Darwin's Nightmare (7 page)

“Did you know?” Steve's voice was like a window breaking; it got everyone's attention.

Mario's eyes focused on Steve's, and he spit out hate camouflaged in English. “What did you expect when you acted like an animal. Everyone pays, everyone. Some just pay more than others.” His last words were framed by a small smirk.

Steve stepped back and bent so that he was eye level with Mario. “Where does Tommy live?”

“Why?” Mario's smirk vanished, and he looked puzzled. I knew what he was thinking: no one would go looking for Tommy Talarese.

The nose came off with screaming and pleading, and then, once again, answers came. Tommy's mother, wife, and son lived in a red apartment building on King William Street. Tommy had made his home in the centre of the city, away from his bloody work on the east side. I knew the area. The building was one of several luxury complexes in the heart of downtown. The city tried to create upscale buildings, like Tommy's, that would offset the rapid decay of the city. Each building that went up pushed more people out. It was the city council's secret hope that they could move every undesirable citizen out of the city a block at a time — a transfusion of wealth to revitalize the decaying concrete. The lobby furniture in one of the complexes would be worth more than a year's rent in any of the older buildings in the area. The new buildings also had doormen working twenty-four hours a day to protect those with money from those without.

The sound of Steve's foot hitting the bloodied face followed the answers. The kick knocked Mario from the chair
to the floor, and then the stomping started. The sound was like boots walking in thick mud. Steve stomped Mario long after he had died on the floor behind his desk. It would take the authorities some time to decipher what the mess on the floor was, and even longer to figure out who.

Back in the car, I didn't question what had happened — no one needed doubt. We moved through the streets fast and smooth. Neither of us spoke for the first few minutes. I was thinking about what Mario had told us. Tommy Talarese was as scary a human as I had ever met. He was a man who had gotten where he was through nights of blood. He revelled in cruelty as though it were a religion. Tommy had butchered entire families, raped children in front of their fathers, and tortured enough people to fill a cemetery. Tommy was a maniac of all trades, but he was especially fond of taking limbs. The east side was like a little Sierra Leone in the eyes of those who had come up against Tommy. He was out-of-his-mind crazy, and now he was interested in Steve.

“This Tommy Talarese,” I said. “He's a big deal. He's Mario's boss, and a scary fuck in the truest sense of the words. He's sadistic and violent on a whole other level. He got where he is fighting with the Russians on the east side. He killed and killed like it was eating or breathing. There were battles in the streets years ago — the Russians tried to keep up with Tommy, and they almost did. Eventually some boundaries were organized, and the Russians got a piece of territory. Tommy was kept on the east side as a reminder of the way things used to be; the way they could be again. The problem is you. Why the hell is someone like him interested in you? Why is he pushing so hard to get rent from a bartender?”

Steve didn't say a word. His face and shirt were speckled with blood, and he held the razor from the barbershop
open on his thigh as he stared out the windshield. His voice eventually broke the white noise of traffic. “However this goes, you can always walk away. You try to stop me and I'll kill you.” His voice never faltered. He never thought about it, or weighed out what he was telling me. He was saying what he was going to do; how it made me feel, and the problems I had with it, weren't going to change anything.

King William Street was lined with cars, so I double-parked outside number sixty-six, Tommy's building. Steve was out of the car before it stopped moving. I caught up with him at the front doors.

“Give me your gun,” he said.

I gave Steve the Glock. He looked at it and asked if there was a round already in the chamber. I nodded, and we walked through the doors. Steve moved ahead, the gun hanging loosely in his hand. The doorman stood behind a counter protecting the tenants' mailboxes. He took one look at Steve's bloody face and reached for the phone. Steve walked behind the counter and kicked the back of the doorman's knee. The doorman slumped to his knees, his red trench coat becoming a dress on the ground. Steve turned the pistol around in one quick flip and hit the doorman on top of his cap.

I checked the doorman's book and found Talerese next to the number 5006. It was the highest number on the page. Talarese was on the top floor.

