by Jon Mills
The lobby was a hive of activity. His eyes scanned the crowd for anyone he knew. He would be lying to say he wasn’t feeling a little nervous. It wasn’t his safety that he was worried about as much as it was Dana and Jason’s. A large group of old people were milling around. They must have been there for a convention. The three of them made their way to the check-in and waited in line for a concierge to come over and take the bags.
“I still can’t believe you never came to the city,” he said to Dana.
“I wanted to but Matt wouldn’t have it. He said it would interfere with his business. Obviously now I understand why.”
“Did you grow up near here?” Jason asked.
“Yeah, not too far from here. I’ll take you there tomorrow.”
Jack had reserved two rooms. One for him and the other for Dana and Jason. He could have got one with two king beds but Dana felt it was probably best to keep things separate.
They received their key cards and left the front desk. Within a few minutes they were upstairs and entering the rooms. Both of their rooms were connected by a single door. Jack had insisted they get two rooms together. The thought of being anywhere near the criminal underbelly of New York was disturbing. If he had his way, he wouldn’t even step foot in the city. Too many people knew him here. The repercussions of that night at the Pig’s Ear replayed in his mind as he unpacked. He hoped to God he didn’t run into any of Gafino’s associates.
7
Eddie Carmine lived in an apartment above a tailor’s on Kingsland Avenue in Brooklyn. It was a new residence. He’d originally been living in New Jersey but after everything that had taken place with Jack and Gafino, he moved. It was closer to his work. It wasn’t a large place. There were two bedrooms, a small open kitchen, and enough room in the living area for a sofa and chair. He’d never been a man for comforts. His time in the military had taught him to stay vigilant. Long after he was out, he still maintained many of the principles he’d learned in the Marine Corps. He didn’t travel far for groceries. He could step outside of his apartment, turn left and walk past two stores, and have access to a full grocery store. There were only two ways out of his place. The main door and the roof. His place was one of three apartments that were above the store. Anyone who wanted to get in needed to ring a buzzer. He’d also installed a security camera. It was hooked up to his TV. A flick of the switch and he could see who was buzzing. He’d avoided numerous door-to-door salesmen this way. But it wasn’t salesmen he was concerned about. It was the mob.
Thankfully in the year that he’d been here, he’d had no visits from anyone. The landlord showed up once every two weeks for his money, besides that he rarely saw anyone come to his door. He liked it that way. He had no brothers or sisters. No family. His father and mother had passed away back when he was in the military. He had learned to enjoy his own company. It was rare that he felt alone. The times he did, he frequented a local escort service. Though that had become less over the past six months.
After life in the military he had no idea of what he wanted to do. Most of his buddies had become police officers. Some who had specialized in medicine went on to become doctors. None of that had been his thing. He had been trained as sniper, specializing in explosives and the art of killing. That was all he was good for.
The first few years Eddie had struggled to readjust to civilian life. He took a job at the local auto parts factory creating lights for cars. It was assembly line work. Shift work that was monotonous, and soul destroying. It meant early mornings and late nights. But it gave him time to think. It might have stayed that way if he hadn’t read a local article about an increase in stalkers.
They had featured a case about a local businesswoman who was still dealing with a stalker and had reported not receiving much help from police. In the article it raised the question: Was the criminal system letting some offenders slip through the cracks?
It seemed she had pursued action against the stalker and got a restraining order but that still hadn’t stopped him from attempting to kill her. Thinking that maybe he could help, Eddie got in touch with her. Perhaps it had been foolish to think he could help but he did a lot of foolish things when he was younger. He offered to put a stop to the stalker for a price. It was enough money to cover him for two months. She took it.
Two days later the stalker was found dead on the subway tracks. It was ruled a suicide but the woman knew better. She never said a word. The following sixteen years were filled with jobs helping people. All the while he watched Jack’s life from a distance. It was good money. In his mind, he was clearing the scum from the streets. Bringing justice where there was none. He never told anyone. Not even Jack. Eddie planned to keep it that way. Most believed that he still worked for the factory, and for a time he did. It was a nice cover for his extracurricular activities.
He placed another matchstick on the boat he was making. He’d often dreamed about buying his own sailboat and living on the ocean. He was closing in on sixty years of age and while his current means of income made sure that he didn’t want for anything, he knew his body couldn’t handle the punishment it was taking. Not all the jobs went as smoothly as the first one. He had been stabbed, slashed, and beaten numerous times over those years. One time he was even shot. And still he continued to go out there and help others. Though as the years went on he became more cautious; more picky about the kind of jobs he took. But it was always the same. He would scan the local paper looking for reports on crime, listen to the police scanner, and in most recent years use the Internet.
He looked for cases where anyone had been let down by the system.
Over time most of the jobs he got were by word of mouth.
