by Dan Simmons
Rigby's dark eyebrows went up. "So now you know they were after the parole officer, not you. You're conveniently remembering a lot today, Joe."
Kurtz sighed. "My car was down the ramp to the right. The shooters were on the ramp where O'Toole's car was parked."
"How do you know that?"
"She was walking in that direction," said Kurtz. "We both saw it on the tape." He braved another nibble of donut.
"Why two men but only one shooter?" hissed Rigby. They'd been whispering, but they were speaking loudly enough now that one of the waitresses in red polka-dot flannel pajamas looked over at them.
"How the fuck should I know?" Kurtz said in a conversational tone.
Rigby plunked down a five dollar bill for the two coffees and donut. "Do you remember anything else?"
"No. I mean, I remember pretty much what we saw on the security video—trying to drag and carry O'Toole back to the door, or at least behind that pillar, and then getting hit."
Rigby King studied his eyes. "That bit about rescuing O'Toole, risking your life to carry her to safety, didn't strike me as the Joe Kurtz I used to know. You were always the living embodiment of the theory of sociobiology to me, Joe."
Kurtz knew what she was talking about—his wino mentor, Pruno, had given him a long reading list for his years in Attica and Edward O. Wilson had been on the list for year six—but he wasn't going to show her he understood the comment. He gave Rigby the flattest gaze he was capable of and said, "I draped O'Toole over my back like a shield. She's a hefty woman. She would have stopped a twenty-two slug at that range."
"Well, she did," said Rigby. She stood. "If you regain any more memory, Joe, phone it in."
She walked out through the southwest door of Broadway Market.
His phone rang as he was driving the Pinto back to Chippewa Street.
"Errand is all done," came Angelina Farino Ferrara's voice.
"Thanks."
"Fuck thanks," said the female acting-don. "You owe me, Kurtz."
"No. Consider us even when I give you the down payment back, and spend the fifteen wisely. Go buy a new bra for your Boxster."
"I sold the Boxster this spring," said Angelina. "Too slow." She disconnected.
The office smelled of coffee and cigarettes. Kurtz had never picked up the habit for the second and felt too queasy to enjoy more of the first.
O'Toole's computer memory had divulged everything under questioning—password-protected files on her thirty-nine clients, her notes, everything except the password-protected e-mail. Most of what they got was garbage. O'Toole obviously didn't use the company computer for personal stuff—the files were all business.
The files on all the ex-cons, including on Kurtz himself, piled up the usual heap of sad facts and parolee bullshit. Only twenty-one of the thirty-nine were "active clients"—i.e., cons who had to drop in weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly to visit their parole officer. None of O'Toole's notes for the last few weeks' visits started with—"Client so-and-so threatened to kill me today…" In fact the level of banality was stunning. All of these guys were losers, many of them were addicts of one or many things, none of them—despite the veil of O'Toole's cool, professional summaries—seemed to show any real signs of wanting to go straight.
And none of them seemed to have a motive for killing his parole officer. (All of O'Toole's clients were male. Perhaps, Kurtz thought, she didn't like ex-cons of the female persuasion.)
Kurtz sighed and rubbed his chin, hearing the stubble there rasp. He'd showered this morning—moving slowly through the haze of pain and queasiness—but he'd decided that the stubble went with the purple and orange raccoon mask and dissolute visage. Besides, it hurt his head to shave.
Arlene had left the office after their meeting this morning—on Fridays she usually went to have coffee with her sister-in-law, Gail, often to discuss Sam's daughter, Rachel, for whom Gail now acted as guardian. So Kurtz had the office to himself. He paced back and forth, feeling the heat from the back room filled with humming servers at one end of his pace and the chill from the long bank of windows at the other end. Yesterday had been brisk and beautiful; today was cold and rainy. Tires hissed on Chippewa Street, but there wasn't much traffic before noon.
He kept shuffling the five pages with their thirty-nine names and capsule summaries and considered ruling himself out as a suspect. The honed instincts of a trained professional investigator. No other strategies or conclusions came to mind. Even if he just cut the list to the twenty «active» clients she was seeing weekly or bi-weekly—and there was no logical reason to do that, nor any logical reason to think it was just one of her current clients who did the shooting since it could have been any of the hundreds or thousands who had come before—it would take Kurtz a week or two to get a door-to-door investigation under way.
