Deadly Lullaby (6 page)

Nico sips his screwdriver, lights a Salem cigarette, and clasps his hands before him as if in prayer. “He's a car salesman that schleps for North Hollywood BMW.” His lips break into something you might call a smirk—which, for Nico, is tantamount to a belly laugh. “When he's not spikin' our smack and bangin' our whores.” Nico gives me a little more contact information about the guy, then studies me from head to toe like he's sizing me up for a new suit. He stares at the usual lineup of liquor bottles behind the bar, taking slow sips of his drink, and turning to me finally says, “Tell me the truth, Crooch. You doin' okay?”

I drain my beer. “Why the hell would you ask me that?”

He shrugs his hands, his shoulders, stares at the liquor bottles again. “The reasons for my concern are too numerous and complex for me to fully express at this time.” He turns to me again. “At least some of it, though, has to do with Al Levitch.”

Al Levitch would be Macky's chief of collections, a person I've had some unfortunate dealings with lately. “What does Levitch have to do with me?”

“She was in here earlier.”

“Al never comes in here.”

Yeah, that's right—
she,
Al being short for Allesandra. Al is, shall we say, somewhat sexually confused, though all outward indications are she's lesbian.

After a pause to take a sip of his screwdriver, he looks me in the eye, serious as a heart attack. “Well, my friend, she was in here today, lookin' for you. She didn't say what she wanted, but it had to be the markers you have with Macky. I'm hearin' Macky and Al've been breakin' a lot of wind over those markers, and pretty soon they might break a lot more than wind. You catch my drift? You understand what I'm sayin' here?”

“Don't worry. I'll take care of it.”

“You better do it quick. Al was bitchin' about you like crazy on the phone.”

“Who was she talking to?”

“She did not confide that in me.”

“What did she say?”

“I paid her no attention 'til your name came up at the end, when in the span of five seconds she called you everything but a white man. What the hell else could she have been carpin' about if not the markers?”

If he only knew.

“In fact,” Nico continues, drinking as if to steel himself for what he's about to say next, “when she got off his cell, she asked when you were comin' in next.”

“You tell her I was gonna be here today?”

He glares at Sam, who's suddenly busy at the other end of the bar, wiping away imaginary dust and moisture from the bar top. Tugging at his cheesy bow tie, beads of sweat trundling down his bald pate and reflecting light from the fluorescent fixture above him, he says, “Sorry, Crooch.” He reaches into the cooler and slides me another Corona across the bar. “This one's on the house.”

“Sam, they're all on the fuckin' house.”

“Sam didn't know what Al wanted with you,” Nico says. “He was just tryin' to be
helpful.
” He brings his drink to his lips and talks under his breath. “Dumb
dick.
”

I push away from the bar. “Is she coming here?”

“Sit tight,” Nico says, putting his hand on my shoulder to ease me back into my seat. “You gotta man up on this one. Tell you what. I'm thinkin' I'll loan you the money myself, vig free. When she gets here, tell her you'll—”

I knock away his hand. “I'm in no fuckin' mood to deal with this bullshit today.”

“You're never in no fuckin' mood to deal with this. You keep dodgin' 'em, man, you're gonna cause trouble for me, too. If Macky involves Joe, he'll blame me for bringin' you on board here to begin with.”

“You don't understand. I—”

The door from the storage area in back swings open and the brittle linoleum flooring creaks and cracks under the weight of footsteps.

“What's a slug like you doin' in a respectable joint like this, uh?”

Al Levitch's voice, as jagged as broken glass.

I swivel in my barstool to face her. If I hadn't met her before, I'd swear she was male. She's close to six feet tall and pumped from throwing weights in prison, and has the sun-slogged face of a construction worker, with a dark, irregular growth under her left eye that could be cancerous. There's a slight implication of breasts under her silk pocket tee—more like man boobs that sprout from steroid injections than female breasts—and her hair is styled in a pomaded pompadour. Levitch just got out of prison a few months ago after serving a hitch for rape and assault, her victim a male prostitute she beat senseless after treating him to an around-the-world with a strap-on.

