by Thomas Laird
*
Greenberg is at my door.
“Let me in and close the door in a hurry.”
I do as he commands, and then he’s standing inside my tiny apartment.
“Costello is furious. He’s atomic, nuclear, whatever you are when you’re lifting off the pad and headed for Mars.”
I look at Greenberg, and I know what he’s telling me. I have to leave this place. Now.
“I’ll get my shit together and be out of here by dark,” I tell him.
“Don’t leave here until the sun is all the way gone. He’s combing this neighborhood. It’s a good thing you lost the hair.”
Greenberg is the only pair of eyes who’s seen me as I was when I made the raid on Tommy’s drug palace.
“You’re not thinking of popping me, too, are you, William?”
I haven’t told him my real name, but I’m pretty certain he knows who I really am. Calling me William, my old alias, is pretty cagey on his part. But he has to have cunning to survive the Italians and every other criminal he does business with. I would’ve understood if he gave me up to Costello, and even though I know he doesn’t like the Mafia overlord, business is business in his world.
I hand him the grand I still owed him.
“How much did you take?” he asks.
I tell him.
“You better have wings, William. And wings that don’t melt, like that Greek kid in the story. You know the one who got too close to the sun.”
“He’s going to kill me. I already know that,” I tell the Jew.
He looks at me in amazement.
“So you got money. Your new face with the skinhead on top’ll buy you some time. Get on a plane and disappear. Nothing’s written, William. You got clear last time. You told me, remember? Get the hell out. Do it, do it now!”
“There’s nowhere I want to go. There’s nothing I have left to do—except for the two of them, Steven and Tommy Costello.”
“You got the rest of them, didn’t you? Why are you pressing your luck? You just said Costello’s going to kill you, so why let him? You took his money, and if you get away with it, he’ll never forget how you screwed him in the ass twice, with the cash and with his brother. Isn’t that good enough?”
He looks at me as if he’s genuinely pleading a case.
“You better go,” I tell him. “He might see you coming out of here. And if he does, he’ll know it’s me whether I’ve changed my face or not. So you better just go.”
“William—”
“You better just go.”
“You can disappear. It’s still a big world with all kinds of wormholes to hide in. Go to the Middle East. Hell, go to Israel!”
“Goodbye, Greenberg.”
He gives it up, turns, and walks out my door.
*
I’m expecting Tommy and his hordes to be waiting for me as I step out the front door, but there’s no one coming up the street but the mailman, and he doesn’t seem to recognize me as I walk past him with a suitcase full of drug money and a duffel with my gun and my clothes stuffed in it.
*
I stay in a hotel in San Francisco. I have to think that the city is the last place Tommy’d expect me to hide. He’ll figure I’m already on a plane or I’m still at the airport waiting to board, and he’ll have the terminal under surveillance. It amuses me to think that he and the cops are working cooperatively to find me.
In the hotel I flop on the king-sized bed and I’m out for three hours before my eyes open. I was so exhausted that I didn’t even have time to screen a few nightmares about Li in my head. It was dreamless sleep—unless I forgot what I dreamed. I’ve read that it happens like that—the stuff that comes alive in your sleep is forgotten if it occurs early in your slumbers.
It’s no big thing, though. I’m sure I’ll see Li again, with the blood on her body, her arms open and pleading with me about something I don’t comprehend. She’ll come back to me again and again because she and the child that might have been are my only consolation. Killing Tommy Costello won’t wash the blood off Li. Shooting Steven James won’t ease me, either. All those other slayings didn’t wash away what we did in Dia Nguc on that day in 1972.
All those deaths are on me now, and my only shot at peace will come if I find out finally that there really is no hell except in the lives we live up top, here. Life is truly all the hell that anyone needs.
