John Connolly - Every Dead Thing

On this occasion, that tension was no longer present. Instead, I felt for the first time the strength of the bond of friendship that had somehow grown between Angel and me. More than that, from both of them I felt a sense of concern, of regret, of humanity, of trust. They would not be here, I knew, if they felt otherwise.

But maybe there was something more, something I had only begun to perceive. I was a cop’s nightmare. Cops, their families, their wives and children, are untouchables. You have to be crazy to go after a cop, crazier still to take out his loved ones. These are the assumptions we live by, the belief that after a day spent looking at the dead, questioning thieves and rapists, pushers and pimps, we can return to our own lives, knowing that our families are somehow apart from all this, and that through them we can remain apart from it too.

But that belief system had been shaken by the deaths of Jennifer and Susan. Someone wasn’t respecting the rules, and when no easy answer was forthcoming, when no perp with a grudge could conveniently be apprehended, enabling all that had taken place to be explained away, another reason had to be found: I had somehow drawn it on myself, and on those closest to me. I was a good cop who was well on the way to becoming a drunk. I was falling apart and that made me weak, and someone had exploited that weakness. Other cops looked at me and they saw not a fellow officer in need, but a source of infection, of corruption. No one was sorry to see me go, maybe not even Walter.

And yet what had taken place had somehow brought me closer to both Angel and Louis. They had no illusions about the world in which they lived, no philosophical constructions that allowed them to be at once a part of, and apart from, that world. Louis was a killer: he couldn’t afford delusions of that kind. Because of the closeness of the bond that existed between them, Angel couldn’t afford those delusions either. Now they had also been taken away from me, like scales falling from my eyes, leaving me to reestablish myself, to find a new place in the world.

Angel picked up an abandoned paper from the booth next door and glanced at the headline. “You see this?” I looked and nodded. A guy had tried to pull some heroic stunt during a bank raid in Flushing earlier in the day and ended up with both barrels of a sawed-off emptied into him. The papers and news bulletins were full of it.

“Here’s some guys out doin’ a job,” began Angel. “They don’t want to hurt nobody, they just want to go in, take the money-which is insured anyway, so what does the bank care?-and get out again. They only got the guns ’cause no one’s gonna take them seriously otherwise. What else they gonna use? Harsh words?

“But there’s always gotta be some asshole who thinks he’s immortal ’cause he’s not dead yet. This guy, he’s young, keeps himself in good condition, thinks he’s gonna get more pussy than Long Dong Silver if he busts up the bank raid and saves the day. Look at him: realtor, twenty-nine, single, pulling down one-fifty a year, and he gets a hole blown in him bigger’n the Holland Tunnel. Lance Petersen.” He shook his head in wonderment. “I never met anyone called Lance in my whole life.”

“That’s ’cause they all dead,” said Louis, glancing seemingly idly around the room. “Fuckers keep standing up in banks and getting shot. Guy was probably the last Lance left alive.”

The clubs arrived and Angel started eating. He was the only one who did. “So how you doin’?”

“Okay,” I said. “Why the ambush?”

“You don’t write, you don’t call.” He smiled wryly. Louis glanced at me with mild interest and then returned his attention to the door, the other tables, the doors to the restrooms.

“You been doin’ some work for Benny Low, I hear. What you doin’ working for that fat piece of shit?”

“Passing time.”

“You want to pass time, stick pins in your eyes. Benny’s just using up good air.”

“Come on, Angel, get to it. You’re rattling away and Louis here is acting like he expects the Dillinger gang to walk in and spray the counter.”

Angel put down his half-eaten section of club and dabbed almost daintily at his mouth with a napkin. “I hear you’ve been asking after some girlfriend of Stephen Barton’s. Some people are very curious to know why that might be.”

“Such as?”

“Such as Bobby Sciorra, I hear.”

I didn’t know if Bobby Sciorra was psychotic or not, but he was a man who liked killing and had found a willing employer in old man Ferrera. Emo Ellison could testify to the likely result of Bobby Sciorra taking an interest in one’s activities. I had a suspicion that Ollie Watts, in his final moments, had found that out as well.

“Benny Low was talking about some kind of trouble between the old man and Sonny,” I said. “ ‘Fuckin’ goombas fighting among themselves’ was how he put it.”

“Benny always was a diplomat,” said Angel. “Only surprise is the UN didn’t pick up on him before now. There’s something weird going on there. Sonny’s gone to ground and taken Pili with him. No one’s seen them, no one knows where they are, but Bobby Sciorra’s looking real hard for all of them.” He took another huge bite of his sandwich. “What about Barton?”

“I figure he’s gone underground too, but I don’t know. He’s minor league and wouldn’t have much to do professionally with Sonny or the old man beyond some muling, though he may once have been close to Sonny. May be nothing to it. Barton may not be connected.”

“Maybe not, but you’ve got bigger problems than finding Barton or his girl.”

I waited.

“There’s a hit out on you.”

“Who?”

“It’s not local. It’s out of town. Louis don’t know who.”

“Is it over the Fat Ollie thing?”

“I don’t know. Even Sonny isn’t such a moron that he’d put a contract out over some hired gun who got himself wasted ’cause you stepped in. The kid didn’t mean anything to anyone and Fat Ollie’s dead. All I know is you’re irritating two generations of the Ferrera family and that can’t be good.”

Walter Cole’s favor was turning into something more complicated than a missing persons case, if it was ever that simple.

“I’ve got one for you,” I said. “Know anyone with a gun that can punch holes through masonry with a five-point-seven-millimeter bullet weighing less than fifty grains? Sub-machine rounds.”

“You gotta be fuckin’ kidding. Last time I saw something like that it was hangin’ on top of a tank turret.”

“Well, that’s what killed the shooter. I saw him blown away and there was a hole knocked through the wall behind me. The gun’s Belgian made, designed for antiterrorist police. Someone local picked up a piece of hardware like that and took it to the range, it’s gotta get around.”

“I’ll ask,” said Angel. “Any guesses?”

“My guess would be Bobby Sciorra.”

“Mine too. So why would he be cleaning up after Sonny’s mess?”

“The old man told him to.”

Angel nodded. “Watch your back, Bird.”

He finished his sandwich and then stood to go. “C’mon. We can give you a ride.”

“No, I want to walk for a while.”

Angel shrugged. “You packing?”

I nodded. He said he’d be in touch. I left them at the door. As I walked, I was conscious of the weight of the gun beneath my arm, of every face I passed in the crowd, and of the dark pulse of the city throbbing beneath my feet.

BOBBY SCIORRA: a malevolent demon, a vision of ferocity and sadism that had appeared before the old man, Stefano Ferrera, when he was on the verge of insanity and death. Sciorra seemed to have been conjured up from some bleak corner of Hell by the old man’s anger and grief, a physical manifestation of the torture and destruction he wished to inflict on the world around him. In Bobby Sciorra he found the perfect instrument of pain and ugly death.