Ed Dee - The Con Man's Daughter

"On the bed, I told you, waiting for me to fuck her again."

Eddie fired; the muzzle illuminated the dark corner of the parking lot. Sergei grunted, blew air out through his nose. The bullet had ripped through the upper leather and exited the sole, a jagged, nearly round hole. At least one toe was gone. Sergei growled in Russian, his face shining now with sweat.

"Where did you last see her?"

"On my Russian dick," he said, his voice gravelly, coming from deep inside him.

Eddie fired again. Son of a bitch, he thought, this isn't helping anything. But the scumbag in his trunk deserved everything coming to him. Next, I'll shoot his Russian dick off, see how tough he is. Why these bastards play this game, I'll never know. It must be something in the way they live-something horrible-that makes them care so little about life. Live or die, it's all the same to them as long as they're big men. "Russian ego," Lukin had said, "is their downfall."

"So this is what makes a Russian a man," Eddie said. "Raping a little girl like my daughter, only twelve years old."

"Old enough to bleed, old enough for butcher," he said. "I like young ones, virgins like your daughter."

"I bet you loved her straight black hair," Eddie said.

"I wipe my ass with her black hair," Sergei said.

Sergei knew nothing about Kate, beyond the fact she'd been kidnapped. Stupid son of a bitch, why didn't he just admit he didn't know where she was? It was more important to him to play the Russian tough guy. Screw him. Eddie put the gun back in the holster. He had to get out before someone called the cops. He'd wasted hours tracking Sergei Zhukov, and it had taken only five minutes to discover he'd abducted an idiot. Psycho bastard. They were all psychos. He rewrapped Sergei's mouth, not sparing the duct tape. He poured the bottle of vodka over Sergei's wounded toes, then hit him one more time before slamming the trunk down.

The lights on the Belt Parkway reflected off the water of Gravesend Bay. Tankers sat out in the middle of the bay, waiting to enter New York Harbor. On the concrete path that ran along the water, a jogger's reflective gear bounced along, yellow and red. He or she was moving at a decent pace, well under eight-minute miles. Eddie hadn't run since Monday, and already he could feel the loss of conditioning. It evaporates quickly at this age, he thought. A man my age should be working out, trying to maintain his strength as long as possible. A man my age should be doing anything other than driving around Brooklyn at this hour of the morning with a bleeding Russian psychopath in his trunk. Now what the hell do I do with this idiot?

Saturday, April 11

4:00 A.M.

The bars in Brighton Beach were closing when Eddie knocked on the Parrot's door. He heard them jabbering inside… then quiet. But Eddie Dunne was not to be denied. He kept pounding and yelling out all the names he knew. It sounded like a casting call for an old Disney cartoon: "Parrot, Tropicalia, Madame Caranina."

Finally, the rough-voiced Caranina said, "Who's this?"

"It's Eddie Dunne," he said. "I need to see your husband."

"He's away on business."

"I saw his van downstairs," Eddie said, sliding a hundred dollars of Sergei's ten grand under the door. "I need someone to help me with my car. Anyone can do it. The battery's run down and I need a jump start. There's another two hundred in it for whoever wants it."

"You have cable?" Caranina said.

"No, I need his cables, and the keys to the van."

Five minutes later, Eddie heard keys jingling. Tropicalia opened the door but left the chain on. She peeked through, checking him out. Eddie stood back from the door, not wanting to scare them off. He noticed Tropicalia now wore a head scarf, the sign of a married Gypsy woman. She opened the door just enough to reach her hand through to drop the cables and keys on the floor, but Eddie moved quickly, slamming into it with his full weight. The chain lock tore away from the old wooden frame as he bulled his way in. He charged through the ofisa , then through the beaded curtains. The floor of the back room was covered with mattresses; you couldn't tell where one stopped and another began. The apartment was overly warm and pungent. Eddie heard the bathroom door lock. He walked across the mattresses, stepping over women and children. Eddie raised his leg and kicked the door just above the knob. The door flew back. Parrot, sitting on the toilet, acted surprised.

"I have the flu," Parrot said.

"Dress," Eddie said.

"It's going around, the flu; everyone is sick."

"Wear these," Eddie said, throwing a pair of powder blue tuxedo pants at him.

"Tropicalia can do the cables," Parrot said.

"You want me to pull you off that thing?"

Grease from cooking covered the inside of the front windows. Packages of Yankee Doodles and Devil Dogs sat on the small table. The family bickered in Romany. Tropicalia was the loudest, Caranina the angriest, banging her finger into Parrot's chest. Eddie knew he was the gadje bastard, the non-Gypsy subject of the squabble, and neither woman was saying good things about him.

Except for Parrot in his red briefs, they all wore too many clothes. The adult women wore long nightgowns, as they did long skirts, to cover the "unclean" parts of their bodies. A guy he didn't know, late teens, remained on a mattress, lying under the covers. Probably Tropicalia's new husband. Eddie told him to stand against the wall, where he could watch him. Someone on one of the kids' mattresses began to cry. Another adult female, fifteen or fifty, crawled over to tend the sobbing child.

"We don't work like this, you and me," Parrot said, slipping into a pair of patent-leather loafers. "We work like gentlemen, not like this."

"Come on," Eddie said. "The sooner we get started, the sooner we get finished."

A box of wax likenesses of Madame Caranina sat open on the floor. She sold them to customers so they could meditate over them. Eddie handed Sergei's money to everyone, including the kids. The family argument escalated. Only Caranina and Tropicalia appeared to have a voice in whatever was being discussed. Parrot handed a pack of cigarettes to Tropicalia's apparent new husband. Then he threw a white silk scarf around his neck, and he was ready.

"You have made a dead man," Parrot said as they crossed Brighton Beach Avenue.

"It's four o'clock in the morning. No one will see us."

"They see everything. All day, all night."

Eddie remembered that Lukin always said, "If you cut the Gypsy into ten pieces, you have not killed him; you have only made ten Gypsies." The Parrot would survive.

Eddie had parked on Coney Island Avenue, next to the construction site where he'd lost Lukin's murderer on Tuesday. It was away from potential eyes in inhabited buildings. People always avoided parking near construction sites because of loose nails and screws. But Eddie's daughter had been missing for almost five days. He didn't care about flat tires any more than he cared about the problems of the Gypsy.

"You have no car emergency," Parrot said.

"In a way I do," Eddie said.

In the second-floor window above the Sea Lanes of Odessa Bakery, the stolen drapes were pulled aside as dark eyes watched Eddie and Parrot reappear from under the el. They got into Eddie's car together. Eddie tossed the carpenter's pouch into the backseat. He started the car and turned the radio on. Those watching from the second-floor window knew there was no gadje car problem.

"Have you delivered that Mercedes to Jersey yet?" Eddie asked.

"Maybe tomorrow."

"We're going tonight," Eddie said. "I'll go with you. Get it over with."

"No way, Eddie. Not tonight. Sunday afternoon is the best time to drive a stolen Mercedes to Jersey. Then I fit in with the Pakistani doctors going to Grandma's for dinner. Cops see me in that car tonight, I'm an automatic stop."