Chasers (10 page)

“And now what are you going to do about it, little man?” Pelfrey said. “You gonna kill me? Shoot me dead with your papa’s gun? Why, I’d bet a cold turd like you ain’t even shot off a round before. And even if you did, you’ve never pulled on somebody alive—somebody that can walk and talk and breathe. I ain’t no fuckin’ tree, kid. You pull that trigger and you’re gonna have a murder pinned on your ass. And you ain’t ready for any kind of shit like that. Because that’s
not
what people like
you
do. Or am I wrong on that, little man?”

Andy Victorino did his all not to gaze at his father’s body, the dark puddle spreading far enough to reach down to his legs and feet, the life gone, replaced now by the cold stillness of the dead. He had heard his father’s and the stranger’s initial verbal exchange as he moved down the stairwell into the dark void of the morgue and had frozen in place. He couldn’t figure out who it could be or what he could want, especially as it was three hours past the parlor’s closing time. He took a long, deep breath and eased down the final three wooden steps leading into his father’s work area. He had his back to the old wood desk that his father used to file his large amounts of paperwork and, when time allowed, to write letters of comfort and hope to those who had left their recently departed in his care. The voices in front of him were gaining in strength and threat. With ghostlike moves, Andy slowly slid open the bottom drawer of the desk and reached for the loaded .38 Special his father kept there. It had been a gift left to him by a longshoreman’s widow, her husband lost to her in a barroom brawl that had escalated from closed fists to bullets in less time than it took to pour a full pint. His father was initially reluctant to accept such a gift, not being a man who found comfort or need to back up his words with a weapon, but the widow insisted. “Trust me, it won’t do anybody a goddamn bit of harm at rest in your desk drawer,” she said through her veil of tears. “And in this world you have no idea when it might come in handy.”

Andy gripped the gun, cocked the trigger, arms held out in a shooter’s pose, and turned toward the voices. In the flash of an instant, he saw the knife plunge into his father’s stomach and stood helpless as Francesco fell first to his knees and then on his face. He had trouble keeping his footing, the room spinning, a mass of bile forming in his throat, heart pumping loud enough to echo. In less than a second’s time, the safe world that his father had so carefully woven for Andy and his mother was torn aside and stepped on. All by a junkie in need of fast cash and a quick fix.

“You hearing me, little man?” Pelfrey asked, not comforted by the moments of silence that had passed between him and the boy. “How about I walk away from all this mess, clean and quiet, like I was never here, and you run your tiny ass over and be with your daddy? Might be the best way for the two of us to clear away from something that maybe should never have happened.”

Andy held the hard gun barrel and the tough look, his body taut, his index finger curled around the trigger. All he needed to do was give the trigger a light touch, a gentle reflex push, and a bullet would warp-speed its way toward the man who had just murdered his father and send him blood-splattered against the wall. Andy wanted so much for the man standing across from him to suffer—to feel the same intense pain that his father had felt, to grasp, during those final, lost seconds, what it meant to die for nothing more than the whim of a stranger. And he would be the only one to bear witness, standing over the dying man, watching as he fought for his final breaths, knowing that his father’s death had been vindicated. This was not the time to consider legal implications. Andy was old enough to have learned that the wheels of justice often spun in favor of the career criminal, and always at the expense of the innocent victim. A savvy street hood like the one who stood less than five feet from him, the soles of his shoes stained with the spilled blood of his father, would know how to manipulate the system as expertly as any seasoned lawyer. His was a sermon that was at its most effective in the presence of a soft judge and a jury whose collective hearts would bleed for yet another damaged soul held hostage by the life-sapping demands of a drug plague now in its third destructive decade.

Nor did it matter that the loss of James Pelfrey would not be felt by any sector of humanity. He would leave no family behind, no mourning widow or grieving son. James Pelfrey would simply be yet another abandoned craft in a long urban chain of predatory vessels, destined to be moored across a cold slab, a thick white sheet hiding what remained of him. And all it would take for that cycle to be set in motion was for Andy Victorino to squeeze down on the curved trigger and let his anger and pain and sorrow guide his motions.

Andy took a deep breath and flashed on an image of his father smiling. He knew that he wouldn’t be the one to end James Pelfrey’s life. He and his father had shared many ideas during their many hours alone together, discussions that touched on all the matters that Francesco deemed important to pass on to his only child. Killing a man in cold blood, regardless of the reasons, never entered into any of those long conversations. For Andy Victorino, it was more important to keep the memory of his father intact than it was to exact cold-steel revenge on the man who had just ended his life.

