The Forty-Two

by Ed Kurtz

  Too little, too late.

  He hoped to every god he could think of that they hadn’t already put a bullet in her brain and dumped what was left into the East River. She was weird as hell, but she had proven herself an invaluable friend. She did not deserve that.

  She did not deserve a friend like him.

  But then, if these killers were indeed so merciless why was Charley still breathing, albeit barely? A glimmer of hope for Ursula. The bumpy ride went on.

  He tried closing his eyes and sleeping the rest of the way, but it was like trying to sleep on a mechanical bull. He wondered if the car had shocks at all, the way it was bouncing. If he went everywhere by way of trunk, he couldn’t imagine a ride worse than this one.

  When the jostling finally slowed to a stop, Charley estimated an hour had passed since he woke up in there. Still, another ten minutes passed before anyone bothered to open the trunk. It was Ivo, staring down with the early morning light providing an undeserved halo around his head. Ivo frowned and recoiled with disgust when the humid stink of Charley’s puke hit him.

  “Sranje!” Ivo cried. He quickly cupped a hand over his nose and mouth. “What you do, puke in trunk?”

  “Yeah,” Charley groaned. “I puke in trunk.”

  “Sranje,” Ivo said again.

  He took several steps back and waited for Charley to climb out on his own. It took some effort, but eventually Charley’s feet touched ground and he struggled into an upright position. He could see the car now; it was Ivo’s Olds Eighty-Eight. There had not seemed to be anything wrong with the shocks when he was riding up front. Charley guessed riding in trunks was just like that.

  A bird cried overhead. He craned his neck back and scanned the sky. Nothing but bare tree branches reaching up high at the cold, gray winter sky. The Buick was parked at a fork where the road split off in two directions, both of them rough and cracked and strewn with pebbles and gravel. On all sides were naked gray oaks and dogwoods that were occasionally invaded by tall green firs and the infrequent holly. Charley strained to listen for any sign of civilization and thought he maybe heard the faraway rush of freeway traffic, but he could not be sure. For all he knew it was a stream somewhere close by; he might have been practically anywhere.

  Another man came around the side of the car, the guy with the submachine gun Ivo had failed to warn them about. The guy grinned from ear to ear. Charley brought his eyebrows into an angry point at him.

  Ivo said, “Is like camping, yes?”

  “Where’s Ursula?” Charley gruffly demanded.

  “Who, the pederchino?”

  “You know who,” he grunted. “Where is she?”

  “Not here, as you can see. Just you and us and beautiful nature is here.”

  Ivo stretched out his arms for dramatic emphasis.

  “I asked where she was, not where she wasn’t. And Eve, too. What have you bastards done with them?”

  A car door slammed shut behind him. Charley whipped around to see a neat-looking man in a gray cotton suit walking slowly toward him. The man wore a preacher’s haircut with gray at the temples and a flawless, toothy grin that looked to have paid for some dentist’s swimming pool.

  “I should be considerably more concerned about my own well being if I were you, Mr. McCormick,” the man said.

  Charley narrowed his eyes at the man, trying to place the face and the voice. He was sure he had seen that smug, self-assured face somewhere before, but his addled mind was not cooperating in the recall effort.

  “Who the hell are you?” Charley asked him.

  “A businessman,” he said. “And you’ve been going to great lengths to disrupt my business.” The man looked Charley over from head to toe. “Jesus Christ.”

  “I didn’t enjoy the ride.”

  “So I see. I must apologize that there are no facilities out here for you to get cleaned up. I’m sure Ivo must have a towel or something. Ivo?”

  The man snapped his fingers and smiled at Charley. Ivo grumbled and ducked into the Olds. He came back with an oily hand towel that he tossed to Charley.

  “Where are we?” Charley asked while he wiped patches of vomit away from his shirt and pants.

  “New Jersey,” the man said. “Never mind exactly where.”

