“He’s hanging in there,” Bobby replied.
“Tell him I said hello.”
“We will and … Well, we heard about your grandson, Joe. We’re real sorry about it.” Bobby’s deep beard dropped in a frown. “If you do some payback, let us know. We’ll keep a couple of shovels in the back of the truck.”
Joe Mac nodded, “Thanks, Bobby.” He leaned toward Jodi. “Hey! Ronnie!”
Ronnie bent, “Yeah, Joe?”
“There’s a chance I might need some taxi service,” Joe Mac continued. “I’d get a real taxi but there might be some gunfighting.”
“Just give us a call, hoss! We’ll pick you up and take you around.”
“Appreciate it.”
Ronnie Kosiniski abruptly focused on Jodi.
“Are you married, little lady?”
Jodi smiled, “YES!”
“Ah,” he growled, “all the good ones is always taken.”
Jodi grimaced. “I’m sorry.”
“Nah, that’s all right, girl. But if you give him nothing but tail lights and dust one day you know where to find me, right?”
“Right,” laughed Jodi.
“Good enough! Let’s go, Bobby!”
Bobby let go a final punch to Joe Mac’s shoulder. “You take care, hoss! You call us if you need some backup. We’ll come running!”
“I will,” said Joe Man. “Thanks, boys.”
“You bet.”
In another moment, and leaving a cloud of blue smoke, the Kosiniski Brothers were well down the road and still gathering speed. They’d only been gone almost thirty seconds when Jodi looked timidly at Joe Mac. “Wow,” she said. “So that’s the Kosiniski Brothers, huh?” She found herself smiling. “They’re colorful, I’ll give them that.”
“They’re good people.” Joe Mac said, curt. “They’re the kind of people that won’t let you down in a pinch – no matter what. They may not look fancy, but they got heart. And I’ll take that over fancy any day of the week.”
“And twice on Sunday,” said Jodi. “So? We ready?”
Joe Mac nodded, “Let’s do it.”
Two minutes later Jodi knocked on the door and an elderly black woman with white hair slowly opened the wood door and walked out onto the porch. But she left the screen latched as Jodi raised her credentials; “I’m Jodi Strong with the New York City Police Department, ma’am. Are you Mrs. Critiani Morgan?”
Her gaze and face were plainly suspicious.
“Yes,” she replied. “Can I help you?”
“Mrs. Morgan, can we please speak with you?” Jodi read more than suspicion – she saw genuine fear. “You’re not in any trouble, Mrs. Morgan. We just want to ask you a few questions.”
Critiani Morgan looked to Joe Mac’s shadowed shape standing beside the squad car and focused again on Jodi as she asked, “What’s he here for?”
“He’s my partner,” Jodi smiled tightly.
After another long moment Mrs. Morgan slowly unhooked the screen door and stepped back. “Come on in, then,” she said.
Joe Mac entered, and they took a seat at a leaf-strewn wooden table. Then Jodi looked at Joe Mac and said, “Mrs. Morgan, this is Detective Joe Mac. He has a couple of questions for you. Is that all right?”
Mrs. Morgan took her time before she said, “I expect that’s all right.”
Joe Mac managed a smile with one side of his mouth, his face slightly uplifted, as he said, “Thank you, Mrs. Morgan.”
“You’re a blind detective?” she asked.
“I am,” Joe Mac nodded.
“How can you be a detective and be blind?”
“’Cause I been arresting all kinds of these fools for forty years, ma’am, and I know a lie when I hear one.”
A smile cracked Mrs. Morgan’s face, and she leaned back in her chair. “You go ahead and listen to me, then. What questions you got?”
With a thrill of genuine alarm Jodi knew this is where it could go south in a heartbeat if Mrs. Morgan had something to hide. She was also deathly afraid that Joe Mac might attack this with a sledgehammer instead of a scalpel. Then Joe Mac said calmly, “I’m sad to tell you that a friend of yours was hurt last night, Mrs. Morgan.”
Mrs. Morgan scowled. “Who might that be?”
“Mr. Tony Montanus.”
A hand rose to her mouth, and Mrs. Morgan gasped, “Oh, no! Not poor Tony!” She looked again at Jodi. “What happened to him!”
