Apaches - Lorenzo Carcaterra [39]
Calise turned into the room, stepped over Jimmy, and fired four .38-caliber rounds deep into the albino’s chest. The force slammed him against the wall, knife rattling to the floor. He slid down the side of the pink stucco wall, staining it with streaks of red.
The second dead man in the room.
“I hope that’s not your bowling arm,” Calise said to Pins, looking down at him between his legs.
Then before Pins could say “You’re all heart,” the bullet came out of Ramon’s .41 Remington Magnum and traveled into Calise’s brain at a speed of 1,300 feet per second. Calise fell into a heap, the smile on his face frozen in death, crashing down on top of Ryan.
Ryan felt the breath ease out of Calise’s body, his friend’s blood pouring down the side of his face and onto his bowling jacket. Pins looked beyond Calise and over at the narcs by the door, hearing them curse and then empty their chambers into Ramon’s white suit. He lifted his head and watched the dealer flip across the room, knocking over a chair and landing on top of a dinette table near the bar.
The man with the accent held his place next to the woman in the red pumps, his right arm still wrapped around her waist, his left hand holding a .32 short Colt to her head. The narcs and the detectives pointed guns and rifles at him.
“I walk out with her,” the man said. “Or I die with her.”
The man with the accent tightened his grip around the handle of the gun and swallowed hard. The cops around him held their aim. Pins stayed still, blood still pouring down on him from Calise’s wound.
Pins looked over at the woman in the red pumps. She ran a hand slowly up her leg, lifting the skirt until it showed the top of her stockings. Strapped to the sheer frill was a white-barreled .22 Remington Jet. The man with the accent was sweating. Wavering. He jiggled the gun nervously, moving it from the woman’s head to flash it menacingly at the cops lined up before him, then back to the woman. When he flashed his gun around the room a second time, the woman moved. She pulled out her gun, put it to the man’s head, and fired off two rounds.
He fell to her feet, dead.
The woman tossed the gun to the floor, bent down, picked up her jacket and blouse, and walked out the open door, well aware of her fellow cops’ stares.
Pins didn’t move from the carpeted floor, now darkened by his friend’s blood. He put his arms around the dead cop, still too afraid to let him go, waiting for the hard faces with the body bags to come take him away.
• • •
FOR PINS THERE were few friends. Women were there when he wanted them, which was not often and never for long. He didn’t sleep much and spent free nights roaming bowling alleys, looking for a fast game for quick cash, quietly excelling in a sport meant to be played alone. He had the house and the car to call his own. And he had the wires.
With his bugs in place, Pins could enter any number of private worlds and listen to the planned deceits of others, free from their treachery, exempt from the harm they sought to cause. It was the center of the safe world he had built from the rubble of youth.
He should have known it was not meant to last.
• • •
THE BUILDING WAS on the Upper West Side, in the high seventies, prewar, seven stories high, with an Otis elevator creaking up and down. Surveillance photos taken by an undercover unit scouting the area led them to believe that a three-bedroom unit on the sixth floor was being used to launder drug dollars. The apartment was always empty between nine A.M. and noon every day; the young couple renting it for $3,000 a month worked out at the Jack Lalanne on Broadway during that time. The undercovers needed Pins to drop a bug near the bed and a video camera somewhere close to the bureau.
It was less than an hour’s work.
Pins pressed the two dozen black buzzers dotting the entry wall, waiting for some frazzled tenant to ring him in.
He moved to the elevator, watched the thick black door slowly close, and leaned on the button that had the number six on it. Pins was dressed in jeans and a thick blue