Where It Hurts (26 page)

(MONDAY NIGHT)

T
hings had gotten very serious very suddenly. Bullets made things much more real than vague threats, planted evidence, and a night in a smelly jail cell. Someone had tried to kill me and had killed an innocent civilian instead. That stank of desperation and it meant that they had little to lose by trying again. So I did what I should have done days before and retrieved my off-duty Glock 26, the gun that had been cleared by ballistics from the scene of Tommy Delcamino’s murder. I would have felt better if I could have gotten my old service weapon back, too, but that was unlikely to happen, as it had been taken from me the night I got pulled over on the Sag. I doubted I would ever see that gun again.

And because things had taken this bloody turn, I had choices to make. Slava and I had set up our payback meeting with Milt Paxson for tonight, but I was no longer sure he was worth the time or effort. I wasn’t sure how much he knew. I wasn’t sure of anything anymore. I had two seemingly parallel lines of inquiry going on in terms of the Delcamino homicides: Regan and K-Shivs. Both threatening, powerful, and dangerous men with lots of resources at their disposal. All weekend long, I had been leaning toward Regan. Although I couldn’t
figure out why he would mean Tommy and TJ Delcamino harm, he had acted so guilty. And then there was his misconduct on the job, paying hush money to Furlong. Look, I was never a detective, never wanted to be one, but I could smell the rot. The floorboards were collapsing under Jimmy Regan. I knew it. He knew it. I even think Father Bill knew it. I’d thought if I could just press a little harder . . .

Yet now that it seemed this was all about missing drugs, it was far easier to imagine any number of scenarios that would explain why Kareem Shivers looked better for the Delcamino homicides. All that information that didn’t amount to much before suddenly added up perfectly. The drug deal with Lazy Eye that had gone wrong. TJ turning up sick and strung out at Frankie Tacos’, then, only a few days later, turning up at Ralph O’Connell’s high as a kite, flush with cash and promises of more to come. TJ had somehow managed to steal a shipment of K-Shivs’ product. He’d sold some off, used some himself, and stashed the rest of it. Shivers had traced the missing shipment back to TJ and had him tortured to force him to tell where he had hidden the remainder of the drugs. TJ had either stubbornly refused to talk or had died before he could reveal where the drugs were hidden. Months later, K-Shivs figures that TJ must have told his father where the product was stashed or had the goods himself.

There was still some stuff that I was sketchy on and some stuff at the edges that I didn’t get, like why had it taken so many months for Shivers to go after Tommy? Why would anyone assume I had the stash? Why wreck my house? And the big question mark was still Jimmy Regan. Why would the cops, especially detectives I had known for decades, protect a suspected murderer, a gang enforcer turned heroin dealer, from a homicide investigation? Sure, law enforcement agencies often shielded important informants from things, but not usually active murder investigations. And if the SCPD was protecting Shivers because he was an informant, he was a shitty one. There was a flood of heroin on the street, and according to Jimmy Regan himself, kids were OD-ing left and right. There was something I wasn’t seeing.

Then, as I was headed downstairs to the lobby to tell Slava that we might as well go ahead with our plans to have a chat with Milt Paxson, I got a bad feeling. A very bad feeling. I told him to forget it, that Paxson wasn’t worth the risk, not with what was going on. He didn’t question my change of heart, nor did he flinch when I asked for the keys to his car.

(MONDAY NIGHT)

O
n the island, it’s easy to know who pays property taxes and who matters to the politicians. You can measure it by the unplowed snow on the streets of places like Brentwood or Wyandanch. At least that was the way it used to be before I put in my papers. I didn’t know if that was as true any longer, because for two years I hadn’t paid attention to the unplowed snow or to politics or to life on earth. For two years, it was one foot first then the other then the other, and then only most of the time. It was inhale exhale inhale exhale. It was trying to stay human in spite of my instinct to bury myself alive. As I drove to North Bay Shore, I couldn’t stop thinking about the black chick at Malo. I had no memory of her face at all, only of her movements. All dark skin and sinew, one wet naked leg before the other.

