by Ted Galdi
Tommy opens it. Enters an office. Bolts to its window. He digs his hands under the blinds and slides open the pane, the summer heat on his face. Three stories to ground level. From his firefighter experience evacuating buildings, he realizes he’s too high for a jump, a broken leg likely.
About six feet to the left of the window a drainpipe runs down the strip club’s facade. That’ll work.
He raises his feet to the bottom edge of the window frame, then springs off it. He soars and clasps the pipe. His legs pendulum right, then left, then grip the metal. He maneuvers downward.
His feet reach the alley pavement. He starts sprinting away. However, a body almost twice as heavy as his tackles him from behind.
“Stay still,” the squashing man says. Tommy recognizes the voice’s owner. The bouncer with the gel in his goatee.
In under a minute a gold clown-face medallion speckled in blood sways into view. The pimp kneels next to Tommy.
“Your time with Gabby is over, bro,” the pimp says with a smirk. “And your time with me is just beginning. I hate to warn you, but my dancing isn’t as good as hers.” He laughs, then howls at the setting sun as a wolf would the moon.
Ten
Tommy can’t feel his hands. The pimp zip-tied them behind his back, tight enough to cut off circulation, before throwing him in his BMW.
The pimp idles on a street corner just outside Zona Norte, his window down. A twentyish Latino in a baggy tee shirt and shorts comes out of an apartment complex with something under his arm.
When he reaches the car, Tommy sees it’s a folded blue tarp. He and the pimp converse in Spanish. Though Tommy can’t understand the language, he can tell they’re deriding him, their eyes flicking in his direction as they sneer.
The pimp takes the tarp from his associate and drives east for about ten minutes. He parks in the driveway of a house with a brown roof, collects the tarp, and pulls Tommy out of the car.
The pimp knocks on the door. Silence beside the grate of the pimp’s teeth on a toothpick. The door opens. Standing before Tommy is a man with a boa-constrictor tattoo around his neck.
Danielle’s killer.
Tommy’s instincts tell him to attack. But he refrains. An offensive right now with tied hands would be a guarantee of his own death.
The pimp shoves Tommy into the house, then across the den. He opens a door to a boiler room. He unfolds the tarp and lays it on the floor, an ease to his motions as if he’s done this before.
A metallic clang. The gangster with the tattoo drags a chair across the house, a similar ease to him. He positions it on the tarp. The pimp grasps Tommy’s shoulders and pushes him onto the seat.
The gangster with the tattoo unsheathes from his waist a knife with a blade almost a foot tall. And Tommy deduces the tarp’s purpose. To collect the profusion of blood about to spill from him.
His breathing speeds up. If he doesn’t lie his way out of this in the next few seconds, that knife is sure to hack him into a stump.
“You a cop?” the gangster asks.
Everything Tommy knows about him is confined to Danielle’s case-file statement, his mind rushing to recollect as much as possible. Gangbangers are predators. And the only thing a predator respects is an even bigger one.
“I’ll tell you who I am,” Tommy says, impersonating the voice of an Italian mobster he grew up around in Queens. He stands, looks down on Danielle’s shorter killer, and says, “I’m your worst nightmare, douchebag.”
The two Mexicans glance at each other, squinting.
“Looking for coke at the strip club was an act,” Tommy says. “I wanted to find out where your ass was for a more important reason. I planned to roll up on you and deliver a message from my boss. Until this idiot in the leather jacket ruined my flow.”
The pimp barks something in Spanish, likely profane.
“I work for Frank Lunezzi,” Tommy tells the man with the tattoo.
“Lunezzi? I don’t know no Lunezzi.”
“You probably never heard of him because you deal in peanuts. He deals in steak. Tijuana is small. It’s scraps. Frank Lunezzi is head of one of the mafia’s five families in New York. Runs an organized-crime empire from there all the way to Cali. Call any one of your drug distributors in San Diego and ask them who my boss is. Go on.”
The gangster says nothing, his unblinking eyes surveying Tommy’s expression.
