by Norman Green
When she was done, Rachel pulled Al’s covers back up and sat down in the chair. “Do you know what your BMI is?”
Body Mass Index, Al thought. The new statistical tool to tell you how fat you are. “No.”
“I suppose it doesn’t matter. I dated a guy when I was in pre-med. He was a soccer player. He ran miles every morning. Worked out every day, ate measured amounts of protein and complex carbs, did ’rhoid cycles twice a year. He was out of shape and dumpy, next to you.”
“I’ve always been this way.”
Rachel nodded. “You haven’t got the muscle mass of a juicer.”
“Mass does not equal strength,” Al said. “Bruce Lee was a skinny guy. Didn’t have the biceps everybody loves.”
“Genetics is a fascinating subject. Did you know that you carry within you the entire history of your race? It’s in your DNA, everything we ever were, all the way back. We’re only just beginning to learn how to read it. At one time, our ancestors needed to be much stronger and quicker than we do, just to survive. Those traits are still there, but they’re carried by recessive genes. That means if both your parents have a particular gene, they pass on the trait it carries to their child. That’s why you have the physical gifts you do. It probably happens about once in five or ten thousand births.”
“I’m a freak, you mean.”
“If you want to look at it that way. Alessandra, I couldn’t get to where you are, physically, not if I left my family, quit my job, and worked out with a personal trainer every day for the next five years. I’ll bet you’re stronger than most men. Better coordinated, too.”
“Maybe.”
“Accept it,” Rachel told her. “Stop trying to prove it. It’s a shallow way to measure yourself anyway. I think you’re probably better than that.” She looked away. “End of lecture. The rest of this is medical fact. You are going to have to spend the next few weeks right where you are. Your body needs time to heal itself. You don’t have anything broken, but you’ve got bone bruises and cracked ribs. There isn’t a lot we can do for that, you’re just going to have to let them heal. I’m going to leave two prescriptions with Anthony, one for the pain and one to help you sleep. The only other thing you need is time.”
“Okay.”
“If you start pushing yourself too soon, you’ll only delay the process. When all the discoloration from the bruises has gone away, you can start some mild exercises.”
“Okay, Doc.”
“Good. Now how about we get you into the shower?”
“I can make it.”
“No, you can’t. You were in enough discomfort just going through an examination. Honey, I went to school for this. It’s what I do. Let me help you. Please. What if you slipped in the tub?”
Irritated, Alessandra inhaled a little deeper than she had intended, ready to tell Rachel where to go, felt the sharp pang in her side. Okay, God, she thought. I get the message. “All right.”
Her cell phone warbled. Alessandra opened her eyes, looked at the thing with distaste. May as well answer it, she thought. “Hello.”
“I heard you got roughed up.” It was Caughlan, and he sounded agitated.
“That right?” How could he have known? She tried to rouse herself out of the half-sleep she’d been in. “Who told you that?”
“What difference does it make?” he said. “I thought you were the best. I thought this kinda shit didn’t happen to you. I thought—”
“Yeah,” Al butted in. “I’m fine, thanks.”
“Hey,” Caughlan said. “I thought you were the one who was gonna kick ass, not the other way around. What the hell happened?”
“Lighten up, Caughlan. Even Ali lost once in a while. How well do you know Jerry Tomasino?”
“I know him.” Caughlan’s voice was a little calmer. “We do a little business. What of it?”
“He a friend of yours?”
“Friend?” Caughlan said the word like he’d never heard it before. “He’s a guy. What about him?”
“Tell me about him.”
“What do you wanna know?” Caughlan was starting to get loud. “He’s got money and he’s got connections. Used to be mayor of Union City. You need to get something done in New Jersey, the guy to go to is Tomasino. He can get you permits, he can get you variances, and he can also get you put in a box and buried in the swamp if you piss him off. That what you needed to know?”
“Keep going.”
