11821 words (47 minute read)

Chapter 3

Kinneavy

Jalisa Thorpe’s been my best friend since the first day of sixth grade, when I sat with her at lunch because I thought none of the other girls would sit with a black girl (really, it was that she was voluntarily avoiding the other girls because she thought they were “too loud”, but just one white girl would be okay, she guessed). We spent lunch (and a good bit of our next class, the hell with Sister Margaret) chatting; I didn’t think of it as a sacred bond or anything, but then the next Saturday, a little after I’d finished my lunch, Jalisa took a bus all the way from Harlem to Inwood and came shuffling down a street lined with Irish death glares to see if I wanted to hang out. Crown Heights was less than a month in the past, and particularly in blue-collar white neighborhoods, you could almost see the tension piled up like the first snowfall.

Jalisa, being an 11-year-old girl, probably didn’t understand all of this at the time- I know I didn’t. But somehow I knew that even if she had understood, she wouldn’t have cared. I still don’t know what I did to inspire that kind of loyalty, but I did my best to be worthy of it. When I look back at the next twenty years- cheering on our shitty football team, getting drunk for the first time one summer night when we were 17 and my dad yelling at me, not for the drinking but for bearing his name and being such a lightweight- I thank God that there was no Facebook back then, because we would’ve gotten obnoxious as shit.

After college, I tried to find something to do with my lit major before drifting over to the NYPD, whereas Jalisa ended up in the D.A.’s office. We’d still kept in touch, of course, and for a time we collectively referred to ourselves as Law & Order before deciding that was stupid. Where she was, Jalisa was an excellent resource for my work, but she was also fiercely professional enough that I knew I’d never put her in a position where I was exploiting our friendship.

As we sat in her office, I explained the situation with the late, lamented Russell Milazzo and his client list. She thought about it for a second. “It’ll be tricky,” she said. “20 years ago it’d have been easier, but I doubt there’s a hard copy of that list anywhere. From what I hear, Joe Cataldo’s obsessed with running things like an actual business, so it’s probably in an Excel doc somewhere, a doc we’d have to go through Cataldo to get.”

“Yeah, but you’re assuming Cataldo was intimately involved with the human trafficking.”
“You don’t think he was?” Jalisa asked. “Dude’s a control freak from what I hear.”

“Well, my friend in Org Crime seems to think this was entirely Milazzo’s thing. And if we move quickly enough, we may be able to seize his laptop before Cataldo can cover his ass even if he was involved.”

She leaned forward and laced her fingers together. “Or, if we don’t move quick enough, we let him know we’re going after him.”

“Well a- we’re not going after him, we’re going after the people who killed Milazzo and b- he already knows I’m looking into this because he saw me doing it.”

She shrugged. “I mean, let’s say I can get you a warrant for Milazzo’s laptop. Let’s say it has his client list on there. What do you want me to do from there?”

“I want you to help me send a canary into the coal mine. We’re gonna dangle all these perverts and rape-os in front of the perps and when they take the bait, we grab them too.”

Jalisa rolled her eyes. “I’ve seen that look before, K. Don’t go all cowgirl, now.”

“Wait, when have you seen that look before?”
She thought about it for a second. “It was a while ago—OH! You know what it was? It was that time freshman year when that drunk guy catcalled me. Remember, you chased him through Times Square and when you caught him you just started slapping the shit out of him?”

I tried to remember. “Wasn’t that, like, right under the ‘Mamma Mia’ sign?”
“YES! And you only stopped when that cop pulled you off!”
I snorted. “I know that cop. He’s still a patrolman, too.”

She sidestepped over to her computer and fired off an email. “So who’s that light-skinned fella you’re drinking with these days?”

“Wait, how do you know about that?” I asked.

Her expression turned serious. “Neville has our office tailing you.”

“Wait, what the fuck, J? First, why, second, why your office?”

She held up her hands. “It’s entirely ceremonial, K. Neville says she told you how nervous she is about this particular case and she wants people from outside so no one can call bias.”
“Why am I under investigation at all?”

Jalisa sighed. “You’re not. At the captain’s request, the D.A.’s office had a trial observatory period for this particular case. You’ve passed. Okay?”

I was still pissed off. “He’s a journalist, if you must know.”

She narrowed her eyes. “What are you telling him?”
“Boilerplate shit. Don’t tell the captain, though.”

She gave a little cluck of mock-offense. “Now, would I be me if you had to tell me that? The tail was D.A. Hague’s call. I had nothing to do with the decision, I just thought I’d let you know. It was a favor, sweetie.”

Steady, Katherine. “Okay. Sorry. And thanks.” I got up. “I really appreciate this, J. You understand that, yeah?”

She gave me a hug. “Of course. Just relax, okay? Or try to.” She pulled away for a second and met my eyes. “You sure you got this, K? You know why I’m asking.”

“Oh my God, yes. Why would you ask me that?”

“You know why I’d ask.”
“Well, YES. My God. I’ve got my big-girl pants on and there’s a Glock in them. Jesus.”

She shook her head again. “I swear, you practice those lines, girl. Don’t argue ‘cuz it wasn’t a question.”

“You’re just jealous ‘cause I’m hot.”

“Bitch please, I’m the one with the tasteful pantsuits.”

We exchanged another, tertiary hug and I left the office. This was really not a turn I wanted things to take. I knew exactly why I’d gotten the news I was being followed from Jalisa, of course: Neville had almost certainly fed Jalisa false information about the extent to which I was being tailed, knowing I would trust anything I heard from her (a little misanthrope on my shoulder reminded me that Jalisa could very well be in on it too, but I liked to think she wouldn’t have brought it up if that were the case). Until given reason to think otherwise, I decided to just assume I was still being followed. That might seem like a paranoid conclusion to draw, but like the man said, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.

Once I got to the car, Donnie let me know that Judge Howard Mendez had texted us that he had signed a warrant authorizing the seizure of Russell Milazzo’s personal effects. After we picked that up from him, we headed for the storage unit that was registered as Milazzo’s business address. The Senegalese guy who owned the place repeated “Show me the fucking warrant” several times even after we produced it; I guess cop shows don’t really give you a clear idea of what they look like. After about 10 minutes of that, Donnie just said “Shithead, if you don’t open that door for us you’re gonna have to rent out that place with a big fuckin’ hole in the door, and that’s if anyone wants to rent from you at all after they hear the cops making noise around here, which they won’t,” and the guy muttered something and unlocked Unit 501 for us.

Milazzo’s office had all the organization of a 17-year-old boy’s bedroom, and for some reason just about as much pornography. Maybe he had to work nights.

Donnie squatted and began sifting through the debris. “This is my favorite suit, too,” he said, in a way that made it sound more like a Shakespearean aside than a complaint.

“So take off your jacket.”

“And put it where? Everything in here looks like a giant used it to scratch his ass.” He gingerly hefted a repulsive-looking beanbag chair to one side before his grip slipped. “Agh, fuck, Katie, it’s gonna fall over on me, catch it catch it catch it.” I caught it and flipped it backwards; the laptop- or a laptop, at any rate- was underneath. On the one hand, under the biggest single thing in the unit was a pretty obvious hiding place; on the other, Milazzo was probably pretty smart to think no one would ever want to touch it.

