Apaches (22 page)

“She say anything?” Nunzio said. “Can she talk at all?”

“I was carryin’ her down the street to my car.” Boomer’s voice betrayed the weight of his emotions. “I still couldn’t get over the shape she was in. So much blood, so many bruises, you had to look to find skin. I was cursin’ to myself, sick about the whole fuckin’ business. Then she opens one eye, looks at me, and says ‘thank you.’” Boomer put his head down and picked up his fork.

“I’m only sorry I didn’t leave Malcolm’s body on top of Junior’s,” Dead-Eye said. “Cancel out both their checking accounts.”

“What happens to him now?” Nunzio asked.

“Malcolm?” Dead-Eye said. “He’s looking at a hard ten. Even with a soft judge and a kind wacko report.”

“Doesn’t seem like it’s enough,” Nunzio said.

“It’s never enough,” Boomer said. “No matter what they end up with, it’s never enough.”

“The family needs anything,” Nunzio said, finishing off his wine and getting up from the table, “let ’em know I’ll do all I can.”

They watched the restaurant owner walk toward the bar, giving quick greetings to diners along the way.

“How much juice does Nunzio really have?” Dead-Eye asked, leaning back in his chair.

“About as much as he needs,” Boomer said.

He paused for a moment and then reached inside the pocket of his blue button-down J. Crew shirt. He pulled out the card he had taken from Malcolm’s jeans and slid it across the table.

“Lucia Carney,” Dead-Eye said, reading the name printed on it. “Should that mean something to me?”

“She’s got four names.” Boomer picked up the card and placed it back in his shirt pocket. “Been married three times. All three husbands ended up dead.”

“Everything comes in threes,” Dead-Eye said. “Good things and bad.”

“She works out of Arizona,” Boomer said. “Runs a day care center. One of those drop-off-at-seven, pick-up-at-six places. Takes in about fifteen, maybe twenty thousand a year.”

“Any kids of her own?” Dead-Eye said.

“Can’t have any,” Boomer said. “She had a botched abortion when she was twenty. Messed up her insides. She was either living with or spending quality time with a drug runner down south. Beyond that, her early background’s sketchy.”

“I’m ready for another Pepsi,” Dead-Eye said. “You set with your water?”

“Get yourself two and a large bottle of Pellegrino for the table,” Boomer said, pushing his chair back and walking off toward the men’s room. “I’ll pick it up from there when everybody else gets here.”

“Who’s everybody else?” Dead-Eye asked, wondering where Boomer was taking all this, why he had devoted so much time to digging into the life of a three-time widow who spent her days watching other people’s kids.

“Don’t worry,” Boomer said, stopping between two empty tables. “You’ll like ’em. They’re a bunch of cripples. Like you and me.”

•    •    •

B
OOMER
F
RONTIERI HAD
stopped being a cop physically but not emotionally. His every action, every movement, every glance smelled of cop. He would regularly pass on tips he picked up from old street stools to the beat units and was one of the few retired cops brazen enough to make citizen’s arrests. Once, not long after he’d been
pensioned off, he spotted two teens mugging an elderly woman on Sixty-sixth Street, over near Central Park. He cornered the two, confiscated their pocket knives, and yanked them face forward against a black stone wall. He needed to keep them in place while he phoned for two uniforms. After helping the woman to her feet and resting her against a parked car, he stopped a young student heading home from a nearby private school.

“What’s your name?” he said to the startled boy.

“Joshua,” the kid said.

Boomer pulled the service revolver from his hip holster and handed it to Joshua. “Make sure they don’t move” was all he said, pointing to the two teens over by the wall.

“What if they do?” Joshua said, holding the gun toward the pair, both hands shaking.

“Then shoot ’em,” Boomer said, limping off to the corner phone booth to call the local precinct.

The rescue of Jennifer Santori had brought Boomer back to life. He was angered and repulsed by all that he had witnessed, but it also made him feel like a cop again. His mind was back on red alert, and the adrenaline rush was nearly strong enough to drown out the pain of his wounds. The eventual capture was worth the risk of being hit with a fatal bullet. He knew now that was all he had to keep him going.

The risk.