James Pelfrey caught the look in the boy’s eyes and knew that this was not the day he was meant to die. “I don’t want to ever come back here,” he said to Andy. “So don’t do or say anything to anybody that would give me cause. You tell the cops the same story you’re going to tell your mother. That you walked down them steps behind you and found your daddy the way you did. If you can keep your shit together long enough to do that, then me and you won’t be nothin’ to each other but a bad fuckin’ memory.”

Andy Victorino lowered the handgun and nodded. “We’ll see each other again,” he said, his voice small and hollow but steady.

James Pelfrey managed a smile and wiped his runny nose with the front of his right hand. He lowered his head, turned, and did a quick fade into the darkness of the room, heading for the back door that would lead to a dark alley and freedom. Andy waited a few long, lonely seconds and then walked to his father’s desk and rested the gun in a bottom drawer. He sat on his father’s old, creaky wooden chair, the wheels squeaking from his slender weight, and stared across the room at the still body. It was then that the tears began to rain down his face, his chest and stomach heaving from the heavy and painful spasms. It was there, less than an hour later, that his mother found him, her screams only adding to his pain. And it was there that he stayed, through that long night, as the room filled with police and crime-scene investigators, an unfolded black body bag spread out in the corner, two burly men standing off to the side, waiting for the signal that the corpse could at last be removed.

“You ready to do this, Quincy, or what?” Bennett said in his thick baritone, snapping Andy Victorino back into the present. “Not like this poor bastard’s gonna up and fill us in on who it was did him in.”

“You go on ahead,” Andy said. “I want to go over the body once more, make sure I didn’t overlook something easy to miss. Check in with me in a few hours. I’ll have a bone for you to chew on by then.”

“That’s a call for you to make,” Bennett said with a slight shrug of a pair of massive shoulders. “And it’s not in my nature to tell people how to go about their business. If you find anything sooner than you figure, give me a blow and I’ll head down your way. In the meantime, I’ll deal with his bios and kick-start the paperwork.”

Andy Victorino waited until he was alone with the victim. He knelt down over the man, slapped on a pair of latex gloves, and probed the fatal wounds once again, looking for the one mistake that would eventually lead to the track and takedown of a killer.

He was where he knew that he truly belonged.

Alone, in the company of the dead.

13

The Boiler Man listened and nodded. Nothing the tall man standing across from him in the empty men’s room at the rear of the midtown steak house was saying was new to his ears. In the end, after you broke it all down, his business was a very simple one. There was a price, a target, a preferred date of execution, and the clean walkaway. It had been his experience that anything beyond those basics that was added to the mix was done either because the client was looking to impress or because what was being tossed on the table wasn’t as clean a deal as he was expected to believe. The Boiler Man had been around the murder track enough times to have learned that if either of those two factors entered into play, it was a clear signal for him to turn his back on the deal, regardless of the sum of money being dangled.

“Three hundred thousand in cash just to put to waste a fuckin’ accountant with millionaire taste and a turncoat’s instincts,” the tall man said, his voice thick with disdain, the attempt at the tough talk more wholesale than retail. “And they say I’m in the money end of the pool. I did your kind of work, I’d be wiping my ass with a handful of hundred-dollar bills. Hear what I’m saying?”

“There’s no one here but you saying you can’t do my kind of work,” the Boiler Man said, his tone laid-back and matter-of-fact as he gave himself a quick glance in the large bathroom mirror. “It would save you all that cash you jammed into that little satchel over there, not to mention give you the total satisfaction of taking out your own garbage. Of course, if you in any way fuck up and either botch the job or get pinched hard by a young badge eager to make homicide first grade before his hair starts to thin, then, first offense or predicate, you would no doubt be staring down hard at natural life. And you don’t have the balls, the money, or the head to handle that kind of weight. Which is why here I stand, in a fucking men’s room, talking to you instead of hanging my dick over a urinal.”

“I didn’t mean to set off your alarm,” the tall man said, the bravado behind his words taking a long step down. “I was just making conversation before we got down to it, is all. Didn’t mean to offend.”

“If I’m lonely for conversation I’ll dial one of those all-night radio stations,” the Boiler Man said. “Or maybe see a shrink and figure out why it is I visit my father’s grave once a year and piss all over the headstone. Or, better still, I’ll find an Irish bartender. What I would never fuckin’ do, no matter how desperate I might be, is seek you out and start to shoot the shit. Now, are we ready to get on with the business at hand?”

