“This is the Police. Throw the gun down and place your hands on your head. We are not going to harm you.” Santos sounded like Darth Vader doing Mickey Mouse through the megaphone.
“Fuck you!! Fuck you!!” the black man screamed, raising the gun, pumping a new shell into the chamber.
The windshield of the car behind exploded. Nick hurled himself to the ground, shards of glass dancing off his cap.
Shit!
His bowels churned with fear.
One of the women on the ground, a slim, pretty girl in her late teens, screamed. And screamed. A child was crying and a dog barked in the tenement behind them. Every sound tore at his ears, competing for his attention.
Santos crouched beside him. “You okay?”
Nick nodded.
“Hang in there. Call Control and check on the back-up.”
Nick pulled his radio from his belt, pressing the button.
The gunman resumed his litany of rage and madness.
“You can’t touch me!”
“Somebody shut him the fuck up,” muttered the middle-aged man nearest to Nick as he called Control.
“This is Car Seven, copy?”
“Control, copy. Over.”
Santos eased himself up as Nick spoke with HQ. There was no way he could reason with the guy. Probably on some kind of PCP derivative, he thought. Completely A-1 wacko, totally bugfuck. The Emergency Services Unit better get there fast or there was going to be blood all over the sidewalk. He’d been through this scenario a handful of times before and it nearly always ended the same: someone was going to get hurt and it was a miracle no one was dead or dying because the crazy son of a bitch was ready to go right over the edge. He could feel it coming.
“Throw down the gun and place your hands on your head!”
The brute responded by whirling in his direction, pumping another shell into the breach, firing instantaneously. Santos threw himself down. A loud boom was followed by an explosion as the charge hit the roof of the car and took out the other windows. The woman started screaming again. Somewhere in the distance, he thought he heard the wail of sirens and he signed with relief. Let it be over with quickly, please God.
Nick turned to Santos.
“They’re on their way. Two units and the EMS.
Santos nodded.
“You want some more, mutherfuckers?!!” the gunman bellowed. “You won’t take me! You can’t take me!”
Nick glanced around the front of the blasted Ford and saw the maniac shift his position.
Later, when he tried to put it all into perspective, he found he couldn’t remember exactly what happened next. It wasn’t like they wrote in books, where something happens and time stands still, and it certainly wasn’t like an action movie where the violence suddenly goes slo-mo and every detail stands out in stark relief. It happened so fast there was no memory because there was no conscious thought, only pure instinct, fluid movement, cause and effect.
As Nick peered around the fender, the man raised the gun, pumped the chamber, turning the barrel towards his own face. Nick brought his gun up, shifted his body weight, crouching, his two hands and the gun coming together to form the apex of a triangle as he shouted “Don’t!”, took aim and fired.
The bullet caught the giant in the right shoulder, jerking his arm as he pulled the trigger, the combined force of the slug and the shotgun’s discharge throwing him back like a spastic puppet, spinning him towards the wall of the apartment building as the blast gouged the right side of his face, stripping ebony skin to the bone, splintering an eyebrow and shaving off a strip of scalp, the bulk of the charge smashing the window directly behind his head.
Nick eased up into a standing position, ready to fire again as the man collapsed, screaming, to the sidewalk with a heavy thump.
Santos blinked, turning to Nick. The woman on the ground shrieked hysterically. The rookie’s expression was blank as he lowered his gun. The detective was stunned. The move had been so smooth, so fast he’d only just caught the whole thing: Nick shifting into the crouch, the gun coming up, the crazy black fuck turning the shotgun barrel on himself, the blossom of blood appearing on the man’s shoulder. For an instant, silence descended on the street, then was shattered as approaching sirens wailed banshee-like from down the block. Santos dropped the megaphone and ran, gun in hand, towards the downed man.
The gunman writhed on the ground, his shotgun lying near the apartment wall, his hands grabbing his face as he cried out, “Brenda!!” Santos threw a glance back at the rookie, who was starting across the street as two patrol cars and an EMS wagon came tearing up the block, lights flashing. Then the sirens cut and the silence rolled back in as the vehicles screeched to a halt.
