Where It Hurts (30 page)

(EARLY CHRISTMAS MORNING)

M
agdalena asked me to stay after a kiss or two or three, but like I said, I’d been through too much to just cave to desire. Instead, I asked her if she’d like to do New Year’s together.

“Can’t,” she said, a sigh in her voice. “I’ve got a bartending gig in the city. That’s big bucks I can’t pass up. How about Christmas dinner here later?”

“Christmas dinner, yes. Here, no.” I winked. “I’m a sucker for a woman cooking me dinner. Might get me in all sorts of trouble. I’ll call you later. Have a restaurant picked out and I’ll come get you.”

“All right,” she relented, but with a smile. “You really are an okay guy, Gus Murphy.”

“I’m getting there.”

For a great deal of its length, Route 25A skirted the Gold Coast and the northernmost towns in Nassau and Suffolk counties. At most points along the way, you weren’t more than a mile south of Long Island Sound. Back in the day, before Robert Moses built the LIE and the Southern and Northern State Parkways, it had been a major east-west road. But it was a narrow road, winding and tree-lined and hilly and
dark, and I would hate to think how long a trip from the Nassau border to Orient Point would take these days.

At one a.m., though, traffic was light, and at one a.m. on Christmas morning it was fairly nonexistent. So I had the road all to myself. It must have been the lack of traffic and that I was alone on the road with only my thoughts for company that helped make it happen. That and the shock of the fat biker dressed in a Santa suit zooming past me in the opposite direction out of the darkness, his Harley done up in red, green, and white Christmas lights. But all I know is that when it hit me, it hit me all at once. I went from knowing nothing to knowing everything. It was as if my unconscious mind had broken a code without me even knowing it had been trying to decipher one.

Yeah, there had been some things irking me, like about Ralph O’Connell getting murdered. I didn’t understand what the upside was for Regan, McCann, or even Kareem Shivers in killing the big dumb kid. Ralph was no threat to any of them, not really. His only contact had been with Lazy Eye, Jamal, and Antwone. Lazy Eye was dead and the other two were in custody. And I wasn’t buying that Pete or Regan would have dared shotgunning me to death in my bed at the hotel. That was real outlaw shit with the risk of too much going wrong. And where was the missing heroin? The fact was, it wasn’t actually missing. Its showing up on the street was what had started this whole second round of violence. Shivers was looking for it. Regan and McCann were looking for it. Someone was selling it, and I suddenly knew who it was.

The thing was, what to do about it? You can’t call 9-1-1 with suspicions, especially when they’re messy and contradict the official narrative of events. There were other factors, too. Although Bill and I were still wearing the white hats, Jimmy Regan’s suicide was too fresh. The details and full extent of his crimes hadn’t yet hit the street. Whatever facts had made it into the press were vague and, as always, less than accurate. Some of the media were framing Regan as a tragic figure, a martyr, a victim even. Maybe more details would surface in the coming months. Maybe the whole ugly story would come out someday, but I
doubted it. The whole truth would be an embarrassment to a lot of powerful people. Then again, everyone who knew Pete McCann knew he was capable of all sorts of sins. He was the easy villain. No one would have trouble believing the worst of him. His bad rep and the fact that he was too dead to defend himself would come in handy when it came to scapegoat-picking time.

I thought I had one card to play and one man to play it with: Al Roussis. Tommy Delcamino’s homicide was his case and I had the answers I hoped he was still looking for. I was depending on his bulldog nature not to swallow the official bullshit story whole. But as I was fishing my cell phone out of my pocket, I noticed three headlights in my rearview mirror and they were closing in on my rear bumper fast. Those headlights made me realize that I was totally vulnerable. I didn’t even have a weapon. Both of my guns had been seized as evidence. I stepped hard on the gas, trying to put some distance between me and the headlights racing in on my tail. Suddenly I felt much more alone than I had only two minutes earlier. I wasn’t alone for long.

