Bruce DeSilva - Cliff Walk

“This is where it happened,” I said.

Sal just stood there for a moment, staring at where the ocean was supposed to be, but in this weather there was nothing to see. Then he bowed his head and prayed:

“God our Father, your power brings us to birth, your providence guides our lives, and by your command we return to-”

It was the kind of rain that muffles sound. I could barely hear the blasts from the foghorn at Castle Hill. Even without the rain, I doubt I could have distinguished between the smacking of the waves and the soft slap of sneakers on wet rock. I didn’t know he had come up behind us until I heard the first pop.

I spun toward the sound and saw a hand gripping a little nickel revolver. A thin brown finger squeezed the trigger, and the gun popped again.

Slugs fired from cheap little handguns are low-caliber and have a slow muzzle velocity. When they enter the back of a skull, they don’t come out the front. They just bounce around inside.

Sal crumpled.

The ex-SEAL dropped the funeral wreath and reached inside the flap of his raincoat.

I grabbed for Sal and missed.

A Glock 17 appeared in the ex-SEAL’s hand.

I reached for Sal again.

The Glock cracked, the muzzle flashing in the corner of my eye.

Sal toppled over the edge and vanished in the fog.

I reached for the.45 tucked in the small of my back, but it wasn’t there. It was miles away, hanging on my wall.

The Glock cracked again. The second shot blew the assassin off his feet, the little pistol sailing from his hand and clattering on the rocks. He landed in a broken heap at my feet, blood welling from a hole in his chest. A quarter of his skull was gone, but there was enough left for me to make the ID.

Dying hadn’t changed him all that much. Marcus Washington, King Felix’s sixteen-year-old gun hand, still had those flat, dead eyes.

The ex-SEAL tucked the Glock back inside his raincoat. “Dumb fuck,” he said. “If he’d shot me first, he could have iced all three of us, no problem.”

He kicked Marcus savagely with the toe of his boot. Then he unzipped his fly, straddled the corpse, and urinated on it.

I bent down, picked up the funeral wreath, and tossed it into the sea. I was reaching for my cell to dial 911 when the truth hit me with the force of a newspaper bundle heaved from the back of a delivery truck.

The Newport cops had some questions for me. Then Parisi wanted his turn. He drove me back to state police headquarters, tucked me away in an interrogation room, and kept me waiting for two hours before coming in to grill me. This time, he didn’t confiscate my cell phone; so while I was waiting I called Lomax and fed him details about the murder. When Parisi finally got to me, I answered all of his questions.

But I didn’t tell him everything.

By the time he finished with me, it was nearly midnight. I was famished and dead tired. The captain was kind enough to drive me home. I stepped inside my apartment, opened the refrigerator, and found a half quart of milk, two bottles of beer, and a block of cheddar cheese. The milk was sour, so I poured it down the sink. I couldn’t remember when I bought the cheese, but it was still yellow and I didn’t see anything growing on it. I gnawed the cheese standing up, washed it down with one of the beers, and took the second one into the bedroom. There, I stripped off my clothes and left them where they fell. Then I took my laptop and the beer to bed with me.

Could urine be tested for DNA? I didn’t know. I fired up the laptop and started searching for the answer.

When I awoke the next morning, the laptop was still on my belly, the screen dark and the battery dead. Somewhere, Don Henley was singing “Dirty Laundry.” For a moment, I thought it was coming from my neighbor’s apartment. Then I shook off the cobwebs, got out of bed, picked my jeans off the floor, and plucked the cell from the pocket.

“Mulligan.”

“Where the hell are you?” Lomax said. “It’s nearly ten, for chrissake.”

“I’m fine, thanks,” I said. “And how are you?”

“I don’t have time for pleasantries, Mulligan. Nice job last night, but I need you to get your ass in here to write Maniella’s obit.”

“I can do better than that,” I said. “Plan on a page one start with a half-page jump inside.”

Sunday morning, my long story was stripped across the top of page one:

Salvatore Alonso Maniella, 65, the reclusive Rhode Island pornographer who was murdered in Newport on Thursday, was more than he seemed.

Although he had no scruples about exploiting women for profit, he bore a deep antipathy toward anyone who sexually abused children, the result of a traumatic incident that occurred in his youth. For at least a decade, he secretly contributed millions of dollars to organizations that fought for missing and abused children and their families.

And there is mounting evidence that military-trained assassins in his employ routinely hunted down and killed pedophiles. Among their apparent victims: the three child pornographers who were shot to death in the Chad Brown housing project; a pedophile priest in Fon du Lac, Wis.; a child pornography collector in Edison, NJ; and Dr. Charles Bruce Wayne, the Brown University Medical School dean who had a similar taste in entertainment. All of those killings occurred in the last few months, but there could well have been others.

In a display of contempt, the killers often urinated on their victims, apparently unaware that urine contains traces of DNA that could be used to identify them…

Twenty minutes after the paper hit the streets, Jimmy Cagney’s voice screeched from my cell: “You’ll never take me alive, copper!”

“What the fuck ?”

“Morning, Captain.”

“How the hell did you figure all this out?”

“Remember when Maniella’s ex-SEALs trashed the Tongue and Groove ten years ago?”

“I heard about it, yeah.”

“When they were done, they pissed on the stripper poles.”

“Where’d you get that?”

“From a confidential source.”

“Going to tell me who?”

“No.”

“And the ex-SEAL who took out Maniella’s murderer urinated on the body,” he said.

“He did.”

“Sounds like you’re jumping to an awfully big conclusion.”

“There’s more.”

“What?”

“The Chad Brown murder scene stunk of urine,” I said, “and so did Dr. Wayne’s study.”

“We figured the victims evacuated when they got shot.”

“Maybe they did,” I said, “but they weren’t the only ones who pissed on your crime scenes.”

“I’ve already ordered DNA testing of the victims’ clothing,” he said. “That should tell us if you’re right.”

“I am.”

“Why didn’t you tell me about this when I questioned you Thursday night?”

“Maybe I just figured it out,” I said. “Or maybe it slipped my mind.”

“Why didn’t you give me a heads-up before the story hit the paper?”

“I guess that slipped my mind, too.”

“You really fucked me on this.”

“Bullshit. I solved the damn case for you.”

“Yeah, but the ex-SEALs are in the wind.”

“Maybe I’m okay with that,” I said.

“Well, I’m not.”

“What about King Felix?” I asked. “Can you put him away for Maniella’s murder?”

A five-second delay. “I doubt it. He claims Marcus Washington acted on his own, and the only one who could say different is on a slab in the morgue.”

“Think Felix was also behind Dante Puglisi’s murder?”

“I do,” he said, “but there’s no way to prove that, either.”