All pretense of courtesy disappeared from the woman. Her upper lip involuntarily curled into a feral snarl, like a dog giving a final warning before it bites.
‘That’s not going to happen. You paid for the hour. You can play Parcheesi with her if you like, or talk about how your day has been, or you can just take a walk right back out the door and go someplace else. The choice is yours, but the money stays here.’ She made one last effort at being conciliatory. ‘Look, honey, why argue and spoil a beautiful encounter? You’re going to have a good time.’
‘You told me that already.’
‘She’s a nice girl. You’ll like her.’
‘I don’t care if she’s Miss American Pie. She’s not what I ordered.’ He took out his cell phone. ‘Maybe I should call the police.’
The woman backed away from him. ‘Rudy!’ she shouted. ‘We have a problem.’
The closed door at the end of the hall opened, and he heard the TV more clearly. There was a hockey game on. He didn’t know who was playing. He took no interest in the sport. Only white people truly appreciated hockey, and that was because they didn’t know any better.
The man who emerged was wearing track pants, sneakers, and an oversized Yankees shirt. He was in his late twenties, and gym-toned. His dark hair was neatly cut. He looked like a college student on spring break, except for the Llama tucked into the front of his pants. It had pearl grips, and a chrome finish that caught the light.
Rudy sidled up the hall, pausing at the bathroom door. He hooked his right thumb into the band of his sweatpants, close to the butt of the gun, and leaned against the doorjamb. He looked bored. The visitor figured Rudy wasn’t very bright. A bright man would have been alert for danger. Rudy was too used to hustling underage girls and overweight johns. The visitor was neither.
‘What seems to be the trouble?’ said Rudy. His eyes swiveled lazily to the woman.
‘He says the girl isn’t what he ordered. He wants his money back.’
Rudy spat out a laugh and gave the visitor his full attention. ‘What do you think we are, man, Sears? We don’t do returns, and we don’t do refunds. Now, you can stay and have a good time with Anya or you can take a cab over to Hunts Point and see if they might have what you’re looking for. The cash stays here, though.’
‘I want my money.’
Rudy changed tack. ‘What money? I don’t see no money here. This money, did it have your name on it? The Federal Reserve, they make it out to you personally? I mean, I got money, but I don’t think it’s yours. You didn’t bring no money in here. You just came to visit, have a little fun. I don’t recall no money changing hands. Bro, money changing hands for pussy – that’s illegal. You ought to be careful what you say. Now, your time is ticking away. I was you, I’d go colorblind for the rest of the hour and just enjoy myself. So, what do you say?’
The visitor seemed to consider for a moment. ‘I still think I should call someone,’ he said. ‘This really isn’t very satisfactory at all.’ His finger hovered over the keys on the bulky black cell phone.
The woman moved farther away from him and stood behind Rudy.
‘Prick,’ she said. ‘You’re a jerk, you know that? Coming in here and wasting our time. You deserve to get your ass kicked.’
‘I’m warning you,’ said Rudy. ‘You need to put your phone away and get out of here right now.’
Rudy’s hand moved closer to the butt of the gun, but he still didn’t draw it. Maybe he wasn’t so inept after all, the visitor thought. The old axiom about never pulling a gun that you didn’t intend to use sprang to mind. Either Rudy was prepared to kill him, in which case his hesitancy was linked to his understanding of the finality of the act, or he wasn’t prepared to fire, in which case he was hesitating because he was afraid. The visitor believed that the latter was probably the case, although if it turned out to be the former then, well, he could deal with that as well.
‘You know what General Patton said about pearl-handled grips?’ said the visitor. ‘He said that only a New Orleans pimp would carry a pearl-handled gun. Guess he was wrong. Looks like shitty New York pimps carry them too.’
Now Rudy did reach for the gun, and the visitor shifted the cell phone in his hand. Two barbed darts shot from the tip, penetrating Rudy’s shirt and attaching themselves loosely to the skin on his chest as fifty thousand volts coursed through his body. Rudy fell to the floor, convulsing madly. The woman ran for the living room, screaming for help, while the visitor appropriated Rudy’s pimp gun for himself.
