After a few more blocks, he let out a low, “Fuuuuck.” Guilt was eating at him. He should’ve known what was going to happen when he shot at the squad car. The police did not care about the “little people.” They didn’t even use words like collateral damage or even casualties. The policemen’s report from the night’s shooting wouldn’t mention anything except the shots fired at them. And anyone hit would have no recourse. They couldn’t sue the city or the police officers. If they couldn’t afford a good doctor, then they would die and no one would care. Not even Cole.
There was no way he could go back to help. He couldn’t even go back to his own apartment now. It was too risky. This sucked to no end. It had cost him a thousand dollars to get his belongings out of the various pawn shops and now he was being forced to leave it all behind.
“Maybe I can go back in a couple of weeks, when this all blows over,” he lied to himself. The thing with mobsters is that they never forgot a slight. And this was wee bit more than just a slight. For what he’d done they would hold a grudge against Cole for the next two generations.
By morning his neighbors would have been visited by hairy-knuckled mobsters. They’d be told to keep an eye out for him and that there’d be a little something in it for whoever was first to call if he showed up. Every one of them would watch him gunned down in the street for three dollars.
The thought turned his guilt to hate. He hated the very people he was trying to keep safe as a Dead-eye hunter. He hated the world that he had been given, and sometimes…many times, in fact, he hated his life. And yet, what choice did he have but to live it?
He was still stewing when he found the brownstone. Before getting out, he checked on Eddie. Unfortunately, he was still alive, mewling through his gag. The kind thing to do was to kill him right there, however Cole didn’t want to touch him. His anger had switched so quickly back to guilt that his head went light.
In a way, Eddie was his fault. Why couldn’t I have just taken the job? he asked himself. If he had gone in search of this Scott Davidson person, three innocent people wouldn’t have been hurt. It was an easy assumption that Davidson wasn’t innocent. Mob bosses didn’t pay six hundred dollars to find some nobody schmuck. Davidson had to be deep into the Fantuccis.
Cole left Eddie and went to the trunk to snatch up the old pillowcase. Pulling his Fedora low, he went to the front door and hammered on it with his fist.
“Jussa minute,” a woman called from inside. As she worked the locks on the door, of which there were at least four, Cole stepped to the side and slid his hand up under his trench coat. The gun turned out not to be needed. Unlike Eddie, his sister, Yvonne Lutz was a proper slick. She had a mass of dark hair and large coal-black eyes. These seemed oversized as the rest of her was a tiny bird-like thing with woozy, heavy eyelids and a wide down-turned mouth. Perpetual frowning had turned her lips into those of a grouper.
“Who’re you?”
“I’m here for the girl,” he growled, shoving the pillowcase at Yvonne. “Don’t make me wait.”
The fish-look grew more pronounced as she leaned in the doorway, arms folded across her chest. “I asked who the hell you think you are talking to me like that? You know who I am?”
“Mr. Fantucci wants the girl. Don’t make me go in there after her.”
The woozy eyes shot a little wider. “Of course. Sorry. I thought you was one of Eddie’s boys. They don’t know no respect for women. If I had knowd you was with Mr. Fantucci I wouldn’ta questioned a thing. Honest.”
“Yeah,” was all Cole said to her rambling. Yvonne left in a hurry, leaving behind the fading scent of perfume beneath the stronger aroma of gin. She mumbled and scraped through the lower floor of the boardinghouse, her house shoes making a shiff, shiff, shiff sound as she went.
Although she had been somewhat disheveled, the house was immaculate. It was practically sterile. Even in the dim light, the floor gave off a shimmer as if it had just been polished, and the furniture was absolutely dust free. What was also apparent was that the furniture was all ill-gotten. Not one piece matched another.
“Here she is,” the woman called out as she shiff, shiff, shiffed from the basement. “I told her to watch her mouth. She’s got a dirty tongue, worser than some of them Red Dogs. Here ya go.” Yvonne presented the hooded little girl; Cole had to resist the urge to lift the pillowcase to see if Corrina had been abused. If she had been, he would have busted the woman’s fish lips.
