by Thomas Laird
“I know, but we can’t talk about that.”
“I know, Mark.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“I’m sorry. I forgot.”
“Don’t apologize. I’m making you live this crazy life. It’s not your fault.”
“I want you to come home when it’s done.”
“The minute it’s finished, I’ll be on my way. You can depend on it.”
“I don’t feel good about it. I can’t help it.”
“I understand. It’ll be all right. I’ve done this kind of thing a hundred times. I’ll be back. I promise you. And then I won’t leave you again…how’s the new one doing?”
“He’s restless.”
“He may surprise us and be a girl.”
“It’s a boy. I’m certain of it.”
“I’d love a daughter. I wouldn’t be disappointed at all.”
He could hear her sniffling.
“Don’t. You’ll make me nuts.”
But she couldn’t stop.
Then her voice came back at him composed, under control.
“We better stop talking or I’ll try to get you to turn around.”
“Okay…I’ll try to let you know when I’m on the way back.”
She told him she loved him. He told her the same. Then he hung up.
He lay down upon the king-sized bed. He didn’t take his clothes off. He figured he should eat something and then maybe take a shower before he retired for the night. If he was lucky, he might be back on the road tomorrow night. It was after six, now, and by the same time tomorrow evening he might chance it.
He couldn’t find a way to get himself off the firm mattress. He was weary. Not just tired from the icy roads and the long wait for the tow truck. Not just from the encounter with the trooper, either.
Mark decided he was tired of his life, his life as it still was. He was sick of his trade. The killing. The stalking before the killing. The whole damned thing. It was all he’d ever done since he was eighteen years old, and now he’d been at it for over a decade.
There was a time to strap it on and there was a time to hang it up.
He cursed Rossi for elongating his career, his business. If it hadn’t been for David’s murder, he wouldn’t be in this roadside motel, waiting out the weather to go ply his livelihood one more time. His trade was the trigger. What kind of life was that, after all?
There was no denying it had been what he was suited to do. He could explode a man’s head from a mile away if he had the right equipment. But he wasn’t going to be hunting someone in the bush, this time. It was going to happen in a city. There were all kinds of variables, and those variables complicated his task. It multiplied his problems. They knew he was coming. They probably figured he wasn’t giving Rossi up. Then the first two, Cabretta and Fortunato, would have been pointless. Sure, they’d done the actual murder, but it was Ben Rossi who ordered it, put everything in motion.
He was frazzled with fatigue. The old football coach with Green Bay understood fatigue perfectly—it made cowards of those who were simply worn out.
Was he wasted? Could he pull one more op effectively? Did he have one more slaying left in his trigger finger?
He knew the alternative. If he turned around and went back to Utah, eventually that Sicilian-American prick would locate them. He’d done it once, he could do it again. He had enough money to make it happen. No one knew Johansen’s location, no one but one man. Who knew how good Rossi’s intel was? You could locate and kill anybody, no matter how clever and devious they were. It was simply a matter of endurance. He didn’t know Ben Rossi, but he figured the capo had to have a very high survival instinct, so Benny Bats could never relax unless he knew Johansen was off the board, dead.
It was the way the Italian gangsters worked. Mark had encountered them long before David was suffocated and tossed into the lake like a fucking food wrapper.
The anger welled in him, but he wouldn’t give in to rage. It made you miscalculate. It affected your reason. He couldn’t have any of that if he was going after an Outfit chieftain on this murder raid. He had to be calm. He had to keep his cool, all of that.
It had to work as an operation, the kind of thing he did in Asia when he was still with that elite bunch of killers. You couldn’t let emotion override your intelligence. If you got all crazy, it was an advantage for the target, especially if he knew you were coming for him.
All those weeks of down time wouldn’t persuade Rossi that Mark was out of the scenario, out of the picture. Unless he saw a body, he’d figure Johansen was still on the way. The way Mark had carved up those two soldiers was a message to Benny Bats:
It would never end until one of them was dead.
