The Exterminator

by Peter McCurtin

  With his back against the side of the stall, Eastland watched while Pontivini zipped up his fly and ran water in the hand basin. The old man splashed cold water in his face and was reaching for a towel when Eastland clapped a hand over his mouth and pushed the needle into his neck. Carried into his body by the jugular, the drug acted almost instantaneously and the old man sank to the floor with hardly a struggle. Eastland grabbed him before he got all the way down. He propped the old man against the wall while he put the hypo in his pocket. After he got the window open—earlier he had sprayed it with graphite—he dragged Pontivini over to it. He pushed the old man out feet first and then went after him. The old man didn’t move. Eastland closed the window, picked up the old man in a fireman’s lift and started down the alley.

  He left the old man in the shadows while he went to see what was happening on Ninth Avenue. People got off a southbound bus. A faggy looking fat man drove past in a restored 1950’s convertible—and that was all. He didn’t see Dalton. He didn’t see anyone.

  Pontivini’s body was so limp that Eastland felt his neck pulse after he got him in the back of the car. The son of a bitch was all right. Before he drove off, Eastland uncapped a pint of whiskey and splashed some on Pontivini. If a cop stopped him he’d say he was taking his drunken uncle home.

  Obeying all the traffic rules in the book, Eastland went east on 14th Street, got on the East Side Drive, and went north toward the Bronx. They’d be looking for Pontivini by now and the bodyguard was going to come under a lot of suspicion. So much so that he might be dead by morning. In a little while the cops would hear about it, and they’d brace themselves for a gang war. What else could it be but the work of rival mobsters? Nobody else would have the nerve.

  It was still only nine o’clock when Eastland got to the market. The night shift didn’t go on until 2:00 a.m. That gave him five hours. Five hours to get Pontivini to talk, drive to Riverdale, find the money and get back. It was tight but he figured he could do it if the old man didn’t stall too long.

  Eastland, when he thought about it, didn’t think he would. He drove the car around to the back of the market and left it behind two huge piles of empty crates. Then he opened the back door and carried Pontivini inside. After eight years he had keys to every door in the place. He switched on the overhead lights and looked at his watch—9:10 p.m.

  On the floor the old man began to stir.

  CHAPTER 9

  While Eastland was trying to slap Pontivini awake, Dalton was getting out of his car in front of the hospital. An ambulance came screaming toward the emergency entrance as he headed for the main door. Two hospital aides ran out and opened the door of the ambulance and wheeled out a body on a stretcher covered by a bloody sheet. Dalton sighed and went in.

  The emergency room was like a madhouse, with people hurrying in all directions, but all with a purpose. In the background people not too badly injured sat in plastic chairs, crying and moaning. A fat nurse sat behind a desk with a “take a number” machine on it. An old man holding his hand against a bloodstained tee-shirt pushed the handle of the machine, got a number and looked at it, and sat down.

  Dalton went to the elevators and up to the fourth floor. There a uniformed policeman sat reading a magazine outside the intensive care unit. Dalton knew the cop by sight if not by name.

  “How’s the crazy one doing?” he asked. He remembered the cop’s name—Rivera.

  “Still crazy I guess,” Rivera said. “But he’s not dead or they would’ve told me. Be no loss if he did die.”

  “Yeah,” Dalton said.

  Paco had a room all to himself and he was barely breathing. Canvas straps kept him from falling off the bed. There was a foul smell in the room that no amount of disinfectant could disguise. Paco’s face was covered by bandages and there were plastic tubes in the holes left for his mouth and nose.

  Dalton pulled a chair close to the bed and sat down. God, he was tired and the few hours sleep he’d grabbed on a cot at the stationhouse was worse than no sleep at all. His eyes were tired, he was tired all over. He wondered how in hell he had ended up in such a stinking job. The pay was good if you figured it on a nine to five basis. But no homicide detective ever, or hardly ever, managed to work an eight-hour shift. Most of the time it was ten and twelve and fourteen hours at a time.

