6046 words (24 minute read)

Kinneavy

I got back to the station with about an hour to go until my meeting with the reporter; while I was typing up my notes about the dead wiseguy from the docks, Donnie told me the captain wanted to see me.

Capt. Meghan Neville bore an eerie resemblance to a middle-aged Florence Welch and was covertly known as “Scarlet Witch” among the detectives. She would not have gotten either of those references. I was pretty sure she had heard of Marlene Dietrich, though, because her style ran in the direction of men’s suits and Brooks Brothers ties. About 10 years ago, back when she made captain and got her first taste of media scrutiny, a handful of moral guardians, led by Marvin Devaney of the Decency League, threw a shitfit about the “message this sends to young girls”, who I guess look up to police captains or something. Eventually, the Chief of Detectives was ambush-interviewed about Neville’s wardrobe and said (this is an exact quote) “She’s the most qualified for the job, what do I give a shit if she likes to dyke it up?” Various gay-rights groups puzzled over that one for a while before deciding that even if the chief’s wording was problematic, the sentiment was admirable; the next week, “Avenue Q” opened on Broadway and a high school in Queens made “The Color Purple” required reading, so Devaney abruptly lost interest in Capt. Neville.

All bullshit aside, Neville really was ideal for her job: nobody better if you needed leadership, nobody scarier if you were out of line. I hoped to God I wasn’t out of line.

“Door. Sit,” was all she said when I walked in. I closed the office door behind me and took a seat in front of her. She was wearing a double-breasted sharkskin with a black silk tie and pocket square. Her desk and the wall behind it were unadorned except for an ashtray shaped like a skull and a “Hang in There” cat poster that instead read “Go fuck yourself”.

“Heard the stiff from this afternoon was connected,” she said.

“Uh, yeah,” I replied. I checked my notes. “Russell Milazzo, made member of the Cataldo crew. Priors include aggravated assault, two different unlicensed firearms, DUI, resisting arrest- that was the same occasion- and Lt. Ciorra in Organized Crime says they were trying to build a case on pimping.”

“And what’s the connection to the guy in Seward Park this morning?”

I cleared my throat. “Well, I personally believe them to have been committed by the same person.”

“Why’s that? Just because both their throats were cut?”
“Well, no, because both their throats are cut with what appears to be a blade of similar width, with a single, more-or-less unbroken stroke, the, for lack of a better word, confidence of which indicates familiarity with such matters, because of the bruising indicative of handcuffs on both bodies, because of both men’s history of accusations of violence with little or no actual legal penalties as a result…”

“Oh Jesus,” she said. “So a vigilante, you’re telling me?”

“It’s possible. I’m not willing to stake everything on it being the same perp, though; I just think the motivation has something to do with their priors.” I paused for a second. “Captain, Martin Vickner was a rapist. I believe the targeting of these two men may have had to do with their history of violence against and exploitation of women.”

“Aw, fuck me,” Neville said. Somewhere, Marvin Devaney’s head exploded. She thought about it for a second. “Listen, Kinneavy, I don’t know if this is going to end up being big news. It might not be, and it might just be on you to find two different people with big fuckin’ knives. But if you’re right about a connection, any connection, the official line is this is gang-related, got me?”
I was confused. “Why gang-related?”

“Because the more adamant we are about that, the less likely someone will decide it’s terrorism or a serial killer, and any whiff of either of those is going to send the feebs stampeding in here with their dicks in their hands, and I’m not gonna get stuck cleaning federal cum-stains off of my department. Someone like me in a job like this, how much room do you think I have to fuck up?”

Her features relaxed. “They’ll never get it, will they?” She inclined her head towards the blinds. “How it is for us. They just get to do this job whichever way comes naturally. You and me, though, we’re the trailblazers.” She lit a cigarette, putting a finger to her lips. “And what that really means is, anything we do, right or wrong, proves some broader point about women and their fitness for the job.” She gestured to her tie. “You think I fuckin’ like wearing ties every day? They’re a huge pain in the ass. But I can’t stop now.” She turned away and blew smoke over her shoulder. Her voice still sounded like the narrator of a Mickey Spillane audiobook, but her eyes were shot through with fear. “Because when everybody assumes they can fuck with you, you never give them an inch. Doesn’t matter how inconsequential it is. ‘Just wear a skirt’ turns into ‘give me a blowjob’ turns into ‘retire early for half a pension so one of the boys from the club can have the office he’s earned’.” She took a drag. “Here’s the short version: if someone is killing men who hurt women, and you and I can’t bring them down, do you really believe anyone will think it wasn’t for lack of trying? I mean, really?” There was another one of those pauses that had been so commonplace. “I’m asking, Detective.”