Cole turned to leave just as Yvonne grabbed his arm. “You want a drink?”
He grunted a “No,” hoping that Corrina wouldn’t recognize his voice and say his name. Despite running a boarding house, Yvonne seemed more than a little lonely and she followed him onto the stoop of the red brick building.
“Say, ain’t that Eddie’s car? Yeah. He got them flash hubcaps. What happened to the windows? He’s okay, ain’t he?”
“That ain’t his car, and what happened to the windows is my business. Now go inside and wait for a call from your brother.” He opened the door and shoved her bodily inside, shutting the door behind her. When he turned back, Corrina was lifting the pillowcase. “Not yet,” he told her.
“Cole?”
He took her pointy little elbow in hand and led her quickly down the stairs, expecting cars to flood the area. With his luck it would be a combination of the police and mobsters, with maybe his boss Shamus McGuigan, lurking in the background wearing a look of monumental disapproval. Save for the pattering rain the night remained quiet. Once they were in the car, he yanked the pillowcase from her head and was happy to see that she hadn’t been touched.
She gave him a weak grin that did not remain in place for more than a second. Then she sat very still as he wound his way north, looking to cross into Queens using the half-ruined RFK Bridge. Once in Queens, he would be in Morlock territory, safe from the Fantuccis.
“You gave me a scare,” he told her.
“Yeah. Me too. They said they’d kill me.”
“Wanna cig? I have a few Confederates.”
She nodded, still somewhat blank-eyed. As he unlocked her cuffs, Eddie made another pitiful mewling sound. Corrina looked back, noticing the roll of carpet for the first time. “Who is…is that Eddie? What did you do to him?”
Cole tapped out a cig from the box before he answered. “He wouldn’t listen to reason. I gave him a choice to walk away. He didn’t take it, and so now he’s going to die.” The two savored their cigarettes, taking the lightest drags possible to make them last. As they smoked, Cole drove and filled Corrina in on what had happened. She then told him how she had been nabbed right after leaving the police station.
“They knew right where I was,” she said in something of a whisper, after a glance back at Eddie. “You know what that means, right? They got someone on the take with the taxmen. Maybe you should give him a whack until he tells you who it is. He deserves it ya know. He grabbed me by my hair and called me a slag, and he slapped me and did other stuff, too.” Cole shot her a look and she shook her head. “Not that kinda stuff. He was just mean.”
He glanced back at what he could see of Eddie. “I think he’s getting punished enough. And it would surprise me if everyone down at the station isn’t on someone’s payroll. Cops ain’t nothing but legal mercs these days.”
“Mercs?”
Cole rolled the cigarette to the left side of his mouth, where the blue smoke leaked from the tip. “Mercenaries. They’ll pretty much do anything for money.” He sighed out a plume of grey. “I was hoping Eddie’d be dead by now.” He drove in silence, wondering what he was going to do with Eddie. It had been his hope that he would have at least clean-ish hands when it came to his death. “I think we’ll just have to leave him with the car,” he said as they crossed over into Queens. “The Morlocks will take care of him.”
The Morlocks were not a pleasant people. Because of the intense pollution that wafted across from Brooklyn, more of them lived below ground than above it, and when Cole turned onto
Astoria Avenue, the pedestrians seemed to disappear. Light did as well. The sky was the usual: close and menacing; the buildings were so dark as to appear deserted. Occasionally, a shadow would dart across an alley, but other than that almost nothing moved down the trashed-out streets.
“Let’s dump him and go,” Corrina said in a whisper. She didn’t like the idea that the windows of the Rambler were shot out. It made her feel vulnerable and she pushed in close to the center console.
“Not yet. We’re leaving the car as well,” Cole told her. She looked at him like he was crazy. “It’ll be alright. The Morlocks are people just like you and me.” This was something of a lie. The Morlocks were not quite people. They had a higher proportion of slags than anywhere in the city, and they weren’t shy about it, either. Whereas most people tried to hide their lesions and scars, the Morlocks displayed theirs openly.
