by Norman Green
His face got even darker.
“No bet? I’ll give you one more thing. I saw one of them, last time I saw you. In that empty office building. I don’t know the dude’s name, but you’re a smart guy, you’ll figure it out. Gotta be a lot of money sitting in someone’s sock drawer, that’s for sure. I don’t understand how come the cops haven’t shut them down yet, but then, you know more about that kind of shit than I do.”
He stared at me for a moment. “Are we finished?”
“Yeah, more or less.” I stood back up. “Okay, get up. You and Little Willy get back in the bathroom.”
He gritted his teeth as he struggled to his feet, but his eyes went wide when I picked the baseball bat up off the bed. “Don’t worry, this isn’t for you. In the bathroom. Go.”
He eyed the bat as he backed away from me, kept going until he was at the far side of the bathroom. I swung the bat hard, broke the knob off the inside of the door. He finally thought to cover his wee-wee, which he did with both hands. He looked like a chubby little kid, angry and ashamed, embarrassed, short-changed by life. The goonas had to be pissing in their pants.
If they wore any.
“Your secret is safe with me,” I told him. “And I’ll stay off your block, if you stay off mine. Mess with me and your picture goes viral.”
I closed his bathroom door, made sure it latched. As I walked out into the hallway I could hear him screaming and throwing shit. His date for the evening was still waiting in the entry, her face white. “Take me with you,” she whispered. “Please? For the love of God, don’t leave me here . . .”
I dropped her at the bus station in Yonkers.
I had a voice mail from Francis O’Neill. I listened to his message, he said he’d been thinking about my problem and he had some ideas; maybe he and I ought to meet and have another conversation. O’Neill knew the neighborhood, and he was no desk jockey, my impression of him was that he’d been a street guy. He had even intimated, in our last conversation, that his investigation skills were centered on the more, shall we say, physical aspects of interrogation.
I punched up his number.
He answered, which surprised me, given the lateness of the hour, and he dropped me into the middle of the conversation he’d been having with himself, no surprise there. “I hadda put her in a home, Saul.”
What do you say to a guy who just had to have his wife committed? I assumed it was his wife. “Damn. I’m sorry to hear it.”
He was silent for a second, then I heard him sigh. “I really wanted to get with you, Saul, what you were telling me before, it bothered me. But I can’t even think of . . . I can’t remember what I was thinking. I can’t remember what I was going to do with you.”
“I understand,” I told him, even though I didn’t, there was no way I could. “Don’t worry about me, I’ll be fine.”
“Twelve grand a month,” he said. “Can you believe that? Twelve grand a month and they can’t even . . . She kept getting lost. She’d go out for a walk and she’d forget the way home. They tied her to the bed, Saul. I pitched a fit. I mean, I pitched a real fit.” I pictured it, all six-foot-six of him, pissed off. “They tied her to the fucking bed, and when I went off on them they called the cops. Okay, I got loud, and whatnot. But can you blame me?”
“No. But you being an ex-cop, that must have helped.”
“Damn right it did,” he said. “We take care of our own, you can believe that. Twelve Gs a month and they tie her to the fucking bed. Son of a bitch. So I wanted to take care of you, Saul, if I could, but I can’t. I can’t do it. I can’t even think straight.”
“Forget it. She’s lucky to have you.”
He snorted. “Yeah. Right. I tell you what, for a long goddamn time it didn’t look that way. So, anyhow, I’m jammed up right now, Saul, but I won’t forget you. I’m gonna call, as soon as I can get my head straight. I’ll get to you yet.”
“Thanks,” I told him.
Chapter Seventeen
So that’s how it all came together, it’s like when you’re trying to remember someone’s name and you can’t, you go through the whole alphabet and you still can’t come up with it, then later on when you’re thinking of something else, it comes to you. It was like that. And Mac had been half right, it was about the money after all.