We didn’t look at the laptop’s contents until we got back to the station, per Neville’s orders. She snatched it from me as soon as I was inside her office.

“Why the hell weren’t either of you wearing gloves?”

“Because there’s nothing on our fingers that’ll keep us from reading a spreadsheet?” Donnie offered. She gave Donnie the same look my mother gave me when I was 13 and decided I was “mature enough” to start calling her by her first name.

Capt. Neville set the laptop on the corner of her desk and cracked it open as Donnie and I huddled behind her. As luck would have it, the laptop wasn’t password-protected. This kind of made sense to me; for all his obsession with legitimacy, Cataldo’s employees were not IT guys, and it followed that one of them figured a lock and himself (unless something really weird happened like a bunch of militant anti-rapists killed him) was all the security he’d need. Neville opened Milazzo’s Documents folder. All it contained were 7 Word documents which appeared to be expense reports, but nothing was clearly labeled. All of it was about as helpful as a hot bath to a burn victim.

Neville brought the heel of her hand down on the desk. “Cunt.” She opened several more folders. Nothing. A few red strands fell across her forehead; she didn’t seem to notice.

“Hold on,” said Donnie from the back. “Lemme look.” He took his place next to Neville and opened “My Music”, then “iTunes”. The folders contained therein were mostly Springsteen and Stones, which kind of upset me because I didn’t want to have anything in common with this guy. At least there wasn’t any Pogues. Donnie scrolled until he got to “Unknown Artist”; he opened that and then “Unknown Album”. Inside the folder was a single Excel doc; Donnie double-clicked. “Come. To. Daddy.”

The spreadsheet was 4 pages long and alphabetized. It had addresses, phone numbers and even a separate column for johns who’d started a tab.

Neville grabbed Donnie by the shoulder and kissed him hard on the cheek. “How the hell did you know to look in there?”

“It’s how I used to hide my porn in high school,” Donnie replied, too flush with having figured things out to be embarrassed. Or at least I assume that’s what it was.

Neville’s eyes returned to the screen. She scrolled down a bit and then placed a hand over her mouth. “Ho-ly shit,” she said. “Judson Crowning is on here.”

“Who?”

“The mayor’s chief of staff. The fuckin’… iron fist in the silk purse or whatever the term is.”

“Seriously?” I tilted the laptop my way. There he was. Crowning, Judson, 212-555-8223. I doubted there was an overabundance of “Judsons” in the boroughs, and the address was in a Long Island neighborhood that seemed just about right for an upper-level City Hall salary. Donnie broke into my fugue-state yet again, but considering it would take me 5 seconds to confirm it one way or the other, I wouldn’t fault him this time.

“Sonofabitch,” Donnie said. “Marvin fuckin’ Devaney’s on here!”

I followed his finger. “You’re shitting me.”

“Hey, kids, calm down,” Neville said. “Could be a different guy.”
“Call the number,” Donnie said.

“I’m not calling, you call it.”

“I’ll do it,” I said. I put my phone on speaker and dialed the number given for the Devaney in the spreadsheet. It rang a few times and then we heard a voice that sounded like it should be telling a teenage girl she looked like a whore.

“Yeah, hello?”

All three of us instinctively burst out laughing, mostly out of shock, I think. I fumbled for the phone and turned it off just as I heard Devaney angrily ask who this was.

Neville was, naturally, the first of us to calm down. “So now what?” she said. “There’s like 60 names on here. I sure as hell don’t have the resources to tail them all.” She laced her fingers together and pointed at me. “What’s the next stage in your master plan, you magnificent bitch, you?”

As was often the case with Neville, I wasn’t entirely sure what in there was sincere praise, but I plunged ahead anyway. “Well, you’ll notice- and I figured this would be the case- the names on here tend, with a few outliers, to fall into three distinct categories: organized crime figures, people associated with municipal politics and your wealthier private citizens. Which makes sense, because Milazzo was running a specialist enterprise and it wasn’t gonna be cheap. So rather than shadowing everyone on here, I suggest we shadow two johns from each category. If a week passes without incident, we move on to the next two, keeping any initial surveillance in place to the best of our ability. I know we run the risk of leaving a significant percentage of the list exposed… ”

Neville waved her hand. “Kinneavy, I don’t give a happy assfuck if any of these people die. They all have it coming. You and me and Klein all know that. I just want this case closed, ideally without the media turning you into Johnny Depp in ‘From Hell and Back’.” I nodded, but I was confused. Did Neville know I had talked to Roane? Was the “media” reference a subtle threat of some kind? Subtlety in general isn’t really the captain’s style, particularly with regard to threats.

Donnie coughed. “It’s, uh, it’s just called ‘From Hell’, actually.”

Neville turned towards him. “Klein, if you ever interrupt me again, I swear to God I will come to your house and put a naked mole rat in your mouth while you sleep.”

Like I said.

For the first phase of the operation, Donnie and I were assigned the organized crime figures. There were only about ten of them on the list, which I guessed was to protect Milazzo’s exclusivity. You don’t invite the other chefs to your dinner party. I was assigned to follow Frankie O’Halloran, which I only agreed to after Neville promised me body armor and guaranteed backup if I ever had to get out of the car.

O’Halloran, if you believed the word on the street, had done the kinds of things you normally heard descriptions of in UN war-crimes trials. Territorially, he had always been satisfied with a small chunk of what they used to call Hell’s Kitchen, but he didn’t take kindly to incursions from outside. About 7 years ago the Dellapontes sent a mook over to O’Halloran’s territory to demand a cut; the guy was sent back with no legs, hands, ears or nose and to this day is unable to say anything other than “Don’t”. Word is that over the years, O’Halloran’s fine-tuned his strategy a bit: anyone fucks with him, the first thing he does (where applicable) is kill their kid. The implication, of course, being If I start out by killing a child, what do you imagine I’ll do if things escalate? I used to see him in the neighborhood occasionally when I was a girl, a huge, broad guy in a black scally cap and a long black leather coat, the lapels of the coat and his aviator shades making it all but impossible to see any of his face but his big, burnt-orange drooping mustache. He had this way of rolling his head on his neck when he walked that I found terrifying as a kid, and this was before I heard half the stories; something about it just made me think “That’s not how people are supposed to move”.

I envied Donnie, who was tailing Daniel Legenza, a Greenpoint coke dealer known to his associates as Danny the Polack, because, as far as I could tell, that was the only semi-notable thing about him. I tailed O’Halloran from right around the asscrack of dawn, gulping those vile little energy-shot things that they sell at the pharmacy on the rack above the pregnancy tests, which is a funny juxtaposition because I’m pretty sure they’re an abortifacient. The Pogues’ Rum, Sodomy & the Lash was the only thing keeping me lucid when Halloran lumbered out the door. I hadn’t actually seen him since I was a kid, and until we found his name in the spreadsheet I hadn’t even been entirely sure he was still alive, so I was kind of surprised to see he had exactly the same aura, for lack of a better word, as he had 20 years ago. Inanimate objects somehow seemed like they were scrambling to get out of his path (the same couldn’t be said of people, because they were never anywhere near his path in the first place).

