9
Ahmed Kadyrov twitched and scratched at his arms as he walked along Watson Avenue. He was badly in need of a fix and had come to the right place even if it was still early in the morning. The avenue, which cut through the notorious Soundview neighborhood, was the biggest open-air drug market in the Bronx.
However, he wasn’t just going to buy whatever meth one of the losers on the street was offering out of his pants pockets, cut with God knew what shit. He was heading to the apartment of a dealer one step up from the streets who sold a better product, if you were willing to pay for it. And Kadyrov was willing and able.
He felt the left side of his face-the swelling had gone down overnight but it was still tender and he had a nasty purple bruise. He’d slipped up with that bitch over near Mullayly Park. Distracted by the guy with the dog and then getting the arch of his foot stomped, he hadn’t seen the elbow coming and it had rattled him pretty good. Stunned and panicked, he’d been lucky to get away and catch a subway into Manhattan and over to Brooklyn while he gathered his wits.
It had taken the last of his meth, which he shot up in a stall of a public bathroom along the Coney Island boardwalk, to feel right again. Wish I’d cut the bitch, he thought. But the next woman, a pretty Hispanic girl who’d fallen for his offer to help her move a box into her Bedford-Stuyvesant apartment, had paid the price. She’d apparently just cashed a paycheck, too, because her purse had more than two hundred dollars in it.
Although his eagerness to “help” worked with the Hispanic girl, Kadyrov had been finding it more difficult to lure young women into letting him into their confidences and apartments. Thanks to the meth he was losing both his looks and his charm.
Since the previous July, when he’d taken the violence to a whole new level- What was her name? Oh yeah, sweet Olivia — his life had been going downhill. He’d been arrested for an aborted snatch-and-go robbery of a Jewish diamond merchant in the subway that ended when the man’s two huge bodyguards caught him before he could get away. Along with a beating from the merchant’s men, he’d spent six months in the Tombs.
It could have been worse. In his struggle with the bodyguards, he’d managed to get rid of his switchblade by tossing it under the subway platform. Getting caught with it might have prompted some ambitious detective to try connecting him with two recent knife murders near Columbia University. But instead, he just copped a plea to two misdemeanors, petty larceny, and possession of stolen property, and got a half year in lockup.
Forced to go cold turkey in jail, once he got out he jumped back into the drug scene. Crank made him the king of the world. When he was powering along on methamphetamine, he could stay up for days, fantasizing about all the great things he would accomplish, making grandiose plans. His self-confidence and self-esteem-neither of which existed without meth-soared; he believed that men envied him and women wanted him, and in the early days, some of them did. He was a sex machine, and his mind worked at a thousand miles an hour, displaying what he considered to be a dazzling wit and impressive intelligence, especially compared to those around him.
Crank also seemed to give him almost superhuman strength and alertness. Without it, he was depressed and just wanted to sleep all the time. He didn’t like what he saw in the mirror. Why in the hell would he want to give up meth?
When he got out in March, Kadyrov started shooting up again with a vengeance. However, the more he used, the more he needed, and the more he needed, the more he changed.
His formerly olive complexion turned sallow and his skin had a dry scaly look to it-he’d even taken to wearing a long-sleeved sweatshirt to cover the scabs from his constant scratching. He was having problems with his gums bleeding and had lost a bottom front tooth when it just fell out one morning. And his hair, which he’d once taken such pride in, was thinning and had lost its luster.
Kadyrov considered his large brown eyes one of his chief physical assets. Only now, bloodshot and yellowed by jaundice, they burned with a sort of crazed intensity-at least when he was high-and constantly darted around, as if he expected an attack from any side.
The more significant changes, however, had been psychological, although he failed to recognize them. Speed still made him feel like he was on top of the world, but he was also more irritable and aggressive. Paranoia was a way of life. The mere sight of a cop car made him jumpy, and he suspected everyone of plotting against him. Thus he stayed increasingly to himself, except when preying on others or buying drugs.