“Them people attacked him at his house,” said Joe Mac.
“No! No!” She followed, “Was he hurt bad?”
“I’m afraid so,” said Joe Mac and morosely bowed his head. “He passed away last night at the hospital. The doctors couldn’t save him.” A pause. “They tried, but they couldn’t save him. I’m sorry, Mrs. Morgan.”
That was a lie, but Jodi surmised it didn’t matter. Mrs. Morgan didn’t know about the attack, anyway, and Jodi saw the wisdom of breaking it to her gently. Finally, Mrs. Morgan shook her head and said, “I’ve always been afraid of something like this happening. Ever since poor Cathren died I’ve been afraid of something like this happening.”
“That’s why we’re here,” Joe Mac nodded.
Jodi knew that Joe Mac knew absolutely nothing about the wife of Tony Montanus, but he was doing a good job acting like he did. And Jodi also realized in the same split-second that the death of the husband was linked to the death of the wife. She wasn’t sure how she knew, but she was certain that she did.
Obviously so did Joe Mac as he continued, “I know you don’t want no more of this terrible stuff happening, Mrs. Morgan. You seem like a good person. And you’re tired of these people same as me.” A pause. “I think something needs to be done about ‘em.”
“I do, too!” Mrs. Morgan slapped a hand down flat on the table. “I do, too!”
“Just point me in the right direction,” said Joe Mac, lifting his chin. “I might be blind, but I can smell scum like this a mile away.”
“Oh,” she stretched a hand across the table, “you have to be careful with those people, Mr. Joe Mac. They’re awful! They killed poor Mr. Montanus’s wife, and now they done for him. Oh, they’re terrible people!”
“I need a name!” Joe Mac boldly declared. “It’s time!”
“Oh, lord!” she groaned. “They killed poor Cathren and now her poor husband! They’ve killed all kinds of good folks that know their secret!”
“I need a name!” said Joe Mac like a judge pronouncing doom.
Mrs. Morgan rested with both hands over her face a long moment. Then she rose with, “Wait here. I have to get my book.”
Jodi said nothing as she disappeared into her house and then looked at Joe Mac whispering, “What are you talking about? What are we gonna do with a name? We can’t just bust in on these people! We need to know what she knows! And you said you weren’t even going to mention the shooting last night!”
Joe Mac turned his face. “Sometimes you just have to wing it. Like Poe.”
“Oh, god!”
Mrs. Morgan came out the door and sat, quickly flipped through an address book. “There’s a note in here that has a name on it. I kept it after Cathren died. I just knew I’d probably need it one day.” She continued looking. “He’s the only one I know by name. But Cathren told me there was a heap of ‘em. She said she’d been keeping up with ‘em because of what they did to that boy.”
Joe Mac asked, “Is this the person that hurt Cathren?”
She answered. “He’s one of ‘em. But there’s a bunch of ‘em.” She slowly shook her head. “I told Cathren not to mess with those people. I told her how mean they was. I said they were straight from the devil, and they are. They think they can just do anything they want to anybody they want. And most folks are too scared to say anything. But Cathren wasn’t. She was going to the police after they disappeared that boy.”
Joe Mac scowled, “You said that twice. What boy are you talking about?”
“Cathren was gonna report them to the police a
fter they made that last little boy disappear out west of the city near that graveyard. I don’t remember the little boy’s name. But it was some little boy who accidently saw them coming out of some graveyard somewhere.”
Joe Mac asked, “How did Cathren know about it?”
“A friend of hers told her about it. And then the friend ended up dying the next week in some kind of terrible accident.” She made a distressing sound. “Those folks just seem to bring death on everybody they meet. It don’t matter if you’re a child or full-grown.”
Joe Mac waited like a monument to justice, and Jodi barely dared to glance between them until Mrs. Morgan lifted a piece of paper.
“Here it is,” she said in much a softer, and frightened, voice. “This is the name of the man that called Cathren two days before she fell down the stairs. But she didn’t fall down them stairs! Everybody knows that!” She gazed at the name. “I kept it all this time because I felt that the good lord would make this day come ‘round and somebody would do the right thing for poor Cathren!”
