The Death Panel: Murder, Mayhem, and Madness

by Tom Piccirilli

  “What kind of fucking joke is this?” Mann said out loud.

  Perno didn’t have any answers. “Somebody spotted the stiff up there this morning, thought it was some crazy bastard stuck up there …”

  Perno said the investigating uniforms knew a corpse when they saw one, even when it was thirty-odd feet up in the air. They brought in homicide and cordoned off the area. Perno hadn’t been up there, but he talked to one of his metro friends that had been … the stiff had been badly mutilated, bones broken, belly slit open, head almost cut off. Crazy thing was … if it could get crazier than this … there didn’t seem to be any blood around, like maybe the John Doe had been murdered somewhere else and dropped there.

  “From what?” Mann said. “A passing plane? A big Jesus hawk?”

  Again, Perno had no answers. “I called you over because I knew you were going to want a look at this one. Maybe it has nothing to do with our friend Richie R, but I’m willing to bet it does.”

  Mann swallowed down a bad taste in his mouth. “How so?”

  “The mutilations are similar to Richie R’s for one thing,” Perno said to him. “We pulled the guy’s wallet out of his pocket and we ran his name—” Perno flipped open his notebook “—Carlo Arroyo, first generation Cuban-American. His parents got out of Cuba just before Castro. I didn’t figure you’d care about that, but when I say that Arroyo was a known hijacker and strongarm thief, was in Lewisburg about the same time as Donny Cerrone … well, thought you might be interested.”

  “Shit,” Mann said.

  He took a breath and let it out real, real slow. Tenuous as all hell, that’s what this was, but Mann trusted Perno’s sense of intuition, his ability to string together things others might miss. You worked Intelligence as long as Perno had, you got real good at things like that. Mann lit a cigarette and stirred it all around in his mind. Okay. Injuries apparently concurrent with those of Richie R. That was a start. A known hijacker. That added fuel. Did time with Donny Cerrone. That lit a spark. No fire yet, but the tinder was there and the conditions were right … still, it was a hell of a reach.

  “What’re you thinking, Archie?” Perno asked him. “You got a feeling on this, don’t you?”

  Mann exhaled a column of smoke. “Sure, I get lots of feelings. Cops are like that … don’t you ever watch the late show for chrissake? Problem is, mine are mostly gas or my prostate acting up.”

  Perno chuckled.

  The CSI people were bringing the body down now. You could almost hear a hush fall over the crowd. Some vacuous-looking blonde with a nice set of ta-tas and a plastic sort of face she probably kept in a drawer was speaking into a mic and staring into a TV camera. Story at six.

  The body was taken down carefully, loaded in a gurney, brought behind a barrier the cops had set up. The techies, led by the M.E. himself, descended on the fresh meat like turkey buzzards, elbowing their way in for the best parts.

  Mann crushed his cigarette out under his shoe. “They tell me this guy ain’t got a heart, I’m calling her quits and going down to Florida.”

  6

  About two that afternoon, Donny Cerrone was sitting at a basement bar about two blocks from his place on North Georgia. Just sitting there with a Chivas on the rocks in his hand. Thing was, he wasn’t drinking it, just holding it. Feeling how cool it was. Sitting across from him was Jimmy Jack Furnari, just staring at him, giving him the sort of look that could have stripped varnish off a door, not saying a thing.

  You had to love the guy.

  He could be smooth as imported silk when it came to schmoozing with politicians or casino bigwigs, assorted celebrities and industrialists, but when he was around his people—made guys, high-ranking criminals, connected guys who got to see him, which were few—he didn’t bother with any of that shit. He just sat there, staring holes through you with those black, narrowed eyes of his, that crooked toothy grin on his face like he was thinking about taking a bite out of your throat.

  That was the real Jimmy Jack Furnari, Calabrian-Italian racketeer and out and out homicidal maniac if you didn’t tell him what he wanted to hear. And that was the rub … Cerrone didn’t know what Furnari wanted to hear on account he wasn’t saying a damn thing.

  Just staring.

  And Cerrone had to wonder how many guys got that look right before Furnari had them put down like sick dogs.