As his physical appearance deteriorated so did the pride he once took in how he dressed, even if it had been for the purpose of luring his victims. He’d returned to his basement apartment in the South Bronx from jail only to find that his landlord had tossed all of his belongings out on the sidewalk and rented the room to someone else. That left him with the clothes he walked out of jail wearing, plus the tattered gray hooded sweatshirt he’d dug out of a Dumpster.
He lived most of the time on the streets or in various homeless shelters, so his bathing was infrequent, too. But Kadyrov didn’t care. He desired two things in life-crank and sexual killing, each having become an addiction. Only torturing and murdering young women gave him the same sort of high he got from speed; indeed, each seemed to enhance the pleasure of the other.
The craving for both had increased while he was in jail. He’d only been out for two weeks when shortly after shooting up one afternoon, he spotted Dolores Atkins as she was entering the tenement off Anderson Avenue. He’d quickly made up his mind and bounded up the steps in time to catch the security gate before it closed and enter behind her. She was a little older than he’d thought at first glance but was a brunette and a close enough resemblance to his whore mother.
Dolores was clearly uncomfortable when he got on the elevator after her. And she avoided eye contact when he offered “please, to help” her with one of her bags. “No, thank you,” she’d said tersely.
In the past, if his efforts to charm the women into gaining access to their apartments didn’t work, he’d have moved on to a more cooperative victim. But there was something about this woman, maybe the way she summarily rejected his offer to help, that really made him angry.
He suddenly grabbed her by the throat with one hand as he held the blade of his knife to her neck with the other. Lack of proper nutrition, and a lack of interest in food when on meth, had caused him to lose weight from his already thin physique. But like many fellow users, he’d developed a sort of hard, rope-like musculature that could be astonishingly strong when he was high. He told her that they were now going to her apartment, where they were going to get busy. And if she screamed, he’d cut her fucking head off.
What he’d actually done was worse. “Slaughtered” was the word that reporter Ariadne Stupenagel had used, quoting her unnamed police sources. He liked the press coverage in all its macabre detail-it gave his “work” a sort of religious quality. The killing certainly released a lot of anger, so that after it was over, he was able to calmly clean himself up and then slip out of the apartment with no one the wiser.
Still, forcing women to take him into their apartments as opposed to talking his way in was a change in the way he liked to do things, and it made him uncomfortable. He recognized that he was taking a greater risk of being discovered.
Then there was the woman at Mullayly Park, which was yet another change and even more risk. Attacking her had been a spur-of-the-moment decision. He’d been out wandering the streets, wondering how he was going to score more meth when the last of his supply-one more hit-was gone. He wasn’t really even interested in raping or hurting her; the bushes in a park weren’t his style, at least not yet. Robbery had been the motivation, and it almost backfired.
Fortunately, the little Hispanic girl over in Bed-Stuy had taken care of both of his needs. The bloodlust was sated and he had enough cash to stay high for a week.
Time to party, he thought as he reached the six-story public housing complex off Watson Avenue. The building was an ug
ly, unimaginative box built of dull red bricks, just one of many similar public housing complexes and tenements that dominated Soundview.
The security intercom and locking gate had long since been destroyed by vandals, so Kadyrov was able to just enter the building and make his way to the stairs leading to the third floor. He walked down the long dark hallway-most of the bulbs had been removed or never replaced-and put his hand in his pocket, clasping his new switchblade. For many years, the Bronx’s notorious Soundview section had been dubbed “the murder capital of New York” by the media; more than half the population of seventy-five thousand residents lived below the poverty level, and crime was a way of life for many of them. The knife made him feel safer.
He walked to the apartment on the far end of the hallway and knocked on the door. “Quien es?” a gruff voice behind the door demanded. “Who’s there?”
“The police, open up,” Kadyrov said. He could feel the occupant looking at him through the peephole. “It’s Ahmed. Who the fuck do you think it is? I know you’re looking at me, you dumb fuck.”
The sound of bolts sliding and chains being unhooked came from the other side of the door. The door opened and a tall white man with a large protruding forehead rimmed by long stringy gray hair peered out. He was wearing a stained long-underwear top and frayed boxer shorts from which his long bony legs protruded like those of an ostrich.
