by Thomas Laird
“I’m not going anywhere, and if it takes time, then it takes time. You can have all the time I have, Rita.”
“Don’t ever give me that goddam disappointed look again, James. I don’t think I can stand it.”
“You have a deal. I won’t do it anymore.”
She puts her face against my chest, and she grips me like we’re both going over Niagara Falls together.
Without the barrel.
*
I put in a call to the San Diego PD. I talk to Sergeant Phil Donofrio in their Homicide Outfit. He gives me everything he’s got and tells me he’ll mail me a copy of the jacket on Miranda.
“It was a pro job,” Donofrio tells me over the phone. “He smacked him unconscious while he was in bed, we’re guessing, cold cocked him, and then cinched him up in the kitchen chair and plugged him in the back of the noggin, just below the skull. Reminds me of a Mafia-Outfit whack.”
“Yeah, I think he knows his way around guns and hits.”
“It looked a lot like those kinds of killings. The Italians—our boys, right?—do it this way when it’s just business and not something personal.”
“I’m not sure it’s nothing personal,” I say.
“Because the other ex-Ranger took it the way Miranda did?”
I break off with Donofrio and thank him for his trouble.
Series killings are troublesome, and a lot of coppers don’t want to go there because these serial killers, as they’re referred to, are a pain in the ass to catch. They tend to be organized, thoughtful, and intelligent. The above are traits that don’t fit a lot of the murderers we arrest within a couple of days. They’re obvious and stupid, most of these slayers, and they leave all kinds of markers behind themselves. Killing people is remarkably stupid, even for those considered reasons you can come up with. Divorcing your wife or husband may be expensive, but in the long run murder costs you your own life, which is profoundly stupid.
If our guy is on that list that Rita and I came up with, I’m sensing that he’s not stupid. What Donofrio said struck a nerve with me, mostly because I’m Italian–American, and also because I have family members who are a part of the Chicago Outfit, our homegrown version of the Mafia.
“You think one of those ex-Rangers could be working as an associate for the boys in San Fran?” I ask Rita as she sits in my office opposite me, perusing the jacket on Carl Vincent.
“They are trained to do that kind of shit, sure. GIs turn into cops. Why not into bad guys, too?”
“I don’t want to believe it. He would’ve been on our side, Rita.”
“You know some evil men who fought elbow to elbow with you in the shit, no?”
I nod my head.
“We were always supposed to be the good guys,” I say.
“Maybe that’s what our guy thinks, too, and maybe he became really disenchanted with something his bros pulled over in Nam.”
“Rangers are trained to do tasks, not go apeshit.”
“It was an apeshit war, I heard tell,” Rita answers.
I look over at her, and then I lose my train of thought, and I reach over, over my better judgment, and I lay my fingers on her doe-colored, soft right cheek.
CHAPTER FIVE
Chicago, 1984
Vincent seemed more difficult for me to do when I first researched him. I was in Chicago to do another piece of work for my associates in San Francisco, so I figured two birds and so on. I was flying on the Italians’ dime, so I figured it only made sense to get rid of Carl.
I never liked him much. He was always a little too patriotic, a little too by-the-book, or gung ho, as the Marines call it. Whatever America wanted, we’d get it for her. The guy never had an original thought in his life. He simply could not think for himself. Me, I was in the Rangers because of the challenge and because of the competition with my old man. He was Arabic, but he never admitted to his heritage. He was first and foremost an American. He was third generation, and he’d fought at Iwo Jima. The only thing he regretted, he told me, was that he didn’t get to help plant the flag on the famous mount. So I grew up competing with him, maybe for the sake of my Greek–American mother—second generation—Connie. I loved her completely, unashamedly, and I desperately wanted to make her proud of me, but she was too wrapped up in the Old Man, the World War II hero.
I guess I should’ve told some shrink about my mommy and daddy issues, but it’s too late, now. I was a hitman for the United States, and then I became a hired assassin for the mob in Frisco. I’m doing my old war buddies for myself, of course. If I’ve screwed up everything else in my life up until now, I can try to straighten up one piece of business that heaps me, that eats me alive.
