Cutter

by Laird, Thomas

  A half-hour after we cut the ‘private eye’ loose, we got a call from Sal Donofrio himself. He was calling from his cell phone. He said he was on the way to the hospital.

  ‘That motherfucker Karrios busted into my house. But he had bad luck. He got a chunk out of my forearm, but I think I popped him high on his torso with a.38 slug,’ he told me on the phone.

  I told him to shut up and get to the emergency room.

  *

  ‘I moved my old lady out. I hired help, and you goofy fucks pick him up and Karrios is out there waiting for his chance,’ Sal told us while the emergency physician was stitching him up. ‘You want a songbird, you got one,’ Sal continued, once the doctor had left the room. ‘You guys still give me that deal?’

  ‘Why now, Sal?’ Doc asked.

  ‘I have to live without my wife. I can’t go nowhere. I can’t do business. This fuckin’ guy is like a ghost. He fooled all of you and got into my house. It’s a good thing I got insomnia. I been carryin’ the piece around the house like it’s the fuckin’ remote control for the tube. I can’t get no peace. This guy’s wearin’ me down, and that piece of shit Fortuna has put a hit out on me because he found out Karrios and me paid him no tribute. But I ain’t sayin’ anything else until I get a piece of paper with signatures on it.’

  He looked down at his bandaged arm.

  ‘Motherfucker’s got me so’s I can’t even take a decent shit. I been takin’ bran and everything, too. Prune juice. The whole fuckin’ nine yards. It’s over. I’ve had enough. I want immunity.’

  Doc looked over to me.

  ‘Prune juice,’ he repeated.

  *

  ‘I’m next,’ I told Gibron and Wendkos. We were taking a walk around the Loop as a break from all the paperwork and interviewing with Sal. The FBI were part of the interview process since they put up all the manpower on Donofrio. A federal prosecutor made the final deal with Sal. He had delivered John Fortuna and he had handed over Marco’s contacts with Europe. We called Interpol and they said arrests were imminent. As for Karrios ... we got a post-office box number and a lock box in a bank where Marco put some of his money. We were putting people at those two locations to try and snag him. But I knew as soon as Marco discovered Sal was missing, he’d figure out what had just happened and he’d avoid checking in for his mail and chump change.

  None of the hospitals had a record of a gunshot victim that would match the description for what Sal said had happened to The Farmer. We had all the medical centers under alert. There had been wounds to tend to that night, but none of the wounded even came close to our guy in size and shape. They’d all been positively ID’d.

  ‘He’s self-medicating,’ Doc said as Jack and he and I circled State and Lake.

  ‘How many places can he go for an antibiotic?’ Jack wondered.

  ‘He’s not a doctor. He’ll have to forge something,’ I said. ‘But we could get some help from some Academy manpower. We could have those kids canvass every all-night pharmacy in a ten-mile radius of Sal’s house. I’m guessing Marco’s still in the city, still living somewhere on the North Side. We could take a chance that he’s living upscale, so that would mean the northwest area. It’s a very faint chance but we might get a sighting.’

  Doc said he’d take care of it. Jack said he’d call the Academy and try to round up a hundred or so volunteers to canvass the drugstores.

  ‘He’ll have to come in and present a prescription. He’ll probably have an idea of where to go to get a doctor’s pad. He’s smart enough not to check into a health center. He knows we’ll be watching there,’ I told the two detectives.

  ‘But he’s hurting, Jimmy. And he’s likely very angry at you and at Martinson for the lovely article you two concocted. He’ll have to move fast, and there’s also the chance that he just won’t be able to get himself any penicillin. If we’re lucky, nature’ll kill its own fuckup.’ Gibron smiled.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  The bullet has gone clean through the top of the flesh of my shoulder.But the bleeding was severe,and I barely made it back to my apartment before I collapsed on my single bed.

  When I awoke,there was a bloodstain beneath me,soaked all the way into the mattress.But my bleeding had ceased and there was caked black blood over the entry and exit wounds.I checked myself in the mirror.Having been a medic saved me from having to run to a hospital.I have to have an antibiotic,however,or infection will surely set in.The problem,of course,is that I can’t go to a doctor.The only physician I could’ve trusted is the dead plastic surgeon.Ironic,isn’t it?

