“You don’t need that,” you say, but Lily can only hear the sirens. “Put the gun down, Lily.”
“What if I — ”
You grab the barrel and push the slide back while twisting the Beretta upward. Trapped against the trigger guard, her index finger is pulled back painfully. Lily’s shoulder drops until the muzzle points at her face.
“What if I say no? What if you shoot me in the head? I’d still love you. Don’t you get it? I fucking worship you, Lily! You don’t need a gun with me.” As soon as she lets go of the Beretta, you twirl it around and give it back to her. Then you give her the storage locker key. “Got it?”
“I got it solid. Please, let’s go.” Lily sits back against the door and you gun the engine. She leaves the Beretta in her lap and pushes back in the passenger seat, bracing herself. No big bang boom through your temple. It would sap energy from your chivalry to point out that the Beretta is empty, so you keep that to yourself.
The Ford shoots out of the back gate and the tires squeal in protest as you twist the wheel and head toward the city. The gate’s hanging open and Freejack Jack’s car is gone. How many of The Machine’s guys got away and how many will come back? The Machine is made of a couple of hundred associates: punks, wannabes, overseers, loan sharks, bookies, regular muscle, fronts, lawyers, enforcers and the thirty-five higher-up, made soldiers. Denny’s got about the same number as the DeCavalcante crime family used to have in Jersey: about a hundred guys. The DeCavalcantes thought The Sopranos was based on them and a lot of guys thought they might be right. Denny will be a real threat once he reorganizes. Unlike the DeCavalcantes, The Machine will carry on. Now is the time to disappear.
“Why didn’t Denny kill you himself?” Lily asks.
“Old time’s sake.”
“No, really.”
“I’m on his to-do list, sure, but he’s safe up in the panic room with no gunpowder residue on his hands. When the cops show, they’ll take everybody left alive to jail, but he won’t stay there long. Jimmy’s lawyer is also Barbara’s lawyer so he’ll have high-powered legal muscle on his side. He’ll just be the big guy on crutches comforting the widow as far as the cops can prove.”
“So Denny will be after us, too? Really? Why won’t he go to jail?”
“The lawyer will just say he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, that he was Mrs. Lima’s bodyguard or something. That’s what I’d do if I were him. Play dumb. All this time…I think Big Denny was pretty good at playing dumb. Nobody knows what goes on in anybody else’s head, I guess. All this time, I thought I was the ninja.”
“So Denny’s really going to walk? That’s bad for us, Jesus.”
“He’ll limp, but yeah. The cops will know the score but they’ll call today a victory over organized crime, anyway. We kill each other and the cops pat themselves on the back for a job well done. They’ll be very happy Vincent and Jimmy Lima are dead. With Pete and Bob gone, it leaves a power vacuum, but not for long. Five minutes, maybe. The Fed’s anti-drug task force will throw a party with strippers and blow this weekend. It’s quite a week for them, but before they’re over their hangovers, The Machine will be back in business and allied with the Banda now.”
You check the rearview mirror and realize you’re making a rookie mistake. You’re speeding away from a crime scene. You ease up on the gas pedal and drive a few miles over the speed limit like a normal citizen.
“What happens next?”
“When The Machine comes back, Denny will step in and be an important guy. When he double-crossed me, he bought a truce and standing with the Banda, though maybe not as much if we have Panama Bob’s skim.”
Lily opens the glove box and finds a pack of cigarettes. She puts the Beretta in there, too, and your shoulders relax as a ladder truck and a water truck scream past, heading to Jimmy’s castle. It’s Barbara’s home now, be it ever so bombed, aflame, water-damaged and humbled.
Vincent made a classic military error: He underestimated his enemies. He didn’t pull in all his available numbers from the streets to defend his perimeter. He thought he’d get another afternoon of earning out of The Machine before the war began. It’s a common flaw: The arrogance of a smart guy who gets too comfortable. That attitude killed Vincent and it almost killed you. In The Godfather, Michael never got comfortable so he got to live, though he wiped everyone out until he ran out of friends.