I tried not to think too much about the last time I’d been on Fifth Avenue, but it wasn’t working. Less than a mile south of where I was on Fifth Avenue sat the Third Precinct. And it was off Fifth Avenue that Smudge lived. Problem was, I couldn’t remember which street off Fifth. It had been dark the time I picked Bill up from Smudge’s terrible rental and I hadn’t paid all that much attention. I remembered the house well enough. Half its windows boarded up, the wilt and exhaustion of the
place. And as I cruised around Anna, Bancroft, Marvin, and Dalton roads, I listened to the reports on news radio, trying to decipher if the SCPD had made any progress in the shooting earlier that afternoon. So far, the cops had put it down to a twisted act of violence, some lunatic sniper with a rifle who had killed at random.

It wasn’t the first time that had happened in Suffolk County. Only a few years after I got on the job, some idiot named Peter Sylvester shot several people through store windows at night with a .35 Marlin hunting rifle. He’d killed one man who had been seated near the front window at a Commack diner and had wounded others in the same general vicinity. So it was natural for the cops to assume that what had happened once could have happened again. They also assumed it because, as yet, they could find no reason for the victim, a retired dentist from Queens, to have been murdered. It seemed the only thing he was guilty of was a terminal case of bad timing.

There it was, Smudge’s ugly house on Eden Road. Eden Road, yeah, right. The house was dark and lifeless and as welcoming as a septic tank. Not even snow and the cover of night could improve its appearance. Maybe it was all Smudge could afford or maybe he thought it was what he deserved. I hoped to ask him and hoped he’d be alive enough to answer. That was the thing, now that I was pretty sure of what TJ Delcamino had stolen and just how far the people who wanted it back were willing to go to retrieve it, anyone connected to Tommy Delcamino or his son were in danger. And no one was more connected to Tommy D. than Smudge.

I’d get around to warning Richie Zito in person later. Crippling arthritis or not, Zee was a guy who knew how to handle himself. You don’t rise through the ranks of the Maniacs and stay alive as long as he had without being a dangerous motherfucker. I had already tried calling him a few times on my ride over to Brentwood, but he’d refused to get on the phone. The fourth time I called, the guy who answered the phone just hung up. Smudge, on the other hand, was no tough guy, and the man who had protected him and befriended him in prison was
dead. I didn’t have Smudge’s phone number and the only way I had to get in touch with him was to go knock on his door.

I was encouraged to see that there were two sets of footprints in the snow, but just as quickly discouraged by the size of those tracks. Smudge was a little guy with small feet. The prints before me in the snow belonged to bigger, heavier men whose bulk had displaced the snow so that the soles of their shoes reached down to the walkway. I couldn’t tell much beyond that because I’d left my Maglite in the trunk of my car, so I used the flashlight setting on my phone. I stood in place at the edge of the house’s postage-stamp-sized lot, listening for any sounds coming from inside the house. There were none that I could hear, but there was enough ambient traffic noise coming from Fifth Avenue that I couldn’t be at all sure about what I was or wasn’t hearing from inside the house.

I took out my little Glock, keeping it down at my side as I approached the house. There were several other houses on the block and I didn’t want to attract unwanted attention by waving my gun around. I walked slowly, carefully, up to the front door and tried the knob. It resisted my efforts to turn it. That was something, at least, a locked front door. I crept around to the side of the house, shined the light through a window into the dark kitchen. The kitchen was a mess. It had been tossed much as the trailer at Picture Perfect Paving and my old house in Commack. My heart sank all the way to the bottom when I walked around back and saw that the rear door was flung wide open. There was no good way for me to spin optimism into the sight of that, and when I got to the stoop, the stench that came at me from inside the house removed any stubborn sense of hope I might have clung to for Smudge’s survival. The smell of death is unmistakable.

