A CARESSINGLY WARM FRIDAY morning, the kind of a spring day that destroys the will to work. A morning when the bright yellow forsythia growing freely along the Grand Central Parkway beckons to the commuters crawling past LaGuardia Airport, reminding them of other times. Reminding them of young love and long-forgotten resolutions to find a different way. Of dreamers crushed by the relentless grind of the city as surely as Sylvia Kaufman was crushed by the greedy dreams of Marek Najowski and Martin Blanks.
Betty Haluka, driving out to the 115th Precinct with Stanley Moodrow, thought of her aunt even while she noted the annual miracle. The yellow flowers grew so thickly it seemed as if an artist, in a sardonic moment, had decided to paste a swatch of bright yellow over a field of soot and litter. The forsythia, she knew, grew completely wild, like the laurel thickets in southern mountains, though on a much smaller scale. Of course, one expected beauty in the wild mountains of West Virginia. The sudden, brief appearance of the forsythia (to be completely forgotten with the onset of the broiling summer) always came as a surprise, even to veteran New Yorkers who’d been plying the same commuter routes for decades. A surprise, an intrusion, a silent, uneasy memory.
“What are they called again?” Betty asked. “The yellow flowers? All I can remember is that it’s a word that begins with ‘f’ and I could never pronounce it.”
Moodrow stirred alongside her. “I been thinking the same thing. Funny, I never saw this before. Whatever it is, there’s an awful lot of it. You think someone planted it?”
“I don’t know.” She paused as a giant Pan Am jet crossed the parkway a hundred feet above them. So loud it seemed to shake the world. “Forthithitha,” she said after the plane had safely dropped onto the La Guardia runway a quarter mile to the east. “Damn! I can’t say it. I could never say that word. Fasythitha.”
Rabbit Cohan didn’t want to get up when the alarm rang. He didn’t want to get into the shower or get dressed, either. In fact, he hadn’t been awake at eight o’clock in the morning since he’d come out of the service in ’86, not since he’d been initiated into the economic mysteries of cocaine by his twin older brothers, Ben and Mick.
But it was their own progress into those economics that had him out of bed after three hours’ sleep. The Cohan brothers were about to move up (assuming the job went off all right) and moving up was what it was all about—moving up to Jaguars and Porsches and North Shore mansions on Long Island Sound.
The best part was that he’d never done cocaine. Never done it and never been tempted. His relationship to the white lady was that of protector. He and his brothers protected shipments and money exchanges for bigger, stronger people who would, sooner or later, realize the value of the brothers Cohan. Who would properly evaluate their industrious sobriety and give them a piece of the mother-fucking action. In the meantime, they lived from contract to contract, augmenting their incomes with the odd hijacking.
“Big day comin’, boyo,” Mick Cohan said as Rabbit went by. “You ready to work?”
“Fuck you, too,” Rabbit answered smartly. Mick had a thick scar under his right eye. Without it, Rabbit could only tell the twins apart by their behavior. Mick was the aggressive one. He gave orders and the brothers obeyed. Ben was quiet, almost sullen. For some reason, Pop had liked his little Mickey. He’d never, so far as anyone could tell, liked anything except Budweiser before Mickey’d come along and he clearly disliked Ben, beating the boy as often and as casually as he beat his wife.
Still, the old man hadn’t been able to come between the twins, who stood by each other (and by their mother and, later, their little brother, Rabbit) despite their father’s tyranny. Predictably, Pop had died in his early fifties when his heart had followed his liver into the alcoholic toilet, and “making it up to Ma” became the second most important goal in the brothers’ lives.
“Whatsa matta with ya filthy sinners? Can’t yer stop that mastrubatin’ long enough to have a breakfast before ya go off ta work?”
“We’ll be there in a minute, Ma,” Rabbit called. He threw himself out of bed, pulling a Kelly green T-shirt over his head. Green was the family trademark and the brothers never left the house without proudly displaying a bit of the Irish. This despite the fact that only Rabbit had ever seen the “old sod” and he’d done it via a four-day pass while stationed in Paris.
