Mad Dog Justice (8 page)

“Yeah, Dan, but there’s a way you can be vague but not say
too
much. Why give away the whole goddamned ranch? Listen, I gotta be honest with you. When Morgan threw that shit at me about Kenny’s two hundred fifty K coming from the Cayman Islands, he thought he was onto something big. And you know what?”

Danny waits, wide-eyed, with his head nodding slightly.

“I gotta say this, because it’s true.”

“Say what?”

“We shouldn’t have to be dealin’ with this crap now. You fucked up. You should’ve looked more carefully into where Kenny’s money came from,” Roddy says, the words slipping out. He hadn’t meant to be so forceful, so blunt. He feels himself recoiling at the vehemence of his voice and his choice of words:
You fucked up
. Not fair and not the way to go.

“What the fuck’re you saying, Roddy?” Dan’s head shakes from side to side.

Roddy wants to hesitate and think through his next words, but they pour from his lips. “If you really wanna know, Dan, you should’ve been more careful. We wouldn’t be in this deep shit—you in the hospital, Walt McKay dead, and we’ve got targets on our backs. For Christ’s sake, even our families gotta be hidden.”

“What’re you fuckin’ doing—laying blame?” Danny growls as his eyes widen. His brows arch, and Roddy sees the whites of Dan’s eyes above his irises. “What’re you saying? You’re putting this shit on
my
shoulders? You have some fuckin’ nerve, Roddy. You’re my best friend, always have been, and now I gotta hear talk like this? Holy shit. I never thought I’d hear crap like this coming outta your mouth. What the fuck? Jesus, I’m so disappointed I don’t know what to say. I can’t even put it into words.”

“C’mon, Danny, you gotta be realistic.”

“As a matter of fact, Mr. Tough Guy, Doctor fucking Mad Dog Dolan, biggest badass in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, New York, US of-Fucking-A, lemme put it to you this way as long as we’re tossin’ shit on the table. And I’ve thought about this plenty since it happened.”

Danny swallows, shifts in his chair, and winces. He’s pouring sweat; it drips down from his hairline. He tries to wipe some of it away with his palm.

“I wonder why the fuck I was stupid enough to let you strong-arm me into hauling that fat fuck Grange upstate. It was
your
goddamned idea, not mine,” Dan snarls. His eyes bulge and look ruthlessly bloodshot. “And you didn’t have the decency to tell me about it beforehand—”

“Because you’d have panicked if I had, Danny.”

“
Bullshit
. You didn’t trust me—your best fucking friend, your goddamned blood brother from the very beginning, from before either one of us can even fucking remember. You didn’t trust me worth a damn. You just hinted at what you wanted to do while we sat in McLaughlin’s back office waiting for Kenny and Grange to show up. And I was a schmuck—a fucking panty-waist because I just went along with you, with committing murder. I should’ve told you to fuck off as soon as I realized what was going down.”

Danny’s sweat-drenched face glistens in the morning light.

“Bullshit,
yourself
, kemosabe,” Roddy hisses. “You knew what was going down as soon as we got on the West Side Highway. Even before then. As soon as Grange passed out from the Mickey Finn. Don’t bullshit me. You fucking knew, Danny. And you didn’t say
squat
.”

“You’re right, Roddy. And you know what? You know the
fuck
what? I shoulda told you to stop the goddamned car and turn around. I shoulda told you to head right the fuck back to Manhattan. But I didn’t, because I’m a schmuck. Just a total
schmuck. And if that didn’t work, I shoulda told you to stop the car and let me the fuck out. I’da walked home … all the way back to Tuckahoe.”

Danny sucks in a breath and then lets it out slowly.

“But I
didn’t
. I just sat back like a goddamned wuss. I let you call all the shots, and now we’re here, up to our lips in shit,” Danny snarls and then coughs raucously. Mucous is building up in his chest. Roddy hears it rattling around; Danny could launch into a full-blown asthmatic attack. His neck veins bulge; his eyes close and his breath begins sounding like a punctured bellows. His face turns purple and looks congested. Looks like he’s about to burst a blood vessel.

“So what’re we now? Just what the fuck’re we?” Danny gurgles through the phlegm. “Two assholes blaming each other for what happened. Let’s face it; we’re just a couple of murderers who left two corpses in the woods. And now whadda we have? A pack of goons’re after us. And the cops’re sniffin’ around like we stink as bad as that shithole in the woods where we dumped those bastards. Jesus Christ, I’m such a fucking asshole.” He shakes his head, moves his bulk in the chair, and winces again.

