The Warriors

by Paul Batista

  “Ricin? You people are crazy. I don’t like that.”

  “It was the men with the zigzag marks in their hair, wasn’t it? You sent them into my life, Señor Decker, and they killed her so that she couldn’t set Baldesteri free. And you tricked Señor Caliente into believing the zigzag men worked for him. That was very magical work by you, Señor Decker. Really. I don’t know anyone who ever came close to tricking Señor Caliente. You almost did. The zigzag men showed their complete allegiance to Señor Caliente by killing that gigolo, Hayes Smith, so that Raquel Rematti would be painfully hurt and think the killers were coming for her, too. And lose the trial.”

  Hunter began to swim from the center of the Olympic-size pool toward the aluminum ladder. “I’m not listening to any more of this,” he said. For the first time in his life, this man of privilege and fortune was genuinely afraid.

  “Slow down,” Hugo said steadily. “You’re never leaving that pool, Señor Decker. Ever.”

  With his entire body and head under the surface of the water, Hunter continued swimming toward the ladder. As he gripped the first submerged rung, his head rose into the cool air.

  Then Hunter saw two other men emerge from the darkness in the carefully tended shrubbery. In the faint upward illumination from the underwater lights, he recognized Curnin and Giordano. As his muscular arms gripped the railing, Hunter said, “You’ve made huge mistakes, Salazar or Suarez. These men are going to arrest you. They take my orders.”

  * * *

  Hunter Decker’s last moment of life was the recognition that Curnin and Giordano were aiming black pistols at him. The sharp, brief burst of gunfire resonated for two seconds above the pool and then abruptly subsided. In only twenty seconds the water of the pool was permeated with red. Hunter Decker, spread-eagled and eerily floating, drifted gently downward through the depths of the illuminated water.

  * * *

  Hugo Salazar would need only five minutes to nail and tape to the walls of the house’s main hallway twenty-one pictures of Hunter Decker, naked, having sex with fifteen different women. Oscar Caliente had told him that the pictures should be the first things that Hunter Decker’s wife and kids saw when they entered the house that night even before they looked for Hunter.

  CHAPTER 45

  CURNIN AND GIORDANO had spent enough time by now with Hugo Salazar to know how powerful he was because of his connections to Caliente. They also knew how erratic Salazar was and how intricately unpredictable Caliente was. They said nothing as they stood in the house’s grand entrance while Hugo tacked and taped to the walls a vast montage of pictures of the naked Hunter Decker with so many different young women. The pictures would be the first things Carolyn Whitehouse and the children would see when they walked into the mansion to begin to wait for their loving husband and father to greet them when they returned from the Little League game.

  As he carefully secured the multitude of photographs to the walls, Hugo said, “I used my cell phone to film you shooting Decker. I’ve already sent it to Señor Caliente and wrote in Spanish that you did a great job. He wrote back and told me to say Good work to you.”

  Without answering, Curnin and Giordano simply left the house as Hugo continued with his posting of the photographs. While they walked on the long pathway to the smoothly graveled area where the two cars were parked, Giordano and Curnin didn’t speak. They both realized that Oscar Caliente now completely ruled their lives: he had a film of them killing the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. The video could easily be posted on the Internet and viewed by millions of people, including the Director and other officials of the FBI, from which Curnin and Giordano had permanently and secretly removed themselves because of the lure of the vast reservoirs of cash Oscar Caliente had already arranged to deliver to them and promised to continue to deliver so long as they maintained the façade of active FBI agents. That enabled them to feed the Sinaloa cartel with invaluable information.

  As they waited uneasily for Hugo Salazar to finish his work, Giordano quietly said, “How long is it going to take for that crazy motherfucker to tape up his little display?”

  “What’s the difference?” Curnin said. “I mean, what could be the difference after all the sick shit we’ve done? Let him take as long as he wants. Maybe he’ll choke on the tape.”

  After two more minutes, Hugo stepped onto the veranda. He pulled the oak door shut behind him and, not speaking but leading them, casually walked past them. His Chevy and the black SUV in which Curnin and Giordano had arrived were parked side by side in a dark culvert near the long driveway’s entrance.