We got on the elevator and rode up side by side. I scanned for cameras, but saw none. The upscale building management must have thought the doorman was enough security. The elevator stopped just as a chime announced our arrival. We moved out and followed the direction arrow to apartment 5006. When we got to the door Steve knocked and waited. The knock was loud and authoritative.

A male voice said, “Who is it?” The voice was muffled, as though the man inside had his mouth full.

Steve knocked again. The voice barely got out, “I said who is —” before it was interrupted by Steve's boot kicking the door in. The door ripped through the lock and flew past the safety chain, knocking the owner of the voice to the floor. Steve fluidly moved through the door frame, firing a bullet as he crossed the entryway. Screams erupted like applause after the gun exploded. The bullet wasn't for the male voice; it was for the grandmother, the Nona, of the family. Mrs. Talarese — Tommy's wife — was shrieking as she rushed to the floor beside the body of the elderly woman. Steve quickly moved to the huddle of women on the floor and silenced the younger woman with a kick. The hard shin to the side of her head snapped her body onto the elderly woman already on the floor. The young man flattened by the door rolled to his feet and started to run at Steve. I grabbed him by the hair as he passed and yanked. His body, surprised and pained, straightened enough for me to loop an arm around his neck to hold him. Fuelled by rage, he strained against my body, pulling past the point of exhaustion. After forty-five seconds he was tapped, and his back slumped against my chest.

After the struggle was over, I had time to survey the situation. The son, a thin kid in his early twenties with a protruding Adam's apple, was hanging in my arms. Tears streamed his cheeks, and saliva hung in strands between his lips as he gasped for breath. He was like a mad dog surging against a chain on his neck, instinct forcing him to push against the yoke no matter the consequences. From the shape the side of his face was in, I could see he had already been worked over in a bad way. The other two occupants of the apartment lay huddled together. The grandmother was lying on her side near an overturned
wicker chair and a toppled cane. Her white hair was thin and cut short. I could see her scalp through the strands surrounding her head. Her mouth was closed, and her chin sat higher on her face than it should have. She was old-world by the look of her. The old woman's toothless mouth would confirm her poor rural Italian heritage better than a birth certificate ever could. As she lay there unblinking, the centre of her blue dress bloomed a stain — one much darker than the light material of the dress. Tommy's wife moaned and held her rapidly bruising face as she recovered from the short kick she had received to the left side of her head. Her appearance was unlike her mother-in-law's. She was a petite woman, with a plain, unpretty face and large dark hair artificially expanded to twice its natural volume. The massive amount of jewellery on her hands and ears showed her to be far from the farm her mother-in-law grew up on a continent away.

Steve produced the razor from his pants and opened it slowly. The blade was black with the crusted blood that had pooled and dried while the razor was closed. The sight brought Tommy's wife to full attention.

“Where is the phone?” Steve asked.

No answers came from Maria's lips, so he slapped her hard across the face. When her head lolled back, Steve presented the question again, this time with the blade of the razor resting just under her nostrils.

“Call your husband and tell him what I have done.”

Tommy's wife looked confused, but she did as she was told. She dialled the phone with shaking hands, softly whispering a prayer until someone picked up. “Tommy? It's Maria. Just listen. This guy just . . . just came here and shot Momma, and she's dead, and he hit me, and this guy he told me to call you. Help us! Please help us! I don't want to die, please, baby, please!”

The conversation turned into sobs and pleas. Steve took the phone from Maria. “Tommy, this is Steve. Sandra goes home now with you and she calls me when she's there. After she calls, you come home. Any tricks, and the boy and your wife die. You have twenty minutes.”

The phone call ended with the beep of the portable. Steve looked around the large family room of the apartment. A dim light beside a beige sofa pushed away the dark from the corner of the room. The sofa was surrounded by wood furniture and encased by maroon walls the colour of dark blood. Steve told both mother and son to sit on either side of the couch.

Before I let the kid go, I asked Steve, “You know this one?”

“Came around the bar the other day.”