This is the type of sexual confusion that plagues Al Levitch.

Levitch has a goon with her, presumably a punk named Latzo whose name she's mentioned to me by way of a threat. A burr-headed, knot-headed, dark Caucasian, his shoulders and arms strain against the seams of his jean jacket. Tatts sheath his hands, his neck, and what you can see of his arms, and his face is shotgunned with acne. His expression is slack, and though I've never laid eyes on him before I know without question that bits of food fall from his mouth when he eats.

My chest feels like a lead brick just materialized in it. This situation doesn't feel right. “Levitch,” I say, “you need to be more respectful when you talk to me.”

She acts like she didn't hear me and says to Sam, “Get me a Beefeater rocks and give Latzo a Coke.” She sits on the stool to my immediate right and pulls out a stubby cigar from the pocket of her tee. Takes her time firing it up with a Bic lighter. Her head engulfed in a tobacco fog, she says, “It's you who'd better be careful, Crucci. You're in deep shit.”

“Not with you. My business is with Macky, and I'll settle up with him when I'm ready.”

Sam mixes Levitch's drink in a highball glass, sets it before her, and gets busy on a second one.

She drains more than half the drink and takes a languid draw from her cigar, her smile revealing bad teeth, crooked as old tombstones in a dilapidated graveyard and tobacco stained. She props the elbow of her cigar hand on the edge of the bar and studies me a few seconds. “So you'll settle up with Macky when you're ready, huh, in the future?”

“You heard me right.”

She nods to herself, sucking her teeth and inspecting the fingernails of her left hand, buffing them with her thumb. She looks me in the eye. “That's an interesting promise, if you want to call it that, considering Macky told me last night you and your old man were going to stop by the warehouse this morning and pay him off.”

Smug bitch.

“No,” I say to Levitch, “the old man was going to loan me the money but he backed out. I called Macky this morning and cancelled.”

Levitch tilts her head to consider this, giving me a sidelong glance. She's not buying it. “And
that's
even more interesting, considering me and Latzo drove by the warehouse this morning and saw a black Cadillac parked there, a new DTS sedan. That's what your old man's driving now, right?”

Jesus.
“Macky would be the guy to ask whether my father was at his office today, not me.”

She draws on the cigar and finishes her drink, frowning through the smoke. She rattles the ice in the otherwise empty glass, puts it on the bar next to the fresh drink Sam just placed there. “I've been tryin' to find Macky since he missed our lunch. I can't find him or any of his guys. Nobody can find 'em.”

Latzo's close enough that I can kick him in the nuts and still have a fighting chance to draw my pistol before Levitch has time to react. Watching for false moves from either of them, I say, “If you're that worried about him, file a missing person report with West Covina PD. It's out of my jurisdiction.”

“We don't think he's missing, asshole. We think he's dead.” She hits the cigar again, its tip a red-hot coal.

I shrug. “So what's the world lost?”

Levitch stands, flush with anger.

Nico scoots away from the bar and Sam disappears behind it like a condemned man dropping through the gallows trapdoor.

“Cocksuckin' cop, that's my uncle you're dissin',” Levitch says, then swipes the cigar from her mouth and tries to jam the business end of it in my eye, simultaneously reaching for something in the small of her back.

I try to block the cigar with an upward sweep of my left forearm, but I'm late and it hits the corner of my left eye orbit, sparks of ash nailing my eyeball and burning like the point of the devil's pitchfork. It's the kind of pain you learn to ignore in bar fights, and I unsnap my speed holster with my right hand, push off my seat and drive the heel of my left palm up and through her nose, turning the entire weight of my body into the blow.

The bone and cartilage in her nose collapse in a satisfying
crunch
the way they always do, all wet and gristly.

Standing now, I've whipped out my Sig Sauer and have it aimed at Latzo, who appears even more dumbfounded than his natural expression suggests.

“You want to get involved?” I say to him, pushing the pistol barrel between his eyes, forcing him to stumble backward two or three steps.