“Thank God.”
Santos whirled, gun up, at the unexpected voice.
An old man with a bloodied face and a gigantic bruise on his left cheek stumbled out of the building entrance.
“The children. He killed the children,” the man said before slumping on the steps.
Two cops raced over from the nearest patrol car as Nick walked up to Santos, who was staring down at the black.
His face had paled beneath his tan, and the detective could see emotion welling up the rookie’s green eyes as the full consequences of his action hit home.
“The children,” the old man muttered again.
“Where?” Santos asked.
“Up there.” The man waved a finger towards the stairwell.
“Get a medic over here, now!” Santos shouted. “Stay with him,” he said to the two officers as they came to a halt. Then to Nick: “Come on.”
He turned, entering the building. Nick followed.
The stairwell reeked of piss, dope, and garbage, the walls oozing wetly in the stagnant heat. Nick and Santos took the stairs three at a time.
A door opened as they reached the second floor and a pair of nervous red eyes peered out of the gloom.
“Police! Stay in your apartment,” Santos snapped as he saw the first body. The fearful occupant slammed the door.
The corpse was an elderly woman, her spindly arms and legs akimbo as she lay sprawled at the foot of the stairs leading to the third floor. She’d taken a full blast to the chest, the force ripping open her torso like a smashed melon, exposing the shattered rib cage and punctured lungs. One brown, wrinkled breast hung on strands of tattered skin, lolling against the rent fabric of what had once been a floral print cotton dress, its pattern now deep red from the thick heart blood covering her body, the walls, the floor. Santos recoiled from the heady tang of blood and excrement that cloaked the hallway and heard Nick gag behind him.
The detective continued up the stairs, suddenly aware the rookie had stopped.
Nick stood in front of the corpse, eyes wide, and Santos was certain he saw a tremor ripple up the kid’s back.
“Come on.”
Nick looked up at him, eyes wide, his pale face sheened with sweat.
“Move.”
He started up the stairs behind Santos as the detective spied an open doorway on the next floor. In one of the other apartments a TV set droned, the sound shifting to loud canned laughter followed by a voice he recognized as Jackie Gleason’s.
The Honeymooners, he thought obliquely.
It never ceased to amaze him how, in these life and death situations, his senses went into overdrive, every little detail clamoring for his attention. A large, jagged crack in the plaster of the stairwell wall caught his eye, shifting his focus away from the TV noise. Droplets of blood ran down the dirty green paint, glistening in the strip of light spilling from the open apartment. Splashes of red flecked the cracked linoleum at the top of the steps, a macabre signpost pointing towards further tragedy.
The apartment was de rigueur tenement: fractured plaster, chipped dirty paint, worn carpet, thrift-store furniture. Santos paused in the doorway until Nick reached the top of the stairs. The door on the right led to the tiny bathroom which reeked of animal shit. A tray of soile
d kitty litter stood beneath the cracked basin. He turned to the left, his nose tensing again at the heavy scent of blood. He pushed in the door and found the children’s bedroom. Sesame Street wallpaper ran along two walls—Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch and Bert and Ernie smiling in mute impotence at the bodies of two little girls propped up on the bed. Santos let out an involuntary groan as he stepped further inside.
The girls were aged between three and five, he guessed, their hair carefully styled in corn rolls and colored barrettes, both cute as proverbial buttons—or had been until the maniac downstairs had taken a carving knife to their throats. Each one had her eyes closed, her expression peaceful, innocent as only a sleeping child looks lost in the land of dreams. Although their heads rested on their chests, he could clearly see the serrated incisions that had slit their necks from ear to ear like grotesque Cheshire Cat grins. Their clothes—one was wearing an aqua dress with Care Bears skipping through clumps of daisies; the other, older child a pink T-shirt with a ribbon bow and white panties which contrasted sharply with the ebony of her legs—were soaked with blood like someone had dipped them in a barrel of ketchup. He grabbed the wall for support and backed out of the room, colliding with Nick, pushing the rookie into the hall.
