by Thomas Laird
*
We sit on the couch, this time fully clothed, both of us. I have my arm around her, and she has her head on the left side of my chest, and then I begin kissing her. Just kissing her, and her lips are soft and thick and moist, and her tongue just lances its way against mine gently. There’s no volcanic eruption this time, because we’re too worn out. And I know she’s thinking that it’s over. I’ve had my fun with her, and now I’ll become apologetic and start telling her I’m exhausted and that I have to sleep because I’ve got things to do in the morning, early, and that I’ll see her again soon.
“Do you want me to give you some time alone, Diana?” I ask her.
“Are you very tired?”
“Yeah, but I want to stay right here.”
“You mean overnight?”
“I mean until you kick me out,” I say.
“And what if I don’t kick you out?”
“Then I guess I could move what little I have down here. Do we really need two apartments? I could pay you rent and stay with you if you want me to.”
“All this after one day and night?” she asks.
“How many days or nights have you had like this one?”
She doesn’t answer.
“You sure you want to stay?” she asks again.
“I’ll let you know when I’m ready to leave, and you can toss me to the curb whenever you get that feeling.”
She looks at me, and there’s a droplet swelling in her right eye. I put my fingertip on it and blot it out.
“We don’t have time for any of that. If it makes you feel any better, just think of us as one day at a time.”
“One day will never be enough.”
“I hear you. I was thinking the same thing, Diana.”
She smiles up at me. “There’s something very crazy about all this, about you and me.”
“That’s the charm, isn’t it? It’s nuts, just plain section eight.”
She smiles again. “We have to get hungry—for food—sometime.”
“Are you hungry, for food?” I grin back at her.
I don’t think I’ve shown anyone my teeth this way in a very long time.
She nods.
“I’ll take you out. They have any good restaurants out here in the sticks?”
She nods.
“Well let’s go, before I have to eat you, lady.”
“I’m looking forward to it.”
She kisses me, and we finally leave the couch and Diana’s apartment and head out her door for her car.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Chicago, 1985
We visit each of Pete’s known operations, but it’s anybody’s guess what he actually owns and operates in the city. There might be someone else’s name on the deed, but Pete is probably the actual proprietor for more ‘businesses’ than we know about.
There have been no sightings of Tommy Costello, but as the spring progresses into the second week of April, we’re expecting him to surface.
And he does. Two Homicide detectives assigned to Pete’s Michigan Avenue condo spot him and his entourage emerging from the building about ten in the morning, and the cops report in that they’re headed north on Lake Shore Drive. They get off at the Belmont exit, and I know Tommy’s headed for Wrigley Field since the San Francisco Giants are in town. We were told he was a big baseball fan, a big Giants’ aficionado, and so Doc and I head out to the ballpark to catch up with the horde of other coppers who want to see if anyone we know might show up and try to take down the West Coast don. Azrael used to work for this asshole, so he probably knows a lot about him and his habits, and it was no secret in the Bay that Tommy dropped a lot of coin betting on his favorite team. He wouldn’t miss their opener for the world, and his cabin fever probably got the best of his common sense, which should have told him to watch the game on TV.
When we park on the street, we put out our copper sign so we don’t get towed out of a no-parking zone.
“They might haul our ride out of here anyway. The boosters might enjoy a Crown Vic as a change of pace,” Doc grins.
We head toward the ticket booths and we see Sergeant Vince Flanagan waiting for us. He’s a short, heavily bulked man of about five-seven. Used to wrestle in his high school days at Mount Carmel High School, and he was second in state his senior year. It looks like he could handle himself on the mat right now. There’s no spare change on his frame.
“Jimmy, Doc,” he greets us. “He’s got a box on the third baseline, and he’s got a collection of gunslingers sitting all around him. We checked for firearms, and all his assholes have legal licenses to carry. I’m surprised they aren’t carrying a goddam bazooka.”
