Night Work (35 page)

“Do you know anything about it?”

“No.” What other answer could there be?

“Is Sergeant Lopato in New York?”

“I have no idea. Sergeant Lopato is no longer under my command. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have things to do.”

“I want you to come down to the station house. We need to talk to you about General Garza y Mendoza and who might have killed him.”

“Communists, as I told you. I have nothing more to add.”

“Is that your room at the end of the hall?”

“Yes.”

“Everything in it is yours?”

“Yes.”

“Tony, do me a favor, keep the colonel company for a moment. I'll be right back.” He came back carrying the holstered pistol. “This is yours?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have a New York license for it?”

“No.” Fuentes was wary now.

“You're under arrest under the Sullivan Act for owning an unlicensed gun small enough to be concealed.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“Tony, could you take him over to the house for me and book him? I'll finish up here.”

“I want to speak to my lawyer.” Fuentes was losing some of his calm.

“Let him call his lawyer after he's booked, then bicycle him.”

“Sure.”

“What is this,
bicycle
?” He looked alarmed.

“Nothing that'll hurt. It's not
paredón
. We're just going to move you from precinct to precinct for a while, give your lawyer some exercise.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“Because I don't like you, and you piss me off.”

“Do you think it will make any difference? You are involved in something much bigger than you can understand.”

“What's that?”

“No,” Fuentes sneered. “What's the point of saying anything to a man like you? You have the small mind of a cop.”

“He's all yours, Tony.”

“How long do you want him on the bike?”

“A couple or three hours. Enough time to go through here without interference, see if we find anything interesting.”

“All right. You've got it.” He took the gun belt and draped it over his shoulder and then clamped a hand on Fuentes's arm. “Let's go, pal.” Fuentes tried to jerk away, but Orso's grip tightened, and the blood drained from Fuentes's face. Orso turned him toward the front door, looked back at Cassidy, and winked.

Cassidy knew that arresting Fuentes was nothing more than petty revenge, but fuck him. It felt good. Put him at the wrong end of power for a while and see how he liked it.

*   *   *

Cassidy, Susdorf, and Cherry searched the apartment, but they found little of interest unless you counted the list of people slated for execution when Batista returned to power that Cassidy discovered under the paper liner of a drawer in the desk. Carlos Ribera was on it. So was Dylan under her work name of Selena Perez. He gave the list to Susdorf, who looked it over, nodded, and said, “I'll pass it up the line.” It was information above his pay grade. Best to shove it off on someone closer to the holy of holies at the top.

“Any news on the three guys in the Lincoln coming up from Florida?” Cassidy asked.

“No. I checked with Washington this morning. They've got people watching the roads coming into New York, but nobody's spotted them yet.”

The elevator arrived and a uniformed patrolman came in through the open door to the apartment. “Detective Cassidy?”

“Yes.”

“You're supposed to call the house.”

“Okay.”

“Wow, some joint, huh? Mind if I look around? I've never been in a penthouse before.”

Cassidy went into the living room and dialed the precinct, identified himself, and asked for the captain. “What's up, boss?”

“Orso's in the emergency room at Roosevelt.”

“What happened?”

“Apparently he was bringing in a prisoner, and the guy took him out.”

“I'm on my way.” Fuentes got away? How did that happen? And why did he run? His lawyer would have had him out in a few hours even if they moved him around for a while. Now if they caught him he was in real trouble. Assaulting a cop. Why? What was so important? Was there something he couldn't afford to miss?

The Roosevelt emergency room was in Hell's Kitchen, and it saw more gunshot and knife wounds than any other in the city. It was a place of despair and fear—fear of mortality, fear of medicine, of the unknown:
What's going to happen to me now? Will I heal? Will I live?
A large man in a ragged raincoat leaned his forehead against the wall near the door and sobbed while a small gray-haired woman in a bathrobe and slippers patted him on the back and whispered words of comfort that could not penetrate his grief. A young woman in a flowered rayon dress sat on a bench next to a ten-year-old boy who was clearly her son and smoked a cigarette in short rapid puffs. The woman wore only one stocking. The other, bloodstained, was wrapped around the boy's knee below the hem of his cut-off jeans. The boy was absorbed in a comic book, oblivious to his surroundings and his mother's anxiety. Two teenagers in motorcycle boots, pegged black jeans, and leather jackets leaned against a wall in studied nonchalance while they answered questions from a uniformed cop who took notes in a lined book. A third teenager lay on a bed in an open cubicle behind them. The side of his face was bloody, and his eyes were closed.

