The Four-Night Run

by William Lashner

  “Why didn’t they do something for him?”

  “The high school football coach came to the elementary school to get a look at this huge aggressive kid he had heard so much about, and after that the coach pulled every string he could to keep Breest from being expelled or sent away. They gave him special programs, tutors, psychological testing and counseling. Nothing did any good. And then, in his physical for the junior high football team, the doctor found Breest’s heart to be grossly oversize. He would never play football. The coach lost interest, the district threw up its hands, and that was the end of Breest in school.”

  “Sounds like a kid desperate for help and not finding any.”

  “You don’t have any children, do you, Scrbacek?”

  Scrbacek shrugged.

  “I have two sons. They live with their mother now in Delaware. They’re both great kids and both completely different—one loud and physical, one quiet. We didn’t form them as if out of clay. They simply came out the way they are. Mozart came out with the ability to be a great musician. Caleb Breest came out a monster. You can’t blame the parents or society all the time. Sometimes out pops Mozart, sometimes out pops Breest.”

  “And who judges which is which?”

  “You don’t have to judge. They let you know. Some kids you can chart a slide from a specific point—the death of a father at an early age, say, or a period of abuse. But with Breest there was no slide. At six he was biting off a little girl’s ear, and then he turned nasty.”

  Scrbacek looked up again at the house. The guard, while still staring at their car, was walking down the steps, his hand reaching into his belt. A second man, also in cable-knit and beret, was now standing in the doorway.

  “The guy on the porch is coming for us,” said Scrbacek.

  Surwin checked out the rearview mirror without noticeable alarm. “Like I said, this used to be a nice neighborhood. But then a swarm of cutthroats and thieves descended like a plague. Burglaries. Arsons. It didn’t take long. Within a few months the whole thing was a ghost town, except for Mrs. Breest’s house. One rumor had it that Breest decided to clear the whole block, even though families had lived here for generations. The neighbors hadn’t been nice enough to him as a boy.”

  Surwin took a final glance at the man coming toward them before putting the Hyundai in gear and slowly pulling away. Scrbacek eyed the expanse of ruin and rubble as it slid past his window.

  “All the abandoned properties on the block,” Surwin continued, “were bought for pennies by a developer named Frances Galloway.”

  “Galloway?”

  “You know her?”

  Scrbacek shrugged. “Not personally. I’ve read her name in the papers.”

  “She keeps a low profile, but she’s the biggest slumlord in the city. Inherited great swaths of real estate from the husband she married when he was eighty-four and she was thirty-one, with two failed marriages already behind her. She hasn’t done a thing to these houses. She’s let them fester and crumble. Word is, she’s afraid of what Breest will do if she rebuilds. In effect, the garden of ruins that surrounds the house is now a permanent fixture of Mrs. Breest’s landscape. A fitting tribute, I figure, to the blessings she has bestowed upon all of us through her son.”

  “The corner plot of land used to be the seat of power in this town,” said Surwin as they drove toward a high wooden fence, covered in posters advertising this angry new rap band or that high-octane new movie. “The place where those who wanted to do business had to come and get their permits.”

  “A government office?”

  “A restaurant. Migello’s. They made a cioppino that was legendary. Fresh clams, mussels, vermouth, enough cracked peppercorn to light your mouth on fire. Migello’s was where three generations of the Puchesi family did business.”

  Immediately surrounding the fence, buildings that had once been fine, grand, with facades of cut stone, lay abandoned, boarded up, crumbling one into the other. The whole neighborhood appeared abandoned as if in a hurry. Something terrible had happened here, something long ago, from which the neighborhood had never recovered. Surwin parked the little blue Hyundai beside the high wooden fence at the corner of Ninth and Polk.

  “They had carved this niche out for themselves, the Puchesis, controlling crime in this city even as they ruthlessly kept the bigger families in New York and Philadelphia from moving in. This was before the casinos, when gambling meant the numbers, and the Puchesi syndicate kept strict control of prostitution, loan sharking, extortion, and a minimal amount of drug trafficking. In the old days they said the Puchesis were the biggest problem facing the city. Now they seem like kindly old caretakers who were keeping the city together.”

