Omega Dog (7 page)

And he did, indeed, step on it.

Venn was used to travelling at speed. As a Marine, of course, he’d been in his fair share of hair-raising flights, on land as well as at sea. As a cop, he’d been renowned for staying on the tail of his prey no matter what the obstacle. But even he felt shaken by the manic trip the cab driver took him on. Hairpin bends, last-minute handbrake turns round corners, hair’s-breadth escapes from major fender-benders. The driver left a symphony of yells and horns and screaming tires in his wake as he cut round the perimeter of Central Park and headed west.

He was tearing down Broadway, sending late diners and showgoers scattering in alarm, when Venn leaned forward.

‘Go down there.’

‘Is not the right street yet. Another block.’

‘Just take me there, okay?’ Venn wanted to be dropped off away from the apartment block’s entrance so that he could scout around a little, getting a feel for the layout of the area in case he needed to make any rapid exits.

The driver shrugged, grinning in the mirror. ‘You the boss.’ And he executed another handbrake turn, one that flung Venn against the rear door.

‘Stop!’ Venn slapped the driver on the shoulder. The man’s reactions were fast. Before Venn had gotten the syllable out, the guy slammed on the anchors. The cab howled to a stop, slewing sideways a little as it did so.

Up ahead, Venn had seen something he didn’t at first register for what it was. From the rear window of an apartment block, high up, around four floors, a human figure was protruding. It was a woman, only her head, arms and torso visible. She seemed to be stuck, and even from up there Venn could hear her desperate cries and grunts as she struggled to free herself.

Venn flung open the door of the cab and dived out, his hand already moving inside his jacket to the grip of the Beretta. The woman’s gasps were turning into small screams now. She’d seized the fire escape railing and was hauling for all she was worth, frantic to get all the way out. From the way she was thrashing around, Venn could see she was terrified.

Was the building on fire? Or was there somebody in there, trying to harm her?

And was it the Colby woman? It certainly looked like it might be her apartment. It was the right block.

Venn ran forward so that he was directly under her. Cupping one hand to his mouth, he called, ‘Miss.’

She continued to writhe and twist like a netted fish, seeming not to have heard him.

He was about to call out again when the woman screamed. This time it wasn’t a half-gasp, but a full-blooded cry of terror.

The next moment, she was through the window, her legs swinging to crash into the metal of the fire escape. Venn heard her cry out in pain and felt his heart leap as she let go of the rail with one hand.

But she managed to hang on. 

And it was then, beyond her, that Venn saw the man leaning through the window, his arm outstretched, a gun aimed straight at the woman’s upturned face.

––––––––

W
ithout thinking, and with reflexes born of thousands of hours of simulated and actual situations in which failure to react quickly would have meant certain death, Venn drew the Beretta and snapped off two shots in rapid succession.

It was a close thing. He was directly under the dangling woman, and the other man with the gun was directly above her. Venn’s shots sang narrowly past the woman and she screamed again, swaying violently. Above her, the man ducked back through the window and Venn heard his shots ricochet off the brick wall into the darkness.

She was looking down now, her face white with fear. Venn beckoned urgently with his free hand, keeping the Beretta trained on the open window beyond her. If she dropped now, he’d catch her. At least, he told himself he would.

With a yell the woman’s grip slipped off the rail and she fell. Venn dropped his gun instinctively, holding out both arms. But she jerked to a stop once more, and he realized she’d grabbed on to a rung of the fire escape further down, so that she now hung adjacent to the third floor.

Venn rolled on one shoulder, diving for his dropped gun and coming up in a crouch just as the man’s silhouette appeared through the window again. This time the other man got off two shots, three, and this time they were aimed at Venn. He rolled again, hearing the bullets spang off the sidewalk around him, and came up firing, taking only a split-second to aim. This time he hit the fire escape near the window, the bullet striking the metal with a clang.

The woman was swinging under the fire escape, climbing her way down step by step, one hand at a time. That was good, Venn thought. The fire escape would afford her a degree of cover, while he concentrated on taking out the man above.

In the distance, drawing nearer, Venn heard sirens.