In Apocalypse Now, Martin Sheen’s soldier knew that every minute he stayed in his hotel room, Charlie was getting stronger out in the jungle. You let yourself be weak. You didn’t see what was happening beyond the day-to-day bullshit. You had no idea Denny was banging Jimmy’s wife. You didn’t find a way to get out from under the shit assignment of whacking Panama Bob. Bob was right all along. Out on the ledge, hiding behind a gargoyle, Bob told you that the first thing they do in a conspiracy is kill the assassin. You let Denny get stronger while you dreamed on about the skim like a stupid lottery player. You are not a smart ninja.
“What are you thinking about?” Lily asks.
“Movies.”
“I’m thinking about my father.”
“Right. Sorry about Pete.”
“Yeah.” Lily’s quiet for a long time. “You know those prints on my wall? The Dalis?”
“The melting clocks guy and the other one?”
“Salvador Dali. The artist’s name is Salvador Dali!”
No idea why she’s so pissed, you shut up and wait, keep your gaze on the road, and keep glancing in the rearview mirror, alert for bad news.
And Lily tells you about Salvador Dali’s life. “He thought he was the reincarnation of his dead brother. He was as old as I am now when he illustrated his first book. He dressed weird and acted weird, but he could paint. People know all about the melting clocks, but before that he messed around with Cubism. He could paint anything. It didn’t have to be strange, but he had to be different. Some of his paintings are floating around with forged signatures. Dali sometimes got his chauffeur to sign his paintings for him. It made him laugh to think of rich people paying big bucks for his paintings, putting it on their walls and saying ‘There’s the master’s signature!’”
“That’s kind of a cool ‘fuck you.’”
“You’ll like this part, Jesus. Dali experimented with Bulletism.”
“He shot at a painting or something?”
“He’d shoot paint at paper and develop an image out of the ink blot.”
“Okay.”
“He even lived in his own museum! He was crazy, but genius crazy, not the regular kind of crazy like the guys in The Machine. Not like guys like you.”
You turn that over in your mind. You don’t like where this is going. “We can get away and live a different life. We can reinvent ourselves. I’ve already done it a couple of times. I started out as a swimmer, shit happened, I got in the Army, I got out — ”
“And you got into another army. You didn’t change, Jesus. Wherever you go, you’ll always drag a heavy bag of bad behind you.”
You stop at a red light and dare to look over at her for the first time. Black mascara slides down her cheeks.
“You’re a great salsa dancer, Jesus, but that’s not enough,” Lily says. “I want to be crazy like Salvador Dali. I want to live a big life, live long, and when I die, I want to inspire a bunch of bitches I never met to say they want to live like I did. If I go with you, all we’ll do is hide. I don’t want to live my life in hiding, Jesus. I want to live a big, Salvador Dali-sized life.”
You swallow hard.
She talks some more, but you aren’t really listening for the meaning of her words anymore. Instead, you listen to her soft accent, memorize the musical rise and fall of her voice and breathe in the faint hint of lavender. No matter where you go, you will always have a bottle of lavender with you as a reminder. Part of Lily will never get away.
You say, “I’ll drop you off at the locker.” You mean, “Please don’t leave.”
When she steps out of th
e car, Lily doesn’t look back.
THE MAN YOU ARE
You slip around the “Restroom Closed for Maintenance” sign and climb the steps two at a time. The Post Office’s second floor is the perfect observation post to surveil the storage locker business. You didn’t know for sure the federal agent would be there, drinking coffee and peering through a camera with a huge zoom lens, but it’s the obvious spot for a lookout. The fed wears a sweater vest over a blue buttoned-up Oxford shirt and Mom jeans. If that weren’t enough of a clue, the baseball cap that reads FBI in bright yellow stitching confirms all you need to know.
“Agent! There’s a gorgeous Latina moving in on the objective! Have you spotted her yet?”
“Wha — ?” The guy looks up and that moment of indecision between reaching for his weapon and reaching for the walkie-talkie is plenty of time to whip the Uzi out from under your trench and smack him across the face with it. He’s knocked against the wall and face down on the floor before he can get to the t in “What?”
You grab the walkie-talkie. “All units, stand by. Do not move in. Keep this channel clear. Over.”
