Mick Abruzzo

by Nancy Martin

  Turning red, Erlanger flipped pages and started reciting the basics of Garza’s career—his start in Juarez, his use of neighbors and family members to mule drugs out of Mexico, the transportation of large quantities of marijuana over the border. The deaths of maybe two dozen people in Mexico, and a handful in the States when he moved north. The switch from grass to coca products and the exponential growth in the number of Mexicans who died as a result. Finally he hit the motherlode, distributing crack. Now Garza had a cadre of men working for him in the U.S. He was a cartel—a small one, perhaps, but definitely his own man.

  “Yeah, okay,” Mick said when the recitation was over. “I read all the same stuff on Wikipedia.”

  “Did you know one of his known associates got killed today?”

  “I don’t even know Garza. How am I supposed to know his associates?”

  “Man’s name was Soto. Served time for rape, armed robbery, so he’s in the system—a Garza soldier, good with a gun. Cops in Jersey found him dumped near the beach. He’d been shot twice—once in the face, once in the chest. Shot recently, like probably this morning.”

  “What’s your point?”

  Erlanger finally looked up and met Mick’s gaze. “The point is, one man’s dead and we want to know why Garza says he wants to talk to you.”

  Which couldn’t be good.

  But it was how Mick found himself standing at the warehouse gate several hours later. Not happy. The sun was just started to lighten the eastern sky. While the promise of morning glittered on the horizon, Camden smelled like a sewer that had overflowed. Mick’s eyes felt scratchy, but he wasn’t tired. Maybe that’s how men felt when they faced a firing squad at dawn. Full of dread, but wide awake.

  The muscle at the gate wasn’t the same two guys who’d been guarding the compound when Mick and Bruno passed the first time. The guy with the automatic was there, but his partner had been replaced by another man with a handgun. They must have gotten the word that Mick should be unmolested, but ushered as far as the steel door under an overhang. They left him there and faded back with their weapons.

  Mick looked straight into the door’s peephole and knocked.

  A moment later, the door swung open, held by a stocky man dressed in a black t-shirt and jeans, a gold cross at his neck. He was a couple inches shorter than Mick, but not small. Strong shoulders, big hands, chunky body with such solid muscle tone as to appear to be a cobra reared up to strike. He had short dark hair, fading back from a broad forehead, bad skin, a pug nose and black, narrow eyes. He might have been good-looking once, but that time was past. It was hard to imagine Liz being with him. His eyes didn’t reflect drug use. His knuckles were scabbed-over.

  Mick had met a lot of dangerous men in his lifetime. A few of them were close relations who could laugh over bocce games at family picnics one minute and be smashing each other’s faces the next. Other dangerous men he had encountered on the street or in prison. From ordinary fuck-ups and crazyass maniacs to stone killers, they could all trigger a fear factor in other men. Some were simply annoying, but the scale ran all the way to downright terrifying.

  Garza had the dead-eyed look of a man who did as he pleased. But there was something else. He had the wired-up intensity of a desperate animal ready to claw past anything to get out of his cage.

  Before he stepped over the threshold, Garza spread his hands in the usual apologetic gesture before starting to give Mick a quick, but expert pat down.

  Lightly, Mick brushed Garza’s hands away. “Hang on.” And he opened his shirt to reveal the wire.

  “Ah,” said his host, tension relaxing a bit. “You carrying?”

  Mick shook his head. “No gun. No weapons.”

  Garza nodded, and for the benefit of who was listening, he said, “Thank you for coming. I am Rick Garza.”

  Mick figured he hadn’t taken any oath saying he was willing to die for the cops, so showing the recording device was his first move to stay alive.

  He shook Garza’s proffered hand—solid grip, but fleeting--and allowed himself to be shown into the empty warehouse. It was a dark, cavernous space with humid air that had an industrial stink to it. Except for the acrid air, nothing was stored inside. The long, empty space stretched for a full city block. A deep, throbbing noise seemed to come up through the concrete under their feet—some nearby factory maybe or the living river nearby. It had the sound of a faraway, groaning dragon.

