The Juror (29 page)

And by the time Eddie gets back up to speed? Sure-Knack is out of sight again.

Vincent doesn’t seem distressed, though. He says calmly, “Eddie, do you have a knife with you?”

Eddie digs in his pocket, passes him his penknife. Vincent has removed his jacket, and he sets it on his lap and cuts holes
into the back of it. Two eye-shaped holes side by side.

He asks Eddie, “What kind of tags have we got?”

“License tags? We’re good there. From Maxie’s chopshop. They can’t be traced or nothing. Ah shit, where does this guy think
he’s going?”

Says Vincent, softly, “St. Ignatius.”

“The hospital?”

“If you were shot, where would you go?”

“I
was
shot,” says Eddie.

“I’m sorry,” says Vincent. “That’s my fault.”

Eddie glances at him.
My fault?
Not a thing you’ll hear Vincent say often.

They come around a curve and there’s the maniac’s taillights again.

Says Vincent, “Eddie, have you ever known me to so misjudge a man’s mood or abilities?”

“Hey. It’s done.”

“I never should have let him out of those cuffs. I knew it was too early. I knew he wasn’t ready. All I’d done was ignite
his pride. I hadn’t begun to redirect it. But I was impatient, I was pushing, I was proud myself, I was reckless, I wasn’t
thinking—”

“Hey! So
what?
” says Eddie. “So you’re not thinkin so good. So you’re a little stressed out. You’re distracted maybe, don’t sweat—”

“Do you think I’m distracted?”

“I’m trying to
drive
here, Vincent.”

“Distracted by what?”

“By the fuckin trial. By this Annie woman, by—”

Vincent smiles. “Do you think I’m in love with Annie? Do you think I’m full of desire?”

Christ, thinks Eddie, I do not need this just now. I do not need Vincent’s dumping his crazy head all over me.

Sitting there with that grin on his face.

Sitting there cutting those holes in his jacket and grinning and waiting for Eddie to say something like
Well, I don’t know
, are
you full of desire?

But I’m not going to ask him nothing. I’m too busy chasing this crazy Sure-Knack all over the county, for one thing. For another,
I don’t really want to know.

S
LAVKO
turns in at St. Ignatius, roars down the circular drive. His left eye is swollen shut and his right eye is only a thin slit.
He’s looking through his lashes. He leans forward, trying to see out through the hole he hacked in the windshield. A sign
says “Emergency” and it’s got an arrow. This juror, she’s a doctor in the Emergency Room, isn’t she?

Or, wait—that wasn’t the juror, that was Juliet. Right?

You better wake up, Slavko. You’re driving across the lawn and you’re going too fast and you’re falling asleep and you better
wake up.

Well, here’s a nice stone pillar, this should wake me, right?

The Buzzard smacks into it.

But the jolt isn’t particularly rousing. If anything it makes Slavko more sleepy than he was before.

But I gotta, I gotta, I gotta get out of this car. Get the door open. Good. But these legs won’t move. Oh shit, look at this
blood, it’ll gross Sari out I bet. No no, she’s a doctor, don’t worry about it.

Just relax. You always get so uptight before a date. This’ll be fun. Just lean to your left and fall. OK? That’s right, just
topple.

People are coming, white-jackets. Voices, commotion.

He’s got his head on the asphalt but his feet are still in the car.

Faces. Where is she? Where’s the juror? Oh shit, look at them, they’re hanging back, they’re afraid the car’s going to blow
up.

Crawl, Slavko.

Crawl out of here. Come on, come on, move.

He gets about four feet.

A white-jacket (but it’s not Juliet the Juror) says, “That’s all right. Just lie there, sir. You’re all right. Don’t move.”

They’re doing things to him. Good, but where is she?

Where is she?

It comes out of his mouth as “Way-o, us, shhh?”

“That’s all right, just relax.”

“Shhh, way-o, Yuli?”

Four people around him now. Good. They’ll carry him to Juli. Is that her name though? Doesn’t matter. What matters is this
deep cure he’s undergoing.

