Afterburn (24 page)

His problem was that he was getting low on cash. Down to a hundred bucks. He sat heavily in the truck and took his last tomato from the dashboard. Perfect, not one spot, and he ate it, getting juice in his beard, while he thought about Aunt Eva. If she had not changed her locks, then his chances were good. In and out in a few minutes; no one will know. Civilized, functional, a man with a plan. He started the truck and pulled south on the West Side Highway, then from there around the bottom of Manhattan and over toward Brooklyn, where Aunt Eva had lived on Carroll Street between Fourth and Fifth Avenues since his boyhood. But he didn't know anyone there anymore, he didn't want to be seen. The street used to be all Italian families, with a social club on the corner—old guys in permanent-press pants and hair grease, sitting around. Tired, but not too tired to drive new Cadillacs. They knew what was going on. Some remembered Tony Verducci as a young man. Some even knew Paul. Yet most of the old families had died off, or married out, with other people moving into the neighborhood of grand old brownstones, full of money now, full of Manhattan people who worked in law firms and investment banks and computer companies, and they'd trickled down the hill onto Aunt Eva's block, where the buildings were not brownstones but squat three-story brick row homes half the size. She'd never move, though, never sell out. Maybe she hadn't changed her locks, either. Maybe his money was still there.

He turned off Flatbush and headed south on Fourth Avenue. A fat woman in a short yellow dress and yellow boots stood on the corner looking into the cars while slipping two fingers in and out of her mouth. One of the forgettables. He pushed the truck past the bodegas, the closed hubcap shops. The only things moving on the street this early were the taxis and the cops and the newspaper delivery vans. He'd turned down one of those teamster jobs. The guy who had taken the job instead of Rick now owned a sixty-foot, five-chair Chris-Craft that he took out into the Gulf Stream three days at a time. Somebody else's life. He decided to circle Aunt Eva's block, just to see how things stood. At the corner of Carroll and Fifth, the Korean deli had a light on in the back, some poor Mexican fuck sitting on a bench cutting carrots. He could smell the bakery down the street. Nobody would recognize the truck, nobody would recognize
him
. The last time he'd been around, he'd sported a shaved head, twenty-two-inch arms, and a Fu Manchu mustache. Veins full of growth hormone. Now he looked like a regular guy—some heavy regular Brooklyn guy driving past. But if somebody recognized him, it could get back to Tony Verducci. Everything got back to him. Rick parked in the lumberyard driveway on the corner of Fourth Avenue and Carroll Street. It was too early for the business to be open. The truck would be okay for ten minutes, which was all he needed. He lifted out the gallon tub of chimney cement he'd bought the day before. Nobody would think anything; it looked like a can of paint. Ten minutes; don't fuck with my truck. The question was whether Aunt Eva's block was still respected, whether the neighborhood kids had gotten the message. All you needed was a few young guys in flashy suits and good haircuts standing around now and then, that was it. Or that
used
to be it. What did Rick know anymore? Not much: how to grow corn, how to tie a boat to a dock, how to talk to dead fish. He could tell from the stores around the corner that there was more Puerto Rican and black action nearby, but here, walking up the rise of the street, he saw no graffiti, no heavy window bars, no broken glass in the gutter, and a preponderance of heavy, American-made cars, none of them with detailing or goofy shit hanging from the mirror, no bead-lights around the license plate. And trash bags already out for the garbage pickup, each tied neatly. Some of the old families still lived on the block.

Which was not good. It was the little widows peeking sleeplessly out their windows who would call the cops or blab it to Aunt Eva and maybe someone else. They all talked to one another, standing out there with a bag of rolls from the baker. He hurried along the street with his head down, carrying the chimney cement. At Aunt Eva's door, he slipped his old key into the lock—it went right in—and entered silently. She slept in the back bedroom upstairs, he knew. The table next to the door was piled with mail. It would be interesting to examine, but he didn't want to waste time. In and out, Rick-o, in and quickly out.

