“Are the feds watching this house?”
“How the fuck would I know?”
“Are they?”
Carmine hesitated and then shook his head.
“No.”
“Why?”
“They don’t know Jackie was coming this way. After Fabrizio called, I told them they was going south. Jersey. They broke off.”
“You wanted them off, right? So you could kill Jack?”
“It wasn’t about Jack. He was bringing the feds in on you. Whining and begging. Alla this time, Jack’s too fucking good to hang out with people like us. He gets into trouble, all of a sudden we’re family. I done it for you, Frank. He’s gone, the feds can’t get to you. All I been doing in this is keeping them off you.”
“You put the feds on Jack in the first place.”
“It wasn’t that simple.”
“You talking to the feds, hah? About me?”
Carmine shook his head.
“No. That’s not how it went.”
Frank shook his head, glanced over Carmine’s shaved skull. Carmine followed the look and tensed up so hard the sinews in his neck popped out like cables. Senza did nothing, only waited. From where Jack was standing, he could see all three men, arranged in a tight group, Senza half in shadow, Carmine upright in the chair under the light, bathed in the kind of glow you expect to see around angels, and Frank, his weight on one foot, body held up by nerves and anger, but calm, calm in a way Jack had never seen him before.
It was Frank’s business calm, he decided. This was how Frank looked when he was involved in his business. He wasn’t Jack’s old childhood buddy anymore. He was a grown man and most of his life had been spent doing things that Jack had never wanted to believe he would ever be capable of doing. Things like this. Frank’s voice was low and soft, his anger damped down but present.
“Fabrizio knows what each one a them spinal bones does. He’s like a doctor. He can cut you so your arms don’t work, or your legs and your arms, or just cut you so your pecker don’t work, or you can’t breathe, or you can’t move only you can still feel everything.”
“I know … Jesus, Frank, I know.”
“So don’t embarrass me like this. I ain’t having any fun here.”
“I know. Jeez, Frank—we’re friends. This wasn’t about you.”
“You got busted. For something. The Canadian shit?”
Carmine was silent for perhaps another thirty seconds. Jack waited and wished with all his heart that he had never come back from the war. Senza shifted his weight, his shoes grated on the concrete floor. Carmine jumped as if they had wired him to a socket.
“Fabrizio,” he said, “come out from behind me, hah?”
Senza said nothing. Frank reached out and lifted Carmine’s chin so the light was full on his face and he could see the man’s eyes.
“Carmine. You gotta explain this. We can’t walk away from here without knowing what the deal is. I don’t wanna hurt you. But I can’t let this thing get away from me. On my mother, Carmine, I’m gonna let Fabrizio do whatever it takes, and you know, at the end of it, you gonna tell me everything. This ain’t the movies, Carmine. You gonna be in bad pain. You never gonna be a walking man again, you gonna piss in a diaper, live the rest of your life on your back, breathing through a tube in your throat. We go back all the way to Ditmars, Carmine. I don’t want this. Please, be a friend here.”
“I was being a friend! I gave them Jackie. I coulda given them you! But I covered you. Now I’m inna chair here, and that cocksucker over there is laughing at us both.”
Frank lifted a hand, touched Carmine’s cheek.
“Listen to me. This is about you and me. Inna beginning. What did they pop you for? Drugs?”
“Okay … it was the cars. And the money.”
Jack pushed himself off the car, spoke to Frank.
“Ask him about Creek.”
Carmine sent Jack a look of hundred-proof hatred.
“Creek’s a fucking mope, a tool. I used him. He’s bringing in cars from Auburn, I put him on to a seller in Canada. Creek goes up there, buys a couple, maybe once or twice a month. Sometimes he takes Fabrizio for the company or to drive one back with him. I ask him, can I get in on this? The mook says yes. He don’t know shit.”
Jack wanted to believe him but could not.
“Why did you want in on his deals, then?”
