She got off the 7 train, which was never not crowded. She plopped down the elevated stairs and then suddenly remembered the slasher. Stupid, stupid. She should have taken an Uber. But Uber drivers were rapists. But the slasher had never slashed in this neighborhood. Still, he might want to branch out to Queens, to Woodside, what with all the cops on the streets now in Williamsburg. And if not that, or just that, all the slashing might give new people ideas…
She looked up and down the street. It was dead empty. Quiet. She thought about running the three blocks home but worried that it would totally make her throw up.
Gabby lived in a pre-war walk-up with a kitchen with full stove, microwave, full refrigerator, and “granite” countertops, and two bedrooms—shared with three roommates, tight, but each got a closet. Her keys were at the bottom of her bag again, and she stopped in the middle of the sidewalk to dig down to get them. That is when she heard the footsteps. Not so much stepping as stopping. That is why she noticed them. They had stopped the same exact time she stopped. Behind her. To the right.
No! All her fears and worries actually coming true. No! That’s not the way things happened in real life, was it? No, no, no! You worry about something and that means it never happens—that’s the way life works. That’s the way it was supposed to work.
She took a step. She heard nothing.
She took two steps. She heard steps.
She ran.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
Petrosino parked his PT Cruiser in front of the apartment building on Conselyea Street. Aluminum siding, three stories, no pets. It looked like a quiet block, a good block, nice place to live. He walked up the short stoop and rang the doorbell.
It took a while. He was thinking about lighting up when, through the glass in the front door, he saw Hadid coming down the stairs. From what he could see, the guy looked awful.
“Petro. This is a surprise. How’s it going?”
“Same old, same old,” Petrosino said. “How you holding up?”
“So so,” Hadid said. There were dark bags under Hadid’s eyes. He was wearing a stained wifebeater and dirty sweatpants. He hadn’t shaved in days. “They say I should consider modified duty a mini-vacation. But I think riding a desk all day is hell. Come on in.”
They went up two flights of stairs and entered the kitchen of a small railroad apartment. Two walls were painted in orange while the other two were in blue.
“Somebody’s a Mets fan,” Petrosino said and whistled.
“That’s from the last tenant. I gotta paint over that. But the floors are in good condition,” Hadid said, taking a pair of socks off a chair. There was a card table in the kitchen, cluttered with cereal boxes and takeout food containers. “Cop a squat.”
“Gonna need lots of primer.” Petrosino handed Hadid the bag he was carrying.
“What’s this?”
“Eggplant parm with linguine. From that place on Frost Street I was telling you about. Been there for years. Nobody does it better. Cono’s used to, but they closed.”
“Why’d you—”
“Man’s gotta eat, and you said you didn’t cook.”
“Thanks,” Hadid said. “How’d you know?”
“Thing about living with a woman. They won’t let you leave the house with shaving cream in your ear. Not that often anyway.”
Petrosino looked around at the tiny apartment. Underwear lay on the floor, porno DVDs were stacked three feet high against a wall, and the whole place smelled of armpit and damp socks.
Petrosino said, “You told me she wanted to be close to her family.”
“Yeah. Thing is, they all live in the Bronx.”
“Right-o.”
“So, uh, she never actually moved here with me. She refused. Which is why I live like this. By myself. Alone.”
“Yeah, I kind of got that.”
Hadid opened a fridge that had survived the 1970s, maybe even the ’60s, and brought out two beers. “Last couple of days the neighborhood’s been going crazy, huh? I heard about the bodega fight. And that bar fight that turned into street brawl. Then there was that scuffle at the Bedford Avenue station.”
“Yeah, two males fighting themselves onto the tracks,” Petrosino said, cracking open a beer. “It’s getting to be a regular war zone, for sure.”
“Our slasher’s or slashers’ bringing out the best in people.” Hadid cracked open a beer and sat in front of the takeout bag. “And how’s the case going?”