Two weeks before, I wouldn’t have hesitated to call 9-1-1, but I couldn’t pretend that the last two weeks hadn’t happened. It was hard for me to accept that I couldn’t trust the very people who had been my brothers and sisters, people to whom I had, on hundreds of occasions, entrusted my life. As hard to accept as it was, I didn’t waste any time
denying my distrust. I’d almost been killed once already that day and I wasn’t going to let hesitation give somebody a second chance. Smudge’s body would get found by someone else eventually, but now I had to see for myself.

I walked into the back of the house, gun sweeping before me, and cautiously followed my nose to the source of the stench. You might have thought the house should have been ice cold because of the back door being wide open, but the opposite was true. The cold had caused the thermostat to keep the oil burner churning up heat. Except for the small alcove leading away from the back door into the rest of the house, the damned place was like a sauna. The heat made the nauseating, slightly sweet stink of rotting human flesh and feces even more intense. I found the body in an unfurnished bedroom off the main hall from the tiny living room. In spite of the overwhelming smell and the presence of a man’s body at my feet, I smiled when I saw the body wasn’t Smudge. This man was way too big to be him, but that was about all I could make out about him, since he was facedown.

As this was one of the rooms with a boarded-over window, I felt fairly safe in turning on the overhead light. When I flicked on the switch, that glad expression on my face went to the place where smiles go to die. The dead man wasn’t Smudge. I’d gotten that much right, but I wasn’t happy to see whose body it was. The detective who had pulled me over on the Sag was sprawled across the worn, shiny carpeting in front of me with two bullet holes in the fabric of his khaki-brown trench coat. Those two shots had probably gone right through his heart. There was a pillow on the floor there next to him, its yellowed linen case badly charred by contact with the muzzle of the weapon that had fired the two bullets into the dead man’s chest. I had to get out of there, but not before I did a quick check to make sure Smudge wasn’t dead somewhere else in the house.

He wasn’t anywhere in the house, but I couldn’t be sure he wasn’t dead someplace else. I chose to believe he had gotten away or hadn’t been home at all. I didn’t want to think that he had killed the detective
in the bedroom. I didn’t have time to stand around contemplating the possibilities. It seemed to me that someone was as busy tidying up his loose ends as he was trying to retrieve his stolen drugs. I was a loose end. Richie Zito was another. Maybe Frankie Tacos, too, if he wasn’t in the middle of this himself. But when I pulled away from Smudge’s house, headlights off, I headed to Wyandanch.

(LATER MONDAY NIGHT)

I
drove past Lazy Eye’s house. It was as dark as Smudge’s had been. There was no car in his driveway. There were no cars anywhere near his house that I could see. I didn’t figure Slava’s beat-up old Honda was likely to be associated with me or be on anyone’s radar. Well, the only person who might be able to connect Slava’s car to me was in a shitty little house in Brentwood with two bullet holes in his chest. So I parked down the block, facing Lamar English’s house, and waited. I intended to wait as long as I had to wait or, in truth, as long as I could last. It was cold out and I hadn’t stopped for coffee or to take a bathroom break.

I listened to the radio and quickly got bored. The music was all either music my parents had listened to or as interchangeable and disposable as plastic razors. The news stations repeated the same stories over and over and over again without adding a single new detail. But the worst by far was sports talk radio, listening to Riley from Toms River complain about the Knicks to an arrogant host who seemed far more interested in condescension than discussion.

I sat there remembering how, as a cop, I had such mixed feelings about the cold and the snow. How bad winter weather was great at
tamping down crime, sometimes even bringing it to a complete halt for days at a time, but how it created other problems and nightmares, nightmares often as terrible and as tragic as murder. There were the traffic accidents, of course. The fools in the big SUVs who forgot that four-wheel drive helps you get through the snow, but doesn’t help you stop in it or help you survive collisions with trees. The church vans hitting patches of black ice, speeding up their passengers’ reunion with their creator more effectively than any prayer service ever could. The worst were the house fires, though. The poor families using the range or kerosene heaters in enclosed spaces. The smell of fire-ravaged human flesh and hair. The stink of melted plastic. The burnt baby bodies I would never get out of my head. I remembered the fireman’s mantra:
Probably smoke inhalation. They almost never burn to death
. As if that was of any help.

