Where It Hurts

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  “Why’d you kill Tommy? He was your friend.”

  “I didn’t like having to do that. Christ, I didn’t like it at all, but it seemed to me he might’ve been working his way around to the same conclusion you got to. That somehow I was involved in TJ’s murder, and I also needed to distract the cops again once the heroin started killing kids on the island. Maybe it was easier ’cause I didn’t actually have to pull the trigger.”

  I stared at the revolver in my hand and got a sick feeling in my belly. “You were wrong about Tommy.”

  “What do you mean I was wrong about him?”

  “He never suspected you, not for one second. He trusted you.”

  Though Zee’s face went blank, all he could say was “Price of doin’ business, I guess.” But I could see it in his eyes that not even a lizard like him believed it.

  “Tonight on the road and trying to shotgun me in my bed at the hotel, that was you, too?”

  “I shoulda had the Maniacs do you after your first visit.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “I didn’t know where all the loose ends might be. I couldn’t be sure Tommy D. had told me everything. Now they’re all tied up but for you.”

  “Well, Zee, unless you got a secret weapon in here, that’s not gonna happen.”

  He got a smug look on his face reminiscent of Pete McCann’s. “No need,” he said. “You can’t prove a goddamned thing. Heroin’s gone. The money’s hidden where nobody but me can find it. There’s no evidence connecting me to any of the killings and nobody to testify.” He picked up the cordless phone off his desk and waved it at me. “You wanna call 9-1-1, be my guest.”

  I smacked the phone out of his hand with the revolver and it crashed to pieces against the wall. I didn’t mind that the barrel of the gun made solid contact with Zee’s knuckles.

  “You’re almost right, Zee. Almost. One of the three guys who tried to kill me tonight is alive. He’s in rough shape, but alive.”

  Zee got that Pete McCann look about him again and laughed at me. “Man, Gus, you don’t understand, do you? He won’t testify against me or against anybody else.”

  “You think he’s gonna eat a few murder raps and two attempted murder raps just to save an ex-Maniacs’ ass?”

  “I don’t think it. I know it. And all that shit’s got to get proved in court. Let’s just see what happens between here and court. The Maniacs got plenty of money for good lawyers and they can make life pretty good on the inside if one of their own goes down.”

  I’m not sure exactly what set me off—his smugness or the fact that he was right. Whatever it was didn’t matter, because I backhanded Zee across the face and knocked him off his throne. I yanked him back into his seat by his hair. Then I pushed the cylinder of the .357 out and dropped the three remaining bullets into my palm. I tossed two away. I put one back in the cylinder, spun it, and flicked the cylinder back into place.

  “You think you’re gonna scare me with a little Russian roulette?” he said, his voice thin and brittle in spite of his bravado. “I played it once or twice before.”

  “Yeah, I bet, but the last time you played, you weren’t this close to getting out from under. What did you get for the dope, a quarter of a mil, half? The last time you played, you couldn’t taste that much money.” I held my left thumb and index finger barely apart. “If what you say is true, you’re this close to being gone. This close to living the rest of your miserable scumbag life in the warmth of the desert sun. Let’s see how much fun you have with it now.”

  I yanked his hair again, and when he opened his mouth in pain, I shoved the barrel of the Smith & Wesson so far down his throat, he gagged.

  “Say goodbye, motherfucker.”

  His eyes got very big as I thumbed the hammer back. He started to choke with panic when it clicked into position. As I put my finger on the trigger, he pissed himself. It wasn’t much of a price to pay for what he had done, but it was something he would have to live with. A guy like him, it would eat at him till the day he died. I pulled the trigger. Empty. I pulled the hammer back again, but there was a knocking at the office door.

  “Suffolk County Police, open the fucking door. Now!”

  I guess somebody in the bar noticed the gun in my jacket pocket or my bloody hands or that Zee had been missing for a while. I pulled the trigger again anyway. Empty again. Would I have kept pulling the trigger if there wasn’t a cop outside the door? I don’t know. Maybe. I wiped my prints off both guns and laid them on the desk before opening the door.