I’m ready for all this to end. I’ve been ready since I saw Li’s empty eyes on that death bed in the pines in Upstate New York.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Portland, Maine, 1985
For all the good it’ll do us, Rita and I hop the jet to Portland, Maine, to see the crime scene of Mark McIntosh. But the Homicide detective there, Fred McCann, is very helpful toward the two of us. Mostly you get hostility when you travel to some remote spot where someone did a lot of bleeding, but Portland extends a lot of professional courtesy toward us, and McCann informs us that McIntosh went down with extreme prejudice. It appears that Azrael didn’t sneak up on the ex-Ranger, since there were signs of a struggle in McIntosh’s living room—overturned furniture, and so on.
McCann is very thin. He looks like an athlete, maybe a basketball player, and he’s very tall, maybe over six-six. His hair is sandy-colored and thinning, and he is perhaps in his mid-thirties. I know Rita takes a close gander at him, and it makes me a little uncomfortable.
She’s becoming remote, once more. She told me last week that she’s worried that we both have baggage, even though she’s never been married.
“What baggage have I got?” I asked her back in Chicago at a 4 a.m. dinner break in yet another White Castle.
“You have Mike and Mary, and I’ll never be ‘mom’ to them.”
I took a slug out of my Coke, and I looked over at her. I wanted her so badly at that moment that I didn’t become angry with the “baggage” shit.
“You don’t have to be their mom. They only had the one, and she’s never coming back.”
“You know what I mean, Jimmy.”
“No. I don’t think I do.”
She took a bite out of her cheeseslider, and then she stared down at her plate.
“I mean I’d never be able to start anything brand new with you. That’s what I’m saying.”
There was nothing left to add to her comment, so I let it go, but her words stung me, and I knew what was coming.
We only stay in Portland overnight, and this time we spend the dark hours in our separate rooms. I know it’s over. All she has to do to finalize it is to say so. But all the time we’re in Maine she keeps pretty quiet, except to talk business, the business of how the hell we’re ever going to erase Evan Azrael’s name from our whiteboard. Actually his name isn’t up there—all of his victims are listed there instead, and Azrael’s listing is engraved inside both of our heads where the letters are in bold and are heightened more than the dead listed in red marker on that board.
*
Doc is coming back on Monday, on this weekend in February. We have had word from our friends in San Francisco that someone has knocked over one of Tommy Costello’s drug operations, and the Homicide department there is of the unified opinion that Evan Azrael was the likely perpetrator, mainly because no one else would have the sack to rob Costello in his own backyard, no one but our surviving ex-Ranger.
They think he did it because he might be running low on funds. We knew he relieved Willy Costello of several grand, but there is no way of knowing exactly how much Tommy’s little brother was carrying on him when the Army operator doused his flames with a very precise shot. The money was enough, it seems, to get him back to the West Coast from Upstate New York, but after that the trail goes cold. He’s in the Bay Area, they figure, out there, because that’s where Costello lurks. He might be headed our way to take down Steven James, the sole remnant of that group of elite troops who were on Azrael’s list, but I still think, and Rita concurs, that the Italian in the Bay Area is his target of choice be
cause their thing is personal. Emotions almost always take precedence over business. Dia Nguc has become secondary, we believe, and we’ll find out soon where Azrael plans to light, after finishing his last two tasks.
*
Doc comes back on that very Monday, and he returns to work in the middle of an ice storm. Freezing rain has totaled up to a half inch of ice on the ground, and driving is extremely treacherous. Rita has been partnered with Al Fredericks, a Homicide with ten years experience in our department, and he’s a good guy who doesn’t mind working with a woman or with a woman of color. He’s yet another Vietnam Vet on staff here, and he was in the shit right around the time I was in-country. So I’m relieved she didn’t wind up with some clown with an attitude toward females and Hispanics or blacks or anybody of color. She’ll settle in with him pretty quick, and I don’t think he’ll try playing grab-ass with Rita because he’s rumored to be gay. But who the hell knows?
“You’re looking a little gray in the puss, James,” Doc says as he settles into the chair across from my desk. “You still have the best view in the goddam building.”