We head toward the stands, and we walk behind the box which is just above the dugout on third base. I see my cousin Pete sitting right next to Tommy Costello. Himself. I go over to Pete and greet him and tell him that this was a very bad idea.
“We’re fine, Jimmy. We’ve got plenty of security with us.”
“You’ve got a lot of cops diverted here, too, and we all could be doing better things,” I say as I bend toward him in his box seat.
The stands are packed and there isn’t an empty seat in the house, and this is only the end of batting practice. It’s a 1 p.m. start for the game itself, but Tommy is the fanatic the Frisco cops said he was about his Giants and about baseball.
Costello leans over and looks up at me, still leaning toward Pete. I’ve got my hands on the back of his chair, and all the bodyguards are eyeballing me with unfriendly stares, and Doc laughs out loud.
“There’s enough grease here for all of you punks to slide back to the Golden Gate,” my partner chuckles.
“This rude guy your partner?” Costello asks.
I introduce us both. There are a dozen other plainclothesmen in our immediate vicinity.
Costello has dark eyes, almost black. It’s impossible to read his face or his mood. The man looks like a landlocked shark without the dorsal and the tail. I hope he never goes swimming in Lake Michigan or they’ll have to close the beaches.
“Can I buy you fellas a beer?” Tommy grins.
I don’t answer, and the smile is withdrawn from Doc’s face. The noise in the ballpark is beginning to gather as game time nears, and everyone’s in their seats.
Then Costello stands up, and so do his five bodyguards.
“If you gentlemen will excuse me, I gotta take a leak.”
They make their ways out of the box, leaving Pete sitting with three of his own crew.
“Sit down, Cousin. You and your boyfriend.” He nods to Doc.
“We’re here on business, not pleasure,” I explain.
Doc and I follow the entourage toward the tunnel that goes to concessions and toilets.
When we weave our way through all the foot traffic, I spot him first.
Doc knows it’s Azrael, too, and we rush past the group of mobsters who apparently haven’t spotted Azrael, yet, and when we take off at a sprint to catch up to the fleeing ex-Ranger, the goombahs join in the chase behind us. I can’t see them behind Doc and me as we burst through the clots of fans buying beers and seeking the pisser, but I can feel them and I know they’re right behind us.
Azrael is getting a bigger lead now, and I only see the back of his head for a second, here and there, because he’s moving at top speed, and I’m feeling more and more sure that we’ll never catch up to him. We didn’t have time to relay the sighting to the other cops inside and outside of the ballpark, but I yell for Doc to call this in and get more help to nab the soldier before he gets out into the neighborhoods where we’ll never find him.
We’ve lost him. Doc and I and the bodyguards have been outrun.
I turn and see that Tommy Costello didn’t come along for the chase, and I know the johns are far behind us. Then it occurs to me that Azrael has decoyed us, drawn us away from Tommy, and I tell Doc we’re headed in the wrong direction, that the ex-Ranger was just separating us from the man he was after, and we begin anot
her sprint toward the heads.
But there are multiple bathrooms, so we split up and try the two that were closest behind us. The Italians are close behind us, and they have the same idea that we do, and they split into two groups of three—someone has to still be with Costello.
When I get into the restroom, there’s a man on the floor, face down in a pool of blood, and there are dozens of civilians, fans, trying to get the hell out of here.
I have my .38 raised and ready, and I hear the bodyguards breathing like fatigued horses, and I approach the body, now that all the innocent bystanders have rushed out, and I go to the stalls with the doors, and I kick them open, one by one, and at the fourth stall from the left, I find Tommy Costello on his knees on the floor of the can.
He’s got his hands over his ears as if he’s afraid of the next sound he hears.
Then he looks up and sees that it’s me and some of his gunmen, and he shakily lowers his hands to his sides.
The front of his expensive trousers is wet. He’s pissed himself.
Then I hurriedly check the other stalls, but there’s no one inside any of them.