“It’s going,” Petrosino said. He took a long sip of beer. “I’ve been working it over in my head. I wanted to run some stuff by you.”
Hadid looked surprised. “Is that copacetic?”
“Sure. Why not?” Petrosino said. “Let’s just, for a minute, take our heads out of Tuchman’s ass.”
“Okay.”
“We’ve been looking at gangs for this whole mess, right? Now Cortés’s in lockup, and he ain’t saying nothing. Fine. But now: Let’s look at the patterns. First few slashings, before they got fatal, up until Maxine Channing and Elijah Sackler, seemed like tryouts, going back months. All at night. And all white vics. Then we get Nelson, Hewitt, Stoller, and Horvath. All at night.”
“And all white again.”
“And all male. Then: We get Echeverria and Horvath, who was on crutches.”
“Yeah? So?”
“Keep up,” Petrosino said. “And then, in broad daylight, two more in quick succession: Erin Cole, our first woman. And then Vishal Raghavan—within an hour.”
“A Span—Latino, another white guy, a woman, and an Asian. So our boy or boys are branching out. So?”
“Branching out? It’s practically a rainbow coalition, especially if you count the guy in crutches as handicapped.”
Hadid shook his head. “What? Maybe the first ones were all just opportunistic, and white guys are more likely to be out late. And then these gangbangers got hair on their balls, and start going after whoever in the daytime. This eggplant parm is excellent, by the way.”
“It’s the best,” said Petrosino. “I thought the same thing. Just random. I mean, rainbow coalition of victims, no gang is going to be that organized.”
“But you think someone is being that organized, someone’s being very specific.”
“Right-o.”
“You tell this to Tuchman?”
“No, and anyways he’s had reporters coming out of his ears since the Cortés thing.”
“Yeah, that.” Hadid got up to get two more beers.
“About that,” Petrosino said, “what happened with Awilda aka Beyoncé, it was a million-to-one freak accident.”
“You’re saying I couldn’t’ve shot her in the head if I actually tried to do it.”
“No, you moron. It’s just—it was a tense moment, we all had our guns drawn, she was yelling, Tuchman was yelling, you guys were squeezed in by the door. It’s not something you should eat yourself up over.”
“Yeah, well.” Hadid sucked down his beer and stared at the mess on his table. He looked miserable. Through the uncurtained, unshaded windows, the summer light in the room was starting to fade. Hadid got up and turned on the kitchen lights.
“I don’t know what else to tell you,” Petrosino said. “You have to hang in there, kid. You know, when I was just starting out as a detective—”
“Back up a second,” he said. “I know you don’t like to talk about yourself, but I gotta ask: Back when you were talking to Steven Pak, was it true what you said, about your wife being killed and all?”
Petrosino gave him a long serious look. Then he smiled. “My wife is fine and fat as a Buick. But sometimes you have to say something. People like that guy, they’re just miserable. They need to think people understand what they’re going through. It’s a lie, but it’s also human courtesy. Know what I mean?”
“Yeah,” Hadid said. “So were you just about to tell me about some time you accidentally shot somebody.”
“Right-o,” Petrosino said and he laughed.
&
nbsp; Hadid caught it and laughed too. After a little while, he said, “Do you mind if I finish eating here? I’m starving.”
“Dig in. You mind if I smoke?”
“Knock yourself out,” Hadid said, sliding a small, used microwave container stained with brown sauce over to him.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
Tony thought he knew what it was to be hot.
He thought he knew what hot was as a kid sharing a bed with his brother on August nights with no AC in a small room. He thought the Union Square subway station in July was hot, when the platform gets overcrowded and sour as rotten milk. And he thought he knew what hot was at that club he went to—once—where he felt like he was dancing in a sauna. He went to the bathroom and practically showered in the sink and when he got out, his date had evaporated. That was real heat in action, he thought.
But none of that was hot.
He had never known hot before now.
