Angel Face

by Stephen Solomita

  ‘Called who?’

  ‘Al Zeffri.’

  ‘I got his number.’ The Blade takes out his own cellphone, runs through his contact list for a moment, then presses the call button. He holds the phone aloft and both men listen to it ring four times before Zeffri’s voicemail kicks in.

  ‘Shit.’ Bobby again surveys the warehouse. If anything, the shadows are deeper. But it doesn’t really matter. He can’t lose the money, his own or the money fronted to him. If he does, he’s as good as dead.

  ‘I gotta go in,’ he says. ‘Simple as that. I gotta go in.’

  ‘I’m not armed, boss.’ The Blade’s gaze is intense, but his tone is apologetic. ‘We were just supposed to dump the freak tonight. I didn’t know we were comin’ here.’

  Bobby instantly corrects his lieutenant. ‘What we were supposed to be is ready for anything.’

  ‘What can I say? You get caught with a gun, it’s three years minimum. And it wasn’t like the freak was gonna put up a fight.’

  Bobby drops the cellphone into his pocket and fishes for his keys. He’s thinking that his life has been a battle from the day a federal judge sentenced his father to a sixty year bit. Bobby had been what? Fifteen years old? Yeah, fifteen years old and responsible for a morbidly obese mother who cried from morning to night, and a dimwit brother who got beat up every other day.

  ‘Boss?’

  ‘What, Marco? What the fuck do you want now?’

  ‘It ain’t what I want. It’s what she wants.’

  Despite everything, despite even the gun in her hands, Bobby Ditto is taken with Angel Tamanaka’s beauty. The teardrop eyes, the glossy black hair, the rounded mouth and the determined little chin. Too determined. The gun’s moving between himself and the Blade, and her hand isn’t shaking.

  Bobby Ditto knows the difference between a genuine threat and a bluff. Angel will not only pull the trigger if attacked, she’s only a heartbeat away from pulling the trigger right this minute. That’s OK with Bobby. He feels better now that there’s an enemy standing in front of him, and better still when the little gun settles on the Blade.

  ‘Remember me?’ Angel asks.

  ‘Yeah, I remember you.’

  ‘Remember all those things you said you were going to do to me?’

  The Blade’s mouth opens, closes, opens again. ‘I was only tryin’ to scare you.’

  ‘Scare me into doing what?’

  ‘Into telling me where your partner was.’

  ‘Ah, so that means you weren’t going to tie my wrists to a ceiling beam? And that thing with the pliers? That was an empty threat? You were planning to let me go?’

  Bobby’s measuring the distance between himself and Angel, maybe fifteen feet, two strides and a leap. The little automatic’s not a man stopper. Unless she gets real lucky, it won’t even slow him down. Of course, she doesn’t have to get lucky if he’s standing still when she pulls the trigger, which is why he intends to move on her when she finally shoots the Blade.

  The Blade straightens up and draws a long breath through his prow of a nose. Old school to the max, threats from a whore don’t appeal to him, as Bobby knew they wouldn’t. If he was armed, his piece would already be in his hand.

  Angel smiles. ‘Nothing to say?’

  ‘Yeah, I got something to say. Go fuck yourself.’

  The conversation having come to a dead end, Angel pulls the trigger, surprising Bobby. Nevertheless, he moves before the echo dies off, his head down, hands reaching for the gun even as the Blade falls backward. He puts everything he has into the charge, but he’s not fast enough. A bullet whizzes by his ear when Angel fires a second time. Then he’s on her, slapping the gun away, pulling her into a bear hug, overwhelming her with his bulk and his strength. When he hears the little automatic clatter on the sidewalk, he knows he’s won. Not so the Blade. He’s lying on the ground with his head propped against the Explorer’s front door, one hand clutching his throat in a futile attempt to stem the blood gushing from a little hole beneath his Adam’s apple. He looks at his boss and tries to speak, but there are no words left for the Blade, only a trail of bubbles that spray from the hole to hang for a moment in the darkness.

  ‘Tell me your fuckin’ name.’

  Bobby’s dropped into survival mode, a core space hollowed from a mountain of ice. He’s thinking it’s tough shit about Marco, but he can’t take his eyes off the blood streaming down the side of the SUV. In the dim light, the blood appears as black and thick as motor oil.

  ‘Louise,’ Angel replies, her tone quavering just a bit.