Just a handful of old men, old women, and mothers and children. They were no blood kin to me. They weren’t Americans. Just some ragtag Vietnamese rice farmers and three cutthroat VC who likely had it coming. I don’t know why all those strangers took me over into the abyss, into the deep end.
But there it is.
Now it’s Carl who tasks me. I break into his place with the same relative ease that I creeped Miranda’s house. It’s four in the morning. Only the serious drunks are awake now, along with the shift workers doing midnights in some sweat factory around the environs of Chicago. And me.
Carl is out in a deep sleep. The sleep of a corpse, except he’s still breathing. I can see the swell of his chest, and then the release. But Carl does not snore. He breathes deeply from his nostrils—his mouth is clamped shut.
Then his eyes shockingly flap open, and he sees me by the bedside.
I hit him hard between the eyes with my right fist, but he tries to get up, so I hit him twice more, and this time he settles back on the bed, motionless but still breathing.
I drag him out of the bed only to find that he wears pajamas, so I rip off the tops and the bottoms and leave him on the floor wearing baby-blue boxer shorts. Next I pull him by the ankles out into the kitchenette and I lift him up into the wooden straight-backed chair, and I take the rope from the small duffel I brought with me, the one with the .22 pistol in it, and I tie him securely to the seat.
Then he awakens again, to my horror. It’s not supposed to work this way. They’re not to wake up when I dispose of them. They’re supposed to go to their last sleep, and they’re never supposed to wake up. It’s my version of euthanasia, the good death as my Greek mother would know. She spoke her family’s language fluently, and she even taught me a few words and sentences.
“Evan? What the hell?”
“You weren’t supposed to feel a thing.”
“What the hell are you doing? Why are you doing this? We were—”
Tears come to his eyes. Maybe they’re from fear, or maybe they’re from the reflex of getting socked in the head several times.
“It wasn’t supposed to go this way, but I have to finish it.”
“Finish what?” he begs.
“Those people we killed.”
“Which people? We killed all kinds of people, goddammit! What are you doing?”
“Justice,” I tell him.
“You’re out of your section eight mind, Evan.”
“Yeah. There’s that.”
“We were soldiers! It was a war!”
“No one can hear you. No one can hear that excuse anymore. They were old people and mothers and children, and we wasted them all. They’ll get to me eventually, too. I don’t expect to escape what’s coming. I deserve it, too, but I have to make sure someone calls us for what we did.”
“You’re insane, aren’t you? You’re—”
I slug him hard in the forehead. It stuns him and puts him out.
Then I swivel his chair. His head is slumped, and it makes an easier target for that sweet spot at the base of his skull. I bend over and take the .22 pistol out of my duffel. There’s no need for a silencer because all this gun makes is a quick pop, like the cork on a champagne bottle.
I aim at the crease at the bottom of his skull, and I pull off o
ne round. His head and torso lurch forward in a spastic jump, but he stays aboard the chair, and he doesn’t tip the chair over face forward.
I feel for the pulse in his neck, but he’s gone already. He sits with only the entry wound in the back of his head. There is no exit hole. The .22 has burrowed madly inside his brain, but the slug has not emerged. There is very little blood.
I’m sick, yes. I’m thinking it but I’m not saying it aloud because there is no one here to hear my words. Carl Vincent is dead, and so is Frank Miranda. I still need to locate Mark McIntosh, Terry Dellacord, Steven James, and Cal Johnson. The list was six, and now there are four. Unless you count me in that tally.
I make seven.
*
Chicago, 1984
She says she’s too tired, tonight, so I go along and kiss her goodnight. She’s been moody all night, on this four to twelve shift, and she won’t talk about it, and I’m too scared to ask. It’s been too good to be true, just like the cliché. It happened too quickly, too easily.
