The room was ablaze and the heat was increasing. Eddie turned to face Caradonna and was surprised when the bigger man hit him with a powerful punch to the jaw. Eddie staggered back, impressed by the man’s strength. Don’t go down, Eddie told himself as he absorbed a second savage blow to the face. Take his best shot and attack.
Caradonna was moving forward with an overhand right when Eddie ducked under the punch, spun behind him, and drove his fist into the man’s right kidney and then his left. They were devastating blows.
Caradonna arched his back in pain and sunk to his knees. He looked up at Eddie as the flames burned higher and smoke filled the room. Had the window not been wide open, the conditions would have been intolerable. Neither of them could last much longer, but neither of them seemed willing to retreat. Caradonna was struggling to rise when a support beam in the burning ceiling broke loose and swung in a wide arc downward. The heavy beam hit Eddie on the back of the head, knocking him down before it collapsed on his back and drove him face-first into the floor. Eddie didn’t move.
Caradonna struggled to his feet, stunned. His battle with Eddie the Kid was over, with an unsatisfactory ending. He walked to the open window, picked up his canvas bag, put his foot on the sill, and prepared to jump out. He looked back and noticed the Kid’s sleeve had caught on fire. This is no way for a brave man to die, Gianni said to himself, and stepped back into the inferno. He ran to Eddie’s side, removed the beam from his back, threw him over his shoulder, and went out the window.
The fire department found Eddie on the sidewalk three blocks away from the burning building. He was unconscious, breathing, and alone.
Chapter 30
A Matter of Life or Death
Wednesday, October 16, 1974 (One Month Later)
1:00 P.M.
Eddie, Patty, Shannon, and Peggy and Ryan O’Toole sat by Mickey’s bedside at Mass General Hospital.
“The doctor said Mickey’s brain is functioning normally,” Mickey’s mother said.
“That’s the first time that’s ever happened,” Eddie said, and everyone laughed.
Mickey lightly patted Eddie’s bandaged left forearm with his own right hand. The hand was in a cast that ended at his right shoulder. His left arm was also in a cast. His torso was in a cast and his entire head was swathed in bandages.
“You two look like you’ve been to war,” Shannon said.
“A seven-day war,” Eddie said.
“That’s all it was?” Shannon asked.
“The day Jimmy Gorgeous was shot until the day of the fire was one only week,” Eddie said.
“Life can change in heartbeat,” Patty said.
Eddie looked at Shannon and Mickey, who had been looking at each other since Mickey woke up two weeks ago. Lucky. They had a second chance at life. Shannon would be loved, never to be abused again. Mickey would be loved, never to be his partner again. He had sustained too much damage to continue fighting on the streets. Shannon will be his new partner, Eddie thought.
Sean Collins had been charged with manslaughter and Adrianne Resnick had pleaded justifiable homicide on his behalf. And she was going to win.
Eddie glanced at Mickey’s parents. He had no idea what the future held for them, or even if they were happy. Their minds were blank slates to him. He only knew that they were haters.
Patty Perlmutter was smiling, her depression having been replaced by gratitude that Eddie was alive and had been saved by—of all people—the man who had threatened to kill him. She was Patty again, and it didn’t get any better than that for Eddie.
A twinge of pain in his thigh reminded Eddie that Otis Perry, the Helter Skelter man, had been killed three weeks ago by a fellow inmate at Concord Prison. His murderer had used a tightly rolled lid from a large can of tuna as a dagger and plunged it into Perry’s neck thirty-two times. His motive, the killer said, was that he liked Sharon Tate, the actress killed by the Manson family seven years ago. It didn’t matter to the killer that Perry had had nothing to do with Tate’s murder. People killed for strange reasons, and sometimes for no reason at all.
The Shotgun Man had reasons to kill, but Eddie accepted none of them as justification for the premeditated murders the man committed. He believed the Shotgun Man deserved a murderer’s punishment, even though he had saved him from a fiery death. Eddie told the FBI everything he knew about Gianni Caradonna, including where he could be found. But America had no extradition policy with Italy so the Shotgun Man was out of the reach. When Eddie was asked if he would be interested in bringing American justice to Sicily—unofficially—he said he would consider the offer.
