Authors: Lorenzo Carcaterra
“When?”
“Every time I’ve needed you,” Jimmy said, stepping out of the car.
“Maybe today I’ll fuck up and you’ll get lucky,” Calise said.
“I’m counting on it,” Jimmy Ryan breathed.
He slammed the car door behind him, zippered the front of his black bowling jacket, and raced across the street toward the entrance of the luxury high rise.
• • •
P
INS WAS ON
his back, in the basement of the high rise, staring up at a thick cluster of phone lines. He held apart the dozen wires connecting the twelfth floor to the mainframe and followed their flow until he found the one leading to Room 1211. He gave the wire a slight tug and unclipped it from the board, killing the line. He checked his watch and clicked on his radio ban.
“How we doin’?” Pins said, holding down the red transmit button.
“Stevie’s in the room,” Calise said, the machine giving his words a grainy weight. “They cleaned him for weapons. Now they’re scopin’ out the bag of cash.”
“How’s our girl?” Pins asked.
“Like ice in winter,” Calise said. “This broad don’t sweat. Dealer tells her about some guy he smoked in Miami just ’cause he felt like it. Know what she tells him?”
“What?” Pins said, scooting out from under the wires and closing the phone system lid.
“She did the same to a guy in a motel in Ohio,” Calise said. “For keepin’ her waitin’. That jammed his balls back in his shorts.”
“I’ll be up there in less than five,” Pins said, heading down a dark corridor toward the dim light of a basement elevator.
“Check in before you go in,” Calise said. “I need you safe, sound, and alive.”
“Didn’t know you cared so much,” Pins said, walking into the empty elevator and pressing the button for the twelfth floor.
“I don’t,” Calise said. “But I put a hundred on you in Sunday’s bowling tournament.”
Pins turned off the transmitter and slid it into a side pocket of his jacket. “Easy money,” he whispered to himself.
• • •
T
HE EIGHTEEN LARGE
packets of cocaine were piled in two neat rows on top of a glass coffee table. The woman in red sat on a couch, lit cigarette in her right hand, bemused look on her face, watching the man with the accent take the bag from the undercover cop to her right. She watched the man’s manicured fingers slowly unzip the black duffel and saw his brown eyes gleam when he flipped it over, emptying a dozen thick pads of cash over the kilos.
“I’m gonna go take a piss,” the undercover, Steve Rinaldi, said. “While you and your boys busy yourselves countin’ out the cash.”
“We don’t need to count it,” the man said, his eyes on the woman, his voice soft. “We trust you.”
“I still gotta piss,” Rinaldi said. “Trust me on
that.
”
There were three other men in the room.
Two sat at the bar, elbows stretched out, facing the group around the coffee table. The third man stood with his back to the bedroom door, hands hidden behind the folds of a white silk jacket, heavy lids covering albino blues. The man with the accent turned to him, a smile Krazy-glued to his face, and nodded.
The albino whipped his right arm free, a .44 S&W Special in his hand, silencer screwed tight over the smoke end. He fired off three quick rounds, each finding flesh. The first hit Rinaldi in the neck, spraying blood
across the blue fabric of the three-cushion couch. The second hit his right shoulder and shattered bone. The third bullet killed him, entering at the temple and lodging at the base of his skull. The force of the bullets jolted Rinaldi’s body forward, his arms dangling at his sides, his face smearing blood and bone over the cocaine packets.
The woman in the red pumps finally lost her cool demeanor, the color fading from her tanned face, eyelids twitching, her expensive suit splotched with the undercover’s blood. She sat straight up on the couch, cigarette still in her hand, staring down at the body next to her, the man’s jeans soiled through with urine and excrement, the smell reaching down into her throat.
“He really did have to go to the bathroom,” the man with the accent said. “I thought he was only joking.”
“You kill everybody you do business with?” the woman asked, taking several deep breaths, fighting to regain any semblance of composure.
“Only the ones with badges,” the man said.
“You think my friend was a cop?” she said, trying to sound credible.
“No,” the man said, moving closer to her. “I
know
he was a cop. What I don’t know is, who are you?”