  The mob capo sat there, just watching him. He was wearing a white polo shirt and it made his thick, tattooed forearms look almost vibrant. Finally, he sighed, shook his head. “What is this shit, Donny?” he said. “What the fuck is this shit I’m hearing all over? What can you tell me about it?”

  Cerrone knew what he was talking about. Even though not a word had been spoken on the subject, he knew all right. And he wasn’t stupid enough to pretend ignorance. You didn’t do that with these Calabrians. They were a hardcore bunch. Maybe you could joke with the Sicilians … sometimes … but not their Calabrian brothers.

  Cerrone shook his head. “I don’t know, Mr. Furnari. There’s something fucked up here, but I just don’t know what it is.”

  Furnari nodded, smiled thinly, but his eyes were simmering and dark like pools of acid you might drop bodies into, watch the bones come bobbing back up. “Let me see what I’m hearing here. Some shit … crazy shit … about two boys, Richie R and some spic name of Arroyo, work for you, got themselves clipped and in a real bad way. Am I right on this shit?”

  “Yeah, you’re right.”

  “They work for you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Now they dead … you don’t know why?”

  Cerrone told him very honestly that he didn’t. That he’d been all over this and he couldn’t think of any reason why somebody would want to kill the two men. Sure, they were tough boys, hijackers, ran some muscle for Cerrone, but he’d never gotten them involved in anything that could have pissed somebody off like this. Unless, well, they’d been bopping around on their free time, doing some grabs from the wrong people.

  Furnari nodded. “Sure, I see. Thing is … we been talking to people here. You know the kind of people I mean? People who play rough, don’t like poaching on their turf? Them kind … but nobody saying shit here. This is some kind of fucking mystery. So I want you to think real hard … whoever these boys pissed off, don’t matter who, I can straighten it out. I just don’t want a lot of trouble on this, I don’t want it getting out of hand. You hear what I’m saying, Donny? I don’t want your people tracking shit back to me.”

  Cerrone almost laughed at that, despite the threat behind Furnari’s words. Laughed because it was classic Jimmy Jack. He didn’t care where the shit fell or in which direction it sprayed, as long as none of it got on him. Because if it did, if it did and you didn’t get in the way and catch it … you want it in the belly or the head? Your choice, friend. Of course, it wasn’t just Jimmy Jack, all made guys were like that. Cerrone had been playing with these boys for a lot of years and they were all the same. Fuck that men-of-respect shit you got in The Godfather, that was Hollywood fantasy. The reality was that these Italians were greedy, violent animals that would slit your throat for a nickel.

  “No, I don’t think you have anything to worry about here, Mr. Furnari.”

  “You don’t think?” He didn’t exactly look satisfied with that. “I wanna know what these boys were into, Donny. I want to know what kind of fucking dirt they were scratching around in.”

  So Cerrone told him all there was to tell.

  Rice and Arroyo, along with another tough named Pauly Wade, were basically smash-and-grab artists. When they took something down, they did it the hard way. Cerrone knew their reputation, used them to do some collecting for his loansharking operation and, now and again, some heavy takedowns where a guy had to have some real balls. Mostly over-the-road tractor-trailers, hijacking stuff. They’d taken down four rigs in the past month.

  “But you got your cut on that, Mr. Furnari, I made sure of that. You know what I’m talking about here,
right?”

  Furnari nodded. He remembered. One hijacked rig had a load of furs, another cigarettes, and another top-of-the-line HDTV’s. Cerrone had middled the swag on those, moved the merch through his contacts, turned some good numbers on it.

  Furnari said, “I remember those three … but there was a fourth? I’m hazy on that one.”

  So Cerrone told him about it, how the whole thing went south, belly-up. Wade, Arroyo, and Rice had taken down a truck, conked the driver into dreamland, discovered that there wasn’t a damn thing in back worth grabbing. Just soil or some shit for a tree nursery. Something like that. Nothing.

