The Death Panel: Murder, Mayhem, and Madness

by Tom Piccirilli

  That pretty much said it.

  Richard Rice, a.k.a. Richie R, had been—according to the Medical Examiner’s cursory exam—beaten to the proverbial pulp, nearly decapitated, then disemboweled and hung up like a party pinata with his own intestines. That was real sweet, that bit. Took real imagination to come up with that one. But Mann had seen lots of crazy shit in his time. He told Perno about that Puerto Rican broad over in Vineland, how she’d been sharing the goods with some of her husband’s friends, so he stuck the barrel of a Remington 12-gauge up her cootch and pulled the trigger. Said that had been an ugly one, all right. With the Remington hanging out of her, she looked like a corndog on a stick someone had taken a big bite out of.

  Perno said, “This is just disgusting, Archie. This isn’t a trunk job or a slice-and-dice, let’s hide the body parts so no one can put Humpty Dumpty back together again … no, this ain’t like that. This is … what? Like whoever did Rice wanted people to see his work, say, lookit the shit I can do. I’m something, all right. Like maybe a serial killer, that sort of thing.”

  Mann nodded. “Yeah, still I wanna have a talk with my pal Donny. You say Rice was bouncing with Cerrone? Well, you never know, old Donny might be in on this, might have pissed somebody off.”

  “Whoever it is, Mike, you remind me not to piss ’em off.”

  Perno gave Mann what Cartland, the M.E., had given him, the sort of stuff that made you want to skip lunch. Rice had been worked on pretty good, smashed around so that the majority of his bones had been broken. His left lung was collapsed, neck shattered, skull fractured in three places, right arm snapped off at the elbow. “Like he was hit by a train, Archie.”

  “Yeah, a pissed-off train that kept coming back for more.” Mann sighed. “What about all those lacerations … Jesus, looks like somebody was trying to peel him like an orange, then changed their mind.”

  Perno nodded, swallowed something down. “Cartland’s saying some sort of knife, maybe a sword … something real sharp. The only thing that’s bothering him is the angle of penetration at the entry wounds, more like sharp hooks than a blade.”

  Mann turned away. “You look at stiffs long enough, you start thinking they’re looking back at you.”

  Perno understood. “I’ve saved the best for last.”

  “I knew you would.”

  Perno smiled, then decided this wasn’t the sort of thing you smiled about. “As a joke, whoever did this took Rice’s heart with him. Don’t that beat all?”

  Swallowing, something bad being born down in his belly, Mann had to admit that, yeah, it was really something.

  3

  Donny Cerrone was shaking his head, saying, “Okay, you go figure this shit out, you’re so smart. I’m telling you what I know is all. What do you want from me? Pull something better outta my ass … that make you happy?”

  Archie Mann pulled off his cigarette. “I’m of the mind that there’s nothing up your ass I’d want to see, Donny. So let’s try something different here. I’ll go real slow so I don’t confuse you and your third grade education … okay?”

  “Sure, but take it easy on me, will ya?”

  Mann smiled thinly. “I will. I’m all heart. That’s what they say about me.”

  “Is that what they say?”

  “Sure, just like they say you’re some kind of stand-up guy. You know they say that about you?”

  “No, that’s gangster-talk, so I wouldn’t know about that shit. I’m an honest, hardworking businessman, ask anybody. People bring things in here, I front ’em some cash, they don’t come back, I sell the stuff. Hey, Mann, you need a guitar? I got some nice guitars. No, that wouldn’t be your thing … you’re a trumpet sort of guy, I bet. Like to blow your fucking horn all the time.”

  “You think so?” Mann said. “But when Jimmy Jack Furnari and some of the Georgia Street Irregulars decide to cut your trash-talking head off, Donny, I’ll set that trumpet down and play my fucking violin. How’s that grab you?”

  Cerrone didn’t bother smiling. He just leaned on the counter and let Mann have his fun. They played tag like this every month or so and it got to be like old times after awhile. Cerrone was thinking he should’ve ducked out for lunch ten minutes earlier and he could have missed Mann altogether. That cheered him some until he remembered he was still here. With Mann.