He's shaking his head:
No, no, no, no.

“Raise your hands.”

I speed frisk him one-handed and snatch the revolver stuck in his hip pocket, an old .38 Chief's Special, a snubby. “What a candy-assed piece,” I say, and shove him away. “Stand back, and if you make one move—
any
move—I'll clip you just for bein' so damned ugly.”

Levitch is bent over holding her nose and mouth, blood streaming through her fingers, and I kick her feet out from under her. Her ass thumps the floor and she rolls around like a stunned boxer. A fighting knife is sheathed in the small of her back and after frisking her for other weapons I stuff it in my breast pocket as a trophy.

The burning pain revisits my eye with a vengeance.

I yell at Sam to be useful for a change and get me a clean bar rag, a cold, wet one, then tell Latzo to help Levitch to her feet and get her ass out of here before I put a bullet in her head.

He helps her to her feet.

Leaning against him, Levitch jabs a bloody finger at me the way pro wrestlers do in those stagy pre-bout TV interviews. Pinching her nose with her other hand, her voice muffled and high-pitched like a munchkin, she says, “I'm gonna kill you, motherfucker. Your old man too.”

Sam's handed me the bar rag by this point, and I have it pressed against my eye. I inspect it and there's a pink semicircle of blood and fluid on it. “Lean her against the bar and stand back, Latzo.”

He hesitates until I say
“Do it!”
with a considerable amount of leverage, considering I've got his pistol aimed at his nuts.

After he complies, I knee Levitch in the solar plexus, grab her hair, and jam the mouth of the barrel of Latzo's .38 under her jaw into the digastric muscle, and push up hard.

My first field-training officer when I hit the street out of the academy, an old-school beat cop named Krauss, taught me this move as a way to communicate with assholes when you don't want to listen to their blowback. The technique is effective because when you jam the mouth of a pistol barrel up into the digastric muscle, you force the tongue flush against the palate and block the windpipe, making aspiration and speech impossible. Being the assholes you figured them to be when you initiated this maneuver, they'll always try to talk back to you, but the most they can muster are these strained and nasal
unc unc unc
noises that are really fuckin' comical.

Just like the noises Levitch is making now.

I yank her hair back to point her face at the ceiling. “
You
are gonna kill
me
?”

I thumb back the hammer and get that satisfying
click
in return.

She flinches.

“Regardless of what else you might think of me, don't ever forget I'm a detective with the Los Angeles Police Department. That means I'm way above you in the food chain, and you don't have the fuckin' standing to kill me. As for the money you think I owe you, don't ever try to collect it from me again—
ever.
I owe the money to Macky. If he wants it, he can come get it himself. Understand?”

A noise comes from the back of her throat that resembles an affirmative response:
“Uncay…uncay.”

“And another thing: If anything out of the ordinary happened to Macky today, it happened without my approval or prior knowledge. So don't even
hint
to anyone,
ever,
that I had
shit
to do with killing that sonofabitch. If you do, we'll dance this dance again, except next time you won't waltz away from it.”

The same affirmative noise limps from her throat again.

It occurs to me that if I let her go she'll retaliate in the future, and the urge to blow the top of her head off almost overwhelms what's left of my good sense. Deciding she's not worth the cost of a bullet, I thumb down the hammer and get all the satisfaction I can afford by shoving her so hard she back-flips over the barstool.

I wake up naked and sweaty from a short nap. It takes a few seconds for me to recall that the king bed I am sprawled across is in the Emperor Suite of the Little Tokyo Hotel, located in—where else?—the Little Tokyo neighborhood near Dodger Stadium.

First thing I do is lean over the bed stand and check my cellphone to see if Tarasov has texted the all-clear sign—meaning the bodies have been collected and disposed of without incident.

No texts, no calls.

My concerns fade to the far recesses of my mind when Maggie rustles and sniffs. She is naked and uncovered by my side, staring fish-eyed at me with strands of her honey-blonde hair covering half her face. I brush back her hair and stroke her cheek.