  Both Zee and I were led out in cuffs. The parking lot outside was alive with the whirling and flashing of blue, red, and white lights. I looked up into the sky, but there was no Santa. There were no reindeer. There never were. I thought of John’s face the first time he opened a gift on Christmas morning and the first time he helped Krissy open gifts. I smiled. I thought of the rude display atop Mr. Martino’s house and the baby Jesus with the blue doll eyes in the manger on his neighbor’s lawn. I thought of Bill reliving his loss of faith and of Katy Smalls beating her father’s body with his nightstick. I thought of all the pain and needless violence that came of greed and revenge. And I thought that with each drop of innocent blood spilled, I understood the world less and less.

  Epilogue

  (EARLY MARCH, TUESDAY EVENING)

  I’d just dropped off four guests from the hotel at the Ronkonkoma station. I wasn’t scheduled to do another pickup all night, so I parked the van in the designated spot and went for a stroll. It wasn’t spring yet, but it sure felt like it. It had been one of those Marches, one that came in like a lamb and seemed to be staying that way. The sun in the sky was telling the truth again, its warmth on my skin matching the intensity of its color. The trees were budding early. Maybe the grass was greener sooner than usual. Maybe not. Somehow it even smelled right, like there was honey in the air. And I was restless, an old symptom of spring I hadn’t been afflicted with for years.

  As I strolled the less than scenic area around the train station, I scrolled to Magdalena’s number and tapped the screen. The call went to voice mail. I didn’t leave a message. We were in a good place, the Magster, as I now sometimes called her, and me. While we had progressed beyond the “just friends” stage, we hadn’t gotten to making promises or commitments. We didn’t ask each other too many questions and just tried to enjoy each other’s company when we were together. One of the few rules we had was that there was no bitching about our exes allowed.

  Frankly, I didn’t have much to complain about in that area. Annie seemed to have gotten her life back in order. She had moved out of her brother’s place and gotten an apartment in Stony Brook to be near Krissy. She and Rob were doing fine. Even if she could never manage to love Rob the way he loved her, she had learned to love him back enough so they could both be happy. We spoke on the phone occasionally, mostly about how Krissy was doing at school. The conversations were always cordial if not downright friendly. I won’t lie to you, as incredible as Magdalena looked naked, as good as she smelled, and as intense as the sex was between us, I sometimes missed Annie that way. I suppose I always would.

  Magdalena hated her ex, so there wasn’t much point in bringing him up, ever. She sold the old Mercedes for a nice price, given its condition, and had thrown out the rest of her custom-made perfume. She was taking acting classes again and doing at least one audition a week. I admired the hell out of her for that. Took more courage than I had. Malo never reopened after the bloodbath that had happened there, but Magdalena got a few bartending gigs at other places. One at a fancy steak restaurant in the Huntington area, a million miles away from Harrigan’s.

  Speaking of Harrigan’s, Zee was right: the cops and the DA’s office never laid a glove on him. It wasn’t like they didn’t try. They did. Al Roussis knew it was true and didn’t question any aspect of my narrative when I explained it to him. The ADA also knew the truth when
she heard it, but just as Zee had bragged last Christmas morning, there was no evidence of any kind tying him to the homicides or the drugs. The fact was that from all appearances, Zee looked like Tommy Delcamino’s best friend and a second dad to TJ. The third biker survived, but, again as Zee predicted, he refused to talk to the cops or the ADA no matter what incentives they put on the table. He’s facing about sixty felony counts ranging from first-degree murder to illegal possession of a firearm to . . . I think the only thing he’s not charged with is stealing nuclear secrets. His trial is set for some time this summer.