After finding her card in Malcolm’s pocket, Boomer spent three full days gathering information on Lucia Carney. His first meeting was with DEA Special Agent Tony Malazante, a head banger from his days working buys and busts in Alphabet City. Over two cups of coffee in a downtown diner, Malazante told him about a new brand of cocaine that was just hitting the streets. The dealers called it crack, the junkies called it heaven, and the narcs called it their biggest problem since the Golden Triangle glory days of heroin. New York got its first taste
in late 1981. Since then, arrests had multiplied and demand for the drug quadrupled.

“What’s the difference between that and regular blow?” Boomer asked.

“The hits are cheaper,” Malazante said. “Five bucks gets you high for five minutes. Don’t need a lot of cash to stay on the wire all day. You can pick it up stealing petty.”

“Who’s in on it?”

“Everybody so far but the Italians,” Malazante said, sipping from a large cup of mocha. “The demand’s so high that a street dealer can set up shop on a Monday and have a full crew of twenty working for him by Friday.”

“Where’s it coming from?” Boomer wanted to know, holding Lucia’s card in his right hand.

“Same place all this shit comes from,” Malazante said. “South America. Southeast Asia. And it’s landing heavy on the streets. The rock comes in and the cash goes out, usually on the same day.”

“That’s where Lucia comes in,” Boomer said. “How big a hitter is she?”

“She started out small-time.” Malazante leaned his large frame against the back of a torn plastic booth. “Now I’d say she’s in the top three, easy. She’s got a big outfit that’s well run and, I guess you could say, unique.”

“What’s unique about it?”

Malazante finished the rest of his coffee and leaned closer to his friend. “I can help you with this, Boomer,” he said. “But only up to a point. I don’t know what you’re thinking and I don’t want to know. You and me didn’t talk about this and I didn’t leave this folder behind on my seat. If anybody asks, we met, had coffee, and talked about my kids.”

“You don’t have any kids,” Boomer said.

“Then we didn’t talk,” Malazante said, squeezing his girth out of the booth.

An old girlfriend from the FBI gave Boomer the statistics he needed about crack and a confidential printout on
Lucia Carney. She promised to help in the future as well, in return for anonymity and the occasional dinner at Nunzio’s. He spent a day working the computers at One Police Plaza, cross-referencing Lucia’s name with known cartel bosses and seven-figure dealers. In between, Boomer ate a quiet office lunch with Deputy Chief Ken Wolfson, a bright, personable man who collected rare comic books and was known on the streets as a cop who liked to see jobs done with as few questions asked as possible. He agreed to be Boomer’s inside man so long as his involvement was that of a silent partner. Boomer would assume all the risks. Wolfson’s cops would get the credit for any busts. Once that was agreed upon, the deputy chief opened a file drawer and laid out all the NYPD background information on Lucia Carney.

A connection from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms then gave Boomer a stat sheet filled with her known lift-and-drop locations. A neighborhood friend now working for a Secret Service unit in Maryland gave him a detailed report on her money-laundering capabilities and how the fast cash was washed overnight between one flight and the next.

In seventy-two hours, using the sources available to him, Boomer Frontieri knew as much about Lucia Carney as any cop in the country. He studied up on crack and read assorted medical documents detailing its instant addiction. He learned about mules and smurfs and the women who carried drugs and cash for Lucia and the men who killed at her whim. The more he read, heard, and learned, the more determined Boomer Frontieri grew. His anger wasn’t fueled by the fact that she was a drug queen. He had heard about other such women working the distribution end of the drug business.

It wasn’t even the amount of money involved, even though it totaled out to a numbing multibillion-dollar-a-year network.

It was the way she did it.

Lucia Carney was as cold and as heartless as any drug
runner Boomer Frontieri had ever seen. Life meant nothing to her, especially an innocent life that had yet to begin.

That’s why he read and reread the folders until his vision blurred, quietly steeling himself toward making the most difficult decision of his life.

•    •    •

D
R
. C
AROLYN
B
ARTLETT
sat on a gray folding chair, her legs crossed, blond hair combed back into a tight bun. The room was filtered with shadows, lit only by a fluorescent bulb attached to the center of the wall, just above the roll-away bed. She read over the contents of a yellow folder which was clutched in her hands, crammed with the detailed notes and observations she had made over the previous four days.

