Onion Street

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  “Huh?”

  “That apartment she lived in, some guy claiming to be her father rented it for her. Only it wasn’t her father. It was another cop. If her landlady hadn’t forgotten about the suitcase Sam had stored in her attic, Sam’s death would’ve gone down forever as a screw-up by some half-assed radical group. Don’t you see, Bobby? Susan Kasten had nothing to do with Sam’s death. For all we know, Sam and Marty just went for a hot dog at Nathan’s that night and had no idea the bomb was in the car. The only explosives the Committee had were the dummy explosives you supplied them with, but it wasn’t dummy explosives that blew up Sam and Marty all to hell. It was Tony P protecting you, his cash cow. That’s why Jimmy Ding Dong tried to run me off the road in Pennsylvania. They thought I was on to something about Sam. The irony is that if Jimmy hadn’t tried to kill me, I probably would’ve put down my trip to Koblenz as a painful waste of time.”

  “But why didn’t the cops do a better investigation if Sam was one of their own? They always go nuts when another cop gets killed.”

  “Because no one knew she was a cop. That was the whole point. Read the letter again. Her name wasn’t on the books, she got paid in cash, and she had only one contact whose real name she didn’t even know. It protected her from being exposed, and it protected the cops who could deny any connection to her. I hope that half a million dollars was worth it to you, Bobby.”

  “Do you want some of it, Moe? I’ll cut you in for half. You and your brother can go into business, take care of your folks, never have to worry about anything again.”

  I felt myself squinting at him in disbelief. I couldn’t quite believe I’d heard what Bobby had just offered. “Are you outta your fucking mind? I don’t want your blood money, Bobby. Forget all the junkies whose lives you and Tony are ruining. You can probably rationalize that away, but you can’t rationalize away what happened to Sam. You’ll be repaying that debt the rest of your miserable fucking life.”

  “You’re right,” he said, swallowing his words. “I’ll never stop repaying it. I promise.”

  “Well, it’s over now. I won’t turn you in, Bobby. I should, but I won’t. Tony P would have you killed the second you got inside because he could never trust that you wouldn’t rat him out. I don’t want that on my conscience too. I figure you’ll have to run anyway because without your magic get-out-of-jail number, you’ve become a liability to Tony. Either way, you’re fucked.” I turned to go.

  “There’s one problem,” Bobby called after me.

  “Yeah, what’s that?”

  “It’s not over. I have one more run to do. That’s what Tony and Jimmy were doing here before, letting me know.”

  “But you’re not protected anymore.”

  He laughed. “You think they give a shit about that now? Besides, Moe, it’s not like I have a choice.”

  “Yes, you do. You have to run anyway. Why not run now, before this last shipment? I’ll help you get out of here tonight and you can be on a flight to Mexico before they know you’re gone. With all your money, you can get to Europe and make a nice life for yourself. You’ll even have your guilt to keep you company.”

  He shook his head no. “Can’t do it.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  “For one thing, even if I get away, you’ll still be here. And …”

  “And what?”

  “Tony and Jimmy have Lids.”

  “How?”

  Bobby shouted, “Hey, you told me to find Lids, right? Wasn’t it you who said I had all the connections? So I used my best connection, and Tony had the number you gave me traced. Tony said he would keep Lids safe. I had no reason not to believe him. How the fuck was I supposed to know you’d gotten yourself tangled up in all this shit?”

  He was right. When I asked Larry to help me find Lids, I hadn’t thought anything through. Now I’d helped deliver Lids into the hands of the man he feared most. After a moment of quiet came the revelation: Whether he did the one last drug run or not, Bobby, Lids, and I were all on the roster of the soon-to-be deceased. Bobby and I seemed to hit on that realization at about the same moment. We were both looking off into space and then, as it came to us both, we turned toward one another, our eyes locking together in mutual understanding and fear. If this was what seeing the future was like, I wanted no part of it. We are all born into this world under penalty of death, but we don’t walk around with destiny on our shoulders. Now I felt like I would snap in half under its weight. Bobby too, from the look of him.