And then, about two hours after my vigil had begun, just as I was about to run the engine again to get some heat into the car to prevent my feet from going totally numb with cold and inactivity, a pimped-out Chrysler 300 appeared at the corner of the street. Ground-shaking hip-hop, window-buzzing bass destroyed the silence of the night as it rolled down the block and pulled into Lazy Eye’s driveway. I waited in my car until I was sure it was the man I was waiting for. I wouldn’t be able to clearly see his face, certainly not his eyes, from where I was parked, but I figured it was a safe bet that if he had a key to the house, it was him.

The car door flew open and the music stopped. Silence returned to the night. A short, almost two-dimensionally thin African-American man got out of the Chrysler. He was dressed in a hoodie over a flat-billed baseball cap—I couldn’t make out the team logo—baggy jeans and boots. He reached back into the car and pulled a nickel-plated Desert Eagle, a ridiculous weapon that looked foolish even in the hands of a big man, and stuffed it down the front of his pants. He folded the front of his hoodie over the handle of the weapon. Christ, I thought, if this was Lamar English, he was doing everything possible to call attention to himself. He scanned the night as if to make sure there were no
threats close by. He didn’t seem to take note of Slava’s Honda, or if he did, he didn’t seem to care. He took some keys out of his hoodie pocket and popped the trunk. He scanned the night again. Satisfied, he reached into the trunk and removed two densely packed, black plastic garbage bags. He leaned them against the rear bumper of the 300 and closed the trunk.

I was satisfied, too. This had to be Lazy Eye and my bet was there was a good sixty pounds of marijuana in those garbage bags. As I threaded my fingers through the Civic’s door handle, a new set of headlights appeared at the corner. There was nothing particularly threatening or noticeable about them, but if a car came down the block as I was approaching Lazy Eye, he would spot me coming. I didn’t want him to see me coming, especially if he had any skill with and willingness to use the Desert Eagle stuffed down his pants. As silly a weapon as it was, it had bullets the size of a grown man’s thumb. Even an off-center hit could tear you apart. Sorry. One bullet wound at a time was about all I could deal with.

I unthreaded my fingers from the door handle and waited for the car to pass, but that’s when things went to shit. The headlights turned off. An engine revved. Tires squealed. I wasn’t the only person to notice trouble was coming. Lazy Eye yanked up the front of his hoodie and stuck his hand down into his pants. He was nervous, though. Fumbling the handle of the Desert Eagle, he couldn’t get a grip on it until it was way too late to do him any good. I’m not sure it would have done him any good anyway. As the other car approached him, the night exploded in artificial thunder and very real fire. One second Lazy Eye was upright. The next second he wasn’t.

I waited a beat to make sure the car wasn’t going to make another pass at its target. When I was sure, I got out of the Honda and raced over to where Lazy Eye was. It was him, all right. His left eye aimed at a very different angle than his right. It wouldn’t matter now or ever again. Death was an equitable master. Once you crossed the threshold, no man or woman was more dead or less dead than another. And that
threshold was one Lamar English had most definitely crossed. He’d been hit in every part of his body, including the face. Bits of his shattered teeth poured out of his wrecked mouth in a stream of blood and saliva. The coppery, metallic scent of blood was still heavy in the air, as was the intense smell of burnt marijuana. The hot lead had ripped through the bales of pot as well as the dead man’s flesh.

I ran back to Slava’s Honda and got out of there as quickly as I could. There was no doubt anymore about loose ends and inconveniences being tidied up. For me it was no longer a matter of if, but when. I suppose it had always been so. Death is never a matter of if. Murder was more a question of when.