Forced Entry (33 page)

Rabbit, at twenty-seven, had never done crack or any other drug (excepting, of course, Irish whiskey, which is or isn’t a drug, depending on which end of the American schizophrenia happens to be wagging the dog), but he’d seen the power of drugs many times. First it was boyhood companions, kids he’d been playing with since he was old enough to go out on the streets. Half of them tried heroin and a quarter became desperate junkies. A number were dead—of an overdose or of AIDS. Cocaine had offered another enticement altogether, a controlled pleasure that smacked of affluence as surely as gold chains and German automobiles. Rabbit had been in Europe, a soldier, when the coke epidemic had exploded on the American public, and he was glad the lessons had been learned before he was faced with the temptation.

On the other hand, Ben and Mick, Rabbits brothers, had been right in the thick of it, but had never been tempted to try the white powder. They were unionized construction workers who supplemented their incomes during the slow winter months with armed robberies, ripping off poker and craps games, and drinking themselves into a brawl every Saturday night. Their big break had come when they’d run into an old friend, a lawyer named O’Brien. O’Brien knew a number of cocaine entrepreneurs who needed occasional, reliable muscle. Mick and Ben, with their big Irish grins, were nothing if not muscle.

So the power of the lady had then seduced Ben and Mick as surely as it owned the sweet, white ass of Katerina Nikolis. Rabbit, focusing on the van again, noted that her dedication hadn’t flagged. She was lying on her side, her head buried in Mick’s lap. Ben had curled up behind her and she was pushing back against him as he attempted to enter her. Somehow, all through the various switches, she kept her head up with nearly constant pulls on the crack pipe. Rabbit felt himself beginning to stir again. He smiled brightly, listening to his brothers moan and grunt, considering
exactly
what he’d make the whore do next.

Stanley Moodrow was the only one of the three interrogators confronting Anton Kricic in his first floor Jackson Arms apartment who wasn’t surprised to find Kricic intelligent and purposeful.

“I’ll talk to you,” Kricic explained, once they were inside, “because I hate arsonists even more than you do. There’s no place for poor people to live in this city and the torches keep destroying what little there is. But there’s gotta be some ground rules and the main one is you accept that I mean what I say. Don’t worry about
why
I give a shit, just respect that I do.”

Moodrow understood the demand to mean that Kricic not only wouldn’t succumb to pressure, he’d walk away at the first hint of it. “Whatever you say, Kricic,” he announced. “I tell ya the truth, I don’t have any use for landlords, either. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that
everybody
in New York hates landlords. The goddamn real estate people run this city and they always have. The landlords and the banks and the fucking politicians.”

Betty glanced at Moodrow, probing for a sign of insincerity, but Moodrow’s face was completely blank, as was that of Paul Dunlap. Suddenly, she realized what ordinary people dislike about cops—they’re
never
sincere. They’ll say anything to make a clean collar. “My name’s Betty Haluka,” she announced, extending her hand. “I’m a Legal Aid lawyer. In most cases, we’d be working together, but I expect we’re going to be on opposite ends of this deal before it’s over.”

Kricic almost smiled, taking her hand. “You’re against warehousing apartments,” he announced, “but you’re also against homeless squatters in middle-class neighborhoods. No surprise, right?”

Betty held firm, despite the sarcasm. “If we start that argument now, we’ll never get to our real business. You say you hate arsonists and I presume that you’re not supporting drug dealers. Those are just two of the calamities that have come down on the people living here. Six months ago, the Jackson Arms was fully occupied by middle-class families and elderly people on social security. We know the building changed hands in November, but we don’t know who bought it.”

“I hope you don’t think
I
know,” Kricic responded angrily. “If you think I’m working for the landlord…Man, that’s the worst insult I ever heard.”

Moodrow, convinced that Kricic (innocently, no doubt) was part and parcel of
somebody’s
plan for the Jackson Arms, nodded his head approvingly. “You know what, Kricic? I’d have to be even crazier than I am to believe you’d work for
anybody
you didn’t approve of, and one thing I’m not is crazier than I am. But what I was wondering is how you found out about this building. You’re not even from this neighborhood. In fact, last time I heard of you, you were living in an HPD tenement on 7th Street. Likewise for the dopers and the juicers: they don’t have empty apartment radar and neither do you. Somebody had to tell you about us, and we think…wait a second, lemme get it right.” Moodrow paused, his eyes down, as if he didn’t know what he wanted to say. “We think if we can find out how all these people heard the Jackson Arms was giving out free apartments, we can find the scumbag who set the fire that killed Sylvia Kaufman.”