Gianni Caradonna traveled through Canada and returned to Sicily using the same basic route his grandfather had taken more than fifty years before. In Catania, he purchased an old pickup truck for cash and drove the sixty miles to Vizzini, arriving after dark. He went directly to the old farmhouse, passing Rosa and Marco’s house on his way up the hill. His headlights illuminated Marco’s truck in the Marcellas’ front yard, and Gianni was pleased to see some things had not changed. He pictured the beautiful Rosa and imagined her married with children. He smiled at the memory of her and wished his life had been different. He reached his old farmhouse, and using a flashlight, walked up the slope to the family cemetery behind the house. He shined a beam on each of the eight headstones: two grandparents, two parents, two sisters, one brother, and a best friend. All gone. All dust. All avenged. He sat, opened his bag, removed a single-barreled shotgun, and put it on the ground next to him. Using the bag as a pillow, he stretched out his long legs and stared at the sky. He was not far from the place where he had made love to Rosa. He wished he could have that feeling again, but it was not meant to be. His was a life of death and the killing was done. There was nothing more for him to do. He could not live with what he had done, or without what he had lost. In the morning he would join his family, but not before he saw the dawn of one new day … when all things seemed possible.
He awoke at sunrise and immediately noticed what he had not seen in the darkness of night. The eight graves were well tended and flowers grew around them. Someone had been there regularly to care for them—probably Marco. Soon Marco would have another grave to tend. Gianni walked to the barn, glanced at his old workshop inside, and then picked up the shovel he had used to bury his family so long ago. It was rusty but it would still do the job. He walked up the hill and drove the shovel into the ground next to Giorgio’s grave.
An hour later, covered with sweat, he pulled himself out of the hole. He had much more digging to do.
“What are you doing, Signore?” a child’s voice asked, startling Gianni. He turned to see a small boy, perhaps five or six years old, holding flowers and looking up at him.
“He’s digging his own grave,” a woman’s voice said. Gianni saw Rosa standing behind the boy, looking at him with love, with tears in her eyes. She was more beautiful than ever. Her shining black hair reached her shoulders. Her body was as he remembered it, only more voluptuous.
“Why is he doing that?” the boy asked his mother.
“Ask him,” she said. “It’s his grave.”
“Why are you digging your own grave, signore?” the boy said. “Are you going to die soon?”
“I’m not sure,” Gianni said.
“I hope you don’t die,” the boy said. “But if you do, I will tend your grave. I tend all these graves with my mother. We come almost every day.”
Gianni cleared his throat. “Why?” he asked the handsome boy.
“These are the graves of my family,” he told Gianni. “My grandparents, aunts, and uncles.”
“And where is your father?” Gianni asked, afraid of the answer.
“He went to fight a war before I was born,” the boy said. “Mama said he might come back.”
“Unless he is dead already,” Rosa said, looking directly into Gianni’s eyes and hoping for an answer.
When she saw only confusion she put her arm around the boy’s shoulder.
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“Come,” she said. “We must leave this man to his work and his thoughts.”
“What is your name, little one?” Gianni called after them.
“Gianni,” the boy said proudly. “Like my father.”
The Shotgun Man watched them walk away until tears blurred his vision. He slumped to the ground. He had lived so many years without love, could he love now? He had fought so many battles.
Could he live in peace now?
When the sun set in the evening he was still sitting there with one foot in the grave, thinking about the sins of his past, his present love for a woman and for a child … and his unfinished business with Eddie the Kid.
The End
Keep reading for a sneak peek at the new Eddie Perlmutter novel coming in January 2012, Boca Daze.
Prologue
NOVEMBER 20, 1943
CENTRAL PACIFIC, WORLD WAR II
The Japanese war flag—sixteen red rays bursting from a rising sun in a field of white—flew over the coral island of Tarawa. At dawn, twelve Allied battleships, sixty-six destroyers, seventeen aircraft carriers, and thirty-five thousand troops launched a withering attack on the tiny atoll. Seventy-six hours later, the Rising Sun went down, Old Glory went up, and thousands of soldiers, from both sides, lay dead. Corporal Herb Brown was not one of them.
