by David Wind
“Inscrutable,” I corrected.
“Yeah, inscrutable. Why you looking for him? Did he have something to do with Sugar?”
Something flashed across her eyes. Fear, perhaps, or maybe it was sadness. “I don’t know. Do you know if he had any dealings with Streeter?”
She shrugged again. “I never saw them together.”
“Thanks Lilah. Don’t work too hard.”
“I always work hard, Gabe, I need to keep my customers satisfied. You be careful, you hear?”
“I hear.” With a wave, I started toward Tenth Avenue to McRoy’s and my date with Johnny Woo.
Just after I crossed Ninth Avenue, I spotted the shadow pacing me from across the street.
Chapter 32
The outside of McRoy’s was as uninviting as I knew the inside would be. The brown wood faced storefront surrounded a dirty picture window and looked like it had been made from washed out exterior paneling. A red neon sign with curved lettering spelled the name McRoy’s while preventing anyone from seeing inside.
The door was made of the same discolored brown wood, with a small window so you could see if anyone was on the other side—if it had been clean. Opening the door rewarded me with the smell of old cooking oil and beer. It could have been worse. I exhaled out the stink and went in. The floor was cracked and unpolished, the walls a dull ochre.
The bar ran the length of the room and had at least twenty people at it. Unlike O’Brien’s, the inhabitants were a dozen notches down on the evolutionary scale. Tables were scattered haphazardly, with only a few occupied. At the far end of the dimly lit bar were two empty pool tables under hanging lights.
I scanned the room and spotted the Chinese guy two thirds of the way in, holding a tall glass and talking in earnest with someone. I took an empty spot at the bar ten feet from him. There was no rush and I wanted to see what was going on.
The bartender ambled over to me and raised his eyebrows. “Tsingtao”
Again, the bartender didn’t speak; he just looked at me as if I was stupid. “Anything cold will work, in the bottle.”
He slid the rusted top of the cooler open and pulled out a Budweiser, used a bottle opener instead of twisting the off cap, and set it on the bar. “Four bucks.”
I put a ten on the bar, which he slipped up and walked away with. When he returned, he put the change on the table and gave me a quick stare before going off to pour someone a drink. He’d pulled four bucks for the beer—that’s what happens if you’re not a regular. Beer shouldn’t have been more than two-fifty.
I nursed the beer and watched the goings on in the smeared mirror. The chinaman was still deep in conversation. He wore a tight fitting short sleeve pullover, which showed a well-defined chest. He was tallish, close to six feet, and wiry thin. He had a mean cast to his face, all sharp and pinched features with high cheekbones and narrowed black ovoid eyes. His skin tone was more mustard than beige; his hair was an inch long and stuck out almost straight.
His hands moved rapidly while he talked, but not too fast for me to miss spotting the calluses on his fingers and around the knuckles. He was a fighter, or at least a practitioner of some form of martial arts like Lilah had said.
Five minutes passed before the front door opened. I used the mirror to see who was coming in. He was five-eleven, broad and packing a piece at his hip, which his long pull over shirt didn’t quite conceal.
As he walked, his eyes flicked along the line of men at the bar until they reached me and then skipped past faster than they should have, which told me he was my shadow. When he spotted Johnny Woo, he went right to him.
Adrenaline leaked into my system. My senses picked up the way they always do and the snatches of conversation around me became louder. A woman at a table behind me snarled at her companion. A man two down on the bar turned and spat on the floor.
My shadow reached Johnny Woo and bent to his ear. He said something and, in the mirror, I caught Woo’s not to subtle glance at me. He nodded and the man started back toward the front.
Using the mirror to study his face, I marked it in my mind. He had a big nose, wide set eyes and a large mouth with thin lips. There was an old crescent shaped scar on the left side of his jaw. His hair was black, and tied in a short ponytail. He looked the part of a tough guy. I was sure he could handle himself, but just how well was something I figured I’d know soon enough. He walked by me without a glance and headed straight for the door.
