Sweeney on the Rocks

by Allen Morris Jones

  Russians, though? They’d monitor a place for weeks if there was a buck in it.

  And yeah. No shit. Half a block later—past a long row of middle-American Toyota Tercels and Honda Civics and Chevy Malibus of older vintage—two goons sit horizoned in the front seat of a Grand Marquis. Windows down, elbows out the window, cigarettes smoldering.

  They’re eyeing the front door, but they don’t have visual access to the back. Russians. Not the sharpest tools in the shed.

  Sweeney ducks lower and, once he’s well past, takes a right turn, then another. Slips into the alley.

  There’s no surveillance, but…

  The back door—the same door that Tina said had been trashed with an axe (nice narrative touch…visual)—stands in one piece. Unscratched. Two locks. Solid oak, stained dark, weathered.

  Sweeney parks and walks to the door. Under his feet, on the concrete stoop, a rope welcome mat crumbling with mold and moisture. A kitchen window beside the door, protected by security bars, has lace drapes and a forgotten houseplant on the sill. Sweeney puts his nose as close to the window as the bars will allow. A cheap fridge, humming. Cabinets closed and intact. Couple dishes stacked in the drain tray. On the wall, a “Fuck the Cook” needlework that Sweeney remembers from Tina’s apartment.

  Okay.

  Okay.

  Okay, Sweeney.

  This changes…everything.

  You’re a fool.

  Consider how much of this mess, this whole house of cards, how many of his preconceptions, have been built on the words of a woman whom he already knows to be a liar.

  Russians. Breetvah. Moretti. All of it. Bullshit. Probably.

  So, okay. Take a step back. Reevaluate. What does he know for sure?

  He’s got three million dollars in his pocket. That’s one thing.

  And the guy who’s been trying to fuck up his life in Montana has kidnapped Aggie.

  But that’s all. That’s it.

  And Eddie’s death is such common knowledge that even the pizza guy has heard about it.

  Plus…plus, there’s two assholes in a Grand Marquis out front.

  Which is a start.

  The thing with cell phones, Marilyn’s opinion, they’re like snowmobiles. They die on you at the worst times. Twenty miles up the trail in waist-deep snow. Right when you need them the most.

  Seven thirty in the morning, Marilyn plugs her phone into the prowler’s charger, starts the car and turns on NPR. She’s not on duty until eight, so there’s no guilt about the distraction. Good coffee between her legs and a bagel with cream cheese beside her.

  She orders her beans online from a roaster in Brooklyn, buys her bagels in Bozeman. Going to bed at night, she’s already looking forward to breakfast. Her Sunday Times is delivered by mail on Tuesdays. Her New Yorker on Thursdays. She has her routine, her tiny pleasures, the comfortable fluff that, in aggregate, constitutes a life.

  She’s smart enough to see it for what it is, the fluff. And console herself with the thought that it’s this same awareness that makes for a good cop. She’s perceptive. Consider this twenty minute drive from her front door to the courthouse. A drive she’s made, what…Five days a week, times fifty-two weeks, for three years now. She still finds it fascinating, her own transition.

  Six a.m., swinging her legs out of bed, she’s an old biddy. Cat curled on the next pillow, dog off her hip. Down comforter coated with pet hair. She stumbles to the shower, glances reluctantly at the mirror (her ass…bigger) and, after the shower, steps into her uniform. Buckling up her utility belt, she’s already somebody else. By the time she slips a key into the prowler, Marilyn Sweeney is more than halfway buried, replaced by this jaded ball buster of a cop.

  She eases out onto the frontage road and sets the cruise control five miles below the speed limit. Gets a grim pleasure from seeing the traffic stack up behind her. Morning commuters.

  Even as she drives, she starts seeing the world with a new eye. Everything’s a crime. Cow dogs running loose in a field? Biters. A rancher burning trash? Permit violation. Brand new Mustang parked up next to a ramshackle trailer? Meth dealer. Throw in some spousal abuse, drunk drivers, serving civil papers and busting medical marijuana providers, that’s pretty much her job in Montana.

  A kid in a three-quarter ton Ford diesel comes fast around the corner, sixty-one in a forty-five. She flicks her lights at him. As they pass, he gives her a pale, wide-eyed stare, mortified.

  “Asshole,” she says happily.

  Coming through the canyon, she turns on her radio. “Dispatch, Charlie 313, I’m ten-eight.”

