Robert Tanenbaum - Act of Revenge

“Oh, Jesus!” said Marlene, and then, “Butch, I got to go now.”

He yelled her name a couple of times into an instrument unmistakably dead and, slamming it down, cursed fervently to the unsympathetic heavens. Then, being a good, even a model, citizen he dialed 911 and called in the shots fired and gave the address of the East Village Women’s Shelter.

Marlene dropped the phone, leaped up, and made for the door of Mattie Duran’s tiny office, where she was knocked back against a filing cabinet by the incoming proprietor, who did not interrupt her violent Spanish cursing to make an apology. The woman raced to her desk, leaned over it, jerked open a drawer, and came away with her family heirloom, a Colt Peacemaker.44 caliber revolver, like the ones cowboys shoot in the movies, but this one was real and it worked. More shots sounded; above, a child began to shriek in terror. Marlene got out a feeble “Hey, wha-” but Mattie had already gone off at a run, the sound of her steps echoing in the narrow hallway. Marlene ran after her, unlimbering her own weapon, yelling for Mattie to for chrissake wait up.

A nice little firefight was under way in the shelter’s reception room. Marlene could not see anything much because Mattie had halted in the doorway, but she could hear the sound of a heavy pistol firing and the snap and thunk of bullets flying and striking the walls and floors and furniture. A man was yelling obscenities in the entrance hallway, beyond the door with the glass window, now shattered. Mattie raised the big Colt and took aim.

Marlene felt the rage rise in her; these morons , and Mattie Duran not the least of them, were going to keep shooting until someone was dead or a stray round traveled up into the building and struck some kid. Unlike most people, Marlene when enraged did not start shaking and doing irrational things. Instead she became preternaturally cool, steady, and calculating. Scholars who study men in combat have discovered that this anomalous condition is present in about two percent of soldiers, who make up the vast majority of both heroes and the perpetrators of atrocity. An odd gift to bestow on a Sacred Heart girl from Queens, but there it was, and Marlene used it now, first throwing a solid body check into Mattie, knocking her against the door frame and, not incidentally, ruining her aim. The Colt boomed in Marlene’s ear, deafening her. Then she was past Mattie and into the anteroom. Vonda the guard, she noted in passing, was crouched behind the thin protection of her steel desk, her face a ghastly greenish-tan, trying to clear the round jammed in her shotgun, while confronting her from the doorway were two obvious Mafiosi, one shooting, the other crouched low, changing magazines on a large chromed pistol. Marlene strode directly up to the two amazed men, firing rapidly, every shot finding its mark in a disabling but non-lethal place, the guy on the left going down with two through the shoulder and one through the other bicep (his gun rattling onto the floor) and the second taking a bullet through his raised kneecap; he went over like a ninepin, howling. Marlene kept moving, kicking their guns out of reach, passing the shattered inner door and up to the shouting man in the hallway.

This, as she had expected, was Little Sally Bollano, singing an aria in which the words cunt, fucking, stupid , and bitch appeared repeatedly in uninteresting combinations. Little Sally was locked from behind in the embrace of an enormous neckless man who filled the hallway like a cork in a bottle. This was Lorenzo Mona, Larry Moon as he was known, the Bollanos’ leg breaker and Little Sally’s personal bodyguard. Marlene read confusion and dismay on the vast, lumpy face: he couldn’t let the boss proceed farther toward what had become a free-fire zone, nor did he have the gumption to roll the little shit under one arm like a newspaper and carry him out of there. Marlene attempted to resolve his confusion by pointing her smoking nine at Little Sally’s low forehead. “Out! Get him out of here!” she shouted. This had the effect of redirecting Little Sally’s attention from the absent wife to the woman just in front of him, and he launched his signature fucking, stupid, cunt, and bitch at Marlene, together with a shower of fine spittle. He seemed not to notice the gun pointed at him, and on closer examination Marlene could see why: his dark pupils were contracted to the size of elementary particles. As per his rep, Little Sally had medicated himself before attempting a complex mission, with the usual result.

While Marlene considered her next move, whatever it would have been was preempted by the sound of thumping feet and shouts of “Freeze! Freeze!” Marlene looked around Lenny Moon’s bulk to see the face of a terrified young cop. He was pointing his.38, perhaps for the first time in real life, at her in the approved two-handed grip, and she saw with remarkable clarity that it was cocked and that the hands that held it were trembling. She would have been happy to freeze, but the cop changed his tune to “Drop that fucking gun! Now! Now!” She could see his finger tightening on the trigger, the knuckle turning white. Make up your mind, sonny, was her thought, and also, oh fuck, what a stupid exit, shot by an infant cop, at which moment Lenny Moon, straining to look over his shoulder at this new source of potential danger to his charge, relaxed slightly his grip, whereupon Little Sally got an arm free and sucker-punched Marlene in the jaw.

It was a good solid shot: Marlene saw the familiar blazing lights and fell to the floor, where Little Sally connected with a couple of hard kicks to the side of her skull. After that she saw through pain-fed mists an impossible number of dark blue-clad legs towering above black, thick-soled shoes, and felt herself frisked and rolled, and cuffed. She heard shouts and more rude language. She blacked out momentarily, relaxing into the puddle of warm blood that had gushed from her bitten lip and tongue, and the next thing she was aware of was being hustled out by a couple of cops and tossed into the rear of a blue-and-white (of which there seemed to be unreasonably many on the street in front of the shelter), the driver of same complaining that the bitch was going to bleed all over his vehicle, until an authoritative voice told him to shut the fuck up, Chapman, and he got in and drove off. Marlene lay back in the cool, disinfectant-smelling plastic, and gladly abandoned all responsibility for herself and others, which is one of the very few pleasant features of being arrested.

When his wife got into violent-felony trouble in the County of New York, which she did more frequently than your regular Smith College, Yale Law grad, Karp naturally had to recuse himself from any involvement in the procedural aspects of the case. He interpreted this, however, as not forbidding the conveyance to him of information about her fate from various sources, for it is no fault to keep one’s ears open; God, after all, did not provide us with earlids, and the criminal justice system was chock full of people in the know who wanted to do the chief assistant D.A. a favor. Thus he learned in short order what had gone down at the EVWS, that his spouse had shot two Mafia soldiers and had been written up for assault in the first degree, that she had been punched out, that Little Sally’s wife, Vivian Fein Bollano, was a shelter resident, that Little Sally and his three fuglemen were in custody on a variety of serious charges, and that the bunch of them, including Mattie Duran, were in the cells at the Ninth Precinct waiting for transport to central booking.

Replacing the phone after the last of several informative phone calls, Karp swiveled around in his big leather chair and stared out the window. He placed a pencil in his mouth and tapped out the rhythm of “Yellow Rose of Texas” between his upper and lower teeth with plenty of grace notes, as his mind drifted like a hang glider through the twisted canyons of the present situation. After four choruses he re-swiveled, stuck the pencil behind his ear, and picked up the phone.