The Border: A Novel

by Don Winslow

  “They’ll kill me.”

  “Not if we do it right,” Cirello says. “Look at me, Marco. Marco, look at me.”

  Marco looks at him.

  “Son,” Cirello says, looking all fatherly. “I am the way, the truth and the life. I am your one chance at still having some kind of future, but I can’t do it on my own. I need your help. Work with me here. Give me what I need and you walk.”

  Marco hesitates.

  The deal is on the tipping point.

  Cirello says, “The guys who sold you this shit know you don’t know how to do time. They know you’ll be jonesing. You think they’re going to sit around worrying about whether you’re going to flip?”

  Marco thinks about it.

  The last thing Cirello wants is Marco thinking. You let a skel think, he comes up with all kinds of happy shit to make your life complicated. “No, you know what? I’m full of shit. Let’s get you booked so you can call your lawyer.”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “No,” Marco says. “Please help me.”

  Yeah, that’s what I’m here to do, Cirello thinks.

  I’m in a helping profession.

  Cirello follows Marco’s car west on Arden Avenue across the southern end of Staten Island.

  To Cirello, who’s done most of his narcotics work in the ghettos of Brooklyn, it’s surreal driving past strip malls and blocks of single-family homes on one side and the green of Arden Heights to his left. He feels like he’s in the suburbs—some ardent New Yorkers might call it “the country”—as they pass under the Korean War Veterans Parkway through leafy Edgegrove, then turn north onto Amboy Road at the northeast corner of Blue Heron Park. Amboy is mostly residential for the next ten blocks or so, then opens into a commercial area in Eltingville—the post office, a couple of banks and the Eltingville Shopping Center on the left, another strip mall to the right, where Marco pulls into a parking lot.

  Cirello passes him and pulls into the far end of the lot near a Smashburger and gets on the phone. “Where are you meeting them?”

  “Out in front of Carvel.”

  “The ice cream store?” Cirello asks.

  “Yeah.”

  “That makes the cakes?”

  “Yeah, Carvel.”

  Jesus Christ, Cirello thinks. Ice cream cakes and smack. The Professor and Mary Ann . . .

  He watches Marco pull into a parking slot. A couple of minutes later, a red Ford Explorer pulls up next to him. Marco hands some money across, a package comes back in return.

  Marco, as per their deal, pulls out.

  Cirello follows the Explorer as it takes a right onto Amboy and heads north into Great Kills and past Ocean View Cemetery (although why a view would be important in a cemetery is beyond him), then past Frederick Douglass Park (which is a little weird, because Cirello hasn’t seen a black person all day) into Bay Terrace.

  Normally he’d call in the plates but he doesn’t want to be on the record and he already has an ID from Marco—the car should belong to a Steven DeStefano.

  Then right on Guyon Avenue—east toward the beach—a left onto Mill Road and then a right onto Kissam Avenue, where the houses thin out into a marsh that flanks the road on both sides. The Explorer pulls into a driveway on the north side of the road by a shotgun house with no other houses for two lots on either side.

  Privacy, Cirello thinks.

  Good.

  Cirello drives past the house and takes Kissam to its end where it hits Oakwood Beach at Lower Bay. There’s nothing here, he thinks, nothing but beach to the right or left as far as he can see.

  He takes his Glock from its holster, sets it on the seat beside him, pins his shield on the lapel of his jacket, turns around and drives back to the house. Taking a deep breath, he opens the door, gets out and walks up to the front door.

  There is nothing about this that is even slightly regulation.

  Proper procedure would be to have marked the address, gone back to Division and reported it, obtained a warrant, and then come back in force—several detectives, some uniforms—maybe SWAT, maybe ATF—coordinate with DEA.

  It’s definitely not one detective with a Glock and no paper, and probable cause that wouldn’t hold up five minutes in an evidentiary hearing. This is stupid shit, the kind of stupid shit that gets you fired, maybe indicted, maybe killed.

  But he doesn’t know any other way to do it.

  Cirello raps the gun butt on the wooden door. “NYPD!”