  “Roger that, Marilyn. Just in time. Over.”

  “Oh?”

  The dispatcher, Patricia Mulligan, becomes more officious the more serious the crime. “Car 313, proceed to I-90 eastbound, mile marker 384, we have a possible 10-54.”

  It takes Marilyn a second. Then: Dead body.

  Sweeney’s bridge buddy.

  “Roger. On my way. Over.”

  Rather than going to the courthouse, she pulls onto the Interstate, hits her lights, accelerates hard.

  She’s wondered often: How is it in New York? Beating the pavement, working a crime scene, filing paperwork. Procedures. Because however they do it, it ain’t like Montana.

  Interstate 90 between Rockjaw and Big Timber follows the Yellowstone River. At her mile marker, she takes the exit and pulls into a fishing access. Wedged between the highway and the river, there’s room for a dozen or so cars and a toilet. Paths in the weeds where fishermen have tramped up and down.

  The only vehicle is an old Chevy Suburban. Muddy blue, dented rocker panels, cracked windshield. She recognizes it as belonging to a retired Amherst English professor, Peter Hadden. Rumpled linen kind of guy. A pipe smoker with family money. Privileged, but he doesn’t flaunt it.

  He’s in patched, down-market waders, leaning on his bumper. Slouch hat and sunglasses, age spots and the befuddled expression of an old man ambushed by late-life fatherhood. Stranger to this gawky, petulant creature beside him. His teenage son, six inches taller and ten pounds skinnier. Hair in his eyes and a cigarette in his lips. Kid’s eighteen, so the cigarette is legit. But she finds it offensive. Cigarettes in the morning, no doubt medical marijuana after lunch. The kid’s name is…Drew, yeah.

  “Deputy Sweeney.” The kid speaks up first. “Nice to see you again.”

  Smooth talker, this kid. She remembers that about him.

  “Drew. Dr. Hadden. You called in an incident?”

  Hadden’s paler than usual. “Over here. Darnedest thing.”

  She follows him down one of the paths beaten into the grass by fishermen. Couple hundred feet away, his fly rod lies flat in the brown grass, tip pointed to the river, green arc of line still wafting in the water. “We were stripping streamers, like this.” Hadden mimes jerking his rod back. “And darnedest thing, I cast into the corner, get hung up. And I started trying to, well…Here.” He picks up the rod, strips line until he meets resistance. Pulls hard.

  And twenty yards downriver, a dark piece of fabric rises to the surface from amid the tangle. Fabric, and then beneath it—limp, dainty, loose as a conductor waiting for the beat—a pale human hand.

  Sweeney left a message on Eddie’s cell. Waited around for an hour, then decided, sheeyit. Looks like he has to drive up to White Plains. Eddie had given him an address on Midchester Avenue. “Got an empty rental house where we cut the coke, me and these kids I got working for me, mix it up with baking soda and lactose.” But the address was an empty lot. A square full of weeds and rusting metal. An old swing set, a mound of tires.

  Sweeney sat in his Caddy, considering. A small thing, maybe, for Eddie to lie to him about the address. But why would he? Sweeney stepped out for a smoke. Maybe Eddie wasn’t limiting his operation to White Plains at all, in which case he’d have to lie to everyone to keep the Gambinos happy. Maybe he was protecting Sweeney, keeping him out of the loop. But what kind of favor was that? Sweeney was going to g
et blamed no matter what.

  Eddie, man. Just like the guy. Give you a present with one hand, sucker punch you in the kidneys with his other.

  Sweeney was grinding the cigarette under his toe when an old Chevy station wagon, crooked on weak springs, pulled up next to him. Eddie rolled down the window. “Cousin,” he said. “Brings you to White Plains?”

  Sweeney hadn’t seen Eddie since the Bytchkov job. Eight days ago now. Long time, given how tight they were. How tight they used to be. You want to think there are friendships in the world that might last, you know…forever. That the human animal is capable of forming those bonds. Ten thousand beers you buy for each other, you save each others’ lives, kill for each other…You’d like to think that some things wouldn’t change. But they do. They do. Maybe you forget Christmas one year. Maybe you neglect a phone call. Maybe you leave your partner to clean up his own mess. Nothing hurts like the demonstration of a previously-hidden disdain. Nothing poisons like a lack of respect.

