by Ray Daniel
Crap!
I pawed through the snow pile, my gloves making it difficult to get a feel for the metal. I could see the spot where it went in, but it had fallen at an angle into two feet of snow. I got down on my hands and knees, pushing snow out of my face and feeling around for the metal. Couldn’t find it. I took off my gloves and plunged my bare hands into the snow, all the way to the roof. Felt along the tarpaper with numbing fingers. Hit metal. Pulled the crowbar from the snow with red frozen hands. Jack London would have loved this—“To Build a Fire: Boston.”
My burning, frozen hands refused to warm the insides of my gloves. Praying for blood flow, I trudged toward the edge of the building to check out the next one. Peered out at a ten-foot drop to the next roof. I was victim of one of the oldest engineering mistakes in the world: the unchecked assumption. I’d assumed all these buildings would be the same height. I was wrong.
A ten-foot jump into snow. How bad could that be? I looked for a good landing drift but spotted a shed instead. Only a four-foot drop to the shed’s roof. Much better plan. I sat on the edge of the current roof. Dropped to the shed.
The snow had hidden the fact that the shed’s roof slanted away from a peak. I hit the slant, fell. Rather than break my fall, I gripped the crowbar, determined not to lose it again. Glass shattered. What the hell? A chunk of snow fell through a sudden hole. I wasn’t on a roof. I was on a skylight, over a stairwell. Cracking sounds tore through the snow as the glass gave way. I threw myself off the skylight and fell through the night onto a drift of snow below. Not sure how I kept from impaling myself on the crowbar.
I rose and headed for Joey’s building. The wading became easier, as the snow had drifted to the edges of the roof.
“I might just survive this,” I said to the crowbar.
That was when a gunshot blasted the night, followed by a little girl’s scream.
Eleven
Screw stealth! Time to call Bobby. I ran through a foot of snow, pulled off my gloves, and grabbed my Droid, trying to run and call at the same time. The touchscreen ignored my dead cold fingers as I ran through the powder, and I tripped on a drift-hidden firewall, a thick concrete speed bump that extended a foot above the roof. The firewall caught my boot, sending me sprawling and the Droid flying off the roof. I listened for the sound of it hitting a snow bank. Heard it shatter on freshly salted concrete instead.
On the bright side, I had made it to Joey’s roof. The crowbar lay next to me. I grabbed it, climbed through more drifts, and hoisted myself over the fence that surrounded another roof deck. I listened for more shots and, hearing nothing, heel-kicked the rooftop door and flew backward as the door repulsed me. It hadn’t budged. Another kick, another rebuff. The UGGs were great for snow, but the big soft heel was dampening my kicks.
Great lock artists study locks the way I study software. They know every weakness, every loose pin, every poorly made tradeoff. For a lock artist, this door was nothing. Too bad I wasn’t a lock artist.
Heel-kicked the door again. Nothing.
I jammed my crowbar into the door frame. Hard, frozen wood shattered, giving my crowbar access to the spot right next to the lock. I stuck the straight edge of the crowbar into the door, left it hanging there, and kicked the other end. Wood shattered, splintering into the hallway. The door swung open, the deadbolt still in place.
More silence. I slipped through the door into the dark stairwell. I didn’t have a flashlight, didn’t have a gun, didn’t know who was down there, and had no help. I figured the one thing I could do was be quiet.
I failed.
Someone had been using the staircase as a storage closet for home repair goods. I took a step and kicked over a paint can that clattered down the stairwell. Lost my balance, dropped to the next step. My heel hit a narrow part of the stair, slipped off, and landed in a paint-pan that flipped under my foot and acted as a ski. The paint-pan leg shot out from under me, and I sailed down the stairwell, trying to grab the railing while protecting my face from hammers, two by fours, nail-filled coffee cans, and my own crowbar. I landed flat on my back, hit my head on Joey Pupo’s front door, fell through it, and came to a stop looking up at a sink, stove, and refrigerator. I had landed in the kitchen.
