“We didn’t call nobody,” the albino said, large hand on the edge of the door, ready to slam it shut. “Go play with somebody else’s phones.”
Pins had his gun in the albino’s chest before he had a chance to breathe. “You don’t understand,” Pins said, his gun hand visibly shaking. “I take my job very seriously. Now, let me in.”
The albino took two steps back, hands at his sides, palms out. “Two phones. Bedroom and out here.”
“There’s three, putz,” Pins said, walking into the suite, looking at the dead undercover and the woman in the red pumps, stripped down to her bra. “You forgot about the one in the bathroom.”
“You walk in here, you don’t walk out,” the albino said. “I make sure of that.”
“Hey, fixing phones is a risky business,” Pins said, backing the albino against a wall. “But the benefits can’t be beat.”
Ramon tossed the duffel bag back on top of the coffee table and turned to the man with the accent for a signal. The man put an arm around the woman in the red pumps and held her close to his side, rubbing against the lines of sweat running down her back. The albino slid an open blade down the side of his sleeve and cupped it in his palm.
They held position as the cops flowed into the suite.
Calise and Fitz were in the doorway, short of breath and guns drawn. The three narcs from the stairwell were in vests and shotguns, crouched down behind them. The four detectives from the adjacent suite had poured out and were braced two apiece on both sides of the hall.
“Looks like a lot of people want to use your phone,” Pins said, turning his head slightly toward the cops covering the room.
The albino saw the opening and took it.
He wrapped his fingers around the knife handle and swung it. The blade slashed open the sleeve of Jimmy’s bowling jacket, drawing blood and knocking him to the ground.
Calise turned into the room, stepped over Jimmy, and fired four .38-caliber rounds deep into the albino’s chest. The force slammed him against the wall, knife rattling to the floor. He slid down the side of the pink stucco wall, staining it with streaks of red.
The second dead man in the room.
“I hope that’s not your bowling arm,” Calise said to Pins, looking down at him between his legs.
Then before Pins could say “You’re all heart,” the bullet came out of Ramon’s .41 Remington Magnum and traveled into Calise’s brain at a speed of 1,300 feet per second. Calise fell into a heap, the smile on his face frozen in death, crashing down on top of Ryan.
Ryan felt the breath ease out of Calise’s body, his friend’s blood pouring down the side of his face and onto his bowling jacket. Pins looked beyond Calise and over at the narcs by the door, hearing them curse and then empty their chambers into Ramon’s white suit. He lifted his head and watched the dealer flip across the room, knocking over a chair and landing on top of a dinette table near the bar.
The man with the accent held his place next to the woman in the red pumps, his right arm still wrapped around her waist, his left hand holding a .32 short Colt to her head. The narcs and the detectives pointed guns and rifles at him.
“I walk out with her,” the man said. “Or I die with her.”
The man with the accent tightened his grip around the handle of the gun and swallowed hard. The cops around him held their aim. Pins stayed still, blood still pouring down on him from Calise’s wound.
Pins looked over at the woman in the red pumps. She ran a hand slowly up her leg, lifting the skirt until it showed the top of her stockings. Strapped to the sheer frill was a white-barreled .22 Remington Jet. The man with the accent was sweating. Wavering. He jiggled the gun nervously, moving it from the woman’s head to flash it menacingly at the cops lined up before him, then back to the woman. When he flashed his gun around the room a second time, the woman moved. She pulled out her gun, put it to the man’s head, and fired off two rounds.
He fell to her feet, dead.
The woman tossed the gun to the floor, bent down, picked up her jacket and blouse, and walked out the open door, well aware of her fellow cops’ stares.
Pins didn’t move from the carpeted floor, now darkened by his friend’s blood. He put his arms around the dead cop, still too afraid to let him go, waiting for the hard faces with the body bags to come take him away.
• • •
FOR PINS THERE were few friends. Women were there when he wanted them, which was not often and never for long. He didn’t sleep much and spent free nights roaming bowling alleys, looking for a fast game for quick cash, quietly excelling in a sport meant to be played alone. He had the house and the car to call his own. And he had the wires.