  Hugo waited for them. As they came closer, Hugo said, “I’ll see Señor Caliente soon. I know him. He’s generous. He’ll give you a bonus when I show him again the film of what you did to Decker.”

  The remote area where the vehicles were parked was even darker than the surrounding air because of the thick, enveloping shrubs.

  Neither Curnin nor Giordano answered him. They despised him. Since the cars were side by side, the men were both within the range of Hugo Salazar. Like a magician whose movements were all sleight-of-hand, Salazar plunged a long blade into Curnin’s neck and with the same blade into the heart of the terrified, immobilized Giordano.

  Hugo had one more assignment, and after that he would use his chameleon skills to elude Oscar Caliente forever. Hugo knew to a certainty that Caliente, despite his promise at the sleazy motel to let Hugo slip away into the world after murdering Hunter Decker and Raquel Rematti, had no intention of allowing him to live. But Hugo wanted to live, and there were many places in the world to live.

  CHAPTER 46

  IT WAS A wondrous night in Riverside Park. A slight breeze from off the Hudson River rustled through the myriad leaves of the park’s ancient trees. On the walkways lined by British-style lampposts, dozens of men, women, and children strolled. In the nighttime cloudless sky, a bright half-moon—the same moon that shed its lunar glow on the lifeless, steadily bloating body of Hunter Decker at the bottom of the pool thirty miles north of the city—was intense enough to create the shadow of Raquel Rematti as she ran toward the esplanade along the river’s shore.

  Ever since her happy, successful years in college, Raquel, although not a flawless runner, had always found in exercise a way to unravel the knots of anxiety and fear that sometimes—but not often—seized her thoughts and muscles. Even when she had cancer, there were days or nights when, with a white turban wrapped around her bald scalp, she was able to stride for two or three miles in her running clothes through the familiar park. At that point, she sometimes found herself wondering whether that particular time would be the final one she’d envelop herself in the lushness of the park.

  Tonight, when she reached the esplanade, she turned north, in the direction of the awe-inspiring immensity of the George Washington Bridge. She already sensed some of the anxiety that had come to beset her drain away from her consciousness and her body. She thought for a moment that she might be able to run to the esplanade directly under the bridge, which would loom above her, with traffic roaring overhead. But that was at least four miles away, and then four miles to return, and she knew that would be too much distance since, during the weeks of the Baldesteri trial, she hadn’t found the time to exercise consistently.

  In an oversize pouch strapped to her waist, she carried identification cards, the Ruger, and her cell phone. After half an hour of slow movement uptown, with steady river traffic of cargo ships and tugboats flowing down the Hudson to New York Harbor, she felt her cell phone vibrate. From habit, she stopped at a green bench facing the river and the New Jersey Palisades. She found the phone and on its screen appeared Michael O’Keefe’s name.

  She pressed the Accept icon, and Michael’s voice emerged. “Raquel, my dear, where are you?”

  “Michael, I’m running along the Hudson River, believe it or not.” She laughed ruefully and said, “Trying to forget my troubles.”

  Michael, usually circumspect so as to ca
lm clients, was blunt. “Your troubles are deeper now.”

  Involuntarily, even in the warm and benign night air, she began to shake. “Why?”

  “Hunter Decker is dead.”

  “What?”

  “He was swimming in his pool in Harrison. About two hours ago, two men shot him.”

  “My God, how do you know this, Michael?”

  “He has a younger brother, Gordon, a lawyer, who also worked briefly for me. He left the law. He wasn’t cut out for it. But he stayed close to me. He calls me Uncle Mike. Hunter disliked that. But Gordon was, because of their grandfather and father, as wealthy as Hunter. Gordon lives less than a mile away from Hunter. Gordon called me even before the local police arrived.”

  Raquel spread her hand over her face. “How awful, how awful.” And then she said, “How did Gordon find out so soon?”

