“Three out of five, Charlotte. Two from behind at close range, and the third one was runnin’ right at you. You’re one hell of a shot.”
“Almost got you, too.”
“You weren’t even close.”
“I am now,” she said with a grin, moving the pistol in a small arc that centered on my chest.
“You didn’t stick around after Chick. What about the other two? Did you gloat over Teddy after you put the bullet in his back? And did you have a good look at your brother Jimmy’s brains splattered all over the pavement? Did you watch the steam rise out of them?”
“No.”
“They found him a couple of alleys from here. Did it take you that long to get your nerve up?”
“He was gonna tell Caroline.”
“And you couldn’t let him do that, could you?”
“No.”
“And Teddy?”
“He got scared. He wanted out.”
“And nobody backs out on Charlotte, right?”
“Somethin’ like that.”
“So you lured him somehow to that empty lot, lured him out of hiding with a promise of safety. A friend of yours who lived out of town, maybe.”
“Maybe.”
“And you did the same with Chick outside St. Margaret’s.”
“He wanted out, too. They had him scared. But they don’t have me scared. You said ten thousand, right?”
“That’s what Scarpetti said. So, are you ready to go?”
“Where?”
I wanted to say, “Straight to Hell,” but I didn’t. “Scarpetti’s place, in Bay Ridge.”
“You first,” she said, waving the automatic.
“Do I get my gun back?”
“No.”
“Can I put my coat on, then? It’s cold out there. Almost as cold as you, Charlotte.”
“Sure.”
I hefted my overcoat on and she followed me out the way I’d come in, keeping her little secret about the other entrance. She shut the cellar door, hid the key, and waved the gun at me again.
“What kind of a business relationship is this, Charlotte?” I needled. “We’re partners now. We gotta trust each other. Fifty-fifty. Everything straight up.” She didn’t answer, so I turned my head and gave her the kind of grin Gino says’ll get me killed one day.
I was still grinning as we emerged onto Sands Street. She had the gun in plain sight, and I had my hands high enough in the air to convince even the Barracuda Brothers that something was up.
But they weren’t there.
CHAPTER
44
The only tracks along Sands Street were still my own, and my car was the only one at the curb. No hearse. No back-up. Somehow, the one time I hadn’t wanted to lose the Barracuda Brothers, I had.
Charlotte was in a hurry. Even stalling the car twice and almost flooding the engine wasn’t enough delay. And when I finally pulled away from the curb, the once-watchful hearse was still nowhere in sight.
Charlotte sat in the front passenger seat, wedged as close to the door as she could manage, keeping herself out of reach. The two files sat in her lap, Shork’s on top. The .45 was pointed at my groin.
We drove west, because that was the quickest way to Bay Ridge, and because I hoped to double back on my own trail and find the missing Barracuda Brothers. It didn’t take long. The hearse was at the curb a couple of blocks short of the hideout. One of the brothers was pulling the jack from under the right rear wheel, and the other was putting a flat tire into the trunk.
“Jesus Christ!” I shouted, hitting the brakes hard and putting the car in a spin. As I bounded off the curb, I watched Charlotte’s hold on the gun. It was still firm. The barrel had drifted higher and was aimed just below my heart.
“What are you, crazy, Lombardi?!”
I started driving in the other direction, watching the Barracuda Brothers scramble to follow.
“Those guys’ve been tailing me, and they don’t belong to Scarpetti.”
“So, what the hell are you doing?!”
“Tryin’ to lose ’em, if you don’t mind.”
I drove straight for the Brooklyn Bridge. A siren’s mystic voice was calling to me through the blinding snow. “Come ahead, Eddie. Come to me now and put an end to bad dreams.”
I accelerated when I made a hard left onto Fulton Street. The bridge’s graceful stone arch loomed ahead, but my eyes were fixed on the steel guardrail on my right. I tried a couple of false skids, then righted the car and downshifted, hoping Charlotte would be unprepared for the next, deliberate skid that would crash her side of the car hard into the rail, knocking the gun loose, knocking her silly, or both. That was now part of the Plan.
