by Archer Mayor
“It also brings back what Ogden said,” Gunther added. “That she never surfaced where most junkies do, on the welfare rolls, or unemployment, or parole and probation. Like she had a secret nest egg.”
Jim Berhle had finally worked out the kinks enough to sit down again. “I also wondered about that credit card. I know she didn’t use it much, and the limit’s low, but I was surprised she had one at all. Most junkies aren’t that organized.”
“What was the name of her primary girlfriend?” Gunther asked.
Sammie looked it up. “Louisa Obregon, nicknamed Loui.”
“She said she’d seen a couple of boyfriends. Maybe we should get mug shots of these gentlemen and run them by her.”
“Yeah,” Sammie agreed, “add them to Bob Kunkle’s picture.”
The phone rang beside Berhle’s elbow. He picked it up, muttered a few monosyllables, and hung up.
“That was Ogden,” he told them. “Sounds like your loose cannon is at it again. Ogden told Kunkle on purpose that Ron Cashman used to work for an old hood named Manotti, but didn’t tell him Manotti and Ogden are old acquaintances. Apparently Willy and another guy just finished giving Manotti the third degree, looking for Cashman. It wasn’t a casual interest.”
Crestfallen, Sammie stared at the floor. “Damn him.”
“Christ,” Riley Cox murmured. “I thought I was out of this kind of thing.”
Willy didn’t comment, but he knew the feeling. They were in Brooklyn’s Red Hook district, a thumb-shaped appendage jutting into New York Bay below Governors Island. It was late at night and they were approaching a very large, very dark warehouse that sat at the end of an enormous concrete pier surrounded by cold jet-black water. The surrounding light show of distant buildings, twinkling like Christmas lights, and the muffled, far-off rumblings of the urban sprawl around them only enhanced their isolation. Falling back on their separate memories, neither one could shake a sense of foreboding.
They had made contact with Ron Cashman—or at least someone they hoped would turn out to be he. Buying illegal guns, unlike scoring drugs, was a tangled and cautious affair. Guns were expensive, high-profile with law enforcement, and easily traceable through serial numbers and federally mandated recordkeeping. Not only that, but the gun laws in New York specifically were among the harshest in the nation. No one with any survival skills was going to do business with the first joker into a neighborhood asking to buy a gun.
So, at Willy’s urging, Riley had sent inquiries through his contacts about making a buy. After a lot of talk and negotiation, he’d eventually been told to come alone to the Red Hook warehouse and to bring six hundred dollars in cash. The deal was to purchase a new Glock .40, and ammunition, with an option to buy many more if the deal proved satisfactory. From what they’d been told, and as they’d been hoping, the discussions had piqued Cashman’s interest. He was going to be there himself to check out this new, potentially big buyer.
The two men stopped in the darkness several hundred yards shy of their target.
“You got everything you need?” Willy asked.
“I got everything I got,” Riley answered him. “I’ll only know what I need when I find out I don’t have it, like a missile launcher.”
Their plan wasn’t very sophisticated. It hadn’t been allowed to be. Cashman’s people had only told them to be near a particular pay phone at a certain time in order to find out the location of the meet. That call had occurred just twenty minutes before, precluding any chance of getting to the place first to check it out.
More than anything, that’s why they’d both been nurturing memories of Vietnam: As they’d chronically had to do over there, they were going in blind.
And, as everybody knew, the worst time in these deals was when the product met the money.
Their choices were rudimentary: Either Willy went in first covertly and found a place to hide and observe, from which he could quickly move in as backup, or Riley went in first as the buyer—since Cashman knew Willy by sight—hoping that most of Cashman’s team would then be focused on him and pay less attention to any additional company. They knew the opposition would keep an eye out for the cops, but that didn’t preclude a single, trained man from slipping through.
They’d chosen the latter course of action, and after a few whispered exchanges to coordinate what little they could, they parted company, Riley slowly, carefully, and in plain view, walking down the rest of the pier toward the warehouse’s primary entrance.
