3 Quarters (44 page)

Gleason would be meeting him in the basement office to work out a plan on how to enter Shine's house. To find Dorothea.

As soon as Bobby entered the lobby, he thought there was something wrong. The security guard who usually sat at a large metal reception desk wasn't on duty. And there was something cockeyed about the two janitors. First of all they were white, and he hadn't seen any white janitors here before. They had their backs to him, and the one with the mop moved with a half-stooped shuffle, as if he was favoring a rather tender injury. He also sported highly polished leather-soled loafers, too fancy to be wearing while slathering ammonia and disinfectant in an office building lobby.

Bobby took several steps to his left, using the black-backed glass of the wall directory as a mirror to get a better gander at this big janitor. The two janitors drifted to either side of Bobby. In the reflection he recognized Kuzak immediately, but before he could remove his .38 from his pants pocket, the second janitor raced from his left and whacked him with an industrial broom across the side of the head. Bobby fell to his hands and knees, from where he now saw the security guard handcuffed behind the metal desk, his mouth taped, terrified.

Bobby looked up, saw Kuzak and Zeke produce pistols from their overalls and take aim. Bobby toppled the security desk in front of him, the metal desktop deflecting the first two bullets. He rolled across the floor and pulled the .38 from his pocket, fired blindly, scampered across the lobby away from the vulnerable security guard, and took refuge behind the display advertisement for
Guinness Book of Records.

He fired at Kuzak. The bullet shattered a display case holding King Kong memorabilia. He fired twice in Zeke's general direction. It had been so long since he'd fired a gun that it felt tiny and toyish in his hand. Zeke pulled the security guard to his feet and used him as a human shield as he advanced toward Bobby, firing. Kuzak did the same with a petrified real janitor who was stripped to his underwear. The
Guinness Book of Records
display case shattered. Bobby dashed past the elevators for the fire stairs. He wasn't going to help kill a security guard or a janitor. And he knew Kuzak and Zeke weren't going to drag these poor working stiffs
up
several flights of stairs in pursuit. So he hoisted open the fire door and thought for a moment of running downstairs toward the office, where he could call 911.

He heard someone shout from below, “Who the fuck's that?” The voice sounded vaguely familiar, but the timbre was too deep to be Gleason's, so he ran upward. Up into the winding spine of the most famous skyscraper in the world, up toward the red blinking light.

After a flight and a half, he paused, heard Kuzak and Zeke firing blindly up the stairs. The gunshots echoed in the great hollow enclosure, the bullets pinging around the metal banisters, overhead pipes, and old stone steps.

“You're dead, Emmet,” Kuzak screamed. “I'm gonna cut your fucking cock off and force-feed it to you.”

“I'm here,” Bobby taunted, hoping to draw them higher. He knew his wind was better than theirs. He could take them when they were half spent. “Two against one is shitty odds,” Bobby shouted, “for you two pussies.”

Kuzak fired a shot up the narrow space between the banisters, the bullet ricocheting like a pinball.

Bobby kept taking stairs two at a time, saving his last two bullets for when he would really need them. At the eighth floor, he could hear the ex-cops groaning and puffing. This was as good a place as any to make a stand, Bobby thought.

He flattened himself against the cement wall on the eighth-floor landing, listening to the huffing grow nearer. He had his gun cocked, ready to fire. But he realized he was now listening to only one set of foot falls, one panting mouth. And it wasn't Kuzak's pained wheeze. The footfalls were lighter.

Bobby waited until he heard a foot scraping the landing below him, and then he twisted in one motion to fire. As he did, someone burst through the fire door leading from the eighth floor onto the landing. The swinging door startled him and made his shot go awry. Zeke fired a wild round from below. Bobby squeezed off a second shot just as Kuzak lunged through the open door and grabbed Bobby in a powerful bear hug. Zeke crouched, pulled the trigger. Out of ammo. He quickly produced and flashed a seven-inch switchblade. The sound of the steel blade locking into place sent a jailhouse shiver up Bobby's back. Zeke charged at Bobby to gut him while Kuzak held him from behind. But as Bobby had done on more than one occasion in prison when attacked from behind, he managed to wiggle his hand backward far enough to grab Kuzak's already damaged crotch. He squeezed hard, and Kuzak howled in agony and loosened his grip. Bobby spun Kuzak around in front of him as Zeke's blade plunged downward. The silver blade disappeared deep into Kuzak's chest. Bobby felt the big man vibrate and surge, and then Bobby knew Kuzak wasn't alive anymore.