  After he got back from Nam he tried a lot of things: computer programming, market research, driving a taxi, tending bar. A cop who came in the bar all the time said he should take the patrolman’s exam. A young guy with his experience was throwing his life away pouring boilermakers for drunks. For lack of anything better to do, he took the exam and passed it without any trouble. In time he got to be a detective. He was a detective now and knew he could go higher but wasn’t sure he wanted to bother.

  Cheryl looked as tired as he did when she came in. Some of the weariness faded when she smiled.

  “Why didn’t you let me know you were here?” she said.

  “I knew you’d be busy.”

  “Not as busy as you are. Are all detectives as dedicated to their work, or do some of them make an effort to lead some kind of normal life? All over the world millions of people lead normal lives, but not you. Not James Dalton, detective first grade, soft in heart and hard in head, crusader for truth, justice and the American Way.”

  Dalton smiled tiredly. “What are you getting so worked up about?” He thought Cheryl was the best looking doctor on or off the TV screen. There hadn’t been doctors like that when he was a kid. For such a great looking woman, Cheryl had a terrible temper.

  “Why should I get worked up? Just because you break dates at the last minute, that’s no reason, is it. Just because you leave me standing at the theater with two tickets I practically had to sell my soul for, is no reason I should get worked up.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You’re always sorry and I’m getting sick of it.”

  “Later for you and me,” Dalton said. “How is this guy doing?”

  Cheryl’s voice turned sarcastic. “A friend of the family?”

  Dalton said, “Hey, I didn’t put him there. I’m trying to find the guy who did.”

  “I didn’t mean to say that.” Cheryl’s eyes softened.

  “That’s okay. I guess I’m not going to get much out of him.”

  Cheryl shook her head. “Not a chance in the world. He’s got rabies. All we can do is keep him under heavy sedation until he dies. You’re really worried about this, aren’t you, Jim? What makes you think this won’t be the end of it? If these three men were the ones who paralyzed Jefferson, then …”

  “They’re the ones all right. We’ve established a motive that doesn’t leave any room for doubt. Jefferson and another man had a fight with the Ghouls at the market. The other man, John Eastland, a white guy, says Jefferson beat them up with karate. I talked to this Eastland, but didn’t get much out of him. I don’t know what to think of Eastland. He and Jefferson were close friends ever since Vietnam, yet he doesn’t seem to give a damn. I take that back. He cares but he doesn’t care, if that makes any sense.”

  “Perhaps he’s just scared.”

  “I didn’t get the feeling that he was scared.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know what I mean. All I can tell you is that Eastland doesn’t seem to give a damn about anything. A lot of guys who were in Nam are like that. Sometimes I feel the same way myself.”

  “Only when you’re very tired,” Cheryl said. “I didn’t mean to add to your burden, Detective Dalton. And I’m sorry I was sarcastic.”

  “I guess we both had a long day. You hungry?”

  “Yeah. What do you have in mind?” She laughed. “We were talking about food.”

  “You want Chinese, Italian, Spanish, Greek?”

  Cheryl laughed. “I’m hungry enough to eat anything.”

  “Then how about a picnic? It’s a nice night.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Sure, why not.�
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  “This is going to be fun,” Cheryl said.

  When Gino Pontivini opened his eyes he found himself supported by chains directly above the huge meat rendering machine. He didn’t know what the machine was for, or where he was. All he knew was that he was in some kind of warehouse. Terrified and bewildered, his eyes moved up to the steel beams of the roof, then down at last to the man looking up at him. When he finally became aware of the smell of blood, he knew where he was and began to moan. He closed his eyes and opened them again and found that the nightmare hadn’t gone away.

  “Who are you?” Pontivini screamed. His voice faded away in the vast spaces of the warehouse, and for some reason that made him whisper. “I don’t know you. Why are you doing this to me?”

  Instead of answering, Eastland pressed a button in a wall plate and the huge machine roared to life. At the end of the every shift the grinding machine was scalded out with a steam hose until the stainless steel blade glittered. Forcing himself to look down, Pontivini could see the bright whirring blades below him.

