Onion Street (Moe Prager Mystery)

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  It now occurred to me that even if they weren’t going to kill me, they were probably willing to get as close as they had to. I was in no mood to find out just how close. As Hubert turned the wheel to pull back into traffic, I planted my elbow smack into George Wallace’s nose. It broke with a sickening, dull snap. He dropped the gun to the car floor and kicked it under the front seat as he writhed in pain. Blood gushed through the nostrils of the rubber mask. I hit him with my elbow again, this time in the throat. He slumped against the door, gasping for air. I twisted in my seat, pushed my back up against Wallace for leverage, and kicked LBJ with the flat of my sneaker square on the side of his head. The force of the kick sent his head into the window with a bang. I reached over Wallace, yanked the handle, and tumbled out the door.

  I hit the pavement pretty hard and although the car wasn’t moving very fast, I rolled into the curb with a lung-emptying thump. I forced myself to get up, to run. My lungs didn’t seem to want to work, but self-preservation is a great motivator. I refused to look behind me as I ran. No use wasting time or energy or getting any more frightened than I already was. I recognized where we were, and knew I was not in the best of places if I was looking for someone to help me. Even in broad daylight, the area around Avenue Z and Shell Road was a pretty deserted part of Gravesend. Ahead of me, to my left, under the el and across the old trolley tracks, were the South Highway Little League baseball diamonds, and just beyond their outfield fences, the massive Coney Island rail yards. Further to my left was an area I thought of as Desolation Row: the murky, polluted waters of Coney Island Creek, the litter-strewn underbelly of the Belt Parkway, and the Brooklyn Union Gas Company. I doubted that Susan and her band of unmerry men knew their way around here half as well as I did. There was the additional benefit that most of it was inaccessible to cars.

  If I had turned right and made it to Avenue X, I would have been safe. There would be plenty of traffic and people on the street even at that hour of the night. The problem was that there were four blocks separating me from the safety of Avenue X, four blocks where I would be totally out in the open, four blocks that were completely accessible to cars. It would have been easy for them to drive up to me and snatch me again. Somehow I sensed that if they got me a second time, I would have paid a big price for escaping. People with broken noses and bruised egos tend to lose their senses of humor. Still, the choice I made to head for Desolation Row was not without risks of its own. Between the buzzing of cars on the Belt Parkway and the din of subways passing on the el, it would be nearly impossible to hear someone coming up on me. Once caught, I could scream my head off and not a soul would hear me. And while that area wasn’t quite the Fountain Avenue dump, many a body had been left there to rot and gone undetected for weeks. It was too late to change my mind now. I was committed.

  I made it across Shell Road and leapt onto the high fence that kept unwanted visitors off the Little League fields. I wasn’t a great fence climber, but fear improved my skills. When I came over the top of the fence, I finally looked behind me. It was a good thing I did. LBJ and Hubert Humphrey were close, heading across Shell Road, running not for office but for me. I climbed halfway down the fence, jumping down the rest of the way. I raced across the entire length of the field, from the third base line to the right field corner and hopped the low outfield fence. I got down on all fours. Dark as it was, I wasn’t trying to hide. You can’t hide behind a cyclone fence. What I was doing was looking for the hole in the fence that separated the ball field from the rail yard. It wasn’t a hole so much as a square of fencing that came loose when the Little League officials went to retrieve balls hit into the rail yard. Our parents thought we didn’t know about the hole. They thought that if we knew about it, we’d sneak into the rail yard. Of course we knew about it, and of course they were right: we used to sneak into the rail yard all the time. Well, until Pete Malone brought his dog with us once and it got fried like the Rosenbergs on one of the electrified rails. We stopped going after that.