“Hey, he’s a mutt. I packed the trunks with dope, with shit, and he never tumbled. That dumb bastard, he drives up to the customs stop at Wolf Island, up there by Cape Vincent, they could have sniffer dogs, whatever, he never thinks of that. But they don’t, and he goes back and forth, him and Fabrizio, just an old wop and a cowboy numb-nuts. The customs guys never gave him a look, just wanted to feel up those old classic cars. I used them. I used Creek, I mean. Not you, Fabrizio. Not you, I swear. I would never have let—”
“What were you bringing in?” asked Frank, his voice soft.
“I been doing some stuff for the Canadians. Moving cash mainly. For the bikers. The Mohawks. Frank, I needed the money. You ain’t active now. People are making their own moves. New people. You ain’t paying any attention. I know you’re sick, but jeez, Frank, you got fucking responsibilities.”
“I know I got a wife.”
Carmine flinched.
“Claire’s got nothing to do with this.”
“She didn’t know?”
“She … knew I was protecting you.”
“You and Claire close, then?”
“Frank, she’s … worried. About the future.”
“So you the future for Claire, hah?”
“No. It wasn’t like that.”
“Yeah? Tell me what it was like. I’m lying in bed at night, you mutts think I’m stoned, I’m gone. I watch you and her. You doing it right in front of me. I watched, Carmine. Don’t tell me you both doing all this for me. You got busted, then. How? Did Creek find out? Rat you out?”
Carmine pulled his lips back, showed his teeth.
“Creek rats me out, he’d be a greasy smear on my heel.”
“How, then? How’d you get nailed?”
“The Canadians, the fucking horse cops. Whaddya call them?”
“The RCMP?”
“Yeah. They had a fink in the Mohawks. He rats me out. The Canadians hand me over to the feds.”
“The feds? This Greco broad?”
“Yeah. I mean, she’s the main one. Once I got busted, the FBI handed me over to the U.S. attorney. Make a deal. That was her.”
“How long?”
“Shit … six, seven months.”
“Who’s the target?”
“It was gonna be you. I had to give her something. I don’t give her something, my deal’s off. She figured Jackie here was dirty already. She was primed up. So I give her what she wanted. I give her a guy, big shipping company, lots of assets, told her he was all mobbed up, connected, a made guy. She went for it like a snake at a chicken.”
“This Pike guy. He a part of this?”
“Pike. Shit, no. The guy’s a fucking loose cannon.”
“How’d he get into it, then?”
“He come to me about his guns. I figured, hey, this is fucking icing on the cake. I already had the Cobra primed up. Jackie takes the gun thing on, all I need to do is find out when it’s going down the river, and I make sure the Cobra’s on board same day. Then I call Greco and ba-bing, they got Jackie for guns too. It was a walkin off the street. It was too good to pass up. Then Jackie goes all civic and rats Pike out. Man, that rocked us all. Greco almost shit when she got the call. Then she figured it didn’t matter. They had Jackie either way. But it was beautiful all the way around. They get Jackie here, and they get Pike too. Bonus, two for one.”
“How’d you do Jack?”
“Jackie brings his Cobra in. I got another. Guy I put Creek on to, in Montreal, he knew where to get one just like Jackie’s.”
“Did Creek help you? Get the Cobra?” asked Jack.<
br />
“No. I couldn’t trust him for that. Why? He saying I did?”
“I haven’t asked him. Yet,” said Jack.
“Well, he ain’t been no fucking friend, Jackie. You think he’s such a big buddy? Fuck that noise. Ever ask him where he gets his money? He paid me a hundred thousand on the vig just a month back. You see him, ask him where that came from.”
“No. Not my business.”
“No? You dumb prick. You so fucking stupid, you drove that fucking Cobra for two whole days, didn’t even know it wasn’t yours. It was a walk. Setting you up was a fucking pleasure.”
Jack kept his mouth shut. Frank walked away to the workbench and poured himself a glass of red wine, another for Jack. He placed each glass carefully on a wooden tray with the words Lake Placid painted in a forties arc of bright fall colors. Jack thought he looked like a priest, working at the low wooden bench under the dim light. Frank walked over with the tray held out before him, his face moving from light to shadow and back into the light again as he reached them. Jack looked in Frank’s eyes and saw pain, loss, and death there, and also the kid he used to be, the boy’s face under the ruined mask of sagging skin. Frank touched his glass to Jack’s glass.
