One of the waiters walked over to the row of picture windows. The waiter did seem to be looking across at the Tropicana. Was there something about the predawn light that made it possible for him to see inside the Tropicana’s windows?
“Do you think they found out something?” Sarah asked.
“I don’t think—”
Stefanovitch was suddenly sitting up in his chair. “No. Hey! Don’t do that, shit-for-brains. Hey. Hey!”
The waiter inside Trump Plaza was pulling the curtains.
“Damn it,” Stefanovitch muttered.
He switched his earphones up.
“Get away from those drapes, you creep.” Sarah had moved close to the picture window. Her nose was against the glass. “What are they saying now? How good their nova and omelets look?”
Stefanovitch listened on his earphones. They were talking about the food.
Suddenly, someone screamed inside the penthouse. A horrible sound came over the earphones.
“What the—” Stefanovitch blurted.
Somebody in the penthouse yelled, “Oh God, no! No!”
54
THE UNMISTAKABLE ROAR of gunfire followed. Loud screams echoed over the headphones.
Stefanovitch pulled the earphones away. “Somebody’s attacking the penthouse. They just hit Trump’s!” he yelled.
Sarah ran to get David Wilkes.
Stefanovitch hadn’t moved so quickly in the last couple of years. His heart pounded. Spasms of incomprehension flickered.
He made it inside the first elevator. FBI men with shocked expressions were strapping on their revolvers. David Wilkes was there, his eyes still glazed. His button-down shirt was un-buttoned.
The elevator touched down and the FBI men ran across the Tropicana lobby. Stefanovitch was left on his own. His wheel-chair nearly lifted off the floor as he burst forward.
Once he was outside the hotel, a cool ocean breeze slapped his face. He was soaking wet: his neck, hair, the back of his shirt. As he reached the far side of Texas Avenue, he remembered the walkie-talkie.
“This is Stefanovitch. What the hell’s happening?”
No answer came back.
Stefanovitch reached the glass side doors into Trump’s. Two security guards were body-blocking the way.
“You can’t come in here!” one of them shouted.
“Police!” Stefanovitch flashed his shield.
Even more confused, they let him inside.
A blur of terrified faces, bodies in bathrobes and pajamas, swarmed across the lobby. Bizarre language punctuated the scene: “There was a shooting upstairs!” “No, it’s a fire.” “I tell you, it’s a fire in the goddamn kitchen!”
Stefanovitch located the express elevator to the penthouse. Inside the elevator, he tried the walkie-talkie again. “David? David?”
No answer came from Wilkes. What had he found in the penthouse? Why wasn’t he answering? What had happened up there?
The padded elevator doors opened. Stefanovitch recognized the acrid odor of gunfire. He proceeded through the open door of the suite. Bodies were sprawled everywhere in the living room. A horrifying scene met his eyes.
The Midnight Club.
55
Isiah Parker; Trump Plaza
THE TELEPHONE ON Isiah Parker’s bed stand started to ring. His eyes slid open and he reached for the jangling phone.
“Isiah! Somebody hit the penthouse at Trump’s,” he heard, recognizing the voice of Jimmy Burke.
“Say again?”
“They went in with submachine guns. FBI agents and cops are all over the hotel,” Burke continued.
“Who went where with machine guns? What are you saying?”
“We have to get out of Atlantic City. We ought to leave separately, like we came in. I’ll take care of Aurelio.”
“All right. I hear you,” Parker said. He thought Burke was making sense, though he wasn’t sure.
Parker finally jumped out of bed. He lunged into the hotel bathroom, where he stuck his head under the tap, letting the cold water revive him.
All his worst fears and suspicions rose to the surface again. Why hadn’t Charles Mackey called him? What about Burke and Aurelio Rodriquez? How could someone else have hit Trump’s? Who?
Ten minutes later, Parker was one of several hundred spectators in a crowd outside Trump Plaza. Many of the people were still in their nightclothes. Some wore shoes or slippers, some were in bare feet. All the faces seemed in shock.