I remained still, listening. Nothing happened. Either the apartment was empty or its occupants were hiding. I took a moment to assess the damage. My head throbbed, my elbow was growing a knot where it had hit a wall. I tried to wiggle my fingers and discovered that the pinky finger on my left hand wouldn’t move. Brought the hand to my face and saw the poor guy was bent the wrong way. They’re only supposed to bend forward and backward.
Bobby Miller was tapping my face with a cold hand. “Tucker. Tucker, wake up.”
He hadn’t been here a second ago. A second ago I was looking at my bent finger. I raised my hand to my face. The finger was straight.
“Must have been a dream,” I mumbled.
“What?” asked Bobby.
“I had a dream that I’d dislocated my finger.”
“You did. I straightened it out for you.”
I flexed my hand. “Where did you learn to do that, Dr. Bobby?”
“On the football field. Can you stand?” Bobby pulled me to my feet. We stood in Joey Pupo’s tiny kitchen, looking at the two doors. Bobby picked a door and led the way. We stepped through one bedroom into another. The second room commanded the view of the courtyard that had worried Bobby.
I looked around the empty room with its drawn blinds. “He was never up here.”
Bobby shrugged. “Better safe than sorry.”
“Maybe not,” I said. “Didn’t you hear the shot?”
“Shot?” Bobby drew his gun. “What shot?”
“What were you doing down there?”
“Arguing with the Boston cops.”
We slipped back through the kitchen.
Bobby peered into the living room. “Shit,” he said. He holstered his gun.
A dead guy lay on the living room floor. Blood pooled in a lake on the hardwood.
“Got him in the aorta,” Bobby said.
“Oh my God. Maria was here. She saw this.”
“How do you know?”
I pointed at the floor. A trail of tiny bloody footprints splashed into the kitchen.
Bobby said, “Those are snow boots.”
Small snow boots. Maria’s snow boots.
“She ran right through the blood,” I said.
“Somebody must have called her over. She was in the back room. The killer shot this guy, watched him bleed out, then called her over.”
“So where is she now?”
“Lost,” said Bobby.
Twelve
A splash of pale winter sun snuck past my window shade and hit me in the face. I covered up with a pillow, tried to go back to sleep, failed. It was winter; if the sun was high enough to hit me, it had to be nine o’clock. Closed my eyes, saw Maria getting in that car, Sal handcuffed, bloody little bootprints. Last night flooded back.
We had called the Boston police and they had shown up within minutes. We waited in the kitchen, staying out of the crime scene while they strung yellow tape and took pictures.
Lieutenant Lee showed up, crumpled and cold, his hat hair plastered across his forehead. He peeked into the room. Said, “Good Lord.”
Bobby said, “Yup.”
Lee turned to Bobby, pointing back at the room. “That’s Joey Pupo.”
“Indeed.”
Lee’s eyes traced the bloody boot tracks. “Whose footprints are these?”
I said, “Maria Rizzo’s.”
“Did you find her?”
Bobby said, “No.”
“The killer took her?”
I said, “Yes,” as Bobby shrugged. “You don’t think the killer took her?” I asked Bobby.
“For all I know,
Maria killed the guy. Got a gun somehow, shot him, ran out.”
“That makes no sense. You were at the end of the court. You would have seen her.”
“Probably. Like I said, I was arguing with the Boston cops.”
“What was the argument?” Lee asked.
“Long story.”
“Just tell me what happened.”
We told him, and finished at two in the morning.
I climbed out of bed wearing only my boxers. Thought better of it when my feet hit the cold floor, threw on sweatpants, a sweatshirt, and wool socks. I missed the warm mornings of summer.
A new Bialetti coffeemaker waited on the stovetop. It was my Christmas present from Sal, a single-cup brother to Sophia’s family-sized coffeemaker. Its little box had sat under the Christmas tree waiting for me to arrive. When I had walked into the door, Maria ran to the tree and grabbed the box.
“Open it, Tucker, open it!” she’d squealed.