A second man appeared in the doorway of the bedroom, bigger than Rudy but dressed the same way. His hair was shaved tight, and he had blunt, Slavic features. Unlike Rudy, he was sufficiently alert to have a gun in his hand already, but not prepared enough to make himself a smaller target. The two shots from Rudy’s gun hit him in the chest. He held on to the frame of the door, then collapsed to his knees. He raised the gun again, and the third shot flung him back, his knees trapped beneath him, his body convulsing just as Rudy’s had, but this time to a different end.
The visitor kicked the dead man’s gun away and kept moving. The living room was empty, but he could hear the woman in the kitchen. He followed the sounds and found her searching in the silverware drawer. He kicked at the drawer, trying to slam it closed on her hand, but she was too fast. She came at him with the carving knife, but her arm was high, the blade raised to the level of her head, the tip arcing down. He stepped inside her reach and used his left forearm to force her hand against the wall while his right brought the gun down on the side of her head. He hit her twice and she slid to the floor, moaning. After checking that there was no one else in the apartment, he went back to the hallway and saw that Rudy had crawled into the bathroom. Carefully, the visitor approached the open door. Rudy had already removed the second .38 from under the sink when the visitor appeared in the doorway.
‘Don’t,’ said the visitor.
Rudy fired, but he was still shaky from the electric shock. The bullet took a chunk out of the plaster a foot to the right of the visitor’s body, and in response he emptied two shots from the Llama into Rudy, then tossed it aside. He entered the bedroom. The girl named Anya had crawled into a corner by the window, her hands on her ears.
‘Odensia,’ he said. ‘Bystro.’
The girl didn’t move. She was trembling hard and stared at him without blinking, as though fearful that, in the instant her eyes closed, he would put an end to her. The visitor tried to remember the word for ‘friend,’ and managed to dredge something from his memory.
‘Drug,’ he said, then corrected himself: ‘Druz’ja.’
It seemed to have the desired effect. The girl stopped trembling, although she still looked frightened. He repeated his injunction to her to put some clothes on. The girl nodded and went to the closet, retrieving a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt decorated with a spangled cat. He watched her as she dressed, but she didn’t seem to mind. He figured that, after all that she’d been through, being semi-naked in front of a stranger was a minor inconvenience. She slipped on a pair of laceless sneakers. He indicated that she should go ahead of him, then followed her into the living room.
He thought that he heard a sound from the hall outside, a door opening and then quickly closing again. The gunfire had been unfortunate but not unexpected, and the visitor did not panic. He searched the apartment, finding two iPhones and a BlackBerry, as well as $4,000 in cash, not including his own $1,000. The woman had stopped moaning and had lapsed into unconsciousness. Her breathing was shallow, there was a blue tinge to her skin, and blood was flowing from one of her ears. He wasn’t sure that she’d live, which suited him just fine.
He took the girl’s hand and pulled her into the bathroom, forcing her to step over Rudy’s body. He could hear sirens approaching as he opened the window, revealing the fire escape. He made the girl go ahead of him, and stepped down after her. A Lexus pulled in at the curb, and he put the girl in the back before climbing into the passenger seat.
/>
‘So how’d it go?’ said the driver. He was short and dark-haired, wearing old jeans and a worn leather jacket. He didn’t look like the kind of man who should be driving a Lexus, not unless he’d stolen it. His name was Angel.
‘Noisy. Messy,’ said his partner, both professionally and personally. His name was Louis, and he was dressed like an executive with one of those shadowy, discreet firms that handle other people’s money, and handle it well. His hair was cut close to his ebony skull, his skin almost entirely unlined. It would have been difficult to tell his age were it not for the gray beard that he had begun to cultivate, an unconnected goatee and mustache arrangement known in the trade as a ‘balbo’ but known to his partner as ‘that fucking growth on your face.’
‘Bad?’ said Angel.
‘Two down, one pending.’
‘You get hurt?’
‘No.’
Louis took out the phones and the BlackBerry, and checked the numbers and contacts.
