Philip Carlo - The Ice Man

“My friend,” he said, “I want you to know that I’ve been sent by friends of the girl you beat up and raped.”

With that the mark began to moan and flop around like a fish suddenly out of water.

“If you don’t stop making a fuss, I’m going to hurt you.”

The mark became still, silent. What was so unsettling about what Richard said was not so much the words. It was the cold, detached way he said them, each word like the cut of a jagged knife.

“So, my friend, I want you to know that you have to suffer before I kill you. They paid me well for that, but truth is I’d gladly do this for free. I want you to know that.”

“Hmm! Hmm!” the mark mumbled, panic-stricken.

“If you believe in God, my friend, you better start praying because you’ve reached the end of the line. The train is going to soon stop and it’s time to get off.”

Richard was purposely tormenting the mark, letting the caustic words be the last words he heard in this life.

“Did you really think you could do such a thing and go about your business like nothing happened? Well, my friend, you picked the wrong girl this time.”

Richard turned right, shut off the lights, and made his way onto a rough road that went all the way down to the beach. There was a nearly full moon in a velvet black sky. The moonlight, white and clean and lovely, reflected off the calm sea, laying a glistening lunar highway on the still surface of the water. Richard stopped, sat, and listened. All was quiet and still. No sound but the gentle lapping of small waves on the fine white sand of the beach.

Richard put on blue plastic gloves, pulled the rapist from the van, dragged him to a wide, particularly curved palm, and tied him to the tree with yellow nylon rope. Now the mark was in a frenzied panic. Richard showed him the gleaming curved blade, the moonlight reflecting ominously on the razor-sharp steel.

“So, my friend, let’s get started.”

And with that Richard roughly pulled down the mark’s pants, took tight hold of both his testicles, and pulled so hard he literally tore them off the mark—

White-hot pain exploded where his testicles had just been. His eyes burst open. Richard showed him his balls.

“How’s that feel?” he asked, smiling. “My friend.”

Richard gave time for the shock to wear off a bit and for the pain to set in.

“Nice night, isn’t it?” he asked. “Look at the moon, how pretty.”

Now he used the knife; he grabbed hold of the mark’s penis—“This is what got you in all the trouble, you don’t need it anymore”—and easily cut it off. He showed it to the rapist as blood gushed from the sudden fleshy stump Richard had created. He went back to the van and put the severed member in a Ziploc sandwich bag he’d brought for this purpose.

He returned to the mark, ripped all his clothes off him, and began slowly slicing away fillets of flesh—kind of like pieces of skirt steak, making sure to show him the pieces he was methodically taking away, smiling as he worked.

The mark was soon a monstrous sight, terrible to see in the pale silver light of the Miami moon. Richard again returned to the van. He had brought along a large container of fine kosher salt and he now poured the salt all over the exposed flesh. The salt would bring, Richard knew, a whole new symphony of pain. He gave time for the salt to work.

Now Richard forced the blade into the mark’s lower abdomen and slowly pulled it up with his superhuman strength. The mark’s guts spilled forth and were suddenly just hanging there like a nervous cluster of blue-red snakes.

Richard cut him free, put a life preserver on him, grabbed his ankle, and dragged him down to the water’s edge, talking as he went: “My friend, I know the tide’s going out now, I checked, and you’re going out with it. I put the life vest on you because I don’t want you to drown. I’ll bet you my last dollar that the sharks’ll find you in no time. I hear there are big nasty tiger sharks here.” And with that Richard swung him up and around and tossed him into the water and watched him drift out. Then he turned and went back to the van, retrieved what he had cut from the mark, threw it all in the water, and returned to his hotel, where he had a nice sandwich—his favorite, turkey and mayo on rye—and slept like a baby. Richard always slept particularly well after a good piece of work.

In the morning, after a leisurely breakfast and a nice walk, Richard started back home, calm, relaxed, listening to country music as he went. He had very much enjoyed this job and wondered how long it had been before the sharks found the rapist. He knew they prowled the shoreline at night and was sure it hadn’t taken long at all.

As Richard was going through South Carolina, a van with a rebel flag in the window pulled up alongside him. There were three guys in it. They began to taunt Richard, called him a “nigger lover,” gave him the finger. Of all the people in the world to pick on, they chose the wrong guy. Richard told them to fuck off, to get lost. They again gave him the finger, all serious faced, as if they had bad intentions, wanted to hurt him. He pulled ahead of them, spotted a rest stop off the highway, and drove into it. They too pulled into the rest stop. Richard retrieved his gun from under the seat. The three of them got out of the van. One of them had some kind of club. Richard got out of his van and without so much as one word shot all three of them dead, got back in his van, and pulled away. In less than ten hours he had killed four people without a second thought, other than to wonder how long it took for the sharks to find the rapist; he was proud of his work, his imaginative ingenuity, the justice he had served up. When the police found the three dead men at the rest stop, there was little they could do with no tangible link—witnesses, clues, tire marks—to these bodies and the person responsible for the three homicides.

Back in Brooklyn, Richard went to see DeMeo. He met him at the Gemini Lounge, told him what he had done, and gave him the severed member.

Roy smiled. This he liked. “Good, great!” Roy exclaimed. “I’ll show it to our friend. He’ll be pleased. Excellent job. Fuckin’ beautiful. You’re the best…. Ju eat yet, big guy?”

“No, you?”

“Let’s go grab a bite,” Roy said, and they went and had a good meal in a restaurant Roy liked in Coney Island called Carolina’s, and over a large, colorful platter of antipasto, Richard provided more details of how the rapist met his end. Roy just loved it, smiled and laughed and had newfound respect for Richard.

“You’re fuckin’ one in a million!” he exclaimed happily.

Richard smiled along with Roy, ate with gusto; but Richard had not forgotten the beating Roy had given him or how Roy had pointed the cocked Uzi at him. It would be, Richard knew, just a matter of time before he had revenge. For now he’d wait, bide his time, smile and be friendly and make money with Roy. He’d profit. Richard was, in fact, a very good actor; he could effortlessly sit and eat and drink and laugh along with a man whom he knew he would surely kill. Until he killed DeMeo, however, he wouldn’t quite be whole. That’s how he looked at it. That’s how it was.

Because of DeMeo, news of Richard’s homicide acumen quickly spread in the circles all mob guys frequented. Made men are a clannish lot, a close-knit society, and talk incessantly among themselves; like old washwomen they are incorrigible gossips.

Richard began keeping a record of new ideas he had about ways to torture and kill people, writing down these new inspirations in a small spiral reporter’s notebook. He’d be sitting home watching TV, see something, and write it down; the idea of using salt on the rapist came from a pirate movie he’d seen; the idea of using wet strips of rawhide and pouring hot water into people’s noses also came from a film. Richard even took inspiration from cartoons, especially the Road Runner with Wile E. Coyote: the use of heavy weights, fires, booby traps, throwing people out of windows, all came from Road Runner cartoons. He also found inspiration for mayhem and chaos from Popeye cartoons.