As usual, breakfast was a massive affair—eggs, pancakes, ham, bacon, toast, fruit, coffee, juice. Lunch, if Ma got to serve it, would be just as heavy, and dinner was a challenge the boys loved to accept. Rabbit sat before his plate and reached mischievously for his coffee.
“Say yer grace,” Ma warned, swiping at his hand with the flat of a knife.
“Blessusohlordandthesethygifts…”
“Not like that, ya heathen bastard.” Her voice rose into a familiar screech. “Y’ll say yer prayers like a proper Catholic or ya won’t eat in this house.”
She raised her knife again, but Rabbit hastily apologized, running through the prayer calmly and clearly.
“Are ya givin’ yer saintly mother a hard time?” Mick asked, reaching for his own coffee. It was a ritual they observed whenever they assembled, although Ma never seemed to get the joke. But then, Ma was, indisputably, the brains of the gang.
“We’ll go through it one more time,” Ma announced. “If ya can stop stuffin’ yer mouths. It’s a wonder yer not fat as pigs. Ben, let’s hear you say it.”
Ben, sullen as ever, continued to chew his food and Ma went into a frenzy, her lined face trembling as if she had Parkinson’s disease. “If that’s the way it’s gonna be,” she declared, “yer can all stay home and we’ll go on the welfare. Yer incompetent bastards, I’d sooner have three Brits than a gang of fools like yourselves.”
“C’mon, Ben,” Mick said quietly, “let’s just do it.”
Ben finally looked up, muttering, “We already did it fifty times.”
“Then once more wouldn’t hurt, boyo,” Mick observed, tossing brother Ben his friendliest smile. “Wouldn’t wanna make a mistake and do the wrong pig, would we? Don’t think we’d get no second chance.”
“I’m the driver,” Ben said, his gaze returning to his plate. “Mick and Rabbit are the shooters. We wait on 37th Avenue between 72nd and 73rd Street until we get a call on the cellular phone that Moodrow’s leaving.”
“Do yiz have the photos?” Ma interrupted. “So ya know what in the name of God yer shootin’ at?”
Ben held up Moodrow’s photo (taken three days before with a telephoto and supplied by Blanks’ man, Mikey Powell) for his mother’s inspection. “Then I drive to the front of the building and double-park until he comes out. As soon as I see him, I nod to Mick and Rabbit. They open the van door and start firin’. If Moodrow runs, I follow. If he runs toward the front of the van, I try to keep the side door lined up with him. If he goes toward the back, Rabbit kicks open the rear doors and they fire through the back. The boys have two twenty-five-round clips taped back to back. When the clips are empty, I go, even if the pig is still alive.”
“Well,” Ma observed. “So ya can talk. I didn’t think ya had it in ya. But how is it possible ya forgot about the masks? Is it because yer as stupid as ya look?”
“Yeah,” Ben muttered. “Before we move in, we put on ski masks, so’s the witnesses think we’re a bunch of niggers.”
She paused to let the information sink in, then went on. “And you, little Rabbit, what do yer do if there’s other people around when the pig comes out? What do yer do if there’s darlin’ little children returnin’ home from school?”
“We blow ’em into the next fuckin’ universe.”
Ma actually smiled for a moment. “They should all be as quick as you, me lovely boy,” she said. “But I’ll be pleased if ya’ll watch yer filthy mouth as long as yer livin’ in my home.”
Moodrow and Betty found Paul Dunlap in his office, playing with a computer terminal. They called out quick greetings, then helped themselves to coffee before sitting down next to his desk.
“Since when did they start letting cops use computers?” Moodrow asked. “I always thought we were too stupid to use computers. If I wanted access when I was working, I had to beg some civilian.”
“Well, it’s the old good news and bad news routine,” Dunlap explained. “The bad news is the captain won’t give me any other men. He’s not convinced the fire was deliberate.”
“Is he a fool?” Betty asked. “What about the wiped vials? And the syringes?”
“He says it could have been by accident. Maybe the marshal mishandled them. Maybe the druggies wiped ’em for some reason. Also, even if it is arson, most likely the print belongs to some junkie and the perp missed it when he was wiping down the vial. It’s enough to keep the case open, but not enough to spare any homicide dicks. Meanwhile, I should work on it in my spare time. He did manage to get a print man over to do the basement, though. Dusted the doorknobs and like that. We found out the doors and the glass weren’t wiped, but that’s as far as the captain’s willing to go without more evidence.”