‘Lot of good stuff here,’ he said. ‘Lot of names.’ He took a netbook from under the seat, powered it up, and began transferring the contact details from the devices to the computer.
‘You know,’ said Angel, ‘I gotta ask: Are we on a crusade?’
‘Unless you got a better word for it,’ said Louis. ‘Sometimes I wish you’d never introduced me to Charlie Parker. I suspect that he may have contaminated me with idealism.’
‘You think you’ve come a long way. I used to just steal stuff.’ Angel looked in the rearview mirror. The girl stared back at him. Her eyes were those of a shell-shocked soldier.
‘You okay, honey?’ he asked.
‘I don’t think she speaks much English,’ said Louis. He dredged up the remains of the little Russian that he knew. ‘Kharasho?’
The girl nodded.
‘Ty v bezopasnosta. Druz’ja.’
‘What did you say?’ asked Angel.
‘I told her she’s safe, and we’re friends. That’s all I got. Anything more, we’ll have to stop in Brighton Beach and get a waiter to translate.’
He felt pressure on his arm. The girl’s pale hand rested on his forearm.
‘Dina,’ she said. ‘No Anya. Dina.’
‘Dina,’ repeated Louis. He took her hand in his, and held it as they drove.
The shelter was in Canarsie, almost within sight of Jamaica Bay. When they were a block away, Angel made a call from one of the stolen cells. He told the woman who answered that they had a young girl with them who was the victim of sex traffickers, along with the phones used by those responsible. They killed the lights in the car, and pointed out the shelter to the girl. He handed her the phones, and the cash.
‘We’ll watch you, Dina’ said Louis. He touched two fingers to his eyes, then turned them to the girl, and toward the shelter. ‘Ja tvoj dryg.’
Angel opened the passenger door for her. The girl put one foot out of the car, then paused.
‘Ya nichevo ne videla,’ she said.
Louis raised his palms in frustration and shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand.’
The girl frowned, then spoke again, this time in English. ‘I see nothing,’ she said carefully, then left them. They marked her progress, watching for strangers on the street. A door opened as she approached the shelter, and a woman appeared. Gently, she laid a hand on Dina’s shoulder, and ushered her to safety.
Dina did not look back, and the gentlemen from New York drove away.
14
Dempsey and Ryan were sitting in a chain coffee joint at Boston’s Scollay Square. If there was a more sterile part of Boston than Scollay, then Dempsey hadn’t found it yet. Oh, there were places that were skankier and rougher, projects and wastelands and dumping grounds, but Scollay Square was in the heart of downtown, a series of unforgiving slabs that formed Government Center, dominated by City Hall and the JFK Federal Building. Scollay had once been the home of Boston’s elite way back in the eighteenth century. Bowfront houses and grand row houses followed in the nineteenth century, and then the immigrants arrived and the elite left, and Scollay became the center of commercial activity and entertainment in the city, the latter centered on the grand Howard Athenaeum, later known as the Old Howard. In the 1960s it was decided that old was bad, and ugly was good, and Scollay was earmarked for destruction. The existence of the Old Howard presented the only real obstacle to the plan, and a group of concerned citizens pressed for its renovation, a campaign rendered null and void when the Howard burned to the ground in 1961 for no cause that anyone could establish, although there were plenty of people prepared to take a guess. As Dempsey well knew, there was no shortage of guys in Boston who knew how to light a match. The destruction of old Scollay had subsequently given birth to the strip joints and porno theaters of Lower Washington, although the excesses of the Combat Zone were now largely the stuff of memory.
For now, though, Scollay Square was safe territory, so far as any such place could be found in their current situation, on the grounds that someone would have to be crazy to try to whack anyone within sight of City Hall and a building that was crammed with feds the way a newly filled salt cellar was crammed with salt. Dempsey didn’t know for sure if there was a price on all their heads, not yet, which was why the meeting had been arranged. His belief, which he had not expressed to Ryan but which he suspected the younger man shared, was that it was only a matter of time before final sentence was passed, if it had not been agreed already in their absence. The hit would have to be sanctioned; unsanctioned hits brought an immediate death sentence for those involved, or that was the theory. In reality, except in exceptional circumstances, the sentence tended to be passed solely on the man who had pulled the trigger, and not on the man who had told him where to point the gun. But if a decision had been made to put Tommy Morris in the ground, then the additional expense of a couple of bullets for the men who had remained loyal to him was unlikely to trouble those behind the hit. Like any good gambler, Dempsey just needed to clarify the extent of their exposure before he played his hand.
