by Norman Green
“Told him she was my cousin,” he said. “Told him I was keeping an eye out.”
“Didn’t faze him,” Al said.
“You kidding? Guy like that in a place like this? You ain’t gonna show that guy nothing he ain’t seen before.”
“Maybe not.”
“You figure he’s carrying?” TJ said.
Al glanced back over her shoulder. “Depends,” she said. “He might be a retired cop, he’s got the look. If he is, a buck buys you ten he’s got a piece on him, but if I had to guess I would bet that he ain’t no cop, he don’t take up space like cops do.”
“What do you mean?”
“Cops always act like they got a piece of the joint,” Al said. “This guy is too quiet. I’m guessing he’s an old neighborhood pro, he made it through the drug wars alive, now he’s just playing out his hand. He won’t be carrying, but there’s probably some iron back behind the bar there someplace. Besides, look around. The clientele in this place ain’t exactly your average demographic. Bet you ten bucks there’s four or five pistols in this room.”
TJ glanced around, then looked over at Frank Waters’s broad back. Sarah sat opposite, and her eyes never left Frank’s face. “You might be right,” he said. “You don’t carry a gun.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Never thought I needed to,” she said. “Besides, you carry a gun, only bad things can happen. You get into a fistfight, nobody really remembers what actually happened and nobody really cares, the winners run away and the cops take the losers. You shoot somebody, okay, you are married to the pistol, the round, the brass, the gunpowder residue, the stiff and all the rest of the forensics, and the cops got a long memory. You are not gonna walk away that easy.”
“What if the bad guy has a gun?”
“Him? No way. Guy that size, he’s too used to relying on intimidation.”
“Well, all right, I meant the generic bad guy, not this one in particular. But what if you’re wrong about this one?”
“Well,” she said, “you stay fifteen, twenty feet away from the guy, odds are he ain’t gonna hit you anyhow. Pistol in his hand in a public place, he’s gonna be jacked, his hands are gonna be shaking too much for him to hit what he’s trying to aim at. You get inside five feet, you know what you’re doing you got a decent chance of—”
A car alarm went off.
Frank Waters stood up, motioned Sarah to wait where she was, then strode from the room. Most of the eyes in the dining room followed him out, then went quickly back to what they were doing. TJ Conrad patted his jacket pocket. “I need a cigarette,” he said.
“Be careful,” Al told him. “Watch your ass.”
He nodded, shook out a smoke, stuck it behind his ear as he got up. Again, most of the patrons watched discreetly. Well, Al thought, Frank Waters might not know he’s been shadowed, but everyone else does . . . She wondered if she’d been right to let TJ follow Waters out. She and Sarah made eye contact. Sarah shrugged, a tiny gesture that eloquently conveyed her lack of understanding.
And her disappointment.
Outside, a gun barked three times.
Bang.
One, two, three seconds.
Bang-bang.
Alessandra and Sarah both jumped up and ran for the door.
Fifty other restaurant patrons reached for jackets, pushed back chairs, and prepared to follow.
The big maître d’ barred the exit, but Al got the heel of her hand up under his nose, pushed his head up and back, shoved him back out of the way like someone peeling open the lid of a tin of sardines.
Outside, about ten feet from Costello’s front door, a man lay dying on the sidewalk. At the far end of the block a set of red taillights vanished around the corner to the howl of tires pushed beyond their ability to hold traction.
Frank Waters was nowhere in sight.
Neither was the shiny black Suburban.
For about a third of a second, Alessandra Martillo was lost.
Sarah Waters stared at the dying man.
A Chevy Malibu slid to a stop at the curb, TJ Conrad behind the wheel.
Al grabbed Sarah by the arm.
“Time to go,” she said.
In the distance, a siren wailed.
Six
“Easy,” Al told TJ. “Don’t go too fast, don’t run any lights, use your turn signals. We do not wanna get stopped.”
“Got it,” he said, and he slowed down. “What the hell just happened?”
