A Dark and Broken Heart (4 page)

“Good ’nough,” Madigan says.

Fulton and Williams are standing by the front of the sedan.

“Guns now, all of them,” Madigan says. “Over there by the wall. I’ll take care of their disposal.”

The three other men comply, dropping their guns in a pile against the far wall.

“Ready?” Madigan asks.

“For some wild-ass party, yeah!” Fulton says.

Madigan shakes his head. “You go easy, Zeppo,” he says. “Stupidest thing you could do right now is flash that money around the place.”

Fulton laughs. “Think we can do without the dumb nicknames now. Don’t you?” he says, and there’s something in his eyes.

Madigan says nothing.

“I mean, hell, man, we’re all friends here now. Brothers in arms, partners in crime an’ all that shit.” He glances at Landry. “Me an’ Bobby ain’t strangers. We did some work together a little while
back, and this guy over here,” he adds, indicating Williams, “sure wasn’t keeping his name a secret. Were you, Chuck?”

Williams looks pissed. He shakes his head at Fulton and looks away. He knows Madigan is staring at him, but he can’t face him down. Doesn’t even try.

“You are full of shit, Zeppo,” Madigan says. “I said what I said, and what I said I meant. Don’t fuck with me—”

Fulton sneers. “You think I don’t know who you are?”

Madigan’s eyes widen. This is not what he planned for, not what he expects, not what he needs. He is aware of the .44 in the back of his waistband.

“Seriously? You think I don’t know about you . . . about who you are, your reputation?”

“Shut the hell up, will you?” Williams says urgently.

“Yeah, shut the hell up,” Landry echoes. “We’re done. The whole thing is done. Let’s get out of here right now.”

Fulton stands his ground. He’s cock of the walk now. He stands straight, like someone jammed a stair rod up his ass.

“You know who I am?” Madigan asks.

“Sure as shit stinks, I know who you are,” Fulton replies. “You’re Vincent Mad—”

Madigan would later marvel at his own speed. He has the .44 in his hand before he is even aware of it himself. The bullet hits Fulton in the stomach.

Williams and Landry don’t move. The sudden noise, the sight of Fulton looking at his own stomach, the way he just goes on standing there smiling his condescending smile. And then the blood starts coming and he knows he’s in trouble, that it isn’t his imagination. He drops the duffel full of money and clasps his hands to his gut, and he goes on standing there for a good ten seconds before he finally lets out a noise like
Neeeuuuggghhh
and drops to his knees. Fulton looks up at Madigan. Still the disbelief is there in his eyes. Madigan doesn’t say a word. Fulton’s eyes roll back, and then he falls sideways. His right foot is twitching.

Williams starts hyperventilating. “Oh Jesus, oh Jesus, oh Jesus. What the fuck. What the fuck . . .”

Landry steps away from the front of the car. He looks down at Fulton—there on his side, still now, not a flicker of motion—and Landry says the only thing that he can think of in that moment which is, “I don’t know who the hell you are, and I sure as hell don’t wanna know.”

Madigan looks at Williams. Williams slows down. He calms a little. He’s gripping the handles of the duffel like a lifeline to something. He’s breathing heavily.

Madigan knows what to do. It comes together like a jigsaw puzzle. He walks to the wall and retrieves Fulton’s .38. He points it at Williams.

“You know who I am?” Madigan asks him.

Williams is shaking his head vigorously, but Madigan knows he’s lying. He knows they’re both lying. Fulton found out who he was and told both Williams and Landry, and now he has to deal with it.

“You know Ben Franklin?” Madigan asks.

“I don’t know anyone,” Williams says. “I don’t know you, and I don’t know any Franklin guy.”

Madigan smiles. These guys really were dumber than dog crap.

“Benjamin Franklin, the President of the United States . . .
that
Ben Franklin.”

“Sure, yeah. Sure . . . Heard of him, yeah . . .” Landry says. He takes a step back. He’s clutching his duffel to his chest like it’s bulletproof.

“Said something that makes a great deal of sense in this situation,” Madigan continues.

