Hell's Kitchen (25 page)

Another one of the men said, “Tell him what happened. To O’Neil.”

“Oh, the swim?” offered Pellam’s minder.

“Yeah.”

McCray said, “O’Neil went for a fucking swim in the Hudson, next to the QE2. Ain’t come up yet.”

Ramirez shook his head. “Oh, that’s brilliant. You cap the only gun dealer in the Kitchen . . . Jimmy buys from him too, you know. Now we all gonna go buy shit up in Harlem and East New York and the niggers gonna rob you blind. Oh, you soooo fucking smart. Jimmy don’t know you did it, I bet. Man, you fuck this one up.” He spit blood.

A moment’s silence from the thugs. One of them eyed McCray uneasily.

“Shit,” Ramirez spat out. “You know what happens if you kill me? Sanchez takes over and fucking wipes you out. We’ve got MAC-10s and Uzis. We got Desert Eagles.”

“Oh, we’re fucking scared.”

“And when Corcoran find you started a war, if Sanchez don’t nail your ass, Jimmy going to. Just get the fuck outa here.”

“Man, you got a mouth on you, Ramirez.”

“You fuck—”

McCray swung hard and caught Ramirez’s jaw again with a glancing blow. Pellam struggled to get up and got a booted foot in the belly. He dropped to the ground, clutching his stomach, moaning.

The Irishmen laughed.

“Your girlfriend here, he’s not feeling so good, Hector.”

Pellam’s guard gripped his collar firmly and the three around Ramirez wrestled him into an alcove.

“Why’n’t you piss on him?” one of them asked.

“Shut up,” McCray barked. “This ain’t a game.”

Pellam, retching, got up on his knees.

“He’s gonna puke,” his minder called, laughing.

But they lost interest in Pellam and concentrated on pounding on Ramirez. He fought hard but he was no match for the burly Irishmen and finally he dropped to his knees. McCray looked up and down the alley, nodded to his lieutenant, who pulled the hammer back on his pistol, aimed it down at the Latino. The other two stepped away. One squinted.

Ramirez sighed and stopped struggling. He gazed back at his killer, calm, shook his head. “Cristos . . . Okay, so go ahead and do it.” He smiled at McCray.

No choice, Pellam thought, consoling himself. No choice at all. He gave up on the fake retching and rose into crouch, knocked his minder’s hand away then swept the Colt Peacemaker from his back waistband, cocking the single-action gun with his thumb. He fired toward the shooter’s leg, which kicked out sideways under the impact of the large slug. The man dropped his gun, twisting away, screaming in pain, falling to the cobblestones.

Pellam’s guard went for his own pistol but the barrel
of the Peacemaker caught him in the nose with a loud crack. Pellam ripped the Glock from the screaming man’s fingers as he backed away, hands up, “No, man, no, don’t. Please!”

McCray had leapt for cover, sprinting for a Dumpster. The other Irishman, near Ramirez, started to turn but the Latino decked him with a solid fist in the chest. Three fast blows. He cried out and dropped onto his back, gasping for breath and vomiting.

Pellam slipped behind a corner and fired another shot—toward but not at McCray—aiming for the brick at his feet, worried about bullets flying through the populated neighborhood. The shot drove the Irishman further behind the Dumpster.

The thug with the gunshot was screaming, “Oh, God, oh, shit. My leg, my leg!”

Everybody ignored him. Pellam’s minder had vanished, running down an offshoot of the alley. McCray and the remaining Irishman were firing blindly at Ramirez, who was pinned down, looking for cover as best he could behind a pile of trash bags.

“Yo,” Pellam called, ducking as a bullet from McCray snapped past him. He tossed the black automatic to Ramirez, who caught it one-handed, pulled the slide and fired several covering shots. The man who’d been hit kept sobbing, hands over his face, crawling an inch at a time toward his comrades.

Ramirez gave a whoop and laughed loud. He was an excellent shot and the Irishmen could only peek out for a second or two and fire a careless shot before ducking back.

The gunfire lasted for no more than thirty seconds. Pellam didn’t fire again. He was sure there’d be sirens
filling the night, whipsawing lights. A hundred cops. But he heard nothing from the streets around them.

It was, of course, Hell’s Kitchen. What was a little gunplay?

A hand reached out from behind the brick wall and grabbed the wounded man. He disappeared. A few minutes later the three Irishmen were stumbling out of the alley. A car started and squealed away.