But something was gnawing like a rodent at Joe Kurtz's bruised brain. One of the names…
He shuffled the pages. There it was. Page three. Yasein Goba, 26, naturalized American citizen of Yemeni descent, lives in a part of Lackawanna called "back the Bridge," meaning south of the first all-steel bridge in America, in what was now one of the toughest neighborhoods in America. Goba was on parole after serving eighteen months on an armed robbery conviction.
Kurtz tried to remember what his bag lady informer, Mrs. Tuella Dean, had said—rumors about "some crazy Arab down in Lackawanna talking about wanting to shoot someone."
Pretty thin. Actually, Kurtz realized, thin was too grandiloquent a word for this connection. Invisible, maybe.
Kurtz knew that his search for this Yemeni, if he did it, went straight to the heart of the most pressing question in his world right now—If the odds are that someone was after Peg O'Toole rather than me, why the hell am I looking into that shooting rather than the heroin killer thing? After all, Toma Gonzaga was going to kill a guy named Joe Kurtz in—Kurtz glanced at his watch—seventy-eight hours, unless Kurtz solved the mobster's little serial killer problem. Kurtz had only met Toma this one time, but he had the strong feeling that the man meant what he said. Also, Kurtz could use one hundred thousand dollars.
So why am I fucking around investigating my shooting if O'Toole was the probable target? Get to work on the heroin shooter, Joe.
Kurtz walked over to the four-foot by five-foot framed map of the Buffalo area set on the north wall of the office. Sam had used the map in their old office, and Arlene had put it up here despite Kurtz's protests that they didn't need the damned thing. This morning, though, he and Arlene had gone through the list of murder sites from both Angelina Farino Ferrara's and Toma Gonzaga's lists and stuck red thumbtacks at each site—fourteen sites for twenty-two missing and presumed murdered people.
The hits had been literally all over the map: three in Lackawanna, four in the black ghetto east of Main, but others in Tonawanda, Cheektowaga, four more in Buffalo proper, and more in relatively upscale—or at least middle-class—suburbs such as Amherst and Kenmore.
Kurtz knew that no investigator in the world, even with police forensic resources behind him or her, could solve these murders in three days if the perpetrator didn't want to be caught. Too many hundreds of square miles to cover, too many hundreds of possible witnesses and potential suspects to interview, too many scores of fingerprints to check out—although Kurtz didn't even own a Boy Detective fingerprint kit—and too many possible local, state, and national killers who'd benefit from putting a crimp in the Gonzaga drug empire in Western New York.
If Kurtz were to make a list of suspects in the heroin killings right now, the name Angelina Farino Ferrara would fill the first five places on the list. The woman had everything to gain by destroying the Gonzagas' historical claim on the drug scene in the Buffalo area. She was ambitious. My God, was she ambitious. Her life's ambition had been to kill Emilio Gonzaga—which she had done last winter using Joe Kurtz as one of her many pawns—while weakening the Gonzaga crime family's grip on the city and strengthening what was left of the Farino Family power he
re.
All this «Toma» and «Angelina» first-name crap made sense to Kurtz only if the woman was playing the old game of being friends with her adversary even while plotting his destruction.
But there were the five blue pins on the map—all Farino Family dealers or users who had disappeared with only bloody stains left behind!
Who said they'd been killed?
Angelina Farino Ferrara. Her family, in the first year of her rebuilding, had grabbed just enough peripheral drug action that it would be too suspicious if only Gonzaga people were being murdered. What was the loss of a few dealers and users if it meant gaining Toma Gonzaga's trust? Maybe they'd all been relocated to Miami or Atlantic City while Ms. Farino Ferrara continued to murder Gonzaga junkies.
But Kurtz was sure that Gonzaga didn't trust Angelina. Anyone would be a fool to trust this woman who shot her first husband and kept the pistol out of what she called sentimentality, this woman who married her second elderly husband to be trained in the strategies and tactics of thievery, and who calmly admitted to drowning her only baby because it carried Gonzaga genes.
