Apaches - Lorenzo Carcaterra [80]
She walked out of the house, leaving three crinkled hundred-dollar bills on the doctor’s desk, blood still running down her legs, not answering Travis’s apologetic pleas. Her mind forced her body to stride forward and ignore the growing pain that had replaced the curled fetus. Lucia had learned at the earliest age not to cry at the hurt life threw down a person’s path, and she did not shed any tears on this night. Instead, she found solace in thoughts of revenge.
Harry found her sprawled face down in the backyard of their house and rushed her to a nearby clinic that excelled at asking few questions. A three-day stay was all it took to heal the external wounds, stop the hemorrhaging, reduce the fever, and quell the infection.
Lucia smiled and kept her focus on the half-empty IV dripping into her arm as she listened to the soft words of a concerned intern tell her she could never have children. She was warmed by the knowledge that at that moment Dr. Ranyon B. Travis, who once headed the OB-GYN wing of a northern Chicago hospital, was hanging from a back alley wall, two thick tire chains wrapped around his hands, his mouth sealed, and his eyes stapled open, being stomach-gutted by the sharp end of Terry’s bowie knife. The pain was so intense Dr. Travis chewed off his tongue in the minutes before he died.
Lucia was spending a long weekend in New Orleans in the summer of 1966, looking once again to expand her drug operations, when she met Carlo Porfino sitting by himself at the back table of her friend Anna Cortese’s blues bar. She joined him for a drink and then for the night. By midafternoon the next day, Lucia had found her second husband and a fast route out of Kentucky.
Carlo Porfino had affiliations with both the New Orleans and Chicago mobs and was moving heavy quantities of everything imaginable. He was the opposite of Harry in all respects and was not shy about flashing the cash to show Lucia a good time. He also learned quickly in their relationship that she was more than a bar pickup. She had a knack for the drug business, combining a natural ability to make people want to work for her with a ruthlessness that was often necessary in the powder game.
While eager to expand into new territories, Lucia was reluctant to give up what she had built back in Kentucky and Ohio. She turned Carlo’s initial indifference into enthusiasm when she told him about the $100,000 a month Harry and Terry were taking in without having totally exploited the burgeoning market. She and Carlo cut a deal. Lucia would get 25 percent of all the Midwest action, plus an additional 10 percent of his southern end, in return for overseeing the operations from her new base in New Orleans. It was a deal a woman like Lucia would never pass up.
She and Carlo were married on the afternoon of July 27, 1967, in a small chapel overlooking a pre–Civil War cemetery. On that same day, Kentucky police found Harry Corain’s electrocuted body floating face down in a cast-iron tub, his left arm amputated at the shoulder and hanging loose off the side. He was less than ten feet from his baby brother, Terry, who had taken three Magnum hits to the head, his bowie knife still clutched in his right hand.
Lucia was twenty-three years old and well on her way toward stashing away her first million. She had laid the foundation for a national drug network that in fifteen years and one more husband would blossom into an empire that reached into forty-six states and eight foreign countries. By the time she was standing in the large, airy kitchen in Sedona, Arizona, Lucia Carney was feeding four hundred million a year into the coffers of the international drug cartels and organized crime families that relied on her for safe delivery of their cocaine and guaranteed transfer of funds.
She was their cocaine queen, a beautiful woman with a luscious smile and a cold heart. They called her the Dragon, since she had a tattoo of a small black one breathing flames stenciled over her right shoulder blade, a birthday gift years earlier