“Hello?” Tommy says. “When you got your head buzzed, did the barber shave out all the brains too?”
The gangster glares. Then removes his phone from the back-right pocket of his jeans and taps the screen as if to unlock it, his other hand steadying the knife on Tommy’s throat.
Tommy tries to appear calm as an outgoing call rings, quieting the pump of air out his nose. A voice through the phone answers in Spanish and the two converse, Tommy making out “Frank Lunezzi” though not much else.
The gangster hangs up, slips his phone back in his jeans’ pocket, and asks Tommy, “So what problem Lunezzi have with me?”
“He knows you killed those people in California the other night.”
“What people?”
“Good try. He owns all sorts of businesses he launders money through. Got security cameras on the outsides facing the street. They’re on twenty-four hours a day. One of these shops is in San Diego, less than a mile from the woods you were in.”
“I don’t know about no woods in San Diego.”
“Well, Lunezzi’s camera does. After the story broke on the news, he had some guys check out that night’s footage. Spotted an Escalade driving toward the crime scene. So clear you can even see the victims’ faces through the damn window. Not to mention a plate number. We dug into it. Tied it to a driver’s license in Mexico. Yours.”
“Bullshit.”
“Hey, believe what you want to believe. But when dealing with the Italian mafia, ignorance never means bliss.”
“Show me proof. Proof you get me on camera.”
“Show me fifty grand. That’s Lunezzi’s message. The FBI doesn’t know our tape exists. If we give it to them, they’ll have enough evidence to extradite you. Or, you give me fifty thousand dollars in cash and this all goes away.”
“Don’t threaten us,” the pimp shouts. “You have a knife to your neck. You don’t make threats. We do.”
“Sure, you can kill me,” Tommy says. “But…my crew knows I’m down here. And if I don’t make it home to New York, they have instructions to mail the video to the feds.”
The one with the tattoo says, “Show me video. On your phone.”
“It’s not on there. It’s on a thumb drive in my car. Happy to get it, upload it to the internet, then play it for you on my phone. But only if I can expect fifty large waiting for me when I come back.”
“How do we know all of this isn’t a lie?” the pimp asks. “Fine, our guy in Cali heard of Frank Lunezzi. But how can we be sure you actually work for him?”
“You can’t. But is that really a set of dice you want to roll? If I am telling the truth, and you disregard it, your buddy here will spend the rest of his life in an American prison, maybe even get the needle.”
Silence for a few seconds.
“Eleven o’clock,” the one with the tattoo says. “I have cash in safe at my business office. Meet there. Calle Toro, number eight thirty-nine. But you come with no video, I stick this knife all the way up your ass and turn it in circles.”
“If you cut these damn things off my wrists I’ll shake on it,” Tommy says.
The gangster lowers the knife from Tommy’s throat to the zip-ties and severs them. Tommy shakes his hand and says, “See you at eleven,” though has no intention of showing up.
He steps out of the boiler room, exits the house, and takes a long breath of air, a pleasure he was close to never experiencing again.
His priority was getting out of that man’s house alive. With that behind him, Tommy refocuses on his original goal. Killing him.
He glances over his
shoulder, noting in his mind the number by the door. He treads to the end of the block and glimpses the street sign, making another mental note. If he is going to kill a gangster in his own home, he’ll need the surprise factor on his side. He’ll return to this address later armed with a plan.
He begins the long walk to his car parked near the strip club, his mind evaluating options for tonight’s move.
Eleven
Tommy paces through Zona Norte’s center, only a couple more blocks to his car. The sun low in the sky, darkness descending on the city, the nightlife crowd spills into the streets. A man with a smiling-face belt buckle in front of an open doorway promises Tommy he can buy anything he needs inside for a low price. Tommy ignores him. The man repeats himself, stressing anything.
“You’re an asshole,” a different voice says over Tommy’s shoulder.