Now it was a matter of practicality. You didn’t leave the other man standing. There was no quarter, no mercy, in this shit. The other guy stopped breathing, then it was finished.
There was a Burger King right next to the motel. And there was a pizza joint and a sub shop close by, as well.
He figured he owed himself a pie, with sausage and Canadian bacon, if they offered the Canadian bacon.
So he hauled himself off the bed, put his jacket back on, too, pulled the .22 automatic out of the duffel and stuffed it behind him into the waistband.
He walked downstairs. He never used elevators when he didn’t have to. They were too confining. There were no escape routes. Too dangerous.
He walked out of the lobby and across the parking lot into Lou’s Pizza, maybe a hundred feet away from the entry to the Super Six. The place was jammed, but there were a few booths still vacant. All the road warriors craved pizza after the adventure on the icy highway.
A teenaged girl took his order. He added a pitcher of imported German beer along with the pizza. He wasn’t driving tonight, anyway.
It was noisy in the place, but that was all right. The uproar sounded like peace to Johansen. It was civilian life, everything he’d never had until Marilyn and the kids entered his existence. He ached for her presence, for the presence of the two girls, Morgan and Elizabeth. For the child inside Marilyn, too.
Maybe it was a boy. It was too bad he’d wind up with a false ID, like all the others in Johansen’s new family. As long as they had a life together, as long as it was over with Rossi, that murdering son of a bitch, who the hell cared?
They could have a life, yet. Mark could make it happen. He could see it all in his head.
Vancouver.
He had the best phony documentation money could buy. He could outfit Marilyn and the girls with an alternate universe. He could create a world for all of them to live in. No one would find them where they were going. It was halfway out in the boonies, the place he had in mind, and they could thrive if they did everything just right. People minded their own yards and their own lives in his chunk of the Northland. It was up in the woods, but not all that far from Vancouver, the city. There were schools near enough for the kids. They weren’t moving into the fucking Yukon or into the fucking Arctic Circle, after all.
The teenaged girl couldn’t deliver the beer. A bartender plopped it on the table in Johansen’s booth, along with a tall, chilled glass mug. The teen delivered the pizza right after the pitcher arrived.
It was amazing what hope did to your appetite, Mark thought. He was never thirstier or hungrier in his life.
The beer wouldn’t inebriate him. He was damn-near immune to brew. Tequila might loosen him up a bit too much, but beer just relaxed him. He had a stopping point with any alcohol, though. He knew when to quit. One pitcher would suffice. It always did.
He took down the medium pizza in less than ten minutes. He scarfed it so fast that it scorched his palate. He washed it down with the import, and then he left a twenty on the booth’s table. He didn’t wait for the teenager to bring him the bill. The tip was likely more than she was used to.
He walked out into the still chilly night air. If the alcohol had any effect on him, the cool of the night sobered him back up. He walk
ed to the counter at the office and bought a local newspaper. It was for reading in the head in the morning.
When he got into the room, he ached again for Marilyn. He was becoming almost domestic, he mused with a faint grin.
Marilyn had charms to soothe the savage breast.
Or some shit.
He fantasized that he was a traveling salesman, out on the road, dreaming about his wife in a warm bed, back home, awaiting his return.
He wasn’t going to let Ben Rossi intrude on that fantasy.
But Benny Bats shattered the pleasant image as soon as Mark Johansen collapsed on his king-sized bedspread.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
“We tried to get a judge to wire-tap Rossi’s house in Cicero,” Lieutenant Manning told Parisi and Gibron as the three of them sat in the cafeteria in the Loop Headquarters by the lake.
“But he turned you down,” Gibron smiled sadly.
“It was a she. And yeah, she did. Cold. Stone cold. Lack of probable cause. The usual bullshit. She’s a defendant’s judge, anyway. I suppose we could try someone else.”
Manning was a medium-sized Irishman who stood out with all the Eastern Bloc types in his native Cicero. The Micks mostly lived on the southside in the city and in the ‘burbs if they could afford it. Parisi knew him slightly, and what he knew of Dave Manning he liked.
