by Thomas Laird
We enter his large office, and we see it’s well stocked with bottles and books and a desk and a TV and a dozen other accommodations for a businessman of great enterprise. He probably thinks he’s a CEO, like at GM or US Steel.
“Have a seat.”
There are two chairs opposite him at his desk, and we take them.
“I’m not thrilled you laid hands on one of my guys.”
“I told you he disrespected my partner, and I know you’re not dumb enough to mess around with a cop—at least not out in the open. And we don’t take money, so that road’s closed.”
“You’re pretty confident in yourself, Parisi.”
“You’ll want to put a ‘Detective’ in front of that name, Costello.”
“You can call me Tommy.”
“We’re here on business,” I tell him.
“Yeah, I know. This guy Roberts or Azrael or whatever he calls himself is under the delusion that he did some work for me, and he thinks I fingered him to my brother, Willy. As I say, this guy’s nuts. He’s the one you think whacked those other soldiers from like Vietnam, right?”
“That part’s right, but they know that your brother never scratched his dick without asking big brother’s permission.”
Rita sits in silence. It seems she’s happy to allow me to piss this gangster off. I’m wondering why he didn’t ask for his lawyer to be present, and the only thing I can think of is that he might be worried that Evan Azrael’s as good as Tommy Costello thinks he is, since he employed the Ranger to do hits for his crew.
“You need to stop being so easy, the way you talk about my brother… You’re awfully quiet,” Costello says, looking over to Rita.
“I’m new at this. I mean I’ve never been this close to a genuine criminal like you.”
She smiles at him, and Tommy smiles back at Rita.
“Are all the amenities covered now?” I ask.
“Yeah. She’s a lot better looking than you, Detective Parisi.”
“Now that that’s clear, let’s talk about Evan Azrael.”
“I already told you, I had nothing to do with that guy.”
“Then why’s your brother dead?” Rita shoots right back at him.
He gives her the charming smile, once again.
“That’s something you’d have to ask Willy about, but I hear he’s not available.”
Then he shoots that crooked snout back at me. The lines in his craggy face seem to deepen every time we mention his brother.
“I’ll leave it to you, to the cops, to find vengeance for Willy.”
“We don’t do vengeance. We don’t do vendettas,” I say.
“Very funny. Your family has dealt in blood for a very long time,” he tells me.
“I’m not a branch of the crew in Chicago, and neither was my old man.”
“Yeah, Detective, I heard about your old man. They say you’re a bulldog, just like the old man.”
“You want to talk personalities or do you want to ask where we are with Azrael, because I know the only reason you let us in here was because your shorts have a brown stain over this Ranger who’s gunning for you? And if your help is anything on the same level as that pissant bodyguard out front, I’d say you’re very frightened of that gunslinger you once hired to remove problems that you couldn’t or wouldn’t handle on your own.”
He jerks his eyes back over to Rita, maybe to calm himself.
“Why haven’t you lawyered-up with us?” Rita throws in.
He tries to smile, but he can’t pull it off.
“He worked for Willy, not me, and Willy’s dead so you can’t deal with my brother anymore. And I had nothing to do with this guy. No contact at all.”
“That’s not the way Azrael looks at it, I don’t think,” Rita adds. “He’ll figure you were calling all the shots even if it was Willy that ran him,” she tells him.
“Yeah, that’s likely the way he’ll see it, but it don’t mean it’s true. And where are you on my brother’s case, and why ain’t I talking to that guy Serafin who called me in the first place?”
“We’re in on this because Azrael’s killed two men in Chicago, and we’re doing this investigation cooperatively, Tommy.” I smile at him.
“Looks more like you’re double-teaming me.”
“There are all kinds of police looking at you. We’re here to find out if there’s anything you can tell us to help us find the grim reaper before he slices little pieces off you, Costello. Willy killed his lady, and he murdered their baby when he did her.”
A dark look looms on his face now.
“I didn’t know the woman was pregnant. It’s unfortunate.”
