Shoot the Moon

by Joseph T. Klempner

  “Our two wrong guys are out of the Rolls,” Weems tells Abbruzzo.

  “What’re they doing?”

  “Crossing the street . . . looking around . . . Shit, Ray! They’re going into Goodman’s building!”

  “Are you sure?”

  “How sure do I gotta be?” Weems asks. “They’re already inside, if that helps any.”

  “What’s going on in the apartment?” Abbruzzo asks.

  Weems aims the binoculars at the fifth-floor window. “Nothing,” he says. “It’s still dark.”

  “Keep an eye on it.”

  Hammer uses a thin piece of steel to slip the ground-floor lock of Michael Goodman’s building. It’s the same implement he uses when he wants to borrow someone’s car and can’t seem to locate the door key.

  Big Red checks the names on the mailboxes in the lobby. He finds what he’s looking for: M. GOODMAN, 5F

  With no elevator in sight, they begin climbing the stairs. They’re both smokers, and though they both work (after a manner of speaking), physical labor appears on neither of their job descriptions. By the time they reach the fifth floor, they’re both seriously out of breath.

  Big Red knocks on the door of apartment 5F and waits for an answer. There is none. The nice thing about the way the building’s laid out, he decides, is that there are only two apartments on each floor. (Though why they’re lettered F and R he can’t imagine. White people too good for A and B?) He knows that a little noise won’t alarm anybody, particularly on Halloween. He steps aside and motions to Hammer.

  The trick to kicking in a door is understanding what’s keeping it shut in the first place. Hammer understands this, and he now spends a moment studying the lock pattern on Michael Goodman’s door. First, he notices that’s there’s no Fox police lock, a contraption that consists of a long steel bar with one end set into the floor and the other wedged against the center of the inside of the door. Then he assures himself that there’s no crossbar, a heavy metal plate running horizontally across the width of the door. Either device could spell disaster for someone foolish enough to make a run at the door - the first because it could impale him, the second because it could sever his body at its midsection.

  Next, he inspects the frame - which in this case seems to be fairly substantial - and the composition of the door itself. It appears to be constructed out of several pieces of wood, a thick border surrounding a recessed center panel. Hammer taps softly on the border, listening to the solid sound of the wood. Then he taps on the center panel. A hollow sound answers him, causing a smile to spread across his face.

  As Big Red stands off to one side, Hammer takes one step back, plants his left foot, and drives the sole of his right foot clear through the panel, which splinters like the plywood it is. Then he extracts his foot, reaches his hand inside the hole he’s made, unlocks the door, and opens it wide for Big Red.

  It’s dark inside, and Big Red flicks on the light switch.

  “They’re inside!” Weems shouts. But he needn’t have, since Abbruzzo has already heard the crash of the door panel giving way and is now picking up sounds from inside the apartment.

  FIRST MALE: What’s all this white stuff all over the place?

  SECOND MALE: Beats me.

  Abbruzzo distinctly feels his heart skip a beat. He leans forward, not wanting to miss a word.

  FIRST MALE: Careful you don’t get it on your clothes there.

  SECOND MALE: Shit, man, it’s all over the place. There must be tons of it here.

  That’s more than Ray Abbruzzo can stand. Grabbing his gun and his handcuffs, he’s on his feet. “Come on, Harry!” he shouts. “We’re going to save this day yet!” Then he’s out the door and running across the street, with Weems struggling to keep up, the binoculars looped around his neck and banging painfully against his chest.

  They slip the downstairs lock with a credit card and are in the building seconds before the black Mercedes makes the turn into the block from Lexington Avenue.

  Lenny Siegel and Luis Sandoval find the traffic much lighter uptown, well away from the Greenwich Village area. By 8:30, Sandoval has the Cadillac in the Eighties, heading up Park Avenue.

  “Hang a right at Ninety-second,” Siegel says.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And don’t sir me.”

  “Sorry sir.”