“So what was the alternative, Danny? Just pay up? Let that fat extortionist take us for five hundred K?”

“We wouldn’t be here right now if we had.”

“Danny, lemme ask you something.”

“What?”

Roddy catches himself. If he asks Dan about a possible connection to Grange—if he even hints he’s had thoughts that maybe Dan was in on Kenny’s scheme—their friendship is down the drain. Gone. Forever. A momentary wave of guilt washes over him for even thinking it. Danny involved in the scheme with Grange and Kenny? It doesn’t make a particle of sense; Kenny would’ve ratted Danny out the second Roddy held the .45 to his head at Snapper Pond.

I’m going back and forth and doubting everything. Am I going paranoid?

“So what the fuck you wanna ask me, Roddy?” Dan’s eyes are wide. His face is flushed, still purple.

“You think Grange would’ve stopped at five hundred? You
really
think he wouldn’t up the ante to a
million
or even more? He had a surgeon and an accountant on his fish line. Two Westchester candy-asses like us. You think he wouldn’t’ve hooked on to us like a leech and bled us drier than a communion wafer, two Irish schnooks from Brooklyn? What’s with you? What? Were you born yesterday? C’mon, Danny, you’re a money guy. You know the world. It’s a fuckin’ cesspool—especially greedy pricks like Grange. The guy never saw a penny he didn’t want in his own pocket. Not one fucking penny,” Roddy whispers. “We did what we
had
to do and
now
we’re in deep shit and we gotta do something.”

“Yeah? Like what?” Danny whispers back through a mucous plug in his chest. “What’re we gonna do,
tough
guy? Kill more people? And who the
fuck
are we gonna kill? What’re we? Back in Brooklyn? Huh? Back in that shithole by Sheepshead Bay? You wanna know something, Roddy? I’m looking at you right now, right here today, and you know what? You look just like you did back then—like a goddamned mad dog. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think we slipped back in some fuckin’ time machine.”

Danny snorts and exhales loudly. His nose starts running; clear liquid dribbles down from both nostrils.

“We gotta do something?” Danny says. “Like what? What the fuck’re we gonna do? Huh? Who goes down
this
time? The Russian mafia? The fucking Italians? The Fontana brothers? Maybe John Gotti … oh, I forgot. He’s already dead. How ’bout Vladimir fuckin’ Putin? Huh? Maybe we can get to him. Why not the KGB? Or how ’bout the CIA? Jesus, let’s face it. We’re toast.”

Roddy feels every blood vessel in his body overheating. A
momentary thought glimmers in his brain about Danny and the distance that’s grown between them, how he gets the feeling Dan’s been avoiding him. Jesus, it’s so goddamned tempting to call him on it—to unload and let Danny know how he feels. But before he says anything, another thought comes to him: talking about their relationship right now is a useless diversion. It’s a road trip to no place good. It’s potentially more destructive than anything it might possibly reveal. And it’ll solve nothing.

Roddy inhales deeply and lets the swirl of thoughts slow down. He feels the muscle tension begin dissipating in a system cooldown.

Keep your cool. Don’t get sidetracked into accusatory cul-desacs that’ll do nothing but flame resentment. Neither of you needs that right now. You need to be on the same page and figure this out
.

“All I know, Danny, is this: soon as you’re out of the hospital, you gotta get lost. Me, too. And we gotta convince Angie and Tracy to take the kids and leave.”

“How’re we gonna do that?”

“Let’s dope it out.”

“Yeah … for how long do we
vacate
?”

“Until we solve this thing,” Roddy says, aware his heart rate is decelerating.

They fall quiet for a moment. Dan inhales deeply and seems to catch his breath. Roddy listens for squeaks or mucous coming from Dan’s chest but hears nothing. The room seems very still.

“What’re we gonna solve, Roddy?”

“We gotta learn who’s coming after us and why.”

“What about our practices?”

“You have people working for you. I have my partner. He’ll cover for me.”

“So what do we tell the girls?”

“C’mon, Dan, we’re smart guys. We can figure something out.”

“Yeah, like we figured out how to handle Grange and Kenny?”

A
half hour later, Roddy sits in his car outside St. Joseph’s Hospital. Workers are streaming into the place for the morning shift. It’s nearly eight a.m. It’s a work-a-day world. And he’s not going to be part of it much longer. No, he’s going to
vacate
.