He supposed gunfire in the night on a New York street
did
tend to attract the interest of the cops. This wasn’t the 1970s anymore, after all.

Venn dodged out from under the fire escape and loosed off another two shots with the Beretta. Damn, he was even closer this time. The guy up above jerked back out of view and Venn thought he heard a muttered curse. A cry of pain was what he’d been after, though.

The woman was making steady progress, swinging like a monkey down the underside of the metal stairs. Venn saw her reach the level of the second floor. Then she dropped, landing with a yowl as one of her ankles gave way.

He peered up, couldn’t see the guy at the window, and duckwalked over to the woman. She’d sat up. She wasn’t wailing, so he assumed her ankle couldn’t be that badly hurt.

‘Are you okay –’ Venn started to say, before the woman’s hand came out of the purse he noticed slung across her shoulder. She held her arm straight out toward him.

There was a sharp hiss, and Venn felt one of the most agonizing sensations he’d ever experienced sear across his eyes.

He staggered back, landing on his ass, his free hand clawing at his eyes, trying to tear the pain away somehow. Even in the depths of the agony he realized what had happened.

She’d Maced him.

He couldn’t see, felt as if he’d never be able to see again. Through the red darkness he tried to say, ‘Wait, you’ve made a mistake, I’m on your side,’ but the words didn’t come out properly through his distorted face muscles.

And in any case, he registered footsteps.
Her
footsteps, scurrying away into the night.

Choking, every nerve end screaming, Venn nevertheless understood that he needed to forget about the woman for a moment, because his priority was to stay alive. And if that guy up there with the gun saw Venn on his butt, clutching at his face and feeling sorry for himself, he’d put a bullet right through the back of Venn’s head.

Opening his eyes, seeing nothing but a stinging, soupy haze, Venn rolled hard and fast, coming up against the wall of the building. He groped blindly with his free hand, clutching the Beretta in the other, till he felt the cold metal of the fire escape. He hauled himself beneath it. The guy wouldn’t be able to hit him from up there, and if he started coming down the fire escape, Venn would at least hear him.

The sirens were getting closer. The cops would be here any minute, and Venn was going to have a hell of a lot of explaining to do if they found him there. Especially if they’d encountered the girl, and she fingered Venn as one of her attackers, which she clearly thought he was.

Venn rose to a stoop under the metal framework of the steps. His eyes still stung like hell, the tears were streaming down his face, and he felt as though acid was eating into his cheeks. But each time he dared to open his lids a crack, he saw a little more clearly. The blurred shapes around him - fire escape, wall, trashcans - were taking on a little more definition, bit by bit.

The girl couldn’t have hit him squarely with the blast of Mace. The stream must have been angled so that his eyes hadn’t taken the full force of it.

Venn ground his teeth. The man up there with the gun was the best lead he had so far. Someone who could well lead him to Professor Lomax, or at least give him an entry in. But there was no chance Venn could get near him now. Even if the cops weren’t about to arrive round the corner, guns drawn, even if Venn could somehow get up that fire escape and confront the guy, he could barely
see
him. The guy would put a 9 mm bullet between Venn’s eyes before Venn even heard the shot.

Snarling in frustration and pain, Venn took the chance and began to lope down the street away from the sound of the sirens. He half-expected a fusillade of bullets to come raining down on him from above, but nothing happened. At the end of the street he glanced back, once. Through the filter of agony he saw that the cab driver who’d brought him there had long gone. And as he rounded the corner, he observed the first splash of police car lights across the walls as the cops arrived.

Thrusting his gun back into its shoulder holster, Venn straightened and strode off down the street, losing himself in the crowd that was starting to mass there, drawn by the gunfire.

––––––––

D
eeDee Rosetti was sixty years old, and had spent the last twelve of those years without the use of her legs.

This was courtesy of a drive-by shooting in the Bronx by a rival crew. Her
capo di tutti capo
, the man she answered to in the pecking order of the mob family she belonged to, had been taken out in the shooting. In fact the only reason Rosetti had survived at all was that the
capo
, Rudy Cardinale, had landed on top of her as the Uzi fire had ripped through him. He was a big man, Rudy – no, a truly
vast
man, bloated by a lifetime of pasta and rich gravies and fine wines – and his corpse had shielded Rosetti from the worst of the assault.

