The Friendship of Criminals

by Robert Glinski

  And still Nick Martin stumped the hell out of him.

  Why come back to Fancy Tina’s? What was the point of waiting three nights and making a date for the following week? Was Martin rebelling, staging some kind of bizarre protest? Maybe it was a fuck-you to the club’s owner, or he’d cracked from the undercover deployment, or was he waiting for Bielakowski’s men to pass information? All were plausible excuses until he incorporated the stripper. She was the wild card, the Black Maria trashing the hand.

  Half a day spinning scenarios convinced Bielakowski he wouldn’t be threading the needle with a perfect explanation. The move was too unorthodox, too random. So he settled for the one conclusion that made the most sense. Nick Martin was reeling in the stripper as a future witness. Instead of being grateful for his life, the cop was expanding his evidentiary reach. Hey, Cheryl, who told you to drug me? Did you know Bielakowski was behind the kidnapping? Who hauled me from your apartment? They were going to kill me, don’t think they won’t do the same to you.

  Ready for a resolution, Bielakowski started with the easiest task. A few days before her dinner date with Nick Martin, Bielakowski had the stripper delivered to the abandoned warehouse. Not bound, though not free to leave either. He explained how she controlled the meeting’s length. Answer two questions correctly and she’d be on her merry way. Red buzzer beeps and things would get rough. Cheryl knew who she was dealing with, the ramifications for getting lippy. Not like she had anything to gain safeguarding a guy she’d already poisoned once.

  “First,” said Bielakowski, “what did Martin want with you?”

  “I thought he was getting even, but that wasn’t it.”

  “What, then?”

  She looked at each man in the room, dismissing all for their inherent emotional weaknesses. “Lonely. The guy is just real, real lonely.”

  Bielakowski was more confused. What the hell was he dealing with? He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “Okay, second, you want five thousand dollars and a one-way flight to Florida?”

  “Or what?”

  “Or do you want to die?”

  Cheryl picked Curtain Number One. Nick Martin’s loss was Tampa’s club scene’s gain.

  The Martin problem was trickier. He was an undercover cop who’d survived ten years in the mob plus a night in the Port Richmond warehouse. Bielakowski conceded he’d underestimated and misplayed the man. Should have whacked him when he had the chance, not overthought all the angles. He tried imagining his father in a similar predicament. That ended any debate.

  Bielakowski called his two best men. Day after tomorrow, go to Fancy Tina’s. Kill the sucker from the warehouse. Closing time he’ll be sitting in the parking lot, waiting on that blondie who’s long gone. Dump his body in the goddamn Delaware River.

  The Polish hitters baited their trap with the stripper’s car, parking it in her usual spot—two rows from the back, beneath an overhead light. They took a position six spaces away in a beige Crown Victoria with tinted windows. As they waited, the men didn’t eat or drink or talk. They sat still, holding pistols in their laps, watching for Nick Martin.

  * * *

  Martin kept the television on in the background as he cooked his meal for two, but he was just going through the motions. His body hadn’t caught up to the decision building all week, right up to cutting the vegetables and marinating the meat. He couldn’t take the chance going back to Kensington, must have been a little insane thinking it was even possible. Deserving time with Cheryl—wanting time—had nothing to do with it. What if the Pole heard? Or if Rea saw the stripper and started wondering about that night he disappeared, popping up twenty-four hours later, his wrists scabbed over, claiming kinky handcuff sex? Should never have stalked the broad. Whole fantasy was toxic enough to get him killed.

  So close to the finish, he couldn’t trip now. Keep it on the road, he whispered to himself. No swerving.

  He pulled his trash can from the end of the counter. He dumped the potatoes first, followed by the veggies and even the meat. All of it had to go. The wine was allowed to survive only because he was using it to dull the pain of missing his date. Adios, Cheryl. Another time, another life.

  * * *

  Bielakowski let his cell ring twice before answering. The voice said the man from the warehouse never showed. “Should we track him down?”

  “Let it go,” said Bielakowski. “We’ll have other chances. Better chances.”

  17.