Sweat rolled off of him, soaking his tee shirt and shorts. His sneakers felt wet all the way through.
As soon as he thought the goons who had dumped him there had gone, Tony yelled for help.
“Hey! Guy stuck on a roof here! Hello! Help! Help already!”
But the sound of his own muffled voice bit into his ears, and his throat went dry.
He tried to wiggle the plastic restraints off his legs. His sweat gave him enough lubrication to get his left shoe and sock off. It took a very long time.
But the restraints remained. He decided to take a break and contemplate a barrel of iced coffee. Poured over his head or with a straw. Either was fine.
How long does it take to die of thirst? Three days? Five days? Three to five days? He would trade that bucket of iced coffee for a chance to google-confirm.
Tony wiggled his legs some more, and the restraints dug into his flesh. In frustration, he pushed hard, slicing off a long piece of skin.
“Dammit!”
No pain, no pain, no pain, no pain.
Tony had figured out why he was there, the answer was obvious: Jackie Tomasello and/or Elias Litvinchouk. This was a stupid bogus Mafia bullshit kidnapping stupid bullying threatening garbage thing, and it seemed straight up her alley. She had threatened him. Litvinchouk had been less cartoony, had offered him a bribe. Was it Tony’s refusal to take the bribe what got him up there? It didn’t matter. They had done their job. He was done with the whole Rosa Irizarry case, done trying to play intrepid reporter, even in the half-assed way he had been doing it.
He wanted instead to swim inside a vat of ice cream.
He wanted to slide down a snow-covered hill and plop through the ice of a frozen lake. Naked.
Were they going to leave him to die? That didn’t seem to be the point. The thug with the list had said it was a lesson. Again, two lessons, really. Technically, lessons meant something you took away from an experience. And you had to survive the experience to take something away.
How long could he survive up there?
Tony’s skull was covered in sweat. It was not easy to breathe, but if he didn’t move, he could just avoid the nagging feeling of suffocation. He tried to get his mind off of it, tried to let his thoughts drift. To his job. Pétanque. Magaly. His mom. Williamsburg.
He found himself thinking of his stepfather, Raul. Raul had been a decent enough guy who treated Tony’s mother well and had stuck around, unlike his father. When Tony was a kid, Raul used to bring him along on the odd jobs he did. Like roofing.
“It’s like making a sandwich,” Raul would say, “with the old roof as one piece of bread and the new paper as the new piece, with the tar in the middle like jelly.”
Tony had been too small to lift any roof paper or buckets of tar, but his stepfather would ask him to bring him beers from a cooler or to walk back and forth on the newly laid roof paper to pat it down.
One time, on one of those roofs, Tony stood on the side, playing with his stepfather’s radio to get WKTU in just right, when he saw a patch of something fuzzy and brown on top of a tarred-over chimney. It looked like feathers, but then he realized that it was hair, and in the hair were sticks that looked like chicken bones, but they were too small and thin to be chicken bones. He asked his stepfather what it was.
“Carajo!” his stepfather had said. “You know what that is? That’s kittens. Little kittens. Some son of a bitch put them on the roof to die. I swear to god, people are animals.”
And that’s why Tony hated reminiscing, and—suddenly, he realized: Coconut lotion. That’s what he had smelled in Litvinchouk’s car. What the hell did that mean? Litvinchouk’s wife didn’t seem the type to wear coconut lotion, at least not so heavily scented. He hadn’t smelled any at Litvinchouk’s apartment. Of course, he and Jackie Tomasello knew each other, but why would they be driving around together? Litvinchouk said he left all the management to them. Maybe they viewed new properties together. “Let’s tear down this charming building over here.” “Yes, an ugly co-op for yuppies would look lovely there.” And that gaudy bangle in the car. That couldn’t belong to Litvinchouk’s wife, could it?
Why was he even thinking about this stuff anymore? What did it matter when he was slowly being turned into a mummy?