  He can hear the scrambling inside, the kind of chaos he’s heard a few dozen times as drug skels panic and try to figure out what to do. Flush their stash? Run? Fight?

  “I said open the fucking door, Steve!” he yells, then steps to the side in case Steve decides to shoot through the fucking door instead.

  He doesn’t.

  Cirello reaches in and tries the knob.

  The fucking door is unlocked.

  These assholes are confident.

  Taking another deep breath, Cirello slows down his heartbeat, kicks the door open and steps in, the Glock held in front of him.

  Two guys stand there looking at him.

  Deer in the headlights.

  A strip of the wood-paneled wall is open and Cirello can see the heroin stash inside. The idiots were trying to decide whether to go out the back with it but didn’t decide quick enough. It looks like about a kilo cut into bags.

  “You move your fucking hands, I’ll splatter your fucking brains all over the room,” Cirello yells, hearing how adrenaline jacked his voice is.

  “Take it easy, take it easy!” This comes from the fatter one. Looks to be in his young thirties, beefed up from the gym, classic Staten Island goombah short-on-the-sides haircut. From Marco’s description, this is DeStefano.

  The other one is about the same age, same uniform haircut, not as active on the bench press. They each have Yankees caps on backward, track suits, gold chains.

  Where do they find these guys? Cirello wonders.

  Neither of them look to be heroin users.

  Anadrol, maybe.

  “Sit down,” Cirello says. “Cross your legs in front of you.”

  They do it.

  “Now stretch your legs out, roll over on your stomachs and put your hands behind your backs,” Cirello says.

  “Come on,” DeStefano says. “Is this really necessary?”

  “Depends on you,” Cirello says.

  He sees the wiseguy smirk come across DeStefano’s face. Mob guys always think everyone is like them—everyone has an angle, everyone is for sale—and Cirello has just confirmed his deeply held beliefs.

  The smirk widens into a smile. DeStefano juts his chin toward the wall. “There’s twenty-seven large in a bank deposit bag in there. Take the money, walk away, have a Coke and a smile.”

  Keeping his gun trained on DeStefano, Cirello steps over to the loose panel, feels inside and comes out with the bag. “What about the smack?”

  “You want it, take it,” DeStefano says. “But where are you going to lay it off?”

  Cirello sticks the bag into the waistband of his slacks in the small of his back, under his jacket. “I’m not going to lay it off, you’re going to lay it off. Business as usual, except now you have a partner.”

  “Yeah? How big a partner we got?”

  “Ten grand a week.”

  “Five.”

  “Seven.”

  “Done,” DeStefano says. “But I like to know my partners’ names.”

  “Bobby Cirello. Narcotics Division.”

  “What precinct?” DeStefano says. “Because I haven’t seen you around.”

  “One Police.”

  DeStefano lets himself look impressed for a second. “So if I have a problem with one of the local cops, I can come to you.”

  “I’ll straighten it out.”

  “Out of your cut.”

  “I said I’d take care of it,” Cirello says.

  “Okay, Bobby,” DeStefano says. “I can call you tha
t, right? I give a guy twenty-seven K, I can call him by his first name, can’t I? So, Bobby, how’d you get onto us?”

  “You kidding?” Cirello asks. “You been slinging out of that parking lot for weeks. You need to mix it up a little.”

  “I told you,” the skinny guy says.

  “Shut the fuck up.”

  “So, Steve,” Cirello says. “I want to see you every Friday. Your Carvel parking lot. You don’t show up, I’ll find you. If I have to find you, I bust you. We understand each other?”

  “That twenty-seven gives me three weeks and change, though, right?”

  “No,” Cirello says. “The twenty-seven is a fine for being stupid and lazy. Mix it up from now on. See you Friday.”

  He goes out the door.

  There’s no going back now, Cirello thinks.

  Now I’m a dirty cop.

  He drives back out to Tottenville and meets Marco in the parking lot by Mickey D’s. He gets into the Taurus and hands the kid two thousand in cash. “Don’t put this up your arm. Drive. You have people anywhere outside of New York?”

  “My sister’s in Cleveland.”

