The ineligible. The underprivileged. The ignored.
Nanny Mouse calls us the Latch Key League. Dumb name. Makes us sound like neglected children. That was probably Myrna’s doing. She can be real corny with words. Our benefactors at Nanny Mouse seemed to like it, so the name stuck.
Nanny Mouse? A derivation of Anonymous, perhaps? No one knows who funds our operation, maybe not even Myrna. But they pay us well. And the perks, especially the sick leave and vacation time, are outstanding.
We are professional vigilantes. Where the NYPD resorts to stopping and frisking anyone who’s a little too brown for the neighborhood, we give folks the benefit of the doubt. We make sure our targets’ crimes are documented and confirmed. Then we dole out some sweet retribution.
We do it all without guns, blades or clubs. Nanny Mouse doesn’t allow weapons. It makes things interesting sometimes. By ‘interesting’ I mean challenging and dangerous. Good thing Brax and Mink are good with their bare hands and feet.
We’re not your father’s Guardian Angels, the beret-wearing gang who provided vigilante-style security in sketchy neighborhoods during the seventies. We do more than stand on street corners trying to look tough.
Some of us have real skills. Carpentry. Plumbing. Medicine. IT. We try to make life easier for folks perched on the brink of going under. Beating up on knockout gangs isn’t all we do.
We help the homeless whenever we have the chance, but direct most of our energy to the less poor, people living at the margins, treading water, on the verge of making a living or going under. We try to sway the odds in favor of success.
Me? I’m an ex-Navy Corpsman from the green side and a SEAL school washout. I handle all the triage and paramedical stuff, though we have a real Doc, Noreen, who operates out of Myrna’s place in Brooklyn when she’s not doing family practice at a community health clinic in Jersey City.
After my discharge, I got into this line of work, partly because of what happened to my little sister Brianna. She ran away from home during my second tour in Afghanistan.
Her junior year in high school, she started a war of independence with my parents that that escalated beyond any hope of reason. They played it tough with her, letting her go, thinking she’d be begging them to come home within a week.
But Brianna never did return to our little house West of Boston. She lasted four months before some meter reader found her curled up dead in someone’s East Village flower bed. I was home on leave when we got the news.
Her cause of death remains a mystery. We knew she had gotten into some drugs, but the autopsy was inconclusive. They couldn’t rule out homicide.
Speculations regarding her death have haunted me since the night we got that call from the State Police.
A cop car blows by. I don’t even look up.
The NYPD is no friend of the Latch Key League. They’ve tried to infiltrate us. We’re on their terrorist watch list. Four of our people are already serving time for various trumped up charges – stuff like resisting arrest, obstruction of justice, perjury, contempt of court—the usual tools of the machine. We even have our own martyr—Jimmy Raffaele—who was gunned down unarmed trying to save some school girl from a would-be rapist. We have reason to believe that was no oopsie. Jimmy was a well-known thorn in the side of the precinct that offed him.
It’s getting harder to keep our cover, but the monthly rotations help folks forget us. That and the sheer size of our territory. We cover the whole tri-state area from New Jersey to Connecticut. We’re too small to make more than a small dent in the bucket of need, but that’s enough to justify our existence to our benefactors, whoever they are.
I tail the gang down Amsterdam Avenue, letting them stay a full block ahead of me. My job is to check on any new victims they might create on the way home, render first aid, call in the first (second?) responders.
Cyrus is in his mid-town bat cave monitoring police scanners and web-cams. Mink planted a GPS tracker in one of the kids’ backpacks earlier in the evening so Cy can confirm that they are headed for the subway stop where Brax is already waiting. Mink is at 138th making her way back around the block. She’s geeked herself up with a weird hairdo and some not so stylish glasses, anything to make her stick out and attract these kids’ attention.
At this point it doesn’t matter if they ignore her or try to make her victim number four. Their fate is sealed. Cy just wants to see if we can document an attempted atrocity.
I stop half a block away from the subway entrance and go into observer mode. Brax, across the way, slumps beside some trash bins in front of an out-of-business cigar shop. These kids are in for a big surprise.
Mink emerges from the shadows on schedule to reach the subway stairs exactly when those kids get there. No accident, this. And don’t you know, one of them points at her. The rest stop to watch, stifling guffaws as a chubby jamoke steps away from the group and lunges at her.
The boy’s fist never connects because Mink is already winding around and swinging her boot heel at his chin. His head snaps back. He goes tumbling over the back of one of those apartment listings dispensers.
Two of the kid’s friends go after her. Brax rises up to intercept them. Mink is back in her stance, ready to go. Both kids crumble under a whirlwind of fists and feet. The rest of the kids, being either sensible, cowardly or conscientiously objecting, stand around and gawk until Brax and Mink start laying into them as well. Those that remain standing, finally get a clue, scatter and flee.
One of them comes running towards me. He looks sixteenish. Athletic. Handsome. Indeterminate ethnicity. He could be Puerto Rican, Italian, Iraqi, Jewish. Maybe a little of each.
Maybe I should let him pass. Maybe he never approved of this whole knockout game bullshit and had even advocated against it. Though, I didn’t hear anyone raise any objections when his buddy went after Mink.