I had a brief last-minute case of cold feet, you know, what if I’m wrong, but I screwed up my resolve, sent my questions out there into the universe, and then I texted Scanlon, the vice cop, and I gave him the particulars. He texted me back a half hour later. He and his boys were coming. I had known it would happen, just not so quickly, but Scanlon was not a guy to leave money lying on the table. He’d taken an educated guess on the identity of his target and he already had his search warrants. Smarter than me, I suppose, but I had my guess, too, finally, just not so educated. I had enough time to go wrap up my stuff at Los Paraíso and get out. Klaudia had never seen the place, so she tagged along.
I read somewhere that in some primitive tribal societies, when you see children misbehaving, you are considered rude if you do not discipline them as you would your own. In other words, you see something obviously wrong, it’s on you to do something. Not the cops, not some other faceless government entity, not your mother.
You.
Okay, more specifically, me, since I was there. And maybe outrage would have been the correct response all along, and maybe I would have felt something more than pity had not my humanity been eroded by the insanity of my own path. Hector, the five-year-old kid, watched me climb the stairs and walk down the hallway. “Where’s my mom,” he said.
Five fucking years old. Maybe six.
You had to know this day was coming. Selfish, I know, but I had figured to be long gone before it arrived, that way I could feel bad for Hector in the abstract, him and all the other kids just like him, not Hector in the flesh, not right then and there. I wanted to blame the goonas for it, or the system, or his mother, or whoever, and walk away.
“Where’s my mom?” He stood there in his clean white shirt and his black pants so carefully ironed and creased, his shiny black shoes and his bowl haircut. Sounded more worried than before. I reached over his head and knocked on the door.
No response.
Bitch probably OD’d, I thought, she’s probably right there dead on the floor inside. You want the kid to see that? Shit, man, I didn’t even want to see that. “She’s probably downstairs, Hector. She probably had to go down to the corner for something.”
Go ahead, lie. Get away while you can. You got business, man . . . Klaudia was with me, she was right downstairs hanging with Gelman while I wrapped things up, and I wanted to get back to her. “I gotta get something inside my room over here.” I pointed at my door. “Then I’ll go downstairs and check for her. You stay right there, okay?”
He just looked at me.
I went into my room and shut the door behind me. I closed the laptop down and unplugged it, and then I paused to wonder what the hell I even wanted it for. There was a suspended ceiling in that disgusting bathroom, the kind with four-foot by two-foot foam panels hanging in a white metal grid. I stood up on the toilet, pushed one of the panels up, shoved the laptop and its power cord up inside.
The hell with it.
The kid was still in his spot. “I’m gonna go look right now. Okay?”
He just watched me.
Funny, how easy it is to believe in God when you really need a favor. You wanna see an atheist turn agnostic? Just add hot water.
One floor down I saw Heather, the girl I talked to in the hotel in midtown, and I yielded to a sudden urge. You can’t help the kid, I told myself. Do something for someone else.
Anyone.
“Heather, don’t go up. The cops are coming.”
“What?”
“There’s gonna be a raid. Tonight. Right now. I got the high sign from a guy I know in vice about a half hour ago.”
She seized my elbow. “Walk me out,” she said. “Get me th
e fuck out of here . . .”
I gave Klaudia the high sign on the way past, sort of a give-me-five-minutes kind of wave. She and Gelman watched us go by, she said something to him and he turned red and laughed. How cool was this lady, I knew women who would have wigged right the fuck out . . .
Outside on the sidewalk Heather turned her head against my shoulder and we headed north on Avenue C. She didn’t make a sound until we were a couple of blocks away. “Are you some kind of cop,” she whispered harshly.
I didn’t see the need for whispering. “Are you really so far short of your retirement number? Are you close enough to your two mil?”
“This wasn’t supposed to happen,” she said, still whispering. “The Worm told me they were dialed in. He said they were connected, he said the guys in the precinct got theirs.”