The key is in the ignition, but Roddy doesn’t turn it. He closes his eyes, and the strangest thing happens: it feels like he’s back in the Sequoia—that huge, forest-green SUV with its rear storage area packed with shovels, a pick, his toolbox, plastic wrap, and that old army .45. Danny’s sitting in the front passenger seat, to his right. They’re on the West Side Highway heading north through Manhattan. Grange is in the backseat snoring like a boiler factory; Kenny’s back there with him, wearing his maître d’ tuxedo.

They’d hauled the loan shark’s fat ass out to West 46th Street, where the Sequoia was parked. Roddy’s thoughts fast-forward. In a moment, it feels like they’re on the Taconic with its dark tree line on either side of the deserted parkway. Kenny’s going through his insane, drug-fueled rant, punching the sleeping Grange, rifling through his pockets, grabbing his wallet, dumping it in the plastic bag Danny’s holding open as he leans over the front seat. Kenny’s screaming he wants to keep the shylock’s Rolex, but Roddy tells him to drop it in the bag. Then Kenny’s taking off Grange’s belt and shoes, and tossing them out the window into the vegetation along the highway, only a few miles from Snapper Pond.

Yes, Danny knew exactly what they were going to do; Kenny certainly did. There’s no doubt about it: from the moment Grange passed out after drinking the spiked scotch, it was clear they were gonna put him in the ground. Danny’s just getting off on some self-serving bullshit—he’s convinced himself he had no idea what was going down until it was too late.

But maybe Danny’s right: maybe it was possible for them to have paid Grange off before the vig got too high. Maybe, just
maybe, the bastard would’ve gone away, just disappeared like the ghost he claimed to be. Maybe things would be different now if Roddy hadn’t been so quick to go mad dog and veer in a lethal direction.
If
… the biggest little word in the English language. You can change the entire course of world history by using the word
if
.

Don’t kid yourself. Half a million would never’ve been enough for that loan shark. He’d’ve come back for more … and more after that
.

Besides, it doesn’t matter now. It’s over and done. Now they have to come up with some plan of action. But what? What can they do except run and hide?

Roddy snaps himself back to the present. He presses the “Contacts” icon on his cell. He hits the number and hears the ringing at the other end. Roddy knows from their years together that his partner always answers his cell phone on the first tone.

“Yeah, Roddy, where are you?” says Ivan Snyder. “The guys in the OR are waiting for you.”

“Ivan, you have a few minutes?”

“Yeah, sure. I’m between surgeries. But where
are
you?”

“Listen, Ivan. I have to leave town for a while. Have David do my surgeries today and for the duration. He’s very good. I have complete confidence in him.”

“For the
duration
? Whaddaya talkin’ about?”

“Something personal. I have to leave.”

“Now? We’re busy as hell. I’m swamped. We have wall-to-wall patients. Our schedule is insane, and—”

“I know, Ivan, but I’ve got no choice.”

“When will you be back?”

Roddy now realizes how tentative his life has become. He can’t even answer the simple question about when he’ll return. His throat closes off as he looks through the windshield at the hospital workers entering St. Joseph’s.

“I don’t know. I have to call hospital administration and tell them I’m taking a leave.”

“A leave? You don’t know when you’ll be
back
? Hey, Roddy, we’re running a busy practice here. I can’t keep it going myself. I need to know when you’ll be back.”

“I wish I could give you a definite on that, Ivan, but I can’t.”

“Listen, we’re already handing surgeries off to the Isler brothers. With you gone, our income’s gonna plummet and I’ll be overloaded. Sylvia and I are looking at some huge expenses these days. My kid’s about to start college and … oh, forget that. I can’t afford to cut back right now. What the hell’s going on?”

“We’ll straighten it all out when I get back.”

“When you get
back
? And you don’t even know when that is? What’s going on?” There’s a long pause. Roddy hears Ivan exhale loudly. “Listen, Roddy. I’ve been thinking for a while we have to take on a junior partner, and now this shit you’re dumping in my lap …”

“Who do you like?”

“You already mentioned David. I know he’s good.”

“Sounds fine, Ivan. Do what you think is best.” Roddy’s foot taps a rapid tattoo on the Rogue’s floorboard. He grips the steering wheel with one hand and pushes. He feels it bend forward.

There’s silence on the other end. Roddy can almost hear Ivan’s mental gears whirring.