Great Kills

by Kevin Fox

  “So, you never found the cash—or the kids?”

  “Nah. Too bad. I heard it was like almost ten million.”

  “And why didn’t your boss keep comin’ after me?” I asked. If I was so important, why was I left alone all these years?

  “You? Boss’s inside guy said you was half a retard. Hit in the head. Had no memory of nothin’. Your dad bein’ a cop, who needs the shit we’d get for kidnapping a moron?”

  “Thanks for that,” I muttered, unsure if I was supposed to be glad that I was some kind of a retard.

  “Yeah, no worries. Probably saved your life. But now it’s your turn to save mine, or what I got left of one. Can you get me a deal? I’ll give you the boss’s name if you get me off this ward so I can go home to die. I’m not really a threat to nobody no more, and it’s awful hard on my moms comin’ in this place.”

  “I’ll need something I can work with if I bring in the U.S. Attorney. Dates, times, places. I’m on a clock here, Morocco. The guy I’m looking for can take off as soon as the bridges open up again.”

  “Not fuckin’ likely. If he wants that cash, he ain’t gonna leave without it. You tell the U.S. attorney-guy that I’ll give him whatever he needs, but here’s a tidbit to tease you. After 9/11, the boss gave up on flyin’ stuff in—we bring it all in by boat now. Right through the graveyard. Never stay long, just take up residence on the day. Check that out, that’ll show him what I know,” Morocco offered. “I just want to go be with my moms. I’m dyin’ in here.”

  “I’ll see what I can do. If you want to help it move faster, call me with something more.” I got up to go and was halfway across the room when I thought of another question, calling back to Morocco.

  “Morocco, what would your boss have done if I ever remembered?”

  Morocco shrugged, as if it was obvious. “Whatever he had to. He had a guy keepin’ tabs on you. But it never happened. You stayed fucked in the head.”

  I heard Kat snicker. Lucky me, I was still fucked in the head.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Kat and I were walking to my car when I reached my connection at the United States Attorney’s Office, Tommy O’Connell. Tommy grew up next door to my buddy Charlie Pederson and still hung out at The Annex with us, at least whenever his wife was out of town. He was a Staten Island guy at heart, even though the wife had made him move to Williamsburg a few years back. Tommy had hooks in on the federal side because his ambitious aunt with the breast implants and a degree in modern dance was the third trophy wife of a federal judge. If anyone could help me get some kind of deal for Morocco, Tommy was the guy.

  “It’s a kidnapping case, Tommy, RICO Act stuff. You want to make a name for yourself, this is the case to do it on. Tt’s an ongoing enterprise going back at least to nineteen eighty-five,” I told him. “I have a confidential informant willing to talk, but he wants a deal. He’s dying of AIDS anyway.”

  “I’ll talk to the boss. And hey, Kill—is it true what I hear about The Annex?”

  “It’s gone, Tommy.”

  “Fuck me… We gotta find a new place. I can’t drink with all these douchebags in Brooklyn,” he said, with genuine sadness.

  “I hear that. We’ll find someplace,” I assured him and hung up without saying good-bye. We never did. We knew when a conversation was over.

  “Jesus and ever lovin’ Mary, what the fuck?” Kat asked, suddenly taking off at a run toward my car.

  I looked up and saw what she did—four teens with gas cans, siphoning gas from my Nova and the Hummer next to it. They looked up as they heard Kate and ran like hell. I angled down the slight slope of the parking lot to cut them off, but they must have been the track team from nearby Curtis High School. Those fuckers flew, darting in and out between parked cars, gaining ground on me until I finally cornered one as he ran smack into a chain-link fence. As I went to grab him he turned and threw a can of gas at me, spraying the cars around us—

  I ducked to avoid it and by the time I was moving again the little fuck was over the fence and all the gas was on the ground, washing away in the rain. A half second later Kate ran up, looking at the empty gas can lying on the ground.

  “You lost him?”

  “What’s it look like?”

  “Like you’re slow as shit.”

