The Complex (5 page)

“You three stay under there,” she tells them.

Hannibal nuzzles her cheek with his nose and meows. Mrs. Carlucci turns to him, purses her lips, and makes a kissing noise. Hannibal responds by pressing his nose against her mouth and purring.

“You stay here, too. Protect the others.”

She swears, not for the first time, that Hannibal understands what she’s saying. He doesn’t crawl underneath the bed to hide with the others, but he does leap up onto the mattress and position himself on the comforter. His eyes remain alert. One corner of his mouth is curled up in a sneer, revealing a long, pointed incisor. His tail whips back and forth in agitation.

“Good boy.”

He meows once, confirming that he is indeed a good boy, and that it’s about time she recognized it.

Groaning, Mrs. Carlucci stumbles to her feet and opens the drawer on her nightstand. Inside is Mr. Carlucci’s Colt .45 revolver. He taught her to fire it many years ago, and she used to accompany him to the range twice a year to practice shooting at cans. She has not held it since he passed. She pulls the weapon from the drawer. It feels cold against her skin, and heavier than she remembered. Mrs. Carlucci keeps the gun loaded, much to the consternation of some of the ladies at her church. But as her husband had always said, what good was an unloaded pistol? If a burglar broke into her apartment, would she ask them to wait while she fumbled with the bullets?

She releases the cylinder, making sure that all six chambers are filled. Then she snaps it back into place. Clutching the pistol in one hand, she reaches down to give Hannibal one last scratch. She runs her index finger beneath his chin. He raises his head and closes his eyes, signaling his contentment, but when she stops, he is immediately alert again.

As Mrs. Carlucci walks out of the bedroom, the fire siren begins to wail. The fire house is six blocks away from the complex, but the siren is loud enough that it regularly wakes her from her sleep. It continues shrieking as Mrs. Carlucci crosses the living room and reaches for the doorknob. She is still terribly frightened, but she is also very calm. The naked people have knives, axes, and a weed whacker, but she has a gun, and she is tired of their nonsense.

She doesn’t stop to consider a plan. Her intent is vague. She thinks that perhaps she will scare them off, or manage to somehow hold them at gunpoint until the police arrive. Yes, her land line is out, but surely one of the other tenants has used their cell phones to call the police. She doesn’t see herself killing anyone, but she will if she has to. There’s no question about it. Stephanie is a nice young woman—or is it young man? And she’s a neighbor. Mrs. Carlucci will not allow her to become the victim of some crazed naked mob, probably high on drugs.

Mrs. Carlucci has seen that on the news before—stories about homicidal naked people, under the influence of new designer drugs, breaking into homes and attacking cars on freeways, and in one case, trying to abduct a little girl from a park. She is fairly certain that something similar is happening now. It’s the only reasonable explanation. The closest mental health facility is in York, and if the throng outside were escaped from there, it was inconceivable they would have reached Red Lion unstopped. So yes, drugs are probably the culprit. She just hopes they aren’t so high that they ignore the fact that she has a gun.

As the fire siren and the weed whacker battle for noise supremacy, Mrs. Carlucci grips the revolver tighter. Then, murmuring a quick prayer, she opens the door and steps outside.

Five - Shaggy and Turo: Apartment 5-D

Shaggy is sprawled out on a stained couch that was rescued from the curb in front of a fraternity house, and Turo is slouched down in a sagging recliner purchased at a yard sale for ten bucks, when they hear the noises erupting from the apartments around the front side of the building. They hear the siren at the fire house. They hear shouts and screams. They hear thuds and bangs. They even hear a sputtering weed whacker. But they don’t pay attention to any of these things for several reasons.

First of all, their gaze is focused on the flat screen television that occupies one wall of the living room. It squats atop a black pre-manufactured television stand that is too small to properly hold it. Shaggy and Turo are staring at the screen in dismay, because their Xbox just lost its connection to the internet in the middle of their game.

