by Johnny Shaw
“Did you say car bomb?” the doctor asked. “Were you ever unconscious?”
“I’ll rub some butter on it.”
“There’s a difference between tough and stupid,” the doctor said. “They’re going to need me back at County. The ER was stacking up when you—when I left.”
“Don’t interrupt when the criminals are talking,” Agnes said.
The doctor nodded and sat down.
“Did I dream about being chased by monsters, or did that really happen?” Kate asked.
“A little bit of both,” Andy said.
“They killed Ben.”
“Not the monsters,” Rocco said. “But, yeah. He’s dead.”
“He was worthless at a job he didn’t want to do,” she said, “but he didn’t deserve that.”
“No, he didn’t,” Rocco said.
“Give me ten minutes to get some new civvies. I got some vengeance to burn,” Kate said. “And, Andy, quit staring at my tits.”
“The Japanese need to be told about Ben. It’s delicate,” Rocco said as he and Andy walked into the long hallway. “Something that needs to be done in person. We’ll go through Naga on the way to the safe house.”
Cemetery Joe Sullivan walked out of his holding cell ten feet in front of them. In his hand was a crushed ballpoint pen wrapped in wet toilet paper, some kind of poor man’s lock pick. He turned and saw Rocco and Andy.
“Well, this is embarrassing,” Cemetery Joe said.
Rocco went for his weapon. Cemetery Joe charged him. It was close, but Cemetery Joe won the race and got his shoulder under Rocco’s arm, forcing it up. Rocco fired into the air. The bullet disappeared into the plaster ceiling, leaving a small divot. The two men fell backward, slamming into Andy. Knocked off balance, he fell and slid along the hall floor.
By the time Andy got to his feet, Rocco and Cemetery Joe were wrestling on the ground, all arms and legs, Rocco’s gun pointing willy-nilly. They punched and grappled with their free hands. For a man in his seventies, Rocco had some fight in him, but he couldn’t keep it up against the younger man. Andy drew his weapon, but he had no clear target.
Agnes stepped into the hallway behind Andy. She held a scalpel in each hand. Not many people would respond to a gunshot with such inadequate weapons. After what Andy had seen from Agnes, he wouldn’t bet against her.
As Rocco pounded Cemetery Joe’s thighs and side with his knee, Cemetery Joe brought an elbow down onto Rocco’s neck that took most of the old man’s strength. The fight was over.
Before Agnes or Andy could intervene, Cemetery Joe had wrenched the gun away from Rocco and put it to the side of the old man’s head. They rose together, Cemetery Joe keeping an arm around Rocco’s neck.
“Don’t move,” Cemetery Joe said.
“You can live,” Agnes said. “If you put down the gun, you can live.”
“Especially you, you bald bitch. I don’t want to see a muscle twitch. You stay the hell away from me.” He looked as if he was going to cry.
“What did she do to you, Joe?” Rocco asked. “She must’ve really got to you.”
“Shut up!” he yelled. “Tell her to stay away. I’ll shoot your head off your body.”
“Stay put, Agnes,” Rocco said.
Pilar entered the hall behind Rocco and Cemetery Joe. She remained silent, moving stealthily, a knife in one hand.
“You know what, Pops? I’ve had it,” Andy said. “For an elite criminal organization, you people sure screw up a lot. The unprofessionalism is hard to bear.”
“Not really the time, son,” Rocco said.
“Do whatever you’re going to do, Joe. I’m sick of it. Yesterday I was living a normal life. Well, not normal, but you know.” Andy walked forward, keeping his gun aimed at Cemetery Joe. “And now I’m a deputy to the moron police. They never have a plan. And the endgame is to let assholes continue to control the city.”
“The preferable assholes,” Rocco said. “It’s relative.”
“Shut the hell up!” Cemetery Joe yelled. “Both of you.”
Andy kept walking forward. “Here’s the thing, Joe. I don’t care if you shoot him. Yesterday, he didn’t exist. I won’t miss him. So unless you have another threat, I’m going to do whatever the hell I want.”
“You people are crazy,” Cemetery Joe said. “I could shoot you, too.”