After he left, Johnny Woo talked for another two minutes, then pulled some bills from his pocket and set them on the bar. With a nod to his bar-mate, he turned and went to the back and into the bathroom.
I pulled my bills from the bar top, slipped them into my pocket—he wasn’t getting a tip for a four-buck beer—and headed to where Woo had disappeared. The bathroom door was locked, so I leaned back against the wall and waited.
Thirty seconds later the door clicked and started to open. I lunged across and shoved the door hard, sending Woo back into the sink.
“What the fuck?” he shouted, as I stepped inside and locked the door behind me.
His move was clean and fast, just not fast enough. His foot came up in a sweeping arc which I blocked with crossed wrists, caught his ankle with the same movement and spun him around. Without missing a beat, I grabbed the hair at the back of his head and shoved his face into the mirror. It didn’t break, but it cracked pretty good. The fight was over before it began.
“Don’t even try.” I pulled the Sig. “Turn around.”
When he did, his eyes locked on the black automatic. “You can’t be stupid enough to be ripping me off.”
“I don’t want your money, Woo, I want some information,” I said, playing his game. “But you know who I am, Don’t you?”
His denial was a slow shake of his head while his eyes slid toward the door in an effort to figure a way around me. “I think you do, but if you don’t I’ll tell you. My name is Gabriel Storm. I’m a private cop, and my friend was killed last week.”
A puzzled look flashed across his face. I couldn’t tell if it was because he didn’t know what I was referring to or if he was acting dumb. “And I’m also the guy who had your pal Streeter busted.”
This time he showed understanding. “I don’t know noth–”
“–Sure you do. You’re the one who dropped the quarter on Rabbit. You set him up so they could pull me in.”
“You’re making a mistake. I don’t know a fucking thing.”
“I doubt it. You know where Streeter is, don’t you?”
“All I know is Streeter is gone.”
“Gone where?”
“I don’t know. He left the city.”
Very quietly, I said, “You know he killed the girl.”
Woo blinked: a nervous tongue whisked across his lips. “What girl?”
Oh yeah, he knew. “When I find Streeter, and I learn you helped him, I’ll be back for you. Tell the people you work for I’m going to find out what’s going on.”
Johnny Woo smiled then. “You don’t want to go there…. You don’t know who you’re messing with.”
I gave him a toothy grin and saw myself reflected in the cracked mirror, looking like an African death mask with big teeth. “You got it backwards, Woo, they don’t know who they’re dealing with.”
Accepting there was nothing else to get out of Woo, not now anyway, I lowered the Sig. When I did, he moved on me. I took the glancing blow to the side of my head, rolled with it and backhanded him with the Automatic. I broke his nose. Blood gushed down his face.
“Shit!” he screamed, cupping his nose with both hands.
I grabbed his shirt, felt the warm blood, and slammed him onto the toilet. “Make sure you tell them I won’t stop until I have the one who killed my friend.”
He stared at me with narrowed hating eyes while I took the time to wash the blood off my hands and dry them with a paper towel. “Stay here for a little while. You don’t want to get hurt any more.”
&n
bsp; I closed the bathroom door behind me. There was one more to deal with. Maybe I’d learn more from him than I had from Woo.
It was a long walk out of McRoy’s, with twenty pairs of eyes hot on my back. When I hit the sidewalk, I took a couple of breaths of city-scented air to clean out the smell of the bar, then headed uptown.
Three blocks later, without needing the nape of the neck tingle to tell me my tail was with me, I slowed to make sure the guy tracking me would do the same. The streets were almost empty, which is what I needed.
I turned down Fifty-third, crossed Eleventh Avenue and continued west. The block was populated by warehouses and old office buildings. It was quiet, with only the occasional car headed toward the West Side Highway. Halfway down the block, in the shadow between two streetlamps, I risked a quick peek over my shoulder and spotted the guy from the bar.