  “OH, SONNY, I’M A LITTLE light-headed,” teased Tatiana, flipping back the bedsheet, smoothing her tousled hair, and heading for the bathroom. “I guess you did miss me.” Passing a mirror, the Russian caught her boyfriend surveying her runway figure and rewarded him with a one-two hip shake. With the self-assuredness of a model, there wasn’t an angle or ounce she was afraid of promoting.

  Their evening had started two bottles of wine earlier when Sonny arrived home from Philadelphia. Dinner, the booze, and Tatiana were waiting for him on the condo’s balcony. The food was takeout because she believed in spending time on her best assets. For their stay-at-home date, that meant an afternoon at the salon and shopping for a dress as sexy as a secretly passed hotel key.

  Brushing her teeth in the bathroom, Tatiana was thrilled with her plan’s execution and return on investment. Sonny held her hand throughout dinner, shared stories of his hometown, complimented her dress, and said they could skip dessert because he was having her.

  She rinsed her mouth, added a touch of color to her lips, brushed her hair, and reached for the thigh-length robe hanging from a nearby hook. It was pale pink and decorated with Japanese cherry blossoms. She slid her arms into the cooled silk and considered how to best tie the strings. If Sonny wasn’t already asleep, she didn’t want to discourage a second go-around with a CLOSED sign.

  Returning with the silk lapels hanging loose over her breasts, Tatiana found Sonny out of the bed, scrambling to collect his clothes. She asked if everything was okay. After a few silent moments passed, she rephrased the question with the same result.

  Sonny’s mind was elsewhere, plotting a strategy for grinding the next few hours. After Tatiana had excused herself to the bathroom, Sonny called his son and caught a worst-case scenario. In all other aspects of his life, Sonny had a simple philosophy for dealing with past mistakes—he didn’t pay them much attention. Michael, his oldest son, was the exception.

  Like Sonny, Michael had an obsessive personality that teetered between genius and disaster. As a kid, he sold stolen bikes out of the family garage, sometimes collecting enough to post liquidation fliers on neighborhood light poles. Two years into puberty, Michael brokered low-grade grass between Puerto Rican youth gangs and suburban high schoolers. At twenty-five, he made his first million peddling Yellow Pages ads. Three “Salesman of the Year” plaques went hand in hand with a full-time coke habit and a stint in the state penitentiary for misappropriation of funds. Sonny picked up the court-ordered restitution, which was a few bucks shy of a hundred grand.

  After his release, Michael did sixty days at an Arizona rehab facility, remarried, had a kid, revisited rehab three more times, and convinced Sonny to stake him in a used car dealership. Six months after the lot opened, Michael was back to earning big bucks and blowing it on bad habits. The only lesson he’d learned was being a little sharper hiding his footprints.

  When Sonny called Michael from his bed and the line picked up, he could hear a Latin dance beat in the background. It struck him how there was always a soundtrack to his boy’s struggles. Punk, hair metal, reggae, techno, hip-hop—the tunes changing as the crowd turned over. “Michael, it’s me. I’m back from Philly. You in a club? Go outside for a second.”

  The music faded at the same pace as a closing fire door. “You’re too late,” said Michael, his speech breathy and rushed. “I’m a dead man walking.”

  Sonny pictured his son standing in a nightclub parking lot, his pockets full of dope and someone else’s money. If the call was going to be pro
ductive, Sonny needed to know what direction his son was heading. On the back side of a binge, Michael was unreachable. Sonny would hang up and start fresh in a couple of days. But if he was still ascending and minus the voices, there was time.

  “How much of that talk is the blow?”

  Michael enunciated each word with a double-time cadence. “I told them everything would be all right if I could get to my dad. So that’s what I was doing. Okay? I was trying, man, really working on making everything right. But I screwed it up. I’m, I’m screwed up.”

  Sonny tried keeping his voice down. Tatiana wasn’t Michael’s biggest fan, telling Sonny his son was a taker, the type who wrung the rag until there wasn’t a drop left. Sonny would respond with a half-dozen excuses, including Michael’s no-show father and bipolar mother. Tatiana didn’t buy into the enabler propaganda.

  Clutching the phone, Sonny concentrated on rolling his words right down the middle. Steady and firm worked best whenever his boy was ranting. “Take it easy for a second. Come by the diner tomorrow. I’ve been traveling all day and could use some sleep. You could, too.”

