I turned around and saw Lynch standing petrified, his expression frozen as if he were about to scream for his life. The man he was staring at, though, wasn’t James Longo, but one of the store’s customers—a guy in his thirties, about average height and weight—and from the way he was staring at Lynch he recognized him also. The man stood maybe twenty feet away from me. An almost animalistic snarl had come over his face, and I noticed he had taken a gun out of his jacket pocket and was leveling it at Lynch.
I grabbed the closest thing to me—a thick hardcover book—and threw it tomahawk style at him, hitting him on the side of the face. The impact was enough to knock him off balance and keep him from shooting Lynch. I charged him then, throwing myself at him from about five feet away, and ended up knocking him to the floor. We grappled for a minute or so over a pile of books that had also been knocked over. He fired his gun once, but I outweighed him by a good fifty pounds and was able to get him in a submission hold and force him to let go of the gun. After that I cuffed him and dropped his gun into my coat pocket. It was a .32 caliber.
I looked up briefly to make sure Zachary Lynch was okay and hadn’t been hit by the random shot, then turned back to the suspect. Breathing hard, I told him he was under arrest for the murders of Gail Laurent and Paul Burke, then read him his rights. The man’s eyes were filled with such an intense fury that it was hard to look at him. He wasn’t paying any attention to me or Lynch, and I glanced over my shoulder to see who he was staring so intently at. It was James Longo, who stood nearby looking completely startled.
“You smug bastard,” the man swore at Longo, his voice seething with contempt.
“Do you know this person?” I asked Longo.
James Longo shook his head. “I’ve seen him in the shop over the last few weeks, but I’ve never spoken to him. I have no idea who he is.”
“If you’d read my manuscript instead of lying about it, you’d know who I was!” he yelled at Longo, his eyes shining with a mix of triumphant glee and insanity.
“I don’t know what he’s talking about,” Longo told me.
“Of course not! Because you’re a liar!” The man turned his madness to me. “I sent this lying piece of shit a manuscript I wrote. My book is beyond brilliant. I spent over three years polishing it to make it more perfect than anything he’s ever seen, and you know how this shit responds back to me: ‘Thank you for letting me see your manuscript. You have quite a handsome package here—and have done a nice job with your cover art—but unfortunately that is the only value I can find in what you sent me. I regret that I can’t offer more encouragement, but I’m afraid your work doesn’t merit it. Good luck with your efforts to find a publisher for this. Miracles do happen.’”
He was staring at me as if he had made some revelatory statement. “I don’t get it,” I told him.
“I had to prove that lying piece of shit never read my novel. And I proved it all right!”
“I still don’t get what you’re saying.”
He shifted his gloating, triumphant look back to Longo. “If he’d read my novel he would’ve known who it was killing those people.”
“How?”
He looked at me as if I was dense. “Because they were done exactly as they were in my book.”
“Let me get this straight, you murdered two people to test whether some guy in a bookstore read something you wrote?”
His expression turned extremely smug. “Four people,” he said. He glanced down at me, smiled, and added, “With a little luck, maybe five.”
James Longo muttered something about not knowing what this person was referring to. “I have so many hopeful writers sending me their manuscripts. My staff reads them and responds back,” he said. His eyes grew wide as he looked at me. “Detective Green, you’re bleeding.”
I had thought I’d pulled a muscle during the scuffle. I touched my side where it hurt and saw blood covering my fingers. That sonofabitch had shot me. With the adrenaline rush wearing off, I started to feel woozy. I asked James Longo to call 911.
They took me to the Downtown Hospital on Williams Street, which was just on the other side of City Hall Park. The guy I arrested turned out to be named Allen Cowler, and I was lucky he had switched from a .40 caliber with hollow-points to a .32; otherwise he would’ve blasted away a good chunk of me. The .32 slug went cleanly through me without causing any internal damage. According to my doctor, a quarter of an inch to the side and I would’ve been in serious trouble. It bled a lot and hurt like hell, but it was not much more than a glorified flesh wound. I probably could’ve just been stitched up and released, but the doctors wanted to keep me overnight, maybe longer, and I was groggy enough from anesthesia and the pain medication not to fight them on it. Anyway, the hospital bed was a hell of a lot more comfortable than what I’d been sleeping on at the Y.