“Just think how the Ranger feels. He figures he owes you the same kind of treatment you would’ve given him if you’d caught up with him yourself,” Rita says.
“You sound like a hard woman—what’s your name? I forgot to ask.”
“Espinosa. Rita Espinosa.”
“Mexican?”
“He isn’t going to euthanize you, the way he did the other troopers,” I interrupt. “He knows how to use a knife. They’re all experts with a blade. He’s going to make you bleed, and he’ll take his time to drain you.”
“You tryin’ to put the big scare in me, Parisi? You think I haven’t had other swinging dicks come looking for my scalp before?”
“If you know anything, Mr. Costello,” Rita tells him, “it’s to your advantage to tell us now. We’re leaving in a few hours and we won’t be back this way.”
“I ain’t got a thing for either of you. I know a couple of your clan, Parisi. They’re not going to be overjoyed that we had this little talk together. They don’t like you sticking your beak where it don’t belong. I haven’t killed any goddam body, and this sit-down is officially concluded.”
He rises from his swivel, plush chair.
“You two know your way out.”
*
“He looked concerned. Maybe not frightened, but he knows this Azrael won’t be put down easily,” Rita says as she lathers me up in the shower.
We’re due to board the plane back to O’Hare in two hours. We won’t get home until late Sunday night or early Monday morning, and we’ve got the day’s shift on Monday. Sleep will not be much of an option, and I have to relieve my Aunt Maria, who is, as usual, taking command of my son and daughter.
I take her on top of my forearms and I lift her to the wet wall behind her and then I’m inside her and she moans and her mouth goes oval. When I can no longer keep her airborne, I carry her back into the bedroom, still wet and soapy, and I lay her on the king-sized bed, and I thrust myself as deeply as I’m able, and again her mouth goes circular. She starts coming up at me, and at one point she lifts me totally off the mattress.
And then we’re spent and lathered up again, and we both have to re-enter the shower and finish the job we started.
*
The flight goes faster with the westerly wind behind us, and it only takes three and a half hours to arrive at O’Hare. There was a little turbulence, but it didn’t wake Rita up, and she snored her soft feminine snore all the way back home.
*
I check on Steven James right after I leave Rita at the end of our tour Monday. She’s still pooped, and I’m going to give her a little alone time tonight even if she didn’t ask for it. I told her I’d see her Tuesday at work in the morning, and she didn’t argue about it.
James seems like he’s made the adjustment after talking to his shrink at the VA. He says he’s got a woman named Margaret Shula talking to him, and he says she’s really helping him try to live well in order to free himself from those Southeast Asia demons he has locked in his head and in his soul.
Steven tells me all this as we sit in the Garv Inn, a seedy little tavern in Berwyn. They have sawdust on the floor and there’s a juker at the back that no one ever plays unless there’s younger broads here, and younger women don’t seem to populate this joint very often, most of them being of the Rush Street persuasion where the men wea
r suits and where adultery is fashionable.
There is only one other patron at the bar, and it’s an old guy and a regular that knows John Garvin, the owner, on a first name basis.
Garvin brings us two Old Styles, and the light is fading in here because it’s late afternoon, and the owner finally relents and turns on the lights overhead. The glare makes this dive garish, but neither Steven nor I seem to mind.
“He’s going to kill Costello, and then he’ll come for McIntosh and me,” he says, looking over at me.
“It’s more likely he’ll get nailed by Tommy and his people. The odds are really stacked against him. You know that.”
“He’ll find a way,” Steven says as he takes a snort of the draught. “He’s very resourceful. He’s one of these cold-blooded killers when he wants to be. That’s why he made a good contract killer. Shit, it’s what we were over there, wasn’t it?”
“You were soldiers. It was for your country,” I offer lamely.
“Yeah, they told you that story, too, didn’t they, Jimmy?”
I’m rather pleased that he’s calling me by my first name, and I’m beginning to pull for him, now that he’s trying so hard to make a life from the disaster he left behind in 1972.