Brown, a twenty-one-year-old marine from Providence, Rhode Island, jumped from an amphibious vehicle into knee-deep water off Red Beach One and waded ashore. By the time he reached the beach, eleven of the twenty men from his ATV were dead. Those who survived … attacked. A marine running next to Brown stepped on a land mine and disintegrated. Brown saw the dead man’s bloody dog tags flutter to the sand and bent to pick them up. A bullet tore through the front of his helmet, knocking it off his head, sending him sprawling on his back. He rolled onto his stomach, facing the ocean. Blood from the gouge on the top of his head trickled into his eyes but he was able to see his helmet a few feet away. A hole was in the front and another in the back. A bullet had passed through his “steel pot,” seared his scalp, and missed his brain by a millimeter.
He jammed the M1 helmet on his head and struggled to all fours. Immediately machine gun bullets slammed into his buttocks; two in the left cheek and two in the right. He sprawled facedown into the sand and heard himself scream. A body fell next to him. Brown turned to his right, wiping sand from his eyes and spitting it from his mouth. Private Hugh Stone lay on his back, mouth open, gasping. Stone’s insides were outside and he was holding them in his blood-soaked hands. He looked at Brown and winced. They were fellow marines, but not friends. In boot camp Stone, an uneducated kid from West Virginia, referred to Brown as a Yankee Jew boy. Brown, much bigger and stronger than Stone, responded with a one-punch knockout of the smaller man. Their master sergeant enforced a truce, ordering them to “hate each other after the war.”
Brown grabbed Stone’s shirt collar and began dragging him to the ocean. Brown dug his elbows into the sand and swiveled his hips, painfully squirming toward the shoreline. When he tasted salt on his lips, he knew he was at the water’s edge. He felt his fingers being pried from Stone’s collar and heard, “This one’s alive. This one’s dead.” He closed his eyes, not knowing who was who.
Herb Brown lived. Hugh Stone died along with fourteen hundred Allied soldiers and nearly five thousand Japanese troops in the three-day battle. When the war ended, marine general Holland Smith was asked if Tarawa had been worth the losses, and he said, “No.” When an investigating marine lieutenant asked Brown if he had been shot in the buttocks while retreating, Brown’s answer was also “No,” but he added a string of curses directed at the officer. His insubordination cost him a medal but he had no regrets.
He returned to civilian life in 1945, married Joan Livingston, a girl he had been dating before the war, and they started a family. He went to work for a clothing distributor in Providence, Rhode Island, and eventually bought the company. Throughout his career he won the respect of the competition, the local unions, and the Providence Mafia. No one ever asked Herb Brown again if he had retreated. Whenever he thought of Tarawa, he wondered why he had lived while so many others had died.
MAY 17, 1980
LIBERTY CITY, MIAMI
Clarence “Big Dog” Walken had just finished unwittingly impregnating his seventeen-year-old girlfriend, Gladys Hightower, when he got a call from Clifford “Free Man” Foster telling him a riot was happening in Liberty City. Big Dog got out of bed, dressed quickly, and hurried to meet Foster without saying goodbye to Gladys.
Free Man and Big Dog ran the nine blocks west to Sixty-second and Seventeenth … hoping to do some serious looting. Big Dog needed a TV, Foster wanted a stereo. They wore their black-on-silver Overtown Outlaws jackets.
Look like the goddamn Oakland Raiders.
They found another Overtown Outlaw already at the riot.
“What’s happening?”
“People goin’ nuts … jury found them cops not guilty of killin’ Arthur McDuffie.”
“McDuffie that motorcycle-ridin’ mothuh-fuckah crazy?”
“Yeah, cops stopped him for speedin’ then broke his head with nightsticks. Not guilty my black ass.”
“Whatchu expect from an all-white jury?”
