As the minutes passed, Winuk’s thoughts drifted to his cash-flow problems. He was coming to view the problem as a blessing. He’d been jumping on any deal that came along for the past few years, had even worked briefly for a Queens’ shylock now doing forty-to-life in the Green Haven Correctional Facility. A little dope here, a jewelry store there, with maybe a hijacking thrown in for seasoning. You had to prove yourself before you collected allies, prove yourself on the street. That had taken time, even though it turned out to be easier than he expected.
Maybe those days were over, but he was still mired in the past, still jumping at every opportunity. And it was no good. He needed to organize, to delegate authority. As it was, nobody was in charge of anything and he spent most of his day improvising solutions to problems he shouldn’t have had to deal with in the first place.
No more. No further expansion until he solved—
Teddy’s thoughts were interrupted when a car, a Beamer, rolled down Newell Street, its headlights sweeping over the Impala. He glanced to the side as the car passed, just glimpsing a man with a bandage covering most of the right side of his face. A bandage the size of a racing sail that only emphasized his enormous nose.
The name popped into Teddy’s mind: Steve Ungaro, Stevie Eagle. That guess was pretty much confirmed when the BMW pulled to the curb at a fire hydrant across from the cop’s house and the headlights flicked off.
Teddy smiled to himself. Here it came, opportunity, and he was jumping at it, as he always did, going so far as to indulge himself in a little fantasy that had Ungaro killing the cop, the cops attacking Johnny Piano on all fronts, the empire destroyed, this end of Brooklyn up for grabs. A nice fantasy, but completely wrong, as it turned out. First thing, Stevie Eagle didn’t get out of the car, just sat there. Second thing, about five minutes later, a woman slipped out of a narrow alley running between two houses. She passed right in front of him, keeping low until she reached the shelter of a parked car, then dropped to one knee.
Despite the poor lighting – the nearest street lamp was three houses away – Teddy recognized her as the raven-haired woman Boots had escorted into his home. A beauty, for sure, despite the nine millimeter semi-automatic clutched in her right hand.
Teddy watched her inch down the line of cars, coming up behind Ungaro, until she again crouched, this time beside a Toyota parked almost directly across the street from the BMW. He watched the woman’s eyes and her weapon clear the hood, watched her line up the shot. A cop, for sure, and a predator to boot.
Another quick fantasy. The woman sprays Stevie Eagle’s brains all over the sidewalk, after which he, Teddy Winuk, has ultimate leverage over her and Detective Littlewood.
Teddy went so far as to take out his cell phone, his intention to record the event.
Again, it was not to be. The door to the Littlewood house opened and Detective Littlewood emerged, looking somehow bigger without his three-piece suit. Boots Littlewood wore jeans and a T-shirt and he walked straight at the BMW, coming fast, his hands empty.
A set-up.
If Ungaro made a move, if he produced a weapon, the cop’s lady friend would put a bullet through his head, all nice and neat. In New York City, cops got away with shooting unarmed teenagers. Shooting an armed gangster would draw nothing but praise.
Maybe the gangster sensed the trap. Or maybe he just lost his nerve. Either way, he drove off before Boots cleared the sidewalk on his own side of the street.
The woman rose to her full height and said something to her partner that caused him to laugh. Neither seemed overly concerned with the encounter. If Ungaro had come to intimidate, he’d failed miserably. Littlewood picked up his girlfriend, slung her over his shoulder and marched back into the house.
The show over, Teddy relaxed, again thinking he might as well head back to Sanda’s, call it a night. He was horny and he was hungry and the temperature had dropped into the forties after a relatively warm day. Still, he lingered to watch an elderly man walk a thickly muscled pit bull up and down the street.
‘No, heel. No, heel. Bad dog.’
The animal paid exactly zero attention. It was taking its master for a walk and would not be distracted.
The old man disappeared a few minutes later, leaving Teddy to contemplate the occasional passing car, lights going on and off, a flickering television in a darkened upstairs room. Some notion was tickling the back of his mind, teasing him. Something about the woman, something he’d missed because he’d been too busy staring at her ass when she crouched beside the car in front of his.
