by Rex Miller
Almost two hours. A little car pulls up and two beanors get out, talking their fucking greaser talk, chattering away and laughing, and Spain moves back into the hallway as they come in, his piece out in one hand, a sap in the other, piece with a suppressor on, then that whole thing wrapped. A dipshit.22.
The door closes. They start to say something and he steps out of the darkened hall with the piece pointed. Tells them to freeze en espanol.
"Turn around, punks." He motions.
"Whachew wan'?"
"SHUT THE FUCK UP," he hisses. "Morales, listen to me, punk. I need some information and I'll leave you be. You first — put your hands behind you." One of them does, and that's cool. He didn't give a cucaracha which was which but he had to know who was who. He quickly sapped the other one lightly. Wired Morales' hands with a twist-em, stepped on the back of one of his knees, taking him down to the floor. Did a half-frisk. Slipped a billfold out and nodded. Gagged Morales, now that he'd seen the name on a card in the man's wallet and knew they weren't jiving with him, and quickly leaned over and fired a.22 Long Rifle round into the head of the man he'd sapped, placing the shot behind the left eye about one and a half inches from the ear and firing in an upward trajectory. The wrapped, suppressed.22 sounding like a loud, metallic fart.
"Fucked up that towel, didn't we?" He took the coat hanger he'd laid on top of the TV, all nicely straightened, and his pliers, and wired Morales hands nice and tight. The punk's eyes were as big as silver dollars.
"Si, si, senor. You're in a bit of trouble here, chinga chinga. What do you think?"
"Mmmmmfffffffff." Morales struggled.
"Wass yo' name, amigo? Pace? Listen, douchebag, you really like taking pictures of the little kids, eh? You and your pal Juan," he exaggerated the name, "get off on the kiddie stuff. So I'm going to fix you up good." A straight razor flashed open from nowhere and Spain showed it to the man. Then he pocketed it and wired Morales' ankles, pulled the razor out, slit the man's fly of his trousers, and picked up his pliers. The eyes were like golf balls now.
"Hey, I'm not going to hurt your pecker with this," he said gently to the bound man. "This, is jus' so I don't have to TOUCH your filthy excuse for a cocko, Paco." He carefully pulled the limp brown penis from the man's pants and undershorts using the pliers. "No, see, I'm not goin' to hurt you with this." The razor flicked open again. "I'm going to hurt you with THISSSSSSSSS," he said, making the final cut on the last Morales scene.
"This is a little something my daughter wants you to have as a going away present, you spic greaseball garbage." Smiling real big, he stuffs the thing in the man's mouth. "You like the little kids so much, you motherfucker," he says in his tight, fierce whisper, "now you got yourself a little kid's pecker." And he started wiping off prints, careful not to step in the blood.
He took a last look at the two on the floor and walked out to the stolen van, parked right there in broad damn daylight across the road from the Bacardi Bar. Fucking Reynosa.
"Adios, Taco, or Paco, or whatever your fucking slimebag name was." Spain drove back the way he'd come. Driving calmly now. Driving past the back of the Vivir un Poco billboard and heading toward Jon Belmonte's. Five names were now lined through at the bottom of his long list: Greg Dawkins Roger Nunnaly Charles Freund Bobbie Freund Paco Morales
He picked up a sixth name back across the Mex-Tex border. The only one of the first six that was the least little bit tricky. Of course the Nunnaly punk had been a gift from God. But he couldn't just go up to La Bellamonde and gun his ass down in the street. He needed more names and corroboration of the way the Blue Kriegal thing worked. He didn't want to miss anybody because of an itchy trigger finger. Turned out he had to shoot him anyway.
The Mel Troxell people had been achingly explicit about the part Belmonte/La Bellamonde played in his daughter's torture and demise. Another insult on top of insult was the way nobody had even bothered to be very secretive about the snuff movie. Like it was so protected who'd bother them? The cops in Mexico are in with the beaner wise guys anyway, but you'd think Belmonte would at least have been a bit circumspect.
Spain knew he'd have to exercise the greatest degree of self-discipline to keep from whacking Belmonte out immediately.