  * * *

  Abbruzzo and Weems huff and puff their way up the stairs to the fifth-floor landing. They’re both overweight - Weems by eighty pounds - and a steady diet of pizza, doughnuts, coffee, soda, and cigarettes has somewhat underprepared them for this particular event. Abbruzzo fishes around in his pockets for his Maalox before remembering he finished the roll awhile back.

  Johnnie Delgado leads the way from the Mercedes into the building, followed by Mister Fuentes, Papo, and Julio. They find the stairs and begin the climb to the fifth floor. They proceed slowly. For one thing, they feel no particular urge to hurry. Beyond that, by the fourth floor, they’re all beginning to feel the effects of a lunch of rice and beans, habanero peppers, tequila, and pulpo y olio. Pulpo y olio is a delightful concoction of baby octopus and fried garlic cloves swimming in olive oil, but it begins to repeat on you just a bit during strenuous stair climbing.

  “What’s that?” Johnnie Delgado says, trying to quiet the rest of the climbers. It takes a moment, but eventually their burping and belching subside and they’re able to hear the sound of heavy breathing other than their own. It’s coming from the stairs directly overhead. They press their bodies against the wall to stay out of sight, and listen. They strain to make out the conversation coming from above them.

  “Nice job they did on the door,” the first man is whispering. His voice is that of a gringo.

  “If nothing else, we got a felony burglary here,” the second one says. He sounds black. “These fuckers give us any trouble, we blow ‘em away, get their stories later,” they hear him say.

  The next sound they hear is that of an automatic pistol being jacked as the first round is lifted from the magazine and chambered into firing position. It is a sound that Johnnie Delgado, Mister Fuentes, Papo, and Julio all happen to be familiar with. Without so much as a word or a glance among them, they begin backing slowly down the stairs, looking something like a caterpillar in retreat.

  It’s turned out to be a very productive evening for Fingers Nelson. “Fingers” - a nickname that replaced the somewhat more formal Francis around the time of Nelson’s third arrest for picking the pockets of unsuspecting New Yorkers - has been working the crowd of parade watchers up and down Sixth Avenue, between Christopher and Eleventh streets. Next to New Year’s Eve, which Fingers likes to celebrate at Times Square, Halloween is his favorite night of the year. He’s done so well, in fact, that he’s had to remove his jacket and use it as a satchel to conceal the four wallets, three change purses, two credit card cases, and assorted other treasure that he’s accumulated over the past two hours.

  The problem with success, of course, is that it has its price. And the particular price that Fingers is paying right now is that he’s cold without his jacket. As a result, he’s been forced to seek temporary shelter between the outer and inner doors of a large apartment building on the corner of Sixth and Tenth Street. He knows he can’t stay there long without being asked to move by a doorman or a tenant, but there are so many people milling about that he decides he’s safe for a little while. But, just to be sure, he occasionally glances over his shoulder into the lobby to see what’s going on.

  Luis Sandoval makes a right turn off Park Avenue at Ninety-Second Street and heads down the hill in the champagne-colored Cadillac.

  “Take it slow when you get into the next block,” Lenny Siegel tells him. “We’ll see what’s going on.”

  What’s going on is that there’s a light on in Michael Goodman’s fifth-floor window, and two guys can be seen walking around inside.

  “That’s strange,” says Lenny Siegel.

  The retreating caterpillar of Joh
nnie Delgado, Mister Fuentes, Papo, and Julio inches its way down the five flights of stairs to ground level. Johnnie Delgado is about to lead them out of the building when he sees a champagne-colored Cadillac pull up in front and double-park. Something about it - perhaps the dual antennas, perhaps the unlikely combination of the two men inside, the young Hispanic driver and the older white passenger - causes him to hesitate.

  “El Hombre,” he whispers to Mister Fuentes.

  Mister Fuentes nods. They look around for some sign of a rear exit from the building but see none. What they do see is another stairway, this one leading down. With no other avenue of escape, they take it.

