The Victim boh-3

by W. E. B Griffin

  The Victim

  ( Badge of Honor - 3 )

  W. E. B. Griffin

  W. E. B. Griffin

  The Victim

  ONE

  On the train from New York to Philadelphia, Charles readTime and Victor readThe Post. Charles was thirty-three but could have passed for twenty-five. Victor was thirty-five, but his male pattern baldness made him look older. They were both dressed neatly in business suits, with white button-down shirts and rep-striped neckties. Both carried attache cases.

  When the steward came around the first time, when they came out of the tunnel into the New Jersey wetlands, Charles ordered a 7-Up but the steward said all they had was Sprite, and Charles smiled and said that would be fine. Victor ordered coffee, black, and when the steward delivered the Sprite and the coffee, he handed him a five-dollar bill and told him to keep the change. Just outside of Trenton, they had another Sprite and another cup of black coffee, and again Charles gave the steward a five-dollar bill and told him to keep the change.

  Both Charles and Victor felt a little sorry for someone who had to try to raise a family or whatever on what they paid a steward.

  When the conductor announced, "North Philadelphia, North Philadelphia next," Charles opened his attache case and putTime inside and then stood up. He took his Burberry trench coat from the rack and put it on. Then he handed Victor his topcoat and helped him into it. Finally he took their luggage, substantially identical soft carry-on clothing bags from the rack, and laid it across the back of the seat in front of them, which was not occupied.

  Then the both of them sat down again as the train moved through Northeast Philadelphia and then slowed as it approached the North Philadelphia station.

  Victor looked at his watch, a gold Patek Philipe with a lizard band.

  "Three-oh-five," he said. "Right on time."

  "I heard that Amtrak finally got their act together," Charles replied.

  When the train stopped, Charles and Victor walked to the rear of the car, smiled at the steward, and got off. They walked down a filthy staircase to ground level, and then through an even filthier tunnel and came out in a parking lot just off North Broad Street.

  "There it is," Victor said, nodding toward a year-old, 1972 Pontiac sedan. When he had called from New York City, he had been told what kind of car would be waiting for them, and where it would be parked, and where they could find the keys: on top of the left rear tire.

  As they walked to the car both Victor and Charles took pigskin gloves from their pockets and put them on. There was no one else in the parking lot, which was nice. Victor squatted and found the keys where he had been told they would be, and unlocked the driver's door. He reached inside and opened the driver's-side rear door and laid his carry-on bag on the seat and closed the door. Then he got behind the wheel, closed the driver's door, and reached over and unlocked the door for Charles.

  Charles handed the top of his carry-on bag to Victor, who put it on his lap, and then Charles got in, slid under the lower portion of his carry-on bag, and closed his door. Charles and Victor looked around the parking lot. There was no one in sight.

  Charles felt under the seat and grunted. Carefully, so that no one could see what he was doing, he took what he had found under the seat, a shotgun, and laid it on top of the carry-on bag.

  He saw that it was a Remington Model 1100 semiautomatic 12-gauge with a ventilated rib. It looked practically new.

  Charles pulled the action lever back, checked carefully to make sure it was unloaded, and then let the action slam forward again.

  He then felt beneath the seat again and this time came up with a small plastic bag. It held five Winchester Upland shotgun shells.

  "Seven and a halfs," he said, annoyance and perhaps contempt in his voice.

  "Maybe he couldn't find anything else," Victor said, "or maybe he thinks that a shotgun shell is a shotgun shell."

  "More likely he wants to make sure I get close," Charles said. "He doesn't want anything to go wrong with this. I had a phone call just before I left for the airport."

  "Saying what?"

  "He wanted to be sure I understood that he didn't want anything to go wrong with this. That's why he called me himself."

  "What did this guy do, anyway?"

  "You heard what I heard. He went in business for himself," Charles said. "Bringing stuff up from Florida and selling it to the niggers."

  "You don't believe that, do you?"

  "I believe that he probably got involved with the niggers, but I don't think that's the reason we're doing a job on him."

  "Then what?"

  "I don't want to know."

  "What do you think?"

  "If Savarese was a younger man, I'd say maybe he caught this guy hiding the salami in the wrong place. It's something personal like that, anyhow. If he had just caught him doing something, business, he shouldn't have been doing, he probably would have taken care of him himself."

  "Maybe this guy is related to him or something," Victor said, "and he doesn't want it to get out that he had a job done on him."

  "I don't want to know. He told me he went into business for himself with the niggers, that's what I believe. I wouldn't want Savarese to think I didn't believe him, or that I got nosy and started asking questions."

  He loaded the shotgun. When it had taken three of the shotshells, it would take no more.

  "Damn," Charles said. He worked the action three times, to eject the shells, and then unscrewed the magazine cap and pulled the fore end off. He took a quarter and carefully pried the magazine spring retainer loose. He then raised the butt of the shotgun and shook the weapon until a plastic rod slipped out. This was the magazine plug required by federal law to be installed in shotguns used for hunting wild fowl; it restricted the magazine capacity to three rounds.