When you handcuff his wrists, they make a satisfying ratcheting sound. You should have been a cop. In retrospect, that would have been a better career choice. Who knows? You could have been the guy on the floor with the swelling jaw.
“Nice sweater vest. What’s your name?” you ask.
He says two words. The second word is “you.” The first word is not “thank.”
You fish his ID out of the FBI jacket hanging from the camera tripod. “Agent Smith?”
“You are in for a world of trouble, mister.”
You have to chuckle. The guy sounds like a high school principal, not a supercop.
You read his home address to him off his driver’s license. That settles him down immensely. That, and saying, “Sh!” while putting your SIG to his head.
You key the walkie-talkie’s mic. “This is Smith. The Latina going for the storage locker. Do not move on her. Do not move on her. Maintain radio silence. Over.”
“That won’t work,” Smith says.
“Your name is Agent John Smith? Really? Agent Smith? I suppose it’s a common name for a white guy, but your buddies must have made a lot of Matrix jokes about you when the movie came out, huh?”
“Yeah, they did, but I haven’t heard a Matrix reference in months. Listen — ”
“Is this the part where you tell me we’re going to be besties? Let me guess: If I put the gun down, give you back your driver’s license and forget your address, we’ll go around the corner to Saluggi’s. We’ll share a pizza pie and a few laughs, right? Bad things happen to my friends, man.”
The radio crackles. “Smith? Come in?”
You key the radio and just say, “Stand by.” Thanks to Tia Marta and her insistent elocution lessons, you sound like a white guy to the FBI.
“They are going to be all over you in a minute.”
“How’d you find the locker? How long you been on this stakeout?” He doesn’t say anything until you ask, “You got a wife and kids up there in Elizabeth, New Jersey?”
“There was a body in the locker. Shot in the head.” Smith says. “It was wrapped up, but the smell still got out and the owner of the lot called the police. I’ve been on this stakeout for about a week.
So that’s what happened to Cat Fornes. Panama Bob Lima shot him. Cat was a tough guy, but nobody’s tougher than a bullet that’s worth about two bits and no amount of sit-ups makes anyone immortal. Old Bob was tougher than anyone thought.
“You the shooter?” Smith asks.
“Nah, but you can close the case with this: Big Denny De Molina did it. Take it from me. In fact, I’m here on Big Denny’s behalf, so when you start with your chasing and beating, start and end with Big Denny De Molina.”
“You still talking? Sounds like a lot of hot air,” Smith says.
You can’t help but smirk. “Yeah, I get that a lot. You need evidence. You know who Denny is because you know who Jimmy Lima is. Jimmy’s dead. Get a warrant for his records. Somewhere in the paperwork for one of his legit businesses, a property management company, is the money trail for pay that goes to Denny De Molina. He’s listed as the Assistant Super and his rent is free. Denny could break a toilet by sitting on it, but he sure wouldn’t know how to fix one. Then get a warrant for the Assistant Super’s residence, Apartment C, in the basement. There’s a big freezer that doesn’t work. You’ll find a lot of explosive residue there and some very illegal firearms. That should give ATF something to get excited about.”
“Interesting. Anything else?”
“That’ll be a good start.”
“If you’re here for him, what have you got against the guy?”
“Family feud. And I don’t want to have another family reunion any time soon.” That ought to keep everybody busy for a little while, at least.
You look through the camera. The old guy up front at the storage facility’s office is peering toward you holding a walkie-talkie. Lily thinks she’s talking her way to the storage locker and getting by on her looks and charm. The agent would let in anyone with a key to locker 408. In is easy. The trick will be getting her out.
You angle the camera and zoom in. There’s the lovely Lily. She unlocks the padlock, bends to pull the metal door and it slides up. It probably still smells bad in there. Otherwise, the Feds would have a guy in there waiting to arrest her. If you don’t do something drastic soon, the rest of Smith’s stakeout team will ignore your walkie-talkie antics and put her in cuffs. Handcuffs aren’t the sort of bracelets she’s destined to enjoy. She’s going to study art in France and Spain.