“Don’t go in there,” he managed to say before clamping his hand over his mouth as his throat flooded with bile. He swallowed it.
During his fifteen years on the force he’d seen it all: shotgun suicides, throat slashings, stab wounds by the dozens, severed limbs, putrefying bodies that had decomposed undetected in apartments until they had burst open like rotting, exotic fruit, mutilated corpses so disfigured they bore no resemblance to the human form, cranial matter spread across ceilings like globs of pale peanut butter, the ugly face of death in all its guises. But this, the brutal violation of innocence, still got to him like nothing else. Like the mangled baby in the trash compactor. Or the eight-year-old kid who got creamed by a runaway Mack truck and had been dragged half a block, the pulped, scraped body resembling nothing more than rags stuffed with raw hamburger meat.
“Don’t…ask,” he said.
Nick’s face had lost all color now, the shooting and the old woman’s corpse erasing the lines from his features, reducing his appearance to that of a young, bewildered boy.
Re-holstering his gun, Santos made his way to the bathroom to splash cold water on his face.
Feeling helpless, Nick shuffled into the kitchen, checking the rest of the apartment.
A half-eaten bowl of strawberry Jell-O lay melting on the table, dirty pots and pans stacked high in the overflowing sink. A pile of empty Bud and Thunderbird bottles sat haphazardly in the far corner. Above the slag heap of cans hung a small, red shelving unit containing items of drug paraphernalia. A bong, a clay pipe filled with marijuana ashes, several empty Crack vials, a screwed-up wad of tinfoil and a lighter.
He walked to the farthest room, the living room, as he heard Santos turn off the faucet in the bathroom. What he’d just seen didn’t prepare him for the atrocity draped over the worn, vinyl couch.
A young black woman lay twisted over the right arm, her legs dragging on the floor as if she had been kneeling before being pulled up, her torso turned to face him. Her eyes and mouth were stretched wide in silent agony, her tube-top torn open displaying vicious slash marks that angled down from her neck, over her breasts, and down to her abdomen from which a slick coil of small intestine protruded like a bolus of bubble gum. Nick’s stomach churned and he gagged. Then he saw the broken neck of a beer bottle jutting from her ruptured rectum. He doubled over, the obscenity of the violation hitting him like a heavyweight punch to his guts.
His gun slipped from his fingers. Nick threw up.
CIA HEADQUARTERS, LANGLEY, VIRGINIA.
7:03 P.M.
Del Valle poured himself a glass of cognac and sat back at his desk, returning his attention to Corvino’s file. He knew everything about his friend’s career as a soldier, mercenary, assassin, and more about Dominic, the man, than anyone else in the Company. At least as much as Corvino wanted him to know, which when you sat down and thought about it in detail—as he’d been doing for most of the day—wasn’t really a whole lot. He could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times he’d visited Corvino’s apartment; when they met outside the office, it was usually at a restaurant or on a golf course. And now, in light of the affair with Mitra and Corvino’s desire to quit, Del Valle wondered whether he knew him at all. Corvino’s confession seemed so out of character.
Spiral had been established as the cream of Covert Operations; a crack team made up of the best operatives, men whose lives no longer officially existed and could act as true shadow warriors—unseen, untraceable, anonymous, autonomous. Corvino had been ideal material.
He turned over the dossier and went back to the beginning.
NAME: Corvino, Dominic Anthony
D.O.B.: 07/09/48
PLACE OF BIRTH: Watchung, New Jersey.
PARENTS: Corvino, Michael (deceased); Molicone, Florence (deceased)
LIVING RELATIVES: None.
EDUCATION: Brandywine High School, Tarrytown, New York.
MILITARY CAREER: Enlisted New York City, 1966. Marines. Selected for Special Forces, 1971. Trained at Fort Bragg. A-Team detachment. Operations Sergeant.
ACTIVE SERVICE: Vietnam. Four tours of duty.
Del Valle skipped over the Nam details. He’d been on three of the four tours, and knew all the pertinent facts by rote.
Honorable Discharge, 1975.
FREELANCE ACTIVITY: Mercenary.