The woman crushed her cigarette out in an ashtray and stood, ignoring the blood droppings on her hands and clothes, staring straight at the man with the accent.
“I was here to make a deal,” she said, her voice regaining strength. “It looks to me like that’s not going to happen.”
“We made a deal,” the man said, pointing to the coffee table next to his leg. “We have the money. And you have your drugs. I will even have Ramon pack it for you.”
The beefier of the two men at the bar walked over to the table, lifted the undercover by the hair, and tossed his body to the ground. He picked up the black duffel and started to lay in the cocaine packets.
“Before Ramon finishes, there is something I would like you to do for me,” the man said. “A small favor.”
“Do I have a choice?” the woman asked.
“No,” the man said.
“Then just tell me what it is.” She sighed.
“Take off your clothes,” the man with the accent said.
• • •
P
INS WAS AT
the door, poised to knock.
Calise and Fitz were in the elevator, out of the van, and into the high rise as soon as they heard the undercover take the hit. The narcs in the stairwell held their position, lead man with one hand gripped around the doorknob. The three detectives in the suite next door snapped on their vests and clicked their guns into readiness.
The albino opened the door on the second knock.
“Who the fuck are you?” he said, staring down at the much shorter Pins.
“Telephone repair,” Pins said, catching a glimpse of the undercover’s body behind the albino’s left shoulder. “Your lines are down.”
“We didn’t call nobody,” the albino said, large hand on the edge of the door, ready to slam it shut. “Go play with somebody else’s phones.”
Pins had his gun in the albino’s chest before he had a chance to breathe. “You don’t understand,” Pins said, his gun hand visibly shaking. “I take my job very seriously. Now, let me in.”
The albino took two steps back, hands at his sides, palms out. “Two phones. Bedroom and out here.”
“There’s three, putz,” Pins said, walking into the suite, looking at the dead undercover and the woman in the red pumps, stripped down to her bra. “You forgot about the one in the bathroom.”
“You walk in here, you don’t walk out,” the albino said. “I make sure of that.”
“Hey, fixing phones is a risky business,” Pins said,
backing the albino against a wall. “But the benefits can’t be beat.”
Ramon tossed the duffel bag back on top of the coffee table and turned to the man with the accent for a signal. The man put an arm around the woman in the red pumps and held her close to his side, rubbing against the lines of sweat running down her back. The albino slid an open blade down the side of his sleeve and cupped it in his palm.
They held position as the cops flowed into the suite.
Calise and Fitz were in the doorway, short of breath and guns drawn. The three narcs from the stairwell were in vests and shotguns, crouched down behind them. The four detectives from the adjacent suite had poured out and were braced two apiece on both sides of the hall.
“Looks like a lot of people want to use your phone,” Pins said, turning his head slightly toward the cops covering the room.
The albino saw the opening and took it.
He wrapped his fingers around the knife handle and swung it. The blade slashed open the sleeve of Jimmy’s bowling jacket, drawing blood and knocking him to the ground.
Calise turned into the room, stepped over Jimmy, and fired four .38-caliber rounds deep into the albino’s chest. The force slammed him against the wall, knife rattling to the floor. He slid down the side of the pink stucco wall, staining it with streaks of red.
The second dead man in the room.
“I hope that’s not your bowling arm,” Calise said to Pins, looking down at him between his legs.
Then before Pins could say “You’re all heart,” the bullet came out of Ramon’s .41 Remington Magnum and traveled into Calise’s brain at a speed of 1,300 feet per second. Calise fell into a heap, the smile on his face frozen in death, crashing down on top of Ryan.
Ryan felt the breath ease out of Calise’s body, his friend’s blood pouring down the side of his face and onto his bowling jacket. Pins looked beyond Calise and over
at the narcs by the door, hearing them curse and then empty their chambers into Ramon’s white suit. He lifted his head and watched the dealer flip across the room, knocking over a chair and landing on top of a dinette table near the bar.
The man with the accent held his place next to the woman in the red pumps, his right arm still wrapped around her waist, his left hand holding a .32 short Colt to her head. The narcs and the detectives pointed guns and rifles at him.
“I walk out with her,” the man said. “Or I die with her.”