He found him in back of his house, beating two little tables with a chain. He had the tables out in the hot sun of his courtyard working them over to age them. He hit the captain's desk about a dozen times, not hard shots, but just enough to bite a little wood out each time, and he was going to start on the honey pine chest when he heard Spain walking across the courtyard toward him.
Spain could tell his reflexes were good the way he turned with a graceful, balanced half-spin still holding the chain down by his right leg, and nodding to Spain as Spain said, "Excuse me, sir. I was wondering if you could tell me how to get to this address," as he pulled a folded up piece of paper from his shirt pocket.
Spain looked at the paper as he got closer and shook his head as if perplexed. But he could see Belmonte shift his weight a little. He was moving back as Spain moved forward. Spain read off a fake address and held the note in an outstretched hand but J.B. wasn't having any of it.
He shook his head politely and said, "Sorry, bud, but I haven't lived around here long myself," moving a little as he spoke, wary and experienced, keeping the piece of chain beside him as he stayed a chain-length away from the stranger with the outstretched arm.
Spain read the situation and clocked the guy for a pro, shrugging as he folded the note back up and smiled, saying, "No problem, pal, I'll ask back at the gas station," turning as if to leave as he dropped his sport coat around the .25 Browning and turned firing low. The shot made a loud SSPPPAAAKK as it blew a hole in the coat and hit Belmonte in the hip. He dropped the chain as he fell in a shout of pain, and Spain got to him fast, kicking the chain away and clipped him lightly, then dragging him into the nearby garage.
He had the man bound and gagged and the blood flow stopped within a couple of minutes, and was backing into the garage and loading him into the trunk. He went in the back door of the house and checked it fast, racing through the house with the gun ready, but it was empty. He got in the car and drove out of town until he found some country roads that didn't look like they had much traffic on them.
Juan La Bellamonde came to with his hands wired behind him, bound to a tree. Spain reached down on the grass beside where he'd been sitting and got a straight razor and a small bottle of smoky-looking liquid. Dr. Spain pulled on his rubber gloves, which he'd picked up at the hardware store, and bent to his task. Spain's rubber-covered fingers ever so gently blotted the watering eyes and removed the glass stopper from the acid.
"Do you believe in an eye for an eye?" he asked the man, rhetorically.
The man's eyes teared again, lidless, as he soaked the front of his trousers with urine.
"You've got one chance. And goodness gracious, stop pissing all over yourself — you've got to learn to control your emotions a little." He picked up the wadded tissue and held it in front of the screaming man. "Know what these are?" La Bellamonde knew before he looked into the bloody tissue. "These are your eyelids, freak," he said through gritted teeth.
"And this" — showing him the smoking stuff —"is your acid, you see." The man tried to bite through the gag and began to choke. Spain pulled the gag out for a moment, and when his choking had subsided he told him, "One chance. I want everything about the Kriegal operation. Every name in the mob you can think of. Every address. Every method of contact. Take me through the whole thing by the numbers, from what Blue does with the little boys and girls to who he buys 'em from to what brand of rat poison you put on your cornflakes in the morning. All the dirt. You miss a comma in there. You even ACT like you're getting tired. You leave out one fact and I catch you . . . " He holds up the acid.
La Bellamonde was voluble and forthcoming. He told him all the nitty 'n' every bit of the gritty, but in the end it didn't help. Spain was getting bored with him and he sighe
d, picked up the acid, and removed the stopper, smiling, holding it real close and saying liltingly, "Murine time . . . " as the man fainted.
Spain was in a great mood by the time he'd taken up temporary residence in a motel a week later. He was doing several things at once, constructing his cover, cultivating a cutout, building a mail-drop legend, all the things he'd done a score of times before, but doing it with a difference now. For the first time he wasn't working for pay. He was working for revenge and it filled him with something akin to glee. The singer was wrong. Living well wasn't the best revenge. REVENGE was the best bloody, fucking revenge there was, and anything less was just kidding yourself.