  With a bang, Garza shut the steel door and slammed a deadbolt mounted high on the doorjamb. He turned his back and led Mick across the cracked concrete floor of the gloomy warehouse. Garza led him past a couple of closed truck bays toward a lighted office with windows that overlooked the large storage facility.

  The butt of Garza’s handgun was plain to see, tucked into the back of his jeans. On his belt he wore a large hunting knife in a leather sheath.

  In the office, a drip coffee pot sat smoking on an electric ring. A rusting weight bench in one corner. Overhead, a fluorescent light hummed. A battered console television stood in the corner with a smaller, presumably working television sitting on top. A dirty mattress on the floor. An old kitchen table with chrome legs and two chairs that didn’t match. Someone had made an effort to tidy up—newspapers and pizza boxes were stacked on the floor by the televisions—but nothing could be done to make such a place habitable. Nicky Severino’s garage hideaway was a palace compared to Garza’s rat hole.

  Garza was no wealthy drug lord living in luxury. No Scarface drinking champagne with beautiful women.

  Garza noticed Mick halted involuntarily in the doorway, and he smirked. “So,” he said, “is this your future, Abruzzo?” He spread his arms wide to indicate his squalid living conditions.

  “Mine?” Mick said.

  “Will the cops back you into a corner like this someday?” Garza asked.

  A punch in the gut couldn’t have been more painful. Maybe this was the culmination of everything Mick had been thinking lately—that his life of crime might feel like sport sometimes, but there was a good chance it would end exactly as Garza found himself. He was holed up with nothing to show for all the money he’d made.

  In a moment, Mick said, “I don’t know why you asked for me. It’s not like I’m some kind of brother in arms.”

  Wiping the smile from his face, Garza paced forward. Mick let him get close. Close enough to rip the taped microphone from his chest. Violently, Garza smashed the transmitter box on the table over and over until the battery popped out, then he threw the offending electronics to the floor where they landed in a tangle.

  “Sit,” Garza said when the violence was over. “We’ll talk.”

  Mick entered the room. The floor was sticky. He chose the least damaged of the two chairs and sat. Straight ahead of him on the wall was a crucifix—an old one.

  Garza stayed on his feet, moving restlessly around the cramped office as if trying to gather his thoughts. “You have seen Liz?”

  “Couple days ago,” Mick said.

  “Is she well?”

  “Except for the bruises, she’s not bad.”

  Garza flashed a glare at him. “Bruises? You think Liz is bothered by a few little bruises?”

  “Nothing much slows her down,” Mick agreed. He took a chance and said, “Except maybe a baby. You beat her up while she’s carrying your child?”

  Emotions flitted across Garza’s face—ugly rage first, then reconsideration, and ending with something close to resignation. He controlled himself and laughed shortly. “She was right about you. No, she doesn’t deserve to be hit. Not by anyone. Maybe not even me.” In a different tone, he said, “It makes me ashamed to see her like that, but I—you must know what it’s like in our business. So many pressures. The last thing I need is a woman telling me she wants this or that.”

  “What does she want?”

  Garza waved off the question as inconsequential. He paced the length of the small room and back again. After a while, he said, “I haven’t seen her in th
ree weeks.”

  “She’s okay,” Mick said, sensing Garza was asking for information. “Maybe scared. Sad. Feeling trapped.”

  “Yes.”

  “Can’t you get her out? Send her somewhere safe?”

  “I am greedy,” Garza admitted. “I don’t send her away because I want to be with her.”

  “She’s not here,” Mick said. “And you’re not there. So find a place and send her away. Make at least one of you happy.”

  “You make it sound easy. Do you have a woman? A wife?”

  “I think you know the answer to that.”

  Garza shrugged, caught in the lie but unrepentant. “I do. You live in a big house with a pretty woman. I have seen her picture in the newspaper. You keep her protected, the way I do with Liz. But how much longer will you be able to do that? Before you’re living the way I do, and she is far away?”

  “Is this what you brought me here for? Some kind of parental lecture?”