  “No good. Too late for that,” said Michael, dragging out the last syllable before recharging. “Dad? Dad?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Meet me in an hour. At the place you took me last year for my birthday. You know the one, right?”

  Sonny was moving as he answered. “Yeah, the joint with the stiff drinks.” He tossed the phone and dashed to the closet. They’d agreed—had sworn to each other—that whenever either dropped the SOS line they were to rendezvous on Sonny’s sailboat at the Boca Raton Marina.

  He pulled on pants, shoes, and a windbreaker before reaching to the top shelf for his gun. The pistol’s diminutive size and lack of registration were its main attributes. He tried hiding it in the small of his back, didn’t like the feel, and settled for a jacket pocket.

  Stepping from the closet, he looked up and saw the blue eyes of his girlfriend. If she’d observed the whole routine minus the gun, Sonny could have explained the mad scramble with a mostly true story about Michael needing quick cash. Except he was sure she caught a glimpse of the metal.

  “What the hell is going on with you?” she asked, reaching for the drawstrings of her robe and cinching it tight. Tatiana wasn’t a simpleton. She knew Sonny didn’t make his money in the ministry or serving the poor. But a loaded gun in the middle of the night was new territory, a discomforting deviation from the norm. When Sonny reached for her hand, she snatched it back and stepped away.

  “Don’t start,” he said.

  Tatiana had spent her twenties in a succession of unhealthy relationships with immature, possessive men. Then she met Sonny and found herself wishing he cared more, that he held her tighter, that he didn’t let her float so loose and free. “I like you,” she said, wiping a tear from her cheek, “and we’ve got something good going. But I’m not sure I can handle that.” Eyeing his pocket, she said, “Secrets are okay, and you don’t know all mine. But some are too dark, and I’m worried that’s what I just saw.”

  Dozens of women were sprinkled throughout Sonny’s life. Most were pleasant, a few not so much. All were physically beautiful, and perhaps it was the open competition for their affections that lured him in. The courtships began with good intentions—six made it to an engagement ring, and three wore white down the center aisle—but whatever the genesis, none lasted longer than a few years. Three ended less than honorably, in explosions of bottled resentment, infidelity, or emotional manslaughter. Others died a slower death, like neglected fruit left too long on the vine. In his sixth decade, Sonny was tired of being damaged goods, incapable of giving and accepting all the elements of an evolved relationship. He wanted to push through, to outlast the low points, to be a couple that trusted in love and believed in its safety net.

  Softer now, Sonny said, “What you saw, and me walking out the door, has nothing to do with us. Here’s the truth. You could ask me to stay and I wouldn’t. Tears, tantrums, the whole emotional routine—wouldn’t matter. It’s a dog deal, worst thing I’ve done to you. But that’s the way it’s going down. All I’m asking is for you to draw the line out and give me some room. You don’t owe me that, but I’m still asking.”

  Tatiana knew her choices. A man with the motivation to load his pocket with a gun wasn’t opening the floor for debate. The absoluteness of Sonny’s decision was the known variable. She was the question mark, the one with the ability to pull back or push forward. Truth was, while she didn’t know Sonny well enough to write his obituary’s first paragraph, she’d never made him for a killer and still didn’t. He was just a guy with a problem.

  Tatiana stepped toward him, eyes up, making sure he had enough sense not to look away. If he’d acted put out or distracted she might have pushed him aside and made for the door, silk robe be damned. He didn’t, which made her heart jump.

  Wrapping her arms around his neck, she said, “Fly away, birdman. The cage door will be open when you get back.”

  18.

  GUN BENEATH THE SEAT in case he got pulled over, Sonny turned right out of his building’s underground garage and accelerated with a heavy foot. The initial plan was to arrive first, prepare the sailboat for a quick launch, and cover the parking lot in the event uninvited guests followed his son.

  The radio was playing a Coltrane set he’d heard a thousand times. While jazz had been Sonny’s thing since meeting the saxophonist during his Strawberry Mansion days, he didn’t like tarnishing the artist with the night’s black cloud. He tapped the row of preset stations for a different riff—one he didn’t mind getting dirty—and found enough ads and soul-killing oldies to make him punch the OFF button with a closed fist.