Under any other set of circumstances, I don’t think I would have seen those closing headlights as a threat, but three headlights across meant three motorcycles. And when you were thinking what I was thinking, three motorcycles on your bumper felt pretty fucking threatening. When they rode up behind me, in spite of my attempt to put distance between us, my throat got drier with each thump of my heart. I stared into the rearview, trying to see if I could recognize anything about the bikers. It was a waste of time as the glare of their lights prevented me from making out any details at all. Then their left turn signals came on at once and they passed on my left in single file. The hoarse rumble of their engines filled up the night as they went. All were dressed in black from neck to toe, with red bandannas across their faces. They all wore goggles and matte-black Nazi-style helmets. Nothing says peace on earth and goodwill toward men like a Nazi helmet. There was nothing familiar about any of them. The last biker to pass turned to look at me and then gave the thumbs-up as he sped by.
Just as suddenly as they had rushed up behind me, they disappeared over the next hill.

I calmed down some because when I came up over the hill, I didn’t see them ahead of me. My moment of relaxation lasted only as far as the next bend in the road. For when I came over the hill and the road curved right, there they were, riding slowly, three across, as if waiting for me to catch up. And when I noticed that none of the bikes had license plates, I knew I was in trouble. I knew that the thumbs-up guy had stared at me as he passed, not to make nice, but to make sure I was who they were looking for.

Once I came up behind them, things went bad in a hurry. The biker in the middle waved his arm and the two bikers on either side moved out wide, then decelerated so that they flanked my right and left fenders. The middle biker weaved his bike in front of me as if to keep my focus on him, but I forced myself to look away, to look right and left to see what the other two were up to. I thought I saw a reflection off something metallic that appeared in the hand of the biker on my left fender. The dark and the distractions made it impossible for me to make out what it was, but I got the sense that whatever it was, it was trouble. The guy on my right thumped my fender with his boot and swerved away. Then did it again and again. Reflexively, I turned my head to the right. When I refocused, I saw that the guy on my left had decelerated so that he was now riding parallel to my door. I looked to see what was in his hand, and even before I could make out the meaning of its shape, I sped up.

The window behind me exploded, little beads of glass pelting the backseat, some hitting my neck through the gap between the bottom of the headrest and the top of the seat. I felt the back of my neck. It was wet with sweat, a lot of it, not blood. The quiet in the car was as shattered as the glass. The wind howled as it whipped through the car, and the deafening noise of motorcycle engines filled up any empty spaces the wind had missed. And it got cold, very cold. The time for reaction had passed, so I sped up and tugged right on the steering wheel. The
biker on that side of me had no choice now but to lay his bike down or get pinned between my front fender and a stone wall. But as he made to lay it down, he ran smack into a metal mailbox pole. His bike sparked like mad against the pavement as it skidded out from under him. He skidded along behind it, his head bouncing off the blacktop, his limp body flopping as it went.

Then, up ahead of me on my left, there was another burst of smoke and of fire. My left headlight exploded, metal pinged off metal, my windshield cracked in five or six places, and spiderwebs spread out from where each buckshot pellet had hit glass. I floored it, swerving hard left, really hard left, and clipped the back wheel of the bike ridden by the shooter. He dropped the sawed-off and tried desperately to regain control of his machine. And for about a hundred yards he looked like he might pull it off, but in the end, he lost it and slammed into a guardrail at a curve on the westbound shoulder. The shooter flew off the bike headfirst and into a tree. I didn’t know about the first guy and the mailbox pole, but I was pretty sure this guy was dead.

I forced myself to turn my focus away from my sideview mirror and saw that the middle biker, who had been weaving in front of me, was now so far ahead that his taillight was barely visible. I knew better than to think I was safe, so I slowed down as quickly as I could and swung over to the westbound lane. I drove on, looking for a place to hide out. There weren’t many straightaways on this part of 25A and I didn’t want to risk killing anyone who might be out on the road. Too much blood had lately been spilled on Long Island, and I didn’t want to be the reason innocent blood got added to the reservoir. Then again, I had even less desire to add mine to the mix. I drove past the first two accident scenes. Neither of the bikers was moving. I found a hidden driveway at the end of a curve in the road, backed far enough into it so that the nose of my car would be impossible to see. I shut off my one working headlamp and waited for the third biker to double back. I had no doubt that he would. I didn’t have long to wait.