  “What happened to them?”

  “They made a mistake in personnel.”

  Scrbacek simply looked at Surwin and waited.

  “Caleb Breest was fifteen when he was sent to reform school for assault. It seemed a high school football player made a snide comment about Breest’s weak heart, and in response Caleb Breest repeatedly slammed his fist into the kid’s face until it fell apart. Breest, being only fifteen, was locked away in reform school for the last three years of his minority. It was in reform school that he met Joey Torresdale.”

  “I wondered when Torresdale entered the picture.”

  “After Breest turned eighteen and was released, Joey brought him in to meet Luigi Puchesi. Torresdale was just a hanger-on with the Puchesi syndicate, but Luigi was always in the market for big amoral thugs who liked pounding flesh, and he immediately hired Caleb Breest as one of his collection agents. Breest proved himself to the bosses in his very first week by taking care of a deadbeat debtor with six kids who couldn’t come up with the three hundred he owed. He killed him with his bare hands, in front of three witnesses from the syndicate. Breest’s evident enthusiasm for his work earned for himself and for Joey enough promotions so that after only a few short years of mayhem, Breest was making loans himself, using his boss’s money, while Joey had become one of Luigi Puchesi’s captains. Breest wasn’t Sicilian, so there was only so far he could rise in the family, but he was rising, gaining more responsibility, garnering more fear. Then the inevitable happened. A Puchesi lieutenant accused Breest of shorting the family on profits.”

  “Was he?”

  “Probably. It was a criminal organization, and Breest is a criminal. But the truth of it didn’t matter. A week later they found the lieutenant stuffed shoulders-first into a trash can, his legs sticking out and his head missing. Not so earth-shattering a move except this lieutenant was married to a granddaughter of the old man himself. The feds had a bug in Migello’s, and they caught Luigi Puchesi in a meeting with his top men. ‘There’s a cancer in the family,’ he said in a hoarse Old World voice. ‘You don’t negotiate with a cancer, you don’t make deals with a cancer, you don’t sign treaties with a cancer. What you do with a cancer is you cut it out and stamp it dead and then feed it to the rats. There’s a cancer in the family, and it’s time to feed the rats.’ It was a declaration of war, and the outcome is all there on the tape. Luigi’s declaration, a discussion of strategy, Joey Torresdale leaving the restaurant to relay orders to the troops, and then, exactly thirty-seven minutes after Luigi Puchesi said it was time to feed the rats, there is a dark rumble of sound before the tape goes dead.”

  “What happened?”

  Surwin leaned over to his glove compartment and pulled out a flashlight, which he handed to Scrbacek. He nodded at the fence surrounding the corner lot. “Go see for yourself.”

  Scrbacek approached the wooden wall with trepidation, keeping the flashlight off as he moved closer. A moist rot seeped through the edges of the posts. The fence was over six feet high, too tall for him to see over, and the top was jagged and full of splinters, so pulling himself up with his hands was not an attractive possibility. He tramped up and down the edge, looking for something to stand upon, and found, finally, a piece of cinder block with one edge flat enough to serve as
a stoop. He hoisted the block close to the wall and stepped up onto it, pressing one hand on the wall for balance. The scent of rot grew stronger. Slowly he rose on tiptoes to peer over the jagged top.

  Nothing.

  Not a building, not a sidewalk, not a light, not even a vacant lot. Instead there was a great hole in the surface of the earth, a massive crater, as if something supernatural had reached down and grabbed a handful out of Crapstown, leaving nothing but the nauseating scent of ruin and death.

  In the thin glimmer bleeding over the fence from the streetlights, Scrbacek could barely make out the edge of the crater, but not its depth. He switched on Surwin’s flashlight, lifted it over his head, and focused it on the center of the crater’s darkness.