“It wasn’t a story, back then. We’re looking at it in twenty-twenty hindsight. We were both just kids, Steven.”
He nods and takes another hit from the brew.
“Maybe you’re right, but it feels wrong. It felt wrong for over a year, back there, at the end of the shit.”
“I bet the shrink’s telling you to deal with it one day at a time, like the drunks do. Like in AA. My old man was a card-carrying member.”
“Really?” he asks.
I nod back at him.
“My old man was a high school football coach. Mean individual. I was never very good at football, but I had to play. So did my two brothers. We all hated him. Maybe that’s why he was so successful. He won four state championships in Ohio. That’s where I’m from, just outside of Columbus. My older brother, Matt, got a full ride to Ohio State. The old man got the biggest hard-on over the scholarship, but Matt blew his knee out as a freshman and never played another snap. He became a priest, and the old man went ballistic. The other brother is gay, and he went west somewhere, and we never heard from him again. So I just naturally went into the Army for a four-year hitch. I enlisted, but I never looked back and I never talked to the old man again. My mother died three years ago. She was a diabetic. They kept cutting her until there wasn’t anything left.”
“Your story is similar to Azrael’s. His old man was at Iwo Jima.”
“I know, Evan told all of us that story.”
He downs the dregs of his beer.
“The shrink doesn’t like me to drink at all because it’s a depressant, but I have one or two, now and then. It relaxes me a little, and I haven’t had the urge to swallow a barrel lately. You ever had that desire, Jimmy, to eat a round?”
“I did after my wife, Erin, died of cancer.”
“Yeah. They say we might’ve cured that shit with the money we wasted in Nam, but I don’t believe it. Life has to screw with you somehow. Only the incredibly stupid don’t get depressed, Jimmy. The rest of us have to keep it out of the basement, like rainwater in a downpour.”
“You lose people. It’s the way it is, as unprofound as it sounds.”
“You going to locate Evan, Jimmy? Are you going to stop him before he wastes anyone else?”
I look into the amber liquid in my drink, and then I slug the rest down in one lonely swallow. There won’t be any refills tonight. I have to return to the house to reacquaint myself with my children. The boy is Michael and the girl is Mary. Two very nice Catholic-approved names.
“I’m going to keep you in the pink, Steven. You didn’t come all this way for nothing, and Evan needs to find rest, whether it’s dead or alive. The killing really does have to stop. Costello deserves it, but you and the guy in Maine don’t, and it’s going to all end, right here. I know all that, sure as this planet keeps swinging on its hinge. Evan needs it to be over with.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Portland, Maine, 1985
It’s probably the wrong move, but I figure they’ll be waiting for me in San Francisco, and I want to give Tommy Costello a little more worrying time before I go out to meet with him. I figure he can only lower his guard if I wait just long enough to let him relax. It’d be what he’d do to me, if he had the chance. It’s reasonable to assume that he’s sending people to find me right now, but I still think he needs time to come to a boil. I probably won’t get him in the end, but at least he’ll suffer waiting to find me standing over him in bed with a small caliber pistol in my hand.
It’s also easy to predict that the cops will be watching Mark McIntosh very closely, but I think the surveillance won’t be as high profile as Tommy Costello’s. Costello has his own army, and the cops naturally realize that he’s well protected.
McIntosh isn’t the big name on the marquee, so I’m on a flight to Portland, and I land in that Maine city in a half hour.
Li comes to visit me in the night, and sometimes the baby is in her arms. But there’s blood all over them both, and I remember in my nightmares that the Costellos are responsible for them. I have to have patience, I keep reminding myself when I wake from these nighttime horrors. I have to let Tommy suffer as much as I can before I make that last run at him. There’s not much chance I’ll get him, but I can make him very uncomfortable while he keeps looking over his shoulder.
We land on time at the airport, and I rent a car with the credit card I stole from Willy Costello. The dumbasses in California haven’t cancelled the card, amazingly enough, but they’ll get around to it soon when they see the bogus bills I’m piling up on the card.