Pellam stood, still struggling for breath. Ramirez too, laughing. He checked the clip in the gun and slipped it into his pocket, retrieved his own automatic.

“Son of a bitch,” Ramirez said.

“Let’s get—”

The gunshot was deafening. Pellam felt a hot, searing pain on his cheek.

Ramirez spun and fired from his hip, three times, four, hitting the man—Pellam’s minder—who’d returned and fired from the shadows of the alley. The man flew backwards.

Hands shaking, Pellam watched the body twitch as he died.

Ramirez asked urgently, “Jesus, man, you okay?”

Pellam lifted his hand to his cheek. Touching a strip of exposed flesh. Looked at the blood on his fingers.

It stung like pure hell. But that was good. He remembered from his stuntman days that numbness was bad, pain was good. Whenever a gag went bad and a stuntman complained of numbness, the stunt coordinators got nervous in a big way.

In the distance, the first siren.

“Listen,” Pellam said desperately, “I can’t be found here.”

“Man, it was self-defense.”

“No, you don’t understand. I can’t be found with a gun.”

Ramirez frowned then nodded knowingly. Then looked toward Ninth Avenue. “Here’s what you do, man. Just go out to the street, walk slow. Like you out shopping. Cover up that.” He pointed toward the wounded cheek. “Get some bandages or something. Stay on Eighth or Ninth, go north. Remember: Walk slow. You be invisible, you walk slow. Gimme your piece. We got a place to keep ’em.”

Pellam handed over the Colt.

Ramirez said, “I thought you said you weren’t carrying.”

“White man’s lie,” Pellam whispered, and vanished down the alley.

“Louis,” Pellam pushed into the office. “Got something you might want to look at.”

It was late morning, close to ten, and Bailey the somewhat-sober lawyer had not yet been replaced by Bailey the somewhat-drunk apartment dweller. The lights were out in the office portion of the rooms and he shuffled in from the bedroom in a bathrobe, mismatched slippers on his feet.

Despite the agonizing groan, the air conditioner still wasn’t doing anything but pushing hot dust around Bailey’s office.

“What happened to your face?”

“Shaving,” Pellam answered.

“Try a razor. They work better than machetes.” The lawyer then added, “I heard there was a shooting last night. Somebody from Jimmy Corcoran’s gang was killed.”

“That right?”

“Pellam—”

“I don’t know anything about it, Louis.”

“There were supposedly two men involved. One white, one Hispanic.”

“‘Latino,’” Pellam corrected. “You’re not supposed to say Hispanic.” He dropped the Polaroid onto the desk. “Take a look.”

The lawyer’s gaze remained on Pellam for a moment longer.

“Yesterday I showed that picture to Flo Epstein. At the insurance agency.” He held up his hands. “No intimidation. Just snapshots.”

Bailey examined the photo. “Wine? No? You sure?”

Pellam continued, “I took a picture of Ettie at the Detention Center. I showed it to the Epstein woman and asked if it was Ettie.”

“And?”

“She said it was.”

“Well.” Bailey examined the picture. Squinted. Picked it up and laughed. “Say, this is very good. How’d you do it?”

“Morphing. Computer graphics at my post-production lab.”

The photo was the Polaroid that Pellam had taken of Ettie at WDC, body, hair, hands, dress. The face, however, was that of Ella Fitzgerald. Pellam had had the two images assembled by computer and then had taken a Polaroid of the result.

“Encouraging,” the lawyer said. Though Pellam thought he wasn’t as encouraged as he ought to be.

Pellam pulled open the door of the tiny refrigerator. Jugs of wine. No water, no soft drinks, no juice. He looked up. “What’s eating you, Louis?”

“That poker game I told you about? With the fire marshal?”

“It didn’t happen?”

“Oh, it did.”

Pellam took the slip of paper Bailey offered with an unsteady hand.

Dear Louis;

I did what we talked about and got a game together with Stan, Sobie, Fred and the Mouse, remember him? Been years. I lost you sixty bucks but Stan let me take a bottle of Dewar’s, almost full, so I’ll drop it off sometime after its not so almost full any more.

Here’s what I found and I think you might not like it. Lomax found a passbook Washington didn’t tell any one about. Grand total inside of over Ten Thousand. And guess what. She took out 2 Gs the day before the fire. Also they say your a prick because you didn’t list the $ on her financial disclosure statement for the bail motion. But mostly they’re happy cause it gooses they’re case.