“Let me see,” said Jodi and took the scrap of paper. She stared down. “Does this guy live in the city?”
“No. I think he lives out this way.”
“Good.” Jodi gently gripped Mrs. Morgan’s hand. “Mrs. Morgan, I don’t want you to tell anyone that we visited with you today, okay? We don’t want you involved. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“Yes,” she nodded.
“That means that you can’t even tell your friends,” Jodi added gently. “You can’t tell your family or your church or anybody else. You understand me, right? We were never here. You never talked to us. You don’t know anything about us.”
“Oh!” Mrs. Morgan cried.
Jodi had whirled in her chair, her hand already on her Glock, to see Poe tucking in his massive black wings that momentarily blocked out the sky. He had landed on the rail of the short stairway leading up to Mrs. Morgan’s porch, and after he settled in, he raised his obsidian black eyes to focus directly on the old woman as if gazing into her soul.
“A raven!” Mrs. Morgan whispered. “Somebody gonna die for sure!”
Jodi noticed as Joe Mac narrowly turned his face to the sun. She couldn’t see his eyes but she sensed they were open. Then with a shriek Poe erupted from the handrail as a black four-door sedan sped up to Mrs. Morgan’s house with the windows rolled down.
Jodi dove into Mrs. Morgan shouting, “GET DOWN!”
Jodi sensed rather than saw Joe Mac hit the deck as the thin screen surrounding the porch vanished and the wooden wall of the house was tattooed with multiple lines of bullet impacts that continued for an unknown period of time because every second felt like a full minute. Finally Jodi lifted her head and saw, with horror, four men on foot, the sedan stopped in the road, and Joe Mac rising with his .45 drawn.
“Four men!” Jodi shouted. “They’re spread out, Joe!”
Joe lurched into the lower wooden half of the porch and froze in a shooting profile. Jodi expected him to fire immediately but then he shouted, “Give me one on the clock!”
“Eleven o’clock!” Jodi responded and focused on the one on her far right.
They fired at the same moment although Joe kept firing in a tight pattern until the slide locked. He changed clips with a smoothness that was more instinct than skill as bullets tore through the porch. Strangely, where the wood was reenforced with wooden beams, the bullets failed to penetrate; it was something Jodi noticed with preternatural acuity and shouted to Joe, “Get behind a beam, Joe! Bullets don’t penetrate! Stay down, Mrs. Morgan!”
Another fusillade tore through screen and wood panels, and as Jodi came up again to return fire she saw Joe’s man dead in the yard. The other three were rushing forward, and Jodi took a lesson from Joe; she focused on the one in the middle and emptied the entire clip from the Glock. It was seventeen rounds fired in a tight pattern.
She saw the man go backward with a shout just as she saw something else blast its way through the smoke-filled ditch roaring into the melee like the wrath of God. A shotgun blast from the passenger side sent one attacker flying backwards as the last attacker spun and was running to barely evade the second shotgun blast. Then Bobby Kosiniski was out of the pickup truck, arm leveled with the massive Smith and Wesson .44 as the man fled, and Bobby didn’t hesitate to fire. The impact was – as Jodi expected – enormous and hurled the attacker forward ten feet before he landed on his face, skidding to a stop. Then the driver of the sedan obviously decided that discretion was the better part of valor and was speeding from the scene, vanishing into smoke and dust.
“WAIT!” screamed Jodi as Ronnie and Bobby Kosiniski raced back to the pickup to give chase. “Don’t go after him!”
Bobby bellowed, “But we can still get him!”
Quite unnecessarily, Ronnie added, “We saw that car coming this way and knew something was wrong with it! That’s why we –!”
“FORGET ABOUT THAT! You two get in your truck and get out of here! Get out of here NOW! You won’t be in any report! Now go! VANISH! DO IT NOW!”
Ronnie and Bobbie Kosiniski obviously knew the drill, and Jodi didn’t have to ask who taught them as Joe rose to his feet. He stood hunched, head bowed. Listening. He nodded as he heard the pickup tear through the yard, back across the ditch, and down the road.