Lucky for Lily Vasquez, lover of Salvador Dali, ex-lover of the loser you have been, it’s new leaf time. You take Smith’s pistol and his FBI cap and sling the trench over the Uzi to hide it.
Lily comes out of the locker with two suitcases, one in each hand. The old agent from the booth moves toward her. You smash out the bathroom window with your elbow, stick the SIG out and fire two shots into the air. The old guy wheels and dives for cover.
Good luck, Lily.
The walkie-talkie crackles. “Johnny? What’s going on up there?”
“This is Mr. Anderson,” you say. “I have an automatic weapon pointed at Agent Smith’s head. Pull back and let the girl go or I will blow his stupid head off.”
“Anderson? Who are you?”
“Don’t you remember Mr. Anderson? Code name Neo? Keanu Reeves played me in the Matrix movies. I’m Agent Smith’s nemesis. Pull back and let the girl go with her suitcases or I will kill your man. Guaranteed. No kung fu. Just bang!”
There’s some cross chatter on the channel as the FBI crew regroups to figure out what they’re going to do. You’re hoping embarrassment will slow their response, but you’ve learned your lesson: Never underestimate the enemy. SWAT’s surely already on its way. On the other hand, SWAT will be way too late. You have no idea how many guys the FBI would spare for a stakeout like this, but not enough to set up a perimeter quickly enough.
“I should kill Agent John Smith just for his fashion sense. If you’re going to carry a gun, you can’t wear a sweater vest. Make a choice. The shirt’s okay, but I don’t know if I can forgive the pussy sweater vest.”
“Hold on!” It’s got to be the old agent pretending to be the storage locker guard. He’d have to be the senior agent on the stake out. “Don’t do anything crazy! Let’s talk about this before you do anything you can’t take back.”
“I’m already ten past crazy o’clock.” You mute the walkie-talkie and slide it under your trench just as three guys with FBI emblazoned in yellow across their backs race across the street and up the Post Office steps. They pass you without giving you a glance. In their rush to be heroes, they’re focusing on the wrong details. You empathize. You’ve done that.
Once they’re out of sight, you raise the walkie-talkie and key the mic, “Back off or I’ll kneecap your boy!”
/> Sirens wail, coming fast, but you’re already a block away by the time they figure out you aren’t in the observation post with Agent Smith.
You cross Canal street and slide up beside Lily. “The FBI will be after you. The money will be real so they have evidence but there have to be tracers in there. Grab a cab uptown and as soon as you can, get those suitcases underwater. A fountain, a bathtub, a hotel swimming pool. Whatever it takes. I’ll draw them off and stall them.”
“How’d you know that would work? I saw the guy coming toward me with his gun out as soon as I came out with the suitcases.”
“Han Solo tried to bluff the Stormtroopers when he and Luke Skywalker rescued Princess Leia from the Death Star’s jail. He tried to bluff, but Han didn’t have my gift of gab.”
“I guess not.” Her eyes are wide and shining. Before she can turn away and hail a cab, you kiss her for the last time.
As you steam away, you turn up the volume on the walkie-talkie and tell the feds if they leave the Post Office, three cars on the block will explode.
Smith answers immediately, “You son of a bitch! When I find you, you are going down so hard. We don’t believe a word you say, you fucking piece of shit liar! You can’t sucker us twice!”
“Three cars, pigs! Just like the Cutlass Supreme that exploded outside of Jimmy Lima’s house this morning in Great Neck! Three cars wired with Semtex just like that one. I’ll detonate them one at a time, killing civilians up and down this busy block. Try me, Sweater Vest! One explosion for every FBI jacket I see.”
The key to a great bluff is specifics, conviction and evidence you’ve already taken the full tour of Crazy Town. You drop the walkie-talkie into a garbage can and keep going.
When you glance back, Lily’s already in a cab, going away and getting away. Soon she’ll be just a dot on the horizon. Then less than a dot. Then just a memory.
To her, you were always and forever going to be nothing more than the salsa dancer she had fun with for a while on her way to Dali. As you head down Greene Street, you promise yourself that, as good a liar as you are, you’ll never lie to yourself again.
Bigger Than Jesus Page 19