Kricic turned away, shrugging his shoulders. “I couldn’t really tell you who the dude was that told me about this building. You were right about where I was living—on 7th Street in a condemned twenty-family tenement that HPD took over when the landlord walked away. I went in there in ’84, just knocked down the cinderblocks in the doorway and moved inside. First, I got the water turned on, then I pirated enough electric to keep the apartment lit. Little by little, people began to join up with me. In ’88 we applied to the city to become a co-op. We offered to do all the work necessary to get a certificate of occupancy if the city would give us the building, but the bastards kept putting us off. They were too chickenshit to throw us out, but they weren’t going to surrender a valuable property to a gang of homesteaders who have to beg Legal Aid for a part-time lawyer. Now the mayor and his HPD flunky are getting ready to auction off
all
the abandoned buildings and empty lots on the Lower East Side. That whole neighborhood’s coming up and the sharks are making fortunes. Anyway, the city was too scared of publicity to evict us, so it was pretty much a standoff until someone made a fire. That was a month ago and the back wall of the building was burned out so bad it looked like it would fall down any minute. But we hung on, anyway. We got an architect from Pratt Institute to come in and show us how we could put the walls back together.”

Moodrow waved his hand impatiently, but Betty moved closer to him, urging Kricic to continue. “Go ahead, Anton, I’d like to hear this.”

“We were scared shitless most of the time,” Kricic admitted. “There were times we’d be sitting around drinking beers and hear chunks of the back wall break off and crash onto the floor. But we didn’t have any place to go. Maybe I could have found a place, but the others were really poor. They were uneducated and unskilled, some had been in jail and most had passed through drugs or alcohol addiction. So we hung in until the city came by with a demolition order and enough cops to throw us out. They claimed the building was going to fall down on top of us unless it was knocked down. Naturally, we decided to make a fight out of it—take the publicity if that was all we could get, and somehow enough neighbors showed up to make the city give us three days to move our possessions. Man, we threw some party that weekend. We knew we weren’t gonna be in there come Monday night, but if we drank enough beer and wine, we didn’t have to admit it.”

“Is that when you heard about the Jackson Arms?” Betty asked gently.

“Yeah. I was in the kitchen with a guy named Bill, who I knew from college, and a black dude named Dayton, who I didn’t know. We were talking about landlords who hold apartments off the market. Some newspaper guy had written an article claiming that 70,000 units were being warehoused. These are the cheapest apartments in the city. That’s why the landlords don’t wanna rent ’em out. Think about it—you got families living in shelters because there’s no apartments and landlords are deliberately keeping the same apartments these homeless families
can
afford off the market. Anyway, I was pretty drunk and Dayton was going on about this place in Jackson Heights where homeless were already moving in. I started thinking about what kind of craziness I could make by establishing a homeless community in a privately owned middle-class building. It’s gonna take a year, even if the landlord is serious about throwing us out—which I
don’t
believe for a second—to get the court to issue an eviction notice. By that time I’ll have the building organized, and every camera in New York’ll be on hand to record the battle.”

Thank God we have our pants on, Rabbit thought, as the call came through on the portable phone. Somehow, the brothers had fixed on the belief that Moodrow would be spending the entire day in the Jackson Arms and the eleven
A.M.
call announcing his imminent departure from a first floor apartment would have led to panic had the trio not been temporarily through with Katerina Nikolis. Katerina, of course, was still naked, lying dazed on the waterbed with the pipe clutched between her small breasts.
That
, Rabbit knew, was truly unfortunate. It meant their plan to dump her before doing the deed on Stanley Moodrow was out the window and they would have to think of something in a hurry. For a long moment, the brothers were paralyzed by indecision, but then Rabbit, who
knew
he was the smartest, grabbed Katerina by her hair, and pulled her erect before slamming her against the paneled wall of the van between the rear and side doors.