There were many times he wished he could have told Jack. He’d thought about having him work alongside him but he knew Gafino wouldn’t have let him go. He needed that wake-up call. To see Gafino for who he was. Someone who was only out to line his own pockets.
The evening had been like the two before. He’d ordered in Chinese and he and Milly ate it while watching an old Western movie. It was the first time she had tasted Chinese noodles. It was hard for him to comprehend that she had never tasted Chinese food. But then again she had been in treatment since she was eleven.
Over the past year when he visited her, Jack would Facetime. It was the best they could do under the circumstances. After the explosion at the Pig’s Ear the city had been crawling with police. He’d seen them coming out of the local restaurants that were owned by the mob. They weren’t going to lie down and let the mob set the city on fire.
He’d received a text from Jack that evening to say they had arrived safely and that he was looking forward to seeing them.
The clock ticked quietly in the background. Milly had turned in for the night and he was sitting working on the one hobby that he had taken up since leaving the military. Building things out of matchsticks. It was therapeutic. It focused his mind and calmed him. He would have never got into doing it had it not been for Jack. Jack was shit at buying gifts, and for a while he thought he had come up with another doozy when he handed him the gift on his birthday. Beneath the wrapping paper was a craft set. The Leaning Tower of Pisa. The entire thing had to be constructed out of cardboard and matchsticks.
As Eddie sat there gluing on another stick to the cardboard his mind drifted back.
“What? It will keep you busy in your old age,” Jack had said.
“Matchsticks?”
“They say it helps with memory.”
“Last year it was pair of socks. You have outdone yourself.”
Jack chuckled to himself.
“Well, you can always make it and then use it for target practice.”
“I might just do that.”
His mind snapped back into the present at the sound of a buzzer going off. Still holding a plastic bottle of glue in one hand, and a match in the other, he glanced at his watch. It was a little after eleven at night. Had Jack decided to show up early? He reached for the TV
clicker and punched it on. The image was unclear at night. There were no lights. But he could make out two men standing in the darkness. Their silhouette said enough. They were bulky and gazing up at the camera. They pressed the buzzer again.
Moving fast, Eddie went over to a cabinet and pressed a button on the side of it. What should have been a place where you stored bottles of drink held something far more dangerous. Weapons. He had an AR-15 and two Glock 17s. As he grabbed the two Glocks he heard the sound of a door being broken. He cast a glance at the TV and noticed the two men were now gone but the door was swinging in the wind.
A long staircase led up to a short landing. He could hear the thump of their boots as they came up the stairs. Eddie dashed into the spare bedroom and woke up Milly. She still hadn’t fully recovered from all that she’d endured over the years. They had made progress but it was minimal. This was liable to set her back years.
Eddie guided her into a closet and locked the door behind her. He knew it was futile, but he had to hope they wouldn’t look there.
How had they found him? He’d been careful. The phone number he’d given out was for an online software application that then forwarded all his calls to a disposable cell phone. He changed that mobile every month. There was no way someone could find him. Unless he had been spotted, or someone knew his whereabouts. Everything he did was precise. The places he visited. The food he ate. The times he left and returned. He spoke to very few people. The less people who knew him the better. Even when he showed up to pick up Milly, he never went in. He avoided cameras.
He racked his brain for answers as he prepared for them to burst through his door.
He didn’t have time to figure out the hows, all he could do was fend them off. He heard a foot pound against the other side of the door.
He raised his gun to heart level. He waited. He wasn’t just going to start randomly shooting through the door. He’d triple bolted that door, installed a steel door kick plate. If they wanted in they were going to have to do more than give it a kick.
The pounding on the door was followed by silence, then rapid gunfire.
8
By the time Frank Banfield arrived on scene he was already feeling agitated. After going over the crime scene down at the East Star Behavioral Treatment Center he was trying to make sense of what seemed like another senseless crime. The initial thoughts by the officers on scene were that it had been committed by addicts.
It hadn’t been the first time that their guys had been called out to a treatment center. Most drug users in the city knew that they could find pharmaceutical medication to feed their habit. Trouble was the storage room that held medication hadn’t been touched. Usually it would have shown signs of forced entry. Nothing. Then there was the fact they had damaged the surveillance equipment. It just didn’t add up.
He had barely got a few hours’ sleep when he got another call.
A cup of coffee in hand, he showed up in Brooklyn in the early hours of the morning. A crowd had gathered outside a small block of apartments. Lights from two police vehicles were flashing intermittently. Officers on scene had taped off the area and were keeping a few of the bums back.
“What we got, Carl?”
“One dead. The place has been torn apart. Bum over there said he saw two men bust in the front door before he heard gunfire.”
Frank glanced over at a guy in his late fifties. The city was full of them. Their faces and clothes dirty with the grime of the streets. Most were addicted to crack or meth. Some of them slept in cardboard boxes or found warm spots around the city where they could sleep until they were moved along. The sad cases were the former Wall Street brokers. People who had seen the bottom drop out in the late eighties. Those guys had been at the top of their game. Most had owned two homes, boats and vacationed two months of the year. Now they were showing up at homeless shelters.