  I’ve been around enough doctors to know how to falsify a prescription.It isn’t all that difficult.I’ve done it before to get Ellen some painkillers in a dosage that her family physician would never prescribe.I’ve got a pad I had made up which uses a real doctor’s name.He’s in family practice.I’ve only forged his name twice,and both times I was successful in securing something with codeine for my lovely ex-lover,the sister of John Fortuna.

  I’ve been hitting an unlucky streak,it seems.I missed Fortuna and Sal Donofrio,and Sal has put two holes in my shoulder.And when I opened the newspaper recently,I read all about my Marina and me.Written by some hack named Martinson.The list of those people l need to encounter is apparently growing.Parisi has been quoted numerous times in Martinson’s column,and I really need to talk to both of them.

  Marina was the last insult.Martinson wrote about her as if he thought he knew her.No one knew her as I did.I loved her more than anything I have ever cared about.She was the only human being who made my life temporarily livable,so naturally she was taken away from me.

  Then I get the information from Elena that Marina is not my sister as I had been told so very often.I was informed that she was my biological mother.But it made no difference to the way l felt and the way I still feel about her.She was mine and I was hers.It made no difference that we had something that is considered a taboo.Incest.It’s supposed to be a word that freezes your blood.We were having incest all along,even when I thought she was my older sibling.Why would a change in identity alter our relationship?It didn’t,at first.But then she met Aaron Blassingame and she confided in me that she had fallen in love.She told me that what we had was wrong,was evil.She broke me in two and shattered everything I dreamed of having.I told her we could share an apartment when I got out of school.When I got into medical school we could cohabit somewhere in the city.Who would give a damn who was living with whom in a city of millions?We could always say we were married or go with the brother-and-sister story and share a two-bedroom apartment.No one would give a shit.We wouldn’t have to explain anything to anyone.

  But she’d developed a serious case of conscience,she said,just as I was finishing my second year at the university.It couldn’t go on any longer,that which we’d been sharing since I was seventeen.She told me she knew it was unspeakable from the beginning,but she had a special feeling for me that went beyond the maternal.Marina said she couldn’t explain it to me,but she felt for me as she felt for no other.She would love me always,but she couldn’t go on sharing a bed with me.The pressure on her from herself was too great.Marina couldn’t live with the growing shame.It had to stop,and it suddenly did when she met Aaron.

  I can’t say I hated him.He was a decent young man.But he took her away,and that was reason enough to despise him.

  I didn’t kill them.Niko and Elena had it in mind,though.The police even talked to me.But there was nothing to the accusation,and they let me go.I still think Niko believes I was involved.My brushes with the law after my military service convinced him I was a criminal.Reading about Elena’s death,l can’t say that I miss my grandmother.But I will never be able to heal the hole that Marina punctured my chest with the night she died in that wreck.It is,therefore,her fault.If she’d gone away with me somewhere where Elena and Niko could never find us,my life would have taken a 180.None of this would have been necessary,I’m certain.Marina’s the one who put the knife in my hand.I could’ve finished medi
cal school.I wouldn’t have become involved in selling drugs...Truly,all of that self-hatred would’ve been avoided and I could’ve lived a traditional life if I could’ve simply had one very non-traditional relationship.

  The herd crushed us.It moved her away from me and eventually got her killed.She would never have been on that highway and in that car if it hadn’t been for her conscience attack.But the cattle closed in on her and made her go their way.Now she’s dead and I’m alone,and when the hate becomes too virulent,I use my knife.No,I’m not just in it for the money,no matter what the police like to say about my being a sociopath,that generic term for anyone who escapes categorizing.

  They all pushed her away from me,and I can’t see her or touch her or smell her again.But I can make them pay.I can transpose Marina’s face onto all those others,and when the rage builds to its apex,I can carve them like beasts in a slaughterhouse.Each time I do one of them,my anger increases.I know I’m not getting even,but it does vent some of my spleen.Besides,they are the people who separated us.They and their ancient desert-prophet codes.

