Apaches - Lorenzo Carcaterra [70]
“Give the uniforms your statement,” Boomer said. “I’ll call in from the hospital to back it up. Then we’ll take it all from there.”
“I’ll tell ’em what I saw,” Malcolm said, his upper body starting to shiver. “Swear to God, tell ’em everything. Unless you let me go. Now.”
“Look down at that big hole in Junior’s head,” Dead-Eye said to Malcolm, turning his back on him long enough to close the door behind Boomer and the little girl in his arms. “Then remember I’ve still got five more bullets in my gun.”
Dead-Eye rested his back against a far wall, his legs stretched out, arms folded across his chest. In the distance, he heard police sirens drawing closer.
“I don’t see you puttin’ down a brother,” Malcolm said. “You don’t look the type to kill your own blood.”
Dead-Eye pushed himself away from the wall, the siren wails growing louder, and headed straight for Malcolm. He pulled the gun from his holster, cocked it, and jammed it right under the naked man’s chin.
“We don’t have the same blood,” Dead-Eye said, barely moving his lips, shoving the gun in harder against the fleshy part of Malcolm’s jaw. “And, believe me, I would kill any brother who was scum like you. Even my own.”
He pulled the gun away, stepped over Junior’s body, and walked to the apartment door. He opened the door, leaned his shoulder against the cracked hinges, rested his head on the wood, and stared up at a bare bulb hanging from a ceiling wire.
A cop waiting to be rescued.
9
BOOMER SAT AT his usual corner table at Nunzio’s, hovering over a large bowl of penne with pesto. Across from him, Dead-Eye quietly cut into a thick char-broiled veal chop. Nunzio Goldman watched as they both ate, his back to a closed window, a large glass of red wine in front of him.
Nunzio knew his two friends had been through an ordeal these past few days. He could read it in their faces. Reading people was one of the things that came as second nature to Nunzio Goldman. He had spent his life on both sides of the law and managed to avoid any problems from either end. The good cops, like Boomer and Dead-Eye, trusted him. They knew that bets came in steady over his phone and that the sporting spreads for the Upper West Side were set behind his bar, but that kind of action didn’t interest them. Boomer’s mother bet a dollar on a number every day of her life, even hit one on a few occasions. Dead-Eye’s father had ten dollars riding every week on his beloved Giants during football season, with or without points. It didn’t make it right, it just didn’t make it a crime, not in their eyes. Not when off-track betting in New York State was legal, enticing people as easily as any street hustler to lay down money they could ill afford to lose. To Boomer and Dead-Eye’s way of thinking, they were all bookies.
Dirty cops periodically tried to shake Nunzio down and were always sent away empty-handed. Nunzio made it his business to get as much information on them as could be dug up. If they were too dirty for his hands, he passed the folders on to the right people. If they were just looking to do some light skimming, he told the cops what he knew about their business and threw down a simple choice—either disappear from his line of vision or prepare to deal with Internal Affairs.
In Nunzio’s world there was no black and white, only shades of gray, and he lived with ease within that cloudy area. He was a criminal who hated drugs and all that their sale embodied, but was comfortable in the company of hired killers who contracted out murders as easily as he sliced off strips of prosciutto. He ran an honest restaurant, treating customers with respect and serving only the finest foods he could afford. At the same time, he and his accountant devoted hours to cooking the books, keeping two sets of ledgers, reporting only the false set to the Internal Revenue Service. In the midst of a complicated universe, Nunzio Goldman kept his life and his ways as simple as he could