“Yeah, okay . . . Okay, man,” Williams replies. “Ca—can we just get the hell out of here now? Fulton’s dead, okay? He was an asshole and he opened his dumbass mouth and now he’s dead. We’ll split up his share, you and me and Bobby here . . . No, forget that. You just take Fulton’s share, and that’ll be the end of that—”

“You haven’t heard my Ben Franklin quote yet,” Madigan says. He takes a deep breath. He doesn’t understand why he feels so calm. He hefts the .38 in his hand. “He said that a secret between three people is only a secret if two of them are dead.”

It takes a second before either Landry or Williams understands the significance of Madigan’s words.

A second is too long.

Madigan shoots Williams first, right through the heart, and he’s close enough for the force of impact to spin Williams right over the bumper of the car and onto the ground.

Landry looks like he’s going for the wall.

Madigan takes one step forward and shoots him in the face. Both of them are down. He checks vitals. There is nothing.

He gathers up the four duffels, opens one up, takes a good three
or four handfuls of notes and scatters them across the floor. He turns the bag out and empties it beside Fulton.

Madigan wipes his prints off of the .44 and puts it in Williams’s hand. He cleans off the .38 and reaches down to put it beside Fulton.

Fulton opens his eyes and looks back at Madigan.

Madigan starts suddenly.

Blood bubbles from Fulton’s lips as he tries to speak. Madigan stands straight. He pockets the .38. He cannot shoot the man again. A second shot would preclude any possibility of this being read the way he intends. It needs to be clean, simple, a closed case. Three people robbed one of Sandià’s drug houses, and those same three people had a go at each other in a storage unit near the subway. Three shots, three DBs, case closed.

Madigan backs up the Econoline and opens the door. He sits sideways in the seat, now no more than three or four yards from where Fulton lies on the ground in an ever-widening pool of blood. The man’s leg twitches once more, a brief flurry of motion, and the side of his shoe draws an arc of blood out from the edge and across the concrete.

Fulton tries to speak again, and blood bubbles grow and burst from his mouth.

“It’s over, Larry,” Madigan says. “I ain’t takin’ you anywhere. You do understand that, right? You and me are just going to have to sit here until you die.”

Fulton’s eyes tighten with whatever ravages of pain are coursing through his gut. Stomach wounds are the worst—the slowest, the most painful, the most difficult to repair.

“You been a bad guy,” Madigan says. “Hell, what goes around comes around, eh? Seems to me that something like this is the only way it could end for you.”

Madigan pauses, wonders if this will be the way for him as well. Sometime.

Fulton is down on his right side. He tries to lift his left arm, but he has no strength. His fingers are trying to reach for something he cannot see, perhaps reaching out toward Madigan in a last, desperate attempt to provoke some slight sense of mercy.

Madigan closes his eye and exhales. The adrenaline has gone. He is exhausted. He feels as if the edges of his mind have been frayed and weathered by some terrible storm.

He feels the weight of the .38 in his pocket. He needs to get it
into Fulton’s hand and get the fuck out of there. He cannot leave until Fulton is dead.

Madigan stands. He surveys the scene around him—the bodies, the blood, the money, the Econoline. Devastation every which way he looks. Kind of like his life.

He takes three steps and is down on his haunches beside Fulton, careful not to get any more blood on his shoes.

“Just fucking die already, will you?” Madigan says. “Just die and go to hell where you belong, you piece of shit.”

Madigan gets the next words that Fulton tries to utter. He can lip-read enough to see
Fuck you
amidst the blood.

“Fuck you too, Larry,” Madigan says, and the temptation to just reach out and close his hand over Fulton’s nose and mouth and let him suffocate is very strong, but he cannot touch the man.

Madigan waits.

Larry Fulton’s mouth opens and closes a couple of times, and then he is gone—eyes wide, looking right back at Madigan, and the light behind them goes out.

Madigan takes the .38 from his pocket, wipes it down, and puts it in Fulton’s right hand. He moves the hand slightly and lets it come to rest in half an inch of blood. The blood, still fluid, closes around the hand, and the scene is set.

Madigan spends a good ten minutes wiping down every possible surface in the Econoline, and then he’s behind the wheel of the sedan. He manages to maneuver it out past the van and up to the door of the storage unit. He looks back at the scene. On his passenger seat are three duffels, over three hundred and sixty grand in cash. He doesn’t know what he’s feeling. He doesn’t need a Mandy anymore. He could use a Brooklyn Pilsner, a shot of Jack, a smoke. That would do him right now. The adrenaline has lit a fire in him, and it ain’t going out anytime soon.

