Headstone City

by Tom Piccirilli

  “They're not even as tough as the guy who came around last time,” Pepe said.

  “That one's name is Joey Fresco, and he's not even as tough as he used to be a few years ago.”

  “They got legit and they got soft.”

  “These two tell you the same spiel? It'd be in your best interest to do a favor for the Monti crew?”

  “Yeah, but without the subtlety of that guy Joey shaving with his butterfly knife. These pricks, they just came right out with it, said they wanted me to fire you. If they were going to make a play, I thought they would've pulled it weeks ago, carrying some real firepower.”

  “Me too,” Dane said. “I paid the Don a visit yesterday. It must've pushed a few buttons.”

  “Not any serious ones. They didn't even draw down on me.” His hands kept working in the air as he talked, like he still wanted to throw punches.

  In the corner of the lot sat a maroon LeSabre with the passenger door ajar. “This their car?”

  “Yeah, they pulled in while I was catching a smoke and just started staring me down. When that didn't work they called me spic, like I might break down and weep out of shame for my family heritage. They threaten to beat up some of the other drivers, but the guys just ignore them. Then this one here actually shoves me.” Pepe grinned telling the story, his small hands moving in the air. “It was like junior high school all over again. I think they were working their way up to stealing my lunch box or giving me noogies. What the hell happened to the real wiseguys?”

  “I don't know,” Dane said. He frisked both the mooks and they weren't even carrying guns.

  “Nothing?” Pepe asked.

  “No. He had a pistol yesterday. Maybe they're scared of getting pulled over by the cops and found carrying.”

  “Does the Don know he's hiring such pathetic examples of la cosa nostra?”

  “You know, I've got a feeling he does. But he's so sick and crippled that he smokes a lot of weed to help him with the pain.”

  “Really? Like any punk on the corner. That's sort of sad, ending up like that.”

  “I have to agree.”

  They wrestled the two legbreakers back onto their feet and helped them over to the LeSabre. Dane got the driver in and said, “Listen, tell Berto and Vinny to relax, I'm quitting Olympic. Oh no, my life is in tatters, how will I survive? The terror, the horror. Hey, watch your head now,” and carefully closed the door. Pepe tapped the roof and the car pulled out.

  “I have mixed feelings about all that,” Pepe told him, still bouncing on his feet like he wanted to go another few rounds. “I kind of miss the old neighborhood, you know?”

  “Yeah.”

  “A man is defined by the strength of his enemies.”

  Dane looked at him. “You quoting The Art of War now or what?”

  “It's a line from Under Heaven's Canopy. One of those terrorists in the caves says it.”

  “I fast-forwarded through a lot of that.”

  “So did I the first twenty times, but then I finally let it roll.”

  Dane glanced over at the limousine in the garage, the back bumper all banged out and polished up again after the fracas with Big Tommy, and he felt a twinge of regret. He'd miss working on it. “I'll quit tomorrow, okay?”

  “You don't have to leave on account of those mooks. Stick around if you want. Besides, didn't you want to build a stake?”

  “Like you said, what do I need money for? Besides, something's happening.”

  Pepe gave him that long once-over. “What do you mean?”

  “I'm not sure. Things are just coming into focus a little better.”

  Pepe made the same face again, but not nosy enough to ask if Dane had any kind of a plan in mind.

  “What time does Glory Bishop want to be picked up?”

  “What, you need an invitation from her now? Just go. Drop the limo off tonight or early tomorrow. Maybe I'll send Fran on the Montauk run from now on. She could use a little ocean air.”

  “By the way,” Dane said, “I think she's insane.”

  “I've had some worries about that, but she's pretty stable most of the time. Like I told you, she's mostly a sweetheart, but she's got a fine-tuned instinct for criminal-type activity, you know? The action boiling behind the scenes.”

  “But she didn't know you were out here brawling with two mob dumbasses.”

  “I think she knew, she just didn't care much. She figured I could handle it.” A worried expression crossed his face. “She doesn't get rattled most of the time. Except by you. You shake her up worse than anyone.”