Teddy’s thoughts immediately jumped to Sanda, his crotch deaf to his commands. He felt like the old man with the dog. But Teddy wasn’t an old man and he shifted his focus back to the cop’s girlfriend after a few seconds.
Not her butt this time, though it had shown to advantage when she drew down on Stevie Eagle. Littlewood had put his life in her hands. If he’d doubted her willingness to pull the trigger and hit what she aimed at, he would never have left the house.
So?
So, if some bad thing happened to her boyfriend, she’d be inclined, and have the ability, to do something about it. Like kill Johnny Piano? A boy could only hope, hope for the prick to die, hope for the chaos to follow.
THIRTY-ONE
Take out the cop, leave the girlfriend to do her thing, without, of course, dying yourself in the process. A tall order, maybe too tall. Or so Teddy thought as he drove to Sanda’s. He was tough enough, not to mention ruthless enough, to pull it off.
But skilled enough?
That last part, about dying in the process, held no appeal. Live to fight another day seemed a lot more realistic.
He was still mulling the possibilities when he entered the apartment to find the bathroom door open and Sanda climbing out of the bathtub. She hadn’t heard him come in and he watched her towel herself dry, totally unaware of his presence. But then she glanced at him out of the corner of one green eye, her look mischievous. Sanda’s left leg was propped on the edge of the tub as she ran the towel along her inner thigh.
‘Hello, Teddy. Did you have a good day?’
‘Yeah, and I’m about to have a better night.’ Teddy walked into the bedroom, already taking off his shirt, only to find an assortment of velvet-covered restraints laid out on the comforter. He started to ask if they were for her or him, but decided he could swing either way.
Sanda came up behind him. ‘Tonight,’ she said, ‘I teach you about relationship between sex and pain.’
Teddy smiled. ‘Guess I better put on my thinking cap.’
‘Got a proposition for you,’ Teddy said.
‘What, Teddy? I have not satisfied you.’
Teddy laughed. ‘Not that kind of proposition. A business proposition.’
‘Sex is only business I know.’
‘Never too late to learn. Anyway, there’s serious money in it.’
‘Risk, too?’
‘Yeah, there’s risk.’ Teddy described the drug scene he and Shurie had set up in Jackson Heights, the locked-in retailers, the pay-in-a-week policy. ‘I’m looking for someone to manage the operation. Take orders, make delivery, collect the money. One thing you wouldn’t have to worry about, you won’t be on the buying end. You’ll pick up product at a location on the other side of Brooklyn and distribute it in Queens. We’re gonna deal in standard units, so the product will already be weighed out.’ Teddy filled his mouth again. Suddenly, he was starving. ‘I’m offering five percent off the top. You take it as you collect it. Maybe two grand a week at the start. Once we get going, it could be anything.’
Sanda didn’t respond at first, but her eyes ripped into Teddy’s. ‘Why do you do this? It cannot be for … pussy. You could have many women.’
‘Hey, Sanda, don’t make a mistake here. I never get sentimental when it comes to business. I’m offering you the position because I have a job that needs doing and I think you can do it. You’ll be working with Shurie, by the way. It’s his project. I don
’t wanna hear word one. You have a problem, you take it up with him.’
Far from convinced, Sanda shook her head. ‘First time one of your customers gets arrested, he will bring police to me. How I am to trust them?’
‘That’s the risk part, Sanda, but I did have a little one-on-one talk with our retailers. I gave each of them my lawyer’s business card, told them, “Call Mel Abzug from the precinct if you get popped. He’ll arrange bail, represent you at the arraignment, get you out if you can be gotten out. On the other hand, if you don’t make that call, and I mean from the precinct before you talk to the cops, I’ll put a bullet in the back of your fucking head. You want off the hook, better find someone besides me to put on it.”’
One more thing to do before Teddy settled down with a beer to watch a little late-night TV. Sanda was already asleep.
‘You home?’ he asked Shurie.