He turns to it. A Black man in his fifties. “I get that from people a lot. But usually I at least have to piss them off first. What’d I do to you, walk by too loudly? You have sensitive ears or something, man?”
“Cut the shit.”
Tommy recognizes him. The face, the voice. On the television this morning. The FBI agent at the press conference. Clyde Gabor.
“What is this?” Clyde asks. “Some vigilante thing?”
“I came down here to fight. But not how you’re envisioning. International karate tournament.” Tommy strikes a kung fu pose.
“What is that supposed to be, New York sarcasm?”
Tommy looks around, wondering how he found him. Clyde points at a four-story building and says, “My partner and I have been conducting surveillance of gang members from the motel. I spotted you from your DMV photo. Was easy. Probably thought you were really slick after you left the police station? You fooled some cops. But you won’t fool us.”
Next to Clyde is an attractive girl in her mid-twenties with green eyes and straight black hair. Tommy glimpses her, then says to Clyde, “So I lied to a receptionist. You looking to arrest me? Lying isn’t a crime last I checked.”
“No. It just makes you an asshole.”
“You seem tense. That guy back there with the weird belt buckle seems to be selling all sorts of stress-relieving goods and services, FYI. Maybe he can square you up.”
“What you did today was irresponsible. Detective Browing has a job to keep a community safe. And you hit him with some bullshit about…what was it? A man with a long beard in a bandana. You ate up more than an hour of his afternoon with a scavenger hunt through the computer for Captain Kidd lookalikes.”
“I wasn’t consciously going for a pirate motif with that description, but now that you bring it up maybe—”
“You took time away from real work on another case. A real murderer out there maybe got away because of your distraction. Did that possibility even cross your mind? Did you take a second to consider the repercussions of walking into the Homicide unit of a big-city police department and spreading nonsense all over?”
Tommy looks away. Scratches his face.
Clyde says, “Not to mention, you apparently got the receptionist’s hopes up about a date. Now she feels terrible you were just manipulating her.”
“This was…instructive. Thanks for everything. But I’ve got to get going.” Tommy slips his headphones in and walks toward his car.
Clyde steps in front of him. “I get where you’re coming from, Dapino. I have a sister too. And if something like this ever happened to her, a desire…for revenge might come over me too. But you don’t know what you’re up against. The gangsters down here aren’t like the ones back in America. They operate outside the law. They can basically do whatever they want to you without consequence. If you keep going down this path, you’re going to wind up dead.”
“You just outlined in detail the glaring level of asshole I am. Now you’re trying to convince me you have my safety in mind? Which is it?”
“Let’s talk in the motel. Someone out here could hear us. It’s dangerous.”
“Is that the reason or do you just want to get back under a fan? Those pit stains are screaming at me.”
Clyde peeks at the armpit sweat marks on his shirt. “That’s…look, it’s hot. Who cares? We have more important things to discuss.”
His partner fights back a grin. “Sorry,” she tells him.
“You busted me, Dapino,” Clyde says. “I perspire, just like everyone else. Congratulations. I’m trying to do you a favor here, trying to help you step out of this mess piling up around you.”
“You’re the one who can help me, huh?”
“That’s right.”
“I’m just some schmuck who doesn’t know what he’s doing and you, the big FBI guy, are here to show me the error in my ways and keep me safe. Is that it?”
“I wouldn’t phrase it like that. But you’re not far off.”
“Well then, big FBI guy, someone as skilled and experienced as you, a member of such a distinguished law-enforcement organization, must have my sister’s killer in custody by now. So when’s the trial date? I definitely don’t want to miss that.”
Clyde bites his lip, nodding.
“Oh,” Tommy says. “So nobody in custody yet. I suppose that’s excusable. The main suspect though, the gangster with the boa-constrictor tattoo around his neck, I’m at least assuming the FBI has some identifying information on him by now.” Tommy smirks. “Like…I don’t know…his address.” He starts playing his grunge rock and strides toward the car.
Clyde jogs up to him. Tommy pauses the music. Clyde asks, “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
Tommy shrugs, steps around him.