“No, Captain, I don’t believe that.”

“Then please, please don’t fuck this up. Right now, my balls are in a vise. Please don’t tighten it.” She nodded towards the door.

I stood up. “I don’t plan to, Captain.”

She stabbed her cigarette into the skull. “Nobody plans to, kid.”

McSorley’s Old Ale House is the oldest Irish pub in New York, and it’s kind of hard to tell what’s actually been here the entire time and what’s modern affectation that nobody notices because it fits with the image we have of places like this. The floors are covered in sawdust, the beer comes to you in pitchers as big as your thigh and your server’s hair and face will probably be a white and red, respectively, not found in nature. Oh, and they also had to be sued back in 1970 to allow women inside, but to their credit, they seemed just as hostile towards everyone else in there as they did to me.

“ ‘Snug and evil’,” Wendell Roane said, nursing his drink. “That’s what e.e. cummings called this place.”

“Yeah? What does Wendell Roane call it?”

He looked around, dragging his eyes over the smoky air and the kitsch on the walls. “It’s all right. I feel way safer with a woman. Folks in here probably don’t know who to attack.”

I rolled my eyes. I liked him a lot more than I thought I did, but even if you find someone charming, make him feel like he’s got to work for your goodwill. Just one of those things you learn growing up Irish.

I had the letter in a plastic evidence bag inside my coat. I hadn’t told Roane that it had pretty much confirmed my suspicions about the motivations for the murders- or for Vickner’s, at least. I had, however, explained Capt. Neville’s insistence that Judith was a gang and given him a (brief) look at the photo of Milazzo’s body, just to confirm that he’d been killed in the same manner. I figured it wouldn’t do any harm now that he apparently already knew Milazzo had been killed.

“Why are they called Judith?” I asked. “Do you know?”

He took a folder out of his messenger bag and laid a printout on the table. It was `a reproduction of an oil painting. It showed two women holding a big, bearded guy down in a bed while the one at the front hacked off his head. The one doing the hacking was a brunette in blue with a frighteningly intent expression.

“In the book of Judith, which appears in the Catholic Bible and the Septuagint but isn’t acknowledged by Jews or Protestants, Judith was a Hebrew widow who walked into the tent of the Assyrian general Holofernes when he was about to lay waste to her hometown, and got him drunk; when she had his attention, she and her handmaid beheaded him. She’s developed some resonance among feminists because, even though she’s a character in a religious text, she uses her sexuality to achieve her aims and that’s presented as okay.”

I couldn’t take my eyes off that picture. “But they kill rapists, yeah? Holofernes doesn’t rape her.”

“Ah, but there’s a bit of a story behind this particular depiction of it.” He pulled out another reproduction of a painting; this one was a fair-skinned, plump woman with dark hair painting with a brush and palette; she bore a distinct resemblance to the painting of Judith and also, weirdly enough, to me.

“Artemisia Gentileschi,” Roane explained. “Baroque-era painter. Judith was one of her specialties, but she also did a lot with Esther and Jael.”

“All the badass women.”

“Pretty much. And a lot of people think the reason for her preoccupation with Judith is that she was sexually assaulted by her colleague, Agostino Tassi; Artemisia’s father had him charged and convicted, after which he served a staggering sentence of one year. Artemisia confided that in this particular painting, she deliberately made Holofernes look like Tassi.”
I slid the two pictures around so that they were side-by-side. “So it sounds like they’ve got more in common with Artemisia than with Judith.”

He shrugged. “Well, I think maybe that’s deliberate. Judith’s story isn’t about sexual assault, but Artemisia makes it about that because she needs to sublimate her rage at what was done to her and Judith, an independent woman who can go toe-to-toe with a man, is the ideal vessel for it. Judith the organization is appropriating Judith the person- and Artemisia’s appropriation of Judith the person- in much the same way. It’s meta, as the kids say.”