  ‘That’s not your fucking name.’

  ‘Sue me.’

  Bobby Ditto’s massive left arm tightens around Angel’s chest as he draws the .40 cal with his free hand. He pushes the barrel into the back of Angel’s head and pulls her in close to the Explorer. They’re now standing in a little pool of the Blade’s blood.

  ‘You think I won’t kill you because you’re a woman?’

  Angel manages a tiny laugh that’s very distant from the guffaw she hoped to produce. ‘Tell me something, Bobby. Are you still hoping your men in the basement are only asleep?’

  ‘Hear this, bitch. I die, you die.’

  ‘And vice versa.’

  There’s nothing to be gained by arguing and Bobby keeps his thoughts to himself as he weighs his options. He’s telling himself that he should force the whore into the Explorer – the armored Explorer – and get the fuck out of Red Hook. The Blade’s lying in his own blood, his blank eyes sightless, and the minutes are ticking away. How long before somebody comes driving down the street, somebody with a cellphone? How long before Carter shows up? One thing is certain, with the alarm still set, Carter won’t be comin’ out the front door, which means he might be comin’ from anywhere. No, the thing to do is take the whore and bargain for the money later on. Only Bobby can’t make himself believe that any sane man would pay $497,000 for a whore. Bobby Ditto wouldn’t pay that much to get his mother back from heaven.

  ‘I die, you die,’ he repeats. ‘But I’m not leavin’ without my fuckin’ money.’

  Carter’s greeted by the crack of a small caliber handgun when he finally hauls himself on to the roof. His first thought is of Angel, a thought he puts to one side. Both bags, the tool bag and the money bag, are attached to the other end of the rope on the floor of the warehouse. First things first. Carter slides the M89 off his shoulder, lays it on the black tar roof, then pulls up the bags, his ribs throbbing with the effort. The tool bag comes through easily, but the hard-sided suitcase wedges in the hole. Carter has to lie over the opening and yank it through with his bare hands, which does nothing to ease the pain. Still, he doesn’t hesitate. Spurred by the sound of voices in the distance, one of them Angel Tamanaka’s, he picks up the M89 and scans the roof in search of cover.

  He notes, first, a low wall topped with red tiles at the edge of the roof. Most of the tiles are missing now, individual bricks as well. The broken pattern suits Carter, presenting an advantage compounded by the deep shadows on the roof. Forty feet away, a small air conditioning unit casts an even deeper shadow between itself and the wall. Carter’s nylon ski mask is soaked with sweat. It clings to his face like a suction cup, but he’s glad for it now. In the darkness, with only the top of his head exposed, he’ll be a shadow within a shadow, for all intents invisible.

  Carter takes the last few yards on his knees and his elbows. He’s not unmindful of the need for haste. Gunshots tend to attract attention. Nevertheless, he remains calm as he lifts his head a few inches above the ledge and surveys the field of battle. At the other end of the block, Bobby Ditto’s standing behind the Explorer. He’s holding Angel tight against his chest and he’s pointing a gun at her head. Just behind Bobby, the unmoving legs of a man Carter assumes to be the Blade project on to the sidewalk.

  Carter doesn’t drop the M89’s folding bipod. The ledge is too irregular, and he settles for laying the rifle’s stock on a patch of smooth brick. He fi
nds himself admiring Angel, at least on one level. She definitely has pluck. But her leaving the van was a bad mistake and she’s compromised the operation. Carter’s able to recall a time when war was personal. He was a gung-ho soldier boy on his way to Afghanistan, prepared to do his bit, proud to serve his country. But Carter doesn’t have enemies now. He has competitors. Like Roberto Benedetti, who needs to be removed, post haste, from the game.

  In the military, Carter almost always operated with a spotter. The spotter calculated distance, elevation and windage, matching each to ambient temperature, barometric pressure and angle of aim, upward or downward. Carter’s on his own here, but he’s far from handicapped. Mounted on the M89’s telescopic sight, a BORS optical ranging system does, in less than a second and with far greater accuracy, what took his spotter minutes to accomplish.

  After allowing for all the variables, the effective distance between himself and the top of Bobby Ditto’s skull, according to the BORS unit, is 127 yards. Carter turns the elevation dial on the scope until it reaches the 127 yard mark and that’s it. The system has compensated for every other factor, including the downward angle. All he need do is train the scope on his target, squeeze the trigger and put a bullet in a two-inch circle. Without flinching, of course.