It ain’t fair.
Big Dog shrugged. “Where the TVs at?”
Suddenly the crowd roared. Big Dog saw an old Dodge sedan careen into the intersection with a white boy at the wheel, another in the passenger’s seat, and a white girl in back. They looked like teenagers. The mob was pelting the car with rocks and bottles. The driver lost control and the Dodge swerved, hit a young black girl standing in the street, and slammed into a lamp-post.
Big Dog watched as the three white kids were pulled out of the Dodge and attacked by black rioters. The white boy who had been driving was immediately knocked unconscious by several blows to the head. The crowd left him and turned on the other male passenger, beating him mercilessly. Big Dog saw a middle-aged black man wearing a cabby’s hat pull the screaming white girl out of harm’s way.
Gunshots split the air and the crowd cringed. Big Dog saw the badly beaten white kid who hadn’t even been driving stagger backward with blood spurting out of his body. When the barrage of bullets stopped, the boy crumpled to the street like a bloody bag of laundry. Big Dog didn’t care. He felt nothing except a sharp pain in his chest. He looked down.
Aw, shit.
The front of his Overtown Outlaws jacket was leaking blood. He’d been hit by a stray bullet.
Now that ain’t fair.
Big Dog fell to his knees, crumpled face-first on the pavement, and died. He was twenty years old … the same age as the white boy lying dead in the same intersection.
Nine months later Gladys Hightower gave birth to a baby boy she named Clarence, after his father. The Overtown Outlaws took care of mother and child in their own way. They had Gladys work as a prostitute to feed her baby and her drug habit, and they made Clarence’s education a gang responsibility. The streets of Liberty City became his classroom.
When his mother died of a drug overdose in 1991, Clarence could not read or write. But he could disassemble a .38 caliber handgun, clean it, and reassemble it as fast as any other gangbanger. He could cut pure cocaine into rocks of crack and knew a brick weighed a kilo and a kilo weighed 2.2 pounds. He grew up huge and could fight with his fists, feet, teeth, knife, or gun. He was a pure gangbanger; programmed from cradle to crib.
When the Liberty City drug wars erupted in 1998, Clarence was the Outlaws’ ultimate weapon. At six foot six, 305 pounds, he was terrifying and fought like a wild animal.
That mothuh-fuckah vicious … like a wolf.
When the wars ended, Clarence Walken Jr. was the leader of the pack. He had been born without a father, and some say he had been born without a soul.
He became known as Mad Dog Walken.
Chapter 1
BOCA KNIGHTS AND OTHER SUPERHEROES
MID-JANUARY 200
6
Some people say I’m a senior-citizen superhero. I’m not. Superheroes have special powers. I have special needs. Superman has X-ray vision. I’m nearsighted. Batman has a Batmobile. I have a Mini Cooper. Spider-Man spins large webs. I have an enlarged prostate. I was Boston’s most decorated and demoted policeman in my prime and the best marksman on the force. Now, I’m just a sixty-one-year-old ex–Boston cop trying to adapt to life’s changes. I retired to Boca Raton three years ago, and after solving local crimes and rescuing two damsels in distress, I became a private detective. A young newspaper reporter looking for a story dubbed me the Boca Knight, and the name stuck. I’m a little guy, barely five foot six, 165 pounds. But I’m fearless and that makes me bigger.
I had just sat down at the counter at Kugel’s Boca Deli and ordered a cup of coffee when an old man tapped my shoulder and asked if I was the Boca Knight. I nodded. “Eddie Perlmutter,” I said, and held out my hand.
“Herb Brown.” His hand felt like old iron. “I’m a big fan of yours.”
“I’m a big fan of the US Marines,” I said, pointing to the SEMPER FI insignia on his cap. “You live in Boca, Herb?”
“I retired here thirteen years ago.”
“Enjoying your retirement?”
“Not really,” he said. “My wife died five years ago.”
“My wife died over twenty years ago.”
We retreated to our coffee cups, both of us thinking of lost love.
“When were you in the Marines?” I asked.
Eddie the Kid Page 9