Apaches - Lorenzo Carcaterra [103]
Lucia lit a cigarette and walked out onto the sun-bleached deck, blowing a stream of smoke into the hot desert air. She sat down and placed her feet in the crystal-blue chlorinated water, calmer now than she had been since Albert called her with the news. She lifted her face to the sun and played the heist over in her mind as it was relayed to her.
Other than walking out with the baby, the thieves hadn’t stolen anything. They had washed two hundred thousand in cocaine down a sink without even a second’s hesitation. So it wasn’t money or drugs that piqued their interest. And they certainly didn’t need to shoot their way into a Queens apartment to steal a baby she had paid a hooker $600 for three months earlier.
No, there was a professional logic to the attack.
That meant it was personal.
Whoever it was, they were coming after Lucia and they weren’t being coy. They wanted her to know. Maybe they were backed by somebody bigger or maybe they were lone wolves out looking for a name to match the bravado. Or maybe it went even deeper.
Maybe someone Lucia had touched, a young girl perhaps, or the relative of a child, now wanted to touch her back.
It didn’t really matter to her. She would do all that she could to find them and erase them from sight. Lucia Carney was sitting on the crest of a six-hundred-million-dollar mountaintop and had come too far over too many long nights to let anybody throw her off.
The group that shot up the safe house had come out gunning for a battle.
Lucia was going to give them a war.
She tossed the cigarette into the clean pool, looked down at her reflection, and smiled, once again a happy woman.
The smell of death was in the air.
15
BOOMER LEANED THE back of his chair against the wall and watched Mrs. Columbo feed the baby a bottle of warm formula. The other Apaches sat around a table in the main dining room at Nunzio’s, nursing their drinks and replaying the actions of the night over in their minds.
“You look good with a baby in your arms,” Boomer said, smiling.
“It’s been a long time since I held one this close.”
She thought back to when Frankie was the same age as the baby she held, Joe following the two of them everywhere they went, armed with a smile and a camera. It was a happy time for all three, filled only with warm feelings. She wished they could someday get back to that.
Boomer held his smile and stared at Mrs. Columbo and the baby, thinking only about what might have been.
“You make the call to social services yet?” Geronimo asked.
“We don’t need social services.” Boomer answered the question without looking away from Mrs. Columbo, the baby serene and content in her arms.
“You sure as shit got a full plate planned out for us, Boomer,” Rev. Jim said. “We break a drug ring and we babysit. You can’t find a squad like us anywhere.”
“We look like a couple to you guys?” Boomer walked over to Mrs. Columbo and put his arm around her.
“A couple of what?” Pins asked, finishing off a glass of tap beer.
“I’d buy into it,” Dead-Eye said, understanding without being told what Boomer was really asking. “Married since high school, two other kids grown and out of the house, money a little short, and then, the last thing you need, a surprise baby.”
“Is that what you doormen do with all your days?” Rev. Jim asked him. “Watch soaps?”
“I work nights,” Dead-Eye said. “And I listen to the radio.”
“Me and the wife here got ourselves a kid we can’t afford,” Boomer said, walking slowly around the table. “We’re way low on cash and there’s no way we can keep him. But we wanna make sure our baby has a good home to grow up in and good people to raise him. So where do we go for something like that? Who we gonna turn to?”
“I’ll take Lucia for forty, Alex,” Rev. Jim said.
“Holy shit,” Pins said. “You guys are fuckin’ crazy.”
“Maybe,” Boomer said, stopping at the table between Geronimo and Pins. “But I don’t see it any other way.”
Mrs. Columbo instinctively held the baby tighter to her body. “Are