  “You mean you had this son of a bitch cart me clear the hell out here just to knock me off? What’s wrong with killing a guy in the Bowery? Happens every day, you know. Probably no one would notice if you’d have done it in the middle of the street at noon.”

  The man gave a sardonic laugh.

  “True. The city is getting awful these days, isn’t it? Nice to get away, place like this. Fresh air. Crisp.”

  He made a show of inhaling through his nose and exhaling through his mouth. Good air in, bad air out. Charley finished wiping himself down and dropped the hand towel into a pile of dead leaves.

  “That’s some interesting accent you’ve got there,” Charley said sullenly.

  “That so?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And what’s so intriguing to you about my accent?”

  “You don’t have one.”

  The man smiled.

  “Ah. You are surprised that I am not Serbian. No, I am not closely involved with this bunch.” He jerked a thumb at Ivo and his comrade. “Like I said, I am a businessman. Not a gangster.”

  “How about a murderer? You look like you might dig stabbing a young girl in the back. You know, just for shits and giggles.”

  “You are grasping at straws, Mr. McCormick. You would make a terrible policeman.”

  “I don’t suppose I like policemen any more than you do, buddy. But I still want the same thing they do.”

  “Oh?”

  “Sure.”

  “What is it that you want, then?”

  “I want guys like you to eat shit.”

  “Guys like me,” he quietly parroted. “What sort of guy do you think I am?”

  “The kind who ought to eat shit.”

  “I see.”

  The man clasped his hands behind his back and idly wandered to the edge of the road where it met the tree line. He passed the Serbs on his way and lazily gestured at Charley with his head. The one with the PPS handed the submachine to Ivo, marched over to where Charley was standing and threw an underhanded punch into Charley’s stomach. Charley pitched forward with an anguished moan and collapsed in the road like a pile of dirty socks.

  Now Charley was gazing out of tear-filled eyes at the man’s feet at the roadside. He had shiny, expensive-looking black shoes that spun around on the heels when the man turned to face him.

  “Shoot him in the head, just once, with the revolver,” he said with all the calmness of a man ordering a hoagie sandwich. “Make sure he’s dead and drag him out into the woods. Make it fast.”

  And with that simple series of commands, the shiny, expensive-looking shoes tramped out of Charley’s field of vision. Charley whimpered and tried to roll over on his back. He made it about halfway before he got kicked in the ribs and forced to snap back into the fetal position. One of the Olds’ doors creaked open and then slammed shut. The next thing Charley knew the cold metal of the revolver’s barrel was bearing down on his cheek.

  “Sorry for you,” Ivo said. He sounded a little giddy.

  Charley squeezed his eyes shut and twisted his mouth into a frightened snarl. A loud report shattered the quiet winter air, disrupting a flock of nearby birds that now squawked and anxiously flapped their wings as they escaped to safer quarters. The blast echoed in snapping ripples of noise that cracked over and over again, traveling into the far distance beyond the forest to the north and clear across Long Island Sound to New Haven.

  And then, after a while, it was quiet again.

  Chapter 23

  Ivo staggered for a few seconds, his feet getting tangled up with one another so that he sort of looked like he was dancing. Then his eyes rolled back into his skull, and he fell forward, landing on the cracked white pavement with a th
ud. There was a squeal of tires after that and Charley’s face got flooded with an acrid exhaust smell. He was face to face with the dead Serb now; there were only a couple of feet between their noses. Ivo’s mouth hung open, displaying his yellow teeth. Two of them were broken at the grayish gum line, their remains lying on the road right in front of Charley’s eyes. Ivo’s left cheekbone was shattered, too, his face sinking into a bubbling red crater where the bullet must have entered. Charley knitted his brows at the grotesque death mask before he started working at rolling over again.