“Stay there, bitch. Don’t move a fuckin’ muscle,” he said.

Rabbits sudden action set the twins in motion. Ben climbed into the drivers seat and started the engine. Mick opened a long, narrow cabinet built into the paneling on the side of the van and removed two 9mm Uzis, passing one to Rabbit. The magazines had already been inserted and the gray metal weapons, their stocks folded, looked as lethal as they actually were. Lethal enough to make Katerina’s eyes widen, to pull her back into the present. In an instant, in the time it took for Rabbit to jack a round into the chamber of the Uzi, the cocaine burning in her nerve endings turned from warmest pleasure into darkest terror. She leaned forward to grab at her skirt and blouse, but Rabbit kicked out at her, driving her back against the side of the van.

“I said to stay put,” he yelled, putting the barrel of the gun against her throat. “By fucking Jesus, I swear I’ll blow your eyes outta ya goddamn head if ya make another move.”

“Please, please lemme go,” Katerina begged, the words spilling out, one on top of the other. She’d given them
everything
and now they were going to reward her by killing her.

When Paul Dunlap pushed open the front door of the Jackson Arms, Betty Haluka and Stanley Moodrow in tow, the first thing he noticed were three black youths, obviously children and obviously dealers, standing off to one side of the entrance. The sight grabbed at his attention, enraging him. The little bastards didn’t even have the good sense to run. He knew their defiance meant they had neither drugs nor money in their possession. They were advance men, bracing potential customers and steering them to the proper apartments.

“Do you wanna take them out?” Dunlap asked seriously. “Slap their faces, show ’em they’re not in charge.”

Betty pulled Dunlap to a stop fifteen feet from the doorway. “I’m a Legal Aid lawyer,” she said evenly. “Except for the color of their skin, you have no reason to harass those children. Remember ‘probable cause’? If I witnessed an unprovoked attack on civilians, I’d have to do something about it.”

“That’s easy for you to say, Betty,” Dunlap argued. “But all three of us know those bastards are dirty. If I have to wait until they actually shoot someone, I’ll never get their respect.”

“Respect?” Moodrow gestured toward the trio, who still held their ground. One, the tallest, wore a Yankee cap with the brim turned to one side and pulled down over his ear; he openly watched the two cops and the woman, seeming more curious than concerned. “Forget about it, Paulie,” Moodrow continued. “What you gotta do to these kids if you want respect, you’re not gonna do surrounded by civilian witnesses.” He gestured toward Inez Almeyda and her three children coming up the walk. Inez, her mouth already moving, was marshaling her complaints and Moodrow exchanged a private look with Betty, his arm encircling her waist as he prepared himself to absorb Inez’s energetic onslaught.

“How come you no do your job?” she shouted (much to Stanley Moodrow’s relief) at Paul Dunlap. “How come these pigs stay here and deal their drugs without no police come to arrest them?” She gestured at the dealers who, uneasy now, began to move slowly away, their shoulders dipping and rising contemptuously, their manner screaming, “We’ll be back.”

When Rabbit pushed the side door open, slamming it toward the rear of the van until it locked, Katerina’s mind shut down altogether. Like Sylvia Kaufman’s first reaction to the smoke pouring into her bedroom, Katerina could only form a single thought: escape. She had no idea where she was, no idea of the landscape that awaited her if she managed to get out of the van. She didn’t realize that she was naked or that her pulse, already pushed to a flutter by the cocaine driving through her nervous system, had been accelerated by terror and now pounded behind her eyes at better than 200 beats per minute. The same fear that had frozen her against the side of the van suddenly twisted her body through the open door and she ran screaming into the street.

Curiously, both Mick and Rabbit had exactly the same reaction to Katerina’s sudden and unexpected flight. “Fuckin’ bitch,” they said in unison, raising their rifle barrels until the black holes were in line with her retreating back. The first salvo of six shots, fired off as fast as the brothers could pull the triggers, pushed Katerina forward in a series of jerks, like she was being shoved repeatedly by an invisible giant. A seventh shot, fired by Rabbit after an instants pause, took her in the back of the head and pitched her forward on her face.