He glanced up the stairs next to the front door—darkness, no sound. He slid his feet along one side of the hallway, where the floorboards were not so loose from people walking on them for a hundred years. Somebody had fixed the basement door at the end of the hallway. He carried the chimney cement down the basement stairs, turning on only one light, enough to see the boxes of rotting letters and photographs, broken patio furniture, piles of Uncle Mike's clothing, mouse-eaten, moldy, and unworn in twenty years, a tangle of rusted bicycles and wagons, some of which Rick had ridden as a kid. The furnace, so old it had been installed back when Aunt Eva was still getting regular action from Uncle Mike, sat at one end of the narrow, rectangular space, its asbestos-wrapped air ducts octopused out to the ceiling above. Rick noticed a new box of air filters for the furnace. Somebody was changing the filters for Aunt Eva. He slipped behind the furnace, next to the party-wall foundation that she shared with the house next door, the Marinaros', and then put his hands around the sheet-metal exhaust tubing that coiled from the furnace into the chimney. The vent was sealed with chimney cement where it went into the brick orifice, to protect against carbon monoxide backdrafting into the basement. He cracked the old seal as he yanked the vent tube from its space. Before him appeared the black circular hole that opened the chimney. Everything looked okay. He reached into the sooty space, ran his hand along the wall. All he had done before was pull a brick out of its mortar, chisel away another crumbly brick behind it, stick in a thick envelope wrapped in waterproof duct tape, and replace the first brick, hammering it with the heel of his hand until it was flush with the others in the chimney. Then he'd jammed in a few pieces of wood to replace the mortar. The next time the furnace fired, he'd figured then, it would belch black soot over his stash, obscuring any changes in the chimney's interior surface. And anyway, the brick was tight in there, not loose at all. Even if Aunt Eva had hired a chimney sweep, highly unlikely given her age and condition, he would have had no reason to poke around. Now Rick found that same brick and pulled hard, sliding it out. Was the envelope back there?
Yes
. Blackened by the soot forced into all the crevices. He slit it open with his pocketknife, just to be sure. Three inches of one-hundred-dollar bills came to forty-eight thousand six hundred dollars. The old kind of hundreds, with the small portrait of Benjamin Franklin, but still good. This was the last cash from the all-time best Jersey mall job, money that Christina had helped him make. They had dropped three new Cat bulldozers at a sprawling construction site over the river. Keys in the ignition, hauled on three different canopied trailers from a housing development being built in suburban Atlanta. Nighttime drop-off, trailers immediately driven to Buffalo and parked at a scrap yard for a month. Rick had maneuvered the bulldozers off the rigs himself, taken the briefcase handed to him. Big money. Maybe he could spend some of what was left on Christina, buy her a dress or shoes, whatever. Jewelry, underwear. Cigarette lighter. Women loved little Italian cigarette lighters.

He wanted to take all of the cash, but that meant he had no backup position if things didn't go well, if the money got stolen or he blew it. On the other hand, he had been sitting in the woods for four years, and a little fun wouldn't kill him. You had to have a little fun or you didn't understand life. He split the stack of bills in two, shoved one half in his pocket and the other back into the envelope, which he replaced in the chimney. The brick might be a little loose, but who would know? He wrenched the exhaust tube back in place and opened the tub of chimney cement. The stuff looked like oatmeal, and he troweled it around the tubing, sealing the wall again. This would take extra time, but it was the right thing to do.
I did bad things, but I never killed anybody
. He had to protect against the furnace's backdraft; didn't want to asphyxiate Aunt Eva, death seeping through the house. The cement would be dry in a day, undetectable. Like him. The whole point was to be undetectable.

He finished the job, picked up the bucket, and on the stairs up from the basement heard a baby making cranky noises one floor above. "Oh, chickie-bee, I'm coming," called a woman sleepily. He stopped on the stairs. Aunt Eva was seventy-something years old. A baby meant young people, a young guy living in the house. Some guy who might notice new furnace cement when he changed the air filters and become curious about what was in the chimney. The baby cried again. Get the rest of the money. Rick turned back down the stairs, moving loudly, slipped around to the back of the furnace, and pulled on the exhaust vent. Nothing—he'd done too good a job cementing it in place. He savagely clubbed it with his arm. He had to hit it twice to dislodge it. Naturally the sound went through the house like a drum. The vent sagged to the floor. He reached in, grabbed the brick, threw it behind him, pulled out the envelope, and slipped it into his other pocket.

Now he could hear footsteps. He hurried back to the stairs and climbed them three at a time, but stopped at the open door to the first-floor hallway.