  “Go inflict yourself on her,” Cirello says. “Whatever you do, don’t come back here, okay?”

  He gets out of the car and Marco takes off.

  Cirello doubts he’ll get any farther than Jersey, but you can always hope. Except he knows junkies, and if anyone’s capable of doing something stupid, counterproductive, and self-destructive, it’s a junkie.

  It’s what they do.

  The loan shark is surprised.

  Maybe even disappointed. He doesn’t make money by people paying off the whole principal in one shot.

  But that’s what Cirello does. Finds Angie among the happy hour crowd at the Pier 76 bar and slips him a heavy envelope. “That’s all of it. Principal and vig.”

  Angie tucks it into his jacket. “You get lucky?”

  “You could say that,” Cirello says. “Can you lay me ten on North Carolina–Louisville? I want the Heels and the points.”

  “Jesus, Bobby, you just got out of the hole, why do you want to jump back in?” Angie asks.

  “You want the action or you don’t?”

  Angie shrugs. “Yeah, I can lay it for you.”

  “You the man.”

  “No, you the man.”

  Cirello refuses the offer of a drink.

  Over the next few weeks, he chases his money like a pathetic middle-aged man going after a young chick he isn’t ever going to catch.

  He bets basketball, college and pro.

  He goes to the casino, plays blackjack.

  He bets baseball, for Chrissakes, and no one in his right mind bets baseball, except for a degenerate gambler.

  Which is what he is.

  Angelo tells him so when he comes in light for the third consecutive week, uses those exact words. “You’re a degenerate gambler.”

  “You’re a bookie and a loan shark.”

  They’re back on their customary stools at Pier 76.

  “I’m a bookie and a loan shark who pays his bills,” Angelo says. “You’re into me for thirty-two large and you can’t even cover the vig.”

  “Georgia Tech–Wake Forest—”

  “Georgia Tech–Wake Forest my aching balls,” Angelo says. “We’re right where I said I didn’t want to be. I’m supposed to hurt you, but how can I hurt a friend and a fucking NYPD detective to boot?”

  “I’ll get you your money.”

  “Gold shield or no gold shield,” Angelo says, “we can’t just let you walk, Bobby.”

  “Who’s ‘we’?”

  “I can’t afford to carry you for thirty-two,” Angelo says. “I laid your account off. I’m sorry, but you didn’t leave me any choice.”

  Meaning Angelo sold Cirello’s debt to someone higher in the organization.

  “So it’s like that,” Cirello says.

  Angelo swirls the vodka around his glass. Then he says, “The Play Sports Bar. On Sneden. Go there.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Just go there, Bobby.” Angelo polishes off his drink, gets up and leaves.

  Cirello parks the car on Sneden and walks into the Play Sports Bar.

  There’s a guy in a booth, eating. Midforties, thin, black hair with streaks of silver. He looks up and says, “You Cirello?”

  “Who’s asking?”

  “Mike Andrea.” He gestures at the bench across from him, but Cirello doesn’t sit. “You want a panini? They’re good here. I like the Trio—prosciutto, sopressatta, capocollo . . . You should eat something, you look thin.”

  “The fuck are you, my mother?”

  “Right now I’m your best friend, Bobby boy,” Andrea says. He takes another bite of the panini and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “I can throw you a rope, pull you out of the shit you’re in.”

  “What shit am I in?”

  “Angie Bucci sold your paper to me,” Andrea says. “Angie’s a nice guy, I love him. I’m not a nice guy, I didn’t go to high school with you, I don’t know your grandmother, I don’t have a problem hurting you.”

  “It might be more of a problem than you think.”

  “Yeah, I know—gold shield, tough guy,” Andrea says. “We don’t have to go there. Sit and have a little something to eat, act like a human being, listen to me.”

  Cirello sits down.

  Andrea signals the waitress to come over. “Lisa, my handsome young friend here will have a Trio and a beer.”

  “Have you had a chance to look at our beer menu?” she asks.

  “‘Beer menus,’” Andrea says. “This is what our world has come to.”