I walked another quarter block. Ahead of me were the lights for the docks. There was one cruise ship in port, its lights blazing. When I was a hundred feet from the corner, I turned and doubled back.
The guy froze, stared at me and then made as if he was looking at his watch. He spun and started walking fast. I matched his pace then added some extra speed. Twenty seconds later, he looked over his shoulder and saw me catching up.
He lowered his head he started to run. He didn’t get too far because a big shadow popped out of a doorway in front of him. The guy who was tailing me stopped short.
Tarz’s broad body and wide shoulders was a big enough roadblock to hold the guy back. My tail’s head bobbed, looking for an escape route. His right hand opened and closed around the butt of a nonexistent pistol.
“You don’t want to be doing this,” he said when he met my stare. His dark brown eyes were almost black under the streetlight. The crescent scar on his jaw had an eerie glow. Up close he was even broader than I’d thought, and well muscled.
“And why is that?”
“You’ve been told to let it go.”
I lifted his shirt to expose the Beretta at his hip, and nodded to Tarz who pulled the piece free. The guy didn’t try to stop him. “I’m still confused. What am I supposed to let go?”
He blinked and I knew I’d taken him off guard. “Don’t screw with me, Storm. This ain’t no game.”
“The last thing I’m doing is screwing with you.” I went into his face and smelled garlic and onions and tobacco. “What am I supposed to drop?”
Waiting for him to speak, I stepped back and held out my hand to Tarz. He laid the Beretta into my palm. I popped the magazine, slipped it into my pocket, and unchambered the round in the pipe. It hit the ground and rolled a few feet.
“I’m waiting.”
He sneered. “You’re not going to do anything to me.”
I tightened my hand around the Beretta and gave him a hard short jab in the stomach. He had good muscles, but the metal punched through them and doubled him up. Tarz grabbed his hair and jerked his head up.
His eyes flickered with pain. “I’m still waiting.”
“You… you’re interfering with business,” he finally said.
“What business, the girls?”
He didn’t say anything; his expression said it all. I put my face an inch from his. “You tell Santucchi I haven’t done anything yet. You tell him if he wants a fight, he’ll get it.”
A funny look crossed his face but disappeared as fast as it had arrived. “You want me to say that to Santucchi?”
“You catch on quick.”
“Consider it done.” He held out his hand for the Beretta, which I planted in his palm. “The clip?”
I winked. “I’ll keep it as a souvenir.”
He holstered the piece, pulled his shirt over it and said, “I was told you were a real smart guy. I think I was told wrong.”
He side stepped around Tarz and took off. Tarz looked at me. “You learn anything?”
“Yeah, I did. Thanks for watching my back.”
Tarz gave me a silent and solemn nod. He hadn’t helped me for any type of payback. He’d helped because that’s what you do after spending a couple of years together in an eight by eight cell, just as I’d helped him with things over the last couple of years.
We walked together until we hit Eighth Avenue and I put Tarz in a cab. As it drove away, a wave of tiredness washed over me, but there was something else as well. I had my first real lead. Whoever murdered Scotty was somehow involved with Santucchi’s people—it might be tenuous, but it was something.
Chapter 33
I rehashed everything that happened yesterday, during the hour and a half drive to Newburgh’s Stewart Airport. The deeper I delved into it, the more weight fell to the possibility of Scotty’s murder involving the work he was doing with Save Them. And while my tussle with Streeter didn’t have anything to do with Scotty, it seemed to be more than just an unconnected happenstance to discover Streeter ran underage girls and was involved with Santucchi. I didn’t see the connection yet, but it would be just a matter of time.
I reviewed the details of my talks with Lia Thornton and Thomas Albright; the cast members of the play, and the reports from Sonny Marks. While I puzzled over Lia and Scotty’s friendship, and what he had wanted to tell her before he’d been killed, I couldn’t connect her to Scotty’s murder. Albright had dropped down on my suspect list for a multitude of reasons.