The last biker was no fool, though. He didn’t come screaming
down the road or through the curve. No, he took the curve very slowly, his head scanning left and right. I shut my engine off, fearing he’d do the same. Just because he couldn’t see me didn’t mean he couldn’t hear me. And when he was fully through the curve, he pulled to the narrow shoulder and did what I thought he might. He shut off his engine and the night went silent again. He hopped off his hog, took off his helmet, gloves, and goggles. He slid the bandanna down off his face onto his neck. He moved cautiously forward. I could see him pretty clearly through the bare hedges and under the glow of a garage-mounted spotlight that popped on because he had parked within range of a driveway motion sensor. I didn’t recognize him at all. As he moved, he reached under his leather jacket and pulled out a revolver, a big revolver. He was listening for the ticking of my engine as it cooled, the same sound that had gotten my attention at the paving yard the night I found Tommy D. murdered.

It was harder for him to see me than for me to see him since my car was camouflaged in darkness and its shape was broken up by the maze of leafless hedge branches that lined the driveway. He kept moving forward, then stopped in his tracks. He tilted his head in my direction and froze, squinting, trying to peer through the darkness. I don’t think he saw me, but he had heard something. He ran straight toward the entrance to the driveway. I was as good as found, but didn’t start my engine, not yet. If I had any chance, it was to wait until it was almost too late. Then I saw his silhouette in the middle of the driveway. He turned, raising up his arm up to shoot. I turned the key, dipped my head as low as I could, and put the car in drive.
Bang!
My windshield shattered, a spray of glass beads bouncing off the top of my head.
Bang!
The rear windshield cracked. The next sound was the thud of my bumper hitting the biker flush and of his head connecting with the pavement. I stood on my brakes.

I rushed out of my car, brushing glass beads off my jacket, cutting my hands on their edges, and got to the gunman, who was screaming and writhing in pain in the middle of the road. His gun, a Smith &
Wesson .357, had fallen about ten feet farther across the street. I gave him a quick once-over. His left leg was broken for sure and his right wrist was bent at an angle that wrists didn’t make on their own. I felt his abdomen to see if it was hard from internal bleeding. It wasn’t, though when I touched his side he wailed and went rigid with pain. My guess was he had a few broken ribs. He was hurt pretty bad, but I thought he’d probably live. I knelt down at his side and took a close look at his gun hand. There was a very vivid tattoo on the back of his hand. It was of a half clown face, half bloody skull. Zee had one just like it on his right hand. It was the gang tat of the Maniacs Motorcycle Club.

“You’ll live,” I said, picking up the .357. “Don’t be a schmuck. When they ask you about Zee, give him up or you’ll be spending the rest of your fucking life in prison.”

Then I got in my car and headed back toward Huntington Station. As I went, two SCPD cruisers screamed past me, their sirens blaring, their light bars flashing madly. Their drivers too busy to notice the car with one headlight and no windshield driving too quickly on the opposite side of the road.

(EARLY CHRISTMAS MORNING)

H
arrigan’s was still packed fifteen minutes before closing time on Christmas morning. Where else would losers celebrate the birth of Christ: the savior who had failed so miserably at saving them from their own lesser angels? There was always hope, I thought, laughing at myself for thinking it. No there wasn’t. Karl Marx had it wrong. Religion wasn’t the opiate of the masses. Hope was. Most of the bar crowd were so shitfaced, they didn’t notice my bleeding hands or the glass beads I was still brushing off my clothes. Nor did they notice me make a gun of my thumb and index finger and point it at Zee. Zee noticed and that was what mattered. But instead of looking scared or even surprised at the sight of me, he smiled like a man who had it all figured out. We were about to find out if he did.

I tilted my head to where his office was and then pointed at my pocket. When he looked at the pocket, I showed him the handle of the Smith & Wesson. That seemed to concern him some, but not any more than if a fly had landed on his steak. Annoying, off-putting, but nothing more. He was a cold-blooded son of a bitch. Then again, that was the nature of lizards.

Inside the office, I locked the door behind us and pulled the revolver
fully out of my pocket. Before I let him sit down at his desk, I checked the drawers. I’d been right about the gun he’d been holding on me the last time I was there. He had an old army-issue Colt .45 in a side drawer. I stuck it in my belt and waved for him to sit down. He moved slowly, painfully, but this time I kind of enjoyed it. He deserved all the pain available to him.