  “Why?” Dane asked.

  “She said you give her nightmares.”

  “Me?”

  “She told me she dreamed of your eyes before she ever met you.”

  Tension tightened the muscles in Dane's back. “Jesus.”

  “Hey, I'm just explaining what she said.”

  Dane thought about it, wondering if Fran might have a touch of the burden herself. What Special Agent Daniel Ezekiel Cogan's blessed granny would've called special consideration under the Lord.

  “I'll see you tomorrow,” Dane told him. “Sorry for the trouble.”

  “No trouble at all, man, I had fun.”

  Dane climbed into the limo and went the slow way to Glory Bishop's place, hoping the extra time would help him to put everything into perspective. He cruised from Flatbush Avenue to Parkside, hitting the next roundabout to Ocean Parkway, into the Prospect Expressway, merging onto the BQE, the flow of the cars around him always more consoling than being surrounded by people.

  He slid into the Brooklyn Bridge traffic, another component of the burg, no different than any piece of stone or iron. Slowly he hiked from Greenwich Village to the Upper East Side, working his way through rush hour, enjoying the flux and drift.

  Here he was doing nothing but killing time, even though it felt as if he didn't have that much time left.

  A miserable whisper from the backseat made him look in the rearview. It was Aaron Fielding again, the grocer and fish seller, sitting back there whimpering. Dane wished he could hear the man's booming laugh just one more time, instead of all this sniveling.

  Dane met the man's eyes in the mirror, and saw him raise an ashen, quivering hand, trying to clutch at Dane's shoulder. “Johnny, I need to—”

  “What, Mr. Fielding? I'm listening.”

  “Johnny!”

  “Tell me. I'll help if I can. I promise.”

  “I . . . I swear that I—”

  What kind of confession was so important it would keep someone trapped in jail with you, in the cemetery with you, in the backseat?

  “I never burned the fillet!”

  The despair finally lifted clear of the old man, and Fielding threw his head back and smiled. A heavy, joyful laughter broke from him, resounding and pure, deepening and echoing beyond the confines of the car until the sound of his own deliverance carried him away.

  Did you bring all your petty fears and worries with you right into the grave? Did they keep you awake during the long night of your interment? Were you compelled to confess and apologize and justify throughout the hereafter?

  A weak man became a martyr in his own mind. Did you do the same thing when you were underground?

  The poor bastard, spinning in his coffin because every Friday afternoon Grandma Lucia would send Dane down to Fielding's market for the same order, memorized word for word. “Gimme two portions of shrimp, two of potatoes, three fillets and don't burn them.” A small joke preying on a corpse's conscience, even way down in the box.

  Whatever the answer, Dane knew one thing now. The dead didn't have a sense of humor.

  He pulled up to Glory Bishop's building and Special Agent Cogan was standing outside eating a cannoli, ricotta cheese on his tie. He grinned and approached.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Once, back when you were still driving a cab, you saw two guys beating a police officer in an alley with his own nightstick.

  The cop scrambled
on all fours trying to fight back, but they started kicking him until he rolled himself into a ball, his face to the brick.

  Dane gunned it to the mouth of the alley, threw the taxi into park, and hopped out with the engine still screaming. He took his civic duty seriously, most of the time. What the fuck. The cop scuttled under the front end of the cab, and the two guys turned to face Dane, the one with the nightstick raised above his head, and the other picking up the vials of crack he'd dropped.

  If you stared straight ahead long enough, they'd take it as a sign of fear and attack. The guy with the nightstick charged, bringing the club down, giving a warrior's bellow, and doing this little twirly jump he'd seen some stuntman do in a movie once.

  Dane caught him by the throat with one hand and broke his nose with two short chops. The nightstick started to drop and Dane grabbed it in midair. A silly macho gesture because he didn't even need it, but it was kind of a cool move. This dumbass fell to his knees, clutching his face and sobbing. The other was still rooting around in the trash on the ground, picking up his drugs. Dane kicked out and felt the hinge of the mook's jaw shatter. Teeth collapsed against each other and his tongue slithered loose as if the muscles had been cut.