“Salud,” said Frank.
“Now what?” asked Jack.
“Up to you.”
Jack looked over his shoulder at Carmine. Carmine was staring at them both. Behind him Fabrizio Senza stood in the half shadow, staring down at the back of Carmine’s head, the blade in his right hand shimmering like a little silver flame.
“You got your cell phone with you?”
Frank pulled it out of the pocket in his bathrobe.
“Give it to Carmine.”
“Carmine?”
“Yeah. He’s gonna make a call.”
“I’m calling nobody, you fuck,” said Carmine. Nobody looked at him. Carmine was over. Frank raised his right eyebrow.
“So who?”
“Pike,” said Jack.
Frank was quiet for a while.
“You think that’s safe?”
“No,” said Jack.
“Then why?”
“I owe him.”
“Owe him for what?”
“Carmine’s not the only rat in the room, Frank.”
OFFICE OF THE DISTRICT ATTORNEY FOR MANHATTAN
CENTRE STREET
1900 HOURS
Nicky Cicero and Dexter Zarnas had spent two hours sitting in the outer offices of the district attorneys assigned to cross-jurisdictional cases in New York State, waiting to see which way a three-way tug-of-war was going to snap loose. Inside the glass-walled offices, the two cops could see at least seven different lawyers representing three different agencies, the United States attorney’s office, the state DA, and two ADAs for the city of New York. Pete LeTourneau was in there as well, along with some senior police officials from the NYPD and even a lawyer representing the District of Columbia. The argument was loud and angry and right now it looked as if everybody but the state lawyers was winning.
Dexter was leaning back in the wooden chair with his feet propped up on a trash can and sipping at a cup of black coffee. Nicky was sitting opposite him, stretched out on a slatted wood bench, his hands folded behind his head. He was … conflicted.
Casey had called him a little after five, just as they were getting Pike processed and into a state-federal lockup in the basement of Central Booking. Nicky listened to her story with a great sense of relief—the briefcase was back in her hands and Casey’s mother hadn’t OD’d. But the stuff about her mother’s change of heart, Nicky found that less than convincing. He’d heard that kind of thing many times before, and it always ended up in a Friday night jail cell, a crowded ER on Saturday, or the city morgue on a rainy Monday. The call had ended with Casey telling him she’d try to call him at home—at his hotel room in Yonkers—later this evening. No, she wasn’t coming back in today. She figured he and Dexter could handle the rest of the Pike arraignment. If they needed a statement, she’d be on the job tomorrow. She and her mother had a lot to talk about. Good-bye, Nicky, was what he heard. What he was still hearing.
“Whaddya thinking, Nicky?”
Nicky looked over at Dexter.
“What?”
“You look like somebody buggered your cat.”
“I don’t have a cat.”
“Buggered your hamster, then.”
“These are mental pictures I do not need to have, Dexter. How long are these weasels going to bat this thing around?”
“They’re lawyers. We could die here.”
“Who’ll win, you think?”
“You will. The only thing the rest of the jurisdictions have on Pike is suspicion. Until the ATF finds that Barrett Fifty and links it to Pike or gets somebody at Crisis Control Systems to rat Pike out, they got nothing going. The witness at Beach Haven never saw Pike there, and so far they haven’t come up with the Smith that Pike is supposed to have used on those two guards. This guy’s a hired killer, Nicky. A professional assassin. That’s what he did in the army, it’s what he’s doing now. And CCS is protecting him.”
“Why? Why would his firm go the distance, take a chance on an obstruction charge or accessory after?”
“I figure Pike has as much on them as they have on him. These guys work the gray areas between the CIA and the FBI. Companies like Executive Outcomes, Military Professionals, the rest, they work for private companies or third-world governments in places where due process is a midnight wake-up, a free ride in a white van, and a bullet in the back of the head. Pike’s probably insane, but he’s not crazy. He had all the angles figured before he went after any of these guys. He had his route in and his route out and what he’d say later all planned, right down to the distance between Red Hook and LaGuardia. Compared to him, these federal mutts are Teletubbies.”
“Then how’d we get him?”
“We didn’t. He came in.”