But Zeke was fast with a blade, the way small mean men often are, and he came at Bobby from the side, this time the blade ready to descend into his neck. As he made his flashing move, Bobby saw a flying bulk sail past him from the stairs leading down from the ninth floor. Herbie Rabinowitz smashed into Zeke with a blind-side tackle that crushed the astonished smaller man.

“Fuckin' wop bastard!” yelled Herbie Rabinowitz, who twisted Zeke's grossly overmatched arm until the big knife dropped to the floor in a rattle next to Kuzak's lifeless body. Kuzak lay across the threshold, jamming open the fire door to the eighth floor.

“Herbie,” Bobby shouted. “We need to hold on to him . . .”

But Herbie was lost in the white-hot zone again. Bobby watched Herbie lift the moaning Zeke over his head by the crotch and the throat and run with him into the corridor of the eighth floor.

“Find me a fuckin' window!” Herbie shouted, kicking at locked office doors. Zeke made choking noises and kicked madly to get loose, but the big man was too strong. Bobby ran after Herbie.

“Herbie,
nooooo!
” Bobby shouted as Herbie stomped open an office door and charged inside as if running with the World Cup.

Herbie ran across the dark, cluttered office, heading for a wall of windows that looked out over the neon-charged night of Thirty-fourth Street. He did a crazy twist in preparation to hurl the terrified Zeke through the window, a loud primordial bellow escaping from deep in Herbie's guts.

“Herbie,” Bobby screamed. “Listen to me! There's a better way! One your mother would have been proud you thought of.”

Herbie stopped and looked at Bobby with a wave of sudden sadness in his eyes. Zeke writhed and gagged above his head.

“Talk fast,” Herbie said, veins jumping in his neck.

“Let me ask him some questions,” Bobby said. “He can help us. Please.”

Herbie reluctantly slammed a terrorized Zeke down onto his back on a desktop with a loud thump. Then he gazed around the darkened office. Mock-ups of detergent ads were pinned to the wall above the desk.

“How'd you know to look for me here?” Bobby asked, wrenching Zeke to a sitting position.

Zeke didn't answer, clutched his throat, trying to catch his breath. Herbie twisted his ear like a beer cap.

“Barnicle hit redial . . . on the phone . . . that the Sandy broad dialed . . . and this number come up,” Zeke said, panting desperately for the air necessary to form the words. “She tried to call you . . . . We used the reverse directory . . . figured out it was Gleason's office . . . . We laid for you . . .”

“Why'd she call?” Bobby asked.

“Something about that brat kid of hers,” Zeke said, breathing easier now. “How the fuck am I supposed to know?”

“There's been a big push the last few days to collect three-quarters money?” Bobby asked. “Why?”

“They don't tell me shit like that,” Zeke said. “But you'd have to be one dumb prick not to know why. The fucking Stone campaign. I know that. Everybody was promised jobs. Us, too. No-show jobs. Dick-work titles. Seat-belt inspectors. Water-bill adjusters. Government cars, cherry dome lights to get through the fuckin' rush-hour traffic, parking passes. Plus the three-quarters city pension, the SSI. And what Barnicle pays us off the books. House down Windy, a boat, no yoms. Kiddin' me? Set for fuckin' life.”

“All you had to do was kill Sandy,” Bobby said. “Then kill me. Great citizen.”

“All that was never spozed to happen,” Zeke said.

“Where's Dorothea Dubrow?”

“Fuck kinda question's that?”

Bobby walked to the big window overlooking the street and then looked back at Zeke, who saw him nod to Herbie and then hook a thumb over his shoulder and start to walk for the office door. Herbie grabbed Zeke by the ear.

“No!” Zeke screamed.

“Where's Dorothea Dubrow?” Bobby said, turning.

“You killed the broad, last I heard,” Zeke said, tenderly touching his ear, examining his fingers for blood.

“Who killed Sandy Fraser?” Bobby demanded.

He hesitated, looking trapped and defeated, and then Herbie corkscrewed the ear again.

“I got a flat tire I could patch with this here ear,” Herbie said.