My fist catches him in the side of his head. He slams face first into a light pole and crumples onto the street.
He’s out cold. His nose is askew. Broken. I do him a favor and reset the bones while he’s still unconscious. I prop him up into a position where the blood won't impede his airway. His eyes pop open. He sees me, screams and crab crawls away.
Brax and Mink are already gone from the scene. Sirens sound down the avenue. Now it’s my turn to vanish.
***
I’m no MD. I never went to medical school. Never took the Hippocratic Oath. First do no harm? Sometimes, to do a little good, you have to hurt somebody.
Doc Noreen and Myrna pleaded with us not to do this op. They were worried how Nanny Mouse, our sponsor, would react. My guess is that Nanny Mouse approves. They have commissioned ops before that involved tough love. They seem to like our purposeful pranking. Like the time we slapped labels for pepper spray on a shipment of canisters of lilac-scented air freshener bound for the NYPD. They are not averse to having us mix things up with both sides of the law.
While none of us knows exa
ctly who or what Nanny Mouse is, Brax likes to believe he’s some eccentric billionaire like Richard Branson. Someone with New York roots who likes playing Batman in his spare time. Mink’s pretty sure it’s some crowd-sourced operation run by a rogue faction of Anonymous, the infamous hacker group known for their Guy Fawkes masks. I don’t know what to think, and I don’t care. I’m just grateful to have such a fun job.
Myrna’s the only one of us in a position to know the truth, but she’s never slip the slightest hint. Sometimes I wonder if she’s the real Nanny Mouse.
There are twenty-two of us on the team, never more than eight or nine working a particular shift. Unless someone gets yanked, we stay on duty 24-7 for one full month before being replaced by someone coming off R&R.
One month on, one month off. That’s the rotation. The only rule for where we go is that we have to leave the New York Metro area entirely, and go far enough away that we won’t be tempted to check back in on the team. Our duty time gets so intense sometimes; it can be hard breaking free. Having an ocean or a continent between us and our cases makes it easier to disengage.
Nanny Mouse owns time shares in condos all over the world. We get to pick from any open slot. So far I’ve done Edinburgh, Tokyo, the Dolomites and Cuzco. Next time out, I’m angling for Principe.
So we’re much more than mercenary vigilantes. We’re social custodians of the Tri-State region. Jacks of all trades. We police the police. Provide social services for the underserved. Feed people. Fix their plumbing. Heal their infections. Avenge their bullying. Sometimes we go beyond our jurisdiction and do stuff just because it feels right. Myrna tries to keep us in line, but if we ever go out of bounds, it is usually for good reason.
Like tonight. That’s one bunch of kids who won’t be knocking out random strangers anymore.
***
The night air, it’s frigid for October. There will be frost before sunup on the sleepy fringes of Westchester. Maybe it reaches as far down as the lower parts of Riverdale, but down here in Morningside Heights, the urban heat island effect will keep it at bay.
Frankly, I welcome the chill. Cold air tamps down the smell of the alleyways. Numbs my nose to my own stink.
I find Brax and Mink at our chosen rendezvous spot behind the Popeye’s chicken off St. Nicholas Avenue in Harlem. Mink looks fresh as ever. Neither has broken a sweat or scraped a knuckle.
“So how many did you all get?”
“Four,” said Brax.
Mink is grinning like a little demon girl.
“Plus one,” I say.
“You dog!” says Mink, cuffing me on the shoulder. “That means only four got away unscathed.”
“Crap!” says Brax. “I wanted to get them all. They scattered too quick.”
“Anybody hurt bad? I didn’t get a chance to check.”
“Don’t worry. We was gentle,” says Brax, winking at Mink.
It’s my job to worry about whether one or more of those kids has ended up badly injured. Subdural hematomas sometimes take a while to produce symptoms. The last thing we need is a homicide rap. That would be a sure way to get our contracts terminated.
I text Cyrus, who’s still up monitoring the scanners. We all keep in touch with cheap Pantech smartphones, each with two sets that we swap back and forth for charging. Cyrus coded a custom app that routes our messages through an encrypted virtual server that floats around in the cloud.
“No admits,” Cyrus texts. “All 4 rlsd frm ER.”
“Released?” says Brax. “No arrests?”
“No witnesses?” says Mink.
“What about their victims?” I say.
“It’s hard to pull someone out of a lineup when you’ve been blindsided.”
“And if nobody presses charges, nothing happens.”
“Fuck it,” said Brax. “We did our part. Let’s go get some rest.”
We split up for the night, go our separate ways. None of us on the street team have a home. Nanny Mouse insists that we eat and sleep in the same conditions as the people we help. Something about building empathy. It’s built into the contract.
Doc and Myrna have their headquarters in a cozy brownstone, but they’re admin and not on the same month on, month off rotation as us. Cyrus sleeps under a roof as well, though his midtown digs are not exactly posh. He doubles as the live-in janitor of a Unitarian church down near Chelsea. He keeps a mattress on the floor of a mechanical room.