  “And you? I don’t see any gas in your hands,” I shot back.

  Kat just shrugged. “They had a car waiting. Kid in the driver’s seat pointed a gun at me. I let them go.”

  “Good choice,” I told her, and I meant it. With gas stations flooded, closed, or just plain out of gas, there was a black market to keep generators running. The gangs on the North Shore had a long history of knowing how to make money off the suffering of others. Leave it to Staten Island punks to steal from the most vulnerable—the people visiting a hospital. I started walking back to my car and Kat followed, her adrenaline surge slowly turning to anger.

  “You know, I coulda stopped the little pricks if . . .”

  “You had a gun. I know.”

  “And now we’re screwed. There’s no car service with Sandy, no buses. The train tracks are flooded. We’re stuck… Unless…” Kat thought out loud -- then held out a hand for my phone as we reached the Nova.

  “Who are you going to call?”

  “My new best friend. Your mother. And I don’t mean that colloquially.”

  “You’re not calling my mother. I’d rather walk,” I said, getting in the car.

  “In the rain?” Kat said, smirking at me. I turned the key in the ignition. It was dead. They’d gotten all my gas.

  I didn’t let Kat make the call. I made it, and then got in the car to keep the damp and chill away while we waited. I needed the time to think anyway. To put the pieces together with all the new information Morocco had given me. Did Markov actually believe his brother and the cash were still here? That either Rigan or I might know where either one was?

  Even if he did, the cash had been in the plane, lost in Clay Pit Ponds, and could have either rotted away or been stolen by someone else by now. Or, worse, Uncle Joe could have hidden it before he died and the location died with him. I still felt like I was missing something. Why was Josef Markov here now, so many years later? What prompted him to come to the States for his uncle and the cash after all this time? And what did Morocco mean when he casually mentioned going “right through the graveyard”? I felt like I should have known what he meant by that, but it was another fact lodged somewhere in a memory I had no access to.

  There was nothing I could do, because right now I was stuck—with the sound of rain on the metal roof of the Nova growing louder once again. It was a soothing sound at this point, somehow, and helped me focus. I focused so deeply that I’m not even sure I was still conscious as the case, and my nightmares, slowly started to merge in a limbo of what might have been a waking dream. Or maybe I drifted off. In my defense, it had been an exhausting couple of days.

  The box was heavy and awkward, the cold metal constantly slipping out of my grasp in the rain. I knew I needed to hide it before they caught me, but I had nothing to dig with to bury it, and there was nowhere that I could put it down without it being obvious. I was stumbling and staggering toward a nearby tree line that was full of firs and oaks—a place that should be perfect for hiding. That’s when I saw the flashlights illuminating the night again.

  I started moving faster, branches slapping my face, sticker bushes and burrs tearing my legs. I was panicked and running out of breath—and in that way of dreams, I stumbled out of the woods I had just entered into someplace much farther away in reality—to the shore of the Arthur Kill, a tidal strait separating Staten Island from New Jersey, where cattails and sharp-edged bladed grass suddenly surrounded me. The ground was no longer solid, but amorphous under my feet. Ahead of me I could see the splotchy reflections of rain hitting the oily and polluted surface of the water. I was cold and soaked to the bone, carrying the box that had somehow grown heavier. I started moving slowly, trying not t
o rustle the cattails.

  In another five feet I was in water up to my shins and able to see through the cattails to what lay beyond them—a hulking, rusting fleet of abandoned and decaying ships—the Arthur Kill boat graveyard. Everything from splintered and sinking tugboats covered in algae to oxidized and rusting trawlers were creaking and groaning with the tides, left here to be reclaimed by a salvage company that never seemed to reclaim anything.

  Maybe I could hide here, on one of these boats. Or maybe this was my way out, if I could find anything that could float. I could go through the graveyard. I started wading deeper into the water when something behind me moved the cattails, rustling them as if they were trampling over them, coming right toward me. I tried to run, but the muck and sludge that had settled at the edge of the Arthur Kill sucked my feet in and I tripped, falling face first.

