by Lee Child
“The one sentence,” Angie insisted. “Repeat that one—”
“He said, ‘I don’t want to see him no more.’ ”
“Meaning what?”
“Well, I don’t think he wants you to move, Ang,” Turnip chuckled.
“And you don’t take me out, he’ll blow up the Camaro. What’s wrong with this guy? Did you tell him they made a lot of Camaros?”
You had to be half a fag to drink Tab, but Turnip liked the taste. “In fact, Ang, they ain’t made that many Super Yenkos.”
Angie narrowed his eyes and sat back in the orange booth.
Silence hung heavy. Soon Turnip wondered if his friend could kill him with a plastic spoon covered with chicken liver.
“I’m saying, that’s all.”
Angie tapped his fingers, one after the next, and Turnip began to squirm.
“Ang,” he said finally, palms up. “What the fuck…”
Angie adjusted his eyeglasses. The color began to return to his face.
“Let me guess your plan,” Turnip said. “You let me guess?”
“Yeah. Go guess,” he replied, dabbing at the corners of his mouth with his thumb and forefinger. He’d noticed the knockout behind the counter. A schnoz on her, but those dark curls and like an hourglass under the Bagel Nosh uniform. A streak of mischief too: He could tell she liked that he wouldn’t return when they were done.
He had to ask if she had a friend. A friend with a car didn’t mind driving Turnip down to Narrows Gate after.
“You want to find out where they got another ’69 Camaro,” Turnip said, sucking on a lemon slice.
Angie stood. “No. Jesus…”
Looking up, Turnip frowned. “What then?”
“When I come back, you tell me how Soldato’s connected,” he said. “Let me know if there’s somebody maybe who wouldn’t want to, you know, make a move, given his misstep.”
THOUGH IT WAS a short ride under the Hudson from Little Italy, Narrows Gate no longer drew much attention from the Five Families. The Gigentis still had a slice via the creaking waterfront, but the shipyards had closed, the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company moved, Venus Pencil too, and now the city’s population, once as high as sixty thousand, was down to less than half that. And half of those left were melanzane who’d turned the projects into Little Harlem.
Seeing the Mob now thought the place an ass pimple, Soldato had moved in and set up his own operation, running a numbers racket that catered to the old-time Italians, the coloreds, and the Irlandese. Soon, come eight thirty at night and almost everybody left in Narrows Gate was throwing elbows, grabbing the bulldog edition of the Daily News for the total mutual handle at the track to see if the last three numbers matched their bet.
Given it’s a thousand-to-one shot to hit on the nose, Soldato needed a rake to collect, taking in maybe two large a week in small change and paying out less than 7 percent. Most of that went to his army of bookies, all blue-haired grandmothers who knew everybody on the block who wanted in. Somebody gave him shit he’d send Pinhead to bruise her sensible. Grandma in ShopRite with a fat lip and a shiner, and soon everybody’s back in line, the thing almost running itself.
Angie knew the donnaccia with the Ping-Pong ball at Muzzie’s was a sign that Soldato wanted to expand. But the Gigentis sent hookers through the Lincoln Tunnel for action all over the county: One Saturday 4:15 a.m., Angie and Turnip counted sixteen zoccolas waiting for a New York–bound bus outside a motel only a mile from Muzzie’s platform.
Clear, Soldato asked nobody what he could do.
Angie got his meet at two thirty in the morning at Sal Rossi’s on Houston Street with six feet of poured concrete named Bobo. Him and his giant melon coming out of the kitchen and Angie wondered if he’d made the right play.
Adjusting his sunglasses, Bobo passed on the handshake and said, “What?”
Angie was no pigeon. “It’s about propriety,” he said.
Bobo went, “Uh?”
“He put the puttana two blocks from a school. Muzzie’s is the place. It used to be a nice restaurant. Long row of brownstones around the corner. Two, three generations in the same building.”
“Muzzie’s.”
“Now you got mothers going by with their little kids, teenagers hanging around… It’s not a class move and people are thinking it’s you.”
“Me?”
“The family.” Jesus.