  Enough.I have two physical holes in my flesh that need tending to.I have to find an antibiotic to stop the infection.I have to clean myself up and go to a pharmacy.Somewhere close,because I still might fall on my face from the loss of blood.I’m very weak.It’ll be a while before I’m back to full strength.

  Then I’ll meet with Martinson and Parisi.I don’t care if I’m caught or killed.There really is no good reason to keep on.My contacts have been severed before I could get my own operation up and running.I literally have no income coming in,although I have at least a half-million stashed in my lock box downtown.The police and Sal and John Fortuna are all seeking me out,and I understand the weight of the odds.One of them will find me eventually.There’s no sense in running because Fortuna and the police have universal manpower.All I can do is make a final gesture to them.All I have is one last statement,if you will.

  I get up slowly and make my way to the bathroom.My shoulder is throbbing.I need to get cleaned up,dressed,and get to that drugstore before the fever I have at the moment knocks me all the way out.I’m hoping the shower will revive me.

  I struggle to get my blood-soaked T-shirt off.Then I strip the underwear off as well.I manage to turn the water on in the shower,and I get into the stall.The water assaults me with a cold spray.The shock almost sucks my breath away.I can feel the wooziness coming on,and I grip the cold-water handle before I go down flat on my face.My grip on the handle becomes weaker and weaker.The lighting in this shower stall is becoming progressively dimmer,and suddenly I’m on my knees and I’m bleeding again.

  This is just a shoulder wound,I keep telling myself.It’s nothing fatal.Then why is it that I feel like I’m never going to wake up when my face meets the floor of this stall?

  My face does meet the floor.My eyes are a few inches from the drain.Tm hunched up like a Muslim at prayers.I want to get up.I need to rise.I know if I stay here that red trickle going down the drain will become a river of my own blood.Who knew that those guinea bastards would be awake so late?Who knew that Sal Donofrio would be waiting for me with heat in his hand?

  I reach out and put my fingertips over the drain.I figure I’ll be able to save my blood,somehow keep it from dribbling down and out into the city’s sewer system.It’s a ridiculous notion.

  But I’m getting very sleepy and I cannot move.I can’t get to my feet.Everything I’ve ever desired in my life is joining that scarlet rivulet.The bright red stream flows past my eyes,downward,downward,downward ...

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Natalie sat in the kitchen while I was asleep. She said it gave her a better visual of the floor plan in our house. She could concentrate on keeping watch if she was not in the same room with me.

  The kids and my mother had been gone two weeks. We both missed the three of them terribly. I felt as if Karrios was already here, an intruder in my home. I liked it when everyone was here, when I could see all of us together. When the kids were out of the house, I suffered anxiety attacks wondering if they were all right and if they’d arrive home safely. The Elmhurst police force had cooperated with us and had put a man with my family at Uncle Nick’s - I still couldn’t call him Papa or Dad. I called them frequently. They were lonesome for their friends and their home surroundings, but I couldn’t put them where Karrios might show up.

  I didn’t sleep well. Maybe it would’ve been better if we’d kept the security system running and the dog at home. But then a smart little dick like Karrios would sniff out the trap. The way he’d got to Sal had impressed me with his patience and his alertness. No, he wouldn’t try to come in unless his way was cleared. I was hoping he’d figured that I was confident that he wouldn’t dare attack a policeman. It just wasn’t done. Certainly not by his former associates, Fortuna and Donofrio. They wanted to fuck with a cop, they threw some money around. Killing lawmen was just too messy. And it generated unbelievable heat. You could buy a cop and get away with it, but you killed one of the brotherhood, there was no hole you could hide in. It was the one taboo that most of the Outfit would not mess with. It was just not worth the problems you’d suffer after the fact.

  But Karrios was not Sicilian, he was not in a crew, and he was not the usual workmanlike thug. He was beyond that ballpark. He’d loved his own mother, she’d died on him, and since he couldn’t have her again, he was punishing women who fit into her age and physical categories. They were surrogates for his abuse. I was no shrink, but that was the only way I could figure him.