Dr. Bartlett, though only thirty-six, was in charge of the hospital’s rape and trauma psychiatric unit. In her four years at the hospital, she had seen all the horror imaginable.

Until the afternoon they wheeled in Jennifer Santori.

The sight of the young girl, the condition of her body, the sunken look on the face of the man who had brought her in, made Bartlett, for the first time, truly question what it was she did and what, if any, difference it made.

She closed the folder, resting it on the ground next to her Cuban-heeled black Ferragamo shoes, and ran her hands across the starched white sheets of the bed. She took a deep breath and touched the soft hand of the young girl asleep beneath those sheets.

She studied the silent, bandaged face. The girl’s rest was disturbed only by the occasional twitch and moan. There were three IV pouches draining off into her right arm and bandages covering a multitude of wounds. Her left hand was in a cast that brushed up to her elbow, an empty space where the index finger should have been.

Dr. Bartlett leaned closer and touched each of the wounds with a gentle hand. She had clear blue eyes, a
taut athlete’s body, and a face that had not begun to betray her years. She had seen a great deal of abuse in her four years at Metro, but never anything close to this. It had taken nurses and interns two full days to wash off the caked blood and three days for Bartlett to get the child to give her anything more than a nod.

She had paid a visit to the suspect. She always made a point of doing that, even though some doctors in the department frowned on the idea. But it was important to her, allowing a rare glimpse into the other side of the room, in an invariably futile attempt to understand why such men—and they were always men—did what they did to their victims.

She didn’t get much out of Malcolm Juniper, about as much as she got out of any of them. He smiled, asked for some coffee, even asked her how Jennifer was doing. She turned her back on him when he asked for her phone number, leaving him with a smile on his face and a look in his eyes that told her all she really needed to know. She walked out of the holding room thinking about her father, Richie Bartlett, a twenty-year veteran of the NYPD who had killed two men in the line of duty and who died working three jobs so his dream of a daughter with a medical degree could become a reality. She wondered how long Malcolm Juniper would have survived in a locked room with Richie Bartlett.

Dr. Bartlett sat back in her chair, her eyes locked on Jennifer’s face. It was early for the dreams and nightmares to begin, but she knew they would soon be there for the girl who had seen so much darkness in such a short period of time. She knew that the girl’s parents would turn to her for answers, for pleas to bring the nightmares to a halt, but all her years of training, all the books and files and reports, now boiled down to one horrible fact: She couldn’t make those nightmares stop. They would be a part of Jennifer Santori for the rest of her days.

Helping Jennifer cope with the night visions was the
best Dr. Bartlett could do. In truth, it was the only hope she could offer.

There was a bigger problem facing Dr. Bartlett, one she had wrestled with since she was first handed the file folder less than three days before. She knew that the police, the district attorney’s office, every prosecutor assigned to her case, would need Jennifer’s testimony, demand it, in order to secure a prison space for Malcolm Juniper. Without Jennifer Santori in the courtroom, there would be no conviction. There wouldn’t even be a case. But having Jennifer testify would mean reliving the nightmare. It would mean sitting next to a judge and, worse, across from Malcolm Juniper, telling all in attendance what had been done to her, in full detail, with as many follow-up questions as the defense team could muster. Questions meant to rattle a teenager and release the shackles from a man without remorse.

Dr. Bartlett stood and leaned closer to Jennifer. She stroked her hair, careful not to touch the thick bandages surrounding it, gently brushing back the loose strands. She wondered what she could ever do to make the pretty girl smile again.

Dr. Bartlett leaned down, kissed Jennifer twice on the cheek, squeezed her undamaged hand, and walked out of the room.

Her head was down.

Her decision had been made.

T
HEY SAT CROWDED
around a table in a rear room off the main bar. Boomer held the head, his back against a wood-paneled wall, just below a framed photo of Nino Benvenuti and Emile Griffith slugging it out for the middleweight title. Dead-Eye sat to Boomer’s left, a large wineglass filled with ice and Pepsi in his hand, a puzzled look on his face.