Albright just didn’t work as the killer: He didn’t have what it took to do what had been done to Scotty. If Albright wanted Scotty dead, he would have hired someone, and whether he’d hired a pro or an amateur, the hit wouldn’t have been as messy and angry as it had been.
Which brought me back to the same spot I’d been at earlier: Who was so damned angry with Scotty that they’d eviscerated him with bullets?
The sign for Route Eighty-Four came up; telling me there was five miles left on the Thruway until my exit. The clock on the dash read quarter to ten.
My thoughts drifted to last night. When I’d gotten back to my place, Gina had called to report in on her afternoon at the office and to find out if I’d missed her. After a little playful banter, she’d told me she’d been unable to pull a connection between Santucchi and Streeter and Margaret Ann McNickles, other than Streeter’s rumored ties to Santucchi. Gina did, however, find both names of the kids in Scotty’s folders.
Both cases were girls, but had no similarities: one girl was abducted on her way home from school; the other was supposed to have gone to a friend’s house for a sleepover after school. The only problem was she had never gone to her friend’s house, even though she’d called her mother just after nine to say goodnight. This was, Gina added, the standard operating procedure of this type of slime.
The FBI report on the second girl concluded—after several hours of interviewing the friend she was supposed to have stayed with—she had been the victim of a sexual predator who had lured her through the Internet and coached her on how to get free so they could meet. It shook me up to think so young a girl would even consider doing something like that.
The first girl’s case was substantially different. The abduction happened in plain sight. She and two friends walked the four blocks from school to their homes, which were all on the same block. The victim was the last one to reach home. As she crossed the street, a van roared up, the sliding side door open, and scooped her in while her mother stood at the front door.
Even though the mother called the police within minutes, they’d never found the child, but had discovered the abandoned van parked four blocks away. The prints found on the van were the owners, who had called in a stolen car report the day before. No one had gotten a clear look at the perp who’d grabbed the child.
The owner was cleared, and the child was never found. This had happened six years earlier. If the girl was still alive, she would be fourteen now. If….
I pushed the thought away. Gina wouldn’t hazard a guess why Scotty had been working on the files, nor would she take a stab as to why the killer had pulled the paperwork out of
those two files and from his sister’s as well.
The exit for Interstate Eighty-Four and Stewart Airport came up and saved me from any more thinking. Maybe I’d have some answers in a few minutes.
<><><>
The airport wasn’t busy, but it still took time to pass through security. After showing my Sig, my PI license and my gun permit, and the fact that I was meeting Cohen, they sent me through to the gate where Sam Cohen was waiting.
A half dozen people sat in the waiting area, none of whom looked like cops, so I stayed where I was and waited. A minute later, a man sitting against the wall stood up and looked at me. He was five-ten, wore a lightweight brown suit, and had a yarmulke—a Jewish skullcap—centered on a head of wavy salt and pepper hair. He had brown eyes, thick eyebrows and a strong chin with a sharp cleft. His mouth was large, which made his small nose stand out.
He started toward me. “Mr. Storm?”
“That’s me.” I took his outstretched hand. His grip was firm and his skin warm and dry.
“Sam Cohen,” he informed me. “Why don’t we sit in the corner over there? It seems private enough.”
I followed him to the seats.
“You seem surprised,” he said as we sat.
“I didn’t expect a cop with a Yarmulke.”
He gave me a wide grin. “Most don’t. You should see my partner—black hat and all. They call us God’s squad.” His eyes sparkled with humor.
I’ve seen all kinds of cops in police departments, everywhere. Religion doesn’t make a cop, crime does. “And a pretty good squad from what I’ve been told.”
“We try. You wanted to speak about predators?”
“Samantha Collins said you were the man to talk to.”
His somber nod was followed with, “I wish I weren’t. What can I help you with?”
“Let’s start with the McNickles girl. You’re familiar with the case?”
His eyes narrowed. “Very. She came from a bad home. We were never able to prove her father had molested her, but everyone concerned with the case was certain of it. The wife is a battered woman who can’t stand up to him, even today.”