That said, if this was a normal day for O’Halloran, his routine was pretty mundane. Most of his day was just making pickups. Maybe movies have given you a different idea, but without “Gimme Shelter” playing in the background, watching gangsters make pickups is really fucking boring. I mean, it’s a guy handing money to another guy. The only variation in O’Halloran’s case was how terrified everyone else looked through the whole thing. At about 11 a.m., O’Halloran went into an auto parts shop on Dyckman and stayed in there a while. With an eye still on the door of the shop, I took advantage of the lull and turned up “A Pistol for Paddy Garcia”. Right as I was getting embarrassingly close to air-drumming in the car, I heard a knock at the window. I gave a small shriek that I hoped was muffled by the window. Outside, a skinny black kid of around 12 was standing at the window with a brown paper bag. I cracked the window.

“What do you need?”

The kid cleared his throat. “Mr. O’Halloran said you looked kinda hungry and it was getting on for lunchtime, and to bring you this.” He dropped the bag into my lap and darted back across the street. Against my better judgment, I opened the bag. It was what looked like a normal cheeseburger. I didn’t worry about poison or anything; this was a guy who chopped off people’s testicles with a meat cleaver, not a Borgia. Goddammit, either way.

I elected to keep tailing O’Halloran; he might have made me, but then, he wasn’t the only one I was staking out. If he was modifying his routine for my presence, he made no indication. By 5, the sun was setting and he was heading home.

I sat in the car across the street and finished the Pogues CD. I opened my coffee cup, pulled a flask from inside my coat and Irished up the coffee. A light, cold rain started plinking my car as I switched the CD out for Springsteen’s Nebraska. I grabbed my binoculars and looked through the illuminated window of O’Halloran’s place; he was sitting on a ratty couch and reading. I turned back to the dash as “Atlantic City” queued up.

Now, our luck may have died and our love may be cold,

But with you forever I’ll stay;

We’re going out where the sand’s turnin’ to gold;

Put on your stockings, baby, ‘cause the night’s gettin’ cold.

As Bruce’s harmonica sliced through the cold stillness of the car, I noticed a large, dark shape moving across the street. I clutched my piece and stared through the windshield; the rain had picked up a bit but I could tell he was standing right in front of the car.

He circled around to the driver’s-side window. “Detective,” he said, his ground-glass voice raised slightly to be heard through the window and over the rain, “would you like to come in and warm up?”

I didn’t say anything. He wove around my car to the passenger seat. “May I sit for a second?” he said. He held open his coat. “I’m not packing. Take your gun out if it makes you feel better. I just want to discuss some things with you.”

After a little while, I reached over and unlocked the door, knowing I shouldn’t all the way. He bent nearly double to fit in, pulling his coat around him so he wouldn’t shut it in the door. I angled the gun in my lap towards him, keeping my grip tight. He nodded a bit to the music. “This was really where he started to stretch, I think,” he said. “To challenge himself. I think if he’d gone any darker with this album it would’ve come off kind of ridiculous, but he walked that tightrope and we got some great fuckin’ music out of it. Excuse my language.” He wiped some rain off of his sunglasses and turned towards me. “So am I really the best Commissioner Clarkson can do at this point, Detective?”

“You’re not the target of our surveillance, Mr. O’Halloran. It’s our belief that you’re the target of a criminal enterprise and we decided that if we let you know we were following you, it’d make it harder for all involved to do what we do.”

He nodded. “Judith, you mean?” Goddammit, did everybody know more than me? He turned his head back towards the front of the car. “Is this because I showed up on that dumb fuck Milazzo’s list?”

“How do you know that?”

He laughed, which sounded even worse than him talking. “Can you name anyone who works for me, Detective? You’d have to look it up, right?” My silence apparently answered the question to his liking, and he kept going. “But most everyone’s heard of me. I got this dumb little cooze-hound works for me, Mickey Heffernan, he wants a better deal on one of Milazzo’s fillies, so he gives him my name and contact information because he thinks it’ll get him a discount. Now I’m on that wop prick’s radar, God rest him.” He crossed himself. “Nah, but I’m afraid you’re out of luck if you expect Judith to come after me, Detective. We’ve had some contact, believe it or not; we disapprove of the same things, I’ve found.”

I had just wasted an entire day surveilling this psycho; no way was I going to listen to him sell himself as a folk hero on top of everything else. “You kill kids, Mr. O’Halloran.”

He didn’t seem angry, but then, I had the gun. “That’s a business strategy. And I know that’s not going to make it any more palatable to you, but when that happens, there is no malice towards those kids. The men Judith kills… what they do, Detective, is an act of war against all of you. And there’s no percentage, either. Even in a business like mine, someone who’ll do harm just because it makes them feel good is just not on.”

I stared at him as the rain picked up. “You mean to tell me you don’t enjoy inflicting pain, Mr. O’Halloran?”
“Oh, quite the contrary. But I enjoy it precisely because I know they’ve earned it.”

“You know, Mr. O’Halloran, I wasted an entire fucking day shadowing you. If you’re trying to impress me, it doesn’t really endear me to you that you just let me do that even though you knew it was pointless.”

He spread his hands. “I apologize for the inconvenience, Detective.” He tipped his cap and leaned toward the door handle. “By the way, the rest of the client list is pretty much accurate. Devaney’s not going to give you much; he’s into getting spanked, shit like that. I’ll allow it’s hilarious, but he’s on the low end, degeneracy-wise. Crowning, though… Crowning scares me, Detective. My advice? Follow Crowning. Sure as you’re born, they’ll be getting around to him sooner or later. You want to feel like you really did a public service, make sure he gets got by one or the other of you.” With surprising speed, he opened the door, slammed it behind him and then he was gone.

I gave Donnie a call and explained the situation to him before driving over to Legenza’s apartment to back Donnie up. Donnie had slightly more to show than I did, but only in that Legenza definitely seemed like enough of a creep to belong on the client list. Donnie admitted he was mostly basing that on the way Legenza spoke to his employees, wife and mistress on the phone; the rest of his notes were just a single question, written on the first page of his notepad: “How many times can a guy jack off in one day?!”

I tossed the pad back to him. “The answer, my friends, is blowing in the wind.”

Donnie raised his index finger. “Hold on, shut up for a sec.” He tuned the car radio and the dispatcher’s voice faded in. “All units in Brighton Beach area, multiple reports of shots fired at the Zhar-Ptitsa restaurant….”

My phone rang. I snatched it up. It was Neville. “This is bad,” she said. “This is fucked, Kinneavy. This was a goddamn massacre. I need you both over there right-the-fuck-now.”

She was loud enough that Donnie had heard her too. He peeled out towards the Lower East Side. “Was it Judith, Captain?”
“What the fuck do you think? Yes, it was Judith. We have a roomful of bodies and I need…”

I heard her shriek on the other end. “Captain?!”

