Apaches - Lorenzo Carcaterra [43]
Ray took the envelope with his free hand, stood up, put it in his pocket, and turned to look at Bobby.
“Forget the rest of the money,” Ray told him. “After tonight we’re even, you and me. You want any fresh shit, you hustle it someplace else. Anyplace but me. Deal?”
“Deal,” Bobby said, nodding his head. “Thanks, Ray. I appreciate it.”
Ray smiled at Bobby, turned back to Beatrice, grabbed her hair, and pulled it back with a hard snap, waiting until he saw her neckline under the glimmer of the overhead light.
He brought the blade down next to Beatrice’s throat, his eyes gleaming, a relaxed smile on his face. He ran the blade against her neck, one long cut from the edge of the left ear across to the bottom of her right jaw. He watched the blood gush out in thick rolls and held on to her hair until he saw the life float from her body. He watched Beatrice slump down the side of the park bench.
Ray Monte cleaned the sides of the knife against his victim’s coat, snapped it closed, and walked off into the night.
“My pleasure,” Ray said to Bobby, leaving the young boy with his dying mother.
Bobby cradled Beatrice in his arms, letting her blood flow over him. He didn’t cry, didn’t speak, just held her close, head against her heart, rocking slowly back and forth. He hadn’t touched her in years and couldn’t remember the last time he told her he loved her. And yet he knew she would forgive him anything, even her own death.
He put his head down against the side of hers, his lips close to her ears and whispered the words to “Partira,” the Italian ballad she had sung him to sleep with when he was a little boy.
They stayed that way until the dawn broke and the police arrived.
• • •
BOBBY SCARPONI BURIED his drug habit alongside his mother. He stayed clear of the streets and worked hard in school. He fought off the nighttime urges when he hungered for a needle bubbling with heroin, for an escape from the life around him.
He lived with his father in a silent house. Albert Scarponi said good-bye to the only woman he ever loved, then turned his back on his only child. They shared a home but never spoke, the older man living quietly with his grief and anger, unable to forgive Bobby for leading his mother into the path of a dealer’s knife. Albert’s hatred was further fueled by his son’s refusal to identify his mother’s killer.
Ray Monte had walked free.
“Don’t get any ideas about doing this on your own, Bobby,” one of the detectives told him. “He’ll kill you just like he did your mom.”
“The dealer didn’t kill my wife,” Albert said, looking up at the detective. “He only held the knife. She was brought there by her son. Her own blood.”
“You get a change of heart,” the other detective told Bobby, placing a card in the napkin holder in the center of the table, “give us a call. Day or night.”
The two detectives left through the back door of the wood-shingled house, leaving Albert and Bobby Scarponi behind, alone in their two separate worlds.
• • •
FROM THEN ON, Bobby Scarponi kept track of Ray Monte.
He would see him occasionally walking the streets of his Queens neighborhood, drinking coffee and pushing drugs, never far from a new car with a running engine. Bobby finished a two-year army tour while Ray sat out the calendar in a Comstock cell, doing three to five on an assault charge. They were discharged two weeks apart.
Ray Monte returned to the streets, ready to move back into the prime arena of the drug trade. He teamed up with an Irish crew working out of Forest Hills and set up shop on 168th Street in Jamaica, handling heroin and cocaine for the posses wresting control of the drug action from the old-time Italians. He took a cut from all the pot and illegal prescription sales generated in the area, and contracted out members of his outfit for hits on anyone who objected.
And he never carried a gun. Only a knife.
• • •
BOBBY SCARPONI SAT across the desk from a detective with a long scar across his face, its edges brushing the lid of his right eye. The detective lit a cigarette