Forced Entry (15 page)

“C’mon, ya little gook, answer the fucking door,” he said, slapping it with the palm of his hand. “C’mon, Vallone, take the spike outta ya fuckin’ arm and lemme in.”

Steven’s impatience had nothing to do with any impending symptoms of drug withdrawal. Unlike Born Miller, his addictions, though well-developed, were under control; he even kept a bottle of prescription Dilaudids in his medicine chest as a kind of health insurance. Besides, he could go to any of a dozen places in Corona or South Jamaica to get what he needed. What bothered Steven was the certainty that, wherever he went, he wouldn’t get anything like the quality available in 4B, especially the coke which was unreal in its intensity.

“Anyone helping you?”

Steven spun on his heel, automatically flashing a confused smile. “I’m looking for my auntie’s apartment. Her name’s Weinstein.”

“Yeah?” Pat Sheehan had been chasing junkies away from 4B ever since Moodrow had evicted the tenants. At first, it was a labor of love, but he was getting tired of it. He drove ten-hour shifts for United Parcel and took care of his partner when he was home. Louis had been running high fevers in the evening, fevers that responded to the prompt administration of ice packs and alcohol rubs. “Well, there’s no dope in your auntie’s apartment, pal. The cops closed down the store.”

“Pardon?” Steven Horowitz knew, of course, that he was dealing with a fellow graduate of New York’s penal system. But the guy had some kind of hard-on and Steven figured him for an asshole trying to go straight.

“The store is closed,” Pat repeated. “Permanently closed by order of the police. So it’d be best if you stopped bangin’ on the door and took off.”

Steven Horowitz wasn’t afraid, though he found Pat Sheehan formidable; he’d functioned in far worse situations. On the other hand, though he held on to his smile, Steven
was
absolutely enraged. His first instinct was to smash the smaller man, to crush him, but as an experienced opportunistic thief, he knew there was no opportunity in an even contest. It wasn’t like jail where you had no place to retreat to. “Hey, man,” he said, “I’m just lookin’ to get high. You know how it is, right?” He continued to smile as he turned, not toward the elevator, but toward the stairwell.

Steven was almost down to the next level before he stopped to compose himself. The flip, from soon-to-be-stoned criminal to humiliated, retreating junkie, had been much too sudden; it only added to his need for drugs. But there was no sense in going out on the street with a bad attitude, either. The first thing he had to consider was how to get high. He was tempted to settle for a crackhouse on 105th Street, in Corona. It was only ten minutes away, but the crack in Corona was all comeback and he would probably have to go inside to buy it. If he drove to the Liberty Park Houses, in South Jamaica, on the other hand, his regular people would come up to the car. And the crack was clean, pure cocaine; the dope reasonably potent; the home he was sharing with Louella less than twenty minutes away. Fuck the faggot upstairs. Nothing would prevent him from enjoying the fruits of his labor.

When a thoroughly calmed Steven Horowitz stepped into the third floor corridor, the first thing he noticed was the open door to apartment 3H. As this (and not a fistfight with a rock-hard Pat Sheehan) was what he defined as opportunity, he walked over to take a closer look. He was in the mood to indulge his nostalgia for the old days, when his criminal career consisted entirely of taking things directly from their owners. But the apartment was stripped and empty, the floors strewn with the odds and ends of moving: torn boxes, pieces of tape, chunks of packing.

With a barely perceptible shrug, Steven started to turn away, then heard the elevator clank to a stop and the door wheeze open. The old man who stepped out did such a double take upon sighting him, that Steven nearly laughed, but Steven, even while his mind worked furiously to analyze the potential for opportunity, managed to control himself. Instead of laughing, he flashed his brightest golden smile.

“Hi,” he said, drifting back to a conversation with Darryl Porter in which Darryl had explained the philosophy and the technique of the push-in, a form of robbery that could be done without weapons if the victim was old enough to guarantee control. Control. Steven could hear Darryl’s high, sharp voice even as he measured Mike Birnbaum.

Can you control the vic? That’s the first rule
.
You gon be with the vic a long time, so you best be able to control him.

“And what could I do for you?” Mike Birnbaum asked. Mike had never liked golden smiles.

“Looks like we’re gonna be neighbors,” Steven said. “My name’s Steven Horowitz.”