“You okay?” I say.

She smiles, touches my cheek. “Oh yeah.”

A soft sound, almost a murmur, floats from the foot of the bed, and I raise my head to find Ronni lying crossways at our feet, also naked and uncovered. She snores cutely with her head resting on her little clasped hands the way a child's would, and the angelic expression on her face is incompatible with the acts she performed earlier.

“Man,” I say to Maggie, “you made her happy.”

“You helped,” Maggie says, and yawns lightly before she smiles and says, “a little.”

“I did not know you harbored such, um,
intense
desires for women.”

“Me neither. I was with women in threesomes when I started in the biz, but this is the most fun I ever had with one.” She raises her head to peek at Ronni. “She's so pretty and nice”—a roll of her eyes—“and willing.” She sighs. She props her elbow on the bedding and leans her chin on her hand, an amused, slightly embarrassed expression on her face. “Guess I got carried away. And, lucky you, you had a front row seat for all of it.”

“More like a seat on the bench, a second-stringer raring to get into the game.”

She strokes my face. “Aw, Babe, I let you play with her.”

I knit my brow. “Not for long.”

“It didn't take long.”

“Hey.”

She laughs and kisses me on the corner of my lips. “You know I'm kidding.”

I roll to my back, smiling. “It was fun,” I say to the ceiling. “Weird…
very
weird…but still fun.” Turning to her, I say, “Fact is, though, the experience convinced me I prefer sex the old-fashioned way, one-on-one.”

This is a true statement.

I turn to peck her cheek and stroke her breast. “So…you know…”

“So,” she says, trying to read my eyes, “I know what? You want to go one-on-one?” She draws me close. “Tell me what you want to do.”

“You do not know what I want?”

She nibbles my neck. “Nooo, you have to tell me.” A husky whisper. “I'll do anything. Just tell me, please.”

“You sure?”

“Yes.”

“Positive?”

She giggles. “
Yes,
you maniac.”

“I mean, if you insist, sure.” I take her chin between my thumb and forefinger and turn her face to mine. “What I want is for you to leave the room so me and Ronni can—”

She smacks my ass.

The sharp sound echoes off the low ceiling and gives Ronni a start. She grunts, rolls over, and shows us her back and buns.

“You know I am kidding,” I say, and initiate a bout of playful wrestling, rolling on top of her to pin her down and bite her neck, her breasts, her pink little nipples.

Before long we get serious. Her hands work the muscles on my neck and back, knead my ass, sending little shockwaves through me, as we suck and nibble on each other's lips and tongues. I slip two fingers inside her with ease and her eyes flare as she says, “You rested up? Ready for some real love now, huh?”

I notice with more than a little relief that I have a very serviceable erection.

She pushes me onto my back and kneels before me to suck my cock just long enough for it to achieve maximum hardness. Smiling with anticipation, biting her lip, she mounts me, deftly taking me inside her without using her hands, her long hair tenting my face. She straightens, facing the ceiling as she whips her hair from her eyes, and arches her back to take me in as deeply as she can. She bucks and grinds while I thrust and grind and suck and bite her nipples and squeeze her ass. Her breathing becomes rapid, and shudders rack her body when I gently grab the nape of her neck and ease her downward to apply firm friction on her clitoris with my pubic bone.

Gasps, a yelp, more shudders, and she digs her teeth into my neck when I burst inside her, spasms tickling my legs and toes.

We turn to our sides, holding each other close for what could be one minute or ten, eyes locked together, and we do not break the gaze when Ronni says from the foot of the bed, “Guess it's too late for me to join in.”

We both say
“Yes,”
Maggie giggling and kissing me and running her fingers through my hair, massaging my scalp.

We hold each other close for a long time, whispering praises, and my last thought before drifting off into what promises to be a forever-lost dream is,
Freedom, my God, freedom
….

Said dream is interrupted when my disposable cell begins to chime and vibrate, flopping around on the bed stand like a landed fish; I snatch it.
“What?”