“Yeah, right, and…”
“And the cops come, and the newspapers,” Angie said, “and soon they’re closing down the York Motel and half the whorehouses on Tonnelle Avenue. In time, it blows over and he moves in on your territory.”
Bobo thought. Then he said, “Who is this guy?”
“Soldato. Right now he’s under the protection of nobody. But after he makes his move, he seeks an accommodation…”
“And you got a hard-on for this guy why?”
Angie sat back and lifted his palms. “Why?” he asked, feigning surprise. “Because he figured this. You and me. So he tells some guy he doesn’t want to see me anymore.”
“Maybe you hop a Greyhound or something.”
“No good. Not for the long run.”
Bobo agreed. Then he rubbed his chin. “You want in?”
“Hell no. It’s yours and God bless you.”
“But what?”
“One, Muzzie’s goes back to scungilli and calamari.”
“Two is…?”
“Nobody misses this guy.”
Bobo couldn’t decide on his own, Angie knew, but how the big guy left the table told him he was going to get his way.
HE WAITED UNTIL “Mala Femmina” ended on the jukebox and joined Turnip at Sal Rossi’s horseshoe bar.
“So?” Turnip asked.
“It’s done. You’re off the hook. Drive in peace.”
Turnip smiled his relief.
“So what happens?”
Angie said, “Stay out of the Grotto until I tell you.”
They wandered onto Houston. Traffic to the FDR was backed up to Mulberry Street.
“Ang, I’m surprised at that guy, to tell you the truth.”
“How so?” They turned up their leather collars in unison.
“If he gives you a hard time, I’m sitting there,” Turnip said. “I can put two between the third and fourth buttons before he knows what hit him.”
“Not likely,” Angie said as they headed toward the garage on Elizabeth Street. “The guy at the bar with the wavy hair, black suit, resoled loafers? Playing with his onyx pinkie ring?”
Turnip frowned. “Three stools down? You’re shitting me.”
“Carrying double. On the right ankle and the ribs.”
“How’d you—your back was to him. How’d you make him?”
“My guy’s sunglasses,” Angie said. “Plus your guy got up when the genius scratched his chin.”
Turnip shook his head in wonder. “How you like that.”
As they walked in silence toward the Camaro, Turnip pondered how much his friend could achieve if he had a speck of ambition.
PINHEAD WENT PAST the bar and poured himself a big cup of hot clam broth, dropping in a couple shots of Tabasco. Screaming at the widows gave him a scratchy throat, so he threw it down, thinking a Schlitz chaser.
“Yo, Pin,” said Milney, the night bartender. He wiggled a crooked finger.
Pin said, “What?”
Milney leaned over. “The senior center on Fourth Street,” he whispered. “Some bullshit in the lounge. Take a cab, but go.”
Pin understood and he threw Sally B a fin.
Milney slipped it over the half a yard Turnip gave him a half hour ago.
Outside the Grotto, Pin flagged the first cab that rolled the corner. He didn’t notice Angie behind the wheel.
Soon, they were on their way toward the Jersey City end of the viaduct, taking the cobblestone road behind the last horse stable in Narrows Gate.
“Angie, you got some set of coglioni on you, y
ou know that?” Pin said. “But I admire that. I do. Tells me we can do something, a guy like you.”
Angie looked in the rearview, seeing if the barbed wire he’d used to tie Pin down was making a mess of the vinyl seat.
“Pin, there are five stages of receiving catastrophic news,” he said. “You blew through anger—wisely, if you ask me—and you’re bargaining now. Which means depression is next.”
“Hey, Ang, smart is smart, but sometimes what’s smart in books—”
“You don’t hurry, there’s no time for acceptance.”
Fourteen minutes later, Pinhead went over the rusted rail atop the viaduct and landed two hundred and thirty feet below, smack on a chain-link fence outside the bus terminal, the cops trying to figure how the barbed wire got hooked so thorough around the weasel’s neck and hands.
“SYMMETRY,” SAID ANGIE as he entered Muzzie’s, old Maxwell House coffee can in his hand. “I love it.”