  Sweeney was reasonably sure that Eddie would cover for him with Bytchkov. It was in Eddie’s best interest, after all. Stonewall, make excuses. But no doubt that clock was ticking. The dilemma Sweeney had seen in Bytchkov’s basement was essentially unchanged. Sweeney was either with them or against them. Being now against them, he needed to make some kind of move. But not yet.

  Eddie said, “Get in. Let’s take a drive.”

  The station wagon had a cracked dash, and bare metal under his feet instead of automotive carpet. Sweeney sank low in the seat. “You got my message?”

  “Yeah.”

  The blinker was going, but Eddie let the wagon idle at the curb. He stared at Sweeney. A minute, maybe two. A good long time. Finally, he hit the steering wheel with his palm. Frustration, real or dissembled. “Goddamnit, Cosmo. What are we going to do? What’s our play here”

  Sweeney breathed easier. Finally. “We take out Bytchkov.”

  “Simple to say.” Eddie pulled away from the curb. “But, yeah.”

  “How you want to do it?”

  Eddie ignored the question. “So what’s this about Anthony?”

  “He wants you to lay off the blow.”

  “Asshole.”

  “The old guy sounded pretty serious.”

  “I’ll talk to him, smooth it out.”

  “You do that.”

  “Meantime, you and me, we need to get to know each other again, spend some quality time.” He tossed a leather envelope in Sweeney’s lap. “Peace pipe?”

  Unzipped in his lap, a womb-full of drugs. Codeine in a prescription bottle, a plastic vial packed tight with coke, a Ziploc full of X. An invitation to the kind of night that would either put you in a coma or send you to Mexico. Intensive care or Cancun.

  Eddie said, “You been to the Cherry Pit?”

  “Heard about it.” A strip club in Yonkers.

  “They got these dancers, man. Top notch talent.”

  Sweeney was only human. “I’d like to see that.” Opened the vial of coke and rubbed a fingertip across his gums.

  Eddie reached across to knead Sweeney’s shoulder. “My man.”

  Through the blur of that evening, the visual smears of red and blue neon, house music insistent enough to bring Sweeney’s own pulse into its orbit, the slow-rotating ceiling with Sweeney spinning at the axle, Eddie kept setting off alarms. The way he kept staring past Sweeney, not meeting his eyes. Sweeney finally said, yelling over the music, “What is it with you.”

  “What?”

  “What is it! With you!”

  Eddie frowned at his drink. Made a decision. Drank hard and chewed at his ice, staring directly at Sweeney for the first time all night. “We went ahead. Without you.”

  “What?” Sweeney heard only half of it but could read lips for the rest.

  Eddie cocked a discrete finger toward his own temple. They’d been tipping the help like rock stars, and a topless waitress hovered close, playing with Sweeney’s hair.

  “Who did it?”

  “Does it matter?”

  Sweeney leveled a gaze. “Maybe.”

  “B himself. He wasn’t happy.”

  Sweeney was relieved, at least, that Eddie had avoided this particular stain. But inside, even past his glorious, bemused haze, Sweeney still balked. That poor, poor woman. And if she was dead, then those poor, innocent kids. And poor Eddie, too, having that on his conscience. Because surely he’d wake up one day with regrets.

  And Sweeney? Here’s a question. You take a guy who can’t swim and shove him in a pool. That’s murder, right? But take that same guy and somebody else shoves him in the pool. He’s drowning, but you only stand there and watch. Is that still murder? And if it’s not, then what is it?

  Sweeney gave the night an extra ten minutes, said, “I gotta go.”

  Eddie didn’t even try for surprised. He stared off, interested in the wallpaper. Tossed Sweeney his car keys. “Take the wagon. I’ll catch a ride later.”

  “I’ll leave it at your, you know, your headquarters.”

  Eddie was a thousand miles away. “Do that.”

  ~

  Half a block later, Sweeney’s rearview mirror lit up with a red strobe, a rolling dashboard light. It had been raining, and the lights fractured against wet pavement.

  There’s that oh shit moment. Stretched out and distended in memory.

  They’d been waiting.

  Sweeney with his elbow out the window, his other hand loose on the staring wheel (keep your hands out where they can see them), stared into a flashlight. “What’s the problem, officer?” He quailed, hearing his own sibilant slur. Offisher.

  Two of them, in suits. “Mr. Aniello,” a voice, cordial enough, but with a barely disguised delight. “Please step out of the car.”

  “Problem?”

  “Hands against the vehicle please. Feet out. You know the drill.”

  “The problem, man?”