Police cars and EMS ambulances were crowded four and five deep across Mississippi and Arkansas avenues. Police cruisers were parked up and down all the other narrow side streets.
Parker stared at the blockaded lobby entrance to Trump’s. He gazed toward the top floor, where entire picture windows had been blown out by the shooting.
He desperately tried to sort out what had happened. It struck him that he had never been told his target in Atlantic City. Deputy Commissioner Mackey hadn’t called after eleven, as he’d promised to several times.
Undertones of terror and black humor circulated through the boardwalk crowd. The comedy was part high-roller irony, part Saturday Night Live tastelessness.
“Who the hell got shot?” a fat man in a garish bathrobe asked. “Wayne fucking Newton?”
“Wayne Newton? He deserved to be shot, show he did last night at Caesar’s.”
Parker finally began to inch away from the restless, milling crowd. As he did, he saw Lieutenant John Stefanovitch. Stefanovitch was leaving Trump’s, pushing his wheelchair forward with grim determination. He looked numb and drained.
What was happening?
Parker finally walked down the steep stone steps dropping away from the boardwalk. He had to think in straight lines. Nothing but straight lines of logic.
Parker heard a soft cry…low, obviously uttered in fear and confusion. It took him a few seconds to realize that the sound had been his own voice.
He touched the .22 revolver concealed under his sports jacket. Then Parker continued down the eerie, darkened street, which was filled with obscure, almost solid black shapes. He could sort out street-sign poles, hydrants, garbage cans, the hulks of parked cars, the serrated outlines of trees.
He found that he couldn’t get past the wall of his own shock. Not right now, anyway.
He had been undercover. He’d been waiting for special orders from New York, directly from Police Plaza. Somebody had hit Trump’s. Who? The shock was still reverberating through his nervous system, building up force, adrenaline surging. He played back Detective Jimmy Burke’s phone call, over and over, in his head.
Somebody hit the penthouse at Trump’s!…
A hollow pain was knotting his stomach. Parker felt wasted, almost out of control. After he walked another block down Indiana Avenue, Parker stepped into one of the dark alleyways between tenement buildings. The alley smelled of urine and spoiled garbage. He took out his pocket recorder. He needed to get some of this down.
His voice was shaky, more than a little uncertain, as he finally spoke. He was feeling so paranoid. But was it paranoia? Why hadn’t Mackey called?
“This is a surveillance log. The time is oh-four-hundred-thirty hours. This is Detective Isiah Parker… Someone just attacked Trump Plaza. It happened about thirty minutes ago.
“New York policemen and FBI agents entered Trump Plaza at about four in the morning. How the hell did they get there so fast? Why were they down here in Atlantic City?
“Officers Burke, Rodriquez, and myself are leaving Atlantic City.”
Parker stood quietly at the edge of the alleyway. He gazed up and down Indiana Avenue. The scene was strangely placid, especially when he considered the commotion just four blocks away.
Then something moved.
56
SOMETHING FARTHER UP the street caused Parker to pause at the mouth of the alleyway.
Somebody was moving on the sidewalk, almost directly across from where his car was parked. He wasn’t sure what it was yet; his
eyes strained to see in the dark. His throat was painfully dry.
Could be just neighborhood types, Parker thought. Maybe it was a street junkie or a wino? The odor in the alley was a fresh scent.
He quietly made his way back into the shadows of the alleyway. Then he walked in a hurry another forty or fifty yards to Illinois, the street running parallel to Indiana. He wanted to come back onto Indiana, but behind the man loitering near his Audi.
Parker peered down another vacant alleyway. His chest felt uncomfortably tight.
He saw something move again. Shadows parted. Then the red ember of a cigarette traveled in a familiar arc.
The left side up ahead…
A distinct outline was poised at the end of the alleyway. A man was waiting near Parker’s car. The man was only twenty to thirty yards away.
