Apaches - Lorenzo Carcaterra [98]
There would be no party for Malcolm Juniper.
Nothing to celebrate. No hooker to stroke and torment through the long night. No big check to cash. No more innocent blood to shed.
Malcolm’s journey was at an end.
The man in black closed the door behind him and locked it. The click of the cylinder caused Malcolm’s eyes to flutter.
It was now only a matter of time.
The anguished cries of innocent children who suffered under Malcolm Juniper’s crazed urges would finally be brought to an end.
They would be avenged.
BOOK THREE
Beat the drums of tragedy for me,
Beat the drums of tragedy and death.
And let the choir sing a stormy song
To drown the rattle of my dying breath.
Beat the drums of tragedy for me,
And let the white violins whir thin and slow,
But blow one blaring trumpet note of sun
To go with me to the darkness where I go.
—Langston Hughes,
“Fantasy in Purple”
14
April 17, 1982
THE NAKED BABY was placed on a thick white bath towel in the center of the kitchen table, under a large overhead light. Two men hovered over him, both wearing translucent surgical gloves, one gripping an eight-inch butcher knife. Behind these men were two others, standing by the kitchen counter, taping and sealing small packets of cocaine from the kilo sacks resting inside a dry aluminum sink. The rest of the four-room second-floor apartment was a blanket of darkness, the back bedroom windows half open, letting in a soft spring breeze. A portable radio nestled near the baby and lodged against a napkin holder was tuned to an all-news station.
Outside, the narrow Queens street was silent and still, leaves on the trees still damp from a late afternoon shower. Cars were parked tightly on both sides, alarms armed, tires turned in curbside. All were empty except for two, which were parked directly in front of the building.
A middle-aged man sat upright in the lead car, a black four-door Buick LeSabre, smoking a thin cigar, windows rolled up tight. Periodically, the man checked both his watch and the safety on a 9 millimeter jammed inside the spine of the passenger seat. He was nervous and edgy, concerned that the people at work in the apartment above were leaving him little margin for error. He had chewed the lip of his cigar down to the quick, the smoke from its tip engulfing him in small circles. He was new to the country and even newer to a line of work that could easily end with a bullet to the head or a long prison sentence in a state with a name he couldn’t pronounce.
The money made it worth the risk.
Three hundred in cash to drive a mule and a baby to the airport, another two hundred to gas the car and wait in the parking lot for the next pickup, and a final three hundred to wrap up the round trip. Eight hundred cash in less than four hours, three nights a week. Tack that on to the thousand-dollar salary he pulled in working for a private car service on Long Island, and Gregor Stavlav, less than three months in the States and a wanted man in his native Greece, found himself smack in the middle of an American dream.
The car parked behind Gregor was dented, rusty, and dirty. He had given it a quick glance in his rearview mirror, then shrugged it off. It was the kind of car a student working his way through school, or a small-timer years past any chance at a score, might own. It was not the kind of car a man with money would be seen in, let alone call his own.
And it was definitely not a cop car.
That much Gregor, who prided himself on his knowledge of cars and the people who drove them, knew.
He would bet his life on it.
• • •
REV. JIM LOVED his seven-year-old AMC Gremlin, loved the way it handled, even liked the way it looked. He took pride in the polished full-leather interior he had custom made at discount by a friend in Washington Heights and wasn’t all that concerned by the ruined condition of the outer body. It was, for him, the perfect car.
He was stretched out across the