It fit: Tommy was introducing his boy to the family business. The kid had been given a low-level muscle job to toughen him, the way his old man had probably been toughened. The kid tried to deal with Steve and came out with the short end of the stick and a swollen head. Steve had made an impact that no one could miss. The kid's face was like a billboard broadcasting the boy's ineptitude to everyone. The billboard caught Tommy's eye, and turned it to Steve and Sandra. The kid fouled up, and dear old dad was stepping in to show junior how to handle a tough situation. I grabbed the kid by the belt and heaved him to the couch. He had to use his hands to prevent himself from crashing into his mother. Once they were seated together on the couch, the rage began.

“You're dead, you animal. My husband is going to find you and your family, you greasy shit. You and him.” The word “animal” betrayed her heritage; it came out as if there was an “eh” on the end of the word that wasn't there when I said it.

The son stared at me, burning holes in my chest, saying nothing. I leaned against a wall and watched Steve. This was Steve without Sandra. She could calm him down. She could reason with him. By taking her, Talarese had taken reason and restraint away from Steve. There was no one to stop him. No one to try to calm him down. It was like taking the bars off the zoo. The wild was loose in the city, and everywhere there was prey. He set the wicker chair beside Tommy's mother upright, placing it over her body, and sat in it. Her head protruded between his feet and he sat staring down into her open eyes. The curses kept coming from Maria, hurling at Steve like javelins meant to pierce his soul.

He stared at the dead woman between the legs of the chair and interrupted Maria. “You know what your husband is?”

“Oh, I know, and you're going to find out exactly what he is. You just wait. Just wait!”

Steve looked at Maria. Their hatred fought each other in stares. Neither looked away; not even Steve as he raised the gun in his hand and wordlessly shot Maria in the knee.

As the two living family members huddled in agony, Steve went to the kitchen and grabbed a towel. He threw it at the son and told him to tie it around his mother's wounded leg. I stayed true to my word and did not interfere.

The gunshot had made the room quiet for ten minutes until a mechanical buzzing turned Steve's attention away from the two on the couch. Steve opened his phone and spoke. “Are you okay? . . . I know . . . It'll be okay now. Is he with you? Tell him to come home . . . It will be fine, I promise . . . I love you, too. Tell him to come home now.” Steve disconnected and closed the phone. He had not let Sandra try to calm him down; he wasn't going back to his cage until he was done.

Ten minutes after that quiet conversation, the door opened. Tommy walked in, swearing at Steve about the nerve he had and where they would find his body. If he was fearful of two men holding his family hostage at gun-point, he didn't show it. He moved across the room quickly like an overzealous prizefighter. He was so brazen that he walked past me without giving me a second thought as he continued his verbal barrage at Steve. Steve nodded to me, and I hooked Tommy hard in the right kidney. The punch drove all the air out of his lungs with a grunt that made the second hook, to the left side, only as audible as the dull thud of my fist against his soft flesh. He crumpled to the floor without another word.

When he raised his head he saw his family as if for the first time. “Maria, what happened? Look at the blood . . . Oh, my God, Ma!”

He got off the carpet and ran to the couch to embrace his family. They sobbed together, holding each other tight. It was almost touching if you could forget why they were together on the couch. After a while Tommy pulled himself away from the embrace and stared at his mother for a long moment, then at Steve, and finally at me.

“You two fucks are dead. Dead!”

Steve raised the gun and spoke softly. “Is she back alone?”

Tommy screamed, “I'm going to kill you myself, you dirty prick. You, then that bitch of yours. Then I'm gonna burn that shithole down!”

Steve pointed the gun at Maria's other knee. “Tommy!” she shrieked. “Tell him please. I want him to leave. Please. . . tell him!”

She again broke into wordless cries and moans. Tommy stared at his wife for at least ten seconds. With each passing second his shoulders shook more and more. He finally erupted. “Shut up! Shut up!” he shouted at his wife. “Do
you know who I am? Do you? Huh? No one does this to me! I made my bones. I'm made, and this piece of shit thinks he can do this? He's dead!”