  Zee will never face trial, not because he’s above the law, but because he’s below the ground. He made it out to the desert a few weeks later than he had planned. Still, he made it west all the same. I hadn’t really given him much thought because I’d had more than a month of legal entanglements to deal with myself, some stemming from what Bill and I had been forced to do at the warehouse and others from the encounters I’d had on Christmas morning with the bikers and with Zee. Eventually, Bill and I were cleared of everything. About a month ago I picked up a newspaper one of the guests left behind in the van. I skimmed it to kill some time until the next train from Penn Station got in.

  After the sports pages, I flipped the paper around. On page five there was a picture of Richie Zito in his younger days, wearing his Maniacs colors. When he wasn’t a hunched-over bastard and his mustache wasn’t the color of two-day-old snow. I think the headline was something like “Ex-LI Bar Owner Murdered in Arizona.” Zee had been caught in a shootout in a small border town. The shootout was between members of a Mexican drug cartel and a motorcycle gang. The writer described Zito as an innocent bystander. In the history of innocent bystanders, there had never been a less innocent one. The levels of irony involved were so varied that it was to laugh. But I didn’t laugh because poetic justice wasn’t justice at all. I was just happy he was dead and I hoped to Christ it took him a long time to die.

  As I suspected, the whole story about Jimmy Regan never made it into the press. Not yet, anyway. Enough was leaked inside and outside the department so that no one made a stink about defending his reputation or building him a statue. Although the O’Connell and Delcamino homicides were still technically open cases, there was little doubt that down the road the cases would go before a review panel and they’d be attributed to Pete McCann or Kareem Shivers. Pete was already guilty of at least two killings. Who knew how many K-Shivs was responsible for? What were a few more bodies to throw their way? No one was going to defend their honor or build them statues, either.

  Smudge reappeared after New Year’s. He showed up at the hotel to let me know he was all right. Guys like Smudge possess a developed knack for survival. They have to. I explained to him about the differences between the official story of Tommy D.’s murder and the truth. He accepted it without a word of protest or bitterness. That was another thing about guys like Smudge. They didn’t open the door to bitterness for fear of it eating them alive.

  I have no idea what happened to Katy Smalls after that night in the warehouse. I sometimes think I should drive to the house in Melville to see if she still lived there with her puppy. Whether she was or she wasn’t living there, I was pretty sure the events of that night last December had beaten all the residual girlishness out of her. And as far as I know, Jamal and Antwone are still in the system and I hope to steer clear of them when they get out.

  Slava and I have gotten into the habit of having breakfast once a week, usually on Saturday mornings. Sometimes we discuss going into business together as kind of unofficial PIs. You know, doing favors for people for a price. Technically, I guess we’d already had a case, and Tommy D.’s three grand—minus the money I’d given to Ralphy O’Connell and to Smudge to help him find a new place to live—was ours. It was something to think about, at least. Slava still refused to discuss his secrets or his shame, but I’d come to know he was a far more thoughtful and serious man than the image he presented to the people for whom he opened doors and carried luggage.

  Oh, yeah, Casey started showing up at the club again, but has turned her attention to other men. At first we’d say our hellos and leave it at that. One night, when I went to get a glass of water at the bar, I wound up standing right next to her. It was pretty awkward there for a minute. Then I said, “Don’t worry, Jocasta, your secret’s safe with me.” When she stopped laughing, the awkwardness was gone.

  Bill is doing okay and claims to be fine, though he’s smoking more and the distance in his stare has lengthened. He’s been doing a lot of reading lately on Eastern religion and philosophy. I wonder if his shooting Pete McCann has scarred him or if it has become an extension of what he’d done all those years ago in Vietnam. He won’t talk about it. I tried to get him to go to Dr. Rosen, even offered to help him pay for it. He wouldn’t hear of it. “It’s not my way,” he said. I respect that. And though I can tell he’s suffering, I lack his magic for taking away other people’s pain.

  Yesterday, Bill and I went to visit John Jr. It had been a long while since I’d been to the grave and Bill kind of pushed for me to go. I think he saw the guilt in me. I know he did.