“And that’s where the computer comes in, right?” Moodrow observed wryly. “So you can do the work by yourself. I take it you’re hooked into the FINDER system.”
The FINDER system, only a few years old, had been created by the FBI to allow the computer to cull probables from among the millions of prints in FBI files. The probables were then given over to humans for closer comparison.
Dunlap shrugged. It was warm in the precinct and he was beginning to sweat, but he knew the captain wouldn’t trigger the air conditioning for another month at the earliest. By then, Moodrow would probably have him on the street. “I only wish I could, but it’s not gonna be that easy. All we have is a piece of a central pocket loop. Eight ridges of one fingertip. There’s not enough potential points of comparison for the computer. I tried to feed it to the FINDER system anyway, but the computer spit it out. I’m using the state system now. First I’m gonna pull a list of all known arsonists working out of the city. Go back about ten years. Then I’ll cull out the ones in jail or dead. That’ll leave me with about four hundred names. I’ll punch the names into the computer, one by one, and get a screen on the right little finger. From there I can make the comparison by myself.”
“You know that’s gonna take you about…”
“I know,” Dunlap interrupted. “I have it figured. Five-minute delay between keying the name and getting a screen on the print. One minute for comparison. One minute to punch in the new name. Seven minutes times four hundred names equals twenty-eight hundred minutes. Forty-five hours of work. Now, if you’ve got something better for me…”
“Sounds like you spent some time in the John Jay College of Criminal Justice,” Moodrow teased.
Dunlap smiled ruefully at the name of the school. “Yeah, I went to John Jay. About five years ago. I had this flash that I could get off Community Affairs by studying forensics and I took eighteen credits before I gave up. I’m not saying I’m an expert, but if we get an exact match, I’ll know it.” He turned to Betty. “The print we took off the vial has a triple bridge to the left of the loop. That’s rare enough to use for a key. I’ll check for the bridges first and if there’s no match, I’ll move to the next name. That triple bridge is how come I can do a comparison in sixty seconds. If the print we’re looking for was more common, it’d take forever.”
“I’d say forty-five hours is pretty close to forever,” Betty said. “Do you have enough points to go into court?”
Dunlap shook his head. “I can’t be sure, but I don’t figure to get more than ten points. We need twelve to get it admitted. Maybe I could stretch it, maybe not. Of course, there’s enough so we’ll know who set the fire, assuming the print belongs to the perp and he was printed in the city some time in the past ten years.”
“Did the captain at least canvass the neighborhood?” Moodrow asked.
“No way. I canvassed the building myself, but nobody saw anything out of the ordinary. As for the rest of the neighborhood…I think my time’s better spent working on the print.”
“Well, I gotta take a few hours of that time,” Moodrow said. “Me and Betty are on the way to brace the political, Anton Kricic. I checked him out and he’s serious about the squatters. He’s some kind of housing freak. A leftover from the 60s or maybe a new breed altogether. I can’t tell anymore, but I’m hoping he’s bright enough to feel something for Sylvia Kaufman. If I can get him to explain how he heard about this building, I can start digging down to the bottom of the bullshit.”
“So what do you need me for?”
“I’m not a cop,” Moodrow explained simply. “Kricic doesn’t have to give me the time of day. If you flash your shield, at least he’ll talk to us.”
Paul Dunlap came within an inch of asking Moodrow why he, an NYPD sergeant, should take orders from a civilian, but he held himself in check. “Yeah, but let’s do it fast, so I can get back to work.”
According to the Cohan brothers, their biggest challenge was keeping themselves occupied until the hit went down. Once they had the van parked near the Jackson Arms, all three would move to the rear of the van and wait for a phone call from an anonymous spotter inside the building. If Moodrow decided to spend the day talking to the tenants, the wait would seem like forever. They’d voiced their objections to Ma when she announced the plan, but she’d screeched their objections away. Calling them “sissyboys” and “homos.”