When a worker wants to insulate himself — or for that matter, when a dealer wants to protect himself — an innocent party is used. Mules, mokes, they're called different things. Square johns who can be spotted, isolated, cut from the pack, cultivated, and put into play without their knowing it. Spain had newspaper ads set to hit the next day at a motel he was using only for fake screening of job applicants. A girl-Friday executive assistant for a mail entrepreneur. He would set some turkey up with a cheap storefront office first. Have her depositing real checks, opening a mail drawer, all that shit. Then he'd use her to take care of details like dealing with realtors — all the things he'd be needing where he didn't want personal contact.
Meanwhile, he did something very tricky. He carefully scripted a meticulously worded scenario and when he had it just right he phoned the cop who'd been out to his house that last time to see "what they'd heard" if anything. They had an odd, linear conversation that had been laid out like a script so that later — if necessary — Spain could always say he had called the police like the concerned father he was to ask if the cops had learned anything about who was responsible for the death of his daughter. In tandem with the Troxell report it wouldn't fly too far but the conversation had been sufficiently ambiguous that it would be something. A card to play just in case. It might be enough to buy him some time when he needed it.
The good part was that it told him Mel Troxell hadn't talked. That was what he had to know. He took the first steps of his plan through the painful motions of calling Pat. He wanted to talk to her like he wanted to chew on broken glass but he was going to lay down whatever cover he could. It was cheap at this price — a few telephone calls.
"Pat," he heard himself saying, "Have you heard anything from Tiff?" wanting to tell his child's mother, his murdered baby's mother, wanting to tell her that he hoped she was happy now. Wanting to rub it in. Wanting to ask her if Buddy's big cock was worth losing her little girl. But number one, he had to play this one straight as an arrow, and number two . . . Shit, that bitch, it probably wouldn't get to her that badly. The cold cunt.
He got through the phone call on automatic and prepared to go into action. He felt the excitement inside him. The knowledge that he was going to bring those sons of bitches down. He was going to start a fucking war.
Part Three
Eichord
The fact that Eichord had detected a wise guy or an ex-con or whatever breed of felonious monk the non-existent Mr. Streicher might or might not prove to be, would have been insufficient to pull Jack to St. Louis. The gangland type action might not have reached out for him. It was a thing of one too many coincidences. Bad vibes. Rankling hunches. The St. Louis kills were firebombings. Some shootings. But no EYEBALL M. O. No ballistics, forensics, or any other hard information linked the California assassinations and the St. Louis murders.
The randomness of the kills were, however, a factor in themselves. The St. Louis homicide reports told of brutal and what appeared to be unconnected slayings. They could be strictly gangland stuff. But like the L.A. area murders the media attention was noteworthy. When you add to this factoring the coincidental sighting of a definite wise guy leaving the Coast for St. Louis, Eichord thought it might be worth a look.
He was coming in superficially just as he had in L.A., at a summons from the Task Force. But this time he would not be a cherry to be picked, chewed, pitted, and spit out. He'd not be manipulated again by "liaison" smoothies. He'd come in quietly. Unannounced to all but the local honcho. No VIP stuff. He'd ease on in and look around. Check it out his own way.
Jack had fond memories of the St. Louis he could recall from the couple of good years he'd lived there a quarter-century ago. But from the second the cab left Lambert he might as well have been on Mars.
Similarly he found himself unprepared for the Special Division, a compact unit working out of the Homicide Bureau at Twelfth and Clark downtown, now Twelfth and Tucker Boulevard. He found the burg largely unrecognizable, this town he'd called home in the 60s, in Plaza Square, not two blocks from the Division HQ.
Homicide occupied the fourth floor of the six-story building where Chief Adler ran his command post for the Metropolitan Saint Louis area. This was the headquarters for the detectives assigned to the nine St. Louis Police divisions.
The city was a completely different ball game than he remembered. Gone was the old, infamous Pruett-Igo, where two-man cars eventually became open game for snipers. But there were still low-income housing projects in heavily black areas north of the city. Still pockets of unrest and crime. It would take some time to get used to the absence of Gaslight Square, and the wide open Strip. De Baliviere Strip had been notorious back in the druggy 60s, a hot tenderloin of street-corner smack dealers and hookers flagrantly offering their wares. Now De Baliviere, the Seventh Police District — was all rehabs and pricey condos. And the only dope was being sold by $200,000-a-year professional men.
