Lobster Johnson: The Satan Factory

by Thomas E. Sniegoski

  “Mother o’ God,” McDonough exclaimed, as he stared at the still images splayed on the tabletop. “Who coulda done something like this?”

  “Whoever it was, they’re animals,” Decante said, moving the pictures to be sure he could see them all. “Animals that don’t deserve to live.”

  Fazzina saw his opportunity and went for it.

  “There was no love lost between myself and Red O’Neill,” he said, “but somethin’ like this . . .”

  He gestured toward the pictures.

  “You say you know more about this than us,” Zenna said, holding a particularly nasty photo of a man’s insides strewn across the warehouse floor like a discarded hose. “How do we know that you’re not responsible?”

  Fazzina wanted so desperately to tell him that he was, but that wasn’t part of his plan. He wanted them to come over to his side naturally.

  “You don’t,” he shrugged. “But then again, how do I know that none of you are to blame?”

  The men looked at each other with murder in their eyes.

  “Gentlemen, calm yourselves,” Fazzina said smoothly. “We’re all men of business here. Now, I may be mistaken, but somethin’ tells me that whoever’s responsible for this revolting crime would not be standing here tonight.”

  The others seemed to agree with his assessment. Agree with his lie.

  “What do you know?” McDonough asked. His drink was empty and he returned to the bar for a refill.

  “Only a little more than you,” Fazzina answered. “Whisperings on the street are talking about a gang . . . Foreigners, with their eyes on what belongs to us.”

  “Foreigners,” McDonough hissed before tossing back his whiskey. “I hate bloody foreigners.”

  “Give us more,” Zenna demanded. “Foreigners from where?”

  Fazzina shrugged. “Someplace where something like this is considered fair game, I’d imagine.” He gestured to the photos.

  “Chinamen,” McDonough yelled from the bar. “I bet it’s those filthy bastards from the Far East.”

  “Jesus,” Decante said. He’d removed a string of rosary beads from his vest pocket and was now nervously rubbing them between forefinger and thumb. “If they did this to Red, who’s next?” he asked.

  “Exactly my concern,” Fazzina said. He had them where he wanted them. “Red was first because he must have been perceived as the weakest.”

  He eyed the other bosses, watching as his last statement began to sink in to their skulls.

  “Yeah,” Zenna agreed, nodding slowly. “He was the weakest of us. It was only a matter of time before somebody put him out of our misery.”

  McDonough returned to the group, alcohol fueling his swagger.

  “I say let ’em try to take me,” he said. “I’ll cut ’em six ways ta Sunday.”

  Fazzina could see him staring at the crime-scene pictures lying on the table. Was that a seed of doubt that he saw in the mick’s eyes?

  “Red didn’t know this was coming,” Fazzina said. “But we do. Together we could show these foreign devils what for.”

  Zenna had retreated to the other side of the room. The cigarette he was smoking had created a gray halo that floated around his head.

  “What are you suggesting, Fazzina?” he asked.

  “Strength in numbers,” Fazzina stated with a shrug, as if it was all so obvious. “We combine all our gangs into one. We’d be unstoppable for sure.”

  Old man Decante was staring intensely at Fazzina as he returned his rosary to his vest pocket. “One gang,” he said. “And I suppose there would be one boss as well.”

  “Only to make things run smoother,” Fazzina agreed.

  “And who would that boss be, if you don’t mind me askin’?” piped up McDonough.

  Fazzina thought he’d had them, but now he could sense it all beginning to slip away.

  “It would be someone strong enough to hold it all together when dealin’ with those who could do something like this.” He reached down to the table, grabbed a handful of photos and threw them at the other bosses.

  “And I suppose that someone is you?” Zenna asked calmly.

  Fazzina rested his fists on the table and leaned forward, his eyes burning into each of them.

  “Under my command, I’d pity anybody who’d try to challenge us.”

  The bosses were silent, and for the briefest of moments, Fazzina thought he just might have won.

  But that was before McDonough started to laugh.