Frank ducked under the tape and went up the stairs, two at a time. He was closing in on forty. Was still in pretty good shape. You had to be for this job. Too many officers after getting out of the academy let themselves go. But that’s why so many criminals got away. They could outrun an overweight, sweating, donut eating cop. He made sure that wasn’t the case with him. Whether he had been up all night or not, he was awake by five every morning. He took thirty minutes to work out at his home. That was followed by a thirty-minute jog in the city. It awoke his senses. It got him in touch with those living on the streets. He would see the homeless curled up on benches as he dashed through Central Park or Washington Square Park. Some days he couldn’t squeeze in the run, but he always got in that workout.
At the top of the stairs an officer stood watch in the doorway of the apartment. Inside, CSI were already taking photographs and collecting physical evidence. Lying face down on the floor in a pool of a blood was a body.
“Who is it?”
Tom Parnor was crouched down beside the body, performing an examination. He’d pulled out a wallet with some identification.
“Eddie Carmine. Shot point-blank. Execution style. But not before he had taken one hell of a beating. Whoever did this, tortured him. They pulled out teeth, broke his fingers, put two bullets in his kneecaps.”
Frank screwed up his face. The name rang a bell. Carmine? He came around and stepped in close so he could get a better look at the victim’s face. He used a pen from his top pocket to lift back the strands of long hair that were obscuring the face. He tilted his head.
“Shit.”
“You know him?”
Frank nodded. “Yeah, well, when I was a kid.”
An investigator came up from downstairs.
“Frank.”
Frank got up and walked over to the main door.
“Seems we might have a possible kidnapping. A witness said they saw the two men leave with a woman. There was a lot of screaming.”
“Any description?”
“Too dark but they could hear her.”
The next few hours CSI gathered what evidence they could collect. Trying to solve these kind of crimes was like searching for a needle in a haystack. It wasn’t just the fact they happened so often. Witnesses were usually too scared to speak. Those who did were usually bums. Most of the time their accounts were sketchy at best as they were just keen on getting cigarettes and coffee in exchange for information. Then when you gave them what they were after, they would just come up with anything. It was like chasing your own tail.
9
Seven o’clock in the morning was always a busy time in the city. The city never rested. It was stunningly beautiful outside that morning. From the hotel window Jack could see pedestrians already clogging up the sidewalks and yellow taxis honking for no other reason than they were New Yorkers. The tree branches of Central Park would have been coated in a deep frost, not that he could see them from Brooklyn but he had made a mental note to take Dana and Jason there before they returned to Rockland Cove. The concrete jungle beyond the window was as stunning as he remembered.
He had a bounce in his step that morning. It was New Year’s Eve. The time of the year that the city came alive. The best time to visit the city and go unnoticed. And yet the one time of the year people could vanish unnoticed.
Jack found the fresh air intoxicating as he returned to the hotel that morning with a tray of coffee. He could have purchased it from the lobby, or even made some in his room, but he knew the area, and remembered a local café that had been a favorite of his. It was a little after seven when he entered the warmth of the lobby.
It had been over a year since he’d seen his sister in person. Talking via a mobile device always felt uncomfortable. He’d specifically chosen a hotel that was a little rundown. Nothing fancy. Nothing that might draw attention. It was odd being back in his old stomping grounds. He thought of the many people he had killed in Brooklyn. Those he had taken and dropped to the bottom of the Hudson River. Life in the mob was something that few would ever understand. Why would a person get involved? People did not choose it
. You were chosen. They were very picky about who they brought into their inner circle. Most of them had grown up in families that were already involved. He’d once overheard someone talking in a bar. A tourist about the recent string of arrests. Why wouldn’t they just leave? Why not just walk away? You didn’t walk away from the mob, by the time you were involved it just became a way of life. After you got away with murder once, twice, even three times, you started to think you were untouchable. Then, add to that the money that flowed like water and the comradery. It felt like a brotherhood. But that’s how it appeared on the surface. That’s what most thought it was until they were staring down the barrel of a gun, until they were ratted on. Then the tables turned and it showed its true face.
Jack knocked on Dana’s door and Jason answered it. He handed him the tray. He could hear the shower going. Jason said she’d been in there for over twenty minutes. That might have been cause for concern if it wasn’t for the fact that Jack had lived with Dana for several months and had witnessed her lengthy bathroom routine.
“You think you two might want to have some alone time today?”
“What?”
“You know, show her the sights.”
“What about you?”
“I was just thinking of chilling here. Going in the pool, maybe stepping out and browsing some of the local stores.”
Jack chuckled. “There is a really big music store about four blocks from here, you might want to check it out. They have tons of drums.”
“Sounds like a plan.”