They lounged at the table with their coffees, watching the tourists and businesspeople pass by. One of the restaurants had dumped a pile of stale doughnuts and bagels outside for the birds to eat, and the seagulls fought the pigeons for a share of the spoils. Dempsey had ordered coffee for Ryan, who was now looking at his cup suspiciously.
‘What is this?’ he asked.
‘A latte.’
‘What’s in it?’
‘Coffee. It’s coffee. You asked for a coffee.’
‘Yeah, but a regular coffee.’
‘That is a regular coffee. They just add milk to it.’
‘I like to add my own milk.’
‘Just drink it. You need to broaden your horizons.’
Ryan sipped warily at the cup. ‘It tastes milky.’
‘I swear, I don’t care how many cops are around, I’ll leave you bleeding on the floor if you don’t shut up and drink your coffee.’
Ryan sulked. A fine rain was descending, so fine that you knew it was falling only because of the sheen on the ground, and the way everyone was wearing what Ryan called the ‘Boston rain face,’ a kind of grimace that spoke of deep dissatisfaction with God and the elements. Dempsey drank his coffee. At times like this he wished that he still smoked instead of just carrying around a pack of Camels as a reminder to himself of what he had to avoid, which he acknowledged was perverse. A cigarette took some of the tension away but left the edge.
On his lap was a copy of the Boston Phoenix. The gun lay inside, and he kept his right hand closed on it. Only when Joey Tuna appeared, his hands buried deep in the pockets of his overcoat, did Dempsey even begin to relax. Joey owned a fish market in Dorchester, which paid good; and he did a little business on the side involving drugs, guns, protection, whores, and loan sharking, which paid better; and he had connections up and down the Northeast. Joey’s uncle, who was younger than he was, which Dempsey could never quite figure out, and even better connect
ed, which he could, was doing a dime stretch in Cedar Junction, except everyone of Joey’s generation still called it Walpole. For a meet like this, one involving a situation where trust was at a premium, Joey was the go-to guy, since it was understood that the only person who pulled out guns around Joey Tuna was Joey Tuna. Joey was a guarantee of safe conduct, but Dempsey was still wary, and didn’t like the idea of someone waiting until Joey was gone to try his hand at some other form of conduct. Better, then, to meet here, in a place that was safe, and public, and cop-heavy, as long as those self same law-enforcement officials didn’t look too hard through the tinted windows.
Joey’s real name was Joey Toomey, but most people who knew him called him Joey Tuna. He had another name, though, among the lowlifes, one that was never spoken aloud in his presence, and only whispered at other times.
They called him Joey Tombs.
Joey entered the coffee shop and pulled up a chair. He must have been closing in on seventy by now, but he looked good for it. His hair had gone white when he was in his thirties – behind his back, people joked that it happened when a customer asked for credit – giving him a prematurely distinguished air that had done nothing to harm his rise to his present position of authority. He had the natural bulk of one who had spent most of his life doing hard physical labor, and was still regarded by women of a certain age as a good-looking man, at least until he opened his mouth: Joey Tuna had never bothered having his teeth fixed, so his smile resembled a busted picket fence. Dempsey knew that he had a wife, although nobody had ever met her. Like her husband, she wasn’t one for unnecessary socializing.
‘Terrible weather,’ said Joey. All those years in Boston had barely left a mark on his accent, as though he had just got off the boat with a sack on his back. Dempsey was not the only one who sometimes struggled to understand what Joey was saying. ‘I can’t even see the rain and I’m soaked to the skin.’
Dempsey and Joey shook hands. Ryan received a nod for his troubles.