“You shouldn’t’ve killed the O’Connell kid,” I said. “If you didn’t have him killed, I probably wouldn’t have put it all together.”

The corners of his droopy, dull gray mustache lifted up in a smile. “The O’Connell kid . . . that’s on your head, Gus. You were the one who pointed out that TJ had gone to visit him before we . . . before he died. And then you led us right to him. That was stupid of you.”

I wasn’t going to debate the point. “I should have known it was you the second I came in here the first time. Tommy D. trusted you. TJ trusted you. Of course the kid would come to you and not his father to stash the drugs.”

He laughed. “Maybe it’s my sweet face or that the arthritis makes me seem older than I am. People trust the elderly for some stupid fucking reason.”

“You saw the opportunity the second you looked in the duffel bag, didn’t you? It was your way out, your deliverance. You gave the kid a cash advance on the dope and told him there’d be plenty more to come because you’d be able to get rid of it, all of it. That part, at least, was the truth. The Maniacs have a distribution network that stretches from here to Maine and back.

“Then you let him take enough product to keep him out of it for a few days. What’d you tell him to do if he got picked up? You tell him to keep his mouth shut no matter what, that you’d take care of everything? You took care of everything, all right. You snitched him out to someone in the Second, who alerted the guys in the Fourth. You took any possible stink on you and put it all on the kid. You may be a low-life scumbag, Zee, but not a stupid one.”

“Thanks, Gus. I’ll have that put on my headstone.”

I smiled at the thought. Zee noticed.

“Don’t get your hopes up,” he said. “I’m not dying just yet.”

“There are all sorts of ways to die.” I waved the .357 at him. “Only some of them are naturally occurring.”

He shrugged. It hurt him to do it.

“But you knew you couldn’t trust a junkie like TJ for very long. You had to let him live long enough for the cops to follow him around a little while, but not long enough to trace him back to you. And you knew it was only a matter of time till he came back to you for more dope and more money. Here’s the part I haven’t worked out yet. How did you know that killing him so brutally might implicate Regan and Shivers?”

“You don’t really think I’m gonna answer that, do you, Gus? Not that it matters, ’cause you can’t prove a thing.”

“For now I’m not worried about proving things. I’m in a locked office with you and I have two loaded guns. Maybe I’m just interested in blowing your balls off.”

That shook his tree a little. He tried not to show it, but he couldn’t quite pull it off.

“Once you got rid of TJ, you probably thought you were home free, huh? You let Tommy D. cry on your shoulder. Maybe you even paid for the kid’s burial. But Tommy couldn’t let it go and that was gonna be a problem for you eventually. Who knows, maybe if the cops had worked the case harder, Tommy would have found a way to live with it.”

Zee said, “There were times I almost had the poor bastard convinced to move on, but that wasn’t Tommy D.’s way, moving on. Then he went to you. I knew that was trouble.”

“In a way, but the real trouble was that the stolen heroin started showing up on the island and kids started dying from it. That got all sorts of attention from all the wrong people.”

He reached for his top drawer. “I gotta smoke a bowl. The pain’s bad.”

I walked around the desk and slammed his hand in the drawer.
Then I held the muzzle of the .357 to his temple. “Fuck you! The pain is bad. Good. Good. Just keep talking and I’ll think about it.”

“You made your point,” he said, doubling over in agony. He used one gnarled hand to rub pain out of the other, wincing as he did so. “You made your point.”

“Why’d you let the Maniacs sell the shit here?”

“It wasn’t a matter of let. I sold it all to them for a lump sum instead of a percentage. I asked them not to sell it here, but they get better prices in suburban New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey than in the ’hood or trailer parks. You think they give a shit about what I want?”

“Why’d you kill Tommy? He was your friend.”

“I didn’t like having to do that. Christ, I didn’t like it at all, but it seemed to me he might’ve been working his way around to the same conclusion you got to. That somehow I was involved in TJ’s murder, and I also needed to distract the cops again once the heroin started killing kids on the island. Maybe it was easier ’cause I didn’t actually have to pull the trigger.”

I stared at the revolver in my hand and got a sick feeling in my belly. “You were wrong about Tommy.”