A run-down bar a block or so away provided dim lighting. The neon glow from the All-Star Lounge was enough for him to decipher a full silhouette.
Parker began to inch forward again. The waiting man was only ten yards away. He slid out his .22. Who the hell was standing there in the alleyway?
“Freeze! Don’t move,” he finally called out.
The man dropped into a professional shooting crouch.
“It’s Parker,” Isiah shouted, identifying himself.
The man paid no heed. He fired, and the round whistled past Parker.
Instinctively, Parker fired back. He fired a second time. Both hurried shots missed.
“Don’t shoot, Isiah. Don’t shoot, for Chrissakes!”
Parker recognized the voice, and he couldn’t get his breath. Dread clutched him.
The man was Jimmy Burke. His own partner had purposely shot at him.
Burke suddenly darted from the alley. Parker could have fired. He didn’t. There were too many questions. Maybe he couldn’t have fired at Burke anyway.
Isiah Parker ran down the alleyway after Jimmy Burke. Spots appeared in front of his eyes, obscuring the scene.
All at once he stopped. A body was there; a dark shape was curled up beside a collection of rubbish.
There was enough light to make out features of the fallen man. A mop of curly black hair; a long beaked nose; two black holes in the forehead. Aurelio Rodriquez had been murdered.
Police sirens were screaming through the night again. Parker’s brain was screaming. Finally, Parker began to run. He stumbled as he ran away from the police, from whoever was chasing him.
He disappeared into the darkness of Atlantic City….He passed New York Avenue… Then Baltic Avenue…The fear, the feeling of helplessness from just a few minutes before, was already being replaced by rage.
57
John Stefanovitch; Minersville, Pennsylvania
THERE HAD BEEN a massacre, and he had been there. He had heard the horrible screams of death.
Relax, now. Don’t overload, Stefanovitch told himself.
Let everything settle down first, then try to sort it out…
Stefanovitch’s parents’ house was visible down the winding road, beyond a dusty coal hauler they had been following the last few miles. The sky overhead was dark gray, stirred up but oddly beautiful over the sprawling Pennsylvania farmlands, which weren’t all that far from Atlantic City.
“That’s it on the right down there. The homestead.” Stefanovitch broke the silence of the past couple of minutes.
Rest, he thought again.
Get away from Atlantic City, from all of the death and chaos.
Tomorrow is soon enough to start again; to try to understand…
“So you really are a farm boy,” Sarah said in a soft whisper, her waking-up voice. It was just past two in the morning.
“Yes, ma’am. That’s Stefanovitch A&M up ahead. Stands for Agriculture and Mining. My humble beginnings.”
Nobody was up at the nineteenth-century farmhouse; nobody except for Stink. Stink was a brown and white mongrelcollie, now officially retired from running the farm. Stink had a friendly, intelligent face, with the softest chestnut brown eyes. Stefanovitch called her to him, puckering and smooching his lips.
Stink began wagging her tail, working it into a blur. She was yipping and circling Stefanovitch and Sarah as if they were farm animals to be herded into a tighter pack.
“Get down, Stink. You been in that brook again, haven’t you? That old creek in back.”
The dog was happy to see Stefanovitch, but also confused. It was the wheelchair—juxtaposed with the familiar face and voice. Stink had never gotten used to it.
“Let’s go inside. Get some sleep if we can,” Stefanovitch finally said to Sarah. “You can meet everybody tomorrow.”
Relax for now, he told himself again.
Forget about Midnight.
Sarah learned all about the Stefanovitch clan over Sunday breakfast. She heard tales of the famous Stefanovitch soup kitchen, which Isabelle and Charles Stefanovitch had maintained at the farm for twenty-five years; which they still kept open for anyone in the area needing a hot meal.
Stef’s father told humorous stories about John and his brother, Nelson, growing up in the small town, both of them local sports deities; both boys also unusually sensitive toward the poor and unlucky, because of their soup kitchen duties.