  His ribs protested the movement, particularly the fractured one that scraped against itself at the break when Charley twisted his midsection. He groaned and searched for something to focus on, something to help take his mind off the pain. What his eyes found was the other Serbian, his face a searing red avatar of fury. He was glowering at something behind Charley’s back, something that was compelling him to lay his submachine gun down on the road. Charley turned a little more, causing his ribs to scrape and burn a lot more. He stopped turning when he made out the blurry figure standing in the middle of the road, its arm raised up with some manner of handgun at its end.

  He blinked and squinted, and when that did not work he balled up his fists and rubbed his knuckles into his eyes. That did the trick, so when he opened his eyes again and refocused them on the figure he could properly determine who the gunman was.

  Eve.

  Charley gaped at her, forgetting for the time being all about the screaming pain in his side. The Serb displayed his palms to her and sneered.

  “You see?” he hissed. “No more gun.”

  Eve smiled and let out a bitter little chuckle. Then she squeezed the trigger twice in rapid succession, and the Serb collapsed at the feet of his dead compatriot. Charley jerked and scrabbled away from the two bodies, his eyes widening in terror at the blood that oozed out of the Serb’s neck and forehead. Eve finally lowered her gun arm and strode wearily over to where Charley was crumpled on the road, shaking all over.

  “You’d better get up, Charley,” she wheezed.

  Her voice was hoarse, like she’d been screaming for hours. He looked her over and noticed for the first time that her left hand was badly swollen and thoroughly bruised a deep purple. He presumed those gangsters must have worked her over, but good. He cringed and bared his teeth in pity.

  “Don’t worry about my hand,” she went on, “just get up. We don’t got a car and we’re in the middle of damn nowhere.”

  “I know,” he groaned. His ribs were working hard at reminding him of their plight. “Jersey. What is this, the Barrens?”

  “Jersey!” Eve exclaimed. “You idiot, we’re on Long Island.”

  Charley said, “Oh.” Then, “I rode here in a goddamn trunk, you know.”

  “We need to get back to a main road,” she said, ignoring his comment entirely. “The parkway isn’t too far, we can follow it down to the expressway.”

  Eve turned and began walking down the middle of the road, away from where it forked and with the gun still in her good hand.

  “So, what? We’re walking back to Manhattan?”

  “No. And who said anything about Manhattan?”

  “I just…” Charley trailed off. He was beginning to feel mightily frustrated.

  “Ridge is just west of us. I’ll find a car.”

  “Find. Right. And then?”

  “Back to Queens.”

  He sighed heavily. “Of course,” he said.

  He hustled to catch up with her. They walked for forty-five minutes together on the narrow road that sliced through the dense trees. Neither of them spoke until they reached the parkway, which they darted across like coyotes. On the other side of the parkway stood more trees, but just south of that began the outcroppings of a developing subdivision. Each house stood on a perfect square of yellow grass, some of them inhabited and some of them just being built.

  White flight, Charley thought.

  Eve crossed her lips with her index finger, gesturing for him to maintain silence, before leading the way across a couple of brown backyards into the new neighborhood. When they reached a curving street flanked by two-story homes on either side, she paused and glanced up one length of the street and then down the other.

  “What are we doing?” he whispered.

  “It’s probably only forty degrees out here,” she said.

  Charley puzzled at the apparent non sequitur. She began walking determinedly toward the bend of the street. “In the suburbs people tend to leave their cars running for a bit before they leave for work when it’s this cold.”

  Charley arched an eyebrow and nodded. Thirty seconds later, he got it.

  “Wait a minute—”

  “Shut up!” she hissed.

  He did.

  On the elbow of the street, cattycorner to the parkway behind the angular curve of allotted backyards, a station wagon with false wood paneling spewed white steam out of its exhaust pipe. Eve pointed at it and said, “There.”

  She broke into a sprint and he struggled to keep up. The faster he moved, the more vigorously his fractured rib scraped against itself. It burned under the skin and muscle, begging him to stop. But after another few paces, he made it to the station wagon’s passenger side and Eve was already behind the wheel.

  “Get in, damnit!” she shouted.

