Damaged Goods (7 page)

He looked at Theresa huddled next to him. She was shaking like a leaf.

“Now, c’mon, sugar, it ain’t gonna be so bad.” He began to wrap her in the blanket, making sure to cover her feet and her hands the way Jilly had told him. “I fixed the trunk up real nice and soft with foam rubber. Why, it’ll be just like goin’ to beddy-bye. Ceptin’ for the story, a’course. I can’t tell you no story in the trunk, but if you’re a good little girl, tomorrow I’ll run down to the Toys “R” Us store and buy you the biggest ol’ teddy bear in the whole wide world. That way, next time Jilly says you gotta go in the trunk, you could have some company.”

It was a little before eleven when Jilly parked the car on Fifteenth Street, a half block from the highway, and switched places with Jackson-Davis. This was the part he hated. The part about trusting a retarded hillbilly rapo with a man’s job. The part about Jackson-Davis fucking it up and Jilly Sappone going out of business. Too bad he didn’t have any choice. There was just no place to park a car in Manhattan and not risk having it towed away. Not unless he wanted to leave it in a parking lot and walk eight or nine blocks.

“You know what you gotta do, Jackson-Davis?”

“I sure do know.”

“Which is what?”

Wescott felt the blood rush up into his face. Sometimes Jilly treated him like a little kid, like Jilly treated Theresa, like Jackson-Davis Wescott was some kind of a dog.

“We been through this, Jilly,” he muttered. “Been through it a whole lotta times.”

“Then one more time ain’t gonna hurt. Bein’ as it’s
my
ass on the line.”

“There you go again, Jilly. Actin’ like I’m some kinda he-she. I swear to the good Lord above. …”

Sappone reached out, grabbed his partner’s earlobe, twisted sharply. “Ya wanna mouth me? Huh? Ya wanna mouth me?”

“No, Jilly. No way.” Jackson-Davis tried to pull back, which made his punishment hurt even more. But maybe that was good, too. Maybe he needed to remember about Jilly’s shitstorms. That they came out of nowhere, that when ol’ Jilly got mad, he drooled like a pit bull chained in the sun. “I’m gonna park the car by a fire hydrant and stay there until I seen you done the deed. Then I’m gonna pick you up and drive off real slow. I’m gonna drive straight down the avenue till you tell me to turn. And I’m not gonna panic, no matter what happens.”

The deed didn’t take all that long to get done. They parked on the west side of Avenue C, next to the enormous complex of redbrick high-rise buildings collectively known as Stuyvesant Town. Jackson-Davis started to shut down the engine, then remembered that he was supposed to leave it running. He raised a defensive hand to his ear just in case Jilly had seen him, but Jilly was already opening the door, stepping out onto the sidewalk.

“Get ya shit together, Jackson.” Jilly leaned over, put his face in the open window. His hand snaked down into his jacket, came up clutching his nine-millimeter Colt. “The prick is comin’ right for us.”

Jackson looked down the avenue. The middle-aged fat man carrying the Bloomingdale’s shopping bag sure didn’t seem like no Mafia guy. No, what he looked like was the ol’ pudge who ran the feed store in Ocobla, Tommy-Lee. Hell, Tommy-Lee didn’t even hunt …

“Hey, Jackson-Davis, don’t stare at the fuckin’ guy. Look at me.”

“Sure, Jilly.” Jackson-Davis did as he was told, though he didn’t much like the expression on Jilly Sappone’s face. It wasn’t exactly Jilly’s shitstorm expression. More like Jilly was gettin’ ready to jump one of them he-she bitches up at Clinton prison. Jackson had seen that look a time or two, and he remembered what came next. That’s why he wasn’t surprised when Jilly spun around as the fat man passed the car, took a step forward, and splattered the man’s brains all over the sidewalk.

No, what surprised Jackson-Davis was the echo of nine millimeter bouncing off city walls. It was real,
real
loud. Loud enough to bring people running out of the garage down the block, running out to get a good look. So why was Jilly bending over to snatch the fat man’s shopping bag off the sidewalk? Why was he fishing in the fat man’s pocket?

Suddenly Jackson-Davis felt like he just had to get away before the whole world fell down on him. All he could think about was jammin’ that car into gear, layin’ him a line of rubber from Avenue C to the Mississippi border. He squeezed his eyes down, grabbed onto the wheel, remembered that it would’ve been Jackson-Davis’s butt gettin’ jumped in Clinton if Jilly hadn’t helped him out.