  Garza shook his head, and his face closed. “No. Let’s talk business.”

  “Yours or mine?”

  “You steal cars. That’s silly work.”

  Mick shrugged.

  “I know also about your family’s gambling cartel. Football, basketball, World Cup, horses, whatever. The real money is in gambling.”

  “My father’s money,” Mick said. “I’m out of the rackets.”

  “So you say. Do you remember Tony Vargusti?”

  The name surprised Mick. A blast from his past. “I thought Tony was dead.”

  “Sadly, he is. Before he left us, he told me about you. Said you spent time together. Went to Mass together sometimes. That you were more a part of your father’s business than you pretended to others.”

  In high school, Tony got his start assaulting girls in between sticking up convenience stores. He’d been a cellmate back when Mick was in the juvenile system. The most memorable thing about Tony was how fast he could get back into trouble after his release. But at least he got himself released now and then. Once Mick was in the system, the first damn offense seemed to lead to another during his incarceration—which was how an easy nine-month stretch had turned into nine years. But Tony behaved himself inside, served his time and got out, only to break parole or commit another stupid felony and get rotated back into the prison population where in time he learned about more sophisticated kind of crime from more dangerous criminals. The main thing about Tony was his loose mouth.

  “Tony worked for you?” Mick asked.

  “Muscle only. Tony’s skills were not here.” Garza tapped his forehead. “And in the end, he betrayed me—stupidly, for no good reason—and I killed him. I killed him here. He sat at this table, and I cut his throat.

  The knife on his belt. The sticky floor. To remain calm enough to think, Mick tried to push the mental pictures out of his mind.

  “Tony, he had a good memory,” Garza continued. “Before he died—many weeks before he betrayed me—he talked about you, and I began to think we had more in common than Liz.”

  “About Liz and me,” Mick began.

  He didn’t finish, because out of nowhere Garza’s meaty fist came and walloped Mick across the jaw. He saw stars, bit down on his grunt of pain. Nearly fell off the chair.

  “No more talk about Liz,” Garza was saying. “Nothing about you and her, I don’t want to hear it.”

  Mick checked his teeth with his tongue. All still there. He steadied his balance with both hands on the table and shook his head to clear it. Garza had speed. Unexpected strength. The advantage of standing. And a whole lot of rage.

  “Okay,” Mick said. “So we’re alike. What do you want? You can’t have called me here just to kill me.”

  Garza walked back and forth, maybe calming himself down, maybe deciding something. At last, he said, “It can’t be a surprise to you, seeing me here in a prison of my own making. That I want a new life.”

  No, no surprise.

  “I have money, nothing else. I want out. Out of this country.”

  “Where you going to go?”

  “Back to Mexico maybe. There is a place I think about. But I can’t get there by myself. I’ve tried, and my contacts are no help.”

  “What do you think I can do?”

  “You ship cars all over the world.”

  “No place you’d want to live,” Mick said. “Venezuela? Bosnia? Libya? Hell, you’re better off in a prison than--”

  “Let me worry about getting from place to place. I just need to get out of this country first. And you can help with that.”

  “You’d take Liz?”

  “Of course.”

  “What about your business?”

  “I have moved money to offshore accounts. I can walk away from the rest of it.”

  All the cash that Damian Sanchez had laundered—it had been clean enough to deposit in a bank and then wire-transferred elsewhere in small batches. It’s what Mick would have done, anyway. He considered what to ask next and finally said, “You’d be leaving behind a hell of an enterprise.”

  Garza sat down at the table and faced him. “Is that your price?”

  Garza was offering his operation in exchange for safe passage somewhere far away. Mick said, “What are we talking? Just what you’ve got going here in Jersey? Or Philly, too? Where else? New York?”

  “Are you interested?” Garza pressed.

  Mick hesitated.

  Like a schoolboy, Garza linked his fingers on the table, and he began to talk, to make a case. Maybe he was tired, or maybe he was desperate. But he talked about his business up and down the east coast, as far as Buffalo, Youngstown, Detroit. In small towns, big cities. Everywhere small time dealers needed product from a big supplier.