  I inhaled a mouthful of oily and polluted water, my eyes stinging as the viscous liquid stuck to them. I wiped them, only making my vision blurrier as something in the mud moved, squirming underneath me. It felt like a muscular snake, five-foot long and six inches in diameter, with open sores on its slimy skin.

  It was a conger eel, poisoned by the pollution in the Arthur Kill, and as I saw its flattened head and beady eyes rise out of the water with thin, razor-sharp teeth gnashing at my face, I screamed—

  —And I woke up with my throat ripped raw. I stopped screaming as soon as I was fully conscious, only to scream again as I looked out the driver’s side window.

  My mother was tapping on it, her gray hair plastered down by the rain. I stopped as I recognized her and looked over for Kat, but she was gone.

  “Where is Kat? When did you get here?” I asked.

  “She’s already in your father’s car. She was standing in the rain when I got here. Said you were snoring—but she had your gun and was watching every car that came by like it was full of hit men. You ask me, that girl’s got some anxiety issues.”

  “I figured out where Markov is,” I told her as I grabbed my stuff and opened the door. I was almost positive that I’d seen the answer in my dream, or memory, or whatever the hell I saw when I slept.

  “You have an address? I have your father’s car. I don’t like to drive mine out this end of the island. Can’t trust the lowlifes around here. I got a radio stolen from my old Toyota in 1982 right on Targee.”

  “Jesus, do you let anything go?”

  “No. This is proof. They stole your gas. Let’s get moving. I hate this part of Staten Island, and since I have your father’s car, I can get directions to wherever you want. Deliver you straight to the Red Mafia. He’s got his bitch-in-a-box that can tell us where to go.”

  “It’s a GPS, Mom. And I don’t exactly have an address,” I admitted, seeing Kat already in the back seat of my father’s old Honda.

  “So, you don’t know?” Mom asked, with an element of derision in her tone that reminded me of the days when she tried to teach me the nine times tables. The nines still screw me up.

  “I know exactly where it is. I’ll drive,” I told her, trying to grab the keys.

  She snatched them out of my reach. “You can’t drive. You’re in no shape. When’s the last time you slept?”

  “Just now. Maybe. And it doesn’t matter. We need to move fast and you refuse to speed,” I protested. It was a weak excuse, since my mother actually had a lead foot. When I was a kid, she had a second job driving an ambulance, and my father had taught her to drive—the man who had taught chase driving for the NYPD. She could drive fast. She just wouldn’t.

  “I told you. I have your father’s car,” she said, as if that would explain why she could speed this one time. It did, in a way. My father was enamored with gadgets, including radar detectors, police band radios, and a GPS system that tracked traffic, radar traps, and red-light cameras. To back that up, he had cell phone apps that did the same thing. “Safety in redundancy,” he always said.

  Ten minutes later we were taking the ramp from the Staten Island Expressway onto the West Shore Expressway at seventy. Mom was driving; Kat was up front in the suicide seat, disgusted by the smell in the car. Apparently, Mom had chain-smoked her way across the island to get us, even though she refrained from lighting up on the way home. The same cigarette she had put in her mouth in the parking lot still dangled from her lips.

  Still, the car smelled like an ashtray and Kat kept cracking the window to breathe. It became a battle of wills as my mother rolled it shut after a few seconds, and then Kat cracked it open again. After about five go-rounds of this passive-aggressive window rolling, my mother put the window lock on.

  “You know what you did, right? By dragging up all this nonsense?” she started lecturing us, her captive audience.

  “I didn’t exactly ‘drag up this nonsense,’ Mom. Hurricane Sandy blew up that yacht on shore with kids dead in the hold.”

  “You upset your father.”

  “When? Today? Or twenty years ago? Does he know the difference?”

  “You find this funny?”

  “He doesn’t find it funny. Do you, Kill?” Kat interrupted, noticing that when my mother spoke to me, she glared at me in the rearview and paid no attention to the road ahead. Kat wanted to end the conversation, for safety’s sake.