Hennison was waiting for me when I was brought out of surgery. His eyes narrowed as he studied me, and then he told me that I deserved to take that bullet for not bringing him in on this.
“It couldn’t be helped,” I told him, my voice sounding weaker than I would’ve thought it would. “I don’t think I could’ve gotten Zachary Lynch to come with me to that bookstore if you were with me. Has Cowler said anything about James Solinski?”
“Yeah, that psycho’s proud of himself. He told us all about killing Solinski and gave us the location for another body that he claims he buried upstate. A retired cop from Trenton who stopped when Cowler was shooting those dogs. Cowler’s going to be disappointed when he hears about you. He was hoping to add another notch to his belt.”
I gave Hennison a puzzled look.
“The sonofabitch actually has four notches carved on his belt,” Hennison said.
“Did he tell you about his book?” I asked.
“Yeah, he did.” Hennison paused for a moment. “How’d you piece this together?”
I wasn’t going to tell him that I suspected Wooten and had pulled a warrant to search his shop. Instead, I told Hennison how I’d made the connection between Wooten and all three murders, and brought Zachary Lynch to the store so we could keep an eye out in case the murderer showed up. It was a white lie, but one I could live with.
Hennison chuckled at that. “That psycho sonofabitch. If he only knew that your oddball friend can’t even describe him he might’ve been able to keep his cool instead of giving himself up the way he did. You want to know why he didn’t shoot Lynch when Lynch witnessed him killing that woman?”
“He was out of bullets?”
“Nope. I gotta give that FBI profiler credit. She nailed it. Cowler couldn’t pull the trigger because his book only had one killing happening then. Fucking nutcase.”
Hennison stopped and gave me a long look. While he did this his face hardened and his lips compressed into two tight lines. “You got lucky today, Green,” he said at last.
I nodded. I was going to say something, but I felt so damned tired all of a sudden, and my eyelids started drooping shut. I guess Hennison must’ve left then. Next thing I remembered was Phillips pushing me awake. Blinking, I looked at the clock on the wall and saw that it had been three hours since I’d conked out.
“Good work, detective,” Phillips said gruffly. “You up to talking to the media?”
I took a drink of water to clear my throat and told him I was. Phillips waved to someone standing beyond the door, and the room filled up quickly with cameramen and reporters. I gave a brief statement with Phillips making sure to stand next to me so he’d be in the shots. I ended up taking questions for about ten minutes before I started drifting off again, and one of the nurses cleared the room of reporters. Right before I fell asleep, Phillips grunted something again about me doing good work but that it was damn careless of me to go to that store without backup, and that if it were up to him I’d be written up for breaking protocol. I tried to give him the finger, but I think I was too tired to lift my hand.
The next time I woke up I realized Joe Ramirez was standing next t
o my bed.
“Stan,” he said when he saw my eyes open.
“Hey, Joe.” My voice was raspy, not much more than a croak. “What time is it?”
He looked at his watch and told me it was ten past one in the morning. That didn’t make sense. He should’ve been in the middle of his shift. I woke up completely, a coolness filling my head. From the way he was looking he wasn’t there to congratulate me, and all at once it hit me what must’ve happened. A sickish feeling flooded through me as I waited for him to tell me that those fucking Russians had enacted their revenge on me by breaking into my apartment and killing Bambi while she was there all alone and helpless. Joe was having trouble getting his words out, and it was agonizing waiting for him.
“Stan,” he said finally, “there’s no easy way to tell you this. Your brother was found murdered tonight.”