But neither of us ever said we loved each other. I thought those words would surface naturally, so I was waiting to see if she’d say them first, but Rita never did, and I didn’t want to be lucky Pierre, holding the bag.
I thought she was in love with me. I knew I was in love with her.
Actually, she seems to have cooled off the last three or four days. She hasn’t ripped off her clothes or mine, and she says it’s because it’s her time of the month, so I haven’t pressed the issue. What am I going to do? A physical exam? Not likely. Not with her. So we just talked for the last couple of encounters, and now she sends me away, tonight.
The thing to do, I tell myself, is to cool down myself. If I press her too hard, it’ll shove her away from me. She’ll think I’m too needy, too desperate (which I am), and it’ll make her recoil like that canon of a .45 that she carries in her shoulder holster.
So I go home. I want to take Maria home, but it’s one in the morning, and she’s already crashed in the spare bedroom. The kids have to get up in the morning to go to school—it’s mid-September—and I figure I’ll drop them off and take my aunt home, too. I’m off today. I was planning on seeing Rita in the afternoon, early, to take her to lunch, but I figure that’s all off, now. It feels like everything is finished with her, but she hasn’t said it to my face, yet. I’m not going to press for a showdown, either, but it bothers me that all this detachment has come about so suddenly and so much without any apparent cause.
We never argued. Things were going along well, and now…
I tell myself that I have to resign myself that I’m going to be alone again. The bed at home has always been missing one occupant, and now there will be no coupling with Rita, in the sexual or social context. I can smell it when it’s over. I think I can read people at least that well.
Rita might be thinking about the chance she’s taking with a love relationship with a partner, or with any co-worker. Cops don’t make good lovers with civilians, let alone with other coppers.
I’ll resign myself. I have two children, my daughter and son, to bring up in the world. And maybe all this occurred because I cut Erin from my life too easily.
But it wasn’t easy, and she’s not gone and she never will be. You can’t dispose of people that way. You can’t make them disappear.
But isn’t that what Rita is about to do to me?
*
We decide to tail Cal Johnson since we don’t have any other solid leads to follow. We figure we might find something on him personally, or we might catch sight of someone else trying to do to Cal what happened to Carl Vincent. At least we can see if he’s being watched or if he’s being tailed on the street.
Cal doesn’t go out much. He has a job at a lumberyard, and he’s taking a night class at JFK Junior College on the south side. He doesn’t appear to have a social life—no women or men are on his dance card that we can see. He works the eight-hour day shift, and then he does the JC classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays from six to nine.
We check with the Junior College, and we find out he’s taking Criminology 101. It’s an entry-level course that leads to a Criminal Justice major—a typical course of studies for anyone who wants to be in law enforcement. In other words, Cal Johnson wants to be one of us.
We follow him until he goes home at 9:28 on a Thursday evening in mid-September. The heat is still around. The temperature was 91, today. We’re lucky the Ford has air conditioning.
I ask Rita if she wants to go somewhere to eat after our shift ends at midnight, and she says she doesn’t.
I pull over to the curb before I park the Ford in the CPD lot.
“You want to tell me what’s going on?” I ask.
“I don’t know—”
“Just get it over with now so I know where I stand.”
She stares at me in the dimness from the lone street light across from us.
“I think we need to back off. I think things are getting out of control.”
“Out of control for who?” I ask her.
“For me, James. That’s for who.”
“I don’t follow any of this.”
“I’m in love with you, but I don’t want to be.”
“Now you really lost me, Rita.”
“I got a career. So do you. You already have kids, but I can’t see us having children while we’re on the job, and I can’t see walking into a ready-made family. I just can’t do it now, James. And I don’t know if I can ever do it, and if we keep on being together the way we are, I know I’m going to give it all up because I’m crazy nuts about you, and then I’d make you miserable because I’d regret giving up my badge to be a mother, and I know you don’t think we’d have to have kids now, but I think we’d both change our minds, and then we’d wind up unhappy, and then we’d get a divorce like all those other coppers we know, and I couldn’t stand breaking you apart, not after you lost your wife the way you did.”