  “I’ll have a Sixpoint,” Cirello says.

  “The ale or the pilsner?”

  “The pilsner, thank you,” Cirello says.

  The waitress smiles at him and walks away.

  “I’ll bet you could fuck her, you play your cards right,” Andrea says. “No, I forgot, you don’t play your cards right. You play them stupid, and you want to know why?”

  “No.”

  “You want to lose,” Andrea says. “All degenerate gamblers, what they really want is to lose. Something about punishing themselves, I don’t know.”

  “What do you want?”

  Andrea says, “Maybe you do a favor for some people.”

  “What kind of favor and what people?”

  “People who are willing to stop the collection process on your loan,” Andrea says, “you don’t need to know who exactly. And just for some information. These people are thinking of getting into business with someone sometime, they want to know if he’s clean, they’re not walking into a sting.”

  “Getting that kind of information is risky.”

  “Not as risky as owing thirty-two K you don’t have,” Andrea says. He slides a slip of paper across the table.

  It’s an empty threat, Cirello thinks. The problem with owing a loan shark money isn’t owing too much, it’s not owing enough. You owe five grand to a wiseguy, you’re in trouble. You owe ten or more, he can’t afford to clip you. He’ll send a bodyguard to keep you safe because he needs you to pay that money. You want to live forever? Get into a shy for a hundred K. He’d donate a kidney if you need it.

  Cirello glances at the paper, sees three names written down. “I won’t give up CIs.”

  “Don’t get your panties in a wad,” Andrea says. “No one’s asking you to get anyone killed. These are people we aren’t in business with yet. Think of it as job screening. Due diligence. That’s all.”

  “How do I know you’re not wearing a wire?”

  Andrea says, “Yeah, you got me, Cirello. Lisa the waitress is an undercover agent. Those tits are microphones. You want to get well or not?”

  “You’ll suspend the vig.”

  “The vig is still there,” Andrea says, “but it stops growing. And no one comes to collect, we work out some kind of payment plan.”

  “This is the payment plan.
” Cirello takes the paper. “And dinner’s on you.”

  “Every little bit helps, right?” Andrea says. “Fucking cops—nickel-and-dimers.”

  Lisa brings the food over.

  Andrea was right, Cirello thinks. It’s good—prosciutto, sopressatta, capocollo.

  He has breakfast at Mullen’s house out in Long Island City.

  Judy Mullen made them French toast and they sit at the kitchen table, the sound of the chief’s two boys playing Halo drifting in from the den.

  “Mike Andrea is a capo in the Cimino family,” Mullen says. “Out of Bensonhurst. If he picked up your account from Bucci, it’s serious. OC likes him for at least a dozen murders.”

  “The Ciminos are out of the dope business,” Cirello says. “Have been for years.”

  “Maybe Andrea is in business for himself.”

  “Then who are these ‘people’ he says he reps?”

  “That’s what we’re going to find out,” Mullen says. He looks back at the list Andrea gave Cirello. “I’m betting they already know about these guys. They’re testing you.”

  “That’s my read, too.”

  Mullen looks at the paper again. “Markesian and Dinestri are clean. Tell him we have eyes on Gutiérrez.”

  “Do we?” Cirello asks.

  Mullen smiles. “We will.”

  Cirello asks, “You want me to push Andrea on meeting these people?”

  “Too soon,” Mullen says. “You’ll scare them off. Just keep doing what you’re doing.”

  Mullen knows he’s asking a lot. He’s already getting blowback about Cirello. Just two days ago, his lieutenant came in to talk to him, shut the door behind him. “Organized Crime is hearing shit about one of our guys. Bobby Cirello has been seen with a loan shark named Angelo Bucci.”

  He laid out surveillance photos of Cirello sitting at a bar with Bucci.

  “Maybe he’s working a case,” Mullen said.

  “I hope so,” the lieutenant said. “I hope it’s just that, but there’s word that Cirello’s been gambling. And losing. Drinking hard, coming in looking like shit . . .”

  “Okay, let’s keep an eye on it.”

  “Look, I know he’s your guy.”