Also, it’s not the first time they’ve heard any of these sounds around the Pine Village Apartment Complex. Shouting, and sometimes even screaming, occurs regularly. So do thuds and bangs and other noises. And the weed whacker? Well, there’s a lawn and garden service that tends to the property once a week (although it doesn’t occur to either of them that it’s a little too late in the day for someone to be trimming the grass).

But the main reason they haven’t really acknowledged the noises coming from the apartments above them, is because both Shaggy and Turo are stoned as fuck.

However, when the gunshots start a few seconds later, that gets their attention.

Shaggy bolts upright on the couch, dropping his video game controller.

“Whitey,” he shouts, looking at Turo in alarm.

Panicked, Turo crouches further down into the recliner, as if trying to hide himself in its cushions, and shakes his head.

“Tony and Vince,” Turo says. “It’s gotta be.”

“Shit,” Shaggy responds. “What if it’s all three of them? What if they’re teaming the fuck up?”

They stare at each other for a few seconds, their bloodshot eyes bright with panic. A spent bowl sits in an ashtray on the coffee table, along with a lighter, a plastic bag with six more buds inside of it, twelve empty beer bottles, a crumpled potato chip bag, a half-eaten package of cookies, and several mugs of days-old coffee—the surfaces of which have begun to sprout a thin, scummy layer of mold. Amidst all of this is a Kimber .45 handgun. A full spare magazine lies next to it, loaded with hollow points.

Shaggy slips off the couch, and grabs the weapon with one trembling hand.

“Where’s your gun?” he whispers.

Shrugging, Turo shakes his head again. “I don’t know. Around here somewhere.”

“Well, you better get it, motherfucker. You hear that shit?”

As if to punctuate his query, several more gunshots echo outside. Judging by the sound, there are two weapons, and two different calibers.

Nodding, Turo starts to stand up, but Shaggy gestures wildly at him.

“Duck, you dumb fuck. Don’t let them see you at the window. You fixing to catch a bullet?”

“They’re on the other side of the building,” Turo says. “Up over the hill. And I don’t think that creepy Russian fuck would team up with the Italians anyway.”

“We stole from them both. I don’t see why they wouldn’t. Whitey does business with Tony and Vince. Ain’t no reason he wouldn’t join them in killing some motherfuckers.”

“But if it’s them, then why are they on the other side of the building? And who the fuck are they shooting at?”

Shaggy pauses, considering this. “Maybe they got the wrong apartment. Or maybe they’re asking around about us, and nobody would tell them nothing, so now they’re getting fucking rough.”

“Or maybe it’s not them at all.”

“Then who the fuck would it be?”

Turo shrugs. “I don’t know. All I know is I’m tired of hiding up in here. What good is that money if we can’t go outside to spend it?”

“Shit. We can’t spend it till we fucking get it again.”

Four days ago, Shaggy and Turo became rich. Unfortunately, they haven’t been able to enjoy their newfound wealth.

It all started two months prior when Shaggy got pulled over by the cops—not for speeding or running a red light or ignoring a stop sign or failure to properly signal. Indeed, he’d been doing thirty-five in a forty-five mile per hour zone when he and Turo spotted the swirling blue and red lights behind them. No, Shaggy had been pulled over because the State Trooper’s vehicle was equipped with ALPR—Advance License Plate Recognition—a computerized system that automatically scanned the license plates of every car that drove by the cruiser, and alerted the officer inside of any infractions. In Shaggy’s case, his crime had been driving without automobile insurance—an automatic infraction in Pennsylvania. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to have car insurance. It was that he hadn’t been able to afford the premiums, and had missed two monthly payments as a result. The insurance company had cancelled his policy, and informed the Pennsylvania Department of Motor Vehicles, and the next thing he knew, there he and Turo stood along the edge of the road. Fifteen minutes earlier, they’d been on their way to work. Instead, they watched as the State Trooper seized Shaggy’s license plate at the scene, wrote him a citation, warned them not to drive the car without a plate, and then drove away.