“Watch your mouth, asshole, or next time I won’t open the door, and you can buy some of that rat poison they’re selling on the sidewalk,” the man growled. “You got cash? No money, no honey, son.”
Kadyrov held up the wad of bills he’d taken from his victim in Bed-Stuy. “Here’s your honey, muthafugga.”
The dealer glanced at the cash and then nodded. He turned and led the way into the one-bedroom apartment. He was carrying a big. 357 Magnum revolver, which he now laid on the counter that separated the tiny kitchen from the living room.
The apartment was a filthy mess that smelled of mold, urine, and rotting food. The stained and threadbare carpeting was littered with trash and dirty clothes that looked like they’d been jettisoned on the spot and left to rot by their former occupants. Dirty dishes, glasses, and porn magazines seemed to cover every usable space, and cockroaches roamed freely in and out of various food containers. The only art on the walls was a torn black-light poster of Elvis Presley.
The room was only nominally lighter than the hallway. The sole illumination was provided by a small window that was so dirty it might as well have been a gauze curtain. A heavyset woman with long gray hair sat in a sagging orange chair near the window, reading a magazine. She wore an old blue bathrobe over men’s pajama bottoms and didn’t even bother to look up when he came in.
“Hi, Lydia,” he said without expecting much of a response. He didn’t like her, and she didn’t like him. She looked over her magazine at him and grunted.
“What can I do you for?” the man asked as he sank down into a large overstuffed recliner that appeared to have been salvaged from some alley Dumpster.
Kadyrov noted the pump-action shotgun within easy reach of the chair. When it came to methamphetamines, whose users tended to be violent, dealers didn’t trust their customers any more than strangers on the streets.
Vinnie and Lydia Cassino were two of the only whites still living in the Soundview neighborhood, which was mostly populated by blacks, Puerto Ricans, and Dominicans. Most of the other whites had long since fled, but the Cassinos had been there since the 1970s and stubbornly refused to move-even when Vinnie went to prison in the 1980s and ’90s. They were both tough and known to carry, and if necessary use, guns. That along with Vinnie’s connection to a good cheap source of crank, which the smaller dealers below him could cut with strychnine to increase profits, meant no one bothered them much.
Kadyrov sat down on the couch next to Vinnie’s chair and tossed his money on the coffee table in front of them. “Two hundred worth,” he said. “I should get a good deal too for that much cash.”
“Two hundred bucks is shit,” Vinnie said. “I’ll give you a deal when you’re buying an ounce at a time, not a couple of grams. If you and me didn’t go back a ways, I wouldn’t sell to you at all.”
By that he meant that he didn’t trust Kadyrov, who might just rat him out to the police if Vinnie cut off his supply of clean meth. And as a two-time loser, if he got busted again, they might put him away for life.
“Cheap bastard,” Kadyrov complained as he pulled out his drug “kit,” containing a spoon, a small container of water, and a syringe, from the belly pocket of his sweatshirt. “Just give me my shit.”
Vinnie Cassino leaned forward, scooped up the money, and counted it. Pocketing the cash, he opened a wooden box on the coffee table and pulled out two small plastic bags of white powder. “You know I don’t like tweakers shooting up in my pad.”
“Well, unless you want me doing it in the hallway in front of your door, you’ll break your fucking rule,” Kadyrov replied as he continued with his preparations. “I’m not going to make it any farther than that.”
The dealer didn’t say anything more as Kadyrov tied the surgical tubing around his upper arm, mixed some of the white powder with water in the spoon, filled the syringe, and plunged it into a protruding vein. Ten seconds later, the younger man shook his head and smiled. “Now, that’s more like it.”
With his customer happy, Vinnie asked, “Who hit you?”
“No one.”
“Looks like you got in a fight and lost.” The dealer chuckled. “One of your ‘girlfriends’ fight back?”
“None of your business.”
