Apaches (6 page)

In there, the price of a gun had no history and a life had meaning and respect. If death did arrive, it came by way of disease or destiny, not in the form of late-night bullets. If only Dead-Eye could seal the contents of this house and keep everyone inside it safe and warm.

But he knew that was a dream.

Reality was waiting for Dead-Eye on the streets of Brooklyn. He had a meeting with Magoo in less than two hours, and one of them would die.

Dead-Eye looked over at his son, asleep in this safe house of peace, and prayed that his guns would not betray him on this night.

•    •    •

D
EAD
-E
YE KNEW IT
was a setup the minute he stepped out of his car.

Four men stood around Magoo, each wearing a long leather coat, standard designer wear for the heavily armed.

The Spanish man was behind Magoo, nodding his head as Dead-Eye approached.

“Hello, my friend,” he said. “You are here.”

“I’m here,” Dead-Eye answered, looking over at Magoo.

“Now we can do business,” the man told Dead-Eye. “Enough of this silly talk between us. We have to trust each other. You can’t do business without trust. And I trust you. It’s what I told Magoo. If you are a cop, then I am a cop. Then we are all cops.”

“Chatty motherfucker, ain’t he?” Magoo said, smiling over at Dead-Eye.

“Too chatty to be a cop,” Dead-Eye said.

“It’s cold out here,” Magoo said. “Let’s take it upstairs. I think better when my teeth ain’t chatterin’.”

They walked around the corner in a group, past graffitistrewn walls, Magoo holding the middle, the Spanish man next to him, four leather coats filling out the huddle. Dead-Eye stayed in step behind Magoo.

“Lips here tells me you pretty good with a gun,” Magoo said, looking over his shoulder. “Took out one of his boys before he could even blink. That true?”

“Pays to advertise,” Dead-Eye said.

Magoo stopped, bringing the entire caravan to a halt. He turned to face Dead-Eye.

“I ain’t too bad myself,” Magoo said. “In case you was wonderin’.”

“I wasn’t,” Dead-Eye said.

They stood before the entrance to a large housing complex. The benches around them were filled with sleeping homeless and users eyeing their next score. The few patches of grass at their feet were littered with bottles, used condoms, and split needles.

“What sort of piece you carryin’?” Magoo asked Dead-Eye.

“Askin’ to buy?” Dead-Eye answered with a smile. “If you are, it’s gonna cost you.”

“I ain’t askin’,” Magoo said.

Dead-Eye heard one of the leather coats to his left click a chamber into a semi. He looked over at the Spanish man, who smiled back at him and shrugged his shoulders.

Dead-Eye unzipped his pea-green army surplus and reached into a side pocket. Magoo put a hand on top of his arm.

“Do it slow,” Magoo said.

Dead-Eye nodded and pulled out a semiautomatic, showing it to Magoo.

“Release the clip,” Magoo said, looking at Dead-Eye and not the gun.

“You ever do anything for yourself?” Dead-Eye asked,
staring back, letting the silver cylinder slide from the gun to his cupped palm.

“Only what I need to,” Magoo said, turning away.

•    •    •

T
HEY MOVED AS
one, past a flurry of curious eyes. One of the leather coats held the heavy green door to unit number six open with one hand. The other stayed in his pocket, cradling a cocked gun.

Dead-Eye walked with his head bowed, mind racing. He had just made the biggest mistake an undercover could make—he had trusted a marked man. He had bet his life that the Spanish man feared him more than he did Magoo. Moving down the urine-stenched hallway of the project, Dead-Eye knew he had wagered wrong. Worse, he had told no one about his meeting, stubborn in his belief that he could bring Magoo down alone.

Now he had less than five minutes to figure out a way to save his life.

“You ever seen my place?” Magoo asked, the group stopped in front of the double doors of the elevator.

“Don’t think so,” Dead-Eye said, scanning the faces of the men he was up against.

Except for the Spanish man, they were heavily armed and, considering the odds, confident enough to take him out at close range. Dead-Eye was down to one gun, a 9-millimeter Hauser, jammed in the back of his jeans. It might be good enough to drop two, maybe three. But in a large space, like Magoo’s apartment, Dead-Eye had no chance. Too open, too vulnerable. It left him with only one choice, one place to make his move.