She didn’t panic at the two diversionary skids, and I kept pretending that the Barracuda Brothers were more to be feared than she was. When I started the third skid, the brakes locked hard and the car fishtailed with maximum impact into the rail. But Charlotte didn’t drop the gun, and she didn’t hit her head on the door or sail into the windshield. When the .45 went off, the bullet passed right behind my head and took out the driver’s side window. The world went soundless in that instant, then crept back as a ringing tattoo within my pounding head.
The boom of the .45 had stunned Charlotte just long enough for me to push the door open, roll out into the snow before she could get off a better-aimed shot, and start running hard toward Manhattan. That’s not easy to do through half a foot of wet snow on only six toes, but I was giving it my best. Manhattan wasn’t my goal, but rather the catwalk below the roadway of the great bridge. The catwalk from my nightmare, where I hoped Charlotte wouldn’t try to follow.
I looked back only once to check my progress. The passenger side of the car was against the rail, and Charlotte had to slide all the way to the driver’s side door to get out. I looked anxiously for the Barracuda Brothers, but it was still just Charlotte, that .45, and Fast Eddie Lombardi running in slow motion for his life. I put my head down then and pumped my legs hard, as hard as I’d ever pumped them running high school track or up that Georgia mountain in basic training. I was doing pretty well, too, until I felt a searing pain in my left heel. The heel swung out from behind me, the torque pulling to the right, spinning me, and tipping me finally onto my right side in the snow.
The sound of it followed a split-second later, but I wasn’t sure it was a bullet until I saw the snow turning red around my left shoe. Charlotte herself seemed surprised at the result. She stood beside the car admiring her work and expecting that I wouldn’t move further.
But I did. I started again for the rail, dragging myself the first few feet, and then, after bracing my shoulder against the steel superstructure of the bridge, inching myself to my feet.
Charlotte was walking slowly through the falling snow, her coat open, breasts and hips moving in silent syncopation, the black widow preparing casually for the fatal sting. I kept my eyes riveted on her as I hooked my good leg over the side and dragged the bum one after it. If she was going to do this slowly, very slowly, I might still have a chance, unless the Barracuda Brothers were a lot more dense and inept than I’d figured them to be. She had bullets left, so nobody and nothing else was going to save me.
I’d climbed halfway to the catwalk when she reached the rail, the automatic aimed at my forehead.
“Climb back up!” she shouted, so I did, my ears still ringing. The gun drifted toward my groin, and she smiled. “I think I’ll shoot you right in the balls, Lombardi.”
“The deal’ll be off, then.”
“You never made any deal with Scarpetti that included me.”
“You’re right about that, Charlotte. Scarpetti offered me the ten grand to bring the file to him, but I never told him I would.”
“You were gonna take it to the cops?”
“That’s right.”
“Who would’ve paid… ?”
“Not a nickel. So, how does it feel to have murdered your brother and two other kids for absolutely nothing?”
“You’re still gonna take me there,” she said, pointing the gun at my head again. “To Scarpetti’s. You’re gonna take me right now, you son of a bitch!”
“Wrong again.”
“Then you’re gonna die right here.”
I took in the bridge in all its stony majesty, and suddenly I was filled with the sense of my own invincibility. I was grinning shamelessly when I said, “I’ve already died here, Charlotte. A dozen times. You’re too damned late.”
The sound of car doors slamming took her attention away from her trigger finger. The Barracuda Brothers had arrived and stopped fifty feet away in the middle of the center lane. They were standing on either side of the hearse, guns drawn.
“What the… ?” Charlotte growled as she whirled around. In the instant it took her to draw a bead on the closest of the Barracuda Brothers, I’d pulled myself up the railing far enough to grab her by the tresses of her long, black hair, and, using the rail as a fulcrum, pulled her over.
As the automatic fell silently onto the snow-covered lane, a screaming Charlotte plummeted into the freezing water of the East River a hundred and thirty-five feet below. If her body didn’t get snagged on a piling or a pier at Red Hook, the current would take it right into Upper New York Bay. Some tug pilot or barge captain would find it in the morning, after the fish had nibbled on it for breakfast. Even Paulie the Pickler wouldn’t want to play with it when they pulled it out.