Kurtz stood at the window and watched the cold rain fall on Chippewa Street It made sense that Gonzaga «hired» him to find the heroin-connection killer in four days. At the very least, Kurtz's failure would give Gonzaga another reason for whacking him—as if possible collusion in the death of the mobster's father wasn't enough. And Angelina wasn't going to throw a fit when she learned that he'd been whacked—she'd accept Toma's explanation without rancor. The life of one Joe Kurtz wasn't that important in the grander scheme of things for her—especially when that grander scheme included revenge and ambition, which seemed to be the alpha and omega of Angelina Farino Ferrara's emotional spectrum.
Kurtz had to smile. His options were few. At least he'd neutralized the loose cannon that had been Big Bore Redhawk, recording the cell phone conversation with Angelina setting up the hit as he'd done so. Of course, the recording incriminated Joe Kurtz even more than the female don. In truth, they'd both been so circumspect over the phone that the tape was all but useless.
So it came down to the five thousand dollars advance money in an envelope that Kurtz was still carrying around. He'd use that on Tuesday morning—Halloween—when he drove away from Buffalo, New York, forever, buying a different used car before crossing the state line (and violating his parole). Kurtz knew a few people around the country, perhaps the most important right now being a plastic surgeon in Oklahoma City who gave people like Joe Kurtz new faces and identities in exchange for hard cash.
But he'd need quite a bit more hard cash. Kurtz could get fifty thousand dollars in a minute by asking Arlene to buy his theoretical share of WeddingBells-dot-com and SweetheartSearch-dot-com, but he'd never do that. She'd waited for years to start an online business like this, even if the high school sweetheart thing had been his idea in Attica.
Well, he could always get more cash.
Kurtz pulled on his baseball cap, slipped the.38 into his belt, and headed down to the Pinto. He had someone in Lackawanna he wanted to see.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Lackawanna had been one of the great steel centers of the world for almost a century. Raw materials flowed in by ocean freighter coming up the St. Lawrence Seaway and across the Great Lakes, by canal barge, and by locomotive; steel flowed out. Tens of thousands of workers in Lackawanna and Buffalo owed their livelihood to Lackawanna steel for more than fifty years, and it was a good life, with higher wages than those earned at the Chrysler plant or American Standard or any of the other large employers of the blue-collar city called Buffalo. The steel business's medical and pension plans were among the most generous to be found anywhere.
As the market for American steel declined, the heaps of slag near the Lackawanna mills grew higher, the skies grew darker and filthier, the worker housing grew more grim, and the pension plans ate up more and more of the companies' profits, but the idea of steel still flourished in Lackawanna. By the late 1960s, the unions had grown too strong, the technologies had lagged behind, corporate accounting practices had become mossbacked and lazy, and the mills themselves were obsolete. The unions still received huge packages. The managers gave themselves raises and bonuses. The companies diverted profits to shareholders rather than reinvest in new technology or pay for managerial changes. Meanwhile, Japanese steel and cheap European steel and Russian steel and Thai steel were running their industries with cheaper labor, newer technologies, and slimmer profit margins. The steel companies in Lackawanna cried foul, cried dumping, diverted money to politicians to get protectionist legislation, and continued with the same pay scales and pension plans and obsolete machinery. They made steel the way their granddaddies had made steel. And they sold it the same way.
By the 1970s, the Lackawanna steel industry was on a gurney and hemorrhaging badly. By the mid-nineties, it was on a cold, stone slab with no mourners waiting around for the wake. Today there were more than a dozen miles of abandoned mills along Lake Erie, a hundred square miles of ghetto where workers' neighborhoods had once been, scores upon scores of empty parking lots that had once been filled with thousands of vehicles, as well as black mountains of slag heaps running back east from the lake for block after block—a cheaper alternative for the defunct mills than cleaning them up—thus insuring that the city of Buffalo, with a third of its population fled seeking work elsewhere, would never spend the money to develop these lakefront properties.
The neighborhoods in the shadow of the huge mills, neighborhoods that once housed German and Italian and some black skilled laborers, now boasted crack houses and abortion clinics and storefront mosques as even poorer blacks and Hispanics and Middle Eastern immigrants flowed into the vacuum created by the fleeing steelworkers.