  It was impossibly deep, the crater. The flashlight’s uneven circular light was too weak to light up the entire pit, so Scrbacek could not immediately get a clear view of what was inside, but he could tell, even in the uneven light, that it was fearsome and deep. And, somehow, in motion.

  He shifted the beam back and forth to get a better view, and suddenly he realized what he was seeing, and from the sight and the smell he gagged loudly and gagged again. The puddled bottom of the pit was alive with a scavenging army of rats, huge angry rats, scores of them, their fur slick, tumbling one over the other, gnawing at an oily pile of fat and bone. As the beam moved among the plague, their eyes, caught in the light, glowed red.

  “The lot is now owned by Galloway,” said Surwin after Scrbacek retreated back into the car. “The husband tried to build on it once, but someone burned down his mobile construction office before he could start, and that was the end of that. Since his death, the wife’s done nothing to fill in the hole, despite orders by the city to clean it up. She owns so much of the city’s ruins, and has so many orders to clean up so many properties, that the city can’t afford to enforce any of them.”

  “That’s as ugly a spot as I’ve ever seen,” said Scrbacek.

  “Every once in a while, to great fanfare among his goons, Caleb Breest sponsors a dog shooting contest. Whoever brings to Dirty Dirk’s the bodies of the most strays gets a thousand-dollar bonus.”

  “I heard about that,” said Scrbacek. “Joey Torresdale made it seem like good-natured civic-minded fun.”

  “I bet he did. It’s illegal as hell, and the night is a terror for civilians in the worst parts of town, but the cops let it happen. Wild dogs are a problem in those neighborhoods, they figure, and the less roaming the streets, the better. And then, after all the beer, the boasting, the shots fired in celebration, after roasted pig is sliced and digested by all the hunters, they pile the stiff bodies of dogs and the pig carcass into a pickup truck, take them here, and toss them over the fence into the pit that was Migello’s. Twenty years after he packed enough dynamite in the sewer beneath Migello’s to level a small town, twenty years after he destroyed the Puchesi family and took control of the city’s criminal organization, Caleb Breest is still feeding the rats.”

  Surwin parked the car across the street from a nicely maintained row of houses on a block with living trees and streetlights that glowed brightly.

  “It’s a brothel, one of his better ones. You go in the door as if you’re heading into a simple narrow row house, but four of them have been gutted and combined into one grand sex palace. Many of the high rollers from the casinos end up here for a couple of frolics, and to get their pictures snapped.”

  “Sounds kinky.”

  “Oh, they don’t know about the pictures until they get an envelope in the mail.”

  “How come it’s still there?”

  “It’s licensed as an oriental massage parlor. But we’re getting ready to close it. We’ve closed others, we’ll close more. Even now he’s setting up another site for when this one shuts down. The girls get out of jail on bail, and he sends them to the new house. He keeps the younger ones, boys and girls, in a separate house we haven’t yet been able to find.”

  “Maybe it’s just a rumor, then.”

  “What I’ve found in investigating your client, Scrbacek, is that behind every rumor is a reality that is far, far darker.”

  Surwin and Scrbacek were parked a hundred yards away from a street corner alive with lights and trucks and hordes of people, despite the late hour and the wet streets. Cars lined up to be greeted one at a time by a young runner, as if at a McDonald’s drive-thru.

  Scrbacek didn’t have to get too close to recognize what he was seeing. He had spent enough nights waiting in line in his car—not at this corner, maybe, but others just like it—waiting in line with a desperate joyful anticipation, pulling up to the curb, the brief conversation with the young runner, the bills given, the runner strolling off to the stash beneath a stoop or under a rock, coming back without even a hint of concern and bringing with him the sweet little vials with their brightly colored caps.

  “He runs corners all over the city,” said Surwin. “The price is low enough that he gets customers from four different states. You can see it in the license plates. He hires the youngest to deal with the customers—you’ve surely defended some of them—but he has put in place an astounding number of levels between himself and the street. Less profit for himself, but more safety and more control. We’ve run up the chain a number of times, but it always stops one or two levels below the big man.”