“You were missed, Harold.”
No one is allowed to call him by his given name except me, as far as I know. Everyone else in this copperdom high rise calls him Doc because of his advanced degree in English literature from that very swanky Big Ten school, Northwestern, up in Evanston, by the Lake.
“You’re exciting me, Jimmy. I think it moved, just a wee bit.”
I flip him the file on Evan Azrael.
He opens it, and then he shuts it abruptly.
“It’ll be my shithouse reading. We’re never gonna catch this piece of work, you understand,” he tells me.
“Why? Because he’s transcontinental?”
“No. It’s because he’s prepared, he’s trained for this sort of shit. How do you figure he’s going to trip over his own dick?”
I look back out the window to the blue-green slab of ice that is Lake Michigan and everything close to it. The freezing rain continues to drizzle down, and the traffic on the Outer Drive has come to a literal standstill, and there are red strobe lights everywhere up and down the Drive. The salt trucks can’t keep up with Mother Nature. I figure I might be bunking here tonight, and I’m hoping Doc and I don’t have to go out on any calls. I’m hoping all the murderous little fellows will keep it in their pants at least until a thaw happens.
I see Rita’s face inside my eyelids when I close my eyes for a brief moment. Then I’m looking at the icicle that is the city beyond my window. I’m glad the kids didn’t have to go to school today. It’s Lincoln’s birthday.
“He’s got to get past all the goombahs to get to the last item, who is Steven James. We’ll have to wait it out until he kills Tommy or Tommy kills him. If he gets the wop, then he’ll be headed our way, and that, Professor, is when we catch our boy. You know about fatal flaws, you literary giant. His fatal flaw is revenge. He can’t stop. He might have disappeared if Willy had left him with his lady in that upstate cabin in New York, but little Will had to follow orders and try to deal with the ex-assassin and the ex-Army Ranger, and we all know how that one turned out.”
Doc smiles at me, and I remembered how vacant this whole building felt without him. He’s my best and only friend. I left my other buddies in Vietnam, and I haven’t made any new close acquaintances after Erin died.
I thought I had with Rita, but I should’ve known it wouldn’t work. She’s as driven and focused as I am, and we would’ve never had a future. I was just in a fugue of denials, the way the shrinks look at it. I wanted, and I want, her so much that I couldn’t face up to facts.
The way I just laid it out for Doc. It’s a fact that Evan Azrael will try for the mob boss on the Left Coast first, and if he survives that round, he’ll be coming to the Windy City. I know it in my bones. It’s the way those operators operate. They hate loose ends. The Rangers and I have that much in common, although I was an ordinary grunt serving out a tour via getting drafted, over a decade ago.
“I don’t know how much good I’ll be to you, Jimmy,” Doc says, breaking a few minutes’ worth of silence.
“You’re too young to go Section Eight or senile,” I laugh.
“I mean my pins, my legs. The one knee is fixed, and the other one ain’t in great shape, either. When your legs go… You know how that story ends.”
“This isn’t a marathon. You don’t need legs to do this job.”
“There you’re wrong. The real story is that I’m not certain I want to do this much longer. The ivy-covered halls have been calling me.”
“You got a job offer?”
“I might, at NU.”
“Northwestern?”
He nods.
“You really want it?” I ask him.
“I got to think about it, but you’ll be the first one to know. My ex-wife doesn’t give a flying turd what I do, and that’s fine with me, but I’d miss you, Dago. I missed you and … this.” He smiles, pointing outside at the ice kingdom here, near the Golden Mile.
He stares out that window again, but then a smile lightens his weathered face.
“I’ve got Korea to thank for these dysfunctional knees, but I think I’ll stick around long enough to see if your theory about this swinging dick Ranger comes true.”
*
Doc and I visit Steven James together, for the first time. James looks good, the best I’ve seen him since our first interview with Rita. There is full color in his cheeks now, and he occasionally smiles when we talk to him.
