Dark City (Repairman Jack - Early Years 02) (41 page)

“Got it,” Tommy said.

Vinny had to ask. “And when they want to know the rate, we tell ’em what?”

For a second it looked like Tony was going to explode again, but instead he took a drag, exhaled a cloud, and said, “You tell ’em twelve fucking percent. I gotta preserve my price point. You hear that? I’m talking about my fucking
price point
. I coulda went to business school, coulda aced it, but I don’t need no MBA to know this shit. I graduated from the school of hard knocks, and I learned that I can’t look like I’m cavin’ to them Genovese fucks. So you find a guy needs a loan, you say it’s twelve percent, but tell him because you like him—whoever the fuck he is—you’ll jew me down to ten as a special favor.”

Vinny nodded in unison with Tommy. “You got it, boss.”

Preserving my price point
 … What kinda bullshit is that? Vinny thought as he was leaving. I’d go eight percent if it brought in the business.

Eight percent, even six percent—didn’t Tony realize that was
per week
? Like printing money, f’Christ’s sake.

This place needed an
Under New Management
sign.

THE IDES OF MARCH

FRIDAY, MARCH 15, 1991

1

When word came down from Tony the Cannon to meet at his store after midnight and come loaded for bear with tons of ammo, Vinny knew it could only mean trouble.

He arrived after Aldo and ahead of Tommy. When he saw the Colt .44 Magnum that had earned Tony Campisi his nickname sitting on his desk, he knew the trouble was going to be big.

He gave a mental shrug. It might mean more burials at sea, and that was not a bad thing.

“Okay,” Tony rasped after Tommy arrived. “We’re gonna make life miserable for Vinny the Chin.”

“We talking hit?” Tommy said, looking nervous. His face was flushed and his eyes bright. Probably did a coupla lines before showing up.

“Yeah, but not on warm bodies. We’re hittin’ windows.”

Tommy seemed relieved. Vinny didn’t blame him. Warm bodies were known to shoot back. Windows, not so much.

“Lotta windows around. How we know which ones?”

Tony smiled, something he didn’t do often, which was probably a good thing because his teeth were the same nicotine yellow as his fingertips.

“I got us a list. Soon as I heard them Genovese fucks was movin’ in on the loans, I started doin’ a little research. Remember that, guys. That’s what you do when you’re in business: You research the competition.”

For years now the feds had been cracking down on the windows racket, and probably thought they had it beat. All five families had had a hand in it to some degree. The Luccheses had grabbed the biggest share, and Junior Gotti had been up to his eyeballs in it, but they’d been mostly chased out. The Genovese family had managed to stay in, though, mainly because Benny Eggs Mangano had taken the fall for his boss, Vinny the Chin.

Vinny couldn’t help admiring Gigante—and not because they shared the same first name. His crazy act of wandering around the Village in his bathrobe, looking lost and mumbling nonsense, had convinced the shrinks that he was “mentally unfit” to stand trial. Yeah, right. Plus he was smart about his family business. Unlike the Chief, who’d dressed sharp and held his meetings in the Ravenite Club for all to see, the Chin kept to the shadows, gave orders to a few close underbosses, and let them get their hands dirty.

So while all the other families were bailing out of the windows racket, the Chin stayed in. But instead of bilking the New York City Housing Authority, which was what had landed everyone in hot water, the Chin put private businesses in his sights.

He kept it simple. You find a guy with a window replacement crew who owes you or somebody money. You move in on him and take over. All of a sudden the customers on his list run into trouble with all sorts of window damage—damn kids!—and after a while it’s costing them a fortune to replace them. The solution? You offer a contract that guarantees unlimited window repairs for a flat annual fee. After the contract is signed, the window damage stops. It’s like a freaking miracle. You expand your customer base, and pretty soon you can fire your repair crew and just sit back and collect those annual fees.

A sweet deal, and the only thing that can mess it up is some clown coming along and busting up a ton of windows. Then you gotta deliver on your repair contract. But you ain’t got no crew because you shitcanned them all so you wouldn’t have to pay them for doing nothing. Now you gotta find workers and you gotta buy replacement windows and all of a sudden money’s flying out the door instead of in. So you close up shop and disappear.