I killed my beer. “Is that what the kids say? When I was a kid, we just cursed a lot.” I looked around. “Back then, I couldn’t wait until I was old enough to go in here. That was that one thing I thought would finally make me a big girl.”

“Planning ahead for the rebellious phase?”

I laughed a little. “Yep. Dated a black guy at Gotham U, too, thought I’d piss off my dad a little. No offense.” I sighed. “I wonder how old Barack’s doing these days.” His eyes went wide. I flicked my fingers off his shoulder. “I’m just fucking with you, Sarah Jane.”

He smiled. “Don’t touch me unannounced, okay? I still think of you as a threatening voice over the phone; it makes me instinctively look for something to defend myself with.” He checked his phone and put it back on his pocket. “You got somewhere to be?” I asked him.

“Got another source to call once we’re done here, is all.”

“I’d better let you run along, then.” I slid the pictures back to him. “Got one more thing to say, though. And you can quote me on this.”

“Sweet.” He took a silver voice recorder out of his coat pocket.

I hesitated. “I… I meant as an anonymous source within the homicide department.”
“I knew what you meant.”

I leaned in. “However we may feel about this organization’s aims, its violent methods make it a criminal organization and it will be treated as such. You want to know why I think they don’t follow the story of Judith exactly? Because I think they want a symbol, but they also don’t want to be predictable enough to get caught, as is the case with most murderers. But you can bet your ass we’re going to catch them. All of them.” I laid a ten on the table and got up and left, wishing I’d had a mic to drop. I was Little Katie Soundbite now, apparently. God help us all.


Roane

I called Will on his burner as soon as I got back to my apartment.

“This is D-Nunz. What up?” was how he answered the phone, which made me worry he was dumb enough to be taking calls from his friends on this phone.

“It’s Roane. What you got for me?”

His voice dropped. “Hey, man, so look, somebody cut Russell Milazzo’s throat and dumped him on Pier 17 this afternoon.” Milazzo and I had met very briefly once a couple years ago when I tried to get a quote from him on a recent longshoremen’s union agreement; he responded by calling me a nigger and slapping me a couple times before Joe Cataldo, to his credit, did that “Hooooooooo!” thing Italian guys do and pulled him off of me. I hoped this had been Judith too, because otherwise I was worried I’d been sleepwalking.

“So what’s Cataldo’s play? Do you know yet?” Joe Cataldo was stretched pretty thin even on his best day; even though he was nominally only a regional underboss for the Dellaponte family, Old Man Dellaponte had gotten out of prison 8 years ago and had pretty much been telecommuting from his lodge in Ithaca ever since, so Cataldo was left with all the legwork associated with being the boss on top of his own duties as a capo.

“Well, Mr. C figured it was the Russians out in Brighton Beach, but I heard they say no.”

“Why would it be the Russians?”
“ ‘Cause Russell was running pussy. Foreign girls.”

I was pretty sure I’d spotted the thread. “Why foreign?”

“Why do you think? Because there are sick fucks that’ll pay through the nose for a girl they can hit or cut up or whatever else, especially when she can’t go to the cops.”

“And the Russians don’t like that?”

“The Russians fuckin’ love that, and they don’t want anyone else stepping on it. Especially since all of us are citizens, so Milazzo and his crew are taking way less of a risk bringing the girls in. Or were.”

“You know anyone with the Russians who might talk to me?”

“No-o-o. No. Get that idea outta your head before it can grow. Nothing good will come of trying to talk to them, I promise you.”
“Okay. Jesus.”

“Hey, I’m lookin’ out for you, man. And I’m not picking on the Russkies, either. My people would fuckin’…liquidize me if they found out I was talking to a reporter, ‘specially a colored guy. No disrespect.”

“Do they know my mama was Italian?”
He snorted. “That makes it worse, dumbass. Look, I gotta go. I’m ditching this phone as soon as I’m done. I’ll text you the number for the new one.” The call ended.

So now I understood why Judith wanted Milazzo dead, but I was a little confused as to their methodology for targeting people. Milazzo was an abusive piece of shit, but there was no indication he was a rapist per se. I wasn’t defending him, I was just curious as to what met their criteria.