  Furnari said, “Okay … this Wade is still above ground, you get on his ass, find out what they were up to. I don’t like this shit. I’m smelling something here and it’s bad, Donny. Real bad. But these are your people here, so clean your own house, Donny. Because you know what they say: a fish rots from the head down …”

  7

  Cerrone didn’t go to the pawnshop that day. There was nothing that the hired help couldn’t deal with. He drove around Atlantic City, watching all those streets and avenues pass by as he winged down Pacific in his sky blue Crown Vic—Pennsylvania, Carolina, Kentucky, Illinois, Indiana—thinking, and not for the first time, that living in this damn town was like living on a Monopoly board … though you had to look damn hard for that Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card. If you fucked up here, you pissed off some of the meat-eaters and leg-breakers that greased the wheels, you didn’t pass Go, you went straight off the pier with a cinderblock chained to your leg.

  Take Jimmy Jack Furnari for example. The feds had been taking one unsuccessful run after another at that guy for years and probably would still be wearing out their shoes if it weren’t for budget cuts. But he was smart, crafty, dangerous as all hell. They knew he had his fingers in the unions, extortion, drug trafficking, illegal gambling, and cyberporn … they just couldn’t prove it was all.

  But Cerrone wasn’t worried about Jimmy Jack.

  For Jimmy Jack was a known quantity, but what had happened to Richie R and Carlo Arroyo was definitely on the unknown side of things. It all tied together somehow just as it tied in with those gouges in his door and that weird phone call he’d gotten last night. He hadn’t slept much after that and he had a feeling he wouldn’t be sleeping for some time to come.

  Baby-killer … I’ve prepared a place for you.

  Although it was a hot day, Cerrone found himself shivering. What did it mean and what in Christ’s name kind of voice was that? Like the guy had been gargling with rusty nails and rock salt. A raw, bleeding sort of voice … eerie and wavering. What the hell did it all mean?

  Cerrone pulled into the lot behind his building and there was Archie Mann waiting for him. Thick-necked old bull leaning up against a state-issue Lumina, a real piece of shit. Just like the guy who drove it.

  “Okay,” Cerrone said when he got out. “What now? I’m plotting the overthrow of fucking Paraguay? I’m counterfeiting Beanie Babies? What kind of shit did I do this time, Columbo?”

  Mann just smiled thin as a paper cut, flicked the ash off his cigarette. “Hey, Donny, how’s things? You look tired … you getting enough sleep? Eating right?”

  “Sure, three squares a day. Watching the cholesterol and shit.” He patted his expanding belly. “In the gym every morning.”

  Mann nodded. “Me, too.” He pulled off his cigarette. “Reason I stop by, Donny, is I met this friend of yours.”

  “No shit? Well, you give him my respects. I’d like to stay and chat, but I gotta go cut my toenails and—”

  Mann caught his arm as he passed. “Think you ought to stay and be sociable, Donny. Think that’s what you ought to do.”

  “What is this? A fucking pinch?”

  “Nothing like that. Just wanted to talk about that friend of yours, guy name of Carlo Arroyo, Hispanic fellow, though he could pass for a cracker easy enough. You know the guy?”

  Cerrone just stood there, not knowing what to do with his hands. Not knowing how to stand. Not knowing what to do about that dread creeping up from his balls in slow, shivering waves.

  “I see that you do,” Mann said. He looked tired, too many lines on his face, lips pulled into a frown. “See, Donny, when I met this friend of yours, he was something like thirty feet up an elm over in Chelsea, treed like a fucking cat. You should’ve seen him when they brought him down, Donny … just a fucking mess. All busted-up and swollen, most of his bones broken, like something made of red, white, and gray pulp. Like maybe he’d taken a dive off a ten-story building, kissed the concrete, then some wise-ass, as a joke, scraped him up and dumped him way up in that tree.”

  Cerrone was trying to find something smart to say, but he was suddenly dumb all over. Dumb and numb, his guts filled with something greasy and shifting. “You don’t say? What was this guy’s name again?”

  “I was thinking maybe you and your crew pissed off Jimmy Jack and his boys, but I’m not thinking that anymore. Not at all.” Mann wasn’t playing the game here, he was serious as a heart attack. He looked sad, worn-out, just flat used-up. “Donny, I’m not fucking around here … Arroyo, they cut his heart out, too. Cut it right the fuck out.”

  Cerrone swallowed, but his throat just wouldn’t obey. Up his spine and down his arms there was gooseflesh now. His mouth was dry and his heart was hammering. “I don’t know about this shit, Archie,” he heard himself say. “I don’t know what it’s about, I just don’t know what’s going on here.”

