Where It Hurts

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  I don’t know what it was I thought I’d heard, but whatever my sleeping brain perceived it as, I knew it wasn’t good. I swiped my gun off the nightstand even before I opened my eyes. Then I heard it again, again, and again. This time I didn’t have any questions about the sound or my muddled perceptions. Gunshots, even muffled, distant ones, have a distinct quality about them that distinguishes them from fireworks or engine backfires.

  Still in my clothes, I tripped out of my room barefoot, ran down the hall, and stumbled down the cold stairs to the second floor, trying to shake the sleep out of my head as I went. I turned left out of the stairwell door, running toward my old room. The glut of snowed-in guests we’d had over the weekend had thinned out so that we were now nearly empty, though a few nervous heads popped out of their doors to see what was going on.

  “Get back in your rooms,” I shouted at them as I ran.

  And even before I turned the last corner, I could smell the acrid tinge of gunsmoke in the air. I pressed my back flat to the wall and listened. Nothing. No gunfire. No footsteps. Nobody’s breathing but my own. I peeked past the corner of the wall around the bend. Again, nothing, though the last remnants of smoke hung in the air. Then, just as I was stepping out, turning to go to my old room, I heard footsteps coming up behind me. I spun, my gun out in front of me.

  “Is Slava, Gus,” he said, coming at me. “Don’t shooting. Don’t shooting.”

  He held that Russian pistol in his hand as he came.

  “The guests are all calling desk to see what is the noise. I’m hearing it from downstairs.”

  “I heard it, too. Cover me.”

  He understood and struck a pose with his Makarov aimed right at the door to my old room. As I moved flat along the wall, my gun before me, Slava moved, too. We both inched toward what was left of the door to my old room. Someone had blasted the lock and hinges with shotgun slugs, then kicked the door down. Enough ambient light from the hall leaked into the room so that we could both see the room was empty.

  “Clear,” I said, as much out of habit as anything else.

  When Slava and I finished double-checking, we turned to look at the ruined bed. The comforter was peppered with little buckshot holes around one large central blast that would have cut a tunnel through my midsection and soaked the mattress with my blood and intestines.

  “Mixed load,” I said to Slava. “Buckshot and slugs.”

  He nodded at me. He knew it before I said it. Even in the midst of this I could not help but wonder about who Slava really was and how he came to be standing in this hotel room with me.

  Slava said, “I was late to come because one of guests using his key card to get in north side door from parking lot entrance was attacked by man with black hoodie. But guest was not robbed.”

  “No, the guy just wanted to get in without coming through the front entrance. And we know why he wanted to get in.”

  “This man in hoodie, he is serious to kill you, Gus.”

  I nodded. “Listen, Slava, I have to get outta here.”

  He understood and pulled his car keys from his pocket. I told him I’d gotten rid of the tracking device, but that my car might not be safe.

  “Don’t worry. I will take cab. You go,” he said, pointing at my bare feet with the muzzle of his gun.

  I thought about running back upstairs to get my leather jacket, socks, and shoes, but the sound of sirens made me rethink that. Instead, I grabbed my gym bag and filled it up with whatever I could yank out of my drawers. Found an old pair of Nikes and stuck them on my feet. Then I did what the Nikes had been designed for: I ran.

  59

  (TUESDAY MORNING)

  I’d slept in car seats more comfortable than Bill Kilkenny’s couch, but I wasn’t about to complain about a man who had opened his door to me at four in the morning without so much as a second look. It was as if he had expected me to show up there sooner or later. Only he knew if it was the former or the latter. All he’d said to me was “You can sleep on the couch and we’ll talk later in the morning, the two of us.”

  Later was now, but Bill was nowhere to be seen when my phone buzzed in the pocket of my jeans. The jeans I’d slept in. And I’d slept lightly, even nervously, and was easily stirred. The sun was up and the basement apartment was alive with the angry hum and rumble of the oil burner. Still, I could see how Bill might find comfort in this basement-dwelling life he’d carved out for himself. It was alive with things: noises and smells that wouldn’t permit a man to be numb. I didn’t have time to search for Bill, answering my phone instead.