“You could try,” Andy said.
Pilar motioned with her hand for Andy to keep talking. She crept closer.
“Let me tell you something about your hostage.”
“I don’t want to hear it. I don’t want to hear any of it. I want a car or a boat. I want—”
Andy interrupted. “That’s my long-lost father. He abandoned me when I was born. We lived in the same city the whole time, and he didn’t contact me until he had to.”
Cemetery Joe’s eyes closed in resignation. He sighed. “There’s someone right behind me, isn’t there?”
Pilar plunged the knife into the back of Cemetery Joe’s neck, severing vertebrae and spine. The pistol fired. Rocco had leaned at enough of an angle for the shot to miss his head. His ears would ring like the aftermath of a Quiet Riot concert, but he was alive. The same could not be said for Cemetery Joe Sullivan.
Rocco slid out from under the dead man, holding one hand to the side of his face. “Thanks, son. Great job distracting him. Even I believed you didn’t care if he shot me.”
“The lies we tell,” Andy said. He stepped over the dead man and walked out the hallway.
CHAPTER 31
He dangled the bespectacled scientist off the edge of the roof. “You tell those other turkeys who put this jive bionic heart into my fine African body that Black Robot is coming for them. They gonna feel the funkadelic power of one angry cyborg brother. Can you dig it?”
—Excerpt from the men’s adventure novel Auction City Assassin, the first book in the Black Robot series by Brace Godfrey (1971)
“You know what?” Andy said. “I’m sitting the rest of this out.”
“What?” Rocco shouted. Andy couldn’t tell if Rocco’s volume was out of anger or if the old man couldn’t hear him.
Andy sat on the couch in the factory’s open area. Rocco loaded the weapons on the table into three large duffels. By the sheer volume of weaponry, it looked as if they were invading South America.
“I watched a guy get spine-stabbed,” Andy yelled. “I hurt all over. And while there was a part of me that actually cared if you got shot—and definitely if I got shot—you know what? I don’t want to play anymore.”
Rocco shook his head and pointed at his ear. “Nothing. Just ringing. Sorry. Be ready in five to hit the road.”
Kate sat down next to Andy. Her arm rested in a sling. She still didn’t have all the color back in her face, but she had plenty of fire in her eyes.
“If you want to sit this one out, we can’t stop you.”
“You’re not going to turn me over to the cops for killing Gray?” Andy asked. “You still have that hanging over my head.”
“This doesn’t work if you don’t want to be here.”
“I don’t.”
“Yes, you do,” Kate said. “This gig is perfect for you. You’re built for it. We’re offering you a great opportunity. Unlimited resources, no oversight, and access to information that you can’t even imagine.”
“Can’t enjoy any of that if I’m dead,” Andy said.
“Some danger comes with the deal,” Kate said. “I want to show you something.”
“Holy crap,” Andy said. “This place is massive.”
Overhead fluorescents lit the basement storage area, enveloping the room in a sickly glow. Dusty file boxes on steel shelves. Rows and rows that stretched the length of the factory. Everything labeled with numbers and codes, it resembled the records room in the basement of the ACPD’s Central Records, only three times the size.
“These are past cases, old news, ancient history,” Kate said. “The files upstairs, those are our active files.
We end up down here a lot, though. You’d be surprised how many things in the present have roots in the past. Auction is embroiled in its history. The people of this town love their feuds.”
“I’ll admit it. I’m a little turned on. I can see myself down here,” Andy said, opening a random box and looking at the multicolored sheets of paper and files inside. “But running around the streets, getting shot at. We were in the sewer with Merlin, the Cannibal King. That was bananas.”
“You go where the work takes you. It’s never boring.” Kate tapped a file box on a top shelf. “I stumbled on this when I was looking for something else.”
The box was labeled, “1949–1962—Melungeon Hayte River Smuggling Trade.” Andy pulled the heavy box down. He set it on the wheeled footstool in the aisle and popped off the lid.
