Bloodline (21 page)

As his eyes grew more accustomed to the deeper darkness back here, he noticed a dogleg turn in the alley, a turn that had been invisible until he was right up on it.

The indistinct sounds grew louder, clearer. Tommy took a deep breath and stepped cautiously around the corner, and the sounds, no longer muffled by the wind and the walls of the buildings, became instantly clear. Ahead, he could hear the sound of two different motors running. The sound clearly came from two dark splotches in the night. He could hear the sound of scurrying feet but could not tell how many people they belonged to. He stopped for a moment, trying to will his heart to stop pounding so loudly, to stop making so much noise. It did not work. He could hear voices, voices talking softly in Italian. He understood the language well enough to know they were cursing good-humoredly, cajoling each other to work faster.

Tommy stepped back against a building wall and tried to think clearly. Whatever was happening was nothing small. Not with two trucks involved. This had the smell of being a professional job of some sort. Probably bootleggers, and that meant big trouble because bootleggers always went on jobs carrying enough weapons for a small army. The sensible thing to do was to get the hell out of the alley, find the nearest call box, and call up reinforcements.

That was what he would do, Tommy decided. There were too many of them for him to handle by himself. He would get out of here and call for help.

Then he heard another sound. It was a moaning wail. He had heard that sound before, heard it in Belleau Wood, and he would never forget it. It was the sound of a wounded, perhaps a dying, man.

Tommy cocked the hammer on his service revolver and started toward the spot where the two trucks were parked.

Suddenly a flashlight flicked on from close by, its beam striking him in the eyes with the force of a quick left jab. He hesitated for only a split second, but it was too much.

“Don’t move,” another voice said from behind him in Italian. “Put the gun down.” He felt the cold barrel of a gun against the back of his neck.

“Jesus Christ,” came the voice from the man who was somewhere in front of him holding the flashlight. “It’s a goddamn cop. Shoot the bastard.”

The flashlight beam wavered for just a split second, and as it did, Tommy made an instantaneous decision. He dropped to one knee and fired a round at a spot directly above the light. Then he lunged backward against the legs of the man behind him, trying to turn his body as he moved so he could fire another shot.

He heard a man curse in pain and then the metallic clatter of the flashlight rolling across the graveled deck of the parking lot. He tried to free his gun hand to take out his other attacker, but somebody had a death grip on his hand.

And then he felt another body crunch down onto his and another pistol was poked roughly into his neck.

“Stand up,” said the voice behind him. “And let go of that gun.”

Tommy did as he was ordered.

“Move,” the voice ordered.

He hesitated and somebody kicked him, sending him sprawling forward, and then he saw a starburst as he was cracked across the back of the head and dropped to the ground. He lay there in a crouched position, struggling to maintain consciousness, but he could see nothing and all the sounds seemed distant and echoing.

“What’s this?” another voice called out in Italian.

“A cop. He shot Vinnie.” This came in English from somewhere behind Tommy. He wanted to turn his head to see who was speaking, but he could not move.

The voice spoke rapidly, and Tommy could not make out all the words, but the ones he understood said: “Then kill him and let’s get out of here before anybody else comes. Shoot him and get it over with.”

“I’ll only do it if the Kid says to.”

There was a moment of palpable crackling tension and Tommy thought that death was at hand. He wondered if Mario would conduct the funeral Mass. It seemed such a waste to have survived the war and beaten morphine, only to die like this. He thought about his family, all of them he would never see again, and he kept his eyes tightly closed.

No bullet came. He tried to open his eyes and felt himself bathed in light. Someone behind him was shining a flashlight on him. He heard another voice, almost familiar, speak softly in Italian. It too sounded far away.

“What the hell’s going on here?”

“We’re loaded, ready to go, and this cop wanders in here and shoots Vinnie. We was just waiting for you.”

“I’ll take care of him. The rest of you get the hell out of here. And take Vinnie with you. Get him fixed up.”

“You going to kill him, Kid?” another voice asked. It belonged to the man who earlier wanted to shoot Tommy.

“That’s none of your damned business, Rico. Just get that truck out of here. I’ll take care of this.”

