The Sniper's Wife (20 page)
The other man’s eyes widened. “That’s what this is about? That asshole? Shit. You coulda asked me that in the elevator, I woulda told you. You guys’re crazy. Fuckin’ boneheads.”
Willy was losing patience. The knife tip eased into one of Manotti’s nostrils.
“Hey, hey,” he said, careful not to move.
“Don’t give me etiquette,” Willy said menacingly. “Give me what I want.”
“All right, all right. Jesus Christ. Last I knew, he was hanging around the Carroll Gardens area, either on Clinton or Henry. I don’t keep in touch.”
Willy laughed at the cliché. “Doesn’t mean you won’t drop a dime and let him know we came asking.”
Despite his precarious position, Manotti flared, “What’s with you? You dumb and ugly both? I told you I think the guy’s an asshole. You wanna take him out, be my frigging guest.” He leaned forward slightly, making his nose bleed, and yelled,
“I don’t give a fuck.”
Willy sat back and glanced at Riley. “You believe him, Reuben?”
Riley was standing out of Manotti’s view and rolled his eyes at the name. He spoke for the first time since entering the apartment. “Sure.”
“I guess I do, too. Who’s Cashman working for nowadays?”
“He’s a freelance,” Manotti answered, calmer now that he felt he’d made his point. “That’s the biggest reason we split up. I thought he was ripping me off; he thought I was too much the big boss. It’s not like I miss him, the guy was a thug.”
Willy stood up and moved the chair he’d been sitting on. “Wild guess: You wouldn’t want us coming back. Am I right?”
Riley had removed enough duct tape so Manotti could bring his hand up to his nose and touch it gingerly.
“No shit.”
“You got anything to add, then? Some way we could find Cashman extra fast?”
Manotti examined his fingertips for blood, finding only a drop. “Go to that neighborhood and ask for a cold gun. That oughtta flush him out. He’s into guns big time.”
Willy pocketed his knife and stuck out his hand. “Thanks, Lenny. You’re a stand-up guy.”
Manotti shook his head, but he also took Willy’s hand in grudging respect. “And you’re an asshole. Close the door on the way out.”
S
ammie Martens intoned, “Nancy Hidalgo,” and gave an address.
Jim Berhle, Ward Ogden’s young partner, typed the name into the computer and waited a few moments for it to respond. “A shoplifting rap six years ago. Otherwise clean,” he read back to her.
“Anthony Mallon,” Sammie said next, and followed it with another address. She was reading from a list in her hand.
Berhle repeated his part of the exercise.
“Wonder if that’s one of the boyfriends,” Joe Gunther said, standing by the coffee machine they’d smuggled into the room. The three of them were upstairs in the precinct house, far from the Whip’s prying eyes, or anyone else from the detective squad. Ogden was where he was supposed to be, satisfying the powers by catching up on some of his other cases. He’d been taken “off the chart” for any new cases, but Mary Kunkle hadn’t been declared worthy of undivided attention.
“Clean as a whistle,” Berhle reported.
“Last one,” Sammie announced. “Michael Annunzio.”
Jim Berhle waited for the address and typed in the name. After the usual pause, he said, “Little more interesting: Mr. Annunzio’s been busted for possession twice, disorderly twice, and once for domestic assault. He might stand a friendly chat.”
They’d been closeted for hours, Sammie and Gunther scrounging through all the Metro cards, bills, sales receipts, and credit card slips, building what they could of a timeline and linking it to a geographical chart on one hand—where Mary had been each time she’d generated one of these mundane documents—and to a list of names and addresses of everyone she’d phoned over the past six months on the other.
Berhle shoved his chair away from the computer, pushed his glasses up high on his forehead, and rubbed his eyes vigorously. “Man, I can’t imagine doing this all day, every day.” He stood up and paced the floor briefly, stretching his legs, before coming to a stop behind where Sammie was sitting so he could look over her shoulder at the complicated, hand-scribbled chart.
“So, we have anything after all that?” he asked.
Joe Gunther by now understood why Ogden had chosen this particular partner for this case. Like the dinosaur, Berhle was calm, thoughtful, smart, and not driven by ego. He’d also proved to be as happy as his senior colleague to work with a couple of complete outsiders, at least when it came to pure grunt work.
Sammie tried to decipher her own handwriting, not to mention the arrows and scratch-outs that also covered her notes. “One thing’s for sure,” she told him. “Mary had a whole different lifestyle than we thought. I’d pictured some walking wounded dragging herself toward employment and education through guts and determination. She’s a whole lot more complicated than that.”
She tapped one of the sheets with her pencil eraser. “Like with these phone contacts. Besides the usual coworkers and friends is an inordinate bunch of social misfits. Michael Annunzio is the sixth man with a violent criminal record, all of which include domestic assault raps. That’s either a weird coincidence or she wasn’t able to break the cycle. Did you cross-check to see if any of their victims was Mary?”