Her voice was calm, but wrong calm, like my dad when he told us he had lung cancer. “There are two dead cops in my office, Detective Kinneavy. In my office.”

“SHIT- Donnie, turn around, we’re going back to the station.”
“No. You’re not my only fuckin’ detectives. Don’t you dare turn around.”

I ended the call. Donnie’s knuckles on the steering wheel were sickly-white.

“Jesus Christ,” I said. “How many of them are there?”


Roane

I do my very best never to be late for the Monday morning staff meeting, and the next Monday I came too close for comfort. I darted into the conference room just a few minutes ahead of Tony, largely due to my cunning strategy of screaming “HOLY SHIT, WHAT’S THAT?” in the lobby and making him miss the elevator. I am the Bre’r Rabbit of my generation.

When I came to a stop in my seat, I’d built up just enough momentum that I nearly elbowed Rosalind Garwood, the small, eminently snarky brunette with a smoker’s voice who’s our financial correspondent, in the face.

“Awww, Tony’s gonna make you beat erasers,” she said as I moved my chair back to the edge of the table (I’d knocked it halfway to the window when I sat down).

“Have you been saving that one, Ms. Garwood?” I asked as I slapped my notebook down on the table.

She made a fake sad face. “Be nice to me, you dick. I spend every day getting quotes from Wall Street bros and I’m never allowed to snap at them. You have no idea how that backs up inside a person.”

I gave her my best “bitch, please" look. “Really, Roz? You wanna cry to the guy who has to talk to City Council about this?”

Tony sauntered into the room. “Turns out it was a dragon, Wendell,” he said to me. “Too bad you ran off. Story of the century.” He took a seat as the rest of the staff made their customary confused faces and then their customary “Okay, I guess we don’t get any context for that one” faces. “Happy Monday, you bastards,” Tony continued as he took his seat at the head of the table. He pointed at Rosalind. “Rosalind, what have you got for us?”

“I’m maybe 75 percent done with the piece on the Worldlink selloff,” Rosalind said. “Give me until the end of the day to bug the NYSE guy and if I can’t get him I’ll just ‘could not be reached for comment’ him and then I’m good.”

“Magic,” said Tony. He pointed to Dewayne Broward, our music critic. “Where we at with the Music of the Revolution spread?” Dewayne had been working on a multi-part story in which he talked to veterans of the Black Power, feminist and gay-rights movements in New York about the use of music to further their causes; I was kind of jealous.

Dewayne looked excited. “Guess who I scored an interview with?” He went on when he realized no one was going to guess. “Dhoruba bin Wahad.”

Rosalind whistled. “Nice.” Even Tony looked starry-eyed. Dhoruba was a major figure in the New York Black Panthers before he was convicted of the attempted murder of two cops; he was released when it turned out evidence that favored him had been withheld. After that he’d done community organizing in Ghana for a while before returning to the city. Needless to say, an interview with him was a hell of a coup.

Tony did a slow-clap for Dewayne, which was eventually joined by the rest of us. Then he turned to me. “And Wendell, listen, I may have given you my share of crap about publishing the Judith letters…”

“And the accompanying story.”

“…and the accompanying story… but credit where it’s due, because circulation is up 500 percent this week. And that’s not pageviews, that’s circulation of the physical magazine. People are so into your story they wanted to read the whole goddamn magazine. We are getting this town back into serious journalism, and all it took was a bunch of crazy rapist-hunters. It’s all so simple, in hindsight.” He raised his arms. “L’chaim, motherfuckers.”

He dismissed us, but stopped me at the door after everyone else had headed back to their desks.

“So, Wendell,” he said, in the worst fake-casual voice I’ve ever heard (and I’ve heard my share), “can you think of any reason I might be getting angry e-mails from the Decency League?”

I shrugged. “Because you’re Jewish?”
“Well, I doubt that helps, but this seemed to have more to do with you.”

“Yeah?”
“Wendell, did you tell Marvin Devaney to suck your dick?”
I looked at my shoes. “I asked him, more like. Didn’t put any pressure on him or anything.”

“Jesus, Wendell.”

“I know my maturity is kind of on probation at this point, Tony, but he started it.”

“I’m sure he did, Wendell, but he’s talking about an advertiser boycott.”

“Oh, heavens, you mean he might cut into our conservative Catholic readership? The monster.”

“Hey!” Tony snapped, which is not a thing he does, generally. “I don’t care whether he can actually deliver or not. That’s not what this is about. What this is about is, my people don’t get in fucking rap beefs while they’re representing my publication.”

“Oh, why’s it gotta be a rap beef?”

Tony rolled his eyes. “I know for a fact your iPod is full of fucking Ke$ha, so don’t start with me, Wendell, okay?”

“It’s not ‘full of’ her, she only has two albums,” I mumbled.

“Look, Wendell, did this all start because you’re covering the Judith thing?”

“More or less.”
“Okay. I want you to work on something else on top of that; you’re doing great work with it but maybe Marvin the Martian will back off if it’s not the only thing you’re associated with.”
“Sounds fine. What you got for me?”

He pulled a business card out of his breast pocket. “So you know Judson Crowning, the mayor’s chief of staff?”
“I know OF him.”

“Not many people know much of anything about him. I think it’d be interesting to do a profile. Just a neutral thing. I talked to the press secretary, she says he’s interested, just call this number.”

“Why you want me covering the mayor’s office?”

Tony gave a crooked grin. “’Cause he says he’ll kick my ass next time he sees me and I believe him.”

I called the number on the card as soon as I got back. He answered on the first ring.

“Judson Crowning, Mayor Peters’ office, how may I help you?” His voice had the nasal, reedy twang of a transplanted Virginian or Carolinian, but none of the pronunciation. It was made even harder to place by his weird, staccato delivery; he sounded like an old recording I’d heard of J. Edgar Hoover.

“Hi, Mr. Crowning, this is Wendell Roane at the Septima…”

“Ah, yes, the reporter. I can meet you outside Castle Clinton in an hour. Have some questions ready for me, please.” He hung up.

I got to Battery Park in just about 45 minutes, but Crowning was already there. He was about 50, a little over six feet with a square jaw, dark, neatly-combed hair and a high forehead. His eyes were a strange, dark blue that made the iris seem to subsume the pupil. He leaned forward and shook my hand when I approached him, which struck me as odd, for no other reason than the fact that he struck me as someone who wouldn’t shake hands with anyone.

“Let’s walk,” he said. I asked him my questions as we circled the walls of the fort. He was from D.C., as it turned out, and his father had been an aide to H.R. Haldeman.

“I’d known for a while that my daddy worked for the president,” Crowning said- the word “daddy” sounded bizarre in his voice- “but when I went to watch him at work, I saw this one man- this skinny gentleman with a brush cut, getting everything done, everyone jumping at the snap of his fingers, just generally coming off like he owned the place. I said, “Daddy, that man’s in charge, he must be the president.” My daddy said no, that was the chief of staff. I met the man himself shortly afterwards. All sweaty and hunched-over and wild-eyed and ‘Ah, you must be Caleb’s boy, happy to have you here’.” He did a passable Nixon impression. “I could tell, even then, he was a striver. I have no patience for such people. If you have to make that much effort to seem like the man in charge, Mr. Roane, you are not the man in charge.”