  I found the patch. It was held onto the yard fence with six of those little twisty ties your mom uses to close up plastic sandwich bags. I didn’t have the time to undo them. Instead I pulled on the patch as hard as I could and it came loose. I wriggled through the hole, replacing the patch as best I could. I hoped that my body had blocked Lyndon and Hubert from seeing exactly where the patch was. Anything that slowed them down, even a little bit, improved my chances. Rows and rows of subway cars lay silent at this end of the yard, but I knew better than to think that it was safe to move about as I pleased. The long lines of subway cars might well have seemed dormant. That didn’t mean the rails on which they rested couldn’t jump up and bite. Six or seven hundred volts of electricity were running through some of those rails, and guessing which ones were live and which ones weren’t would be playing Russian roulette. The rails weren’t the only danger, either. Trains were constantly pulling in and out of the yard, and there was the odd chance you might run into a security guard or a yard worker. The rumor was that if you got snagged in the yard, you were going to catch a bad beating.

  Carefully navigating my way between trains and across many sets of tracks, I kept in the shadows of the darkened subway cars as much as possible. As I went, I looked for some sort of weapon: a stick, a crowbar, anything I could swing. The best I could do was rocks. I picked a couple of the biggest stones out of the gravel that covered the floor of the yard. My plan, such as it was, was to draw them deep into the yard while I doubled back behind them. Once I got to Coney Island Creek, they’d never find me. I stopped to listen for them, and heard their feet churning up the gravel. It was funny how when there were no passing trains on Shell Road and traffic was light on the Belt, it was quiet enough to hear their clumsy footsteps. I heard something else.

  “We have to split up or we’ll never find him. You go right. I’ll go left.”

  “I don’t like it. What if I find him, what do I do?”

  “Hold him and scream for help.”

  “Me? He’s bigger than me and you saw how tough he is. He broke Jimmy’s nose and nearly broke your jaw.”

  “Here, then. You take this. If he runs, shoot him.”

  “I never fired at a person before. Besides, the Committee didn’t authorize — ”

  “You see anyone from the Committee out here with us?”

  “No.”

  “Then do what I say or I’ll shoot you. Now take this and get going.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that, but I fought the urge to bolt. I listened to their steps go in opposite directions. Then a subway came rushing over Shell Road and put an end to my hearing anything but its rumblings. Losing track of them forced me to move, but instead of going right or left, straight ahead or back, I went up. I pulled myself onto the rear platform of the subway car closest to me, then climbed onto the roof of the car. I pressed myself flat against the filthy, ice-cold metal, and waited for the subway train on Shell Road to pull out of the station. It seemed to take forever. Eventually, the train’s air brakes psssss-ed and it slowly moved off toward Coney Island. When it had gone, I lifted my head to see if I could get an idea of where LBJ and Hubert had got to. No luck. Under cover of all that noise, they could have been about anywhere. For all I knew, one of them could be standing just below me.

  First I peeked over one side of the car, then the other. No one. I was thankful for that, at least. Quietly as possible, I got onto my knees and scanned the yard. Again, nothing. I reached into my coat pocket, pulled out a stone, and hurled it into the night. I wasn’t trying to hit anything in particular. I was just trying to hit something. Mission accomplished. It clanged off metal and the clang echoed through the yard. That set off a chain reaction: the crunch and scrape of running feet on gravel, a short flash of fire, a small explosion, and screams.

  “You stupid prick. You shot me! You fuckin’ shot me.”

  “Oh, shit, man. I’m sorry. Where are you?”

  “Where did you aim the gun, you moron?”r />
  “Oh, yeah, right. I’m coming. I’m coming.”

  That was my cue to exit. I jumped down off the top of the subway car and ran for the hole in the fence. I was no longer worried about being stealthy. Five minutes and another climbed fence later, I was heading along the bank of Coney Island Creek. When I made it to Neptune Avenue, I walked back out onto the street and I let myself exhale. I didn’t relax, not totally. I wasn’t sure I would ever fully relax again, or stop looking over my shoulder.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  No ringing telephone this time, just Aaron shaking me awake. Given a choice, I preferred the phone.

  “What? What’s up?” I said, my head still foggy with sleep.

  Aaron dropped me and I collapsed back onto my bed. My big brother didn’t let me go back to sleep, though.

  “Get up, Moses. Get up right now,” he barked at me.