  Charles then reassembled the shotgun and loaded it again. This time it took all five shells, four in the magazine and one in the chamber. He checked to make sure the safety was on, unzipped his carry-on bag, slid the shotgun inside, closed the zipper, and then put the carry-on bag in the backseat on top of Victor's.

  "Okay?" Victor asked.

  "Go find a McDonald's," Charles said. "They generally have pay phones outside."

  "You want to get a hamburger or something too?"

  "If you want," Charles said without much enthusiasm.

  Victor drove out of the parking lot, paid the attendant, who looked like he was on something, and drove to North Broad Street, where he turned right.

  "You know where you're going?" Charles asked.

  "I've been here before," Victor said.

  Eight or ten blocks up North Broad Street, Victor found a McDonald's. He carefully locked the car-it looked like a rough neighborhood-and they went in. Charles dropped the plastic bag the shotshells had come in, and the magazine plug, into the garbage container by the door.

  "Now that you said it, I'm hungry," Charles said to Victor, and he took off his pigskin gloves. "Get me a Big Mac and a small fries and a 7-Up. If they don't have 7-Up, get me Sprite or whatever. I'll make the call."

  He was not on the phone long. He went to Victor and stood beside him and waited, and when their order was served, he carried it to a table while Victor paid for it.

  "2184 Delaware Avenue," he said when Victor came to the table. " He's there now. He'll probably be there until half past five. You know where that is?"

  "Down by the river. Are we going to do it there?"

  "Anywhere we like, except there," Charles said. "The guy on the phone said, 'Not here or near here.'"

  "Who was the guy on the phone?"

  "It was whoever answered the number Savarese gave me to call. I didn't ask him who he was. He said hello, and I said I was looking for M
r. Smith, and he said Mr. Smith was at 2184 Delaware and would be until probably half past five, and I asked him if he thought I could do my business with him there, and he said, 'Not here or near here,' and I said, 'Thank you' and hung up."

  "If it wasn't Savarese, then somebody else knows about this."

  "That's not so surprising, if you think about it. He also said, ' Leave the shotgun.' "

  "What did he think we were going to do, take it with us?"

  "I think he wants to do something with it," Charles said.

  "Like what?"

  "I don't know," Charles said, then smiled and asked, "Shoot rabbits, maybe?"

  "Shit!"

  "How are we fixed for time?"

  "Take us maybe ten minutes to get there, fifteen tops," Victor said.

  "Then we don't have to hurry," Charles said. He looked down at the tray. "I forgot to get napkins."

  "Get a handful," Victor said as Charles stood up. "These Big Macs are sloppy."

  ****

  Officer Joe Magnella, who was twenty-four-years-old, five feet nine and one half inches tall, dark-haired, and weighed 156 pounds, opened the bathroom door, checked to make sure that neither his mother nor his sister was upstairs, and then ran naked down the upstairs corridor to the back bedroom he shared with his brother, Anthony, who was twenty-one.

  He had just showered and shaved and an hour before had come out of Vinny's Barbershop, two blocks away at the corner of Bancroft and Warden Streets in South Philadelphia, freshly shorn and reeking of cologne.

  The room he had shared with Anthony all of his life was small and dark and crowded. When they had been little kids, their father had bought them bunk beds, and when Joe was twelve or fourteen, he had insisted that the beds be separated and both placed on the floor, because bunk beds were for little kids. They had stayed that way until Joe came home from the Army, when he had restacked them. There was just not enough space in the room to have them side by side on the floor and for a desk too.

  The desk was important to Joe. He had bought it ten months before, when he was still in the Police Academy. It was a real desk, not new, but a real office desk, purchased from a used furniture dealer on lower Market Street.

  His mother told him he was foolish, that he really didn't need a desk now, that could wait until he and Anne-Marie were married and had set up housekeeping, and even then he wouldn't need one that big orfor that matter-that ugly.

  "I already bought and paid for it, Mama, and they won't take it back," he told her.

  There was no sense arguing with her. Neither, he decided, was there any point in trying to explain to her why he needed a desk, and a desk just like the one he had bought, a real desk with large, lockable drawers.

  He needed a place to study, for one thing, and he didn't intend to do that, as he had all the way through high school, sitting at the dining-room table after supper and sharing it with Anthony from the time Anthony was in the fourth grade at St. Dominic's School.

  The Police Academy wasn't school, like South Philly High had been, where it didn't really matter how well you did; the worst thing they could do to you was flunk you and, if it was a required course, make you take it again. The Police Academy was for real. If you flunked, they'd throw you out. He didn't think there was much chance he would flunk out, but what he was after was getting good grades, maybe even being valedictorian. That would go on his record, be considered when he was up for a promotion.

  Joe had not been valedictorian of his class at the Police Academy; an enormous Polack who didn't look as if he had the brains to comb his own hair had been. But Joe had ranked fourth (of eighty-four) and he was sure that had been entered on his record.

  And he was sure that he had ranked as high as he had because he had studied, and he was sure that he had studied because he had a real desk in his room. If he had tried to study on the dining-room table, it wouldn't have worked. Not only would he have had to share with Anthony, but Catherine and his mother and father would have had the TV on loud in the living room.