“She’s excited because she thought of the present,” said Sophia.
“They weren’t going to get you a present,” said Maria. “But I remembered.”
“You got a big mouth for a little girl,” said Sal.
“Thank you for reminding us, honey,” said Sophia.
“You guys didn’t need to get me something,” I said.
“Of course they did,” said Maria. “You’re family. We always buy presents for family.”
I had started to disassemble the wrapping paper, being careful not to tear it. Sal lost patience with the process. “Just open the fucking thing.”
I opened the fucking thing and discovered the coffeemaker.
“This is so cool!” I said, and hugged Maria. “Thank you, guys.”
Sal said, “Make sure you don’t put too much coffee into it. Everyone thinks it’s an espresso maker, and they pack the coffee into it.”
“It’s not an espresso maker?” I asked.
“No.”
“The box says it makes espresso,” I said.
“Don’t believe everything you read. Listen to me,” Sal had said.
I filled the Bialetti with water and coffee, did not pack it, and set it on the stove. Considered my breakfast options. I needed something hot. The cold had slipped into my chest and my back. I don’t know what it is about winter, but the thermostat can read 70 and still you freeze. Click and Clack slept inside their shells.
“Tough day to be cold-blooded, eh, guys?”
I boiled some water, broke out a single pack of oatmeal and stirred it as the little Bialetti began to gurgle, let it finish gurgling just as Sal had shown me, and poured a cup of dark black coffee. The coffee and oatmeal steamed on the breakfast nook. I sat, propped my tablet in front of me, tapped the Boston Globe icon, and let its headline drag me right back into yesterday.
GANGLAND MASSACRE
I grimaced at the coffee’s bitterness. Read about Sophia’s murder, Joey’s murder, Sal’s arrest. The article implied that Sal had killed them both, along with Marco Esposito, in a wild triangle of terror—this despite the fact that Sal was in jail when Joey was murdered.
The end of the article, in a typical case of the newspaper almost getting it right, mentioned that Maria Rizzo was missing after sledding with “her uncle, Al Tucker.”
Al? Seriously? Also, I wasn’t Maria’s uncle, I was her cousin.
I tweeted:
If a newspaper gets the news wrong is it still a newspaper? #questions
The article went on to say that Maria was thought to be with family. Who thought that? I didn’t think that, and I was family. I swiped back to the article’s byline: Jerry Rittenhauser. Why didn’t he call me? He could at least have gotten my name right.
I closed the article, opened Gmail. I had long ago given up the notion of personal privacy and had willfully joined the Google infoverse. Google knew where I was, what I got for email, and, because I used Google’s phone service, all my voicemail went to my Gmail account. Voice messages from Jerry Rittenhauser filled the inbox. He had tried to call me, but my phone had been destroyed.
The heating system ticked as I ate my oatmeal, drank my bitter coffee, and reread the article, reread the notion of me being “Uncle Al.” This was ridiculous. I moved to my office, fired up the Gmail application that turned my computer into a speakerphone and called Jerry.
“Rittenhauser,” he answered.
“This is Tucker. You called me—let’s see—five times last night.”
“Thanks for get—”
“And still you got the story wrong.”
“Well, you know, we do our—”
“Do you want to get it right?”
“What are you going to do? Defend Sal?”
“First I’ll tell you my real name.”
“Okay. It’s not Tucker?”
“It’s not Al. That’s the tip of the vast iceberg of your wrongness.”
“Meet me for lunch.”
We made plans and exchanged phone numbers, which reminded me of the reason that I hadn’t gotten any of Rittenhauser’s calls.
I needed a new phone.
Thirteen
The LaBrea Tar Pits of retail buildings sits on the corner of Newbury Street and Mass Ave. It’s a nifty structure with tall arching windows, canted external beams, and a matching canted roof that flares into the skyline. It has 45,000 square feet of retail space, sits on a busy corner, and has access to students and professionals alike. This attractive spot is irresistible to the mighty retail beasts that drown in its clutches.