  “I got something for you, jefe,” said Alvaro Peña, his voice full of pride.

  I was glad that someone had something for me other than a death wish.

  “What you got, Alvaro?”

  “I couldn’t find nothing on Ilana Little, but I remembered you saying that you weren’t so sure on the last name. So I called around to some of the guys who worked Wyandanch back in the day. I think I found the woman you were looking for. She went by the name Ilana Smalls, not Little.”

  I could hear that Alvaro was still talking in my ear, but I couldn’t make out the words he was saying. Somehow the droning of the furnace was more distinct. A flurry of images, of red hair and green eyes, of an old cop and a pretty young girl, flashed through my head. And suddenly things had fallen into place. Not completely, not yet. There were still a few ingredients missing from the stew, but not many. I was almost there. I just had to keep myself alive long enough to get those last few missing pieces to put it all together.

  “Are you even fucking listening to me, pendejo?”

  “Sorry, man. I had a rough night. What were you saying?”

  “Starting from where?”

  “From the beginning.”

  “So this Ilana Smalls was really something, Gus. All the guys said she was smoking hot, but that she could be one mercenary bitch. Word is she was connected all around, Mob ties and gang ties and . . .” His voice drifted off.

  “And cop ties, too, huh?”

  I could almost hear his shoulders sag on the other end of the line.

  “Yeah, maybe. That’s what the old-timers said. Rumors, you know, that she did favors and got favors in return. But there was nothing anyone could prove. And who wants to prove that kind of shit, anyways?”

  “You got a current address for her?”

  “Depends, bro.”

  “On what?”

  “On whether you believe in hell, because that’s as close to a street address as I can give you.”

  “Deceased?”

  “With a capital D, my man. About eighteen months ago. Somebody in Kings Park used her head for batting practice and dumped her body over on the grounds of the old psychiatric center. Story was all over the media. I’m surprised you didn’t hear about it.”

  I let that pass. I didn’t want to go into why the world had been a vacuum and void for the last two years. For all I knew or cared during that time, the Asian continent might have been swallowed up whole or Atlantis could have been discovered. What would any of it have mattered to me?

  “Catch the guy who killed her?”

  “Nope.”

  “Thanks, Alvaro. I owe you.”

  “You bet your ass you do,” he said with a laugh in his voice. “Nah, Gus, we’re good, man. But I got a bad feeling about all this. Watch your back.”

  “I will.” I was about to say my goodbyes when another question occurred to me. “One more thing, then I’ll let you be. You have any idea who caught the Smalls case and who worked it when it was turned over to Homicide?”

  I heard his fingers tapping at the keyboard.

  “Pete McCann caught it first and it wound up with . . . Paxson and Carey.”

  “Thanks, Alvaro.”

  He clicked off.

  I swung my feet over the edge of the couch and t
ried stretching the bad sleep out of my bones. It helped some. I threw on my old Nikes and walked around to the side of the house where Bill did his smoking and thinking. There was no sign of him other than some ugly shoeprints in the hardened snow that remained from Saturday’s storm, so I went back into the house. When I got out of the shower, I shaved with Bill’s old-fashioned blade razor, and used a little of his mouthwash. Even that was old school. The kind of stuff that tasted more like Lysol than cool mint.

  I threw on some fresh clothes and put in a call to Al Roussis. He thanked me for putting him onto Jamal and Antwone. As I’d suggested, he picked them up for questioning. Said that I was right, that there’d been plenty of forensic and ballistic evidence tying them to the Delcamino crime scene, but not to the homicide itself. He was sweating them on the homicide anyway. For leverage, he said. Al was smart that way. If K-Shivs’ boys thought they were facing first- or second-degree murder charges, they might cough up all sorts of information to save their own necks. Might even roll over on their boss and put a major-league feather in Al’s cap. So far, he said, they weren’t talking. My guess was they wouldn’t give up their boss, murder charges or no murder charges. With K-Shivs’ gang connections, neither Jamal nor Antwone would live to see a month in prison if they rolled over on Shivers. Gangs didn’t abide by New York State’s ban on executions, and their appeals process was fairly nonexistent.

