by Justin Scott
“Then you will walk away?”
“You asked me that ten years ago.”
“You have a long memory.”
“Always.”
“What about Miss Rizzolo? What if she won’t walk away?”
Taggart smiled. “I’ll reform her.”
“And if she resists reformation?”
“I’ll kidnap her back to Europe.”
“She can destroy you, you know.”
“She’d destroy herself in the process. But she has no reason. In fact, she might even be in love with me. Want to be my best man?”
“And we’ll all live happily ever after.”
“Except for Crazy Mikey.”
“And the redoubtable Eddie Rizzolo?”
“Eddie’s another reason to reform Helen. I want Helen clear before the dumb fuck finally gets himself indicted for something.”
“Do it quickly. He’s sniffing around for a drug deal.”
Reggie cast off the lines and backed the red boat into the river, which approaching night had turned deep purple.
At the hour Taggart watched Reggie disappear down the Hudson, Tony Taglione got a call from the Strikeforce’s FBI agent director. An agent planted as an instructor in a Manhattan health club where Crazy Mikey had agreed to meet Eddie Rizzolo had just recorded an incredible tape. Twenty minutes later the agent ran in, flinging open his raincoat. A skintight red Spandex T-shirt with East Side Ironworks stretched across his bulging chest drew whistles from the agents and attorneys that Taglione had hurriedly assembled to hear the evidence. Taglione shoved the cassette into his ghetto blaster. It started with a heavy grinding noise, punctuated by sharp hisses.
“Sounds like he’s fucking a snake.”
“The heavy sound is the chain pull,” the agent explained. “The microphone’s in the weight machine.”
“What’s the hiss?”
“That’s the prick breathing. They start talking in a minute. Mikey’s on the machine, doing like bench presses. Eddie ‘the Cop’ comes up and stands over him. All around are their hoods, trying to outpump each other, which is kind of funny ’cause a lot of them are spaghetti bellies. It’s a legit club, so regular guys and girls are passing through and using the other machines. You can hear ’em talking in the background. I’m next to Mikey, instructing my partner, Zell, how to exercise her lungs.... Okay. It starts in a second. Mikey pretends he’s surprised to see Eddie, like they haven’t set this thing up for a week.”
Cirillo’s voice rasped out of the machine. “What the fuck?”
The agents laughed. “Knock it off,” said Taglione.
“Yes, sir. This is Eddie talking now. Mr. Subtlety.”
Eddie Rizzolo’s voice vibrated with the hearty tones of a radio announcer. “I hear you owe a guy.”
“Where’d you pick that up?”
“The street says, ‘The Man Who Can owes a ton.”
“You put out word about a deal.”
“You put out word about peace. Business is the best way to make peace, my father always said. Buyers and sellers don’t have to be friends, but they can’t be enemies.”
“I don’t need your business.”
“The more you sell, the faster you pay off.”
“I don’t need your business.”
“Brooklyn.”
“What about it?”
“If you don’t supply me, I’m going to start a heroin detox program in Brooklyn.”
“What?”
“Yeah. It’s a new method. Instead of methadone and counseling and all that shit, we set the kiddie gangs on your pushers.”
The weight chain ground. Mikey’s breath hissed as he pumped. The agent said, “Get this. Mikey is really being nice. I mean this is not the Crazy Mikey we know and love. He smiles, like Eddie’s joking.”
“How will you know who are mine?”
“Anybody who’s not mine. So be my Man Who Can, then we’re both happy.”
“Since when do you deal in product?”
“I been waiting for the right supplier. That’s you. Hey, listen, I’m offering you the world on a platter. A steady street market from a guy you can trust.”
Another silence was underscored by the sound of the weight machine. Taglione asked, “There are people around?”
“Yeah, but they’re not close. And they’re doing their own thing. Besides, what’s he said so far?”
“Arrogant bastards.”
“What does your sister say?”
“My sister’s got nothing to do with this.”
Taglione stared at the tape machine, aware the others were afraid to look at him.
“Relax. Just asking.”