  Mann seemed to believe that. “If I were you, Donny, I’d get the hell out of town,” he said and meant it. “If you need a better reason, one that’ll keep you up nights, I got one for you: Arroyo didn’t have a drop of blood left in him, he was bled fucking white.”

  And then Cerrone was stumbling away, feeling dizzy and sick to his stomach, his entire world, the one he’d known all his life, unzipping around him and something out there, something dark and nameless, reaching out for him.

  8

  “Just answer the fucking question,” Cerrone told Pauly Wade that evening. Feeling night coming down slick and dark like an oil-spill, swallowing the world in black rivers and murky lagoons, making something in his soul rot to carrion. “I ask and you answer … that ain’t so goddamn hard is it, Pauly?”

  Wade just shrugged.

  You couldn’t intimidate or muscle the guy, not Pauly Wade. He was full of muscles and concrete. A career criminal that had been in some of the worst hard time joints on the eastern seaboard, you just couldn’t shake a guy like that. But at least they were alone now. Wade had sent Celia, his black girlfriend who was probably a casino hooker, out for an order of something called shrimp pizza … Jesus, shrimp pizza … and now Cerrone could talk to him, try to get something out of him.

  “The last job I sent you boys on,” Cerrone said to him. “You know the one I mean?”

  Wade nodded, stroked his thick black mustache. “What about it? Was a bust. Shit, nothing there worth grabbing. A fucking waste … I shoulda capped that driver for taking up my time with something like that.”

  “Yeah, yeah … was there anything, I don’t know, unusual about that bit? Something that stands out?”

  Wade sat there, pulling off a bottle of malt liquor, staring out the window of his apartment which was above a clam shop and smelled like it, too. Then, slowly, he shook his head. “Like I said, a bust.”

  Cerrone turned away from him, looked at the wall, the ceiling, the furniture and home electronics, knowing it was all probably hot. He ran a trembling hand over his face, gripped his jaw with it. Jesus, there had to be something here. Had to be. They’d been over everything else, this was all that was left. And if Wade got whacked, well, there wouldn’t be any answers left … just a lot of dying for no good goddamn reason.

  “Okay, then, okay. Just go over that clusterfuck with me, step by step. You conked that driver, tied him up … then what?”

  Wade shrugged. “The usual. We drove his truck out into the boonies
, to that old warehouse out near Margate. You know the one. We pulled it inside, opened it up. Nothing in there, just those boxes.”

  “Boxes? You never said nothing about boxes? You said dirt, just a lot of dirt, that’s what you told me.”

  “Yeah, the dirt was in the boxes … what you think? It was just piled in the back?”

  “Boxes full of dirt?”

  “Yeah, crates I guess you’d call ’em.”

  Cerrone was feeling something worming at the back of his mind, something he’d seen in an old movie once. “Crates … what do you mean? Like … like coffins full of dirt?”

  Wade shook his head. “Not unless they was coffins for little kids. These weren’t no bigger than suitcases. We broke them all open, cracked the lids open with crowbars, thought maybe there’d be something good inside, something special, you know? Nothing but dirt, though.”

  “Dirt? Little crates full of dirt?” Cerrone felt himself getting farther away from the truth here all the time or maybe he was getting closer and he just couldn’t see it. “All right, tell me about the dirt.”

  Wade looked at him like he was crazy. “Just five, six inches of dirt in them. Stuff smelled pretty rank, rancid-stinking dirt and really black, moist. There were worms in it.”

  “Worms?”

  “Yeah.” Wade, a guy who was unmoved by just about anything, seemed uneasy or uncomfortable with the memory of those boxes of black earth. It was there on his face, just behind his eyes, then it was gone. “Worms … like maggots, you know? Big fucking maggots rooting around in there and that stink. It was pretty bad.”

  Cerrone felt his breath catch in his throat. It was filled with razors. Maggoty black dirt? The smell of putrescence, of death? What the hell did that mean? “Anything else?”

  That look passed over Wade’s face again, lit up like a shooting star and then died in his dire, gray eyes where there was nothing really alive and hadn’t been for years. “I think … I think rats got into those boxes.”