  And when the guys came around after supper, his old gang, and wanted to go for a beer or a ride, it would have been hard to tell them no. With him studying at the desk upstairs, when the guys came, his mother had told them, "Sorry, Joseph is studying upstairs, and he told me he doesn't want anybody bothering him."

  The Army had opened Joe Magnella's eyes to a lot of things, once he'd gotten over the shock of finding himself at Fort Polk, Louisiana. And then 'Nam, once he'd gotten over the shock of being in that godforsaken place, had opened his eyes even more.

  He had come to understand that there were two kinds of soldiers. There was the kind that spent all their time bitching and, when they were told to do something, did just enough to keep the corporals and the sergeants off their backs. All they were interested in doing was getting through the day so they could hoist as much beer as they could get their hands on. Or screw some Vietnamese whore. Or smoke grass. Or worse.

  The other kind was the kind that Joe Magnella had become. A lot of his good behavior was because of Anne-Marie. They were going to get married as soon as he came home from the Army. She was working at Wanamaker's, in the credit department, and putting money aside every week so they could get some nice furniture. It didn't seem right, at Fort Polk, for him to throw money away at the beer joints when AnneMarie was saving hers.

  So while he didn't take the temperance pledge or anything like that, he didn't do much drinking. There was no temptation to get in trouble with women at Polk, because there just weren't any around. And when he got to 'Nam and they showed him the movies of the venereal diseases you could catch over there, some of them they didn't have a cure for, he believed them and kept his pecker in his pocket for the whole damned time.

  How the hell could he go home and marry Anne-Marie, who he knew was a decent girl and was saving herself for marriage, if he caught some kind of incurable VD from a Vietnamese whore?

  The first thing he knew, he was a corporal, and then a sergeant, and a lot of the guys who'd gone into the boonies high on grass or coke or something had gone home in body bags.

  Joe had liked the Army, at least after he'd gotten to be a sergeant, and had considered staying in. But Anne-Marie said she didn' t want to spend their married life moving from one military base to another, so he got out, even though the Army offered him a promotion and a guaranteed thirty-month tour as an instructor at the Infantry School at Fort Benning if he reenlisted.

  A week after he got home, he went to the City Administration Building across from City Hall and applied for the cops, and was immediately accepted. He and Anne-Marie decided it would be better to wait to get married until after he graduated from the Police Academy, and then they decided to wait and see if he really liked being a cop, and because her mother said she would really feel better about it if Anne-Marie waited until she was twenty-one.

  He really liked being a cop, and Anne-Marie was going to turn twenty-one in two months, and the date was set, and they were already in premarital counseling with Father Frank Pattermo at St. Thomas Aquinas, and in two months and two weeks he could move himself and his desk out of the room and let Anthony finally have it all to himself.

  Joe had laid his underwear and uniform out on the lower bunkAnthony's-before going to take a shower and shave. He pulled on a pair of Jockey shorts and a new T-shirt, and then pinned his badge through the reinforced holes on a short-sleeved uniform shirt, and then put that, his uniform trousers, and a pair of black wool socks on.

  He took one of his three pairs of uniform shoes from under the bed and put them on. He had learned about feet and shoes, too, in the Army, that it was better for your feet and your shoes if you always wore wool socks-they soaked up the sweat; nylon socks didn't do thatand never wore the same pair of shoes more than one day at a time, which gave them a chance to dry out.

  Some of the cops were now wearing sort of plastic shoes, some new miracle that always looked spit-shined, but Joe had decided they weren't for him. They
were plastic, which meant that they would make your feet sweaty, wool socks or not. And it wasn't all that much trouble keeping his regular, leather, uniform oxfords shined. If you started out with a good shine on new shoes and broke them in right, it wasn't hard to keep them looking good.

  He strapped on his leather equipment belt, which had suspended from it his handcuff case; two pouches, each with six extra rounds for his revolver; the holder for his nightstick; and his holster. His nightstick was on his desk, and he picked that up and put it in the holder and then unlocked the right top drawer of the desk and took out his revolver.

  He pushed on the thumb latch and swung the cylinder out of the frame and carefully loaded six 168-grain lead round-nose.38 Special cartridges into it, pushed the cylinder back into the frame, and put the revolver in the holster.

  He didn't think much of his revolver. It was a Smith amp; Wesson Military and Police model with fixed sights and a four-inch barrel, the standard weapon issued to every uniformed officer in the Police Department.

  It had been around forever. There were a lot better pistols available, revolvers with adjustable sights, revolvers with more powerful cartridges, like the.357 Magnum. If Joe had his choice, he would have carried a Colt.45 automatic, like he'd carried in the Army in 'Nam after he'd made sergeant. If you shot somebody with a.45, they stayed shot, and from what he'd heard about the.38 Special, that wasn't true.

  He'd heard that people had kept coming at cops after they'd been shot two and even three times with a.38 Special. But department regulations said that cops would carry only the weapon they were issued, and that was the Smith amp; Wesson Military and Police.38 Special, period. No exceptions, and you could get fired if they caught you with anything else.

  It probably didn't matter. The firearms instructor at the Police Academy had told them that ninety percent or better of all cops went through their entire careers without once having drawn their pistols and shot at somebody.