The tall man nodded and kicked the satchel closer to the Boiler Man. “It’s all in there,” he said. “I took the cash out of the office safe late last night, long after the place had cleared. I didn’t go home, as I was told not to do, but got a room at a motel in Queens over by LaGuardia.”

“You check in under your own name?” the Boiler Man asked.

“Look, I know I don’t play in your league. But a moron I’m not. I have this alias I’ve used as far back as when I first started stepping out on the wife. It’s a character from a favorite book of mine.”

The Boiler Man held up his right hand. “Save the details for your obit,” he said. “All I need to be sure of is no one saw you take the money or leave with the money, and no one knows where you’ve been for these last twenty-four hours. And if the answer to all of the above is a yes, I can die happy.”

“Hand to God, nobody’s seen me since I took that dough out of the safe, not unless you count the dim-bulb clerk working the front counter at the motel,” the tall man said. “And I wouldn’t, not since the guy was so fuckin’ stoned he couldn’t pick Ronald Reagan out of a police lineup.”

“We can move on then,” the Boiler Man said. “What else do you have for me other than the money?”

“What else do you need?” the tall man asked with a hint of surprise. “All I was told was to get the cash, bring it here, and hand it over to you.”

“I’m sure that’s exactly what you were told,” the Boiler Man said. “That may be due to the fact that those in the know weighed you in as smarter than you turned out. In all of these situations, the less said is always the cleanest path to go, which, by nature, leaves a lot of unresolved issues. It’s then left out there for the buyer to figure out what else there is to be done. You then, using the old pasta bowl, provide us the answers without being told to do so.”

“I didn’t know,” the tall man said, the concern on his face real enough to touch.

“That’s as clear as that fucking mirror staring back at us,” the Boiler Man said. “What isn’t clear is what I need to know in order to bring the job full circle.”

“Can I get a for instance?”

“You want someone dead,” the Boiler Man said, keeping his temper in check, confident that this part of his evening would soon draw to an end. “You set up a meet with certain people, settle on a price and all that followed which put us both here in this shithouse. You still on the same channel as me?”

“Right next to you.”

“You delivered the dough, covered your tracks better than an old Indian scout, and got as hot as an Indy 500 engine over it all going down as planned,” the Boiler Man said. “You were in the fucking end zone, money man, getting ready to slam down that ball and do yourself a TV time dance.”

“So what’s the fucking problem, then?” the tall man asked, surrendering to his feelings of frustration.

“Here it is, slow and simple,” the Boiler Man said. “You need to tell me who the fuck is it that’s supposed to get iced. I got everything I need but the fucking name. And if I have to guess, it’s going to cost you a lot more pesos.”

The tall man gave a nervous laugh. “Jesus Christ, what the fuck was I thinking? I suppose I never mentioned it since no one ever bothered to ask.”

“In my line, that’s not the sort of information you seek,” the Boiler Man said. “You just expect it to be given, after all the details have been worked out.”

“Okay if I give it to you now?”

“Be better if you wrote it down on a slip of paper,” the Boiler Man said. “Otherwise, there’s a good chance I’d forget, and then we’d be back on first base.”

The tall man pulled a thin silver pen from his shirt pocket and reached behind him and grabbed a thick paper towel from the dispenser. He leaned over the sink and, with the paper against the wall, scribbled two words across it. He then turned and handed the paper to the Boiler Man.

The Boiler Man glanced down at the name and smiled, shoving the paper into the pocket of his thin leather jacket. “I know this man,” he said. “I met him two nights ago. In this very same shithole, truth be known.”

“You met him?” the tall man said. “Why the hell would you meet with him?”

“He offered me a job and the money was good, a hundred larger than what you put on the table,” the Boiler Man said. He walked two steps closer, his eyes in full focus, his body relaxed but poised.

“Who was the job?” the tall man asked.

“You are,” the Boiler Man said.

The first shot put the tall man down. The second, landing right above his nose and crashing through the bone and tissue of his forehead and lodging in the center of his skull, killed him. The Boiler Man bent over, picked up his two shell casings, and shoved them into his pants pocket. He opened the satchel, checked to see if the money was all there and tossed the gun in, then locked it shut.

He opened the bathroom door, turned left, and walked out of the quiet restaurant. The Boiler Man’s long day had finally reached its end.