“It’s our chance in life, boyos,” she’d explained. “Marty Blanks told me personal that he’d be more than grateful if this man was relieved of his life. Since when does the likes of Marty Blanks personally call the likes of us? And here’s another question for yer bunch of lazy bastards. If ya will risk such a chance for lack of a mornings entertainment, what sort of men are ya? Are ya even men at all? I tell ya, the curse of an Irish muther has always been the Irish son.”
It wasn’t a long drive from the Cohans’ home in Woodside to the Jackson Arms (the neighborhoods lay against each other), but the brothers, mischievous as ever, took a detour into Astoria. They went to an attached home on 28th Street near the Con Ed plant, cruising slowly past the house before pulling to the curb near the corner. Five minutes later, Katerina Nikolis trotted down the block and climbed into the back of the van without a word. Though she still lived with her parents and still spoke Greek at the dinner table, Katerina was one soldier in a growing army of middle-class New York children addicted to crack cocaine. At fifteen, without money and not yet ready to commit herself to the street, she would do almost anything for the man (or men) who supplied her with the drug. Curiously, she never thought of this as prostitution. When she looked in the mirror, she saw a siren with black hair and black, black eyes, milky skin, and full lips. As far as she was concerned, her flat abdomen and the patch of dark pubic hair so startling against her white flesh merited the slavery of the men who gladly spent hundreds of dollars to feed her habit (a habit which, coincidentally, inflamed her own sexual desire, making the whole business that much easier).
Katerina lay back on the waterbed in the rear of the fully-customized van Rabbit had liberated from a north Jersey parking lot the night before. Smiling happily, she reached for the crack pipe and the tiny vials in Mick Cohan’s palm. As she fired up the first hit, she raised her knees to allow her short skirt to slide up toward her waist. “Top o’ the mornin’, boys,” she called in her heartiest false-Irish voice. “Top o’ the mornin’.”
Moodrow began to suspect that it was going to be a bad day when he pushed open the front door to the Jackson Arms (without benefit of a key) and found Ino Kavecchi waiting in the lobby. At first, the paralegal turned to Betty, reeling off a list of court dates, and Moodrow was momentarily relieved, but then, after passing Betty several manila envelopes enumerating legal precedents in the various actions they were pursuing, Kavecchi turned back to the ex-cop.
“Hey, Moodrow,” he screeched. “What’s the matter with these people? I never seen anything like it. They won’t even let me in the door. ‘Don’t wanna get involved. Don’t wanna get involved.’ Whatta they think, they’re invincible? The Chinese don’t wanna talk to the Indians. The Indians don’t wanna talk to the Irish. The Koreans must think they’re goddamn Japanese, because they won’t talk to nobody. They think they’re too good for Jackson Heights, anyway, so they don’t mind moving out, which is what they’re doing. The rich ones are buyin’ two families out in Flushing and the poor ones’re gonna be the tenants. I mean it just amazes the hell out of me. I could go up to Harlem and the first thing anyone asks is when we’re gonna throw a rent strike. Nobody talks about running. These fools…”
“All right, Ino.” Moodrow put his hand on the paralegal’s chest, shutting him off abruptly. “Why don’t you tell me what you want. We’ve got a lot of work to do.”
Kavecchi, offended, stepped away from Moodrow. “Hey, look, I couldn’t care less. I’m just trying to let you know what’s happening out here. I mean it’s your party and all, but I think you oughta realize that the building’s gonna be empty of bona fide tenants if things don’t turn around. I been doing this a long time and it’s my experience that if the people don’t wanna stand up for themselves, the courts and the politicians don’t wanna stand up for ’em, either.”
“What about the city councilman, Connely?” Betty interrupted, trying to smooth Kavecchi’s ruffled feathers. “And HPD. I thought they were all involved.”