Angola 1975-1977. CIA-supported.
Mozambique 1978-79. Rhodesian CIO-financed.
Retired: 1980. Recruited, Covert Operations, 1982. Field Team Leader, SPIRAL, 1983-present.
BIOGRAPHICAL: Son of Army Corporal Michael Corvino. Died, Korea, 1952. Mother, grade school teacher, died in automobile accident, 1953. Subject raised by paternal grandmother, Sophia Corvino, Nyack, New York, until 1954 when last remaining relative died of a stroke. Subject was left alone with the undiscovered body for three days due to heavy snowfall.
Age 6. Ward of the state, St. Paul’s Orphanage, Tarrytown, New York.
Age 11. Deaths of two other wards of state: Billy Katz, Steven Richardson. Implication subject involved with deaths, though never proven.
Age 13. Subject began learning karate under the tutorship of Bernard Huston, former Captain, U.S. Army, stationed in Japan, 1948-1956.
Age 16. Awarded Black Belt.
Age 18. Enlists in Marines, encouraged by Huston. Passes all examinations within top 5 percent. Recommended for Special Forces (see Military Training).
PSYCHOLOGICAL EVALUATION: Corvino is, and has proved himself to be, perfect killing material. Due to lack of parental contact and a relationship with grandmother the subject describes as “cold,” range of primary emotional responses narrow, bordering on sociopathic with highly motivated survival instincts. Inhibiting factors of guilt, nonexistent.
Del Valle paused, taking a sip of Cognac. He tried to imagine what it must have been like for Corvino during the three days the child had been snowed in the house with the old woman’s body. He’d brought up the subject only once in conversation during their second tour of duty in Nam on a plane ride back from Saigon, saying very little but implying a secret world of childhood nightmares and buried fears. Terrors Del Valle couldn’t conceive of, although he remembered what it had felt like the first time his parents had gone away for a week without him—a week he’d spent in a gloomy old ranch outside Dallas, with an old aunt he’d met only once before and never saw again. It must have been terrifying for Dominic, trapped alone and confused in a house with only a dead woman for company. The thought tapped a primal nerve. He shuddered, returning to more pressing concerns.
Like the two million dollars missing from the house in Panama. Had Corvino killed the other Spiral members for the money? Del Valle didn’t believe it, but then two million dollars would come in handy if he wa
nted to disappear. That kind of money could buy you a new identity, a new life, and if he was ready to retire…
If that was the case, then it would have made more sense just to disappear in Panama, fleeing to some other South American country where he could arrange plastic surgery and a new set of papers.
No, it didn’t hold water as far as Del Valle was concerned. Even if Dominic had killed Lang and disposed of the body to make it look like the Englishman had run, there were too many loose ends. Corvino was too methodical to set up a situation with so many holes in it. But unless they located Lang, all they had to go on was Dominic’s report and the basic information from the Panamanian police.
He checked his watch—7:30 P.M. His day had started at 5 A.M. He should go home and eat dinner with Jeannie, relax, watch some television, try to make it an early night. Tomorrow was going to be long and complicated. Harris’ and Skolomowski’s bodies, released by the Panamanian police, were being flown in and were due to arrive at Bolling round nine. There’d be autopsy reports to go over, more data to be compiled, and a meeting with top DEA officials who weren’t happy with the fact that the two million dollars was still missing.
Del Valle replaced Corvino’s file in his safe and switched off the lights.
WASHINGTON HARBOR COMPLEX.
GEORGETOWN.
7:43 P.M.
You are the wind moving over rock.
Flow…
Dressed in black sweat pants and a white silk gi, Corvino stood in the center of an empty room. White walls, a plain wooden floor, it was his Dojo and was sacred. He alone trained there, four hours a day minimum between assignments. He stood perfectly straight, feet together, heel to heel, big toe to big toe, and exhaled. He swept his hands down gracefully from his chest, spreading his arms out into a reverse V pattern, bending his knees out as he lowered his torso, his back remaining rigidly straight.
Left foot out, knee bent at a right angle.
Wet Work: The Definitive Edition Page 8
