Richard Montanari - The Killing Room

‘Thanks for coming, Vince.’

‘Any time, brother.’

The waitress brought Vincent’s beer, and a second Bushmills for Byrne. The two men clinked glasses.

‘ Slainte ,’ Byrne said.

‘Better days,’ Vincent said. He sipped from his beer, put it down, interlaced his fingers. ‘How can I help?’

Byrne glanced around at the other patrons. They were mostly cops, but even so he had to be careful with what he had to say. ‘You know a dealer named DeRon Wilson?’

‘ Know him? We’ve been trying to bury that motherfucker for five years.’

‘You heard about my little problem on the news?’

‘I did.’

Byrne told him the specifics, including the detail that it was Wilson he had braced.

‘I had no idea it was him,’ Vincent said. ‘Sorry to hear you’re jammed up over that piece of shit.’

‘Thanks.’

‘What do you need?’

Byrne lowered his voice. ‘I need to find him.’

Vincent Balzano was a veteran detective, not only of the streets, but specifically North Philadelphia. If you were a narcotics cop, there were few places in the country tougher to work.

‘I’m not going to ask you why, but I need to know what I’m calling in,’ Vincent said.

‘I understand.’

Byrne told Vincent about Gabriel Hightower. He showed him the picture on his cell phone.

Vincent took a few seconds to rein back his anger. He drained his beer. ‘I know all of his KAs, but I don’t think they’re going to give him up,’ he said. ‘He’s got a few stash houses, though. Let me make a call.’

Vincent took his cell from his jeans, stepped out of the bar. Five minutes later he was back. He didn’t sit down. ‘Nobody’s saying where DeRon is holed up, but I reached out to a detective in North. He said he thinks DeRon has been staying with his girlfriend. He’s got triplets with her.’

‘ Jesus . There’s three more of him?’

Vincent laughed. ‘I think they’re girls. Word is this girlfriend lives in Juniata Park, but nobody knows exactly where. The good news is that DeRon’s brother Carter is going to make a drop tonight.’

‘Do we know where?’

‘I’m waiting on that text right now.’

‘And this Carter is going to give his brother up?’

‘Carter likes to pose, but he’s no hardass,’ Vincent said. ‘If we find him, I’ll turn him.’

Byrne downed his shot, looked over both shoulders. Even though there was no one in earshot, he still lowered his voice. ‘You might need to go off the reservation here, Vince.’

‘How far off?’

‘Like, maybe, Cleveland.’

Vincent’s phone buzzed. He checked the text, zipped his jacket, grabbed his car keys, and said, ‘I’ve always liked Cleveland this time of year. Let’s do this thing.’

Shane Adams sat watching the two women in the car, his heart racing.

He had changed the tire in short order — he had learned to change a tire as a boy out of necessity, his mother didn’t know a lug wrench from a pipe wrench — and was back on the road in fifteen minutes.

He had to hand it to Detective Balzano. She was sharp. He should have known that he was getting played. He had spent only an hour or so going through the trash behind their rowhouse in South Philly. He knew that both Jessica and her husband Vincent were cops, which meant that there were probably a half-dozen weapons in the house, and he didn’t fancy getting shot to death in a pile of garbage.

He did learn a few things from Jessica Balzano’s trash. He learned that Jessica’s daughter went to Sacred Heart of Jesus, and he had hoped this might be a point of entry for him. He’d found the picture of an eight-year-old in someone’s trash a year earlier, having no idea if or how he was going to use it. He’d then found a picture of Sacred Heart online and, with a little bit of effort, was able to PhotoShop the girl in front of it. It was a passable ruse behind the scuffed plastic laminate in his wallet.

Or maybe not. It seemed the detective had made him from the start.

She would not give him the slip again.

Shane had been doing things like this — shadowing cops, politicians, judges — his entire career. Although it wasn’t technically illegal, he was walking the thin line between journalism — or at least what passed for journalism these days — and interfering with a criminal investigation.

But, as the saying went, it was easier to get forgiveness than it was to get permission.

The streets around this part of North Philly were mostly empty at this hour. The occasional car passed by. Each time Shane lowered himself slightly in the seat. Just because the two detectives in the car a block ahead of him were facing the other way didn’t mean they couldn’t see what was happening around the area. Shane Adams was pretty good at covert surveillance, but cops, especially homicide cops, were experts.

St Simeon’s. He looked it up on his smart phone, but couldn’t find much information about it, except that it had been closed for a long time.

Shane lifted the opera glasses, scanned the area. Nothing moving. The two detectives were just sitting, watching the church. It was mind-numbingly boring work, but he knew they were watching the church because they thought something might happen there. The very idea was intoxicating.

Shane Adams was actually at a crime scene before the fact.

He could barely breathe. In fact, he had left the station so quickly, following the two detectives, he had forgotten to stop for food. And he had most definitely forgotten to take a leak. Ten cups of coffee without a pit stop.

He checked the immediate area. He saw no one. He eased open his door, ran around the back of his car, then a few feet into an alleyway between a burned-out rowhouse and a closed rib shack. He unzippered, and relieved himself.

Before emerging from the alley he looked both ways. No traffic. The two detectives were still silhouetted in their car up the street. In his earpiece he heard no new police-scanner activity.

He crouched low, circled his car, slipped inside. Nothing like the pause that refreshes, he thought. He felt a million percent better.

Except that he was starving. He reached over, opened the glove compartment. There he found a half-dozen unpaid tickets, the car’s owner’s manual, a pair of nail clippers. Clippers were an essential part of the reporter’s tool kit. If you gripped a microphone on camera, your nails mattered. Shane was hoping for a stale protein bar, a half-eaten bag of pork rinds, something.

Maybe in the backseat, he thought. Sometimes he left half-eaten Subway sandwiches when a story called. He got up on his knees, spun around.

And came face to face with a killer.

‘Shane Adams reporting,’ the killer said with a smile.

Shane felt a pinprick on the side of his neck. It felt exactly like the time he had been hit with a pellet from a BB gun when he was six years old. But this was no BB. Within seconds he felt his legs fail him, then his arms.

As the warmth spread over him, through him, he felt the waters of the Ohio River, heard his mother’s voice calling him to supper. But it wasn’t his mother’s stern voice, it was the darkness itself beckoning with a final call:

‘It seems you have one more story to tell.’

The building was a twenty-four-story high-rise near the corner of Fourth and Washington. It was one of the few remaining old high-rise buildings in the area. It had recently been converted into a senior living facility. On the way over, Vincent explained to Byrne that one of DeRon Wilson’s dodges was to use the place as a stash house. He said Wilson’s grandmother had passed away in 2009, but Wilson kept the place.