  It was a high-pitched cackle. He looked over at his own men, who had been sitting silently at the back of the room, and immediately they began to laugh as well.

  “You must be outta your mind,” Zenna spat. “What do you take us for, a bunch a scared little girls?”

  “I never knew ya to be a comedian, Rocco,” McDonough said as he returned to the bar for another refill. “But I think you’d be a much better clown than a leader.”

  Decante had remained silent, and Fazzina wondered if he might be the only boss to see that he was right. If he was the only one who could keep the others alive.

  The old man finally stood, and slowly walked around the table toward Fazzina. Rocco watched him with unblinking eyes as he stopped mere inches away. Decante reached into his vest pocket, and again removed the prayer beads. Taking Fazzina’s hand, he dropped the beads into his palm, and closed the man’s fingers around them.

  “I believe you’ll need these more than me,” he said dismissively, then turned around to join the others.

  Fazzina spat upon the rosary beads and threw them to the ground.

  He spun around and headed toward the door. He had wanted to keep this civilized, but they had left him no choice.

  “We’re leaving,” he told his man, who quickly stepped in front of him to open the doors.

  Fazzina stopped and turned to look at them one more time. He looked at Zenna, who cursed him with his eyes; at the back of Decante, who couldn’t even be bothered to watch him leave the room; and at McDonough, who stood at the bar pouring himself another drink of the booze that he had provided. The son of a bitch was still laughing.

  Fazzina said nothing more as he left the meeting room, committing to memory the moment that the other crime bosses had signed their death warrants.

  —

  Hurley had a hunch.

  Red O’Neill was still thought to be dead, massacred in his warehouse, torn to unidentifiable bits by, according to the Lobster, things right out of a bad dream.

  Even the crime boss’s own men and family still believed this.

  But Hurley knew better. He had the word of a crazy man who said he saw O’Neill escape in a car.

  If Red was still alive, it was obvious that he’d gone deep underground, probably lying low, trying to figure out what he should do next.

  But where?

  Hurley had an idea. He remembered that Red’s father, Quillan O’Neill, had been an undertaker. Red and his three sisters had been raised in an apartment above the O’Neill Funeral Parlor in Brooklyn.

  Quillan had gained a reputation amongst the criminal community for his cosmetic talents with even the most violently damaged bodies. No closed caskets if Quillan O’Neill had anything to say about it.

  It was those criminal connections established in the funeral home that had given young Red the inspiration to aspire to something more than embalming and making corpses pretty. In fact, as he had climbed the criminal ladder, it was said he had been responsible for quite a bit of his father’s business.

  Quillan had been crushed by Red’s lack of interest. Like most strong Irish fathers, he had believed his son would carry on his legacy, but it wasn’t meant to be. A life of crime had called to the immigrant’s son, and the boy had answered.

  It had taken Hurley nearly an hour to get out to Brooklyn, and now he stood before the old, abandoned funeral home. The death of Quillan had meant the end of his business, but the family hadn’t ever sold the building. Instead, it had remained shuttered and empty
, falling into disrepair as the years had passed.

  Hurley clung to the shadows as he crossed the street, darting down the long driveway to the back of the building.

  There had once been rumors circulating that it was Red himself who hadn’t wanted to sell the building, out of guilt for not carrying out his father’s wishes. It was said that he’d actually beaten a man to death with his bare fists in this very building after he’d approached Red with a plan to buy the funeral parlor and reopen the business.

  A full moon cast a white light over the backyard of the funeral home, providing Hurley with just enough illumination. There was a large, two-car garage made of stone, its door padlocked and chained. Hurley wondered if there were hearses still stored inside.

  The deceased had been taken through a bulkhead into the basement, where the work was done on them. At first glance, the bulkhead appeared to be secured tightly, but on closer inspection . . .

  Hurley’s heart skipped a beat when he saw that the padlock wasn’t closed completely.

  As quietly as he could, he removed the heavy lock, carefully pulled open the heavy wooden door, and slipped down the stone steps into the darkened cellar.