  Bill came through the door as I was hanging up with Al Roussis. He had a brown bag in his hands that might just as well have been a magic hat. For out of that bag he produced two large coffees and two heart-attack specials: scrambled eggs, bacon, and cheese on buttered rolls. The aroma of the coffee and bacon were almost enough to make me forget that somebody, maybe more than one somebody, was anxious to kill me.

  “From the look of you in the wee hours, I sensed you might be in need of this,” Bill said, spreading the food out on his table. “You can explain as we eat.”

  I sat down at the table, fixed up my coffee the way I liked it, and demolished the egg sandwich in a few big bites. Bill ate more like a human being, patiently waiting for me to begin the conversation. And when I did, I don’t think what I said surprised him.

  “When you and Jimmy Regan came to see me the other night and he swore his innocence to me, I saw the look on your face, Bill. You didn’t believe him, did you?”

  He shook his head. “I did not. Not a word of it, I’m afraid.”

  “I don’t know if he killed either TJ or Tommy Delcamino, but he’s involved in some bad things.”

  “I feared as much.”

  “You do realize he tried to buy me off with that bullshit about his door always being open to me.”

  “That was uncharacteristically ham-handed of Jimmy.”

  “Desperate people do clumsy things. I think he senses the walls are caving in around him and he’s flailing about trying to keep me off his case at any cost.”

  “I have to say I think you’re exaggerating a bit there, Gus. It’s quite a stretch to describe a vague offer of a job as a desperate attempt to keep you quiet at any cost.”

  “How about two attempts on my life in one day? Would that qualify?”

  Bill swallowed hard and went pale. “Jimmy tried to have you killed?”

  “I’m not sure it was him, at least not directly,” I said.

  I told him about the retired dentist who’d taken the bullet meant for me and the shotgun blasts in my mattress at the Paragon. I told him about the dead detective I’d found at Smudge’s house and about how I’d seen Lazy Eye gunned down right in front of me.

  He crossed himself. Shook his head in disbelief.

  “Gus, while I don’t doubt a word of it and I’m sure Jimmy was lying about some things the other night, what has he to do with a dead drug dealer?”

  “Remember when Regan denied knowing a Kareem Shivers?”

  “I do.”

  “The guy I saw gunned down last night worked for Shivers, and if what I’m thinking is correct, Jimmy Regan has a pretty direct connection to Kareem Shivers.”

  Bill made a face. “And that would be?”

  “Not until I’m sure, Bill. Not until I’m sure.”

  “Don’t you trust me, Gus?”

  “With my life.” I raised my palms to him. “I think I trust you more than anyone else alive, but I also think you still trust Jimmy Regan in spite of what I’ve said and what you’ve seen for yourself.”

  He tilted his head and nodded. “I suppose I do. My trust is a persistent thing, not so easily shaken. Sometimes you have to want to believe in people, and I want to believe in Jimmy as I would always want to believe in you, Gus Murphy.”

  “I’m lucky to have you in my corner and so is Jimmy Regan.”

  I walked over to the couch and threw on my blue work jacket, the words “Paragon Hotel” emblazoned on the back. I collected my things and tossed them into the gym bag.

  He seemed surprised. “Gus, you know you’re welcome to stay with me as long as need be. There’s no reason for you to leave.”

  “There will be people looking for me, Bill, and it’s better for you and safer for us both if you don’t know where I’m headed or what I’m doing.”

  He didn’t say anything to that. Instead, he put out his bony and brown-spotted right hand to me. When I went to shake it, he slipped a small gold crucifix onto my palm and folded my fingers around it.

