Hot-Wired in Brooklyn (24 page)

I was still grinning as we emerged onto Sands Street. She had the gun in plain sight, and I had my hands high enough in the
air to convince even the Barracuda Brothers that something was up.

But they weren’t there.

T
he only tracks along Sands Street were still my own, and my car was the only one at the curb. No hearse. No back-up. Somehow,
the one time I hadn’t wanted to lose the Barracuda Brothers, I had.

Charlotte was in a hurry. Even stalling the car twice and almost flooding the engine wasn’t enough delay. And when I finally
pulled away from the curb, the once-watchful hearse was still nowhere in sight.

Charlotte sat in the front passenger seat, wedged as close to the door as she could manage, keeping herself out of reach.
The two files sat in her lap, Shork’s on top. The .45 was pointed at my groin.

We drove west, because that was the quickest way to Bay Ridge, and because I hoped to double back on my own trail and find
the missing Barracuda Brothers. It didn’t take long. The hearse was at the curb a couple of blocks short of the hideout. One
of the brothers was pulling the jack from under
the right rear wheel, and the other was putting a flat tire into the trunk.

“Jesus Christ!” I shouted, hitting the brakes hard and putting the car in a spin. As I bounded off the curb, I watched Charlotte’s
hold on the gun. It was still firm. The barrel had drifted higher and was aimed just below my heart.

“What are you,
crazy,
Lombardi?!”

I started driving in the other direction, watching the Barracuda Brothers scramble to follow.

“Those guys’ve been tailing me, and they don’t belong to Scarpetti.”

“So, what the hell are you doing?!”

“Tryin’ to lose ’em, if you don’t mind.”

I drove straight for the Brooklyn Bridge. A siren’s mystic voice was calling to me through the blinding snow.
“Come ahead, Eddie. Come to me now and put an end to bad dreams.”

I accelerated when I made a hard left onto Fulton Street. The bridge’s graceful stone arch loomed ahead, but my eyes were
fixed on the steel guardrail on my right. I tried a couple of false skids, then righted the car and downshifted, hoping Charlotte
would be unprepared for the next, deliberate skid that would crash her side of the car hard into the rail, knocking the gun
loose, knocking her silly, or both. That was now part of the Plan.

She didn’t panic at the two diversionary skids, and I kept pretending that the Barracuda Brothers were more to be feared than
she was. When I started the third skid, the brakes locked hard and the car fishtailed with maximum impact into the rail. But
Charlotte didn’t drop the gun, and she didn’t hit her head on the door or sail into the windshield. When the
.45 went off, the bullet passed right behind my head and took out the driver’s side window. The world went soundless in that
instant, then crept back as a ringing tattoo within my pounding head.

The boom of the .45 had stunned Charlotte just long enough for me to push the door open, roll out into the snow before she
could get off a better-aimed shot, and start running hard toward Manhattan. That’s not easy to do through half a foot of wet
snow on only six toes, but I was giving it my best. Manhattan wasn’t my goal, but rather the catwalk below the roadway of
the great bridge. The catwalk from my nightmare, where I hoped Charlotte wouldn’t try to follow.

I looked back only once to check my progress. The passenger side of the car was against the rail, and Charlotte had to slide
all the way to the driver’s side door to get out. I looked anxiously for the Barracuda Brothers, but it was still just Charlotte,
that .45, and Fast Eddie Lombardi running in slow motion for his life. I put my head down then and pumped my legs hard, as
hard as I’d ever pumped them running high school track or up that Georgia mountain in basic training. I was doing pretty well,
too, until I felt a searing pain in my left heel. The heel swung out from behind me, the torque pulling to the right, spinning
me, and tipping me finally onto my right side in the snow.

The sound of it followed a split-second later, but I wasn’t sure it was a bullet until I saw the snow turning red around my
left shoe. Charlotte herself seemed surprised at the result. She stood beside the car admiring her work and expecting that
I wouldn’t move further.

But I did. I started again for the rail, dragging myself
the first few feet, and then, after bracing my shoulder against the steel superstructure of the bridge, inching myself to
my feet.