“You
owe
Jilly Sappone,” he screamed. “Don’t you be no fraidy-cat. There ain’t no such thing as a Wescott fraidy-cat.” His daddy had told him that.

The door opened and Jilly slid in next to him. “Get it goin’, Jackson. Nice and slow.”

Jackson-Davis responded by throwing the transmission into low. He was about to mash the gas pedal into the floorboard when Jilly put a restraining hand on his knee. Jackson, his breath coming in short heaves, turned to look into his partner’s eyes. He was expecting to find a hurricane, but Jilly’s eyes were calm, brown pools. Like the eyes of the Pentecostal saints in his ole ma’s picture books.

“Nice and slow,” Jilly repeated. “Remember what we got in the trunk. You wouldn’t wanna give our insurance policy a bumpy ride.”

They drove down Avenue C to Third Street, stopping twice for red lights, then made a right turn.

“Awright, pull it over here, Jackson. Over against the curb.”

“But, Jilly, they could be comin’ after us.” Jackson-Davis obeyed even as he protested.

“Who, Jackson? Who’s comin’ after us?”

“The cops, the … the damned ol’
posse.
”

Jilly reached under the seat and pulled up a set of license plates and a screwdriver. He opened his door, started to get out, then leaned back to remove the keys from the ignition. “One thing, pal. If ya should hear horsey-hooves in the distance, be sure to let me know.”

Thirty seconds later, Jilly tossed a pair of stolen New Jersey license plates into the storm drain on the corner. The New York plates he’d replaced them with had been stolen in upstate Sullivan County and wouldn’t appear on a city hot sheet. The car itself, a faded-blue 1990 Taurus stolen out of a parking lot near the Sunrise Mall, was so nondescript as to be actually invisible.

“I done it good, Jackson.” Jilly opened the driver’s door, waited a moment for Jackson-Davis to slide over. “It was a lotta work, but I took care of the details.” He pronounced it “
dee
-tails.” “That’s what makes it work. Lookin’ out for the details.”

He put the car in gear and began to drive west on Third Street. “Jackson-Davis, you remember what comes next? What you gotta do?”

“Yeah, Jilly. I remember every damn bit.” Jackson-Davis felt his whole attitude change. Now that he wasn’t scared anymore, now that he knew they’d gotten away, he felt … well, he felt proud, like he’d really accomplished something. After all, how many Ocobla boys got to make a real, live, Mafia hit? Probably not a single one. He’d bet on it.

“Tell me.”

“Okay, first thing is I take the keys.”

Jilly held up two house keys and a set of car keys on a key ring. “Which is which?” he asked.

Jackson touched the house keys. “The big one is for the front door on the building. The little one is for the apartment.”

“Keep goin’.”

“I take the elevator up to the sixth floor and I find Apartment 6C. Then I use the key all quiet-like and get inside. Then I find the bitch and show her my gun. Then I tape her mouth and I tape her hands. Then I do whatever I want real fast and come back to the car.” He turned to Jilly and smiled. “Don’t worry, Jilly. I didn’t forget a damned thing. Before I do whatever I want, I tell her, ‘Jilly Sappone says, Hello.’ ”

I
T’D BEEN A PERFECTLY
miserable morning, but it was over, now, and Stanley Moodrow was determined to put it behind him. He and Betty had arrived at La Guardia Airport’s Delta Terminal forty-five minutes before her plane’s scheduled takeoff only to face the usual indefinite delay. For the next two hours, he’d perched on a hard plastic chair, balancing a coffee container and a glazed doughnut on one knee while he listened to her talk about Michael Alamare, the five-year-old boy she’d risked her own life to save. The usual airport mix of scruffy college kids, briefcase-toting executives, and immigrant families lugging taped boxes and young children had swirled about them, coming and going in response to the public-address system. Yet, despite the buzz of conversation, a buzz that at times threatened to become a roar, they’d somehow created a space that was entirely their own, a space into which nothing could intrude.

Except, of course, Moodrow’s guilty conscience. And it wasn’t just the half-truth he’d pushed on her the night before. No, far worse, even as he’d listened to her, as he’d sympathized, nodded at the right moments, taken her hand, kissed her good-bye, a part of him was lining up a strategy that led from Leonora’s unexpected appearance to the apprehension of Jilly Sappone.

What it is, he told himself as he walked through the doors of the Seventh Precinct, is that I’m just not what you call a sensitive type. After forty years in the crime business, I’m a hardened urban warrior. My psychic armor is …

“Hey, Moodrow, you turn fuckin’ senile or what?”