With his bugs in place, Pins could enter any number of private worlds and listen to the planned deceits of others, free from their treachery, exempt from the harm they sought to cause. It was the center of the safe world he had built from the rubble of youth.
He should have known it was not meant to last.
• • •
THE BUILDING WAS on the Upper West Side, in the high seventies, prewar, seven stories high, with an Otis elevator creaking up and down. Surveillance photos taken by an undercover unit scouting the area led them to believe that a three-bedroom unit on the sixth floor was being used to launder drug dollars. The apartment was always empty between nine A.M. and noon every day; the young couple renting it for $3,000 a month worked out at the Jack Lalanne on Broadway during that time. The undercovers needed Pins to drop a bug near the bed and a video camera somewhere close to the bureau.
It was less than an hour’s work.
Pins pressed the two dozen black buzzers dotting the entry wall, waiting for some frazzled tenant to ring him in.
He moved to the elevator, watched the thick black door slowly close, and leaned on the button that had the number six on it. Pins was dressed in jeans and a thick blue baseball jacket, topped by a Yankee cap. In his left hand he held a thin leather briefcase. He popped two slices of red hot cinnamon gum in his mouth and got out of the elevator when it stopped at the sixth floor. He pulled a folded sheet from his back pocket to double-check the apartment number. He found it scrawled in black ink across the top of the wire sheet, 6F, and moved on down the hall.
It took less than thirty seconds for Pins to pick the lock and enter the apartment.
He moved down a long corridor, a large living room and two bedrooms to his left, a bathroom facing straight ahead. There was little in the way of furniture. A scrawny black cat hissed at him from behind a radiator pipe.
At the end of the corridor Pins turned right and walked into the master bedroom. The walls were painted dark blue, photographers’ flashlights stood in each corner, and a Sony twenty-five-inch color TV rested on the bureau. In the middle: a king-size four-poster.
Pins tossed his case on the bed, zipped it open, and started to work. He laid a bug inside the thin pole of one of the lights, running it from the bottom up, past the wires and into the main fuse connector.
He grabbed a Minicam out of the briefcase and walked to the back of the television, planning to rest it alongside the main tube.
It was then he heard the footsteps coming down the hall.
They were heavy, a man’s step rather than a woman’s, wooden slats creaking with each imprint. Pins rested the back of the TV on the floor and moved toward the bed, looking for the radio that would link him with backup.
He had his back to the door.
A young man, thin brown hair disheveled, vacant look in his eyes, stood at the edge of the bedroom entrance. His entire body shook with anger.
“I knew I’d find you here,” he said.
Pins turned around, radio in his hand, and faced the man.
“You live here?” Pins asked.
“I’m Sheila’s husband,” the man said. “And you’re standing in my bedroom.”
“I don’t know anybody named Sheila,” Pins said, pressing down on the black transmitter button.
“You sh
ould know her,” the man said. “You’ve been fucking her for almost a year now.”
“There’s a mistake here,” Pins said, his voice steady. He stayed focused on the man’s eyes, looking to talk his way out of this strange situation.
“I love her,” the man said. “Can you understand that, you bastard? I love her.”
“Listen to me,” Pins said quietly. “I’m a cop. I’m gonna take out my shield and show you. Okay?”
The man lifted his right arm and pointed it straight at Pins. There was a .22 caliber clutched in his hand.
“You’re not gonna show me anything,” the man said, clicking back the trigger. “And you’re not gonna see Sheila ever again.”
“You don’t know what you’re doin’.” Pins was surprised at how level his voice was. He wasn’t even yelling. “I’m not the guy. I’m a cop.”
One look at the man and Pins knew he had moved beyond reason to reside in madness.
In a lifetime constructed around caution, Jimmy Ryan had made a mistake. He had misread the scrawled handwriting on the wire sheet. He had walked through the wrong door, 6F instead of 6E, and there he stood, inches from a jealous husband’s rage, accused of having an affair with a woman he had never met.