Clyde says, “If you have information I should know and you’re keeping it from me, you’d be obstructing a federal investigation. Not a good look for a guy with a prior. So tell me what you have before your ass ends up back in prison.”
“You know what’s not a good look? You being four days into my sister’s case and finding nothing.”
Clyde’s partner says, “We have a lot more than what’s in the San Diego Police Department’s file you stole.”
Tommy stops walking.
She says, “After we took the case over from Browing, we looked into events he didn’t. The takeaways are all documented in the FBI file. Which you don’t have.”
“What sort of takeaways?”
“Danielle didn’t die in an isolated incident. Something a lot bigger is going on here. We probably shouldn’t tell you what we’ve learned. But if you play ball with us, maybe we can trade. What we know for what you know.”
She glances at Clyde, as if for his approval. He huffs. But nods in agreement.
She asks Tommy, “So…swap?”
He holds his stare on her for a while, then laughs to himself. And runs a hand through his hair.
Twelve
Tommy leans against a wall in the FBI motel room beside a surveillance telescope on a tripod. He watches Clyde on a phone call with a federal-police contact in Mexico City. Tommy’s eyes drift to his partner, Jordana, sitting on the edge of the bed. Her legs are crossed in a fitted, pinstripe skirt, the shadows of the room bringing out the contours of her cheekbones.
Clyde hangs up and announces, “Carlos Ayala.” He claps his hands.
“So my info checked out,” Tommy says. “I held up my end of the bargain. Your turn.”
Clyde clicks the keys on a laptop. “Just pulled up the FBI file. Have at it.”
Tommy sits at the desk. Views notes on missing-persons reports and witness interviews. Soon learns his sister’s murder was part of a baffling string of attacks all over San Diego likely organized by one of the White men from the box truck.
“What was your intention with Ayala?” Clyde asks him.
“I already told you. I’m just down here for a karate tournament.”
“Well, if you were banking on using your karate skills to kill him, don’t.” Clyde lights a cigarette. “He may have pulled the trigger on Danielle. But whoever is at the top of all
this is even more responsible for her death. He ordered Ayala to pull it.”
“So what, just because Ayala has a boss, he gets a pass? To me, sounds like both of these freaks need to go down.”
“And the FBI will bring them down. We all just need to be smart about it.”
“Smart like you were the last four days?”
“Things are different now. We have a name. Because of you. Thanks, really. And I can assure you it makes our job simpler. The roadblocks we hit the last four days are gone.”
Tommy gazes out the window, the neon lights of Zona Norte bars bleeding through the curtain fabric. “Theoretically, if Ayala were to say step in front of a bus, how does that prevent you from pursuing the White guy he’s working for?”
“Nothing can prevent us from doing anything,” Jordana says. “Having Ayala around just makes strategizing easier. These crime-syndicate investigations work like chess games. We can leverage a smaller piece on the board to get closer to the big one.”
“I was specific with you guys. Told you everything that happened at the strip club and Ayala’s house. Appreciate the metaphor, but I’d prefer an actual explanation.”
Clyde replies, “Agent Quick, the Mexican police, and I will question Ayala tonight. I’ll threaten him the same way you did when you were pretending to be an Italian mobster. With extradition to the US. Except I won’t be pretending. Once he’s scared, I offer him a deal. He gives up the name of the leader, I take the death penalty off the table. Ayala still goes to trial in America. Still likely ends up in prison the rest of his life. We’ve got it from here.” Clyde opens the door as if suggesting Tommy leave. “Thanks again for the address.”
Tommy stares him down. “Don’t mention it.”
Jordana unzips a bag in the corner and pulls out a cellphone. She taps on the screen and hands it to Tommy. “This is a secure device. If you get into any trouble with Los Hombres del Vacio before you drive back to California and need help, I just put my number in the contact book. Don’t hesitate.”
He smirks. “Don’t worry. Hesitation isn’t a problem of mine.” He exits the room.