Al glanced into the backseat at Sarah Waters. The color was gone from Sarah’s face and she stared blankly at the back of the front passenger-side headrest. Better start with TJ, Al thought. “I don’t know. What did you see?”
TJ shook his head. “It all happened so fast,” he said.
“Step by step,” Al told him. “You were sitting with me. You got up, stuck a cigarette behind your ear, and you walked away from the table. What came next?”
“Walked past the register,” he said. “Old guy at the door said to go left, said there was a butt can down by the corner of the building. We were parked on the street up that way anyhow, so I went to the end of the building, like he said. I didn’t see anybody. Wait, that’s not true, the parking guy was walking back, he musta just parked a car. Had someone’s keys in his hand. I took a couple steps toward the sidewalk, away from the building, then I heard the shots. One first, then two more, close together. Couple more steps, okay, I reached the sidewalk, the big black Chevy with the chrome rims went flying past me. And then I ran to get this car.”
“Good job,” Al told him. “You see how many guys were in the Chevy?”
TJ thought for a minute. “Two that I could see,” he said. “The back windows were blacked out.”
“Either of those two guys Frank Waters?”
“No.” He glanced at Al, then in Sarah’s direction.
“I know,” Al said softly. “Okay, the two guys you did see, would you recognize either of them if you saw them again?”
“No. I only saw them for like a tenth of a second.”
“White guys? Black guys?”
“White,” he said. “Dark hair. That’s all I got.” He glanced in Sarah’s direction again.
Al nodded, looked in the back. “Sarah, baby, are you okay?”
Sarah blinked twice, looked up at Al, tried to focus. “Well, I’m not shot,” she said, and she hugged herself. “Do you think Frank’s okay?”
Alessandra looked at her partner. She loved the business yesterday, Al thought. Said it was fun. “Probably,” she said. “That guy on the sidewalk, he had at least one slug in him and he wasn’t Frank, we know that much for sure. And we didn’t see Frank anyplace else. Plus, there were only three rounds fired, so you’d figure one or two of them missed, so I’m guessing Frank didn’t get hit.”
Sarah hugged herself tighter.
“Sarah, listen, are you all right?”
“I always knew something like this would happen,” she said.
“Something like what? We don’t know anything yet, all we know is that one guy who ain’t Frank got shot, so don’t jump to conclusions.”
“Okay.”
“Did Frank have a gun?”
Sarah shook her head. “I never saw him with one.”
“He know how to shoot? He’s a vet, right?”
“Army,” Sarah said, nodding. “But he was a motor pool sergeant. Never fired a single round after boot, that’s what he told me.”
“He never carried when he was knocking around Brooklyn?”
“No. He was never that kind of guy. I mean, Frank’s pretty good in a fight, and you saw him, he’s a big man, but he always said if you thought you needed a gun you were probably in over your head. We knew a few neighborhood wiseguys, we went to school with them, but we were never tight with them.”
“Smart.”
“Do you think . . .” She was beginning to shake. “You really think he’s all right?”
This is where w
e find out if she falls apart, Al thought. This is where we find out how much Brooklyn she’s got in her. “We don’t know, babe. Let’s just decide to assume he’s all right until we find out different. Can you do that? Until we find out otherwise, okay, he didn’t do anything wrong tonight and there’s a good explanation for all of this, we just don’t know what it is yet. You all right with that?”
Sarah stared at Al’s face for a moment. “If you were a cop,” she said, “you’d think it was him that shot that guy.”
“Yeah, but I’m not a cop,” Al said. “I’m a person who wants to find out what really happened. Most cops just wanna get the paperwork filled out right and off their desk so that it’s someone else’s headache.”
“Okay,” Sarah said. “Are we in trouble?”
“We didn’t shoot anyone, either,” Al told her.
“No. But we’re witnesses.”
“To what? You see who popped that guy?”