  “How do you move it?” Mick asked.

  “I use people like you—who can disguise trucks to look like UPS, Fed Ex, school buses, any big vehicle. It’s not difficult.”

  “You ship from this location?”

  Garza shook his head, not willing to get more specific.

  “Do I know anybody you operate with?”

  Again, another head shake. Which could mean Mick knew the people. Or that Garza wasn’t giving away everything.

  “I need to think about it,” Mick said. “We’ve both been up all night. But I know I’m not getting out of here alive unless I say yes.”

  Garza drew his knife and smiled, too, a little sadly. “That is true.”

  He had given away information—too much information—in hopes of getting out of the life he’d made. Had he made this fatal mistake because he wanted to be with Liz? Or because he had a baby coming? Or had the sport gone out of his business? Had the pleasure gone? Had his conscience finally kicked in?

  Mick had no time to ask the questions.

  The first sound of gunfire came through the warehouse walls very clearly. Automatic weapons spitting ammunition that spattered the walls of the building over their heads. Answering fire came from closer still, and then shouting. Cops, storming the warehouse. Garza’s face changed, turning furious.

  Mick had the advantage of forewarning. And he was taller than Garza, so slamming the knife to the table was first. He tried to pin Garza’s left hand there, but Garza lunged up and almost dislodged the knife. Right-handed, he swung a punch at Mick’s face. Mick hunched his shoulder and absorbed the blow.

  At the same time, an explosion rocked the building, and then smoke rolled into the office from somewhere out in the warehouse. Mick and Garza were scuffling by that time, fighting for control of the knife. When Garza gave up fighting long enough to reach for the butt of his gun, Mick knocked him to the floor. He kicked Garza’s arm, but the gun came up anyway, the black eye of the thing so clear he could see down the barrel. Mick flung himself back toward the doorway, and the first slug whined past his head. Two more slammed into the doorjamb. He turned and went out the door and into the warehouse.

  More gunfire outside. Inside, the smoke was very thick, chokingly thick, but no flame. Probably tearg
as. Somebody was battering the door down. Mick had his handkerchief out and jammed against his mouth to breathe, but it was still hard and he could hardly see. With all his senses failing, he took a dive and went down into the deepest smoke. Last thing he heard was Garza shouting in Spanish. After that, his heart was pounding so hard he couldn’t hear anything else.

  The cops broke in and stampeded past in SWAT gear, guns to their shoulders. Ricci came out of the smoke and grabbed Mick by his shoulders. Dragged him outside where the air was clean. Mick coughing up his lungs, trying to find his feet under him. Ricci saying, “You hit? You hit?”

  Mick shook his head and climbed upright. He staggered to the weeds by the chain link fence and hung there by his fingers, coughing but feeling the heat of morning sun.

  “Guys in the truck heard it all.” Ricci got busy pulling out Mick’s shirt tail and ripping the tape and electronics from his back. “The second wire picked up everything—all the details. His contact in Detroit is the best stuff. Enough for a conviction, if it comes to that. You went from zero to hero overnight, Abruzzo.”

  “Garza,” Mick croaked. “Is he dead?”

  Ricci pulled Mick’s shirt back down and held up the listening device like it was the catch of the day. “If he is, you and me--we’ll think of it as a public service killing.”

  Debriefing—that’s what the feds called it. Erlanger wanted Mick to listen to the tape and describe what happened in Garza’s office during the silences. All the cops crowded into the room to listen, hoping to squeeze every tiny clue out of Garza’s words. After the first hour, there was no more to tell, and anyway, Mick felt like shit—tired and half sick and disgusted by the whole thing, too. Maybe with himself. So he clammed up, which made everybody nervous so they made threats and denied him a phone call to Nora, despite Cannoli’s objections.

  Garza had asked for his help. Man-to-man, nothing shady, a straight-up deal. In return, Mick played him, essentially ratted him out to the cops, and it felt wrong.

  A feeling he was going to have to get over, he acknowledged to himself. Unless he wanted to end up exactly as Garza had—in a prison of his own making.