  It was enough. The cop had blood on the back of his head and kept muttering, “Motherfuckers. Those rotten motherfuckers.”

  Dane leaned down and took his hand. He could not feel it. The cop was his father.

  He didn't know what it meant. The man's ghost wandering around, talking to him finally? Or had Vinny's abilities somehow infected him, allowed him to warp things, tread another track, maybe even back in time? Or was he finally dead? Dane waited for Dad to speak. That same cold expectation he'd felt so many times before.

  Without touching him, he helped his father into the back of the cab. His dad looked the way he had on the ten o'clock news the day of his murder. Not tough at all. Sort of soft, maybe a tad too nice for the job.

  “I'll take you to the hospital,” Dane said, knowing how stupid it sounded. The plates in his skull were vibrating.

  “No, I'll be okay,” his father told him, and said nothing more.

  Blood dripped through the man's hair and soaked into his uniform shirt collar. His aftershave wafted through the taxi and made Dane grimace, thinking about his teenage years, when he used to splash on his father's remaining skin bracer while he learned to shave.

  He drove his father home to Grandma Lucia's house. He led him up the front stairs and rang the bell. He hung back for a moment. His dead mother answered and gave a terrified cry. His father shushed her and said, “I'm all right, it's nothing. Let me get cleaned up and I'll walk to the station.”

  Dane thought that perhaps he'd been murdered himself, shot in the head, and was sitting around in limbo. He ran his fingers through his hair feeling for bullet wounds. There weren't any, and he stared at the closed door to his grandmother's house, where he lived, before he turned back to his cab.

  He had slept in the backseat for two nights after that, and when he finally went home again, his grandmother slapped the crap out of him for not calling.

  Dane was starting to feel like that again. Stuck in purgatory, waiting for the hand of God to reach down and smack him around.

  Daniel Ezekiel Cogan walked over to the limo and asked, “You doin' okay there, son?”

  “Sure.”

  Maybe it proved Cogan was wired into Olympic somehow, or maybe Fran was just telling everybody where Dane would be, at what time, hoping somebody would take him out when he got there.

  Or perhaps Cogan really had managed to lie during his night ride and the feds did have Glory Bishop's place tapped. It put some tension between Dane's shoulders, all those possibilities.

  “You waiting for me?” Dane asked.

  “I thought we could talk together some more.”

  “Get in,” Dane said, and Cogan did, impressed with the dashboard like he'd never been in a limousine before. “Where'd you get the cannoli?”

  “A place called Warm & Wonderful up on 65th. I had one there in the place and I've been carrying this other one around for a while. I had the hankerin', you know? But these here aren't nearly as good as the ones from that Brooklyn bakery though.”

  “That shop is mostly bagels and whitefish. I'm probably the only Italian within a fifteen-block radius.”

  “Tha' right?”

  You had to take your pride where you could. “What would you like to chat about?”

  “Heard there was a little shake-up over at the Monticelli place.”

  Dane still couldn't figure where Cogan was tied in or what he wanted. Going after a mob family who'd lost all their juice seemed a big waste of time for the feds. Didn't anybody have anything better to do?

  “I wouldn't call it much of a shake-up. I just stopped in to say hello.”

  “In your daddy's ex-partner's stolen vehicle.”

  “I was only borrowing it.”

  “He filled out a report.”

  “He got the car back, didn't he?”

  “You put almost three thousand miles on it. Where the hell'd you go?”

  “Nowhere,” Dane admitted. “I just drove it around for a while.”

  “Like my cousin Cooter after the moonshine dried up.”

  That windblown, choppy hair hung at all kinds of crazy, clumped angles. The corners of his mouth were thick with chocolate. When he let out his weird, wide smile, with those thick square teeth, he looked a little retarded. Dane knew Cogan was affecting the bumpkin appearance, but he'd never seen anyone go to such extremes before, just so folks would underestimate him.