The elevator doors creaked open. The group got in and turned forward, one of the leather coats pressing the button for the fourth floor. Squeezed into the four-by-five space, they watched the doors close, then trained their eyes on the numbers above. The only light was a forty-watt bulb wrapped inside an iron basket.

Dead-Eye had inched his right arm out of his coat
pocket and moved it to where his hand could feel the handle of the Hauser. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, swallowed hard, and was ready.

“These things are so fuckin’ slow,” the Spanish man said, watching the number move from one to two. “Be faster if we walked it.”

“Healthier too,” Dead-Eye said, a smile on his face now.

“What’s the rush?” Magoo said, looking over at the Spanish man and giving him a wink. “We got ourselves all night.”

The elevator eased its way slowly from two to three.

“I can’t stay that long,” Dead-Eye said. “I made some plans.”

“Such as?” Magoo asked, still looking up at the numbers.

Dead-Eye came out with his Hauser, coat slipping off his shoulder, and put one into the back of Magoo’s head. He then aimed up and shot out the forty-watt bulb, plunging the elevator into pitch darkness. Within a fraction of a second, all guns were drawn and fired, sparks setting off steady flashes of light. The noise was deafening, screams and shouts as loud as the steady fusilage.

It lasted less than thirty seconds.

More than sixty rounds were exchanged.

•    •    •

T
HE DOOR TO
the fourth floor slowly slid open. An old woman pulling a shopping cart stood by the entrance, a look of horror across her face. The light from the hallway entered the elevator with a sudden jolt. Blood dripped down the sides of the walls. Magoo’s body slumped forward and fell onto the hallway floor. Two of the leather coats were piled on top of one another in a corner of the elevator. The other two lay wounded on the ground.

The Spanish man had taken three in the chest, yet stood with his back against the elevator buttons, a sly smile still on his face.

Dead-Eye was against the far wall of the elevator, facing the old woman. He was shot in the leg, chest, and both
arms. His empty gun was still in his hand, blood pouring down his fingers. His face was splattered with other men’s blood, thick enough to blur his vision. The pain was so intense, he could barely speak. He knew he couldn’t move.

“My God!” the old woman said, shaking where she stood.

“Maybe you should wait for the next one,” Dead-Eye said to her, trying to manage a smile.

“I’ll call the police,” she said through quivering lips.

“Doctor be better,” Dead-Eye whispered.

Dead-Eye fell to his knees and tossed the empty gun to the side, watching it land in a large circle of thick blood. He rested his head against the wall and closed his eyes, waiting for whatever help would arrive.

Dead-Eye wasn’t in any rush. Not anymore.

It was March 8, 1981.

His last day as a cop.

M
ARY
S
ILVESTRI STARED
at her husband across the kitchen table. He had his head down, forking apart a chicken leg, trying to avoid another night of arguing. Their fourteen-year-old son, Frank, sat between them, immune to his parents’ squabbles.

“Are you going to answer me or not, Joe?” Mary asked with an edge she usually reserved for work.

“Can we give it a rest?” Joe looked up from his plate. “One night. That’s all I ask. One night when we don’t have to talk about it.”

“I
need
to talk about it,” Mary said, hands resting flat on the pine surface. “And I need to talk about it
now.
”

“You
always
need to talk about somethin’
now
,” Joe Silvestri said, pushing his chair back and folding his arms across his chest. “You ask your questions and then you want your answers. And you don’t ask them like a wife or a mother. You ask them like a cop. You treat me and Frankie like we’re two suspects. Well, not tonight, Detective. You want any answers outta me, you’re gonna have to arrest me.”

Joe Silvestri walked out of the kitchen, turning his back on his wife and son, and grabbed a jacket from a hook in the mud room. He slammed the door behind him.

Frank looked over at his mother and managed a meager smile, fork poised against the side of his plate.

“It’s like an episode of
The Honeymooners
in here every night,” he said, shaking his head.

“Keep your facts straight, honey,” Mary said, taking a
long sip from a can of Dr. Brown’s cream soda. “Ralph and Alice didn’t have a kid.”