  When I didn’t respond quickly enough to suit him, he dumped a glass of cold water on my face. The water did a better job of getting my attention than the shoulder shaking.

  “What the fuck?” I sat up, wiping the water off my face with my T-shirt.

  “Go do your business and I’ll meet you in the dining room in five minutes.” It wasn’t a polite request. It wasn’t a request at all.

  Normally, I don’t respond real well to my brother bossing me around or his attempts at being a third parent, but there was something, maybe the tone of his voice, that compelled me to do as he said. So five minutes later and slightly more awake, I found myself at the table. Aaron had a cup of my mother’s reheated death coffee waiting for me. I drank some of it, too much of it, and wondered how much worse could Drano have tasted and how much worse for you could it be.

  “Okay, big brother, what’s the word?”

  “You may be fooling Mommy and Daddy, but not me. What’s going on with you? Is it drugs? Are you in some kind of trouble?”

  “Nothing’s wrong.”

  “Bullshit.”

  Of course it was. I didn’t believe it myself. How was he supposed to swallow it? He held up a piece of paper and read his car’s odometer numbers to me.

  “Thanks for the wine. It’s a nice gesture, little brother, but I’m not stupid. Where the hell did you go to put on all that mileage?”

  “The Sea of Tranquility.”

  “The moon shot’s not scheduled until two years from now. I want the truth.”

  That’s what I gave him, if only a little piece of it. “I went to Koblenz, Pennsylvania.”

  “Never heard of it. Why would you go there?”

  “Because Koblenz, Germany, is too far away and I don’t have a passport.”

  “You’re especially not funny in the morning, Moses. What were you doing in Koblenz?”

  I gave him another sliver of truth. “I went to visit Samantha Hope’s grave.”

  “Wasn’t she the girl who — ”

  “Yeah. Bobby’s girlfriend, the one who got blown up in December in Coney Island.”

  “Bobby has a car. Why didn’t you take his?”

  “I didn’t go with him. I went alone.”

  “Why?”

  “Because.”

  “Don’t be an ass. You sound like a five-year-old.”

  “Sounds about right,” I said.

  “Okay, forget that for now. What’s this?” Aaron held up my coat. “And don’t say ‘it’s my coat.’ I know it’s your coat, but it’s filthy and it’s torn and there’s dried blood all over it. Your sneakers are caked in mud, and the bottoms of your Levis are still damp. Your shirt stinks from sweat.”

  It was tough to argue with the truth. I had been so full of adrenaline last night, and then so exhausted when I got home, that I hadn’t given a second thought to my clothes. Apparently, my brother had done that for me. I had to say something or Aaron would keep pushing. He was like the prosecutors on Judd, for the Defense. He was better than them because he didn’t lose. He’d missed his calling in life.

  “I guess I got into a fight last night.”

  “You guess?”

  “I got into a fight.”

  “With who?”

  “With whom,” I corrected. “It’s ‘with whom did you get into a fight.’ It doesn’t matter anyway. It’s over now. It’s done.”

  “This is Brooklyn, Moe. Fights are never over.”

  He was right about that too, especially this time. Susan Kasten wasn’t done with me, nor did I think Jimmy — George Wallace — was going to forget that I broke his nose and nearly smashed his windpipe. I decided to go on the offensive, or I knew Aaron would wear me down.

  “We’re not kids anymore, big brother. You can’t fight my fights for me. You can’t protect me.”

  “Well, you need protecting because you’re acting like an irresponsible idiot. Like I said, you may have Mom and Dad snowed, but I know you haven’t been going to school. You can’t just not go to school like that.”

  “How would you know? You haven’t taken a fucking risk in your whole life. You’ve never drawn outside the lines. All you ever do is follow the rules and toe the line.”

  “I’m not going to apologize for doing the right thing or for having goals and trying to achieve them. What do you have? Do you even know what you want? You’re wandering around BC like a moth looking for a flame. Now you’re not even doing that. Do you want to be like Dad?”

  “I know who I am.”