He wasn’t armed, despite his rocket launcher comment and their assumption that the sellers would be. The core problem in these deals was that the guns allowed either party to try taking the other guy’s offerings by force. In fact, there was a growing trend demanding that all weapons be left behind. Riley had chosen to do so even though the subject had never come up.
He reached the huge, partially open sliding metal door and sidled inside, stopping to let his eyes adjust to the gloom. The only light was the city’s reflected glow coming through a string of skylights high above. Slowly, what emerged before him was a long, towering central hall extending the length of the building, with girders overhead equipped with traveling winches and catwalks, metal grid-floored galleries on either side about twenty feet up, and a series of large doors, some open, some closed, lining the walls on the first floor. Massive steel pillars stood like regimented redwood trees, two by two, all the way to the end.
The whole enormous place was as still as a tomb.
Riley proceeded to the distant far wall, as he’d been told, discerning as he went a small glimmering of light in the distance. There was moisture on the concrete floor— occasional small puddles of water or oil as black as onyx—and his footsteps, no matter how soft his tread, echoed off the walls to either side of him. He wondered how in hell Willy was going to enter undetected and, not for the first time, why it was he’d stuck his neck out for a dead friend and a complete stranger. Not that he didn’t know in his heart. For all that he might have denied it, he hadn’t felt this alive since returning from ’Nam.
“Stop.”
The voice had come as from some celestial height, without an identifiable point of origin. Riley stopped, keeping his hands open and within plain view.
With a startlingly loud metallic snap, a light suddenly burst alive and surrounded him in a blinding white cone, making him squint in pain. He considered ducking away, to dispel their advantage, but knew that might be the last move he ever made.
“Why are you here?” asked the voice in a dispassionate, almost bored tone.
“Same reason you are.”
“No games. Answer the question.”
“I want to buy a gun.”
There was no response from beyond the light.
A couple of minutes passed before Riley clearly heard the sounds of approaching footsteps, although he still couldn’t see a thing. The voice spoke again, but this time from just beyond his vision, a mere few feet away, startling him.
“What’s your name?”
“Waldo Upshriner. What’s yours?”
The voice laughed. “Very good. You bring the money?”
“Turn the light off or you’ll never find out.”
Whether because of his tone of voice or the fact that his request had already been anticipated—which was far more likely—the light died as abruptly as it had appeared. The man with the voice waited patiently as Riley blinked and slowly got used to the softer glow of a battery-powered camp lantern atop a nearby fifty-five-gallon drum. Beside it stood two rough-looking men dressed in dark clothing, with guns stuffed into their belts. Whatever this was, it wasn’t the romantic claptrap of the movies, where everyone wears fancy suits and pulls up in limos with ten bodyguards. This was a street-level business deal, as gritty as the surroundings in which it was occurring.
High above and nearer the front entrance, Willy Kunkle silently stepped onto one of the grid-decked galleries overlooking the vast room. He had located the one sentry outside, equippe
d with a walkie-talkie to give the alarm, and had knocked him unconscious without a sound. Then, not trusting to follow Riley’s path, he’d opted instead to climb an exterior ladder and enter through a broken office window. Which had led him to where he was now, just in time to see the bright light replaced by the weaker one.
He could hear the voices of the three men, although not what they were saying, and hoped to hell things would continue smoothly, at least until he got closer. He removed his rubber-soled shoes and shoved them into his coat pocket, to be sure that the metal grating beneath his feet would not issue a betraying sound at the wrong moment.
Moving slowly, crouched low from instinct, his gun in his hand, Willy placed one foot before the other, as carefully as if he’d been treading razor-thin ice.
Below him, Riley was negotiating: “You said on the phone it was six hundred for the one piece. I can live with that this time, to show good faith, but I got to have a break if we’re going to be dealing in quantity.”
Ron Cashman—whom Riley recognized from Willy’s description of the bandage especially—shook his head. “You think the risk goes down with more guns? It’s just the opposite. Besides, I don’t know you. Why should I cut you any breaks?”