I look at her and I’m stunned into silence.
“You want a new partner?” I finally ask.
“No. Not really. I feel comfortable with you on the job, and then we got those red names on our board, and I want to clean it up before I go anywhere. Is that all right with you, James?”
“I don’t want you to leave, no. As a partner, and as everything else. I love you, Rita. I do.”
She gulps, quickly. It isn’t much of a sound.
“You never said that before,” she tells me.
“Neither did you, until a minute ago.”
“I was too scared to say it, James.”
“When are you going to start calling me Jimmy, like everybody else?”
She smiles. Then the tears come.
“I don’t know what to do.”
“You’ll figure it out, Rita.”
“I can’t stand hurting you. I never meant to.”
“It probably won’t be the last time either of us gets hurt. It’s the life. It’s life outside the job. Everybody takes the heat.”
“You understand what I meant, about the kids?”
“I could stand not having kids with you, Rita, if it meant having you. There’s nothing I can do about my own. They’re not negotiable, and hell, you never even met them. Maybe you really do need time to get this all straight in your head, and if we back off for a while, maybe you can do just that.”
She bends toward me and plants her lips on mine.
“Thanks. I’m going to take my two weeks starting tomorrow. I hate to leave you in the middle of our caseload all by yourself.”
“I’ll survive. You do whatever you need to. You know how I feel, now.”
“Yeah, Jimmy, I know how you feel.”
I start up the motor and I take us into the parking lot, and I watch her walk toward her Mustang. I sit in the copper ride, the Ford, for a long time before I’m able to get out and move on to my family car, the beat-up Chevy that I need to trade in soon before it falls to the ground on its own.
*
Ri
ta keeps her word and takes her two-week vacation, and I’m chasing our phantom, the guy who did Carl Vincent, all by myself. I go see Doc Gibron at his apartment on Clark Street, and I fill him in on this case with the ex-Ranger and with the other dead Ranger out on the West Coast, and he’s intrigued.
But I never say a word about my new, temporary partner, and Doc doesn’t ask. He reads me like people read a headline on the newspaper. He knows there’s something up with me, but he never goes there, and I love him for not asking.
CHAPTER SIX
San Francisco, 1984
I see her in the street all the time as I pass into the doorway of the apartment building where I live under the name Roberts. She’s Vietnamese, I’m thinking. They have a look of their own, compared to the Japanese and the Chinese and the other Southeast Asians I’ve seen. She’s about five-five and maybe 100 pounds of scrawny. Her hair has that blue sheen to it that comes from the deepest black hue hair can have. She doesn’t strike me as being mix-breed. Her face reflects in flesh the landscape of the country where I fought, a decade ago.
Whether she’s panhandling or hooking, I can’t tell at first, but then she comes up to me on this day in late September when the chill from Fisherman’s Wharf is penetrating to the bone, and she’s wearing a tee shirt and shorts and sandals that all look like they came straight from Goodwill. And she’s shivering. I know it’s a mistake to talk to her, but she asks me if I have a couple of dollars.
“I won’t give you cash. But I’ll buy you lunch,” I tell her.
She’s about to turn and walk away, but she stops and tells me, “Okay.”
I figure she must be hungrier than she is proud, so I walk with her down the block to a Burger King. We go inside, and I let her order whatever she’d like, and she’s not shy. She asks for a double Whopper meal and an apple pie for dessert. She looks at me in a guilty sort of frown, but I try to smile, and then I order the same thing she did. It arrives at the counter in a blink because Burger King is slammed and they’re all racing around behind the counter. We take our trays to a booth and sit down. Then she gets up and comes back momentarily with a load of condiments in small round cups. She must really like ketchup and mustard. I think she might be living on the shit, from time to time, not being able to afford the entrees. I’m guessing she fills up on water and the free condiments—until a manager throws her out, that is.