“Sure you are,” said the agent.
“Shut up!” Taglione leaned over the tape player, but Mikey Cirillo abruptly changed the subject. “Like I told you. We’ve fucked each other over. Your father and brother are dead. My brother’s in jail. My father’s dead. His consigliere—my godfather—killed himself.”
“From grief,” said Sarah Gallagher.
“Who’s left?” Mikey continued. “You and me. Hey, like you said, we’re two young guys. We’re on our own. We can work it out.”
“So when do I meet your man?”
“That’s going to be a problem. He said no partners.”
“Who is this guy?” asked Taglione. “Why can’t we get a line on this guy?”
“So we lean on him,” said Eddie. “Like I was kidding with you. He can figure out he’ll have no customers.”
“This guy is independent.”
“Come on, he’s a businessman. He’s not going to fight two families. If he does, we blow him away and then you don’t owe nobody anything. So what do you got to lose?”
“A goddamned good source is what I got to lose.”
“Sorry, Mikey. If we’re going to trust each other, I gotta meet him.”
The chain ground again.
“Get this,” said the agent. “Remember, they’re standing there in shorts.”
“Eddie? You mind if I pat you for a wire?”
“So Mikey gets off the bench and pats Eddie for a wire and the whole gym stops. I mean, here’s these two guys in shorts inspecting each other’s asses like—”
“Where are they meeting this supplier?”
“I don’t know, Tony. They went into the sauna. I hung close, but couldn’t catch much.”
“Did they say anything about a boat?”
The agent looked surprised. “You kidding?”
“I’m not kidding. What did they say?”
“Mikey told Eddie, ‘I hope you don’t get seasick.’”
Taglione looked around his office. Somebody said, “It sounds like they’re meeting a mother ship offshore.”
“Catch those two together with a load of dope?”
“No way.”
“It can’t be. Even Eddie’s too smart to get near the stuff.”
“Can you blanket Eddie Rizzolo?” Taglione asked the DEA agent director.
“Take a lot of guys.”
“I don’t care if it takes a hundred. I want to know every second where he is. And goddammit, anybody who gets made might as well join Jack in Europe.”
Taggart’s plan was simple—strand Mikey on the red boat, in which the heroin was hidden, turn the boat in to the Feds, and let the law-enforcement agents draw their own conclusions. He left Tarrytown at midnight and steered downriver on a cool breeze. At half-speed—an effortless thirty-five miles per hour— the engines were quiet, and he could hear the wake falling back on itself in the dark. He passed beneath the Tappan Zee Rridge, spotted the George Washington, and opened the throttles. In half an hour the George Washington’s catenary lights draped the horizon, and on each sweep of the radar screen a massive target blossomed in the lower right quadrant like a huge white flower.
Taggart pulled his ski mask over his face and steered for it. He found Reggie anchored in the red boat, two miles up from the bridge and an eighth of a mile off the
Palisades, which loomed darkly on the Jersey shore. Crazy Mikey was lounging in the stern beside a huge man whom Taggart assumed at first was a bodyguard. But as he eased the black boat alongside the red and handed Reggie a line to raft them by their midships cleats, he saw the Reggie had made the same mistake.
Eddie Rizzolo, with arms folded to conceal his missing fingers, was grinning.
“What the hell is he doing here?” Taggart whispered over the joined gunnels.
“He was aboard before I realized he wasn’t the bodyguard. I decided best to play it through.”
“Did you sweep them?”
“Oh, yes. And they swept me. Eddie brought cash.”
“How much time do we have?”
“Time is not our problem. The phone dialer will send the Feds a recorded message with this location when I radio. Rizzolo’s the problem. How do we separate him from Mikey?”
Taggart looked out in the dark. The bridge lights would reveal river traffic from the south. But they were sitting ducks from the dark water to the north. “Get on the radar. I don’t like this at all.”
“I don’t trust it with the aluminium boat so near,” Reggie warned, swinging aboard the black boat.
Taggart climbed onto the red boat. “I told you no partners.”
“You want to get paid, you gotta ease up.”