When I get back to the still kneeling Costello, he looks up at me like a whimpering child who’s been caught reading a cockbook in his bedroom with a flashlight under the covers.
“He said it wasn’t … time. He said he’d be back. He said he’d be back when I least expected it.”
He struggles to his feet.
“He said this was a preview of coming attractions. The bastard said he was coming back!”
*
Doc and I drive back to headquarters when we’ve escorted Costello in a motorcade back to Pete’s estate in Oakbrook. Tommy never got to see the first pitch, and the guy on his face in the john was Sal Pasquini, and he’s never going to see another first pitch or anything else, ever again. Azrael put a .22 short right through his brain.
When we get up to my office, we exhaustedly sit at the two chairs in my cubicle.
“He could’ve got him right there and then,” Doc says. “He had him cold and he lets Costello go?”
“Sounds about right.”
“How can he blow a chance like this, Jimmy? He knows it isn’t likely another sweet opportunity’ll come along like this one. It makes no sense.”
“Think about how Costello feels, right about now. It won’t be the last time he pisses his own drawers. Every time he hears a noise, his bladder is going to go nuts. He’ll be in those adult diapers pretty soon. He wants to punish Costello, Doc. If he kills him the way he did the bodyguard, it’d be too quick, too merciful.”
Doc drums his fingers on the top of my desk. The hair on the crown of his head is a little wispier, a little thinner, than I remember it being before his knee operation.
“It’s just loony, letting him up when he has him dead in his sights. Things could’ve gone south for Azrael. The goombah could’ve shot him before our boy put one in his brain pan.”
“But he didn’t. He probably figured the way we did, that we had Azrael running for his life, instead of the Ranger separating us from Tommy Costello. The element of surprise, Doc. And I don’t think our soldier really cares if he’s successful or not. He’s not afraid to die.”
Doc taps his digits on my desk once again, and then he ceases abruptly.
“If he wanted to die, why didn’t he do Costello and then wait for us to take him down in a hail of bullet glory, Jimmy?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it really was to stretch it out over Costello, and maybe there’s something else that Evan Azrael has going on that wants him to borrow some more borrowed time. Who knows what’s in his head. All I know is the sooner Costello gets out of the city, the sooner you and I can sleep at night. Let the San Fran coppers worry about him.”
“Yeah, but then we lose our best chance to get the Ranger while he’s here, in our territory instead of in the Bay where we can’t get at him.”
*
I find myself whistling the Beatles’ tune “Lovely Rita Meter Maid.” The real Rita doesn’t think it’s all that funny while we’re soaping each other in her shower. She’s got her back to me, and she reaches around and holds me.
“Insistent, isn’t he?”
She releases, and then she raises her wet face to me as the water streams down and she kisses me and then turns about and takes me in hand in the appropriate direction, and she jumps up and wraps her legs around my waist, and then I’m inside her and the water seems to be pulsing in the same rhythm as we are, and then I have her against her tiled wall and I’m kissing her and we’re pressed against each other in an embrace that seems like a breathless death lock.
When she comes back down to her feet, our lips are still pressed fiercely against each other’s, and neither of us seems to want to be the first to let go.
“What if I were pregnant?” she smiles.
“Don’t play, Rita.”
“I’m just supposing. I’m not, but what if I were, Jimmy?”
“Then I’d marry you, of course.”
“To make an honest woman out of me.”
“I won’t fall into that trap, no. You’re already honest, so don’t play me, Rita.”
“Tell me you love me.”
“I already said it twenty times today. You get me in that shower or here in your bedroom—or anywhere the hell else—and I’m going to tell you the same thing. I love you, Rita.”
“Yeah, but do you really?”
I huff out a stage breath.
“I’m exasperating. Is that the word you were searching for, Jimmy?”
“Sounds like it. But I love you anyway.”