“I tried,” Berhle admitted. “But I only scratched the surface, and some of that information isn’t in our data bank, either. We’re getting better, but the idea of one computer terminal doing everything is still a ways off. Anyhow, she didn’t surface in anything I checked, to answer your question. What else did you find out?”
Sammie turned to the Metro card map. “First time we saw this, the big thing that jumped out was how many times she went to Harlem, which we’re now figuring was to sign up for those classes. This map shows only three Brooklyn locations, in three different neighborhoods. No big deal on the face of it. Except”—and here she pulled together several more scraps of paper—“for when you start superimposing a bunch of these.”
She placed her finger on the map. “Here, for instance. We’ve got a subway stop one day, a thrown-out receipt for a fast-food lunch on another, and the address of one of the men she called, all happening within the same three-block area.” She moved to another section. “Same thing for here. No subway stop, but another receipt, a credit card charge for some store item, and again, a nearby phone number of some creep. In fact, each of the three subway stops corresponds to one of these kinds of men. She was definitely up to something. I can feel it in my gut.”
“It also brings back what Ogden said,” Gunther added. “That she never surfaced where most junkies do, on the welfare rolls, or unemployment, or parole and probation. Like she had a secret nest egg.”
Jim Berhle had finally worked out the kinks enough to sit down again. “I also wondered about that credit card. I know she didn’t use it much, and the limit’s low, but I was surprised she had one at all. Most junkies aren’t that organized.”
“What was the name of her primary girlfriend?” Gunther asked.
Sammie looked it up. “Louisa Obregon, nicknamed Loui.”
“She said she’d seen a couple of boyfriends. Maybe we should get mug shots of these gentlemen and run them by her.”
“Yeah,” Sammie agreed, “add them to Bob Kunkle’s picture.”
The phone rang beside Berhle’s elbow. He picked it up, muttered a few monosyllables, and hung up.
“That was Ogden,” he told them. “Sounds like your loose cannon is at it again. Ogden told Kunkle on purpose that Ron Cashman used to work for an old hood named Manotti, but didn’t tell him Manotti and Ogden are old acquaintances. Apparently Willy and another guy just finished giving Manotti the third degree, looking for Cashman. It wasn’t a casual interest.”
Crestfallen, Sammie stared at the floor. “Damn him.”
“Christ,” Riley Cox murmured. “I thought I was out of this kind of thing.”
Willy didn’t comment, but he knew the feeling. They were in Brooklyn’s Red Hook district, a thumb-shaped appendage jutting into New York Bay below Governors Island. It was late at night and they were approaching a very large, very dark warehouse that sat at the end of an enormous concrete pier surrounded by cold jet-black water. The surrounding light show of distant buildings, twinkling like Christmas lights, and the muffled, far-off rumblings of the urban sprawl around them only enhanced their isolation. Falling back on their separate memories, neither one could shake a sense of foreboding.
They had made contact with Ron Cashman—or at least someone they hoped would turn out to be he. Buying illegal guns, unlike scoring drugs, was a tangled and cautious affair. Guns were expensive, high-profile with law enforcement, and easily traceable through serial numbers and federally mandated recordkeeping. Not only that, but the gun laws in New York specifically were among the harshest in the nation. No one with any survival skills was going to do business with the first joker into a neighborhood asking to buy a gun.
So, at Willy’s urging, Riley had sent inquiries through his contacts about making a buy. After a lot of talk and negotiation, he’d eventually been told to come alone to the Red Hook warehouse and to bring six hundred dollars in cash. The deal was to purchase a new Glock .40, and ammunition, with an option to buy many more if the deal proved satisfactory. From what they’d been told, and as they’d been hoping, the discussions had piqued Cashman’s interest. He was going to be there himself to check out this new, potentially big buyer.
The two men stopped in the darkness several hundred yards shy of their target.
“You got everything you need?” Willy asked.
“I got everything I got,” Riley answered him. “I’ll only know what I need when I find out I don’t have it, like a missile launcher.”
Their plan wasn’t very sophisticated. It hadn’t been allowed to be. Cashman’s people had only told them to be near a particular pay phone at a certain time in order to find out the location of the meet. That call had occurred just twenty minutes before, precluding any chance of getting to the place first to check it out.
More than anything, that’s why they’d both been nurturing memories of Vietnam: As they’d chronically had to do over there, they were going in blind.
And, as everybody knew, the worst time in these deals was when the product met the money.
Their choices were rudimentary: Either Willy went in first covertly and found a place to hide and observe, from which he could quickly move in as backup, or Riley went in first as the buyer—since Cashman knew Willy by sight—hoping that most of Cashman’s team would then be focused on him and pay less attention to any additional company. They knew the opposition would keep an eye out for the cops, but that didn’t preclude a single, trained man from slipping through.