  He had to show up soon. There’d been no progress in canvassing all the pharmacies. No one’d come in with a bogus prescription for a bug zapper. We’d given all those places a general, and vague, description of the ‘new’ Marco Karrios as well. We had a hundred Academy kids who had volunteered to keep going round to the drugstores for as long as we needed them to.

  I rolled over and I saw that Natalie was out in the house somewhere. It was three in the morning. We were still working days. We figured our being at home at night would edge Marco even further in our direction. But, like I said, it had been two long weeks.

  I heard something like a thud that seemed to come from the kitchen. I snapped myself up to a seated position. I wanted to call out for her, but I didn’t want to announce that I was awake.

  I got up out of bed and threw on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt, and I picked up the Bulldog from the nightstand. The gun was kept in easy reach now that my kids were out of the house.

  I walked slowly toward the kitchen with the piece palmed in my hand. When I got to the room where my wife liked to keep watch, I didn’t see her. There was only a fluorescent bulb lit. It was over the kitchen sink. I walked back toward the front of the house, toward the living room. It was dark. No one there.

  I was beginning to feel my pulse take off from the launchpad. I wouldn’t be taking my hypertension medication until seven in the morning, and I could feel the invisible fingers applying pressure to the back of my neck. I thought I was going to explode if I didn’t see Natalie in about ten seconds.

  I ran up the stairs to the second floor, where the kids’ bedrooms were. Nobody was there. I came back down the stairs and checked if she had missed me in transit somehow and was back in our bedroom. Still no one. I went back toward the kitchen. It was still unoccupied.

  Then I heard another thud coming from below, in the basement.

  I cocked the .44 Bulldog. I opened the door that led downstairs. It was a few paces beyond the kitchen, toward the back door. I flipped on the light switch and began to move down the stairs very lightly. But there were a few inadvertent creaks in spite of my careful steps.

  The only light came from a forty-watt globe hanging from the ceiling. We rarely went into the basement unless it was to clean or to look for something in storage. I heard another quiet thud, and I aimed the miniature cannon into the darkness.

  ‘Natalie?’

  There was no reply.

  There was a flashlight at
the bottom of the stairs on a workbench. I found it and flipped it on, but the batteries were dead and I got no light from it.

  I walked into the basement, away from the stairs, and immediately stubbed my toe on a piece of copper pipe that was lying in the middle of the concrete floor. Which caused me to snap my head up in agony. Which, in turn, caused me to whack the overhead bulb that hung from the ceiling of the basement. Which caused the light to bob eerily throughout the cellar, creating shadows and flashes of light that bounced off the various items of junk we had on the walls down here.

  In one of those flashes I saw a face. I yanked the pistol upward as I grabbed hold of that bobbing goddamned forty-watt bulb. I aimed the fixture toward the face, and I saw it was our front-lawn Santa Claus statue. I had almost whacked the fat, jolly guy with a .44 slug.

  I was convinced there was no one down here but a resident mouse. Now I’d need to buy a goddamned cat to even the odds against the fucking rodent.

  I headed back carefully toward the stairs. Suddenly I heard footsteps above me. It sounded as if they were moving rapidly across the kitchen tiles. Moving faster now, I reached the top of the basement stairs. I shoved open the door with the Bulldog stuck out in front of me.

  There was still no one in here. The light remained on, but the kitchen was deserted.

  I tried the bedroom on the main floor once more. Nobody. I trotted upstairs. Nothing. I came down into the living room and it was as it had been. Dark. Unoccupied.

  Someone was playing hide-and-seek with me and it’d gotten beyond irritating.

  ‘Natalie,goddammit!’

  The only place left was the backyard. I walked through the kitchen yet once more and opened the back door. I walked down the steps onto the cool concrete, and I felt a shiver work its way up my back. There were cops down the alley and cops down the street aways, but I hadn’t used my handheld, back in the bedroom, to call in the troops.