“What? What, keep going? What the fuck do you want from me?” She could hear the steam building in his voice. “He’s a douche bag and a fucking pain in my crotch, but I live and do business in Jersey, so Tomasino has got to get his. Okay? Why you so goddamn interested in Tomasino? You telling me he’s the guy behind this morphine running through my trucking company?”
“Tell me exactly how you heard I got beat up.”
“Tomasino, Christ, you better be goddamn sure. I need this like I need a fucking hemorrhoid . . .”
She allowed herself the luxury of yelling, put up with the pain in the ribs that it caused. “Goddamn you, Caughlan, quit whining and suck it up! I need to know. How did you hear I got beat up?”
There was a sudden silence on the line, and Alessandra began to wonder if she’d pushed him too far. “They were talking about it in the office this morning,” he said finally. “O’Hagan and them. I didn’t ask how they’d heard. I should have done that. Should have . . .”
“Leave it alone,” Al told him.
“Is it him? Is it Tomasino?” Caughlan’s voice was flat and hard.
“Maybe. I don’t know for sure yet.”
“Look, you go stepping on Tomasino’s dick, you’re doing it on your own account, not mine. You hear me? You go up against a guy like Tomasino, you can’t just knock him down. You gotta put a knife in his throat. Anything short of that, you’re just signing your own death warrant.”
“Thanks for the call,” she told him. “You been a lot of help.”
He hung up.
It only took a half hour for Stiles to get to her.
“What are you doing?” He was both scared and indignant; she could hear it in his voice.
“Hiya, Marty.”
“What are you doing? What are you thinking? What makes you think you can go after a guy like Tomasino? Do you got any idea . . .”
“I didn’t go after anybody, Marty. He came after me.” She told him about the assault.
“All right. All right, Al, you did good.” She could still hear the fear in his voice. “This might not be as bad as I thought. You stay in bed, okay, and you let me take it from here. You remember that thing you did with Caughlan’s computer? Yesterday afternoon I got the spam from Frederick’s, okay, and I followed the truck to a warehouse in Jersey, up in Norwood.”
“And you were gonna tell me all about this, right? Next time you saw me?”
“Yeah, come on, I was gonna tell you . . .”
“Gimme the place, Marty, I want a name and an address.”
He was silent for a moment, but then he gave it to her. “Anyway, the warehouse don’t matter, it’s just a blind drop. Fuckin’ place is leased by some offshore corporation, I couldn’t trace it. But there’s a lab in New York, just up over the Jersey border. I think that’s where they’re cooking this shit. What we gotta do is connect the lab to Tomasino. We find a link between any of this and Tomasino, that’ll be enough. I can give that much to Mickey, and what he does with it is his business. But you stay down, you hear me? You stay out of sight. This shit is out of your league.”
“What about Tomasino’s inside guy?”
“We ain’t even sure he’s got one. Let Mickey worry about—”
“What about Willy?”
“What about him?” Stiles was on the verge of losing it. “What are you, the Spotless Avenger, for crissake? You wanna worry about saving some kid, why don’t you find one that’s still alive? We got this just about wrapped up, Martillo, so don’t you go and blow it. You hear me? You let me tie Tom
asino to the dope so I can collect and we can walk away from this. You get out of that bed, you’re fired, and I mean it.”
“Okay, Marty.”
“Goddamn you, Martillo, I ain’t kidding.”
“Stop worrying, Marty, I can’t get out of bed, it hurts too much.”
“Good!” He sounded relieved. “I mean, you know—”
“Good-bye, Marty.” She snapped the phone shut and lay back on her pillows. The thought came, unbidden: they’re walking away, Willy, and they want me to walk away, too. She sat back up, swung her legs down to the floor. She went dizzy and her head began to throb. She could feel every nerve ending in every spot where they’d kicked her. The pain was almost a physical assault. After a few minutes, it seemed to coalesce and settle in the front part of her head. The bathroom seemed a lot farther away than it had just seconds ago. How bad do you need to do this, she wondered.