  “No, no! Please don’t do that to me.” He screamed again when Eastland pressed another button and the chain unwound from the drum and Pontivini began his descent into the machine. He doubled up his legs and tried to swing from side to side as the unwinding chain brought him closer to the horror beneath him.

  Eastland stopped the machine when Pontivini’s feet were just inches from the spinning blades. He looked at his watch and it was just nine thirty. It had taken too long for the hoodlum to wake up. Now he had to make up for lost time, or the whole thing might fall apart.

  Pontivini was starting to sag against the chains that encircled his body under his arms. Eastland said: “I’ll say this once and that’s it. Try to fuck around and I’ll make hamburger out of you. First you’ll lose your feet, then the legs. You’ll go in inches at a time. The last thing to be ground up will be your head. You understand what I’m saying?”

  “I understand,” Pontivini whispered.

  “I want the keys to your house, the combination to your safe, all information on alarms and bodyguards. How much money is in the safe?”

  “Quarter of a million. Take it! Take anything, everything I own. You have my keys. I’ll tell you the right ones. The alarm key turns left instead of right. The safe is in the room behind the kitchen.”

  “What about the bodyguards and the blonde?”

  “They probably took off. By now they’re running for their life.”

  “Anything else I should know?”

  “No, no—I swear upon my mother’s grave. You got to get me down from here. Tie me up, I don’t care where you leave me.”

  Before he turned off the light, Eastland said, “Hang in there. If you’re lying, I’ll be back.”

  Across the boulevard from the hospital was a small park and they went there after Dalton bought sandwiches and Dutch beer at an all-night deli. The owner, a gaunt Israeli immigrant with wild eyes, had a pistol permit. Both pistol and permit were in plain sight: the permit in a frame, the pistol in a holster strapped around the deli owner’s waist. It was the first time Dalton bought sandwiches from a man wearing a gun.

  “How good are you with that thing?” Dalton asked him.

  “Like Wild Bill Hitchcock. I was for five years in the Israel Army.”

  “Why don’t you keep it out of sight?”

  “Well it’s like this. These bandits, they look in here and see a man wearing a gun, they know he’s wearing a gun, and a man wearing a gun probably has it loaded. So they have to make a decision: do I risk getting killed for the few dollars in the register, or do I find an easier way to rob and steal? On the other hand, if they look in here and see a man that’s not wearing a gun they’re not sure he has one and think maybe it’s worth the risk.”

  Walking back toward the park, Dalton said, “That guy is going to get himself killed.”

  “You mean they’d take on an armed man just for a few dollars?”

  “They won’t kill him for the money. They’ll kill him for the gun. Sorry I said that. We’re going on a picnic, right? So no more talk about crime and killing.”

  “I’m with you,” Cheryl said, linking her arm in his.

  In the park they settled for a place that hadn’t been worn away too badly, beside a big rock. Before they sat down, Dalton opened his jacket and unsnapped the strap that held his revolver securely in the angled belt holster. Cheryl caught him doing it and her eyes were sad for a moment.

  “There’s no getting away from it, is there?”

  “Probably not, but you have to try.”

  “All right. We’ll try as hard as we can.”

  From where they were they couldn’t see the hospital. They didn’t want to see it. Part of the boulevard was closed for repairs and there was almost no traffic. The moon was trying to shine in spite of the dirty, ragged clouds drifting across its face.

  “It’s so quiet here,” Cheryl said after they hadn’t said anything for a few minutes.

  “Yeah, it’s nice. Like Wall Street on Sunday.”

  “What do you do on Wall Street on Sunday?”

  “These days I don’t do anything. When I worked downtown I used to ride my 10-speed bike all over the place. Don’t tell a soul. I was afraid to take the bike out in traffic.”

  Cheryl reached into the bag for another sandwich. “What happened to the bike?”

  Dalton made a face. “It got stolen.”