“She’s dirty,” Jimmy told the Lieutenant.
“You mean Carmen,” Manning said.
“She killed Bertelli. She had motive and opportunity. The Outfit boys know she was Bertelli’s on-the-side punch for a few years. Everybody but her old man, Benny Bats, seems to know it,” Doc offered.
“But the lady judge doesn’t know it or doesn’t seem to give a shit…I’m sorry I don’t have better news for you two,” Manning told them as he stood up.
The pair of Chicago Homicides rose and shook hands with the Cicero dick, and then Manning took off.
Parisi and Gibron sat back down in the booth. The cafeteria was deserted. It was 9:35 P.M. on a Thursday night, and they had another three hours left in their afternoons’ shift.
“Maybe the Feds’ll tap her anyway. They know more judges than our Mick buddy,” Doc suggested.
“We’ll never know. They never seem to want to share the wealth. And we can’t go at either her or Benny Bats because they’ll threaten a harassment suit against us, and the Captain is already short-tempered enough. In other words, we ain’t got dick, Doctor.”
“Succinctly put. And true, which is worse. Seems like all we do is stand by and wait for a new crime scene when one of them gets whacked. I’d prefer being a bit more proactive.”
“No word about Johansen’s brother, either. They put out APBs on the guy in all fifty states, and on David Johansen’s wife and kids, and still nothing.”
“I think the brother is a lost cause, Jimmy. He’s too slick, too sly. Maybe he gave up on working his way through Rossi’s crew. Perhaps he just wants to protect his sister-in-law and the girls. He might worry about them being all alone if he chances a run at Ben Rossi.”
Parisi took a gulp out of his Coke. They only had drinks because they’d grudgingly returned to the 95th and Cicero White Castle at seven for their dinner break. They’d also taken a pass by the Rossi compound in Cicero right after the sliders and drinks.
“It’s like watching a tidal wave come at you on the beach when you got nowhere to run. I don’t like this helpless shit.”
“We could go shoot Benny Bats ourselves,” Doc suggested.
“We could use throw-downs.”
“When fucking piggies go airborne,” Doc rejoined. “The son of a bitch isn’t worth going to jail for.”
“No, he isn’t…and what’s the Boss of Bosses up to, lately? He’s gone silent.”
“Well, hell. The beaches’ll be open around Memorial Day, and then we can scope the talent on the sand from up here. Look on the bright side.”
“I like the shoot them option better.”
Parisi looked over at his partner.
“What if we took a run at a sympathetic judge ourselves? All he could say is no. It beats sitting around with our thumbs up our asses,” Jimmy said.
“You have someone in mind?”
*
Judge Wendell Oliver was known as a hard ass and as a cop’s judge. Being an African American, Oliver had no use for the Outfit. The Italians had shit on blacks for as long as they operated in the city and in its western suburbs.
Wendell Oliver had been a superstar college basketball player at DePaul, but his busted up right knee prevented him from engaging in a professional career. He’d been a six-five shooting guard, and he averaged 27 points and 8 assists per game. He might have gone in the first round, but he took a tumble in a game against Northern Illinois University, and even the surgeon couldn’t put the pieces back together again.
The Homicides caught up with him at his lunch break in the Judge’s quarters downtown. Oliver had put on considerable weight since he was now in his mid-forties, but he looked to be a powerful and athletic man.
They sat opposite the jurist while he finished his salad.
“Got to drop thirty pounds or the doc says I’ll need surgery on the knee again.”
“You look like you could hit the court today,” Gibron smiled.
“In a wheelchair, maybe,” Wendell Oliver smiled back. “What do you two examples of Chicago’s finest desire? I know you’re not here on a social call.”
“We’re after Ben Rossi for the murder of David Johansen. I’m sure you know the case,” Jimmy explained.
“Yes. I’ve heard tell.”
“We think his wife Carmen did the deed on Joe Bertelli.”