Most revealing of all, Sarah witnessed a touching and special love between Stef’s mother and father. She had never seen anything like it, especially among people their age. They were obviously best friends, intimate and loving.
“Do they ever fight?” Sarah asked as she and Stefanovitch drove around the countryside later that morning.
“One time when we were kids, she marched off to her sister’s. She stayed for two weeks. Called it a long-overdue vacation. Most of the time, though, no. My parents are amazing people.”
“So what happened to you?” Sarah grinned as she asked the question. Her hair was piled up at the back of her head. Her clothes were early lumberjack. She looked like a local beauty.
“People always ask the same thing. I learned all of their bad habits, none of the good ones. I screwed up so bad, I became a cop in New York. A form of social work, in some opinions. What makes it worse, I have no major regrets.”
58
SARAH AND STEF got back to work before noon on Sunday, finally beginning to talk about what had happened in Atlantic City. The investigation had to move along, to go forward somehow. At least they could think straight after a good night’s sleep.
There had been a horrifying massacre. More than a dozen crime bosses had been murdered in cold blood.
By whom?
For what possible reason?
Strangely, by late Sunday, Stefanovitch was sinking into a black mood, a frame of mind he didn’t understand, much less know what to do about.
He tried to work for a little longer, out on the screened-in back porch, with its view of the farm’s silo and woodshed. He and Sarah kept returning to the same question about the investigation—who stood to gain from the shootings in Atlantic City?
That was the linchpin now, the huge unanswered question. Who would benefit because of the murders?
Stefanovitch’s back ached, and his leg tingled unpleasantly. He hadn’t had any exercise for days. He thought that he needed to go for a long walk; to run across these familiar fields the way he had for twenty-some years of his life. He needed to run full out now, until his lungs burst, until his legs collapsed underneath him.
“Hi there. Hey, are you all right?” Sarah finally picked up on his strange mood, his isolation over the past hour.
“I think I have to go. I have to leave,” Stefanovitch said, absolutely a shot out of the blue.
He couldn’t run; he had to go. Everything was collapsing in on him. The investigation. Coming home. Sarah.
It was too much to handle. He felt like he was finally cracking, a huge fissure starting at the base of his spine.
“Excuse me?” At first, Sarah didn’t think she had heard him right. “Stef?”
His face flushed, Stefanovitch beg
an to push himself off the back porch. “I have to go, Sarah.”
Everything was coming apart in his head. He thought he might be sick…
But mostly it was one thing, one impossible problem that he couldn’t begin to deal with… He liked Sarah too much—and he understood in his heart that it could never work between them.
He couldn’t stand that. Maybe people had to be stuck in a wheelchair to understand. Probably they did. But that was the way it was. He had to get out of there right away. The feeling had come over him like waves of claustrophobia in a crawl space. It was unbearable. Impossible to explain to Sarah or his parents.
Sarah might have stopped him, physically stopped him, but she didn’t even try.
She let Stef take his things out to the van. She watched him say good-bye to his parents, apologizing for leaving so suddenly. It was all so weird, and so intense. Real life could be like that: the daily soap operas most families learned to live with.
She stayed on at the farmhouse for the night. She wanted to talk to Isabelle and Charles about their life out in Pennsylvania. She needed the background for the book, she told herself. Getting back to New York would be easy enough in the morning.
“I know John too well,” Isabelle Stefanovitch finally said to her in the brightly lit kitchen, where the two of them had talked for hours, sipping port wine. “He would never hurt your feelings like this, not unless he couldn’t help it. He would never purposely hurt your feelings, Sarah. He’s very tense now.”
“I know that,” Sarah said. She thought that she understood what had happened. She could imagine his state of mind.
Her feelings were hurt, though. She couldn’t help that either. That was reality, too.
Somewhere out on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, meanwhile, Stefanovitch drove with his foot pressed all the way down to the floor. The foot in his mind.
He was falling in love, and he couldn’t bear it…