The hell with that, she thought, and she stood up. She held onto the bed to steady herself. Move, she told herself. Take the first step.
Seventeen
Two days of inactivity were all she could stand. Her body wasn’t ready, but she was. She took her time getting ready, took a cab to the lot where she kept the van, stopped to take a rest whenever she needed it. Pretend you’re rich, she told herself. Pretend you’ve got all the time in the world.
She drove the van to Dumont Avenue in Brooklyn, found a parking spot. She shut the van off but made no move to get out. She was behind the Brownsville Houses. She wore shades and heavy makeup to hide her bruises. She was sure her presence had been duly noted, what would come next would be the assessment: is she weak? Is she vulnerable? Is she good to eat? Is she a cop, a customer, or just a nutbag? They would need to know.
You could hate the hyenas for what they did, but it was pointless. It was their function to eliminate the weak and the sick, and if you had a problem with that, you probably needed to take it up with the system architect, because the hyenas, ignorant beasts that they are, just follow their programming. They were hungry, they fed themselves the best way they knew how.
This was where she’d spent the first twelve years of her life, but the place had no nostalgic pull. She had no sense that she’d ever belonged here. Her life then had been lived under the wing and watchful eye of her mother. Her mother had been there to walk her to school, to walk her back home when school let out; she had accompanied Alessandra virtually everywhere she went. That’s how it had been in this place. Maybe it still is, she thought, looking out her window. Maybe the predation level here is still so high that the only way to see your children safely grown up is to guard them every moment. Other than that, the only memories she had of life in the projects were sensory: the noise level, smells of cooking, oppressive heat of summer, occasional gunfire, the strong urine smell of the elevator unless her mother or one of the other ladies expected company, in which case the elevator would smell like Pine-Sol for a day or so.
They used a kid to make the approach. He was maybe twelve or thirteen, and he wore the uniform of the day: cornrows, baggy jeans low on his waist, boxer shorts, muscle-T. He sauntered out of one of the buildings and rolled up to the driver’s side of the van. Al, resting her arm out the window, did not look at him. “Hey,” the kid said. “Wassup.”
“Looking for someone.”
“Who you wan’? I could, you know, expedite.”
She turned her head slightly in his direction. “That what you do?”
He shrugged. “You want sum’in?”
“Guy used to live up on fourteen. Dealt in hardware. He still around?”
The kid straightened up, looked a bit more cautious. He probably thought he was going to make a drug sale, Al thought. This was a bit more unusual. “I ’ont know,” he said.
She rolled her fingers, and a C-note materialized in her hand. “Suppose you go find out.”
He looked at the money, took a step back. “You keep it,” he said. “I be back.” He turned away, walked back inside the building.
It took a while. Alessandra sat where she was, feeling the heat of the late afternoon sun coming through the windshield, watching the people come and go. Brownsville was one of those places that put pressure on everyone who lived there, but it was hardest on the men. There were mothers with their children, grandmothers with their grandkids, young girls and young boys, but not as many young men walked the sidewalks and even fewer mature males. Al watched the boys with a sort of resigned sadness. We put you in a place where you can’t succeed, she thought, and then we punish you for failing.
When she had been a child down here, the gangs that ran life in the projects had tolerated the presence of the arms dealer on the fourteenth floor. They got a cut of his gross and a professional discount, and in return, they were the crocodiles in his moat. It had been a while, though, and maybe things had changed. Maybe the guy is gone, Al thought. Maybe he’s out of business, maybe he’s dead. Maybe the kids inside the projects had more pressing matters to attend before they’d get around to her. In the meantime life flowed by and Al sat watching it, wishing Brownsville were something other than what it was. Every four years a succession of earnest-looking men would appear on television and promise, in exchange for your vote, to rescue the next generation of children but day followed night in Brownsville and nothing much ever seemed to change.
The kid came back out about forty minutes later. “Yo, Martillo,” he said. Someone had remembered her. “You can go on up. Fourteen C. You could leave the van here.”