  “Call him Killian, not ‘Kill’—and you’re the one that got me going with all this obsessive rolling down of the window for fresh air. Open windows make a noise like torture and lets in all the exhaust.”

  “Can we drop it, Mom?”

  “No. The crazy bastard started pulling the whole house apart after you left. Went in the garage and tossed boxes all over, looking for something. He wouldn’t stop. Went and found his old snub-nose back-up revolver and started to load it, the jackass.”

  “You left him alone when he was like that?”

  “Do I look like an amadon? I put an Ambien in his orange juice before I left, and that little slip of a strange thing is with him. Maybe the old mare you rode to exhaustion is even up to help by now.”

  “Rigan was still asleep and you left that girl in charge of an old man with dementia and a revolver?”

  “Calm down. She adores the loon. He’ll sleep it off, and she’ll take care of him if he wakes up,” my mother answered calmly, as if this was a routine procedure.

  “You slipped Dad Ambien?”

  “I was a nurse for almost forty years. He’ll be fine. I just couldn’t have him calling any more dead people.”

  “Calling dead people?” Kat asked, fascinated.

  “He does it when he’s tense. Calls the cops he used to work with,” I explained.

  “He upsets the widows something terrible is what he does. Even worse, he gets emotional when the old ladies tell him his friends are gone. Goes to pieces like it’s the first time he heard about it.”

  “Why was he calling dead cops, Mom? Was it the plane?”

  “How would I know? He was just ranting about a conspiracy. He thought someone was knocking off his old friends and had them all on a hit list. Even caught him trying to call your Uncle Joe a couple of times.”

  “Were his friends murdered?” Kat asked, horrified.

  “Hell, no. Vinny Gatto died screwing his granddaughter’s babysitter. Dave Coonan ate his own gun after his kid OD’d, and Bobby Michaels went out like Elvis, on the shitter,” Mom related matter-of-factly.

  “Lovely, Mom.”

  “They were cops. It’s to be expected.”

  “What did Dad say about this so-called conspiracy that you didn’t snoop into?”

  “He was just rambling, and don’t ask him about it. He’s been enough trouble lately. Had all his old charcoal pencils out today, making crazy drawings and sketches.”

  Sketches and drawings. My father had done that ever since I was a kid. He claimed drawing helped him think in another dimension.

  “What were the drawings of?”

  “Trees. Streams. That damn piece of junk ring you kept.”

  My memento mori. My father knew
more than he was saying, and I’d need to find out what it was while he was in the present and in his right mind.

  “Yes, but thank God, he chilled out and went back to sketching ships and river scenes.”

  “Ships? Or shipwrecks?”

  “How do I know? It was a crappy sketch.”

  That was all I needed to know. My hunch about where Markov was had to be right. Markov was using the “graveyard”—the Arthur Kill boat graveyard.

  The boat graveyard was actually a salvage yard for wrecks going as far back as the turn of the last century. If Markov wanted to, he could anchor his yacht offshore and use the life rafts to ferry kids and drugs on shore without any prying eyes at some marina seeing them. Because I knew the neighborhood, I knew that Markov would have to transfer the kids to a truck or some other means of transport nearby and couldn’t risk moving too far from the graveyard without getting noticed. That meant he’d have a base of operations…

  Which is where something else Morocco had said started to make sense—that Markov took up residence on “the day.” I knew he didn’t mean that Markov stayed in Staten Island—he meant something different entirely, something I knew only because I remembered specific details about the graveyard.

  Maybe my memory was getting better.

  “Drive faster, Ma. We need to get back before the Ambien wears off and Dad figures out where Markov is by himself.”

  “You know where Markov is?” Kat asked.

  “Yes. Maybe,” I told her, knowing that the bridges would be open again in the next few hours. I dialed my cell, hoping to stop my father from doing something that he thought he could still do because he was living thirty years in the past. The phone just rang off the hook.