  Minus tunes, Michael and Tatiana’s conversations replayed in his head, making him ache for two fingers of Scotch and five minutes to enjoy it. Without handy booze, his thoughts turned to the half-smoked joint hidden between Alabama and Alaska in his AAA map book. Might be just the thing to take the edge off. After a cop-peek left and right, he put the unlit roach between his lips, caught a glimpse of himself in the rearview mirror, called himself an asshole, and flicked it out the sunroof.

  “Damn kid,” he muttered, “the things I do for you.” A lifetime of heartbreaking screw-ups and still Sonny was willing to stiff-arm a Russian beauty, speed around Boca Raton, and toss away perfectly good weed. When it came to motivating behavior, nothing ran on the same racecourse as Catholic guilt. Sonny often wondered if he’d experienced a more normal childhood, if his role models weren’t barflies from Bonnie’s Whiskey Room, if he hadn’t sailed away from so many wives, maybe he could have been a better father and his son a better man. Michael was the backyard rocket that began each flight with such promise and ended nose-down in the dirt, broken and battered. A friend once told Sonny he was missing the point. The issue was no longer who shot Michael. That was old news. The bigger deal was who was driving him to the hospital. That somebody was Sonny. Always had been.

  Turning left into the marina’s entrance, Sonny looped through the crushed-shell parking lot on high alert. He’d once heard an old-timer say No coincidence, no story, a maxim he’d since heeded. Boring was best. Good jobs weren’t supposed to look like a game of pixie sticks.

  The security shack was unoccupied after ten o’clock per the board of directors’ efforts to cut costs. With favorable weather conditions, the lot was sprinkled with three dozen cars left by sailors out for the night or living full-time in the marina. Illumination from the thin-cut moon and single light pole was too dim to make out a man’s face from twenty feet.

  Sonny parked in the last row, a few spaces from the marina’s dumpster. His bumper was tight against a hedge of forsythias, giving him an unobstructed view of the entrance, the storage shed, and most of the parked cars.

  Sitting in the quiet, the devil part of him wished he hadn’t tossed the roach. Whatever fraction of goodness was left over understood the depravity of smoking dope while rendezvousin
g with a struggling drug addict. As he reached for his door handle, a flash crossed his side mirror and cold steel filled his ear hole.

  “Michael said you’d park over here. Guess he doesn’t lie about everything.” The voice had a diluted Latin accent, like a Puerto Rican who’d lived in Brooklyn for a couple of years before returning south.

  Sonny moved his hands to the top of the steering wheel. From the pressure and the voice’s distance, he figured the piece for a double-barrel shotgun, one of those sawed-off numbers with the custom handle. His first thought was that the weapon wasn’t the typical choice for a stickup—an amateur hustle dominated by pocket pistols. Shotguns were the professional’s alternative, a weapon that required less-than-perfect marksmanship without leaving behind forensically traceable ammunition.

  “Why don’t you lower that before it makes a mess of my Cadillac,” said Sonny. Taking in the limited data points, he formulated his first theory of the night. “And tell my boy to come out of hiding.”

  “He said you’d be cool,” said the gunman. “Two for two.” He backed the barrel off Sonny’s head and tapped the metal roof. When the first tap went unanswered, he followed with two more.

  “Come on, man. You can’t whistle?” Sonny rotated his chin a quarter turn. “Tell Michael to get over here. No need to chip my paint.”

  “Old dude with big onions. Dig it.”

  Sonny opened his door. He’d been set up for a reason, and it wasn’t so his brains could fertilize the marina parking lot. “While we’re waiting for Michael to get his back up, why don’t you tell me who you are?”

  The gunman lowered his shotgun to Sonny’s knees. He was wearing a loose-fitting black shirt, and his dark hair was pulled into a thin, braided ponytail. A scar cut a bald strip across his left eyebrow. Clean-shaven with groomed sideburns and deep-set eyes, he had the type of face where a smile made all the difference. “The name is Cassir. C-A-S-S-I-R.”