  Eliminate the brain and the body stops. No message from the brain to the finger and Bobby will never pull that trigger. There’s even room for error. Bobby’s head is about four inches across. An inch either way won’t matter, not given the energy of a 7.62 mm hollow-point round. Bobby Ditto’s brain will literally explode.

  Two inches off, on the other hand, and Angel Tamanaka wakes up on the wrong side of the grass.

  Carter lays the butt of the rifle in the hollow of his shoulder, lays his cheek against the carbon fiber stock. He’s at home now, at rest in the safest place he’s ever known, his weapon cradled in his arms, his child, his baby. He dials up the magnification, peers through the sight, lays the cross-hairs dead-center on the top of Bobby’s head. Then he slips his finger through the trigger guard to caress the trigger, an old habit that’s become ritual. Still unhurried, he brings the trigger to the point of release and holds steady while he centers himself, breathing in, breathing out, seeking the quiet space between rest and action, between life and death. Only when he finds that emptiness inside himself does he squeeze the trigger.

  THIRTY

  The goodbye sex is great, but it’s still goodbye. Angel’s had enough. Something about watching the top and back of Bobby Ditto’s skull fly off while his face remained in front of her, eyes open, mouth fixed, has taken the wind out of her adventuring sails. She’s not psychologically qualified to live in Carter’s outlaw world, simple as that.

  Angel saw and heard nothing before the bullet found its mark. There was no jet of flame, no crack of the rifle. One minute she was standing there, waiting for … Angel doesn’t know what she was waiting for, only that one minute she was helpless, the next she was sprayed with …

  And that’s the problem. A part of her mind shies away from the moment when Bobby’s head exploded, coating her hair, her face, her shoulders with gore. Another part returns, again and again, to the instant of impact, after which she’d fallen to the sidewalk, limp as the dishrag in the bottom of her purse. If Carter hadn’t dragged her to the van and shoved her inside, she might still be there.

  Meanwhile, Carter was all business, and maybe that was the scariest part. He stripped her when they got back to his apartment, stripped her as you’d strip a child, and pushed her into the shower. Then he collected everything they’d worn or used and packed it into four garbage bags, the .32, all of their clothing, including their shoes, the Glock, the rope, the grappling hook and all the tools, the spent cartridge from the M89, which he crushed with a tack hammer. Everything except the M89 itself.

  Finished, he returned to the bathroom, dried her off and put her to bed. ‘Don’t move, Angel,’ he said as he drew the covers up to her neck. ‘I’ll be back in a couple of hours.’

  Carter didn’t tell her where he was going and Angel didn’t ask. But later she learned that he’d carried the bags to an eighty-unit apartment building in Queens where he once lived. Using a key he’d never surrendered to get inside, he’d ridden an empty elevator to the ninth floor, then dumped the bags into a chute leading to the trash collection room in the basement.

  ‘The room’s actually a compactor,’ he explained when he returned. ‘On whatever day the garbage is picked up, all the trash in that room will be compacted, wrapped in heavy plastic and carried to the curb. The city will do the rest.’

  Angel listened to his explanation with one ear, unmoved even by the sight of all that money, piles and piles of money, a waterfall of money dropping from the interior of the suitcase to the comforter on the bed. But then Carter slipped out of his vest and his shirt, revealing a smoky-red bruise that virtually covered his ribs on the left side.

  ‘Close call. A few inches lower and it would have come through under my vest. In which case …’ He winced as he probed the center of the wound.

  ‘You want to go to the hospital?’

  ‘The rib’s not displaced. There’s nothing a doctor can do. What’s that they say? Grin and bear it? No harm, no foul?’

  Angel shakes her head. ‘Joke if you want, Carter, but you came within a few inches of dying in that basement. You’re what? Twenty-nine years old?’ She picks up a packet of hundred dollar bills and lays it on top of the slug in his hand. ‘Was it worth it?’ she demands.

  A week later, Lieutenant Solly Epstein met them in Central Park. He’d come to collect his share of the loot, but his message was encouraging. The Organized Crime Control Bureau, his unit, had pronounced the incident drug related, which it definitely was, and they were looking at the usual mob suspects. Meanwhile, the media had taken OCCB’s theme a step further. The Red Hook Massacre was big time news, yet at no point, in the hundreds of articles and hours of airtime, did anyone suggest that the massacre was the work of a single individual. There were, on the other hand, several pieces linking Mexican drug cartels, in style and psychology, to the carnage.