I opened my laptop and opened Firefox, Office and iTunes. When I’m working at home, I need the right kind of music to do it properly. In my case, that’s bouncy pop by female solo artists. Make as much fun of me as you want; the beat focuses me.

I logged onto my Twitter account; I’ve had one since 2009 but I don’t use it too often. My thoughts tend to run pretty long-winded (maybe you’ve noticed), so a character limit doesn’t suit me too well. I mostly use the account to post links to my latest, although once Paul Krugman wished me a happy birthday on here, which was pretty cool. I typed the following: “Attn: Judith- Russell M not rapist, just pimp/abuser. Targeting all abusers? Email or call and tell me detail proving you’re really judith”. I posted it and then something else occurred to me: “RM also hadn’t been acquitted. Thought you didnt target anyone pretrial.” Hey, I just met you, and this is crazy, but here’s my number, so prove you killed a guy and we’ll go from there.

About an hour later, I was halfway through my piece on the most recent developments in the Judith case when I heard the buzz of a new text. It was (naturally) from a restricted number; it read “RM was in navy tracksuit, gray sleeves, St. Anthony medal around neck. Wait for email”. I turned back to my laptop. An email from a Hotmail address appeared in my inbox. I opened it and read.

Mr. Roane.

Thank you for your prompt response. To answer your question, we are not an assembly line; although our primary focus is rapists, we target anyone who facilitates violence against women; in Mr. Milazzo’s case, especially, as his trafficking activity directly facilitated several acts of rape. As to your question regarding his acquittal (or lack thereof): again, we have to be practical. Mr. Milazzo’s position in his organization was such that he would likely have direct knowledge of his superiors’ criminal activity, making it a near-certainty that any attempt to pursue charges against him would lead to a deal. In addition, when was the last time you heard of a gangster serving time for pimping or sexual battery? Attached is some photographic evidence of Mr. Milazzo and his clients’ handiwork; we’re sure that, after looking at them, you’ll agree he needed to go.

Don’t try to reach us again; we will be in touch with you. Look for the video in the mailroom tomorrow; we would send it to your apartment but that seems vaguely threatening and we don’t want to give you the wrong idea.

JUDITH

I opened the attachment and immediately wished I hadn’t. The black eyes, scar tissue and badly healed broken bones on the women in the pictures were high-octane nightmare fuel, but what was worse were the expressions of utter hopelessness in all of their eyes. This had been happening long enough that they were resigned to the idea that this was as good as it got. I looked at the pictures and I fully understood the instinct to kill a man who made that happen. It was pointless to just be angry at Milazzo, of course; he was only half of the problem. The other half were the people whose money and sick desires created a market for this kind of thing…

Holy shit.

A cartoon lightbulb went over my head as I realized what Judith’s next play would be. I lunged for my phone and dialed Det. Kinneavy. She answered on the third ring.

“This is Katherine.”

“Detective, it’s Wendell.”

“What’s up? Did you forget something?”

“You need to get Milazzo’s client list. They’re gonna go after his johns. Maybe not next, but eventually.”

“Well, how the shit am I supposed to get it?”
“I know a guy inside. Let me make some calls.”

She thought about it. “The list itself won’t prove anything. We’ll need to find the women too.”

“I’ll find the women. They’re prostitutes, they’re not gonna trust you.”

“I kinda doubt they’re gonna want to trust much of anyone.”

“Yeah, but they’ve probably been threatened with the cops or INS the entire time they’ve been put to work. You focus on the list, trust me. And that reminds me, they emailed me from a Hotmail account. I don’t know it’s the same person who wrote the letter, but I’ll print it out for you to look over. Maybe you can figure something out about whoever wrote it from the phrasing or whatever.”

“Will do. Keep in touch.” She hung up.

I stared at the almost-certainly-abandoned Hotmail address on my screen.

Where ya think you’re goin’, baby?

I finished the article and submitted it to Tony. Then I did research for a while, mostly relating to the biblical Judith and to resources available to undocumented immigrants in the city. I must have nodded off at my desk; just a little while later I was woken up by my ringtone.

“Hello?” I said, trying my best not to sound like someone who had been out like a light at 9:15 on a weeknight.