Charlotte was walking slowly through the falling snow, her coat open, breasts and hips moving in silent syncopation, the black
widow preparing casually for the fatal sting. I kept my eyes riveted on her as I hooked my good leg over the side and dragged
the bum one after it. If she was going to do this slowly, very slowly, I might still have a chance, unless the Barracuda Brothers
were a lot more dense and inept than I’d figured them to be. She had bullets left, so nobody and nothing else was going to
save me.

I’d climbed halfway to the catwalk when she reached the rail, the automatic aimed at my forehead.

“Climb back up!” she shouted, so I did, my ears still ringing. The gun drifted toward my groin, and she smiled. “I think I’ll
shoot you right in the balls, Lombardi.”

“The deal’ll be off, then.”

“You never made any deal with Scarpetti that included me.”

“You’re right about that, Charlotte. Scarpetti offered me the ten grand to bring the file to him, but I never told him I would.”

“You were gonna take it to the cops?”

“That’s right.”

“Who would’ve paid… ?”

“Not a nickel. So, how does it feel to have murdered your brother and two other kids for absolutely nothing?”

“You’re still gonna take me there,” she said, pointing the gun at my head again. “To Scarpetti’s. You’re gonna take me right
now, you son of a bitch!”

“Wrong again.”

“Then you’re gonna die right here.”

I took in the bridge in all its stony majesty, and suddenly I was filled with the sense of my own invincibility. I was grinning
shamelessly when I said, “I’ve
already
died here, Charlotte. A dozen times. You’re too damned late.”

The sound of car doors slamming took her attention away from her trigger finger. The Barracuda Brothers had arrived and stopped
fifty feet away in the middle of the center lane. They were standing on either side of the hearse, guns drawn.

“What the… ?” Charlotte growled as she whirled around. In the instant it took her to draw a bead on the closest of the Barracuda
Brothers, I’d pulled myself up the railing far enough to grab her by the tresses of her long, black hair, and, using the rail
as a fulcrum, pulled her over.

As the automatic fell silently onto the snow-covered lane, a screaming Charlotte plummeted into the freezing water of the
East River a hundred and thirty-five feet below. If her body didn’t get snagged on a piling or a pier at Red Hook, the current
would take it right into Upper New York Bay. Some tug pilot or barge captain would find it in the morning, after the fish
had nibbled on it for breakfast. Even Paulie the Pickler wouldn’t want to play with it when they pulled it out.

T
he guy in the other bed had wrapped his car around a pole on Empire Boulevard. He wasn’t talking to me, but only because his
jaw was wired. We shared a nice, semiprivate room on the fourth floor at Kings County Hospital, the same floor where I’d visited
Liam.

The hollow-point .45 slug had glanced off the hard rubber heel of my shoe. Only a couple of fragments had made their way into
my own heel, and the doctors had dug those out. If the bullet had hit solidly, it would’ve taken off my foot.

I’d slept ten hours straight and awakened just in time to get a hypodermic in the ass and grab the nurse’s copy of the morning
paper. There was no news about the Scarpetti file, only a small single-column piece about the accidental death of an apparently
deranged young woman on the Brooklyn Bridge. For some reason, nineteen-year-old Charlotte Hutchinson of Sutter Avenue in Brownsville
had
allegedly tried to murder twenty-eight-year-old Edward Lombardi, a resident of Bensonhurst, with a gun. The woman was also
believed to be the prime suspect in the recent murders of two teenagers from Brownsville and a third from East New York. The
police were performing tests on the gun found at the scene of the Lombardi shooting. Results were pending.

Nick DeMassio was the first one the nurse allowed in to see me, wearing what looked like a sheepish apology on his bullish
Sicilian face.

“How’s it goin’, Eddie?” he asked, nursing a half-smile. I let him fidget mindlessly with his hat before I answered.

“Got a little hot-foot.”

“The local precinct impounded your car,” he said. “Part of the crime scene.”

“Banged up much?”

“Nothin’ that can’t be fixed. I’ll take care of the repair bill.”

“Car’s insured,” I said blandly. “But thanks for the offer, anyway.”

“Sure. No problem.”

I waved the newspaper in his face. “How’d you keep the Barracuda Brothers out of it?”

“Out of what?”

“The cover-up.”

“What cover-up?”

“You never used to take me for stupid, Nick.”