  ‘Al Zeffri’s not talkin’,’ Epstein explained. ‘He claims he doesn’t remember anything about that night, which could be true because he didn’t regain consciousness until late the next day. You must have hit him pretty hard.’

  ‘I had to make sure he didn’t come up behind me.’

  Epstein glanced at Angel and winked. ‘I woulda thought blowin’ his knee apart was enough guarantee. Anyway, you got nothin’ to worry about. Not only hasn’t your name been mentioned, it doesn’t appear in our database. As far as the NYPD’s concerned, you don’t exist. You’re still a ghost.’

  Angel spells it out a week later, as she and Carter lie in bed. They’re going at it twice a day by now, the sex hard and fast and as necessary as breathing. Angel can’t get enough, and can’t wait to get away. Never has she been more attracted to a man, never more repelled. Carter’s death on two legs and she’s drawn to him like a junkie to a fix.

  ‘I’m leaving,’ she tells him.

  ‘When?’

  ‘As soon as you set up my account.’ The account in question will be established in a Cayman Islands bank. There’s a cost, ten percent of the principal, but Angel’s happy to pay. ‘You were right,’ she adds. ‘Eventually, you’ll be caught or killed. I don’t think you care all that much.’

  ‘But you do?’

  ‘I murdered a man.’ Angel hesitates before adding, ‘I’m not feeling guilty, not by a long shot. The Blade deserved what he got and the world is better off without him. But I can’t go back there again. Taking a life, it’s too big for me.’

  Her independence finally declared, Angel returns to her pursuits. She completes her Art History paper, collects her diploma, purchases a spare-no-expense, hot-weather wardrobe. The surface of their dining room table quickly disappears beneath stacks of books on Caribbean art, exhibition notices, website printouts, travel brochures, real e
state listings from a dozen nations. By early June, when she books an airline ticket to Piarco International Airport in Trinidad, she has everything in place: her bank account, a small rented townhouse in a resort community, plans to open an art gallery in Tobago, appointments with a dozen artists’ representatives.

  If there’s a fly in this ointment, it’s Carter’s attitude. He’s not trying to dissuade her, not clinging to every moment of togetherness. No, Carter leaves the apartment shortly after breakfast and doesn’t return until evening. Angel assumes he’s off to one or another of his training sessions, but he doesn’t tell her where he’s going or where he’s been. He doesn’t tell and she doesn’t ask.

  There’s a simple explanation, of course. Carter’s become indifferent. Stay or go – it’s all the same to him. But the evidence doesn’t add up. Their nights are spent in bed, Carter a one-man gang-bang, Angel urging him on. This proves especially true on their last night together, which they spend in Vincent Graham’s den on 37th Street. Carter’s taken, not to mention inspired, by the mirrored ceilings and Vincent’s toy collection, especially the restraints, the handcuffs and the shackles. They do argue, for just a moment, over who gets to play the prisoner and who the prison guard, but finally agree to take turns.

  Long after midnight, when Angel and Carter are too sore and exhausted to do more than lie next to each other, Angel explains why she bought the two guns, the revolver she left for him to find and the little automatic, and why she’d arranged access to Graham’s apartment. Carter doesn’t blame Angel for not trusting him. In her position, he would certainly have done something similar and he tells her so.

  A segue into their feelings for each other might easily follow this conversation, yet the hows and whys of their doomed relationship go unmentioned. They don’t discuss even the possibility of meeting again. No, in the end, they turn out the lights and roll on to their sides. Carter falls asleep within a few minutes, as usual, leaving Angel to her own thoughts.

  Talk it out, resolve the conflicts. That’s the conventional wisdom, repeated hundreds of times each year on dozens of ‘talk’ shows. But that’s not happening here and Angel finally realizes that Carter’s reticence hasn’t impaired their communication, not at all. The Tibetan who painted the bhavacakra would have understood perfectly. Their unfolding karmas brought them together, two infinitely small particles, in order to complete some necessary transaction. That done, those same karmas are driving them apart. Call it fate. Hell, call it serendipity. Whatever business they had with each other is finished. Time to move on.