“If you want him killed, I’ll kill the bastard.”

“You just move your ass,” snapped the one they called Kid.

Tommy listened with a sort of detached fascination. It was as if they were not arguing about killing him but were talking about someone else. The flashlight’s beam stayed fixed on Tommy, and he was afraid to try to turn his face from the wall.

He heard people running and then the sound of doors slamming and the two trucks grinding into gear. They crunched over the gravel as they pulled from the lot. He saw their headlights slash across the walls as they drove away. The silence of the night closed in around him. He wondered if everyone had gone. Maybe he could flee. If only he could get to his feet.

He heard footsteps approaching him from behind. Involuntarily, his shoulders tensed as he expected the loud crack of the bullet.

Instead, he heard a voice close by his ear. It spoke in English this time, and while it was muffled and soft, he thought he recognized the voice.

Before he could react, the voice said, “Sorry,” and even as he heard it, he felt another thud against the side of his head. His face smashed forward against the brick wall and he sensed himself losing consciousness. The last thing he heard before he settled onto the icy gravel was the sound of footsteps running away.

He mumbled to himself. “Nilo.” And then he lay still.

*   *   *

T
OMMY CAME TO,
cradled in the arms of a uniformed policeman who squatted down on the frozen gravel next to him.

“Easy, Tommy.” Tommy recognized one of the precinct sergeants, Artie Tracey. Tommy was surprised at the officer’s apparent concern; he could not remember Tracey ever speaking to him in the station house, except to give him an order.

“How you feeling?”

“I’m okay,” Tommy said. “I think so anyway.”

He did not know how long he had been unconscious

He sat up slowly. There were four other policemen wandering around the now-empty parking lot.

“How’d you find me?” he asked.

“Somebody phoned the station house, said we’d find you here. Good thing, too. You could’ve frozen to death out here.”

“You know who it was?”

Sergeant Tracey shook his head. “He didn’t give no name. But he was one of your goombahs. He talked with an accent. You got any idea who it was?”

Tommy hesitated, then shook his head. He tried to get to his feet, but Tracey would not let him.

“You stay put,” he said. “An ambulance’ll be here any minute.”

He stood, took off his heavy overcoat, and wrapped it around Tommy’s shoulders, then squatted next to him again. “What went on here? Can you tell me?”

“I was on my way home and I heard noises in the alley. When I looked, it was some guys in two trucks. I guess they were heisting stuff from one of these warehouses. A couple of them jumped me and then they bopped me and got out of here.”

“Get a look at any of them?”

“No. They had a flashlight in my eyes. But before I went down, I think I shot one of them. I heard them call him Vinnie.”

“That might be. We found your gun over there,” Cole said. “One bullet was fired. I hope you killed the son of a bitch, whoever he is. You hear any other names?”

“Just Vinnie. And there was somebody named Rico.”

“There always is,” Tracey said drily.

A siren neared then silenced abruptly, and Tommy heard its tires crunching over the gravel as it came down the alleyway.

“What is this place anyway?” Tommy asked.

“Well, it’s supposed to be a warehouse, but it’s actually one of Joe Masseria’s stills. From what you say, somebody heisted two truckloads of his booze. They busted some watchman’s skull.”

That was the moaning he had heard, Tommy realized.

“He all right?” he asked.

“He’s not complaining about anything. One of the trucks rolled over him on the way out of here. He’s dead.”

It was murder, Tommy thought. And Nilo was part of it.

*   *   *

D
ESPITE
T
OMMY’S ANNOYANCE,
the doctors at St. Luke’s insisted on admitting him so they could monitor his progress for at least a few hours.

“I’m telling you I’m fine. I’m getting out of here.”

“And I’m telling you you may have sustained a concussion, and if I release you too soon, you may keel over in the street and derail a trolley car, and then there’ll be hell to pay.” The speaker was a courtly old doctor with a thin pencil-line mustache and rimless glasses that perched on the end of his nose. He smiled at the young patrolman, who sat in a hospital bed, propped up by pillows behind his back. Outside, a cold winter sun bounced its light off the rooftops of other smaller hospital buildings into the room.

