Shoot the Moon (40 page)

Instead, the voice he hears comes from the guy with the big neck. “We’re on the job, here, assholes! Who the fuck are
you?”

Now if the one with the big neck had said, “We’re cops,” or “We’re police officers,” or even “We’re federal agents,” Waters might be having his doubts right about now, might even be cocking the hammer of his weapon to show just how much he means business. But “on the job” is a magic phrase, and as soon as he hears it, Lee Waters experiences a sinking feeling. He’s not sure yet, but he senses already that the whole Gabe Pressman interview is down the tube, so to speak.

The standoff continues for a few minutes, each side demanding to see the credentials of the other but afraid of any move toward a pocket. There’s some swearing and name-calling, as well as an accusation or two that one agency has interfered with another’s investigation. But in the end, nobody gets shot, punched, or even arrested. Which is a pretty fortunate thing, considering how these jurisdictional disputes usually seem to wind up.

Zelb continues to monitor the locator device, which blinks and beeps a steady indication that their target is still nearby. Farrelli uses a portable radio to call the group leader, Lenny Siegel.

“Stay on the building,” Siegel tells them. “We couldn’t get any closer with all the traffic, so we’re heading uptown. We’ll swing by his house. If he slips past you guys, we’ll be waiting for him at his house.”

“Don’t worry, boss,” Farrelli says. “No way he’s gonna slip past this team.”

“Why am I not convinced?” Siegel asks. He clicks off before Farrelli can answer.

But by this time, the team consists of six men, including Waters and Gleason. They represent the United States Justice Department’s Drug Enforcement Administration and the New York Police Department’s Organized Crime Control Bureau. All told, they have eight guns, 200 rounds of ammunition, five pairs of handcuffs, and the locator device. They’re waiting for a little, unarmed guy with a big suitcase to walk out of the building and into their arms.

Now those are the kind of odds you’ve got to like.

Shortly before 8:30, Big Red pulls his Bentley into Ninety-Second Street, finds a parking place that’s more or less legal, and kills the engine. He taps a pack of Marlboros and extracts one of them. Before it reaches his mouth, Hammer has lighted a match and holds it ready.

“What’s the plan, Red?” Hammer asks.

“We gonna jus chill here a few minutes,” Big Red explains. “Then, if everything looks cool, we gonna pay Mr. Pure a little call.”

Not thirty feet away, Harry Weems studies the Bentley in his binoculars.

“Two wrong-looking characters sittin’ in a red Rolls-Royce right in front of us, Ray.” By “wrong-looking characters,” Weems, of course, means blacks. But being African-American himself, he chooses to state it somewhat differently.

“What are they up to?” Abbruzzo asks.

“Hard to say,” Weems says. “But nothing legal, that’s for damn sure.”

“Keep an eye on them.”

“Oh, I will,” says Harry Weems. “I will.”

The black Mercedes 500S cruises slowly down Lexington Avenue. Johnnie Delgado is behind the wheel. Mister Fuentes sits alongside him. Two guys known as Papo and Julio ride in the back.

“What street we looking for?” Mister Fuentes asks, turning up the heat. He wishes he were back in Miami.

“Ninety-second,” Johnnie Delgado says. He knows the block well. He’s known it ever since a couple of their men followed the gringo there - the same gringo who stole the heroin Raul Cuervas was supposed to pick up at the airport in Fort Lauderdale. That little mistake had cost Cuervas his life.

“Raul Cuervas was my cousin, you know,” Mister Fuentes says. He’s always had this uncanny ability to know what’s on the other person’s mind.

“I didn’t know that,” Johnnie Delgado says, not sure if it’s really true or not.

“Yes, it’s true,” Mister Fuentes says. “That’s why it’s so important for me to avenge his death.”

Which strikes Johnnie Delgado as a bit strange, given the fact that it was Mister Fuentes himself who ordered the death of Raul Cuervas.

“That was business,” says Mister Fuentes.

“And now?”

“Now we find our little gringo and avenge Raul’s death.”

Johnnie Delgado has the feeling that there’s more involved here. Mister Fuentes hasn’t flown up from Miami just to kill some Anglo. He could have done that with a phone call.