“I don’t ‘gotta’ anything. You want to buy from me, you know the rules.”
“All we’re doing tonight is talking about changing the rules. No risk to you. I don’t want to hear a word about product. Just meet my partner and see if you want to do business with us both.”
“If I’m paying,” Eddie Rizzolo interjected, “I want to know where my bread is going.”
Taggart had to get Eddie away from the red boat. “Okay, Mikey, I’m taking Eddie for a ride. You wait here.”
“No way,” Mikey said.
“It’s okay with me,” said Eddie. “I don’t mind.”
“I mind,” said Mikey. “This is my supplier. If you get on that boat with him, you can kiss the street goodbye.”
Eddie grinned, his teeth flashing in the bridge lights. “Maybe I ought to throw you overboard.” He looked ready to do it, Taggart thought, and he wondered, Why not? But Mikey was worth so much more alive than dead.
“Kill each other elsewhere. You coming, Eddie?”
Mikey moved faster, seizing his bug-sweeping briefcase and vaulting over the gunnels into the black boat. “Okay. Me and the Brit’ll take a ride. You two talk.”
Taggart looked at Reggie, who cocked an eye from the radar screen. Did Mikey suspect something or was it animal instinct to retreat from danger? Whichever, Taggart and Eddie were on the wrong boat. Not only was the red boat a radar target; it contained the heroin.
Powerful engines droned on the dark water in the north.
“One of you was followed,” Reggie said calmly as a dozen white dots began to sizzle on his radar screen.
“Cops,” Eddie Rizzolo shouted.
And, to the south, a helicopter buzzed under the bridge, flickering yellow and blue in the catenary lights. Taggart saw Mikey shift his attention from the helicopter to the loud drone of the boats, then to the radar screen fairly white with targets, and finally to Reggie at the controls.
“This boat!” Taggart yelled. “It’s faster.”
He cranked the red boat’s engines and they started roaring. Reggie scrambled aboard as if his life were in the balance. Mikey seized the wheel of the black boat.
“Jump,” Taggart yelled again. “This one’s faster.”
Mikey hesitated, frantically fingering his shotgun coke spoon.
“Hurry up.”
“Wait for him,” Eddie yelled.
Mikey dropped his coke spoon, snatched up a real sawed-off shotgun he had secreted in his electronics briefcase, jumped into the red boat, and leveled the yawning barrels at Taggart and Reggie. “Get off! Get on the other boat. I’m not getting caught on a conspiracy thing with you guys.”
Taggart and Reggie retreated.
“If you make it we’ll talk again. If they catch me and Eddie, we’re just a couple of guys going for a ride. Right, Eddie?”
“Right,” said Eddie. Although he looked bewildered, he flung off the rafting line as Taggart and Reggie climbed over the gunnels into the black boat. Taggart had left the engines running and Reggie engaged them.
“I hope he remembers his anchor.”
But they had cut it too close. A searchlight tore the dark like a grasping hand; then another, and a third from the side, a blinding white circle, dead on target. A bullhorn boomed, “Freeze, you fuckers!”
26
CHAPTER
Chase boats loomed out of the dark, a dozen sturdy cutters and sleek new racers, whose decks were lined with rifle-and shotgun-toting agents in flack vests. Bullhorns boomed a warning that no one was to move. Taggart dived for the locker that held their night goggles as Reggie slammed the black boat’s engines to full throttle and put the helm hard over. He saw the red boat pinned in the lights of the raiding fleet, frothing at the stern as propellers fought the drag of the anchor. Crazy Mikey Cirillo and Eddie Rizzolo struggled in the cockpit, fighting for the wheel.
The black boat lifted, stood up on its stern, spun a half circle like a cutting horse. Reggie reversed his helm and drove for a dwindling gap in their line. A police boat darted to fill it, but when the fifty-foot black hull slammed down at the space, the little boat fled. The turbochargers cut in with a liquid roar and Reggie ripped through the line, building up speed. Taggart thought they had made it. Then, overhead, a searchlight lunged out of the sky—a helicopter stabbing the dark.