A triage nurse directed Cassidy to a curtained cubicle at the back of the room where Orso, naked to the waist, lay on a cot and held the hand of a nurse with short black hair. She laughed at something Orso said, and then he saw Cassidy and said, “I'll see you later, honey. My partner's here.”

She gave Cassidy the once-over and said “Hi” as she left.

Orso's head was bandaged above the right temple. He had the beginnings of a black eye, and there was a dark line of stitches at the corner of his mouth.

“What happened?” Cassidy asked.

“Ahh, shit, I wish I knew.” He pushed himself up to a sitting position, winced, and closed his eyes. “Worse than a fucking hangover. I don't even know what he hit me with.” He scrubbed his face with his hand. “We come out of the building. The nearest call box is over on Broadway, so I figure we'll take a cab to the house rather than make the walk then wait around for a squad car. But there are no taxis coming down West End, so we'll walk, take whatever comes first, a taxi or the call box. Right on the corner he turns an ankle and goes down. My first instinct is to reach for him. When I do, he comes up with something from the gutter, slams me in the head, a brick, maybe a piece of wood. Hits me again, and I go down. When I wake up, he's gone, and a couple of people have called an ambulance. Here I am.”

“He wasn't cuffed?”

“No, he wasn't cuffed. I mean, what's he going to do, run? I told him if he tried, I'd shoot him.” Orso was embarrassed. He knew the prisoner should have been handcuffed to him.

“Shit, Tony.”

“I know. I know.” He put up a hand to ward off any more comments and was saved by the doctor who picked the clipboard off the cot rail, glanced at it to make sure he knew what was what, and then flipped it on the bed near Orso's feet. The doctor was a man in his thirties, but emergency-room duty sucked something out of him, and he looked worn and tired and older than his years. There was a big smear of blood on his white coat, and his fingernails were bitten to the quick. His manner was brisk. He had no time to waste. “Okay, Mr. Orso, you've got a mild concussion, nothing to worry about unless someone hits you in the head again pretty soon. Contusions around the eye. You're going to have a shiner. Nothing much to do about that. Put a piece of steak on it if it makes you feel better. It won't make much difference. Go see a doctor in a week and have those stitches removed. Do you drink, Mr. Orso?”

“Yeah, I've been known to take a pop.”

“No liquor for twenty-four hours. If your vision suddenly blurs or the headache gets worse, go see your doctor. Go home and lie down. Take it easy.” He tapped Orso on the knee and left.

“Let's get out of here,” Orso said. He swung his legs to the floor and got up and had to steady himself for a moment on the bed rail. He waved away the hand Cassidy offered and went to where his clothes hung. He took his shirt off the hanger and examined it. “Shit, look at that, a fifteen-dollar shirt and I've only worn it once.” There was blood on the collar and on the front of the shirt. His tie was stained with blood, but he put it on and pulled up the knot. He shrugged into his jacket. “You know they say you can't get blood out, but it's not true. I've got this Chink down on Canal Street can get any stain out you want.”

“I try not to bleed on my clothes,” Cassidy said.

“Yeah, but sometimes you've got no choice. Then you need the Chink. Let's go up to Dempsey's and get a drink. They don't mind blood on your clothes in there.”

“The doctor said no booze.”

“Yeah, and my mother tells me to wear galoshes when it rains, but I don't do that either. Are you coming, or am I drinking alone?”