“Maybe some of them did,” I told her. “I found one who didn’t.”
Avenue C stops at Fourteenth, and when we got to the corner we saw several black Chevy Suburbans with darkened windows whoosh by us. Heather watched them pass, then shivered and turned us in the opposite direction. “I’m close enough,” she said. “I’m retired, as of right now. Can we get off the street somewhere?”
“If you want,” I told her. “I figured you’d want to be on your way back to Delaware.”
“I do,” she said. “But I owe you for this, and I don’t like owing anyone.” I wondered what she had in mind, opened my mouth to tell her thanks just the same, that I wasn’t in the market, but she was already pulling me into some restaurant we happened to be passing. It was a glorified Jewish deli, common in New York, rare elsewhere, and a pretty good reason to visit. She asked for a table in the back.
Her hands shook as she fumbled with an electronic cigarette. She got it in her mouth and sucked. “Was Melanie really your sister,” she said.
“I don’t know. It doesn’t really matter anymore.”
“I’ve known guys like you before,” she said, nodding. “Not happy unless you got something to hunt. Something with claws.”
“I’m not sure that I—”
“Don’t talk,” she said, pointing her finger at me. “Listen.”
I shut up.
“Your timing sucks,” she said. “The Worm and the two Chinamen are not in the building.” She toked on her plastic cigarette again. “They’re down in the park, down by the projects. By Tenth and the river. They’re gonna put a beating on Aniri and her boyfriend.”
I started to say something but she pointed her finger at me again. “You ever wonder what happened to the asshole who was runnin’ those kids that used to sell dope right there on the corner outside the hotel?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “He’s dead. You wanna know why? He was drawing too much attention. They warned him off but he wouldn’t go. They want Tenth Street nice and quiet, so that nobody looks too hard at Los Paraíso. You ever wonder what used to be on the first floor? In that street-level space under the hotel?” This time she did wait for an answer.
“I heard it was a pork store or something like that. Some kind of butcher shop.”
“It’s still a butcher shop.” She stood up.
“Ah, Heather . . .”
“The name ain’t Heather. And I don’t live in Delaware.” Her face twisted up into something between a smile and a grimace. “That’s where he killed her. You know who he is, by now. You must.”
“Yeah. El Tuerto. The twisted man. I know who he is, what I don’t know is why.”
“She made the same mistake the guy running them kids made. El Tuerto warned her away but she wouldn’t go. Stubborn, just like you. You get in front of the money train, you get run over. And that really does make us even.” She sucked on the plastic cigarette. “Happy hunting.” She stood up, took two steps, then looked back at me one last time. “Don’t leave him alive,” she said, and then she did it, with her it was almost a sneer, but it was her just the same, that other woman looking out through Heather’s eyes, and then Heather turned and she was gone.
Heather, or whoever she was, headed west on Fourteenth, clicking down the street in her high-heel boots like she had someplace important to go. She didn’t look back and I never saw her again.
I went back to Los Paraíso. The cops weren’t there yet, I wondered if maybe they wouldn’t come after all. Maybe those Suburbans we’d seen on Fourteenth belonged to some politician, some sheik, some captain of industry on his way to see his girlfriend. I ran up the stairs. Klaudia was still sitting with Gelman inside his little glass booth. She started to rise but I motioned her to stay put. “How do I get into the space downstairs?” I said to Gelman. “Where’s the door?”
He pointed to the rear of the building. “Down the back stair,” he said. “Go out into the alley, I think there’s a door . . .”
You can tell a lot about a guy from the kind of work he turns out. I had to believe that the same guy who’d bricked up the front windows had set the gray metal door into the back wall of the alley. He’d gotten the courses so crooked out front that my friend William had noticed it from a half a block away. Same douchebag had hung the door, had to be, thing looked relatively new but it was on crooked and the hinges were installed backward, the dope left the pins exposed. All I needed was a hammer and a drift punch, I could have taken the door right off, locked or not, but I didn’t have a hammer, I didn’t have a punch, and I didn’t have time. Did have my shims, though.