“Yeah, is this Wendell Roane?” The voice on the other end was harsh, cab-driver-risen-above-his-station bray. It sounded familiar, but I was pretty sure I’d heard it on TV or the radio rather than one-on-one.

“Yeah, it is; may I ask who’s calling?”
“This is Marvin Devaney with the New York Decency League.” Oh, Jesus.

“I see. What can I help you with, Mr. Devaney?”

“Well, I was sent a link to the story you posted today, and I just wanted to ask why a journalist with as prestigious a history as yours would agree to become a mouthpiece for a bunch of militant lesbians.”

“Mr. Devaney, do you know something about these women I don’t?”

“I know they’re killers and your magazine’s website is giving them space to justify their criminality.”

“Oh, for God’s sake.” I had had too long a day to humor this dipshit. “We’re not ‘justifying’ anyone. We’re reporting. Do you think Jimmy Breslin is pro-serial killers?”

“You reprinted an entire letter from them and posted that grotesque video. That’s glorification.”
This had to be a nightmare. “Mr. Devaney, if I wanted to glorify somebody, it’d be kind of counterproductive to publish video evidence that they were murderers. If my sympathies were with these people, I wouldn’t be publicizing their activities.”
“But that’s what they want you to do!”
“Yeah, a lot of people want to be noticed. Sometimes, that helps people catch them.” I took a turn for the ill-advised. “Maybe you’d better go, I think I hear a gay guy getting an abortion.”

“Oh, is this a joke now? All this is funny to you?”

“Mr. Devaney, neither rape nor murder are a laughing matter. But yeah, the fact that you called me at home at 9 p.m. to yell about lesbians is pretty funny.”

He sounded faintly apoplectic. “You know, Mr. Roane, considering you write for a publication that owes literally the entirety of its revenue to advertising, I would think twice before you offend an organization with our track record when it comes to organizing advertiser boycotts.”

I had a headache. “Suck my ambiguously-brown dick, you fat fuck.” I hung up and turned the phone off. For reasons I couldn’t fully articulate, I was more disturbed that Marvin Devaney had my cell number than I was that a terrorist organization knew where I lived. At least they were being polite about the whole thing.

Cataldo

Shit. I knew I forgot something.

The windowless concrete basement was beneath a warehouse on Orchard Street. The room was lined with ratty, awful-smelling sleeping bags. At the very back was a discolored tile section with a shower head about 6 feet up the wall. Huddled against the wall on both sides of the room were about 15 women, pretty much all of who looked like drowned rats that whoever drowned them had also hit with a hammer a few times. Most of them were white but there were three or four chinks.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “If they got a shower, what the fuck is that smell?”

“Aw, JESUS!” yelled Paulie from the far-left corner of the basement. I walked over to where he was standing; a few feet of the floor appeared to have been caved in with a shovel; inside the hole were the bodies of three more women.

If I wanted a business that never got ugly, I could have gone into dry-cleaning. But this was just fucked up.

Paulie followed me back over to the door. “So what do we do with ‘em?”
I wasn’t sure, honestly. Nicky Brunaldi, Russell’s replacement, definitely wasn’t cut out to continue where his predicate left off. Killing them wasn’t an option either; there was no way we could make 15 bodies disappear at the same time unless we took them to different parts of town one at a time, and I had day-to-day shit I had to attend to. It occurred to me that maybe I could turn them over to Degtiarenko as a peace offering and avert a war without making him feel like he had me by the balls.

I knelt down in front of one of the white girls. She was blonde with green eyes, and I could tell she wasn’t any older than 27, but she managed to look older and wearier than my mother. “You speak any English, sweetie?” She just stared at me, then said, in an accent thicker and harder to place than Degtiarenko’s, “Hey, daddy. 400 straight, 550 up the ass. Sounds good?” Her eyes looked so dead as she said it that I recoiled a little. I hadn’t felt that kind of shame since I told Father Philip I’d been spanking it when I was ten. I sighed and pulled out my phone and dialed somebody.

“Charlie, any way you can get me a school bus? With tinted windows? And a piece of cardboard and a marker.”