  “Hunter was married to Carolyn Whitehouse. Carolyn had been away all afternoon at a Little League game for their twin nine-year-olds. She also had the baby girl with her. The first call she placed was to Gordon Decker. Gordon and Hunter were estranged. But Carolyn treated Gordon as a brother.”

  “So Hunter’s wife found her husband dead in the pool?”

  Michael O’Keefe inhaled and blew out a stream of pained breath. “Not right away, not right away.”

  “How?” Despite Raquel’s shock and her involuntary quaking, the question was motivated by the lawyer in her, that need to know. “So how did she find him?”

  “We’re in a business with hard truths, Raquel. And here is a hard one. When she returned to their house, it was already dark. The front of the house—it’s a mansion, Raquel—was illuminated. She opened the front door. The boys ran in ahead of her, shouting for their daddy. The boys were still in their uniforms. They had won the game.”

  “And they couldn’t find their father because he was already dead in the pool?”

  “Not quite that.”

  “Then what?”

  “Taped to the walls and bannisters were arrays of photographs of their father, naked, having sex with young women. Many young women. He was obviously obsessed. He had a secret life.”

  “What did Carolyn do?”

  “As soon as she saw the lurid pictures, she took the boys and the little girl upstairs to their rooms. There was a nanny with them. One of the women in the pictures turned out, in fact, to be the nanny.”

  “This, Michael, is far beyond anything I can understand. And I thought I understood everything.”

  “Carolyn ran outside. Carolyn did know that Hunter, who was very fit, often did laps in the pool, which even in the winter was heated, but on a warm summer evening like now was perfect in every way. She immediately saw that the water in the pool was reddish. When she looked down into the water, she saw Decker at the bottom of the pool. His head and chest were, she said, like pulp from the gunshot wounds.”

  “Good God. What then?”

  “She called her brother-in-law. Gordon ran to her house. He saw the pictures in the hallway and then found Carolyn upstairs with the kids and the nanny. Gordon called me. I told him to contact the local police and the FBI. Even old radicals like me know when you need the police.”

  Driven by anxiety and shock, Raquel stood up and leaned against the iron railing that separated the esplanade from the black, glittering waters of the fast-moving Hudson. “Have the police found the killers?”

  “They did.”

  “Was it a robbery gone badly? Hunter and his wife must have had expensive antiques in the house.”

  “It wasn’t a robbery gone badly. There were two men who deliberately did the killing, Raquel. Their guns still had that telltale smell of cordite. The two men who did the killing, Raquel, were Giordano and Curnin.”

  “I learned as a good Catholic girl not to hate. But I hate them. Are they under arrest?”

  “They would wish they were. They’re dead.”

  “What?”

  “They were stabbed in the same way the two men with the zigzag hair markings were killed on the West Side Highway.”

  One hand squeezing the curved iron railing, Raquel gazed across the Hudson to the heights of the brightly lit apartment buildings atop the Palisades on the New Jersey shore. “I’m certain those were the same two men who stalked me on Madison Avenue a few days ago.”

  “My guess,” Michael answered, “is you’re right.”

  “Michael,” she said, utter conviction in her voice, “I know who has done these things.”

  “Raquel, my instincts all tell me I do, too. It’s the man you told me you once loved. Juan Suarez, Hugo Salazar, or what was he known as? The Blade of the Hamptons?”

  “He’s a serial killer, Michael.”

  Quietly Michael O’Keefe said, “Raquel, dear, he’s coming for you. Fifty years in this business have taught me to understand the rare men like this. It’s dark outside. Most killings take place at night. Go to your apartment. I’ll meet you there. We will pack everything you need tonight: clothes, food, your precious high heels. I’ll have a driver—I’m too old to safely drive myself—take you to Maine, tonight. I have a house I rarely use in Maine. It’s on the coast, next to Bath, the Maine village, on a peninsula called Orr’s Island. You’ll be safer there than anywhere else in the world. And as inept as the FBI is, when it comes to their own agents, even agents who were as thoroughly corrupted as Curnin and Giordano, they have an uncanny ability to find the killer. He will never find you on Orr’s Island. The house rests on a granite promontory at the very end of the peninsula.”