  I said it first. “We’re all dead, you know that, right?”

  “I know. Tony P may be a fat gavone and a buffoon with his stupid magic tricks, but he’s not stupid. Believe me, the guy’s smarter than you think. He makes all kinda money.”

  “That’s why we’re dead. He knew your deal with the cops was gonna come to an end sooner or later. What, did you think he was just gonna give up the drug trade and happily go back to car parts and fireworks?”

  “I never thought about that. All I could see was the money,” he said, his face turning red with shame. In all the time I’d known Bobby, I’d never seen him red-faced. “Besides, I haven’t been doing a lot of clear thinking since Sam got killed.”

  “Well, think about it now. The whole time you’ve been doing these runs, Tony and Jimmy have probably been looking for another way to transport the heroin and to cut you out of the deal. My guess is the only reason you’re not dead yet is because all the pieces of their new system of getting the heroin out of the airport aren’t in place yet.”

  Bobby seemed surprised. “Get outta here.”

  “Christ, Bobby, use your brain. If you’ve made a hundred grand, that means he musta cut you in for what, half?”

  “Forty percent.”

  “Did you really think he was gonna keep giving up almost half of the profits?”

  “Like I said, Moe, I haven’t been thinking.”

  “The most fucked-up part of this, Bobby, is that I’ve admired you my whole life. I wanted to be like you. Shit, I wanted to be you. You always seemed to know where you were going and how to get there, and I’ve always felt lost.”

  Bobby didn’t say anything to that and then he mumbled, “I can’t die yet.”

  “Do you know where they have Lids?”

  “Tony said they’ll have him at the drop and that when I deliver the last shipment, they’ll let him go.”

  “Yeah, and Santa will come down the chimney holding the Tooth Fairy’s wing and the Easter Bunny’s paw.”

  “What can I tell you? That’s what he said, that he’d let Lids go if I did this last thing for him.”

  “Is this drug run the same as the others? You park in the lot outside the Eastern terminal at JFK, they load your trunk, and you deliver it?”

  “That’s how it’s always works.”

  “Okay, I think maybe there’s a way to keep us alive.”

  “You can’t go to the cops. Like you said, if I go away, Tony P will have a hit put on me. I won’t last five minutes inside.”

  “For once in your life, Bobby, you don’t get a say in things. You do what I tell you or you won’t live to see the inside of a prison. When’s the drop set for?”

  “Monday. I’m supposed to get released tomorrow.”

  “In a few hours, you call Tony P and tell him I ran, tell him I figured out that Jimmy was trying to kill me. He’ll ask where, so tell him you think I caught a bus to Texas at the Port Authority. Tony will believe you.”

  “But — ”

  “Just do it. I’ll call you in the morning with the rest of the details.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  There are months I love and months I hate. March, for instance. I have always loved March. October too. I love October because its still-warm days beg you to play basketball in the park: no sweatshirts, no gloves, no shovels necessary to scrape away the snow and ice. I love it because while its waning heat invites you to play ball, October throws leaves on the court, leaves so much more beautiful
in death than in life; leaves to remind you to savor those last moments, to savor what you have and what you have left. I hate January for its endless cold and sense of hopelessness, New Year’s notwithstanding. I’d never given much thought to February, not until that February.

  On that Monday in that February, late in the afternoon, the sky was already darkening, but not quite as quickly as it had darkened the week before nor as slowly as it would the week after. That day, the sky had reneged on its promise of snow, delivering only panic in its stead. I remember that the stores were overrun by shoppers buying out milk and bread and eggs. To this day, I wonder why it is that snow makes people hungry for just those three things. That day, not all promises of white delivery were reneged on. At 4:35 P.M., in the parking lot closest to the Eastern Airlines terminal at Kennedy airport, a van pulled up behind Bobby Friedman’s Olds 88. A big guy got out of the van, keyed the lock, and popped the trunk lid. He moved three two-kilo bricks of heroin into the trunk. According to Bobby, the bricks, like the ones he’d moved before, were covered in blue plastic and brown packing tape. The big man shut the trunk, got back into the van, and drove away. Ten minutes later, Bobby made a call from the Eastern Airlines terminal.