Riley smiled. “ ’Cause you’re goin’ to want to know me. I got what you need. And don’t feed me that crap about higher risk. I’m offering to buy fifteen pieces off you in one shot. What d’you think is riskier? One deal for good money, or fifteen deals where you got fifteen chances of selling to a cop?”
Willy was getting closer, had almost gotten to where he had the advantage over both Cashman and his henchman.
Cashman pulled his gun from his waistband. “What tells me you’re not a cop?”
This time Riley actually laughed. “You knew me, you wouldn’t ask.” He turned and began walking away, adding, “You also ain’t the only guy sellin’ guns.”
Cashman hesitated, either thinking things over or waiting for Riley to stop.
But Riley kept on walking, out of the lantern’s immediate reach.
“Wait. Hold on. We got off on the wrong foot here,” Cashman said, replacing his gun.
Riley turned to face him, but stayed where he was. “We stopping the dick-around dance, then? We gonna do business?”
Cashman let out a forced laugh. “Yeah, yeah. You show me yours, I’ll show you mine.” He reached into his pocket and removed a rag-wrapped bundle the size of a hardback book. He laid it onto the barrel’s top with a deep, echoing clang.
Which was repeated by Willy as he brushed past a piece of unseen rebar leaning up against the wall and knocked it over with a startling, reverberating, heartstopping rattle.
The reactions below him were simultaneous and immediate. The sidekick pulled out his gun and stared up at the gallery, partially blinded by the light near his head. Cashman pointed his gun at Riley. And Riley dove for cover farther into the darkness around him.
Three gun flashes filled the air like a triple burst from a fireworks display—the sidekick shooting in Willy’s direction, Willy shooting back, hitting the man in the chest, and Cashman firing at Riley Cox, who let out a grunt, spun around, and landed like a dead tree, bouncing without a twitch.
After that, it was a running firefight between Willy and Ron Cashman, with the latter sprinting toward the back of the building, shooting wildly over his shoulder, and the former keeping pace twenty feet above him, firing through the steel grate at his feet and sending up a row of sparks from the fragmenting bullets.
At the end of the gallery there was a staircase leading down to the ground floor. Willy took it three steps at a time as Cashman slammed through a door on the far wall and disappeared from view.
Breathing hard, his feet hurting from running on the grating, Willy didn’t even hesitate at the door. Seeing Riley drop amid a nightmarish flashback that commingled with images of Mary and Nate somehow finalized a cycle in his head. As he had so long ago, opening his shirt to the enemy soldier for a clean ending to it all, so now did he go after Ron Cashman with suicidal intensity, exchanging self-protection for a longing to stop the guilt and confusion.
There was a hallway beyond the door, leading down a row of abandoned offices. Ahead of him, visible in the harsh light cutting in through a shattered window from a security lamp outside, Cashman leaped over a pile of debris, dove to the ground to use it as cover, and twisted around to kill Willy Kunkle.
But Willy didn’t care. He continued running at full tilt, the bullets singing by his ears as Cashman fired in a panic, methodically squeezing off his own shots, making them count, until he stopped on top of the debris pile and was staring straight down at Cashman’s crumpled, bleeding body.
The dying man looked up at Willy, his gun now beyond his reach, his eyes wide and white in the artificial light. “Don’t shoot,” he said. “Help me.”
Given his fatalistic passion of moments earlier, Willy felt suddenly totally remote, Riley’s inert body blending with countless other killed and mangled corpses, to be filed in a part of his brain he both cherished and loathed.
He used the trick he had earlier of pretending his dead pager was a cell phone, holding it up, half hidden in his hand, and saying, “I’ll call 911 right now if you tell me what I want to know.”
Cashman groaned, tried to move, and rolled his eyes. “Oh, Jesus.”
“You killed my wife?”
“Yes.”
“With dope you bought from La Culebra?”
“Yes.”
“You killed Nate Lee?”
“Yes.”
“You tortured him first to get the goods on me?”
“Yes. Please call.”