Frank stood up, walked over to his mother, and kissed the top of her head. He took a step back, looked down at the .38-caliber revolver in her hip holster, and smiled.

“Alice didn’t pack heat either,” Frank said, leaving the kitchen for the sanctuary of the den.

Mary Silvestri watched her son disappear around the corner. She rested her soda on a napkin and lit a Kool.

“Alice
should’ve
had a gun,” she whispered to herself, clutching the cigarette between her teeth. “She would’ve shot him dead for damn sure.”

•    •    •

M
ARY
S
ILVESTRI WAS
thirty-six years old and for a dozen of those years had been a member of the New York Police Department. As a rookie, she’d started working out of the Ozone Park section of Queens, moved to Brooklyn and plainclothes, and from there to her true calling, a homicide unit in the Wakefield section of the Bronx.

She had an affinity for the death detail and, each year, her conviction rate placed her in the top tier of detectives across the five boroughs. She never tossed a folder into the unsolved pile. The fewer the clues, the less the logic behind each murder, the more fascinated Mary Silvestri became.

She exploited her talents.

Silvestri studied forensics at the John Jay College for Criminal Justice and then spent three months working alongside the chief medical examiner, trying to understand what he looked for at a crime scene, what crucial information could be picked up from a cold body. She took courses in abnormal psychology at Queens College, wanting to know as much about the killer as she would end up knowing about the deceased. In her free time, Mary Silvestri read mystery novels and true crime accounts of sensational cases. She made ample use of all
the available technology and was one of the few NYPD detectives familiar with the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, then in its infancy. VICAP, when effective, searched for patterns among at-large serial killers and would then draw up psychological profiles. Most street cops scoffed at such notions. Mary Silvestri used one profile to capture a car salesman on Tremont Avenue who had razor-slashed to death four teenage prostitutes.

Mary was an attractive woman but paid little attention to keeping up her appearance. She was tall, close to five-ten on the few occasions she wore pumps, and svelte despite a steady cop diet of pizza, deli, and coffee. Her long red hair was often unruly and hastily brushed, held in place most mornings with clips. She dressed in a nondescript mix of L. L. Bean outdoor and S. Klein’s indoor, favoring short skirts and sneakers, blouses open at the collar. She seldom carried her gun and always had a pack of saltines in her purse.

The homicide cops in her detail, all of them male, took delight in her flakiness. When Mary worked a case, she was so focused, so zeroed in on the most minute aspects of the murder, she would forget everything and everyone around her. The more disheveled she grew, the more foglike she walked around the office, the closer, they knew, she was to cracking the case.

Homicide detectives see themselves as elite members of the department. They carry themselves with confidence and arrogance. Many wear their motto on a T-shirt under their shirts and sweaters. The shirt has a chalk outline of a dead body. Above the sketch are the words
OUR DAY BEGINS WHEN YOURS ENDS
.
HOMICIDE
.

Among such a group, Silvestri was considered the best, and her skill earned her the street name “Mrs. Columbo,” the female version of the rumpled TV detective.

Mary was the badge others turned to when the case seemed beyond solving. She was also the one that other detectives trusted the most in the interrogation room. She could crack a suspect in less time than it took to play a
regulation hockey game. Once again, she used everything at her disposal—from sex appeal to physical force—to break down the man in the bare-back chair. She never came out of that cold room without a tired look and a signed confession.

The only thing Mary Silvestri wasn’t good at was marriage.

She hated housework and cooking and had little patience for family gatherings. She had no siblings and both her parents were dead. Her husband was a mechanic who owned two Bronx Mobil gas stations and from day one groused about not having a stay-at-home wife. It was a lament encouraged by her in-laws, none of whom ever resigned themselves to having a cop in the family—let alone a female cop.

Mary loved her son and would sometimes take him out of school and bring him on the job with her, sitting surveillance in unmarked sedans. It was her version of bonding, and Frank ate up every minute.

“You want me to be a cop?” Frank asked one day as her police car sat in a Taco Bell lot.

“Not unless you want to be,” Mary said between bites.

“Then why bring me along?” Frank asked.

Mary looked out the window, took a sip of coffee, then turned to her son. “So you understand what I do,” she said. “And maybe why I am the way I am.”