The rest of the walk was a runthrough of his routine and a couple choice anecdotes about county commissioners who he said would “remain nameless”, which as far as I knew was generally what county commissioners did anyway. And then about an hour after we started, he turned around and asked, apropos of nothing, “So how’s Detective Kinneavy?”

His voice hadn’t changed at all, but something about it scared me regardless. He was smiling, for some reason, but it looked more like a grimace turned slightly up at the ends.

I didn’t see any point in bullshitting him. “What’s Detective Kinneavy got to do with this?”

He got a little bit closer to me. “I want to know, is what she’s got to do with it, Mr. Roane. See, that’s how you play to win, Mr. Roane. You make everything your business.”

I wiped my glasses on my tie. “What do you want from me, Mr. Crowning?”
“At present? Nothing major. But that might change at any minute, particularly given your involvement in this whole Judith imbroglio.”

“And why do you care about Judith?”
“The mayor is my nominal superior. Some vague sense of loyalty compels me to nip anything that makes him look bad in the bud.”
“And you think trying to intimidate reporters is the best way to do that?”

“You’re not listening to me, Mr. Roane, which I feel like you should, as a journalist. Detective Kinneavy, your source, is one of the primary investigators of the Judith case. I’m concerned that her interest in the case goes beyond simply finding the perpetrators. You’re to let her know at your earliest convenience that she’s not doing a goddamn sociological study on these people, she’s putting them in jail.”

I looked at him for a second. “You said ‘I’.”

“Pardon?”

“You said ‘I’m concerned’ even though you were talking about how Judith was making the mayor look bad. Is this personal for you in some way, Mr. Crowning?”

His smile flatlined and then he made a valiant attempt at forcing it back into shape. “Do you know why I said ‘I’, Mr. Roane? Because I’m the only one you need to worry about right now. And I would strongly advise against antagonizing me, Mr. Roane, because, to paraphrase Tolstoy, I have as many hands as there are balls to twist.” He was only inches away from my face now. “Do you want it to get out your new friend Detective Kinneavy got up to in college? Or how about I cook up some evidence Ms. Garwood is fucking her sources? She seems like the type, doesn’t she? Or maybe your editor Mr. Mendelsohn wakes up one day and finds himself arrested for possession of drugs. I’m not just some guy who schedules meetings, Mr. Roane. I can bury you and anyone connected to you so deep Australians can see the tops of your heads. And I can do it all without firing a shot or throwing a punch. Although I’m happy to do either of the above if we reach that point. Do you want us to reach that point, Mr. Roane? Because I’d hate for anything to interrupt your mother while she’s watching her favorite show by from 7:30 to 8 p.m., or while she’s sitting up reading for the next hour, both directly in front of the south-facing panel window.”

I didn’t give him the satisfaction of looking scared. At least I hope I didn’t. “Mr. Crowning, I’m getting kind of used to people threatening me this week. So tell you what: next time I see Kinneavy, I’m gonna talk to her about whatever the fuck I feel like, and whatever little heartwarming street urchins you’re paying a nickel to spy on us can tell you how that goes, okay? And for now, keep your old-timey-radio-announcer ass the HELL out my personal space.”

He stepped back. “I apologize for the leaning in,” he said. “I often forget myself. I don’t believe we’ll need to take any drastic measures at this point, Mr. Roane, but consider yourself on-notice.”

I rolled my eyes. “Can I go back to my office now?”
He walked backwards towards the north end of the park a bit. “A few years ago, there was a union rep giving us trouble,” he said. “So in the interest of him giving us less trouble, this gentleman’s wife met with an unfortunate accident. Now, when he still wouldn’t play ball, it somehow got into the rumor mill, after a little while- somehow- that this man had poisoned his wife. And further investigation unearthed an online receipt for several grains of cyanide as well as a Google search for ‘how much cyanide to kill instantly’. Now, this man protested his innocence, obviously, and could afford an excellent lawyer, but it was all for nothing. He was convicted, and sentenced to life in prison. Now, wait for it, Mr. Roane.”
“Okay, I’m waiting.”

“The gentleman’s wife? She died in a car accident. I mean, that was common knowledge. The coroner’s report was on the kitchen table when they arrested him. Isn’t that the damnedest thing?” He quickened his pace and strode out of sight into the financial district.

A guy like that, you never know how much of his power is actual capability and how much is his ability to fuck with your head. Crowning was clearly more of a legitimate threat than Devaney, but that song-and-dance was probably usually deployed against city employees- the kinds of people who, at the end of the day, could be fired if you stepped out of the line. He might have been a good bully, but the whole point of being a good bully is that you never have to back up any threats you make.

All the same, I gave Kinneavy a call on my way back to the office. It went to voicemail. “Hey, Detective,” I said after I heard the beep. “This is Roane at the Septima. Listen, Judson Crowning just talked to me and I don’t know what his deal is, but he seems like he’s gunning for you on a personal level. It wouldn’t surprise me if he got in touch with you sometime soon, so tread carefully if he does.” I hung up, perfectly aware of the hypocrisy of advising anyone else to tread carefully, thank you very much. I got back to the office and started typing up my notes from my pre-ugliness conversation with Crowning. Judge me as a person if you like, but I feel like being able to write a balanced profile of a guy who implied he’d murder my mother speaks well for my journalistic objectivity.

The office phone rang; it wasn’t a recognized number. “Wendell Roane, the Septima.”

“Don’t react in any way to this call. Don’t say anything that makes sense out of context.” The voice was modulated, and I was pretty sure I knew who it was. “You need to go to the Cathedral of the Transfiguration of Our Lord, in Brooklyn and you need to do it now.”

“Um, okay. Why now?”

“We have something planned for tonight in that area. There’ll be police in the area and the women will be too scared to talk to you.”

“Women?”
“Go and you’ll understand. Now.”

“But it’s only 1 o’clock.”

“Crowning pulled his people off of you for the interview; he’s on his way back to his office and once he gets there, he’s going to put them back on. You need to be out of the borough before he has a chance to follow you.”

The call ended. I put my notes in the drawer and walked around to Tony’s office. “Hey, Ton’? I gotta head out early. Got someone to talk to in Brooklyn.”
“Hey, great,” he said. “Try not to tell anyone to suck your dick.”
“No promises.”

I had the whole subway ride to ponder my newfound moral crisis. I had been forewarned of illegal activity- shit, murder, let’s call a spade a spade- and I had a cop’s name in my phone, and I was doing nothing with that information. I told myself “tonight” and “that area” wouldn’t be any help, I told myself Kinneavy wasn’t answering her phone- but I couldn’t sell myself on the idea that it was anything other than conscious refusal, because that would be bullshit. Why, though? Did the story mean that much to me? Or was I starting to sympathize with these people? Or did I just want to see what would happen? I was pretty sure it was a combination of the three, and I wasn’t sure I liked what that said about me. In the absence of anything else, I just repeated, like a prayer, that whoever they were hitting tonight had it coming. I repeated that until it drowned out the other voice telling me that that was Dillinger’s excuse too.