They’d spent their last sixty bucks getting the car towed back to the Pine Village Apartment Complex, and Shaggy had fretted over how to pay the two-hundred and fifty dollar fine, and then he’d gotten a notice in the mail saying his driver’s license was suspended for ninety days. And since Turo’s license was also suspended for driving while intoxicated six months before, they were fucked.

One night, while stoned, they’d been commiserating about how all of their problems in life stemmed from being broke—a problem that had only been exacerbated by the fact that they’d now lost their jobs because they had no way of getting to work. They’d discussed robbing a bank, a grocery store, and the check cashing place over on Walnut Street. Then they’d considered stealing from Sam, the neighbor who lived above them. The dude wrote horror novels, supposedly, so it was possible he had Stephen King money. They soon decided against this, however, reasoning that if Sam had any money at all, he wouldn’t be living in Pine Village.

Then, their friend Ron had offered a plan. An uneasy truce existed between the local Russian and Italian organized crime outfits, who were both struggling against the black gangs and Mexican cartels moving in from Baltimore and Philly. He told them about a strip club called The Odessa, which was owned and operated by an albino Russian gangster named Whitey. According to Ron, two soldiers from the Marano Family—a pair of made men named Tony Genova and Vince Napoli—dropped a bag full of money off there every month. How much money? Ron didn’t know for sure, but several friends had told him it was usually upwards of a quarter-million dollars. The next such financial exchange was scheduled for the following week. Stealing it inside the club would be impossible. They’d never make it out alive. But hitting the two mobsters in the strip club’s parking lot might be doable.

Shaggy, Turo, and Ron staked out The Odessa, making note of the car the mobsters arrived in, where they parked, and what they did upon exiting the vehicle. In addition to Tony and Vince, there were two other associates. All four were armed, but none of them were carrying openly. The bag full of money was, in fact, a briefcase, and the way Genova clutched it, the contents were certainly valuable.

When their surveillance was finished, the three conspirators had retreated back to Shaggy and Turo’s apartment, and hatched their plan. Given that there were four mobsters and only three of them—of which Ron would remain behind the wheel of their car—they needed a fourth person. Ron suggested his brother Jimmy, just out of a six-month stint in county prison and looking for work.

Shaggy and Turo struggled to make the rent for the next month, hustling and stealing and doing whatever they could to hold off the bill collectors and the utility shut-off notices. They talked about what they would do with the money, and tried to hold out. Tried to stay positive and upbeat. It seemed to them that the next exchange would never come, but it did, and everything started out great.

Arriving a few hours early, Ron parked his car four spaces away from where the mobsters had parked the previous month. The four of them went inside the club for a while, so as to not arouse suspicion. The parking lot had security cameras, and it might have seemed odd for the four of them to sit inside the car the entire time. As the expected arrival time drew nearer, the four of them finished their drinks and decided to return to the car.

Unfortunately, they almost missed their window of opportunity. As they exited the club, they nearly ran into Genova, Napoli, and their two associates. The mobsters had arrived early.

“Excuse me,” Genova had said, smiling. “My fault.”

Then he’d backed up, allowing them to exit through the door.

“Sorry about that,” Ron had muttered.

“No worries,” Genova insisted. “It was my fault. Should have been watching where I was going.”

Shaggy and Turo had glanced at each other, unsure of what to do.

Then, Ron decided for them by punching Genova in his still-smiling mouth. The stunned criminal stumbled backward, arms flailing. Jimmy darted forward and grabbed the briefcase, wrestling it away from the injured man. Then, before the other three mobsters could even draw their weapons, Jimmy took off across the parking lot.

“Come on,” Ron shouted, as Shaggy and Turo stood there blinking. “Move your ass!”

Shaggy and Turo raced after Ron and Jimmy. Shouts echoed behind them, but they were too afraid to turn around and see what was happening. They were halfway to the car when Jimmy lurched forward, as if he’d been kicked in the back. Bloody holes appeared in his shirt. A second later, they heard the shots. The briefcase slipped from Jimmy’s grasp as he tottered back and forth, weaving unsteadily on his feet. Then the back of Jimmy’s head exploded.