  “It’s done,” he said. “I hope you know what the fuck you’re doing.”

  “For the first time in my life, I think I do.”

  “I hope it’s not the only time in your life.”

  “If you can come up with a better option that doesn’t end up with the three of us dead, Bobby, let me know. Get moving, I’m going to make the call.”

  Click.

  • • •

  There were few benefits from my father’s litany of failures. More often than not, my dad’s going in the tank did not happen with a resounding clap of thunder but with a meek, pitiable sigh. His failures tended to play out like long, sad songs with only tears and debt collectors at the end. Although there was the occasional perk, like the time he thought he would capture the market on the next kid’s fad and bought a thousand star-shaped Hula Hoops from a Japanese importer. They were about as popular as square eggs and kosher bacon, but Aaron, Miriam, and I had a lot of fun with them. It took him about five years to sell them off, and the loss was minimal. Then there was the time he invested some money in a scheme hatched by the sons of two guys he worked with. They were going to build household computers smaller than a TV set. Sure they were.

  But one of his ridiculous investments was hopefully going to pay off for me if not for him. About two years ago, he had put money into a personal storage warehouse out in Suffolk County on Long Island in someplace called Lake Ronkonkoma. Only my dad could invest in a business in a place he couldn’t even pronounce. The idea was to compete with the big cold storage warehouses by renting small lockers and garage-sized compartments to people who could come and go as they pleased. Aaron and I went with my dad for the grand opening. We knew it would fail when we saw that almost no one lived in Suffolk County, and that those who did all had big private houses with garages, backyards, and sheds. If it had been built in the city, it might’ve had a chance. If, now there’s a dangerous word. The building had sat empty for a year now. Technically, my dad didn’t own any part of it anymore, but I still had a set of keys. And while it might not have been the perfect place for storage, it seemed like the perfect venue for our showdown with Tony Pizza and Jimmy Ding Dong.

  Among the first things I learned about sports was that there were advantages, both obvious and subtle, to playing home games. Knowing which way a ball bounces when it hits a dead spot on the court, or at what time of day the wind comes up, or at what hour the sun drops beneath the bottom ledge of the backboard to shine in your opponents’ eyes, can mean the difference between winning and losing. And since playing ball was the only thing in the world I really knew anything about, I let it guide me. Another thing I knew was that we couldn’t afford to play this game on Tony Pizza’s home court. Bobby explained that he was supposed to drop the heroin off at a body shop Tony Pizza owned on Flatlands Avenue in Canarsie, as he had previously. Scared, inexperienced, and outgunned, we were already at too much of a disadvantage. Flatlands Avenue at night was deserted, and Tony and Jimmy probably knew every inch of the place and the surrounding area. There was no way we could walk in there and have any hope of walking back out. That’s why I dropped the money down the slot of the pay phone across the street from the warehouse and dialed the number Bobby had given me.

  “Body shop,” someone said at the other end.

  “Let me talk to Tony or Jimmy.”

  “Who’s calling?”

  “Tell him it’s the delivery man. He’ll understand.”

  “Hold on.”

  “Yeah, Bobby, what?” Tony barked into the phone. “Get over here. I don’t have time for your bullshit.”

  “For one thing, Tony, this isn’t Bobby. For another, you’re gonna have to make time.”

  “Moe? Moe, I thought you split to Mexico or — ”

  “I guess Bobby musta got that wrong, Tony.”

  “Listen, kid, don’t let that tough Jew thing I said about you the other day go to your head. I’m not some shithead cop.”

  “Don’t worry, Tony, I’m plenty scared. Me and Bobby, we both are. But we’re smarter than we are scared and we’ve gotta use the only leverage we got.”

  “Leverage, huh? It’s harder to use than you think.”

  “I guess we’ll find out. Meantime, Tony, write this down.”