Headlights coming. Fast, bearing down. Oh yes, the killers. Nearly forgot. The headlights stop and a man with a sort of hood
on his head gets out of the car. Oh yes, he’s a killer. Probably E.R. Some of the white-jacket people go away. They’re afraid.

But one nurse lingers.

Tell her now. Tell this woman. You won’t see Juliet ever again because that’s the way it is but it’s OK, this woman, she’ll
have to do.

Force your tongue to work. Lips to nearly close.

Tell her. It will save the juror’s life.

“Og,” he says.

He tries again. “
The
. Log. It’s at. Oak. And Holly. The…
log
.”

Then he hears E.R.’s voice. “Get out of my way, ma’am.”

E.R. is wearing a hood and carrying a pistol.

The nurse doesn’t want to move, though. She’s frightened of what he’ll do to Slavko.

Lady, there’s nothing but nothing but nothing to be scared of. This is the best part.

E.R. scares her away, then kneels close and Slavko feels metal touching the bridge of his nose. He and the cool metal understand
each other instantly, perfectly. You see? You do your work, that’s all. Simple. Why was it always so tough for him to understand?
You do your work. Rescue people, or kill, it doesn’t matter: you do your work. While you’re working, if you work hard and
well? You’re happy. You’re winning. When your work is done? Absolute victory. You’re a conquistador.

In fact, once that bullet touches my brain, E.R., I’ll be even better than that, I’ll be a
DEMON
CONQUISTADOR, and I’m gonna haunt you and haunt you and haunt you, and hound your hairy ass ALL THE WAY DOWN TO HELL, E.R.,
and there’s NOTHING YOU CAN—

A
NNIE
in the bottle-green prison of the jury room. Some of her colleagues are still hunched over their Styrofoam coffee cups, but
Annie’s done with her coffee. She’s wide awake.

She’s a tree of nerves.

She’s contending with the man who works for OSHA.

She says, “But you do admit that the Teacher exists? You’ll at least admit that he
exists?
”

“I dunno,” says OSHA Pete.

“You don’t
know?
” A little loud, but she’s pissed. So dense, this guy. She’d rather be arguing with the blackboard. She says, “Two people
testified about the Teacher. He’s on the tape. And you don’t know if he even
exists
—”

Says OSHA, “I just don’t know who he is.”

“You don’t
have
to know who he is! You have to know how powerful he is! Can’t you see that? Didn’t that get through to you—”

“Annie,” says Clarinet Will. “No need to raise your voice.”

Annie turns on him. Sweet shaggy bear, maybe, but sort of dull-witted himself. “No need?” she says. “No need to raise my voice?
Why? This isn’t important enough?”

She lets her eyes linger on his for a moment—then she drops him. Turns back to OSHA. “Think of how they sounded when they
said his name. ‘The Teacher.’ Almost whispering. That guy DeCicco, he’d say ‘the Teacher,’ and he’d be looking all over the
courtroom. Scared to death—”

“Oh bullshit!” says OSHA.

“Hey,” chides the Forewoman. “Fella.”

But Annie waves her off. “No, go ahead, let him say what he feels like saying.”

She rises and moves down the table till she’s between the tree surgeon and the grandmother, right across from OSHA. She puts
her hands flat on the table and confronts him. “Let it hatch. What?”

He won’t meet her eyes. “I just, damn it, Boffano he’s the boss. He’s the
boss
. They work for him. They—”

Annie snaps back, “They’ve got that deal with the Ndrangheta. They’ve got those Italians. They’ve got the government of Curaçao,
they’ve got Jamaican runners, they’ve got this whole huge web and one spider sits in the middle of it, one guy scheming out
the whole thing, and you think it’s
Louie Boffano
—”

She shreds the name with a laugh.