He thought the Bureau looked like a city room of a very-laid-back metro newspaper, or the offices of a prestigious yuppie insurance agency. The cops looked like schoolteachers or ad men for an ultra-conservative house account. Anything but coppers. Only the eyes and the holstered Smiths said different.
"Good morning, Jack, glad to have you aboard," his new temporary boss said with a half-smile in an exchange of the initial pleasantries.
The district commander, under whom Eichord would nominally be working, was out of the city taking an FBI-agent-taught course sanctioned by the University of Virginia, and the acting shop head was Lieutenant Victor Springer, whom Eichord found distant and routinely polite, as if meeting Jack was 361 on a list of 362 things he had to do that day, which it probably was.
"Come on in. You settled yet?"
"No," Eichord said, "I just came in this morning."
There was the ritual of getting coffee. The usual exchange of amenities. The obligatory comments about Eichord's track record and the expected questions about his fame and the Chicago case. The comments about lodging, the bread-and-butter basics of payroll stuff, where he'd sit, his temporary place in the scheme of things. Then Springer laid it out for him.
"As you know, we have what appears to be the beginning of a full scale gang war on our hands."
"Yeah."
"These mob killings have up until recently been just that — within the crime factions. Wise guys taking down other wise guys. So we thought. But then there was the shooting at Laclede Landing." Springer shoved a newspaper across the desk. "I saved that one." The headline said Two Injured In Saint Louis Mob Shoot-out. Replete with front-page crime-scene photo.
"Mayor Carrol Donovan told St. Louis Police Commissioner Powell, 'Instruct the police department it either cleans this mess up or their replacements will. This city will no longer tolerate an atmosphere of violence,' " Eichord read aloud.
"Well, Jack, you know how it is. You got gang homicides." He shook his head sadly. "Most of the time you're not going to be able to do much. Hell. When they keep it in the family you tend to just go with the flow. The paper's headlines or the position of the Ten O'clock News'11 pretty much dictate how many man hours we have to waste on looking into something like that." Eichord nodded. "I mean, you got a pro job, well .... "He shrugged and the thought trailed off into space.
"But you got guys going for a whack-out in Lac
lede Landing, Jesus. It's a helluva mess."
"All these firebombings," Eichord said. "These all related?"
"Yep. Here's what you got." He got up and uncovered a standup easel with a family-tree genealogy plotted out on it. "St. Louis family is really several different factions. You got your basic made wise guys, the old LCN, which was under the legendary Tony Gee, who I know you've heard about. He was the fucking man. He ran the whole schmear. His main man was another Tony, Tony Cypriot, and that's where they got the old name the papers used to use: the Two Tonys Mob. But it wasn't that at all. Gee ran everything for Chicago. This is back when I guess" — he glanced at some papers —"you were living here, if I remember my notes correctly."
"I was here in sixty-two and sixty-three," he said. He was looking into the lieutenant's eyes as he spoke and Jack doubted if there were too many notes Springer would remember incorrectly.
"Well, Tony Gee pulled the pin in the seventies. And what he left was Sally Dago — Salvatore Dagatina — who's still alive, by the way, and in the can. And a half-assed dope empire. The old-line Italian and Sicilian factions that had one time controlled all the gambling and narcotics and prostitution, which were under the splinter groups of Syrian, and Chink, and Latin wise guys — and the bikers — now these guys are getting long in the tooth too.
And they can't control the ethnic groups 'n' that. So you got the whole thing breaking into factions.
"Now you got your two Tonys gone. one dead, one kicked upstairs — Cypriot a big shot sitting on the national council, and Sally Dago takes a fall and goes in the slams. So all the people capable of running anything are out of pocket. Gee dead. Cypriot gone. Dago behind bars.
"See . . . Tony Gee was the last peacekeeper. He was like a, uh, orchestra leader, ya know? He pulled tile whole thing together. And with the other Tony and Sally out of the game there was nobody left with the brains, balls, and experience to keep the family unified. No godfather, like the papers are always saying. No safety valve for the territorial disputes and the faction arguments. No more clearinghouse. If you had the balls to make a move, you made a move. Never mind whose country you were in. Forget that turf shit — you went for it. So you had a mess.