They’d chosen the latter course of action, and after a few whispered exchanges to coordinate what little they could, they parted company, Riley slowly, carefully, and in plain view, walking down the rest of the pier toward the warehouse’s primary entrance.
He wasn’t armed, despite his rocket launcher comment and their assumption that the sellers would be. The core problem in these deals was that the guns allowed either party to try taking the other guy’s offerings by force. In fact, there was a growing trend demanding that all weapons be left behind. Riley had chosen to do so even though the subject had never come up.
He reached the huge, partially open sliding metal door and sidled inside, stopping to let his eyes adjust to the gloom. The only light was the city’s reflected glow coming through a string of skylights high above. Slowly, what emerged before him was a long, towering central hall extending the length of the building, with girders overhead equipped with traveling winches and catwalks, metal grid-floored galleries on either side about twenty feet up, and a series of large doors, some open, some closed, lining the walls on the first floor. Massive steel pillars stood like regimented redwood trees, two by two, all the way to the end.
The whole enormous place was as still as a tomb.
Riley proceeded to the distant far wall, as he’d been told, discerning as he went a small glimmering of light in the distance. There was moisture on the concrete floor— occasional small puddles of water or oil as black as onyx—and his footsteps, no matter how soft his tread, echoed off the walls to either side of him. He wondered how in hell Willy was going to enter undetected and, not for the first time, why it was he’d stuck his neck out for a dead friend and a complete stranger. Not that he didn’t know in his heart. For all that he might have denied it, he hadn’t felt this alive since returning from ’Nam.
“Stop.”
The voice had come as from some celestial height, without an identifiable point of origin. Riley stopped, keeping his hands open and within plain view.
With a startlingly loud metallic snap, a light suddenly burst alive and surrounded him in a blinding white cone, making him squint in pain. He considered ducking away, to dispel their advantage, but knew that might be the last move he ever made.
“Why are you here?” asked the voice in a dispassionate, almost bored tone.
“Same reason you are.”
“No games. Answer the question.”
“I want to buy a gun.”
There was no response from beyond the light.
A couple of minutes passed before Riley clearly heard the sounds of approaching footsteps, although he still couldn’t see a thing. The voice spoke again, but this time from just beyond his vision, a mere few feet away, startling him.
“What’s your name?”
“Waldo Upshriner. What’s yours?”
The voice laughed. “Very good. You bring the money?”
“Turn the light off or you’ll never find out.”
Whether because of his tone of voice or the fact that his request had already been anticipated—which was far more likely—the light died as abruptly as it had appeared. The man with the voice waited patiently as Riley blinked and slowly got used to the softer glow of a battery-powered camp lantern atop a nearby fifty-five-gallon drum. Beside it stood two rough-looking men dressed in dark clothing, with guns stuffed into their belts. Whatever this was, it wasn’t the romantic claptrap of the movies, where everyone wears fancy suits and pulls up in limos with ten bodyguards. This was a street-level business deal, as gritty as the surroundings in which it was occurring.
High above and nearer the front entrance, Willy Kunkle silently stepped onto one of the grid-decked galleries overlooking the vast room. He had located the one sentry outside, equipped with a walkie-talkie to give the alarm, and had knocked him unconscious without a sound. Then, not trusting to follow Riley’s path, he’d opted instead to climb an exterior ladder and enter through a broken office window. Which had led him to where he was now, just in time to see the bright light replaced by the weaker one.
He could hear the voices of the three men, although not what they were saying, and hoped to hell things would continue smoothly, at least until he got closer. He removed his rubber-soled shoes and shoved them into his coat pocket, to be sure that the metal grating beneath his feet would not issue a betraying sound at the wrong moment.
Moving slowly, crouched low from instinct, his gun in his hand, Willy placed one foot before the other, as carefully as if he’d been treading razor-thin ice.
Below him, Riley was negotiating: “You said on the phone it was six hundred for the one piece. I can live with that this time, to show good faith, but I got to have a break if we’re going to be dealing in quantity.”
Ron Cashman—whom Riley recognized from Willy’s description of the bandage especially—shook his head. “You think the risk goes down with more guns? It’s just the opposite. Besides, I don’t know you. Why should I cut you any breaks?”
Riley smiled. “ ’Cause you’re goin’ to want to know me. I got what you need. And don’t feed me that crap about higher risk. I’m offering to buy fifteen pieces off you in one shot. What d’you think is riskier? One deal for good money, or fifteen deals where you got fifteen chances of selling to a cop?”
Willy was getting closer, had almost gotten to where he had the advantage over both Cashman and his henchman.
Cashman pulled his gun from his waistband. “What tells me you’re not a cop?”