It was a pretty wild-looking church. It was the biggest building on the block and it had those big-ass onion-looking domes you always see in tracking shots of Moscow. I tried the door; the inside was just as impressive, all marble and mosaic and icons. As far as I could tell, the main church was empty; I wandered down the aisle and for the first time noticed a young priest lighting candles; from where he’d been standing, he’d been out of my field of vision until I got to the altar.

“If you’re police, you must leave,” he said without looking at me, his accent a mélange of Russian and Jackie Gleason Brooklyn. “I know the law.”

“I’m not a cop, Father, I’m a journalist.”

“Ah, yes, one of these horrible little men who runs around trying to take pictures of famous people and write about their sex lives. Well, we have no famous people here and our sex lives are better than our friends in Rome but still pretty dry.”

I walked past the altar and moved closer to him; it’s hard to argue your case when you’re not making eye contact. “Listen, man,” I said. “I think there’s someone in here I might need to talk to. My name’s Wendell Roane, maybe you’ve heard it over the past week.”

It sounded way cockier than I’d meant it to, but he didn’t seem to take it that way. He tentatively offered his hand. “Chris Mirzoyev,” he said. “You wrote about those murders, didn’t you?”

“Yes, I did. And that means a big chunk of the city’s watching right now, and I don’t want to waste that. I want to give a voice to someone no one would ordinarily be listening to, and I promise I can do it without using the girls’ real names or exposing them in any way.”

He looked me over. “You’re assuming they’re even here. That seems like it could be very embarrassing for you if you’re wrong.”
I shrugged. “Can’t be but so good a journalist if you’re afraid to embarrass yourself.”

His eyes twinkled. “Same could be said of the priesthood. Maybe you missed your calling, Mr. Roane.” He led me past a column and down a long-ish hallway. We stopped at the fourth door on the left. “They speak hardly any English,” he said. “I’ll interpret as best I can; keep in mind that they also have hardly any education, and if they feel you’re trying to intimidate them, they won’t talk to you. Do you understand?”
“Yeah, definitely.”

He opened the door; the layout and décor of the room indicated it was ordinarily used as a classroom. There were several tables folded against the wall, presumably to make room for the multiple cots towards the middle of the room; there were about 15 women in the room, some sitting on cots, a few sitting around an Asian woman sitting upright in a chair with a Bible in her hands.

“The bilingual edition,” Father Mirzoyev explained. “For the ones who want to pick up some English. Oksana!” He beckoned to a blonde sitting at the edge of the circle. She put her palm against her chest and he nodded. She walked slowly over to us. She had a painful looking bruise down one side of her face and some distinctly finger-shaped ones on her throat. She pointed to me and said something to Father Mirzoyev; obviously I don’t know any Russian but her inflection made it sound like a question. Father Mirzoyev responded in kind and she looked relieved.

“Oksana, I’m a journalist,” I said. “I write for a magazine that wants to tell people about the kinds of things that were done to you, and maybe get some changes made as a result. I’m not gonna tell anyone your real name or where you are. Will you help me, please?”

Father Mirzoyev translated for her. She looked confused and said something to him.

“She wants to know, will the people who hurt her and the other girls know that she talked to you?”

“No, ma’am. In fact, the man who did most of the hurting is dead. And if you talk to me, it may help stop the other men who hurt you from hurting anyone else.”

She looked back at the priest, as though seeking his approval. Finally she looked back at me and nodded.

“Let’s sit in this corner, shall we?” said Father Mirzoyev, pulling up a couple chairs. We sat down and I got out my notepad and DVR.

“So how did you come to this country, Oksana?”
“Her mother was very sick, and she needed a way to make money. There was a man in her town who said they needed secretaries in America, that it would pay good money. She went with this man, he took her to the hold of a boat, and she spent the next two weeks in the hold. When she got to New York, they put her in the back of a truck; she doesn’t know how much time passed in the back of the truck, but when she got out, she was in a basement with all the other girls. There was a man who she thinks was in charge, he kept yelling at them but they didn’t understand. Finally they brought in a man who knew a little Russian and he said that they were all going to fuck any man who came in there and if they didn’t, they’d be deported. If they objected to anything the men did to them, they’d be deported. If they tried to leave, they’d be deported.”

“Was it only the first man who hurt you, or did the men who came in hurt you?”

She shook her head violently. “There… there were many men who hurt her, one in particular. But almost all of them hurt her. Some of them didn’t start out that way, but they couldn’t… you know, do it properly, and they got angry and hit her.”

“How often were you fed?”

“Once a day. Usually… I think she’s trying to say McDonald’s. She’s not quite sure, but it tasted like McDonald’s. It was usually only two or three sandwiches to go around.”

“Was there competition at all among the women? For food, clients, anything?”
“No, not at all. She says she’d be crazy if she didn’t have the other girls around. It helped her feel like she was staying alive for someone other than herself. She’s worried they’ll have to be separated eventually.”

“The one man who hurt her… tell me about him, if you can.”

“He was a big man but not fat. He wore a suit and seemed important. He had a razor… an old razor the kind that unfolds,… and sometimes he would cut her on her thigh or her shoulder blade while he went inside her. When she screamed, he would hit her very hard, and seemed to really start enjoying it at that point. He would grab her hair and force her to meet his eyes. His eyes are…” Father Mirzoyev looked back at me. “I’m sorry, Mr. Roane, I must be rustier than I thought. She says his eyes were the navy. I have no idea what that means.” He looked back at Oksana, whose eyes were shining. “I think perhaps we’ve talked enough, yes?”

“Wait. Navy. I think she means…” I opened Google Image Search on my phone and prayed there wasn’t a country singer or anything with the same name. Jackpot. There he was. I held the phone out to Oksana. “Is that him?”

She recoiled a bit when she saw Judson Crowning’s face; she must not have needed a translator for that, because she nodded and handed the phone right back to me. She was full-on sobbing by now. Father Mirzoyev asked her something and when she weakly nodded again, he placed a hand lightly on her shoulder and began rotating it.

I got to my feet. “Thank you, Father. Can I reach you later on if there’s anything I need to ask?”

“Of course,” he said. He dug into his cassock and took out a business card for the cathedral. “Mr. Roane?”
“Yeah?”

He gestured towards Oksana. “Don’t have put her through this for nothing, yeah?”

“Father, I’m generally not in the promises business, but tell her I promise it won’t have been for nothing.”

I went straight home but I kept working after I got there. I was done with the Crowning profile by 7. I hated reading it back; remembering the look on Oksana’s face while reading my own descriptions of Crowning’s “efficiency” and “reputation for turning around struggling local campaigns” and “running a tight ship” were starting to make me physically ill. This was the life I’d chosen. Sometimes to report the news is to rattle off a man’s career highlights even when you know something awful and venal and only tenuously human is scuttling around beneath the surface of things.