“And while we’re at it,” Mister Fuentes continues, “we’ll see if there are any black duffel bags lying around his apartment. Heh, heh, heh.” As usual, he’s his own best audience.

“Good thinking,” says Johnnie Delgado.

The two guys in the back of the car say nothing. Johnnie Delgado can’t remember if they speak English or not. In any event, they’re along for a reason, but it’s not to express their opinions.

Big Red stubs out his cigarette. “Let’s take us a little walk,” he tells Hammer.

They step out of the Bentley, slam the doors, and cross the street.

“You packin’?” Big Red asks Hammer. “Packin’“ in this case means “strapped” - carrying a gun. Big Red doesn’t like to pack. Possession of a loaded weapon is a class D felony, get you seven years upstate. That’s one of the reasons he has Hammer.

“I do believe I am,” Hammer replies, patting an area just to the right of his belt buckle.

“Is it clean?”

“Clean as a whistle.”

Here, Big Red’s jargon leaves just a bit to be desired.
Clean,
when it comes to a gun, is a word that can be used to mean that the gun’s been cleaned since the last time it was fired, not only so that it will operate properly but so that if it’s seized by the police there will be no evidence of discharge visible upon examination. And indeed, it’s precisely that meaning of the term that Hammer has in mind when he assures Big Red that he’s recently cleaned the gun.

But a clean gun has a second connotation altogether, and it’s actually that second connotation that Big Red was concerned about when he posed the question in the first place. A clean gun also refers to one without a criminal history, a gun with no “bodies” on it. Since guns and bullets can be matched by microscopic comparison, a seized gun can occasionally link its possessor to an unsolved homicide.

But when you come right down to it, Hammer has a rather childlike mind. He tends to take things literally. So it’s really no surprise that he attaches the more literal meaning to Big Red’s use of the word
clean.
The gun is clean, he knows, because he cleaned it himself - just the other day, in fact.

“Our two wrong guys are out of the Rolls,” Weems tells Abbruzzo.

“What’re they doing?”

“Crossing the street . . . looking around . . . Shit, Ray! They’re going into Goodman’s building!”

“
Are you sure?”

“How sure do I gotta be?” Weems asks. “They’re already inside, if that helps any.”

“What’s going on in the apartment?” Abbruzzo asks.

Weems aims the binoculars at the fifth-floor window. “Nothing,” he says. “It’s still dark.”

“Keep an eye on it.”

Hammer uses a thin piece of steel to slip the ground-floor lock of Michael Goodman’s building. It’s the same implement he uses when he wants to borrow someone’s car and can’t seem to locate the door key.

Big Red checks the names on the mailboxes in the lobby. He finds what he’s looking for: M. GOODMAN, 5F

With no elevator in sight, they begin climbing the stairs. They’re both smokers, and though they both work (after a manner of speaking), physical labor appears on neither of their job descriptions. By the time they reach the fifth floor, they’re both seriously out of breath.

Big Red knocks on the door of apartment 5F and waits for an answer. There is none. The nice thing about the way the building’s laid out, he decides, is that there are only two apartments on each floor. (Though why they’re lettered
F
and
R
he can’t imagine. White people too good for
A
and
B?)
He knows that a little noise won’t alarm anybody, particularly on Halloween. He steps aside and motions to Hammer.

The trick to kicking in a door is understanding what’s keeping it shut in the first place. Hammer understands this, and he now spends a moment studying the lock pattern on Michael Goodman’s door. First, he notices that’s there’s no Fox police lock, a contraption that consists of a long steel bar with one end set into the floor and the other wedged against the center of the inside of the door. Then he assures himself that there’s no crossbar, a heavy metal plate running horizontally across the width of the door. Either device could spell disaster for someone foolish enough to make a run at the door - the first because it could impale him, the second because it could sever his body at its midsection.

Next, he inspects the frame - which in this case seems to be fairly substantial - and the composition of the door itself. It appears to be constructed out of several pieces of wood, a thick border surrounding a recessed center panel. Hammer taps softly on the border, listening to the solid sound of the wood. Then he taps on the center panel. A hollow sound answers him, causing a smile to spread across his face.