“He’s got advisers,” OSHA tries—but Annie is rocking and rolling now. She squats before him. Her face is a foot from his.
She’s never been like this before. This hot quick fury, her thoughts whipping so cleanly around corners of logic. She’s starting
to draw a sort of manic exhilaration out of her own performance. She scoffs:

“
Advise?
Did the Teacher
advise
Louie to build a tunnel? Or did he
instruct
him: ‘
I’m
going to dig a tunnel to Salvadore Riggio’s house and
I’m
going to kill him—’”

“But Annie,” Clarinet Will breaks in, “Boffano said OK. He said, ‘Kill that motherfucker.’ He gave his OK.”

“Does that make him a murderer? Suppose, suppose I told you I was going to kill this guy here.”

She points at OSHA Pete. Everyone laughs. Good, she thinks, get em laughing. Get em on my side. “Suppose I said, ‘I’m going
to poison his coffee’? And you said, ‘Yeah, sure.
Kill that motherfucker
. Do whatever you want.’ Would that make you the murderer?”

“Oh, Jesus!” OSHA throws up his hands. He stands up across the table from Annie. “I don’t believe this. I do not believe you.
You think we should let him go? You want us to let that greaseball go free?”

And though Annie doesn’t smile, though she meekly shrugs, she figures that right there OSHA Pete just lost the old grandmother
with the Italian name.

That’s one, she thinks.

She thinks, One by one by one.

F
RED CAREW
, Senior Investigator with the New York State Troopers, sits atop the desk in Slavko Czernyk’s office and studies a yellow
legal pad. Two uniforms look expectantly over his shoulder.

A scrawled note in the upper left-hand corner:

Carew wishes the unies would quit staring at him. It’s too crowded in here, in this tiny office.

At Carew’s feet his partner, Harry Beard, is sitting on decedent’s mattress, going through decedent’s files. Shaking his head,
making faces.

“So what do you think?” says one of the unies.

“I think it’s too god damn cold in here,” says Carew.

Says the unie, “It’s Jimmy the Face, huh?”

Carew calls out to the hall, to where the landlord is waiting patiently on a little three-legged stool. “Hey, mister.”

The man appears at the door. “Yessir?”

“You always keep it this cold?”

“No sir. It seems there’s some mechanical difficulty with the heating system.”

“Yeah. It seems,” says Carew.

Seems perfectly clear that this murder is the handiwork of Jimmy the Face.

Here’s this legal pad they found in Slavko Czernyk’s desk. And right here in front of Carew’s nose are these quickly jotted
numbers.
2k
, that must mean 2 kilos of heroin.
42000
is the wholesale price per kilo, a little high, but then it’s
primo
quality.
$84000
, that’s the total for the transaction.

And
J the face?
Must be Jimmy the Face of the Gambino clan.

Therefore: Czernyk was muling dope for Jimmy and something went awry.

ABC. Spelled out in bright red ink on a yellow background.

“Prints?” Carew wonders aloud.

“Nothing yet,” says one of the unies.

“Anybody tried to roust up Jimmy?”

The uniformed troopers look at each other.

Ah Christ. Carew puts his tongue between his teeth. A visit to Jimmy the Face. What fun. “I guess,” says Carew, “I guess I’ll
see if I can’t find him.” Then he asks Harry, “What’re you looking at?”

“Nothing. These are just Czernyk’s Reports of Surveillance.”

“Are they interesting?” says Carew.

“Nope. This one is from two years ago. Some guy’s wife was spending a lot of time at the house of some other guy.”

“Oh, my goodness,” says Carew. “Were they… was she… ?”

“It doesn’t say. Perhaps they were sharing Bible study together.” Harry yawns. “You want to look at it?”

“Nope. Are they all like that?”

“We’ll see. We shall fuckin see.”

Carew calls out to the landlord, “Hey, mister, can I ask you something?”

Whereupon the officious sparrow pops his tiny face in the doorway again. “Yessir?”

“When you evicted this guy, why the hell didn’t you
toss
this shit?”

“I will right away. Yessir.”

“Nosir,” says Carew. “No you sure as shit won’t. Not till we run down every last god damn name in that file cabinet. Monu
men
tal pain in the tush.”