The two of them would stand out, but there was nothing Cole could do about that. Going to Brooklyn was out of the question. The vamps owned that entire section of the city and ran it like an assortment of concentration camps. A Rambler in that part of the city would be noticed and more than likely stopped. The Bronx was Puerto Rican territory. They hated slicks with a passion, and the Rambler practically screamed mafia.
The Morlocks were unnerving, but at least they could be counted on to hate each other more than outsiders. Queens was at war and had been for as long as Cole could remember, but since the battles took place below ground and were almost always restricted to the various clans, no one in the rest of the city much cared.
Cole certainly didn’t care. He had enough trouble on his plate.
Ditching the Rambler was not a problem. After a mile, he took a turn into an alley and trundled over piles of garbage, stopping the car on the side of the street. Before opening his door, he leaned back to look at the lump. “It wouldn’t hurt to start praying, Eddie. I think you’re a piece of shit, but supposedly God doesn’t care about that.” He patted the lump. “Good luck,” he said and meant it. Despite being perpetually cranky, Cole didn’t carry grudges. It was a waste of anger.
Corrina didn’t know what to think about letting him live. She had come to possess a gangster’s mentality and didn’t like the idea of letting loose ends dangle. “What if he’s faking?” she asked as they hurried away from the car.
“Then he’s the best actor I’ve ever seen. Trust me, it’s only a matter of time. An hour, tops. And if someone finds him, he can’t do much more damage than he’s already done. We’re pretty well fucked. I told the Fantucci crime family to kiss my ass. It’s not something they’re going to forget. Watch where you’re walking.”
She had almost stepped on a body. It was carpeted in black rats which had blended in with the night shadows. As she danced away, there was a loud snap! She had set off a rat trap. Cole grabbed her before she could move. They were surrounded by both rats and traps.
“Get away,” a woman hissed from above them. She was lurking in an abandoned second floor room, staring down at them from around a broken storm shutter. “Those are mine! Get away.”
“We’re going,” Cole assured her. “We don’t want your rats.”
“Speak for yourself,” Corrina muttered. “I haven’t eaten all day. You think we can stop and get something to eat?”
Cole was getting hungry as well, but there’s no way he was going to eat rat that had been feeding on a human corpse. “We’ll get something at the station.” She assumed he meant Penn Station in Manhattan, but when they found a wide set of stairs heading down below street level, they entered into a subterranean world that was as alive as the upper world was dead.
People were everywhere, talking, yelling, laughing, and above all, haggling. The subway station had been turned into a local market with vendors scrabbling over territory and customers. Everything could be had for a price, and many times anything could be had in the same ten-foot square. Most of the vendors did not contain themselves to a single item, instead you could buy refurbished socks, invigorated gin, tooth powder and uptown ice from the same dour man as his mom tried to take your shoes off for a pedicure and his daughter lifted her skirt for a brief glance at the wares she was hawking.
Practically everyone offered food of some sort and the air in the station was grey with smoke and foul with the stench of old fish and unwashed bodies. Rat was not an uncommon food source. It was always referred to as “meat,” as in noodles with meat or fried meat with rice. Sometimes they didn’t bother to hide the fact that they were serving rodent. More than one vendor had skinned rats, stretched and splayed out, spinning rotisserie style over small coal fires. In other stalls, the rats were sold live from low cages.
When Cole and Corrina passed these, the vendor would smack the cage so that the rats would wiggle and squirm over each other to show their “vitality.”
“I can wait until we get back home,” Corrina told Cole, talking out of the side of her mouth. She wasn’t just turned off by the rats and the stink. She had eaten rat on a hundred occasions, and she had spent the better part of two years living in tunnels that made the aroma in the station seem like a meadow. But she had been almost constantly high and or drunk during those two years.
Even then she wasn’t used to slags hovering over her food as ugly, greasy fluid dripped from the fissures and lesions that covered their faces.
“I’m with you on that one,” Cole told her. “Come on. I hear a train.” He began pushing through the crowd. There was only a very narrow causeway between the vendors on either side of them, and the path wasn’t close to being straight. It meandered, seemingly at the whim of fate and it took Cole nearly five minutes to get to the train. The engine in front was a huffing, tired thing that trembled every fifteen seconds as the rear three pistons scraped in their chambers.