Photographs filled the box. A picture of a young Rocco holding a swaddled baby. An older photo of Rocco, Champ, and Champ’s husband, Manny, in their twenties. The rest of the photos were of Andy. Him and Champ building a snowman. Little League games. The school play where he played Benjamin Franklin. His high school graduation. Police Academy graduation. With another cop, Hanley Woronov, at a sidewalk crime scene. The photos spanned his entire life.
While the graduation and sports photos were taken from the crowd, the others were shot from far away. Telephoto. Across the street. Behind bushes. Around corners. His life surveilled.
At the bottom was a crayon drawing that Andy knew he must have drawn but didn’t remember. A frowning, stick-figure Andy stood in front of a purple house. There was a green dog and a person who looked like a potato with legs. The only words on the paper were a scrawl that read Dad and Mom next to two potato-people floating above the rest of the scene.
“He never stopped caring about you,” Kate said.
“He never started,” Andy said. “You stay with the people you care about.”
“Not all people know how to do that,” Kate said. “Rocky’s life has been all death and loss. He wanted one piece of it to survive.”
“Since I met him, I’ve been in constant danger.”
“Proves the point,” she said. “He didn’t want you in this life, but now it’s the best place for you. Even with a few bullets flying over your head.”
Andy looked at a picture of him and Champ at Splash Gardens. He remembered that trip to the water slides vividly. The surge of water from one of those vertical pipes had jammed his shorts straight up his ass. You didn’t forget a thing like that.
“Doesn’t change a thing,” Andy said, flipping through the images in the box.
“It’s not what it changes. Not meant to change anything,” she said. “It’s what it reveals. It’s just information. Data. Do with it what you will.”
“He’s a guy I met yesterday,” Andy said.
“You might not know him, but he’s known you his whole life,” she said. “He’s your father. You’ve given him a day. And a crazy day at that. Maybe he deserves more.”
Andy picked up a photo of Champ pretending to hit a young Andy, him pretending to get hit. He tossed it back in the box, replaced the lid, and lifted it up onto the high shelf.
“He didn’t regret his decision,” Kate said, “but that didn’t make it easier on him. You were in better hands with Champ.”
“I don’t doubt that.”
“If you’re happy not having a father, then keep your distance.”
“You act like we should make plans to go fishing on Sucker Lake. Or have him teach me how to ride a bike. Toss a ball around. But his idea of a good time is running a raid on a safe house harboring dangerous escaped felons.”
“It’s his way of bonding.”
Andy got in the ice cream truck. His brief moment of rebellion had passed. The shock of seeing Cemetery Joe stabbed—while still in his mind—was tempered with the reminder that the man had tried to kill both him and Rocco.
He was ready to do battle, but he wasn’t doing it for Rocco. Or for Floodgate. Or for the city. He was doing it for himself. To learn who he was. Time to see how insane his world could get.
Andy watched Rocco drift into walls as he walked to the ice cream truck. He blamed it on the weight of the weapons bag, but Andy knew that was an excuse. His balance might have still been suspect because of his ear injury, but there wasn’t a chance in hell he was going to miss this fight.
Andy drove with Rocco navigating from the passenger seat. Pilar and Mirna took the Town & Country. Agnes followed on her motorcycle, because of course she rode a motorcycle. They would reconnoiter in Blackstreet Hollow and case the safe house.
While they attempted to neutralize the threat of the escaped convicts, Kate remained at the candy factory with the rest of Pilar’s girls. She would coordinate with Cardinal Macklin, and track the progress of his efforts to oust Hank Robinson as the new deputy commissioner and put Randall Ashley in his place. Wars weren’t always won on the battlefield. For this to end well, boardroom treaties needed to be made, and that was Macklin’s job. Until the generals negotiated the end of the war, the soldiers wouldn’t have peace.
If they could stop the three remaining guns-for-hire and Mac could work out some deal with the ACPD, they could all eat cake at the end of the day.
Driving to Naga, Andy noticed that the streets had grown emptier. With the darkness, the earnest protestors had gone indoors. Aside from a candlelight vigil they passed, the rest of the shadows were filled with the opportunists, rioters, and the angry. Both the innocent and the guilty outside on that night should expect trouble.