  “When you were in the pen, I almost paid you a visit.”

  Dane said, “I know. Why'd you want to, and why didn't you bother?”

  Cogan took another bite out of his half-eaten cannoli but wasn't much enjoying himself. That Warm & Wonderful Café catered to the neighborhood wealthy, the supermodels and celebrities whose daily caloric intake never broke five hundred. The café probably used skim milk and a sugar substitute.

  “I was thinking of cutting you some kind of a deal,” Cogan told him. “Protection if you helped us take down the crew.”

  “My grandmother could take down that crew. What stopped you from making the offer?”

  “I read through your file. It looked like you could handle yourself all right. Like you said, they're not so plucky anymore. I wanted to see what would happen when you got out.”

  “Nothing's happened.”

  “That itself is the puzzle.”

  Dane had met a lot of cops—including his father and Phil Guerra—who knew how to shoot the breeze and patiently chat with perps for weeks or even months before making a bust.

  But looking into Cogan's eyes, Dane couldn't get any sense of what the man was after, except that he hadn't come close to getting it yet. Even the night ride hadn't given Dane much information, Cogan's soul just sitting in the backseat bouncing around.

  On the surface of things, Cogan certainly wasn't making great strides.

  “What'd you go see the old Don for?”

  “I wanted to say hello,” Dane said. “It had been a while since I'd seen him.”

  “And your pal Vinny wasn't there.”

  “No.”

  “That's what's so surprisin' to me. How little you and Vinny been in the same place since you got out. So little interaction. You Mediterranean types run too hot or not at all. I would've thought you'd have walked right up to each other and started shootin' it out in the streets. But that's just not the way.”

  “No,” Dane said.

  “And nobody else has taken a run at you?”

  Either Cogan wasn't as wired as it seemed, and he hadn't heard about Big Tommy Bartone and the chase through the hospital, or he was faking it. Testing Dane's honesty? Seeing how much Dane might be holding back?

  You could make yourself nuts trying to second-guess every son of a bitch who got in your face. Dane figured telling the truth was always the best course, and it fuck
ed the other guy up just as much as if you lied to him all the time.

  “Big Tommy Bartone made a dash at me the other day. Sort of a half-assed one.”

  “Now, I did some checking on him too. He don't appear to be the sloppy type.”

  “He's not. At least he never used to be.”

  “Maybe he likes you too much to take you out of the game.”

  “I keep hoping someone will appreciate my charm.”

  “I wouldn't wait on that, son.”

  Special Agent Daniel Ezekiel Cogan, with pastry crumbs on his specially cut jacket, stepped out of the limo, the burden weighing on him, his gaze kind of shimmering with crucial knowledge, and said, “I enjoy our talks. I'll see you soon.”

  “Okay.”

  Dane watched him walk down the block and turn the corner before he got out of the car to go up and see Glory Bishop.

  The doorman was back to making faces. Dane felt himself losing ground.

  The elevator carried him too slowly to the fourth floor. Behind him he could feel two figures slumping against each other, not quite across the veil yet. Mako and Kremitz, in their comas, coming around again. They were both hanging on. Drawn to him as the source of their anguish, but not dead enough to prod him much.

  The doors slid open and Dane stepped out, Mako and Kremitz shuffling along, their eyes closed.

  They nudged forward just enough to annoy him, almost like they were trying to cockblock him, racing him down the hall. Dane started to say something but Glory's apartment door was already open, her shadow slanting across the carpet.

  She waited there wearing a gaping crimson kimono, nothing beneath but a gold silk nightgown that tied at the shoulders and hips with cute little bows.

  “Come in,” she said, taking his hand. “Make yourself a drink.”

  “I don't drink on the job.”

  “You're not on the job, we're not going anywhere, if you couldn't tell.”

  That stopped him. “Why'd you book the limo then?”

  “Maybe so you'd show up?”