  “Stolen vehicle? For a start.”

  Turns out, Eddie’s wagon was hot. Lifted from a mall parking lot in Hicksville. And, oh yeah—while Sweeney sat on the curb, watching them search the vehicle, hands cuffed behind him, hunkered in the rain—Eddie had six ounces of uncut coke in the glove compartment, packaged in vials. Not to mention a pistol under his seat, a .38 with the registration numbers filed off deep.

  They were Feds. Not bad guys, it turns out. Sweeney might have had a beer with them, under different circumstances. The older of the two, a guy in his sixties (gray, poorly-trimmed mustache and a few yards of extra skin hanging down under his eyes), came to sit beside Sweeney on the curb. “The drugs say intent, Mr. Aniello. Seven years. The stolen vehicle, that’s four. But that pistol? That’s a class-C felony, my friend. That’s fifteen years.”

  Put it all together, tack on another year for the drunk driving, even if the judge was sympathetic, Sweeney was looking at twenty-plus years, maybe paroled in ten. If he was lucky.

  They threw those numbers at him again in the interrogation room, his future spread out across the metal table like cards..

  “Yeah,” Sweeney said three hours later and still not even close to sober, “we can talk deals. But I’m not giving up Anthony. Or Eddie. Or anybody else close like that. My family, those guys, they’re off limits.”

  “You’re breaking my heart.”

  “What it is.”

  “It doesn’t leave us much.”

  “Yeah, though,” Sweeney said, thinking of Bytchkov’s basement, considering the hand in a jar, the bowl full of teeth. “Yeah, it does.”

  “Talk to me.”

  “Russians? You guys like the Russians, yeah? Sexy. Newspaper headlines. I can give you a Russian. Murder, kidnapping. Maybe a gasoline scam.” The nurse girlfriend, murder one if the body turned up, if the Feds got lucky with the forensics. And the kidnappings? Maybe the Feds could set up surveillance. Catch Bytchkov right after he takes the kids. Turn the snatcher into a snatchee. Sweeney would get all kinds of satisfaction out of that.

  A poke
r player, Sweeney caught the glances between the Feds.

  “One thing, though…” Sweeney shifted on the hard metal chair, cleared his throat. “You got to keep my cousin out of it. Eddie stays out of jail. We clear?”

  ~

  Sweeney’s off his game. The spirit is willing but the chutzpah’s…meh.

  He leaves his rental in the alley. Strolls up behind the Grand Marquis, playing it pedestrian casual. There’s no movement inside the car. Just two shadows with smoldering smokes. Sweeney thinks of his own cigarettes and gets a nicotine itch. Save it for later.

  He has the .357 in the small of his back. And coming closer—five steps away—he reaches around. Dig the feel of a good pistol, the potential of it. Right on. In New York, just carrying this piece could get him a mandatory three-and-a-half.

  He pulls it out smooth with his right hand. Be quick, Sweeney, be brutal. Reach in through the open window and punish the passenger (a quick couple raps to the temple), open the door and dump him out onto the sidewalk. Point the pistol. “Drive.” On the way to wherever, make the driver spill what he knows.

  Pray he can speak English.

  Sweeney’s three steps away, now two. Breathing harder. Feeling the plunger behind his adrenal gland punch a few CCs into his bloodstream.

  Which is when the pizza arrives.

  Some kid’s ancient little Ford Fiesta, rusted out on the rocker panels and dragging sparks, pizza sign strapped to the roof, hauls ass into Eddie’s little driveway. Thinking about his tip, he runs to the front door, manhole-sized pie balanced on the flat of his hand.

  The goons in the car sit upright. All attention focused on the door, on the pizza.

  Nice.

  Nicer still, The Marquis’s backdoor chrome lock buttons are clearly popped up, conveniently unlocked.

  So no whipping necessary. Easier just to open the back door, slip in behind. Cock the pistol and shove the barrel hard up against the nearest ear, which happens to be the passenger’s.

  All of this Sweeney does in a trice. Says pleasantly, “Howdy fellers.”

  First surprise? The passenger isn’t Russian but Hispanic. A green do-rag and earrings up and down, all the usual tattoos, knuckles to nape. Considerately, he’s already placing his hands on the dashboard. A Hispanic gangbanger in his early thirties. Ancient for the gangs. That green belongs to the Trinitarios. A reputation for machetes. A thirty-year-old Trinitario? We’re talking a mean, sword-wielding motherfucker.