The good news was that Pilar’s diplomatic efforts within Consolidated seemed to work. The Wretches and other gangs had become a visible presence, policing the streets block by block and spreading the word that they were the law for the night. The process would be a slow one, but should prove effective in avoiding a citywide riot. The unrest had started with the death of the gangs’ leader. Without their endorsement, the mob would lose steam.
The news that played out in the papers and on television would tell a different story than the one Andy was seeing from behind the scenes. No matter how the day ended, the public would never know about Andy’s role in the day. It was fascinating to see the conspiracy from the inside.
The ice cream truck stopped on the edge of Naga. A line of Japanese gangsters blocked their way. A quick glance to the rooftops revealed sniper rifles and even more soldiers. Rioting wasn’t going to reach this neighborhood. Little Nagasaki was fortified.
“I’ll do the talking,” Rocco said.
“I wouldn’t know what to say anyway,” Andy replied.
Rocco got out, visibly disarmed himself of all his weapons, held his arms to the side, and approached the row of men. Andy took his cue and did the same.
The 893 crew looked more like the backup dancers for a New Wave band than a deadly army, but Andy had no desire to test them. The bright colors of their suits, the strange sunglasses, and their spiked and coifed hair were offset by the very real guns they all carried.
“Floodgate,” Rocco said.
The men kept their eyes straight ahead. They never looked in Rocco’s direction. A man stepped forward through the line of soldiers. Andy recognized him as the bouncer in lime from Ikejime. He gave Rocco a nod. The shoulders of the soldiers relaxed by a quarter-inch.
“Come with me,” the bouncer said.
The bouncer guided them through the maze of streets. Andy lost north, but he thought he could probably find his way back. He had counted seven lefts and three rights. Next time, he would bring bread crumbs.
When they had reached their destination, the bouncer opened the door to a building with no sign in a row of buildings with doors and no signs. Andy gave Rocco a questioning look. Rocco shrugged, giving him no confidence. Andy and Rocco walked inside. The door closed behind them, and they stood together in the pitch dark.
“I think I prefer monsters chasing us through the sewers to this,” Andy said. “Not even a nightlight.”
“These a
re our allies. There’s nothing to be worried about.”
When the lights turned on, Rocco’s words proved to be absolute, one hundred percent bullshit. After their eyes adjusted, they were greeted by the realization that they were surrounded by a dozen armed men. Guns pointed directly at them, some barrels only inches away. Usually something to be worried about.
Rocco spoke slowly. “The man that you entrusted into our organization, Ben Jigo, has been assassinated. For that I am sorry. The impact of one of the recent explosions. We are also aware that you suffered losses from a simultaneous attack. Our condolences to your fallen. We are on our way to stop those responsible. The war continues, and we have no desire to operate without a representative from 893. With the loss of Jigo, we request a new recruit to take his place in Floodgate.”
Nobody moved or spoke for a moment. A space formed and an old man walked into the center of the circle. Andy recognized him from the back table at Ikejime.
“My nephew? Did he die well?” the old man asked.
“Benjamin Jigo was a credit to Floodgate. His death was honorable,” Rocco said.
“It’s 1986, Colombo. We’re gangsters, not samurai. And for a criminal, you’ve got to be the worst liar I know,” the old man said. “But the lie is appreciated. I will give you a soldier. Someone more suitable to your needs. I’m beginning to see the usefulness of your team.”
“Has Macklin contacted you?”
“We will be meeting within the hour.”
Andy and Rocco left with a Japanese man in a New Orleans Saints jersey named Hiro, who the old man promised was one of their best. The guy had a permanent smile and a thick Cajun accent, and he seemed to be ready for anything.
“Are you going to show him the hobo movie?” Andy asked as the three walked back to the ice cream truck.
“You kidding me? I get to watch movies on this gig? With hobos in them? Like Emperor of the North? Love Lee Marvin,” Hiro said.
“Going to toss you in the fire,” Rocco said. “You’ll have to pick up most of it on the fly. Right now, best we can do is point you at the bad guys.”