Kurtz knew Lackawanna well. He'd lost his virginity there, lost any illusions about life there, and killed his first man there, not necessarily in that order.
Ridge Road was the main east-west street through the heart of Lackawanna, past Our Lady of Victory Basilica, past Father Baker's Orphanage, past the Holy Cross Cemetery, past the Botanical Gardens and Lackawanna City Hall, then over the narrow steel bridge built more than a century ago, then "back the Bridge," south, into the warren of narrow streets that dead-ended against the walls and moats and barriers bordering the mile-wide no-man's land of railroad tracks that ran south to everywhere and north into the grain-mill industrial area near Kurtz's Harbor Inn.
Parolee Yasein Goba's address was south of the old Carnegie Library and the nearby Lackawanna Islamic Mosque. The house was a leaning, filthy gray-shingle affair at the end of a littered cul-de-sac. To the right of and behind the house was the high fence of a salvage yard; to its left was the rusted iron wall and barbed wire fences marking railroad property. Freight trains heaved and clashed in the rainy air.
Kurtz backed the Pinto out of the cul-de-sac, swung it around, drove east a block, and parked it near Odell Playground, the only bit of grass and open space within miles. He made sure the Pinto couldn't be seen from the main north-south street, Wilmuth Avenue, or from Yasein Goba's house. Black and Middle Eastern faces peered at him from passing cars and from between sooty curtains as he tucked the.38 in his belt, took a long-bladed screwdriver from the glove box, locked the Pinto and walked the two blocks toward Goba's gray house.
Kurtz cut right a block and came at the house along the salvage yard fence, approaching from the north. The smoke and noise from the rail yards were almost melodramatic: steel couplers crashing, machines grunting as they hauled heavy loads, men shouting in the distance. More crashes and bangs came from the huge salvage yard beyond the fence.
Kurtz paused when there was nothing but open field between him and the house. Except for one small window on the north side here, all the house's windows looked east up the empty street or west over the railyards. There was no car parked next to the house and no garage, although several abandoned cars, wheels missing, littered the street.
Kurtz pulled the.38, held
it loosely against his right leg, and walked behind the house.
The back door wasn't locked. There was dried blood on the steps, the stoop, and the door itself. Standing to one side of the glass, Kurtz opened the door and went in crouched, 38 extended.
The blood trail went up some stairs. A perfect red handprint was in the middle of the half-open door at the top of the inside stairway. Kurtz used the pistol to swing the door open wider. A kitchen. Dirty dishes. Garbage stinking. More blood on the cheap table and chipped tile floor. One of the chairs had been knocked over.
Breathing through his mouth, Kurtz followed the blood trail through a living room—filthy shag carpet with blobs of dried blood, sprung couch covered by a filthy sheet, big color television. The blood trail went up a narrow flight of stairs in the narrow central hall, but Kurtz checked the other two downstairs rooms first. Clear.
Yasein Goba was sprawled half across the grimy tub in the little bathroom at the head of the stairs. The blood trail led there and ended there. Goba had been hit high in the right ribcage—the wound looked consistent with the nine-millimeter slugs O'Toole had loaded in her Sig Pro that Kurtz had been firing—and the man had poured his life's blood half into the tub and half onto the bathroom floor. The bottom of the tub was solid brown with dried blood. There was blood all over the sink and blood on the mirrored door of the medicine chest. Bottles of pills, rubbing alcohol, and Mercurachrome were scattered on the floor and broken in the bloody sink. It looked as if Goba had tried to find something to stop the bleeding, or at least something to dull the pain, before he fainted onto the tub rim and bled out.
O'Toole's file said that Yasein Goba was twenty-six years old and from Yemen. Making sure not to step in the dried pools and rivulets on the floor, Kurtz crouched next to the corpse. The young man may have been an Arab, but the loss of blood added a paleness under the brown skin and tiny black mustache. His lips were white, his mouth and eyes open. Kurtz was no medical examiner, but he'd seen enough corpses to know that rigor mortis had come and gone and that this guy had probably been dead about forty-eight hours—since a few hours after Kurtz and O'Toole had been shot.