‘Yeah.’
‘You alone?’
‘Just me, my mom and my five brothers and sisters.’
‘You don’t think it’s time you got your own place?’
Shurie’s sigh emptied his lungs. ‘C’mon, Teddy, don’t bust my balls.’
‘All right, you remember you told me about this tracking device, it’s like as big as a pack of cigarettes and attaches with a magnet?’
‘Yeah, you can buy ’em for a couple of hundred bucks.’
‘You still have it?’
‘Yeah, sure.’
‘What I want you to do, Shurie, is bring the device to me in Brooklyn.’ Teddy rattled off Sanda’s address. ‘And bring me whatever software I need to make it work.’
THIRTY-TWO
Better. That’s how Corry Frisk described her condition to herself on Wednesday morning, four days after the assault. Better physically and better mentally, proof being that she now had a word for what happened to her. She’d been obliterated.
Corry’s brother, Tommy, had supplied the word. Inadvertently, of course. Tommy never seemed to do anything deliberately except strip and clean his guns, sometimes twice a day. Anyhow, they were in Tommy’s little apartment – it had to be about three o’clock in the morning – when Tommy described an assault his platoon fended off in Helmand Province outside of a city called Lashkar Gah. The unit battled a numerically superior enemy for nearly an hour until a pair of helicopter gunships made an appearance, whereupon the enemy disengaged. Eight men, including Tommy’s best buddy, died in the fight, while another fifteen were wounded. Twenty-three casualties out of twenty-eight men. They were obliterated.
‘I thought I was a done dog. Like a video of my body dragged over the desert would surface on YouTube. Check out the dead soldier. And the funny thing, there’s times – I swear, Corry – when I think I did die and this is the afterlife. I mean, when there’s so many bullets snappin’ past your head, you just figure somebody’s callin’ your name.’
So, she was obliterated and now she was feeling better, which was natural. Bodies heal. Minds are another thing. There was no restore button on the computer inside her skull and Corry believed that she’d never get well, not in her mind. Any more than Tommy would get well in his. Which is not to say that anyone gave a shit. No, sink or swim, they were on their own.
‘Are you gonna do this?’ Tommy asked from the front of the gypsy cab he drove whenever he was stable enough to face the world.
‘I’m workin’ up to it, Tommy.’
There was no going back to the streets. That was the first thing she had to face. Hooker time was over. Just the thought of sliding into a stranger’s car filled her with a disorienting fear, as if she’d stumbled and fallen over the edge of a cliff. Like the ground was rushing up to meet her.
By her own reckoning, Corry needed time. Time and space, which her brother also needed. If they were there for the taking, she would already have grabbed them both. Unfortunately, time and space were for sale, pay the price and no freebies allowed.
Tommy’s eight-hundred-dollar government disability check, even supplemented by his cab driving, wasn’t enough to maintain the status quo. Not given her unfortunate dependency. Tommy hadn’t asked her to contribute, but that would eventually come. And what would she do? With two prostitution arrests on her record? Send off her resume?
Dope helped. Shoot up, slide into a hot bathtub lit with candles, let your mind drift. Sometimes the tension seemed to release from every cell in her body. Sometimes she could almost feel her DNA relax, her essence, her most basic self.
Just what she needed, for maybe an hour. Then time and space began to contract, minute by minute, faster and faster, until she was back where she started. In need of a fix.
Corry took a cell phone from her purse, brought it to her ear, then dropped it into her lap. Tommy was driving beneath the elevated subway on Roosevelt Avenue and a seven train was passing overhead.
‘You think you could find another street?’ she said.
‘What?’
Corry waited until the train passed. ‘Find a quieter street, Tommy. I don’t wanna be screamin’ at the guy.’
‘Sorry.’
She waited until Tommy made a right onto National Street, then punched a number into the phone.
‘Amoroso Construction.’ The woman’s voice was young and friendly, though her New York accent was pronounced. ‘How can I help you?’
‘I want to speak with John Pianetta.’
‘Please hold.’