“Now you can just cooperate or I can call the chief’s office and have you ordered into this hospital. And then you’ll stay for three days, minimum, because they’ll want to protect themselves from criticism. I’ll leave it to you.”

“All right,” Tommy grumbled. “Can I call my family and tell them I’m okay?”

“Your father’s outside, waiting to see you.”

A few moments after he left, Tony Falcone entered the room. With him was his partner, the hulking Detective Tim O’Shaughnessy.

When he saw Tommy, O’Shaughnessy boomed, “Will you be looking at this goldbricker? Some’ll be doing anything to get some time off work.”

Tony came over to the bed. “How you doing, son?”

“I’m fine. They’re making me stay here for no reason at all.”

His father reached out and touched Tommy’s face. Even the delicate soft touch made the younger man wince.

“You look like hell,” his father said. “I guess you left some of your face on that brick wall.”

Until then, Tommy had not realized that his face had been injured at all. He reached up and found three different bandages on his face.

“The doctor says you’ll be fine, though. Not even a scar,” Tony said.

“There. You see. So get me out of here.”

“In a while. What happened down there?”

O’Shaughnessy brought up a chair and sat next to the bed, and Tommy began relating the night’s events.

“So it was about six and you were on your way home? Why so late?” his father interrupted.

“I stopped in at a friend’s house.”

“Mabel Fay?” his father said. Tommy was startled. He saw a grin crease O’Shaughnessy’s florid face.

“What do you know about Mabel?” Tommy asked.

His father pulled his gold badge from his pocket. “That says ‘detective sergeant.’ Detective. It’s my business to know things.”

“And here I thought I was being discreet.”

“You be as discreet as you want. I’ll still know everything you do.”

“Okay, Papa. So I was with Mabel and—”

“She tell you to go or you go on your own?”

“I went when I felt like going. Why?”

“’Cause I just want to make sure you weren’t set up tonight by someone who was gunning for you.”

“No, Papa, it wasn’t like that. I took a shortcut home because it was so cold. Then I had to take a pee and I went into that alley. It was just bad luck. I shot one of the guys. Did they tell you that?”

“Yeah.”

“Somebody named Vinnie. And there was another one named Rico.”

“Think hard, Tommy. You hear anybody called Kid? Or something like that?”

Until that moment, Tommy had been planning to tell his father the whole unvarnished story, but now he found that he could not. Perhaps it was O’Shaughnessy’s presence. While the big cop was like a family member, the fact was that he was not a family member. Nilo was. And this was a family thing.

Too, his father was in this room not just as his father, but as a policeman. He was investigating the case, and if Tommy told him about Nilo, Tony would, without a moment’s hesitation, go and arrest him.

But Nilo had saved his life when everybody else back in that alley wanted to shoot him. Would it be fair to incriminate him now? The doctor was right, Tommy thought: he needed time to rest and to think.

“I don’t think so,” Tommy said. “But I was slugged and kind of not thinking real well. Why?”

“This has the look of a Kid Trouble operation,” Tony said. “And I’ve got some ideas of my own about him. And I guess I’m just wondering why they didn’t shoot you.”

“I don’t know why they didn’t shoot me, either,” Tommy said. He looked out the window at the bristling sun on the roofs. “I heard some of them talking about it, but I guess, I don’t know, maybe they figured shooting a cop might be more trouble than they needed.”

“Yeah, maybe that was it,” Tony said in a grudging tone. “Cop-killing gets all kinds of people’s backs up. How many men were in this gang all together?”

“It was dark, so I couldn’t really see. And I had that damned flashlight in my eyes most of the time. I don’t know. Maybe four.”

“It’s usually four,” Tony said. “And you didn’t hear any other names? Didn’t recognize anybody else?”

“No,” Tommy answered stolidly. “The man who was killed. Was he a … you know, innocent bystander?”

“Don’t worry about that,” O’Shaughnessy said. “He was just another one of Masseria’s punks. He had a gun in his hand, so he was probably asking for it. Somebody else killed him, it saves us a bullet.”

Tommy tried to change the subject. He asked, “Mama’s not coming down here, is she?”

“Try to stop her,” Tony answered.