Muzzie and Little Muzzie came from the kitchen. The asbestos in their hair and on their faces reminded Turnip that soon they’d be coated in flour, making fresh linguine for the seafood and flaming-ass sauce.
Turnip sat next to his friend at the bar and pointed to the nothing where the platform had been. One of the Muzzolinis had spackled the holes.
“What happened to Miss Ping-Pong?” he asked.
Little Muzzie, who now feared Angie more than ever, shrugged. “I heard the Gigentis are opening some new clubs on Tonnelle Avenue.”
“Could be,” Angie said. “You of the mood to pour a little sambuca?”
Big Muzzie stepped up. “We’re closed—”
“No problem,” said Little Muzz, going quick to the round bar, yanking back the canvas cover, and coming up with a bottle. With Pinhead two weeks dead and Soldato missing, Little Muzz was looking to the future.
Turnip smelled the anise through the cap.
Two shot glasses, and Little Muzzie retreated as the friends set their elbows down to raise a toast.
“To what?” Turnip said.
“To Soldato,” Angie replied, “and to being careful what you wish for.”
Turnip didn’t get it, but he sipped anyway, expecting a coffee bean to bump his lip. When he put down the little glass, he said, “So you’re going to tell me?”
“Tell you…”
“What’s in the coffee can?”
Turnip shook it and heard something rattle inside.
“You like to guess,” Angie said. “Guess.”
A minute later, Turnip said, “I could use a fuckin’ clue, Ang.”
“What did Soldato say?”
“He said he didn’t want to see you no more.”
“Which did not mean…”
Suddenly, Turnip recoiled.
“Bingo,” said Angie.
“Madonna mio, Ang.” Then he whispered, “You took his eyes?”
Figuring the Muzzies were peeping, Angie nodded slow.
Turnip blessed himself.
Angie said, “Nobody puts you on the spot, il mio amico.”
His head spinning, Turnip asked, “Ang, dead or alive?”
Angie dipped his little finger in the sambuca. “What do you think?”
THE CONSUMERS
BY DENNIS LEHANE
It wasn’t that Alan didn’t love Nicole. She was possibly the only person he did love, certainly the only one he trusted. And after he’d beaten her or called her all kinds of unforgivable things in one of his black rages, he’d drop to his knees to beg her forgiveness. He’d weep like a child abandoned in the Arctic, he’d swear he loved her the way knights loved maidens in old poems, the way people loved each other in war zones or during tsunamis—crystallized love, pure and passionate, boundless and a little out of control, but undeniable.
She believed this for a long time—it wasn’t just the money that kept her in the marriage; the makeup sex was epic, and Alan was definitely easy on the eyes. But then one day—the day he knocked her out in the kitchen, actually—she realized she didn’t care about his reasons anymore, she didn’t care how much he loved her, she just wanted him dead.
His apology for laying her out in the kitchen was two round-trip tickets to Paris, for her and a friend. So she took the trip with Lana, her best friend, and told her that she’d decided to have her husband killed. Lana, who thought Alan was an even bigger asshole than Nicole did, said it shouldn’t be too much of a problem.
“I know a guy,” she said.
“You know a guy?” Nicole looked from the Pont Neuf to Lana. “A guy who kills people?”
Lana shrugged.
Turned out the guy had helped Lana’s family a few years back. Lana’s family owned supermarkets down south, and the guy had preserved the empire by dealing with a labor organizer named Gustavo Inerez. Gustavo left his house to pick up training pants for his three-year-old and never came back. The guy Lana’s family had hired called himself Kineavy, no other name given.
Not long after Nicole and Lana returned to Boston, Lana arranged the meeting. Kineavy met Nicole at an outdoor restaurant on Long Wharf. They sat looking out at boats in the harbor on a soft summer day.
“I don’t know how to do this,” she said.
“You’re not supposed to, Mrs. Walford. That’s why you hire me.”
“I meant I don’t know how to hire somebody to do it.”
Kineavy lit a cigarette, crossed one leg over his knee. “You hire somebody to clean your house?”
“Yes.”