I know his address from the source I have back in California. He’s a guy I used in researching the hits I did for the Costellos. He lives in Sausalito, just across the bridge from San Fran, and he’s an associate for the Italians, but his name is Joe Greenberg, and Jews can’t get made by the Mafia any more than Arab–Greeks like me. He’s a first-rate investigator, and he’s expensive, but he located everyone on my personal list of the Rangers, and he found out the whereabouts of the guys I whacked for cash. The best part about Greenberg is that he keeps his mouth shut. He doesn’t spill on any of his clients, mob or otherwise.
The address is different from the first one Joe gave me for McIntosh. Mark was sly enough to change residences, but you can find anyone if you’re persistent enough. I drive the car past the address in a moderate, middle-class neighborhood, and it’s already dark at 4:35 p.m. The forecast is for snow, so I have to get out of here before the heavy stuff arrives late tomorrow evening. The flight out of Portland leaves at 11:20 a.m., so I can just make it on my way back to Sausalito to see my buddy Joe Greenberg for some new identity papers. He’s got his beak into phony IDs as well.
There’s a car parked at the curb, and there’s two men sitting inside, and it’s a Crown Vic, so it must be police because the Ford’s their universal ride.
I pull my rental Chevy down to the end of the block, and when I get out I circle round McIntosh’s ranch house and I approach from the back. I’m counting on no dogs and no electrical surveillance gadgets to keep me from a rear entry. There are no alleys in this neighborhood. The lots are large, and I don’t even see any fences to halt me from moving fast toward Mark’s new house.
It seems too easy. And then I see why. There’s a man walking the perimeter of Mark’s home, in the back yard. He’s carrying some kind of rifle or shotgun—I can’t make it out in the dark, and there are no lights on in the back. The only help I’ve got is the shrubbery between McIntosh’s ranch house and the neighbor’s ranch, next door.
So I approach the bushes with my best stealth, and I wait behind the five feet high greenery until the guy with the long gun comes walking by. He has his head down. He’s probably cold and bored and ready to go off shift, and I h
ave no intention of killing anybody but Mark. Cops are not on my list, and neither is any other civilian.
I walk softly toward the left end of the hedge just as he approaches, and when he’s got his back to me I reach out and sling my right arm around his neck and I put him in a chokehold. There’s no way of determining if I’ve brought him to unconsciousness or whether I’ve strangled him to death, but I’m trying not to terminate this cop. The shotgun—a twelve gauge—drops from his grip with a soft whump to the grass, and then I feel him go limp.
He tumbles to the turf in front of me. I check to see if he’s got a pulse, and he’s alive, and then I remove his .38 from his shoulder holster, and I check his ankles to see if he’s carrying a spare piece, and once I’ve got him disarmed, I stuff the .38 in the front waistband of my pants. I’ve got the .22 in my carry bag, and I take the twelve-gauge pump with me as well.
McIntosh has a glass patio door in the back here in front of me. I see the faint glow of a TV set in a room toward the front of the house, but there are no other lights on inside. I take out the small crowbar from my bag, and I wedge it into the edge of the patio door, and after several wiggles I’ve sprung the cheap crap lock that seals the entry, and I open the glass door slowly and make my way inside. I carefully lay the shotgun and the .38 on the kitchen floor.
I hear the faint murmur of some TV voice, but I don’t hear anything else.
Mark, like most of us, has no wife or children. He was the girl magnet of our group of operators, but he never had any desire to settle down. We’re still in our thirties, I remember, so maybe living alone at this age isn’t all that unusual.
I place my feet down very quietly as I go toward the light in the front room, but I never hear Mark as he sticks the cold barrel of something lethal behind my left ear.
“Welcome to my hacienda, Evan. What took you so long?”
“That’s what Dellacord said, too,” I tell him.
“Let’s have a seat in the living room. We can talk, Evan, before I put a round in your head. I’ll make it look like we struggled, just for the police at the curb. So you nailed the idiot out back, right?”