Yeah, you take the money and run, leaving the customers holding the bag—tough shit—but the downside for you is your sweet deal is dead, and an easy, low-maintenance income stream has dried up.

The Cannon’s plan was obvious—the Genoveses were hurting his business, so he was gonna hurt theirs.

“All right, lissen up,” he said. “Aldo grabbed us two cars. They’re out back.” He handed Tommy a sheet of paper. “You and Vinny take one and hit the places listed here. Aldo and I will go for the others.”

“How thorough you want us to be?” Vinny said.

Tony hefted his Dirty Harry gun. “If you can see it from the street, I want it dead. Don’t go tryin’ to impress me by getting out and walking ’round the side or any shit like that. I won’t be impressed at all if you get collared. In fact, I’ll be royally pissed. So keep it simple, stupids: Drive up, stop, blast away, move on. Capisce?”

They nodded and let Tony lead the way out the back door. As promised, a couple of late-eighties sedans idled in the rear alley.

“Dibs on the moonroof,” Tommy said, grinning like an idiot. “You drive.”

He was jacked now. Shooting up storefronts was his idea of a good time. Better than plinking at the cars in the salvage lot, Vinny guessed.

Vinny didn’t mind driving, though it was a tight fit behind the wheel of the Olds, even with the seat all the way back. He checked the addresses. The farthest were in Astoria—three on Steinway and two on Ditmars. Astoria was kind of a dead end, what with three sides taken up by water and LaGuardia. Probably best to start there and work their way back toward the store. That way, if anyone started chasing them, he’d have more options for escape routes.

The Van Wyck got them there in no time. Vinny ran Ditmars first, calling out the street numbers to Tommy who stood on the front seat and poked the upper half of his body through the moonroof to do his shooting: a Greek restaurant, a bagel shop, a kabob place, then two more restaurants on Steinway. Tommy laughed like a maniac the whole time.

Next was a used car dealer on Broadway in Long Island City. Tommy shattered the big showroom windows, then shot up a few cars on the way out.

“They weren’t on the list,” Vinny said.

“Call it my contribution to his detail guys.”

And in that instant, Vinny figured a way to get Tommy out of his hair—or at least out of his salvage yard.

2

After the
Salaat-ul-Jumma
, Kadir hurried away from the Al-Farooq Mosque with Sheikh Omar’s stinging words echoing in his ears. He’d known the blind cleric couldn’t see him, but Kadir could not escape the uncanny feeling that Sheikh Omar had been staring at him through those dark lenses as he’d preached about atoning for one’s transgressions.

It sounded uncomfortably similar to what he had said to Hadya a few days ago as he’d shaved her bald. When he’d returned Monday night, she was gone, along with all her things. Good riddance.

But had
he
transgressed? He’d made a mistake, that was beyond doubt. He shouldn’t have left the truck unattended. He had told no one, yet Sheikh Omar seemed to know. Could he hear the guilt in Kadir’s voice? Of course he could. The flash of the exploding truck, the impact of the shock wave, the sight of the tattered bodies in the morgue haunted Kadir’s sleep during the meager moments he found any. He was so filled with guilt, Sheikh Omar could probably
smell
it on him.

Yes, he had made a mistake, but when a mistake caused the deaths of twelve soldiers of God, it became a sin of unimaginable magnitude.

He hurried along Atlantic Avenue toward the East River. A sin of such enormity demanded atonement of equal magnitude. As he strode under the BQE overpass, with the afternoon traffic rumbling overhead, his goal came into view. Lower Manhattan rose across the river, and the two spires of evil soared above all the others, so close he felt he could reach out and knock them over with a blow from his fist.

He and Mahmoud had stood here before and dreamed of bringing down those towers and everyone in them. Now he held his palms toward Heaven and swore to Allah that he would not rest until he saw both towers lying in heaps of rubble.

3

The tracking transmitter and remote trigger were taped to the doughy, off-white brick of C4. The detonator cap was inserted into the plastique. As a last step, Dane Bertel aligned the two wires of the cap and wrapped them in black electrician’s tape. He always left them as the last step in arming a bomb; the tape prevented a random static charge or anything else from causing accidental detonation.