The first bullet hit Pins in the right shoulder. The second shattered bone above the right elbow. The final two hit him in the chest and sent him to the ground, pain rushing through his body like a river.
The young man hovered over him, two more shells left in the chamber.
“You’ll never see her again,” he said to Jimmy Ryan.
“It’s sure startin’ to look that way,” Pins said.
He heard the undercovers before he saw them, guns drawn, ready to fire. He looked up at the young man and watched him drop the gun back down to his side. He saw two undercovers rush over, yank the man’s arms back, cuff him, and pull him away. Through it all, the man kept his eyes on Pins, a small smirk etched across his face.
A third undercover, Gennaro, ran over, leaned down, and lifted Pins’s head, holding it in the crook of his right arm.
“We got an ambulance comin’,” Gennaro told him.
“Think I need it?” Pins wanted to know, looking down at the blood flowing out of his bowling arm.
“Who’s the shooter?” Gennaro asked.
“Just a kid,” Pins said.
Pins looked away from Gennaro. He turned to the photo lamp in the corner. He tried to take a deep breath and smiled.
The small bugging device he planted in the neck of the lamp had picked up everything he said and did during his final moments as a cop.
It was the last bug Jimmy Ryan would plant as a member of the New York City Police Department.
6
Rev. Jim
BOBBY SCARPONI WAS a drug addict and an alcoholic.
He was twelve when he had his first taste of scotch; two weeks later he lit his first joint. Besides his ability to consume large quantities of any illegal substance, Scarponi was known for his chronic truancy and violent streak. He stole bikes and toys from his South Jamaica neighbors to help feed his expensive habits. His parents couldn’t exert any control over the boy, finding it easier to ignore, as much as they could, the whispers that followed their troubled son.
Bobby never dealt drugs, but was a steady customer for a number of local dealers. If he got in too deep financially and couldn’t make the payoff from what he could steal, he could bank on a discreet parental bailout. As a result, he was stripping the Scarponis of their security, slapping away at their pride, and digging into their future, which for them embodied nothing more ambitious than a two-bedroom Laguna Beach condo built around Albert Scarponi’s construction foreman’s pension.
Despite his problems and frequent run-ins with the police, Bobby Scarponi was a well-liked kid. In the pattern of the users and abusers he associated with, Scarponi learned early in his addiction to be a performer, to adjust his demeanor, hide the tracks, clear the eyes, and pretend to be normal. He had an easy way, blending natural charm with rugged features that managed to withstand the ravages of the drugs he ingested.
By the time he reached sixteen, Bobby had been in and out of four rehab clinics and undergone three years of ineffective counseling. He had worked his way up the pharmaceutical ladder from pot to glue to crystal meth to acid to cocaine. Then, on a cloudy April afternoon in 1966, Bobby put a thin needle to a fat vein and felt the hot rush of heroin for the first time.
He was now traveling on a narrow strip of road that often led its passengers to a head-on with death.
Bobby Scarponi was no exception.
• • •
BOBBY SAT NEXT to his mother, Beatrice, on a park bench across from the empty playground. It was cold and late, deep into a Monday night. His mother turned up the collar of her brown parka against the chill wind, shoved her hands deep inside the front pockets, and stared down at the withered grass by her feet. She was a short woman, slender, with a thick head of prematurely graying hair and sorrowful dark eyes. She spoke with a slight trace of an accent, remnants of her years growing up in the Italian seaside village of Panza.
“I never lied to your father, Roberto,” she said. “Tonight was the first time.”
“Relax, Mom,” Bobby said. “It’s gonna be over soon. We pay them the money and then we go home.”
“It’s never over, figlio,” Beatrice said. “As long as you buy what they sell.”
“Mom, please,” Bobby said, zipping up his green army jacket. “No lectures, okay? It’s bad enough we gotta sit in the cold and pay these dirtbags off.”