  “Are you sure then that he’s behind it all?”

  “Not sure enough to get an indictment, but still pretty damn sure. Lately he’s been expanding—setting up new corners, lowering the price, as if he’s trying to hook the entire city. Whenever he sets up a new distribution center, the neighborhood in which he situates it goes straight to hell. It’s as if he’s purposely turning the city into one huge crack corner.”

  “The story you’ve heard,” said Surwin, “of the guy with the Mercedes who won money off of Breest in a poker game and who was later steamrolled in his car?”

  “I thought that was just an urban legend.”

  “Well, there’s the lot where they found him,” said Surwin, “flat as a playing card.”

  “This used to be one of the city’s prime employers,” said Surwin, in front of a burned-out hulk of a building, sitting low and squat, its edges black, its sign charred and crumbling. The air around the building still smelled of carbon, the ashes still sifted in the night breeze. “Like every place else, it was paying its city tax, its state tax, its federal tax, and its street tax. It had been paying the street tax, actually, for decades, from back when Luigi Puchesi was still running the show, but it was always a reasonable amount and the owners simply expensed it above the line. Except this year, suddenly, the tax was raised precipitously. It was like Breest was trying to ruin them. They argued and pled and tried to meet with the big man himself, but he refused to see them, and no one else could lower the demand. They had no choice but to come to us. We asked the owners to set up meetings, and they bravely agreed to let us wire them for sound. On the recordings we can clearly hear the threats and their pleas, and then fists smashing bone. The assault was so sudden it came before we could rush in and save them.”

  “What happened to the enforcers?”

  “They’re out on bail, waiting for the trial. Cirilio Vega’s representing them. They’ve said nothing about who they were talking for. It’s clearly Breest, but I don’t know how to connect the dots for a jury unless the enforcers talk, and they’re simply not talking. And the day after the arrest, before the enforcers were back on the street, despite the guards we had stationed around the building, the fire started. There was nothing left of the inventory, of the machinery, of the records. Nothing but rubble.”

  “Are the owners rebuilding?”

  “Not here. They sold the property to Galloway, took the insurance money, bought a plant in South Carolina with the promise of all kinds of tax breaks. There’s no employment left in the city except in the casinos. And the dealers and bartenders and cocktail waitresses, they either live in Casinoland or outside the city. Crapst
own is dying, fast, and for some reason your client wants to speed up the process.”

  Surwin slowly pulled the car away from the burned-out factory, and as he did, Scrbacek turned to take one last look. From this angle, he could see the charred sign and just make out the letters burned like a negative into the wood:

  KEEPING THE RAIN OFF YOUR PARADE.

  EVER-DRY.

  35

  CALVARY

  “I should have my head examined,” said Surwin, driving slowly through the misty Crapstown night. “We’re preparing a racketeering indictment against the whole organization, top to bottom, and here I am spilling what we know to Caleb Breest’s attorney.”

  “Former attorney. Apparently, I’ve been replaced by Cirilio Vega.”

  “On a temporary basis, so they say. Vega came in the day after the acquittal and the bombing, his briefcase stuffed with motions and legal authority. We offered to continue the probation revocation hearing until you showed, or until Cirilio could bring himself up to speed, but he wanted none of it. Filed his notice of appearance, sat right down in your seat, handled himself like he had been there all along.”

  “He’s crackerjack, Vega. And he’s Breest’s attorney now, not me.”

  “Still, if the Bureau knew what I was doing with you, it would mean my job.”

  “Then why are you doing it?”

  Surwin looked at Scrbacek for a moment and then back through the windshield. After a moment, as if in response, he parked the car on a deserted street and killed the engine. “Let’s take a walk.”

  Surwin led Scrbacek down the street and then into an alleyway, dank, stinking of garbage and piss, wet with rain, infested by rodents, inhabited by one person, of indeterminate sex and age, curled inside a cardboard box.

  “Help for the homeless?” said the person in the box.