The next voice, also a woman’s, was decidedly less friendly. ‘John Pianetta’s office. Who am I speaking to?’
‘The woman his kid beat half to death while he was raping her.’
That shut her up. Corry let the silence build for a few seconds, and then said, ‘I can identify the man who put a bullet through Carlo’s head. I’ll be calling again a few minutes from now.’
Corry let her head fall back as she counted off the seconds. She told herself, as she’d already done, many times, that you don’t get all that many chances in life, even if you play it straight. When you’re a junkie prostitute maybe you only get one.
Besides, and Corry was sure about this, what Teddy did to Carlo was about the two of them, not about Corry Frisk. Teddy saved her, and no denying it, but if it had been someone else, and not Carlo Pianetta, Teddy would have walked away. Probably.
A few minutes later, she had a man on the phone who at least claimed to be Johnny Piano.
‘I’m gonna tell you the story,’ she said, ‘and I don’t want you to interrupt me until I finish. Carlo picked me up on Navy Street last Sunday morning at five o’clock. He was real nice, just a horny guy out for a quickie in the back seat. But once I got inside his Lexus, he locked the doors with the child lock so I couldn’t get out and then drove to the Pulaski Bridge. I went along because … because what choice did I have? But when I asked for the money up front, your kid beat me until I couldn’t fight back, until I could barely move. Did he plan to kill me after he finished raping me? I’ll never know because ten minutes later this guy turned up out of nowhere. Him and Carlo, they exchanged a few words, then the guy shot Carlo in the head and walked off like nothin’ happened. They knew each other, by the way. The man called Carlo by his first name.’
Corry ground to a halt, pretty sure her story had been convincing, especially the mention of Carlo’s Lexus. She’d mulled over how to approach Pianetta for a couple of days before she decided to make it as brief and cold as possible. Here it is. Nobody could make this up.
‘Do I get to ask the big question now?’ Pianetta said.
‘Ask away.’
‘Do you know the name of the man who killed my son?’
Corry was unable to detect a hint of sympathy in Johnny Piano’s tone. ‘Yes, I do.’
‘Will you tell me?’
‘Sure, for thirty thousand dollars. And I’m not gonna retreat from that figure. No, I’m gonna call you tomorrow morning and you’re gonna tell me what you decided.’
‘How will I know you’re not lying?’
‘You�
�ll take a good look at my face.’
Tommy pulled over next to a storm drain at the corner and Corry opened the door far enough to flip the cell phone into the drain. Then she closed the door and said, ‘How’d I do, Tommy?’
‘You did great, sis.’
‘All right, then let’s go home.’
Two minutes later, as they came up Junction Boulevard, Tommy leaned on the horn. ‘Move the fuckin’ bus,’ he shouted out the window. Then he pounded the steering wheel with his fist when the bus – which could have pulled to the curb – remained exactly where it was. For a moment, Corry was sure he’d reach for the revolver beneath his seat.
Time and space, she said to herself. And soon.
THIRTY-THREE
Frankie Drago walked the final half-block to Boots Littlewood’s apartment. He ran every morning now, rain or shine. Well, not every morning, not when a cold winter rain, as gray as the sidewalks, pounded those sidewalks. But the cold didn’t stop him. Frankie had changed his life, recovering his health and a bit of his youth in the process. Now, when he remembered those glory days on a high-school baseball diamond, squatting behind the plate, stepping into the batter’s box, taking a few practice swings, he didn’t feel ashamed. As if he’d surrendered a birthright. No, he remembered that he was the star of the team, that he’d hit two home runs for every one of Boots Littlewood’s.
Joaquin’s face appeared in the door, drawing a smile. When Boots first announced that he was adopting the kid, Frankie had responded with a quick, ‘You’re fuckin’ nuts.’
Meanwhile, in his own way, Joaquin projected as much confidence as his dad. He was the kid Frankie would have wanted if he’d ever wanted kids. Which, despite his mother’s pestering, he hadn’t.
‘Hey, Joaquin, I heard you were doin’ good.’
The Striver Page 15