Can you get the vic in his apartment ’thout bein’ seen
?
Don’ forget
,
if some nigger see you go inside
,
he prolly gon’ do his nine one one bit and you still be fuckin with the vic when the man come to bust yo ass.

“What kind of name is that for a Jew? Steven?” Despite the sarcastic tone of his reply, Mike Birnbaum was more than happy to discover that his new neighbor would be a clean-cut Jewish boy instead of the black drug dealer he expected.

“My parents wanted me to be a good American,” he countered with a shrug. “You should pardon the expression.” Steven Horowitz, born Saul Merstein and legally Scott Forrest, was amazed; he’d thought the old Jews had died out long ago. The little mousey ones who gave their kid names like Izzy and the sharp-tongued whiners who soaked up that slimy fish like it was caviar? They were supposed to be long gone.

Suddenly, he was pissed-off again. The night had been shitting all over him, but now he had an opportunity to get even. And to make a few dollars.

Who know how much the poppy love got in his mattress? One time ah catch this ol’ nigger come pushin’ her shoppin’ cart with the house keys in her hand. Man, she look like she sleep in the subway
.
Smell like piss
.
Ah figure ah’m lucky if she got ten bucks
.
Turns out she got her “sick money” in a stocking in the back of her closet. Twelve hundred fifty-five dollars. Ah was jus’ comin’ out the institution and that “sick money” set me up in bidness.

“So when do you move in?” Mike turned the key in the lock and pushed his door open. He was a thrifty man and had remembered to put out the lights before he left. The rooms within, Steven Horowitz noted, were dark.

Is there anybody in there waitin? Sometime you be pushin’ grandma through the door and grandson be there with a damn baseball bat. Put “Louisville Slugger” all over yo ass.

“I think I’ll move in now,” Steven said quietly.

“Without no furniture?”

“You got furniture. You got enough for both of us.”

Mike Birnbaum, despite his bravado, was an old man; when Steven Horowitz, by way of fulfilling the name given to this crime, pushed Mike into his apartment, he seemed to fly down the darkened corridor, thus covering requirements number one, two, and three. The prey was under control. Nobody had seen. The apartment was unguarded.

Do the vic know y’all mean bidness? Don’t let there be no doubt. You fiend that vic till he understand the onliest way you gittin’ outta there is if he come across wit’ the goods.

Steven read the fear in Mike Birnbaum’s face even before he turned the old man over and pulled him to his feet. Steven had seen it many times in the Brooklyn House of Detention, seen a kid so shitass panicked he’d open his mouth before the wolf had his cock out. Steven could smell that fear in the old Jew, but he drove his fist into the Jew’s face anyway. Three times. And the frail hand that floated up protectively was no more than a fly to be brushed away.

Do you know what you lookin for? Can’t be spendin’ all day hangin’ on to the vic. Make yo move and get out
.
Make the poppy love tell you where he got the shit hid, ’cause he know if he don’t, you gon kill him.

“How do you want this, old man? Because we could do this the easy way or the hard way. You know what I’m sayin’? Like I don’t give a shit how we do it. Like I hope you make me hurt you. Like you’re just an old fuckin’ kike who shoulda dropped dead ten years ago. Like they shoulda burned your ass in the mother-fuckin’ ovens.”

I
T WAS JUST AFTER
five o’clock on a weekday afternoon and it was snowing hard in New York. Not a blizzard, by any means; just a brief, intense, snow shower as the temperature began a sudden drop from the mid-thirties to the mid-teens. The warm streets and sidewalks were turning the snowflakes to water as soon as they touched down and, far from a winter wonderland, the black pavement seemed even blacker as the moisture lifted road oils from the tarry surface as deftly as a Crime Scene detective lifts fingerprints from glass.

For most of New York, committed to subway and feet, the snow was a pleasant diversion that would disappear by morning. A minor incident to enliven the coffee break, but not enough to slow the city’s nightlife for a second. On the other hand, for the drivers of the eighty thousand cars, trucks, and buses that invade Manhattan every day, the first swirl of snowflakes was sufficient cause for out-and-out panic. The commuters from New Jersey, Westchester, Connecticut, and Long Island resolved their business as early as possible and rushed for their cars (or their limos) at almost exactly the same time. Similarly, the truckers who feed the monster skyscrapers rushed through their deliveries, then dashed toward the bridges and tunnels just as the suburbanites wheeled their BMWs out of four-hundred-dollar-a-month parking spaces.