“Yeah,” said Nicky. “That’s what I was thinking about.”
“Me too, kid. Oops, here we go.”
One of the suits was walking toward the glass door, one of the women representing the state and the Criminal Investigation Division of the State Police, a blonde-haired beauty with wide cheekbones and a big sport-model frame tucked into a two-piece silk suit in emerald-green. She put her hand out as she came toward Nicky and Dexter, who were on their feet by then.
“How are you, Officers? You must be Officer Cicero, and you’re Sergeant Zarnas of the NYPD. I’m Bridget McCarthy, the ADA for New York State. I’d like to congratulate you on bringing in Mr. Pike. As you can see, he’s quite the wanted man.”
“You’re welcome,” said Dexter. McCarthy beamed at them both and turned away, began to walk down the long terrazzo hallway toward the door. Halfway there she stopped, looked back.
“Well, boys? Let’s go.”
“Where we going?” asked Dexter.
“To chambers, of course. The Pike defense has asked for a hearing, and we’re going to give them one.”
“What kind of a hearing?” asked Nicky.
McCarthy smiled at him over her shoulder.
“A short one, I hope.”
She led them out of the building and out across the deserted parks and sidewalks of Centre Street until they got to the courts. She jogged up the steps and pushed through the brass-bound doors, waved to a couple of guards on her way through the metal detector—Dexter and Nicky at a jog right behind her—and up a curve of marble stairs to a long hallway lined with offices. She stopped in front of a large wooden door with gold lettering:
JUDGE GLORIA BETHUNE
CHAMBERS
“Here we are, boys. You can come in, but sit quiet. This is for lawyers and other grown-ups. Whatever you think, say nothing.”
She knocked on the door and opened it. The room was small and lined with law books and framed artworks in heavy gilded wood. There was a worn Persian carpet in front of a battered mahogany desk, and four chairs on the carp
et. One of the chairs was filled with a small elderly black man in a three-piece navy-blue suit and shiny black shoes. He was tiny, wrinkled, and his salt-and-pepper hair was mostly salt. His eyes were crinkled up in a permanent squint and were surrounded with smile lines. He looked like a cheerful man, in general, who had something particularly pleasing planned for later.
The woman behind the desk, leaning back in her tattered leather wing chair and puffing on a cigarette, was a lean-faced black woman in her fifties, a serious knockout, with fine snow-white hair brushed back from her strong face and held in place with a red ribbon at the back of her neck. Her eyes were soft and calm, and she had an air around her that some judges have, of having seen it all at least three times and been shocked only once. She rose as Bridget McCarthy came over with her hand out.
“Ms. McCarthy, how nice to see you. I think you know S. Walter Kendall.”
“I do, of course. I was in Professor Kendall’s moot court at Yale several times. I don’t suppose you remember me?”
“Oh but I do,” said Kendall, rising unsteadily out of his chair and extending a firm but bony hand. “And these two young men?”
McCarthy introduced Nicky and Dexter and got them arranged around the desk. As she sat down beside Professor Kendall, she sent Nicky and Dexter one warning look and then settled in. The judge leaned forward, crossed her arms, and nodded to Professor Kendall.
“I think we can begin if you wish, Professor Kendall.”
“Thanks. I know we’re all tired, and I do want to express my own appreciation, and that of my client, for the favor of this unusual Sunday evening hearing.”
“I was available. I am intrigued,” said Judge Bethune.
“Intrigued?” put in Bridget McCarthy. “Why intrigued?”
Kendall laughed softly and gave them all a benevolent look over his thin gold-framed glasses.
“I’ll explain. Now, for the benefit of these young officers who have chosen to be present, I’ll just skip all the legalese and say, in the plainest possible terms, that one of the bulwarks of freedom is the Fourth Amendment right to freedom from unreasonable search or seizure. I think this is a principle upon which we may all concur. I also want to point out, off the record, that I deeply regret having to make this argument in the case of our Mr. Pike, who is an individual with whom I share very little in the way of ethics and beliefs. Personally, I’d like to see the brute chained to a wall and stoned. But I must make it. The canon of ethics compels me.”
Black Water Transit Page 35