  * * *

  “He’s coming!” Jimmy Zelb hisses. The red light on the locator device is suddenly blinking faster and faster, and the intervals between the beeps have almost disappeared, leaving a shrill pulsating tone. The only shortcoming of the device is that it has no directional capability: It tells them how close they are to the sending unit (in this case, the suitcase full of money), but not the heading they need to follow in order to reach it. But there can be no doubt that their target’s heading their way and must be almost on top of them - the red light is constant now, and the beep has turned into a steady, piercing whine. They look around frantically, expecting to spot their quarry any second among the mass of people on the corner.

  A roar goes up from the crowd once again, and all eyes are suddenly turned to a group of marchers dressed up as O. J. Simpson and his defense team. There’s a strutting Johnnie Cochran, a chart-carrying Barry Scheck, an F. Lee Bailey wrapped in a marine flag, and a Robert Shapiro distancing himself off to one side. O.J. himself is smiling broadly and blowing kisses to the crowd, who respond with a tumultuous mixture of cheers and boos: No one seems undecided about this particular entry in the parade.

  And then Zelb spots him.

  Not twenty yards away, a small man wearing a bright orange jacket and carrying a large yellow-and-green floral-print suitcase is disappearing into the crowd. By the time Zelb reacts, the man has turned the corner and is heading west on Tenth Street.

  Jimmy Zelb, an offensive lineman in his football days - very offensive, according to some of his opponents - was never known as fast; nevertheless, he was what professional scouts termed “quick off the ball,” meaning he had an explosive quality about him, an ability to catapult himself from a set position into the opposing team’s secondary and toward a linebacker, cornerback, or anyone else foolish enough to get in his path. Only a serious knee injury his senior year kept him out of the pro draft and deprived him of a promising career in the National Football League.

  It is that same quickness, that same explosive quality that Zelb exhibits now as he bolts forward toward the receding orange jacket. Much as he used to knock opposing linemen aside as though they were tenpins, Zelb now clears a broad path through the crowd that his fellow DEA and NYPD teammates quickly fill as all six of them - a half a ton of hurtling human beef - zero in on their target.

  So intense is Zelb’s concentration that not once does he take his eyes off the combination of the orange jacket and the suitcase in front of him. He shortens the distance to fifteen yards, to ten, to five. Away from the avenue, the crowd is thinner and finally parts altogether, giving Zelb an unobstructed path to his prey. Gauging the speed at which the orange jacket is moving away from him, Zelb now instinctively adjusts his stride to that of his quarry, closing the gap between them to three yards, to two . . .

  Offensive linemen are trained to block, not to tackle. They’re schooled in the art of using their shoulders, their bodies, even their heads to fend off opponents and open holes for teammates. They’re drilled for hours on end on how to avoid costly penalties for holding, or illegal use of the hands, or face-mask grabbing. They must endure bitter envy and endless frustration, as the same rules that hamstring them freely encourage their defensive counterparts to grab and tug and hold to their hearts’ content. So - just as every receiver has always longed to turn the tables and throw a touchdown pass, just as every nose tackle has always imagined scoring a touchdown off a tipped pass or a bouncing fumble - every blocking lineman who ever played the game has at one time or another found himself dreaming of making the perfect open-field tackle: of being allowed, just once, to use his hands, his God-given arms, to grasp the enemy and bring him crashing down to earth.

  Not that any of the specifics of this rationale go through Jimmy Zelb’s conscious thought process as he closes in on his target, to be sure. But years of frustration are at play here nonetheless: frustration from his hand-tied football days, frustration from his career-ending knee injury, frustration from a life in law enforcement, in which he’s paid a meager salary to uphold inadequate laws against millionaire drug dealers, frustration from the traffic jam earlier in the evening, frustration from losing sight of the Mole once already tonight.

  Jimmy Zelb’s frustration is about to end.

  A yard from his target, he takes a deep breath and launches himself into the air, head down, arms spread wide, every ounce of his body prepared for impact: a perp-seeking missile locked onto his target with an intensity that is awesome to behold.

  It takes Johnnie Delgado, Mister Fuentes, and the two others a few minutes to get acclimated to the darkness of the basement. One of them finds a book of matches, and halfway through it, they discover an overhead lightbulb that responds to the pull of a cord.