“Crucci, get your ass to the conference room down the hall.”

“Who the hell is this?”

“Michael Fecarotta. Mr. Sacci told me to tell you to get your ass down here. He's waiting. So get your ass down here.”

“Let me talk to Joe.”

“If Mr. Sacci wanted to speak to you, shithead, he would'a—”

Joe barks in the background, “
Michael,
gimme the phone,” and fabric ruffles across the phone's handset. Then, “Babe, you want to talk to me?”

“I saw a baboon at the LA Zoo yesterday that showed me more respect than Fecarotta just did, and it was jacking off between the bars of its cage.”

“Sometimes Michael interprets my orders too literally.”

“You actually told him to tell me to get my ass down there?”

“I'm fresh out of engraved invitations, you fuckin' prima donna. Just get down here, your ass along with everything else.”

“You promised to leave me alone the rest of the day.”

“Something's come up.”

“Really, Joe?”

“What, I'm speaking Chinese?”

“All right,” I say, “
all right,
” and thumb off the cell and roll out of bed, aggravated as hell.

After taking my sweet-ass time to wash up, I pull on a Nike sweat suit and Adidas sports sandals and pad down the deserted hallway. Joe has a silent interest in this hotel and no doubt entered the same way I did—through the rear loading dock and up to this VIP floor via private elevator. By design, me, the girls, Joe, Fecarotta, and whoever else accompanied him are the only people on the floor today.

Fecarotta is stationed outside the open conference-room door. He is Joe's new bodyguard, arriving in town from New Jersey two weeks ago. Fecarotta is nicknamed “The Hook” because he made his so-called bones in New York by stringing up his ex-boss's would-be assassin on a meat hook and torturing him with a car battery, jumper cables, and an ice pick before beating him to death with a baseball bat. He is a fireplug with a permanent clenched-fist expression, swarthy skin, and dark hair that is loaded with so much gel it sparkles from the reflected light of the hall fixtures. Joe says his complexion is darker than your average Italian's because his mother is an off-the-boat Iraqi who fled the Islamic Revolution in the late '70s, ultimately breeding with his mobbed-up father in the Bay Ridge neighborhood of Brooklyn. Fecarotta's wearing his usual wraparound
Bollé
sunglasses and a lightweight black leather jacket over a black T-shirt and black jeans. He is as creepy-quiet as an undertaker and throws off otherworldly vibes, like a paranormal entity trapped inside him is trying to escape.

His demeanor changes as I approach; he smiles and examines me head to toe as if deciding whether I am a candidate to replace his prison bitch.

“Fecarotta,” I say, “the last guy who called me ‘shithead' is still doing time at the Q—in an infirmary bed.”

“Don't be so sensitive, sweetie,” he says, smooching me a kiss in the air,
“Muah,”
as I walk past him into the room.

Joe Sacci is here, plus one person I did not expect.

Joe stubs out his cigarette as he rises from his seat at a round six-top conference table. Joe is seventy-four years old and short, the upper crest of his salt-and-pepper hair hitting a couple inches below my chin. Small and delicate only in the physical sense, Joe's size has always radiated from his inside out. One of the top five so-called crime bosses in LA for twenty-eight years, he proved the size of his balls by making a lot of money despite constant investigations and four assassination attempts. His recent relevance, though, and his fortune have dwindled from the expansion of other so-called organized-crime groups and from the natural attrition of his crew. Hence his merger with Viktor Tarasov, who has also been taking it on the chin lately. Other than his height, or lack thereof, Joe's thick hair is his most distinguishing feature, combed slantwise back and moussed so stiff you would mistake it for a toupee if not for the unmistakable natural part. Though no longer the power player he once was, he still dresses the part of the Mafia don, today wearing a charcoal silk suit and red-and-ecru striped tie, the suit a well-worn one.

Joe steps forward and shakes my hand as he speaks, his naturally high-pitched voice knocked down an octave from a lifetime of bourbon and cigarettes. “Good work on Macky. How'd you do him?”