  “Michael, my daddy taught me never to run. Instead, he taught me how to fight.”

  “Your daddy was wrong, Raquel. You’re now engulfed by a class of professional warriors. This is not a street fight on Main Street in Lawrence, Massachusetts. You were exquisitely brave enough to battle and overcome cancer. As courageous and resourceful as you are, you’re not likely to escape this one. Let me be blunt because I love and admire you. The man you were candid enough to tell me you loved during the Richardson trial is a man I came to know in another context—as a potential coconspirator in a Sinaloa investigation of several people after the Richardson trial. He had quickly and easily slipped back into the country after he was deported. There was never an indictment then because the FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s Office ran into a stone wall when they couldn’t coerce any of the targets to testify against any of the others.”

  “Are you telling me, Michael, that you met and know this man, this Suarez, Salazar, whoever he is?”

  “I do. He was the worst of the worst. And the most resourceful.”

  Raquel said, “Why didn’t you tell me this when we met? I told you all I knew about him. It sounds, Michael, like a betrayal.”

  “Raquel, if I sound now like an old man with wisdom, bear with me. I said at the end of our meeting that I wanted to develop a strategy to help you. Once upon a time, I acted, sometimes impulsively, on instinct. Maturity has taught me to pause and think. Was there a way, I wondered, for me to use my once-upon-a-time knowledge of him and, more important, of the people he worked for and guarded in every way, to help you? These crazy men think they owe me a favor for saving them from an indictment and jail.”

  Raquel watched a big, brightly lit boat, crowded on three decks with partygoers, cruise steadily north against the relentless, seaward currents of the Hudson. At last she said, “That’s a kind offer about the house in Maine. Let me think about it.”

  “Raquel, dear, dear, you don’t have time to think about it. There’s a serial killer on the streets of Manhattan. It’s no secret where you live. He’s like Dracula tonight. There is no end to the amount of blood he needs.”

  “Michael, I live in a safe building. There are always two doormen in the lobby. There are porters at the service entrance. And, believe it or not, the two elevators aren’t automatic. They each always have an elevator operator who uses a handle to take you to your floor. And the gates are those iron-mesh, accordion-style gates.”

&nbs
p; “Let me tell you something. For a man like Suarez or Salazar, access to a building like that is as easy as taking ice cream from a kid.”

  “I don’t believe that. The building is a turn-of-the-century fortress.”

  “Well,” Michael said, “things are happening quickly—events could overwhelm you. At least let me come to your apartment later tonight. As I said, I’ll have one of my BMWs and the driver wait in front of your building for the drive to Maine if you decide to do it. I can help you choose what you will need for Maine because I know how well stocked the house is and what the weather is like in this season.”

  She glanced at the surface of the cell phone. It was not yet eight. She needed time to think. She said, “Michael, can I call you later? An hour or so? I’ll let you know then.”

  “There isn’t much time, Raquel.” Michael’s words were blunt and direct. They didn’t now have that soothing, reassuring Irish brogue that was Michael O’Keefe’s trademark.

  CHAPTER 47

  RAQUEL TURNED FROM the Hudson River railing and saw that the only people on the esplanade were the runners, walkers, and bicyclists. All of them were, she was certain, harmless. She recognized none of them. In just a few running strides she was in the dense foliage of Riverside Park, feeling secure in its enveloping darkness.

  When she reached the bright lobby of her building, both uniformed doormen greeted her with their usual smiling decorum. One said, “Looks as though you enjoyed your run, Ms. Rematti.” She knew there was a gleaming sheen of sweat on her forehead. Like all doormen in Manhattan, they never asked anything but pleasant questions and they kept secrets about the people who lived in the buildings and the strangers who visited them. If the doormen knew anything about all the negative public comments, often insulting and painfully derogatory, now being made about her in the press and on the Internet, they didn’t convey it. But they certainly knew. Just as they knew she had been a loyal, kind, and generous tenant for years.