About an hour later, Charlie came through; the bus was Nassau County Public Schools, but beggars can’t be choosers. Paulie and I got the girls on their feet; all of them seemed like they were able to walk, at least. I couldn’t communicate with them much but they all understood that I wanted them to follow me. I filed them onto the bus, got in the driver’s seat and headed northwest towards the Williamsburg Bridge. Once I was in Brooklyn, I headed North until I reached 12th Street, right around where Williamsburg starts to fade into Greenpoint. I pulled up at the Cathedral of the Transfiguration of Our Lord. I turned around towards the girls. “Everyone sit tight for a second, okay?” I said. I tried to mime the concept as best I could. I uncapped the marker and wrote on the cardboard “WE HAVE BEEN SEXULLY AND FYSICALLY ABUSED. WE DO NOT SPEAK ENGLISH BUT SOME OF US MAY SPEAK RUSSIAN. PLEASE DO NOT CALL THE POLICE OR WE WILL BE DEPORTED.”

Paulie and I herded the girls off of the bus and to the front of the building. I pushed open the door and hustled the girls inside, making sure not to enter the building myself. The blonde girl I’d tried to talk to was the last in; I stopped her and gave her the cardboard.

“Hold this,” I said. I made two fists and held them parallel at chest level. “Understand? Hold this, make sure the priest can see you.” I pointed to my eyes. I lightly pushed her in the door, then closed it. Paulie and I darted across the street, leaving the bus behind. We ran until we got to Bedford Avenue and took the train the rest of the way back to Manhattan.

By the time we got back to the Lower East Side, it was about 11 in the morning. My phone rang and it was a number from the 607 area code I didn’t recognize. “Hello?”
“Giuseppe.”

“Mr. Dellaponte! Good morning.”

“How are we doing on the Milazzo situation, ‘Seppe?”

“Uh, pretty good. I’ve made some calls, I have Nicholas- you remember Nicholas, Pleasant Avenue Nicky? – taking over for him. He’s a good earner.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about and I’m pretty sure you know that. What’s this I hear about him getting clipped for running girls?”

“I told you he got clipped. I called you right away.”
“You didn’t tell me about the girls.”
“Well, I didn’t think it was of major importance.”

The boss had one of those voices that sounds like a roar when it’s raised even slightly. “Your job is not to decide what’s of major importance, you fuck, and if you didn’t already know that you would have been dumped in a hole with your face blown off before your 20th birthday. Now, you might think it’s a pain in the ass making an appointment with me to tell me about something like that, Giuseppe, but I have earned the right to be a pain in the ass. Now, if you were completely uninvolved in this particular business venture, that means Russell wasn’t kicking up to you, which means you weren’t kicking up to me. Now if you- or he- want to do business without giving me my cut, you can make sparkly barrettes and sell ‘em over the fucking Internet. Starting this weekend, you’re coming up here every Saturday to give me an in-person update, and that goes for after this Milazzo situation is resolved too. If you ever blow me off, you die by Sunday morning, and I’m going to make sure that fucking pussy Nicky is the one who does it. You understand me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Have a nice day.” He hung up. Jesus. No good deed.

I headed to Rao’s for some lunch. I generally work out when I’m stressed, but sometimes a bit of the Old Country is the only thing for it.

I was just finishing up my panzanella when Paulie and Nicky came in and approached my table. “Sit!” I said. When they didn’t, I knew something was up.

Paulie spoke first. “That kid,” he said. “D’Annunzio. He’s a bagman, right?”

“William? Yeah, good kid.”

“So you vouch for him?” Nicky asked.

“What, like, to get made? Little early, don’t you think?”

“That’s not what I mean. You trust him?”

“Well, yeah. What’s this about?”

Paulie took a plastic baggie out of his jacket pocket. There was a small, black phone inside.

I tilted my head. “The fuck is that?”

“William was seen chucking that in a storm drain last night. He threw the battery in separately and it went all the way down, but the phone itself lodged between the floor and ceiling of the drain.”

I stared at the bag. “So we got no way of telling what he was using it for?”

Paulie sighed. “No, but really, Joe, how many things could it be?”

Entirely too much shit was happening at once. “Well, what the fuck does he know? I mean, it’s not like he’s sitting in on meetings. He’s way low-level.”
“Joey, that’s not the point and you know it,” Paulie said. “I know you like the kid. I’ll take care of it if you want.”