  “It’s no sin to be happy again, Gus Murphy,” he said. “Your having found a way back to the living is no disrespect to John. It doesn’t mean you loved him less. Wouldn’t the lad want you to live again? Wouldn’t he want to live again?”

  Argue that.

  As Bill laid some flowers at the foot of John’s headstone, I said, “Do you know why I got involved at all with the murder of TJ Delcamino?”

  “You wanted answers, as I recall from your first visit to me.”

  “Answers,” I repeated. “When John died, there were no answers. He had a hidden heart defect. One second he was living and the next he wasn’t. There were no answers, no deeper truths, no mystery, no one to blame. I thought if I could get some answers, any answers, about TJ’s murder, it would give me purpose and some meaning to John’s death.”

  “I remember saying that some answers had to be discovered for themselves. Well, Gus, you’ve had your answers. What do you say?”

  “That I was wrong. That answers don’t give meaning to anyone’s death. TJ and John are just as dead today as they were before Tommy D. came to see me last December. The answers didn’t bring them justice, and even if I’d managed to get some small measure of justice for the kid, so what? He was beyond it. Justice is for those of us left behind.”

  He didn’t say another word. We just stood there for a while until the caretaker came over and stood with us.

  My cell phone buzzed as I was nearly back at the van. I hoped it might be Magdalena, but it was Felix, working a rare night shift. He told me that I had a late pickup at the airport and another one back at the station. It was going to be a longer, harder shift than I’d anticipated, so I went into Dunkin’ Donuts for a cup of coffee. Khalid, the night manager, was there as he always was and eyed me with disdain as he always did. But Aziza, the countergirl, was nowhere to be seen. Instead, a new Pakistani girl in a fresh, clean uniform and a shy demeanor was working the counter.

  “Where’s Aziza?” I asked Khalid.

  He smiled at me for the first time in all the months I’d been coming in to get coffee. “Oh, Aziza has gone.” He waved his hand.

  “Gone?”

  “Back to Karachi to be married.” He waved his hand again. “She will be here no more.”

  “Can I help you, sir?” the new girl asked.

  Khalid answered for me, barking at the girl. “Small coffee, half-and-half, two Sweet’N Lows.”

  I paid, dropped the change in her tip cup, took the coffee, and left.

  Back in the van I stared at the coffee cup, looked up at Bill’s gifted crucifix dangling from the mirror, and cried quietly for Aziza’s gap-toothed smile. A smile I would never see again.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I owe a large debt of gratitude to C
hris Pepe, Ivan Held, and David Hale Smith. It is a revelation to have the support of people who believe in you and your abilities even while you doubt yourself.

  Thanks to my first readers for this book, Kathleen Eull and Ellen Weiler Schare.

  But I could not have come this far without the sacrifices my family made for me. I have gotten to pursue my dream often at their expense. So thank you, Rosanne, Kaitlin, and Dylan. Without you, none of this would be possible or worth it.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I have lived in Suffolk County for the past twenty-seven years. During that time I have had the honor and pleasure of getting to know several members of the Suffolk County Police Department and of the Suffolk County District Attorney’s office. To a person, they are honest, upstanding folks who often perform their duties under difficult and dangerous circumstances. None of them, in any way, resemble the cruel and corrupt characters depicted in this novel. Good-hearted, diligent people make for a safe and stable environment in which to raise a family, but they make for boring crime fiction.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Reed Farrel Coleman, author of the New York Times–bestselling Robert B. Parker’s Blind Spot, has been called a “hard-boiled poet” by NPR’s Maureen Corrigan and the “noir poet laureate” in The Huffington Post. He has published twenty-two novels, including nine in the critically acclaimed Moe Prager series. A three-time recipient of the Shamus Award for best detective novel of the year, a winner of the Barry and Anthony awards, and a three-time Edgar nominee, he lives with his family on Long Island.

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