Authors: Lorenzo Carcaterra
• • •
L
UCIA PUT THE
receiver back in its cradle and stared down at the phone for several minutes. The midday Arizona sun filtered through the open screen doors, the
gleam off the swimming pool casting her face in its warm glow. Her hair was wet and pulled back tight; gold clips held two curled-up buns in place. She stood in the center of her living room, tanned and glistening with sweat, the straps of her two-piece designer bathing suit hanging loose from her shoulders, a calm woman at peace with herself and her surroundings.
Only her eyes and her shallow breathing betrayed the rage within.
Lucia ran a manicured hand over the smooth surface of the phone as if caressing the arm of a lover. She then reached down with both hands, lifted the phone off the polished wood coffee table, and with four violent tugs yanked it free from its wall socket. She spun around and threw the phone across the room, past the open screen doors. With a splash it landed in the shallow end of her forty-foot swimming pool.
The noise brought in her two bodyguards, who’d been sunning themselves by the edge of the deck.
“Get us on a plane,” she told them, her voice eerily quiet. “The next one out.”
“Out where?” asked the bodyguard with the trim black goatee and a tattoo of Lucia’s face on his right forearm.
“New York.” Lucia stood, legs apart, hands folded on her hips, staring out at the pool. “I want to be there by tonight.”
“We takin’ cargo?” the other bodyguard asked. He was as burly and muscular as the first, with a sharp razor cut and a long, ragged scar running down his hairless chest.
“No.” Lucia turned her gaze toward him. “No cargo. But arrange to have some of your tools shipped ahead. We may have to fix a few items.”
The two bodyguards nodded and left the room to tend to their tasks. Lucia paced about in bare feet, sun still beaming off her face, forcing herself to regain focus. The raid on the drug den in Queens was the first move ever attempted against her crew, and its wake left much more
than a bitter taste. It left behind questions. And in the drug business, questions were as dangerous as a loaded weapon.
The team that made the hit on the apartment were pros. No prints had been left behind. The shell casings came out of the chambers of street guns. They had their timing down, from the bomb latched to the door to the precision shooting. These weren’t the actions of either low-level dealers looking to ice a big score or a renegade outfit tied into an existing crew. Albert would have picked up on those. He had been in the drug trade long enough to have done business with everybody working the streets, from first-rate groups to bottom-tier wannabes.
Lucia lit a cigarette and walked out onto the sun-bleached deck, blowing a stream of smoke into the hot desert air. She sat down and placed her feet in the crystal-blue chlorinated water, calmer now than she had been since Albert called her with the news. She lifted her face to the sun and played the heist over in her mind as it was relayed to her.
Other than walking out with the baby, the thieves hadn’t stolen anything. They had washed two hundred thousand in cocaine down a sink without even a second’s hesitation. So it wasn’t money or drugs that piqued their interest. And they certainly didn’t need to shoot their way into a Queens apartment to steal a baby she had paid a hooker $600 for three months earlier.
No, there was a professional logic to the attack.
That meant it was personal.
Whoever it was, they were coming after Lucia and they weren’t being coy. They wanted her to know. Maybe they were backed by somebody bigger or maybe they were lone wolves out looking for a name to match the bravado. Or maybe it went even deeper.
Maybe someone Lucia had touched, a young girl perhaps, or the relative of a child, now wanted to touch her back.
It didn’t really matter to her. She would do all that she
could to find them and erase them from sight. Lucia Carney was sitting on the crest of a six-hundred-million-dollar mountaintop and had come too far over too many long nights to let anybody throw her off.
The group that shot up the safe house had come out gunning for a battle.
Lucia was going to give them a war.
She tossed the cigarette into the clean pool, looked down at her reflection, and smiled, once again a happy woman.
The smell of death was in the air.
B
OOMER LEANED THE
back of his chair against the wall and watched Mrs. Columbo feed the baby a bottle of warm formula. The other Apaches sat around a table in the main dining room at Nunzio’s, nursing their drinks and replaying the actions of the night over in their minds.
“You look good with a baby in your arms,” Boomer said, smiling.
“It’s been a long time since I held one this close.”
She thought back to when Frankie was the same age as the baby she held, Joe following the two of them everywhere they went, armed with a smile and a camera. It was a happy time for all three, filled only with warm feelings. She wished they could someday get back to that.