“You took your father’s heart,” Beatrice said, looking at her son, a hand on his right leg, which was jiggling nervously from the cold and the need for a fix. “You kill him a little bit each day. Every time you put that stuff inside your arms.”
“It’s my life, Mom,” Bobby said, throwing a glance up and down the street, concern etched on his face.
“It’s our life,” Beatrice said. “And it’s a wrong life right now.”
“I’m gonna quit,” Bobby said, turning to look at his mother, seeing the tears welling in her eyes. “I promise you. I don’t like this any more than you do.”
“You know, I was sixteen when I first met your father,” she said. “I looked and I fell in love. I love him even more now. And I can’t let him die and leave behind a junkie for a son. I can’t live with that shame.”
“What about me?” Bobby asked, sadness wrapped around the question. “You still love me?”
“I’m here, no?” Beatrice said. “To give strangers money your father works in a hole to earn.”
“I’ll pay you back,” Bobby said. “I swear it.”
“Don’t pay me with money,” Beatrice said.
“What, then?”
“Walk away from this life for good,” she said. “From the drugs and these bums who sell them to you.”
“I said I was gonna quit,” Bobby said. “This’ll be my last payoff.”
“If you can’t do that,” Beatrice said, cupping his chin, “then take enough to kill yourself.”
“You want me to die?” Bobby said slowly. “That’s what you’re tellin’ me you want?”
“You’re dead now, Roberto,” Beatrice said. “You walk and talk, eat and drink, but inside you’re dead. So, make it simple. For everybody. Stop what you’re doing or let me have a grave to pray over.”
The dealer came up out of the shadows to stand by Bobby’s left, a long, dark raincoat buttoned to his neck. The thin brim of a gray fedora shielded his eyes and hid his face; his hands were covered by thick black gloves. He was in his mid-twenties, long blond hair rubber-banded into a ponytail.
“Hey, Ray,” Bobby said in a startled tone, standing when he saw the dealer. “I didn’t hear you coming.”
“You got my money?” Ray asked, his tired voice sprinkled with venom.
“This is my mom,” Bobby said, pointing down toward Beatrice, who stayed in her seat, staring at the dealer
with contempt.
“I don’t give a fuck who she is,” Ray said. “You got my money?”
“Most of it,” Bobby said, looking over Ray’s shoulders, spotting the car waiting by a fire hydrant, smoke filtering out of the exhaust.
“I didn’t ask for most of it,” Ray said. “I want all of it. Now.”
“I brought five hundred,” Beatrice said to the dealer in the strongest voice she could muster. “It is all we have left.”
“You’re a thousand short,” Ray said.
“I’ll have the rest in about a week,” Bobby told him.
“How you gonna do that, High School?” Ray said. “Mama already gave you everything she’s got, and she’s all you know that’s got money.”
“It’s my problem,” Bobby said. “I’ll figure it out.”
Ray jumped off his stance and pounced on Bobby. His two gloved hands grabbed hold of the front of the zippered army jacket, lifting Bobby several inches off his feet.
“It ain’t just your problem,” Ray said. “It’s my problem now. And I gotta solve it.”
He let Bobby go, pushing him back toward his mother, who sat rigid in fear, her hands locked across her face. Ray walked past the boy, stopping in front of Beatrice. He crouched down, his eyes meeting hers, two hands on her knees, and smiled.
“You tellin’ the truth?” he asked her. “Five hundred’s all you got left?”
Beatrice nodded, too frightened to speak.
Ray took a hand off her knee and put it in his pocket. He leaned closer to Beatrice as the hand came out holding a black Indian-point switchblade. He pressed on a thin button at the bottom edge of the handle, releasing a seven-inch knife, sharp enough to cut through wood.
“I want all my money, Bobby,” Ray said, his eyes still on Beatrice, his face close enough for her to smell his drink-stained breath. “So I’m gonna ask you again. You got it for me?”
“Give me one more day.” Bobby moved two steps closer, trying not to sound as panicked as he felt. “I’ll get you the rest tomorrow. I swear it.”
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