“Caputo and Dixon did that piece of work,” Zeke said, leaning away from Herbie. “To make their bones with the crew.”

“You guys even use the same jargon as the mob guys,” Bobby said. “What's John Shine got to do with all this?”

“Shine? Nobody likes that fuckin' guy,” Zeke said. “ 'Specially Barnicle, far's I know. He's a fuckin' flake.”

“Why is Sandy's kid so important?”

“No idea,” Zeke said. “Square business. Alls I know is they treat him like the fuckin' Christ child.”

“What else should I know that you know about Barnicle and his operation?” Bobby asked.

“What's to know? You do what you're told, you could get rich,” Zeke said. “Hey, it beats chasin' jigs in the dark for chump cop change.”

Bobby pulled him off the desk and onto his feet and nudged him forward, walking him back down the corridor. Herbie walked behind them.

“Let me ask you a question, Zeke,” Bobby said. “And I want an answer, a real answer.
Why?
Why did you cross the line? From cop to skell? Why? Why did so many of you turn your backs on your badges? Flip from good cops to bad guys?
Why?”

Zeke looked Bobby in the eye and cupped his sore ear as he walked.

“Why?”
Zeke asked incredulously, stumbling up the corridor. “The question should be, why not? Why shouldn't
we
have a taste? They send us out there; they let us see it all—money, pussy, power, million-dollar homes, fancy boats, foreign cars. Rich, dumb highschool-dropout spades selling dope, flashing wads that could raise my family for a year. Ex-mayors with talk shows, writin' books, gettin' fuckin' rich. Ex-police commissioners getting twenny grand a pop for asshole lectures. Skells with beautiful babes half their age on each arm, some of them even
white.
All tits, high heels, and lipstick. Fancy restaurants from the
New York Times,
fancy nightclubs with big-name celebrities.” Zeke stopped and spread his arms for emphasis, and Herbie pushed him up the corridor. “They put us up in front of all that,” Zeke said, on a roll now, as if looking for sympathy. “But none of them cocksuckers ever lay awake nights, wondering where the money for the orthodontist is gonna come from for my kid in parochial school. And when summer rolls around, hunrid and ten degrees, how come I can't take my kid to a nice beach house with an Olympic-sized pool? In a spanky new Explorer instead of an eight-year-old Pontiac with a hunrid sixty-two K on the odom that I gotta drive a hunrid eighty-nine miles round trip every day from Cornwall to chase spades through crack alleys in Brownsville.”

Zeke stopped again, touching his ear, touching his fingers together and shaking them as he hunched his shoulders. Bobby looked at him with cold eyes. “You ask fucking
why?”
Zeke said, incredulous. “Why shouldn't we have a taste of all that? We protect this shit-hole city, us, so that these pricks can live it up? Fuck that. Okay, I mean, I'm not gonna sell dope to schoolkids or put hos out on the corner to get
mine
, what's coming to
me
. But what the fuck is so wrong, Bobby, about taking a decent pension from the city I give my best years to, huh?
Why
does everyone else get theirs but not
us?
What, are
we
the wrong fuckin' flavor? We want at least three-quarters of what everyone else gets. That's the fuckin'
why.”

They reached the fire exit where they had entered the eighth floor, where Kuzak lay in a pool of blood.

“And you're willing to kill for this sick, twisted line of reasoning?” Bobby said.

“It wasn't planned that way,” Zeke said. “If it wasn't for you, it would never have come down to bodies. But when you think about it, on
the job
it's okay to kill for a whole lot less. I mean, what the fuck?”

“What the
fuck
about the fucking law!?” Bobby screamed.

“Like Lou says,” Zeke said, shrugging, “sometimes the law is out of order. But one thing I know. Unlike you—me, I ain't going to no fuckin' joint. I got kids, so I'm turning state's in a New York minute.”

“I can still heave him into the street for the Sanitation,” Herbie said.

“He ain't worth the OT,” Bobby said. “But I don't need him awake anymore.”

Bobby stepped aside, and Herbie nonchalantly cold-cocked Zeke with a single backhand blow. Zeke collapsed to the stairwell landing. Inert. Bobby took a pair of handcuffs from Zeke's belt and handcuffed the unconscious killer to a standing hot-water riser a few feet from Kuzak's blood-saturated body. He put the handcuffs' key in his own pocket.