“All right,” she said. She opened her door, gathered herself. It was important, from now until she got back to the van, not to show any weakness. No limp, no hesitation, no fear. The kid was already walking away when she swung down out of the Astro. Doesn’t matter, she told herself, you’ve got eyes on you and you know it. She gritted her teeth at the pain her movements caused, but otherwise gave no sign of her discomfort. She slammed the door shut, stuck her hands in her pockets, strolled across the courtyard in what she hoped was her best unhurried strut.
“Damn,” the guy said. “You sure you gotta have clips? Most shotguns use a tube mag under the barrel, carry seven or eight rounds.”
Al shook her head. “No good,” she said. “Too long, and I don’t want to have to bother with reloading something like that.”
“Babe, listen to me. You can’t clear the room with six or eight rounds from a twelve-gauge, you ain’t in the right business.”
“Are you telling me,” she said, hands on her hips, “that nobody has what I want? Or are you saying that you can’t get it?”
“Easy, easy,” he said. “There’s one piece like that I know of. Made in Italy. SWAT teams in LA carry it. Nice weapon, but kinda rare.”
“I can’t wait around while you get it from LA.”
“Goddamn, you’re in a hurry.” He shook his head. “I got a source,” he said. “But I got to send someone down there to make the pickup. In person. You’re talking five- or six-hour drive, each way, and that’s if my source has one he can lay his hands on. Figure, ten grand for the piece, another ten to transport it. You make the pickup, right here.”
She shook her head. “For twenty large, you gotta bring it to me, where I say. And I want four extra magazines, loaded and ready to go. You interested in taking a car in trade?”
He sneered. “Ain’t no used car dealer, babe.”
“Bentley,” she said, and watched the change wash over his face. She had him now. “Continental GT, still got the new car smell on it. Ain’t got fifty miles on it, never seen rain. Still got the sticker in the window, hundred and fifteen grand.”
The guy watched her for a moment. “Clean,” he finally said. “No LoJack or none of that shit.”
“They ain’t had time to install it yet.”
“Done. But you can’t bring it down here, you got to drop it out on the island.”
“No way. You give me a driver, out in Jersey. Where you take it from there is your business. And you ain’t getting t
he Bent for one lousy shotgun. There’s a few other things I’m gonna need . . .”
If they catch you now, you can’t even run . . .
She changed her clothes in the van, then dropped it back at the parking lot, took her time walking back to where her apartment was. You should have gone back to Anthony’s, she told herself, you should have gone back to bed, you could have done this tomorrow . . . Her impatience had overruled her common sense, and she knew it, but she was still stubborn enough to push her luck.
She stopped when she could find a place to sit. Fear itched at the back of her mind, rolled in her stomach, twitched at her hands. All right, so maybe this wasn’t such a great idea, she thought, waiting to catch her breath. But fear is only natural, it’s a necessary component. You need it, she told herself, maybe it will keep you from making any more stupid mistakes . . . Don’t fight it.
She wore a green corduroy dress, a voluminous black canvas jacket, a knit hat, and sunglasses to hide her bruised face. She’d found the jacket and dress in a Goodwill store in Anthony’s neighborhood, paid four bucks for the dress, fifteen for the coat. She felt absolutely bizarre in the outfit, but maybe it would make it a little more difficult for anyone watching to spot her. She stood up to go, appalled at the effort it took to get up.
“Hey, lady, you okay?” It was a kid, coming up the sidewalk behind her.
“I’m fine.”
“Are you sure? You need a hand, I could—”
“Buzz off, pal. I told you, I’m fine.” No way, she thought. No way I’m that far gone.
“Okay, okay,” he said, and he passed her by. “Sheesh. Suit yourself.”
She watched him go. I don’t need you, buddy. I’ve been making it on my own too long to start taking help from some yutz on the street . . . That had always been the way it was. You get nothing from nobody, not unless you take it away from them. She took a step, felt the pain in her side.