I say nothing, instead casting a fish-eyed stare at the man seated ramrod straight at the conference table, a half-full flute of beer before him. Two open boxes of pizza from The Original North End Pizzeria are on the table.

“Oh,” Joe says to me. “You haven't met my new COO, have you?”

“COO?” I say.

“Chief of operations, Babe. I'm Ricardo Donsky,” the man says, barely lifting his butt off his seat as he offers me his hand across the table. The name Ricardo throws me off because Donsky appears of Slavic descent, so blonde and pale you might peg him as an albino if he did not have eyes as blue as arctic ice—cool eyes that you just know could become fierce at the drop of a dime. Late thirties to maybe fortyish, he is long and muscled and dressed casually, but well, in faded designer jeans with a white-on-white linen shirt, the tail out, and dark-blue silk blazer. He has an erect military bearing, his hair cut in a high and tight crew cut razored clean on the sides. His features are not diminished by a pocked scar below the corner of his left eye that could have been courtesy of shrapnel or a bullet fragment, and there are women who would say it makes him appear ruggedly handsome. Your average wiseguy would take one look at Donsky and figure him for the kind they would belly up next to at a bar and engage in conversation; your above-average wiseguy—i.e., me—would approach him with caution, if at all.

Still standing, Joe says to me, “So you gonna tell us how you did Macky or not?”

I describe in summary form how I did Macky.

Both men like this, glancing at each other and shaking their heads in bemusement.

Joe says, “He handle it like a man?” and pats my shoulder as he moves with distinct purpose to the wet bar behind the table.

“It was not the type of death anyone would handle gracefully.”

Donsky sips from his glass of beer, says, “More important to me, Babe, is how your son handled it.” Donsky's voice is baritone and Brooklyn-accented, nasal, without a single
r
sound enunciated in the entire sentence. Word is he and Fecarotta are lifelong friends, and Fecarotta just got here from New Jersey as part of a package deal.

I say, “I decided against involving my son in the hit. I left for West Covina without him.”

Donsky frowns into his glass as if a fly is floating on the surface of his beer.

Joe stops dead in his tracks on the way to the bar, a perplexed expression further creasing his considerably wrinkled brow. “Why the hell did you do that?”

I shrug as if my decision was a casual one. “We met this morning at my house and I did not like his vibes,” I say, looking at Donsky to say as an aside, “That meeting was our first in over nine years.”

Joe smoothes his trim mustache, rubs his jaw.

I sit in the empty chair directly across from his and Donsky's.

Nobody says shit, and you could bite a chunk out of the silence that fills this room. To pass the time I gaze out the big window just behind Donsky to check out the Yagura Tower, a pagoda on stilts that marks the main entrance to the Japan Village mall down the street. I help myself to a slice of meaty pizza pie from the box on the table before me. “I have not had Original North End in almost a decade,” I say to the room. “The best in town.”

“Michael picked it up for us,” Joe says, resuming his trek to the full bar to my left. He grabs a bottle of Miller High Life from the low fridge, says, “Here,” and shoves it to me over my shoulder. He hands me a chilled beer mug and pours bourbon over rocks in a beveled glass tumbler for himself, walks to his chair and stands there so he can look down at me, a view of me he rarely enjoys. After taking a sip, he says, “Macky refused to see you yesterday without Leo there. In fact, didn't he
demand
that Leo be there with you?”

Having filled my mug, I wash down my first bite of pizza with the beer. “Yeah, yesterday he did. Today he said the same thing but I talked my way in.” I shrug. “Chalk it up to my irresistible guinea charm.”

After exchanging glances with Joe, Donsky says, “I'm disappointed. I wanted to see what Leo was made of. See, the collection crap he's been doing for us has just been an audition. Now we need him to step it up to serious work, work only a cop can do. See, I have old friends in the sheriff's department who came here from New York about five years ago, so we're covered there.” He winks at me. “Especially if you ever need anything handled in any of the local jails. But our payroll's short on LAPD cops, detectives in particular. That's why we need Leo to step up to the plate for us.”