  The basement was dimly illuminated by the light of the moon, filtering through the narrow windows in the upper sections of the walls. It was clearly the old work area, and from the looks of it, it was exactly as Quillan had left it. There were dusty bottles of chemicals stacked upon equally dusty counters and a metal embalming table with a workspace covered by the tools of the trade, still laid out as if waiting for the next customer.

  Hurley felt his excitement begin to flag. The dust hadn’t been disturbed. He left the workroom, pushing aside a tattered, red velvet curtain.

  Hurley guessed that this room was the showroom—it was still packed with coffins of all sizes. He walked among them, his thoughts going to that macabre place that imagined him lying inside one of these things, lowered down into the ground, and covered up with dirt.

  A chill ran down his spine.

  The coffin to his left suddenly opened with an eerie shriek, combining with his own scream of terror as he recoiled from the sight before him.

  A man was climbing out of the coffin, a large man with curly red hair, eyes wild with madness, his clothes torn and covered with blood.

  A man wielding an ax.

  The coffin rested atop a wheeled display cart, and it tipped over as the man threw his legs over the side, spilling his bulk to the floor.

  Hurley managed to get hold of his own senses, recognizing the jabbering man struggling on the floor before him. He was ranting about monsters, and how he wasn’t going to let them take him.

  “Red O’Neill,” Hurley yelled.

  Red froze. His eyes seemed to glow in the darkness of the room as he stared intently at Jake.

  “Not gonna let you take me,” he blubbered, his voice trembling. There were tears streaming down his freckled face.

  “It’s all right, Red,” Hurley said, holding up his hands. “I ain’t gonna hurt you.”

  Red suddenly jumped to his feet, rushing toward Hurley with ax raised.

  Hurley jumped back, and pulled another casket on a wheeled display table between himself and O’Neill.

  “Cut it out, Red,” he said, trying to keep it familiar. “You’re gonna kill somebody with that thing if you’re not careful.”

  The words finally seemed to have an effect. Red slowly lowered the blade and eyed the stranger in front of him.

  “You’re not a monster,” he said, as realization began to sink in.

  “Nope, not a monster,” Hurley said, with a friendly smile. “Just somebody who’s been lookin’ for you. Everybody thinks you’re dead.”

  O’Neill seemed to be thinking about what Hurley was telling him.

  “Everybody’s dead,” he said, his gaze going to the floor. Hurley had to wonder what he was seeing there, as an expression of terror began to bloom. “The monsters came out of the dark and killed ’em all.”

  “Yeah, but you made it out alive,” Hurley reminded him. “You survived, Red. You got to a car and got away.”

  “They got to Floyd outside,” he muttered, remembering. “His blood was all over the front seat . . .”

  “You survived, Red,” Hurley stressed again, hoping to pull the man from his nightmare memory.

  “I survived?” he asked, looking up, and slowly turning toward the tipped-over coffin where he’d been hiding. “I don’t have to be in there.”

  “Nope, not unless you plan on dyin’ soon.”

  Red looked back at Hurley.

  “No, I survived,” he said with intensity, his eyes beginning to clear. “Everybody else is dead . . . but I’m alive.”

  “Yeah, you are.”

  He still held the ax, and brought it higher. “Who . . . who did this?” he asked. “Who killed my men . . . Who’s responsible for those . . . those things?”

  Hurley raised his hands again in a sign of submission.

  “I don’t know,” he said honestly. “That’s somethin’ we’re gonna have to figure out.”

  “Yeah,” Red agreed, turning away, heading through the curtain and back into the embalming room.

  Hurley followed, watching as Red drunkenly climbed the bulkhead steps, dragging his ax behind him as he headed outside.

  “Gonna find out who’s responsible,” he heard the Irish crime boss growl.

  “And make them wish they’d never been born.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  —

  Bill watched the Delacorte Hotel from his perch atop the office building across the way. The image below of the front entrance was slightly blurry so he used the center dial on the binoculars to make it clearer.