Still, a lucky shot – lucky for the other crew, not so lucky for Rosetti – had entered her spine and severed the spinal cord in the lumbar region. She lacked all movement below the waist, and had only partial sensation there.

Which meant that knowing when she needed to piss or take a dump was something of a lottery.

This went some way to accounting for Rosetti’s crabby outlook and explosive temper. So did the psychological effects of not being able to walk anymore. So did the fact that she was always on the verge of suffering withdrawal symptoms from nicotine.

Mostly, though – and Rosetti would have been the first to admit this herself – she was the way she was because she came from a long line of unpleasant, antisocial and volatile personalities. Her father had been a mean, vicious asshole. Her mother had been a meaner, nastier asshole still.

And Rosetti’s grandfather on her pa’s side had been an out-and-out psychopath.

When DeeDee was twelve years old, an unruly tomboy on the streets of Hell’s Kitchen, she and a couple of her pals had taken her grandpa’s Buick for a joyride. There was alcohol involved, and by the time the car was dredged out of the Hudson it wasn’t good for much but engine parts.

DeeDee had returned from hospital after three days, bruised and bloodied but mostly unhurt. Her grandpa had been waiting for her when her ma brought her home. Her ma had disappeared quietly, and Gramps had gone to work. With his fists, with a strip of tanning hide, with his boots.

By the time Grandpa Rosetti had finished with her, DeeDee had five cracked ribs, a busted nose, a burst eardrum, and internal bleeding. Back to the hospital she went.

This time she was in three weeks.

‘No hard feelings,’ Gramps had said, giving her shoulder a manly squeeze and looking her straight in the eye. ‘You got what was coming to you. No more, no less.’

DeeDee quoted those exact same words back to the old man when, twenty-five years later, she dropped a live radio into the tub while the old bastard was taking a bath. She did it mainly because her pa was next in line for the top job in the family and Gramps was taking too long to die.

But she also did it because she’d never forgotten. Or forgiven.

Now, Rosetti was the boss. Head of the Manzullo family. She had been since the death of the
capo
Cardinale twelve years earlier. In a world where the East Coast mob was largely a spent force, a cowed and beaten thing, squeezed out of existence by the Feds, the Manzullos were old-school. Big, bold, and unashamed. Rosetti made sure of it. Her crew didn’t confine their operations to petty embezzlement, money laundering, a little dope dealing. No
way
. The Manzullos under DeeDee Rosetti went in for spectacular heists, wholescale loan sharking, major narcotics distribution. They were the kings of New York, the emperors of the Empire State.

Rosetti feared nobody else operating in the city. Not the Chinese Triads, the Japanese Yakuza, the Russian
mafiya
who were making inroads from their growing base in Little Odessa. They were all third-rate wannabes, Johnny-come-latelys, as far as DeeDee Rosetti was concerned.

And the FBI? They could kiss her ass. 

It was this attitude, this temperament, that faced Zach Infante as he stood on the carpet before Rosetti’s huge mahogany desk. Infante was immaculately dressed in a cheap-looking, shiny suit, his eyes hidden behind mirror shades even though he was indoors.

Rosetti thought he was trying not to piss his pants.

‘Run that by me again,’ she snarled.

They were in Rosetti’s office on the top floor of an office block in the Meatpacking District. It was after two in the morning. Rosetti didn’t sleep much, not since the injury that had robbed her of her legs. She knew death would probably come to her before her three-score-and-ten was up – not a lot of people in her position enjoyed especially long lives, given the nature of what she did – and she wanted to be awake to look death in the eye when it came knocking.

Infante raised the cell phone in his hand. ‘He says the target got away.’

‘Got away.’ Rosetti was disbelieving.

‘Yeah, boss.’

‘A civilian.’

‘Yeah.’ There was a quaver in Infante’s voice, despite his impassive expression.

‘A
girl
.’