 

22

Cassidy went up the stairs to his apartment singing, “Hey, bird dog get away from my quail…” The phrase kept running though his brain on a loop he could not stop.
Jesus Christ, is that what music is coming to?
The cabdriver had found the song on three different stations on the radio on the way downtown, and had been offended when Cassidy asked him to turn it off. And now the damn thing was stuck in his head.
Who the hell are the Everly Brothers and why don't they go screw with someone else's mind?
He scraped the key across the lock and missed the slot. Maybe that third martini had been a bad idea, but it hadn't seemed like it when Orso ordered it. He tried again. Ah, hah! Dead eye. He unlocked the door and pushed it open. “Honey, I'm home.”

Alice screamed.

She was tied to a chair near the windows. The liquor slowed his reactions. When he started toward her someone blindsided him and bulled him into the wall; someone else pulled a big sack over his head and down over his arms, binding him. “Don't hurt him,” a man said. Someone punched him hard in the stomach and sent him looking for breath in the bottom of his shoes. His knees buckled and he went down hard, unable to break his fall.
Don't hurt him, remember?
Hands pulled the sack down over his thighs. The cloth was rough and smelled of grain like the feed sacks he had humped on a ranch in Mexico as a sixteen-year-old summer cowboy. Someone wrapped a belt or rope around his thighs, and he was trapped, unable to move his hands or legs more than a few inches. His own breath was hot in his face and for a moment he panicked that he was going to suffocate, but the weave of the bag was coarse, and light came through it, and if there was light, there was air.

He heard the crack of an open hand on flesh. “I told you not to make any noise.” Alice moaned. The hand cracked again.
She had tried to warn him.

“Where is it?” Was the man's voice familiar?

“I don't know. I don't know what you're talking about.” They must have already been at it for a while, because her voice was weary, resigned, getting to that point where you didn't give a damn anymore; you just wanted it to be over.

“Look, you stupid bitch, you tell us where it is, and we go away. If you don't, we kill you.”

“Okay.”

“Okay, then. Where?”

“Kill me.” Hollow, like a voice down a pipe.

“Let me,” someone said, and a moment later Alice screamed. The scream broke off into bubbling sobs.

Cassidy shouted, “I'm going to kill you fuckers. I'll find you and I'll kill you.” His voice sounded muffled to him, without real threat. He shouted again, trying to distract them. “I'll hunt you down. I'll find you.”

Footsteps, and then someone kicked him in the ribs. “Shut the fuck up.” He did not know the voice.

He heard someone say, “Give me that candle.”

“No!” he shouted. “Don't. Don't burn her.”

The scrape of a match, and then a moment later Alice screamed.

One of the men giggled and said “Jesus,” but it wasn't a prayer.

“She passed out.”

“Wake her up.”

Cassidy rolled over and tried to sit up, but it was no good. He could see light through the coarse weave of the cloth, and sometimes the men, but they were just blurred shapes. One passed near him, and he lashed out with his feet. The man stumbled away and then came back with a kick to reward him for his effort.

Alice screamed. “Please, please, please.”

“Just tell us, and it'll be over.”

“Please.”

A key scraped in the lock and then the front door opened.

One of the men said, “Who the fuck are you?”

The gunshot was loud in the room, and one of the men yelped in pain.

“I'll kill the next one who moves.”

He knew that voice. Was he dreaming?

“Hey,” one of the men said. “You don't know what you're getting into here. You were smart, you'd leave.”

“No. I'm going to stay.”

Cassidy could feel a hand working on the rope that bound him. It came loose. “Can you get out of there now, or are your hands tied?”

“I can get out.” He worked the bag up above his waist until he could get his hands on the bottom edge, and then he pulled it up and off, and as it cleared his head, the world was suddenly clear and bright.

Dylan looked down at him. “Is this what they call a pig in a poke?” She held a black automatic in a steady hand. It was pointed at Junior Carelli and Tommy Longo, the muscle guys Cassidy had last seen outside the White Horse Tavern. They both looked unafraid but sullen. They'd been interrupted in their work, and that was going to cost them when they reported back to their masters. Any harm Dylan offered was of secondary importance. The third man was the young bagman who had been with them outside the White Horse.
What was his name? Jimmy Greef.
Blood dripped from Longo's left hand. His right was clamped on his shoulder where Dylan had shot him.