The picture we were using for the profile’s opening splash had been taken by the staff photographer once Crowning got back to City Hall and then e-mailed to me. It showed Crowning in profile, standing on the steps of City Hall and staring across the street, his hands in his pockets. His eyes were half-closed; it made him look hypercompetent and emotionally uninvolved. His eyes had opened far wider when he’d spoken to me candidly, and I was willing to bet they’d been even more so when he was holding a fistful of Oksana’s hair and holding a straight-razor to her throat. I looked at the picture and decided I was going to be the one who gave this man what was coming to him, not Kinneavy or Judith or anyone else. And I was going to do it my way, no matter how badly I wanted to Moe Green-special him right in one of those creepy fucking eyes.

My increasingly Kafka-esque vigilante fantasies were interrupted by the phone, which I was this close to just turning off at home. It was Tony, who usually restricted himself to e-mail. “Turn on the news,” was all he said. I grabbed for the remote and flicked to the NBC affiliate; “BREAKING: BRIGHTON BEACH BLOODBATH”, screamed the super. I rolled my eyes involuntarily. Broadcast journalists.

“…reputed to include key organized crime figures; although the organization known as Judith has yet to claim credit in the media, detectives on the scene say they believe it was responsible. Captain Meghan Neville has scheduled a press conference for tomorrow morning.”

They were taking it up a notch. If they knew about Crowning, he was right to be scared. I turned off the TV and navigated to my e-mail, hoping against hope that another video wasn’t forthcoming, because this time, I would know its content was only possible because of me.

Cataldo

At some point on Monday, before my evening meeting with Degtiarenko, I realized I was eventually going to have to kill him. I considered having my crew take the long way to Brooklyn and kill Degtiarenko’s guys as soon as he left the meet, but I had no guarantees his entire crew would be around, and besides which, shootouts in the street were exactly the kind of thing I didn’t need. (That didn’t mean I was driving without insurance; there was going to be a sniper on the roof watching to make sure that when the Russians left the restaurant, so did I.)

Because as much as it pained me to admit it, the weaselly little commie fuck was right: I’d lost my edge. We all had. All the individual revenue streams and business models aside, our only real job was to keep people from fucking with us. No, scratch that- to keep people from ever thinking that fucking with us was something they could do in the first place. I wasn’t Superman; I was Old Man Giannini from when I was a kid.

Old Man Giannini had lost a foot- just the foot, not the leg- in World War 2, where he’d also gotten a bad head injury that made him trail off on consonants. He had a little strip of grass between his front stoop and the curb, and he called it his “lawn” and got super-fuckin’-pissed at any kid who cut across it. But nobody ever took him seriously, because even though he was only a stone’s throw away from us, he never did anything other than shake his crutch at us and yell “You keeppppp yourrrrr goddamnnnnn assessssss offa my lawnnnnnnnn.” Then one day Old Man Giannini’s brother Carlo visited him for a weekend. Carlo was nearly as old as his brother, and didn’t look much tougher. But the first afternoon he was there, Paulie (we go back) cut through Old Man Giannini’s yard on the way home from school, and Carlo shuffled over, looked down at Paulie and said “Kid, you step on my brother’s lawn again I’ll beat your little fuckin’ ass so red they’ll make you live on a reservation.” Carlo was gone Monday afternoon, but none of us ever cut across Old Man Giannini’s yard again. That’s power.

I’d been discussing this with Paulie as we drove to Brighton Beach for the meet. Paulie couldn’t come in, but he was gonna wait at the curb with several guns of varying sizes in case things went sideways and Mark Nobile, the guy on the parallel roof, missed any Russians. Paulie’s immediate reaction to my thoughts was to insist that it had been me, not him, who got yelled at by Carlo.

“Goddammit, Paulie, you know that ain’t the point.”
“No, yeah, I know, I’m just sayin’.”

“Well, don’t. Don’t ‘just say’. I’m talkin’ about goin’ to war and you’re ‘just sayin’’.”

“So you’re having this meet to get out of goin’ to war so we can do it later?”
“It’s strategic. It’s like how Joshua Chamberlain gave Hitler Yugoslavia so the English could have peace on time and kick his ass later.”
“Don’t you mean Stalin? I mean, these pricks are Russian, right?”
“YES, they’re Russians, Paulie, it’s a fuckin’ analogy.”

Paulie turned down a side street towards the restaurant. “I don’t think there’s been real war in our lifetime,” he said. “Least, not since we got made. You think we’re ready?”

I shrugged. “We’re gonna have to be.” I turned to look at him. “Paulie, you know they’re gonna come at us eventually if we make them think they can. That’s how it works. There is no peaceful option at this point.” I pointed to a neon sign shaped like an orange bird with its wings spread. “This is it.”

Paulie pulled to a stop in front of it. “It’s funny,” he said. “You know, it’s not like it used to be. Shit was tough when we were growing up but there was a ton of stuff we coulda done when we grew up. I mean, this ain’t the Depression, it’s not like Our Thing was the only option.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m sayin’ the only reason I decided to do this was ‘cuz I wanted life to be like a movie. And all this time, it really hasn’t been, and I’m realizing I’m okay with that, and the idea of it being like a movie is what scares me.”

I felt bad for the guy; this was exactly the kind of vulnerability we grew up being taught to shun. But fuck that. All the rules had been jumping out the window lately; why the hell couldn’t a man admit he was scared? I placed a hand on Paulie’s shoulder.

“Paulie,” I said. “I know. It scares me too. But we are the big dogs, paisan, and they are not gonna yank our chains. And they’re gonna die knowing it was the meanest fuckin’ wops in America that killed ‘em.”
Paulie sucked his breath in a little and put his hand over mine. “Thanks, Joe,” he said a minute later. He pushed my hand off his shoulder in mock disgust. “Now giddada here with that queer shit.”
I laughed in spite of myself. I reached into the glove box and drew out the paper bag. We’d cleaned it as best we could and evened out the cut with a steak knife but I still felt filthy holding it in my hand. I clutched it to my chest, nodded to Paulie and stepped out of the car.

The place was called The Zhar-Ptitsa; it was a classy Russian restaurant, which was apparently a thing. I’d been told to knock rather than just enter; when I did, a guy in a pinstriped suit over a v-neck and a gold chain let me in.

“What you want, man? You the Italian?”
“No, I’m the fuckin’ Jamaican.”

He looked confused and then raised his eyebrows. “Joke! Yes!”

“Yes, joke. Tell Mr. Degtiarenko I’m here.”

He nodded; he patted me down and then pulled out a phone and sent a text. “They are upstairs,” he explained. “Private party.”

The restaurant was empty; ordinarily it was open for a couple hours longer but the doors had been locked tonight. The man’s phone buzzed and he turned to me. “They ready for you in just a minute,” he explained. “Please, take the seat.” I sat down on the velvet bench in the restaurant’s waiting area.