“I’m sober, and I’m in love,” he pronounces. “And as part of my Step Program, I have to apologize to you, Jimmy, for being the asshole I was when we met. But then I was an asshole for a long time before that.”
He laughs, and there’s genuine pleasure in his laugh.
“Well,” Doc tells him, “they say you can’t really be an asshole if you’re aware you’re an asshole, because assholes are assholes because they’re unaware of the fact that they’re assholes.”
We all three enjoy grins together.
“Where’d you get this guy, Jimmy? The woman was lots better looking—no offense, Detective Gibron.”
“There’s no debate there, Steven,” Doc answers. “We were originally paired not long after Parisi got his shield.”
Steven nods, a grin still on his face.
“What’s her name?” I ask.
“Margaret Shula. She’s a nurse at the VA where I’m doing rehab. She works in Psycho there.”
“That’s convenient.” Doc smiles.
“Yeah. It was. It is,” James agrees. “I wanted to tell you I was thinking of signing on at the Police Academy.”
He looks at me as if he’s asking my permission.
“We have a lot of ex-military on the force,” I tell him. “You sure you want to be around guns again?” I ask.
“You don’t have to use them very often except to defend yourself, no?”
“That’s the plan,” Doc affirms. “You know cops have really high burnout, I assume?”
“Can’t be much different from the crew I was a part of, in-country.”
“That sounds about right,” I tell him. “The divorce rate is pretty high for coppers. You have to take that into consideration, Steven,” I tell him.
“She knows I want to go to the Academy, and she’s good with it,” he tells us.
“Does she know about Azrael?”
He grins warily.
“She was a champion shot with a rifle and a shotgun. Trophies all over the apartment. Her old man hunted with Hemingway in Kenya.”
“Azrael ought to think twice,” Doc proffers.
“Yeah. He ought to,” Steven agrees. “I never want to see him again, but if he shows up, I’ll kill him myself.”
His voice puts a chill on my back. I look over to Doc, and he looks back at me with a very sober face.
“We’ll try and do a preemptive strike on him, Steven,” I say.
“Make sure your
firearms are legal,” Doc tells him.
“Like I said, I hope he never shows, but if he does, I’ll do him. I almost got my life stolen over in the shit, but I’m not going to let anyone steal it from me twice.”
He looks over at the two of us, and another snarky grin takes over his countenance.
“You think I’ll make a good policeman?” he asks.
*
Hurry up and wait is a way of life in the military. Azrael knows it. Steven James knows it, and so do my partner and I. There’s nothing to do except watch and wait for Evan Azrael to emerge. Maybe he’ll float right toward us with black Angel of Death wings, like with his last name. Perhaps he’ll flutter above us and rain down the new plagues of Egypt.
He’s nothing supernatural, however. He’s very deadly and very clever, and I figure he’ll go chameleon—he’ll change colors, change his appearance. His photograph from his days in the Army have been well circulated by now throughout the media. His puss has been plastered on TV and on the covers of most major newspapers from coast to coast. He won’t be walking around with the same face that he had when he came out of the military, so we had our police artist do variations of what he could do by adding or subtracting hair and what he could do with colors and eyeglasses and with any other trick that a makeup man in Hollywood could pull for a character in a movie, and we have circulated all those pics as well. The cops in this city ought to have a fair idea of the cast of personas this killer could assume.
*
I see Doc still limping, but he doesn’t use a cane or a crutch. He said his doctors forbade him to use either because they said it would weaken the replaced knee, his right knee. He has to take the pain, and he never complains about it, but his face betrays his anguish, on occasion. He’ll grimace, and sometimes the look will be accompanied by a soft grunt. I try to tell him to sit down as much as he can when we go out on a call, but he won’t have it. He said he’s going to hang around until we see how this Azrael business shakes out, and I’ve never known him to break his word before.