Bullhorns boomed again, their warnings drowned by thundering engines and seconds later by the sharp, rapid notes of a machine gun. The air seemed to explode inches overhead. The helicopter’s searchlight leaped at them; the spot swept the cockpit and whipped back, but the doper boat’s flat black paint merged with the night, her soft materials and nonreflective surfaces forming a radar sieve. At seventy miles per hour they raced down the river as the helicopter searched water, far behind. Seconds later they were under the George Washington Bridge, and then out of its lights, deep in darkness.
Taggart heard a new sound—a high-pitched drone. “What the hell is that?” He looked back at the Strikeforce armada circling the red boat in their wake. Reggie pointed at the radar screen where a pair of blips were closing swiftly from the Jersey side. Taggart slipped night goggles over Reggie’s head and put his on. Scanning the now bright riverscape, he saw two small pursuit boats trailing enormous wakes like spearheads on creamy white shafts. “I thought we’re not a radar target.”
“We’re not,” Reggie yelled back. “They’re using bloody night glasses just like us. And they’re going to radio that damned helicopter.”
He steered for the Manhattan side, angling toward the lights of the Seventy-ninth Street boat basin four miles downriver. The black boat poured across two miles in less than two minutes. “They’re gaining,” said Taggart.
Reggie steered within yards of the rocky shoreline, where cars were traveling the West Side Highway. The pursuit boats followed, closing until Taggart could distinguish their crews, one man driving, the other holding a long-barreled weapon. Reggie glanced back and eased his throttles.
“What are you doing?”
“Look ahead! Find the ice aprons.”
A bullhorn crackled close behind. Taggart searched the water that lay ahead between their boat and the lighted docks. “There!” Two hundred yards upriver from the ranks of yachts and chunky houseboats was a row of wedge-shaped barriers rising out of the water. Fashioned of bent railroad track to protect the marina from river ice, they emerged at an angle.
Reggie looked back again and, when the lead pursuit boat was practically on their stern, pushed his throttles wide open and steered straight at the ice aprons. Taggart gripped the dashboard; the slots between the aprons were narrow and they were approaching at seventy miles
per hour. When they were so close that Taggart could distinguish the individual rails, Reggie flicked his helm to starboard, wove between two aprons, and careened the black boat toward the middle of the river. Taggart, thrown across the cockpit by the force of the turn, looked back. The lead pursuit boat crashed against an ice apron, skidded up the steep incline, crossed a hundred yards of water airborne, and splashed down on its side.
The second boat clipped an apron, rose a few feet on screaming propellers, and landed upright. “Bloody hell,” said Reggie. “Are they stopping to help?”
“Yes, he’s circling... no! There’s people on the dock pulling the men out. Here he comes!”
The pursuit boat tore downriver after them, gaining again, though not quite as quickly. The bullhorn boomed, angrily punctuated by a hail of gunfire. “He’s damaged,” Reggie said. A bullet slammed him to the deck.
“Reg!”
Taggart dropped beside him.
“Get the helm!”
“You okay?”
“No. But we’re dead if you don’t steer! Keep your head down.”
Taggart hunched into the seat and steered, casting anxious glances astern and at Reggie, who was holding his left arm with bloody fingers. “Head for Twenty-third Street before they get that helicopter. World Yacht club.”
Two miles. Taggart was competent on the boat, but nowhere near as good as Reggie, and he knew he never could have pulled the stunt with the ice apron. They thundered abreast of midtown Manhattan, racing top speed down the center of the river, the pursuit boat gaining. Taggart saw the golden top of his Spire riding the rim of the skyline, and wondered if he would ever see it again.
“Are you okay?”
Reggie sat up, his right arm limp at his side. “Not entirely.” He crawled toward the wet bar on the other side of the cockpit, packed ice against the wound, and hurriedly wrapped it with towels. “Here comes the helicopter.”
Taggart saw the piers Reggie had indicated coming up fast. He said, “We can’t just get off. We have to send the boat away and blow it up.”