I shook my head. “I’ll take care of it. Thanks for letting me know.”

Will was shooting pool in Nolita when I found him. Poor kid wanted so badly to be a tough guy, but everything he knew about it he learned from the movies. I caught him just as he was leaving.

“Hey, Will, how long you been with me?” I asked him as he was about to speed past me.
He looked confused. “Uh, 3 and a half years, Mr. Cataldo, sir.”

“That long? GodDAMN,” I said. “Listen, what do you think about, uh, opportunity for advancement?”

He looked surprised and I hated myself even more. “I’d feel great about it, sir.”

“Well, listen, I got a package to run out to Staten Island tonight. Feel like driving?”

“Wow, yeah, definitely. When do you need me?”

“You got a car of your own?”

“Uh, no, not yet.”

“I’ll bring mine by your place around 8. See you then.”

Will didn’t talk much as we took I-78 towards the mid-Island area. As he flicked my high-beams on, I found myself thinking how out-of-place this whole area always looked. Willowbrook was heavily wooded; back when I was a kid, there was a home for retarded kids out here, and sometimes we’d sneak out on Halloween on dares, half-hoping and half-fearing some deformed, crazy ghost-boy would grab us and drag us down to hell. There was a big-ass expose on the local news in the mid-80s, a little while after I got too old for those kinds of stories, and I remember thinking, when I saw the footage of the kids drooling and crowded together in corners, wearing rags and sitting in their own piss, that this was much, much worse than the stories we told each other. I suddenly realized part of why the sight of the basement room shook me up so bad- it reminded me of the pictures of Willowbrook State School. The main road was starting to dwindle.

“Stop here,” I told Will. He parked, and we walked a little ways into the woods. “My guy’s gonna pick it up as soon as he sees us leave. He’s paranoid like that.”

“Okay,” Will said, and I could tell he was getting a little nervous.

We walked a little further until the moon and the stars were all we had to go on.

“Will,” I said, “You want to tell me why you dumped that phone in the sewer last night?”
“Huh?” he said. “Mr. Cataldo, I didn’t dump no phone. Who the fuck said I did?”

“Kid, come on,” I said. “There was a voicemail on it. They used your name.”

“Hey, that’s BULLSHIT!” he yelled, and the panic and anger in his voice rang through the trees. “There was no fuckin’ battery in…” I could see his face fall, even in the darkness. “Oh, fuck. Listen, Mr. C, it ain’t what you think. It’s…”

I sighed. “Just turn around for a second, Will.”

He shuddered. “Gimme just a second. Okay? Just a second.”

I did, and he rubbed his index fingers against his temples for a second, nodded and turned his head. I pulled the .22 from my waistband and double-tapped him at the base of the skull. Then I walked back to the car and took the shovel out of the trunk. Before I began digging, I fished out my phone. Reception was shit out here, unfortunately. I looked up the number for the hipster bar in Brooklyn and asked for Valery. A little while later, I heard that cartoony fucking accent on the other end. “Joey Cataldo, my great friend. How you doing?”

“I found him.”
“Who you found?”
“Guy who killed Russell Milazzo, like you told me to.”
“Really? Excellent. What his name?”

“Will D’Annunzio. He ran errands for me, I guess he got a little too big.”
Degtiarenko laughed. “I guess so, yes. Tell him come to see me.”

Aw, shit. “He’s… he’s already out of the picture, Mr. Degtiarenko.”

“Tsk tsk. I think this might be what you do, Mr. Cataldo. He is on plane to California, I bet.”

“Hey, are you fuckin’ calling me a liar?”

“Calm down, Mr. Cataldo. All you have to do is prove to me, yes? Bring me hand.”

I looked down at the body. “Excuse me?”

“Bring hand. Right or left. I take your word for it; even if it not your Mr. D’Annunzio, you care enough to go find somebody’s hand, I give you credit for trying so hard. Meet me tomorrow night and give it to me.” Click.

I stared down at the body as I felt a few drops of rain. I found a more-or-less flat rock, laid Will’s wrist across it, and lifted the shovel back behind my head.


Next Chapter: Chapter 3