“Oh,
that.”
A wider grin snuck out from behind DeMassio’s feigned ignorance. “Kinda hard to explain them away, and after all, they
did
hand over the Scarpetti file to the
investigating officer, who took it straight to the D.A.’s office, where, of course, it’d been all along.”

“Of course.”

“So, no reason to drag Santini and his kids into it.”

“Kids?”

“Well…”

“The Brothers hand over anything else?”

DeMassio reached inside his overcoat and pulled out Shork’s folder. “You know what this is, maybe?” He placed it in my hand.

“It’s the reason why a certain guy murdered a blackmailing sleaze named Joe Shork.”

“And this certain guy is?”

“Not Arnold.”

DeMassio soured. “Don’t pull this shit with me again, Eddie. I been tryin’ to say I’m sorry, but I’m gonna forget about that
if you hold out again.”

So I told him all of it: Jorgenson, Sissy, everything I knew but still couldn’t prove. At the end of it, I said, “I’m gonna
see that Jorgenson gets this folder. The rest is up to him. And I accept your apology, Nick.”

A smile returned to the big Sicilian’s face. He turned and headed for the door, then turned back as he opened it.

“One more thing,” he said. “How exactly
did
this Charlotte chick end up fallin’ off the Brooklyn Bridge?”

“I think there was a strong headwind last night,” I deadpanned. “Blew straight in from Italy.”

A wind to blow ill-winds away.

“Uh huh,” he said. “I’ll make sure that’s noted in the report.”

“Hey, Nick,” I asked. “How long you think Big Dom will last with his share of the spoils once big brother Alberto gets hot-wired
up at Sing Sing?”

“A month maybe.”

“A fiver says less than two weeks.”

“You’re on,” he said, and he was out the door. He poked his head back in long enough to add, “I’ll see what I can do about
the Pulaski kid.”

My
goombahs
came that afternoon, right at the start of visiting hours, Gino in the lead. They admired me with a gallery of grins, and
then Frankie took out a bottle of beer he’d smuggled past the nurse’s station. It wasn’t Schaefer. His smile was ear-to-ear.

“Get that bottled piss out of here!” was what he wanted to hear, so I didn’t disappoint him. Sal had some garlic bread, which
he hid under the pillow. The five of them signed my bandage and we made small talk. Gino didn’t make any speeches, Arnold
Pulaski’s name didn’t come up once, and they were gone in an hour.

I was up on crutches by midafternoon, visiting everybody on the fourth floor who was coherent.

My sisters and their idiot husbands came that evening, Dino and Letty leading the parade. Their kids were all at a neighbor’s
house, probably tearing it up. I knew the usual lectures were coming from Maggie, Letty, and Fran, and I listened patiently.
The few joys of detective work were minuscule next to the dangers, they said, although nobody actually used the word “minuscule.”
Finally, even fat Dino chimed in: “Didn’t you have enough of this kind of thing in that 82nd Airborne outfit?”

“How many times do I hafta tell you? 101st Airborne, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, Easy company. The 82nd was for twits
and sissies like you, if you’d had balls enough to join up. Got it?”

That pretty much ended the family visit. I made a few more trips up and down the ward on my crutches, getting back in time
to see Watusi sitting patiently beside my bed. He was reading Marcus Aurelius again. I climbed back into bed.

“How’s the leg?” I asked at the same time he asked, “Hows your heel?” We paused, then answered each other awkwardly, “Fine.”

“I suppose I’ll have to start calling you Achilles,” he said dryly.

“It’ll sound better than ‘Gimpy.’ Doc says I might limp a little even when it’s healed.”

“Fast Eddie,” he mused.

“Sounds funnier every day, doesn’t it?”

“I received a letter from Viper yesterday,” he said after a pause. Viper was a hot-headed switchblade artist from Harlem,
Watusi’s oldest friend. He’d fled to the West Coast a year and a half earlier after killing a man. The man had needed killing
for a long time, but murder is still murder, and Viper was still hiding out.

“Hasn’t killed anybody out there, has he?”

“He’s met a woman, had a son by her. Perhaps fatherhood will calm him down.”

“Like it has you?” I smiled.

He didn’t answer. “Desiree still expects you this weekend. She’s made a dress for her cat and wants to show it to you.”

“On the cat? It’s a boy cat.”