I stared at him dumbly because it wasn’t what I was expecting him to say. When I finally made sense of what he was telling me, I felt myself sink into my bed, a numbness taking over my body.
“Where was Mike found?” I heard myself asking him.
“In his apartment. One or more persons had broken in. We’re not sure yet whether the motive was robbery or murder, but death was caused by blunt trauma to the back of the head. They think a hammer was used.”
“It wasn’t robbery,” I said. “Mike had nothing in that apartment.”
Joe sighed deeply and nodded. “The homicide detective working this out of Brooklyn is outside waiting. Are you up to talking to him?”
“Yeah.”
Joe brought the detective into the room. He wanted to know if Mike did drugs or had any enemies or ongoing beefs with anyone that I knew of. I told him it wasn’t anything like that, then explained about the Russians and the veiled threat they had made.
“You know who made the threat?”
“I’ll find out. It was relayed to me by a third party.”
“And this third party’s name?”
I shook my head. “If I give him to you he’ll shut down on us. I’ll talk to him. In the meantime, you know the two Russians I arrested. Talk to Organized Crime, get the name of their boss.”
“Yeah, okay, I’ll see if this leads anywhere,” he said without much enthusiasm. “Right now we’ve got nothing. It could be what you’re saying, or it could turn out to be something completely different, so don’t get yourself too worked up over these Russians, and for fucksake, don’t get yourself involved any further than talking with your friend.” He hesitated, then added, “Your brother was a fireman, right? A decorated hero? We’re going to get whoever did this, I promise you.”
I nodded and barely noticed as he left.
Chapter 25
Friday, February 18, 2005
When morning came, my doctor wanted me to stay another day, and I told him I was checking out instead.
“That’s really not advisable—”
I stopped him with a look. “My brother was murdered last night,” I said. “With tomorrow being the Sabbath, I have to make the funeral arrangements today if I’m going to bury him Sunday.”
“I see,” he muttered, clearly shaken by what I told him. He took off his glasses and wiped them slowly, buying time to collect himself. “Isn’t there any other family member who could do this?”
“No.”
He put his glasses back on and nodded solemnly. “I can’t keep you here against your will, but you’ll be putting yourself at serious risk leaving today. I have to ask that you check yourself back in at the first sign of a fever. You’ll also have to come back later as an outpatient to have your bandages changed.”
He unhooked an intravenous drip from my arm, and I gingerly swung my legs around and lowered my feet to the floor. That damn bullet wound left me feeling as if someone had shoved a lit book of matches into my side. I asked the doctor if he could write me a prescription for some heavy-duty painkillers and he handed me a prescription for Oxycontin that he’d already written out.
After he left, I got myself dressed and called Marcy. As I expected, she was too exhausted from mourning Mike each day over the last three years, and she asked if I could make the arrangements. I told her I would.
I had to go back to my apartment to get the paperwork for a family plot my dad had bought thirty years ago at Cypress Hills, and when I got there I saw that Bambi had already moved out. She’d left a note on my pillow that I was going to find myself missing her. There was a chance she was right.
That afternoon I met with Earl Buntz. He promised me that if he heard anything about what happened with Mike he’d let me know. “I’m going to be asking around about this, Stan, you’ve got my word on that. I’ll always have a soft spot in my heart for your brother. He was a great guy, and a hell of a shortstop when he was younger. He should’ve tried for the pros.”
“Those damned off-speed pitches always got him,” I said. I asked him for the name of the guy who passed that threat to him, and he gave it to me without hesitation.
“Who do these assholes work for?”
He only hesitated for a second before giving me the name Yuri Gorkin. “From what I hear he’s some sort of ultra badass who used to be a colonel in the KGB back in the day. Stan, I don’t know that these Russians had anything to do with Mike. They might not have. I promise you I’ll be looking into this, but you’ve got to stay calm in the meantime and not do anything stupid, okay?”