The cylinder was protected by an escutcheon plate, also installed crooked, but it protected the lock well enough. There was a hole in it where you stuck your key, and that’s where the shims went, too. The cylinder was a contractor’s special and it only took a minute to line the pins up. I got them all popped, turned the cylinder a quarter turn before it stuck.
Fucking shoemaker.
I had to lean my shoulder into the door and bounce my weight against it while I torqued the shims until the lock finally opened with a loud snap; to me it sounded like a gunshot in the quiet of the alley. I could have opened it without a sound if the lock had been installed right, but there was nothing for it. I jerked the door open.
The lights were on. I was in what looked like it had been the back room of an old deli. There was a walk-in cooler to my left. An ancient belt-driven refrigeration unit sat on a metal rack, chugging away. Through the small glass square on the door to the walk-in I saw the torso of a naked man, he seemed to be hanging from his feet. I guess now we knew what happened to the guy who’d been running the drug kids on the corner.
I didn’t take the time to look.
I tiptoed past the walk-in box even though I knew any hope for surprise was lost. I had to be careful where I put my feet. The floor was made of old fashioned quarry tiles. They looked pretty new but they were unevenly applied.
Same craftsman.
In the main room, old store fixtures were shoved back against the walls. There was an open drain in the center of the floor, and about a hundred cockroaches scuttled for it when they felt me coming. I don’t know why they bothered to come out, they could have fed on the blood easily enough down in the relative safety of the drainpipe.
Curiosity, maybe.
It was Hector’s mother.
She was naked, stretched full-length on the floor, facedown. Plastic tie wraps bound her wrists and her ankles together, and she had about a dozen steak knives imbedded in her body, from two different sets. One set had what looked like bone handles and the second had the more common ebony wood.
I think she was still breathing.
To my right, a couple lengths of chain, about three feet each, were anchored to the wall. Each chain ended in a set of handcuffs. To my left, a noose of what looked like satin rope hung from a sprinkler pipe, and directly under the noose was a footstool, about a foot high, covered with a beige silk brocade.
Hector’s mother coughed.
I swear I never heard that back door open, never felt the presence, not a hint of warning from the reptile brain, but the voice hit me, it went through my st
omach like a raw electrical current.
“Where’s my mom?”
God, you gotta be kidding me. The kid followed me down here? Couldn’t you have done something?
Hector’s mother made her last sound, it was a kind of rasping exhalation.
I don’t know exactly what happened next. I am only a man, prisoner to my senses, tied hand and foot to what I see and hear, and I can never know for sure when my mind is lying to me. Maybe I had been touched by Ogun once before, in the hallway of a midtown hotel where three assholes targeted Aniri, I wondered about that, after, but right then all I know is that it felt like the air I breathed was on fire, that when I inhaled, the air burned my mucus membranes away, it incinerated whatever was inside my skull, it torched everything I thought and felt, there was barely room for consciousness, everything else was obliterated by fire, now I knew why they called it blind rage.
“Where’s my MOM?”
The fire raged in my guts, I could barely keep from screaming.
“Where’s my MOMMM . . .”
And then Klaudia was there, she must have followed Hector down the back stairs, she was on her knees wrapping herself around the kid, he fought her but I doubt she even felt it, she pulled him to her, crushed his head to her chest and shielded his eyes.
I looked at Klaudia.
It wasn’t her.
I mean, it was, but it wasn’t. It was gone, that . . . what? That other person who’d been inside her, the one that had hooked me, was gone. The real Klaudia, the little mouse that Reiman and Ms. Branch had described to me, that small and frightened human being was all that was left. I couldn’t speak and she wouldn’t look up. She was shaking, and it knew it wasn’t the butcher shop she was afraid of, and it wasn’t the dead woman on the floor.
It was me.