Eight minutes later Vincent Madigan is heading toward the Triborough and home. That’s when his cellphone goes off. That’s when he checks the number of the caller and feels his balls tighten.

He hesitates, then pulls over, takes one more look at the phone, and answers it.

“Detective Madigan . . .”

6
THE LIE

“Y
ou are
not
the light of the world,” Angela said. She was his first wife, back when things were straight and clean, back when things were far closer to how he’d imagined they should be. She was beautiful and smart, and Madigan was handsome and charming and humorous. They were a great couple, at least for a while. And between them they made Cassie, Madigan’s first child, and anything that produced such a girl as Cassie couldn’t have been wrong.

Cassie was the brightest, the best, the one that seemed to have inherited all his good and none of his bad. Cassie was everything to him. And though Madigan now saw Cassie infrequently, she seemed to be the one person in his life who recognized who he really was.

Madigan could hear Angela’s voice anytime he chose. He just had to close his eyes and remember her face, and with her face came her voice, and with her voice came all the subsequent years of accusations and bullshit that seemed to have been part of both his marriages. At least at the end. After the fire had died.

Angela soured the pitch, always and forever. She seemed to have adopted it as a crusade. “Maybe it’s my job to remind you what an asshole you are. Maybe it’s my task on this earth to keep Vincent Madigan apprised of the fact that the universe does not revolve around him and his desires.”

One time, close to the end of the marriage, she had slapped his face. He raised his hand but didn’t slap her back. Then they made out like sixteen-year-olds, right there in the kitchen, right there on the cold Mexican ceramic tile floor. Aggressive, almost vindictive, like fucking for revenge.

Angela Duggan knew what kind of man Vincent Madigan was. She married him regardless. She knew what kind of man would do the kind of things he did. Bad things. Dirty things. Dealing with the scum of the earth. The dealers and pimps and killers and
psychos and the filth that floated up to the surface every once in a while. She knew that to deal with that kind of thing you had to
be
that kind of thing. At least a little of you. It had to be there in your soul. Only way you could survive that kind of toxic horror was to be related to it.

And now she never missed an opportunity to remind him of who he was, of how little he meant.

“Marcus Aurelius,” she said one time. “He hired a slave to follow him wherever he walked, and whenever anyone showed him respect or told him what a great guy he was, well, that slave had to lean forward and whisper, ‘You are just a man’ in his ear. Kept him grounded, Vincent; kept his feet on the same planet as the rest of us. You could do with some of that, you know? You could do with a little grounding.”

And so she kept him grounded.
You are not the light of the world
, she said, and he tried so hard to believe her.

Moments like this—driving back toward the Sandià house, summoned to the very scene of the crime he had just committed, he wondered if this was the time they’d get him.

Madigan stopped en route to Louis Cuvillier Park. He wiped down his shoes as best he could, found a store, bought a new pair, and once back at the car he bagged the blood-stained ones and buried the bag beneath the driver’s seat. The sooner he had a moment to dispose of them properly, the better. He drove on, and parked a block away from the park. He didn’t want any questions as to why he wasn’t driving a precinct vehicle. He put the money in the trunk, checked it was locked, walked ten yards, went back, and checked it again. He felt nauseous. Now he wanted something, anything to settle his nerves. He had nothing. Maybe it was better that way. Maybe it was better to be on edge, feet hanging over the precipice. Needed to be on his toes, sharp as a paper cut. Needed to be seeing three ways simultaneously, backward as well.

The house was lit up like the Fourth of July. Red and white flashes, yellow crime scene tape, the hum and buzz and crackle of a dozen radios from a dozen cars, a crowd of spectators already gathering along the sidewalk, that insolent screw-you attitude so evident in their eyes as a uniform tried to herd them back away from the road.

Madigan had his wallet out, flipped his badge, and tucked it into his breast pocket. He lifted the tape and went under, was met by
Charlie Harris and Ron Callow from Madigan’s own unit, Robbery-Homicide, 167th Precinct.

“Got a whirlwind of mystery meat up and down the stairwell,” Callow said.

Madigan smiled. “And good morning to you, my friend. Nice weather we’re having.”

“Jeez, Vincent, you look wiped out, man,” Harris commented. “You didn’t sleep so good, huh?”