I grunted out that I’d watch myself and struggled for a moment to push myself to my feet. Earl told me he saw me on the news the other day. “Maybe Mike had a chance to see you also. It would’ve made him proud if he did.”
I fought back the urge to tell Earl that Mike would have had nothing to be fucking proud of me over, but I left it alone.
I drove back to Manhattan and found out what I could about Yuri Gorkin. There wasn’t much about him in the system, but there was a little. At least I knew the name of the restaurant he owned on Brighton Beach Avenue. I also found a picture of him and knew what he looked like.
When I drove back to Brooklyn, I kept driving until I found myself across the street from Gorkin’s restaurant. I sat out there for hours and watched as he walked in. I had my .38 special with me, and I thought long and hard about following Gorkin in there, but I ended up driving away. If it weren’t for Stevie and Emma, maybe I would’ve, but I had my kids to think about. I had to give the system a chance to work things out.
I didn’t plan to go Joel Cohen’s club. I wasn’t even consciously aware of it when I parked on the same block. It was only when I was walking into the place that I realized what I was up to.
As it usually was for a Friday night, the place was jam-packed and blasting some crap synthesized disco music. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the light; then I squeezed through the crowd looking for Joel. I spotted him talking to a couple of young girls at a table. They didn’t look twenty-one to me. I pushed my way to their table. Joel looked surprised to see me. He started to offer his condolences about Mike, and I held up my hand to stop him.
I took my badge out and showed it to the two girls at the table. “Let’s see some ID.” From the looks the girls exchanged with each other, I knew they were underage.
Joel started to excuse himself, and I told him to stay where he was.
One of the girls made a show of looking through her pocketbook before telling me she must’ve left it at home. The other girl just smiled at me. I picked up their drinks and sniffed them. One of them was drinking rum and coke, the other a cosmo.
“Serving alcohol to underage drinkers?” I asked Joel. “Turn around.”
“Cut the shit, Stan,” he said, smiling nervously. “You don’t work Brooklyn.”
I shoved him hard around and had to grit my teeth when I felt the stitches rip in my wound. He stumbled over, and before he could regain his balance I had his arms pulled up behind his back, cuffing him. I took a notebook and pen out and turned to the girls. They gave me their names, addresses, and real ages, a
nd I knew they were too scared to be lying to me. I growled at them to beat it. They didn’t think twice. They got up from their table and ran.
“What the fuck you doing, Stan?” Joel demanded.
“I’m arresting you for serving alcohol to customers under the legal drinking age. Now move it.”
I shoved him hard, and he stumbled forward. A path quickly cleared in front of him.
“You’re making a big mistake,” Joel said once I had him outside. I didn’t bother answering him, just kept pushing him until we got to my car. Then I had him get in the back seat.
“I had nothing to do with what happened with Mike,” he said.
I turned on the ignition and put the car in drive, then slowly pulled the car onto the road.
“This is stupid. It will take my lawyer all of five minutes to bounce these charges. Worst case, we’re talking a few thousand dollars in fines.”
He uttered the latter more as a question, being just smart enough not to offer me an outright bribe in a way that I could arrest him for it, at least not if I told the truth about what he said. I looked in the rearview mirror and could see him sweating badly. It wasn’t over him worrying about me charging him with serving alcohol to underage drinkers. At that moment he wasn’t sure whether I was taking him to a precinct or someplace quiet to put a bullet in his head. The more I looked at him the less I knew myself which it was going to be.
“Jesus, Stan,” he said, a panic creeping into his voice, “you don’t know what happened to Mike had anything to do with us.”
I didn’t answer him. If I allowed myself to, I would’ve hit the gas and kept going straight instead of turning onto Empire Boulevard. Peering in the rearview mirror I could see the relief washing over his face when I pulled into the back lot behind the Flatbush precinct. Fuck, I wish he had had a heart attack on the way over. I brought him in there and handed him to the desk sergeant for processing. After that I drove to the nearest emergency room to have my stitches redone.
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