Boomer held his smile and stared at Mrs. Columbo and the baby, thinking only about what might have been.
“You make the call to social services yet?” Geronimo asked.
“We don’t need social services.” Boomer answered the question without looking away from Mrs. Columbo, the baby serene and content in her arms.
“You sure as shit got a full plate planned out for us, Boomer,” Rev. Jim said. “We break a drug ring
and
we babysit. You can’t find a squad like us anywhere.”
“We look like a couple to you guys?” Boomer walked over to Mrs. Columbo and put his arm around her.
“A couple of what?” Pins asked, finishing off a glass of tap beer.
“I’d buy into it,” Dead-Eye said, understanding without being told what Boomer was really asking. “Married since high school, two other kids grown and out of the house, money a little short, and then, the last thing you need, a surprise baby.”
“Is that what you doormen do with all your days?” Rev. Jim asked him. “Watch soaps?”
“I work nights,” Dead-Eye said. “And I listen to the radio.”
“Me and the wife here got ourselves a kid we can’t afford,” Boomer said, walking slowly around the table. “We’re way low on cash and there’s no way we can keep him. But we wanna make sure our baby has a good home to grow up in and good people to raise him. So where do we go for something like that? Who we gonna turn to?”
“I’ll take Lucia for forty, Alex,” Rev. Jim said.
“Holy shit,” Pins said. “You guys
are
fuckin’ crazy.”
“Maybe,” Boomer said, stopping at the table between Geronimo and Pins. “But I don’t see it any other way.”
Mrs. Columbo instinctively held the baby tighter to her body. “Are you really going to sell him back to Lucia?” she asked.
“Only way to get our foot in her door,” Dead-Eye said.
“There’s a lot of layers between her and the sale,” Geronimo pointed out. “It’s not like walking into J. C. Penney’s and finding her behind the counter. Lucia’s never near the buy and always far away from the kill.”
“We take it one step at a time,” Boomer said. “We start at the bottom of her outfit and work our way up.”
“Where the hell’s the bottom?” Pins asked. “It’s not like this crew takes out ads.”
“You find a guy named Saldo,” Nunzio said, opening a manila folder and sliding out a half dozen head shots of a man with thick dark hair and a long scar running down the right side of his face. “He’s the guy who fed Malcolm
the lady’s business card. He’s her main New York line into the baby market. Pays top dollar and asks very few questions.”
“What is it you
do
, exactly, Nunzio?” Rev. Jim asked, looking over at the older man with a trace of admiration.
“I listen,” Nunzio said.
“Pins, we’ll get you an address and a plate number by early tomorrow morning,” Boomer said.
“I’ll have him wired before lunch,” Pins said. “You want him bodied too?”
“How the hell can you body-wire him?” Boomer asked. “You’re not gonna be anywhere close to the guy.”
“I don’t have to be.” The confidence in his own abilities overcame Pins’s shyness. “I don’t even have to meet the man.”
“What are ya gonna do?” Rev. Jim asked. “Mail him the wire and ask him to put it on himself?”
“He gets his clothes cleaned somewhere,” Pins said. “As soon as I have his address, I’ll figure out where. I’ll plant the bugs there
before
he puts on his clothes.”
Boomer glanced over at Dead-Eye, who looked back at him and smiled. “My hunch is the guy works out of the East Side. We’ll have the layout soon enough. I want the building covered in case of trouble.”
“If there’s a super or a guy at the door, I can talk my way into having them let me do the windows,” Rev. Jim said. “I’ll look scruffy enough so they won’t notice.”
“That shouldn’t be too hard,” Nunzio added.
“Go in on a day there’s a garbage pickup,” Geronimo said. “Around the time they’re working that street.”
“Why?” Boomer asked.
“I got a friend in Sanitation,” Geronimo told him. “He’ll let me work on the truck crew. This way I’m visible but nobody notices me. There’s trouble, I’ll be there.”
“That covers the ground and the outside of the building,” Boomer said. “That leaves the roof for you, Dead-Eye. Your gut tells you something’s not right, don’t even hesitate.”
“What about me?” Mrs. Columbo asked. “What am I doing while all this is going on?”