He tried again and again to break the restraints and to force away the pain he kept repeating: “Dolor hic tibi proderit olim. Dolor hic tibi proderit olim. Dolor hic tibi proderit olim.”
This pain will be useful to you. This pain will be useful to you. This pain will be useful to you.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
At some point, the quiet of the night stopped, and Tony could hear, muffled through the bag on his face and the tarp, the sounds of the city waking up.
Soon after that the heat came. Subtle at first, warmth at the edge of the tarp.
Then it came on full, heating the air under the tarp with him, making him a corn kernel waiting to pop.
How long were they going to leave him here? What if they forgot him? What if they were on their way to get him out and traffic on the BQE was horrible?
He’d be a microwaved enchilada indeed.
Damn, it was hot.
He should have had to urinate by now, but he was surprised that he had no urge. What he did feel was nauseous. But he didn’t want to vomit, not with a bag over his face. That would not be cool in any way, shape, or form. Even if the vomit was lemonade or iced tea, which it was not likely to be.
Punchy. He was getting punchy.
Then he remembered something he had read once about zip-tie restraints, one of those how-to articles he may have even written himself a thousand cooler years ago, in a past ice age.
Instead of trying to slide them off, he spread his ankles apart with as much strength as he could. And then he slammed them into the ground. Nothing.
He did it again. Nothing.
Again.
Again.
And one restraint popped. He could feel it—one less band around his flesh.
Time for the second one. He lifted his legs up—good workout for the abs, he thought.
He slammed. Nothing. He would have to revise that article.
The bag over his head became caught up in his mouth. His tongue felt like he’d swallowed a wool sweater. He never wanted to wear a sweater ever again. He bit into the bag and began to chew at it. He had no spit left and the bag tasted of his own breath, which was awful. He chewed—and he could feel the bag tugging slowly, inch by inch off the back of his head.
But he couldn’t eat the whole bag, his mouth wasn’t big enough? So he began tugging, tugging, and turning his head, wedging the cloth of the bag against his neck.
It slid off.
He spit out the bag, hacking, almost vomiting.
But he could breathe more easily. No light came through the tarp, but he could better sense where he was. Light came from a space in front of him—he must have kicked a brick or two slightly while he was wrestling with the leg ties.
It took another half hour of slamming to set his legs free. Both his shoes
were off by then. His last sock was on and red with blood. He was able to kick up into the tarp.
The blocks were heavy but once he got one loose, the tarp came away—letting the blazing noon sunbeam directly into his face.
Maybe not the smartest move.
He did get a decent look at his surroundings, though. Low horizon, no skyscrapers except that green Citibank building topped with a ziggurat. It was a long way off, but judging from the distance he was likely on a rooftop in Queens. They hadn’t driven him very far at all. But of all the places to die. Fucking Queens.
At some point, he dozed off again. Or just plain fainted. Is this what dehydration did? The roof was spinning, and it was highly unlikely that there’d be an earthquake in the New York area. Although not impossible. They happened, but not like in California. He hated Los Angeles. Went to visit once. Smog. Traffic. He would never move there. Why would he want to leave Brooklyn?
All around him were the wrecked remains of his laptop and near and far, his pétanque balls. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.
With his hands behind his back and a rope tight around his chest, he couldn’t slam his wrists free of the restraints. He tried standing up, but there was not enough slack. He tried again. Again.
He screamed in frustration. And realized he had shaken the tarp off. Maybe someone would hear him. He screamed again, but his throat was so dry it came out like muffled and croaky.
What a way to spend a summer day.
That’s when he heard the voices. Distant. Giggling.
And then footsteps closer. Were they coming for him? What were they going to do next? They couldn’t let him live. They couldn’t.
Then he heard: “Oh shit, that dude is tied up.”
“He’s homeless.”
“What the fuck would a homeless man be doing handcuffed here?”
Hipster Death Rattle Page 20