  They look around and are able to see that it’s a storage area of some sort that they’ve taken refuge in. There are individual bins, each full of household items, each secured with a padlock.

  While Johnnie Delgado listens for noises upstairs, Papo and Julio, still panting from their exercise on the stairs, find a small bench and sit down on it. Mister Fuentes spends his time walking down the row of storage bins, looking at the contents. He sees a dusty TV set, a broken green chair, two pairs of skis, a child’s bicycle, a black duffel bag, an old vacuum cleaner-

  And he stops right there.

  Taking two steps back, he stares at the bin in front of him. He doesn’t even notice the tiny “5F” scratched into the gray paint above it. He doesn’t have to. Mister Fuentes has found the gringo’s storage locker, and in it the black duffel bag.

  He looks at the lock, the only thing in the world that at this moment separates him from the bag. It is a small combination lock, the kind they sell in Kmart or Target for a dollar or two. He allows himself a broad grin.

  “Compadres,” he says, “I think we may have avenged the tragic death of Raul Cuervas.”

  Jimmy Zelb’s tackle turns out to be a wonder to behold, a perfect ten, a one-play human highlight film. He hits his target around the waist, just below the bottom of the orange jacket. Zelb’s shoulder drives into the small of the man’s back, simultaneously lifting him into the air and knocking him prone. For a long moment, both tackier and tacklee are airborne, as though the beefy Zelb is stretched out atop a sled that’s suddenly lifted off and taken flight.

  Then, gravity doing what it generally tends to do, they begin descending for what can only be described as a series of landings. Witnesses (and there were quite a number) will later disagree whether the pair bounced two times or three before finally coming to rest against a trash can. According to measurements taken for a civil suit filed sometime later, the trash can was a full forty-seven feet seven inches from the original point of impact, that point being assumed from the position of a pair of shoes from which the man had apparently been ejected at the instant of the big bang. As for the suitcase, it took a slightly different flight path, somewhat to the north, traveling thirteen feet two inches before hitting the pavement, springing open, and spilling its contents onto the roadway.

  It is the nature of these contents that first alerts the agents and officers to the possibility that something has gone slightly wrong with their game plan. Instead of $3.5 million of the government’s money being strewn about, all that can be seen are four wallets, three change purses, two credit card cases
, a pocket watch, a badly wrinkled jacket, and (upon closer inspection) a miniature device called a sending unit, said to be capable of transmitting a variable-range electronic signal to a second device.

  And instead of it being Michael Goodman who lies face-down on the sidewalk, struggling to regain consciousness, it is, of course, Francis Teller Nelson. Or, as all his friends at Rikers Island call him, Fingers.

  It takes Papo and Julio all of thirty seconds to break the combination lock on the storage bin. As Mister Fuentes watches, Johnnie Delgado reaches forward, grabs the black duffel bag by its handles, and pulls it out onto the basement floor. He crouches over it, unzips it about four inches. He sees blue plastic packages.

  “Let’s go,” he tells the others.

  Mister Fuentes nods in agreement and leads the way to the stairs. In their greed and their haste, both Mister Fuentes and Johnnie Delgado have completely forgotten about the Cadillac outside and the two men who looked like el Hombre. Papo and Julio, if they remember, understand that it’s not their place to say anything.

  Ray Abbruzzo and Harry Weems are inside Apartment 5F before the two burglars know it. They have the handcuffs on them without a struggle. Both are charged with first-degree burglary, a class B felony punishable by up to twenty-five years imprisonment. A search of one of the two - the one who answers to the name Hammer - reveals a fully loaded 9-mm semiautomatic pistol.

  “There’s something going on up there,” Lenny Siegel tells Luis Sandoval. “Let’s go take a look.”

  They climb out of the Cadillac and head for the entrance of Michael Goodman’s building. They find the front door locked.

  “You got a credit card?” Siegel asks Sandoval. Siegel hates the things himself, refuses to carry them.

  “Let me see, sir,” Sandoval says. He pulls out his wallet, finds one, and hands it over to Siegel.