Cashman closed his eyes briefly, like a man fighting off sleep. Willy knew he was running out of time.
“Why did you kill Mary?”
Cashman’s breathing was becoming erratic, his fingers flitting against the filthy floor as if trying to escape their dying host.
“Why?” Willy repeated.
The eyes half opened. The answer came as a whisper. “She was… greedy.”
The last word was an exhalation, and after it had drifted away, Willy felt utterly alone.
Chapter 21
Ward Ogden’s voice on the phone was lacking its usual friendliness. “Something’s up you better see. A car’ll be downstairs in fifteen minutes to pick both of you up.”
Gunther groped in the dark to replace the phone in its cradle and peered groggily at the red numbers on the hotel’s radio alarm clock. It wasn’t quite three in the morning. He swung his legs out of bed, padded over to the double door separating his room from Sammie’s, and pounded on it with his fist.
“Sam. Rise and shine. Gotta hit the bricks.”
The door was yanked open with surprising speed and Sammie’s face hovered before him, looking both haggard and anxious. “Is it Willy?”
“I don’t know. Ogden just called. Told us to be downstairs in fifteen minutes.”
Her face contorted with anger. “Shit, he’s done it again,” she burst out, and slammed the door, just missing Gunther’s fingers.
They were downstairs in time to greet a patrol car as it pulled up to the curb of their marginally solvent hotel. The two men in the front were polite but claimed ignorance on the reason for the trip, admitting only that they were headed for Red Hook on detective Ogden’s orders.
The found Ogden at the back of the empty warehouse, beyond a huge central room rigged with halogen lamps and a team of crime scene investigators. Outlined on the floor was the bloodstained drawing of a man, not far from another stain at least as big, along with a dusting of empty shell casings as thick as sprinkles on a doughnut.
Where Ogden was awaiting them, a second human outline lay sprawled behind a random pile of smashed-up office furniture. A gun rested just beyond the reach of one of the outline’s extended arms.
Ogden did not look happy. “Two dead: Ron Cashman with three slugs in him, and a man named Franco Silva, hit once in the heart.�
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“I noticed a third stain,” Gunther commented, keeping his voice neutral. He was very aware of Sammie’s tension as she stood beside him, prepared for the worst.
“Man named Riley Cox,” Ogden explained. “Badly wounded, but apparently not lethally. He’s also refusing to talk. We checked his hands for gunpowder residue. He didn’t have a weapon we can find, and right now it doesn’t look like he fired at anyone, either.”
“Which presumably leaves Willy as the missing party,” Gunther filled in the blanks.
Ogden’s response was terse. “Right. Not that we have any proof—yet.”
“Have you come up with a likely scenario?” Sammie asked, her tone purposefully strong and professional.
“We’ve come up with a scenario, whether it’s likely or not.” He jerked his thumb toward the huge room behind them. “Some of it’s from Cashman’s lookout. We found him gagged and handcuffed to a chain-link fence outside. His boss was supposed to sell a gun to someone, we think Riley, although the gun in question is missing. It was a one-gun deal, with the option of a bigger buy if everybody got along. We think your boy took care of the sentry while Riley played the front man. Then he snuck along the gallery to nail the other two. After that, who knows? Riley was found near the middle of the room. The paramedics were phoned by an anonymous caller, probably Kunkle. As for him”—Ogden nodded his chin in the direction of Cashman’s last resting place—“it’s anybody’s guess how he died.”
“You think he might have crawled here after the shootout?” Sammie asked hopefully.
“Not with all these shell casings. He was probably wounded, though. We found him face up and he had one bullet hole in the back. One possibility is that he and Kunkle shot it out western-style. There’s a trail of shells all along the hallway.”
“What’s the other possibility?” Gunther asked, already knowing the answer.
Ogden looked at him grimly. “That Kunkle shot him where he lay. At this point, from what I’ve seen, I wouldn’t put it past him.”
Speechless because he knew it could be true, Gunther returned his gaze to the outline, wishing there was some way he could get it to talk.