"Yo, whoever's down there, I got a shotgun!"

The guy was probably hunched at the top of the stairs leading from the second floor to the front door—not twelve steps from where Rick stood in the basement doorway. If the guy came down the stairs from the second floor, he might get a clean shot into the back of Rick's head as he opened the front door.

Now footsteps descended the stairs.

"Where's Aunt Eva?" Rick yelled. "She's my aunt!"

"Who's that?" came the man's voice. "Come out of there."

"That Sal?" Rick yelled. "Don't fucking shoot me, Sal!"

The baby was crying upstairs. "Come out of there!"

"Sal?"

"Sal lives in New Jersey. Who the fuck are you?"

"I'm a member of the family."

"The fuck you are. You come out here."

He was still holding the tub of chimney cement. He flung it down the hallway to see what would happen. The shotgun exploded, tearing away the plaster, splintering the door frame, making the woman scream and the baby cry louder.

The guy is jumpy, Rick thought. "What the fuck you doing?" he called, smelling the smoke from the gun.

"Who is that? You come out here, you motherfucker." Then he yelled up the stairs. "Beth, call the cops!"

"It's Rick!"

"Rick? Who's Rick?"

"Rick Bocca, Aunt Eva's nephew. Tell Beth it's her cousin Rick Bocca."

"Beth," called the voice, "guy says his name is Rick Bocca!"

He could hear her make some kind of answer. Then he heard footsteps.

"Rick?" came Beth's voice. "Is that you?"

"Beth, it's me—tell your husband not to fucking shoot me!"

"He's not going to shoot you."

"Come out of there, you fucker!" came the man's voice again.

"I'll—" she began.

"No, no, don't go get him, let him come out!"

"You're not going to shoot?"

"Come out of there!"

He put his hand out, waved. Nothing happened.

"Come on, goddammit!"

He stepped into the hallway. A small, hairless man in a T-shirt and stained underwear held a double-barreled shotgun. Beth stood behind him, in a short nightgown.

"Ricky?" she cried, still scared. "Is that you?"

"It's me."

"You look so different. Beard and everything."

"It's me, Beth."

"Why you down there?"

"I just needed to get something, Beth, something I left."

"Why didn't you call?" she cried, upset all over again. "I mean, this is crazy, you woke everybody up and scared us and—"

"I thought Aunt Eva was still here."

"She's in a nursing home, three months."

"Oh." He still hadn't taken a step.

"This is Ronnie."

"Hi, Ronnie. You mind putting down the gun?"

But Ronnie was a small man threatening a big one. A rare thrill, and one not to be concluded too quickly. "What did you need to get?" he said.

"Just something I left, Ronnie. Personal."

"What?"

It was ten steps to the door, and if he got near enough, maybe Ronnie wouldn't take a second shot with his wife so close.

"Look," he began, taking one step, his hands up, "Aunt Eva said I could leave something down there, and she let me have a copy of the key. Here." He held up the key.

"We heard you was way out on Long Island, fishing."

"I was, Beth, but I needed something so I came back." He looked into her eyes. "I was out there, and I—"

"I fucking want to know what you were getting!" said Ronnie, waving the barrel at him.

"Hey, Ronnie, wait a minute, I know you don't like this, but you got to see it my way. I didn't want to disturb Aunt Eva."

"What do you have down there?"

It was greed he saw in Ronnie's face now, and this gave him his answer. "You're never going to believe this—"

"Try me."

"Ronnie, for God's sake, put down the gun," said Beth.

Ronnie pointed the gun at Rick. "No. I want to hear this. He came
back
for something, Beth, he came back and wanted something."

"Okay, Ronnie. You're probably familiar with the furnace, the exhaust vent, right?" He could feel the line coming but didn't know what it was yet. "I used to help Aunt Eva around the house, and one day, couple of years ago, I hid a big toolbox up the chimney, leaving enough room so that the smoke can still go up no problem."

You could pack hundreds of thousands of dollars in a toolbox.

"Where's the box?" Ronnie demanded.

"Well, I didn't get it out yet, see, it's still—"

"What's in it?"

Rick waited, listening to the baby's angry fit upstairs. He needed the line. "Hey, Ronnie, that's my money down there," he cried. "All of it. Aunt Eva—"