“No, but—”
“But nothing,” Al said. “We didn’t see shit. I’m sure they’re gonna wanna talk to TJ, but we can worry about that later.”
Sarah blinked. “There was a security camera behind the cash register,” she said.
“Fuck. Are you sure?”
Sarah nodded. “An old-fashioned one, white and sort of long and rectangular. It’s pointed down at the cash register.”
“Ah, Jesus,” Al said. “Well, I doubt if they got a good enough picture to ID any of us.”
TJ cleared his throat. “If they got my picture,” he said, “they could compare it to the pictures of me that they’ve already got, if you know what I’m saying. Might go better for me if I went to them.”
“And they’re gonna ask you who you were with.”
“Yeah. Probably make it go easier if we just tell them the truth.”
“Or something like it,” Al said.
Sarah was nodding. “They’ll ID Frank, too,” she said. “He marched with a group of vets against the war and a bunch of them got arrested a few times. I mean, they let him go the next day, but I’m sure it’s in their records somewhere. Besides, they know him at Costello’s. And they probably remember me, too.”
“Oh, great,” Al said. “Okay, this is our story. For tonight, we got scared and we ran out, just like all the other cockroaches in the joint. Tomorrow morning your conscience can bother you if you want. If you’re ready to talk.”
Sarah took a breath, sat up a little straighter. “Yeah, why not,” she said. “Listen, can I ask a stupid question?”
“Go ahead.” Al watched as Sarah pulled herself out of panic mode and began to function again. Maybe she’ll be all right, Al thought.
“Um. Okay, your BF there, um, TJ, he said he saw the valet coming back from the lot with somebody’s keys.”
“Yeah, so?”
“TJ,” Sarah said. “On your way out, did you see anybody on their way in?”
“No,” he said. “The big dude by the door was standing there picking his teeth with the corner of a matchbook. He looked bored stiff.”
“Okay,” Sarah said. “So whose car did the valet park?”
Al and Sarah looked at each other. “Sonuvabitch,” Al said.
“You think?” Sarah asked her.
“Maybe,” Al said. “Assume the shooters show up, they give their car to the valet, then they hop up and down on the Suburban’s bumper until the alarm goes off. Frank comes running out, they grab him and shove him into the truck. In the confusion one of them takes one for the team. By accident or not, we don’t know. Not bad, Sarah.”
“Why didn’t they take the wounded guy with them?”
Al shook her head. “Easier to finish him off and leave him there.”
“Ohmygod. Their own guy?”
“Dead men tell no tales,” she said. “Especially if they’re just hired help to begin with. Right now we gotta go back to Avis and trade this sucker in for something different.”
“Why?”
“I gotta go back,” Al said.
“Why?” TJ and Sarah asked it simultaneously.
“If Sarah’s right,” Al said, “after everybody goes home, the car the shooters used will still be sitting in that parking lot. I mean, they probably stole it for the occasion, but it’s something. Sarah, you go home and—”
Sarah gritted her teeth. “If you’re working,” she said, “so am I.”
But we ain’t after a crooked barkeep here, Al thought. “Fine. You go sit down at your kitchen table and you write down everything you and Frank talked about tonight, and the other night, too, when he fronted you outside your mother’s house. And then you write down everything that you can remember about Frank’s business deals and all of his neighborhood buddies, Jimmy the Mick and Bobby the Weasel and all of the other mutts he ever ran with, because I’m betting the car in the lot angle goes nowhere. I mean, I still gotta go check it out, but right now Frank is the best lead we’ve got.”
The new rental was a Mitsubishi and it was both smaller and less comfortable than the Malibu. And since she didn’t want to leave the engine running for fear of drawing attention to herself, it was cold, brother, cold. To make it worse, she had to leave both front windows open about half an inch to keep the windshield from frosting up on the inside, and the occasional crosswind whistled through and made it seem even colder.
The cops did not seem to be in a hurry.