  Donny Cerrone ran a pawnshop over on Mississippi Avenue called the Whole Nine Yards, cute name, and regular as a woman’s cycle and about as wanted, Mann would stop by and ride his shit for free. Mann was of the mind that Donny was connected up with some heavy players out of Georgia Street, the sort of guys who liked spaghetti and made a habit of dumping dead bodies in the trunks of cars. Those kinds of guys. Thing was, Mann was right, not that Donny was going to admit as such. He was in deep and Mann knew it, just couldn’t prove it was all.

  “I’m clean,” Donny said. “And that’s all there is to it.”

  “Yeah, you’re clean, all right. Clean like a sewer.”

  Yeah, that Archie Mann was some kind of character. Like a tick that burrowed under your skin and bled you dry drop by drop. That’s the kind of guy he was.

  “Okay now, Donny, here we go.” Mann pulled off his cigarette, flicked his ash on the counter. “You say you know a boy named Richie R? But you say you haven’t seen him in about a week, he was doing some work for you? That what you’re serving up today?”

  “That’s it, boss. You got it right the first time.”

  Mann nodded. “Well, not to piss in your punch, Donny, but I think I should let a hardworking honest businessman like you onto something … Richie R, he was a bad boy.”

  “No shit? And here I trusted him.”

  “Yup. Guy pulled state-time twice, federal time once. Been in half a dozen county lockups in his career as a dumbfuck white trash criminal.”

  “Damn. You’re scaring me now, Mann. Come back here, lookit my balls, will ya? They’re all shriveled-up and shit.”

  Mann laughed. “I love you, Donny, you know that? I would’ve thought a hood like Richie R would scare you … but then I remembered you’d done some time yourself. Where were you at? Let me see … oh, that’s right, FSP Lewisburg. I remember now. People say there’s lots of Mafia-types in there. You meet any?”

  “Me? No, I worked in the chapel.”

  Cerrone knew they could go back and forth like this all day. Mann never got tired. That’s the sort of guy he was. Pushing sixty, lots of snow on the roof, face seamed like a peach pit, but tough, Jesus, tough and randy and smart. The way cops were once before the steroids, lawsuits, and departmental therapists molded them into mass-produced skinheads.

  Mann kept talking about Richie R and his career of crime, the bad things that happen to guys like him and those they associate with, pretty much running circles around what he really wanted to say. But that was Archie Mann all over, you had to give him room, let him run around a lot like something that was kept on a leash for too long. Sooner or later, he’d come back home and use the front door. Maybe piss on your leg or dry-hump your slacks, but he’d come home.

  So Cerrone waited while he talked.

  Now and again a customer would come through the door, jingling the bells, take one look at Mann standing there and go back out again. The sort of people Cerrone dealt with—thieves, junkies, small-time hoods needing to move some hot merch fast—they could smell a cop half a mile off. They made Archie Mann right away, decided they’d better come back. Maybe it was the bad suit or the worse haircut. But maybe it was the eyes … dead and fixed like the eyes of a stuffed toad. Eyes that always seemed to be saying, you can’t show me worse shit than I’ve already seen.

  Either way, Cerrone didn’t need this right now. He was losing customers with a cop in his place. He had too many things going on, too many angles that needed working. The pawnshop was basically just a front for Cerrone, put him on paper as being legit. When you were a loanshark and a bookie, fenced stolen goods for a living, you had to have something legit to launder
your income through. A fact of life.

  Mann was telling Cerrone about this guy he knew, thought he should hear about it. “This guy … we’ll call him Donny, just for the hell of it. He’s not a bad guy for the most part, he just came up in the wrong neighborhood and started playing with the wrong sort of kids. You know the kids I mean … the kind that always end up in reform school and prison later, earners and players. That’s the sort of people Donny got jammed up with. Pretty soon, he’s just like them, got his hands dirty—”

  “All right, all right, Mann, Jesus Christ. I don’t have time for this shit. How many times we gonna stand here and dance this same tired fucking tune?”

  “Maybe until you’re straight with me.”

  “Straight about what?”

  Mann just looked at him. “About what you do for a living.”