Our handymen and jacks of all trades—Andy, Joyce and Wayne—rotate between various construction trailers and shipping containers scattered around abandoned construction projects all over the metro area.
Mink? She’s our burglar. She finds her way into a different office or waiting room every night. She has a knack for identifying vacant establishments, disabling alarm systems and making herself at home in some cozy corporate lounge or store-room, washing her hair in drinking fountains, cooking meals in snack rooms. As a result, she’s the least rancid and best dressed of our street crew.
Brax and I are the only ones on the team who regularly sleep on the street. Brax has a military issue cold weather bag that he drags into whatever vacant foyer or storefront where he won’t be hassled. Though, no one dares mess with him, not even the cops. He has this natural scowl and a build that can do some damage. He spends his off-time working out and it shows.
Me? I have a thing for clean corrugated cardboard. I like the smell. It gets soggy in the rain, but when dry, it’s a great insulator. I find myself a refrigerator box behind some appliance shop and snuggle between some layers, using a block of Styrofoam as my pillow. I think of tropical beaches and misty volcanoes as I nod off, with the city night still buzzing with life.
***
I sleep in until I hear the back door of the electronic shop slam. The morning staff has arrived and it’s time for me to vacate the premises.
I link with Brax behind a bagel shop. A clerk there regularly puts out left day-old bagels in nice, clean sacks. He’s supposed to be tossing them into a dumpster. We let a couple bag ladies take first dibs and then dive in after the remains. The bagels are almost as good as fresh, only a little drier and firmer than the stuff that goes out the front door. Sometimes our friend even drops in a couple containers of cream cheese and a plastic knife.
We in the street crew never carry much cash. For one thing, it would make us the targets of junkies and other desperate folk. And buying too many hot meals at full price would blow our cover. It’s not like we can go and have a sit-down meal just anywhere. We’re pretty grungy and rank by the end of our shifts.
Once in a blue moon, as a treat, Myrna sends her food truck out to whatever neighborhood we’re working. She has licenses, menus and placards enough to run half a dozen mobile establishments. It’s always a pleasant surprise when she and Doc Noreen show up at a work site. You never knew if you’re going to get falafel, poutine or bebimbop.
Mink joins us around noon, munching on some leftover pizza she scrounged from the lunch room of the office she slept in last night. She offers us a slice. I’m full of bagel, so I pass, but I’ve never seen Brax turn down an offer of free food. He gobbles down a cold slice in about three bites.
We lay low in a little park when we notice there seems to be an awful lot of police activity on the streets. Patrol car after patrol car zips down the avenue. We get an urgent text from Cyrus that explains why.
“Clr out uptwn pronto. Nypd sspcts u 3 for knckouts. Sctr.”
“Us?” says Mink. “But we’re the heroes.”
“You don’t suppose we hit those kids a little too hard?” says Brax, looking at me.
“You said you were gentle.” I can only shrug. “Cyrus says none of them were hospitalized.”
So we head downtown, each of us making our own way south. Three homeless people walking together would be a sure way to freak people out and get the cops after our ass.
We head to a place we had been regularly monitoring—One Bowling Green, where Re-Occupy protesters have bee
n repeatedly chaining themselves to the Wall Street bull to draw attention to the lack of justice and accountability in the financial industry.
In the past, we would often intervene when things got out of hand. Slow things down. Get in the way. Make it easier for protesters to escape if they were so inclined. But messing with cops is risky. It’s a sure way to get taken off the street. Myrna isn’t thrilled about the prospect of losing any more of us. Good vigilantes are hard to find.
So we’re strictly in observer mode, hanging back and watching with the rest of the crowd as the cops move in to clear out the protesters. Funny, how they lay off the pepper spray this time. It makes the whole operation a lot more pleasant for all involved.
Cyrus texts while we’re standing around, watching kids get zip-cuffed. “Wtf you guys??? Clr out! now! Avd all cntct w nypd.”
Brax looks at me. “What’s the big deal? We’re not anywhere near any precinct that knows us.”
Another text comes in from Cyrus as we’re about to split.
“Mom sez all hnds queens. Comnty imprvmnt.”
“Oh crap. Looks like they’re making us do some grunt work,” says Brax.
Mink grins. “Yeah, but you know what that means?”
“They don’t trust us to stay out of trouble?”
“Food truck!” says Brax, beaming. “Hot meal almost makes it worth it.”
We each hop separate trains and make our way over to the work site on the edge of Astoria. For three days now our construction team has been working on a set of three decrepit row houses in danger of being condemned by city health inspectors. They had been damaged during Superstorm Sandy and never really brought up to snuff. The plaster ceilings are collapsing, there’s mildew in the walls and the plumbing and electrics are a mess. A neighbor had reported them to the city.
One of the apartments is occupied by an elderly Jewish couple with too many cats. An extended family of immigrants and first-generation Americans from Trinidad lives in the center unit. The last place is basically a flop house for a gaggle of transient kids in their late teens and early twenties. A kid named Baron, whose grandmother used to own, it runs the place. The kids who stay there come from all over, mostly local but ones from Kansas and another is from Newfoundland. One of them—a teenage girl—is a runaway.