Cruisers were parked haphazardly up and down Knapp Street, and the meat wagon sat, engine running, right in front of Costello’s front door, spoiling Alessandra’s view somewhat. It didn’t matter, she was not going to be able to learn anything from watching the crime scene techs, not from this distance. About an hour after she’d found the parking spot and settled in, they loaded a gurney into the van and left.
Bagged and tagged, she thought. Via con Dios, sucka . . .
She searched her memory, trying to solidify her brief and hurried impressions of what the man had looked like as he lay there bleeding his life out onto the sidewalk. Mediterranean, she thought. Not very tall. It was the best she could come up with, and that not-very-helpful category included Greeks, Corsicans, Arabs, Israelis, Italians, and who the hell knew what else. Of course, Costello’s restaurant, along with the neighborhood that surrounded it, favored Italian-Americans. Means nothing, she told herself. Don’t jump to conclusions. Seemed like the smart-money bet, though. If the guy did turn out to be of Italian persuasion, gunned down in front of Costello’s, most people would figure it for a Mafia hit.
A car turned onto the block behind her. She slithered down low in the seat, dropping her head below window level. After the car passed she raised up enough to peer over the top of the dashboard. Two guys in a car, driving slow, taking their time, looking. Had to be cops.
The parking lot at Costello’s was emptying slowly. Al wondered how constructive the conversations taking place inside were going to be. “No, officer, I didn’t see nothing, I was eating my clams. Hey, what, you never ate here? My God, let me tell you, my friend, the clams in this place . . .” Still, the odds were pretty good that the cops already knew about the two couples that fled immediately after the shooting.
Normally Al’s reaction would have been that she didn’t know the dead guy, and if the police came knocking on her door she would talk to them, but she was not going to volunteer, no way, let them catch her if they could. This time things felt a little different, though, because her partner was involved.
Partner. There was a word for you. One thing to know how to use the word in a sentence, but it was another thing entirely to really get it, to understand in your gut what that really meant.
In reality, she didn’t know Sarah Waters all that well. Knew she was of Italian heritage, knew that she had one kid, a boy whom Al had never met, knew that she lived in her mother’s basement and was not thrilled with the arrangement, knew that she was not a dope, knew that she’d needed a job badly enough to agree to work for a guy like Stiles. Knew, now, that she did not fall
apart in emergencies.
Knew, as well, that Sarah’s ex, Frank Waters, was in deep shit.
Somewhere in the dark recesses of her mind a closet door opened, just a crack. The disembodied voice of a social worker she barely remembered snuck out just long enough to ask her how she felt about Sarah Waters. It was an old question, asked about everyone who entered her life, and it was never easy to answer honestly.
“I don’t know” was, as usual, the best she could do.
Maybe things would have been different, maybe Alessandra would have been different if she’d come up the way normal kids do, but then you had to ask yourself what normal really was, what relevance it could possibly have had in a family like hers. In the witch’s brew that was Brooklyn public housing, even the kids who’d had it relatively easy had to be fucked up, too.
The parking valet at Costello’s hung in there, you had to give it to the guy, his take tonight was going to be a fraction of what it should have been, but he was working it for what he could get. Every little while a few more diners would emerge from the restaurant, presumably having done their civic duty and gained their release from New York City’s finest, and the valet would accept the claim ticket and run for another car. Al resisted the impulse to count the number of cars left in the lot and try to figure how long this was going to take.
Anyway, how were you supposed to recognize normal if you’d never met the guy?
The military had shaped her father into a biological guided missile, you pointed Victor Martillo at whoever you wanted in custody and he would return with one former badass in tow sporting the necessary minimum of physical damage and a new pair of shiny bracelets. Sign on the dotted line, please, he’s all yours. But when it came to personal relationships, the man had no clue. He had been often gone, but even when he was home he was just as lost. He had done what he could, he had passed on to Alessandra everything he’d learned about controlling human beings through the careful and precise use of force. Some of his methods were traditional and widely accepted, others were unconventional and Draconian.