“They’re involved for right now because of Birnbaum’s publicity, but the cops’re gonna drop the gun charge and the public is gonna forget. If you wanna keep the bigshots in the ballgame, you better hope something dramatic happens. The new super, Henry something, fixed the main lock yesterday, but somebody busted it out again last night. By three o’clock this afternoon, when the kids get home from school, there’ll be dealers out by the ramp leading to the basement and…”
Once again, Moodrow interrupted. This time, though, his voice held little annoyance. He spoke in a matter-of-fact monotone. “I’m sad to say it, but I think you’re right. Most of the people here don’t have any fight in them. Maybe they think paying taxes entitles them to a safe world. What I see is that the first ones to move out were the last ones to move in. They don’t have any sense of home and they pay the highest rents. I thought about it all last night and I came to the conclusion that none of this makes a problem for me. I’m looking for an arsonist and whoever told him to make a fire. That’s what I’m good at. I can’t make miracles, but I can bust scumbags and that’s what I’m gonna do. So if you got something specific you want from me, I’ll be glad to help out. Other than that, I don’t have any advice.”
Rabbit Cohan, temporarily satiated, sat on the rolling waterbed with his back against the front seat of the van. He watched in amazement as Katerina Nikolis alternately pulled at the smoking glass pipe and at his brother Mick’s cock. Mick was lying flat on the bed and Katerina, kneeling with her bare ass high in the air, worked him over as earnestly as she worked the pipe. She seemed blissfully unaware of Rabbit’s scrutiny and, as far as Rabbit was concerned, her twin preoccupations were just two more indications of the power of the white lady. Especially when reduced to her purest state in the form of rock cocaine.
Rabbit, at twenty-seven, had never done crack or any other drug (excepting, of course, Irish whiskey, which is or isn’t a drug, depending on which end of the American schizophrenia happens to be wagging the dog), but he’d seen the power of drugs many times. First it was boyhood companions, kids he’d been playing with since he was old enough to go out on the streets. Half of them tried heroin and a quarter became desperate junkies. A number were dead—of an overdose or of AIDS. Cocaine had offered another enticement altogether, a controlled pleasure that smacked of affluence as surely as gold chains and German automobiles. Rabbit had been in Europe, a soldier, when the coke epidemic had exploded on the American public, and he was glad the lessons had been learned before he was faced with the temptation.
On the other hand, Ben and Mick, Rabbits brothers, had been right in the thick of it, but had never been tempted to try the white powder. They were unionized construction workers who supplemented their incomes during the slow winter months with armed robberies, ripping off poker and craps games, and drinking themselves into a brawl every Saturday night. Their big break had come when they’d run into an old friend, a lawyer named O’Brien. O’Brien knew a number of cocaine entrepreneurs who needed occasional, reliable muscle. Mick and Ben, with their big Irish grins, were nothing if not muscle.
So the power of the lady had then seduced Ben and Mick as surely as it owned the sweet, white ass of Katerina Nikolis. Rabbit, focusing on the van again, noted that her dedication hadn’t flagged. She was lying on her side, her head buried in Mick’s lap. Ben had curled up behind her and she was pushing back against him as he attempted to enter her. Somehow, all through the various switches, she kept her head up with nearly constant pulls on the crack pipe. Rabbit felt himself beginning to stir again. He smiled brightly, listening to his brothers moan and grunt, considering exactly what he’d make the whore do next.
Stanley Moodrow was the only one of the three interrogators confronting Anton Kricic in his first floor Jackson Arms apartment who wasn’t surprised to find Kricic intelligent and purposeful.
“I’ll talk to you,” Kricic explained, once they were inside, “because I hate arsonists even more than you do. There’s no place for poor people to live in this city and the torches keep destroying what little there is. But there’s gotta be some ground rules and the main one is you accept that I mean what I say. Don’t worry about why I give a shit, just respect that I do.”
Moodrow understood the demand to mean that Kricic not only wouldn’t succumb to pressure, he’d walk away at the first hint of it. “Whatever you say, Kricic,” he announced. “I tell ya the truth, I don’t have any use for landlords, either. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that everybody in New York hates landlords. The goddamn real estate people run this city and they always have. The landlords and the banks and the fucking politicians.”
Betty glanced at Moodrow, probing for a sign of insincerity, but Moodrow’s face was completely blank, as was that of Paul Dunlap. Suddenly, she realized what ordinary people dislike about cops—they’re never sincere. They’ll say anything to make a clean collar. “My name’s Betty Haluka,” she announced, extending her hand. “I’m a Legal Aid lawyer. In most cases, we’d be working together, but I expect we’re going to be on opposite ends of this deal before it’s over.”