Ten minutes later, they still hadn’t called for me. The doorman smiled apologetically when a loud noise upstairs made us both jump. There was a crash and what came next were unmistakably gunshots. The doorman jogged to the bar and pulled an Uzi from behind it. He held up one hand. “You stay there,” he said to me. He checked the magazine and jogged up the stairs. About a minute later, I heard another gunshot.

I really wasn’t sure what to do. I didn’t hear any footsteps on the stairs, but I got up and ran to the curb anyway.

“I need one of your guns,” I said to Paulie when I opened the door of the car.

“Whoa, what the fuck’s going on, Joe?”
“I don’t know, I think somebody else showed up.”

“Well, then, what the fuck are we staying here for?”
“Just gimme something, huh, Paulie? You and Mark keep me covered and if I’m not back down in 5 minutes, get the fuck out of here, huh?”
He sighed and handed me a Beretta Stampede from under the seat. He snapped his fingers next to his eye. “Look at me. Be fuckin’ careful, got me?”
“Always.”

I walked back into the restaurant and up the stairs, gun at the ready. When I was at the top of the stairs, I heard several thumps that sounded like boots; I could tell they were below me, but they sounded like they were hitting pavement, and the lobby of the restaurant was all carpet. At the top of the stairs was a single, closed door, slightly ajar. I eased it open with the gun.

Well, at least there was no one waiting inside.

There was so much blood it took me a minute to realize there were even bodies in there. I jumped back when I realized the doorman, his chest in bloody shreds, was lying at my feet. He hadn’t even gotten off a shot. The rest of the room seemed mostly to be Degtiarenko’s entourage; it was hard to tell anything about the bodies, they’d been so worked over, but a few of them looked as though they’d been smaller and better-dressed, so I was guessing they’d been bosses like Degtiarenko.

Speaking of Degtiarenko, he was sitting at the head of the table, slumped slightly forward. There were no wounds I could see on his torso, but his throat was cut from ear to ear and the half of his face that didn’t look extremely puzzled was completely caved in. Shotgun, from the looks of it. A window at the far end of the room was wide open; I ran over and looked down. Short drop and a fire escape. No wonder I hadn’t seen anyone leave. I stuck the Stampede in my waistband and jogged down the stairs. I jumped into the car and, as I screamed “Drive!” to Paulie, I realized, in spite of myself that him and me, driving for our lives… this was just like a fuckin’ movie. And it made me laugh a little.

Of course, I stopped laughing when I realized halfway back that I’d left Will’s hand in the restaurant.

We had good lawyers and I was pretty sure no one could put me at the restaurant that night, but all the same, I feared the worst when there was a knock at my door the next day. The man who answered was carrying a black combination briefcase. He was better-dressed than me or anyone I worked for, so I knew he wasn’t a cop, but I could tell he wasn’t there to have a beer and watch the ball game either.

“Mr. Cataldo,” he said. I couldn’t tell if he was asking or telling. “My name’s Judson Crowning. I’m with the mayor’s office and we have business to discuss. Can I come in?”

“Uh, yeah, sure.” I stepped back to give him room.

My place isn’t flashy, but it’s nice enough that most people, upon coming in, look around without meaning to. Crowning didn’t do that; he just turned to face me as soon as he was under the threshold.

“Mr. Cataldo, I’ve got a problem,” he said. “You ever read an alternative weekly newspaper they call the Septima?”

“Can’t say I do. I’ve heard of it.”
“I find it smug and overly moralistic. Objectively, their reporting is excellent, but I despise reporters as a rule. They lack the will to shape history and they lack the patience to be historians. ‘So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth’.”

“Spew me?”
“No, not you, Mr. Cataldo, it’s Revelations.”
“Ah, okay.”

He just stared at me for a while after that, and then he said “Mr. Cataldo, there’s a gentleman employed by this particular publication- one Wendell Roane- who’s causing me quite a bit of trouble. I’ve had him under surveillance for a few days, but yesterday he bucked his handlers and they have yet to pick the thread back up.”

“Well, I mean, he’s got an office, doesn’t he? How hard can he be to find?”

“It’s not a question of finding him. It’s my own fault for showing my hand; people who know they’re being followed find all sorts of annoying little ways to give you the slip. Even if it’s only for a little while, it can throw a wrench into things.”

“And what’s that got to do with me, all due respect?”

“Well, Mr. Cataldo, I fear my relationship with Mr. Roane has reached a crescendo, so to speak. Mr. Roane, you see, has been covering the Judith affair.”

“Who?”

“They’re a criminal organization, Mr. Cataldo. They killed Mr. Milazzo and they were responsible for the scene you stumbled upon in Brighton Beach last night.” I opened my mouth and he held up a hand. “Please don’t waste our time with pointless denials, Mr. Cataldo. If you were the last to be seen with a missing person, it would behoove you not to misplace his hand, don’t you think?”

Shit. Shit shit shit.

He kept talking. “Now, here’s my issue with Mr. Roane- much like his counterpart in the police department, he’s not keeping his eye on the prize as far as the Judith case. He’s digging into the people they target as well, and that could potentially lead him to information that I cannot abide him obtaining.”

“Cut the bullshit. Are you asking me to kill him?”

He looked shocked and shook his head. “Oh, no, absolutely not. I’m telling you to kill him.”

Fuck this. I wasn’t going through this again. “Mr.… Crowning? You wanna get the fuck out of my house right about now. I’m done being told anything by people other than my boss, and I don’t give a good goddamn if you want to blackmail me or whatever. I am not the man to fuck with and I’m making sure everyone knows that.”

I thought he’d get angry, but he didn’t sound it when he spoke. “You’re missing the forest for the trees, Mr. Cataldo,” he said. “You think I’M trying to fuck with you? Judith- and you really should read up on them, you’re going to have a hard time following along otherwise- not only have they killed one of your captains, I have it on good authority that they’re going after people who pay tribute to you. You think the Russians didn’t show the proper respect? The Russians were a bunch of new-school punks. These women are mad dogs. You want to reassert your authority? Start with them.”

“You say ‘start with them’ but you want me to kill a reporter.”

He opened the briefcase; it was crammed full of banded stacks of hundreds. “5 million dollars, Mr. Cataldo,” he said, “5 million dollars and a guarantee you will never face any criminal charges in this city so long as you shall live. You should help me undermine Judith for the reasons I’ve already expounded upon, but you should resolve the question of Mr. Roane because, again, 5 million fucking dollars. Are you going to take it or are you going to pass it up because you’d rather find fault with my logic?”

I sighed. “I’ll take it.” There was nothing about this that wasn’t a red flag. Hits for outside operators were a huge no-go, Crowning was clearly a psycho, and a hit on a civilian, especially a journalist, would be an even dumber move from a PR standpoint than the whole shootout-on-a-sidewalk bit. But God help me, I had been so ready to go to war with the Russkies that I needed an outlet for that momentum. Crowning and I shook on it, we hammered out some details and he left the money with me, and the whole time I wondered what the fuck was wrong with me that the money was the least intriguing part of the whole deal for me.