  “You know, Moe, that sounded a lot like an order. I never liked orders much.”

  “Okay, sorry, Tony. Let me put it to you like this: If you want your three bricks of heroin, I would politely suggest you write this down.”

  There was a second or two of confused silence, then, “Put Bobby on the phone.”

  “Can’t do that, Tony. He’s not here. As a matter of fact, you won’t know where he is until we talk. I’m gonna give you a number to call and a place to call it from. When you let Lids go at that phone booth, I’ll give you an address where I’m at. I just want to have a conversation. You get your drugs, and Bobby, Lids, and me, we get to keep breathing. After we talk and reach an agreement, I’ll give you the location of the bricks. Someone will be watching you and Jimmy when you show up at the phone booth. If you don’t have Lids with you, or if you don’t let him go after we talk on the phone, or if you bring anyone with you other than Jimmy, I’ll know it. And don’t bother looking for the spotter. You won’t see him.”

  “You’re takin’ big chances here, kid,” he said, trying to sound calm.

  I didn’t take the bait. I was barely holding it together as it was, and I didn’t want to give him the chance to shake me any more than I already was. “Write this down,” I said, and dictated to him. “Got it?”

  “Yeah.”

  I hung up the phone almost before I heard it.

  Almost forty-five minutes passed before the phone rang again. I’d spent the time getting the warehouse ready and trying not to freeze to death. It was Tony on the line.

  “Gimme the address, kid.”

  “Put Lids on the phone.”

  “Okay, but I’m also gonna teach you a little lesson about usin’ leverage. You ready, Moe?” Before I could answer, I heard Tony say, “Jimmy, break the little prick’s arm.”

  I shouted into the phone, but it was no good. I heard a snap and Lids screamed like he was on fire. I was sick to my stomach. The only thing that prevented me from totally losing it was the fear of what they might do next.

  Tony got back on the line. “Listen to me, kid. Jimmy’s cast has some nice benefits. You don’t gimme that address right now, I’m gonna have Jimmy break every bone in this asshole’s body and then he’ll start gettin’ really nasty. Understand?”

  “I’ll dump your drugs out into a sewer or I’ll call the cops.”

  “You sound scared there, kid. You dump my drugs and you have no leverage, and Jimmy will kill you as slow and painful as he’s gonna kill your lit
tle piece a shit friend here. And you won’t call the cops, because I will see your friend Bobby fries with me. How long you think he’ll stay alive inside? That’s if he stays alive long enough to get inside. See, kid, leverage ain’t always what you thought it was. Now gimme the fuckin’ address and let’s talk.”

  “Not until you agree to let Lids go.”

  “Gimme the address and I’ll think about it.”

  “No. I may not be able to make your heroin scream, but I do have matches here and I’ll make a nice toasty fire using your six kilos for kindling.”

  “Fuck you. Here’s the deal. We’re taking this little prick with us, but I promise I won’t hurt him no more. Take it or leave it.”

  “Here’s the address.”

  I knew Tony and Jimmy were now no more than half an hour away, and I could see that my plan was going to shit.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  The next twenty-eight minutes passed more slowly than the previous twenty years of my life. I tried to convince myself that that was a good thing, because they were bound to be among my last. Problem was, I was too scared to focus enough to see any value in the passage of those long, excruciating moments. And then I heard a car pull up. Two doors slammed — bang, bang — and then, a moment later, a third. Feet shuffled. Grit crunched and scraped beneath hard soles of men’s shoes. A metal gate swung open with a squeal like the cry of a gull. Faint voices echoed in the hallways of the vacant warehouse. As fiercely as my heart was already thumping, it thumped harder still when I noticed that there were only two sets of footfalls and that there were other sounds: the soft steady shhhhh of something being dragged along a dusty concrete floor, and a hushed, ghostly moaning. The roll-up steel gate that was the last solid thing standing between me and my fate was pulled up.

  “The kid’s fuckin’ us around,” Jimmy said, staring into the blackness of the unit. Something crashed to the floor with a sickening thud. “Lemme go look for — ”