Moaning, Mrs. Morgan was attempting to rise. She had a hand on the table, which was remarkably untouched, and had risen to one knee. “Oh, my lord,” she groaned, “They’re gonna kill all of us …”
Jodi sheathed the Glock and helped the elderly lady to her chair. She hugged her for a moment before separating to say very calmly, “No, Mrs. Morgan. We’re going to stop these people before they hurt anyone else.”
“But who will protect me?” Mrs. Morgan asked. “They’ll be back! I know they will!”
“We’re going to put you some place safe,” said Jodi. “Don’t you worry about that. Can you pack a suitcase?”
Mrs. Morgan was nodding, “Yes, I think so …”
“Then pack a suitcase. We’re putting you up in a nice hotel with a few police officers guarding the door until Detective Joe Mac and me arrest these people. Okay?”
Mrs. Morgan walked on shaky legs towards the door, her hands visibly trembling, “Okay. I’ll be ready in a minute.”
Jodi knew it’d be a lot longer than “a minute” before they could transport the old woman to a safehouse or a safe hotel room. She could already hear sirens approached and walked to Joe Mac. She gently put a hand on his shoulder, “How ya doing?”
“Ha,” Joe Mac smiled. “You askin’ me?” He turned his face toward her. “How many did you get?”
“I got one. You got one. The Kosiniski Brothers got two. The one driving the car got away.”
“Why is that?”
“I didn’t want Ronnie and Bobby getting involved in a rolling gunfight on the freeway. The Kosiniski Brothers are too valuable an asset to burn. I’m gonna tell the captain we did all the shooting.”
“Then you better get the shotgun from the car and fire off a round into the ground before those sirens get here. And collect whatever shotgun shells the Kosiniski brother used. And make up some story for the tracks of their pickup.”
“I’m on it.”
“Good girl.”
* * *
Only Brightbarton displayed an aspect indicating that he just totally believed Jodi’s hack-eyed story of how they were attacked by “unknown” persons for “unknown” reasons and then someone driving down the road lost control, veered into the firefight, might have returned fire, and quite obviously fled the scene “in reasonable fear for their life.”
Seated, his elbow on the table, his chin on his hand, Brightbarton merely raised a gaze as an investigator stepped into the porch. “No ID, no keys, no nothing,” said the detective. “Not a one of ‘em has as much as a hamburger receipt. We’ll have to run their prints and facial ID. We might get lucky.”
“Do it,” said Bri
ghtbarton dully. He turned a gaze to Joe Mac, who was leaning against a stout beam. He gestured to the ten cops meandering around the porch. “Could I please have a little privacy, gentlemen?”
No objections. They vanished like ghosts. But Special Agent Rollins remained in place and didn’t look like he was in a mood to move.
“That means you, too, Rollins.”
Very reluctantly, Agent Rollins walked to the bullet-torn screen door as he tossed over his shoulder, “If their lies don’t hold up to ballistics, I’ll see both of them in a federal prison. And just to remind you, federal prisons don’t grant parole.”
He was gone.
With a deep sigh Brightbarton eventually asked, “The Kosiniski Brothers just happened to be passing by?”
Jodi blinked. “I didn’t mention the Kosiniski Brothers.”
“The brothers got two of ‘em,” answered Joe. “Then I got one and Jodi got one. Her story will hold up to ballistics. The rest is just smoke. Confusion. Blinded by the light. She ‘kinda’ saw this. She ‘kinda’ saw that. Rollins can save his federal parole for himself.”
“Why is that?” asked Brightbarton.
“Cause he’s getting high on my list of things to do.”
There was a long silence. Then, finally, Brightbarton asked, “Are you serious?”
“I am.”
“’Cause he knew you were here?”
“And only the killer could have known we were here.”
“Or someone who knows the killer.”
“Yep.”
Brightbarton’s frown was deep and pronouncing.
Jodi had, of course, seen cops break the law in small incidents, knew the oft-necessary times to “forget” a minor crime, and had “bent” the law more than a few times herself. But to see someone of Captain Brightbarton’s royal stature talk about sending an FBI agent to a federal prison and basically cover up a shooting incident involving four dead men reached a new water mark for police discretion.
“And how would Rollins know where you might be?” asked Brightbarton.
“’Cause I told him we might be coming out this way.”
“A blue dye operation?”
DARK VISIONS Page 11