Moodrow stopped short, realized that he’d giggled out loud. He looked over at the desk sergeant, a twenty-year veteran named Martin O’Dowd, and shrugged.

“I wouldn’t deny it. What’s doin’, O’Dowd?”

“Ya mean, since the last time you were in here bustin’ balls?” He laughed shortly. “What’s doin’, Moodrow, is crime and punishment. The same doin’ that was doin’ when you were doin’. If ya get what I’m aimin’ at.”

Moodrow nodded, took a deep breath, remembered that when he was still a cop he’d despised the house, avoiding it for weeks at a time. Now, he sucked at the mingled odors of anger and despair, disinfectant and mold, sweat-soaked crack addicts and homeless men who hadn’t seen a shower in months. He lapped them up like a sick junkie looking for his get-well fix.

“Jim Tilley around?”

O’Dowd shook his head. “Tilley caught a multiple up in Stuyvesant Town.”

“That’s out of the precinct.”

“Hey, you wanna listen or you wanna tell me the fuckin’ sky is blue?” O’Dowd paused briefly to drive his point home. “
Detective
Tilley said you should get your ass up there, said it could be related. The scene is on Avenue C, near Sixteenth Street.”

Moodrow took a last sniff, then stepped back into the sunlight. He looked around for a cab, but the yellows had their off-duty signs lit and there wasn’t a gypsy to be seen. In an earlier time, of course, he’d have simply hitched a ride in the first patrol car to come along. Now he’d have to hoof it.

He walked north, under the Williamsburg Bridge and up Pitt Street toward Houston. Pitt Street was a notorious drug center, even by the standards of the Lower East Side. The junkies called it a twenty-four/seven spot, meaning it was open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. No matter what, no matter when—if you had the bank, you could always get well on Pitt Street.

“Yo, coke, crack, dope, smoke.”

“Jums, baby. The sweetes’ the bes’.”

“Got the baaaad shit, here, bro. Take the worl’ offen yo chest. Give you a positive mutha-fuckin’
attitude.
”

Moodrow ignored the offers, avoiding eye contact without looking away, demanding his space, but offering no disrespect. It was a trick everybody in the neighborhood, male or female, young or old, tried to learn. To be neither predator, nor prey, a true noncombatant. For the very young, the disabled, the elderly, for anyone who couldn’t maintain the fiction, it was, of course, pure hell.

Everybody blamed the cops, and not without reason. After all, if the dealers would hawk their wares to a sixty-year-old white man in a business suit, they wouldn’t shrink from an undercover cop in a sweatshirt. So if mutts weren’t arrested, if they weren’t punished, it was because the cops were corrupt, or lazy, or …

The truth was a lot sadder. The NYPD made nearly twenty thousand felony drug arrests every year, busting users and dealers alike, while the prosecutors and judges did their level best to send them to jail. None of it had more than a temporary effect on the drug business, the number of dealers and addicts remaining virtually constant from year to year despite the billions spent on law enforcement. Coping with that reality, if you were unfortunate enough to live in a drug-saturated neighborhood, was a simple fact of life.

But where, Moodrow wondered, did that leave
him?
He had the money to move out. If he chose to stay on the Lower East Side because he’d lived there all his life, there was no way he could whine about it. Besides, it wasn’t Stanley Moodrow who’d been stuffed into a trash basket.

He was crossing Thirteenth Street when he caught his first glimpse of the Avenue C crime scene—just the flashing lights of a cruiser dyeing the brick a deep, rich crimson. It was enough to push every other consideration into the background. He picked up the pace, drank in the scene as he closed the distance.

The crowd was small, a few pedestrians, a knot of Con Ed workers in blue hard hats, several print reporters trying to edge close enough for a shot of the bloodstained sidewalk. A half dozen patrol cars—their lights flashing, radios screaming, doors open—were nosed up against the yellow crime-scene tape. Behind them, four black Dodge sedans formed a protective half circle, effectively blocking southbound traffic while forcing the curious to the east side of the avenue.

For Moodrow, the scene had a timeless quality. He evaluated the chaos as he approached, found it to be controlled, the uniforms and the detectives standing outside the tape while a forensic team gathered evidence.

“Hey, pop, you goin’ somewhere?”

Moodrow pulled up, remembered that he wasn’t a cop anymore, that the miniature badge and the ID card declaring him RETIRED wouldn’t mean squat to the young patrolman holding the small spiral notebook.

“You the recorder?” The job of the first patrolman to reach any crime scene was to seal it off, then record the name of anyone, from the sergeant to the commissioner, who entered.