Yes, he knew the possibility was remote—perhaps beyond remote—but he firmly believed in Murphy’s law and expended a good deal of thought and effort toward subverting it.

With the bomb ready for arming, he shoved it into the duffel he kept behind the front seat of his pickup. He would have replaced the one he’d used sooner but it had taken him longer than usual to obtain the C4.

In retrospect he regretted detonating the bomb last week for a number of reasons. Not for the loss of life—the world was better off without those dozen or so murderous, child-slaving Mohammedan crazies—but because he had not ended the life he’d intended to end. No one named Reggie—in fact, no American—had been listed among the dead.

The second reason was that the explosion tipped his hand a little more than he liked.

The Mohammedans wouldn’t know. They thought of him as just another criminal in a degenerate country that didn’t worship Allah. And for all intents and purposes, they were right. He broke laws left and right, and had committed mass murder last week. At least that was what the law would call it. He saw it as vermin extermination. But before the eyes of the law, he was indeed a criminal.

The country he was trying to save would put him on trial and seek a death sentence—or at the very least try to lock him away for the rest of his life.

Never happen. He’d die first.

No, the Mohammedans wouldn’t suspect, but Jack would know. And that worried him some. Jack was no dummy. But then again, Jack was a criminal too. And he had as much regard for baby rapers as Dane. But just like everybody else, Jack had no appreciation of the threat posed by these wild-eyed Mohammedans, these so-called jihadists.

They preached worldwide Mohammedanism and the downfall of America. And it wasn’t just rhetoric. That blind asshole, Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, recorded his hate-America rants and had his trusty, sandal-licking minions sell the tapes. Dane had bought a few—he understood Arabic—and knew this guy wasn’t just blowing smoke. He meant every word.

Nope, Jack was smart but he didn’t see the big picture. Hell, hardly anybody saw the big picture. Most people saw a bunch of ragheaded zealots following a religion that kept them in the sixth century. And true, they produced no technology, but they didn’t have to. They could afford to buy the latest and greatest, and they could adapt it to shove it up the asses of the folks who did make it, and keep shoving it until the shovee said
All
ā
hu Akbar
.

So Dane would have to put a little distance between Jack and himself. Too bad, because he liked the kid. But more than that, Jack showed real potential. He had a quick mind and an outlook that mixed outlaw mentality with a moral code. That kind came around only once in a blue moon. Too often the outlaws had no code, and just as often the moral types were too blindered by their code to make a distinction between the right thing and the legal thing.

Yeah, Jack had potential, but Dane had to keep his eye on the prize: Find indisputable proof that these were the most dangerous people on Earth, and then use that as a wake-up call—shove it in the face of all the assholes who thought he was crazy and make them do something about it before it was too late.

Crazy
 … He looked around the front room of his apartment with all the newspaper clippings and magazine pages and photos tacked to the wall. He’d seen his share of psycho apartments and this sure as hell looked like one. But displaying the bits and pieces at all times served an important function: He kept seeing something new and making fresh associations.

And those associations were leading him beyond jihad to something else. Something bigger, something more sinister, something so pervasive and so secret that he saw only wisps of its shadow.

He’d hinted at this to Jack, but just barely. He was already considered a paranoid nutcase in some quarters. To start talking about an ancient, ongoing überconspiracy was a one-way, nonstop ticket to a straitjacket.

So he had to keep quiet.

And vigilant.

Ever vigilant.

4

Hadya stared at herself in the mirror and ran a trembling hand over her shaven head. She still didn’t quite believe it. How could he? Her own brother.

When she’d shown the other workers at the bakery, her friend Jala had offered to share her apartment. Hadya had jumped at the chance to be away from Kadir.

What had happened to her brother? He had been such a gentle soul back home. What had changed him so? It could only be his beloved Sheikh Omar and the hate he spewed. Kadir had fallen for it, every word. He was now determined to bring jihad to America.

Hadya could not allow that. She saw her future here and would not let madmen like her brother ruin it. She would keep a watchful eye on Kadir. And if she suspected that he was going to do something terrible, she would report him.