The man with the accent tightened his grip around the handle of the gun and swallowed hard. The cops around him held their aim. Pins stayed still, blood still pouring down on him from Calise’s wound.
Pins looked over at the woman in the red pumps. She ran a hand slowly up her leg, lifting the skirt until it showed the top of her stockings. Strapped to the sheer frill was a white-barreled .22 Remington Jet. The man with the accent was sweating. Wavering. He jiggled the gun nervously, moving it from the woman’s head to flash it menacingly at the cops lined up before him, then back to the woman. When he flashed his gun around the room a second time, the woman moved. She pulled out her gun, put it to the man’s head, and fired off two rounds.
He fell to her feet, dead.
The woman tossed the gun to the floor, bent down, picked up her jacket and blouse, and walked out the open door, well aware of her fellow cops’ stares.
Pins didn’t move from the carpeted floor, now darkened by his friend’s blood. He put his arms around the dead cop, still too afraid to let him go, waiting for the hard faces with the body bags to come take him away.
• • •
F
OR
P
INS THERE
were few friends. Women were there when he wanted them, which was not often and never for
long. He didn’t sleep much and spent free nights roaming bowling alleys, looking for a fast game for quick cash, quietly excelling in a sport meant to be played alone. He had the house and the car to call his own. And he had the wires.
With his bugs in place, Pins could enter any number of private worlds and listen to the planned deceits of others, free from their treachery, exempt from the harm they sought to cause. It was the center of the safe world he had built from the rubble of youth.
He should have known it was not meant to last.
• • •
T
HE BUILDING WAS
on the Upper West Side, in the high seventies, prewar, seven stories high, with an Otis elevator creaking up and down. Surveillance photos taken by an undercover unit scouting the area led them to believe that a three-bedroom unit on the sixth floor was being used to launder drug dollars. The apartment was always empty between nine
A.M
. and noon every day; the young couple renting it for $3,000 a month worked out at the Jack Lalanne on Broadway during that time. The undercovers needed Pins to drop a bug near the bed and a video camera somewhere close to the bureau.
It was less than an hour’s work.
Pins pressed the two dozen black buzzers dotting the entry wall, waiting for some frazzled tenant to ring him in.
He moved to the elevator, watched the thick black door slowly close, and leaned on the button that had the number six on it. Pins was dressed in jeans and a thick blue baseball jacket, topped by a Yankee cap. In his left hand he held a thin leather briefcase. He popped two slices of red hot cinnamon gum in his mouth and got out of the elevator when it stopped at the sixth floor. He pulled a folded sheet from his back pocket to double-check the apartment number. He found it scrawled in black ink across the top of the wire sheet, 6F, and moved on down the hall.
It took less than thirty seconds for Pins to pick the lock and enter the apartment.
He moved down a long corridor, a large living room and two bedrooms to his left, a bathroom facing straight ahead. There was little in the way of furniture. A scrawny black cat hissed at him from behind a radiator pipe.
At the end of the corridor Pins turned right and walked into the master bedroom. The walls were painted dark blue, photographers’ flashlights stood in each corner, and a Sony twenty-five-inch color TV rested on the bureau. In the middle: a king-size four-poster.
Pins tossed his case on the bed, zipped it open, and started to work. He laid a bug inside the thin pole of one of the lights, running it from the bottom up, past the wires and into the main fuse connector.
He grabbed a Minicam out of the briefcase and walked to the back of the television, planning to rest it alongside the main tube.
It was then he heard the footsteps coming down the hall.
They were heavy, a man’s step rather than a woman’s, wooden slats creaking with each imprint. Pins rested the back of the TV on the floor and moved toward the bed, looking for the radio that would link him with backup.
He had his back to the door.
A young man, thin brown hair disheveled, vacant look in his eyes, stood at the edge of the bedroom entrance. His entire body shook with anger.
“I knew I’d find you here,” he said.
Pins turned around, radio in his hand, and faced the man.
“You live here?” Pins asked.
“I’m Sheila’s husband,” the man said. “And you’re standing in my bedroom.”
“I don’t know anybody named Sheila,” Pins said, pressing down on the black transmitter button.