Kricic almost smiled, taking her hand. “You’re against warehousing apartments,” he announced, “but you’re also against homeless squatters in middle-class neighborhoods. No surprise, right?”
Betty held firm, despite the sarcasm. “If we start that argument now, we’ll never get to our real business. You say you hate arsonists and I presume that you’re not supporting drug dealers. Those are just two of the calamities that have come down on the people living here. Six months ago, the Jackson Arms was fully occupied by middle-class families and elderly people on social security. We know the building changed hands in November, but we don’t know who bought it.”
“I hope you don’t think I know,” Kricic responded angrily. “If you think I’m working for the landlord…Man, that’s the worst insult I ever heard.”
Moodrow, convinced that Kricic (innocently, no doubt) was part and parcel of somebody’s plan for the Jackson Arms, nodded his head approvingly. “You know what, Kricic? I’d have to be even crazier than I am to believe you’d work for anybody you didn’t approve of, and one thing I’m not is crazier than I am. But what I was wondering is how you found out about this building. You’re not even from this neighborhood. In fact, last time I heard of you, you were living in an HPD tenement on 7th Street. Likewise for the dopers and the juicers: they don’t have empty apartment radar and neither do you. Somebody had to tell you about us, and we think…wait a second, lemme get it right.” Moodrow paused, his eyes down, as if he didn’t know what he wanted to say. “We think if we can find out how all these people heard the Jackson Arms was giving out free apartments, we can find the scumbag who set the fire that killed Sylvia Kaufman.”
Kricic turned away, shrugging his shoulders. “I couldn’t really tell you who the dude was that told me about this building. You were right about where I was living—on 7th Street in a condemned twenty-family tenement that HPD took over when the landlord walked away. I went in there in ’84, just knocked down the cinderblocks in the doorway and moved inside. First, I got the water turned on, then I pirated enough electric to keep the apartment lit. Little by little, people began to join up with me. In ’88 we applied to the city to become a co-op. We offered to do all the work necessary to get a certificate of occupancy if the city would give us the building, but the bastards kept putting us off. They were too chickenshit to throw us out, but they weren’t going to surrender a valuable property to a gang of homesteaders who have to beg Legal Aid for a part-time lawyer. Now the mayor and his HPD flunky are getting ready to auction off all the abandoned buildings and empty lots on the Lower East Side. That whole neighborhood’s coming up and the sharks are making fortunes. Anyway, the city was too scared of publicity to evict us, so it was pretty much a standoff until someone made a fire. That was a month ago and the back wall of the building was burned out so bad it looked like it would fall down any minute. But we hung on, anyway. We got an architect from Pratt Institute to come in and show us how we could put the walls back together.”
Moodrow waved his hand impatiently, but Betty moved closer to him, urging Kricic to continue. “Go ahead, Anton, I’d like to hear this.”
“We were scared shitless most of the time,” Kricic admitted. “There were times we’d be sitting around drinking beers and hear chunks of the back wall break off and crash onto the floor. But we didn’t have any place to go. Maybe I could have found a place, but the others were really poor. They were uneducated and unskilled, some had been in jail and most had passed through drugs or alcohol addiction. So we hung in until the city came by with a demolition order and enough cops to throw us out. They claimed the building was going to fall down on top of us unless it was knocked down. Naturally, we decided to make a fight out of it—take the publicity if that was all we could get, and somehow enough neighbors showed up to make the city give us three days to move our possessions. Man, we threw some party that weekend. We knew we weren’t gonna be in there come Monday night, but if we drank enough beer and wine, we didn’t have to admit it.”
“Is that when you heard about the Jackson Arms?” Betty asked gently.