  “You don’t know anything, least of all who you are.”

  “You’re right,” I said, “I don’t. The joke is that you don’t either. You just think you do. You think you are defined by the rules you follow and the plans you’ve made. You think being good defines you. It’s the other way around. They stop you from defining yourself.”

  “I hear Psych 1 and Introduction to Philosophy, but I don’t hear my brother talking.”

  “You can hear whatever the hell you want. I wanna go back to sleep.”

  Aaron shook his head at me in disgust. “Go back to bed. Go do what you want. You’ll just do it anyway.” He walked away.

  “Hey, big brother,” I called after him. “You using your car today?”

  He stopped and turned. “Why?”

  “I need it.”

  “For what? Wait — ” He held up his hands. “I don’t wanna know, do I?”

  “Probably not.”

  He tossed me the keys. “If this will help get whatever is going on with you out of your system, fine. Just bring it and you back in one piece. Understand?”

  “Loud and clear.”

  • • •

  The next time, it was a ringing phone that woke me up. I wasn’t in a really deep sleep, anyway. I was never very good at going back to sleep after my mind was alert. My mom’s coffee hadn’t helped. I was tossing and turning over how things had deteriorated since I began digging into what had happened to Mindy. I had found the guy who’d beaten Mindy into a coma. So what? Abdul Salaam was in worse shape than her. There would be no waking from his sleep. I’d practically watched Billy O’Day murdered. Susan Kasten’s Committee, whoever the fuck they were, wanted to interrogate and now probably kill me. But everything seemed to come back to Bobby somehow.

  Clearly, Bobby was mixed up in smuggling. What sort of smuggling, I couldn’t say. At least now I understood the reason for those stupid airport runs. They weren’t about hitting old people up for flight insurance policies. They were about giving Bobby cover for what he was really up to, but it was more than that. It had to be. The night 1055 Coney Island Avenue burned down, Bobby had shown up just after me and just before Susan Kasten. He had gone up to the third floor and seen Salaam’s body just like I had. Why? What were the odds that Bobby and Susan Kasten didn’t know each other? What were the odds they would show up at the same building on the same evening? Had Bobby smuggled in the boxes Susan and her two flunkies removed from 1055 Coney Island Avenue? What was in the boxes?

  “Yeah?” I said, picking up the phone.

  “Aaron Prager, is that you?” It w
as Murray Fleisher. “I can’t hear so good. Must be a bad connection.”

  He was right. It was a bad connection between the nerves running from his ear to his brain.

  “Yes, Mr. — Murray, it’s me, your future partner.”

  “Wonderful.”

  “I thought I was supposed to call you this afternoon.”

  “What? Did I call you too soon?” he shouted at me as if I was the one losing his hearing.

  “No, Murray,” I upped the volume. “I said I thought I was supposed to call you this afternoon.”

  “Right, but I figured I would take the chance you’d be home. I got what you asked for … mostly.”

  “Mostly?”

  “First, grab a pencil and a piece of paper.”

  “Got it.”

  “One of the license plates belongs to a Ford registered to a Wallace Casey of 34 Trinity Street, Oceanside, New York, 11572. You know Oceanside?”

  “On Long Island. It’s where they got the other Nathan’s Famous.”

  “See,” Murray said, “I knew you were the sharp one. That’s it. The address is off Long Beach Road and Atlantic … around there.”

  “Thanks, but what about the other plate?”

  “What? Now your mother’s late? How is she, by the way?”

  “No, Murray, sorry for whispering,” I shouted. “What about the other plate?”

  “The other plate. That’s the rub, kid, the other plate. Are you sure you got the numbers right?”

  “Positive.”

  “Then we got a problem,” he said.

  “How’s that?”

  “The DMV tells me that plate number is registered to an official city vehicle.”

  “New York City?”

  “Of course. What else?”

  “Did DMV tell you what kind of vehicle it is, at least? I think one of the witnesses who saw it clip my car said it was a white Dodge van.”

  There was silence on the other end of the phone, a long silence.