“We want to get in the front car,” Cole said, imagining the train breaking down somewhere under the east river. There was nothing worse than trying to squeeze past fifteen dead train cars. “Come on…” He stopped in mid-sentence, his hand out to nothing. Corrina was gone.
Chapter 6
“She’s getting to be more trouble than she’s worth!” he muttered, heading back into the crowd. He fully expected her to be standing at a tinman’s stall, eyeing necklaces. Corrina was always going on about the need for a necklace.
“How can I be a girl without one?” she had asked more than once. Her desire for jewelry was her one nod to being “girly.” She wasn’t into dresses and instead liked sturdy denim jeans and plain t-shirts; red if she could get them in that color. And nor was she into shoes. Plain black boots were her thing, though she did like to paint them in a variety of colors.
He gazed around for her, but there was such a press of people and she was so short—just a hair over four and a half feet—that he couldn’t see her.
He was practically growling in his throat as he shouldered his way through the crowd, his eyes shifting left and right for the little girl in red. As he passed stall after stall, his anger gave way to a tingle of fear, which crawled up his spine. Corrina would never think about sneaking away for this long, not after what had just happened to her.
The only conclusion he could draw from her absence was that someone must have taken her. Now he turned in a circle, seeing villains in every slaggy face as some unthinking, primal part of him suddenly equated ugly with evil. The ugliest of them all were the dozen or so daddies pimping out their money-honeys. The girls were splashed with makeup to cover their bruises and the lesions. In contrast to the sad, faux vibrancy of their faces, their eyes were shallow pools of drug-induced apathy. They would do anything for another ride on the Mule.
“Heeeey baby,” one said to Cole. She pointed at him, her finger drawing a slow, unkempt Z as she tried to focus. “I gotta special. Twenty cents a hole. Whatever you want. Whatdya say? I’m clean as…”
A hand grabbed his arm. “Hey!” The voice was lower and more urgent, and instead of shaking the arm off and going on, Cole glanced around to se
e Corrina wild-eyed and shaking. “What the hell are you doing? We don’t have time for this. The taxmen are here!” She wasn’t wrong. There were police officers at the cement stairs that she and Cole had come down. So far, they were only standing at the bottom with guns pointed indifferently into the crowd.
“They’re going to box us in,” he hissed, taking it for granted that the police were there for him. As there wasn’t much profit in it, they rarely came down into the tunnels, which meant this was either a tremendous coincidence or someone had seen the Rambler. With an officer on the take within the force, it wouldn’t have been difficult to connect Cole with Eddie’s Rambler, which was last seen shooting up a squad car midway between Cole’s apartment and Eddie’s sister’s brownstone.
“We have to get to the train,” Cole said, ducking down and slipping toward the platform where the train was settling down, steam venting from it like a dragon. “Shit!” They were releasing the pent-up steam which meant the train wasn’t going anywhere soon. Again, either this was monumental bad luck or someone big was after Cole. “This way! We can’t…”
He choked on his words. Bruce Hamilton had just come swaggering into view from the other end of the station. He was Lieutenant Hamilton now. Years before, he and Cole had been partners. Hamilton had been the man who had “warned” Cole about his overly ethical behavior by shooting him in the back. Seeing him stopped Cole. He reached for his gun, thinking that if there was going to be any shooting, he would take out Hamilton first and worry about escape later.
“No!” Corrina snapped. “I know a way out. Follow me.”
“You don’t know anything. You said yourself that you’ve never been to Queens.”
She only tugged harder on his sleeve. “Will you come on before it’s too late?” Her unusual confidence won him over and he hurried after her in a crouch. With unerring steps, she led him through the maze of stalls until they came to a barber who was in the middle of pulling a tooth out of a man. As the barber was paying more attention to the police than the man’s tooth, he ended up shattering it.
Dead Eye Hunt (Book 2): Into The Rad Lands Page 5