“What do you mean I was wrong about him?”

“He never suspected you, not for one second. He trusted you.”

Though Zee’s face went blank, all he could say was “Price of doin’ business, I guess.” But I could see it in his eyes that not even a lizard like him believed it.

“Tonight on the road and trying to shotgun me in my bed at the hotel, that was you, too?”

“I shoulda had the Maniacs do you after your first visit.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I didn’t know where all the loose ends might be. I couldn’t be sure Tommy D. had told me everything. Now they’re all tied up but for you.”

“Well, Zee, unless you got a secret weapon in here, that’s not gonna happen.”

He got a smug look on his face reminiscent of Pete McCann’s. “No
need,” he said. “You can’t prove a goddamned thing. Heroin’s gone. The money’s hidden where nobody but me can find it. There’s no evidence connecting me to any of the killings and nobody to testify.” He picked up the cordless phone off his desk and waved it at me. “You wanna call 9-1-1, be my guest.”

I smacked the phone out of his hand with the revolver and it crashed to pieces against the wall. I didn’t mind that the barrel of the gun made solid contact with Zee’s knuckles.

“You’re almost right, Zee. Almost. One of the three guys who tried to kill me tonight is alive. He’s in rough shape, but alive.”

Zee got that Pete McCann look about him again and laughed at me. “Man, Gus, you don’t understand, do you? He won’t testify against me or against anybody else.”

“You think he’s gonna eat a few murder raps and two attempted murder raps just to save an ex-Maniacs’ ass?”

“I don’t think it. I know it. And all that shit’s got to get proved in court. Let’s just see what happens between here and court. The Maniacs got plenty of money for good lawyers and they can make life pretty good on the inside if one of their own goes down.”

I’m not sure exactly what set me off—his smugness or the fact that he was right. Whatever it was didn’t matter, because I backhanded Zee across the face and knocked him off his throne. I yanked him back into his seat by his hair. Then I pushed the cylinder of the .357 out and dropped the three remaining bullets into my palm. I tossed two away. I put one back in the cylinder, spun it, and flicked the cylinder back into place.

“You think you’re gonna scare me with a little Russian roulette?” he said, his voice thin and brittle in spite of his bravado. “I played it once or twice before.”

“Yeah, I bet, but the last time you played, you weren’t this close to getting out from under. What did you get for the dope, a quarter of a mil, half? The last time you played, you couldn’t taste that much money.” I held my left thumb and index finger barely apart. “If what
you say is true, you’re this close to being gone. This close to living the rest of your miserable scumbag life in the warmth of the desert sun. Let’s see how much fun you have with it now.”

I yanked his hair again, and when he opened his mouth in pain, I shoved the barrel of the Smith & Wesson so far down his throat, he gagged.

“Say goodbye, motherfucker.”

His eyes got very big as I thumbed the hammer back. He started to choke with panic when it clicked into position. As I put my finger on the trigger, he pissed himself. It wasn’t much of a price to pay for what he had done, but it was something he would have to live with. A guy like him, it would eat at him till the day he died. I pulled the trigger. Empty. I pulled the hammer back again, but there was a knocking at the office door.

“Suffolk County Police, open the fucking door. Now!”

I guess somebody in the bar noticed the gun in my jacket pocket or my bloody hands or that Zee had been missing for a while. I pulled the trigger again anyway. Empty again. Would I have kept pulling the trigger if there wasn’t a cop outside the door? I don’t know. Maybe. I wiped my prints off both guns and laid them on the desk before opening the door.

Both Zee and I were led out in cuffs. The parking lot outside was alive with the whirling and flashing of blue, red, and white lights. I looked up into the sky, but there was no Santa. There were no reindeer. There never were. I thought of John’s face the first time he opened a gift on Christmas morning and the first time he helped Krissy open gifts. I smiled. I thought of the rude display atop Mr. Martino’s house and the baby Jesus with the blue doll eyes in the manger on his neighbor’s lawn. I thought of Bill reliving his loss of faith and of Katy Smalls beating her father’s body with his nightstick. I thought of all the pain and needless violence that came of greed and revenge. And I thought that with each drop of innocent blood spilled, I understood the world less and less.