“Yeah. I was in the kitchen with a guy named Bill, who I knew from college, and a black dude named Dayton, who I didn’t know. We were talking about landlords who hold apartments off the market. Some newspaper guy had written an article claiming that 70,000 units were being warehoused. These are the cheapest apartments in the city. That’s why the landlords don’t wanna rent ’em out. Think about it—you got families living in shelters because there’s no apartments and landlords are deliberately keeping the same apartments these homeless families can afford off the market. Anyway, I was pretty drunk and Dayton was going on about this place in Jackson Heights where homeless were already moving in. I started thinking about what kind of craziness I could make by establishing a homeless community in a privately owned middle-class building. It’s gonna take a year, even if the landlord is serious about throwing us out—which I don’t believe for a second—to get the court to issue an eviction notice. By that time I’ll have the building organized, and every camera in New York’ll be on hand to record the battle.”
Thank God we have our pants on, Rabbit thought, as the call came through on the portable phone. Somehow, the brothers had fixed on the belief that Moodrow would be spending the entire day in the Jackson Arms and the eleven A.M. call announcing his imminent departure from a first floor apartment would have led to panic had the trio not been temporarily through with Katerina Nikolis. Katerina, of course, was still naked, lying dazed on the waterbed with the pipe clutched between her small breasts. That, Rabbit knew, was truly unfortunate. It meant their plan to dump her before doing the deed on Stanley Moodrow was out the window and they would have to think of something in a hurry. For a long moment, the brothers were paralyzed by indecision, but then Rabbit, who knew he was the smartest, grabbed Katerina by her hair, and pulled her erect before slamming her against the paneled wall of the van between the rear and side doors.
“Stay there, bitch. Don’t move a fuckin’ muscle,” he said.
Rabbits sudden action set the twins in motion. Ben climbed into the drivers seat and started the engine. Mick opened a long, narrow cabinet built into the paneling on the side of the van and removed two 9mm Uzis, passing one to Rabbit. The magazines had already been inserted and the gray metal weapons, their stocks folded, looked as lethal as they actually were. Lethal enough to make Katerina’s eyes widen, to pull her back into the present. In an instant, in the time it took for Rabbit to jack a round into the chamber of the Uzi, the cocaine burning in her nerve endings turned from warmest pleasure into darkest terror. She leaned forward to grab at her skirt and blouse, but Rabbit kicked out at her, driving her back against the side of the van.
“I said to stay put,” he yelled, putting the barrel of the gun against her throat. “By fucking Jesus, I swear I’ll blow your eyes outta ya goddamn head if ya make another move.”
“Please, please lemme go,” Katerina begged, the words spilling out, one on top of the other. She’d given them everything and now they were going to reward her by killing her.
When Paul Dunlap pushed open the front door of the Jackson Arms, Betty Haluka and Stanley Moodrow in tow, the first thing he noticed were three black youths, obviously children and obviously dealers, standing off to one side of the entrance. The sight grabbed at his attention, enraging him. The little bastards didn’t even have the good sense to run. He knew their defiance meant they had neither drugs nor money in their possession. They were advance men, bracing potential customers and steering them to the proper apartments.
“Do you wanna take them out?” Dunlap asked seriously. “Slap their faces, show ’em they’re not in charge.”
Betty pulled Dunlap to a stop fifteen feet from the doorway. “I’m a Legal Aid lawyer,” she said evenly. “Except for the color of their skin, you have no reason to harass those children. Remember ‘probable cause’? If I witnessed an unprovoked attack on civilians, I’d have to do something about it.”
“That’s easy for you to say, Betty,” Dunlap argued. “But all three of us know those bastards are dirty. If I have to wait until they actually shoot someone, I’ll never get their respect.”
“Respect?” Moodrow gestured toward the trio, who still held their ground. One, the tallest, wore a Yankee cap with the brim turned to one side and pulled down over his ear; he openly watched the two cops and the woman, seeming more curious than concerned. “Forget about it, Paulie,” Moodrow continued. “What you gotta do to these kids if you want respect, you’re not gonna do surrounded by civilian witnesses.” He gestured toward Inez Almeyda and her three children coming up the walk. Inez, her mouth already moving, was marshaling her complaints and Moodrow exchanged a private look with Betty, his arm encircling her waist as he prepared himself to absorb Inez’s energetic onslaught.
“How come you no do your job?” she shouted (much to Stanley Moodrow’s relief) at Paul Dunlap. “How come these pigs stay here and deal their drugs without no police come to arrest them?” She gestured at the dealers who, uneasy now, began to move slowly away, their shoulders dipping and rising contemptuously, their manner screaming, “We’ll be back.”