CHAPTER
45
The guy in the other bed had wrapped his car around a pole on Empire Boulevard. He wasn’t talking to me, but only because his jaw was wired. We shared a nice, semiprivate room on the fourth floor at Kings County Hospital, the same floor where I’d visited Liam.
The hollow-point .45 slug had glanced off the hard rubber heel of my shoe. Only a couple of fragments had made their way into my own heel, and the doctors had dug those out. If the bullet had hit solidly, it would’ve taken off my foot.
I’d slept ten hours straight and awakened just in time to get a hypodermic in the ass and grab the nurse’s copy of the morning paper. There was no news about the Scarpetti file, only a small single-column piece about the accidental death of an apparently deranged young woman on the Brooklyn Bridge. For some reason, nineteen-year-old Charlotte Hutchinson of Sutter Avenue in Brownsville had allegedly tried to murder twenty-eight-year-old Edward Lombardi, a resident of Bensonhurst, with a gun. The woman was also believed to be the prime suspect in the recent murders of two teenagers from Brownsville and a third from East New York. The police were performing tests on the gun found at the scene of the Lombardi shooting. Results were pending.
Nick DeMassio was the first one the nurse allowed in to see me, wearing what looked like a sheepish apology on his bullish Sicilian face.
“How’s it goin’, Eddie?” he asked, nursing a half-smile. I let him fidget mindlessly with his hat before I answered.
“Got a little hot-foot.”
“The local precinct impounded your car,” he said. “Part of the crime scene.”
“Banged up much?”
“Nothin’ that can’t be fixed. I’ll take care of the repair bill.”
“Car’s insured,” I said blandly. “But thanks for the offer, anyway.”
“Sure. No problem.”
I waved the newspaper in his face. “How’d you keep the Barracuda Brothers out of it?”
“Out of what?”
“The cover-up.”
“What cover-up?”
“You never used to take me for stupid, Nick.”
“Oh, that.” A wider grin snuck out from behind DeMassio’s feigned ignorance. “Kinda hard to explain them away, and after all, they did hand over the Scarpetti file to the investigating officer, who took it straight to the D.A.’s office, where, of course, it’d been all along.”
“Of course.”
“So, no reason to drag Santini and his kids into it.”
“Kids?”
“Well…”
“The Brothers hand over anything else?”
DeMassio reached inside his overcoat and pulled out Shork’s folder. “You know what this is, maybe?” He placed it in my hand.
“It’s the reason why a certain guy murdered a blackmailing sleaze named Joe Shork.”
“And this certain guy is?”
“Not Arnold.”
DeMassio soured. “Don’t pull this shit with me again, Eddie. I been tryin’ to say I’m sorry, but I’m gonna forget about that if you hold out again.”
So I told him all of it: Jorgenson, Sissy, everything I knew but still couldn’t prove. At the end of it, I said, “I’m gonna see that Jorgenson gets this folder. The rest is up to him. And I accept your apology, Nick.”
A smile returned to the big Sicilian’s face. He turned and headed for the door, then turned back as he opened it.
“One more thing,” he said. “How exactly did this Charlotte chick end up fallin’ off the Brooklyn Bridge?”
“I think there was a strong headwind last night,” I deadpanned. “Blew straight in from Italy.”
A wind to blow ill-winds away.
“Uh huh,” he said. “I’ll make sure that’s noted in the report.”
“Hey, Nick,” I asked. “How long you think Big Dom will last with his share of the spoils once big brother Alberto gets hot-wired up at Sing Sing?”
“A month maybe.”
“A fiver says less than two weeks.”
“You’re on,” he said, and he was out the door. He poked his head back in long enough to add, “I’ll see what I can do about the Pulaski kid.”
My goombahs came that afternoon, right at the start of visiting hours, Gino in the lead. They admired me with a gallery of grins, and then Frankie took out a bottle of beer he’d smuggled past the nurse’s station. It wasn’t Schaefer. His smile was ear-to-ear.