  Cerrone tried to laugh, but his throat felt too dry. “I run a pawnshop, Mann, I’m not John fucking Gotti here. Shit, I’m not saying I’m clean as a whistle. Sure, I run some book, put together a few card games.”

  “What about loansharking?”

  “No, not me.”

  “Hijacking?”

  Cerrone did laugh now, but it didn’t come out sounding too good. “That’s for the pros, I’m just a small-timer. I don’t touch that stuff.”

  “No? Then what did you have a boy like Richie R around for? Because you know what? People I been talking with, they’re saying Richie R was a hijacker: warehouses, semis, that sort of bit.”

  “Nothing like that,” Cerrone told him. “I was using Richie for odds and ends. I use lots of guys like that. He was a runner, took bets on games, shit like that. No strong-arm stuff.”

  Mann just shook his head. “If you say so, Donny. I just hope what happened to Richie R don’t happen to you. Because I got the feeling he pissed somebody off. Some real mean, psychotic sonofabitch.”

  Cerrone licked his lips. “They shoot him or what?”

  “No, nothing like that.” Mann told him all about it, how Richie R looked like something you saw hanging in a Chicago stockyard when they were done with him. “And you know what, Donny? Whoever did him took his fucking heart.”

  Then Mann left and Cerrone relaxed inch by inch. As much as he could after what he’d just been told. Thing was, he had been using Richie R for some heavy stuff, for muscle to take down some lucrative heists. But other than that, Mann was way off base. There was nothing they’d been doing that could have pissed anyone off … and particularly not like that.

  This is what Cerrone was telling himself, but down at the pit of his belly, he was starting to get a real tense feeling.

  4

  Donny Cerrone had an apartment over on North Georgia Avenue, about two blocks from the tenement he’d grown up in. He wasn’t married, never dated anyone but hookers because once you paid them, they invariably left. So when he got home that night, there was nobody waiting for him. Not even a cat or dog. In fact, animals weren’t even allowed in the building.

  And that’s why what he saw didn’t make much sense.

  Up there on the fifth floor, his door was scathed with what looked like claw-marks, as if a dog had been trying real hard to scratch its way in.

  Cerrone stood there, that feeling in his belly again.

  It don’t mean nothing, he told himself. Some animal got in.

  The fifth floor, though? Did it take the elevator? But Cerrone dismissed that. He studied the scratches, noticing with unease that they were not down low like the sort a dog would make, but up high on the door, from midline to the top and dug in real deep like somebody had been using a garden trowel … one that was real sharp. Some of those gashes were imbedded a half an inch or more. And in solid oak yet. Cerrone started wondering the sort of strength it would take to sink a blade in that deep and then pull it down at the same depth.

  Like claws, he found himself thinking. Like something very strong with big claws was ripping at the door.

  He started to tremble, the flesh on his forearms and at the back of his neck prickling. Making a funny moaning sound in his throat, he got his key in the lock and went through the door fast as he could. Then he shut it, locked it, even threw the deadbolt though his building was high-security with keyless entry, security guards, the whole bit. His fingers found the lights and it occurred to him at the last possible moment that there could have been somebody in there waiting for him.

  But there was no one.

  Just silence and Donny Cerrone, a forty-nine year old loanshark, bookie, and fence. A connected guy who’d done time and didn’t know the meaning of fear. Not really. Not by this point. But there he was … shaking, scared white inside like some kid who’d just escaped the neighborhood haunted house.

  Sure was funny what your mind could do to you, Cerrone found himself thinking as he poured a Chivas on the rocks and threw it down the hatch, refilling it just that quick. His hands were still shaking. There it was again, that awful, inescapable feeling in his belly, that tenseness touched by nausea: fear.

  Christ, get a grip here.

  So he did. He threw back the second Chivas and got a grip on a .38 Smith Airweight he kept in his bedroom. The feel of a gun relaxed him some. Standing there, he tried to sort it out. He had no reason to be afraid, none at all … yet, he was. These past few days it had been on him, the sense that there was danger and a far worse sense that he was being watched.

  But there was never anyone there.