  Anticipating my reaction, he said, “I know you don’t believe, but take it and keep it close . . . as a favor to me. And whether you like it or not, I’ll pray for you.”

  He smiled a devilish smile because he knew he had me. I slid the crucifix into my jacket pocket.

  “While you’re at it, Bill, pray for him to turn my skin into Kevlar.”

  Bill laughed, shaking his head. “You are a cynical bastard, Gus Murphy.”

  “I didn’t used to be. Not even twenty years on the street could do that to me. I suppose I have God to thank for that. Him and his secret plans for my son.”

  “You still have the rage in you, Gus.”

  “Always.”

  “Do you realize, I wonder, that all that rage and fury is aimed in the wrong direction?”

  I felt that heat rising beneath my skin, bubbling up to the surface. “What’s that supposed to mean?” I slammed my gym bag to the ground.

  “That you’re not angry at God.”

  “Bullshit!”

  “It’s the truth, and what’s more, you know it, Gus.”

  “For chrissakes, Bill, if not God, then who?”

  “Your son.”

  I opened my mouth to speak, but only barely human noises came out.

  “Abandonment is a very special kind of hell, and no abandonment hurts so like the death of a child.”

  He turned his back to me and retreated to the bathroom. This wasn’t up for discussion, at least not between Bill and me, not now. I patted the jacket pocket where I’d put the crucifix and left.

  60

  (TUESDAY EVENING)

  Before saying a word, I waited for Pete McCann to step fully into the motel room and shut the door behind him. I almost hated to ruin it. He had that smug look on his face, the one I remembered from the times we were out after work and he would target his prey. A really beautiful woman, expensively put together, who had come into the bar or restaurant on the arm of a bored-looking man or a man who looked overanxious. You see, for Pete it was as much about the man as the woman, maybe more so.

  He’d give a slight nod, jut out his chin, and say, “Over your left shoulder. That guy’s in way over his head with a woman like that. He thinks she’s too hot-looking for him. And the fucker’s right because she’ll be going home with me tonight.”

  Pete wasn’t always right about that. They didn’t always go home with him, but they often did. He hit it out of the park enough times to let himself
live comfortably with his swings and misses. And that’s why I knew he’d show if Annie called. She was reluctant to play the part at first, but she relented. He had crushed her. People hurt each other all the time. That’s what we do. But there are times when there’s nothing left inside you. No cushion for the fall. Nothing to fight back with. Sure, part of sleeping with him was about blowing our marriage up beyond repair. That might even have been most of it. I’m sure another part of it was curiosity and desire. Annie and I were married young and we were both pretty wild and not inexperienced. Let’s just say she must have been intrigued by the stories she had heard about Pete from other cops’ wives. That, and he was a good-looking son of a bitch. Did she harbor secret hopes that their affair in the wake of John’s death might turn into something else? I don’t know. But as angry as she was at me, it didn’t compare to the sting she felt for how Pete had tossed her away like an empty soda can to the side of the road.

  I knew he’d show up because the other thing he got off on was the kicked dog coming back for more. Those were the stories he loved to tell most, the ones about the women he’d parted ways with who’d been so furious with him, but who couldn’t stay away. It always took a little time for them to get over the first wave of anger, to show him that he didn’t matter to them, he used to say.

  “Some of them, they just can’t help themselves. They either like the sex or they like the abuse, but who cares why they come back as long as they come back?”

  I knew he’d come because Annie had been such a big conquest to him and he’d dumped her so abruptly. I knew because I was back on his radar screen again.

  “Hey, Annie, I’m here. I bet you’re already wet,” he said, coming through the door I’d left open for him. “You in the bathroom?”

  I had seated myself in the darkest corner of the room and kept the lights off.

  “Annie’s not coming, Pete,” I said. “Turn on the light. It’s on the wall right next to the door, but you’d know that. Annie told me you took her here a few times.”