“Get that bottled piss out of here!” was what he wanted to hear, so I didn’t disappoint him. Sal had some garlic bread, which he hid under the pillow. The five of them signed my bandage and we made small talk. Gino didn’t make any speeches, Arnold Pulaski’s name didn’t come up once, and they were gone in an hour.
I was up on crutches by midafternoon, visiting everybody on the fourth floor who was coherent.
My sisters and their idiot husbands came that evening, Dino and Letty leading the parade. Their kids were all at a neighbor’s house, probably tearing it up. I knew the usual lectures were coming from Maggie, Letty, and Fran, and I listened patiently. The few joys of detective work were minuscule next to the dangers, they said, although nobody actually used the word “minuscule.” Finally, even fat Dino chimed in: “Didn’t you have enough of this kind of thing in that 82nd Airborne outfit?”
“How many times do I hafta tell you? 101st Airborne, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, Easy company. The 82nd was for twits and sissies like you, if you’d had balls enough to join up. Got it?”
That pretty much ended the family visit. I made a few more trips up and down the ward on my crutches, getting back in time to see Watusi sitting patiently beside my bed. He was reading Marcus Aurelius again. I climbed back into bed.
“How’s the leg?” I asked at the same time he asked, “Hows your heel?” We paused, then answered each other awkwardly, “Fine.”
“I suppose I’ll have to start calling you Achilles,” he said dryly.
“It’ll sound better than ‘Gimpy.’ Doc says I might limp a little even when it’s healed.”
“Fast Eddie,” he mused.
“Sounds funnier every day, doesn’t it?”
“I received a letter from Viper yesterday,” he said after a pause. Viper was a hot-headed switchblade artist from Harlem, Watusi’s oldest friend. He’d fled to the West Coast a year and a half earlier after killing a man. The man had needed killing for a long time, but murder is still murder, and Viper was still hiding out.
“Hasn’t killed anybody out there, has he?”
“He’s met a woman, had a son by
her. Perhaps fatherhood will calm him down.”
“Like it has you?” I smiled.
He didn’t answer. “Desiree still expects you this weekend. She’s made a dress for her cat and wants to show it to you.”
“On the cat? It’s a boy cat.”
“And he clearly resents the costume. But Desiree doesn’t care about that. Only that you’re expected.”
“Til be there.”
“I have to go now,” he said, getting up. “The sitter’s fee is exorbitant.”
“Maybe we can take Desiree to a movie.”
“Eddie, I’ve told you…”
“I mean up in Harlem. One of those movies where nobody’s a… what were the categories again?”
“A domestic servant, a lackey, or a slave.”
“Exactly.”
“We’ll see,” he said, and left.
When the nurse came in to give me a shot, I asked her the question I’d thought about all day. “Is Nurse Hutchinson on duty?” She didn’t know any Nurse Hutchinson, so I said, “She’s in pediatrics.”
“I’ll see if she’s working,” she said, and left. She came back about fifteen minutes later. Yes, Nurse Hutchinson was on duty until midnight. I thanked her again, lay back and studied the ceiling for another hour. When the courage finally came to me, I slid out of bed, picked up my crutches, and limped to the elevator.
“Second floor,” I told the operator. Only two floors down. It seemed like too short and easy a distance for the penance I had to do.
CHAPTER
46
I sat on a small bench next to the elevator, just outside the pediatric ward. My heel was throbbing, but there was no way to elevate it, so I just endured the pain. It was part of the penance anyway.
I waited an hour until she appeared. She saw me as she came through the double doors and froze there in silence. I tried to smile, but it brought only an empty look. “Thank God for elevators,” I said finally. I pointed to my crutches when she didn’t seem to get it.
“Clear the door!” an attendant shouted behind her. He pushed a gurney with a wheezing child on it past her and around a corner. Caroline’s eyes followed the gurney for a moment, then looked at me without emotion, as if I were part of the furniture. It was a harder, crueler punishment than any beating.
Hot-Wired in Brooklyn Page 19