“It’s like that—you’re paying somebody to do what you don’t want to do yourself. Still has to get done.”
“But I’m not asking you to clean my house.”
“Aren’t you?”
Hard to tell if he was smiling a bit when he said it because he’d been dragging on his cigarette. He wore Maui Jim wraparounds with brown lenses, so she couldn’t see his eyes, but he was clearly a good-looking guy, maybe forty, sandy hair, sharp cheekbones and jawline. He was about six feet tall, looked like he worked out, maybe jogged, but didn’t devote his life to it.
“It feels so odd,” she said. “Like, this can’t be my life, can it? People don’t really do these kinds of things, do they?”
“Yet,” he said, “they do.”
“How did you get into this line of work?”
“A woman kept asking me questions, and one day I snapped.”
Now he did smile, but it was the kind of smile you gave people who searched for exact change in the express line at Whole Foods.
“How do I know you’re not a cop?”
“You don’t really.” He exhaled a slim stream of smoke; he was one of those rare smokers who could still make it look elegant. The last time Nicole had smoked a cigarette, the World Trade Center had been standing, but now she had to resist the urge to buy a pack.
“Why do you do this for a living?”
“I don’t do it for a living. It doesn’t pay enough. But it rounds off the edges.”
“Of what?”
“Poverty.” He stubbed his cigarette out in the black plastic ashtray. “Why do you want your husband dead?”
“That’s private.”
“Not from me it’s not.” He removed his sunglasses and stared across the table. His eyes were the barely blue of new metal. “If you lie, I’ll know it. And I’ll walk.”
“I’ll find somebody else.”
“Where?” he said. “Under the hit-man hyperlink on Craigslist?”
She looked out at the water for a moment because it was hard to say the words without a violent tremble overtaking her lower lip.
Then she looked back at him, jaw firm. “He beats me.”
His eyes and face remained stone still, as if he’d been replaced with a photograph of himself. “Where? You look perfectly fine to me.”
That was because Alan didn’t hit her hard every time. Usually, he just held tight to her hair while he flicked his fingers off her chin and nose or twisted the flesh over her hip. In the last couple years, though,
after the markets collapsed and Alan and men like him were blamed for it in some quarters, he’d often pop the cork on his depthless self-loathing and unleash on her. He’d buried a fist in her abdomen on three different occasions, lifted her off the floor by her throat, rammed the heel of his hand into her temple hard enough for her to hear the ring of a distant alarm clock for the rest of the day, and laid her out with a surprise punch to the back of the head. When she came to from that one, she was sprawled on the kitchen floor. He’d left a box of Kleenex and an ice pack by her head to show he was sorry.
Alan was always sorry. Whenever he hit her, it seemed to shock him. His pupils would dilate, his mouth would form an O, he’d look at his hand like he was surprised to find it attached to his wrist.
After, he’d fill the bedroom with roses, hire a car to take her to a spa for a day. Then, after this last time, he’d sent her and Lana to Paris.
She told this to Kineavy. Then she told him some more. “He punched me in the lower back once because I didn’t move out of his path to the liquor cart fast enough. Right where the spine meets the ass? You ever try to sit when you’re bruised there? He took a broomstick to the backs of my legs another time. But mostly he likes to punch me in the head, where all my hair is.”
“You do have a lot of it,” Kineavy said.
It was her most striking attribute, even more than her tits, which were 100 percent Nicole and had yet to sag; or her ass, which, truth be told, had sprouted some cellulite lately but still looked great for a woman closing in on thirty-six; or even her smile, which could turn the heads of an entire cocktail party if she entered the room wearing it.
Her hair trumped all of it. It was the dark of red wine and fell to her shoulders. When she pulled it back, she looked regal. When she straightened it, she looked dangerous. When she let it fall naturally, with its tousled waves and anarchic curls, she looked like a wet dream sent to douse a five-alarm fire.
She told Kineavy, “He hits me mostly on the head because the hair covers the bruises.”
“And you can’t just leave him?”
She shook her head and admitted something that shamed her. “Prenup.”
“And you like living rich.”