Joey

Ten thousand?

Pellam was stunned. Where on earth had Ettie got that much money? She’d never mentioned any savings to him. When Bailey’d asked what she could contribute to the bail bondsman she said maybe eight, nine hundred, tops. He remembered the other day too. She’d said she couldn’t have bought the insurance policy from Flo Epstein’s agency because she didn’t have the money.

He looked out the window, watching the bulldozer demolishing what was left of Ettie’s building. A worker with a sledgehammer was pounding a star-point chisel into a scorched stone bulldog to break it apart.

He heard Ettie’s voice:

“. . . I’m trying and recall how many buildings were on this block. I’m not sure. They were all tenements like this one. But they’re mostly gone now. This one was built by an immigrant in 1876. Heinrik Deuter. German man. You know those bulldogs out front? The ones on either side of the steps. He had a stone carver come and carve those because he had a bulldog when he was a boy in Germany. I met his great-grandson a few years back. People say it’s sad they pull down these old places to build new ones. Well, I say so what? A hundred years ago they tore down other buildings to build
these,
right? Things come and things go. Just like people in your life. And that’s just the way it works.”

Pellam said nothing for a long while. He picked up a large skeleton key from Bailey’s desk, studied the brass intently then replaced it. “How’d the police find out about the account?”

“I have no idea.”

“Did the teller identify her as the woman who took out the money?”

“I have a call in to somebody in the department to find that out. They’ve frozen the account.”

“This is bad, isn’t it?”

“Yep. It sure is.”

The phone rang. It was an old-fashioned bell, the sound jarring. Bailey picked it up.

Pellam watched a car cruise slowly past. Again he heard the thump of bass notes from that hip-hop song. It must have been number one on the rap chart.
“. . . the Man got a message just for you, gonna smoke your brothers and your sisters too.”

It faded. When he looked back he saw that Louis Bailey was holding the phone absently. He tried to replace it. Needed to do it twice to seat the receiver in its cradle. “My God,” he whispered. “My God.”

“What, Louis? Is it Ettie?”

“There was a fire on the Upper West side a half hour ago.” He took a deep breath. “The insurance agency. Two employees were killed. Flo Epstein was one of them. It was him, Pellam. Somebody recognized him. It was that young man from the gas station. He used that napalm of his. He burned them both to death. Jesus Lord . . .”

Pellam exhaled, stunned at the news. He was thinking: The pyro had followed him there, to the agency. He’d been to Pellam’s apartment earlier and broken in, stolen the tapes. Then he’d followed him uptown. That’s probably why he hadn’t killed Pellam in his apartment. He was using him to find witnesses.

“It was three minutes. You having sex it’s nothing, you having a baby, it’s an eternity.”

And if you’re burning to death . . .

Bailey said, “She’d signed an affidavit about identifying Ettie. That’s admissible. What she told you about the ginned-up picture isn’t. It’s hearsay.”

Pellam looked out Bailey’s window at a square of earth near where Ettie’s building used to stand, illuminated by sunlight shining ruddy and immaculate through a clear sky. It occurred to Pellam now that because the building was gone, sunlight would shine on places that hadn’t been lit for more than a hundred years. This recaptured brilliance seemed to Pellam to alter both the present and the past, as if the ghosts of thousands of Hell’s Kitchen residents long gone to
bullets and disease and hard lives were once again at risk.

“You want to plead her, don’t you?” Pellam asked the lawyer.

He nodded.

Pellam said, “You’ve wanted to all along, haven’t you?”

Bailey steepled his fingers, his pale wrists jutting from dirty white cuffs. “A plea bargain is considered a win here in the Kitchen.”

“What about the innocent ones?”

“This doesn’t have a damn thing in the world to do with guilt or innocence. It’s like Social Security or selling your blood for booze or food money. Pleading in exchange for a reduced sentence—it’s just something that makes life a little easier in the Kitchen.”

“If I hadn’t been involved,” Pellam said, “you would’ve gone ahead, right? And plead her?”

“A half hour after they arrested her,” Bailey responded.

Pellam nodded. He said nothing as he walked outside and started down the sidewalk. The backhoe lifted a shovelful of rubble from the wreckage of Ettie’s building—chunks of the hand-carved bulldog mostly—and dropped it unceremoniously into the Dumpster at the curb.

“Things come and things go. And that’s just the way it works.”