  “You okay with those?” Lester asked, leaning back against the base of a water tower, his communications gear laid out in front of him.

  Normally it would have been only Lester up here on the roof in charge of surveillance, but with one of the kid’s flippers out of commission, he needed some assistance.

  Which Lester hated to admit.

  “I’m fine with it, kid,” Bill told him. “Relax, this isn’t my first time on a stakeout.”

  “I don’t mean nothin’ by it,” Lester said. “Just hate being treated like an invalid is all.”

  Bill took his eyes off the scene for a moment, glancing over his shoulder at Lester, who was struggling to adjust his sling.

  “From the looks of it, you got stuck pretty good,” he said. “Give yourself a chance to heal up. Remember, we ain’t all got constitutions like the boss.”

  “Don’t I know it,” Lester agreed, as Bill returned his attention to the street below them.

  “Remember that bit a bad business with the Bombay death cults? He was stabbed like, what, twenty times in the chest, and still—”

  There was movement across the street.

  “Hold the phone,” Bill announced. “I think we’ve got somebody comin’ out.”

  He watched as Fazzina came through the door, one of his goons nipping at his heels. They headed toward a dark sedan parked out in front, but Fazzina stopped, turning to motion at someone up the street.

  “He just gave somebody a signal,” Bill said.

  “Who?” Lester asked, already flipping the switches on the radio to call the boss.

  “Fazzina. He’s in his car now, but he just signaled to somebody up the street.”

  Bill turned the binoculars in that general direction, and caught sight of a truck driving down the street toward the building. It looked like a delivery truck.

  And the man had to wonder, what kind of a delivery would somebody be making now?

  —

  “Can you believe the pair on that guy?” Salvatore Decante said to his boys, but loud enough for the other bosses to hear.

  McDonough leaned against the bar, silently staring into his drink, as if looking for an answer.

  In a way, that punk Fazzina wasn’t too far off track. They were going to need
to band together if an opposing force was going to try to take a bite out of what was theirs.

  Decante looked over to Zenna, who had taken a seat at the head of the table. He had picked up the rosary beads that Fazzina had so disrespectfully thrown to the floor and had laid them on the table.

  “Big balls or not,” Zenna said, moving the black beads around with his finger, “the guy might’ve had a point.”

  He looked up, his dark eyes intense.

  “I was thinkin’ the very same thing,” McDonough slurred. He moved from the bar to approach the table.

  Decante walked to the table and retrieved his rosary. “Okay, if we’re all thinking the same thing, then what next?”

  He worked the beads through his fingers.

  “A mutual understanding,” Zenna said.

  “What? Like a peace treaty?” McDonough suggested with a laugh.

  Zenna shrugged. “Until we figure who was responsible for taking Red out, I see it as being good for everybody.”

  Decante would never have believed it possible, but here it was: three of the city’s biggest sons of bitches coming together and agreeing to play nice.

  Maybe there really is a freakin’ Santy Claus, he thought, returning his rosary beads to the watch pocket of his vest.

  “I’d say we have a consensus here,” he said.

  “What about Fazzina?” McDonough asked. “Should we call him back or . . .”

  “I don’t trust that guy,” Zenna said with a sneer. “The way he came in here thinkin’ he could call the shots. I say we let him dangle.”

  Here’s the Dominic Zenna everybody knows, Decante thought. If there was one of them who should be made to dangle, it was him.

  But Decante accepted his words with a nod and a shrug. “Let ’im dangle, then.”

  McDonough tossed what remained of his latest drink back and smacked his lips. “Gentlemen, I believe this calls for a toast,” he announced.

  Zenna sneered, but in a display of unity, agreed. “A toast,” he said.

  “A toast,” Decante repeated, motioning to McDonough to bring them glasses and some booze. He looked over to see that Zenna was watching him with cold, dead eyes, and Decante returned the stare. They stood there like that, eyeing each other, until McDonough returned with the necessary items to seal the deal.