Virgin Records, secure in the idea that everything they touch turns to gold, built the damn thing, moved in, flailed around in it, and sank from view. Then Tower Records, drawn by the smell of students, stepped into its gooey embrace, realized its mistake, panicked, struggled, and drowned. Then Best Buy dove in, made a go of it, and looked like it had developed a knack for swimming in tar, but eventually fatigued and slipped under.
MobileMaster was the latest player. A superstore for everything that could fit in your pocket and beep, it clearly believed that it had found the perfect place. I rushed over to buy myself a new phone before MobileMaster succumbed to the tar.
There was a time when manly men carried tiny phones, the smaller the better. Then Apple invented the smartphone and changed everything. Suddenly, bigger was better, and MobileMaster was riding this trend for all it was worth, providing an assortment of expensive phablets. I was considering the merits of a phone the size of a Pop-Tart when I felt a looming over my shoulder.
I turned and was looking into the chest of Oscar Sagese, a soldier in Hugh Graxton’s MetroWest Mafia army. Oscar didn’t worry me. Hugh Graxton and cousin Sal were friends or business partners or something, so he wouldn’t hurt me. Still, he and I had an unfortunate history. I hoped that he had forgiven me for hacking his Facebook account.
“Hey, Mr. Fucking Hacker,” said Oscar.
So much for forgiveness. “Hi, Oscar,” I said. “Could you move a little? You’re blocking the sun.”
“Maybe you should show a little more respect now that Sal’s put away.”
Uh oh.
Oscar continued, “Sal’s the only reason I haven’t beat the shit out of you. But your day is coming.”
“Oscar, did you come all the way into Boston to tell me that you’re going to beat me up someday?”
“No, smart-ass. Mr. Graxton sent me. You’re ignoring his phone calls.”
“I lost my phone.”
“How did you lose your phone?”
“I dropped it off a roof in the North End.”
“You’re a fucking idiot.”
“Don’t you want to know why I was on a roof in the North End?”
“No.”
“I was trying to get Maria back from Joey Pupo.”
This got Oscar to thinking.
Thinking got Oscar to be quiet. I listened for the faint scraping sound of unused gears grinding to life.
“Got nothing to say?” I asked.
“I heard Joey Pupo got aced last night.”
“He did.”
“Did you do it?”
“Do you think I could do it?”
“Anyone could kill anyone.”
“Just like anyone could kidnap Sal’s daughter?”
“Joey didn’t kidnap her. He’s Sal’s buddy.”
“He did kidnap her. Sent a note and everything.”
“That’s bullshit, Mr. Hacker. Why would Joey Pupo kidnap Maria?”
“I thought you might know,” I said.
Oscar grabbed my coat, bunching it up in his hand as he cocked his arm back for a punch. “You calling me a fucking kidnapper?”
I slapped at Oscar’s hand, got him to loosen his grip. “No, you—no. I’m not. But I figure you might know what’s going on.”
“I don’t know anything.”
“Did Hugh have something to do with this? Is that why he wants to see me?”
“I just do what I’m told. Hugh told me to bring you to him and that’s what I’m doing.”
I looked around the store. Oscar and I were the only early-
morning customers. Apparently nobody working at the store had noticed our little scuffle; their caffeine must not have kicked in yet.
“You’re not here randomly,” I said. “How did you find me?”
“I followed you from your house. Couldn’t believe you didn’t see me. You should pay attention. With Sal gone, things are gonna get ugly fast.”
“What does Hugh want?”
“He wants to talk to you. He’s pissed that you’re ignoring him.”
“I’m not ignoring him. I told you. My phone got lost. I’m picking a new one.” I pointed at the display. “It’s a tough choice.”
Oscar looked at the array of smartphones, reached over my shoulder, and pointed at one on sale. “Buy that one.”
“Yeah, but—”
“Buy that fucking phone right now.”
I bought the phone. Oscar left while I was going through the endless activation process. Once the activation was done, the phone sprang to life, displaying a backlog of text messages.