When Rabbit pushed the side door open, slamming it toward the rear of the van until it locked, Katerina’s mind shut down altogether. Like Sylvia Kaufman’s first reaction to the smoke pouring into her bedroom, Katerina could only form a single thought: escape. She had no idea where she was, no idea of the landscape that awaited her if she managed to get out of the van. She didn’t realize that she was naked or that her pulse, already pushed to a flutter by the cocaine driving through her nervous system, had been accelerated by terror and now pounded behind her eyes at better than 200 beats per minute. The same fear that had frozen her against the side of the van suddenly twisted her body through the open door and she ran screaming into the street.
Curiously, both Mick and Rabbit had exactly the same reaction to Katerina’s sudden and unexpected flight. “Fuckin’ bitch,” they said in unison, raising their rifle barrels until the black holes were in line with her retreating back. The first salvo of six shots, fired off as fast as the brothers could pull the triggers, pushed Katerina forward in a series of jerks, like she was being shoved repeatedly by an invisible giant. A seventh shot, fired by Rabbit after an instants pause, took her in the back of the head and pitched her forward on her face.
“Get the pig,” Ben ordered curtly from the front seat. “Wake the fuck up and chill that pig. Ma’s gonna kill us if we blow this deal.”
Rabbit was the first to jerk his eyes away from the naked, twitching body on the sidewalk. He raised the Uzi and tried to point it at Moodrow, but couldn’t seem to keep it aimed; he was seated on the waterbed, his legs folded under him, and the recoil from the first volley of shots had set the water in motion. It was like trying to shoot geese from a speedboat.
“We didn’t put the masks on,” Mick observed, startling Rabbit, who began pulling the trigger as fast as he could.
If asked beforehand, Moodrow would have insisted, with full sincerity, that he was the real cop and Paul Dunlap a Community Affairs facsimile, but it was Paul Dunlap who reacted in proper cop fashion to the naked woman and the volley of shots from inside the van. Moodrow froze initially, but then, as if protecting a child from the blows of an angry parent, turned and took Betty Haluka in his arms, crushing her against his chest. Though his back was completely exposed to the gunshots exploding so close to each other they made a single crashing roar, he had no awareness of personal danger. He was on a street corner in midtown Manhattan, trying to warn the woman who waved to him from across the street. “Watch out, watch out, watch out” he yelled over and over again. Trying to warn her before it was too late. Seeing two scenes at once, seeing another woman and a younger helpless cop unable to protect her. The sounds of the present jumbled into a series of separate impressions. Like a cubist painting in which the parts cross, but never touch. The roar of gunshots; the chink of bullets slamming into brick; the chunk of 9mm slugs entering the flesh of Inez Almeyda; the high-pitched wail of a terrified infant; the voice of a frightened cop holding his woman. It was all happening in pieces—random sounds garnered from a dozen old movies. It would have taken sight to put those sounds together and Stanley Moodrow’s eyes were tightly closed and pressed into the hair of Betty Haluka.
Paul Dunlap, on the other hand, took no notice of the bullets ripping past his body. He saw Katerina Nikolis go down, her body erupting blood from a half-dozen holes, and all the anger in his being exploded at once. He’d been passing empty days for more than a decade, filling the time with a few well-practiced hobbies. Working out with his .38 at the police practice range (in preparation for a competition he never found the nerve to enter) was his oldest hobby. Without a second thought, he drew his revolver with practiced skill and blew Ben Cohan’s brains out.
The Irishman fell against the steering wheel, turning the van sharply into the curb, throwing the already bouncing shooters away from the door and into each other. For a second, as the barrel of Mick’s Uzi swung up toward him, Rabbit Cohan thought his own execution was somehow part of his mother’s arrangement with Marty Blanks. He was surprised when Mick’s chest fell apart under the onslaught of a dozen rounds from his own weapon. He was even more surprised when Porky Dunlap appeared in the open door of the van, his .38 thrust forward, and fired two rounds directly into Rabbit’s chest, killing him instantly.