  Charley obliged, sliding into the right-side seat as she jammed the gear shaft into first. The car was already in motion before he had a chance to slam his door shut. The side-view mirror came into focus with the closing of the door, and in it he observed a bewildered man in a business suit and gray overcoat gaping from the front door of the house behind them. The poor bastard had run like hell from Brooklyn or the Bronx or wherever he was from only to watch Charley and Eve take off with his station wagon right in front of his eyes. So much for white flight.

  Eve sped back around to the parkway and then stomped on the gas. Five minutes later, they were cruising down the Long Island Expressway, bound for Queens. After they passed a sign for Yaphank, Charley finally snapped out of his open-mouthed shock.

  “How the hell did you get here, anyway?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean! What were you doing in the woods back there?”

  “Saving your life, if you didn’t notice.”

  Eve frowned and stuck out her lower lip. She looked like a six-year-old kid.

  “Okay, thanks. I thanked you, despite the fact that I’ve just been an accessory to yet another one of your mounting list of crimes. I’m grateful. But still confused.”

  Eve pursed her lips and downshifted from fourth to third and so on, gliding over to the shoulder of the expressway and slowing to a halt. Once the station wagon was stopped, she leaned back and swallowed loudly.

  “I was getting all the reels together in my apartment so I could rip them to shreds. But these Slavic sons of bitches got to me before I could do that.”

  “The ones you just…uh…”

  “Yeah. And the other guy from your friend’s pad on Staten Island, too.”

  “Marko,” Charley said. “He’s dead, too.”

  “Shit, man. Didn’t think you had it in you.”

  “I don’t. I didn’t kill him.”

  “No? Who, then?”

  “Friend of mine. The newest addition to my list of missing persons.”

  “Damn. That’s just fine,” Eve said sardonically.

  “So I take it they took all the loops, then?”

  “Naturally. And me with them. Took me up to some dump in the Bowery.”

  “That’s where they got us.”

  “Us?”

  “Me and my missing friend.”

  “Oh. Well, it wasn’t very nice. They taped me up and put cigarettes out on my goddamn arm.”

  Eve shrugged out of her denim jacket and rolled up her sleeve to exhibit the evidence of her abuse. Sure enough, her arm was dotted with small, seeping red burns from her elbow to her shoulder. Ch
arley sucked air through his clenched teeth.

  “Pretty, ain’t it? From there they were going to move on to my tits, if you can believe it.”

  “Jesus. What made them stop?”

  “I had no clue at the time, but I guess somebody tipped em off that you and your buddy were on the way. I got bundled up in a hurry and rushed out there. They put me in an even worse place across the hall and kept a big damn blade at my throat the whole time.”

  “You were just across the hall the whole time? Christ, that figures.”

  “Yeah, and I guess I rode with you to that park, too. I got a face full of chloroform or ether or something, put me out for the count. I woke up on the floorboards of that Oldsmobile.”

  Eve produced a crumpled back of menthols from her jacket pocket and stuck one between her lips.

  “I was in the trunk,” Charley said dumbly. “But there wasn’t anybody else? A…uh, girl? Blonde hair, kind of pretty?”

  “Nope. Sorry.”

  “Damnit. Goddamnit.”

  “We’ll find her, Charley.” She cracked a small, sympathetic smile and lit the cigarette.

  “How can you be sure?”

  “I’m not. But we’ll do our best, right? What else can we do?”

  “Call up Walker is what.”

  “What, that cop? Are you nuts?”

  “What’s nuts about it? People are getting killed, Eve. I finally got to you, but now Ursula’s gone. This has gotten way out of hand, you know—we ought to leave it to the professionals.”

  “Professionals,” she said with a dismissive raspberry. “The only cops I ever saw who were professional were working against people like you and me and for people like that Marko asshole.”

  Charley scowled.

  “You think Walker…?”

  “I don’t know that cat from Adam, but cops are only going to make this worse. Take my word for it.”