“What’s that have to do with her old man?” the judge asked.
“Nothing,” Jimmy told him. “But we’re thinking of dismantling his crew one piece at a time, and it seems his better half is now a button-pusher for Benny Bats.”
“So you want a tap,” Oliver proffered.
“Yeah,” Doc said. “And it might be nice to have a search warrant for the premises, too.”
“And you’re looking for what, exactly?” the judge queried Gibron.
“Anything to connect her to Bertelli. The weapon was never found. She might have kept the piece. It’s an outside chance, but we’re struggling to stay afloat in this, Your Honor,” Jimmy told him.
“I could have my own ass handed to me if one of their expensive attorneys cries foul, boys.”
“We understand. But it’s desperation time,” Parisi said.
“I don’t like that word, desperate,” Wendell Oliver shot back. “Let me think about it for twenty-four. You know how much I love that mob of guttersnipes.”
The two detectives stood.
“Thanks for your time, Judge. Please let us know as soon as you can,” Parisi concluded.
They left Oliver to finish his dinner.
*
The answer was no, but it didn’t surprise Gibron or Parisi. Their argument for the wire and the warrant was tenuous at best, and both detectives knew the judge had been correct in thinking that Benny Bats’ mouthpieces would raise holy hell over probable cause and if it came to trial he’d get everything from the search or tap thrown out. There was a thing called the Bill of Rights and the Constitution, after all, and the entire foray to Wendell Oliver was a rather feeble Hail Mary pass.
Then a call came into Jimmy’s office. Parisi was alone in his cubicle when it came in. It was a state trooper from Nebraska who thought he recognized Mark Johansen from a stop he’d made on the road. Some guy had a missing brake light on his van, and the copper, named Tolson, pulled him into the parking lot at a motel just off the highway. The face didn’t register until the next day, this trooper claimed, but he assumed the man who looked like the photo in the APB looked a lot like the ex-Green Beret. He told Parisi he was ninety percent sure it was the ex-special forces shooter.
Jimmy thanked the man from Nebraska, and then he tracked down his partner
in the second- floor john downstairs. Doc was in the stall making a major transaction. They talked through the door as Doc continued to try and make said transaction.
“Jesus Christ,” Parisi complained.
“I suppose yours are odorless.”
“He’s on the way. The guy said he’d been heading east when he turned off the Interstate to stop at the motel.”
“So you figure he’s headed towards Cicero.”
“Yeah, Doc. He’s come to take care of old business.”
“Why don’t we just let him do it? Save ourselves all the trouble. Maybe he’ll shoot Carmen while he’s at it.”
“I think the gas has gone to your skull, partner. Get done in there, will you? You’re fucking killing me.”
“It’s the polish sausage I had last night when I got home. I had the munchies.”
Parisi heard the whoosh and the flush, and Doc emerged soon after.
“Now I feel all better,” Gibron smiled.
“I wish I could say the same. Let’s get the hell out of here,” he told the older detective.
“So what do we do now? Babysit Benny Bats?” Gibron demanded.
They took a walk to the Captain’s office. He was there late again. It seemed as if their jefe was pulling a lot of overtime, but the brass wasn’t on hourly anyway.
They told him about the call from the state trooper out west and how he was 90% sure the guy in the van was Johansen’s killer brother, the man who skinned Cabretta and Fortunato.
“So why would you want to impede him from doing his thing?” the Captain retorted. “Just kidding.”
His ironic look didn’t convince Parisi or Gibron that their lord and commander might be suggesting that they do something unethical, immoral, even.
“So we put a ring around asshole’s house in Cicero. Am I getting the gist of your visit?”
“Yes,” Jimmy told him. “At least we clear two homicides if we nab Johansen.”
“All we have is the word and the day after memory of this copper from Nebraska, the state where fucking whales go to die.”
“No ocean in Nebraska, Boss,” Gibron added.
“No one likes a know-it-all, Gibron,” the Captain shot back. “I suppose this is gut stuff. Intuition, no?”