  A high stone wall ran around all of Pontivini’s property, and there was a wrought iron gate, but it was open. Eastland drove up the long winding driveway from the street with the suburban name—Hunting Horn Avenue—and stopped when he was close to the house. So far no gatekeeper, no guards—nothing. He took the car off the driveway and left it on a path that went through the trees, and walked the rest of the way.

  There were lights in the house, and it was quiet. No dogs were chained or on the loose. For a while he stood in the shadows of the trees and watched the house. There was a single light over the front door instead of the floodlights he expected to find. Still, it was a light and he had to walk into it. For a man in hiding it would be easy to kill him when he did. Maybe he should have killed Pontivini and dumped him and taken the chance that he was telling the truth. But there always was the chance that Pontivini might have been lying, stalling for time, hoping that a watchman—someone—would find him before his abductor returned. If the old hoodlum was lying, then he’d have to be taken to another place and worked over until there was no doubt that he was telling the truth.

  Eastland ran to the front door and nothing happened. Far away a car horn sounded and the night wind rustled in the trees and that was all. He put his ear to the door and listened and there wasn’t a sound. Nothing stirred inside and when he rang the chimes of the doorbell there was no response.

  He fitted the alarm system key into the slot and turned it left instead of right. No bells sounded when he unlocked the front door and went in. The dining room was off the hall and the door to the kitchen was at the far end of it. The door to the kitchen swung back and forth no matter how it was pushed. With the Smith & Wesson magnum in his hand, he went into the light of the kitchen, and the door made no sound when he released it. The door to the other room, where Pontivini said the safe was, was open and the room was dark. He holstered the .44 and started across the kitchen. He looked down when his foot banged against something and knocked it over. It was a dog dish and there was water all over the floor. At that moment nearly two hundred pounds of horror sprang at his throat.

  By the time his hand touched the butt of the long-barreled pistol, the Doberman was already in midair. He raised his arm to protect his throat and the dog clamped its fangs on it. He yelled with pain as the force of the Doberman’s soundless attack drove him back, knocking over the kitchen table. A toaster, a blender and a cordless electric carving knife crashed to the floor. Eastland kicked the dog in the belly and broke its hold for an instant. Then it attacked again, biting h
is arm in another place, dragging him to the floor. The Doberman’s hot, sweetish breath gusted in his face, and he knew it was trying to cripple his arm so it could tear out his throat. His free arm searched frantically for something to use as a weapon. The pain ran up his arm to his brain and he wondered how long he had left.

  His fingers touched the handle of the electric knife. The dog saw the movement and sprang for the other arm. The buzzing knife came up and buried itself in the dog, cutting effortlessly through flesh and muscle. The Doberman died without making a sound.

  Eastland got to his feet on rubbery legs, his hand dripping blood, and looked for something to drink. He opened one cabinet after another until he found a bottle of brandy and took a long swallow. He took another and the pain in his arm wasn’t so bad after that. After he washed the dog bites under the hot faucet, he found a downstairs bathroom with a bottle of iodine in the cabinet. He moved his arm and no bones were broken, though they might have been scraped by the dog’s teeth. Filling the dropper with iodine, he forced it into the wounds, gritting his teeth against the pain. He didn’t know what was going to happen to the arm even with the washing and the iodine.

  There were no bandages so he wrapped the arm in clean kitchen towels, tore the last strip of towel, and went looking for the safe. The safe wasn’t there. He looked at his watch, and if he made it fast, there still was time take care of Pontivini.

  A quick search of Pontivini’s bedroom didn’t turn up any cash; there was a box of jewelry in the top drawer of a bureau. Most of the stuff was solid gold, cufflinks, tie clasps, cigarette lighters. There was an old-fashioned cigarette case that looked to be worth at least five thousand. Maybe the whole box was worth about twenty thousand. It wasn’t a quarter of a mil, it was better than nothing.

  Eastland put the box under the seat of the car and drove back to the market. The place looked the same; the lights were out. Pontivini didn’t call out to him as the lights went on. Pontivini didn’t do anything. At first he thought Pontivini had passed out from fright, but when he got closer he saw that Pontivini was dead.