Vinnie shrugged. “You’re right. And neither is this.” He tossed a section of newspaper that had been folded to display one article in particular on the table in front of Kadyrov. The headline jumped out in large bold type:
POLICE ARREST SUSPECT IN BRUTAL BRONX SLAYING
Kadyrov picked up the newspaper. He’d dropped out of school in the eighth grade and he’d never been much of a reader, so it took him a minute to get through the story. When he did, he laughed. Some loser named Felix Acevedo had been arrested for the murder of Dolores Atkins and the attack on the young woman in Mullayly Park. Apparently, he’d even confessed to the crimes. According to the story, the case was being reviewed by the Bronx DAO but charges were expected soon.
Looks like this might be my lucky day, Kadyrov thought as he read further. Acevedo’s mother told the reporter that her son couldn’t have committed such terrible crimes.
Kadyrov shrugged and pushed the newspaper back at his host. Oddly, he was mildly irritated that this Felix Acevedo punk was taking the credit for his work. With meth cruising through his brain, he was feeling all-powerful. Still, his paranoia cautioned him to be careful around Cassino. “So what’s this shit to me?” he sneered.
“I guess that lets you off the hook for the Bronx deal,” Vinnie said with a shrug. When Kadyrov didn’t reply, he added, “I guessed that might be you. Maybe he’ll confess to those two bitches in Manhattan, too, and you’ll really be in the clear.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Kadyrov replied, though they both knew that he did.
Back in July, Kadyrov had gone to the Cassinos’ apartment looking to buy, and at that time he had plenty of money, too. The dealer even remembered what his customer was wearing, because instead of one of his usual short-sleeve button-down shirts, he had on a blue, long-sleeved silk shirt that wasn’t his style and was too big. “That’s a nice shirt,” he’d commented.
“Want it?” Kadyrov said, stripping down to his wife-beater undershirt.
Cassino figured that Kadyrov was changing his look more than being generous, but he liked the shirt and accepted the gift.
Kadyrov had also been wearing khaki pants, on which his wife noticed something. “What’s on your pants?” she’d asked.
Kadyrov frowned and looked down. “What are you talking about?”
“There around the bottom of the
cuffs, and some spots on your legs,” Lydia said. “Looks like dried blood.”
“You’re crazy, it’s just some dirt,” Kadyrov answered, brushing at the stains before turning the subject to buying meth. He’d left soon after but not before using the bathroom and, the Cassinos noted, trying to spot-clean the stains from his trousers.
However, a couple days later when he’d returned for more drugs, another newspaper article had drawn his attention. He’d just shot up and was feeling confidence flow through his body when he noticed the main front-page headline of the news tabloid lying on the coffee table:
COLUMBIA U SLASHER STILL ON THE LOOSE
“That’s me,” he’d boasted, stabbing the paper with his finger.
Vinnie looked at the paper and then back at Kadyrov and scoffed. “Bullshit. You ain’t got the stomach for that sort of work.”
Insulted, Kadyrov had said more than he intended. “Screw you, I don’t. I was just going to fuck her,” he said. “Then rob her. But I’d tied her up and cut her clothes off when the older bitch showed up. She came at me like a fucking pit bull so I stuck her. But she kept coming, so I stuck her again, like four or five times. Finally, she goes down for good and just sort of lies there twitching and shit. That’s when I remember the other bitch on the bed. I turn around and she’s looking at me all bug-eyed and shit. She’s crying and whimpering, and she won’t shut up, even when I tell her I’m going to cut her fucking head off. But she just kept going. So I used her good and killed her, too.”
Vinnie had looked at him with skepticism but his wife was more convinced. “Jesus H. Christ, I think he means it, Vinnie!”
“Damn right,” Kadyrov bragged. “And after that, I was cold as ice. My shirt was covered with blood, so I took it off and washed up. Then I got another one from the bitch’s closet. That blue silk number I was wearing. Put my shirt in a bag and tossed it in a Dumpster in Harlem. Guess I didn’t get all the blood off my pants.”
“You’re one sick puppy,” Vinnie said to his customer.
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