“Nothing,” Boomer said with a smile. “You’re my wife and no wife of mine’s gonna have a job.”
Mrs. Columbo looked down at the baby, lifted him to eye level, and kissed his flushed red cheek. “Your father’s an asshole,” she cooed as she placed him on her shoulder and patted his back. Seconds later, the baby let out a loud burp.
“That’s what he thinks of you,” Mrs. Columbo said with a laugh.
• • •
L
UCIA SAT AT
the head of the eight-foot dining table, a yellow folder spread open beneath her elbows. A crystal ashtray and wine goblet were off to her left, a 1980 merlot in one, a filter-tipped cigarette smoldering on the edge of the other. She stared across the length of the bare table at the private investigator sitting nervously at the far end. He had on a cheap coffee-colored suit, worn at the cuffs, a brown shirt in need of a wash, and a poorly knotted cream tie. He was thin and balding, the top of his head coated with beads of sweat, his small fingers softly drumming on the top of the table. Three of Lucia’s men stood silently behind him, hidden by the shadows of the drawn brocade drapes that kept out the afternoon sunshine. There was a large glass of ice water in front of the man. It sat untouched.
“You’re charging me two hundred and fifty dollars an hour plus expenses, Mr. Singleton,” Lucia said in a level-toned voice. “I expect you to have something to show for it.”
“It’s all there in the file,” Trace Singleton said. “You can see for yourself.”
“I don’t want to see for myself,” Lucia said in harsher tones. “I want you to tell me.”
“That ambush on your apartment was pulled off by a
group of cops,” Singleton said, wiping a thin line of sweat off his upper lip. “Working on their own.”
“How do you know they were cops?” Lucia asked, taking a puff from her cigarette.
“That part’s confidential,” Singleton said, smirking. “That’s one of the reasons I’m so good at what I do. You gotta trust me on it.”
“And if I don’t trust you on it?” Lucia asked. “What happens then?”
“Then I guess you and me can’t do business anymore,” he said, glancing behind him at the three large men who never seemed to move.
Lucia pushed back her chair and walked down the length of the table, the fingers of her right hand skimming the dark wood surface. She walked past Singleton and over to one of her men. She looked up at him and smiled, slowly running a hand up the front of his blue silk shirt and down to his side, stopping when she found the handle of the 9-millimeter Luger. She pulled the gun from the man’s hip and rested it against her stomach, her back still turned to Singleton.
“Were you telling me the truth?” Lucia asked, her eyes cold and steady, looking at her man, her question aimed at Singleton.
“About what?” Singleton turned slightly in his chair, one arm braced against the curve of the antique wood.
“That everything I need to know is in the file?”
“Everything’s there,” Singleton said, his arrogance tempered by the oppressive heat in the room. “Like I always say, you bring me in, you bring in the best.”
“You were also right about something else,” Lucia said, turning away from the man in the silk shirt.
“You get to know me better, you’ll find out I’m right about most things.” Singleton was full of swagger now, squinting over at Lucia. The dim light in the room kept the gun in her hand hidden from his line of vision. “Now, which thing in particular were you talkin’ about?”
Lucia raised the gun and aimed it at Singleton. “You and I can’t do business anymore.”
Lucia’s index finger put pressure on the Luger’s quick trigger and clicked off two rounds, both of which landed in Singleton’s forehead, cracking open the back of his head, sending blood and bone fragments splashing against the flocked red wallpaper. Singleton’s upper body slumped against the back of the chair, resting there as if he were fast asleep.
Lucia handed the Luger back to the man in the blue shirt. He took it by the handle and shoved it into his hip holster.
“Have someone clean up the room,” Lucia told the three men. She walked back to the head of the table and picked up the folder. “I’ve got some reading to do.”
• • •
“W
HERE IS YOUR
husband now, Mrs. Connors?” the well-dressed man behind the desk asked Mrs. Columbo, flashing a toothy smile.
“He’s trying to find a parking spot.” Mrs. Columbo shifted one leg over the other. Boomer had made her wear a tight miniskirt and she was showing more than enough thigh to interest the man behind the desk. “That’s no easy thing in this neighborhood.”
“How did you find out about our agency?” the man asked, still with the smile, his eyes scanning Mrs. Columbo and the baby braced against her right arm.