The result, as usual, was chaos and Marty Blanks, along with Steven and Mikey Powell, his two bodyguards, was trapped in the worst of it. Blanks was headed south on what was left of the old West Side Highway; he was on his way to Brooklyn Heights and a business meeting with his partner, Marek Najowski, but he was getting absolutely nowhere. Mikey Powell was driving, his brother alongside, while Blanks, lost in thought, had the backseat to himself. The brothers were furious, the long line of gray cars stretching out through the snowstorm forcing them to deal with frustration when they’d lived their lives by smashing anything that annoyed them. Marty Blanks, on the other hand, having spent nearly twenty of his thirty-one years in institutions, felt no anxiety whatsoever. He’d long ago adopted the prison cliché that “what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger” as a driving force in his life. While the Powell brothers fumed silently (they knew better than to vocalize their annoyance in front of their boss), Marty Blanks leaned against the leather seat and relaxed.

“Hey, Marty,” Mikey Powell thrust himself into his boss’s thoughts, “Whatta ya say we take 23rd Street over to the East Side? Try ta get on the bridge from the Drive. We ain’t goin’ nowhere this way.”

“It ain’t gonna be no different on the East Side,” Blanks protested. “It’s snowin’.”

“That what I say,” Steve Powell, who’d been fighting with his older brother since he could walk, chimed in. “When it snows, everything gets fucked up in New York. We just gotta live with it.”

“Yeah, but we don’t
know
what’s on the East Side,” Mikey insisted, his logic irrefutable. “It might be the same or it might be better. It
can’t
be no worse.” He gestured toward the wall of metal surrounding them. “We ain’t moved a hundred yards in the last ten minutes. I don’t want ya ta be late, Boss.”

“Forget about ‘late,’ ” Blanks replied evenly. “This meeting’s gonna be two hours of bullshit and ten minutes of business. I don’t even know why I put up with this guy.” He settled back against the seat.

“So whatta ya want I should do? Yiz want me ta stay on the West Side or what?”

“Take 23rd across to Ninth Avenue, then cut down to 14th Street. 23rd gets fucked up past Fifth Avenue. Take 14th over to the Drive, but don’t hurry. I couldn’t give a shit what time I get there.”

While Mikey Powell turned the Buick into the 23rd Street Marina, swinging in a circle to face east on 23rd, Blanks settled back to consider the nonsense that awaited him in Brooklyn Heights. Najowski, who couldn’t seem to decide whether he was a country squire or one of the boys in a neighborhood bar, would be dressed in some kind of asshole tweed jacket. His shirt would be Irish linen and his flannel trousers slightly wrinkled. He’d be wearing ancient, immaculately shined loafers and checkered argyle socks.

And there’d be a lecture about the “heap,” too. About the ones who escape and the ones doomed to remain. About the ones “born to rise” and the ones who give up, who settle for drugs and welfare handouts and baby after baby after baby. Then they’d sit down to a steak and fries dinner served on Wedgwood china. It amused Blanks no end to take a sterling silver fork and use it like a dagger to spear peas. Najowski always pretended not to notice, making allowances for Marty’s crude behavior, his foul gutter language. Too arrogant to consider the possibility that his partner hated his guts.

Blanks had long ago resolved someday to alter the contours of Najowski’s face. But not until the deal was over; not until their business was concluded. The money and the lure of legitimacy was too big for Blanks to jeopardize the deal. That was the most amazing part—that the money was there to be made with so little personal risk. The attorney he’d finally chosen, Paul O’Brien, a child of Hell’s Kitchen with tie-ins to most of the Irish street gangs that ran the West Side docks, had confirmed each facet of Najowski’s proposal.

“Lemme put it this way,” O’Brien had explained. “Those buildings you’re thinking of buying are in pretty good shape, right?”

“Damn good shape,” Blanks had replied. “Better than anything in Hell’s Kitchen.”

“Well, kiddo, think about this: if you could snap your fingers and make those buildings disappear, the vacant lots would be worth more than the lots with the buildings on them. With empty lots you could build and get top dollar whether you go rental or co-op. No rent control. No bullshit. That’s why the South Bronx is gonna be the next big area for development. You got hundreds of vacant lots from where the city demolished burned-out buildings. You know what I’m talking about?”