  Nobody, nothing … just that feeling at the back of his neck that got so bad sometimes he thought he might scream.

  That’s enough.

  Cerrone sat down, turned on the tube, started watching some lesbo act on the Playboy Channel. Couple broads, lots of legs and tongues. Jesus Christ, who was he to be afraid? He’d dealt with thugs and criminals and psychopaths of every stripe since he was a kid. He was in tight with Jimmy Jack Furnari, a capo in the Calabrian Mafia, the sort of guy, you pissed him off, he’d have a couple hitters do you with chainsaws in a warehouse. These were the sort of sharks he swam with, but if you knew the moves—and Donny Cerrone knew ’em, all right—you could dance away from their jaws every time. And after three decades of that and five years in a maximum security prison, Donny Cerrone did not frighten easy.

  Yet, he was afraid.

  Right then, thinking it over, it came on him again, that electric and somehow sour feeling of adrenaline down low in his guts. The sense that something really nasty had happened or was about to. Yeah, that was it. Like when his mother was in the hospital, shot through with cancer, and he sat around expecting the phone to ring, some half-ass intern saying, yeah, she went down, Mr. Cerrone, she took the leap. It was very much like that, the sense of expectancy in him jarring him with negative energy—

  The phone rang.

  Cerrone felt something kick in his chest like it wanted out. His breath wouldn’t come. The .38 slid from his grip and thudded to the carpet. No, no, no, fucking no, it’s not ringing, you’re freaking out here, having some episode like when “Fat” Bobby Scolari said those little men were coming out of the walls and he started shooting up his apartment, killed the guy next door.

  But Bobby had been a blowhead, spiking more coke than he was pushing on the streets.

  The phone rang again and there was no denying it.

  Cerrone picked up the .38 Airweight, like maybe he was going to bust a few into this caller that made him almost piss his pants. He set it back down, chuckled. Jesus, you gotta stop this shit.

  He picked up the cordless. “Yeah?”

  Static, lots of it. Droning, rising, falling. A bad connection. But Cerrone knew it wasn’t that, nothing that simple. He waited, felt his heart squeeze like a fist. Felt a trickle of sweat run down his temple. Then a voice … ragged and raw like its owner had been chewing on shards of glass, swallowing them: “I missed you tonight … but I won’t miss you next time.”

  Cerrone thought he might faint, but he kept it together. Found some streets inside him, some attitude. “Wh
o the fuck is this?”

  The connection wasn’t broken. Just that droning static, the sound of lungs pulling in scraping breaths. “Baby-killer,” that awful voice said. “I’ve prepared a place for you.”

  Click.

  Cerrone wasn’t easily intimidated, but that voice was terrible. Flat and evil and remorseless, it started filling his mind with reaching shadows and grinning white faces, the sort of things made a man want to sleep with the lights on. Nothing … nothing sane could have a voice like that. It reminded Cerrone of musty cellars and rotting crypts, moldering coffin linings. Stunned, dazed, the phone had fallen from his grip and he didn’t even remember dropping it. He just stood there, not really knowing and not wanting to. Inside him, something had broken like eggs on a sidewalk and that’s how he felt—yellow and runny and messy.

  After a time, he found the sofa again or maybe it found him, all the while wondering just what sort of shit he’d stepped in this time.

  5

  Bright and early the next morning, Archie Mann was over in lower Chelsea, wondering what was happening in this goddamn town. Mike Perno had called him again, said you gotta see this shit, Archie, and now Mann was seeing it and, being a cop, he was trying to label it and fit it in its proper box … but he just couldn’t find the right one in his cluttered mind.

  How did you explain this?

  How did you label this one and file it away?

  The street was a hive of activity—metro homicide people milling around, CSI techies, the M.E.’s ghouls, uniforms holding back the wave of spectators and newsies, and … get this … a couple cherry pickers from public works. Heavy trucks with extendable booms and buckets on the ends, the sort electricians used to service the high lines. The booms had double buckets on them and both were extended an easy thirty feet in the air. CSI people were in the buckets, examining what was lodged up in the crotch of two limbs on a massive elm tree.