She’s on her back, but we haven’t got around to putting clothes on yet. She knows what she’s doing. When she stretches in a very feline pose, I hear the moan escape my lips.
“Jesus, don’t do that,” I protest.
“You mean this?”
And she does it again.
I bury my face in her pillows.
“I love to tease you, Jimmy.”
“I’ve noticed,” I protest into the pillows in a muffled voice.
When I lift my head, she stretches out cat-like again.
“Was it something like this?” she laughs.
“You enjoy my torment, don’t you?” I pout.
She pulls me over to her and rests my head on her breasts. I graze her patch of hair and I rest my fingertips there.
She urges her hips up toward me, and I place my head between her legs, and then I graze her upper thighs and she shivers.
“This is the ocean of time,” I say as dramatically as I can.
“What are you talking about?”
Then I lance the lips with my fingers, and she shivers again.
“This is where we all crawled out. You’re the earth mother, Rita. The mother of all the seas and rivers and oceans.”
She laughs out loud, and then I move my head and face up toward her. When I begin, she moans in a low purr, and I don’t stop until she hoists her lovely rear off the mattress and until she flops it back down when she’s finally finished.
I crawl back up toward the pillows, and then I’m spent, too. We lay there awhile, and we don’t say anything. We’ve already recited that we love each other, and I’m wondering what in the hell else I can do to show her that my words are more than words. It leaves me without speech, and I feel the emotion well up until it’s flooding and out of control.
I feel wetness on my cheeks, and the wetness is coming from me. She sees the droplets and then she gives me a face that wants to soothe me, and she takes my head in her arms and she draws me to her chest again. We lay there for a long time and all I can hear and feel is the regular drumming of her heartbeat.
*
We don’t rise out of her bed until dawn puts yellow fingers through Rita’s white curtains. My aunt is beginning to live over at my house ever since Rita invited me back, and she asks me what the hell’s going on, and I wish I had an answer for her. But Maria doesn’t seem to b
e angry or annoyed that she’s becoming a full-time sitter again because I think she sees that I’ve come alive once more, now that Easter has already passed. I’m not good at concealing happiness, even though I pride myself that I don’t display my emotions in the interview room.
The subject of Azrael never comes up between us because she’s with her new partner, and Doc and I have our own workload, just as she does. At least the Ranger isn’t the source of any anxiety that both of us have to carry.
When we get up and get dressed to go out to get breakfast together, I think about Costello and the soldier, but they pass away from me quickly, and I begin to wonder about her question about what if she were pregnant, and the query gnaws at me because I can’t help but wonder, also, if having a baby is something Rita is really considering.
She’s what they call mercurial, I know, and I also start to think about how long the fuse is on her explosion. She’s gone off on me before and left me shattered, and I don’t know if I have the will and the strength to reassemble the mess if it all comes flying apart again.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Orland Park, Illinois, 1985
I was certain that I could let go of Tommy Costello, but Greenberg told me that Tommy was a big baseball fan, a bigger Giants’ fan, and I knew that greasy dick with ears couldn’t resist going to the season’s opener with the Cubs at Wrigley, so I borrowed Diana’s VW Bug, and I drove into Chicago on a pretext of having business there, and Diana didn’t become suspicious and she let me have her car.
I thought I was going to kill him in the toilets, but I thought of Diana Kaserides, my fifty-two-year-old love, and I just couldn’t pull the trigger the second time. There was no choice with his potty-guard. Once he hoisted on me, I had to pop him.
Then Tommy Costello sported a brand new look I’d never seen on his face before—fear. I suppose terror is an original sensation for this bastard. Plenty of his victims have flashed faces like his in the john at Wrigley, but it was all new for the don, and I rather enjoyed being the cause of it.
Will I really come back and finish him? I don’t really know. I think I want to withstand another urge to kill him because Diana is with me and I’m with her, and I don’t want any other future. The cops may very well ruin that scenario of mine, but until then I want to make good with the time I have left with her.