As Big Red stands off to one side, Hammer takes one step back, plants his left foot, and drives the sole of his right foot clear through the panel, which splinters like the plywood it is. Then he extracts his foot, reaches his hand inside the hole he’s made, unlocks the door, and opens it wide for Big Red.

It’s dark inside, and Big Red flicks on the light switch.

“They’re inside!” Weems shouts. But he needn’t have, since Abbruzzo has already heard the crash of the door panel giving way and is now picking up sounds from inside the apartment.

Abbruzzo distinctly feels his heart skip a beat. He leans forward, not wanting to miss a word.

That’s more than Ray Abbruzzo can stand. Grabbing his gun and his handcuffs, he’s on his feet. “Come on, Harry!” he shouts. “We’re going to save this day yet!” Then he’s out the door and running across the street, with Weems struggling to keep up, the binoculars looped around his neck and banging painfully against his chest.

They slip the downstairs lock with a credit card and are in the building seconds before the black Mercedes makes the turn into the block from Lexington Avenue.

Lenny Siegel and Luis Sandoval find the traffic much lighter uptown, well away from the Greenwich Village area. By 8:30, Sandoval has the Cadillac in the Eighties, heading up Park Avenue.

“Hang a right at Ninety-second,” Siegel says.

“Yes, sir.”

“And don’t
sir
me.”

“Sorry sir.”

* * *

Abbruzzo and Weems huff and puff their way up the stairs to the fifth-floor landing. They’re both overweight - Weems by eighty pounds - and a steady diet of pizza, doughnuts, coffee, soda, and cigarettes has somewhat underprepared them for this particular event. Abbruzzo fishes around in his pockets for his Maalox before remembering he finished the roll awhile back.

Johnnie Delgado leads the way from the Mercedes into the building, followed by Mister Fuentes, Papo, and Julio. They find the stairs and begin the climb to the fifth floor. They proceed slowly. For one thing, they feel no particular urge to hurry. Beyond that, by the fourth floor, they’re all beginning to feel the effects of a lunch of rice and beans, habanero peppers, tequila, and
pulpo y olio. Pulpo y olio
is a delightful concoction of baby octopus and fried garlic cloves swimming in olive oil, but it begins to repeat on you just a bit during strenuous stair climbing.

“What’s that?” Johnnie Delgado says, trying to quiet the rest of the climbers. It takes a moment, but eventually their burping and belching subside and they’re able to hear the sound of heavy breathing other than their own. It’s coming from the stairs directly overhead. They press their bodies against the wall to stay out of sight, and listen. They strain to make out the conversation coming from above them.

“Nice job they did on the door,” the first man is whispering. His voice is that of a gringo.

“If nothing else, we got a felony burglary here,” the second one says. He sounds black. “These fuckers give us any trouble, we blow ‘em away, get their stories later,” they hear him say.

The next sound they hear is that of an automatic pistol being jacked as the first round is lifted from the magazine and chambered into firing position. It is a sound that Johnnie Delgado, Mister Fuentes, Papo, and Julio all happen to be familiar with. Without so much as a word or a glance among them, they begin backing slowly down the stairs, looking something like a caterpillar in retreat.

It’s turned out to be a very productive evening for Fingers Nelson. “Fingers” - a nickname that replaced the somewhat more formal Francis around the time of Nelson’s third arrest for picking the pockets of unsuspecting New Yorkers - has been working the crowd of parade watchers up and down Sixth Avenue, between Christopher and Eleventh streets. Next to New Year’s Eve, which Fingers likes to celebrate at Times Square, Halloween is his favorite night of the year. He’s done so well, in fact, that he’s had to remove his jacket and use it as a satchel to conceal the four wallets, three change purses, two credit card cases, and assorted other treasure that he’s accumulated over the past two hours.

The problem with success, of course, is that it has its price. And the particular price that Fingers is paying right now is that he’s cold without his jacket. As a result, he’s been forced to seek temporary shelter between the outer and inner doors of a large apartment building on the corner of Sixth and Tenth Street. He knows he can’t stay there long without being asked to move by a doorman or a tenant, but there are so many people milling about that he decides he’s safe for a little while. But, just to be sure, he occasionally glances over his shoulder into the lobby to see what’s going on.